Visiting
Fort de France, Martinique/Carlos Pueblo
This is the
4th stop for our Eastern Caribbean Islands tour with Dawn. I walked
out of the
pier toward the fort on the right hand direction as usual. The official
tourist
information stand was right there in the front and the ladies understood
my few lines
of French greeting even though they humbly indicated that they
only spoke
broken French, Antillean Creole similar to our Cajun French in Louisiana.
Lime Lafare
was there with her tourist’s portfolio at hands and explained my
questions.
The tourists pushed her toward the Fort entrance and I had had additional
discussions
with her. The Spanish discovered the Island first yet the French effectively
ruled the
island till this day. Martinique is legitimate territory even though Paris likes
to get rid
of it and the citizen reject the idea. Lime mentioned that I should see her
son’s face
and phoenix eyes with Chinese heritage. Come to think about it, her first
name sounded
like a Hakka girl’s , jasmine plum, I adopted her as my Martinique
daughter and
her son as my grandson. She told me to visit the statue of Josephine
without her
head at the garden park nearby.
If I mention
Napoleon Bonaparte, you would remember this Josephine de Beauhanais
of Martinique,
his lover and first wife. Josephine gave him his first opportunity to grasp
the command
of a battery battalion and the rest was European history. Some vendors
chopped off
her statute head and the city couldn’t restore or remove it from the park.
I walked
into a museum like city library to write an e-mail home. Basically, the city is
lovely similar
to certain part of Paris with several squares with flowers arrangement
with
tropical plants decoration such as mango trees with green fruits hanging on.
It has been
very simple to understand the Caribbean. First was the native Indian and
the numbers
were very insignificant due to food to be survival; Second was the discovery
by Columbus
and the Spanish came in, then pirates, English, French, and Dutch pulled
in to grasp
from Spain and during this time, all of them imported African slave to the
Caribbean
and transferred to North America for profit. During the WWII, European
Nations were
busy to fight each other and left the Caribbean alone for some time and
some island
became independent and some selected otherwise and there were difference
of better
off or worse off situation.
I think of
my home country Formosa very much when I travel to the Caribbean. We are
under tremendous
Chinese pressure to become a part of China, in contrary to what the
European
nations’ attitude toward Caribbean. There is a different and very much
different
philosophy
of ruling and colonization nowadays. I feel very sorry for Taiwanese for we
have
to face the
communist Chinese.
No comments:
Post a Comment