On Bahamian Music

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Well, Independence is over, and it was a musical celebration. From the performances of Bo Hog and the Rooters to the Bahamas Baptist Mass Choir, the celebration was sung, danced, and played.This is unusual, and not. It was unusual because despite our belief that we celebrate everything with performance, it's not strictly true; for quite a while now Junkanoo has been at the centre of our performing tradition, and other art forms have been peripheral. And it wasn't unusual because music is so deeply embedded into the Bahamian psyche that we don't even notice it.Not long ago, Rex Nettleford, Caribbean cultural guru, confirmed this. What he said was this: the Bahamas has the best singers in the Caribbean.This was something I never knew, or didn't believe, or had forgotten. You see, presumably like many Bahamians, I take singing so very much for granted that I simply assumed that what we do here is normal — if not in the world, at least in our region. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had an idea that music comes naturally to human beings. It comes naturally to everyone I know.And then I thought.When I lived abroad, I discovered that people elsewhere don't take music for granted. People who could sing or play an instrument seemed to be regarded as semi-geniuses; being musical wasn't something that everyone could be, and singing was certainly not something that everyone could do.I didn't think much of this. I just thought the people I had met were underexposed, listened to too much canned music, hadn't learned how easy it was to make music of their own.After listening to Nettleford, though, I began to think that maybe what we consider normal here in the Bahamas — being musical, singing, making music — is not.After all, he was simply echoing what I had been hearing from non-Bahamians over and over again — from British people, Americans, Canadians: that Bahamians are unusually musical people. When Nettleford, a West Indian, said that too, I took notice.I took notice because we really don't care. We take the ability to make music so very much for granted that we don't believe that we can do anything much about it. Instead of celebrating the fact that being musical is a Bahamian thing, and celebrating all forms of music, we do our best to box our music in.We actively seek to label it. Is it Junkanoo? Goombay? Rake-n-scrape? It can't be all of them, can it? We don't know, but we want to find out so we can put it in its box. And so we can exclude those forms that aren't "Bahamian". Reggae isn't. Hip-hop isn't. Classical isn't. Jazz isn't. Folk isn't. Country and western — not even close.We dumb down our complexities. Our Junkanoo rhythms have become more and more unidimensional, our melodies variations on the same basic tune, our most popular harmonies the simplest chords imaginable. We make our music on computers, limiting ourselves to other people's styles, cut up and doled out for us to use.We pigeonhole our performers and our sound, so that many of the most musical are considered "not Bahamian". Such was the case during the ZNS coverage of the National Youth Orchestra that the Orchestra was introduced as playing something unfamiliar, something foreign.And we know next to nothing about the richness and glory of the Bahamian musical history.How many of us know, for instance, that one of the most influential men in American folk music was a Bahamian guitarist by the name of Joseph Spence? That what made Spence famous was the fact that he tuned his guitar differently from the global standard? That the unique Bahamian guitar style is based on a system of chords that may be indigenous to Andros? That Andros is the birthplace of yet another unique form of Bahamian music, rhyming, which is our own particular take on the chant-like storytelling-to-music that manifests itself in rap, hip-hop and dub?That Goombay is a name taken from the specific Bahamian drum made from stretched skin over a barrel, whose use appears to be dying out in Nassau, being replaced by tom-toms made in Japanese and American factories? That the name was given to Bahamian music by a white Bahamian, Charles Lofthouse, some of whose arrangements we still sing today?That country and western singers sing the same songs that we sing, generally at funerals? That we share some spirituals with Black America, but that we sing them completely differently?That some of the best musicians of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s were brass players, members of the big bands who appeared in the Bahamian nightclubs, and that the National Youth Orchestra is the continuation of a tradition that is not only Bahamian, but specifically Nassauvian?I could go on, but I'd run out of space. Let me just say this. For a musical nation, we know far too little about our own musicality. I think it's time for us to celebrate it. For me, any music produced by a Bahamian, no matter what its sound, is Bahamian.It must be. Being Bahamian is music enough.

On Absurdity

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Sir Vidia Naipaul, Nobel prize-winning Trinidadian writer, depicts the Caribbean as a place where no real achievements take place. For Naipaul, the Caribbean is a dumping-ground of civilization, a mixed bag where great cultures drop their baggage. "Nothing good ever came out of the Caribbean," he once wrote -- a great irony, of course, because he is a Caribbean man, a brilliant writer, and he comes complete with the self-loathing that is more Caribbean -- and more Bahamian -- than we like to admit. Of course he's wrong. The Caribbean is a small region, but it has produced three Nobel laureates in the space of twenty years.However, Sir Vidia has a point. It's not that nothing good came out of the Caribbean. Rather, it's that Caribbean people -- people who live daily with the legacy of slavery -- appear to be extremely tolerant of the absurdities of life. We can put up with more idiocy in our daily lives than many other people dream of.

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On Development

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We are living in an exciting time.The government of The Bahamas is bruiting about some of the most radical ideas since the ideas of majority rule and independence. We're talking about land reform, for one thing, about the reconceptualization of the city of Nassau for another. Whole islands are being surveyed for long-term development plans. We are promised billions of dollars in investment, and there's some conservative excitement out there in the air. The Bahamas is poised on the brink of a wonderful future.There's only one small problem that I see: the Bahamian people are not talking about it.All the discussion is happening at a governmental level, between politicians and government officials and consultants. This is not to say that the government is not interested in broader discussion; given this government, that would be an absurd suggestion. No; what it is to say is that we, the population, are waiting for direction to discuss the ideas.Now this is a problem. We're talking about development here; and development, no matter what our past experience might be or what our education has taught us, is not something that should be imposed upon anybody from above or beyond.

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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 Government

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Let me ask you a question. When you hear the words Civil Service, what comes to mind?You don't need to answer that. I'm not going to, beyond suggesting that what comes to my mind is something similar to the old American joke about Army Intelligence. What I want to talk about today is the function and purpose of our civil service.Because it doesn't work all that well.Oh, it moves along. It floats, as does a log on the ocean; we've set it up so it can't sink easily, rather like a flat-bottomed boat. But it doesn't move with any kind of efficiency or speed, and it doesn't really get anywhere much.

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On Paradise

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Last week I wrote about fact and fiction, raising the question of how we know what's real and what's not, what's fact and what's fancy, and how much we rely on books to form our "knowledge" about the world.This week's article stems from that, but takes it in a different direction.This week I want to write about paradise.It's an idea we hear a lot when we talk about the Bahamas. But I suspect we don't think enough about it when we hear it; we take it for granted, but we don't really question it. But we should.My good friend Ian Strachan, whose writing every thinking Bahamian should seek to read, has put out a book called Paradise and Plantation, on tourism and culture in the Caribbean. Of course, his main focus is on The Bahamas, because ours is a culture fully steeped in the idea of paradise. You'll notice, though, what he links paradise with. In Ian Strachan's world, the idea of paradise is the flip side of the plantation.I think I agree with him. It's not that I believe that tourism is a bad thing in itself; but I do believe that there's something fundamentally unhealthy in having a unidimensional tourist product, one that's designed to sell an environment, to push an idea.

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On Fact and Fiction

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My recent article on generation property raised at least one very interesting response. The facts were thin on the ground, we were told. Much of what the article covered was fiction. For example, there is no such thing as generation property. The law does not recognize it as fact. Whatever takes place outside the law is illegal. End of story.Know this: Facts are made by people in power.Facts, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, are bits of knowledge or information based on real occurrences, or things that are determined by evidence. But how do we distinguish what is real? How do we decide what constitutes evidence? Do we go by what people say? Or do we wait for someone to write something down, and then rely on that?The common answer to these questions is to assume that it's easy to tell fact from fiction; one is true, and the other is false. We know that one is true because, well, the evidence proves it. Fiction, on the other hand, is a product of the imagination.There's a problem with this assumption. It's this: the very process of writing anything down, whether it be a story that comes from out of your own head or what a witness told you five minutes ago, is fiction.

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On Cultural Production

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There's a lot of talk about globalization these days.We talk about it as though it's something new and potentially dangerous. Globalization is coming, we say, as though it's some kind of demonic force that is going to take us over. And we worry about the free movement of people, our ability to compete in the global job market, our ability to stand up and be counted when it comes to the global scene.We've got a problem.Because you see, there's at least one area in which we Bahamians (and all Caribbean people) can compete on a global scale.It's the area of culture.

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On Generation Property

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There is a lot of talk these days about generation property, the practice by which Bahamians have owned land throughout the archipelago throughout the ages. It's a problem, we're told; it impedes development. Time for us to fix the system.Well, good. Just as long as we don't fix the system by making it just like every other land-owning system in the western world.Keep in mind the following points. First, generation property is an oral way of organizing people's relation to land. The principles that govern the custom are fundamentally different from the principles that govern every other system of land ownership; and any bid to deal with the system must recognize and respect this fact.Second, generation property is a strategy that has provided the descendents of slaves with access to land that is unprecedented in the Caribbean and Latin American region.Third (and this point is closely related to my second), generation property has provided black Bahamians with the ownership of prime land in a region where the second-class position of people of non-European descent is pretty universally entrenched.

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On Being Human

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Imagine this: you wake up one Sunday morning, and you are in a world without art.When you go to church, the building you enter is an ordinary building. Nothing distinguishes it from the buildings around it. Inside, people are clad in uniforms. There are no suits, no hats, no dresses or gloves. The pastor looks like everyone else. Everyone has the same hairstyle, male and female alike.There are no Bibles, for this is a world without literature.There are no hymns or anthems, for this is a world without music.The offerings that are given are plain pieces of metal or paper; coins have no designs on them, nor do dollar bills, for this is a world without art.

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On Self-Reliance

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Two weeks ago, I had the privilege and pleasure of travelling to Cherokee Sound, Abaco, for the rededication of the old schoolhouse there. For those of you who don't know the story, it's an inspiring one. Cherokee Sound is a small settlement, isolated from the rest of Abaco by the fact that until the 1990s the most efficient way to get to it was by boat. Only recently has the settlement been connected to the rest of Abaco by a road, and that, together with the changing economic fortunes of the entire Bahamas, has made it a very prosperous settlement.In the middle of the settlement is an old building -- the Old Schoolhouse, built of limestone with walls easily two feet thick, with buttresses on the side like any good church, and shutters and a roof made of wood. It was built, as near as anyone can tell, during the late 1800s, making it well over a century old. Ten years ago it was decrepit, in much the same shape as too many buildings of that age; the roof was falling in, the doors falling off, and the walls had settled so much that cracks were appearing and some of the buttresses were crumbling. The Ministry of Works marked it down for demolition.But there was something about this schoolhouse that the Ministry of Works -- that indeed most Bahamians -- didn't know. For all the isolation of its community and the insignificance of the settlement, this schoolhouse -- under the leadership of its mid-century schoolmaster, Mr. W. W. Sands -- had turned out some of the best minds in the country, among them Mr. Patrick Bethel, educator extraordinaire.

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On Self-Esteem

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There is much talk these days about productivity and quality. In the House of Assembly, parliamentarians are debating a Bill to govern standards in the marketplace. Pundits who are following the state of Bahamian education worry themselves about the performance of our students in our schools. Our Prime Minister expresses much concern on a regular basis about the quality of the work and the training of Bahamian workmen, and so on.The general consensus appears to be that we Bahamians are not productive enough, that we don't perform to the best of our abilities in the workplace, that our standards are lax, that what we produce is not of the highest quality.The concern is not misplaced. It's a global economy in which we exist, and we Bahamians have got to learn to be competitive to survive. But the concern is misdirected.

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On Democracy

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There are days when I believe that there's such a thing as too much democracy.Let me give you just one example. When I was sixteen I attended a school that was founded on basic democratic beliefs. It outlawed hierarchy. Our teachers were there to guide us, to give us the benefit of their experience, but they were not to be our superiors; to underscore this fundamental belief that everyone was equal, everyone, from the Director of the college to the gardeners and the cleaning ladies, was called by his or her first name.But it was not governed democratically. In fact, when we first arrived, the Director sat down with us and explained to us that although the college was based on democratic principles, there was such a thing as getting a job done, and there was such a thing as division of labour. Our job was to get the best education -- not just academic -- that we could, and to do so not for our own selfish edification, but to make the world a better place. His job was to govern. If that made him a dictator, he said, then so be it. He would be a benevolent dictator.And by and large, he was. Benevolent, that is, and a dictator. And things got done.

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On Christian Values

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There's a parable that Jesus tells, about the Pharisee and the tax collector who go to the temple. The tax collector, overwhelmed with the knowledge of his sin, bows his head in the presence of God and prays bent over, humbled by his own weakness, asking for mercy. The Pharisee stands nearby, looking at the sinner in scorn. His prayer is different. It's a prayer of praise: Thank You, Lord, that I am not like other men.I've been thinking a lot about that story lately. Everywhere I turn, I hear talk that the Bahamas is a nation "founded on Christian values". A year or so ago, before the Constitutional Commission began holding its public meetings, many discussions took place that invoked the inaccurate concept that the Bahamas is a Christian nation; being "founded on Christian values" is not exactly the same thing.I for one am glad for the distinction.

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On Marriage and Family

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You learn something new every day.I would never have guessed how sacred a tradition marriage was to the Bahamian psyche until this past week or so, when the institution discovered more apologists than it can truly handle. I wouldn't talk about the family. All of a sudden we Bahamians are champions of marriage and aficionadi of the nuclear family.Well, child. You coulda fool me.

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On Patronage

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In the opening of the film The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone is visited by Johnny Fantone, a young singer who is trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood. Don Corleone has already helped Johnny to get where he is in Las Vegas, having made his band leader the offer he couldn't refuse. Now Don Corleone agrees to help him break into movies. Everyone who has seen that film knows what happens next: the blood in the bed, the terror in the night. Don Corleone has ways of getting what he wants.Now The Godfather is a movie, and what's in it may not be the exact truth. But what interests me today is not so much the glamour or the horror of specific incidents, or even the tragedy inherent in those who (like Michael Corleone) are destined to be Dons, but the circumstances in which mafia-like organizations arise.

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On Art and Truth

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Ours is a society of liars.Now before you throw down the paper in disgust and pick up the phone to call your local hit man for me, stop a minute. I'm not talking about the everyday kind of lie, the "my-dog-ate-my-homework" or "no-you-gave-me-a-twenty-not-a-fifty" kind of lie. I'm talking about something far more fundamental than that, something that perhaps we don't think or talk about because we have never been taught to.I'm talking about the fact that ours is a society that places very little real emphasis on the arts.

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On the Passing of Good Men

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The death of Brent Malone this week not only shocked me, but shook me. He was too young, for one thing. And for another, he was too special.Those feelings are absurd, of course, and extremely personal. Death is the one thing that does not discriminate. No one is too young, too special, too bad, too good, too black, too white, or too holy to die. The delusions of some North Americans aside, it is the one sure thing.But this isn't going to be about death, per se, but about the goodness of men who do what they were born to do, who recognize the gifts bestowed upon them by the Creator and who respect themselves and those gifts and their Creator enough to sacrifice money, social standing, parental approval, religious recognition, and material security for the exercise of those gifts.Brent Malone was one of them.

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On the Ghetto

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I once taught a young woman who informed me that even though she was born and raised in "the ghetto", she still came from a respectable family. Her parents were together, she said, and they were law-abiding and ambitious. She'd defended herself from criticism or ridicule before any such thing had come her way; the implication was that she expected people to believe that no one from "the ghetto" could be respectable at all.I didn't ask her what she meant by "the ghetto". I can say that I was a little surprised that this American word had replaced our own names for our own neighbourhoods, but I didn't think more of it until this year, when I was informed that tourists who have booked rooms at Dillet's Guest House sometimes have difficulty getting taxis to drop them there. Some have had the experience of being set down at the Fish Fry and left to walk through Chippingham; Dillet's is in "the ghetto", and no place for a tourist or (apparently) a taxi driver.Not only has the American word replaced our name for the area, but White America's concept of what a ghetto is (a place for minorities, a place for poor people, a rough environment, a place no respectable tourist would be caught in, dead or alive) has overtaken our Black Bahamian understanding. I'm not going to ask how or why. I want to talk about the result. Words, you see, have power. The old adage about sticks and stones may bring comfort to a child who's upset by having been called names, but it couldn't be more untrue; words are far more powerful than weapons. Words define who we are. And by referring to the place in which we grow up as a "ghetto" we are creating for ourselves an image that defines us.

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On Elitism

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Last week I wrote about populism, the thing that has made us believe as a nation that elitism (of certain sorts) is the worst sin that could ever be committed. This week, I'm going to talk about the awful sin itself.Before I go on, let's define that term. It can be the best or superior members of a society or group, or it can be a small, privileged, and often powerful group, according to Webster's. On the web, it's defined in various ways, from a small group of people with a disproportionate amount of public decision-making power to selected as the best. I'm going to be elitist here, and select the best definition for my purposes from the above: the last one, selected as the best.It would seem these days that we have a problem in selecting the best in our society. We demonstrate an aversion to claiming anyone is better than anyone else, or that people should receive different results based on what they do. Indeed, our reaction to that kind of thinking is becoming violent; from Junkanoo practitioners to the employees of large corporations to the parents of schoolchildren, we Bahamians appear to believe that we should be rewarded for who we are, not for what we do. A competitor threatens to sue to change a competition's results; individuals involved in a labour dispute sabotage the city power supply; a parent threatens to kill the administrators and blow up the school that has not permitted his child to move up to the next grade. The underlying thread in all of these issues is the belief that someone owes me something, not the concept that what I get is a reward for what I do.

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