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.

Exploding Bananas

Today's Fun Fact: Bananas can explode.
My new flatmate, in my apartment that I just moved into yesterday, warned me not to leave any food on the counter, because the ants would get it. Seeing no ants around, I thought it would be perfectly fine to leave my undamaged produce (a couple of tomatoes and a few bananas that were a little more ripe than I like them but, hey, not great selection here) out. She insisted and picked them up to place them in a microwave cover.
This morning I walked in to find banana and ants all over everything, the backsplash, the counter, the floor, and one banana missing some mass. Apparently, be it do to the heat or just their sheer number, ants can break into undamaged produce here, and somehow they explode.
Today's Useful Fact: Bananas, so long as they are already as ripe as you want them, can be stored in the refrigerator.

Don't you pity me right now?
(This is where I went to swim today,
just up the road.)

Now, I could go on and on in a sob story about my four-twenty-ten-nine problems with bureaucracy (just imagine it, French bureacracy*small town pace*island isolation) and all the hours I've wasted looking for housing, dealing with talkative landlords that didn't actually have to offer what they put online, and trying to get a phone that requires a banking account that requires an address for a lodging you can't rent until you can call the owner on the phone. Instead, suffice it to say that what actually got me in my actual apartment was not filling out my paperwork on time, nor going to my meetings early, nor diligently searching online using all my resources, but through good, old-fashioned, small-town gossip. My supervisor talked to her coworker who is also supervising an assistant and ... Ben, bref, I landed a decent, clean place to sublet, a little far from my work and town but within my price range and totally liveable.
I thought I'd left the world of small-town talk and everybody knowing my business back in Alabama.
Let's just hope that the bus system here works better than the one there (or else I'll never make it to work tomorrow ... )