Martinique is one of the Windward Islands and part of the Lesser Antilles chain of islands stretching from Grenada to St Kitts. It is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and by the Caribbean Sea to the west. With a surface area of only 1,000 square kilometres, Martinique is so small that nowhere is more than sixty kilometres from the capital, Fort-de-France. This does not make for easy communications. The transport network centres on Fort-de-France and the easiest way to go from Le Robert on the Atlantic coast to Le Carbet on the opposite side of the island is to make a detour via the capital. When Fanon lived in Martinique, transport was poor and roads, especially in the north, were often blocked by landslips and mud slides. Despite its small size, the island’s terrain is very varied, and its flora rich and diverse. Its mammalian fauna is relatively poor, largely because of the predatory talents of the mongoose which was introduced in a vain attempt to control the snake population. The mongoose quickly learned that there were many easier things to kill than snakes, and the highly venomous fer de lance viper (Bothrops atrox.) reproduces with impunity in the damp forests despite the financial rewards on offer for bringing in a dead specimen. There is no truth in the story that the snakes, which are an endemic species, were introduced to dissuade slaves from running away from the plantations but, although rarely glimpsed, they are greatly feared, so much so that the fer de lance is not spoken of as such: it is ‘la bête longue’ (‘the long animal’).
In the north of Martinique, the rainfall is heavy and the slopes of the precipitous mountains are clad in the vestigial remnants of a rain forest; the west and particularly the south are much drier and water is in short supply. Most of the terrain is hilly and the rolling volcanic mornes are its most distinctive feature. The island is dominated by the peak of Montagne Pelée (1,250 metres). The volcano is dormant, but far from extinct. Although a child in La Trinité can still be asked to produce essays on ‘My Village in Autumn’ or ‘Christmas in the Snow’,14 Martinique has only two seasons: the dry and warm Carême (literally Lent) from December to June, and then a hotter season (hivernage) with heavy rain and occasional cyclones. Fanon does not describe his lessons in meteorology, but he does describe what happens when ten-to fourteen-year-olds in Martinique are asked to describe what summer holidays mean to them: ‘They reply like proper little Parisians: “I like holidays because I can run through the fields, breathe fresh air and come back with rosy cheeks”.’15
French representations of Martinique defy physical geography, and the syllabus taught in Martinique can ignore elementary climatology. The educational system treats history in cavalier fashion too. Unless a particularly committed teacher introduces an option in ‘local’ history, the history taught in schools is that of metropolitan France and its succession of revolutions and republics, and not that of Martinique itself.16 In ideological terms, this history has been described as serving mainly to legitimize the position of the tiny white minority by stressing the importance of their metropolitan origins, no matter how tenuous the links may actually be, whilst implying that the black majority has no history worth recording.17 Even locally produced histories tend to rely upon a Francocentric chronology.18 Fanon’s comments on history in colonial societies in Les Damnés de la terre refer to the Third World in general, but they echo the lessons he learned as a child in Martinique. It is the colonist who makes history and ‘The history he writes is not the history of the country he is stripping, but the history of his own nation as it plunders, rapes and starves.’19 An alternative history is being created in Martinique, but it is the creation of novelists and poets rather than professional or academic historians. Edouard Glissant proposes a chronology divided into seven periods: the slave trade; the world of slavery; the plantation system; the emergence of the elite and of towns; sugar-beet’s victory over cane-sugar; assimilation; possible annihilation.20 Patrick Chamoiseau divides the history of Martinique into five ages: the age of ajoupas (shelters) and longhouses; the age of straw; the age of crate wood; the age of asbestos; and the age of concrete.21 Raphaël Confiant retells the story of Martinique during the Second World War in distinctly unofficial terms, and that of the serious riots that broke out in 1959 after an apparently trivial incident in which a white incomer’s car collided with the Vespa scooter owned by a black docker; the latter story is also told by Vincent Placoly.22 These were the riots that inspired Fanon’s final article on Martinique.23
Martinique was ‘discovered’, as the Eurocentric tradition has it, by Columbus in the fifteenth century, but it was only in 1635 that it was claimed for France by Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc, the conquistador whose heroic statue – erected in 1935 to mark the tricentenary of the French presence and not a masterpiece of public statuary – looks out to sea from Fort-de-France’s waterfront. The original European colonizers had shown little interest in Martinique, as it soon proved to have no reserves of precious metals. They were also wary of the inhabitants. The Caribs, who knew the island as Madinina,24 were not the aboriginal people of Martinique. They had migrated from Latin America and decimated the earlier population of Arawaks. The Caribs had a reputation for being good warriors, and were also said to be cannibals. ‘Cannibal’ is derived from ‘Carib’, as is the name of Shakespeare’s Caliban. Although the flesh-eating Carib figures prominently in literary accounts of the region, no one ever met one. As Marina Warner, a specialist in cultural mythologies, remarked in her 1994 Reith Lectures: ‘Like the gold which he [Columbus] was certain was always around the next headland, it was always the tribe over the next ridge who were feasting on human flesh. Columbus left the myth of cannibalism thriving, but no account of the practice.’25 Carib resistance was overcome by European weaponry, and according to legend many committed suicide by jumping from cliffs rather than be enslaved by the French. The cliff between St Pierre and Le Prêcheur on the Caribbean coast is still known by the alternative names of ‘The Coffers of Death’ or ‘Tomb of the Caribs’. Little trace or memory of the pre-colonial culture of Martinique remains. There are only some artefacts in museums, a few place names, and mysterious carved rocks in certain of the forests.
Under the colonial system that developed from the seventeenth century onwards, the role of the West Indian colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint Domingue (now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was defined with brutal clarity. Their sole raison d’être was to supply the metropolis with tropical produce. They were not expected to develop an economy of their own or to accumulate wealth in their own right. Trade with countries other than France was forbidden by law. The initial work of colonization was undertaken mainly by engagés, or indentured labourers, recruited from France’s Atlantic seaboard, who worked in conditions of near-slavery; it is no semantic accident that engagé can also refer to someone who has signed a pact with the devil and exchanges temporary wealth or material advantage for eternal torment. The economy based upon cotton, tobacco, indigo and coffee was not a success. Sugar, introduced in the late seventeenth century, was to prove the source of the wealth of Martinique’s planters, and the success of the island’s dependent economy was driven by the rising European demand for a luxury that was increasingly becoming part of everyday life. Like the British ports of Bristol and Liverpool, French cities such as Bordeaux and above all Nantes grew wealthy on the Atlantic trade and the traffic in slaves that supported it. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Martinique’s economy was based almost exclusively on sugar, but the industry began to decline in the fifth of Glissant’s ages, when it was faced with competition from the sugar-beet that was and is intensively farmed on the plains of northern France. Rum replaced sugar as the island’s prime export. Although it is still grown, sugar is now of minimal importance to the economy of Martinique, whose only real export crop is now the banana. Martinique’s plantations are relatively small and the island’s banana growers find it difficult to compete with the giant American-owned plantations in Latin America. The future looks grim.
Tobacco could have been easily produced by independent small-holders, but the production of sugar required both a high level of initial capital investment and a large labour force. The labour force came from West Africa. In 1664, it was estimated that Martinique had a white population of 2,904 and a black population of 3,158; by the middle of the next century, the total population was