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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
