Grandma's Zydeco Stomp Dance

WORLDLIT.ORG 75 Grandma’s Zydeco Stomp Dance A Patchwork Poem* by Rain Prud’homme-Cranford & Carolyn M. Dunn I Mix cultures of home West Africa West Indies disrupted along slave trade French and Spanish traveling tributaries. Mississippi red, blood arteries have long varied stories: colonization and conquest. Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, Natchez, Caddo, and Métis, Cree, Miq’maq come down River Women – by virtue of French exploitation and expulsion of our ancestors from Nova Scotia to Manitoba II Three cultures Choctaw-Biloxi, Louisiana Creole, and Creek woven into my Grandfather – his mother, my Great Grands. Three is a sacred number for us: three sisters, three worlds. Three. The number of strands it takes to weave. Three. The waters of Louisiana: seawater fresh water brackish water. III Memory lives in body stomach, heart, throat, head. Granma’s holding court with family, Grampa fiddle at chin in the middle of bayou. Place my grandmother and grandfather emerged. Where their Ancestors emerged. Our history along swath of okhina oka. IV We are women who shorn our hair in grief – spit bone shard arrow anger at complacent parish priests. Our souls’ burnt edges from prayers form an incendiary roux: cedar, blood & cottonmouth venom. Carry our Grandma’s stories on wide hips laughing through split lips & shuffle shake zydeco rhythms. * Patchwork poem—i.e., found poem. This poem pieces together writing by Dunn and Prud’hommeCranford to form a new poetic conversation in call and response. Rain Prud’homme-Cranford (Goméz) is a “FAT-tastic IndigeNerd” who won the First Book Award Poetry from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas for Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory (MEP 2012). She is an assistant professor of Indigenous literature in the Department of English and affiliated faculty in the International Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Calgary. Carolyn M. Dunn is an associate vice provost of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion and associate professor of English at Central Michigan University, co-editor of The Journal of Louisiana Creole Studies, and part of the NAMMY award-winning allwomen ’s drum group The Mankillers. Her poetry books include Outfoxing Coyote (2002), Echolocation: Poems Indian Country, LA (2014), and Stains of Burden and Dumb Luck (forthcoming). She is also the author of the much lauded play, The Frybread Queen. Tony Tiger (Sac & Fox / Muscogee), Intertribal / Courtesy of the artist (facebook. com/tony. tiger.5268)

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