Martinique Culture & Language

Martinique’s culture is Creole — African, French, Carib and Indian in combination — and it has produced an intellectual output entirely out of proportion to an island of fewer than four hundred thousand people.

The writers

Aime Cesaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is a landmark of twentieth-century poetry and of anti-colonial thought. Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth shaped liberation movements worldwide. Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who won the Goncourt, made the case for creolite against both assimilation and a singular African identity.

Rum

Rhum agricole is distilled from fresh-pressed cane juice rather than molasses, which gives it a grassy, vegetal character quite unlike Caribbean rum elsewhere. Martinique holds an appellation d’origine controlee — the only rum anywhere with one — governing cane variety, harvest, pressing and ageing.

Music and dance

Bele, drum-led and descended directly from plantation-era dance, is the oldest form; zouk, developed here and in Guadeloupe in the 1980s, went worldwide.

Carnival

Five days, with its own characters and the burning of Vaval on Ash Wednesday.

Josephine

Napoleon’s first wife was born on this island in 1763, at Les Trois-Ilets, where the family estate is now a museum. Her statue in Fort-de-France was beheaded in 1991 and eventually removed altogether, because she is widely believed locally to have influenced the reinstatement of slavery in the French colonies in 1802, eight years after its first abolition. The empty plinth stood for years, and the argument about what should occupy it is a reasonable summary of how the island handles its own history.

Food

Accras of salt cod, colombo curry brought by Indian indentured workers, boudin creole, grilled fish, and ti’ punch — rum, cane syrup and lime, mixed by the drinker.

French is the official language and is used in administration, schooling, signage and business. Martinican Creole is the everyday language for most people — French-lexified but with its own grammar, and not simply accented French; a French speaker will catch some of it and not all.

English is not widely spoken, considerably less so than in the anglophone Caribbean or in mainland French tourist areas. Hotel and dive staff manage, but in shops, restaurants and villages you should not count on it.

Some French makes a substantial difference here, more than on most Caribbean islands.

Useful Creole, which is warmly received: bonjou for good morning, bonswe for good evening, mesi for thank you, sa ou fe for how are you, and an ti sek for a small rum.