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.

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.

What a Difference it Makes to be 2,344 km from Miami

On my way to one of my schools, walking through a particular quartier chaud (here, "hot neighborhood" absolutely does NOT mean trendy real estate), I always pass a mysterious monument on the plaza in front of the church.

The back, more interesting side of
the bland monument, which reads,
"Martinique remembers its
children, victims of violence,
November 22nd, 2014"

The front side of the bland
monument, referencing those who
died under the occupation during
WWII

While one side of the particularly boring monument references those who died under the occupation during WWII, the back side referenced victims of violence and the 22nd of November, 2014, a date that didn't ring any bells for me. So, since I've been feeling down lately, I assigned myself a research project to figure out what it was about.
The results were disappointing to say the least. Basically, I have failed my Histoire urbaine de Paris professor; I can't read monuments! The 22nd of November was just the date that they put up the plaque; nothing of particular postcolonial importance happened on that date.
However, my otherwise useless digging did turn up something else of interest. The cable news headline from the 22nd of November, 2014, did reference a different sort of violence. "Fifteen Dead and a Terrible Tension!", reads the title of the segment. Apparently, the night before, the 15th victim of homicide in Martinique in 2014 died. That's right, on this island of nearly 400,000 at the time, only 15 people had apparently been murdered by the end of the year, and people were scandalized! The FBI  estimates that, in that same year, there were 4.5 murders per 100,000 people in the U.S., or about 18 per Martinique-sized sample, and notes that was down from the year before!
I'm thrilled for Martinique that it's still shocking here to hear of guns coming out and people being murdered. What does it say about the U.S. that I find their attitude about it so naïve? (By the way, as of three days ago, the U.S. has had eleven schools shootings alone this year. But, yeah, we're the country of freedom or whatever.)

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.

Savoir vivre, savoir faire avec

My students are basically the
center of my life, which is extra
sad given that I'm with them for 12
hours or fewer a week.

I just finished reading an article from the Guardian about the radical ways in which our lives are almost certainly going to change as our economy transitions due to both automation and ecological deterioration. (Caution, it is a very good, but long, read.) Essentially, there's no way we can continue the consumption-centered, hectic, all-consuming 40-hour workweek we currently suffer under, nor will it make economic sense to for long, given explosive advances in robotic technology and AI. Whatever political changes or dramatic re-structuring of our economy may occur to power the change, we will likely be soon working a fraction of the time we're currently accustomed to. All of us, indoctrinated in near-workaholic ethics, are going to have to figure out what to do with a lot more free time.
Obviously, this resonated profoundly with me. A recent college grad, I inculcated and pathologically lived a bootstraps ideology, forcing myself through extra classes, extra clubs, and extra volunteering in high school and work in the summers to get out of my boring home state. Then I barreled through four years of Columbia undergrad, holding myself to high standards in a full load of Ivy-League courses while also holding down at least two jobs and dragging my ass to church on Sunday morning. And now? My visa prohibits we working more than twelve hours a week. There are no Episcopal churches, only Catholic and evangelical, from what I can tell. In spite of my weekly visits to the community center, I've yet to find a volunteer organization to be involved in. I'm geographically isolated from my old friends, who, quite frankly, are living far busier lives, and I don't even have a secure enough internet connection to work teaching English clandestinely online.
Alors, quoi faire?
My original plan was to live in the library and do all that reading for fun that I've been putting off for ... the better part of a decade. But I ran in to a series of problems. First, there's one library in this town, and it has absurdly restrictive hours to begin with, besides mentioning late openings and basically no-warning unexplained closures. Then there's the fact that tourists file through noisily and the scary librarian won't let me (very carefully!) snack while I read for hours in the straight-backed wooden chairs. So, I brought my books home to read. Except that, at home, I can hardly read! I constantly feel compelled to do something, whether it's clean something, obsessively read the news online, or study creole. I can't manage to calm my mind enough to read for fun (which is terrifying) and don't have a comfy place to sit even if I could.
Of course, I'd love to go out and hike and swim on this fucking gorgeous island. Too bad that would require either a functioning public transit system, which Martinique lacks, or else a car, which, even with  all of my saving and English lessons, I still have yet to save up the money for. (Though I do hope to rent one soon.)
In general, being cultured is important, so I decided to check out the local cultural centers. All two of them. Which have websites designed no later than 1993, I'm telling you. And only sell the theater tickets two days a month-? By phone-? And take two weeks to respond to emails-? And whose staff won't answer questions during regular business hours or accept payments on-site-? In short, I've had a hard time trying to figure out how to get out here, without even mentioned how the heck to get home; the taxi line outside the theater last night was a lie, and the only thing that saved me from trekking up the hill at 21:00 alone on the dimly-lit sidewalks in my business attire was a kindly old lady from my creole class, who offered to drive me home.
I'm not saying it's a total loss. The play last night (Les Hommes, about a group of women imprisoned by the collaboration government in 1942) made me cry, i.e. was pretty good. And the tickets were so much cheaper than theater in NYC! In the fall I took to cross-stitching while listening to the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, which is apparently the right level of busyness for me to avoid feeling guilty.
On a more fundamental level, I worry about what sort of psychological damage I have endured that doesn't allow me to relax and read for fun, and if it'll ever go away.
Then I remember that, starting in June, I'll be working in a school full-time and taking classes at night, and won't need to worry about having free time any more. At least I'm dabbling into that French savoir-vivre a little bit first.

My raison d'être? Junk Food

Personally, I firmly believe in having immersive cultural experiences. Everybody should, at least once in their life, move to a new place and experience a new culture to the fullest extent possible, through the people, the entertainment, and the food. Doing so gives one what many career coaches call "soft skills", or as I like to much less succinctly call them, "hardly defined capacities to understand the worldviews of others and adapt to new situations." It builds character!

That being said, most of us aren't perfect. Everybody has their vice, right? Especially if we're going to survive a whole year or so, we need that ooooone thing from home. And for most expats I know, that one thing is loaded with added sugar and saturated fat.

What can I say, America is truly a land of incomparable culinary excesses. From our chips to our candy, everything has more artificial flavor, more salt, and more sugar. Sure, France is home to countless rich, enticing sweets and fatty delicacies. But that's the kind of thing one wants to eat, as one of my friends put it, on a balcony with a view, in a small quantity while discussing philosophy in good company. Sometimes, that's just not what you want. Sometimes, you just need to waste a few hours of your life on the internet, in your PJs, with dirty hair. And you don't need to bring fine cuisine into that equation at all. No, what you need is some good American home cooking.  Sure, in many large cities you can buy versions of these products adapted to local tastes or American brands at elevated costs, but neither of those really does the trick for a good night of Netflix 'n cry. Furthermore, for many of us this urge arises considerably more frequently when we're, you know, feeling lonely, overwhelmed, or just exceptionally aware of the distance between ourselves and our loved ones. So, bringing adequate rations abroad is a must.

Everybody focuses on different must-haves. For some, it's chips, for others, sour candy, and for still others, it's actually more solid non-perishables, like boxed mac'n'cheese or canned cranberry sauce (I kid thee not, I know somebody who just has to have it). Myself, I have to have peanut butter. There's plenty of it here in Martinique, but it's more expensive even at the cheapest of supermarkets, and the texture still bears some distant resemblance to actual peanuts. So, I stowed away four pounds of off-brand creamy. It may last me a couple weeks, a month at best. I was also spoiled enough to receive a jar of my stepmom's homemade apple butter and a bunch of Reese's minis. Finally, I actually bought myself a box of graham crackers; I think missing any discernible changes of season last fall really got to me, and somehow that anxiety manifested itself as a persistent craving for that exact bland goodness.

I'm just a simple, PB&J kind of gal. In my one (1) 50-lb suitcase
that I brought back from home, I made room for graham crackers,
a jar of my stepmother's homemade apple butter, a ton of mini
Reese's cups, and 4 lb of real, preservative-packed peanut butter.

While I did dedicate quite a lot of space (and weight) in my suitcase to junk food, this of course doesn't even make a dent in the mountain of food I'll eat between now and my departure. Most of my diet will still consists of local produce, and I still have a few more Martinican recipes to try. That being said, it will be comforting to know that I have a stash  for when I need it most.

N:B As of this writing, the Reese's cups are already entirely gone.

Avoir le cafard : an Idiom, an Experience

When I first went to select a photo to include in this post, I
thought my Google Photos had an error, since this was the only
photo in my Martinique album since Christmas. In fact, this is
the only photo I've taken in the last week.
In case you're wondering: when the morning after my return, I
had one deep, inexplicable bruise on my leg. The next day, I
found another just like it. I took this photo in case it kept
coming up. No, I haven't WebMDed it to find out that I have
cancer. I'll let you know if that changes.

Well, friends, I am back. Back to the Caribbean, back to Martinique, back to work, back to the grindstone, back to this blog. And let me tell you, it has sucked.

For full disclosure, I have been sick for the last week, and only today have I had time to really rest and try to recover, so all of the events I am about to relate to you have been colored by extra exhaustion.

First, my flight back was a disaster. Norwegian canceled my flight. I accidentally called the Norwegian help line and racked up a $163 phone bill while waiting on hold. My flight was un-canceled and moved 50 miles upstate to bum-fuck Stuart Airport. Then it was delayed. A bunch. I landed in Martinique at nearly 2 am. There were no taxis (and of course there's no public transit out there - don't make me laugh). I hitched a ride with a rando, thankfully not getting murdered (so far) and got to bed at 3 am, only to have to wake at a later-than-usual 6:30 am to get to work.

Being as tired as I was, I didn't remember that two of my classes had swapped slots and missed one as a result. 

I got a survey request that told me that we're going to have another meeting in two weeks, hopefully not led by the same orientation people that insisted that street harassment "wasn't rape", just that "Martinican men appreciate beautiful women and want to tell you about it."

I've already spent nearly an hour in the discount grocery store, mostly standing in line, only to find out they didn't have any damn avocados.

My flatmate, who couldn't take it anymore and quit the assistantship in December, moved out Thursday. She not only left me alone on the weekends, when our other, local flatmate is gone home, but also left the apartment as a Roach Hotel. Apparently over the holidays, she was feeling too down to clean, so, as we do live on a tropical island, the pests followed. What she didn't tell me until after a few days - and a few meals - was that she'd just been spraying roach poison directly onto the dishes when she saw a bug in the drawer. So, Friday, after falling asleep in the meeting room at school, I drug myself home, washed every dish in the house, moved them into the fridge or outside, sprayed roach spray in the kitchen, closed it up then aired it out, chased down and killed all the crazy roaches, cleaned all the horizontal surfaces, then left the cabinets and drawers open to air out.

I suspect that eating roach spray has contributed to my stubborn cough, which has improved today after I slept for approximately fourteen hours in a much-cleaned house.

While there is no such thing as making up lost sleep according to neuroscientists, I am hoping that moving forward I feel better, and I mean that in many ways. As of this week, I am completely overwhelmed by the idea of staying here for another 3-4 months. I'm trying to keep my options to return open. In December when I found out that my flatmate was leaving, I made the decision to stay with a lot of other events on the horizon: my trip home, visits with my friends in New York, and other adventures. Now there's nothing between me and April 30th. I've decided to not decide right now, while I'm sick, whether to stay or to go. However, I'll admit that, at the moment, I'm just looking for an excuse to pack my suitcase right back up, which I more or less fantasize about every day.

If you've soldiered this far into the post, I'll reveal that avoir le cafard or to have the cockroach is a French idiom for feeling blue. And, boy, have I got it.