Excerpt from Fieldwork

Vilde Fastvold
Translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen

Dreaming of islands—whether with joy or in fear, it doesn’t matter—is to dream of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone—or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew.
                       —Gilles Deleuze

No one colonizes innocently.
                      —Aimé Césaire

If I’m not paying attention, it grabs hold of me in the middle of the day too, when I’m on my way to the university, and the bendy bus bumps over a pedestrian crossing; it’s packed and I’m too hot in my winter coat, but I’ve got a window seat and a little girl behind me is saying what she can see. “Lots of people.” “Yeah, they’re waiting for the tram,” her father answers. “Tram,” says the girl. And then they stop talking, the bus rounds a corner, and I tense my thighs so I don’t squash the woman beside me. Then it hits me without warning, crawling and unpredictable, like an insect under my jumper. The feeling of being back there, of the town, the sweet smell of leaves after a downpour, of warm exhaust fumes filling my lungs, the whole island remains inside me. The smell of decay from a rubbish bin fills me with diffuse discomfort, I can’t get it off me, like a wet sweater that’s clinging to my body and heavy against my skin, it would need a good tug to get it over my head.

In Oslo the leaves have fallen from the trees, it’s that gray time of year. My hands are no longer brown with white between the fingers, they’re pale and frozen, and I warm them against my lips, under my arms. The bus stops, sighs, breathes people in and out of its doors, and drives on. And back home in bed, Mons is breathing heavily, he was still asleep when I got up. He must be a sound sleeper because last night I woke up, had a pee, went back to sleep, woke up again, nodded off, wandered down the streets on the island, and Mons didn’t notice a thing. The façades of the pastel-colored houses looked so sticky, as if the paint was melting in the sun. The rays warmed my shoulders, I felt sweaty under my hair and crossed the road to find some shade. Droplets from air conditioners spat at my neck. I walked across the square in front of the church, past a man selling green bananas, and felt my stomach tighten. I was lifted into the overgrown hills above the town center by a gust of wind. There was a nutty smell coming from rotten figs, and in the distance I saw steam rising from the bay, enveloping the streets in a dusty, damp mist.

Behind me on the packed bus, the father asks his little girl: “Is that a sore place you’ve got there?” She doesn’t answer, or nods maybe, they communicate without words, the bus rumbles along. “Which one do you want?” asks the father. The girl makes thinking noises. “I like that one,” she says. “The green one?” “The red one.” Then I hear his voice, an echo right inside my ear, Theo saying: “I like face-fucking. Not too much, just a bit. ’Cause I’m circumcised, blowjobs are often the only thing that works.” My eyes dart around the bus. I’m the only one that can hear it, and yet I feel hot and unwell, it feels like my blood is swelling, like my arteries have trouble pumping it round, and I want to get rid of the memory, but instead I hear my voice answering him: “Face-fucking?” I say. “When the guy uses the girl’s mouth like a sex doll and just BAM-BAM-BAM, jams his dick in her face, porn-style.” The bus drives on, I close my eyes and see Theo staring up at the ceiling, at the fan. The blades of the fan went round and round, just slowly enough for you to see them individually, but too fast for you to count them. He was trying to be macho, saying things like that. He actually liked it best when it was soft and slow, with me in control. Theo turned towards me. “Are you going to put that in your thesis, then?” I made my lips into a straight line. “Of course.” “You slut.” I picked off bits of peeling skin between my breasts. I’d put sun lotion on but forgotten a patch in the middle of my chest. Now it was bright red, the size of a plum. I tore off large flakes of skin. Pale and transparent, it peeled off and stuck to my fingers like cobwebs. At the time, I was scared of getting sunburnt more than anything else, and everything Theo was scared of only concerned me in theory. I wasn’t concerned when he talked about the poisonous particles trickling down through the soil, leaving traces in all the organisms in their path, crabs, sweet potatoes, dogs and fetuses, in organs and minds. Theo watched me peeling myself. “Ugh. For fuck’s sake, that’s so gross.” He closed his eyes. “What are you going to call me, then?” he asked. “I don’t know.” “I like Lilian.” “Lilian?” “Like Lilian Thuram. On the national team. If I have a son, I’m going to call him Lilian.” “I think I’ll just call you Negro number five,” I said. And he laughed.

Mons’s body is as light as a feather against the mattress, whereas Theo’s was heavy. His black beard was dense and wiry round his whole chin, merging with his thick, glossy hair. His arched nose was nice and big. I’ve always liked big noses. I liked the scars on his cheeks too, asymmetrical dents under each eye, as if tears had corroded his skin. Christ, I think to myself, he would have hated that description of himself.

The bus rounds a corner. I’m queasy. I’ve had trouble keeping food down recently. In the middle of lectures, I have to run to the toilet and pull down my trousers before it runs out of me. It could be a parasite, Mons reckons, I should get it checked out. Sometimes it comes the other way too. The other day I threw up my breakfast right onto my lunch from the canteen, small lumps of half-eaten oatmeal that spread themselves over bits of falafel. I swallow and concentrate on the landscape outside the bus window, a view made smeary by a stranger’s greasy scalp. The bus drives on, and the yellow walls of the hospital disappear from sight.

Mons prefers to have sex with me from behind, lying on his side, with his arm wrapped round my throat. I have to stretch my neck to be able to breathe properly, like a baby bird gaping at the sky. “Was it good?” he asks afterward. “Hmm,” I say.

In the institute corridors, people whisper that having sex in the field is something everyone does, but no one talks about. I haven’t asked anyone if it’s true because I’d rather console myself with the thought that fieldwork is messy and can’t be pinned down by ethical absolutes. Ethnography, good ethnography, must involve such a high degree of immersion in the field that the boundaries are by necessity fluid. Malinowski, for example, wrote about his desire for indigenous women in his diaries from the Trobriand Islands, about his sub-erotic intentions. Margaret Mead had a relationship with a Samoan tribal princess. The big names have always been at it.

I get off the bus and wander up the paths to the main university library at Blindern. I search for some old periodicals stored in the cellar. It’s a diversionary tactic; I should be writing, not burying myself in more reading, but I can’t get the words down, they won’t come to me. My supervisor nags that we must talk soon, and I smile and nod, feeling a tenseness gripping me inside. All that for nothing, it’s just not a fucking option, I think to myself. I don’t think about the guy who keeps writing to me, asking when I’m coming back.

There was a row of discount stores along the seafront. They sold everything from towels, rubber rings, and postcards of the island, all the usual tourist crap, to sweets and lava lamps, casserole dishes, wigs, radio-controlled cars, candlesticks, Christmas decorations, ironing boards, prams, and landscape paintings. All the shops were run by Chinese people. I’d gone inside one for the first time. It smelled strongly of mothballs and chemicals. I trailed my hand along a row of garish-colored dresses. In my bedsit were the clothes I’d brought with me from home, knee-length skirts and dresses in earthy colors that I thought would make me seem professional, not a tourist, not there just to bask in the heat, liquor, sunshine, and brown bodies, I was there for something else, this was work. Instead, people thought I was a Jehovah’s Witness.

“Can I try this on?” I asked the little woman standing behind the till, in front of a line of waving red and gold pussy cats. “Yes, yes, behind there,” she said in Asian French, and showed me a curtain I could pull across between two shelves. The dress was turquoise with thin straps, made of a smooth, synthetic fabric. I wriggled into it among plastic boxes and bags of cat litter. It was a snug fit and came halfway down my thighs. I was surprised when I saw my body in the mirror. There wasn’t a full-length mirror in my bedsit, and this was the first time I’d had a proper look at myself since I got here over a month ago. I didn’t really recognize myself. My body wasn’t thinner or fatter, just different. My skin was browner, my hair lighter, and yet there was something that didn’t look quite right, something grayish about the whites of my eyes, something sunken about the skin around my shoulders, my collarbones. It was probably just the light, I said to myself, but I liked the dress and decided to buy it. To hell with professionalism.

Thinking about the manager at the senior center and those pursed lips of hers still made me feel giddy and ashamed. Her office had been overflowing with sheets of paper. The light shone in at an angle through the white Venetian blinds, the dust floated round the room like plankton, and there was something claustrophobic about it all, as if we were living in a dirty pond. The manager was middle-aged and had pale brown skin, with small beads of sweat on her nose and heavy eyelids, authoritarian and strict. “They are not all in their right minds,” she said, frowning, “there are ethical implications with using them for research.” She glanced at the information sheet that I had meticulously translated into formal French, about the purpose of the study, the potential consequences of participating, how the data would be collected, the academic institution in charge. The language was stilted, hopeless to use in practice, but that was what the conventions of the genre required. “Give them what they want,” my supervisor had said about getting the ethics committee’s approval, “then just do your own thing.” The manager laid the sheet of paper down on a pile of others. “You should have given me this before you began,” she said. I looked down. My heart was pounding. “I’ve explained it to the people I’ve spoken to,” I said. “Yes, but you must understand that I need to know what is going on here. Some of them are confused, vulnerable, I can’t give free rein to just anyone.” I nodded. My cheeks were burning. Then she raised her eyebrows and offered to put me in touch with a local historian she knew. That wasn’t in the least what I wanted, but I said yes please all the same. It went quiet for a moment. “So I can’t continue?” The manager squinted at the window, folded her hands on the desk, took her time. “I am obliged to say no,” she said with an ironic smile. I nodded, got up, and walked out into the scorching sun.

From the moment I arrived, the dry season had been slowly dragging itself across the island. Now it was here big time, pulverizing everything from the inside. Patches of grass became stiff and yellow, dust whirled up from the tarmac, clouds of sand blew across the Atlantic, they came all the way from the Sahara and lay around the hills like corn-yellow patches of fog. The air felt thick and dry, and it felt like I was drying out, too.

“How much?” I asked the woman behind the till in the discount store as I lay the turquoise dress on the counter. “Thirty euros,” she said, tossing it in a green see-through plastic bag. “That’s too much. Twenty euros.” “Thirty euros.” “I’ll give you twenty-five. No more.” “Thirty euros.” I bought it for thirty euros. “Vacation?” the woman asked while the machine printed the receipt. “Vacation,” I nodded, almost relieved. There was something liberating about having made the choice. “I’m going home next week.” “Nice,” the woman said flatly.

I walked out of the shop carrying the bag. Oh well, I thought to myself, so lonely, lengthy fieldwork in a foreign land was not for me. I might as well accept it and take the consequences. If I gave my notice to quit the bedsit by the end of the week, I wouldn’t lose that much rent money. I could live at Ragnhild’s in Oslo till I found somewhere of my own, and I could always find something else to do, but the thought crumpled as soon as I articulated it, because what could I actually do? I could work. But then I thought about the smell of bacon sausages and that oversized Shell outfit, which made me look like a little girl in her daddy’s polo shirt. Getting up at dawn to take the bus to the petrol station by the motorway, serving dry hotdogs to lorry drivers and families with children, being ignored by young men in shiny cars, coming home exhausted in the afternoons. What jobs could I get with an unfinished master’s in social anthropology? But the question wasn’t sincere, because it wasn’t me, I wasn’t just going to do something, I was going to be something. It was like I knew that leaving now wasn’t an option, but I had no idea how to keep going either. I was stuck, like the cockroaches trapped on the sticky tape I’d put under the fridge in the bedsit. In the mornings, the traps were full of roaches frantically waving their feelers without being able to budge. And what would Mons say if I came home in the middle of the semester because I couldn’t hack it? He would gloat, silently but pointedly. He certainly wouldn’t want us to be a couple again. He would think he’d been right, that I wasn’t worth the effort. I’d never really understood why Mons had liked me in the first place, because he always seemed so contemptuous, in a strangely jovial and appealing way. But he still wanted to see me, in his rather reserved manner. Sometimes I wondered if it was because of the mixture of my academic ambitions and old-money background, which admittedly had disappeared when Mum and Dad got divorced, but had somehow made its mark; I fitted the profile of who he thought he should be in a relationship with, yet there was still something that revolted him, something he maybe didn’t acknowledge himself, but which filled him with ambivalence, and at this point in my reasoning Ragnhild would tell me that I was overanalyzing it all. I wanted Mons, not just because he was out of reach, I argued when Ragnhild asked, but because, despite his many faults, he was actually someone who managed to impress me when he spoke. Ragnhild had looked at me. “Do you realize how that sounds?” she said.

Night was falling. I sat with my feet on the windowsill, looking out at the street just like the evening before, and the evening before that, tensing my thigh muscles, registering how the soft skin at the top tingled when I squeezed my thighs together and relaxed, squeezed and relaxed. There was a bottle of ginger wine on the kitchen counter. When it was empty, I moved on to neat rum, and the alcohol made me feel happy and safe. Below one buttock I discovered I had a new mosquito bite, pink and swollen. The mosquitoes were smaller and faster than the slow, noisy, fat, Norwegian summer mosquitoes that can fill an entire bedroom with their buzzing. These were silent and invisible, and they stung me in the weirdest places, behind my ear, between my toes, in my armpit.

The frogs had started singing again, a high-pitched, vibrating sound coming from nowhere in particular. Loud, shrill screams from small chests. So many hollow blasts creating a blanket of sound. They started at dusk, at the same time as the change of mood that kicked in when the darkness erased the contours of the town. That doziness, which lay like a lid on the streets as long as the sun shone, released its grip. It was as if everything flowed faster when the darkness came, cars, motorbikes, cockroaches, and people. The town breathed differently. I didn’t get where they came from, all these frogs, in the center of town somehow. The noise seemed so close. As if the small frogs had crowded together outside my balcony door, intent on coming in. I once read that balconies were a device used by colonialists. They would sit there looking down on the people below, watching them, keeping their distance from all the crap and dirt of the streets. I didn’t often sit on my balcony. Because of the mosquitoes.

When I moved in, the bedsit had been covered in the kind of dirt you only find in rooms that have been empty for a very long time. A layer of dust and exhaust fumes had stuck to the walls and become gooey. There was a grayish-brown film on the floor, and when I scrubbed it for the second time, I discovered that the tiles were actually pale terracotta. Every single nook and cranny was filled with white threads, mesh over mesh, cocoons of spiders’ webs, behind the sofa bed, under the table, under the chairs, behind the TV, under the kitchen counter, in the corners of the slanted ceiling above the mezzanine. The spiders were small and fleshless, beige, with ghostlike bodies. I drowned them with my chemical-filled mop as they tried to dart off. I found a dead cockroach under the rotten wooden shelf in the bathroom. It was as big as my thumb, and from my new Martinican pay-as-you-go phone I sent Mons a text about it. “You know that cockroaches have lived here on Earth for almost three hundred million years?” answered Mons. “Fascinating. Where did they live before that?” I wrote, but he didn’t reply.

The building I lived in was two stories high, grayish-white brick, with dark strips of mold under the balconies and drainpipes. Nearly all the other buildings in the town center were painted in pastel colors, and in a brochure I found at the library, it said that this was a deliberate strategy by the local council to make the town more tourist-friendly. But the tourists don’t come here. Tourists don’t want to go to Martinique. They go to the independent islands, to Saint Lucia, Dominica, Cuba, and Jamaica, where they don’t need to pay with euros. The American cruise ships no longer stop in Martinique, and at night the town center is deserted. Apparently, it’s called une ville fantôme, especially by those who don’t live here themselves, a ghost town.

I’d never been out at night before. At the senior center they had kept checking that I wasn’t wandering around alone after dark, saying it wasn’t safe for me, that I shouldn’t; I could be raped, they said. Thinking about that now I felt provoked by all their warnings, as if they’d been threatening me. Banned from the senior center, I said to myself sarcastically, now that I couldn’t be there anymore. I wanted to belittle the place, but the truth was that in order to study “the relationship between Martinique and France through a focus on changing narratives regarding the post-1946 departmentalization period,” as I had formulated it in my project description, it would have been perfect. Everyone loved talking about the old days, and no one was in a hurry.

I poured some more rum into my glass, put on my new dress, mascara, turned up the music, danced for myself in the bathroom, and put on too much eyeshadow, not thinking about the manager. To hell with her, so fucking holier-than-thou, you’d think I’d actually hurt someone. Anyway, not all hope was gone, there were other organizations in town, other places I could try. I looked at myself in the little mirror above the basin. My hair was a bit greasy, so I put it up in a topknot.

Outside I misjudged the edge of the pavement and almost fell over when the ground was suddenly further down than I thought. The warm rubbish smelled rotten and sweet, the tarmac was orange under the streetlights, there lay soot, chocolate wrappers, and some empty bottles in the gutter. On the other side of the road, the blonde with the coarse voice had found her spot on the corner. Her hot pants were too tight, her stomach bulged between her top and the waistband, and she was holding a phone covered in pink rhinestones. It peeped loudly when she pressed the keys. When a car drove past slowly, she looked up, and her gaze flowed down the street with the car; it was a slow-moving river, and her eyes were carried along by the current.

Along the road towards the square in front of the church, the Spanish-Caribbean women glanced up at me from their plastic stools on the pavement. “Good evening,” I said to two of them, who looked at me skeptically. They sat with their legs wide apart, in low-cut tops. I threw my head back and sauntered past. My dress kept riding up, and I had to tug it down all the time. “Good evening,” one of them replied, cautiously. Her voice sounded young, almost like a little girl’s. I hadn’t expected it. I took my phone out of my bag, went into my messages and read the last one from Mons. It was over two weeks old. “Too bad,” it said. I chucked my phone back in my bag.

The night before I left Oslo, I’d got marks on my knees from Mons’s scratchy sofa. The lino had been dirty from walked-in slush, it stank of smelly socks and wet leather, his room was at the end of the hall. I’d knocked softly three times before turning the door handle, and there sat Mons, with his long, thin body. There he sat, reading and making notes with a pencil and ruler, because that’s what he’s like, his shirts must be pressed and his shoes polished, even though he lives in scruffy student digs. “Hi,” I said. Mons smiled at me, but the look in his eyes was like a dash in the middle of a paragraph. His room smelled of instant coffee, and it was quiet.

The scratchy sofa fabric against my dry hands when I sat down beside him. Mons took a deep breath, put his book on the table, saying nothing. The alarm clock by the bed counted the seconds, like small taps of the tongue. I took his hand. Opposite the sofa stood the large oak desk belonging to his grandfather, and above it hung photographs, hardly any of his family. There was that usual smell of bedding from his hair, and everything seemed familiar now, without me ever being aware of it happening. The books on his bookshelf, his sweating at night, the way he licks his knife when he eats, the wall in the backyard where someone had tagged HAP-PENIS and drawn a rainbow. It was darker out there now, fine-grained snowflakes were falling fast, and all the crap piled up in the yard was covered by a white winter sheet, ready for moving day.

“What do you actually think you’ll find out?” he’d asked.

“It’s about Martinicans and their relationship to the state, France, the metropole.”

“I know. But what issue does it address?”

I hated it when Mons practiced pleading a case.

“What do you mean, ‘What issue does it address’?”

“Why’s it important?”

It wasn’t the fact he asked that was the problem, it was his tone of voice that bothered me, because he’d talked about this several times before, why everyone just has to go abroad, why it’s become a part of our general education, Mons didn’t get it. When I told him that I’d lived in Paris, he laughed and said it was such a cliché, but he still joined me on a trip there that summer.

“You mean I’m really doing this for myself? You think I’m going half the way round the world for six months just to find myself, pretending it’s research? Motherfucker.” Mons smiled, narrowing his eyes. “Don’t say motherfucker. It’s not in your vocabulary. Making out you come from the hood or something, it’s so fake.” He’d gone over to the window, and I didn’t really want to admit it to myself, but he looked cute in that wool jumper, and he had nice hair, even though it was starting to get thin on top. I looked at my nails instead. The cuticle on my middle finger was frayed, and I picked at it with my thumb. Mons was disgusted by them, my bloody fingernails. He likes women with nice nails.

The room was getting colder, the thermostat on the electric heater kept clicking and making noises. I got up and went over to him. The light from the window made a yellow rectangle on the snow outside. I put my arms around him, leaning my cheek against his back. His jumper smelled of late summer, bonfires, and dry grass. A door opened down the hall, I heard laughter from one of the rooms, but the sound was cut when the door slammed shut. Then a pair of feet shuffled along the hall and into the bathroom. The walls were so thin in this student building. The bathroom door closed, the key turned in the lock, and soon a stream of piss landed in the toilet; I could hear it so clearly, it was almost frothy. Then I slid my hand between Mons’s legs. He raised his shoulders slightly, and he held his breath. “What is it?” I asked. He smiled sheepishly at his reflection in the window. “It feels sort of forced.” I inhaled through my nostrils, let go of him, went back to the sofa and looked away, tucking my hair behind my ears. “Hey,” said Mons, in the voice he occasionally uses when he’s upset me, both warm and slightly mocking, as if he was talking to an unreasonable child. “That’s not what I meant.”

He came over and sat beside me, leaned across and kissed my neck, but nothing came of it. Neither of us was really focused, Mons lost his hard-on, and in the end we just lay there on the scratchy sofa in dissatisfied silence. It was a lousy goodbye. A maybe that never became a yes. And yet I had the feeling it wasn’t over. Of course it wasn’t.

It was still nighttime when I was ready to leave. I had showered, gotten dressed, and just rung for a taxi. “Mons,” I whispered, wondering if he was pretending to be asleep.

“Mons,” I whispered, a bit louder. He frowned, slowly opened his eyes, and looked up at the ceiling. Now he’s pretending he’s waking up, I thought. “Hmm?” said Mons, glancing at the alarm clock that glowed with red eyes in the dark. It was just past four. “I’m off now.” My voice sounded strange in the night, hoarse, as if it came from far away. I swallowed. Mons mumbled and rubbed his eyes. “Talk to you later, then,” I said. Mons smiled faintly and ruffled my hair. “Bon voyage, Fam,” he said. The walls had creaked as the frost tugged at the old woodwork, and my suitcase made a rumbling noise, like a hungry stomach, on the way out of the sleeping building.

“In the institute corridors, people whisper that having sex in the field is something everyone does, but no one talks about.”

The beginning of my fieldwork hadn’t felt like the beginning of anything much. In the morning I’d go to the kiosk and buy a newspaper. Then I’d go to the French bakery and order an éclair and coffee. It smelled of fresh bread and hot chocolate. I usually sat at a small table in the corner flicking through the paper, often staying over an hour, watching people come in to buy baguettes, but I never dared to talk to anyone, not even the staff.

I’d gone up and down, up and down the same streets, finding my own way, getting used to the sounds, houses, crossroads. From the town hall there was a road to a new shopping center with air-conditioning, behind it was a pedestrian street with French boutiques, Kentucky Fried Chicken, a couple of closed-down bars, before the town center petered out in the big, fancy pier with the old military fortress on the left, and the French flag swaying feebly on top. Everything lay idle, sort of hard and encrusted beneath the high sun.

On every block of Terres-Sainville, there was a derelict house. I peered in between the cracks in the wall of one that had half burnt down. Charred flexes hung from the ceiling, and a creeper had forced its way through one of the walls. It looked like someone lived there all the same. There were empty milk cartons on the floor, a mattress, and in the corner lay a pile of dirty clothes. I made some comments in my notepad about the town, the people, the drug addicts sleeping in the shade outside the shops along Boulevard de Gaulle after closing time, about the deserted houses.

If it wasn’t too hot, I’d go to the square in front of the church and find a bench in the shade under the trees. Sometimes through the open windows I could hear a drum band rehearsing in the schoolyard. Otherwise it was quiet, the town just dozed. I went to the vegetable market. I went to the museum. I went to the library. It was fine, I said to myself, to acclimatize like this before the real work began, but the truth was these idle days were eating away at me, and I became more and more desperate to get started, to find a place where I could make observations, do some interviews, establish a field, collect data. I didn’t have time to spend months just moping about.

On one of my strolls I found the senior center. However depressing it might have seemed, at least from the outside, it rescued me from those listless days. The doors were always open, people came and went, you could just wander in, and there was always someone willing to chat. After a while I ended up stopping by every morning, it gave the day a rhythm. I would leave the bedsit, walk through the town center and along the seafront, where small grains of sand in the wind would stick to my skin, smeary with sun lotion. I got sand in my eyes too and blinked it out of the corner of my eyes in the course of the day, along with off-white sleep. I usually arrived just after they opened, got some coffee from the machine, and sat down with my notepad until someone came over who wanted to talk. The smell of medicines and unperfumed soap mixed with the wafts of spicy casseroles and fried food seeping out through the kitchen walls.

Sometimes I just sat still and observed, and as I gradually learned people’s names and remembered faces, I started to see things. Who always sat together, who never said hello to each other, who was ignored, like the woman with the milky eyes. She was thin and tall and always sat by the window watching the little birds hopping round in the garden.

At first I associated these social constellations with the obvious things: the severity of their dementia, or the clothes they wore, what their teeth were like, or how they spoke, how strong their Martinican accents were. At the top of the hierarchy were the lightest skinned, café au lait, but these people also had most markers of African ethnicity. They had big afros instead of smooth hair, chunky wooden jewelry instead of simple gold chains, baggy cotton shirts instead of stiff, ironed ones. They always sat round the biggest table, furthest away from the TV, drinking coffee and talking, often about societal issues, knifings in the town center, illegal immigration from the neighboring islands, the election. Occasionally they’d start speaking Creole, in a rather affected way. When they arrived, they said hello to three or four lucky ones on their way through the room, but they never invited anyone to sit with them. On the next level down were the darker skinned people with a more European style of dress, who spoke good French. They watched TV, chatted, or played dominoes. These groupings could change from day to day and made up the majority of the elderly. At the bottom of the hierarchy were the darkest-skinned and shabbiest among them. The ones who smelled, were often ill-mannered, shouted at the TV, had stains on their clothes and wore the same thing several days in a row. In my notepad, I sketched the dayroom at the senior center with its different social zones. I gave them code words. The royal table was in the corner, the church wives sat in front of the soap operas on TV, the domino players—including the alcoholics—were by the bookshelves, and by the windows sat the outsiders. The ones who were either too senile to join in, or chose not to.

Once you have a hypothesis, you’re always supposed to search for things to disprove it, and sure enough, the pattern I saw wasn’t entirely consistent. One of the men sitting at the royal table wore tatty T-shirts, was fat and toothless, clearly worse off than the others. There was a beautiful old lady, stylish with long black braids, who nearly always sat with the ones who seemed most sick and inebriated. She never smiled; I wonder what the story is there, I thought to myself. But no one at the senior center told me their story, and sometimes, when someone was in the middle of explaining this or hinting at it, someone else would interrupt in Creole, leading to a rapid exchange that I didn’t understand but that obviously involved some kind of disagreement. If I tried to ask what it was all about, I would always get the same answer. Pas ni pwoblem. That was the only Creole I had learnt so far. No problem. In other words, nothing I should worry about.

I spent the afternoons in my bedsit. I locked the door behind me, and it went quiet. All I heard was a limp sigh when my bag flopped on the floor tiles and the long breaths of the fan when I turned it on. I opened the wooden shutters and transcribed interviews and conversations until the sun went down and the smell of grilled fish spread down the block, people went back outside again, and the bars began to fill up.

The evenings were the worst. I’d find new mosquito bites, pick yellow gunge out of the old ones, watching the sky change color. I often sat by the window looking down at the street between the gaps in the slats. Sometimes one of the drug addicts walked past. One man in particular, literally dressed in rags, went by quite a lot. He leaned forward as he walked, as if he was about to trip over the whole time. One evening he started rifling through the rubbish bins that stood reeking in the heat near the corner of the building I lived in. Now and then he emitted loud grunts. I wondered if he’d lost the power of speech. I’d heard crack could do that; it fuses the connections in your brain. The man plowed his way through the stinking mounds of rubbish, took a couple of things out, probably some food, then off he went. I got up and rinsed my mug under the tepid trickle of water from the tap by the kitchen sink. Tonight, I thought to myself, but the rest of the sentence faded away of its own accord, disappearing down the drain with a gurgling sigh.

I had flung my clothes over the plastic chair by the kitchen table, it was too hot to have them on. My skin was damp, and my breasts felt soft, softer than usual, my nipples like jellyfish flesh. I sat down in front of my computer, put on my headphones, and pressed play.

In conversation after conversation, the old people at the senior center roamed around in their recollections from the 30s and 40s, walked up paths in their memories, reminiscing about the spread of poor neighborhoods, the sudden modernization in the 1960s, the longing for France, the metropole, everyone that left, everyone that came. Most of them were melancholy tales, nostalgic, idealized maybe, of how they built houses out of the shipping crates used to bring cars for the white people, how everyone lent a hand, sold lemonade to the sailors, kept busy, had a few drinks now and then, but always worked hard. Of the sense of community in the old days, despite all the hardship. I tried not to overanalyze them. But then I overanalyzed them all the same.

At the institute back home in Oslo, there are those who think that you hardly need to read any regional ethnography before entering the field, that it’s more of a distraction than an advantage. You just start searching for confirmation of what you already know, just find what you expect to find. The only thing you need to do is read a bit of methodology, know the theory. I hadn’t actually believed that was correct, but the fieldwork notes I made were all about things I had read about earlier. About the senior center and The Black Atlantic, the senior center Rethinking the French Past, the senior center and Paradoxes of Quasi Colonialism, the senior center’s Crab Antics, the senior center and The Repeating Island, the senior center Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean.

At night I slept badly. It was the heat. I tossed around in the sheets listening to sounds from the street. There was no glass in the windows, just those wooden shutters that you could open and close like Venetian blinds. I dreamt about swarms of insects. About something crawling over me, inside me. A nagging restlessness had crept under my skin. It lay there throbbing in my fresh mosquito bites, in my scalp, dry with saltwater and sand, the sea making my body itch, under my jaw, between my thighs. Sometimes when I listened to the recordings, I began to wonder if the old people were making things up, just to see if I believed them, or to have something new to say; I wasn’t sure, but it made no difference now anyway. I couldn’t go back.

At some point or other I could no longer remember how it felt to be cold, how it felt not to be sticky all over. It’s strange how quickly the body forgets. How quickly it forgets one thing, but remembers something else. I listened to the frogs, they were even louder down on the street, but it was impossible to say which direction the noise was coming from, it enveloped me and followed me with each step I took. A small side-street on the left led round to the church square. The area was completely quiet, the only streetlight had gone out, and the parked cars stood like cattle herded together with their polished roofs shining in the light from open windows. The roads looked unfamiliar in the dark. I walked down the pavement under narrow balconies with satellite dishes fixed to their railings. Black overhead cables hung like slack ropes between the roofs of the houses, the wooden walls had dark patches of damp, and I jumped when a droplet from an air conditioner landed on my arm. I looked over my shoulder, pulled down my turquoise dress, walked faster. The white church tower came into view around the next corner.

There were gangs of youths hanging around in the square by the church. I sat down on a stone bench under the trees. The warmth it had retained from the sun was soothing. The massive, three-story brick building belonging to the communist party towered over the square to my left. Its doors were sealed, its walls flecked with black mold, its windows nailed shut. An evening breeze rustled the fig leaves overhead, large and dark green. In front of the school there stood a man in jogging pants selling big green bananas from the boot of a red car, his long dreadlocks wound together under a black hat. A girl screamed with laughter, faint music drifted from a crackling ghetto blaster, there was a bang from an exhaust pipe behind me. The whole thing felt like watching a film with a plot I didn’t really understand but still found intriguing.

Haitian women, at least I think they were Haitian, were selling drinks and M&M’s from big coolers stacked on top of old crates of soda around the empty fountain in the middle of the square. One of them wore a neon-yellow singlet and was heavily pregnant. I walked over to her and picked up a bag of M&M’s. Her navel protruded from her bulging stomach. She was reclined in a deck chair with a cushion behind her back and her arms crossed over the bulge. “It’s hot,” I said. “Three euros,” she said, and took the money without looking at me. I opened the bag and poured out a handful of chocolate buttons. They tasted stale.

“Psst-psst-psst,” said some of the boys sitting on the church steps. I took another fistful from the bag and saw that my hand was sticky and stained. “Psst-psst-psst,” one of the boys said again. The hard chocolate coating crunched up by my molars was getting stuck in my teeth. I pulled my dress down, picked chocolate shell from one of my teeth, and started walking toward a bar on the other side of the church.

All the tables were full. Caribbean classics playing from loudspeakers, low lighting, faces all fuzzy. Most of the clientele were elderly men, but there was no one I recognized from the senior center. They sat huddled over their bottles of beer, mumbling in French and Creole. I sat down at the bar and ordered a Ti’ Punch with old rum. Didi from the senior center had taught me how to make it. I tore open the sachet of sugar, poured its contents into the brown liquid, and let it sink down to the bottom, squeezed the juice out of a quarter of lime, saw how the drops seeped across the alcohol, darting like flames before being consumed by it. The liquor burnt my throat and my cheeks immediately felt warm.

Then suddenly he was there beside me, as if it had been his place from the start. He was sitting right up close, on the bar stool to my right. His arm touched mine, and our skin stuck together for a fraction of a second. “Is your name really femme?” he asked. It was like he was continuing a conversation that had just been interrupted. I glanced at him, trying to remember if we had already met. He was older than me, perhaps in his late thirties, but seemed quite boyish. He had strong arms, nice features. I sat up straight, smiled, still not able to place him. “F-A-M,” I said, spelling out my name. “Fam de ma vie,” he said, as though he was the first person to ever come up with this pun. I rolled my eyes to not seem flattered, and took a sip from my glass.

“That’s not a woman’s drink,” he said. “Women don’t drink Ti’ Punch, not normally anyway.”

“I know.” I didn’t know. But it explained why they’d had such a laugh at the senior center when Didi made me have one.

“Are you alone?”

“No.”

“You shouldn’t be here by yourself.”

“I’m not.”

“My name’s Theo,” he said. “Do you seriously live in Terres-Sainville?” he laughed.

“I wanted to live in a … real neighborhood.”

“The nice places are real too.”

It was only then that I looked at him properly. His skin was rough and quite light, a shade of caramel; what would they call it here, wheat maybe, or moccasin? I couldn’t remember all the phenotypical labels people used. He was dressed differently from other Martinican men. No prints on his trousers, no shiny synthetic fabrics, just a pale T-shirt, shorts, and trainers. But that wasn’t what made him interesting. There was something about him, something about his eyes, or the sound of his voice. I didn’t really know what it was. I just wanted to look at him until I found out. “Where do you live, then?” I asked. “In Trénelle. Up there, by the old quarry,” he said, pointing at the hill behind the church. “Same shit as down here, but with a view.” I didn’t answer. He glanced at me, smirked, and shook his head. “Don’t you think it’s a bit boring here?” he asked. “No. Do you?” He shrugged, and ordered a beer. There was a big map of the island hanging above the bar. Theo pointed at it. “You see François? That little town there, on the Atlantic coast. You been there?” I shook my head. “I come from nearby.”

“François?”

“We call it Békéland. ’Cause that’s where they live, most of them. Not together with us, though. By themselves. Behind big fences. The békés, you know about them? The white plantocracy, filthy rich, pretty racist.”

“I’m familiar with the term,” I said. Theo took a swig of beer. I looked at his lips, they were wet. “Have we met before?” I asked, realizing how banal this sounded, but he just smiled with his eyes and pressed his lips together. It felt like a cheap trick, but I was curious. “Are you one of those Negropolitans?” Theo pretended to be offended. “Listen, girl, Negropolitans are guys that have just come back from the metropole and suddenly don’t understand Creole no more. They speak with a French accent and go on about everything being so much worse here.”

“You’re not like that.”

“I’m not like that, no.”

“You just think it’s a bit boring here.”

“I’m not bored now,” he said.

I pressed my knee against his thigh and felt the warmth from his skin spreading up to my hips and inwards, the smell of cigarettes and sweet jasmine. When he smiled, a bit of his eye tooth showed from under the left side of his lip. It shone in the glow of the fluorescent light over the bar. I hadn’t planned on getting involved with anyone here. Far too complicated. I was supposed to be doing research, not sleeping around, and anyway, all the Martinican men that had come up to me on the beach or in the shops had been hopeless, grinning clichés, seemingly desperate for tourists to go to bed with.

Theo lifted up his beer bottle, peered inside it as if he was expecting to find something in there, hesitated before taking a swig, then glanced at me cautiously from the side. “Have you found anything out then?” he asked. “Found out about what?” “About us.” It was like he was making fun of me. I looked away. Sitting around a table by the window were three elderly men, maybe in their sixties or seventies, in the company of a woman who looked Spanish-Caribbean. She was wearing sunglasses with yellow lenses. Now and then she brushed away the hair that fell in front of her face, with fingers made longer by sparkling false nails. It was an affected movement, a body language that resembled the gestures of the plump blonde on the corner. She looked drained, not bothering to laugh at the old men’s jokes. Resting her elbows on the table, she gazed dully into space past their heads, as if they were cabbages. “More than you can imagine,” I said. “Like what, then?” I could feel myself blush. Theo said nothing, just continued staring at me. My cheeks were burning, and he seemed to enjoy seeing me so embarrassed. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe rumors had already started to spread. The manager had talked about me, and people here loved to gossip, no doubt about that, and I was already a local celebrity, la Norvégienne who lived alone in the slums and asked weird questions. The manager had probably begun to warn other people about me, told them I’d been dishonest, disregarded ethical research guidelines, but only to make her general skepticism seem remotely justified, I thought to myself. The underlying problem was that she resented someone coming from the outside to study them. She wasn’t the only one. Martinique was proud of its homegrown intellectuals, they didn’t like foreign smart arses. I rubbed my eyes, suddenly feeling so tired. “I haven’t found out very much, actually,” I mumbled. “Maybe you’re looking in the wrong places,” smiled Theo, shrugging his shoulders. I got up. The loo was out at the back. There were dirty tiles on the floor and a faded plastic coating on the walls. A yellow streetlight shone in through the wavy glass window, softening the contrasts. My thong was moist, I pulled it down and peed into the toilet bowl, a long and grateful trickle. There wasn’t any loo roll left, just a brown cardboard cylinder standing, abandoned, on top of a French magazine on the windowsill. I shook myself and pulled up my underwear. There were small drops of pee, like condensation between my thighs, and I tried to wipe them away with my hand but just rubbed them further in.

When I came back, Theo was no longer sitting at the bar. I looked around, went outside, but he wasn’t there either. The sky was tinged with gray, and above the roofs of the houses I could see the moon. It was almost full and strangely dull. It wasn’t shining, it just hung there like a big, wan disk. In the gutter right by my feet, two fat cockroaches danced the polonaise, running in circles around each other before disappearing down the drain. I didn’t want to go back to the bedsit. Something else had to happen.