"What is American Culture?"

Following a family emergency, on April 8th, the last day of Easter vacation in Martinique, I bought a ticket on the first flight out, which was two days later. That left two days, one at each of my schools, to try to close out my year of English classes and give my students, especially the older ones, some sense of closure. First, I finally spoke to them in French, and the jaw-dropped look of surprise on every last one of their faces was priceless. Then, I let them lead the class by asking any questions they had about the U.S., other English-speaking countries, or traveling abroad. That hilarious ordeal is the topic of today's post. My oldest classes made me going away cards / hope your grandma gets better cards, which, if things in my family continue to mellow, I'll share soon. While I miss all my students and hate changing my plans / not using my lesson plans, I'm glad to be out of Martinique and where I need to be with my family. They're not nearly as funny, though, as my 5-11 year-old students, the best of whose questions I present here, translated and unfiltered.

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.

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.

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.

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.