Identity Crisis : To Be French in Caribbean C’est Crazy

Identity is always on everyone’s mind in the French Caribbean. More than 20 years ago, Gen. Charles de Gaulle, making the first official visit by a French president to the French island of Martinique, looked out across a chanting, cheering crowd of thousands of black and brown people and shouted to them, “My God, my God, how French you are!”

De Gaulle’s words reflected the status and much of the reality of the French Caribbean, then and now. Since 1946, Martinique and its sister island of Guadeloupe have been departments of France, legally as much a part of France as Normandy and Brittany. But more than legality is involved. French culture runs deep in these islands.

Yet not everyone would agree with De Gaulle, then or now. Dr. Claude Makouke, leader of the independence movement on Guadeloupe, said over dinner on a recent evening: “We are of the Caribbean. We are Americans.”

People of Two Minds

Many of the people of Guadeloupe and Martinique would accept Makouke’s description--but only if they could call themselves French as well. Only a tiny minority of Guadeloupians share Makouke’s desire for independence. Independence has an even smaller following on Martinique.

The 650,000 people on the two islands have an artificial, dependent and depressed economy. Some might even call it a colonial economy. The islands attract a decreasing number of tourists, manufacture almost nothing and grow crops like sugar and bananas that are in depression.

A tourist hunts in vain for any native product other than rum. Souvenir shops on Guadeloupe sell T-shirts made in China, picture postcards printed in European France, shells packaged in the Philippines. More than a quarter of the workers are unemployed. Government spending by Paris keeps the islands going.

Not So Bad Off

Yet while the islanders may want something better than this, they do not want anything worse. They know that almost all the citizens of the independent nations of the Caribbean are in far worse shape than the French citizens of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

There is something troubling about the French Caribbean. Guadeloupe has been beset in the last couple of years by separatist bombs and racial riots. Martinique has escaped such violence. Six years ago, however, the white minority on the island was shocked when the deputy leader of the largest political party announced, “European friends, start packing your bags. Let us separate like brothers while there is still time.”

But perhaps even more significant and troubling, the islands strike an outsider as a political puzzle. Most islanders want to remain French, but they seem to want something else as well. Yet it is not clear what. Much of the political talk is ambiguous.

Urges Double Identity

President Francois Mitterrand, in an official tour of Martinique and Guadeloupe in early December, reflected this ambiguity when he included a plea for a double identity in every speech he made in every hamlet and town on the islands.

Stressing that his government’s decentralization program had given the islanders more control of their own affairs, Mitterrand told a crowd at Abymes on Guadeloupe, “From now on, at the same time, you can be Guadeloupian, flatter yourself as Guadeloupian, pride yourself as Guadeloupian, and conduct yourself as Guadeloupian, all while being proud and happy to call yourself very French, citizens of the French Republic.”

The islanders may have overwhelmed De Gaulle with their Frenchness two decades ago, but most other visitors from France would probably be struck more by how Caribbean the islands and the people are.

Don’t Look Like France

The islands do not look like France. They are languid, lush green, small and hilly, with narrow, crowded roads shadowed by an overgrowth of sugar cane and bananas. Some of their antique buildings are embellished with the elaborate, curving wrought-iron designs that French architects favored for the tropics in the 19th Century.

Like most others in the Caribbean, the French islanders are a handsome, mixed people, descended mostly from African slaves, partly from colonial slave holders. Many speak what is known as Creole, an amalgam of French vocabulary and African grammar that developed on slave plantations and still has the rhythm of a West African tonal language.

Despite these similarities, the influence of French culture and the special relationship of the islanders with France do make Martinique and Guadeloupe different from the rest of the Caribbean. The career and attitude of the distinguished Martinique poet and politician, Aime Cesaire, probably illustrates this best.

‘Negritude’ Philosophy

The 72-year-old Cesaire, as a deputy from Martinique in the French National Assembly, mayor of Fort-de-France and president of the Martinique Regional Council, is the most powerful political leader on the island. Discovered as a poet a half-century ago by the surrealists of France, Cesaire and his friend, poet Leopold Senghor, the former president of Senegal, developed the philosophy of black consciousness known as “negritude” that helped spawn the independence movements in black Africa and the black-dominated islands of the Caribbean after World War II.

Yet Cesaire, a former Communist now close to the Socialist Party, no longer calls for independence for Martinique. Although it was the deputy leader of Cesaire’s party who warned French whites in 1979 to start packing their bags, Cesaire now advocates no more than increased autonomy for the island.

Welcoming Mitterrand at the quaint wooden theater inside Fort-de-France’s clock-towered and spired city hall, Cesaire, speaking in precise and elegant French, said Martinique had already accomplished “a tranquil revolution” and it was time to turn from the political battle to fight against economic underdevelopment.

The islanders would have to give up a good deal for any independence. In social security benefits and various grants, the French government spends $1,800 more on each islander than it receives in taxes every year. By French law, the islanders are guaranteed a minimum hourly wage--now $2.90 an hour--that is just under the minimum wage of mainland France but far higher than what is usually paid in the rest of the Caribbean. Moreover, an islander, as a French citizen, has the right to look for work in European France at any time. More than 200,000 live there now.

The contrast with the rest of the Caribbean is stark. Beggars do not accost visitors on the street. There are no scenes, such as those in Haiti, where crowds of boys and old women push against a potential customer in the hysteria of sweltering heat, trying to sell pencils, scraps of soap, razor blades, batteries.

Made Surprise Visit

On his visit to Guadeloupe in December, Mitterrand made a dramatic and surprise stop in a shantytown known as Boissard just outside the town of Pointe-a-Pitre and pledged that this blight of housing would be removed and replaced some day. By the standards of France, Boissard is a disgrace. Yet by the standards of the Caribbean and the rest of the Third World, it is far from that.

Boissard is a poor and crowded quarter with many people living in wooden and corrugated iron shacks. But pipes carry water to their homes and there are sewers. Despite the poverty, there is order and cleanliness in the narrow, twisting, makeshift dirt streets. Moreover, there are signs of relative wealth: cars, large stucco homes, shops stocked with supplies of food. There is none of the desperation of Jamaica, the filth and chaos of Haiti, the hovels of Honduras. Many independent countries would be proud to have a shantytown like Boissard rather than those that clog their cities.

Price Paid for Benefits

Martinique and Guadeloupe pay a price for the benefits of their French status. Their economic dependence on France deepens all the time, making it more and more difficult for them to break out of their unreal economy. On top of this, the islands, as a legal part of France, are unable to qualify for help from President Reagan’s regional aid plan, the Caribbean Basin Initiative.

There may be a psychological price as well. There is always the slight hint in the relationship with France that the islanders are not the equal of their fellow citizens in Europe or of the political leaders who come out from Paris. Although Mitterrand makes official tours to all parts of France, not just the overseas departments, his recent official visit to Martinique and Guadeloupe still had a colonial tinge, with the great white president dropping from the sky in a Concorde to greet his dark subjects. Psychological colonial patterns are difficult to break.

The two islands were taken over by the French in the 17th Century. The French killed off the native Indians and then imported African slave labor to turn the colonies into wealthy sugar producers.

Island Rivalry

The French Revolution divided the future of the islands somewhat. The British took advantage of the revolution to occupy Martinique, an act that kept the settlers out of the revolutionary turmoil. The white and mixed-race leaders of Guadeloupe, however, sided with the wrong faction in the revolution and were guillotined later in large numbers. As a result, a light-skinned, elite class continued to grow in Martinique while Guadeloupe had to develop new leadership.

A rivalry developed, with the people of Guadeloupe resenting what they regard as favored treatment of the people of Martinique.

“It is not our fault,” a school teacher in the Martinique town of Ducos said, “if the French government puts the headquarters of the army in Martinique, if they put the rector of the university here, but the people of Guadeloupe blame us. We are all French, and it’s Paris that makes these decisions, but they blame us.”

Past differences may have contributed to the differences now. Unlike Martinique, Guadeloupe, in the past few years, has been shaken by outbreaks of anger against France. In the most celebrated of these, Pointe-a-Pitre was paralyzed last summer by rioters demanding the parole of a Guadeloupe prisoner convicted of swinging a machete and hacking a white teacher who had kicked a black pupil. The riots did not quiet until the prisoner, who was on a hunger strike, was released.

Most Shocking Incident

In the most shocking incident, four militant nationalist Guadeloupians were killed last year by the premature detonation of bombs they were carrying. Four bystanders have been killed by other explosions in the last few years.

It would be wrong to make too much of these incidents as a reflection of widespread discontent with France. In the last presidential elections, in May, 1981, the voters of both Martinique and Guadeloupe, despite the strength of their leftist parties, cast ballots for former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing by a margin of three to one over Mitterrand.

There was a single issue in the campaign. False rumors had spread that Mitterrand was soft on the French Caribbean and intended, if elected, to move the two islands toward independence. The voters of the two French departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe would have no part of such a move.