The Sugar Islands (2 page)

The tourist season for the Caribbean ends in April. The summer is popularly supposed to be made as intolerable by heat as is the autumn by rain and wind. But I do not remember it as being particularly hot. Everything was bright and gay; there was colour and animation along the streets. Many of the women wore the native dress, wide-skirted about the ankles, tight-bodiced, with a silk handkerchief about the shoulders and a smaller silk handkerchief knotted in the hair, with the ends pointing upwards. The French officials looked very dapper and self-important in their white ducks and high-crowned, mushroomlike sun helmets; the mulatto men, very elegant, in their silk shirts and gaudy ties and tightly waisted suits. There was a great deal of noise. Cars were honking at every corner. Range after
range of jagged mountains, indented with the pale blue of bay and estuary, rose like a bastion behind the harbour. Over the porch of the Hotel de France
[the Hotel de France has been displaced by a large Odeon-lighted cinema. The savannah at Fort de France would not affect the modern traveller in the same way today. Too many cars are parked round it. It looks like a garage
.] the tricolour was flying. There was an air of the Midi about it all. And across the grass, the white statue in its circle of guardian palms gave a dignity and significance to the scene. Whom was it to? I asked.

My question was greeted with a laugh. Had I forgotten that Josephine was born here?

I strolled across to it.

So many pens have described the details of that statue—the long, flowing robes of the First Empire, the high waist, the bare arms and shoulders, the hand resting on a medallion that bears Napoleon's profile, the head turned southwards to the place of her birth, Trois Ilets—so many magazine articles have been adorned with its illustration that it is hard for the modern traveller to assess its intrinsic value as a work of art. It is hard to dissociate it from its subject: it is hard not to react against its overpraise; it is easy to dismiss it scoffingly as ‘the kind of thing that you would see in half a hundred cemeteries'. Moreover, it is set upon so high a pedestal that it is impossible to get a level and close-up view of it. I have never seen a photograph that did it justice; and it is possible that if you were to see that statue in a London gallery, you would consider it of small account. Seen, though, in Martinique, in its own setting, from a distance of forty yards, it is not easy to be unmoved by it. As I saw it on that first July morning, white against the green of the tamarinds and mangoes, it seemed to stand there on its pedestal, in the centre of the savannah, in the circle of its palms, as a symbol, as a tribute to the romantic destiny not only of a woman, but of an island's life. ‘This must be a real place,' I thought.

The
Louqsor
was to sail at four. It was close upon six before she did. No French cargo boat, I was told, has ever sailed punctually from Fort de France or made full speed next day. No French sailor, however he may be warned, can appreciate that a liquid which is served as a
vin de table
at five francs
[The value of the franc at this time was a hundred and twenty to the pound.]
the bottle,
can have the potency of rum. The police have a busy afternoon on boat days rounding up the crew.

We leant, the purser and I, against the taffrail watching the stragglers being brought in one by one, while the women who had coaled the ship—the
charbonnières
—stood beside their baskets roaring with laughter, their teeth showing very white against their soot-grimed faces.

The purser shrugged.

‘La Martinique,' he said. ‘There is no place like it.'

‘How about Tahiti?'

He shrugged again. ‘Tahiti is, how shall I say,
hors concours.
You can make no comparison. There is only one Tahiti. But La Martinique. She is special too. Yes; she is very special.'

Fifteen months later I was to remember that conversation. I was in need of an impersonal period, a pause in which to think and write, to refresh and recreate myself. Martinique might prove, I thought, a sister island to Tahiti. It was French and in the tropics, as far north of the line as was Tahiti south of it. She was special in her own way, the
commissaire
had said. It might be amusing to try to discover where the difference lay. I might write an article, or even a book, comparing the two islands. Early in December I started off.

That first trip of mine, in the company of Eldred Curwen, lasted five months. Starting from Martinique, we went northwards to Dominica, Guadeloupe, Antigua, staying long enough in Dominica and Antigua to become identified with the way of life there. Then we made for Barbados, pausing at St. Lucia on the way. From Barbados we went to Trinidad, from Trinidad to Jamaica. In those days there were no aeroplanes and it was an eight days' journey by ship via Panama. From Jamaica we crossed to Haiti, then returned by a slow and friendly French ship that stopped at Puerto Rico, St. Martin and St. Barthélemy. I used this trip as the framework for my first travel book
, Hot Countries.

The book opened with a chapter on Tahiti; it went on to describe Martinique.

from
HOT COUNTRIES

Written in
1928

It
was while I was on my way to Panama, on my second visit to the South Seas, that I first saw Martinique. Out of a blue sky the sun shone brightly onto a wide square flanked with mango trees, onto yellow houses, onto crowded cafés. And here I thought, maybe, is another and a less far Tahiti. An island in the tropics, under French rule, as far north of the line as was Tahiti south of it. I shall come back here one day, I told myself.

Now, having returned, I am wondering whether it would be possible for two islands to be more different. Their very structure is unlike. They are both mountainous, but whereas the interior of Tahiti is an unpathed, impenetrable jungle, every inch of Martinique is mapped. Nor is West Indian scenery strictly tropical. In Martinique the coconut and the banana are not cultivated systematically. The island's prosperity depends on rum and sugar. And as you drive to Vauclin you have a feeling, looking down from the high mountain roads across fields, green and low-lying, to hidden villages, that you might be in Kent were the countryside less hilly. The aspect of the villages is different. Whereas Tautira is like a garden, with its grass-covered paths, its clean, airy bungalows, its flower-hung verandas, it is impossible to linger without a feeling of distaste in the dusty, ill-smelling villages of Carbet and Case Pilote, with their dirty, airless cabins, their atmosphere of negligence and squalor. In Tahiti the fishing is done for the most part at night, by the light of torches, on the reef, with spears. In Martinique it is done by day with weighted nets. In Martinique most of the land is owned by a few families. In Tahiti nothing is much harder to discover than the actual proprietor of any piece of ground. Proprietorships have been divided and redivided, and it is no uncommon thing for a newcomer who imagines that he has completed the purchase of a piece of land to find himself surrounded by a number of claimants, all of whom possess legal
right to the ground that their relative has sold him. Scarcely anybody in Tahiti who derives his income from Tahiti has any money. In Martinique there are a number of exceedingly wealthy families. On the other hand, whereas the Tahitian is described as a born millionaire, since he has only to walk up a valley to pick the fruits and spear the fish he needs, the native in Martinique, where every tree and plant exists for the profit of its proprietor, lives in a condition of extreme poverty.

The Tahitian woman lives for pleasure. She does hardly any work. By day she lives languidly on her veranda, and by night, with flowers in her hair, she sings and dances and makes love. The woman of Martinique is a beast of burden. When the liner draws up against the quay at Fort de France you will see a crowd of grubby midgets grouped round a bank of coal. [
The ships that call at Martinique now are oil-burners and this practice has consequently ceased
.] When the signal is given they will scurry like ants, with baskets upon their heads, between the ship's tender and the bank of coal. The midgets, every one of them, are women. They receive five sous for every basket that they carry. When there is no ship in port they carry fish and vegetables from the country into town. There is a continual stream of them along every road: dark, erect, hurrying figures bearing, under the heavy sun, huge burdens upon their heads.

In Tahiti there exists a small, formal, exclusive French society, composed of a few officials and colonial families who hold occasional receptions, to which those who commit imprudences are not received. But the average visitor is unaware of its existence. It is uninfluential. In Martinique, too, there is such a society composed of a few Creole families. It is very formal and very exclusive. Its Sunday
dejeuner
lasts, I am told, till four o'clock. It is also extremely powerful and holds all the power, all the land, and most of the money in the island.

Tahiti is a pleasure ground; Martinique is a business centre. The atmosphere of Tahiti is feminine; of Martinique masculine. In Fort de France everyone is busy doing something: selling cars, buying rum, shipping sugar. Whereas social life in Papeete is complicated by the ramifications of amorous intrigue, in Fort de France it is complicated by the ramifications of politics and commerce. ‘Life here is a strain,' a young dealer said to me. ‘One has to be diplomatic all the time. One has business relations
of some sort with everybody.' In Papeete it is ‘affairs' in the English sense; in Fort de France in the French sense. No one who has not lived in a small community, each member of whom draws his livelihood from the resources of that country, can realize the interdependence of all activities, the extent to which wheels revolve within one another. Everyone has some half-dozen irons in everybody else's grate.

In Tahiti the only people who are in a position to spend money are the tourists who stay over between two boats and the English and Americans who come to spend a few months on the island every year. In Tahiti there is accommodation for the tourist. In Moorea there is a good hotel. There are bungalows to be let by the month within four kilometres of Papeete. In the country there are several places where you can spend a few days in tolerable comfort. In Martinique there are no tourists. Between January and March some dozen English and American liners stop at St. Pierre. Their passengers drive across the island to Fort de France, where they rejoin their ship. That is all. There is no accommodation for the tourist. In Fort de France there is no hotel where one would spend willingly more than a few hours. [
There are now at least two hotels, the Lido on the beach and the Vieux Moulin in the foothills. Both are about six miles out of Fort de France
.] In the country there is no hotel at all. As far as I could discover there was not in the whole island a single foreign person who lived there out of choice.

Finally, the native population of Tahiti is freeborn; that of Martinique has its roots in slavery. You have only to walk through a native village to realize the difference that that makes. In Fort de France, which is cosmopolitan, you do not notice it. But in the country, where day after day you will not see one white face, you grow more and more conscious of a hostile atmosphere; you feel it in the glances of the men and women who pass you in the road. When you go into their villages they make you feel that they resent your presence there. You are glad to be past their houses. They will reply to your ‘Good mornings' and ‘Good evenings', but they do not smile at you. Often they will make remarks to and after you. They are made in the harsh Creole patois. You do not understand what they say. You suspect that they are insulting you. They are a harsh and sombre people. They do not understand happiness. You will hear them at cock-fighting and at cinemas,
shrieking with laughter and excitement, but their faces, whenever they are in repose, are sullen. Their very laughter is strained. They seem to recall still the slavery into which their grandparents were sold. It is only eighty years since slavery was abolished. There are many alive still who have heard from their parents' lips the story of those days. They harbour in their dull brains the heritage of rancour. They are exiles. Under the rich sunlight and the green shadows their blood craves for Africa. They are suspicious with the unceasing animosity of the undeveloped. They cannot believe that they are free. In their own country they were the sport and plunder of their warlike neighbours. It was the easy prey that the pirate hunted. They cannot believe that the white strangers who stole them from their dark cabins have not some further trick to play on them. They cannot understand equality. They will never allow you to feel that you are anywhere but in a land of enemies. In vain will you search through the Antilles for the welcoming friendliness of Polynesia.

[This is, it must be remembered, a first impression. I do not feel in that way now in Caribbean villages and, of course, in thirty years great changes have taken place in West Indians themselves, mentally as well as materially. They have acquired self-confidence. At the same time, even now there is a basic difference between a freeborn people and one that has been subjected to foreign domination. I felt this very strongly on a recent visit to Thailand
(1957).
The Thais have a light-heartedness that I have not found in India or Malaya. Prince Chula in
The Twain Have Met
referred to the ‘colonial neurosis' to which his fellow-countrymen had been exposed.]

In Martinique there is no accommodation for the tourists. If you are to stay there you have to become a part of the life of its inhabitants. Within two hours of our arrival Eldred Curwen and I had realized that.

‘We have got,' we said, ‘to set about finding a bungalow in the country.'

I am told that we were lucky to find a house at all. Certainly we were lucky to find the one we did. Seven kilometres out of town, between Case Navire and Fond Lahaye, a minute's climb from the beach, above the dust of the main road, with a superb panorama of coastline, on one side to Trois Ilets, on the other very nearly to Case Pilote, it consisted of three bedrooms, a
dining-room, a wide veranda over whose concrete terrace work—the hunting ground of innumerable lizards—trailed at friendly hazard the red and yellow of a rose bush and the deep purple of the bougainvillea. The stone stairway that ran steep and straight towards the sea was flowered by a green profusion of trees and plants; with breadfruit and with papaia; the great ragged branch of the banana; the stately plumes of the bamboo; with, far below, latticing the blue of the Caribbean, the slender stem and rustling crest of the coconut palm. [
The villa was still standing in
1952,
but I had great difficulty in finding it, so built over was the hillside surrounding and below it
.] It was the kind of house one dreams of, that one never expects to find. Yet nothing could have been found with less expense of spirit.