Night Swimming

I’m not going to tell anyone about this. Well, OK, but just you.

Late this afternoon, I went swimming with the girls up to Alice’s, and tried out my new flippers. We stayed in the water til after sunset. My uncle Joseph showed up, who I’d been looking forward to talking with, so we talked for an hour after Veronique had taken all the kids home, mine and hers. By now it was well after dark, but I was resolved to swim home alone down the bay, refusing offers of a ride and my Aunt’s worries about the big fish of the night. As I said goodnight, I thought about jokingly adding, in case this is the last time I see you, but thought better of it and not a moment too soon. I walked out to the end of the dock and put on my blue and black flippers. Hopping in, I saw the sea was teeming with phosphorescence. Tiny sparkling yellow points of light shining while swirling briefly in the water. A few lights from shore shined on the calm water. Stars shown brightly between the broken clouds moving slowly across the night sky. I lay on my back swimming quickly through the water.

While looking up at the sky, the backside of my shoulder glanced against something large and smooth, pushing it below me underwater. I started. Looking around I saw several large splashes, a couple seconds apart, in different directions around me. My hand bumped something below the water. I recoiled, trying to assume a strong or at least defensive position, which is a very odd thing to try to do while floating in a bay of coal black water in the night. I splashed and kicked. There was noise. One of my flippers fell off or was pulled off. I momentarily considered diving underwater to try to get to it, but nearly instantly thought that a crazy idea. I did mark my location, not too far offshore from a white buoy.

Seeing no more splashing fish, I decided to continue swimming home.  The water to my side splashed again. I had the impression it was smaller fish. With my single flipper, I swam on.

Looking ahead when I breathed I could see the stars of phosphorescence glow in my exhale across the water. Under water, my moving arms made ghostly shapes where they moved, like angel wings. When I neared the shore, past our neighbor’s dock, I noticed very little of the phosphor in the water. I stepped out of the water, and headed up for dinner, where my kids asked me what took me so long as they finished eating ribs in their pajamas.

Mapping Openness to Cultures

I’ve been thinking about how differently people orient themselves in relation to other cultures. Here’s a range of orientations to one’s own and other cultures. What are the pros and cons of each? What determines a person’s orientation and openness? It’s hard and it’s strange to get to know other cultures. Is it worth it?

Monoculturalist	Cultural Supremacist, Cultural Elitist	Multiculturalist, cultural pluralist	Polyculturalist
Limits perspective and allows input only from within one’s native culture. Other cultures aren’t really considered to exist	Recognize existence of other cultures, but view one’s own culture as superior. My culture, right or wrong.	Multiple cultures exist and are honored as all having some value.	Individuals are fluent in more than one root culture.
Isolationist. Other cultures are inherently and unfathomably foreign.	Interchange is possible only on resource extraction, exploitation or economic terms.	Interchange possible on economic terms, and also on social terms, such as cultural and educational exchanges	Interchange is the normative state.
Intercultural space is unknown	Intercultural space is a struggle for dominance	Intercultural space is a domain and market for learning, negotiation, exploration, shared reality generation.	Intercultural space is normal, comfortable, cultural boundaries are recognized as highly permeable.
Marry someone from your own church	Marry within your village	Marrying across culture and race is ok.	Marrying across cultures is normal.

 

The columns above aren’t mutually exculsive. I’d say I married within my culture, but also feel rooted within multiple cultures and see the world as a polyverse (a space of multiple cultural universes).

I know many who deeply inhabit one home culture, and who don’t venture forth from there, and often I admire them for their steadfast loyalty to their familiar world, and to the clarity with which they see things. I, on the other hand feel like I live in a honeycomb of multiple cultures, moving between them on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. In a day i might be working with Americans online and by phone, discussing with my daughters a creole expression they heard at school, helping them with French homework or talking with a local neighbor or family member. It takes effort and energy to move between cultures and there pros and cons to doing so. At times I envy friends who are deep within a single culture and have a mastery of that domain. 

Yet, as someone who values learning a bit more than certainty, I think I’m preferring and actively seeking out the awkward discomfort of being a novice in a new culture for how that might enrich me over the certainty that I know how things are. I want a wide range of experiences to contribute to my identity. Surely, though, I also limit the risks of being too much a stranger in a strange land, of being lost or vulnerable to an unsafe extent, or on the point of non-comprehension. This is the brink of chaos; of exile, of an impossibility of participation. I think when we learn or when we’re given the tools of adapting to and learning new cultural contexts; of learning other languages and being at home with the unfamiliar rather than afraid of difference, the fearful aspects of these other worlds are far less and we’re more free to find our way in a wider world.

In a life, we make choices to invest more deeply in a handful of cultures, and those choices are limited by many factors. We’re born into a culture, but we may choose (or be forced) to live in different cultural spaces. Raising a family, we choose what culture to give our children and place limits on that as well. Each family in a sense forms or creates it’s own culture.

This Morning, Montagne du Vauclin

I noticed the night sounds of insects begin to wane and so knew it was early morning. I woke up, favoring the crepuscular hours at sunrise and sunset. The sun will rise in a half hour or so behind a bank of cumulus clouds on the horizon. Above them the pale sky lightens, yellow and faintly rose, and further above are slight traces of pink in some very high altitude clouds against the blue of parting night. Offshore, the reef waves roll in slowly, breaking silence on the calm sea. Nearby, insomnolent doves call to each other. A first rooster crows in the distance. Songbirds chirp in ssss’s and the insect sounds fade further.

While on my run yesterday to the ridges of Montagne du Vauclin, an ancient volcano, I chose to add on a climb to the peak. There is a stages of the cross climb that goes over the top. The way was marked well, but the path was slippery and muddy enough to merit wearing hiking shoes or boots. The view is spectacular of the entire island, though with clouds to the north I wasn’t able to see the pitons or the larger volcano, Montagne Pelee.

Near the peak, mist still lightly hung in the air, and the sunlight streamed through the trees in the mist making rays of light to the root rich ground, and the 14 white crosses along the way were in perfect harmony with the light and the air and the earth. Walking down the far side, though walking slow and carefully, I slipped and fell in the mud. The earth here is soft and a beautiful rust-red. Bright red-rust colored butterflies flit past. Mostly the trail is lined with lush tropical trees and brush. In a few places, large clumps of 50-foot tall bamboo stretch upwards.

Hundreds of dark tadpoles flittered in the deep ditches full of yesterday’s rain. A herd of 30 goats had made a wrong turn and the shepherd asked me to help bring them back, I ran past them and turned them around without thinking. Leggy sheep grazed eagerly.

At Home

I can’t believe our second month has passed so quickly. School for the girls has changed from being fairly radically new to being a comfortable routine. The struggle of not knowing anything has become the practice of learning a little more each day, and seeing the progress. Work for me has been busy and filled my days. We’ve not done much exploring, but have mostly still been acclimating. The dawn, and days and evenings and nights, the tropical surrounds, and regular swimming, the warm rain showers, all of these are now sweet new norms for us. I love running past the bananas and thinking of that as normal.

Colette and Olivia are adapting well to French school. I marvel at how they’ve improved in their writing and reading. French schools place a strong emphasis on note-taking of lessons (le dictee) in well organized notebooks. Lessons are written in French style cursive beginning in 2^nd grade, and include using blue, red, and green ink and ruler-perfect underlines for emphasis. The lessons are very concise and complete summaries that capture the essence of a many subject areas. Students have notebooks for each subject, and notebook paper here is lined horizontally and vertically, with 3 fainter horizontal lines between rows, helping to emphasize correct letter positioning.