The Middle Passage (29 page)

Dr Saint-Cyr sat at one end of the table; the Prefect, I believe, sat at the other. First we had sea-eggs. Then lobster. Then a third fish course, the large fish appearing whole, but sliced. Then came the meat. Rice and minced meat, first of all. Then, to sighs and exclamations, a servant entered, bearing a whole roasted pig on an enormous platter. The pig was displayed to each guest, the servant walking round the table, fighting back a smile; there were continual exclamations and even some slight applause. The pig was then taken away, to reappear presently, dismembered, on several small platters. Between courses we were refreshed with salads; and from sea-eggs to the blancmange of various flavours champagne never ceased to be poured. When coffee and brandy came it was half past four. Madame Saint-Cyr’s father was telling stories about his youth and early manhood. The Prefect, who during the lunch had startled the table with the semi-official disclosure that unexpected economic development awaited Martinique, told stories about President de Gaulle’s recent visit. (I had heard earlier that the President had received a welcome so rapturous that he kept asking those nearest him,
‘Mais sont-ils sincères? Sont-ils sincères?”
The island was Vichy during the war.)
‘Vous m’avez trompé,’
the President had told the Prefect. ‘You told me it was just three steps to the Hôtel de Ville. I find it’s only two.’ There was laughter around the table; eyes moistened.

The Prefect left first; and two by two the other guests followed. As long as anyone stayed refreshments were passed around: coffee, brandy, ice-cream, and even tea. When most of the guests had gone. Madame Saint-Cyr read aloud a letter from her son, a student in Paris. It was full of criticisms of students and professors; its iconoclasm was greeted with laughter.

That Martinique is France, and more than in appearance, that France has here succeeded, as she has perhaps nowhere else, in her
‘mission civilisatrice
‘, there can be no doubt. This is the aspect of French colonialism in the West Indies which has impressed English travellers from Trollope to Patrick Leigh Fermor. ‘It is a significant tribute to France’s management of her Empire,’ Leigh Fermor wrote in 1959, ‘that her distant territories should consider this (assimilation as departments into the
métropole
) to be the highest compliment and benefit they could receive.’

Yet eight years after this was written there were race riots in Martinique in which three people were killed; and these disturbances were repeated in 1961, just a fortnight after I had left the island. The Martiniquans may all be Frenchmen, but most of them can be simple Frenchmen only outside Martinique. In Martinique they are black Frenchmen or brown Frenchmen or white Frenchmen.

In spite of all that has been said about French colour-blindness, race has always been important in Martinique. In the days of slavery the free coloured were forbidden by law to wear clothes similar to those worn by the whites; and pedigrees are so carefully watched that there is no possibility whatsoever of anyone with the least tincture of Negro blood, however unapparent, passing as white. One of the futile skills unconsciously acquired by anyone who has grown up in the West Indies is the ability to distinguish persons of Negro ancestry. I thought I possessed this skill to a reasonable degree until I went to Martinique. Time and time again I was told that a white-skinned, light-eyed, straight-haired person I had just met was really ‘coloured’. Such information constantly circulates; so, in this Martinique oral tradition, family sagas are preserved.

Trinidad is more humane and allows people who look reasonably white to pass as white. Humane is perhaps not the right word, for this generosity can occasionally impose on the Trinidadian a burden of deception which the Martiniquan, who openly calls himself ‘coloured’ because the whole island knows he is only fifteen-sixteenths white, never has to bear. Trollope became skilled at spotting persons who were made neurotic by their incomplete whiteness; his tips hold good today.
*
Nevertheless there is in Trinidad an intention of tolerance and a general laxity which would appal the Martiniquan. And though shade distinctions exist in Trinidad, they are never as oppressive as in Martinique. This comes out clearly if one compares Lloyd Braithwaite’s
Social Stratification in Trinidad
with Michel Leiris’s
Contacts de Civilisation en Martinique et en Guadeloupe
. Braithwaite is a Trinidadian and a Negro; in his admirable study comedy keeps breaking in. Leiris, a Frenchman of liberal views, conducts his survey with a sustained seriousness which at times erupts into indignation.

If the French have exported their civilization to Martinique, they have also exported their social structure. The hard social prejudices of the metropolitan bourgeoisie have coalesced with the racial distinctions derived from slavery to produce the most organized society in the West Indies. In this society education and money and cultured Frenchness matter, but Negro blood is like an ineradicable commonness, a mark of slave ancestry; and in this society, with its single standard of bourgeois Frenchness, social prejudices (which might be racial prejudices) are of importance. No social prejudice, no social sanction really matters in Trinidad: standards are too diverse and society is split into too many cliques. Living in Trinidad and then as an outsider in England, I had never before experienced the organized, single-standard society where sanctions could cripple; and in Martinique I felt choked. Prejudices have been imported wholesale from the
métropole
. I could never get used to hearing coloured Martiniquans say, just like Frenchmen of a certain type, ‘That damned Jew’s place is in the ghetto.’

The dinner-table gossip was the most sanctimonious and the most assassinating I have ever heard – the French flavour of the last adjective is appropriate. This, combined with what an American official described to me as ‘the French Antillean morality’, whereby every self-respecting man has a mistress and every self-respecting woman a lover, all the island knowing exactly who sleeps with whom – this made me long for the good humour, tolerance, amorality and general social chaos of Trinidad.

The division of Martinique society into white (of certifiable purity), mulatto and black is accepted as valid and unalterable by all sections. No other territory in the West Indies could produce a popular Negro song like this:

The white man does call his woman
chérie;
the mulatto does call his woman
dou-dou;
the nigger does call his woman a stinking bitch. Nigger ain’t have manners, for truth.

White man eating out of ware-plate; mulatto eating out of earthenware; nigger eating out of calabash. Nigger ain’t have manners, for truth.

At a higher level, it might be said that in his poems about his childhood in the nearby French island of Guadeloupe St John Perse is not forgetful of his whiteness; while the subject of Aimé Césaire’s
Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal
is blackness. At all levels in Martinique race is important and inescapable. This is one reason perhaps why Martiniquans are all Frenchmen. All cannot be white, but all can aspire to Frenchness, and in Frenchness all are equal.

The prejudices of Martinique lose their validity in metropolitan France, and in Martinique metropolitan Frenchmen are exempt from the racial regulations of the society. But one of the paradoxes of the Martiniquan situation is that it is against metropolitan Frenchmen that animosity is directed. The policy of assimilation, which in its intention was idealistic and generous, has had unhappy consequences. It has not, as Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote, given to Martinique ‘the same privileges, status and representation as the Bouches du Rhône or the Seine Inférieure’. The social benefits of metropolitan France have not been extended to Martinique: the island’s economy would have been disrupted, it is said, and the expense would have been too great anyway. Investments have not come to Martinique. With the fierce jealousy characteristic of petty, tight, self-important communities, every Martiniquan capitalist ridicules and does his best to block every project in which he does not himself have a hand. Little is therefore done, and Martiniquan capital is invested instead in France and elsewhere. Martinique is poor, the middle-class Martiniquans say. Scarcely any development is possible, for no Martiniquan industry could compete with a French one; and without her connexion with France Martinique would be lost.

So Martinique produces nothing apart from sugar, rum and bananas. Couldn’t they even make their own coconut oil for the margarine factory that employs seven people? Surely coconuts can grow in Martinique? ‘Impossible,’ says one. ‘The man is mad. Pay no attention,’ says another. And so the bickering goes on and coconut oil is imported, and milk is flown in from France, from the Vosges, by the Air France milk plane. And because Martinique is part of France, her unique rum cannot be exported direct to North or South America, but must first cross the Atlantic to Paris and be redirected from there, enriching middle-men all the way. Assimilation has not made Martinique an integral part of prosperous France, but has reduced the island to a helpless colony where now more than ever the commission agent is king.

For the metropolitan civil servant Martinique is a relaxing but not important post which he hopes presently to leave for higher things in the
métropole
. For the metropolitan or the Algerian
colon
with even a little money Martinique, with its unlimited cheap labour, is inviting. Unpleasantnesses continually occures; and to the coloured population the presence of French police (the Martiniquan policemen serve in France) is an added provocation.

It was the cane-cutting season, and armed French police continually patrolled the trash-littered country roads in jeeps. It was an unusual sight in the West Indies; but I attributed it to the French flair for melodrama.

In one restaurant one day a strapping young mulatto leaned across my table and said in English, with teeth-grinding passion, that he was going to start a revolution. He objected to the service that had been given to a sad little prostitute with her over-dressed baby. It irritated him, he said, to see black people being offensive to black people. He wasn’t a politician; but he was going to start this revolution, kick every white out, and then hand the island over to the politicians. He had already started in a small way: he had just slapped a metropolitan in the rue Victor Hugo.

And then early one morning a young Negro called on me at the hotel. He waited patiently in the restaurant downstairs. He must have thought me a newspaperman: he said he wanted me to know certain facts about Martinique. He told me little I hadn’t already learned – race, poverty, over-population – but I remembered him for his despair. He promised to call again, but never did.

The blue-suited French
chef-de-cabinet
said with wild French gestures and an official smile that there were no serious problems in Martinique. Industries were being encouraged and so on. At his back there was a large bright painting of a Martiniquan scene. The chair on which I sat, one of three for visitors, was so far from his massive desk that I had to lean forward while he leaned back and made continuous circular gestures with both hands. At the end of every long sentence the movement of his hands was arrested and I was fixed with a brief, wide smile.

It was from M. Gratian, the communist mayor of the small airport town of Lamentin, that I learned there was a strike of labourers in the country districts. The communists had been regaining strength in Martinique, and their cause had been helped by M. Gratian’s administration of Lamentin. This was admitted by all to be efficient and honest and was proving an embarrassment to Gratian’s opponents, who had somehow to put over the view that honesty was the worst policy. Dandling his grandchild on his knee, M. Gratian (he had been chief speaker at the
meeting de protestation: ‘Les colonialistes ont assassiné Lumumba’)
said that the strike was the most important happening in Martinique. It certainly led, a few weeks later, to Martinique’s most serious disturbances.

I did not know about the strike because Martinique had no daily newspaper. Surinam has six, and several weeklies besides; but in Martinique the newspapers come from Paris, with the milk. One result is that there is an acute shortage of wrapping paper; and old newspapers have to be imported in bulk from France, particularly by the banana-growers. Bananas are delicate, and before they are shipped have to be carefully wrapped. The wrapping consists of an outer sheet of stiff brown paper and an inner quilt of straw in old newspaper. Straw, brown paper and old newspapers have all to be imported from France.
*
And to France they presently return. The Compagnie Générale Transatlantique alone is permitted to carry cargo between Martinique and France; it is a lucky shipping line which carries the same cargo back and forth, continually making work for itself.

Martinique in the interior is prettily feudal, with a white or coloured gentry and a respectful mass of straw-hatted black people who can only be described as ‘peasants’, the twentieth-century literary discovery, whose soft manners, acquiescence in their status and general lack of ambition or spirit can be interpreted as ‘dignity’. The peasant doffs his broad-brimmed straw hat to the master, but a man is a man and the peasant will be offended if the master does not shake his hand. This fisherman-peasant was carrying live and frenzied lobsters in both hands; and, on being introduced, I only bowed. For this I was later rebuked by my host. I had wounded the peasant; and I felt I had also damaged the dignity of the host himself. I should have offered my hand; the peasant would have turned away the lobsters and offered me his forearm, his biceps or even his shoulder. So later, when I was introduced to this other peasant whose hands were thick with mud, I confidently stuck out my hand; and he, sure enough, offered me a sweating forearm.