Rambling on Saint Martin

Book excerpt: Grard M. Hunt is a man without a country, trying to piece together in essays, editorials and scholarship a country of his own from three quite separate nations: French Colonial by birth and upbringing; United States by military service and higher education; and Canada by profession in teaching and scholarship. The three have by no means come together in a single national unity. His homing tendency seems to be towards St. Martin, but St. Martin is itself an amalgam a clump of volcanic earth still divided, for no good reason, between two independent sovereigns thousands of miles away. He is a unitary citizen without an integrated polity. (...) Many of Grards essays are grave and penetrating trials. Many are sentimental catching up with childhood comrades, sharing grief over a lost friend or relative. Several of these discourses are critiques of the wayward tendencies of French efforts to govern Saint-Martin from Paris through Guadeloupe. The most serious and extensive of essays aim at encouraging a greater sense of historical awareness and of community solidarity among St. Martiners ... From Foreword to Rambling on Saint Martin by Theodore J. Lowi