Black Islands, White Ocean: Postcolonial Paradoxes in a Caribbean “Paradise"

Abstract

Black Islands, White Ocean:Postcolonial Paradoxes in a Caribbean "Paradise" William F.S. Miles (bio) Welcome to "Paradise" Vauclin, French West Indies Let's play a geographical word association game: I say "Martinique," and you say _______ (fill in the blank). Plausible answers may be "beach," "tropics," "Caribbean." Somewhat informed players might add "French," "sugar," or "rum." But few will think "misery" or "prison." It was quite by accident that I learned the most rudimentary facts about this island in the Lesser Antilles. As my two-year stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) teacher in the former French West African colony of Niger was drawing to an end, I chanced upon a pamphlet circulating among PCVs about other teaching opportunities. One, by the same organization that administers Fulbright, sought applicants to be English language teaching assistants in France. Though this was forty years ago, I'll never forget the asterisk and associated footnote in the program description that would come to change my life forever: "Those candidates with teaching experience are eligible to apply for a teaching assistantship in Martinique." That is how I first learned that Martinique was (and still is!) part of France. It put me on a path that would net me not only a doctoral dissertation topic but a Martinican woman to wed and two cherished fruit of that love. Websites were inconceivable back then; all I had was my imagination to conjure up an idea of Martinique. After two years in a parched and landlocked African post-colony of France, the notion of spending seven months speaking French in proximity to an ocean, where sand embroidered the beach rather than encroaching from the Sahara, was appealing. Little did I know how complicated race relations were on the "Old Colony" island compared within the independent republics of former French West Africa. Even today, with Internet galore, the ambivalence of Martinique's place within greater France pierces through the French Government website that describes the teaching assistantship [End Page 255] program today: "The history of Martinique appears to be intimately linked to colonial expansion and the evolution thereof." "Appears" to be linked? Before Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc claimed for Louis XIII in 1635 the island then called Madinina or Madiana, the indigenous Caribs, and before them the Arawaks, had left little in the way of historical records. By the 1670s, French colonists had already given up on enslaving the island's Amerindians in favor of importing much more disoriented ones from Africa. By the 1700s, the original Amerindian islanders had virtually ceased to exist as a community, having succumbed to genocide and deportation (to a reserve in neighboring Dominica). Enslavement of deported Africans followed: the otherwise heralded beauty of the island certainly was lost on them. Slavery was abolished twice—first during the French Revolution, until its restoration by Napoléon in 1802—and definitively in 1848, thanks largely to the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher. Technically, Martinicans were thereafter citizens of France. In reality, racial equality on the island was a struggle—not only between blacks and whites, but between "real" blacks and mixed-race Creoles (still called "mulattos"). The entire population of the capital—save for a single prisoner in thick walled dungeon of a jail—was wiped out by a tremendous volcanic explosion in 1902. Colonial functionaries posted to this remote outpost of France in the Americas received hardship pay. Local conscripts who survived the Battle of the Somme to freeze in the winter of 1916–1917 may have pined for the tropical warmth back home; but malaria, yellow fever, and malnutrition were scarcely reasons for nostalgia. France's abdication to Nazi Germany in 1940 gave way to Vichy governance on the island, and overt racism, well into 1943. Refugees from Europe—Jews, anti-fascists, intellectuals—sailed to Martinique as an escape from persecution, only to be detained and in some cases expelled back to the continent from which they fled. Some were held in a former leper colony; war-time tropical island anguish suffused the camp. For four decades I have been returning to Martinique. At first it was as a teaching assistant in a lycée technique, a vocational high...