Sybil Kein’s Transnational Louisiana Creole and Exchanges with Michel Fabre

Rachel Kirk is a PhD student in French Studies at Louisiana State University. She is interested in how colonial-shaped environmental changes and disasters have influenced literary and cultural production in Louisiana and the broader Francophone and Creole-speaking Caribbean. Rachel is a recipient of an African American History and Culture short term fellowship for visiting researchers. 

Sybil Kein, who lived between 1939 and 2022, was a Louisiana-born Creole poet, musician, playwright, and scholar, who devoted her life to affirming Louisiana Creole culture, which she believed to be an important yet marginalized part of Louisiana’s Francophone culture[i]. A professor in English and theater who joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in Flint in 1972, Kein produced scholarship, literature, music, and archived personal documents that are enduring and living aspects of her legacy and the transcultural and transnational bridges that she worked to build between Louisiana, France, and other parts of the Caribbean.

Through prior archival research on her life and literature at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans and the University of New Orleans Special Collections, I came across letters that she received from Michel Fabre, a former African-American studies professor at the Sorbonne in Paris. In these letters, he sends her invitations to present her research, poetry, and music in Paris and sends her affirming feedback for her poetry and essay manuscripts. However, I had been unable to find more information about their collaboration, how she described her work to him, and any visits she may had taken to France.

The Michel Fabre Collection at Emory’s Stuart A. Rose Library has been a particularly valuable space for tracing some of these missing pieces. This collection is very impressive and includes photos, conference programs, and manuscript drafts, as well as a large collection of correspondence with 20^th century Black writers, such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maryse Condé, and many many more. Fortunately, Sybil Kein is but one of the many writers included in this list and I was able to more investigate her side of the correspondence between her and Michel Fabre. In reviewing this correspondence, I am interested in analyzing how Kein drew connections between Louisiana Creole culture and Louisiana’s historical and cultural connections with France, and Francophone and Creole-speaking Caribbean islands such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti.

In looking through the folders of correspondence between Sybil Kein and Michel Fabre, she notes in a 1988 letter that she had been invited to Martinique and Paris by the French cultural attaché to New Orleans to perform her “Sérenade Créole” musical program that she did with her brother and prominent New Orleans musician, Deacon John Moore. However, she at the time of writing, she had not yet heard back on these invitations. She also notes: “I find much more interest in my work outside of Louisiana. The response to my poetry and songs is usually tremendous. This is another reason why I wish to present my work to other French Creole speaking people elsewhere. I read my poetry at the Toussaint Center in Miami with Morisseau le Roi in 1985. I was moved to tears by the warm response from the Haitian people there. We expected only a few people to come to a poetry reading when in fact more than five hundred people came to hear us. I will never forget that experience[iv].” This letter and subsequent letters that Sybil Kein exchanged with Michel Fabre will allow me to gain insights on the challenges and opportunities she had in bridging Louisiana Creole history and culture with other parts of the Caribbean. The traces of these bridges are particularly important given that she lost substantial research materials collected throughout her career in her flooded house in Hurricane Katrina in 2005, including over 150 Creole songs that she recorded and transcribed from throughout the Caribbean and Europe[v].

 

When zooming out to get a sense of the larger scope of conferences and events that Michel Fabre organized in Paris and his particular connection with other Caribbean and Louisiana writers and musicians, I also stumbled upon contact sheet photos of a 1992 conference that he organized called “Les Noirs Américains et l’Europe” that included photos of Sybil Kein doing a reading or presentation at a bookstore in Paris, which was a pleasant surprise and a good reminder to look well beyond the boxes that you think you may need. Overall, the letters, photos, conference programs, and other materials that I was able to look through in the Michel Fabre Collection at the Stuart A. Rose Emory library provided me with new insights about the challenges that Kein faced in her life’s work to affirm Louisiana Creole culture, as well as more traces of research and events that she engaged with in France and the Caribbean. The opportunity to visit this collection also gave me broader and fascinating insights on the web of interactions and spaces in France, the United States, the Caribbean, and beyond that facilitated the cultural production throughout the 20^th century for so many incredible Black writers, musicians, and artists from around the world.

 

Footnotes:

[i] Kein, Sybil. Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color. Louisiana State University Press, 2002.

[ii] Photo of Sybil Kein, 1988. Box 33, FF 159,  Michel Fabre Collection of African American Arts and Letters, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

[iii] “Poet’s memories of Creole childhood inspire her writing” Times Picayune Article Copy, March 5, 1989[iii], Box 40, FF 1, Michel Fabre Collection of African American Arts and Letters, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

[iv] Sybil Kein and Michel Fabre Letter, August 29, 1988, Correspondence, 1988-1998, Box 40, FF 1, Michel Fabre Collection of African American Arts and Letters, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

[v] Reich, Howard. “Treasures of Music Lovers Now Just so Much Debris ; Even as the City Rebuilds, It Is Clear ‘a Whole Universe’ of Jazz History Is Lost:” The Chicago Tribune, 27 Nov. 2006, pp. 1–9.

[vi] Contact Sheet Photographs “African-Americans in Europe Conference” 1992, Box 32, FF 13. Michel Fabre Collection of African American Arts and Letters, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.