Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
no Mason-and-Dixon line) in the outskirts of Fort-de-France. Their bare feet shuffled in the dust as they
gazed at the picture in morose cogitation, all sucking Coca-Cola through straws. (This has a happy end-
ing, especially for the shareholders.)
The local manager, a relation of Raoul's, was a friend of mine. 'It's wonderful stuff,' he said. 'The
locals adore it. It keeps them off the rum.' It's true. An increasing number of the inhabitants of Fort-
de-France circulate the capital in a permanent state of stone-cold sobriety, their insides awash with this
strange brown liquid. The propaganda drive of this firm has been so intensive and so ruthlessly efficient
in its execution, that never for a second are the words Coca-Cola out of one's sight. It is on a scale that
nobody who has not crossed the Atlantic can hope to grasp. They are printed on almost everything you
touch. Everywhere the beaming heroines of these giant advertisements smirk and simper and leer. It be-
comes the air you breathe, a way of life, an entire civilization—the Coca-Cola age, yoke-fellow of the
age of the Atomic Bomb.
The bottles, when they are emptied, are sent back to be refilled, but the tin capsules that seal them are
littered everywhere. They clatter against your shoes in the dust and pile up in rusty drifts in the gutters.
Bit by bit they will form a metal humus all over the western hemisphere, so that centuries after the bomb
has done its work and made way, perhaps, for a nobler detritus, archæologists will be able to put a date to
our buried remains with the help of this stratum of small round lids.
The proximity of the United States to the Antilles is a thing that one constantly feels; perhaps dispro-
portionately so, as it is chiefly apparent in the glittering external symptoms of modern life: Coca-Cola
advertisements, frigidaires, wireless sets and motor-cars, especially the last. For the dusty streets of Fort-
de-France are filled with shining and silent bolides so streamlined and purposeful that they give the illu-
sion of an impending massed flight to Mars.
In former times (and still, though less frequently, today) the inhabitants of the French Antilles used
to speak of the
Bons Gens de la Guadeloupe
and the
Grands Seigneurs de la Martinique
; and the at-
mosphere of Fort-de-France is certainly less enclosed in feeling, less parochial and remote, than that of
Pointe-à-Pitre or Basse Terre. The political problems of Martinique, though they are exactly parallel to
those of Guadeloupe, are intensified by the more urban character of a large section of this most densely
populated country. As in the sister island, the years of disciplinarian rule under the Vichy régime, and the
repressive nature of the governorship of Admiral Robert, provoked a swing to the Left; for the coloured
community, which had borne most of the brunt of these bad years, is the section of the population from
which is drawn almost the whole of the electorate. Again, like Guadeloupe, the intensity of this feel-
ing has recently undergone a modification, in reflection of the political changes in Metropolitan France.
Nevertheless, Communism still enjoys a majority vote. The deputy and the mayor of Fort-de-France,
Aimé Césaire, the remarkable coloured surrealist poet and friend of André Breton, carried his political
conviction to the length of flying the Red Flag on the same flagpole, above the Hôtel de Ville, as the
Tricolor: an action which evoked from an opponent the words of Josephine Baker's song reshuffled into
'
J'ai deux amours, mon pays et Moscou …
.' There is, however, nothing startlingly violent in his views
on the problems of the island. He had always been one of the foremost agitators for the conversion of the
colonies into prefectures with full parliamentary representation in the mother country, and he considers
the recent realization of this project—first advanced by a Baron de la Reinty in 1880—an important his-
torical step, and one which will exclude the personal sway of a governor, often proved to be arbitrary in
the past. 'Assimilation with France,' he maintains, 'is the only way to true democracy in the Antilles.' He
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