Pulls From the Moleskine

This is the Moleskine notebook Vaquero gave me at Christmas. I hadn't rated anything worthy to sully the pristine pages until now. It was the perfect writing kit down in St. Ann, Guadeloupe. Right size for my bag, the paper, which despite the humidity, kept the ink from running and didn't rumple and bubble in the heat and humidity, from either air or my skin. The elastic band kept the pages from blowing around. As the conference presentations and panels and symposia were held in le hôtel's salle d'conférence this was much appreciated as well as necessary.

The salle d'conférence is a separate building, between the swimming pool and the beach. The windows' glass louvres tilted open to the trade winds, multiple doors on two sides were wide open, and the ceiling fans blew constantly, as they needed to. There were occasional, and very short, power failures. You could feel the difference nearly immediately when those electric, rotating fans were out of commission, despite the ventilation. By the afternoon sessions, even with all that ventilation it was a wee bit warm and sweaty in there.

I wish I had photos. I took a lot of them, but they are all film, as my digital camera's flash has failed. It will take a while to get them all developed and some scanned. A lot is going on here. As much as I'd liked to have just stayed on in St. Ann, even if it were possible, it would have been a very bad, very irresponsible thing to have done.

But I'm ruffling through the many, many pages written in the Moleskine now. Some oddities jump out, such as, "We all eat so much pineapple that the lavatories smell like pineapple juice."Was that too much sharing?

What else? The Séminaire's organizers and participants do NOT regard Haiti as included in the French Caribbean. This is vastly intriguing, since so much energy is directed toward the efforts by a significant number to erase French in the Dept of Guadeloupe in favor of Créole, for such Séminaires, for schools, for government, and Haiti's Créole is the same as Guadeloupe's, Martinique's, St. Lucía's (though St. Lucía is an English possession -- and some want it to become France). As the title of the Séminaire declares, this is about identity, and the intangible patrimony of these islands, thus the arguments will, of course, be organized greatly around language. Just as here in the U.S. we have the endless argument for "English only," no bi-lingualism. USians like to believe 'we' are above such colonialist concerns as identity politics, but lordessa, we are nothing if NOT about identity politics, or so it seems even more so, from the perspective of sitting in the salle d'conférence.

The anger against France and French emerges again and again. But also what emerges again and again, is the terror of becoming what the Dept. of Guadeloupe sees all around itself, outside of the French Caribbean -- the violence and the poverty of eveywhere else, particularly Jamaica and Haiti. France has saved them from this. They see how much more prosperous in material goods they are than Cubans. Yet, so much of the language of the ideologies and even the research projects and the goals and objectives of preservation and transmission of culture has been lifted directly from Cuba's Revolutionary directives and models.

I had no idea this conference was going to be so much about library skills, archives and organization of information. By and large, I am less impressed by the understanding of these methods as demonstrated by the functionaire participants (as distinguished from the people actually doing the research and other work in the field), than perhaps, I might be. There were these guys showing up who mouthed the jargon in the most awful, boring manner, and to my mind didn't even understand the jargon of the field, and generally tried to plug in the jargon and the methodology in a way that was irrelevant and meaningless to the work that was being done, and was attempted to be done. Kennedy Samuel, a long-time cultural activist Roots Man from St. Lucía was the best. He always challenged empty bs, as did our NYU doctoral candidate who is working with Pacific Colombian black cultures. Both of them walked out on ithe diots too, but first telling them WHY they were idiots and worthless and their time was valuable and the empty-of-content presentations were wasting it. These idiots were all functionaires, naturally. Also, I get the impression that these sorts of affairs aren't anywhere nearly ruled by the decorum that is usually in effect among tenure-conscious academic events in the U.S. Denouncement isn't taken as personally as we might do.

A headshaking moment: a woman ethnologist, Diana Rey-Hulman, who has been working with the Breton descendants on the small fishing island of Désirade, which is part of Guadeloupe, and their traditional marine songs and chanties, spoke of how the men were generally illiterate. The transmission of this traditional heritage was actually in the hands of the women, preserved in family notebooks. The women were literate, and they were the ones who wrote down the songs, and would look them up when necessary, and would sing them to the children, though the men sang them in public spaces, and the women did not. Immediately some blowhard stood up to explicate upon what she said, speaking of how fathers passed these songs down to their sons, when she had just made the point that it was the women who actually passed the words along to their sons.

However, when it came to actual presentation of papers and so on, the USians killed by about a million. So much more to the point and professional. And by golly, we woke 'em right up in the heat and lethargy of the afternoon meetings. Electrified them, in fact. Some things we can still do right, but there appear to be fewer and fewer of them.