December 2008 in Sint Maarten, Netherlands Antilles
FFor a long time I have liked the work of travel writer Pico Iyer, who captures so well a type of travel abroad (in a “broad way”), that I often find myself viewing a new locale through his eyes. His writing is fluid, it’s easy. You are yanked out of your moment and thrust side-saddle as he canters through the most pastoral, forlorn, opulent, or depraved places on earth. I read The Lady and the Monk as a teen, my young head swooning over Iyer’s dichotomous year of Love in the time of Abstention. (Revisiting this book now, though, I am much more critical). Years later, Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World was the book I took on my first international trip (to Taipei, at 23, with no clue about anything). The idea that one could gain an insight, a kind of thermodynamic equilibrium of emotion, was very appealing to me. My temperature inside had always been twelve degrees above lonely; Iyer’s writing inspired me to travel.
This Christmas, my love and I flew to the Caribbean island of St. Maarten/St. Martin to escape New York’s winter. There was snow on the ground at Laguardia airport…and because NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE are SEEING SOMETHING/SAYING SOMETHING I had to relinquish a new bottle of perfumery that makes me smell good. When we deplaned at SXM airport, the salty air promised us happiness. It promised us Rum Jumbie, and then a nap.
Iyer writes:
Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” and “travail,” and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship — both my own, which I want to feel, and others’, which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion — of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly.
For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.
To what things have I been blind?
We stayed at the Princess Heights, a boutique condominium resort near Dawn Beach. We slept by the sea. Sint Maarten, the Dutch counterpart to French Saint Martin, is a pretty place with roads like ribbons laced through the hills. We ate fresh fish — do they feel pain? — and witnessed, languidly, the unfolding of our love in this Caribbean paradise. Our conversations often turned to life in St. Maarten, both the observable life (buying eggs in Phillipsburg, eating on the French side) and the actual life as best we, two Asian American tourists, could surmise it. Of course, silly me, fish do feel pain.
Sint Maarten is officially an eilandgebied (”island area”) of the Netherlands Antilles, one of five municipalities under the jurisdiction of a gezaghebber (Governor) appointed by the Dutch crown. There are an estimated fifty-thousand residents, and eighty-five percent of the labor force works in the tourism industry. This industry, nursed since the 50’s, caters to travelers from the so-called first world who want to enjoy a bit of Gainsbourg’s “sea, sex and sun”. This means me. On the tourism website www.st-maarten.com, I am told that the island is “A Little European….a Lot of Caribbean!” and that it is the “biggest small island in the world.” I’m told that the Treaty of Concordia, signed by the Dutch and the French in 1648, is the “oldest active, undisputed treaty on our planet!”
But how did this happen? Being Korean, this splitting and sharing of a small island by other countries makes my lip curl. Sint Maarten, originally called Sualouiga, or “Land of Salt”, was inhabited by the matrilineal Taíno (aka Arawak) people around 800 AD. Relatively peaceable hunters and farmers, their numbers were threatened and eventually overcome by the fierce neighboring Caribs, who gave the region their name. On November 11th, 1493 — the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours — Columbus claimed the little “salt island” for Spain. Over the next 155 years, Spain wrestled with the Dutch and French for control, each of these conquerors introducing new diseases (smallpox, measles, influenza) which proved cataclysmic to the native populations. In the 16th century, Spain enslaved the remaining Taíno and Caribs, in the 18th century the French imported African slaves for their sugar plantations, and after slavery was abolished in 1848 the British brought in Chinese and East Indian laborers. The Europeans, it seems, do not like to do their own work.
Meanwhile, the Taíno of the Caribbean disappeared. Nearly four-million of them at the time of Columbus’s arrival were, by 1502, decimated to a remarkable sixty-thousand(!) by disease, Carib aggression, and Spanish brutality. Mass suicides and forced abortions among the Taíno were common, as they sought to spare themselves the harsh reality of their subjugation. Today, Taíno mtDNA can be found among Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and the Garinagu of Central America, mixed –quite literally — with Carib and African blood.
As we vacationed in St. Maarten, I looked for bits of this history in the faces around me: the large woman selling mangos street-side, American tourists dining at the Westin, our snorkeling guide named Peter. Admittedly, the people we encountered seemed comfortable and happy. Is it even possible for us to see them, through the thick veil of the service industries? Through the sticky, stained veil of our collective past? and WHY are the mangos imported? Pico Iyer observes:
We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a “one world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.
To what things have I been blind? In what ways have I been complacent?
It makes me angry.
{ 0 comments }