A Few Miles, A Few Years, or Some Intangible Separation

Excuse the dramatic title. I've been feeling a little gloomy. There are many reasons for this, but one of the main ones revolves around the latest school mass shooting in the U.S. You may be thinking, that has nothing to do with Martinique. However, I really feel it does. As a young person, I left home at a to go to public boarding school, which, while it was still small and in Alabama, was much more diverse in a lot of ways and was where I first started to confront ways of thinking substantially different from those of my parents. From there I moved to New York City, which may very well be the single place on Earth with the most variety of origins, without even mentioning my time at Columbia, which was basically spent learning stuff, forming ideas about it, having those ideas ripped to shreds by my liberal arts-savvy colleagues, being bombarded with their own ideas, and then repeating. More or less immediately I found a way to study abroad, which I did twice before graduating and coming to Martinique. These experiences have given me a chance to learn from a lot of different people's perspectives, but also to see that another way of life is possible. There are many people in the world who do not fear getting shot, neither at home, nor in the street, nor at school. There are many people who never fear that a property line argument will result in a violent death. There are many places on Earth where violent death is a widely-condemned anomaly, universally considered unacceptable and the job of the government to prevent. I have studied and, now, worked in school in such places, and I think those people have gotten something right that we in the U.S. have by and large gotten wrong.
But when I call home, my parents just drum on about loading bullets, buying and trading guns without background checks, and about neighbors getting shot. It's the way they live, and they, like so many others in the U.S., have been fooled into disbelieving that another way of life is possible. That all talk of change is just liberal nonsense.
I don't know how to make them understand that's not true. I don't know how, in the stagnation that is U.S. politics, a change in gun policies might happen.
Realizing that I can't make them understand what I've learned really makes me worry that I'm not fit to help anybody learn.

Punishing Puns: English in France, Presented without Comment

Obama saying, "Yes, We Can"? Which is ironic because the TCSP buses aren't running yet -?

Another Day, Another Grève

Look, I'm a lefty. I get strikes. I believe in the power of strikes. Strikes are essential in this no-good, capitalist world in which we live to retain our humanity.
But I'm so over it.
After walking to work (as I do every day, since the buses are to slow in the mornings for me to get to work on time) and then back up the hill to my house, having mulled over this the whole way, I still don't get it. The ENTIRE bus line is on strike not because of wages, hours, benefits, vehicle quality control, or any other reason that I can reckon is the result of a failure of policy. They're on strike because a bus driver was assaulted - which is AWFUL. That's a terrible thing, and I hope the person is okay. But why are they on strike? Is there something that the bus company or a public office like the police could have done to stop that? I mean, I'm sure we could analyze the underlying reasons why racism and the alienation under capitalism might cause someone to rash out at an innocent bus driver, but that doesn't seem like sensible cause for a strike. Are they demanding better barriers between the passengers and themselves? (They already ride behind a locked door with a little window for change that can only be opened from the inside.) Are they demanding risk pay? If they're making any concrete demands, the public, via Facebook groups, news stands, and word of mouth doesn't seem to know it. It honestly just feels like they are, as always, the fickle gods of this island lashing out upon all of the humans present for the impiety of some single Odysseus among us. (Full disclosure: I think Odysseus was a jackass and the source of 98 of his 99 own problems.)
Other things I don't understand: why this iguana was out in the open as I was walking today from my school to the library.

Carnaval: The Cynical, The Crusty, The Curious

After a few naps and a nice, brutal sugar detox, I am proud to report that I have survived my first ever Caribbean Carnival season, unscathed enough to tell the tale.

If you have experienced Carnival where you live, or maybe have just watched The Hunchback of Notre Dame, you probably know that the Mardi Gras season is traditionally a time to not only cut loose, but to reverse social hierarchies, mock those in power, and defy cultural taboos. I looked forward to witnessing the myriad of ways Martinicans would protest their conditions, which, in case you are a new reader, I complain about a lot.

This year's biggest theme, both in songs at private soirées and on bradjacks, junker cars with special permits to be painted for parades, was the TCSP, the long-promised but still not existent bus line. (Seriously, the roads and bus stops are built, they just can't settle on financial questions long enough to actually get the thing going.)

Point of Obama reference unclear

Paper-maché minister who won't
fund bus line completion

The political is always my favorite.

A Purge-themed bradjack, featured a castrated Trump.

However, plenty of appearances were simply dedicated to doing what is normally taboo, be it dressing sluttily, in the case of almost everyone of any age there, or doing drag, was were the majority of the men there each day (not just Monday, Mariage burlesque).

While I absolutely encourage defying social standards and questioning oppressive social constraints, by all means festively, I will say that some of the demonstrations were a little lost on me. I get it, dressing up skinny women like the fake "traditional" creole woman on the label of the rum brand who sponsored your float is a part of the deal, and maybe even dancing in skirts made of McDonald's cups, if that's who sponsored you. But some of it was just ... gross. If this were a society where men had to walk about in suits all day, I'd get why men would want to come to Carnival half-naked with nasty, sexual jokes written on their bodies. But they don't. They walk around half naked here all the time, sexual harassing women every day of the year, then show up at Carnival to make us look at junk we don't want to see. If this was a Puritanical society that repressed all sex, I'd get wanting to be gaudy with representations of it. Instead, the media is drenched in hyper-sexualized images of women, and people just painted more of them on their bradjacks. And made a Peppa Pig-themed bradjack with a pig eating out a blond sex doll. I don't know, I just don't get it.

A final intriguing thought: this experience really made me appreciate how U.S.-centric the idea of cultural appropriation is. When some of my students came to the school carnival party dressed as Indian and Egyptian princesses, I cringed. And plenty of paraders wore what I would call Native-American-esque headresses. But this is a creole society, where almost everyone lays claim, both biologically and culturally, to both Indian and indigenous roots, inside of a larger anti-black global culture in which in the past black people have hailed back to African Egyptian history as a way of reclaiming their identity. For them, all of those symbols are a part of who they are, regardless of how indigenous peoples, Indians in diaspora, and present-day Egyptians and other Arabs may face discrimination, inside and outside of Martinique.

Tricky, hairy, uncomfortable, but true. Just like most of the Carnival get-ups I saw.

Crime and Fessing Up: A Small-Town Saga

A few short days out, my recent post about how much more rare and scandalous murder is here compared to in the U.S. has taken on a new, naive light. This Wednesday, while waiting at a bus stop on the main street in town, with plenty of people around, at around 4 pm (full sun, here), my text to a tutee saying I'd be late was cut short. A skinny kid, maybe about 14 or 16 years old, snatched my cell phone out of my two hands while I was texting, there in front of God and everybody. I ran after him, yelling, but, lagging behind in my sandals and watching him disappear up a tall staircase to an unfamiliar, sprawling housing project, I decided I should go back and pick up my grocery bags that had been between my feet before another teenager decided to pilfer through those.
Though I figured the phone was gone for good, the day was saved by a nearby (and nearly crazy) good Samaritan. A local woman witnessed the whole thing and told me she wasn't going to stand for it. She called her cousins who lived in that housing project to tell them what had happened and that she was coming to investigate. After politely dropping me off at the police station to file a report, she drove up to the complex and basically yelled at every teenager she saw until one of them, too large to have been the thief, sheepishly handed her my phone, saying he'd found it somewhere. I was thrilled, obviously, to have my phone back before I could even get through the line to file a report. However, the innocence of the whole affair - a teenager stupidly snatching a worthless, old Android phone in broad daylight only to hand it over freely once he had been yelled at - is almost annoying. Even in cases of criminal activity, this place operates on a completely small-town basis. So-and-so's cousin saw you do it and she's coming up here to chew you out so you better fess up or she'll tell your mom. It could be in a sitcom, if U.S. television didn't equate black, teenage boys with unsympathetic violence.
After thanking the almost stupidly brave, nice lady who recovered my phone for me (I think I might have even gotten a new tutoring student out of the ordeal), I had to preoccupy myself with the thousand little worries of getting my phone-tethered life back to normal. Of course the kid had the sense to dump the SIM card, so I had to get a new one. He'd also locked the screen, so I had to pay (39 € !) to get it unlocked. Then I've had the fun of wading through the app store and phone settings to return to normal usage. Worst of all, I had to tell my parents what had happened.
Of course, most parents are lovingly protective of their children and would be worried if something like this happened to their kid. My parents hold the particular distinction of being classic, middle-American conservatives who think that every place outside the U.S. - especially commie countries like France and places where black people live - is too dangerous and too unfree to be worth seeing. As I am their only daughter and youngest child, they also just generally oppose me going anywhere away from them, but we've been working through that since I headed off to boarding school at age 15. For them, this incident was just the icing on the cake, and if I had any reason at all, I'd book the next flight back to Alabama (where I have, by the way, no job prospects, no health insurance, and no mode of transportation). When I dismissed the proposition of an immediate return, they became quite cross, to say the least. But we'll work through that.
Though such conversations with my parents are both painful and annoying, this one did inspire me to do a little bit of fact-checking. Other than learning that just about every website has a different method of reporting crime rates, and that the CIA World Factbook, unlike many other sites, does not consider Martinique to be a country, I actually did not learn much. For someone who came of age in the age of the Internet, this is quite frustrating.
But that, like accidentally winding up marooned in a small-town society and Martinican teenagers acting out during Carnaval, is life.