While she was here, I asked her what she thought about living in France. Obviously, after being here, I know that the contrast between France and Martinique is striking, even shocking. I've also mentioned before that the Martiniquais often don't have the best impression of the métropole (or the métropolitains themselves), so I was curious what she had to say.
"Boeuf," she'd replied. She liked France well enough, pour l'instant; she was friends with some of her Antillais classmates that she'd known before, but she told me she hadn't really made any new friends there. "Eux, ils ont leur façon de s'amuser," she said, "et nous, on a la nôtre." They have their way of having fun, and we have ours.
The relationship, or lack thereof, between les métros and the Martiniquais here is actually pretty fascinating, and I've since thought a lot about what M said and what it means.
One day, when M was here, I went with her and her sister to a beach called Les Salines, in the south of Martinique. It's really a pretty sympa beach, especially at dusk.
There, we met a lot of their friends, who were sitting at a table near the beach playing belotte, a card game I'd never heard of. It was intense. You could tell they were really into it, making bets and yelling at each other and intently keeping score. The entire time everyone was loud and boisterous and drinking rum and eating snacks and trying to explain the (surprisingly complex) rules of the game to me, and also teaching me how to insult people in Creole.
Later, we went for a walk on the beach, where they proceeded to throw both me and M in the water, fully clothed. I protested, but there was no escaping it.
Afterward, we went to one of the friend's houses, where we played a game called "Les Loups-Garous de Thiercelieux." It's basically a glorified version of Mafia, except it's the werewolves (les loups-garous) who wake up during the night and decide on a villager to eat. They played it with the same intensity, getting into arguments and discussing strategy and going off on long digressions about the players. It was funny. I was like, Are you kidding me? This is a children's game in the United States!
It also made me think of the trempage I went to, when there was a crazy game of dominoes. In the Caribbean, people don't mess around with dominoes. It's like a national pastime or something. Every single move, you have to smack your domino down on the table so that it makes an obnoxious clacking noise.
Also, at almost every Martiniquais gathering I've been to, there's loud music and (usually) plenty of dancing. Music and dance seem to be the lifeblood of the culture here. People love their reggae and zouk and salsa the way the French love baguettes.
Anyway, I don't want to make sweeping generalizations about the party culture here, or in France, for that matter. This weekend, however, I attended a birthday party that was also a bivouac, a sleepover on the beach. The birthday girl and all the guests were métros, and so it got me thinking again about M's remark.
The differences weren't so obvious on the outside. True, at the party there was no music or dancing or poker or dominoes, but there was quite a bit of rum and general merrymaking, a raucous singing of Joyeux Anniversaire, and a lot of people didn't go to bed until 5 or 6. And everyone was perfectly nice to me, the lone non-francophone. But that instant familiarity that you experience when you encounter Martiniquais people, where you can dance zouk with strangers you've just met, or throw people in the water with all their clothes on, where you tutoyer people in the street and strike up random conversations with the busdriver or the shopkeeper -- that kind of spontaneity seems to exist less chez les Français. Americans, too, I think. I'm not saying either one is good or bad, of course, or that one culture's better than the other. They're just different, is all.
There was one Martiniquais at the party, the birthday girl's neighbor. He seemed to be pretty à l'aise in the group with everyone else, but I was just surprised he was the only one. The guy who gave me a ride home basically told me, straight up, that the métros don't really mix much with the natives. He said the métros have their own network, that everyone is somehow interconnected, and that they become good friends very quickly because they're all déracinés (uprooted) together. He told me that the Martiniquais have their huge families, and so they don't really need to go out and meet people. But we do, he said.
It's true to some degree; from an American standpoint, the Martiniquais are hyper-attached to their families. Everyone has, like, five million aunts and uncles and cousins and sisters and half-sisters and half-brothers, and most weekends bring at least one gathering of all of them. I've always felt welcome in my landlady's family, and so I know that the Martiniquais aren't inherently unwelcome to outsiders, but I can see how the familial barrier might seem a bit intimidating to penetrate for someone who didn't already have an in.
Anyway. I'm not sure how to close this post. One of the assistants told me recently that knowing what she knew now, she might not have chosen to come to Martinique. I could understand where she was coming from -- Martinique definitely isn't an easy place to live, and the inconveniences and problems that plague this island sometimes outweigh the benefits. (Those are all things for another post.) But I still don't regret coming here because it's opened my eyes to an entirely new culture -- a new world, really. It's made me see so, so many things in an entirely different light, and to me, that's worth a lot. More to come...
