Martinique - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 39

of Lafcadio Hearn. It was with astonishment, and then with delight, that I discovered that he had lived
for two years in Martinique, and written about it with the same enthusiasm and sympathy which he later
brought to bear upon Japan. (We had been warned about the Bibliothèque Schoelcher by a local lady.
'Don't go near any of the topics in the library; they are all infected with leprosy germs….') This building
too is entirely built out of metal; not, this time, on the anti-earthquake principle, but because for some
reason it was constructed out of this lasting material for the Paris Exhibition of 1918. It was then taken
to bits and shipped to Martinique and reassembled here, where it now offers to the gaze a great cube
whose iron fabric has been twisted and drawn-out and tormented into the architectural mould of ancient
Egypt, relieved by elements of Norman and Gothic and art nouveau among the pillars of Luxor and lotus
petals, and decorated with inset plaques of turquoise majolica. Inside, it is a skeleton which is spanned
and arcaded by lengths of metal which, bristling with rivets and bolts, inspire the reader with the feeling
of being some rare bird of paradise in a most ornate cage. My fellow-captives were nearly all students in
spectacles, taking copious notes from textbooks.
It is strange—and a pity—that there is no tradition of the open-air café in the Lesser Antilles. This is
understandable during the rainy season; it would involve endless gymnastics. But the dry season? The
Martinicans are forced into the clubs or the rum shops that cluster round the centre of the town, instead
of being able to sit at their leisure under the palm trees, and, as they talked and sipped their petit punch ,
to observe, through the palmistes and the masts of the schooners, the never-failing beauty of the sunset.
When one thinks of the strong Parisian influences that prevail in Martinique, this is an astonishing gap in
the amenities of island life.
There are so many of these gaps. But in spite of the disadvantages, the town has an inalienable charm.
Round the Savane , the streets are laid out with depressing regularity, block after block, not, fortunately,
of cement, but of wood, with jutting balconies and persiennes and high mansard roofs, trooping away to
the rivers and the wooded foothills in dusty and animated vistas filled with the same variegated popula-
tion as that of Guadeloupe. The same dowdiness of the girls, the same magnificence of their mothers and
grandmothers. The men in the street seem more alert and friendly and cheerful than those of the sister
island, and, in talking to white people, far less reserved. Under the walls of the fort stretches an avenue
of mangoes and flamboyants called l'Allée des Soupirs, a shady thoroughfare ending in the region of the
docks and back streets into whose battered precincts a pom-pommed sailor can now and then be observed
disappearing in search of the afternoon of a faun.
' La danse est leur passion favorite ,' writes Père Labat, describing the life of the slaves of Martinique at
the close of the seventeenth century; as on every other subject concerning the Antilles, the indefatigable
Dominican has much to say: ' Je ne crois pas qu'il y ait peuple au monde qui y soit plus attaché qu'eux .'
Their favourite dance was the calenda , which he supposed originated in the Kingdom of Arada on the
Guinea coast; but the movements of this dance were so equivocal, so opposed to all pudeur , that slave-
owners who cared for the morality of their slaves, and incidentally for their own peace and security—the
Father always has some eminently practical corollary for his precepts—put the calenda under an inter-
dict. But it was no good: 'Their passion for this dance is beyond the imagination; old, young, even little
mites who can scarcely stand. One would have thought they had danced it in their mothers' wombs.'
The rhythm of the calenda was given by two tom-toms made of hollowed sections of tree trunk. Both
were about four feet long, but one was a foot and a half in diameter, the other nine inches. They were
gripped between the knees or straddled. The big drummer played a measured rhythm, and the one who