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.

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.

What is in a Name?

So, imagine the following nightmare with me:
On your first day of work in a foreign primary school, your (highly irritated and hardly English-speaking) head teacher asks you to come up with """American""" names for her adorable 5-6 year old students, who are clearly far too afraid / confused by their teacher to report their real names when she asks. This teacher, who hasn't actually been exposed to much American / English culture since her classes presumably in the '90s, has her own idea of what """American""" names sound like: white sitcom names. You have to, in a flash, try to come up with """American""" names for these deserving, good children that are authentic to their age but which also appeal to the bleached tastes of the teacher, who is terrifying them and clearly impatient. Plus, they have to be easy to spell, because she's going to make these kids, who barely know how to hold a pencil, write their own name plates.
Welcome to my reality.
I'm really quite, quite ashamed of the names that these kids may very well carry through the rest of their English-learning career - or even beyond.
Now, mind you, I'm not totally opposed to taking a name from the language you're learning. My first term of French, our instructor directed us to an online database of baby names in France and had us pick from the most popular names from our year of birth. That way, we had some say, some time to prepare, and got a name that was both French and contemporary to our age. We're still in contact, and she still calls me by my chosen French name, which makes it really funny that I have a student named Océane.
This is not what occurred with my poor students.
Bless their hearts.
I'm crippled with guilt! The consequences of my inadequate selection could follow them through the rest of their educational careers - AND BEYOND.
At least I didn't allow any of them to be called Kevin ...