Getting ready to go

In all likelihood, this will be my last post from French Guiana. I'm scheduled to be booked solid from tomorrow morning until my departure. It is bittersweet. I really like it here, despite all the headaches and all the exorbitant prices. I enjoy the people, I enjoy the food, I like living in a place where I get to learn new languages and explore things. I would love to take people here, get people interested in this region, let them see both the beauty and the potential of the area. At the same time, I'm excited to go home, enjoy domestic life, start teaching again, earning money, and starting my dissertation writing and analysis in earnest. I'll have a good post when I return to the U.S. about several awkward moments that I've refrained from writing about. Stay tuned.

Grrrr

This morning was a relatively nice morning. I went to the market with relatively little food to buy, instead focusing on picking up some souvenirs for home and for a couple of friends who I'll be seeing for the first time in a while right after I get home. I sat around for a while with Violette and her family (who have all adopted me and brag about my Creole skills and even refer to me as their Haitian friend), essentially for the last time as I'm not sure I'll make it back to the market in time to see them on Tuesday. I bought a couple of paintings from them, including an original piece that the artist signed and dedicated to me on the back. What I didn't realize about the piece is that it was just slightly too big for a shopping bag to carry home (and also for my suitcase, as I would later discover).

With a beautiful, clear sky above, you might imagine my consternation when it started raining as I was coming home with it. The painting is acrylic, so I wasn't too concerned about the painting itslef getting ruined, but rather the chances of the dedication smudging (or mildew growing). I put the bike on a conveniently placed bike rack and started to walk home.
As I was rearranging the bags to protect the painting, I slammed my knee into a less conveniently placed stone bench. I no longer wanted to walk home, so I decided to hitchhike. After 5 frustrating minutes, some soldiers pulled over and picked me up. They had no idea where I lived when I told them, which suggests that they are either new or they have very little exposure to the area, spending all their time in and around the military bases here (which is a common complaint I've heard about them).
But they got me home fast and relatively dry, so I was happy.

I ate lunch, picked up a couple things for dinner/recording tonight and went back to town. I decided to hitchhike again to speed things up, and the very first car I tried picked me up. It was a Haitian family. As they drove me back to my bike, they talked to me in Creole for a bit, testing whether I actually spoke it. We had a nice little conversation, and when I get out to unlock my bike, I discovered that some jackass had tried to steal it. Luckily they failed, but the chain has some severe damage. I'll have to replace it, but since it still works, I'm tempted to take it home with me to replace the broken one I have at home. In any event, I'm glad that things have by and large worked out for the best.

Murals

Murals are very common here. Actually, all sorts of wall painting is common, whether it's pictures painted on houses, or graffiti on walls (my favorite: "bare walls, silenced people"), or poems painted on school exteriors. Above you see a mural welcoming you to what used to be Chinatown, and is now just a regular old bad neighborhood. I wanted to include more pictures, but the internet café is too slow. So we'll be low on pictures for the rest of my time here (just a few more days!).

Internet troubles

Last night, I went to my normal internet spot and was troubled to find that my internet was suddenly not connecting. I could connect to the network, but the network wouldn't load the world wide web. Hence no blog post. I will try again tonight, and if I succeed, there will be pictures of murals. If not it will have to wait for tomorrow.

My new glasses

Here are my new glasses that I talked about last week.

Hair Fashion

There is something I've been meaning to write about: men's hairstyles. But it's been difficult to do with a lack of an illustration, and I feel weird about just taking random pictures of people on the street, as though they are there for my curiosity's benefit. However, as I was coming home the other night, there was a fashion show going on. Nothing too impressive, at least not to my untrained eye, but there was a male model with exactly the kind of hairstyle that had jumped out at me. And since he was really putting himself on display, I decided to take advantage and get the picture. And here it is:

You'll notice the designs drawn in the hair. I've seen writing, elaborate designs, all sorts of things. I wouldn't say that all young men have them, but only young men have them, and they are not at all uncommon.

Back-ups

Every once in a while, things go very wrong. For that, it's important to have back-up plans. Take last night. I was supposed to have a recording session with one of my participants. He told me to call him the day before to confirm. I called him the day before, and the day of, and yet I got no response. No time to panic! I called the other participant, who was available to come downtown for a conversation session with his girlfriend. I grabbed my equipment and headed downtown. We found a quiet park bench and started to talk. Then I noticed something: the voice recorder wasn't working because it was too full, and it wasn't erasing easily. No need to panic! The other one was working fine. After a little while, I managed to erase the files taking up all the room, and started recording. We talked talked talked then I heard a strange beep: The battery was dying. No worries! I had spares in my bag. Always have a backup!

Too tired for a real post

I don't know why, but I'm exhausted early today. So you're just getting more food.

These are sériz-péyi, known in English as 'acerolas'. Tart, big seeds, not that good.

This is a watermelon, but look at the rind. This kind of watermelon with the solid green rind is a moulondlo (which translates literally as watermelon; how convenient). The kind of watermelon we see in the U.S. (at least the kind that we see as large as this) is called pastèk.

What linguists do

Yesterday, I had a meeting with the owner of the restaurant, the man who had told me if I ever had any questions I should stop by and see him.

So I went to visit him at his office, and he was happy to sit down and answer my questions. But he was taken aback by the way I asked questions. I think now is a good time to show you a bit of what we did.

Warning: NERD ALERT! If you want to get to the summary, scroll down tow where it says "IN SHORT" (yes, all caps).

Joujou timoun yan pèdi.               (joujou plural? Timoun plural?)

game  (of) child  the lost

Joujou tiboug ké tifi ya pèdi.        (joujou plural? tiboug plural? tifi plural?)

game (of) boy and girl the lost

Tifi      profèsè a kouri bokou.           (tifi plural? profèsè plural?)

girl (of) teacher the ran   a-lot

Tifi        mo frè kontan kado ya.          (tifi plural? Mo frè plural?)

girl (of)  my bro  likes     gift the

We basically spent an hour looking at sentence like the ones you see above. The sentences all have possessive subjects (The first one is "The children's game(s)"), and I was trying to figure out if any of the words in the sentence could be interpreted as singular or plural ('game' or 'games), given the following words at the end of the phrases: "ya" (plural 'the') or "a" (singular 'the'), or the absence thereof.

IN SHORT, linguists basically try to poke around the littlest parts of the grammar, prodding to find what's okay to say and what's not, what's ambiguous and what's clear. We do this by crafting sentences we know are good, sentences we know are bad, and sentences we're curious about. Then we ask speakers to listen to them and tell us what they think. The guy I was talking to was not expecting this at all.

Food!

Apologies to those who came here yesterday looking for a post. The server was not working.

After a few food-heavy posts early on, I've shied away from them for two reasons. The first is that my dishes haven't been either pretty or particularly distinctive. The second is that the market has had disappointingly few new foods that haven't appeared on this blog. In a way, it makes sense because I've been here at this general time of year before, but still I was hoping for more. And today, I found some!

First we'll start with the cucumbers.

This is called a long cucumber. It's kind of an understatement. This is a massive cucumber, stretching to at least 16 inches (and this is a small one of this species).

This one is a konkonm tochon, or rag cucumber. Notice the ridges. The skin is very tough while the inside is soft and bland. I'm not a fan.

These cucumbers have appeared on the blog before: konkonm pikan, or spicy cucumbers. They earn their name.

Lastly, here's a comparison shot of the different cucumbers, including a regular one, for comparison.

Onto the fruits. This fruit is a zabriko or abriko péyi; in English its name is usually a variation of mammey. I haven't tried it yet, but I've heard it's good.

These are kénèt or Spanish limes. They are the size of cherries. They have a crispy, easily removable peel, and the flesh is a small layer wrapped around a comparatively large seed (probably three times the size of a cherry pit). Good flavor, bad texture.

Finally these are mari-tanbou, or "water lemons" in English. They are basically just a different kind of passionfruit, with the same sour taste. With sugar, they are very good though.

American

I try to avoid using the word American to describe myself whenever I'm in South America. People in South America (and much of Europe) are taught that there is one continent that takes up most of the Western Hemisphere, called "America", while those of us from North America learn that there are two continents, collectively known as "the Americas". In South America (and indeed, much of Latin America) American is used to mean both "from the US" and "from the Americas", while in the US, American can almost never be used to mean "from the Americas" (though one exception is the Organization of American States, which is countries of the Americas). Because my English so heavily affects my French, and because Europeans frequently use American to denote only people from the US, it's a tough habit to break. There is a word for someone from the US, étatsunien, which I have adopted to describe myself and my home country.

This habit recently paid off. I had lunch yesterday at a gratin restaurant, with really good food but slightly higher prices than I would have liked. As I was leaving, the owner and waitress asked me what I was doing in Cayenne (Vacation? No. Mission? Definitely not.), and I told them about my project. They seemed interested in it, and then they asked me where I was from (Germany? Belgium?), and I said I was étatsunien. The owner said that he was really happy I used that word, that it seemed very respectful, and that if I needed him, I should call him and he gave me his card. I will be going back and taking advantage of that offer.

Glasses

I have had the same pair of glasses for 7 years. I like them, but I've had a hankering for a change for a while now. Well, I noticed that this place with good reviews was having a sale, buy one pair of glasses, get the next two for 1€ apiece. I thought to myself, Hot diggity, I think this might be the time to change. So I looked at the fine print, where it said that one of the extra pairs had to come from a pre-selected collection, and I thought, that's not too bad, I can live with that.

So I woke up Monday morning (feeling like P. Diddy), I grabbed my glasses, was out the door, and was gonna hit the city. I got to the optometrist and really wasn't sure what to do. There was no front desk, all the salespeople were occupied, and I hadn't been to an optometrist in France before, so I really had no clue about protocol. I sat down where a bunch of ladies were sitting, waiting. After about 10 minutes, I looked over at one of the desks and saw someone new standing there: the receptionist, who had apparently just arrived. I went to her, asked for an eye exam, and she was like, Do you have insurance? I had a moment of worry: Was the exam only free if you had insurance that covered it? In any event, I answered that I didn't, and they said, Well, you'll just have to pay the normal price for glasses. A big relief.

After about 10 minutes of waiting, the optometrist took me into an exam room. The technology floored me. I don't know if it's the fact that France has such good health care (which occasionally carries over into French Guiana) or if it's the fact that I haven't gotten an eye exam in five years, but I was impressed. The first thing they had me do was look one eye at a time into this little machine that showed a picture of a road leading to a multicolor hot air balloon. The picture was clear, then blurry, then clear. At the end of two minutes, there was a printout of the shape of my eyes, complete with the astigmatism. Un-frickin'-real.

Then we went through the part of the exam that I was more familiar with, where you look at the letters and read them off, then make judgments about which view is better. The only part I didn't recognize (and therefore messed up) was when there was a screen split between red and green colors with some large letters. I was asked which color stood out more, and it wasn't until we got to my second eye that I noticed that one side was supposed to be blurrier than the other. I was focusing so much on the colors that I ignored the letters. I'm not too concerned, though. At the end of the exam, he told me to compare my vision with my current glasses with the view that he was about to prescribe me. I needed new glasses badly, apparently.

So I went out, and an associate sat down with me and helped me figure out how much my lenses were going to cost. It turned out that it was buy one lens, get one free, so I could get much better frames than I had anticipated, staying right within my budget. The salesman helped me pick out some frames, offering his opinion on what looked good but also helping me realize that if I picked frames that didn't completely go around the lens (i.e. like the frames I've been sporting since July 2004), they'd have to give me slimmer, more expensive lenses. So he helped me a lot. Unfortunately, one thing the billboard didn't make clear was that the 1 euro pair of glasses had to BOTH be from the pre-established selection; if I wanted to get a frame that wasn't from that selection, I'd pay full price for it (but the lenses would still be free). So I ended up getting the pair that I liked best that was made in Europe, rather than another one that I liked that was from the US figuring I could get it in the US for cheaper if I really wanted it. I also got a back-up pair and a pair of sunglasses. The three together totaled 261€, 11€ above my target, due almost entirely to the fact that sunglass lenses were a 10€ fee (which I knew from the start). All three pairs will be ready in a week (which for me is insanely long, since here we usually get ours in an hour or so). Once I get them, I'll put pictures up.

The M Word

I meant to post about this a while ago, but it slipped my mind. But there's a word in the local creole makonmè. This word denotes the godmother of a child that a man is the godfather of. However, it is very close to another word makoumè (which actually comes from the same French words ma commère). This word is a derogatory term for a gay man, and is more generally used as an insult to any man. So at the baptism party, where I basically knew no one yet because I had a camera I was asked to stay near the godmother (among other important people), you can imagine how unnerving it was to keep hearing this word shouted over and over in my general direction. Eventually, I figured it out, but until I did, I didn't feel very welcome.

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

I was playing soccer this morning as I do most Sundays. It was high tide, which meant I couldn't really enjoy the waves because they were just too high and I'm a lousy swimmer. I made a promise to myself: I am not going to die in French Guiana. Anyhow, I commented to one of my teammates that the day I score a goal is the day that the goalie commits seppuku. I rarely take offense and I almost always pass to someone with better control of the ball. But about 5 minutes later, I found myself with the ball and an open goal within striking distance, and I made my first goal after several months of never coming close. I shouted "seppuku!" at my opponents and from that point on, made menacing comments about breaking out my secret talent that I only use every three months.

Work day

Today, after a brief visit to the market where for the life of me I could not figure out what I wanted to buy (and therefore bought nothing), I spent the rest of the day trying to work on a linguistic problem, coming up with sentences to ask people about.

Nothing else to report. Better entry tomorrow!

Languages

I'm always thinking about languages down here, since it's what I'm here for. But the last few days have been really kind of remarkable for me.

For starters, I've been doing some translating between language pairs that I'm not used to. Now I've gotten to the point where translating between English and French or English and Spanish, or even French and Spanish, is not that tough. I'm not perfect, and there are some rough patches, but it's not taxing. However, over the last couple weeks, I've had to interpret a couple times going from Guianese Creole to Spanish, and once between Haitian Creole and Portuguese. I think that it shows the remarkable multilingualism of the region, and how much people are expected to speak each other's languages. As one man put it to me, when we get here, we're just kind of obligated to learn all these languages. Now this isn't a legal obligation, or even a logistical one. If you want to speak French with everyone, you will basically have no problems. And yet, people feel the pull to learn other languages.

Also, apparently it's not rude to speak a language with someone that others in the conversation don't share. This was weird for me. Today, I went past Alex's workplace, and I saw that he was there with his daughter and two other people. They called me in and they invited me to chat a bit. It turned out that the two other people were from St. Lucia, a Caribbean island with a French creole and English as the two official languages.    I struggled to find a way to be inclusive: I started with French, but then they seemed to not speak French. I tried Creole (breaking out my one sentence of St. Lucian Creole), but then they invited me to speak English, which Alex doesn't speak. But he didn't seem to mind. So I used English, which I rarely use here, and we switched into Creole every so often.

And then at the market, I used Creole more freely, which I don't usually do because so many people reacted negatively when I first tried it when I arrived. But now, I think word about me has spread in the market, so people don't think I'm condescending when I use it. One woman was particularly surprised to hear me use it when she mistook cornmeal for fine manioc flour and I politely asked if she was sure. And of course, sometimes my knowledge is used as a means of sending the grandchildren of Haitian immigrants on guilt trips because they don't speak it and I do. It's nice that some things, like guilt, are present everywhere.

Blur

The last couple days are a bit of a blur due to their unremarkable happenings. I'll try to reconstruct it.

On Tuesday, I went early to the market. Now, Tuesday is not one of the regular market days. I didn't even realize it was open that day until Violette asked me to come visit her that day so that she could show me a book in Haitian Creole. I in return would show her a dictionary that one of my advisers edited. Well I showed up, and she had forgotten the book (but I didn't care because I had forgotten to show up to the previous meeting). But we spent a lot of time going through the dictionary with her grandson (who seems to be about my age) and her friends, talking about different words. She's fond of telling me that Haitian Creole is tough because "There's a lot of consonants and vowels." I'm not quite sure what that means or what that's in comparison to, but I like it.

And then I went to help Jorge out, serving as an interpreter with his lawyer, who's helping him chart a way forward in his quest to stay in French territory. That took an incredibly long time, only because the lawyer made us wait a half hour.

The rest of the time has been spent working and cooking. I made beef with bok choi (surprisingly, this is a French Guianese dish) along with a fried-plantain tart. Pretty darn good, I have to say. I'll be making it at home.

No post

Sorry, just forgot to write one

Birthday party

Last night I went to a birthday party for a six year old, but unlike most kids’ birthday parties, this one really seemed to be more for the adults. Lots of food, including a pork fricassee and French fries. But I think the highlight of the evening was the cake ceremony. Unfortunately I won’t be posting any of the pictures, because I don’t have permission. But basically, they lit those self-reigniting candles for the kid, sang Happy Birthday (Creole translation of the lyrics: Apre bèf la se ou ‘After the cow, it’s you’— I’ll find out what the hell that means some other time), and then right at the end of the song, they opened up a bottle of either champagne or sparkling grape juice and sprayed the kid with it, exhorting him to blow out the candles. I for one HATED the “magic candles”; in fact I’m pretty sure I cried when they were deployed on me.  And if I had just been sprayed, I think I would have seriously flipped out. But the kid took it all in stride. I was impressed.

Baptism Party

Last night was another party with the Haitians. Lots of people there, which meant the music was louder and the conversations more difficult, so I actually got less out of it linguistically than I did the first night. But some observations:

1) The men party, the women do all the cooking. The women did not seem to be having much fun.

2) Lots of drinking, very little drunkenness. This was a baptism party, and the booze flowed freely, as evidenced by this gigantic bottle of Johnny Walker whiskey on a special stand that allowed it to be poured easily. Oh and the four year old twins that were the guests of honor opened the champagne bottles and took a small sip.

3. Sparse decoration. These balloons were basically the only decorations there were. The emphasis seemed to be less on making things look nice than making them feel nice. There was some great music all night long, and everyone was clearly having a good time, eating good food, dancing, very relaxed.

4) The cake: Delicious. No one could tell what flavor it was though.

5) Obligatory picture of me, with a Guadeloupean friend.