Local fishermen's fishing boats (Chen Ying/Photo)
The rainy winter always inspires people's enthusiasm for sunny beaches. In order to maintain close ties with the distant overseas provinces in the Caribbean, the French government has frequent flights from Paris to the islands, often every half an hour. Although the journey is long and requires about 9 hours by plane, you can also get out of the current situation and reach the real "other place", from the harsh winter to the hot summer. At the beginning of February 2023, on the plane from Paris to Martinique, people on the left and right coughed, which evoked my afterglow of the virus and my eagerness to bathe in the tropical ocean.
Carnival dances
Santa Ana is a quiet town on the island, with only one main street about three or four hundred meters long. I arrived at Carnival, a beauty contest was being held in the small square next to the sea next to the street, and girls in costume stood on the stage, all plump and unusually full, with oil lines on their faces, crowns of various colors, and bold and imaginative dresses. There is a girl with a green skirt with palm trees, bananas, wooden house shapes, and next to the host's passionate commentary. This is a warm-up for the upcoming carnival parade, surrounded by locals watching, applause, and a sense of order in the mess. On the street corner, there are boys and girls coming out with stereos, singing and dancing, and others quietly drinking beer next to them. It's hot, and people spend most of their time on the street – just as if they were growing on the street. These public spaces, streets and squares are too fully utilized, and seats are added everywhere, and you can sit and lie everywhere, which is very pleasant.
The natives are mostly black and plump. Their body language is rich, every pore and every fiber is alive, exuding confidence and freedom. In the carnival procession, women with dark skin and white or colorful dresses are especially showy. Plump buttocks are the part they are keen to show off when dancing, and they will turn around and dance the waves behind them, falling generously, which is enviable. This is indeed their characteristic, and no matter how much they practice the day after tomorrow, they can't compare to that kind of steepness. There are many shops selling fabrics in the town, displaying colorful materials, which are used by local women to make skirts, and ready-to-wear shops, full of red, green and rhubarb. Watching the black girls walking down the street, I suddenly thought that it was only summer, and even the tablecloths in the restaurant were gorgeous, with frangipani and bright pineapples printed on them.
The town's markets are always worth a visit, with tropical fruits – bananas, pineapples and avocados – as well as huge taro, cassava and sweet potatoes and, most notably, sachets of spices, matching "Cleo" dressings, curry powder, vanilla sticks, cinnamon, paprika, and ingredients for marinated meat and fish. There are also home-brewed "punches" in various flavors, such as passion fruit, which is an after-meal digestive wine that has local characteristics, but if you look at the etymology, you will find that it comes from Sanskrit in India, and may have been brought here by colonists.
Carnival procession (Chen Ying/Photo)
An unbearable past and identity
Martinique means "Island of Flowers" and Columbus landed here in 1502 when it was inhabited by warlike Caribs. Today, the original inhabitants are largely extinct, and the island is mostly black, laborers who were trafficked during the colonial period to grow sugar cane and bananas. Like other places that have experienced colonization, Martinique has a history of blood and tears, from the brutality and exploitation of the colonizers, not a distant memory. There is a famous memorial sculpture in the island town of Le Diamão, a huge statue made of more than twenty white stones, facing the sea and kneeling. The statues commemorate the shipwrecked slaves here in 1830, men and women chained to ships who died in despair. This incident is also a microcosm of the history of the slave trade. African blacks were uprooted and transported to the island's plantations to work and thrive. Europeans, especially the British and Dutch, play a very disgraceful role in this story. African tribes fought among themselves, and many of the defeated were taken prisoner, who were sold by the victors to the colonists and then sold to the plantation owners. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans mostly trafficked slaves from Senegal to the islands of the Caribbean, and by the 18th century, the number of human trafficking had soared, mainly from present-day Guinea, Congo, Rwanda, and Angola. This slave trade was gradually outlawed in the first half of the 19th century.
Saint-Pierre destroyed by a volcano (Chen Ying/Photo)
The volcanic eruption of 1902 is another painful part of Martinique's history. Saint-Pierre, once the island's largest city, was killed by more than 30,000 people in a volcanic eruption, and almost all of Saint-Pierre's inhabitants and peasants from nearby villages (who had taken refuge in the city) were killed in the disaster, with only a few surviving, most notably a prisoner in a dungeon, Sirbari. If you visit the city today, you can still see the theater destroyed by the volcano and the prison where the survivors lived. The sandy beaches of Saint-Pierre are black and a lasting mark left by the volcano.
Martinique has been home to white people for generations, and Napoleon's wife Josephine was born and raised on the island, also known as "Queens Island". Most of the locals speak French, and some speak Cleo, which is a mixture often mentioned in sociolinguistics, expressed in local language structures and French vocabulary, similar to the "pidgin" bred in the old Shanghai concession, and the mixing of languages also brings about cultural mixing.
Phoenix snail, red bean, dog juice (Chen Ying/Photo)
In 1946, Martinique became a French overseas department. In order to promote national integration, the French government hired many islanders as civil servants in mainland France, and there were many Martiniques in the post office system. For example, the island could not produce products from mainland France, but France promised to buy all the products produced on the island, so that Martiniques could improve and compete in rum brewing and sugar and banana production.
Many writers have emerged on the island who have tried to liquidate their identity. Edouard Glissant, a Martinique-born philosopher who speaks French as a black man living in the Caribbean and a French citizen, naturally asks himself repeatedly: Who am I? Where did it come from? Where to go? It is clear that he and his compatriots have a delicate identity: they are from Africa, embrace French culture, but live in distant overseas provinces. I am afraid that only those who have been floating overseas for many years can understand that situation, the shock and vertigo brought about by a heterogeneous identity. Throughout his life, Grissan reflected on the identity of the Antilles, which also influenced an entire generation. This identity is built on a multiplicity or multirootality that is open to the world. Compared with those radicals who advocate awakening black consciousness and proposing a "black sex movement", this is the third way. Grissan argues that every identity exists in a relationship, and that the poetry of relationship lies in a kind of wandering and "uprooting", accepting the existence of "obscure" and "untranslatable" places. "To exist is to be connected," he said. Not from an individual point of view, but as a group and a connection to the world, connecting the self and the other seems to be a way to alleviate identity anxiety. Martinique and any island in the Caribbean, regardless of the country to which they belong, present a homogeneous culture. After Carnival, the firecracker-like sound of young people using locomotive engines is not common elsewhere in France.
The vendor who makes pirate chicken (Chen Ying/Photo)
Robins and "dog juice"
Staying in a small guesthouse near the sea in town, the balcony is against the sea, you can hear countless birds chirping on the palm trees outside the window at dawn, the wind is humid and mild, and you can go down a few steps into the clear water. Eating in the morning at the fully open table, a few robins with red spots on their chests stand on a cable between the pillars next to them, they are small, round, not afraid of people, ready to take crumbs from their plates. The wooden boats unique to local fishermen are parked at the shallow water's edge, and the yachts are parked some distance from the coast, and at the beautiful dusk, the sunset is densely packed with masts.
Downstairs in the small hotel is a restaurant and a dance hall, with upbeat Latin American music playing at night, and there are people reveling until late at night. It's close to Cuba, and the vicissitudes and high-pitched singing of the African-Cuban musician Ibrahim Ferrer are constantly ringing, but in Spanish, it seems to be more suitable for people's cheerful dance steps than French.
The local cuisine is Cleo, and according to European dining customs, the first plate (usually rice) and the second course (meat) are served on a single plate, like the rice we cooked in the canteen. The most common tapas are fried cod balls (Accras) served with "Sauce Chien" — lemon juice, chili peppers and onions. As for why this sauce is called "dog juice", the reason is also amazing, because those seasonings must be chopped with a knife to taste, and the knife that cuts peppers, garlic, small onions, and various spices is a "dog tag", and it is also a necessary knife for every family, and there is a puppy shape on the blade, so it is made of "dog juice". Perhaps the most distinctive local dish is the "Poulet boucané", the chicken is marinated with rich spices and half-smoked and half-roasted in the oven, and the wood used for smoking is juiced bagasse, which is locally sourced and adds a special aroma to the roast chicken. "Pirate chicken" is served on the table, mostly sprinkled with "dog juice" to add flavor, accompanied by a small portion of rice, salad, and most often a piece of steamed taro, which is fresh and delicious. Most of the small restaurants on the beach offer a dozen euro set menus: grilled seafood or other meats, accompanied by a staple dish, sometimes with a few spoonfuls of well-cooked red beans, meat and vegetarian pairing, very balanced, also suitable for the local hot weather. Expensive lobster is considered a common thing here, and it is also roasted and split, served very casually, and unsurprisingly sprinkled with "dog juice" on top. Another special dish is lambi, which is grilled or fried without any seasoning and is very elastic to bite.
The location of the restaurants on the beach is very random, and many of them just have shed on the flat ground among the trees, and you can see the sea when you look up, and there is a touch of detail in the freedom. The most local dessert is "Blanc Manger Coco", which is actually a jelly made with coconut water, milk and edible gum, which looks white and translucent, and tastes fragrant and delicious.
A drinker's paradise, rum made from sugar cane juice is produced locally, and the usual aperitif is "T-punch", which stands for high-grade rum with a little lemon. If you can't drink a high degree of alcohol, there is a particularly sweet and bright "Planteur" cocktail with a variety of juices, which are sweet and delicious. There is also the well-known "mojito", which also uses the island's two specialties: sugar cane and rum. At the small table on the beach, tourists often have a glass of "mojito" on hand.
The island's main products are sugar cane and bananas, which are Asian crops that were brought to the Caribbean by colonists to grow in addition to sugar and wine. Sugar cane goes through a complex process to make rum, which is sold to the European continent and is the base for many cocktails. There are many rum distilleries on the island, and some museums still have old wine-making machines.
1830 shipwreck memorial statue (Chen Ying/Photo)
Hummingbirds and rainforest
There are many species of birds on the island, the most distinctive being hummingbirds, flowers everywhere, and hummingbirds are not a problem sniffing honey. Wandering around the island's banana plantations, you can see tiny hummingbirds, especially red flowers, hanging golden bells upside down on them, and busy among the huge scorpion-tailed banana petals, collecting nectar, sometimes stopping in the air, so natural and pleasant. I don't know why, some people feel that the situation of hummingbirds is precarious. I am reminded of the work "Hummingbird", which won the Italian "Strega Prize" a few years ago, the protagonist nicknamed "Hummingbird", a man named Marco Carrera, whose life is full of frustration and pain, and he tries in every possible way to keep life from getting out of control. But the real hummingbird is as beautiful as a flower fairy.
Caribbean weather is hot, there is no need to protect from the cold, and houses need to be well ventilated, so many blinds do not have glass behind them. Walking around the town, many houses resemble the straw and wooden houses built by the two brothers in the English fairy tale "The Three Little Pigs", and the thick stone buildings on the European continent are not common. I was wandering around the island, and really on a shore where there were no shops in front of the village, I saw a log cabin that looked like it had blown down, protected as a historical monument, the house of an artist who had been in prison, and lived there until his death.
The fine yarn beach of Martinique (Chen Ying/Photo)
The rainforest also lurks with crises and traps, poisonous guava is a common tree here, it looks harmless to humans and animals, and green fruits like small apples, which is an ideal tree for sand-proof forests on the beach, but it is highly toxic, in addition to accidental ingestion, contact with its white sap will also be dangerous, even if it rains, you can not hide under this tree. Fortunately, these trees have red paint marks on their trunks, so that people can stay away. There are also mangrove forests in the wetlands on the edge of the island, and there are boardwalks for visitors to walk in the middle, and the dense rhizomes are spread out on all sides, giving a real picture of "tangled roots". The way mangroves reproduce is also amazing, flowering, fruiting are on the trees, growing seedlings are still on the trees, and the time is ripe to fall off, which is very different from the plants commonly found on the mainland.
Contemporary life alternates between self-exploitation and Epicurean lying down, and distant islands are landscapes of happiness that can inject a touch of vitality and vitality into a tired mind. The Italian poet Milo de Angelis wrote, "The beauty of the island will be seen, both for us and for others." "Sunny Beach is Martinique's most alluring side, with its stretches of soft sand, crystal clear blue waters, and bushes and woods sheltered from the scorching sun. In addition to the natural landscape, the life of the residents here also conveys a cheerful and relaxed atmosphere.
Contributing writer for Southern People Weekly Chen Ying