Kont Kréyol-yé (Creole Folktales)
West Baton Rouge Museum
Port Allen, LA
Through October 12
Have you heard the story of Cows on Halloween? What about the one about the honest thief? Or the dogs in the bottle? These are the folktales represented at Kont Kréyol-yé, an art exhibit at the West Baton Rouge Museum.
The exhibit, “Kont Kréyol-yé” (or Creole Folktales in English), is full of Creole artists’ interpretations of Creole folktales as rendered in a 1931 LSU Master’s thesis by Lafayette Jarreau. He recorded stories in both West Baton Rouge Parish — where the exhibit is — and Pointe Coupee Parish, where many people now living in West Baton Rouge have roots.
The exhibit is like walking through a storybook of all the illustrated stories, and a PDF file with translations of the stories is available for people to follow along as they walk through the room.
The staff at the West Baton Rouge Musuem is friendly and helpful. They help create an environment that is worth returning to and feels like a good place to learn. They wanted to show an exhibit based on 1931 stories now, a tour guide told me, because of recent attempts to revitalize Louisiana Creole.
Louisiana Creole is an endangered form of French Creole. According to best estimates by the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online, there are fewer than 10,000 Louisiana Creole speakers. Creole culture is part of the heritage of Southern Louisiana that’s baked into living in Baton Rouge. But the specific stories and traditions are not as well known as other elements of the culture, like the food.
Consciously or not, folktales shape us, even if they’re remembered in fragmented ways. That being said, those who are unfamiliar with Creole Foktales might catch parts of stories they find familiar.
In a story called “Catafo,” the main character is taken to the woods with his siblings in an attempt to abandon them. He saves at first by leaving trails of flour to find their way home similar to Hansel and Gretel (in which they do the same thing but with pebbles).
The artists interpreted the folktales in their own styles mostly on bagasse and banana leaf paper made specially for the exhibit. There’s a lot to see and a lot to read, but the most striking piece was Jonathan “radbwa faroush” Mayers’ “Djab gardé enba” (The Devil Looked Down), which was painted in acrylic and accompanies “Catafo.” In the story, the siblings find a small house in the woods to take refuge. That’s where similarities to Hansel and Gretel end. They’re in the devil’s house. While the devil’s wife is nice and feeds them, the devil is blood hungry and ready to eat them. The painting makes it look like readers are in a scene from the end of the story, looking up from inside a bag up at the devil falling from a tree. It’s perspective work that enriches the story rather than simply illustrating it.
The experience of walking around the gallery is a Louisiana Creole-centric one. Though translations are available via PDF, only the Creole version of the stories are printed on the wall. Whether it’s to explore familiar stories or to hear new ones, “Kont Kréyol-yé” is a perfect way to spend an afternoon. Hopefully, some people are even inspired to learn more Loiuisiana Creole because of it.
