A Conversation with Stephanie Soileau

By Eleanor Stern

Eleanor Stern: Several stories in this collection, including “The Whiskey Business” and “Camera Obscura,” talk about relationships between people who leave Louisiana and those who stay. How would you characterize the sacrifices made by both the characters who leave and the ones they leave behind?

Stephanie Soileau: Like most people who grew up in Louisiana, so much of my identity is bound up in the place. If you grew up there, thinking that the boundaries of the state are all you're going to know, then once you reach beyond those boundaries, you have to completely redefine yourself. Who you were doesn't always make sense in this new context. Things you learned to survive, or to make nice, don’t read the same way. I moved to Chicago for my undergraduate degree and was constantly  “yes- ma'am-ing” and “no-ma'am-ing” my first boss. She was like, “You don’t have to say ma'am!” We were not a cosmopolitan people, so it was a shock to leave and see how my old self fit or didn’t fit into this new environment that I’d so much aspired to be a part of.  

When you leave, you also sacrifice a piece of yourself, or else find a new identity in ways that alienate you from your homeplace. I mean, my accent changed. I don’t sound like I'm from Louisiana anymore. I can put it on, and code-switch, but when I go back I’m not quite of the place anymore. I feel conflicted that I’m still writing about Louisiana, claiming to represent this place I used to know so intimately. I try to go back at least once a year — my most beloveds are there — but I don’t know it nearly as intimately as some people I knew in high school who had the guts to stay. I’ve become a kind of outsider, despite the fact that I still feel myself to be an insider. I now experience the place at a remove, which might be a good thing for fiction writing.

ES: Has Louisiana always been your topic?

SS: Yeah, so far. I don’t think it always will be. I’m also working on a novel about coastal erosion and loss of home in Louisiana.

Part of the novel I’m working on is historical fiction — traces the Acadian migration from France to Louisiana, and I’m finding I feel pretty at home in history, so maybe that’ll be the next step.

ES: Though this collection isn’t historical, it grapples with the impacts of history. In the first story, “So This Is Permanence,” you write of the main character, “If she had once been curious, it was so long ago she hardly remembered what it felt like.” And in “The Ranger Queen of Sulphur,” Jonathan feels too defeated to get surgery for his obesity. Do you see this hopelessness as coming from outside forces on the region, or as a personal problem?

SS: I think it’s both. I grew up in Lake Charles in the aftermath of the oil crash, when everybody was leaving town. Everybody was out of work. I remember my uncles being unemployed constantly, my grandfather was unemployed. The place was a mess. That’s where the title of the book came from: there were bumper stickers that said, “Last One Out Shut Off The Lights.” Nobody was staying behind. So, there was this economic fallout from a larger global situation that you have absolutely no control over. On top of that, there’s the pollution from the petrochemical industry. It’s hard to make too much noise about that, because that industry is what keeps the place afloat. So people who live there have this complex and ambivalent relationship with the forces that are acting upon them. Those forces are so intractable that it does breed a sense of hopelessness. But that ending in “The Ranger Queen,” where the protagonist finally decides to take a typing class — I know it doesn’t sound all that hopeful, it sounds like resignation, but at least she’s doing something. It’s an act of hope, you know?

ES: From what other places do you see these characters drawing hope?

SS: I think they draw hope from their relationships with each other. I mean, Deana from “Ranger Queen” and her brother have a mutual loathing and affection for the place, and they find humor in it. That’s most obviously true in that last story, “The Boucherie,” where a Cajun French community holds a halal slaughter with their Sudanese neighbors. The way forward in this neighborhood and with these neighbors is to share in ritual together as a community. That’s the thing that you can control in this environment that often seems out of your control.

ES: In “The Boucherie,” why did you choose food as the motif around which to focus this story of people coming together?

SS: Because I like to eat! To share your food with someone is a really intimate gesture, it implies that you’re welcoming them into your home and sharing your resources. Community happens at the table. That neighborhood in “The Boucherie” is a pretty good representation of the neighborhood I grew up in.  All these now-old Cajun people had come to Lake Charles in the fifties, after the war, and set up little houses there, and still carried out those country traditions of barter. My grandfather was raising chickens for a while, and he’d go over and bring some to Uncle Dan across the road. And Uncle Dan, who was a deacon, would bless the new rosaries. There was always this mentality of sharing and trading and a lot of it centered around food. You know, trade your figs for the other guy’s squirrels.

ES: In one of the stories, “Haguillory,”  which is set in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the protagonist, Haguillory, doesn’t watch the news because he thinks of it as all, “New Orleans this, Katrina that.” How did you want to portray these external images of Louisiana, and characters’ reactions to those representations?

SS: Have you seen Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Ted Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story?” I think that same problem afflicts the South. Anyone from outside tells one story about the people there. Now in that story about Haguillory, this bitter Louisiana man who is cruel to his wife and strangers and animals in the wake of Hurricane Rita — his motives are not unkindness. Still, some of what’s portrayed in the national news is absolutely true! That man is racist, he’s small minded, and he’s just out for his own benefit! 

In my corner of the state, Hurricane Rita didn’t create empathy for the suffering Katrina had caused in New Orleans, just weeks before. Instead, working class white people who’d been hit by the storm, or just grazed like Haguillory, felt almost competitive in their suffering. They perceived the media as favoring “New Orleans,” which he’s absolutely using as a euphemism for Black people.  This perspective seems part and parcel of the endemic racism of the place,the way that racism divides people with common interests and seeks to defend white privilege. Haguillory could watch Black New Orleanians waiting on roofs for rescue and still feel aggrieved that his own suffering — the loss of his remote control, the annoyance of sharing a crowded house with his family — has not been adequately represented. 

These days, white people in my corner of the world — and the characters in these stories — seem to have pretty much learned to stifle more obvious displays of racism. Or possibly, as a liberal quasi-outsider I’m just not privy to them anymore. Instead, it leaks out euphemistically, in coded language. “All Lives Matter,” and  “I’m sick of hearing about Black versus white,” and  “We’re all the same inside.”  And in someone like Haguillory’s feeling that any Black people on the news is too many Black people, that they just like to “lamentation over nothing,” as his wife Dot might put it. No one, except maybe the David Dukes among us, wants to think of themselves as racist. Euphemism is a way of denying that we are beneficiaries of a racist system, that we have breathed the air of it, eaten from it, and that moving beyond it takes serious work and self-examination and humility.

ES: In "Camera Obscura," a Cajun couple argue about West Coast perceptions of Louisiana. One character says, "The only brown people on the payroll at that school are the janitor and the Spanish teacher... I don’t appreciate being policed by hypocrites." So many Americans think of antiracism as a Northern or coastal phenomenon, but are there specifically Southern or Louisianian ways that these characters challenge inequality?

SS: Cajuns have a complex history in Louisiana. As French-speakers who regularly intermarried across races and ethnicities, they were victims of oppression by the dominant white English-speaking culture. Many Cajuns I have known cite this history as common ground with their Black neighbors. My grandmother, when she was living, was very proud of the fact that her father’s country store, back in the 30s, was open to anyone, Black or white. She said, “He treated everybody the same. We were all sharecroppers.” Of course, this attitude can veer into willful redirection of attention onto white pain: Cajuns do, by and large, identify as white. But I think there’s something true and sincere at the root of it; I hope there is, anyway. De facto segregation is alive and well in Louisiana, but the demographics of the place make it impossible to live without dealing with each other across race lines: in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in casual encounters at the grocery and Walmart. In that sense, Louisiana and the South in general may have an advantage in confronting inequality over “whiter” places I’ve lived, like Iowa or Maine. The problems are certainly more visible. The conversations are there to be had. Whether those conversations actually happen is another matter.

ES: Racism in these stories is a failure of adults, but it affects their children. In The Whiskey Business, Janessa's white family feels shame about receiving charity from Wei Wei's Chinese one. And in Mr. A., race is one of the forces that ends Julie and Jabowen's relationship. Do you see a way for these younger characters to break this cycle?

SS: I’m trying to imagine which characters in this collection would march with BLM protesters. Sarah in “So This Is Permanence” would be too checked out. She might profess some sympathy if pressed, but she’s probably in the “can’t we all just get along” camp. Deana and Jonathan – oh hell yes, they’d be out there, even if Jonathan had to do it in a wheelchair. They’re ornery enough to care. They wouldn’t know how to talk about it, exactly – or Jonathan might. In “The Whiskey Business,” Wei Wei and Jacqui would be out there in their COVID masks, getting pepper sprayed by police. Janessa – I don’t know.  Maybe if she didn’t have an essay due the next day.

I think the best way for the younger characters to break the cycle – if it is a cycle that can be broken, rather than just shifted in its course — is to recognize their part in it, to recognize that racism isn’t just a failure of adults. That they have inherited the whole awful system, even if they reject that system’s more obvious injustices.

ES: This collection actually has a lot of slightly tortured relationships between parents and children, like Haguillory and his son. What do these parents want for their children?

SS: This goes back to the question of transcending your socioeconomic class, and where that leaves your relationship with those who stay. In the shortest story in the collection, “Poke Salad,” the father is a working-class guy, but he’s got his own artistic and scientific aspirations. He wants to connect with his daughter, but she’s moved on and moved out of the state. There’s a certain pride, but I imagine it’s a little bit wounding, much as it would be wounding for a second-generation child of Chinese immigrants to refuse to speak Mandarin. It’s an implicit judgment of  where the parents come from. Or at least it can feel like that.

ES: You’ve brought up language a few times. Something I love about this collection is the way you capture the languages of Southern Louisiana. Were there any challenges that came up craft-wise when writing that dialect?

SS: I can hear those voices in my head. So in that sense, the Louisiana dialect and the Southern voices don’t feel challenging to reproduce. What was challenging was figuring out how to render Cajun French, because I wasn't taught Cajun French. So few of the younger generations were. So I’d either have to go to my little Cajun French dictionary, or ask my auntie, who speaks it a little bit. I didn’t want it to be the usual, “Euhh, laissez les bon temps roulez” thing, but including too much “off-brand” Cajun French becomes an obstacle to the reader. What was most challenging was trying to faithfully and respectfully represent the Arabic speakers in “La Boucherie,” hearing them through the point of view of their white neighbors, who might be inadvertently disrespectful.

ES: Your perceived reader is not someone who speaks Cajun French. It’s not somebody from this region. Were there cliches about this place that you felt an urge to push back for the benefit of outsiders?

SS: There were so many! I guess “The Boucherie,” was my way of pushing back on the idea that these are backwards, Cajun country people who can’t be accepting of difference, when in reality it’s much more complicated…there’s prejudice, but they also value hospitality when there’s someone right in front of them. In “Poke Salad,” the father is reading about physics, misquoting Stephen Hawking; in “Mr. A,” the point-of-view character is a working-class kid, and she’s digging Shakespeare. So, I was pushing against the assumption that working-class people in red states are incurious.

ES: With so many characters seeking art they can relate to, is there art coming out of the South right now that’s exciting to you?

SS: I love everything Jesmyn Ward writes. Salvage the Bones was beautiful, her memoir Men We Reaped was so beautiful and important. There's a writer to whom I am not related, Ben Soileau — he’s had short stories published in dribs and drabs and I think he’s doing amazing things. 

ES: Are there artistic portrayals of the region that you would like to see more of?

SS: I think I’d like to see — and maybe this is what I like about Ben Soileau’s writing — more weird and shamelessly intellectual fictions coming out of the South. We’ve got this tradition of folksy storytelling, which is beautiful, but I wonder if there's some way of making it more modern and broadly relevant. I think there’s some kind of weirdness and magic that could come into play.

ES: You address that folksy Southern tradition in what is maybe the most mysterious story in this collection, “Cut Off, Louisiana, A Ghost Story,” where Mark Twain appears as a ghost. What does Mark Twain represent in that context?

SS: The seed of this piece was a little ghost story I found in Gumbo Ya-Ya, that collection of folktales. It’s just like, three lines about some woman in New Orleans who is visited by the ghost of Mark Twain. He’s in bed, smoking his pipe, and tells her to feed everyone raw turnips. So she does, and then everybody dies! I think of Mark Twain as this benevolent, genial humanist, and that his ghost would do this awful thing!

That got me thinking about how humor writing— it elevates its content in so many ways, but to make a tall tale out of something kind of robs it of its gravitas. I was trying to give that story back its gravitas. So much of Cajun storytelling is them poking fun at themselves. So what does it feel like to have an outsider tell the same kind of fool’s tale?  

I was also interested in the phenomenon of changing the course of the river, since coastal erosion in Southern Louisiana is so much a product of having levied the Mississippi. The very thing that we’ve done to the river to allow us to live there is the thing that’s destroying the wetlands that keep us safe.

ES: We keep coming back to this idea of outsiders. You said earlier that you feel like you've become an outsider to Louisiana over time. You mentioned this as both an obstacle to your writing and a benefit. What are some specific ways that your writing about Louisiana has benefited from living elsewhere?

SS: Even as I've become more of an outsider, it’s made me love the place in a way that I couldn’t’ve before. Or maybe eventually I would have come to love it if I'd stayed, but Louisiana gives me a sense of yearning that has driven my writing about it. So much of the state and my feelings about it are touched with a presentiment of loss. I think that sense of loss is what drives me to write about it.

Eleanor Stern is a writer from New Orleans. Her reviews and fiction have been published in the Southern Humanities Review, the Tahoma Literary Review, and the London Magazine.

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