Listening to My Leaving Playlist

One of my students' beautiful decorations for the school.

What do crabs have to do with Eater? I don't know*, but it's almost Easter!

Not only does that mean that Lent is almost over (not that I would ever complain about the fast I took on voluntarily, or anything), but it also means that my stay in Martinique is almost over.

And I can't wait.

I'm doing my best to make the most of my time here, but I doubt any regular reader (not that I have any) is surprised to know I'm pretty ready to pack my bags.

I don't really have a normative negative judgement of Martinique. The street harassment I experience here is on par with what I endured in Paris before the street harassment law. The public transit is far better than in many cities of equal size, and at least exists, which is more than I can say about where I'm from. While France may be greedily snatching up resources and treating the department like a colony, the people I've met have a sense of humor about it. I feel like as a teacher I'm not learning a lot, but plenty of people with different prior experiences might get a lot out of TAPIF. Sure, I'm bored and hot, but some people consider under-stimulation on a Caribbean island to be, you know, paradise.

But I don't. And I'm ready to leave. 

As such, it's getting harder for me to come up with insightful things to say about my time here. As such, I've decided to re-work my posting schedule. Instead of aiming to post twice a week, I have a few benchmarks set based on events that should be of interest. That way, I don't waste your time with dumb shit to read that's just more whining.

Don't worry, there's still plenty of whining to come. But I'll be ensuring that it's insightful whining.

Look forward to what I've got in drafts for you, and be well. Seriously, go walk or something, eat a coconut. I have, and look at all this weight I've lost ... **

*That's a lie. I was informed upon asking that Martinicans traditionally eats crabs at Easter, not unlike the way many Europeans / Americans cook an Easter ham.
**That's a bad joke, about how people, especially women, reared in this fat-hating, patriarchical world always assume losing weight is a good in and of itself. I'm losing weight, and I shouldn't be. I think I've walked home too many times.
***Yes, I really do have a Leaving Playlist. I've been playing it since November.

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.

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.

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.

Joyeuses fêtes ... lakay mwen ...

My pretty card, signed by each student in one of my higher
classes.

Happy Holidays, whether you're caroling, reaching the end of your menorah, wondering when all the inflatable snowmen will go away, or going to a family-friendly pole-dance.
I'm heading out tomorrow to returns to the U.S. to visit friends and family for Christmas. As such, posts will not be at their normal, lackadaisical rigor but in fact even more sporadic.
I already dread putting myself on the plane to come back here. I'm not happy with the small-town life here, nor with the way I'm fitting in it - or rather, with the extent I'm not finding a niche. As a very independent person, I'm struggling with my inability to go out and enjoy what Martinique has to offer, and as a New Yorker I'm frustrated with how little it has to offer. While I love my job and the majority of teacher I work with, and I adore my students, work is, after all, not all there is to life.
That being said, I hardly fit in back home in Alabama. I'm not exactly looking forward to being interrogated and derided by my family for my choices and my failure to start my own family, and that will sting all the more when I know myself (and I'm sure my dad has told them) that I'm not happy. So, I don't idealize going home, but I do need a break to see my more intellectual friends, hold my cat, and be able to come and go as I please.
I'm hoping for renewal and peace this Christmas, and I wish the same to you.

The Blessed Tutoie

Some work difficulties are simply
unforeseen.

As you may know, in French there are two pronouns for "you", the singular / informal "tu" and the plural / formal "vous". Whereas in Parisians tend to be fairly casual at work and tutoie (refer to using the more casual form, "tu") most everyone, here in Martinique, as one would expect in more rural settings, manners matter much more, and there's much more vouvoying going on. Furthermore, as I am a foreigner, and as white people risk coming off as entitled here, I am especially careful to vouvoie everyone until they tell me to do otherwise.
Today, a second teacher told me to tutoie her. That makes two out of eleven teachers that I work with and zero out of countless administrators who have decided that, since they see me at least twice a week, I can go ahead and talk to them like work friends instead of in the more distant way.
As I made sure to remind the teacher in question, I might still mess up and call her by the wrong one, since remembering and switching such usages hardly comes naturally to anglophones. To this day, before I email any adult in French, I usually check the last email I sent them to make sure of which pronoun I used before.
One neat memory this brings up for me, though, was being vouvoied at the Sorbonne. Apparently there scholars, as young as eighteen as they may be, are guaranteed the respect of a vouvoie, as of course the students are vouvoying the professors and assistants. I've always wanted to know the story behind that, though it may just be a general tradition. Needless to say, it eased my aching pride, struggling as I was to glean the meaning out of the rapid-fire, two hour-long lectures on subjects I only *thought* I had a decent knowledge of before, to be vouvoied by a professor.
Here not even the students vouvoie me - nor do they vouvoie their regular teachers, either. Go figure.

If it isn't en grève, then I wouldn't still be here

Can you, pray tell, imagine if your preschool workers went on strike? Like, you parental figure went to drop you off at the preschool on their way to work, but when you two arrived, a red and black flag was hanging from the front gate, above a poster proclaiming that the workers were subjected to inhumane working conditions and had shut down the school.
Can you imagine it? Personally, I really can't imagine the 60-odd year-old wives up upstanding church men who ran my Baptist preschool pulling off such a stunt, nor can I fathom such behavior at any other preschool I've ever heard of.
But, indeed, the preschool down the hill from my house did just that this week. The parents, a toddler or two in the crook of each arm, walked up to the sign, sighed in front of it, then calmly turned back to buckle their kids in their seats.
What if, on your way out of elementary school, your teacher slipped a letter home to your parents from the cafeteria workers, explaining that they were overworked and were shutting down the cafeteria for the next day? Skipping home with a list of union demands pinned to your backpack?
Again, the sight of my round, elderly cafeteria ladies, again, mostly women who went to church with my family, ever striking, or even complaining about their minimum-wage work, is hardly conceivable to me.
Yet, when I rolled up to my school yesterday, a letter, signed by the principle was posted to the gate explaining just that, as the letters sent home the day before stated, there would be no cafeteria due to a strike, and that parents should, "make the necessary arrangements". The teachers recalled that many students wouldn't come back for their afternoon classes, and others would bring lunch, and others would skip with their siblings up the hill to Grandma's, according to the habits of each family. This has not only happened before, this happens often enough that the teachers judge each parent based on their particular style of handling the situation.
Personally, I think that strikes are essential steps towards workers progressively obtaining humane working conditions and eventually seizing the means of production. I participated in a union in college and do my best to be an ally to those who strike.
But what does it mean to a society and to an economy if strikes are so common that everyone is used to them? What does it mean if everyone has a backup plan already and is hardly inconvenienced by a strike? Is it still effective? Does progress entail a decline in the efficacy of the strike? Do more progressive conditions require more radical action?

Suffocating Small-Town Life

Martinique is getting ready for Christmas
 by rolling out to the mall - including myself
and apparently many of my students

Today I had to rush from work to the  little grocery store in the shopping center to get my sick flatmate groceries and saw one of my students walking with her dad. She happened to not see me, unlike the speckling of kids that called out to me out of their housing project windows as I walked home. Or the student who came to wait by me for the bus last night. Or the two students who stared at me in the mall as if they thought I never left the school. Or the student I saw on the boardwalk on Friday. Or the only student who's heard me speak French, only because I was afraid his tiny little seven-year-old self was riding the bus alone (his teenage brother was a couple of seats over).
Don't get me wrong, all of these encounters are adorable. But they are telling symptoms of one of the conditions I most detest here: the small-town life.
Speaking to a couple of teachers who took my (then well) flatmate and I out on a beach trip some weeks ago, I learned that both of them had briefly lived in the mainland for a while. Why only briefly? To roughly translate, they were all on their own out there. Here in Martinique they are surrounded by family and life-long friends. If ever they need help, someone is there. Everyone knows everybody, so they feel surrounded by friends, not strangers, which is hardly the case in the mainland. The main reason they gave for returning almost immediately was because they missed that sense of intimate community.
I've heard similar comments second-hand from my friends' parents back in Alabama, from adults who can't imagine being so far from their parents, their cousins, from everyone they've known their whole life like I am. For them, too, proximity to people they know well is a comfort they can hardly imagine being without.
I, on the other hand, can barely imagine that I have to live with it until May.
The former president of my high school, chiding me for wanting to go to Columbia, identified the feeling I'd always felt but never articulated as "the desire to be anonymous in a crowd, for no one to know or care who your mother or your father is". To me, that is always the best part of moving - no one knows who I am or who my family is or my life story. Moving away from people I actually love is hard, but leaving behind the world where everyone knows what I'm up to, even if I don't, is a great relief. What I dread perhaps most of all about visiting my parents is being caught in public by people I sorta know, who feel entitled to know all sorts of details about my life and express their surprise and judgement about it - that I'm living so far, or in Europe, or that I'm still single, or that I'm not "home taking care of [my] parents" (who are only 47 and 46, by the way).
Here, every public outing is a risk to see someone you know. Every professional encounter includes a segment where Martinicans try to figure out who they know in common or, if they already know each other, catch up on all their family news. Everybody knows somebody living in my neighborhood and seems inexplicably reassured by this fact, as if it tells them something about me.
Fin, bref, living in Martinique, even in the capital, is just like being at home, in more bad ways than one. I, however perversely, simply want for no one to care who I am or what I'm up to and to keep their opinions about my life to themselves.
Is that a weird thing to ask?

Exploding Bananas

Today's Fun Fact: Bananas can explode.
My new flatmate, in my apartment that I just moved into yesterday, warned me not to leave any food on the counter, because the ants would get it. Seeing no ants around, I thought it would be perfectly fine to leave my undamaged produce (a couple of tomatoes and a few bananas that were a little more ripe than I like them but, hey, not great selection here) out. She insisted and picked them up to place them in a microwave cover.
This morning I walked in to find banana and ants all over everything, the backsplash, the counter, the floor, and one banana missing some mass. Apparently, be it do to the heat or just their sheer number, ants can break into undamaged produce here, and somehow they explode.
Today's Useful Fact: Bananas, so long as they are already as ripe as you want them, can be stored in the refrigerator.

Don't you pity me right now?
(This is where I went to swim today,
just up the road.)

Now, I could go on and on in a sob story about my four-twenty-ten-nine problems with bureaucracy (just imagine it, French bureacracy*small town pace*island isolation) and all the hours I've wasted looking for housing, dealing with talkative landlords that didn't actually have to offer what they put online, and trying to get a phone that requires a banking account that requires an address for a lodging you can't rent until you can call the owner on the phone. Instead, suffice it to say that what actually got me in my actual apartment was not filling out my paperwork on time, nor going to my meetings early, nor diligently searching online using all my resources, but through good, old-fashioned, small-town gossip. My supervisor talked to her coworker who is also supervising an assistant and ... Ben, bref, I landed a decent, clean place to sublet, a little far from my work and town but within my price range and totally liveable.
I thought I'd left the world of small-town talk and everybody knowing my business back in Alabama.
Let's just hope that the bus system here works better than the one there (or else I'll never make it to work tomorrow ... )