Joyeuses fêtes ... lakay mwen ...

My pretty card, signed by each student in one of my higher
classes.

Happy Holidays, whether you're caroling, reaching the end of your menorah, wondering when all the inflatable snowmen will go away, or going to a family-friendly pole-dance.
I'm heading out tomorrow to returns to the U.S. to visit friends and family for Christmas. As such, posts will not be at their normal, lackadaisical rigor but in fact even more sporadic.
I already dread putting myself on the plane to come back here. I'm not happy with the small-town life here, nor with the way I'm fitting in it - or rather, with the extent I'm not finding a niche. As a very independent person, I'm struggling with my inability to go out and enjoy what Martinique has to offer, and as a New Yorker I'm frustrated with how little it has to offer. While I love my job and the majority of teacher I work with, and I adore my students, work is, after all, not all there is to life.
That being said, I hardly fit in back home in Alabama. I'm not exactly looking forward to being interrogated and derided by my family for my choices and my failure to start my own family, and that will sting all the more when I know myself (and I'm sure my dad has told them) that I'm not happy. So, I don't idealize going home, but I do need a break to see my more intellectual friends, hold my cat, and be able to come and go as I please.
I'm hoping for renewal and peace this Christmas, and I wish the same to you.

Chanté dat Nwel

 Last night I was extremely lucky to be able to take part in a Chanté nwel, the Martinique equivalent of Christmas caroling, in the city of St. Pierre. Let me tell you, I learned a thing or two.
It started with the unveiling of a new sculpture, which is appropriate since St. Pierre, known as "Little Paris" before the volcanic eruption of 1902 wrecked it, prides itself on being a center of art. A few apparently important members of the national government were present to cut some ribbon, shake hands, and, yes, take selfies.

Then my supervisor, who had brought me along, and I checked out the Christmas market, just waiting for the festivities to get started. Local food trucks, rum vendors, and the rotary club (dudes are everywhere) were out trying to sell goodies and last-minute Christmas gifts and crowd slowly formed.
Finally, around 8 pm, the choir was warmed up and the master of ceremonies got the mic to kick things off and remind everyone that, when it comes to goodies and rum, at Christmas there is no such thing as moderation (which I feel is a dangerous proclamation at an event to which most everybody drove). Then he announced that, before the singing began, the event would start with a ... pole dance.
Yup, a pole dance. Two young Martinicans climbed up on a portable pole and did a Christmas-themed number. The best I can reckon, pole-dancing was well-known as a sexual performance in strip clubs more or less only in the U.S. Then, about the time I was in high school, it started to be appreciated by the public - to a degree - as a sport, and mother-daughter pole dancing classes started popping up to try to budge the long-held perceptions of it. I mean, it does appear to be a really athletically rigorous and amazing sport. Through the power of social media, this sporty, family-friendly version of pole-dancing seems to have spread to other locales, such as Martinique, where it is currently all the rage for talented young gymnasts. All the chanté nwel-goers, including the babies and grandmas, seemed dazzled, and I know I certainly was.
Then the traditional festivities began. Everyone whipped out their chanté nwel books - everyone already owns one, some bent and rust-stained, other brand new since apparently the classics aren't budging. The Choir started but paused occasionally stopped to nag at the crowd to sing louder - this was a heavily participative event. Most of the songs were call-and-response style, at least for the choruses, and they got lively. Some were in creole, and many were clearly specific to Martinique, referencing Mont Pelé and local dishes. Usually at the end the choir and most of the crowd, minus myself and the other gringos, would break into an unwritten but otherwise universally known refrain, sometimes as secular (about a mosquito, for example, or about Santa Claus) as the original text was religious.
What I really appreciated sociologically about the experience is the contrast between the popular celebration of Christmas in Martinique and the relatively Victorian Christmas traditions I experienced growing up. Here dancers and guests were gettin' down, raising their skirts to kick up some dust while chanting about the fearful Virgin Mother giving birth and eternal salvation through Jesus. When I was growing up, things like dancing and rum (and the weed that several singers were not-so-subtly smoking off to the side of the famer's market where the event was held) could never be mixed with good ol' gospel singing. But why not? And why not pole dancing as well?

The Blessed Tutoie

Some work difficulties are simply
unforeseen.

As you may know, in French there are two pronouns for "you", the singular / informal "tu" and the plural / formal "vous". Whereas in Parisians tend to be fairly casual at work and tutoie (refer to using the more casual form, "tu") most everyone, here in Martinique, as one would expect in more rural settings, manners matter much more, and there's much more vouvoying going on. Furthermore, as I am a foreigner, and as white people risk coming off as entitled here, I am especially careful to vouvoie everyone until they tell me to do otherwise.
Today, a second teacher told me to tutoie her. That makes two out of eleven teachers that I work with and zero out of countless administrators who have decided that, since they see me at least twice a week, I can go ahead and talk to them like work friends instead of in the more distant way.
As I made sure to remind the teacher in question, I might still mess up and call her by the wrong one, since remembering and switching such usages hardly comes naturally to anglophones. To this day, before I email any adult in French, I usually check the last email I sent them to make sure of which pronoun I used before.
One neat memory this brings up for me, though, was being vouvoied at the Sorbonne. Apparently there scholars, as young as eighteen as they may be, are guaranteed the respect of a vouvoie, as of course the students are vouvoying the professors and assistants. I've always wanted to know the story behind that, though it may just be a general tradition. Needless to say, it eased my aching pride, struggling as I was to glean the meaning out of the rapid-fire, two hour-long lectures on subjects I only *thought* I had a decent knowledge of before, to be vouvoied by a professor.
Here not even the students vouvoie me - nor do they vouvoie their regular teachers, either. Go figure.

Movie Review: Les derniers maîtres de la Martinique

A fellow assistant sent me a link to this video, telling me that she had learned a lot about how this island runs and answered a lot of the questions we'd been dwelling on since arriving here. I didn't get the chance to watch it until just now, but since I have I agree with her - it answers a lot of questions.
First of all, context. This video was produced in 2008 for a series called Spécial Investigation, which ran on Canal+, a major player in French news television. The show ran until 2016, when all of its episodes were apparently made available on YouTube, hence the free link. Canal+ isn't exactly what one would call academic, purely journalistic television - a lot of what they do is about scoops and stories that would strike Americans as celebrity gossip. Yet, the culture of uncovering dirt on politicians is much stronger in France, and such discoveries are more likely to have real effects there (thinking of the American president exposed on film bragging about groping women before being elected ... ).
Though it can seem at times to have been filmed on a home camcorder, the show is well-filmed, with punchy editing, beautiful views of Martinique, and unexpected access to private meetings and interviews on reclusive béké estates. The creators start at the funeral of Aimé Césaire, leading author of the négritude movement (which could be impiously summed up as, "Oh, black people aren't intellectual / rich / analytic? Maybe so, but we have more lyricism / agriculture / spiritualism than whites, so we're equal to you."), largely thanked for the psychological liberation of the descendants of French slaves. Césaire was also at the center of the legislative move to integrate Martinique as a department of France, and the film moves quickly to introduce, from among the crowd at the funeral, the main players in Martinique's contemporary story. The békés, dry-eyed and aloof, are the white descendants of slave owners, never dispossessed during the French Revolution thanks to British protection, and still massively rich and influential in the Martinican economy. The majority of Martinicans are black descendants of slaves, suffering from a far higher rate of poverty than the rest of France and struggling with unusually high costs of living.
The bulk of the film attempts to explain this high cost of living. In spite of French anti-monopoly laws, békés collectively control almost all agriculture, retail, wholesale, distribution, and imports. In spite of special défiscalisation laws in the DOMs allowing business owners to invest what they would pay in taxes in their machinery, almost all food products are more expensive here than in the mainland. In spite of the fact that bananas and other produce are grown here, they cost more in Martinican stores than they do in the mainland, to whence they had to be shipped. The working class insists that this is because of the béké monopoly, and the békés, interviewed on their centuries-old estates on the north of the island, insist that production costs are simply higher here.
The editors also lay bare a startling contrast of political priorities. Towards the beginning of the film, banana farm workers protest, threatening to prevent the export of bananas they say they were underpaid to pick and are overpriced in their home. The békés are unperturbed except by the risk of bad publicity, with a careful mix of (white) national guardsmen from the mainland and (black) local police, get their trucks through. Towards the end, the E.U. considers dropping high tariffs on South American bananas, and the békés successfully form a coalition with European and African leaders in Brussels to maintain their bottom line. The profits of the békés merit the attention of Quai d'Orsay ministers, who are surprisingly friendly with the békés, but the protests of their impoverished employees does not. Békés and reporters alike maintain that the békés have no political sway, yet photograph the békés seated with international agricultural advisers in closed-door meetings.
Near the end of the film, an early-2000s controversy surrounding a now-banned pesticide is invoked, and the filmmakers verge on the conspiratorial, suggesting that the French government allowed the békés to produce and use a banned pesticide beyond the date it was disallowed in France because they didn't care about the health risks to Martinicans, who do appear to have an elevated rate of certain kinds of cancers compared to the mainland. To my knowledge, the first study confirming this suspicion actually came out a couple of years later. Again, the filmmakers had surprising access to former and current ministers in producing this piece, and this adds to the overall informational value of the film.
If you can follow along in French (as of yet, English captions don't appear to be available), I would recommend watching this report if you have any interest in the history of the French DOMs or certainly any interest in coming to Martinique. It clocks in at about a hour but is relatively fast-paced and treats several different subjects that are important to understanding the quality of life and the political life in Martinique. And it will certainly dissuade you from trying to come live here on a low salary.

If it isn't en grève, then I wouldn't still be here

Can you, pray tell, imagine if your preschool workers went on strike? Like, you parental figure went to drop you off at the preschool on their way to work, but when you two arrived, a red and black flag was hanging from the front gate, above a poster proclaiming that the workers were subjected to inhumane working conditions and had shut down the school.
Can you imagine it? Personally, I really can't imagine the 60-odd year-old wives up upstanding church men who ran my Baptist preschool pulling off such a stunt, nor can I fathom such behavior at any other preschool I've ever heard of.
But, indeed, the preschool down the hill from my house did just that this week. The parents, a toddler or two in the crook of each arm, walked up to the sign, sighed in front of it, then calmly turned back to buckle their kids in their seats.
What if, on your way out of elementary school, your teacher slipped a letter home to your parents from the cafeteria workers, explaining that they were overworked and were shutting down the cafeteria for the next day? Skipping home with a list of union demands pinned to your backpack?
Again, the sight of my round, elderly cafeteria ladies, again, mostly women who went to church with my family, ever striking, or even complaining about their minimum-wage work, is hardly conceivable to me.
Yet, when I rolled up to my school yesterday, a letter, signed by the principle was posted to the gate explaining just that, as the letters sent home the day before stated, there would be no cafeteria due to a strike, and that parents should, "make the necessary arrangements". The teachers recalled that many students wouldn't come back for their afternoon classes, and others would bring lunch, and others would skip with their siblings up the hill to Grandma's, according to the habits of each family. This has not only happened before, this happens often enough that the teachers judge each parent based on their particular style of handling the situation.
Personally, I think that strikes are essential steps towards workers progressively obtaining humane working conditions and eventually seizing the means of production. I participated in a union in college and do my best to be an ally to those who strike.
But what does it mean to a society and to an economy if strikes are so common that everyone is used to them? What does it mean if everyone has a backup plan already and is hardly inconvenienced by a strike? Is it still effective? Does progress entail a decline in the efficacy of the strike? Do more progressive conditions require more radical action?

Cultural Preservation: You were so busy asking yourself if you could that you failed to ask yourself if you should (or by what discursive means you might)

During creole class yesterday, the class read an excerpt of Maupassant translated into Martinican creole. The professor mentioned in passing that many of the phrases were clunkier in creole because creole is not yet "enriched" enough to express many literary ideas He often mentions that creole was developed in plantation fields and not, as of yet, in salons, so it vocabulary and usage are necessarily less superfluous. However, this time he used a phrase that struck me: translations between European languages are horizontal, but translations from European languages into creole are vertical.

Of course, every fiber of my being revolts at the implication that any language is "lower" than another. First of all, some people, especially those who favor more "primitive" aesthetics (a term whose usage here should not imply a lack of criticism), might prefer the long phrases that use simpler words to express complex emotions or ideas. More importantly, though, creole has a smaller vocabulary and fewer usage patterns for a reason (or a few), and it's worth exploring why.

Creolophone Martinicans are working quickly to codify their language, to work out in writing its grammar, orthography, and idioms. A few teachers I know are on teams that study particular issues in grammar to determine the "correct" usage to be written down and published. Creole organizations regularly host dictation contests (what could be more French!) in which creolophone guests are challenged to write down what they hear in "correct" creole. The authorities on correct creole (including my professor) tend to be authors of works, either original or collected folklore, printed in creole. 

Why such an effort? Well, of course, on this island there is a dominant and an oppressed culture. The dominant culture in French, in terms of finances, in terms of social authority, in terms of government authority, and, most obviously, in terms of cultural pretension. Can you even conceive of a people more stuck up about their own cultural achievements? In such an atmosphere, creolophone Martinicans, and creolophones around the world, appear to have two options: aggressively codify, put into writing, and sharpen your creole, or watch it be completely overtaken and disappear, replaced completely by the dominant language.

In this particular case, the dominant language has a real ax to grind about "correct" language, too. Everybody knows that the Académie française dictates what is and is not "correct" French, and has been doing so for a few centuries now. What many people do not appreciate is that the French people haven't been speaking French for nearly as long. Even as the French tried to impose French on Arab subjects in Algeria in the Nineteenth Century, many people in the mainland, out in the countrysides neighboring other countries, spoke what we might curiously call a mix or accurately call a different language. Through schooling and various other arms of the government, the French administration developed a state-run linguistic Leviathan to impose "correct" French on its own citizens. Nowadays French speakers feel pressured by encroaching anglophone culture - and post-colonial immigrant cultures cultures, too - and react by fighting to "preserve" their "correct" language, from anglicisms, from creolization, from foreign vocabulary, you name it. How could we expect creole to stand up against the full machinery of a paranoid culture that feels its fetischized culture and language threatened by an outside enemy, mobilized to preserve some fleeting, esoteric ghost of its own authenticity, trained in the battlefields of national development of the 1800s?

So creolophones have to choice but to buckle down and preserve their language from the aggressive slip into French - recording and decimating creole vocabulary so that speakers don't pepper their creole with French words, memorializing and enforcing creole grammar so that speakers don't just speak French sentences filled with creole words, and distinguishing and banishing any in-between forms of usage. If they don't, they know their language will be replaced, and no one will be able to tell their stories, recount their history, share their art of living in the language forged in conditions so intense that there's no word for "happiness".

Where's my beef? Precisely in the fact that this process, the only way to fight French dominance, totally accepts and reproduces the structure of French cultural hegemony. In reality, there is no "correct" or "official" language, not in any language; all languages are constantly evolving according to the needs of the people. Dictionaries and grammars are essential tools for sharing and describing a language, but using them as constraints are total artifice, and, by the way, a habit picked up from the dominant culture. In order to stave off the erasure of their language by French, creolophones have had to learn to fight like the French. This reinforces false - and Western (again, a term not here used uncritically) - dictates about what constitutes a "real" or "high" language.

So, what's the practical alternative? There isn't one. Creolophones are doing what is fundamentally necessary to preserve their language in the current climate, and not just for the sake of the language, but for the sake of their history, their identity, and, quite frankly, for the sake of not letting the French off with their own, pretty version of their colonial history. In order to do this, they have to replicate, more or less conscientiously, French / Western cultural hegemony and linguistic artifice. When you get down to it, they aren't liberated. The choice to abandon French standards of a "real language" to maintain their own cultural standards is as false as the choice to separate from France to do so - it just isn't feasible.

And that, friends, is what we call postcolonialism.

As an epilogue: I'm taking advantage of the local library to read the works of my current favorite author, Dany Laferrière, who speaks of his own mother above. I met him at a talk in February where, confronted by a Haitian students complaining that she had to learn a white man's language (French) to study her people's history, insisted that French was his language, too, not some white man's. He, as a Haitian, lives in a universe where creole is spoken and French is written, and anything else would be artificial. Do other creolophones feel such an ownership of French or of their dominant language? Does Laferrière worry about the disappearance of Haitian creole? Does the independence of Haiti inform that mindset?

Umbrella Breakthrough

The random homeless guy who
declared me to be queen of England
(without even knowing my real name,
mind you), insisted I take his picture,
and tried to kiss me.

This last week I suffered a tragedy that actually led me to a breakthrough of the problem of street harassment. As previously mentioned, it's of the worst parts of living here and an injustice I refuse to accept. But this story starts far from the men-filled streets, up in the forest on a hike. Somewhere between sitting down for our picnic in the river at the Absalon hot springs and the end of our long, uphill trek to the nearest bus stop, I lost my only hat here, a freebie from a senior event at Columbia. I was devastated, not because I especially liked the hat but because I was frustrated with myself for losing it and had no other form of physical sun protection for my face.

Last spotting of my dear hat.

On Thursday I had to handle this situation. However, since both straw hats and bucket hats look dumb and I was tired of carrying around my rain jacket, anyway, I decided to buy an umbrella instead of another hat. I paid too much for it in a corner shop and went about my way (as if I was busy).
The change in my quality of life was immediate.
First of all, carrying the umbrella already makes you out as an independent asshole who doesn't care how precious they look, because they're going about with an umbrella up in the sun regardless of what anybody thinks. So, people approach you less.

I have honestly heard the absolute
 weirdest comments about my appearance. 

Then, it's a physical barrier between you and other people. It both hides your face and discourages any comments anyone could logically make about it and keeps them from getting close to you.

I still need to come up with a hat,
though, since umbrellas aren't very
practical on hikes, like the one that
led me to this beautiful view.

Finally, carrying about an umbrella makes you more physically threatening. Apparently men who fail to gather from my crossing the street to avoid them, refusing to make eye contact with them, and walking quickly away from them that I don't want to talk to them can ascertain from the slightest shake of the folded umbrella in my hand that I might just fucking whack them with it. One little flick of the wrist and the guy who was veering towards me is suddenly veering away.
I feel so liberated.
Mind you, I suffer from no illusions about the complete efficacy of this tactic. I'm sure that the most aggressive street harassers will still bother me. However, whereas I endured several instances a day of street harassment sans umbrella, I've yet to suffer a single one since I've had it, and that's a change I can deal with.

Suffocating Small-Town Life

Martinique is getting ready for Christmas
 by rolling out to the mall - including myself
and apparently many of my students

Today I had to rush from work to the  little grocery store in the shopping center to get my sick flatmate groceries and saw one of my students walking with her dad. She happened to not see me, unlike the speckling of kids that called out to me out of their housing project windows as I walked home. Or the student who came to wait by me for the bus last night. Or the two students who stared at me in the mall as if they thought I never left the school. Or the student I saw on the boardwalk on Friday. Or the only student who's heard me speak French, only because I was afraid his tiny little seven-year-old self was riding the bus alone (his teenage brother was a couple of seats over).
Don't get me wrong, all of these encounters are adorable. But they are telling symptoms of one of the conditions I most detest here: the small-town life.
Speaking to a couple of teachers who took my (then well) flatmate and I out on a beach trip some weeks ago, I learned that both of them had briefly lived in the mainland for a while. Why only briefly? To roughly translate, they were all on their own out there. Here in Martinique they are surrounded by family and life-long friends. If ever they need help, someone is there. Everyone knows everybody, so they feel surrounded by friends, not strangers, which is hardly the case in the mainland. The main reason they gave for returning almost immediately was because they missed that sense of intimate community.
I've heard similar comments second-hand from my friends' parents back in Alabama, from adults who can't imagine being so far from their parents, their cousins, from everyone they've known their whole life like I am. For them, too, proximity to people they know well is a comfort they can hardly imagine being without.
I, on the other hand, can barely imagine that I have to live with it until May.
The former president of my high school, chiding me for wanting to go to Columbia, identified the feeling I'd always felt but never articulated as "the desire to be anonymous in a crowd, for no one to know or care who your mother or your father is". To me, that is always the best part of moving - no one knows who I am or who my family is or my life story. Moving away from people I actually love is hard, but leaving behind the world where everyone knows what I'm up to, even if I don't, is a great relief. What I dread perhaps most of all about visiting my parents is being caught in public by people I sorta know, who feel entitled to know all sorts of details about my life and express their surprise and judgement about it - that I'm living so far, or in Europe, or that I'm still single, or that I'm not "home taking care of [my] parents" (who are only 47 and 46, by the way).
Here, every public outing is a risk to see someone you know. Every professional encounter includes a segment where Martinicans try to figure out who they know in common or, if they already know each other, catch up on all their family news. Everybody knows somebody living in my neighborhood and seems inexplicably reassured by this fact, as if it tells them something about me.
Fin, bref, living in Martinique, even in the capital, is just like being at home, in more bad ways than one. I, however perversely, simply want for no one to care who I am or what I'm up to and to keep their opinions about my life to themselves.
Is that a weird thing to ask?

Today's Level of Inferno: Immigration

During our orientation, one of the organizers told us that Martinique is a Paradise, but that it also has seven Infernos. While I don't think that the metaphor completely jives with the classic literary work, I will say that the observation has been a recurring joke amongst the assistants. The Inferno I finished traversing only yesterday was entitled: Immigration, or, if you had a president who bought into the myth that immigrants are refusing to assimilate into your culture, OFII: Office of Immigration and Insertion.
In order to understand immigration here, one must first appreciate the rigamarole that is Immigration in the capital. When I lived in Paris for a year, I arrived with some important paperwork that had been stamped by the embassy in the States as well as an entry visa in my passsport. I sent off the stamped paperwork with a host of other documents - proof of residence, proof of enrollment, proof that my mother's first cousin wasn't an alien, etc - to OFII right after I arrived, in the first week of September. At the end of October I received a letter summoning me to the immigration office in Paris in late November. There, even an hour before my appointment, the waiting room was full of people and a crowd of folks without an appointment were trying to get their affairs sorted, waiting outside the door surrounded by National Guardsmen with automatic guns. The appointment functioned like an assembly line. First, I waited to have a rude lady take my paperwork and briskly ask me questions. Then, I was moved to another waiting room. Then, a couple of nurses very matter-of-factly took X-rays of my lungs (twice, because a smudge from my old T.B. infection appeared ... ) Then I was sent to another waiting room. Then, somebody quickly took my vitals and asked me about my health - and actually made small talk. Then I was moved to another waiting room, where a bunch of other immigrants were being yelled at. Finally, I was called into one last room where a lady confirmed my identity, slapped my residency sticker into my passport, then shooed me away. Having arrived before 8 a.m. by subway, I was completely immigrated and free to have a late lunch the same day.
Martinique went a little bit differently.
First, my paperwork wasn't sent off until the first week of October, and I was pleasantly surprised to receive a summons by email for the last week of October - given, I only had a week's warning, and it was during school vacation, so several assistants didn't make it to their appointments because of the late announcement. There's no subway and the bus system doesn't come close, so I walked over an hour to a regular medical center a little bit out of the suburb of the capital. It wasn't an immigration center at all, just a medical center, where immigrating persons were waiting with regular residents. I waited to get into a waiting room, which opened, of course, late. Then a very polite lady took my info and ensured that I knew what was going on. Then she called me to a different waiting room. Then a very soft-spoken nurse took my chest X-ray. Then I went back to the first waiting room. Then I was given a physical copy of my X-ray, which I've never had in my hands before, and sent very vaguely to another building. I went to a new building and waited, only to be told I had been in the wrong waiting room and have to go to a different doctor's office. There I waited in a waiting room until I was called into a random regular practitioner's office. He very politely took my vitals and asked me about my health in general, ensuring that I understood how the medical system worked in case I needed anything. Then, when he sent me out, I asked for my residency sticker for my passport. He laughed in my face. Oh, no, he explained, he had to fill out a form, which had to be snail-mailed to OFII, who would then write me a new summons to go to a different appointment. I went home no more legally a resident than I had been before.
Finally, last week I received by email a second summons to a different office, this one mercifully in the capital, and completely unguarded and accessible from the street. Yesterday, I arrived early only to find that the office wasn't open yet and the secretary was bewildered that someone would be there so soon. Only a handful of assistants were there. Finally, several minutes after the first appointment was to have started, a representative from the OFII in Guadeloupe, whom the state apparently paid to arrive by boat or plane, came in. She discussed at length with the secretary that if anybody without an appointment came in, it was in fact alright, but they'd have to wait until she was done with her appointments. She calmly walked us up the stairs and asked us to sit for a moment while she got ready. Then she called me into her office, made some small talk about Martinique, asked me how work was going, and ensured that I understood what steps I had to take if I wanted to renew my visa as she filled out her paperwork and put my residency sticker in my passport. Then she told me goodbye, and I had to remind her to give me my medical certificate, saying I'd gone to the medical appointment last month. She very kindly thanked me for reminding her and explained to me in what cases I might need it. I was out of there within five minutes, a completely immigrated resident.
As is said here, aux Caraïbes, on n'est jamais pressé. The process here took two individual visits out of my way on weekdays, as, as a New Yorker at heart who fetishizes my time, that annoys the crap out of me. Not to mention, there were a thousand loopholes for things to get lost - going to one appointment but not another, bureaucrats forgetting or misplacing paperwork, physical X-rays to get lost. Yet, officials were actually nice to me, which, after Paris, is pretty nice, too.

Call it what it is: Harassment

Iguanas don't disturb passersby. Apparently they also don't fall for traps that stupid.

Recently, I was walking to work, approaching a corner where a lone man was standing, apparently unoccupied. Oh boy, I thought, I know what this means. Sure enough, as soon as I passed, he started talking to me, not to say "Bonjour", which is legitimately relatively common to say to total strangers while walking down the street here, but to try to get my attention, as if he had a question, leaning quite close to me. I said "Bonjour" and kept walking, the received advice for these situations. He started walking with me, leaning in closer, staying a little bit ahead and to the right of me, leaning into my face and starting to get more rude. As I stepped out to cross the road I couldn't really see around him. Suddenly, a moped came screeching by, nearly smashing into both of us. "See there," the man following me said, "You almost got hit, almost got smashed to bits because you're mal-élevée", a word which here translates roughly to "not raised right". That's correct, the man harassing a stranger on the street, who continued to follow me while calling me rude names for a block and a half, felt he had the moral authority to tell me that I wasn't raised right. At least as soon as he stopped following me, the poor guy on the moped drove past, leaning over to shout, "Désolé!" in apology.
While this guy was particularly nagging, the fact of the matter is that street harassment is *literally* an everyday occurrence for me and other women I see walking about. Every single day, it's not an "if" but a "when" a strange man will follow you, say obscene things to you, shout at you, and even grab your arm as they try to keep your attention. I dare say that it's as bad as it was during my summer in Paris before they passed the anti-harassment laws. Oh, right. They made it punishable by fine to harass people in public, and the problem, while not completely gone, diminished dramatically in scale. Over about a year's time, with the passage of that law, my walking-on-the-street experience went from dreading going out because I knew men would lean in to whisper profanities in my ear and follow me to being genuinely surprised when strange men tried to talk to me.
Why don't they do that here?
One reason, I believe, is all of the apologeticism for it. One woman assistant brought up the issue of street harassment in our orientation, and the local teachers, men and women, came up with every excuse from, "Men here appreciate beauty and want to tell you," to, "It's the heat." "It's a complement," one lady insisted, "it's not rape."
All this reasoning and minimizing is ridiculous, of course, and I said as much in my written evaluation of the orientation. That being said, I think there is a real reason why local women go to such lengths to excuse such behavior: racism. I know what you're thinking, you just see racism everywhere. While that may be true, hear me out: part of Racism as it was developed in the West entailed the hyper-sexualization and hyper-criminalization of black people, right? Perfect: white people are extra paranoid about their pure resources (white women) being appropriated by impure, virulent underclass (black men). So, they're quick to accuse black men of sexual crimes, throughout history and in many countries. All the while, white men are committing sexual crimes against women, too, both in the mainland and in the colonies DOM/TOMs. Yet, accusing a white man of sexual harassment entails much more social and financial risk to a woman, whereas accusing a black man of it comfortably confirms racial prejudices and poses relatively little risk of serious consequences. So, even though black and white men are both harassing women, both in terms of criminal convictions and cultural representations, it seems like black men are the problem. How are black women, especially ones from the underserved colonies DOM/TOMs supposed to feel about this? They may feel a loyalty to women and be frustrated / afraid of street harassment, but I can only imagine that this loyalty, above all to white women, is strained by economic struggle and cultural chauvinism on the part of mainlanders. Meanwhile, they also feel a defensiveness for men of their own race / local origin, who they know are only part of the problem yet the focus of racio-sexual hysteria. Result: they defend black colonized DOM/TOM resident men to the death, even though they're also frustrated and afraid.
My analysis, I admit, is based more on in-class discussions of Muslim / middle-eastern francophone women defending patriarchy, and not so much on conversations with locals, because locals won't discuss it with me. I'll keep poking around and initiating uncomfortably political conversations, though, and keep you posted.

From Catalonia to the Caribbean, Independence Movements and European Identity

Over the break, a school administrator and teacher took my flatmate and I with her family to the prettiest beach in Martinique, les Salines, and on the way back I saw an unfamiliar flag over the roundabout. (For context, here, every roundabout has an identity-related installation: statues about the abolition of slavery, gardens showcasing local flora, a shape-shifting ode to Aimé Césaire, etc.) She told me that the flag was the official flag of the Martinican independence movement, which I thought was a pretty bold move on public property. This launched us into a long conversation about independence, or, more accurately, dependence on European infrastructure.

I don't live far from the (modest) headquarters for the "liberation" of Martinique.

Martinique clearly has local character and local pride in its créole culture. While I have previously mentioned that it's relationship to it's language is complicated, I saw immediately that here there is a premium, culturally and literally, on all things local, from food to music to all other iterations of culture. But what does that mean for locals' attachment to the mainland, and to the culture of France?

The friend and driver whom I was able to interrogate on the matter was clear. France hasn't done enough to help Martinique, not with its unemployment, not with its development, not with its safety, but it does enough that the island would cease to function without it. She quickly delved into the trope of welfare queens: individuals, especially women, who live better than the average worker because they claim all sorts of unemployment and family benefits, lavishly bestowed by the welfare state, then work on the side without reporting their income. When I pushed back against this analysis, pointing out that this political myth is pervasive in the U.S. where the state is objectively far less generous, she insisted that, whether or not such individuals were exceptional, Martiniquans in general have come to count on assistance from the state. Tourists from Europe both bring in revenue and jobs and inflate prices, such that Martinique depends on Europe both for work and for financial assistance when prices are too high. Unemployment here is far worse than in the mainland, where it's already problematic, and Martiniquans count on both employment opportunities in the mainland and unemployment benefits from the national government to get by. Even though in many ways the transport infrastructure is pitiful, clearly neglected on the Quai d'Orsay, the European Union's mark can be found on a number of essential projects, from bus stops to public gardens. Martiniquans may disidentify to a certain degree with France, but their belonging to the E.U. is essential, in her analysis.

This isn't the first time I came across such an analysis. Previously, in Guadeloupe, more than one local told me that the politics of this year's election totally ignored them, as French politics usually did, and that they were completely ignored and unhelped by France. Previously, my supervisor and initial cultural guide has mentioned that Guadeloupeans are more radical in their independence and cultural identity, but even here I've yet to hear of a local refer to themselves as a Frenchman or Frenchwoman, unless they were from the mainland.

Pretending for a moment that independence would be feasible or even desired, what would that mean for Martinique? As in Guadeloupe, the specter of Haiti, frequently cited as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, is immediately summoned. The French held a debt / war reparations over Haiti for years, then sold that debt to an American bank, leading more or less directly to two American invasions in the Twentieth Century that put any political stability out of the question. Could they do something like that in today's world, where surely it would be reported on, analyzed through post-colonial lenses? Have the power structures changed in any meaningful way to stop them? Would they resort to military force?

I don't think we'll see any of these questions answered any time soon, but I dare say that they're questions that cross people's minds. An awareness of financial dependence on Europe makes itself more known in this culture than any affection for France, but either way it doesn't look like many people here even get to the point of contemplating leaving.

Mo' (Bills) Mo' Problems

You know what's really unfair? When the pathologization of poverty is so deeply entrenched in our society that certain formative experiences are reserved for individuals of financial means, since they are assumed to be the ones worth investing in to begin with.
It was apparent that this underlying prejudice had pervaded the logic of TAPIF (the American recruitment process to become an English assistant in France) when the introductory materials mentioned that each assistant would need about 2,000 € to start off, before they were paid. You see, pay is normally withheld one month for teachers in France, so normally, since we start in October, our first paycheck wouldn't come until the and of November. Even though we're offered an advance of part or all of our first paycheck at the end of October, significant cash has to be doled out in initial expenses long before we get here: a plane ticket to our new place of work, lodging until we can find a new place to stay, the first month's rent and deposit on our new home, etc., besides just living expenses, like groceries, phone bills, insurance, and public transport, or, if you don't live in a major city, either the rental fees or the entire cost of a car. On top of all that, starting out somewhere new entails higher spending that what you will spend after you get settled, as you're eating out more to try to make friends, as you don't know where the cheapest stores are to procure what you need, and you have to buy all of the things that you could not fit in your suitcases but still use regularly.
In spite of my considerations of all this, I was sure from the beginning that I would never spend 2,000 whole euros in my first month or so here. That figure is so far above my usual spending habits, I thought for sure the data they had collected was skewed by the fact that most of the people who come here already have to have the socio-economic means and independence to have a Bachelor's and the idea to come skipping off to France to work part-time.
How pride doth come before a fall ...
I offer, dear reader, a screen cap of my expenses since I left the U.S., from my flight here to my first paycheck. Note that I spent not 2,000 €, but $3,000.61 (2582.39 €). My only consolation is that this budgetary faux-pas entails multiple mistakes that I can easily avoid in the future: buying black thread in a store that I won't even be going to anymore, going to out eat with totally flaky friends I'm done trying to establish a connection with, and taking a ride from friends who think that because you offered to get their lunch since they're driving that they should order 6 € worth of ice cream. That, and the number encompasses my flight home for Christmas, which really isn't negotiable in my family.

If I distribute this deficit across every month, along with the cost of my flight home in spring and my break in February (when I'm hoping to rent a car and actually see this damn island, which can't be pulled off on public transit), my budget actually gets quite tight, all when I thought I'd be floating in plenty this year. Part of the problem is also that the cost of living is considerably higher here, as everything from transit (1.8 € instead of Paris' 1.1 € a ride) to phone service (14 € for a plan with 1G as opposed to 2 € in Paris) to groceries is more expensive than in the métropole. Fortunately, I think I have a tutoring gig about to come through - which, by the way, is already in defiance of my visa, which requires that I work no more than twelve hours a week. Because they only want assistants coming who already have the financial means to draw from savings to support themselves while they're here. So much for égalité ...

I am lucky enough, however, to have a good friend who will pick up my flatmate and I and include us on their fabulous picnics, like the one here in Coeur Bouliki.

Let's Talk about Language

 

One of the most important, and darkest, chapters in the history of Martinique as we know it is the slave trade, which was triangular, like the Cap 110 monument.

I'm all in favor of making the most of one's situation, even if that situation is being bored out of one's mind on a beautiful Caribbean island for seven months. In that spirit, I am both alleviating my boredom and extending the knowledge gleaned from my degree in French and Francophone studies by taking a course on creole language and civilization here in Martinique.

I only started today (9 classes behind, because I was trying to wait until I was paid, which I still haven't been), but it was a good day to play catch up since only two people total showed up, due to the All Saint's vacation this week. The professor quickly caught me up on the creole alphabet and a few important points about grammar. I don't imagine that you're here to learn a new language, so I'll skip those bits (though you can use my créole flashcards, if that does interest you). However, as ignorance about colonial history and the current conditions of former colonies pervades the ""Western"" world, I will go ahead and share a few points that I gleaned from his lecture on Martiniquais people and their relationship to their creole.

The journey while fighting racism is hard enough to merit its own bench by the way.

This relationship is characterized, he argues, by four rejections. This creole was created quite rapidly as the lingua franca of the indigenous Caribbeans, white French people (who spoke francien of the French countryside, as formal French hadn't actually pervaded the whole country yet), and imported African slaves, between the years of roughly 1620-1670. Creole was considered the language of the slaves, the lowest class of society (the Caribbeans were being rapidly massacred). The French planters (habitants as they are called politely, or békés more commonly, though this term is considered something of a slur / derogatory term now, depending on who you ask) largely came from poorer, rural classes and were trying to move up in the world, so they rejected creole in favor of métropolitain French.

Because of what some might call most basic human nature, or what my former Native America professor called "the history of shagging", mixed-race individuals soon formed their own class on the island. They began to advocate for their own social and legal rights through French institutions, and, in order to succeed and be taken seriously, they, too, rejected creole in favor of French.

With the abolition(s) of slavery in the Nineteenth Century, former slaves and their children basically had the choice of continuing to work on plantations, fleeing into the mountains to start their own small farms, or trying to climb the social ladder through education. In schools, creole was (and continued to be until very recently, actually) not allowed, so anyone pursuing this path had to, again, reject creole in favor of French.

Finally, with the abolition of slavery, "manpower was imported" (a handy euphemism for skipping over complicated histories of class struggle, colonialism, and violation of human rights), especially from Southern India. These Indians, who were known as coolies (super not an okay word now, but it helps to know what it means), were actually not considered French citizens, despite remaining for generations, until 1922, at the end of a long legal struggle. At this point, they, too, basically had only education as a option for climbing the social hierarchy. You guessed it: they by and large chose to speak French rather than creole.

Élizé may be all about sharing
créole flavors with the world in
their Region, but they share their
anti-littering message in French,
which, here, is a choice.

What does all of this mean? Well, for starters, it means that creole is/was in trouble. Though creole is now taught in schools and even universities in Martinique, after several generations of it being formally prohibited in schools and hardly used in any professional setting, with many individuals neglecting, intentionally or not, to speak it in their personal lives, many feared that it would diminish in depth or even disappear. Nowadays, individuals and action groups host events, publish literature and dictionaries, and generally call people to action to preserve this part of local culture. Last week Martinique, along with several other islands, celebrated the International Day of Creole, with several events aiming at celebrating and developing the use of creole. I had the privilege of attending a presentation of creole crafts, poetry, and cakes (you can guess where my money went). 

Does that mean that locals have a purely positive view of creole? What does creole mean to locals who didn't speak it growing up but now feel pressured to learn it? How does the form it takes now differ due to insertions of both French and English? Lacking an Acadamie française, who decides how modern and technological terms are integrated?

I sure don't know, and I may never fully understand, but I intend to keep striving to understand.

What is in a Name?

So, imagine the following nightmare with me:
On your first day of work in a foreign primary school, your (highly irritated and hardly English-speaking) head teacher asks you to come up with """American""" names for her adorable 5-6 year old students, who are clearly far too afraid / confused by their teacher to report their real names when she asks. This teacher, who hasn't actually been exposed to much American / English culture since her classes presumably in the '90s, has her own idea of what """American""" names sound like: white sitcom names. You have to, in a flash, try to come up with """American""" names for these deserving, good children that are authentic to their age but which also appeal to the bleached tastes of the teacher, who is terrifying them and clearly impatient. Plus, they have to be easy to spell, because she's going to make these kids, who barely know how to hold a pencil, write their own name plates.
Welcome to my reality.
I'm really quite, quite ashamed of the names that these kids may very well carry through the rest of their English-learning career - or even beyond.
Now, mind you, I'm not totally opposed to taking a name from the language you're learning. My first term of French, our instructor directed us to an online database of baby names in France and had us pick from the most popular names from our year of birth. That way, we had some say, some time to prepare, and got a name that was both French and contemporary to our age. We're still in contact, and she still calls me by my chosen French name, which makes it really funny that I have a student named Océane.
This is not what occurred with my poor students.
Bless their hearts.
I'm crippled with guilt! The consequences of my inadequate selection could follow them through the rest of their educational careers - AND BEYOND.
At least I didn't allow any of them to be called Kevin ... 

Fiches d'anglais

Dailleurs, French students have a fun predilection for both
pencil bags and oddly specific / outdated American culture.

Back at home, I have a giant, blue three-ring binder full of French learning materials. While some of it was added while I was in college, most of it is copies and handouts from my high school days. It's one of my most prized possessions not because of the perfect dictation that I have slid in the front cover (I'd never brag about that old thing), but rather because of what a long-term learning tool it has been for me.
A lot of the resources inside are more of compendiums than worksheets: the appropriate idiom to say how you play every sport conceivable, every common French idiom about food (there's quite a few of those), guides on conjugating every kind of verb. Whereas I did read and study those materials as they were given to me, I definitely did not internalize all of the material on the first or even second read-through. Rather, I consulted the binder on occasion, before exams or trips to France or interviews or even just for fun, over the course of years. Songs and passages that meant nothing to me in my first years of learning French seemed really beautiful in my fifth. Idioms about wind surfing I could never remember before my first national exam came out perfectly in conversations six years later. My big binder encapsulates, in a certain way, what an on-going and branching process learning is (which is recognized by teaching trends like spiraling, for instance).
That's one reason why I get so excited about lesson planning. Besides that I love my job (location aside, perhaps), I love imagining the students returning to their cahiers years down the road and re-reading the materials I give them now. Some of them don't even try to read their pumpkin poems or question sheets about traveling to anglophone countries, and those who do struggle to shape their mouths around each sound, much less understand and appreciate the language. And, of course, many of the students will chunk their cahiers and all the sheets I've had them glue inside. (Can we talk about that for a second? Why do the French have their students glue handouts inside their notebooks instead of just using three-ring binders or folders? Why spend all that time??) But others will keep them and, as they continue on their journey of discovering the English language and traveling about, they will occasionally peep back into their notebook and learn something they'd missed the first few times.
It really ups the ante about catching typos in my teaching materials.

The Pace of Paperwork

Even if I take the bus, I have to
walk up and down this to get to
one of my schools.

When the bus does arrive, eventually, sometimes, on occasion, when the gods of this island, descended from Mont Pélée to direct our miniscule and insignificant lives, decide they're done smoking and drive out to get their passengers, I always try to stay focused on the road. Traffic here goes from 0 to 60, literally, unpredictably, so it's easy to miss your stop. That being said, I do still read the signs in the bus, just in case they're not from 2012 and actually do contain some pertinent info that I don't know.
I noticed almost immediately that, instead of buying a one-way ticket without transfers for 1,80 €, one-ways with transfers are available in stands for 1,25 €. Plus, those are sold are cards that can be charged with multiple trips, so I can save myself some trouble by buying several at a time. (For reference, the price of one trip on the Parisian transit system, when I was there was 1,10 € if you bought multiple tickets from the booth, which was in almost every station, and that system actually functioned properly.)
I also read that you could get a weekly pass for 10 €, which is pretty affordable. I spend almost that much on bus tickets each week, and I figured my trouble is worth some money, too. So, I be-bopped my happy ass down to the booth to buy one from the machine. No can do. So I go to the window and, after waiting in line, ask for one. The lady looks at me like I'm crazy. I point to the sign. "Oh, noooo, that's not possible!" exclaimed the lady, shaking her head. I insisted, pointing at the picture on the sign of the pass which very much should be available for purchase. She starting saying that just waaaasn't possible, listing off all the steps and procedures I'd have to complete to get one. Having played this game a few times with customer service representatives in other establishments on this island, and quite frankly being sick of it, I asked for a list of documents I needed, which she forked over. Copy of your I.D., copy of your electricity bill (which proves where you live - if you rent, like me, you need a letter from your landlord with their electricity bill and a copy of their I.D., which my landlord has previously refused to fork over), other nonsensical requirements. Now, mind you, I'm not trying to sign up for insurance (which took days), or a bank account (which took weeks), or sign a lease (which took weeks), or get my paperwork to start work (which took multiple trips to various school district offices). I just want a 10 € (= approx. $11.85) bus pass, which I'll have to glue my own damn photo to. You'd think I was asking to open a multinational.

On the plus side, when you walk
about town you see gems like this,
a contemporary, and somewhat
salty, mural about local claim to
fame Aimé Césaire, on the side of
the middle school named after him.

I took the list home and tried to figure out how I'd get another official passport photo made - that's harder to come by, here. Then I finally read the fine print on the back of the list. The weekly card doesn't refill itself. After all that, the form, the paperwork, the photo, the bus company doesn't even automatically refill your card. You still have to go, once a week, down to a booth, which are only in town, to refill the card manually. So, each Monday morning, you still have to buy a bus ticket or walk all the way into town.
I'm not getting a bus ticket right now. I can't deal with this crap.
Meanwhile, I still am not signed up for social security because the department of education did my application wrong, and the French government won't give me a rent subsidy, not because I make too much money, and not because my rent is too cheap, but because my apartment is too small. Too small. According to their estimator online, I'm otherwise eligible for 250 €  (= approx. $296.21) a month, but I can't have it because my apartment is too small.
Vive la France carribbéenne, y'all.

The Secular Spectacular

The French, at least theoretically, really pride themselves on being a secular society. The rantings of snobbish mainland philosophers aside, this has a lot of concrete manifestations, even out here in the DOMs. On the wall of every education department office I've visited and in many other locations, the French charter of laïcité in education is proudly unfurled, a product of an early-19th century, rather avant-garde at the time policy making public education (again, at least theoretically) free, secular, integrated, and obligatory. At our official training, language assistants were reminded to include no religious inclinations in our lessons (nor to divide our classes by sex, a rule which I've seen at least a few teachers break so far). And, of course, all "ostensibly religious symbols" are banished from schools - which is far less polemic out here than in the mainland, where the islamaphobic implications are more evident.

That being said, anyone coming to work in French schools may note, in there joy of discovering a two-week vacation every six weeks or so, that their extended holidays revolve around Christian, and specifically Catholic, holidays: All-Saints, Christmas, Mardi Gras / Carnival, Easter, etc. Of course, Catholicism is a strong cultural marker here in France, as well, and it's perfectly understandable that the rhythms of vacations would carry over from an earlier time.

However, one's pace in life is determined by the Church in other ways, too, here. I was just reminded of such this morning, when a craving for a chocolate bar set in at about 11:54 am, which is about 6 minutes before all the grocery stores, all of which I know about are at least 15 minutes away from my home, close for the day. That's right, almost all businesses are closed on Sunday afternoon. In fact, except for grocery stores, which are allowed to open in the morning, tourist-oriented businesses (after all, gotta eat), and pharmacies, one of each per community is open each Sunday, all businesses are obliged to be closed on the Lord's Day throughout France, though evidently a few loopholes around this rule persist. This regulation is ostensibly oriented towards the rights and dignity of workers, who need a day of rest - which is of course only coincidentally an opinion found in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. I have also recently read it reclaimed in a Parisian publication as a necessary break from consumerist culture - as soon as we all get out of the traffic jam outside the grocery store, of course.

All of life is about the search for the middle path, amirite?

Every society is fraught with contradictions, I suppose, and France, this proudly secular, socialist society, is no exception. Everyone just has to find their own ways of navigating it. Here in Martinique, where most of the population is more or less directly descended from slaves forcibly converted to Catholicism upon importation, religion seems to figure more visibly in the day-to-day life of the society.

Take, for instance, a certain primary school teacher who works with my flatmate, another teaching assistant. She offered, after having met the new assistant only once, to include her on a family beach excursion this weekend. They exchanged WhatsApp numbers to facilitate the planning. Immediately after school, my flatmate was included what is an apparently regular round of evangelical messages declaring Jesus to be the solution to a number of life's problems. Once we arrived at the beach, the first thing the teacher asked each of us, individually, is whether we were Christian. I didn't feel threatened by the question and in fact had a somewhat long conversation about being raised as a kind of baptist then becoming Episcopalian, a church that is not represented anywhere on this damn island. She then asked each of us to join her for church on Sunday, once on the beach and once immediately after buying us tropical-fruit flavored pastries, which I'm ~sure~ weren't intended as bribes.

As what I will cheekily call a recovering evangelical, such behavior is pretty ostentatious, and I'm sure my non-religious flatmate felt it even more so. But all of this flies, and is in fact quite normal, in this particular corner, adorned with large crucifixes at the frontier of most communes, of the ostentatiously secular French society. 

Meanwhile, I'm still craving chocolate.

Eating au Paradis

Today I open with a confession: I really, really don't know how to cook. First, there's the fact that I can't smell - I can't tell when things are burning, and my taste isn't nearly as sensitive as most people I might be cooking for. Secondly, I moved off to boarding school at 15 and proceeded to be on some sort of dining plan almost all the time until age 22. Thirdly, I'm just not that interested. Especially now that my sense of taste isn't that great, I really care mostly about texture and sweetness, so I can do cakes, cobblers, cookies, and basically anything that's loaded with sugar like a pro, but I've never bothered to improve my cooking skills much.

Not my momma's cookin'

Perhaps worst of all, growing up our diet was oftentimes hardly healthy. As Southerners were want to do, my family fried nearly everything, including our nice garden vegetables in the summer. We ate a lot of starch - above all corn and bleached white flour - but not nearly enough vegetables most of the year. And obviously we loved sugar, just obviously.
In spite of my years of body image issues and trying to diet myself to skinny, I never actually started to eat wholesome food until college, where the dining hall had lots of healthy stuff and I could force myself to like raw vegetables one leaf of spinach at a time. Eventually I became vegetarian to cut carbon emissions to my name, further distancing myself from my "home" diet. Eating differently, though, is different from cooking differently. As I weened myself off a meal plan I mostly had rice and beans or frozen vegetables, which is very balanced but not particularly adventurous. But hey, I didn't go to the Ivy League to become a chef.
At home, especially this last summer, I tried to take advantage of my parents' well-stocked kitchen to approach cooking the way I suppose any person my age who feels they don't know how to cook would: by trying recipes off the internet. My parents were just shocked that someone would ask them to eat so much green without any meat.

Flash forward to now, where I live on a beautiful tropical island, of which a solid percent is covered in fields. Surely I can find some way to be healthy here while enjoying the local cuisine, right? Problem: it's an island, and I'm allergic to fish and seafood. Most of the cuisine has fish and seafood in it. That which doesn't, including a great lentil stew that a friend of my supervisor let me try, has meat in it. The rest is mostly dessert an alcohol, based on restaurant menus, internet searches, cookbooks in gift shops, and conversations I've had with my supervisor. Except maybe soup.
I consider a plant-based diet to be more of my ideal, anywho, so why not just buy fresh veggies and chomp down? Since the bus freaking never comes, I can walk to a grocery store of some size in about 45 minutes, but they take a very laissez-faire approach to stocking: they have what they have, and when they don't have something, its bin is empty - can you imagine the riot that would happen if your local Wal-Mart was out of onions? Next, I sauntered over to a street market, where all the vendors have the same things for sale because the same plants get ripe in everybody's garden at the same time. Plus, I paid 6 euros for two avocados.

I strive to be as attractive as humanly
possible at all times.

I tried to bend my goals and cook lentils, a favorite here, even on the beach, made with locally-grown
supplemental vegetables based on a non-local recipe I found on the internet. Too bad I couldn't smell the lentils burning to the bottom of the pan and didn't realize the rock-hard surface my spoon was scraping as I stirred was not the bottom of the pan but a layer of blackened lentils. That added an interesting flavor.
Basically, I'm back to dried grain and beans and frozen vegetables, the most notable exception being that I'm eating entire avocados until they go out of season in a month or so.
Isn't that just exotic.

If It Isn't En Grève, It Isn't French

What I'm up to when I can't visit my schools because they're on strike

If you've never lived in France or had the deep, gratifying pleasure of traveling in France during a time of social unrest (ever), then you, dear reader, might not be aware of just how important the strike is to the well-being of French society as a whole.
My French/American professor once told the  joint seminar on Diversity that, whereas in the U.S. the government decides what's legal, and the citizens may or may not try to influence it, in France the attitude is much more than the citizens decide what will and will not fly, and the government may or may not attempt to disagree.
And, boy, are the French good at putting a brakes on the world turning.
One of the very first vocabulary items I learned was opération molokoye, known on the mainland as opération escargot. Yes, escargot, that weird snail food found only in American cartoons about France, American restaurants pretending to be French, and at the café at Fontainebleu catering to American tourists. In France the snail operation and in Martinique the turtle operation consists of protesters getting into their cars and driving on the most important roads in a town as slow as they possibly can until a meeting is called to meet their demands. During my first week in Martinique, the molokoye was a serious impediment to my going to visit my news schools and potential lodgings. The cause? According to my supervisor, the supplementary mentoring program, providing part-time work to young people and helping teachers reach out to students having troubles, was suddenly cut off, right before the start of the school year. I had the opportunity to listen in as my supervisor and her colleagues discussed it a bit, and it seems that their sympathies (at least so far as they express them in the office in the presence of the new, foreign teaching assistant) seem to lie on both sides: the financial situation that the new administration inherited was impossible to manage without making cuts, but at the same time, both the laid-off workers, the students, the teachers, and the parents lose out in this new arrangement.
Current searches for news in Martinique are actually flooded with word of a different grève, this one concerning transportation workers at the airport. I don't have too many details on that one, but it seems they've also been blocking traffic, which, as one teacher reported in a school I visited today, is keeping some students from getting to school. She called it an aberration, but most of the other teachers and administration I've spoken to simply agree that this rentrée (a delightfully efficient French work for "back to school") has been difficult, and that it shows no signs of letting up. All of this is also a part of the larger challenges proposed by the last French president, Holland, and the current (former banker) president, Macron's reforms / austerity / neo-liberal modifications to labor laws across France. Their changes have begun to roll out across France, but the media largely paints it as though the administration is underestimating how much trouble the protesters can cause before its over.
When I applied for this job (as well as to the Fulbright English Teaching assistantship - oops), I was interested in how politics and teaching came together. In some communities teachers are at the forefront of social and political change, but in others they are more like passive arms of the socializing/educating/civilizing State. As politically active as French people stereotypically are, I can't yet tell where on that spectrum I think my teachers here in Fort-de-France are. So far the grèvistes are an outside force, arriving in the mornings to either board up the school and write in chalk that it is closed or taking the streets to demonstrate. I haven't met any teachers who are themselves involved, though that doesn't mean that none of them are.
Training, at least, took place, and I'm already completely wooed by my tiny new students as well as by even more local sweets - as if I needed more sugar in my diet.

A bakery-ordered pain au beurre et au chocolat, once only made for communions, baptisms, and other important celebrations but now available more or less whenever you please, this one ordered so that myself and the other newly-arrived teaching assistants could get a taste of local culture. Stay tuned to hear more about my struggle to eat healthy in the very place where so many damn wholesome fruits and vegetables are grown.