Caribbean > Guadeloupe > Basse-Terre > Basse-Terre > Articles > The French Caribbean

“Ah... créole, Monsieur...” Words spoken longingly, almost lyrically, by a French West Indian, against a background of Caribbean waves. He was visibly warming to his subject and I could see that we were settling in for a long evening. But then I wasn’t about to complain. I had joined a small after-dinner crowd in a waterfront restaurant in Guadeloupe and we were enjoying a bottle of white rum and discussion: of life, the universe... and creole.

The word creole actually means ‘originating in the West Indies’, but of course it is intensely evocative: spiced food, famously alluring beauty, bewitching rhythm and dance and a near-mystic language or patois. Almost an incarnation of the exotic. It is an inextricably complicated heritage, with strains from around the world which have then been baked in the tropical sun, creating something new, something that is more than the sum of its parts.

The word has also become associated with the French Caribbean of course (particularly New Orleans) and there it is fun to tease French roots out. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, France hits you in flashes: in the mannerisms, the coqueterie, the unutterable stylishness and of course in an infuriating nonchalance. So many of the good things of French life have been adopted in creole form. Lingering in restaurants after meals is just an example.

For all the Caribbean friendliness, the way I had been drawn into the crowd had a surreal French edge to it. I was just swilling the last of some passion fruit seeds in a viscous sump of white rum, when the man walked onto the veranda and said in passing:

“Bon Appetit, M’sieu”.

We fell into conversation from there.

As you might imagine, there’s a certain ritual in the repast. The apéritif is a ponch à fruits (a fruit-flavoured rum) or a petit ponch: rum, sugar and a lime squeezed to near annihilation. It gets the gastric juices going of course. I opened my dinner with an assiette créole: crab-back stuffed with saltfish and spices, accras (seafood and vegetable fritters) and a couple of local crayfish called ouassous.

Martinique and Guadeloupe are untypical of the Caribbean. They have the same fantastic physical setting and climate, but it just takes a trip to Dominica (the island that lies between them) to see how much more prosperous and developed they are than their neighbours. Incredibly, they are a part of the EEC. France took a radically different path from Britain and turned her islands into overseas departments, with the same status as the métropole (as mainland France is called) and the same standard of living. This involves huge financial support.

The connection with France does not come without its contradictions. They are expected to be French. And this in a century of self-determination, when most of the neighbouring islands have severed their colonial links. Unsurprisingly the islanders are intensely proud of their culture and insist that the creole way of life is more than simply France in the tropics.

As a main course I opted for a filet of local fish in a blaff (marinated in lime and cooked quickly in spices), with a sweet potato purée and a gratin of christophine (a local vegetable with the crispness of cucumber and the sweetness of pepper).

In origin, creole cuisine is family based and can be compared to a French regional cuisine. Again there is a tantalizingly mixed heritage of African and French, with a considerable Eastern input in the spices (many Indians came as indentured labourers in the last century). I might have had a colombo, a curry dish. I drank water with the meal, but it might have been wine. Wine is another side of French life that has been willingly adopted, although it doesn’t really go with the warm climate or with the food, because of the spices.

The colonial dilemma crystalized earlier this century in a literary and consciousness movement, Négritude. There were demonstrations. You still see occasional creole slogans: Fwansé Dewo (Français dehors; French out). My new-found friend was something of a radical, but even he put it down mostly to hooligans. He wouldn’t say that he wanted the French out.

The dilemma is all too plain. They are unable to feel fully in control - they want more autonomy to run their own affairs and the freedom to express their creole culture - and yet the prospect of going it alone was too terrible to contemplate. Guadeloupe, traditionally the more radical of the two sisters, has considerable reason to be grateful to France, which basically rebuilt the island after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Plenty to agonise about over a bottle of rum anyway.

But before that I finished off my meal with a banane flambée. I could hear it crackling and crisping as it cooked, in rum that tingled and burned under the tongue.

In Martinique there was a moment of delicious irony recently. Bonaparte’s Josephine came from Martinique, but she is remembered ambivalently (to the tourists she is the exotic creole woman, but to the locals she is the woman who made Napoleon reintroduce slavery). She may have survived the revolution (she was married to a nobleman at that stage, of course), but a few years ago Martinican radicals knocked the head off a statue of her and hid it.

At this stage we were just drinkers remaining, musing and looking out through palm trees that were playing on the evening breeze to a sea glinting with the moon. The chef appeared, bringing an aged rum from behind the bar (they lay rums down in the French Caribbean, much as they do with brandy in France).

My friend became all wistful again. “Creole is... it is a different sensibility”, he said “a sensuality, something beyond the Cartesian limits of European life...”

In a flash I saw what he meant, but then the impression imploded. My thoughts chased their tails - wasn’t the whole setting, with it’s demands and discussion of culture, so alarmingly French as to make the whole thing tautological. Surely only a Frenchman would ever talk like this. Perhaps it was the rum.

His particular bugbear was the creole language itself. It is true that parents will often talk to their children only in French although they speak creole between themselves. It helps them ‘get on’ in a French-led education system. He talked of a 12-year old girl who had refused to acknowledge the language.

“She was the same colour as me, Msieu, (mid-brown) and yet she called the language of her ancestors: ‘uneducated and unrefined, a childish language’.

“I was so angry that I was ready to explode… like... like... yes, like a bottle of Champagne, shaken up to bursting.”

I had to laugh. It was a telling choice of phrase.

Articles

• More from James Henderson