The pistachio merchant
The invitation rings out on the sidewalk: "Biiiiiiiien grilléééé... ! Biiien grilléééé... All hot!" Preferably in a busy place, in the space of a gathering, the same ritornello resounds, so the pistachio cones solicited quickly loosen their ranks to meet expectations. Seated in front of her merchandise on a small wooden tray, or strolling with her wicker basket under her arm, the country pistachio seller has always been an integral part of the small trades of West Indian culture.
Pistachio vendors are everywhere, at local festivals, roadside crossroads, cemetery exits, and in front of festival halls. Pistachios are sold in cones or as nougat-péyi for tasting.
Those who think they've mastered the language of Molière wonder why they should call something pistachio when it doesn't seem to be. Despite the purists' demands for "a packet of peanuts", simplists continue to perpetuate 17th-century French usage: la pistache de terre!
A peanut called pistache pays. In Martinique, faithful to our language habits, we still say pistache as we did in the 17th and 18th centuries. To believe that pistache is simply a vulgar Creole word for peanut, and to think that we must absolutely banish it from our language, sanitized of all Creoleism, is a gross error. Peanuts are still called pistachios in this country, because habits are hard-wired. Here, we have to believe that the content of a peanut is sufficient for two words, pistache and cacahuète, to share it.
What does the dictionary have to say about this? Le Robert 2006 states: "The peanut(Arachis hypogaea) or cacahuète, or peanut in English, or pinotte, also known as ground pea, was commonly called pistache de terre, or simply pistache, a name known and used by the French in the 18th century. The more recent French term cacahuète was borrowed in 1801 from the Spanish cacahuete "peanut", previously cacaguate (1653)."
The pistachio was unknown in France before Columbus' arrival, as it is a plant native to Latin America. However, it was already being cultivated well before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, and the pistachio is one of the names used by the French to designate what is now commonly known in France as the cacahuète (or peanut). Until then, Father Labat had only known the pistachio tree, like those of Provence, and in his work Nouveaux voyages aux Isles, he explains: "It is very improperly called pistachio, for it has nothing approaching the true pistachio, neither for taste nor color, nor for the shell that encloses it, nor for the manner in which nature produces it". He seems to be disregarding the linguistic usage of the 17th and 18th centuries, when the French word for pistachio was la pistache de terre, as we still call it without adding the word terre.
It was in the 20th century that the word cacahuète came to dominate the French vocabulary, gradually replacing the word pistache de terre.
The djobber
The djobeur djobè in Creole is, as the name suggests, a would-be worker who, for a few piastres, is a helpful man who does "djobs". The best known are those immortalized in Chronique des sept misères, Patrick Chamoiseau's first novel.
The man keeps busy, because misery and unemployment demand it, because he's in charge of souls: wife, children. He does favors to keep from starving. Djobeur he is, but not necessarily homeless.
Often, the opportunity will give the thief, he will help transport to market the heavy goods of these women, who have arrived from the four corners of Martinique. These poor porters are at the service of the merchants, who benefit from them in return for a tip. They cart everything on their makeshift devils, built by their own hands. And then modernity came along, with cars and 4x4 vehicles now stopping and depositing everything in the very mouth of the market, killing off the already precarious "function" of the indispensable djobeur. But man's intelligence remains at his service, and the djobeur has adapted to the situation, to the times, and is evolving. And even if they have always done so since the dawn of time, djobbers now confine themselves to the approach of All Saints' Day, where work still awaits them. They're ready to do the odd job, and in a good atmosphere, they continue to perpetuate the tradition. As soon as the cemetery opens, unemployment spurs them on, and they offer their help in exchange for a few coins and bills, to clean the tiles on the graves and pull the weeds around the graves.
Michel Morin is indispensable. The djobber , however, is no Michel Morin. The latter is a handyman who knows how to do everything, without necessarily doing everything well. Michel Morin is the perfect factotum, a professional amateur who patches things up cheaply.
According to the Potomitan website, in an article written by Marie-Andrée Ciprut: "It was Jean Benoist who seems to have identified the precise origin of the term, by finding among 18th-century peddlers' works a text containing the story of a certain Michel Morin, bedeau of the village of Beauséjour, Normandy, who died in 1713, and who is said to have been particularly clever and resourceful.
The self-serving djobber and Michel Morin, the man who knows how to do everything, have long been ingrained in our habits.
