Lecture, Session 11

School Days (cont.)

Creole Cultural Logic

Creole cultural logic tests cultural competence.  For example, the teacher tries to teach ethics via a lesson about stealing apples.  Ask yourself, why would the teacher use apples as a subject when teaching children in Martinique?  Why not choose an object familiar to them?  Notice how Papa responds, "who could steal apples from a tree?  They're imported!"  Apple stealing is not comparable to another form of stealing.  What about stealing mangoes?  Is it considered stealing?  Why or why not?

This veneration of all things French and correlated disparagement of anything Creole is counteracted by the substitute teacher (recall: he temporarily replaces the teacher when he falls victim to Big Bellybutton’s wangas).  The substitute re-wrote texts, inserted local flora and fauna for those of distant lands and climates to which the children couldn’t relate.  He was subversive; he venerated African and Creole culture.  He “spoke a subversive variety of French” which he called "revolutionized."  He even gave the children permission to speak in Creole.

But, the children could not! The teacher’s discipline had been successful.  They had internalized the message that Creole was base, vulgar, inferior.  They were tongue-tied and ashamed (p.130).  They policed one another.  One dared not make a mistake in French.  It was all or nothing.  Better to speak Creole than to falter in French and die of ridicule (p. 65).

Pervasiveness of Creole

Children did not only speak from a Creole base, they thought from it, too. Their images and meanings were taken from Creole, highly descriptive, sonorous, word play, repetition (p. 66).  So, the teacher had a double and impossible mandate which he vainly but determinedly tried to fulfill.  He constantly polices both the form (i.e style, linguistic code, etc.) and the content of their language.  He decries and derides their concrete, image-laden language in favor of more abstract constructions, as if abstraction were somehow superior and also value-neutral.  For example, on p. 127 “We don’t say, 'He was stuck in a tar patch,' We say, 'He was in a difficult situation.'"

Also, the role of the body in Creole utterances differs from such images in French.  Creole exhibits a corporal connection and grounding as opposed to a mental or psychic one.  For an example, consider the use of tèt and fè tèt.

Consider the following examples:

On p. 113,  "We don’t say, 'I’m talking for my body,' (m pale pou kò mwen), we say, 'I’m talking to myself.'"

On p. 56: In responding to the example about stealing apples and being asked to apply it generally, Big Bellybutton cannot.  He cannot apply apples to mangoes. 

On p. 66, “everything ugly was old...”

Notion of time

Children arrive with a concrete, event and task-oriented notion of time.  The teacher squelches it with an abstract, linear concept in order to teach discipline.  And, unfortunately, the children acquiesce to it, and start counting time, spending it not passing it.  Recall them waiting for the bell to ring. 

Children's Clothing

In children's clothing, abject poverty is seen despite their parents' “employment.”  It is a punishment to have to wear rags, having to wear them again without mending or changing clothes, even if cheeks of buttocks are exposed.  Gwo Lonbrik showed up one day in a burlap sack with holes cut out for head and arms.  Then, Gwo Lonbrik's father arrives at the school.  He gives peasant food as presents to teacher and M le D, then beats his son mercilessly.  Notice the comical description on p. 84.

She gives him sheep’s brains once a week to make him smarter (so the teacher will acknowledge him) and his sibling tells him that it will just make him bleat like a sheep.  He checks himself to see if his hair or skin are changing.  Meanwhile, he believes he is smarter on the day after the meal.  But the teacher doesn’t notice any difference.  In addition, she uses the weekly dose of cod liver oil for the purpose of cleaning out the insides along with the outside via the soap in the bathing of the skin and hair.

Big Bellybutton’s magic

By casting a spell on the teacher in Creole, he demonstrates the weapon-capability of language.  On pages 124-125, the author uses the metaphor of maré (tying up).  In forbidden Creole, he mentioned the spirits, beings, things that had bad, magical powers (p. 127).  Included is Makandal–a Haitian slave and sorcerer (poisoner) who was captured and burned at the stake by the colonizers.  This suggests that migration is not just of people but of revolutionary ideas, between populations of the Caribbean.

Education as discipline

• How much is learning?  How much is discipline? 
• How does it squelch curiosity, ambition, communal ethic? 
• What does it teach? What happened to the little boy and to Big Bellybutton?

Consider the role of experience in the family, too.  For fear of humiliation at school and pain from his mother, he starts to hide his tears.  Yet, his reverence for learning is nurtured at home.  His mother stores books in their two-room apartment as though they were treasures.  Because of this, he pays homage to both the teacher and Big Bellybutton, to the Francophile mimic and the Creole magician, to the lover of books and writing and the lover of numbers and wit (p. 128).