On What Government's Supposed to Do

I've spent most of my weekend watching the coverage of what's happened in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I'm sure I'm not alone. It's a hard story to watch, but it's compelling. For people in Abaco and Grand Bahama, the devastation is frighteningly familiar; for those of us in Nassau, it's instructive. Because there but for the grace of God go we.

The biggest problem, as I see it, isn't the geography of New Orleans, or the intensity of the hurricane. Both of these are facts. They're facts with which the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and the federal government of the USA have lived forever. History has shown all of them what floods and storms can do to the city, and studies predicted just this eventuality. For people to claim that what happened in New Orleans was beyond their imagination is inexcusable; what happened was not only imagined, but predicted.

The problem lies with the failure of government at every level it existed.

You see, it seems to me that when you build a city on a flood plain, you'd better be ready for a flood. When your state's economy rests on the commerce that comes and goes through that city, you'd better be ready for a flood. And when a huge chunk of your national economy rests upon the proper functioning of that city, you'd better be ready for a flood.

And not one of those who govern New Orleans -- at the city, the state, or the national level -- was ready.

Let me redirect my focus for just a moment. Let's sit here and work out what exactly it is that a government's supposed to do. It's supposed to look after its economy. It's supposed to protect its infrastructure. And above all, it's supposed to be responsible for the people it represents -- not just the people who voted for it, or the people who support it, or even the people it hopes will vote for it one day in the future; but all the people it represents.

And the governments of New Orleans failed the city and the people so spectacularly that the entire world is riveted.

Now what, I'm wondering, is this? What went wrong? I'm writing this on September 4, four years to the day after our own local disaster, the burning of the Straw Market. As I write, people are continuing to die in New Orleans, dying of thirst and heat exhaustion and illness and starvation. All week they have been dying, and what's worst of all is that they were dying in the very places that they went for help and relief: in the two major shelters that were available for them. For a week the city and the state and the nation have been bickering about who should do what, and when, and people have died as a result.

And so I want to write about what government's supposed to do.

The reason why governments exist is this: when people come together in large groups, the people who tend to suffer are the weak -- the children, the elderly, the ill, those who can't take care of themselves. This doesn't happen in smaller communities in which everyone is known, which regulate themselves according to personal links. But as soon as societies get so large that people become strangers, their ability to regulate themselves breaks down, and they require some kind of outside force to help them maintain order.

It's only relatively recently in human history -- in the last century or shorter -- that that outside force takes the form of a government that is made up people democratically elected by all adult members of society -- by secret ballot, no less. And so it's only relatively recently in human history that elected officials have been (in theory at least) personally answerable to every single adult member of that society. The other side of that, though, is that because a government is created by votes, every governing politician is aware that there are some people who supported him, and there are some people who opposed him. The flaw in the democratic system we now know is that politicians seem less and less prepared to be statesmen, preferring rather to help those they know or think voted for them in the place of governing all equally.

This is what makes the magnitude of the failure of government in Louisiana so staggering, and so regrettably understandable, at the same time. Leaders who were well-versed in the political fray -- who were able to scrap and fight on a partisan level -- were faced with a disaster that did not discriminate. Their response, however, was shaped by their long-seated habit of behaving politically. That this tendency is not limited to minor politicians, but to even those who hold the highest offices not only in the nation but in the world, is evident because even the President of the United States of America appeared not to be exempt.

But I don't want to use this as an avenue for criticism, but for warning. The tendency to focus on partisanism, on special interest groups, on favoured elements, on politics, not governance, is a worldwide malaise. Few democratic countries seem to be free of this. The problem seems to be endemic. Statesmen are hard to find. And the results are tragic.This provides us with a lesson for our own nation. As is the case in so many other places in the democratic world, government tends more towards the superficial and the pragmatic rather than towards the fundamental and the longterm. What has happened in New Orleans provides us with a horrific cautionary tale. It is time for us all to focus less on scoring and more on governing.

On Jobs

It's a hallmark of every political campaign, no matter what the party, no matter what the time, that the next government is Going To Create Jobs. It's been a hallmark of campaigns ever since the Company Vote was removed in time for the 1967 election (it was still around in 1962, Universal Suffrage notwithstanding; it was a benefit of the 1964 Constitution, which made Roland Symonette our first Premier. History is important.) When you've got One (Wo)Man, One Vote, it appears to be imperative to getting elected.Well, fine. I'm not going to argue with that. I'm not a politician, after all. I don't have to please all the people all of the time (thank the good Lord above).But.It seems to me that the Creation of Jobs, this thing that every government or prospective government seems to imagine that it's bound by divine decree to do, could be a little better thought out.You see, the country has changed a bit since 1967, when jobs first leapt to the head of the campaign agenda. In 1967, the majority of the people were both underemployed and undereducated. The two went hand in hand, on the basis that it was cruel to train people to fill positions that were unavailable to them. Thirty years ago, it was easy to Create Jobs. All that had to be done was remove the barriers to the jobs that already existed, and create opportunities for more. Black Bahamians, once relegated to being teachers and nurses and servants, civil and otherwise, could suddenly move into jobs such as lawyers and doctors and bankers and accountants.But there was an educational gap to be bridged. While those of us who were born into a free Bahamas could aspire to become doctors and lawyers and the like, our parents and older siblings were recipients of a relatively rudimentary education. They, too, had to be employed; after all, they had to help us get our educations. And so opening of a great job market in tourism and construction that enabled the generation before ours to earn the kind of money that would sow the seeds of the new middle class.So it was understandable in 1968 and 1972 and even in 1977 that the Creation of Jobs focussed on the creation of employment that offered relatively good pay for relatively low educations. Today, however, we live in a considerably different world. The generations educated on the tourist and the builder's dollar are the first generations to be raised in middle classes. It is our children for whom jobs in 2005 are to be provided.Yet although the society has changed, our governments' philosophy on jobs has not. The Creation of Jobs still implies jobs in construction, in the tourist industry, and in (Lord help us) the not-so-civil service.There's a major problem with this. It's that middle class parents raise middle class children. The aspirations of these children go far beyond construction, the tourist industry, or even the civil Service. And yet Job Creation seems to continue to run in the rut it's dug for itself over the transitional first thirty years of our independence.Now it's perfectly true that there's very little need for the government to invest in the creation of jobs in middle class professions. After all, there are more than enough doctors, lawyers, accountants and bankers to go around, especially in New Providence. And there's the very good argument that it's not the responsibility of any government to create jobs for its people.But let's just look at our society a minute. We've got thousands of students graduating from high school, when thirty years ago most people had only a grammar school education. We've got a slate of professions, most of them middle-class stepping stones to upperclassdom, that are full to bursting with people in my generation and the generations that follow. We've got a nation full of people who regard working in construction or government or hotels as something to fall back upon when one's dreams don't work out. And we've got the generosity of foreign investors, creating thousands of jobs in these fall-back areas. Our Job Creation plans create jobs all right; but more and more, the people who're being hired are immigrants, legal and otherwise.And we've got no creative or intellectual industries to speak of at all.This is very odd, considering the fact that, according to recent economic research in the Caribbean and Latin American region, the most stable economic sector is the cultural sector. Film, television, music production, fashion, the literary arts, publishing, crafts, the visual arts, the performing arts, the media, the folkloric and historic arts, the festival arts — these are the areas that not only remain stable in times of economic downturn, but that sometimes even grow during recessions. The cultural sector accounts for at least 7% of the total revenue of the USA (Hollywood, the television networks, the cable networks and Broadway are included; if one were to count fashion, architecture, and the advertising arts, the figure might go up). In Barbados, the cultural sector is responsible for generating an economic turnover of almost $50 million US every year, and employs thousands of small craftsmen, artists, calypsonians and the like.But wait. We're the ones with five million tourist arrivals a year. Why are we still talking about Jobs as though only construction and the hotel industry count?It's time, I believe, to shift the paradigm when it comes to Job Creation. It's time a government realized that the model we've been using is benefiting immigrants, whether they be the legal ones we welcome with open arms and label Foreign Investors, or the illegal ones we repudiate while making use of their cheap labour, more than it's benefiting us. It's time we started investing in the kinds of industries our middle-class children will want to work in, and stop recycling the models of our past.

On Woodwork and Worms

To every thing, says the writer of Ecclesiastes, there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. He goes on to talk about being born and dying, planting and plucking up, killing and healing, breaking down and building up. What he doesn't talk about, presumably because the writer of Ecclesiastes is generally assumed to have been King Solomon, who got his position from God and didn't have to worry about such things, is that there is a time to hold elections, and, alas, a time to campaign.And we have just about reached that time. We're on the brink of that period when, to quote the inimitable Patrick Rahming,They comin' out the woodwork just like worm,Everybody catching politics like germ,Chasing after sweetness just like fly;Everybody know another five years done gone by.Come convention time, we Bahamians will enter that phase in our national life during which good sense flies out of the window. It's a time when favours so transparent that they could light fires are dispensed like Halloween candy. It's a time when when turkeys and pigs tremble in their barnyards, when appliance retailers at home and abroad find their inventories moving far more quickly than normal. It's a time when the lightbulbs that were for three years absent from streetlights appear, when new tar blackens city streets that had gone grey from the weather. It's a time when prospective voters can travel in comfort and safety to rallies. It's a time when there's more gunpowder in the country than Guy Fawkes stockpiled at Westminster, when t-shirts and campaign flags are interchangeably fresh and new.It will be a time to campaign. It will be a time to party.Already we're beginning to hear the rhetoric that's assumed to have won elections in the past--comments about the participation of white Bahamians in the Independence celebrations, removals of members of the long-dead UBP from Central Bank bills, news coverage whose main actors are either people who drive cars with blue licence plates or people whose situations and statuses make good political talking points. For points, after all, are what it's all about. We've started down that road where party chairmen rack up points like judges in televised competitions. Sitting Members of Parliament and the challengers for their positions are beginning to book slots on radio talk shows, and names of new hopefuls are thickening the air.It's enough to make one give up on democracy altogether.Democracy, you see, quite properly means the participation of the people in the governing process. As it was originally designed (by the ancient Greeks in the city-state of Athens), several restrictions applied that we might find curiously undemocratic: only men who owned property and had achieved a certain level of education were eligible to vote. According to some statistics, suffrage was available to only 16% of the Athenian population; women, slaves and foreigners were excluded. On the other hand, though, that 16% of the population made all decisions directly; they did not elect representatives to do it for them. All things considered, that 16% of the population is higher than the number we currently have, when forty people decide the fate of 400,000.And the Greeks didn't have to hold elections every five years. And they didn't have to spend forty percent of their lives suffering from the shock of the political campaign.Now I wouldn't be so disturbed by the campaign period if we used it as a time to discuss the issues that threaten the nation as a whole, rather than highlighting (or creating) elements, real or imagined, to divide us. We are at a point in our development where the big issues are very very real. We've lived with them long enough for them to enter our vocabulary--issues like globalization and the Bahamas' place in the world economy, whether it be the dormant FTAA, the postponed CSME or the insidious WTO; issues like human rights and the fact that The Bahamas is consistently on the watch list of Amnesty International; issues like long-term development and its potential impact on our environment; issues like our culture, which is weak and wavering in the face of a global culture that is far better developed, packaged and marketed just right; and issues like how our society is going to handle the question of illegal immigration.But Bahamian culture is such that political campaigns are rarely fought on issues. In truth, political affiliation is at best a personal preference, at worst a bottomless pit of greed. The political machinery invokes quick-and-dirty knee-jerk subjects, like white oppression or gay cruises or the personal habits of individual politicians, using misdirection, frivolity and divisiveness to attract the kind of attention that can be translated into votes. And the Bahamian public sits back and waits to see who can put on the best show.The worst of it is, however, is that this kind of approach to electoral politics denigrates the process of democracy in such a way that it ultimately destroys the fabric of the national character. The way in which political campaigns are generally conducted in our nation fundamentally underestimates the intelligence of the Bahamian population. The assumption seems to be that the average Bahamian's vote can be obtained by purchase or confidence games, and that issues really don't matter. And by assuming this, political campaigns help create a citizenry for whom a vote is just a commodity that can be traded for a hand-out or two.So it's woodwork and worm time again, and I'm bracing myself for two years of utter nonsense. And I'm steeling myself to face the ultimate devaluation of the Bahamian soul that may be its result.

On Professionals

In The Bahamas, we're really blessed.Now I know it's become commonplace to say that, and the normal response to that kind of statement is "Amen". We claim our blessings for all sorts of reasons. Some of them are rather shallow if we examine them too closely. Why should we invoke blessing, for example, if we are spared the destruction of the same hurricane that's left scores of others dead, or if we happen to win some international prize or another? I'm not sure that it's blessing to be spared when others are not.Still. I'm going to say it again. We’re really blessed.I'm not talking about achievements here. No. I'm not sure that achievements count as blessings. After all, although we may be divinely supplied with the ingredients for our achievements it is up to us to figure out what we do with those ingredients. As Jesus' Parable of the Talents suggests, gifts are not given to us to bury in the ground. The servant who received two talents and invested them and made them four was rewarded with the same words —"Well done, thou good and faithful servant; I will make thee ruler over many things" — as the one who received five and made them ten. But the one who received only one, and placed it in a hole in the ground, was stripped of what he had.The blessings I'm counting are talents, given to us raw, for us to invest and multiply, in the hopes that one day the Lord will say to The Bahamas, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."Over the past week, the cultural blessings of Bahamians were, happily, on display for all to see. For the first time in many years, audiences in the capital were exposed to the raw talent of Bahamians, young and not-so-young, from the other islands in our family. Thanks to the Independence Committee and to the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture, the E. Clement Bethel National Arts Festival had the luxury for the first time in ages to bring many National Winners from their home islands to Nassau for the Independence season, and they performed for us all.And they blew our socks off.The creative talent that is spread throughout this archipelago boggles the mind. Now this is something that foreigners have often said of us. The thing is, I'm not sure that we have taken them all that seriously. One of the dangers of being blessed with plenty of talent is that we take talent for granted. English and North American music teachers have been passing through the College of The Bahamas and other institutions, glorying in the musical gifts of young Bahamians, and we have ignoring them. Rather than setting about investing and multiplying our talents, we have been systematically digging holes and burying them in the ground.We are a nation of artists, dancers, musicians, actors, and storytellers. We reinvented the Caribbean tradition of John Canoe. But, with the exception of a number of artists and a handful of entertainers, we have virtually no professionals in any of these areas. Our actors and musicians and writers and dancers are all working other jobs to put food on the table and to keep the light on. We are a nation of wicked and slothful servants who seem to believe that talent is enough, that investment in that talent, that focus and skill and multiplication are unnecessary, that there is nothing to be gained by professional training in any of these areas.It seems to me, given the Parable of the Talents, that this is a considerable sin.The difference, you see, between an amateur and a professional is this. An amateur practises until he or she gets it right (and if there isn't enough time to practise, the true amateur hopes that audiences won't notice the difference). But a professional trains until he or she cannot get it wrong.Why we believe that we have no room on our society -- our creative, abundant society -- for people who have developed their talents to the point that they cannot get them wrong I do not know. Why we have turned amateurism into a culture of "all right on the night" I cannot say. I'm not at all certain what it is that makes us think that creative genius is something that shouldn't be developed, that raw talent is all that matters. But I do know that the numbers of Bahamians, young and old, who are willing to allow their talents and the talents of their friends, brothers, sisters and children to languish inside, to remain undeveloped, are far too high. When we do more than allow it -- when we encourage it by proclaiming that there is nothing for anyone with artistic training to do in this country -- we are digging holes for our talents, and setting ourselves up to be stripped of what we have.Let me leave you with just one example.Not so long ago I had the opportunity to hear a young woman -- a college student -- who had one of the purest and most beautiful voices I have heard in a long time. Imagine my surprise a month or so later when I walked into a business establishment to find her working behind the counter! When I asked her what she was doing, she told me that she was working to make money to go back to school. What was she studying? I asked. (I knew enough to sense that it wouldn't be music, but hope sprang eternal.) Computers, she told me. Her parents' wish, because her parents believed that to study music would be a waste of her time.I said a small prayer for her and her parents. Another talent-hole had been dug.

On Merit

Connections, they say, are everything in The Bahamas. They tell you who you are, where you stand in society, what you can do, how high you can climb. The person with connections is rich indeed. The person without --Well, let's say they better have a Green Card.There are many people who believe that a society built on connections is a corrupt society, one in which social ties lead to success. When who you know is more important to your positioning than what you know and how well you know it, a society cannot grow, cannot change. It's a sad truth, these people claim, but it's a truth anyway. The society built on connections is one that's bound to fail.Well, I wouldn't go quite that far. I'm an anthropologist after all, and we never begin by assuming that some human activity is unique to any one group of people until we've looked at the facts. And when we look, we realize that connections are equally important elsewhere in the world. In the US, using connections, pulling strings, is known as "networking", and it's well-recognized as being necessary to success. In more traditional societies, such as the African ones which bequeathed to us many of our habits, everyone is related or connected in some way; using one's connections wisely and well is a marker of one's social savvy. In neither place, can pulling strings be considered corrupt; it's the way things are done.There's after all the concept of six degrees of separation, which suggests that everyone in the world is connected within six other people to everyone else in the world. There's even a game that you can play, called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", in which players are challenged to find the connection between the actor Kevin Bacon and any other actor people name. The easiest way to do it is by matching movies and their casts. (You can play this game with anybody -- and I'll bet if you do it in The Bahamas in the wake of After the Sunset and Into the Blue you'll find many ordinary Bahamians who are connected to Kevin Bacon in six degrees or less.) Connections are the natural way of life in a society as small and interconnected as ours is, and one is almost stupidly idealistic if one doesn't use the connections one has.But here's the thing.A society isn't built on connections alone. It isn't enough to make contact with our mummy-sister-husband-co'n-boss, who is looking for someone to fill the very vacant post we were looking to fill; once we get there, those connections should melt into the background. Mummy-sister-husband-co'n-boss can't to the job for us; we have to deliver.And that's why it's important for us to talk about merit. It's true we live in a society of connections, and it's true that connections are very important in getting one places in this nation. What's also true, though, is that very often connections are simply barter exchanges. The politician seeking votes doles out favours like candy, and the pastor in search of a greater congregation does the same. What falls by the wayside is the fundamental question of whether the party being served can actually deliver.All too often, you see, the exchange is something that rests on the surface of reality. Men of influence pull strings to get choice positions for their friends and supporters simply because they are friends or supporters or affiliates, acquaintances, constituents, or the children of constituents. Once the string has been pulled the transaction is over. Whether the recipient of the favour can perform in the position is irrelevant; what matters is that the favour has been granted.But societies don’t grow like that.Societies that make no room for merit, that run on connections alone, without any alternative or backup, are indeed liable to fail.You see, men (and women) of influence have one major hurdle to climb, and it's this. Influential people tend to be surrounded by people who are extremely good at using connections, so much so that they have not developed those gifts at the expense of all others. After all, they don't need any other abilities; they have their connections. Thus the people who meet influential men and women on a daily basis are all too often the most destitute, the least innovative, the most dependent, or (perhaps) the most loyal people in the country.They are rarely the best.The best, you must understand are too busy working to make themselves better to need the influence of the great.The sum total of this state of affairs is that if you are capable and hardworking and innovative and creative, you're hardly likely to be considered for the jobs and the projects that people of influence have the ability to offer. If you're good at everything you do but bad at blowing your own horn and worse at allowing other people to blow it for you, you are very likely to slide through the choppy waters of Bahamian society without people noticing you until you're gone. You may never get to speak with a person of influence, because you don't need them. And, sadly enough, they may not learn until too late just how much they need you.And so. Connections are all very well. They're natural, and they're cultural, and they are not limited to The Bahamas. But connections without merit are not enough, especially in a growing society. If the only way a person of ability can get ahead in The Bahamas is by pulling a string or touching their forelock to a VIP, then we are bound to lose many of our best people, who will emigrate, seeking a chance to prove themselves, an objective recognition of their ability, and -- yes -- in all probability, a Green Card.

On Danger

I had the pleasure recently to be in the presence of LeRoy Clarke, a Trinidadian artist, one of the greatest in the Caribbean, who visited The Bahamas for the first time this month. It was a pleasure and it was a challenge. His reaction to our nation was complex; not always flattering, often irreverent, always provocative, but also, and fundamentally, true. Much of what he said struck me. What struck me most was this: he believes that we live in a very dangerous country indeed.The thing is, he's not talking about physical danger, about crime or violence or poverty or lesbian gangs. No. He's talking about a completely different kind of danger, the danger that comes to people who live in an illusion and believe that what they see is real. It's a danger of the spirit, a poverty of the soul.And he has a point.He was talking about the fact that we may be rich, but we live increasingly in a country that is not ours.Now let's not make any mistakes now. Trinidad is not a poor country. Trinidad is doing very well indeed. It should be; it's an oil-producing nation, and crude oil prices are rising. And there's something very interesting about the intellectuals it produces. They think for themselves. Perhaps that has to do with the fact that oil is something that you can touch, watch come out of the ground, barrel and sell. Perhaps there's something fulfilling about being able to see the results of your work, at being able to quantify what makes your money. Perhaps when there's something pretty solid about the money you make you're better able to see yourself.Perhaps the ephemeral nature of what we do, the seemingly intangible quality of the things we peddle, makes us blinder to who we are and what we achieve. Our focus is not on something tangible, after all. We are selling our land, our climate, our shores, and our selves. We are the commodity here, not oil. And this is where the danger lies.You see, there's plenty of money to be earned in what we have. The richest people in the world will pay dearly for a little access to the beauty and romance of our country. But the exchange of land and climate, shores and selves for money is not the same kind of exchange as that of oil for cash. Oil is something quantifiable, and can be separated from the Trinidadian people themselves. If and when the Lake of Pitch is used up, if and when the offshore oil is all mined, the Trinidadian people, their personhood and their culture, will remain intact. It is their economy, and not their fundamental identity, that depends upon this exchange.In our case, though, the money we earn is inextricably linked to the sale of the things most central to our selves. We may not understand our fundamental relation to our land, we may be unconscious of our inextricable connection to the sea, we may not be able to quantify our integration into our climate, and we may not recognize the fundamental truth that was very clear to Mr. Clarke, that tourism is in effect a selling of the self; but that is where the danger lies.It's possible, of course, for us to argue that the difference between Trinidad and us is superficial. After all, the oil that makes them rich may be owned by the Trinidadian government, but the companies that extract and sell the oil are more than likely to be multinational conglomerates, and anything purporting to be local in the oil business is almost certainly their affiliate. In other words, the raw material may be all Trinidadian, but the finished product may not. LeRoy Clarke notwithstanding, Trinidad may be faced with the same danger as we are.It's possible, but the argument doesn't hold too much water. Oh, it's true that the power structure of the world is skewed so that profits flow from the south to the north, that countries outside of Europe and North America are generally sources of raw material and cheap labour, while the bulk of wealth-generation remains in the hands of those people who have had it since Columbus set sail. But think of it this way.Even if Trinidad and The Bahamas are similarly placed in the global power scheme -- on the periphery, not at the centre, in positions that require the permission or the strength or the capital or the influence of others in order for our full potential to be realized, there's one difference between us that should make us aware.Their money comes from something they can see, measure, and thus control. It comes from something that is part of their land, but outside part of their being. Oil is something one can observe and comprehend, and what's more, it's something that is not as stable as was once imagined. Trinidadians know, far better than we do, how fragile prosperity can be, because boom can be followed by bust quickly, and a reliance on oil can be challenged by a switch to other forms of energy, such as LNG.Ours, though, comes from something we hardly realize we have. Everything that we sell we take very much for granted; land and ocean and beachfront and culture are woven into the fabric of our being, something of which we are hardly conscious, and will not notice we have lost until too late. It's not visible, it's not measurable, but it's marketable. And we're wonderful salesmen, perhaps too much so. And we won't realize what we've lost until we're living -- as Clarke observed, in the shadow of the big house that's owned by the people from across the sea.You see, when we occupy a space that isn't ours, or worse yet, a space that was ours but isn't any more, but think we are bettering ourselves, we are lying to ourselves and we are stealing from our children. And therein lies the danger.

On Free Trade

The tide has turned. A week ago, there was rampant concern about the signing of the CSME. Now, we're all breathing easily again; we've been told the government will not sign on to the CSME before 2007.Pay close attention. No one's said a word about the WTO. And they should.The whole world, you see, has signed on to a doctrine of "free trade". It's a doctrine that states that the Market, and not nations, is the ultimate controller of business. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of the Market -- not national interest, not cultural imperatives, and certainly not the need to encourage local products. You see, by placing barriers up for any reason, you hinder the Market from doing its work. And the Market's work is to find the best price for every product, and to sell.The World Trade Organization sets the rules that govern free trade. Each country who wants to participate in the great global economy is obliged to sign the trade treaties laid down by the WTO. Here in The Bahamas, we're running behind, and we're rushing to catch up.Now here's the rub. The rules set in the WTO are, by and large, rules that were developed by, and work to the advantage of, the economic G8: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Most of them predate the actual period of globalization, and they are designed to allow the broadest scope for cheap labour, open markets, and high consumer demand for the products of these nations. Protectionism of any kind is anathema, and has been eroded over time.Take the West Indian banana industry, for instance. The small islands of the Eastern Caribbean were for years assured of a steady market for their bananas, because they were protected by the preferential trade agreements of the British Commonwealth. As a result of the Commonwealth agreements, the British market was closed to Central American bananas (those bananas grown by largely American companies like Chiquita and Dole), and even to the bananas produced in the French territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe.When Britain finally signed onto the European Common Market, this changed somewhat. The British market opened up to French bananas, and Europe began to trade with the Eastern Caribbean. Still, though, access to the European market for Dole and Chiquita was limited.Under WTO agreements, however, the preferential treatment given to Europe's former empire has to be removed. No market can be closed to any product. And now, with Chiquita and Dole finally finding a home in Europe, the banana industry of the Eastern Caribbean has died.What's insidious about WTO is that, unlike the CSME, nations don't have to change their legislation immediately when they sign on (although it's the rules of free trade that mandate that things like customs duties and other tariffs have to be removed). No. There's a clause in the WTO agreements that specifies "national treatment" for all. In other words, you can have as many rules as you like about who can do what in your country. The thing is, if a foreign company wants to come in and establish itself, you have to treat it exactly the same as you would treat a national company. In other words, you have to create a level playing field for the Market to work, and allow every foreigner the same advantages that you give to your own people.Now the good thing about the WTO is that when you sign on to it, you can apply for exceptions. The bad thing about these exceptions is that the treaty is huge, and the exceptions are niggly and very very detailed. The worst thing of all is that our very economic success in The Bahamas has made us badly prepared to negotiate any exceptions. Our habit of looking only at ourselves, or at the USA, has allowed us to develop many lawyers and economists who know how to make us or themselves richer, but the rules with which they work are outdated. We have very few professionals who are experts in the field of global commerce, which means that when we sign on to the WTO, we stand a very good chance of locking ourselves into all kinds of situations that will work to erode our economic edge.Consider this. The WTO governs trade not only in goods, but also in services. This means that everything -- banking, tourism, music, higher education -- is regarded as a tradable commodity and is therefore governed by WTO. This is something others have found out the hard way. In one situation, a trade minister signed onto the WTO without consulting all the economic sectors that would be affected, only to discover after the fact that the local university was negatively impacted by the treaty. The government, in an effort to support the regional institution, provided subsidies for students enrolled there. Under WTO, the principle of national treatment mandated that similar subsidies should be available for students enrolled in any international institution that had set up campuses in that country.One very good reason that I see for joining CSME in the long run (after looking at all the implications and working out what helps and what hurts us), is to avail ourselves of two things that membership in CARICOM will confer on The Bahamas: first, the right to seek exemptions from various clauses of WTO, some of which The Bahamas, with its high GNP and position as third richest nation in the hemisphere could not ordinarily access; and second, the ability to piggyback on the negotiating machinery, and use the work of the Caribbean experts who have been negotiating a place for the entire region in the WTO.After all, we have to be realistic. Our future is a global one. In this case, the worry about immigrants from the south is a fleeting one. Our real worry should be the immigrants from Japan, China, India and Israel who are already seeking to move to The Bahamas to establish businesses at the gateway of the greatest market in the world -- the USA.

On Parties

Well, it's that season again -- the season of parties. Summer brings with it regattas, festivals, homecomings, and the biggest party of all -- the Independence celebrations.And it's got me feeling, well, a little uncomfortable.Don't get me wrong. I like a good party as much as the next person. But note here: I said a good party. All too often the success of parties are left up to the people who attend them, and the amount of food and drink that they provide for those people. And the food tends to be the same and the drink tends to be the same, and for people who don't eat or drink all that much the atmosphere tends to become oppressive, rather than happy. The result: a celebration without a really good idea of what or why we're celebrating.I grew up with an aunt who was a party queen. Her favourite thing in the world was to throw a good party. When I explain what she did, maybe you'll get an idea of what I mean when I say a "good" party; I learned it from her. Her idea of a good party was achieving a nice mix of people, a nice range of foods, a nice range of drinks, and ensuring that a great time was had by all. She planned her parties for weeks, cooking and freezing well in advance (or having people, among them her nieces and nephews, cook and freeze for her), playing around with the guest list, choosing the theme, the music, the occasion, the place, the décor, and sparing no expense. When she was finished her parties were works of art. She never had the same people (even her own family members) in the same order twice in a row; she never served the same food at two parties back to back; she never had the same music. Sometimes she had live music, sometimes she played LPs (she's been dead a little while). But the main thing about her parties was her concern that everyone enjoyed himself or herself, that there was something for everybody at her parties.Now that's not the case, it seems, with many of the public parties that we've been having, almost obsessively, over the past few years. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that we've been partying ever since the last election campaigns back in 2001). It may have been the case, once, back in the day, maybe when the first election campaigns began with their live music and their fireworks; but now we've fallen into a pattern that seems to have taken on a life -- and a reproductive cycle -- of its own. To hold a party, all you need are concession stands selling lots of food, lots of liquor (or, if you're a born-again teetotaller, lots of upbeat gospel music, which achieves much the same effect), live entertainment, junkanoo groups, or a DJ playing reggae -- lots of abandon, some knives and guns, a wide open space somewhere, and, often, a deeply subliminal death wish.It's a formula, and it's a formula that works most of the time. But it's a formula that really doesn't do very much for any of us in the long run. Because all the parties end up looking very much the same: the same people, the same music, the same oblivion in the end.Now. I had the pleasure of attending the Cat Island Rake-n-Scrape Festival over the weekend. Believe me, it was a pleasure. It was a party, but more than a party; there was something for everyone, and it didn't simply consist of a bunch of people being squeezed into a single place at a single time. The Rake-n-Scrape Festival was a wonderful celebration of local culture. The main focus of the festival was the rake-n-scrape, which featured a Battle of the Bands on both main nights of the Festival. It was a battle in which Cat Island featured very well -- four of the six bands that competed had Cat Island roots -- but in which Cat Island didn't ultimately win. But what amazed me was that the announcement of the winners -- a band from Long Island -- was not accompanied by the now-familiar charge of robbery that the Junkanoo competition has planted in our psyches. What amazed me was that the men on stage, their concertinas and saws and drums in their hands or beside their feet, turned to one another, shook hands, and clapped each other on the back. And this was no fake tennis-pro handshaking either; it was a recognition of genuine respect for good music and good musicians. And in the end, all the winning bands came together and played good solid rake-n-scrape music in the Seventh Annual Rake-n-Scrape Festival Orchestra.Now that was a party. It was a party because it was a celebration of something other than individual stomachs and other nether regions. There was food, yes, and drink, yes, and music, and everything else that makes parties parties. But all these things were secondary. The primary focus of the Festival was what it said it was: rake-n-scrape. Our culture. Our collective, social selves.I say all of that to say this. Independence is coming, and we are, once again, planning our parties. What concerns me about this Independence season, though, is that, as usual, we are planning parties without encouraging the nation to think about what it is that we are partying about. In large part, of course, this is because we always start our planning too late; eight weeks, or four, or two, are not long enough to develop a full appreciation of the meaning of Independence among our young people. But perhaps it is also because we are collectively losing our sense of nationhood. After all, we leave our flags hanging in sun and in rain, throughout the night and during hurricanes, and in so doing, we grossly disrespect our premier national symbol. We prefer to get people to sing our national anthem to us rather than sing it ourselves; as a result, there's a growing generation of people who don't know what the true words -- or the actual tune -- of our anthem are. And unless we are teachers and say the Pledge regularly in assembly, chances are we have no idea that we have a Pledge, let alone what its words are.Partying alone is not going to do it. And partying without a purpose, partying simply to laugh or dance or fill our stomachs, is definitely not going to do it. Now that the Independence season is upon us, we need to be thinking beyond tattoos and fireworks and sweeting-up on the Fort. We've started, you know. Proposals have been made to ask Family Islands to forego parties in favour of laying the foundation for Heroes' parks over this Independence season. These may not be sexy, they may not be fun, but it's a foundation that's being laid for our futures. And those futures depend on foundations, not on parties alone.

On Why We're Third World

It's commonplace for us to believe that we Bahamians do not inhabit a third world country. We might be forgiven for believing so; to be fair, when we judge ourselves by economic indicators alone, as if money is all that matters, we don't qualify.But we would be wrong.Being first, second or third world isn't simply a matter of economic wealth or poverty; it has to do with the way the world distributes its power. It's deeply rooted in history, and the insidious thing about it is that today's world is so designed as to disguise some of the weakest of us as the strongest. It makes no difference, though; rich or poor, we're still part of the third world.Think of it this way. The terms "first", "second" and "third" worlds originate in Europe, which naturally thinks of itself as the origin of everything civilized. (The fact that we still believe this as true should clue us in to our third-worldness.) In colonial times, the world was divided in two, Old and New, and everything on our side of the Atlantic was considered "new". There were gradations of oldness. There were the countries that were old but "uncivilized", like every country in Africa that doesn't have the luxury of touching the Mediterranean; because of its "backwardness" Europe was obliged to take Africa over, teach it How To Behave. There were countries that were ancient but "traditional", who had got lost in their own civilizations and had not learned how to become "modern", like China and India; these too, begged for Europe to go in and teach them How To Progress. And then there were the apparently empty lands of the Americas, whose people were so insignificant to the Europeans that they could be enslaved or murdered to make room for Europe's economic needs.After the Second World War, when it became evident that empires of the sort Europe had been managing for four hundred years were dying, the terminology changed. As the people who lived in backward and traditional lands asserted their desire to progress by setting up nations — first India, then Israel, then Ghana and the rest of black Africa, then these islands of the Caribbean — words like "old" and "new" no longer made sense. The "Third World" came into being to describe how much further away from true civilization people who lived in coloured countries, who had either severed their links with their original civilizations (as India was forced to do under 150 years of British rule) or who had had their original civilizations atomized by colonization (as was the case in the Americas). It also helped to distinguish the so-called dark races from the light ones, and ensured that no country run by people whose faces grew brown, not red, in the sun could ever gain influence in the world at large.The world we currently inhabit is governed by economic, not political, power these days. Perhaps a more accurate statement would be that economic power is political power; the United States' dominance of the world is far more deeply rooted in the fact that American products form the foundation of every nation's political, economic and social stability than the fact that the American army is the only one left standing with any real clout. The latter is nice to think about, but it isn't so; American security is far weaker than it would like to imagine, despite the rigmaroles and hoops that will meet any traveller who passes through US airports these days. But American products, American culture — well, now, those are different things. Today's world is built on American innovations, from the telephone to the Microsoft Word programme on which I write this article to the electricity that powers my computer.This world no longer depends on military power and European governors and apparently democratic administrations; rather, it depends on who produces the stuff that makes the world turn and on who buys it. The producers are the first world people. The people who can copy the producers' stuff, who can carve out for themselves a little space where they can be a little independent, inhabit the second world. We, who produce nothing but only consume, are the Third World.And it doesn't matter how much money we have. In fact, the more money, the better; the more we can consume, and the richer we can make the producers. Our wealth or poverty are illusions. As long as we buy stuff we do not, and cannot, make (can any computer software compete with Microsoft?), the world we inhabit comes Third.Don't feel too bad about it. This is how the Caribbean came into being. From the moment Columbus took his stroll on the Guanahani beach, our region has existed to do two things: to fuel the economies of the "first world" with raw materials, and to fill the pockets of their producers by consuming what they produce out of them. Now, as then, nothing much is processed here. Our riches — gold, silver, sugar, coffee — are mined for export, sent away, and then sent back to us in packages for which we pay the same cash money that we got for them in the first place. It's a cycle that ensures that the profits always end up far away from us. We've exchanged our local slavery for a global one and have not yet discovered that consumption is the true opiate of the people.There's no question, after all, about our world status. We're rich. We produce nothing. We aren't awfully educated. And given the fact that we spend over $7 billion of our own money in South Florida, we are, most definitely, Third World.

On Asking the Right Questions

There's a lot of discussion out there about acronyms -- CSME, LNG, FNM, PLP. Elections are coming. Oh, sure, they're two years away, and we're not yet at the point when the woodwork meets the worm, but let no one fool you. We're only going to hear more about acronyms as time goes by.The thing is, we're travelling over the same old ground. Take CSME for instance. All we seem willing to talk about, or to listen to, is whether we are going to have free movement of people or not. With LNG, it's whether we should accept it or not.But we're missing the point.The point is not asking questions to which we already know the answers. We already know that CSME is a done deal, whether we vote for it or not; either this government will sign on to it, or (if we have a referendum and the populace says no for the time being) the next government will, or the one down the line. How do I know this? Because when I lived in Britain, the main goal of the population was how to avoid joining the European Union. Margaret Thatcher and her government were adamant that it would be awful for Britain, awful for the people. But now, Britain's an integral part of the EU. And Norway, who voted against it in a referendum, are sorry they aren't, and are moving in that direction. Common markets are the way of the economic future, and if we wish to stay strong, we will have to join the unions; Germany did, and didn't suffer as a result. And we already know that LNG is not going to go away; if we don’t, we should. The point isn't to ask the questions we're already asking.The point is to ask the right questions.Take LNG, for instance -- liquid natural gas. Everybody's asking about the environment and the industry's impact -- good questions, but ones which have already been answered, if we look hard enough. There's no point in avoiding either side of the story; the facts are out there (try the internet) if we want to find them.But here are a couple of questions whose answers may not be so easy to find. And they're the ones that really have some meaning. For instance:Where is this liquid natural gas coming from, anyway? Is it being mined somewhere else, like off the Florida Keys, or is it Bahamian? If it's being mined elsewhere, why does it have to be piped through our waters?If it's ours, why the heck are we selling it to Florida? Why, in this day and age of soaring oil prices, isn't BEC talking about converting some of its plants to LNG?You see, it's quite true that natural gas is a cleaner fuel than oil. Well, hello. If we're suffering from rising electricity rates because of the high cost of oil, and we're looking to diversify our economy and become more self-sufficient, and we have natural gas in our own waters, then why aren't we looking to develop our own industry, instead of allowing Florida access to our natural resource?It seems to me that the answer to those questions is far more open and exciting than the answers to the questions we're asking right now.Or take CSME as another example. We’re spending all our time worrying about the free movement of people, as though joining the CSME will change one thing about the number of Caribbean people we allow to work here. Considering that The Bahamas has the highest ratio of Caribbean workers of all Caricom members, that worry is, frankly, alarmist and a little misplaced, and we already know the answer to the questions we're asking; we just don't want to admit the truth.What we're not asking, what we're not discussing at all, are other acronyms that are far, far more insidious than CSME and far more dangerous to the Bahamian economy -- acronyms like WTO and FTAA, for instance, to which we are just as committed as CSME, and whose implications are far, far more worrisome.As far as the FTAA goes, thank heaven the talks are stalled, otherwise we would already be a member. But just in case things get started again, just in case the USA grows to accept the brakes put on it by Brazil and Argentina, here are some questions we should be asking there:Who will the FTAA benefit? How will it help us? How much clout do we, a nation of under 500,000 people, have against giants like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, the USA and Canada? Why aren't we paying attention to that apparently free market?The real danger to us, though, is the WTO, and it is because of that danger that joining the CSME (if only we were asking the right questions) makes sense. According to the conventions of the WTO, please note, no country may set up any barriers to trade in goods or services on a national basis. There can be no protectionism whatsoever; all people who wish to trade with you must be treated like nationals of your country. So take the Walmart/Kmart proposal of some years ago. Under the WTO, The Bahamas would have no right to choose to support the Bahamian department stores over those megoliths; Walmart and Kmart would the same standing under the agreement as Kelly's. The market, you see, will be free. The Bahamas is insignificant in the Americas. Where do you imagine we stand in the world? A nation of under half a million people cannot negotiate at any table with the EU (one unit), the USA, or Japan. Perhaps the right question isn't who the CSME will let in; perhaps it's whether we can survive without it.Asking the right questions, you see, isn't a matter of losing or winning a battle to be fought in the polls two years from now. Asking the right questions is imperative for each of us because we can determine what kind of future our children will have. Let's forget our narrowness and our fears, and ask the questions that will ensure our survival and prosperity in the future.

On the Plantation

Slavery, they say, was abolished some time during the nineteenth century. We quibble about the date of its abolition, whether it was 1834 or 1838, but according to the history books, it's been out of vogue for, oh, a hundred and seventy years. In The Bahamas, the plantation, which with we associate slavery for the most part, has been out-of-fashion for more time than that -- two centuries, give or take some years. Or so the history books say.

I beg to differ with the history books. I'm going to argue that the plantation is alive and well in The Bahamas. I should know; I work on it.

There's a tendency among Caribbean intellectuals to regard any monolithic agency-employer who reinforces the habits and attitudes of slavery as a reincarnation of the plantations. You see, people raised in the shadow of the plantation -- in the shadow of slavery and all its implications -- develop a set of characteristics that enable them to survive the inhumanity of their situation. And it takes a specific, structured effort to break the habits of generations.In the Bahamas, the plantation is alive and well. Its most faithful replica: the Bahamian Civil Service.

I put it to you that the civil service functions just like a huge plantation. When you can't get rid of your slaves, they are yours for life. You have to keep them alive, more or less, in the hope that perhaps they'll do some work for you at some point in their lives. But you know they are not your loyal servants; and to buffer yourself, you practice divide-and-conquer among them. All slaves are not created equal. They may be house slaves, drivers, overseers, or field workers; and each group has its own system of rewards and punishments that sets its members against one another and never allows them to think about their servitude or the system as a whole.

Not all plantations were worked by slaves, moreover. In the sugar islands, after slavery was abolished, masters hired indentured servants, people who were engaged to work for a set period of time. While they were working with the master, there was little difference between the servant and the slave, except that when the servant came to the end of his servitude, he was given a pre-arranged gift -- of money or of passage home -- to send him on his way.

Sound familiar? Let me put it another way.

One. The plantation owned its people, whether slaves or indentured workers, for as long as they remained on it. Their every waking moment -- and every sleeping one -- belonged to the plantation and to the master. Now check General Orders today; read any government job description worth its salt. The first makes it quite clear that one's time is the government's. The second will always contain the clause and any other duty that the (insert appropriate overseer) requires.

Two. The plantation took care of its people. It may not have taken care of them well, or given them much autonomy in the process, but it ensured that its people wouldn't starve, that its people had clothes to wear; if it didn't, it failed. Now if you work for the Civil Service long enough (thirty years -- most of your life), you get a pension; like the slaves, you will be clothed and fed until your death. If you serve for a set period of time (ten years), you're given a gratuity when you leave, rather like indentured servants. And if you can't make it that long, you leave, like those who died or escaped the plantation. The majority of plantation runaways were people who couldn't (or wouldn’t) buckle under the yoke; most of them chose death over servitude, and ran away, committed suicide, or were killed.

And three. The plantation took away its people's minds. People who thought for themselves lived tortured lives, and died young. If you wanted to survive, you learned not to think only in small and twisted ways that hurt the institution as much as it liberated any slave. In the long run, you might bring the institution down; but in the short run, you learn only how to make it, but not how to live.

Consider this. To make it as a Civil Servant, you will wait upon directives. You'll do just enough work to escape notice from people who are watching, but nowhere near enough to get a job done well; there's no point in investing time and energy in excellence when none of the profit/credit/reward is yours. You maintain your spirits by seeking refuge in the kind of religion that engages your emotions but not your minds, for to think too much will be painful. And you seek to cultivate some ally within the institution who can protect you should the going get bad. Strategy, not merit, is what works; strategy, and scrambling, like crabs in a barrel, for the position that allows you the most power over your fellows.

Sound like an institution you know?

I'm going to argue (as I've done before) that when a free country maintains an institution that mirrors the most soul-destroying institution that humans could invent, and, worse, boosts it every five years or so by the importation of fresh meat, that country is not really free. When we consider that the Government is the largest employer in the nation, and that a Government job is a safe, sure job, we must realize that the civil service is the place where we train our citizens.

And so we have a choice. Either we keep the Civil Service as it is, a mirror of the plantation, and raise up a nation of slaves; or we seek to transform it. The plantation died, killed off by the slaves. If we are to survive as a people, we will have to put the habits of the plantation behind us. Civil Service reform must happen, and now; we must take it in our hands, and create it. We've waited too long already.

On Citizenship

It's a funny thing about belonging to a country. We think of it as something that happens automatically, but it's not. Anyone who's had to apply for a passport for travel will realize that fact; it's all very well to talk about being "born dere", but in fact being a citizen of a nation has far more to do with politics than with birth.There are many people who are born right here in The Bahamas who would attest to that truth.You see, the regulations that govern who may or may not be considered a citizen of these Bahamian islands are not things that are handed down from on high. No. They are written in the constitution of the Bahamas, and they are very clear. In short, they go something like this:You're a citizen if you were born in The Bahamas before July 10, 1973, and were a citizen of the United Kingdom. In short, anyone who held, or could hold, the passport the British assigned to the Bahamas colony automatically became a Bahamian. You could also become a Bahamian if you were a foreign woman who had been married to a Bahamian.You're a citizen, if, after July 10, 1973, you are born in The Bahamas and both your parents are Bahamian or if your father is Bahamian, even if your mother is not.If your mother's a Bahamian, but she married a non- Bahamian, and you're born in The Bahamas, you're not automatically BahamianIf you're born outside The Bahamas, you get to be a citizen only if your father is a Bahamian, or if your mother's a Bahamian and not married. And if you're born into a country that automatically confers citizenship at birth, you will have to give up that citizenship when activating your Bahamian citizenship.And even if everything else is equal, the Government of The Bahamas can, under certain circumstances, revoke your citizenship. It might do this if you are discovered to be in possession of more than one passport, a technical no-no in our scheme of things. Citizenship, you see, is not an automatic entitlement of birth. It's something that a group of people decides for you, something that a government confers. And in the case of The Bahamas, the rules governing that conferring are not the same for everyone.Three years ago, the former government held a referendum addressing certain elements of the Bahamian constitution. Some of them had to do with citizenship, specifically with the role of Bahamian women in the conference of citizenship to their children. The present government, recognizing a potential need for constitutional reform, has established a Constitutional Commission to follow up on the subject. And today, with a growing population of resident non-nationals throughout the country — erroneously called "illegal immigrants" — getting themselves in the newspapers by building shantytowns and forming posses and attacking police cars, it's time for us to reconsider the criteria we use when we're talking about Bahamian citizens.I happen to be one of those people who believe that citizenship should be a simple matter of blood or birth. In my opinion, both are sound criteria for defining citizenship. You should be Bahamian if one of your parents is Bahamian, no matter what their sex or marital status; and you should be Bahamian if you're born in The Bahamas, no matter who your parents are.Now I know that both of these positions are contentious, especially as most of us appear to believe that we are a nation under siege, a nation in imminent danger of being overrun by aliens. I'm not going to spend much time trying to defend my position logically; the reaction to the position is bound to be illogical, and I'll only be wasting words.So never mind the fact that our country is woefully underpopulated — with a landmass the same size as Jamaica and a population that's one-tenth of the Jamaican population, we could do with more Bahamians, and should be encouraging immigration. Never mind the fact that, like it or not, our society is so structured that it needs sizeable numbers of immigrants to make it work. Never mind the fact that in a globalizing world, the ability to be flexible, to adapt easily to difference, to be cosmopolitan, not insular, are strengths, not weaknesses. Let's cut straight to the chase.It seems to me that there's something inherently weak, something soft, about the way in which we define citizenship in The Bahamas. Bahamian citizenship, it seems, does not conquer anything at all. Rather, it seems a pretty vulnerable thing. One gets to be Bahamian only after meeting a complex web of conditions. There's nothing simple about our belonging to our nation; there's no being-Bahamian-by-geography going on, as there is in the USA, or being-Bahamian-by-blood, as happens with Haiti. You're Bahamian if you're born of a Bahamian father, if you're born in The Bahamas, if you're born before 1973, if your Bahamian mother didn't marry your non-Bahamian father. If we were dealing with genetic theory here, the Bahamian gene would be classified as curiously recessive.I can find nothing to be proud of in that. There's a confidence lacking from our identity, a confidence that is found in the Haitian or the American definition of citizenship. In those countries, there's a sense of pride, not paranoia, about deciding who belongs where. Unlike us, there are no if-if-ifs about it; you belong by birth or by blood.I can't help admiring that kind of confidence, and I can't help wondering why we imagine our citizenship as being so weak. And so I ask you. Why, then, when deciding who's Bahamian and who isn't, have we got all those conditions? Why is it that, when defining who can or can't be Bahamian, we reveal more weakness than strength?

On Demolition

Something happened to my family at the beginning of February that is hard for me to get over even now.You may recall that I wrote about my grandmother's house, built in the 1860s out of salvaged wood, salt-cured and tough as granite, which survived every major hurricane of the twentieth century, even though others younger than it fell.Well, it doesn't stand up so well to bulldozers.I found this truth out the hard way. I was driving along East Bay Street one morning, when I saw a backhoe in a most peculiar place -- our family property where my father and his family had been born. Turns out the contractor was taking down the wrong house. He was taking down our grandmother's house at 672 Bay.It was a costly mistake. There was one bright spark about it, though -- no one was in the house at the time.The same can't be said for a certain house in First Terrace, Centreville.A similar thing happened to it, more or less. A contractor with a backhoe drove in the yard one day and bulldozed the house down to the ground. By mistake. But in this case, someone was living there.Thank heaven he wasn't at home when it happened. According to the grapevine, he was at work. But it was his home, and someone flattened it, by mistake.Now the point of this article isn't that these things happened, or that they happened because of gross negligence, or that it is supremely unlikely that that negligence will be corrected, or that the rightful owners of these homes will ever be able to collect what is rightfully theirs; when people make mistakes -- unless they're caught -- they are extremely adept at disappearing into nowhere.The point of it is that they happen every day. And there are laws in place to stop them happening. To demolish a building you need an order. When that order is obtained, it must be displayed. Ideally, no contractor should proceed with any demolition in the absence of such an order. Moreover, my grandmother's house was listed as a historical building, and such buildings may not be demolished; no order could be got for it. But it came down anyway.We are, you see, very adept at doing things against which there are laws. What's more, we are adept at getting away with them. In the case of the demolition of old homes, there is sometimes an element of collusion on the authorities' part that allows people to act with impunity. After all, why should we protect old things that make the country look bad? If we can't destroy them outright, at least we can ignore their tacit destruction. It's called turning a blind eye, being in the right place at the wrong time. And more and more of our patrimony, of our heritage, is being demolished as a result.Now for many people, perhaps most of us, this is not a big deal at all. Why should people be concerned about ugly old buildings anyway? Why should we expend good money fixing them up when we could take that money and invest them in new, up-to-date buildings that look like they could be anywhere in the first world?Well, it's this. Ours is a society whose history is written in our memories, on our landscape, and not on paper. Our forefathers, white, black and in between, gained no benefit from excessive book-learning. There was no space in Bahamian society for people who wasted valuable time in writing down ideas and events; the challenge to survive was too great. And so our history is largely written on the land. Each old house, no matter how modest, is a book. The ways in which our ancestors shaped the wood is a lesson to us about how we used to survive, back in the days before we were American clones. The same is true for the way in which they laid shingle and thatch, the way they burned shells for lime, the way in which they made tabby for our own Bahamian plaster. Our identity lies in what we have created over the years, and not in what has been inscribed in history texts. Every old thing that we destroy now is a part of us.And the men who wrote their existence in wood and stone and house did not intend to be forgotten. They built their homes to last, and expected their posterity to last with them. When my cousin and I looked at the wood we were able to salvage from the ruins of 672 Bay, we found out that it doesn't matter how bad an old house looks. The frame and the planking of the house, made of good old Abaco pine and Bahamian red cedar, were as strong as, or stronger than, almost any new wood that can be bought today. And we found out, too, that the men who built that house had made their mark, inscribing their initials on the corners of the planks before putting them in place. To disrespect them, to roll over their work in machines that turn hard pine into mulch, to remove them so completely from our memories and our futures, is to kill ourselves.You see, it doesn't matter that we have forgotten how to read the lives and the work of our forefathers in the beams and panelling of old buildings. Our ignorance should not allow us to destroy what we do not know we have. Each demolition is a blow against our identity, a removal of a part of us. We no longer know how to build houses without nails, but our forefathers knew. By preserving their work for our children, we preserve the hope that our children may relearn the knowledge and the skills that made us who we are.

On Death

Well, now, Death came knocking at my mother's door,He said, come on, Mother, are you ready to go?Well, my mother bent down, began to buckle on her shoe,And she handed up her cross and began to move,And she move on down by the Jordan stream,And she shouted "Hallelujah! I have been redeem!"She cried, "Yes! My Lord!"She cried, "Yes! Yes! Lord!"She cried, "Done do my duty,Got on my travelling shoes."-- "Death", as sung by the Dicey Doh MenThere's a truth that currently seems to be in the process of being denied in the global media: everything that lives dies.This is a truth that's being discussed ad nauseam in the American media these days, with relation to the Terry Shiavo case. Now I don’t want to get into the ins and outs of that case, or to take any stand on it. Instead I want to think about what it tells us about the people who are making the fuss. Many of the same people who want to keep Shiavo alive -- many of them born-again fundamentalist Christians -- are the very same people who want to make sure that criminals die.There was a discussion on a website that I frequent on this very subject. Someone who was not an American said that it seemed to him that Americans, and particularly those who profess fundamentalist Christianity, were very afraid of death. For them, he said, death was something that should only happen to bad people; good people, at any cost, should be protected from dying.Now I don't want to get bogged down in the politics of all of that. But what he said rang very true for me. For a group of people who should be unafraid of death -- particularly when it affects good people (and having once been a fundamentalist myself, I know very well that what classifies as good has more to do with one's heart, one's commitment to Christ, than with one's actions) -- and for a group of people for whom death is a gateway to a better life, there seems to be a lot of fighting going on to keep people tethered to this life. No laying up of treasures in heaven here, apparently. The treasure that seems to count is firmly anchored to this everyday world.In the words of the song, the good person -- in Christian terms, the mother -- is more than ready to die. Why, then, the fuss about fighting one's time to go? The way in which many people are addressing the question of dying fits a whole lot more in with what happens to the sinner when Death comes calling, than with what happens to the mother:Well, he wade in the water by the ankle deepAnd the water came a-lapping up around his knee,He say, "Go way Death! Please now let me be!"And the water came a-lapping up around his thigh,He say, "Go way Death! I don't want to die!"And the water came a-lapping up around his chest,He say, "Go way Death! Please now let me rest!"And the water came a-lapping up around his chin,And along came Death and pushed him in,He cry, "No!"He cry, "Don't want to go!"He cry, "Ain't done my duty,Ain't got no travelling shoes!"But let's get away from the religious side of this. Let's say that we believe in no God at all (note to all hit men: this is a supposition, not a reality; let's just suppose this). Even beyond that, we are faced with the fundamental truth of life: everything that lives dies. Indeed, without death, life has no meaning for anything. Plants, trees, animals, birds, fish, even amoeba and other germs -- everything that is alive dies. Why should human beings be any different?It is a particularly American malaise, I think, to believe that death can be cheated. It's not something that we tend to suffer from very much here in The Bahamas at the moment; we are well aware that death is a part of living. We follow up our promises with "If God spare life" or "God willing"; we believe in burying the dead very well indeed, with a good funeral that sends them off in style. This is a very African thing. As long as individuals are alive, they keep the others who have passed over alive in memory and truth; it's said that a person doesn't really die until everyone who remembers him or her dies. We have retained much of our African heritage.It's a very healthy way of approaching life and death. Rather than pretending that death doesn't happen -- or that it should happen only to the evil, as it appears to be the belief further north -- we recognize that it happens, we integrate it into our lives.This is something that we should celebrate about ourselves. After all, death comes to us all. As the character in Winston Saunders' I, Nehemiah, Remember When notes, very wisely: People dying today who en never die before. While we are appropriating many of the cultural manifestations of our American neighbours, we will do well to avoid their peculiar aversion to that which is the most natural thing of all -- death.Listen to this article online.

On Foreign Investment

It's not easy living in an archipelago. Oh, it's fun, to be sure. We have seven hundred islands, and lots of bright blue sea. It's great for promotion to visitors. But for governing, for developing -- well, it's one big headache. It's expensive, it's often wasteful, and it's ultimately frustrating. And no matter what we do, apparently, Family Islanders still pick up their georgie bundles and move to the city.Given this state of affairs, the idea of using foreign capital as a tool to assist in the development of the whole archipelago seems to be a good one. We’ve got lots of land going a-begging and not many people taking it up. What's more, much of it seems to be land that's not good for very much. But it has wonderful sea-views, balmy breezes, and beaches that rate among the best in the world.Enter foreign investment.It seems to be a great idea, by which the whole country can be developed with very little extra cost to the government at all. By creating second homes, colony villages, gated communities, resort developments, marinas, golf courses, fish farms, citrus farms, and so on around The Bahamas, we can create jobs quickly, and encourage some of the people currently overcrowding our very small capital island to move out to populate the land that is currently unused. It's a virtually pain-free means of developing remote areas of the archipelago without any real risk. Wonderful.Except.Except that the method's not that free of pain. And it's not that easy. And the returns -- well, the returns are not what we imagine them to be. Foreign investment is the oldest form of development known to the modern Caribbean, and most of us are still living with the legacy of the first wave of it. It works fine as a get-rich-quick scheme -- for the developers. For those of us who remain here, though, the price we pay in the long run for the development is terribly high.You see, we inhabit that part of the planet that was seized and settled by the original foreign investors -- otherwise know as European imperialists -- for their own economic purposes. Ever since the so-called "discovery" of the New World by Christopher Columbus, investments in this region are designed to benefit people far, far away.Consider Christopher Columbus' own words, penned over five hundred years ago, when he first set eyes on the Bahamian islands.This is so beautiful a place, as well as the neighbouring regions, that I know not in which course to proceed first; my eyes are never tired with viewing such delightful verdure, and of a species so new and dissimilar to that of our country, and I have no doubt there are trees and herbs here which would be of great value in Spain ... Here is no village, but farther within the island is one, where our Indians inform us we shall find the king, and that he has much gold. I shall penetrate so far as to reach the village and see or speak with the king, who, as they tell us, governs all these islands, and goes dressed, with a great deal of gold about him -- Christopher Columbus, 19 October 1492Those are the words of the first advertiser, the first promoter of tourism, the first scout for later foreign investors. Then, as now, The Bahamas was regarded as little more than a beautiful source of revenue -- for someone from far away. Columbus has no thought for the King and for his subjects beyond finding the source of their gold, and, after that, using the trees and herbs of the area to the benefit of Spain. What did he say? I could conquer the whole of them [the people] with fifty men, and govern them as I pleased. Nothing at all about making the people's lives better.I'm not so certain that Columbus and his Isabella and Ferdinand didn't set a precedent when it comes to foreign investment that is still prevalent today. After all, the welfare of our people, of our environment, of our way of life, of our culture -- in short, our very existence -- are unlikely to be at the forefront of any investor's minds. Why should they be? All an investor's seeking is a return on his or her investment -- the quicker and the bigger (generally) the better. If it's not at the forefront of our government's negotiations -- well, then, we get situations like Royal Oasis and the citrus plantations in in the wake of Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne.Here's the thing. Why do we still rely so heavily on people to sail in from beyond the horizon to do our development for us? Why do we offer them our gold for the glass beads they give us back? The Lucayans knew no better. But we do.I agree that to expect the Government of The Bahamas to shoulder single-handedly the responsibility for developing the entire country is unreasonable. I agree, too, that injecting capital into remote areas of the archipelago is important. But surely there's as much to gain, or more, from encouraging Bahamians to participate in that process. Why don't we start giving Bahamians the same kinds of concessions we give foreigners to invest in Family Island development?We are a small nation perched on the edge of a great one. When you look at The Bahamas from space, our islands look like beads scattered from the paw of some great beast. But they're ours, and they're all we've got. We need to be super-careful what we do with them. Because if we're not -- well, we can just ask the Lucayans what they think.Listen to this article online.

On Innovation

When life hands you a lemon, they say, make lemonade.There's another way of looking at it. You got a problem -- fix it. Find a solution. And while you're at it, make it a fun one, a creative one. Turn a minus into a plus; turn a sour, rindy fruit into a delicious drink.The process of innovation, of finding appropriate solutions, is a fairly involved one, and to succeed requires something that we seem to have lost as a nation -- confidence in our ability to solve problems. To be innovative, one has to define the problem, consider a variety of possible solutions, and then pick the best one. Not the cheapest, or the one that gets the most votes, but the best. That is how wonderful things like electric lights and telephones get invented; that is how people get sent to the moon.Now we Bahamians, throughout our history, have been a pretty innovative bunch. We invented an original way of building houses, for instance, based on our original way of building boats. We invented unique ways of singing, of keeping ourselves occupied. We invented 101 ways to cook a conch, something a whole lot of people throw away. We created an economic model for our country that works, and has worked, in a region where dependency-based poverty is a curse. Our ancestors found a use for every single thing in their environment. A good look at our history, or in any old family island home, will show exactly how innovative we were.We aren't any more. These days, we seem to invent very little. For some reason, we have become pretty bad at looking at our problems from our own perspective and working out something that is relevant to us. No; instead the first thing we do is engage some "expert" from some foreign country -- usually a country to the north, too, as we all know that southern nations just don’t produce experts -- to come here and tell us what to do with our problems.The second thing we do is suggest, as gospel, some highly impractical and impracticable "solution", and then complain for the next generation or two that no one has Done Anything. Nobody can, considering the general idiocy of the "solution" we proposed.Cases in point.Water -- on Sunday, listening to Parliament Street, I heard once more the idea that the solution to New Providence's water problems is a water pipe from Andros to New Providence. Well, I was ready to throw the radio on the ground and stamp on it -- not because the idea is necessarily a bad one, but because -- well, it's a bad idea. Simple on the surface, but difficult to execute. Difficult to pay for, too. And it's not a solution at all; all it does is push Nassau's problem -- a shortage of potable water -- onto another island, in much the same way that rich Western countries "solve" problems of toxic waste and so on by sending it to poorer, less developed places. In another generation or two, Big Yard or no Big Yard, we will be facing the same issue -- only we will have used up the fresh water reserves of not one island, but two.Immigration -- the only thing we seem to be able to come up with collectively as a country is send 'em back. In all fairness, we have heard a number of ideas proposed, but rather than considering them for their promise, their originality or their potential success, we tend to throw them out without real thought. Well, you should all know by now what I think of that.Development -- the only thing we seem to be able to do here is to invite foreigners in and sell them our land for second homes and for resorts -- or (in a more absurd move) for the creation of salmon farms on Inagua. Salmon? Why not grouper farms, what with the limitations being placed on grouper fishing?Allow me to be radical here. And let me do it not simply for The Bahamas, but for the world.What the world needs is not a whole army of carbon-copies occupying every populated space. People are different, and God gave us the infinite power of creativity. There is no sense in asking other people for solutions to problems of which they have no comprehension. They'll offer the solutions, sure, and they'll charge dear for them, but the solutions we'll get won't amount to a hill of good beans. (Just take the concept of the four-way stop, for example, in this country where the bigger you are, the more rights you have.)Why aren't we creating our own solutions?There's more to this question than simply fixing our problems in ways that work for us. There's something else too. Good ideas are hard to come across anywhere in the world. If we cultivate good ideas of our own, instead of cookie-cutting others' solutions, then we may find ourselves in the position of selling our solutions to other people, instead of buying theirs.

On King Canute

King Canute had courtiers, many a one,And flatterers not a few,And they told to Canute that under the sunThere was nought that he could not do.Then out spake King Canute, "Quite well I knowMonarch and King are weWend you with me to the beach below,We will gaze on that glorious sea."To the beach below he royally strode,And sat himself on the sand,And he cried to the billows, as onward they rode,"Hasten back! It is my command."Yet onward rolling on the billows came,Stopping not in their rage,Scornfully flinging their angry foamIn the monarch's blushing face.Then up rose the king with scorn on his brow,As the billows rushed by his chair,And he cried to his courtiers, still whispering low,Full of shame and contrition there:"Go, flatterers, go ye hence, go away, begone,Wiser be from this day,Mark you this lesson: there is but oneWhom the winds and the waves obey!"(Mistress Lyndall Albury, "The Real Bahamas, Vol. II")There's a lot of talk these days about What We Should Do with the Haitian immigrants who are invading our land, causing all the trouble that has plagued us over the years. The most common refrain in the conversation is this one: "Send 'em back!" Even in the most enlightened debates, when the brightest of the bright are gathered to solve the weighty problems of the now, this refrain continues. "Send 'em back!" When politicians who have spent some time studying the problems surrounding immigration, illegal and otherwise, propose solutions that do not fit into this paradigm, they are dismissed as fools and idiots. It is obvious that there is only one solution that can possibly work: send 'em back.Too bad more of us don't know the story of King Canute.If you don't know the story, he was a Viking monarch who for whatever reason stood upon the seashore and commanded the waves to turn around and go back. They didn't. They came up and wet him from head to toe. Well, of course they did. That's what waves do.To me, that's what the situation with the Haitian migrants is like. We live in a relatively wealthy country that sits between the poorest nation in the region and the richest, and there is a law of migration that states that people from poor nations will move into rich nations, and not the other way around. If a poor nation is on the border of a rich one (or even of a richer one -- witness the Haitian settlements in Cuba, for instance) then there is nothing that the richer nation can do to prevent immigration. It comes with the territory of being rich.And so those people who believe that it is possible send 'em home, stop 'em from coming, whatever it is that we appear to expect the Government to do, are all like King Canute as he stood on the seashore shouting at the waves. You see, whether it pleases us or not, the fact is that governments for forty years or more have been trying their hardest to "send 'em back"; but "they" keep coming, and have kept on doing so, even in the face of the hate that awaits them here. Forty years should be long enough to convince even the most stubborn and prejudiced among us of the fundamental impracticality of stopping Haitian migration.How long will it take us to learn the lesson that Canute taught his courtiers -- that "there is only One whom the wind and the waves obey"? We can't stop migration -- we've tried -- so why aren't we considering how to turn this weakness into a strength? Why are we ignoring the voices of those people who have considered possibilities, and have suggested them to us? We have been burying our heads for so long now that we should have a very good knowledge of sand.It seems to me that if the good Lord sees fit to bless The Bahamas with the immigrants who live here and help to make the country the prosperous one that it is, then that is His Will and His Design for our nation. It is time, I believe, that we recognize that as long as we are a rich nation, we will have to deal with immigrants. It is time, too, to recognize that because our services are paid for primarily by customs duties -- taxes that are paid when goods enter the country and not levied on people's salaries, no one who resides here lives here tax free. It is impossible to buy food from Bahamian food stores, gas from Bahamian pumps, or clothes from Bahamian shops without paying taxes; every resident, and even every tourist, pays for the services our government offers for free. If the good Lord sees fit to bless us with immigrants, then who are we to reject his blessing?Now don't get me wrong (though I'm sure many people will do so). I'm not trying to suggest that our nation is not challenged with accommodating the high numbers of immigrants. But what I am suggesting is that the "solution" spouted by so many of us is not a solution at all. It is time to recognize that we are facing a wave, and that like Canute, none of us can turn it back. It is time for us, therefore, to do the only thing one can do when facing a wave: consider all your alternatives. And learn to float.Click here for a similar sentiment expressed in American terms

On Golden Chains

I had the pleasure of visiting Dominica not long ago. It is a beautiful island -- mountainous and forested, with the kind of loveliness Americans call pristine. As I flew in, I wondered why anyone would leave such a place.When I landed I began to understand why. Dominica is a beautiful place, but globalization has hit the Eastern Caribbean hard. The globalization of the past made them into monocultures, where the only crops grown were for export to feed the desires and needs of Europeans. The globalization of the present extended that relation of dependency; between sugar and bananas, the entire economy rests on the price of cash crops. And that price is set far, far away from Dominica.This is a dependency that we in The Bahamas don't know. Our economy is built on service industries, not on agriculture, and that fact has several positive side-effects. An agricultural community works beyond the centres of civilization. No sustained contact between the town and the country is needed; while the farmer or the peasant may have some familiarity with the town (that is where the market is, after all), townspeople are generally ignorant of the farmer's reality. And so the social exchange between them is limited. The farmer maintains a lifestyle that is substantially different from that of the urban person.A service economy, on the other hand, works in another way. It is founded on the contact between the service provider and the consumer. In our case, the consumer is invited into the host economy. The success of that service depends upon our becoming as much like the consumer and his or her society as possible. Our communications, our infrastructure, our laws must conform to the needs and expectations of our banking customers; in tourism, our accommodations and the training of our staff must do the same. A nation that depends upon service is a nation whose people are transformed into beings who are similar to the people they serve.Now there is a paradox here. Our service economy has made us rich. My visit to Dominica drove home to me that what we Bahamians take for granted here, what some of us even have the temerity to call "poverty" (as in "poor people") is in fact a kind of wealth. In material terms, our standard of living, indeed, places us on par with the USA -- if not with the richest Americans, at least with their servants.Because that is who we are.There is a danger, you see, in maintaining a service economy. The returns are greater than the returns from agriculture, particularly now that the source of wealth has shifted from the agricultural sector to the service sector. The problem is this. In order to serve, it seems, we have to lose our selves.This is not something that should surprise us; we have been here before. In the olden days, the people who toiled outside, who raised the crops and brought them to the central place of distribution, were called field slaves; house slaves were those who worked inside, who kept dirt off their hands and sun off their heads. Like the agricultural islands of the Caribbean, the field slaves were physically worse-off, sleeping in rough quarters, subject to aches and pains and hard, hard work. The house slaves' material lives were better. They wore prettier clothes, slept in nicer beds, and were cleaner and smoother than their brothers outside.But it was the field slaves who kept more of themselves.The house slaves, you see, living cheek-by-jowl with the masters, began to talk like them, dress like them, eat like them, and, eventually, think like them. And of course, because they were closer to the masters, they were more likely to be raped by them; the closer they lived, the more they became like them. In the end, they believed what the masters believed: that blackness was savagery and the only way to salvation was through being as whitely civilized as possible.I write this because in Dominica I witnessed what we can only imagine here: a cultural show involving children, adults and elders, and the children knew the elders' music and dances and songs as well as the elders did themselves. I watched a quadrille dance that was performed by schoolchildren no older than twelve with the same manners and attitudes as the Cat Island Mites; there were no extra steps, no flourishes. We were treated to a Masquerade performance that featured the characters that were common in the past, and kept the costumes and the music of the roots of Dominca's Carnival alive, even though modern Carnival has many Trinidadian elements. I visited a museum that has a living display -- men and women in traditional dress, using the artefacts that we have placed on display in the foyer of our archives. I walked through the complex inhabited by the Cultural Affairs Division, which housed, in addition to the offices, an art gallery, a museum, a gift shop, and an outdoor theatre, all in the surroundings of an old sugar mill. I learned that the reason that the young people all know the songs and the dances and the habits of their forefathers is because there are festivals all year round that enable them to learn those habits, to be grounded in them, so that by the time they grow up they are proud to be who they are.It's easy, of course, to look into the neighbour's yard and to envy what he has there. Our yard is the envy of all our neighbours, after all, some of whom are trying hard to get in. But it is just as easy to believe the lie that to be wealthy is to be free.It's a lie because wealth, material wealth, comes at a price. Our price is the selling of our selves. Our children are not proud of being Bahamian, and we must ask ourselves why that is. Our service economy makes us rich, but we must be careful that it does strip us of who we are; golden chains are still chains.There is no shame, you see, in poverty. On the contrary; it is the rich, the materially blessed, who ought to worry about shame. For nothing comes without a price; and for our material wealth we may have sold something that no one can retrieve -- our selves.

On Immigration

Much has been said of late about immigrants, especially illegal ones. By "illegal immigrants", by the way, we really mean people who come here on boats, not jets, people who sail here from the south, not the north, and people who speak a different language and who worship a different way from us.In other words, we mean Haitians. Or Jamaicans, if we're feeling really expansive.

Send them home, we say. Even those who were here all their lives. Even those who were born here. If they illegal, they gattie go. We're a small country, after all. No space. No resources, not like our neighbours to the north. We are not the USA and Canada, with all that money up there ready to give away to the poor and tired of the world. After all, they pay no taxes, and they crowd up all our services. We cannot afford to be magnanimous. Suffering is not our business; send them home.

Well, fine. No problem. Only—why should we stop at the Haitians and the Jamaicans? Why don't we send all the immigrants—especially the illegal ones—back to where they came from?

Sure. Let's send back all those people whose names we don't recognize. Petit? What kind of a name is that? Eve? Cherenfant? Amertil? Send 'em back. Don't forget Justilien or Paul, now. And why stop at the names we don't know? There are plenty of immigrants pretending to be Bahamians, who have passports and everything. Let's round 'em all up, shall we? Charter a boat (why worry with a plane?) and send 'em back off to Haiti where they all came from. Let's start with the Poitiers, the Moncurs, the Benebys, the Bonabys, the Bonamys, the Godets, the Symonettes, the Dillets, the Darvilles, the Deveaux, the Deleveaux, the Demerittes, the Delamores. Why leave out the Morees, the Romers, the Virgils, the Sargents, or the Scavellas? They trace their roots to Haiti too. And let's not be fooled by innocent-sounding names like Armbrister or Solomon or Bain or Benjamin or Fountain—they'll be found in a Haitian phone book if we look hard enough. The Isaacs may not be as innocent as they sound, and who knows what bloodline lurks behind a Williams or a Foulkes? When you think about it, Francis and Frazier sound kind of French, and Martin and Levarity, Seymour and Larramore are definitely suspect. And who can forget the Duvaliers?

In fact, when we start looking, we're gonna find that more than half the people who come from the southern Bahamas, from Cat and Long and Crooked and Ragged Islands, from Acklins and Inagua and Mayaguana and Exuma, are gonna have some connection with, to, or in Haiti. Why don't we just play it safe and send them all home? After all, there was a time not so long ago when Port-au-Prince was closer and fancier than Nassau to them, and many of their ancestors spent good time down there. We can't trust them at all. Let's send them all back, just to be safe.

And then there are the West Indians, not to mention the Cubans and the Dominicans. So let's see. We can start with the Gomezes, if they manage to escape the sweep of the southern islands. Never mind that they've produced archbishops and doctors and senators; they're immigrants, and as we can't be sure of their legality, let's just be safe and send 'em on home. Cuba or Dominican Republic? Let's not be picky, let's just get on with it. And then the Palaciouses. The Fernanders. The Gonzalezes and the Fondas and the Cancinos. Treco? Who cares, sounds kind of Latin, let's get on with it. DeGregory, D'Aguilar, Ferrera, Ferreira, Laroda—all gone. The Pindlings, the Mitchells and the Dumonts who didn't get sent back to Haiti, the Maynards, the Worrells, the Fieldses, the Alleynes, the Baileys, the Outtens, the Cookes, the Conliffes, the Bosfields, the Edwards, and at least half of the Clarkes.

But why stop there? Why deport just those people with the familiar faces and the funny names? Let's deal with all immigrants. The Bahamas for Bahamians, okay? So we'll send back all the Greeks, the Chinese, the Syrians and the Lebanese; there go the Galanises and the Meicholases and the Maillises and the Klonarises and the Moskos and the Alexious. There go the Cheas, the Wongs, and the Lees, the Bakers and the Ageebs and the Solomons and the Isaacs who didn't get on the boat to Haiti. Bye-bye, Esfakises. So long, Tsavoussises. Armourys, see ya.

But wait. Illegal immigrants, did we say? Well, hell, that has got to include all the Africans who came here as slaves. Did they have papers? We don't think so. Maybe their masters did, but who can tell? And while we're at it, who gave those masters these islands anyway? The Crown? What crown? Who gave England the Bahamas, when it was a sailor named Columbus who found us, and Columbus came from Spain? Surely all the English (and the Scottish and the Welsh and the Irish) settlers are illegal too—all the Christies and the Pinders and the Thompsons and the Russells and the Bethel(l)s and the Griffins and the Culmers and the Forbeses and the Fords and the Mac-whatevers and the Millers and the Smiths. Wilchecombes. Duncombes. Adderleys. Burnsides. Carters. Gibsons. Glintons. Saunderses. Malones. Currys. Foxes. Knowleses. Hannas. Robertses. Fergusons. Farquharsons. Cartwrights. Nottages. Searses. Griffithses. Strachans. Mosses. Careys. Wilsons. And Rolles. Especially those Rolles, with their so-called rights to the land. Who gave them rights anyway, when people were here before them?

In fact, let's get rid of everybody who isn't a Lucayan—a true-true-true Bahamian—anybody who isn't descended from one of the people who discovered Columbus in his lostness, when he claimed these islands, illegally, for Spain. I suppose Seminoles could stay, though they're immigrants too; they came here when America got Florida, back in the 1700s.

Or maybe they should go too. Immigration, after all, is the great evil of the age. We can't ever be too careful in stamping it out, now can we?

You tell me.

On What We're Good At

I was taught never to end a sentence with a preposition. To end anything, for that matter, with a preposition. Instead of saying "This is something I'm not going to put up with", I was taught to say "This is something up with which I will not put". Ends on a verb, see. Much better.I was taught to make an effort to be good at the stuff I did — stuff that included the speaking of English. And being a good child, I tried. Even if it made me sound like a pedant.What I wasn't taught, not consciously anyway, was what we're good at. Be good at stuff, I was lectured; but not so much, look, you're good at this already; make it better. By "we", of course, I mean the collectivity of Bahamians. No. I went to a "good" school, where I received most of my teaching. Received, and soaked it up; like any Bahamian with broughtupcy, I made a very good sponge. The Andros Mud had nothing on me.Fundamental to what I learned was this: we (read Bahamians) aren't good at anything at all.I have since learned better. It's seeped into my consciousness without my realizing it: the fact that we can do some things very well, and others the best in the world. And in this climate of fear-of-the-immigrant, resistance-to-the-expatriate, this fight for protection of our own mediocrity (because of course, foreigners — black or white — do it better), I never hear anyone discussing what it is we can teach other people.No. In fact, we're busily working to destroy what we're good at.Now just what do I mean by this? Well, OK, let's look at what The Bahamas has given the world. (What is she talking about? I hear you saying. What in the world has The Bahamas given the world? Just wait and see.)One: Joseph Spence and the Androsian guitar.Two: Rhyming, in spirituals and other songs.Three: The goatskin drum carried over the shoulder and beaten with one main hand.Four: The Bahamian style of house, in wood or in stone.Five: The Bahamian workboat, in every size, shape and fashion.So where are we now? Well, first, how many young people know the name of Joseph Spence, much less know that he's one of the greatest folk artists in the entire world? Beyond that, how many young Bahamians are making music on guitars tuned to the six notes that Spence tuned his guitar? How many young Bahamians can play a single guitar and sound like a whole band? How many young Bahamians — and not so young too — even know how to hold a guitar these days, much less play it?Second, how many young Bahamians know that rap and even dub are variations of the African-style chanting that occurs throughout the diaspora, and which has its own style here in The Bahamas? How many young Bahamians can rhyme with the subtlety and sophistication of a Spence or a McQueen, or produce a story in rhyme without shrugging on the accents of street Brooklyn or Trench Town? How many of them (us) even recognize the rhythms of the old Bahamian rhyme, much less welcome them?Three: Where have all the goatskin drums gone? I know the challenges inherent in making them: the people who know how are aging, tom-toms are easy to find, goats are few and far between, skins have to come in from Jamaica — but these are weak excuses, not reasons to abandon a skill our ancestors recreated from the ashes of slavery.Four: The houses that are uniquely ours, as opposed to those whose facades and spaces we see in magazines and on screens, are in imminent danger of disappearing forever. These buildings — of wood some of them, built often by master shipbuilders and held together by pegs and engineering designed to withstand waves, and of concrete or stone others, made to be cool without air conditioning and stout against storms — are being bulldozed with surprising rapidity, falling before machines made far away and unlamented by men who value expediency over Bahamian skill. And at the same time, American architects in the South are copying the Bahamian style.Five: Where are the boatbuilders who know how to bend wood? Have we moved entirely over to fibreglass? Is the tradition of Bahamian boatbuilding — so world-renowned that the richest men once had their yachts built in Abaco (the word hadn't got out about Long Island and Ragged Island and Crooked Island and Exuma) — in danger of dying because of our own ignorance?Now, lest it seem to people that I'm drowning in nostalgia, that I'm romanticizing stuff, that I'm being impractical and unrealistic and too passionate to make sense, consider this.We live in a world where ideas, original ideas, are the things that generate cold, hard cash. It's a world that's looking for fresh things, new things, for things that work. The world created by people who are "progressive", unromantic, practical and realistic and devoid of any passion, is a world that falls down in big winds, sinks at the slightest provocation, stops running five years after its purchase (if you're lucky), and issues out of machines. It's also a world whose profits all go to the same places: to the Sonys and Microsofts of this earth.And what sells is stuff that's unique, that works, that lasts, that's special, that's true.Every choice we make to leave what is ours behind, to abandon what we're good at for the stuff that's easy or cheap is not a choice simply to give up a little piece of our souls. It's a choice also to give up a little piece of our wealth. For in this Sonysoft world of ours, our wealth will come from our souls. If we keep it, they will come.