Marie-Galante by Lucretia Stewart

Marie Galante has barely changed since I first went there seven years ago at the suggestion of a waiter in a pizzeria in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe’s commercial capital. Then I had been planning to visit Les Saintes, a pair of pretty, fashionable islands whose rocky, arid terrain provides an ideal habitat for iguanas, but Adbul, who told me that he came originally from Djibouti, advised me instead to go to Marie Galante, which, he said, was “très tranquille, vraiment Creole”. I went and fell immediately in love.

Falling in love – whether with a person or with a place – seems to be largely a question of timing, and I suppose that, at the time, softened by weeks of wandering through the Caribbean, I was ripe. But, since that first trip, I have returned to Marie Galante on numerous occasions, many of them far from idyllic, yet my spirits always rise and my heart always begins to sing as soon as I set foot on the island. Four years ago, at the end of a long, grim English winter, desperate for some sun and more particularly for Marie Galante’s special charms, I flew from London to Paris, from Paris to Pointe-à-Pitre (the plane was bursting with French holiday-makers and their pets; a small boy kicked the back of my seat for the entire ten hours), where I spent a night in a dingy hotel, then, finally, the following morning, caught the early boat to Marie Galante. The whole business took nearly two days door to door. I could only stay for four days before I had to repeat this gruelling journey in reverse. But, sitting on one of the island’s loveliest beaches out at Vieux-Fort, reading Susannah Clapp’s memoir of Bruce Chatwin, I came across the following line by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” I looked out at the aquamarine sea and thought, “No.” When I got back to England, I looked up the poem, Questions of Travel. That verse begins, “Think of the long trip home ...”

When I try to analyse what makes Marie Galante so special, I can’t really pin it down. Yes, it is a beautiful island (“Ideal for hermits or lovers” commented an Antiguan friend dryly) , all lush and green - as Saint-John Perse, the Guadeloupean poet and winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote, ‘The other evening I dreamed of islands greener than dreams ...’; yes, it has beautiful white sand beaches and wonderful, clear waters. The Carib name for Guadeloupe was “Karukera” which meant l’île aux belles eaux and the sea around Marie Galante is as clean and clear as a Highland stream. Yes, you can eat well – the island has a surprising number of good restaurants serving Creole specialities (generally on the spicy side) or more traditional French food. But though Marie Galante may be the largest of Guadeloupe’s dependencies, it is still a small place. You can drive round the entire island in a day with time to spare. It has almost nothing in the way of entertainment; it doesn’t have fancy hotels (the general standard of accommodation is comparable to that on a Greek island); smart people don’t seem to go there. Wherein precisely does its charm lie?

Back in Marie Galante once again in February of this year, I noticed that the map handed out by the car hire company now bore the legend Marie Galante, si vrai. So genuine. This gave me a clue. Marie Galante possesses a unpretentious simplicity which is enormously appealing. It is a simplicity born out of confidence. Unlike the newly independent nations of the English-speaking Caribbean, Marie-Galante is not trying to prove itself; it has no need to make its mark on the world (not that there’s much chance of that). I think this self-assurance must come in part from the fact that Marie Galante is part of France.

Martinique and the Guadeloupe archipelago, which includes Grande-Terre, Basse-Terre (comprising Guadeloupe itself), La Desirade, Les Saintes and Marie Galante, Saint-Barthélemy and the French half of Saint-Martin, started off as colonies in the eighteenth century, then graduated to départements-outre-mer in 1946 and, finally, in 1982, became fully-fledged regions monodépartementales. This means that their citizens are French citizens, have French passports and the right to live and work in France, which is known locally as the métropole; Frenchmen or women from the métropole are métropolitains. The islands are subsidised by France (a friend, Sonia, who has just given birth to a baby daughter, receives a monthly maternity supplément from the state – nothing comparable is available in the Anglophone islands); the standard of living in the French Antilles is generally consequently considerably higher than in elsewhere in the Caribbean: the roads are generally good, the food is immeasurably better, and everything costs even more than it does elsewhere in the Caribbean.

A small virtually round island about twenty-five miles from the Guadeloupe mainland (fifteen minutes by plane, 45 by boat), Marie Galante was “discovered” by Columbus in 1493, on his second voyage to the Antilles. He named the island after the admiral’s flagship, the Marigalante, or Maria Graciosa, but the sailors, inspired by its shape, nicknamed it “Sombrero”. It wasn’t, however, until 1648 that Europeans finally settled there. They then proceeded promptly to do what Europeans usually did in such situations, namely to exterminate the indigenous Caribs (of whom few traces still remain: there is a cave near Capesterre with pre-Columbian drawings).

Marie Galante now has a population of around 13,500; its main agriculture is the cultivation of sugar cane and its only industry the manufacture of strong rum, now usually 59% proof (it used to be 65% and an excess of this once obliged me to crawl across the road to my hotel). Marie Galantine rum is said to be the best in the world (the most potent, Père Labat, is named after the seventeenth-century Dominican missionary who spent twelve years in the region and whom Patrick Leigh Fermor described in The Traveller’s Tree as “a monastic West Indian Pepys”). The island has three functioning distilleries, and a number of picturesque ruins which testify to its sugar-cane past.

The best known of these is the late eighteenth-century Château Murat which lies just outside the island’s capital, Grand Bourg, on the road to Capesterre. The Château, contrary to how it is depicted on the postcards of it for sale throughout the island, is now without a roof and has been so ever since I have known it. Nevertheless, it is an impressive reminder of just how rich Marie Galante must once have been. A large, seriously grand house, now gutted inside, it stands at the top of a gentle incline, commanding a magnificent view of the sea. Nearby lie the ruins of the sugar factory and a windmill. There were once a hundred such windmills on Marie Galante, which gave rise to its other, more common nickname, l’île aux cent moulins; some seventy of these are still standing. The Habitation Roussel (habitation means “estate house”) on the road to Saint Louis is much smaller, but pretty and very picturesque.

There are two ports on the island: the capital, Grand Bourg, and Saint-Louis. Grand Bourg is just another dusty little Caribbean town. Many of the older buildings were destroyed by a fire in 1901 and the architecture is generally nondescript. Fortunately, the church, Notre Dame de Marie Galante, survived. Built in 1827, it has a splendid vaulted wooden ceiling painted a bright sky-blue and a elaborate marble altar with a bas-relief of the Last Supper. The stained glass windows are modern and ugly. A long street full of shabby shops selling shoes and postcards and bolts of cloth runs from the steps of the church past the little market down to the port. There are three or four palatial pharmacies, all plate-glass and chrome and filled with homeopathic remedies for disorders of the blood and liver, and many restaurants, all of them pretty good and one or two quite chic.

Saint-Louis, Marie Galante's second port, is a one-horse town. Its only hotel, Le Salut, lies within easy walking distance of the quay, its view of the sea obscured by the hôtel-de-ville. The beach is perfectly nice, but there are better ones at Vieux-Fort and Capesterre. There is, however, a good restaurant, Chez Henri, run by an unpredictable Toulon-raised Marie-Galantine whose somewhat lethal charm acts as a magnet and ensures that his restaurant is the place in Saint-Louis (and probably in the whole of Marie Galante). The dining room opens onto the beach where a hammock swings between two palm trees. Beyond lies the sea. The French expression for such places is pieds dans l’eau. Saint-Louis faces west and at sunset the water is bathed in gold. When it is dark, the single lamppost on the end of the quay casts a slender column of pale light across the sea to the shore. Henri Vergerolle, the owner of Chez Henri, was born in the small wooden building that has been his restaurant for seventeen years.

Although Henri is somewhat unpredictable, his regular clientele appears to find that the subtle mix of Provençal and Antillais spices which characterise his cuisine creole personalisée more than makes up for his occasional bad temper and irregular hours. His reputation precedes him and his rather lethal charm acts as a magnet. There are usually at least two dismal-looking white women hanging around and wondering why Henri hasn't been in touch. I once sent him a postcard that I found in Pointe-à-Pitre; it showed a handsome black man surrounded by white women in bikinis. Seduction Tropicale ... Vacances Inoubliables ran the caption. He claimed to be furious, saying what would the postman have thought, but he was thrilled really.

It was through Henri that I met Jean-Marc Thudor, a half-German, half-Guadeloupean transpersonal astrologer. Over the years Jean-Marc has given me advice, all of it delivered in a gentle, laid-back, tolerant fashion, all it worth paying heed to, all of it worth acting on, all of it good, all of it suffused by a deep wisdom which cannot, I suspect, be fully understood except over time. all it worth paying heed to, all of it worth acting on. I can remember it all word for word. Jean-Marc once told me I was “trop speedy pour les Antilles.” I am, but if only Jean-Marc knew how much less frenetic I am in Marie Galante, he would either be appalled or delighted.

Up in the hills where time has slowed to a snail's pace and the cane is brought in from the fields in carts drawn by oxen, Jean-Marc has made the most beautiful garden in the world and has built - with his own hands - a development of immaculate wooden houses designed for vegetarian tourists. I can’t stay there, partly because I crave the sea, partly because I crave meat and fish, and partly because, as Jean-Marc has pointed out, I am indeed “trop speedy pour les Antilles.” But, when I am in Marie Galante, it is always a privilege as well as a pleasure to visit Matamin, to walk in the garden at sunset, to see what new plants have sprung to life in the fertile soil, to play with Jean-Marc’s German Shepherds, and to talk and to listen to the man himself. When I am far away, it is a comfort to know that such a place exists.

In my early days in Marie-Galante I used always to stay in Saint-Louis at Le Salut, which, though pretty basic, has a pleasing simplicity. I would sit and work at a table out on the balcony that ran round the building and from which I was able to observe the comings and goings of the town. In the evenings I would go across to Chez Henri and lend a hand behind the bar.

But these days I prefer to stay in greater comfort on the Atlantic coast near Capesterre. If you drive over the hills from Saint Louis, rather than taking the coast road from Grand-Bourg, the road winds down into the town. As you round a curve on the hillside above, the little town suddenly hoves into view and you can see it laid out before you, the houses like coloured boxes in a child’s game, and beyond a great blue stretch of sea. The whole place seems bathed in a glistening, brilliant, white light. On Anse de la Feuillère, the palm trees dance in the sunlight, the sand is fine and pale and the water clear and calm. Apart from a few topless bathers and some children running in and out of the shallows, the place is usually fairly empty.

The night before I left Marie Galante, Sonia wanted to go dancing. Her older daughter, Marcia, who is seventeen, was going to baby-sit. I went to her house around 8. We had something to eat, then Sonia went to get dolled up. When she was ready, Marcia whispered to me, “You must watch Maman very carefully tonight, otherwise someone will steal her, she looks so beautiful.” It was true – she looked terrific. Though Sonia comes originally from Dominica, she has lived on Marie Galante for twelve years and acquired all the considerable sartorial flair and coquettish mannerisms of Antillaise women (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president, once irritably described the French islands as “the dancers of France”, attributing to them a frivolous, subsidised existence, all rum and madras head-dresses, and the women of the Antilles are famously coquette).

We went to Le Touloulou (touloulou is Creole for a crab), which, as far as I know, is Marie Galante’s only night-club, and is on that beautiful strip of beach just outside Capesterre. The discotheque didn’t open until midnight (well past my bedtime, but I didn’t want to disappoint Sonia) so we went to have a drink in the bar. As we sat talking, a man with the heavy features of a habitual rum drinker and a staggering gait, tried to pick us up. Sonia dismissed him with an impatient shrug and the barman came over to get rid of him.

Inside the cavernous disco, the few dancers gyrated under a revolving mirrored ball. The “rumbo’ attached himself to a group of three or four white people, manoeuvring until he was swaying opposite a pretty French girl. He was almost to drunk to stay upright. “Why on earth is she dancing with him?” wondered Sonia . “Because he’s black and she’s in the Caribbean”, I said.

I had been hoping to hear some zouk, the sweet, West-African-influenced, electronicised music of the Antilles, which is a descendant of the traditional biguine (reggae is rarely heard in the French Caribbean; calypso, in which the lyrics are so crucial, not at all). But I was to be disappointed: the music in the disco was bland and monotonous, with a driving bass beat, a sort of universal dance music designed for people on Ecstasy.

But Sonia was happy: music and dance are the lifeblood of the Caribbean. Without them, the locals would die. With them, they die happy.