I’m not an expert on the history of the island of Saint Martin, or Sint Maarten, as the Dutch call it, and they own half the island. The French own the other half. It is not a large island. It is a very small island. So it is odd that such a tiny place would be split in two.
I happen to be on the island at the moment. Thus my interest in the history of this place. Like all Caribbean places, the history of St. Martin is shot through with mind-numbing brutality. The original Amerindian population of the island was basically slaughtered wholesale. Next, the various European powers filled the island up with slaves. Cotton, tobacco, and sugar plantations. People worked to death. Horrors.
In the 17th century, both Holland and France laid claim to the island. Instead of fighting one another for full possession, they decided to split the island. As legend and perhaps some history has it, a Dutch person and a French person stood back to back on one of the coastlines and then started walking in opposite directions. When they finally met up again on the other side, they’d split St. Martin in two. And so it remains today, though the split is amicable and without borders.
For reasons not entirely clear to me, the southern part of the island, which is Dutch, is more developed, and that’s where the cruise ships dock and the resorts can be found. The French, and to my mind, better part of the island is in the north. That’s where you find the sleepier towns and the strange and quiet Caribbean beauty of rock, cactus, sun, crystalline blue and turquoise waters.
St. Martin is called St. Martin because of old Chris Columbus. He sailed past this island on his famous journeys and named this one St. Martin in passing. He was thinking, for reasons also unknown to me, of Martin of Tours, the Catholic saint of the fourth century. You may remember Martin of Tours from the story of the cloak, which is really the only thing about Martin most people know. Martin, so the story goes, was a Roman soldier. On a campaign near the city of Amiens, he encountered a beggar. Something moved Martin to give the man his cloak. But not all of his cloak. Some of his cloak. I guess he needed a bit of cloak for himself. So, he took out his sword and sliced the cloak in two.
Later that night, Christ came to him in a dream and revealed that the beggar and Christ were, in fact, one and the same, just as the Gospels preach. Christ, it seems, was thankful for half a cloak. Better than no cloak at all, I suppose. Martin converted to Christianity then and there.
In one of the websites or magazine articles I came across in my extremely hasty readings, someone noted that there’s something strange about Columbus naming the island after St. Martin, and then the island later being sliced in two. It’s as if the destiny of the island was determined by the fateful name. And yet, as in the story, the cutting of the island, like the cutting of the cloak, was not an act of violence. The violence lies elsewhere, only hinted at by the rending, both of the cloak, and of the island.
I was reminded also that El Greco once painted Martin of Tours. It is a giant painting, though El Greco also painted a smaller version, as he was wont to do. In the painting, Martin sits atop a steed in shining armor. The beggar/Christ stands nearby, so close, actually, as to almost merge with Martin and the horse. Martin has not cut the cloak, yet. It’s a green cloak that looks more like a banner that is wound round the nether parts of the beggar/Christ figure.
The figures in the painting are, as always with El Greco, shimmering, ephemeral, stretched out beyond normal human morphology. The more one looks at the painting the more one realizes that it is not a picture about cutting, it is a picture about binding. The Christ figure bound up in the cloak and bound to Martin and bound to the horse. El Greco was not so interested in what Martin of Tours did with his sword. He was not interested in the cloak becoming two. He was interested in the cloak always having been one.
And, El Greco seems also to have been deeply interested in the horse. Far more than a picture of St. Martin, who is too high in the picture frame to hold one’s attention, and far more than the beggar/Christ figure, who seems almost to fade into the distance as he throws his head back and away, the picture is really and actually a rather astounding portrait of a horse, whose right eye seems to address the viewer directly.
This white horse with its strange gray mane. What is this horse? Who is this horse who holds the painting together and is its not-so-secret focus?
Whenever I am on an island in the Caribbean, I always start to feel like I am melting. Sure, it is generally very hot and very humid. But that’s not exactly what I mean. On this island, whatever island it is, there’s usually a light breeze, but it is coming from nowhere. The sun is high in the sky but I can’t quite locate it from where I am. The blue of the water, which is just over there, merges with the blue of the sky. There is a twittering of birds who hide themselves behind that tree, I think. I hear the laughter of children, muffled in the distance and travelling across space in shimmers and eddies that one can almost see in the thick heat of the day, a heat that cannot be cut, cannot be sundered, and, finally, must be accepted exactly as is.
Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review and is a contributor at The New Yorker. He won the Whiting Award for non-fiction in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan’s selected essays can be found here. His books from Slant are The Drunken Silenus. and The Fate of The Animals He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.
