What the Heck am I Doing?

Today I'm 23, and, besides learning all kids of neat stuff about Martin Luther King, Jr (whose fest day is on my birthday), I'm spending a lot of time, alone at home, reflecting morbidly on how I'm wasting my youth.
My year here in Martinique has proven to be the loneliest and most boring of my life, though I acknowledge that memory isn't perfect and that my preteens were pretty bad (amiright?). I don't feel like I've grown as a teacher, but, rather, that the quality of my teaching has declined since I left my summer teaching fellowship because my teachers undermine me and haven't cooperated with my English immersion strategy. I really got hardly any training at all, and none of quality. Sure, I speak a little creole now, which is fun, but I doubt I'll ever use it again. I've picked up a little drawing and listened to some podcasts, but that's been to avoid desperation. While the women I've met here have proven exceptionally decent people, the Martinicans I've encountered have been more close-minded than I had anticipated. With the exception of Easter, which I happily spent in the company of a gracious local family, I've hardly socialized with locals. In fact, several of the other Martinique assistants and I commiserate about resisting leaving the house because of all the damn street harassment.  I don't feel that owning a car is conducive to a sustainable lifestyle - or safe, here - but without one I've hardly been able to take advantage of the beaches and hikes, and I can't even go for walks or hang out by the beach without being incessantly harassed.
In short, I'm tempted to say that I've wasted seven months of my youth here. I know that's a little dramatic. Surely I've grown as a person, I've gained soft skills, I've seen natural wonders, etc. But I've also grown really bitter and been really sad.
Luckily, Fairly Nuts Ben and Jerry's ice cream is marketed here, which it is not in the U.S., so I do have one thing to look forward to on my birthday and, hopefully, will have more fun once my friend returns with our car rental for the rest of the Easter vacation.

The Kids are Chloridconé: What the Hell is Wrong with the Place, According to Locals

Over the course of my time here in Martinique, I've had the opportunity to bavarder with a pretty wide variety of locals, from young teachers and students to quite elderly students of creole. All of them had one thing in common: they know something is fucked up here. However, they differ quite dramatically in terms of their opinons of the source du mal in Martinique. Today, I present a list of my favorite explanations for all of the problems on this island.

• People don't understand that the country isn't as rich as it used to be (?)
• Parents don't hit their kids anymore*
• Teachers don't hit their students anymore*
• Parents expect the teachers to hit their kids for them*
• Teachers expect parents to hit their students for them*
• There are too many outsiders
• Too many Martinicans have lived for a time in the mainland
• Martinicans are too closed-minded
• People don't respect boundaries and distance between each other anymore
• People don't treat each other like family and neighbors anymore
• There are too many people
• The island is too rural
• Too many people believe in local fairies and myths
• Too many people disrespect the local fairies and powers
• The mainland doesn't invest enough in Martinique
• Martinicans expect too much from the Mainland
• Martinicans didn't run of the békés with machetes when they had the chance
• People use online dictionaries
• Too many artist types are running around inadequately clothed
• Too few young people speak creole
• People don't speak French correctly
• Young people make up their own mix of French and English and use that instead of just one language
• The algae blooming because of fertilizer runoff from Brazil are giving off a gas that's going to people's heads
• Unemployment benefits are too generous
• Unemployment benefits are too sparse
• When feminism hit the Caribbean, French Caribbean men murdered their wives and / or became homeless
• Men here are generally too unemployed
• Young people here have access to higher education too easily (?)

And today's addition:

• The kids act wild because they've been chloridconés**

*Corporal punishment for children has been illegal here for some time. Everyone still proudly claims they do it, though
**The runoff of chlodicone into non-banana fields and into the food and soil is a serious problem which you can read about in English here. While the pesticide does appear to have very serious deleterious health effects, I wouldn't go so far as to pin every instance of primary schoolboys misbehaving to it.

Happy Women's History Month!

Yesterday was International Women's Day, yet, outside of the sacred halls of the Internet, I hardly knew it. I saw exactly two references to the blessed observance, both of which were billboards.

"March 8th?!? Women's rights are everyday. #Queen of everyday" declares this add for a nearby shopping center.

 Obviously shopping centers are wholly invested in promoting only empowering, non-stereotypical, not hyper-sexualized, consumerist images of women.

(in creole) "Woman. McDonald's of Martinique" (in French) "[manager's name], manager of Fort-de-France Location

 Though worker's rights are in a better state in France generally than they are in the U.S., seeing this billboard still made me think of this tweet, because it's an appealing image of a woman that will bring down the patriarchy, not ensuring their equal rights in the workplace, right?
Meanwhile, all of the other billboards in Martinique are totally working on presenting women as equal agents, not at all mere symbols of what money can buy ...

They're supposed to be selling bathroom sinks, here, but I'm not so sure.

If you want to read about the state of feminism in the Caribbean, I would recommend this open letter to Caribbean men by Patrice M. Daniel. 

Punishing Puns: English in France, Presented without Comment

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

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.

Traditions, Neologisms, and Ways of Thinking

A list of conversations / lectures which took place in my creole class (in which everyone other than me is well over forty) yesterday and were not about creole:

• Everyone else in the class agreeing that it's ridiculous that "mademoiselle" (the French equivalent of "miss") has been deemed inappropriate and now you *have* to call young women that you *know* aren't married "madame" (the equivalent of Ms. or Mrs.).
• Everyone in the class emphatically agreeing for the MILLIONTH time that le français inclusif (a modern reform of French proposed to make it more gender inclusive by mentioning both the masculine and feminine in neutral addresses rather than masculine serving as the neutral) is a TOTAL CATASTROPHE, not because it's dysfunctional or because it doesn't resolve the fundamental problem of the gender binary imposed on the language, but because TRADITIONS CANNOT CHANGE EVER.
• Everyone else in the class emphatically lamenting that it's an atrocity that YOUTHS use SHORTCUTS and NEW IDIOMS to text each other, which means that they clearly will never be able to ~properly~ write in ~proper~ French. This last one was all the more ironic because it immediately followed the professor's lecture on how new neologisms needed to be created in creole, because it isn't "rich" enough.

As you can probably tell by the tone of my written descriptions, these conversations fairly discomfited me, not only because it would be impossible for me to defend my positions without seeming like the defensive youngster, but also because it would be useless to defend my positions with the tone of my comrades was already so dismissive. All that, without mentioning that the professor THEN proceeded to dismiss my opinion that his prescriptive position that the practice of repeating morphemes for emphasis in creole was "undeveloped" and needed to be replaced with new words was in fact a paradox à la Foucault, since his normative ideas of what makes a "developed" language is informed by colonialist perspectives.
Now, people in general and older people especially can be dismissive any time or place they please, and I have certainly observed such behavior in many places other than Martinique. However, the way I experience it, this type of close-mindedness reigns here more than anywhere else I've been, besides maybe my hometown.
And it's driving me nuts.

Chanté dat Nwel

 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?

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?

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.

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.