So, these are events that were happening on my birthday. It's so hard in some ways to imagine these actions in these places where I have been. I know what these places look like. But these islands were enthusiastic participants in the French Revolution. Josephine came from Martinque. These were the islands that resisted with everything they had when Napoleon determined to re-establish slavery. It's very easy to block traffic there.
Guadeloupe Strikers Block Roads, Close Airport, Appeal for Solidarity
1) Appeal to the International Workers' and Democratic Movements
2) Guadeloupe Strikers Block Roads, Close Airport
(1)
Appeal to the International Workers' and Democratic Movements
Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon Site officiel du collectif d'organisations syndicales, associatives, politiques & culturelles de Guadeloupe www.lkp-gwa.org
Dear Sisters and Brothers:
As we wrote in our last international appeal ofFebruary 6, 2009: "The bosses and the representativeso f the French State are hoping that the general strik ewill die down, so that they can then begin the repression."
This is visibly the political thinking that prompted the French State to take action, as they did on February 16.
In the face of the obstinate refusal by the French State and the bosses to heed our demands, in the faceof their scorn for the people of Guadeloupe, theLiannaj Kont Pwofitation Strike Collective, or LKP, issued a call to the population on the 28th day of the General Strike to reinforce the picket lines across thecountry. The French State proceeded to repress themovement, seriously injuring one trade union leader,i njuring others less seriously, and arresting more than 70 activists, including many trade union leaders of the LKP Strike Collective.
The population, the workers, the youth have said,"Enough is Enough!" They refuse to give up the struggle.
A number of elected officials protested against thisState violence, which was also denounced by the LKP.
The workers, the youth, the people of Guadeloupe have strengthened their mobilizations on the ground. Their resolute actions won the freedom of all the jailed activists.
Today, on the 29th day of the general strike [Feb. 17],Guadeloupe is paralyzed by barricades in nearly every commune.
Youth were arrested the night of February 16-17, 2009.
This repression is going to continue, as the French State has just sent in a reinforcement of 1,000 mobile police troops [to bolster the 4,000 troops sent in on Feb. 7 -- translator's note]. The LKP has issued a call to the population to reinforce their mobilizations.
Dear Sisters and Brothers:
In the name of international labor solidarity, in the name of democracy, we call upon you once more to request your support for our just struggle.
The workers and people of Guadeloupe have the right to fight for their legitimate demands!
In solidarity,
ADIM - AFOC - AGPIHM - AKIYO - AN BOUT'AY - ANG - ANKA- ASSE - ASS. AGRICULTEURS DU NORD BASSE-TERRE -ASS. LIBERTE EGALITE JUSTICE - CFTC - CGTG - CNL -COMBAT OUVRIER - COMITE DE L'EAU - CONVENTION POUR UNE GUADELOUPE NOUVELLE - COPAGUA - CSFG - CTU - ESPERANCEENVIRONNEMENT - FAEN SNCL - FO - FSU - GIE SBT -KAMODJAKA - KAP Gwadloup - LES VERTS - MADICE - MAS KAKLE - MOUVMAN NONM - PCG - SGEP/SNEC/CFTC - SOS B/TerreENVIRONNEMENT - SPEG - SUD PTT GWA - SUNICAG - SYMPACFDT - TRAVAYE é PEYIZAN - UDCLCV - UIR CFDT - UNSA -UGTG - UPG - UPLG - UMPG - VOukoum-SNUIPP-ADEIC --Guadeloupe, February 17, 2009
(2)
Guadeloupe Strikers Block Roads, Close Airport
Associated PressFebruary 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/02/17/world/AP-CB-French-Caribbean-Unrest.html
BASSE-TERRE, Guadeloupe
The French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe was on the verge of rebellion, a political leader said Tuesday after stone-throwing protesters set cars and buildings ablaze, forced the international airport to close and clashed with police.
Nearly four weeks of work stoppages and demonstrations for lower prices and higher pay have caused thousands of tourists to flee or cancel holidays on the normally tranquil island, prompting many hotels to close and cruise ships to head elsewhere.
"It is a political crisis, an institutional crisis andwe are on the brink of sedition," Guadeloupe's Regional Council President Victorin Lurel told France-Info radio.
From Paris, France's Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said the protests had caused "degradation, devastation and confrontations" on Guadeloupe and its sister island, Martinique, where most shops and offices have been closed by the protests.
She urged "calm, responsibility and restraint" and said she hoped for a resumption of talks with protesters that broke down last week.
Police said they arrested 18 people overnight as protesters burned cars, a library and a boat-rental store in Sainte-Anne and Point-a-Pitre. An official, speaking on the standard condition of anonymity, said at least three officers suffered minor wounds due to gunshots fired by looters taking advantage of the chaos.
Guadeloupe's main airport was closed Tuesday because workers could not pass through barricaded and debris-clogged roads, said Guadeloupe's top appointed official, Nicolas Desforges, and several flights were canceled.
Paris has refused to budge on strikers' demands for a 200 euro ($250) monthly raise for low-paid workers who now make roughly 900 euros ($1,130) a month. But business leaders in Martinique have agreed to lower prices by 20 percent on 100 products, including food items.
Strikers want prices cut on nearly all supermarket products -- a step that Stephane Hayot, a spokesman for the National Union of Wholesale Distributors, said "would represent our death sentence" by forcing themto sell at prices that don't cover their costs.
Police detained 50 demonstrators on Monday after they were pelted by stones as they tried to take down barricades. Roadblocks were being gradually lifted Tuesday morning and a trickle of vehicle traffic was resuming, the police official said.
The U.S. Embassy in Paris issued Americans in Guadeloupe and Martinique to avoid crowds.
"Most commercial activities have ceased, and there are mounting shortages of food, water, and power on both islands," the embassy said. "In Guadeloupe there are reports of increasing tensions, with armed gangs blockading routes and targeting residents and tourists. There have been no reports of U.S. citizens beingspecifically targeted."
In Martinique, taxi and bus drivers blocked streets onT uesday and honked their horns as they arrived at city hall in the capital, Fort-de-France.
Lurel warned that the islands were heading toward"radicalization, a rise in extremism."
"We have the impression that we have been abandoned, that there is an organized indifference," he told the radio station.
Showing posts with label Guadeloupe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guadeloupe. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
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.
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.
Guadeloupe 2 - Why Can't I Stay in France
We return from as close to paradise on earth as you can get, it seems, to -- learning that Vitter likes to have prostitutes order him into diapers, and that the clownfacecrimefamilysyndicate still has not been impeached.
Bad show, U.S.A.
France's Ministry of Arts and Culture really paid for everything. 11 days in a lovely hotel steps from one of the world's most perfect tropical beaches, food, transportation, everything. We paid for transport to and from JFK and a few beers and bottled water. I tend to go through a 6-pack of 1,1 liter bottles every day and a half. (Which is something to think about, since that was just private drinking water, not the other water I drank during the symposia, and elsewhere. Most people in the world don't get that much clean, potable water every day -- not to mention what we need individually for washing, laundry, cooking, to raise the food we consume.) Going by the rates listed on the web, this would have been something like well over $10,000 for the two of us.
And the Ministry of Culture paid for all this, just for this one Séminaire, held within this one arts festival, this one month, on this one very small island of their Caribbean department (department here, meaning like state in the U.S. organization -- Guadeloupe, Martinique, etc., ARE France, in the way Hawai'i is the U.S., and not the way Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, but not a state).
In other words, France supports directly more intellectural and cultural and arts activity, and those who do this work, on one tiny island than the U.S. does for the entire farkin' U.S.A.
The way these intellectuals live! They have vacation homes everywhere! They don't pay for either education or medical care. The food, the clothing, the perfume are the miracle that French joi d'vivre and French exquisite attention to detail make them. The people of the islands are beautiful, with all that French flaire and charm and taste, well-nourished, healthy -- and not fat. You could always tell when you ran into (rarely) someone from the U.S. They were fat. Grossly fat. And wore t-shirts that announced, "I'm a Texan and I Fart in Your Face," and worse. No wonder several people took we 4 USians participating in this Séminaire aside, to assure us that they thought we were splendid exceptions to the view they hold of the USians they generally run into here and in metropolitan France.
The 4e Séminaire d'éthnomusicologie caribéenne: Patrimoine Culturel Immatériel de la Caraïbe was an unparalleled opportunity. It enlarged and expanded my perspectives in just the way they needed to be, started to fill in gaps and connect dots that need filling in and connection for my historical viewpoints. I was able to do the same for them to certain degrees as well. See these are all ethnologists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, etc., but none of them have much, if any training in history and the wider global cultural development over history. For instance, when the Indian Guadeloupian spoke of his work for the Cultural Center in the preservation and transmission of his Tamil heritage, neither he nor anyone in the room realized that sugar cane was originally cultivated in India, which is why the Indians were chosen to be indentured and brought in to take the place of the now sugar cane labor refusnik former slaves -- ain't neveah gonna work on that plantation no mo, fo sho! So they brought in Indians throughout the Caribbean to do the work (by trickery and chicanery and lies -- and even outright abduction -- of course, just as KBR and their Kuwaiti sister corps are doing in Iraq right now).
So I explained this wasn't just a whimsical, arbitrary choice -- just as with the beginning of the New World slavery, those chosen to be slaves had a cultural heritage already of doing the kind of work they were enslaved to do in the new colonies -- cultivation of rice, indigo, etc. There was also the connection with the earliest Europeans to colonize in India, the Portuguese, and with the Spanish, both of which were already running sugar cane latifundia in the Azores, Cape Verde, the Canaries, and their Mediterranean districts before Columbus sailed, that still maintained the strong Arab influences in technology and culture. These were worked mostly with African labor they'd already brought back from their first tentative forays down the African West Coast. Additionally, slavery as an institution continued all around the Mediterranean basin and remained in effect well into the Christian era, and, indeed, was not stopped there, until the Enlightenment. The Vatican worked many of its properties with slave labor in those days.
There were a couple of men who violently stated I was flat wrong about this, demonstrating USian myopia and ignorance, that sugar cane was indigenous to the New World and brought to the old with exploration, like tomatoes. But I rattled off several book titles that document the history of sugar cane and the plantation system, as it moved, via, first the Arabs, out of India and further and further west along the Mediterranean. One of the multiply-lingual participants (languages were Spanish, French, Créole, and English, as well as Portuguese) took his laptop to le hôtel Rotobas's tiny, limited wi-fi (pronounced weefee -- oui, oui, weefee!) area, looked up the books, looked up the subject on wiki, etc., and returned, to solomnly announce that Madame was indeed correct in every respect.
This was my only unpleasant experience. I felt so embarrassed. I hadn't intended to speak to the conference participants at all. But while Raghunath Manet's presentation was in play I inadvertently mentioned this little fact, basically to myself -- connecting dots for myself -- aloud, within our little circle of English speakers and our translator, and Stephanie, the translator, waved wildly to the roving microphone and insisted I present this information to room.
And things went from there.But this little bit of information ended transforming most of the participants to some degree or another, whether a doctoral candidate at NYU, a member of the ministry of culture who lives, naturally, in Paris, to the translator, who is television documentarian of culture and art, to the organizer of the Symposium, whose ex-father-in-law was one of the most poltically significant figures of Martinique, and with whom she shared none of his views -- Aimé Césaire.
But isn't it amazing how every discipline that could so benefit from history, doesn't know it? And I was one of the few non-academics the room. Later in the week, I confounded the French Ministry of Culture guy, who is the one in charge of the Guadeloupe Department (all of the French Caribbean is under the Guadeloupe Department, even if it is named the Guadeloupe Department), and thus the guy who has control of all the money, when I casually mentioned the speculations that can be made in terms of the significance to the history of the Department of Guadeloupe -- slave revolutions and counter-revolutions and, later, their generally activist leftist political leanings -- Martinique being the place from which came Madame d'Maintenon, born protestant as Mademoiselle d'Aubigné, who ended up wife to King Louis XIV, as well as Pagerie Plantation, where the future Empress Josephine grew up.
This was in every way a transformative event, and I feel so very, very grateful and privileged to have had this opportunity.
This nation looks worse than ever from that perspective. We are a civic sewer. Our only culture is greed and consumption. Nevertheless, the citizens of the Department of Guadeloupe have many, many complaints. But they don't want to be separate from France even so. Among their considerations is the terror that if they became independent the U.S. global corps would take over. Not to mention they'd lose their pensions, free health care, free education and all the other multiple benefits they receive from being France.This is what one African national called, "A vision of African paradise, what we should be, and what our colonialism has always made sure we never can be."
Bad show, U.S.A.
France's Ministry of Arts and Culture really paid for everything. 11 days in a lovely hotel steps from one of the world's most perfect tropical beaches, food, transportation, everything. We paid for transport to and from JFK and a few beers and bottled water. I tend to go through a 6-pack of 1,1 liter bottles every day and a half. (Which is something to think about, since that was just private drinking water, not the other water I drank during the symposia, and elsewhere. Most people in the world don't get that much clean, potable water every day -- not to mention what we need individually for washing, laundry, cooking, to raise the food we consume.) Going by the rates listed on the web, this would have been something like well over $10,000 for the two of us.
And the Ministry of Culture paid for all this, just for this one Séminaire, held within this one arts festival, this one month, on this one very small island of their Caribbean department (department here, meaning like state in the U.S. organization -- Guadeloupe, Martinique, etc., ARE France, in the way Hawai'i is the U.S., and not the way Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, but not a state).
In other words, France supports directly more intellectural and cultural and arts activity, and those who do this work, on one tiny island than the U.S. does for the entire farkin' U.S.A.
The way these intellectuals live! They have vacation homes everywhere! They don't pay for either education or medical care. The food, the clothing, the perfume are the miracle that French joi d'vivre and French exquisite attention to detail make them. The people of the islands are beautiful, with all that French flaire and charm and taste, well-nourished, healthy -- and not fat. You could always tell when you ran into (rarely) someone from the U.S. They were fat. Grossly fat. And wore t-shirts that announced, "I'm a Texan and I Fart in Your Face," and worse. No wonder several people took we 4 USians participating in this Séminaire aside, to assure us that they thought we were splendid exceptions to the view they hold of the USians they generally run into here and in metropolitan France.
The 4e Séminaire d'éthnomusicologie caribéenne: Patrimoine Culturel Immatériel de la Caraïbe was an unparalleled opportunity. It enlarged and expanded my perspectives in just the way they needed to be, started to fill in gaps and connect dots that need filling in and connection for my historical viewpoints. I was able to do the same for them to certain degrees as well. See these are all ethnologists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, etc., but none of them have much, if any training in history and the wider global cultural development over history. For instance, when the Indian Guadeloupian spoke of his work for the Cultural Center in the preservation and transmission of his Tamil heritage, neither he nor anyone in the room realized that sugar cane was originally cultivated in India, which is why the Indians were chosen to be indentured and brought in to take the place of the now sugar cane labor refusnik former slaves -- ain't neveah gonna work on that plantation no mo, fo sho! So they brought in Indians throughout the Caribbean to do the work (by trickery and chicanery and lies -- and even outright abduction -- of course, just as KBR and their Kuwaiti sister corps are doing in Iraq right now).
So I explained this wasn't just a whimsical, arbitrary choice -- just as with the beginning of the New World slavery, those chosen to be slaves had a cultural heritage already of doing the kind of work they were enslaved to do in the new colonies -- cultivation of rice, indigo, etc. There was also the connection with the earliest Europeans to colonize in India, the Portuguese, and with the Spanish, both of which were already running sugar cane latifundia in the Azores, Cape Verde, the Canaries, and their Mediterranean districts before Columbus sailed, that still maintained the strong Arab influences in technology and culture. These were worked mostly with African labor they'd already brought back from their first tentative forays down the African West Coast. Additionally, slavery as an institution continued all around the Mediterranean basin and remained in effect well into the Christian era, and, indeed, was not stopped there, until the Enlightenment. The Vatican worked many of its properties with slave labor in those days.
There were a couple of men who violently stated I was flat wrong about this, demonstrating USian myopia and ignorance, that sugar cane was indigenous to the New World and brought to the old with exploration, like tomatoes. But I rattled off several book titles that document the history of sugar cane and the plantation system, as it moved, via, first the Arabs, out of India and further and further west along the Mediterranean. One of the multiply-lingual participants (languages were Spanish, French, Créole, and English, as well as Portuguese) took his laptop to le hôtel Rotobas's tiny, limited wi-fi (pronounced weefee -- oui, oui, weefee!) area, looked up the books, looked up the subject on wiki, etc., and returned, to solomnly announce that Madame was indeed correct in every respect.
This was my only unpleasant experience. I felt so embarrassed. I hadn't intended to speak to the conference participants at all. But while Raghunath Manet's presentation was in play I inadvertently mentioned this little fact, basically to myself -- connecting dots for myself -- aloud, within our little circle of English speakers and our translator, and Stephanie, the translator, waved wildly to the roving microphone and insisted I present this information to room.
And things went from there.But this little bit of information ended transforming most of the participants to some degree or another, whether a doctoral candidate at NYU, a member of the ministry of culture who lives, naturally, in Paris, to the translator, who is television documentarian of culture and art, to the organizer of the Symposium, whose ex-father-in-law was one of the most poltically significant figures of Martinique, and with whom she shared none of his views -- Aimé Césaire.
But isn't it amazing how every discipline that could so benefit from history, doesn't know it? And I was one of the few non-academics the room. Later in the week, I confounded the French Ministry of Culture guy, who is the one in charge of the Guadeloupe Department (all of the French Caribbean is under the Guadeloupe Department, even if it is named the Guadeloupe Department), and thus the guy who has control of all the money, when I casually mentioned the speculations that can be made in terms of the significance to the history of the Department of Guadeloupe -- slave revolutions and counter-revolutions and, later, their generally activist leftist political leanings -- Martinique being the place from which came Madame d'Maintenon, born protestant as Mademoiselle d'Aubigné, who ended up wife to King Louis XIV, as well as Pagerie Plantation, where the future Empress Josephine grew up.
This was in every way a transformative event, and I feel so very, very grateful and privileged to have had this opportunity.
This nation looks worse than ever from that perspective. We are a civic sewer. Our only culture is greed and consumption. Nevertheless, the citizens of the Department of Guadeloupe have many, many complaints. But they don't want to be separate from France even so. Among their considerations is the terror that if they became independent the U.S. global corps would take over. Not to mention they'd lose their pensions, free health care, free education and all the other multiple benefits they receive from being France.This is what one African national called, "A vision of African paradise, what we should be, and what our colonialism has always made sure we never can be."
Guadeloupe 1
Fish at least twice a day, and fruit, yes.
It's very hot, very humid, a drought in progress, yet all is green and blooming with aromatic flowers.
Fascinating people and events all day, every day.
And this beautiful beach almost out the door.If it wasn't for the mosquitos, it really could be perfect.
I have had my first encounters with that famous seductive French masculine charm. I never believed in it before, judging by the French men I've met previously. There are loads of men here at the conference who are high in the French ministry of culture.Good lordessa, if this nation spent only a fraction on the arts and culture that France spends on this tiny island alone, every year .... So much about cultural politics.
The most telling sign concerning our own status in the world, just economically, is that nobody here wants or will take our dollars. We can't change our money anywhere here, except at the airport. That is what the years of the regime have accomplished, people. Made U.S money worthless.
We've learned so much in these intense days of the conference. I've become ignorant in many languages, however. At first, Spanish was a relief, like English. But as of today I've hit that language wall. I can't even speak or write English. From past experience, this will go away, and I'll have another level of fluency.
It's very hot, very humid, a drought in progress, yet all is green and blooming with aromatic flowers.
Fascinating people and events all day, every day.
And this beautiful beach almost out the door.If it wasn't for the mosquitos, it really could be perfect.
I have had my first encounters with that famous seductive French masculine charm. I never believed in it before, judging by the French men I've met previously. There are loads of men here at the conference who are high in the French ministry of culture.Good lordessa, if this nation spent only a fraction on the arts and culture that France spends on this tiny island alone, every year .... So much about cultural politics.
The most telling sign concerning our own status in the world, just economically, is that nobody here wants or will take our dollars. We can't change our money anywhere here, except at the airport. That is what the years of the regime have accomplished, people. Made U.S money worthless.
We've learned so much in these intense days of the conference. I've become ignorant in many languages, however. At first, Spanish was a relief, like English. But as of today I've hit that language wall. I can't even speak or write English. From past experience, this will go away, and I'll have another level of fluency.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
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