On Imagination

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Last weekend I had the pleasure of going to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Now I'm a fan in general of Harry Potter; I've read all the books, and now I've seen all the movies. The fact that he's a wizard doesn't bother me in the least. I don't mix him up with reality. I don't think that Rowling's wizarding world is an extension of devil-worship. No; I'm perfectly capable of using my imagination.And I don't think that children are any less capable than I am. If anything, they're more able; anyone who's talked to a child lately will know that the way in which they view the world is a wonderful and magical way.I know this well. I grew up on books brimming with myth and magic, and wouldn't trade that childhood for the world. I read every children's book that appealed to me; and the kind that did so were books in which life was not as dull and plain as it is in the real world. In the worlds of my childhood, carpets flew, people traveled through space, animals talked and toys woke up after the lights were turned off. There were ghosts and imps and centaurs and fauns and winged horses in my life. Monsters inhabited dark corners, and fairies lived at the bottom of other people's gardens. Our garden had a plaster pirate that I just knew used to come to life after dark; his footsteps shook the ground each night, and I kept my eyes screwed shut until the sun came up, because I knew that if I didn't I'd see his eyes, paint and lacquer though they were, peering at me through the windows.I read every colour Fairy Book I could get my hands on. The Bible stories that kept me most occupied were the ones where cool things happened. David and Goliath was fun but expected; what I really liked was when Baalam's ass turned around and spoke to him, or when Hezekiah made the sun stand still. I believed in Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, in ghosts, chickcharnies and magical cats, in rabbit holes and magic mirrors, in Middle Earth, tesseracts, and Narnia.A wizard who went to boarding school would've filled the most ordinary centre of my imagined world.

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On Class

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I once taught a student who wanted to write a research essay on poverty. As she developed her ideas, it became clear to me that she was choosing to do so because she thought of the average Bahamian as poor, and of herself as an average Bahamian. I asked her a couple of questions, such as how she defined "poor", and how she justified the idea that Bahamians (in general) were poor people; her answer was that most people she knew did not have enough money to pay all their bills. When I asked her whether there was a more basic standard of poverty (Michael Jackson, after all, apparently has trouble paying his bills, but is by no stretch of the imagination poor), she disagreed. Poverty for her was the state in which the majority of black Bahamians found themselves. The fact that she had attended a private school, was employed in a very respectable position, and attended a church whose wealth was patently visible, seemed to make no difference to her belief that she was poor.She is not alone. Again and again, I run into students who believe that the majority of people in the Bahamas, themselves included, are poor. Now when I consider that there are 500,000 trips from the Bahamas to South Florida a year, (there are only 310,000 Bahamian men, women and children, according to the 2000 census); that Bahamians spend hundreds of millions of dollars in South Florida and still seem to have enough money left over to keep the malls and Palmdale in business; and that the number of registered vehicles in New Providence alone appears to be over 150,000 (this in a total urban population of roughly 200,000) I have to wonder just what size this "majority" is.

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