Goodbye Cards: A Cute, but Worrisome, End

I thought there were no victims, only laughs, when I ironically
taught them the worst Valentine's Day poem. Little did I know
it would come back to haunt my last memories of Martinique.

As I mentioned in my last post, my experience in Martinique was cut short due to a family emergency. For my of my classes, my announcement - in French - that I was leaving (as well as the fact that I could speak French) was a surprise. However, one of the teachers in one of my CM2 (11-12 year old) classes told them ahead of time that I was leaving and gave them some time to make me cards. The results are adorable and ... enlightening. In a troubling way. I thought I had been doing a fairly good job of teaching English, but their creative gifts, while adorable, suggest otherwise.

First, I was suddenly made aware of the fact that I never actually wrote down my name for them, but I stubbornly pronounced it in English, rather than how a French person would pronounce it. Apparently my students had widely varying ideas of what my name actually was.

Secondly, only on my last day did I realize that I had taught them all how to say, "I'm in love," but never, "I love you."

Third, while we did go over how to express that one feels ill oneself, we never discussed the right thing to say when someone else is ill. Apparently, their teacher googled it and came up with, "We wish your [relative] a speedy recovery." Some of the students, like the one's whose work is featured just above, got that more or less down. Others struggled a little more and came up with much funnier sentiments.

What I really hadn't expected was that, for many students, the correct way to say goodbye to an American assistant was to draw her homeland's flag.

As in the above case, for many of them, "United States of America" seems like some sort of blessing. Is this the over-estimation of globally-reproduced American culture? A response to perceived homesickness? A middle-schoolers best guess? I don't know, but it's both sweet and funny.

As I mentioned yesterday, most of my students really don't
have it down that the U.S. and the U.K. are separate
countries.

For context, "passe" is the verb one would use in the French
sentence roughly equivalent to "Have a good day."
I think he just wanted to prove he knew a bonus word in
English. Or maybe "lake" has a special place in his heart. 

"Coucou" is a cutesy greeting that isn't really what kids are
supposed to say to their teachers.

"I wish your [grand]ma well / I love
you? you / Rose are red / I love you
with all my heart."

Finally, their artistic exercise reminded me that middle schoolers are really fucking naive. When they made these cards, they didn't know I spoke French. But most of them still used French on there somewhere. Allow me to emphasize, they were all 100% stunned that I knew any French at all. Yet it never occurred to them that if they wrote in French I wouldn't be able to appreciate it. Luckily, I can appreciate it, because it's really fucking cute.

In the end, the only good thing about being in Martinique, besides a few interesting cultural and natural quirks, has been my students. Kids give me the energy to work, and they're honestly the only humans I'll agree to work with for any extended period of time. They're the only thing I think I'll miss about Martinique - shocker, not even the buses make the list. I'm honored to have these little reminders of the fun we had together.

Weekends are for Adventures

On Saturday I drug myself out of bed early and defeated a sequence of bus-related inconveniences with one goal in mind: see the Église de Balata, which is a 1/5 replica of the Sacré Coeur of Paris.
It is, indeed, quite small.

Í didn't even meet any ghosts.

I was quite afraid that I was going to have to mentally blow-up the accomplishment of visiting the very last place of cultural or touristic interest in Fort-de-France into a more exciting adventure than it really was for the sake of my sanity.

Fortunately, my tutrice called me the next day to invite me somewhere much more interesting, the Habitation Clément.

A Habitation is a plantation, most of which here are either still operating as banana farms or have been converted into banana museums / rum museums / slavery museums / tourist traps. Habitation Clément holds the distinction of gaining significance post-slavery, when M. Clément bought it and developed a top-notch distillery. The rum he produced went on to win an absurd number of French awards and become relatively world-renown, considering how tiny and generally insignificant this island is to the world. More important to me, at least, the descendants of M. Clément are, unlike most of the békés, quite engaged on a local level. One of them founded Tous créoles, an organization for connecting, preserving, and unifying creole communities (in all their racial aspects). The grounds themselves are still used as a distillery, a garden, a rum museum, and, of all things, an excellent art gallery.
The title of the current exhibition is just Africa, and, to be honest, since I first saw the posters, I was really afraid it would be another Musée Quai-Branly-esque amalgamation of a show conflating all African eras, regions, and cultures. I am pleased to report that my apprehensions did not unfold into reality. The exhibition divides the works into three rooms. The first two present art from cultures from roughly east and western pre-colonial Africa. The pieces are well supported with informational plaques, comparative descriptions, and downright gorgeous lighting. Visitors leave with an appreciation for the differences and exchanges between pre-colonial cultures, rather than a confusing mish-mash of masks and artifacts in their head. Finally, the third room showcases pieces by artists of African descent that reflect on their interpretations of Africa and colonial representations of Africa.  There's a healthy mix of arts, and no boundaries between the political, the sentimental, and the tongue-in-cheek.

Diaspora by Omar Victor Diop (note the anachronistic soccer gear)

Of course, no place is perfect. The history of rum video is rosy and clearly designed to lull tourists from reflecting on why all the farmers are black or Indian and all the owners are white. It even features a clip from a music video, filmed on the premises, with two pre-1848 clad white people singing about how they're "free to live their lives" with LITERAL SLAVES WORKING IN THE BACKGROUND. The historical plaques in the barn refer to a contract between the former slave master and the former slaves "to maintain the plantation operations and ensure the next harvest", without reference to assuring protections for workers or the atrocities of slavery in general. And of course  I don't think anything should be absolved or forgotten because of one nice art gallery.
That being said, Habitation Clément was a pleasant surprise, both because the owners are working to re-integrate into Martinican society, and because it exhibits the kind of quality I have been missing since I got here.