Mop and Go
I had a very successful day in Martinique in terms of speaking French, and with one particular class.
Before I start off; I have to apologize to Clint. I might have accidentally made one of my students have a crush on you and then taught them the song that goes "(your name here) and (object of your desire's name here) sitting in a tree; k-i-s-s-i-n-g; first comes love; then comes marriage; then comes baby in the baby carriage" and I might have used your name and a student's name. But don't worry; I warned her that she shouldn't get her hopes up. The students ate it up. These kids who I can barely get to speak in class, much less be interested, loved the song as it was a way to embarrass one of their own in another language. One got the feeling that the girl, Yasmina, ate it up as well though. She's an attention lover.
That class, (it was the first time I'd had the class ever because the class who I normally have left for their internship for 6 weeks) rolled with laughter at my accent and they also seemed to enjoy the fact that I asked them questions about créole and zouk music. There's this one song I've heard on the radio a couple of times called (seriously not kidding, this is the title and the song is even more ridiculous)" www.lovinyou.com". Especially when the artist, Saël, says it in his créole accent, oh it's so funny. So they laughed because I thought the song was dumb. Then they wanted me to translate Rhianna's song "Unfaithful" for them. They know all the words by heart and they know what some of them mean; but when I was explaining what the song was about; they listened with intense attention. It was fun to have a class that laughed so much and that expressed a desire to see me again, "Madame, vous revenez la semaine prochaine??" "Madame, vous restez avec nous?" Oui mes chers, je reste avec vous.
There have been times when I wasn't sure I could say that last sentance and mean it. All the new Martiniquais people ask me right off the bat, "Do you like Martinique?" and I always say, "yes, but I need a car badly". And then they agree with me and say “oh yes it's a big problem here” and we talk about the traffic.
The students in the class seemed particularly interested in my love life. The girls told me that they wanted to take me out and show me the Martiniquais men. The one boy in the class asked me if I thought Martiniquais men are handsome. Ummmm, how do you answer that question diplomatically?, I thought. I don't want to indirectly tell this kid that he is handsome so that I don't give him any ideas, (I've been told the guys take an inch and stretch it a mile here) but I also don't want to insult his people. I told him I have met some really wonderful Martiniquais men. Truth. He persisted.
"yez, we arruh niiiceuh, but arrruh we bootifool??"
"Sure, there are handsome men in Martinique."
You can't tell someone you could never respect men who hiss at you in the street, make kissing noises as they drive by like 5 year olds, or try and talk to you while you're in the lane next to them on the road.
It's because of that that I wasn't really surprised when I found that a lot of the girls students in my classes have children already. They are 17 and 18, mind you. No husbands, just children. In the car on the way to the apartment last night Sylvie was commenting on the gentleman who tried to pick us up in the car next to us. She said that they really are like children, they stay in the apartment below their mom's house until they are 30, have no sense of fidelity or monogamy, pick up women even when the woman they already picked up is standing directly next to him... It's embarrasing. How can they have no shame?
In all of my classes on Thursday and Friday I had an activity prepared which compared the past to the present. It was mainly so they would get the idea of past and present tense verbs, but at the end when I opened up the activity to life in general, the thing they said had changed the most was violence, especially towards women. And in both classes, they agreed that men are much more aggressive in Martinique than they ever were. One of the girls started talking about the girls she knows of 10 and 11 who are already sexually active! The other girls in the class agreed with her and confirmed her reports. No wonder girls are having babies at 17.
In the classes I had on Friday the same topic came up. It was the girls who brought up the fact that there is more violence towards women, but only the men commented on it. They say it's all the girls’ faults for wearing short skirts and tight tops. Admittedly, this is true. I know it's hot in Martinique but some of the stuff the women wear here, just during the day or around, is outrageous. But the men say it's because of how they dress that women are violated more, or that men are more aggressive. I tried to get the girls to say something, anything about what this guy had just said but the girls remained silent.
Me: “So, guys, does it make you angry when women wear the sexy clothes?”
Girls (piping up after a long silence): “Bof! Ça m’etonnerais, madame.” Ha! I would be really surprised if that were the case.
Boys: No, we like when the women wear the sexy clothes. We like it a lot.
Me: When you approach a girl wearing sexy clothes and she doesn’t talk to you or ignores you or pushes you away, do you get mad?
Boys (in unison): YES!
Me: Do you approach women who don’t wear sexy clothes?
Boys: Not really.
Me: So if women want to attract men they have to wear sexy clothes but if they aren’t necessarily attracted to the every guy that hits on them, then the guy who is rejected gets angry at the girl, and possibly violent towards her. Doesn’t that put the girls in a difficult situation?
Everyone: (silence)
Me: Do you know what a double standard is?
Everyone: Quoi?
Me: (sigh)
It’s not my place to go off on the role of women in society in the middle of class. Plus, if I said it in English, which I’m supposed to speak in all the time, no one would understand and if I said it in French, the kids would be bored and tune me out because they don’t really care to have discussions like that. All I did was express that that was very surprising to me that that was the case in Martinique and said it was very different in American and elsewhere.
Sarah, my former roommate, told me about some of her travels in Africa and how she was appalled by the treatment of women and children there. I see it here too; I see the strange intersection that Martinique is of European, African and Caribbean cultures. It takes some good things from all of those, but bad things as well, and one of the worst things is this machismo that always seem to govern the comportment of men here. The way they walk and talk and act and think; it exudes a diluted sense of self-confidence. It’s not true across the board. There are exceptions to this, but for the most part, that is what I have encountered. I have met some incredibly kind, not self-seeking, not leering men who are a pleasure to interact with. I see very old gentleman, old sailors who used to race their yoles on the water in their straw hats and clad totally in white linen on their way to the wharf and as I pass they tip their hat to me and say “bwonjou” which is Créole for “bonjour”. These men bring joy to my heart and hope to my soul. It helps me balance out the appearance of posters on the street say “Don’t be like your Dad, don’t beat your wife and kids”. Apparently the problem is that rampant that they needed a national ad campaign. People have told me that while walking down the street they have seen it happening right there on a balcony of an apartment building.
Anyway, the discussions from my classes left me ruminating on how the roles for women and men in Martinique is so different. Not all women are completely submissive to their husbands and not all women who are single have babies at 17. And like I said, not all the men are creepy. But Marie-Ange was telling me how when she first got divorced it was really hard for her living alone because anytime she tried to do something, plumbing, electricity, gardening, people would try and take advantage of her and her vulnerability at that point in time. She told me she finally got wise to it and started standing up for herself and being much more demanding. It’s obviously hard for single women here and there are lot of things enculturated in the people that are so different from America that I have trouble understanding.
Later on that night I went to what I thought was a going away party for Sylvie, but it actually turned into manual labor because she still had tons of stuff to finish at her apartment. Sylvie’s apartment is this long-running bad joke for Marie-Ange and I. Sylvie came to stay with Marie-Ange at the end of August, just after she bought the place and right when she started the renovations. She estimated it would take about a week to remove a small barrier, retile the kitchen floor and the bathroom and paint a few walls. Almost three months later, she was scrambling to finish everything that she had planned on doing before she left for France. A lot of it is due to the fact that the electrician, the tile guy, and pretty much everyone else who did any work on her apartment besides her friends was completely incapable and did more harm than good. Also, it was really hard to get them to show up. And these were supposed to be paid “professionals”. I couldn’t believe the crap they pulled or some of the work they tried to pass off on her. It was absolutely insulting that it took so long for them to come and then when they did finally show up the quality of their work was astonishingly poor. Sylvie came home with stories about the ridiculousness every night.
So to help, I was painting furniture, cleaning and vacuuming, Marie-Ange was toting stuff out to the dumpsters and carting furniture away, Sylvie was touching up doors and tiling, and trying to get stuff for her classes arranged. We worked up until the LAST minute, and I mean it was the LAST minute. We were the last people in line for her flight to Paris and she barely made the final boarding call.
So even though her going away party was a pretense for getting us to help her finish all this crap she had to do, it was still interesting. I find that I am able to understand a lot more of what is said in French at a normal rate of speaking. I can understand TV and sometimes radio news programs. It’s encouraging. But what was funny about Sylvie’s last night in town was that she is a huge fan of puns, Jeux de mot, and so Marie-Ange, me and Sylvie and one other guy from métropole (mainland France) were there and they were just laughing and having a great time and I could follow it for once. I understood what they were saying. I didn’t get all of the wordplay, but I did get a good amount, and if I ever looked confused, they explained it to me and then I usually got whatever the joke was. It was really fun and we all laughed a lot. I enjoyed myself, even if I had been lured there under false pretenses. Because she needed to get rid of it, Sylvie opened some delicious red wine to go along with delivery pizza. I enjoyed the mixing of the two opposite ends of the spectrum. The wine was better than the pizza.
So we took Sylvie to the airport and dropped her off the next night. I had looked at a car that morning and I looked at another that night. Between the options presented to me on Friday, I’m pretty sure I’ve found what I’m looking for. So I’m just excited that now I’ve got a shot at freedom and I might be able to be mobile as early as next week. I woke up in the morning, went for a run, and when I got back I threw myself into cleaning the apartment from top to bottom. Sylvie is storing a lot of stuff here while she’s gone and the vacuum is broken, but I did a lot despite those two things. It felt great when I was done to have a space that is now all mine, and to have it be clean and ready for me, and hopefully my car whenever that happens. It felt like a fresh start, complete with the fresh scent of the cleaner that lingered all day.
I am going to try and get my Carte de Séjour tomorrow. It makes me a temporary French citizen and gives me health insurance and all that. Every time I have to go through one of the French bureaucracy’s mazes I get nervous and hope I have all my papers in order. Half of the things I’m supposed to have for tomorrow are not with me because they haven’t been sent to me yet, or the results aren’t back. Everything reeks of poor planning and it seems like it’s always the assistants who suffer. They’ll give us those awful raised eyebrows and say “you don’t have your social security card?” No ma’am they haven’t sent them yet. Then they give you the short but very pretentious laugh that seems to say, “Well, clearly you’re very disorganized and never do things right. Why are you wasting my time?” I’m kind of fed up with that.
It was a quiet weekend but I feel like I’ve conquered a lot. I feel like I can take Martinique on better now that I have the hope of mobility. I’m looking forward to the few weeks I have left before my visit home. Hopefully I’ll be able to see and do a lot.
Until next time.
Before I start off; I have to apologize to Clint. I might have accidentally made one of my students have a crush on you and then taught them the song that goes "(your name here) and (object of your desire's name here) sitting in a tree; k-i-s-s-i-n-g; first comes love; then comes marriage; then comes baby in the baby carriage" and I might have used your name and a student's name. But don't worry; I warned her that she shouldn't get her hopes up. The students ate it up. These kids who I can barely get to speak in class, much less be interested, loved the song as it was a way to embarrass one of their own in another language. One got the feeling that the girl, Yasmina, ate it up as well though. She's an attention lover.
That class, (it was the first time I'd had the class ever because the class who I normally have left for their internship for 6 weeks) rolled with laughter at my accent and they also seemed to enjoy the fact that I asked them questions about créole and zouk music. There's this one song I've heard on the radio a couple of times called (seriously not kidding, this is the title and the song is even more ridiculous)" www.lovinyou.com". Especially when the artist, Saël, says it in his créole accent, oh it's so funny. So they laughed because I thought the song was dumb. Then they wanted me to translate Rhianna's song "Unfaithful" for them. They know all the words by heart and they know what some of them mean; but when I was explaining what the song was about; they listened with intense attention. It was fun to have a class that laughed so much and that expressed a desire to see me again, "Madame, vous revenez la semaine prochaine??" "Madame, vous restez avec nous?" Oui mes chers, je reste avec vous.
There have been times when I wasn't sure I could say that last sentance and mean it. All the new Martiniquais people ask me right off the bat, "Do you like Martinique?" and I always say, "yes, but I need a car badly". And then they agree with me and say “oh yes it's a big problem here” and we talk about the traffic.
The students in the class seemed particularly interested in my love life. The girls told me that they wanted to take me out and show me the Martiniquais men. The one boy in the class asked me if I thought Martiniquais men are handsome. Ummmm, how do you answer that question diplomatically?, I thought. I don't want to indirectly tell this kid that he is handsome so that I don't give him any ideas, (I've been told the guys take an inch and stretch it a mile here) but I also don't want to insult his people. I told him I have met some really wonderful Martiniquais men. Truth. He persisted.
"yez, we arruh niiiceuh, but arrruh we bootifool??"
"Sure, there are handsome men in Martinique."
You can't tell someone you could never respect men who hiss at you in the street, make kissing noises as they drive by like 5 year olds, or try and talk to you while you're in the lane next to them on the road.
It's because of that that I wasn't really surprised when I found that a lot of the girls students in my classes have children already. They are 17 and 18, mind you. No husbands, just children. In the car on the way to the apartment last night Sylvie was commenting on the gentleman who tried to pick us up in the car next to us. She said that they really are like children, they stay in the apartment below their mom's house until they are 30, have no sense of fidelity or monogamy, pick up women even when the woman they already picked up is standing directly next to him... It's embarrasing. How can they have no shame?
In all of my classes on Thursday and Friday I had an activity prepared which compared the past to the present. It was mainly so they would get the idea of past and present tense verbs, but at the end when I opened up the activity to life in general, the thing they said had changed the most was violence, especially towards women. And in both classes, they agreed that men are much more aggressive in Martinique than they ever were. One of the girls started talking about the girls she knows of 10 and 11 who are already sexually active! The other girls in the class agreed with her and confirmed her reports. No wonder girls are having babies at 17.
In the classes I had on Friday the same topic came up. It was the girls who brought up the fact that there is more violence towards women, but only the men commented on it. They say it's all the girls’ faults for wearing short skirts and tight tops. Admittedly, this is true. I know it's hot in Martinique but some of the stuff the women wear here, just during the day or around, is outrageous. But the men say it's because of how they dress that women are violated more, or that men are more aggressive. I tried to get the girls to say something, anything about what this guy had just said but the girls remained silent.
Me: “So, guys, does it make you angry when women wear the sexy clothes?”
Girls (piping up after a long silence): “Bof! Ça m’etonnerais, madame.” Ha! I would be really surprised if that were the case.
Boys: No, we like when the women wear the sexy clothes. We like it a lot.
Me: When you approach a girl wearing sexy clothes and she doesn’t talk to you or ignores you or pushes you away, do you get mad?
Boys (in unison): YES!
Me: Do you approach women who don’t wear sexy clothes?
Boys: Not really.
Me: So if women want to attract men they have to wear sexy clothes but if they aren’t necessarily attracted to the every guy that hits on them, then the guy who is rejected gets angry at the girl, and possibly violent towards her. Doesn’t that put the girls in a difficult situation?
Everyone: (silence)
Me: Do you know what a double standard is?
Everyone: Quoi?
Me: (sigh)
It’s not my place to go off on the role of women in society in the middle of class. Plus, if I said it in English, which I’m supposed to speak in all the time, no one would understand and if I said it in French, the kids would be bored and tune me out because they don’t really care to have discussions like that. All I did was express that that was very surprising to me that that was the case in Martinique and said it was very different in American and elsewhere.
Sarah, my former roommate, told me about some of her travels in Africa and how she was appalled by the treatment of women and children there. I see it here too; I see the strange intersection that Martinique is of European, African and Caribbean cultures. It takes some good things from all of those, but bad things as well, and one of the worst things is this machismo that always seem to govern the comportment of men here. The way they walk and talk and act and think; it exudes a diluted sense of self-confidence. It’s not true across the board. There are exceptions to this, but for the most part, that is what I have encountered. I have met some incredibly kind, not self-seeking, not leering men who are a pleasure to interact with. I see very old gentleman, old sailors who used to race their yoles on the water in their straw hats and clad totally in white linen on their way to the wharf and as I pass they tip their hat to me and say “bwonjou” which is Créole for “bonjour”. These men bring joy to my heart and hope to my soul. It helps me balance out the appearance of posters on the street say “Don’t be like your Dad, don’t beat your wife and kids”. Apparently the problem is that rampant that they needed a national ad campaign. People have told me that while walking down the street they have seen it happening right there on a balcony of an apartment building.
Anyway, the discussions from my classes left me ruminating on how the roles for women and men in Martinique is so different. Not all women are completely submissive to their husbands and not all women who are single have babies at 17. And like I said, not all the men are creepy. But Marie-Ange was telling me how when she first got divorced it was really hard for her living alone because anytime she tried to do something, plumbing, electricity, gardening, people would try and take advantage of her and her vulnerability at that point in time. She told me she finally got wise to it and started standing up for herself and being much more demanding. It’s obviously hard for single women here and there are lot of things enculturated in the people that are so different from America that I have trouble understanding.
Later on that night I went to what I thought was a going away party for Sylvie, but it actually turned into manual labor because she still had tons of stuff to finish at her apartment. Sylvie’s apartment is this long-running bad joke for Marie-Ange and I. Sylvie came to stay with Marie-Ange at the end of August, just after she bought the place and right when she started the renovations. She estimated it would take about a week to remove a small barrier, retile the kitchen floor and the bathroom and paint a few walls. Almost three months later, she was scrambling to finish everything that she had planned on doing before she left for France. A lot of it is due to the fact that the electrician, the tile guy, and pretty much everyone else who did any work on her apartment besides her friends was completely incapable and did more harm than good. Also, it was really hard to get them to show up. And these were supposed to be paid “professionals”. I couldn’t believe the crap they pulled or some of the work they tried to pass off on her. It was absolutely insulting that it took so long for them to come and then when they did finally show up the quality of their work was astonishingly poor. Sylvie came home with stories about the ridiculousness every night.
So to help, I was painting furniture, cleaning and vacuuming, Marie-Ange was toting stuff out to the dumpsters and carting furniture away, Sylvie was touching up doors and tiling, and trying to get stuff for her classes arranged. We worked up until the LAST minute, and I mean it was the LAST minute. We were the last people in line for her flight to Paris and she barely made the final boarding call.
So even though her going away party was a pretense for getting us to help her finish all this crap she had to do, it was still interesting. I find that I am able to understand a lot more of what is said in French at a normal rate of speaking. I can understand TV and sometimes radio news programs. It’s encouraging. But what was funny about Sylvie’s last night in town was that she is a huge fan of puns, Jeux de mot, and so Marie-Ange, me and Sylvie and one other guy from métropole (mainland France) were there and they were just laughing and having a great time and I could follow it for once. I understood what they were saying. I didn’t get all of the wordplay, but I did get a good amount, and if I ever looked confused, they explained it to me and then I usually got whatever the joke was. It was really fun and we all laughed a lot. I enjoyed myself, even if I had been lured there under false pretenses. Because she needed to get rid of it, Sylvie opened some delicious red wine to go along with delivery pizza. I enjoyed the mixing of the two opposite ends of the spectrum. The wine was better than the pizza.
So we took Sylvie to the airport and dropped her off the next night. I had looked at a car that morning and I looked at another that night. Between the options presented to me on Friday, I’m pretty sure I’ve found what I’m looking for. So I’m just excited that now I’ve got a shot at freedom and I might be able to be mobile as early as next week. I woke up in the morning, went for a run, and when I got back I threw myself into cleaning the apartment from top to bottom. Sylvie is storing a lot of stuff here while she’s gone and the vacuum is broken, but I did a lot despite those two things. It felt great when I was done to have a space that is now all mine, and to have it be clean and ready for me, and hopefully my car whenever that happens. It felt like a fresh start, complete with the fresh scent of the cleaner that lingered all day.
I am going to try and get my Carte de Séjour tomorrow. It makes me a temporary French citizen and gives me health insurance and all that. Every time I have to go through one of the French bureaucracy’s mazes I get nervous and hope I have all my papers in order. Half of the things I’m supposed to have for tomorrow are not with me because they haven’t been sent to me yet, or the results aren’t back. Everything reeks of poor planning and it seems like it’s always the assistants who suffer. They’ll give us those awful raised eyebrows and say “you don’t have your social security card?” No ma’am they haven’t sent them yet. Then they give you the short but very pretentious laugh that seems to say, “Well, clearly you’re very disorganized and never do things right. Why are you wasting my time?” I’m kind of fed up with that.
It was a quiet weekend but I feel like I’ve conquered a lot. I feel like I can take Martinique on better now that I have the hope of mobility. I’m looking forward to the few weeks I have left before my visit home. Hopefully I’ll be able to see and do a lot.
Until next time.
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