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.