Hello,
internauts. My name is Elizabeth and I'm going on a fun adventure called
"I was too paralyzed by anxiety my senior year of college to pick a real job" "TAPIF - Teaching Assistantship Program in France". I'm spending the next year helping adorable little French elementary school children speak slightly better English than their conceited adult friends who think they speak great English when pressed but are really too inhibited to even try. Or, at least, that's what the adults are like in Paris. But we are not in Paris. If you want to look at Paris, here:
That's all your getting. Seriously, soak it up, because we are not in yon
métropole, but in fact in the DOM of Martinique. A DOM is a little bit like Hawaii is in the U.S. - it's a real "state" (unlike, for example, what Puerto Rico is to the U.S. or St. Martin is to France), but it has its own culture, its own language, and is really just quite different from what most people think of when they imagine that country. Martinique looks more like this:
And, after Hurricane Maria, parts of it look like this:
So, you're not getting any more Eiffel Tower photos, and you have by now remarked that I am not at all a great photographer. Why on Earth should you care what I have to say about it?
For starters, I am of a rare breed. By that I do not quite mean an inbred hillbilly family, but I'm not far off. I'm from a tiny town in Alabama, U.S.A., where my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents all lived - we even have our own street, where just our family lives. For one of us to get out and see the world is pretty rare, so what I'm offering you here is nothing less than an opportunity insolite to hear a redneck out of their woods, seeing a part of the world with which even you may very well not be familiar.
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| My Yankee friend shooting a semi-automatic gun that he and my dad built in my home, to give you an idea of what it's like |
Second of all, I theoretically have a great deal of knowledge to share about all this. I recently graduated with a degree in French and Francophone Studies with a concentration (a stuck-ass word for "minor") in psychology, which means I should be able to tell you lots about the
French colonies complex relationship between mainland France and the places like Martinique where people speak, inexplicably, French, as well as about the functioning of my wee students' brains.
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| A couple of my friends and I getting our fancy-ass degrees this last spring. |
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| Josephine is a hometown hero here in Martinique. She married Napoleon, who reinstated slavery. That makes her less popular of a figure. |
Third of all, I'm cynical as hell, and you can count on me to recount to you the most ridiculous aspects of this little adventure in the most negative light possible. Let me tell you, folks, if you thought the Cynical Southerner was depressing, you have no idea how the last two years of collegiate nonsense have driven me to the absolute ends of despondancy
Fourth of all, I absolutely unapologetically use nonsensically colorful vocabulary, in two, three, four, who knows how many languages that I claim to have some knowledge of. So, if you want to get
familier with a bunch of words, crude and otherwise, in English, French, Creole, or whatever else floats my fancy, but have no idea what language they're from or if they're
just words I've chosen to italicize, then you, friend, are the right kind of stupid to jump on this ride.
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| Me, near the site of one of my old teaching jobs but out of earshot of any children, and therefore probably swearing. |
Hold on to your knickers, friends (unless they're side-tie panties - you may just want to go ahead and let those go), because this ride doesn't stop until at least next spring - that is, provided I don't die first. You see, I'm allergic to both fish and seafood, which perhaps I should have taken into consideration before agreeing to come work on this Caribbean island, where not only are both of those things abundant, but they aren't even considered meat. Normally maintaining a vegetarian diet helps me avoid my allergens (and the black bits of meat that I just don't like) and reduce my carbon footprint, but here neither fish nor seafood are considered "meat". Cases in point: last night my new supervisor took me out to eat in a quintessential restaurant
pieds dans l'eau, where I was pleased to find
plat végétarien prominently on the menu. Too bad that has both
accras, little fried breaded bits of veggies and
morue, a kind of fish, and
boudin, a local type of blood sausage. Furthermore, today my AirBNB host that I'm staying with until I can find an apartment offered me a very nice "green salad", which she insisted had no meat at all in it ... with the same two kinds of meat in it. Alas, if the humidity doesn't get me, I guess the delicious local cuisine will.
In short: For cynicism, negativity, inexplicable lexical decisions, and, I don't know, to expand the frontiers of your mind or some shit, join me, here at Made in Martinique.
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| Let me just tell you, friends, shit has gone down around here. Stay tuned to learn more disturbing colonial history. |
