Martinique Trips - The Island: Martinique (National Geographic Directions)

In this compelling travel memoir, author John Edgar Wideman explores Martinique’s seductive natural beauty and culture, as well as its vexed history of colonial violence and racism. Attempting to decipher the strange, alluring mixture of African and European that is Creole, he and his French traveling companion develop a powerful attraction to one another, which they find at once threatened and elevated by a third party—the island itself.

Against Martinique’s vivid backdrop of Africans and Creoles, Thomas Jefferson and Paul Gauguin, a live volcano, Zouk music, native psychiatrist-writer Frantz Fanon, and the legacy of slavery and colonialism, Wideman’s story is a rich intersection of place, history, and the intricacies of human relations. Through it he gets deep into the Caribbean and close to the heart of the Creole experience.