February and March are great to visit Martinique.

Most of the northern hemisphere is cold and sad and has been cold and sad for so long that the spring thaw feels lightyears away. And Martinique is sweetly gorgeous. It’s an environmental wonderland, with lush flowers and forests in constant bloom, fantastic hiking trails, spectacular sunsets, and a snoring volcano, all accompanied by Caribbean vacation staples like friendly beautiful locals, breathtaking beaches, cuisine and tasty varieties of rum to liven the steady stream of parties and carnivals available most nights and days. Martinique also has the particularity of being and feeling like the wealthiest country in the Caribbean. It’s part of France, the fifth or sixth wealthiest country on earth, which still has incredibly generous healthcare and unemployment systems, so you don’t sense the desperation to work to death to survive that is just below the surface in the other well-developed Caribbean islands like Barbados, Bahamas, and the Dominican Republic. Nope, no desperation in Martinique. It’s a highly manicured and sophisticated part of France, like Hawaii is to the U.S. Guadeloupe, its sister island in the Antilles, is as lush but much poorer and less developed, like Puerto Rico. Other U.S. Caribbean outposts like St. John’s, St. Croix, and St. Thomas are too small and politically forgotten for a fair comparison. They are negligible imperial outposts like the Dutch islands, Suriname and Aruba.

Martinique stands out as a post-colonial melting pot. It was a pot of gold during slavery, and now it’s a placid playground for the French bourgeoisie. No Americans allowed. There are no directs from New York City. New Yorkers have to do long pitstops in Guadeloupe or Miami. But there are flights to and from Paris practically every hour. For an added frisson of exoticism (or alienation) for English-speaking tourists, few people speak English in Martinique. The locals speak the same Creole as Haiti and went to the best schools of France, but didn’t bother mastering English, probably because they are French at heart, and Martinique’s economy runs exclusively through mainland France, Quebec, and other French imperial holdovers like Reunion in Africa, Tahiti, and New Caledonia. Clearly the sun still never sets on the French empire. The anglophone Caribbean, the U.S. and even nearby Latin America are after-thoughts.

Still, unlike Paris, visitors to Martinique get friendly welcomes. Even hurricane season smiles on Martinique, since Guadeloupe, Dominica, and St. Lucia surround it and have served as buffers from direct hurricane hits. But the best and most original aspect of Martinique life is like Paris.: Martinique offers a plethora of first-rate arts and culture to enjoy all year round. The number of celebrated authors, painters, theatrical talent, and musicians, both local and international, flowing through its cultural equivalents to Lincoln Center on a nightly clip sometimes makes me feel like I still lived in Manhattan.

A lavish new art exhibit captures Martinique’s braininess. Révélation! Art Contemporain du Bénin, an exhibit at the Fondation Clément, a sparkling indoor and outdoor museum on the site of Martinique’s largest rum company and factory, features over 100 sculptures, paintings, photos, and video installations from 42 of the best artists, past and present, from Benin, the West African country that has been the best run and successful in a region that is still recovering from being divided and exploited by France during the four centuries of the slave trade. The art draws inspiration from voodoo, which Haiti is famous for, but Benin invented. In fact, Benin exported voodoo to Haiti and the Americas in the 18^th century when it injected itself in the slave trade as a major player. Haiti and Brazil received the most Beninois slaves, including Toussaint Louverture, a wild card who was born in Benin, but grows up in Haiti to lead the Haitian revolution against slavery run by Napoleon’s France. In Ridley Scott’s recent biopic, Napoleon’s Martiniquan wife Josephine begs him to let Toussaint Louverture govern Haiti for France to hasten the end of France’s war against Haitian independence. The epically racist Napoleon would not hear of it. He preferred to fight for Haiti til he lost and lose it he did.

The delicious irony that Louverture had risen from slave from Benin to general in the French army in Haiti before making history by defeating and humiliating France echoes in contemporary Martinique: France makes sure its Caribbean jewel is always run by white Frenchmen from the mainland.

Arranged comfortably in brightly lit rooms across three buildings, the Benin art exhibit at the Fondation Clement is a sunny celebration of African genius and France care-taking. French President Macron had returned the ancient art to Benin only a few years ago, so no expense is spared in their display. The colorful, often majestic, and detailed artwork by artists worth googling, like Dominique Zinkpé, Laeila Adjovi, Edwige Aplogan, and the great Yves Apollinaire Pedé, among others, are arranged along the themes of recurrences, transitions, and transgressions-hybridation.

The Beninois artists are canny about art, politics, and their country’s lustrous culture. Luckily buffeted from the brunt of the slave trade by coastal countries like Senegal and Ivory Coast for centuries, Benin entered the European slave trade of Africans to the Americas as a player, not a victim. African leaders who figured it was less bloody to collaborate with colonialism than resist the slave trade made good money. When the Kingdom of Benin decided to participate in the African slave trade, from 1715 to 1735, surprising Dutch traders, who had not expected to buy slaves in Benin, the benefits were considerable. They included military technology (specifically guns and gunpowder), gold, and enjoying good diplomatic and trade relations with European colonial powers. For a spell, the slave trade became a means for some African elites to gain economic advantages. By 1770, the King of Dahomey, which encompasses modern day Benin, may have been earning around $250,000 per year by selling captive African soldiers and enslaved people to the European slave-traders.

Despite that dark history, or maybe because of it and the high value of efficient global mercantilism, French Caribbean countries admire Benin, our fatherland. In December, some Martiniquans protested the arrival of Benin’s ancient art for this exhibit to the point that police had to add extra protection for the President of Benin when he arrived for the launch party. However, most of Martinique celebrated the arrival and the art, no matter the tardiness of the colonial guilt that liberated them. The 26 amazing pieces of art in the ancient part of the exhibit were originally stolen from Benin by a French General named Afred Amédée Dodds in November 1892. Benin’s rulers may have been willing to get their beaks wet in the slave trade, but they had no interest in parting with the wondrously refined sculptures, statues, and furniture their wealth had enabled their artists to create. King Béhanzin of Benin resisted a French military invasion for two years, but eventually lost to General Dodds and his men. They stole all the art they could find and sold them to the grand collectors and museums in Paris. The King of Benin didn’t lose his head, but he lost his throne and country and was sent to live in exile in . . . Martinique. So when visitors to the exhibit in Martinique see 26 of the works originally stolen from Benin by France in the 19^th century in the plush 21^st century museum on a former plantation owned by one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Martinique, they will see a metaphor for the island’s raison d’etre, reason for being. It’s a well-run and picturesque home away from home for black people in search of solace from direct European cruelty under a genteel French banner.

During our first visit to the exhibit, my daughter and I fell in love with the somber and classy loop-de-loop of history in the awe-inspiring photography of Laeila Adjovi. With her partner Loic Hoquet, she created a series of photos Malika Dotou Sankofa in the old justice ministry in Senegal, and they are breathtaking in the stories they tell.

Moufouli Bello, a young multimedia artist from Benin, paints portraits of elegant and stern women with blue skin in colorful dresses in art-filled rooms, like they could be sitting in a museum in a different dimension looking at you looking at them. The figure in Tassi Hangbé is clearly asking you, the viewer, what the fuck are you looking at, which, momentarily, can make you wonder if you are a piece of art, and she was the real person visiting YOU in a museum.

Tassi Hangbé by Moufouli Bello. (Photo: Dimitry Elias Léger)

Less festive, fairly claustrophobic, and somehow captivating, Edwige Aplogan’s painting In Memoriam Ablodé is worth the price of getting to Fondation Clément before March 31. Aplogan was a lawyer for decades in Benin before switching to painting in the ‘90s and becoming the nation’s first international art star. The figure in the painting seems to have a head on fire and arms straining to escape a cell. The earth and volcanic flames seem to be competing to collapse on him. The painting feels like any of us trying to make sense of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous take on the long arc of the moral universe. Does it bend towards justice or hell? Can war, enslavement, collaboration, wealth creation, and art create peace, durable peace, in the present, without amnesia, or can the heady cocktail of living history drive us mad, and does it keep us mad, low key nuts, if we think about it too much, but we can get by, endure, if we have a sense of irony, or knowledge that irony and beauty and the blues can exist everywhere, in Washington, Paris, midtown, Cotonou, and Saharan, drought-stricken, and war-ravaged communities, no matter how hard-bitten?

Edwige Aplogan’s painting In Memoriam Ablodé. (Photo: Dimitry Elias Léger)

In Martinique, you can see this impressive swirl of pan-African-American art and culture at the Fondation Clément and elsewhere, and it will make you wonder about American, African, Caribbean, European, and Middle Eastern cries for truce and love that are centuries old and certainly on-going. Then you can go find a beach and pina colada and float on your back in oceans as clean and blue as Listerine and thank God you’re alive. And free. The fine art and eternal sunshine won’t give you all the answers for the crimes and blues in the world today, yesterday, and tomorrow.

But you’ll be alive in Martinique, and, briefly, everything will be alright.

Artists from Martinique worth checking out

Painters and sculptors with ateliers and exhibits include the brainy Ricardo Ozier Fontaine, sensual Julie Bessard, and edgy Christophe Mert. Musicians include mainstays like Jocelyne Bérouard of the legendary group Kassav, Tony Chasseur, and Victor O, young superstars like the rapper Kalash, jazz artists like the adventurous Viktor Lazlo, the highly entertaining trumpeter Ludovic Louis and a slew of sunny young singers like Maurane Voyer, Stefi Celma, and Maher Beauroy. Watch the award-winning French-Brazilian movie Orfeu Negro from 1959 (and free on youtube) and you’ll see a carnival and romantic spirit similar to Martinique’s. Among the best festivals held in Martinique annually is the Festival en Pays Revé (the festival of a country of dreams), a hugely popular literary festival. Each year it features the bestselling writers from Martinique, mainland France, Haiti, and the entire francophone world. They spend a week hosting public discussions of big ideas and inspirations in sexy places all over the island, often accompanied by live music and rum tastings.

Dominique Zinkpe, Reine mere. (Photo: Dimitry Elias Léger)