On the Milk Stand

Something happened recently that went without much comment. A building that once stood at the northwestern corner of Mackey and Shirley Streets was bulldozed down to rubble. The reason? To create a turning lane. The building? A milk stand.Before I go on, let me say that I don’t have a problem with the bulldozing of the milk stand. Oh, I felt a twinge of regret at seeing it go. But this isn’t going to be a polemic on the evils of tearing down historic buildings to ease traffic congestion. I recognize the need for a turning lane right at that point, and I applaud the decision to make that corner more efficient for traffic. The decision was a pragmatic one, and it was a good one, as far as it went.What I do want to write about is our capacity for bulldozing that building without understanding — without even asking — what a milk stand is and why it’s significant for the city of Nassau. So I want to give a little history about the milk stand.Before I do, let me say that I am not a historian, so this article isn’t going to be giving dates and full names and all the written facts. I’m an anthropologist, and have the luxury of regarding history as one of a set of stories that people tell themselves and their children to make sense of the world, to make sense of themselves. All too often we live in blessed ignorance of our ancestors and their lives, their struggles and their needs. We Nassauvians are still fortunate enough to inhabit a city in which our forefathers’ stories are written in the very buildings we see around us, but we exist in such studied ignorance of what those stories are that when things happen to change that environment, we have no way of knowing what has changed.Here’s my version of the milk stand story.Once upon a time, there was a man named Harold Christie. Now he is incidental to the story of the milk stand, except in one respect — he invented the first Bahamian model of development-through-foreign-investment. Thanks to H. C. Christie, during the 1920s, when other countries in the region were struggling with post-war poverty, industrial unrest, and hardship, The Bahamas flourished. Part of this was due to the transhipment of liquor to the USA. But part of it, thanks to Christie, was the first Bahamian land boom since the Loyalists. Long before the UBP or the PLP or the FNM were ever dreamed about, Harold Christie was selling Bahamian land, water and climate to the first foreign investors to line the government’s coffers with gold.Enter Austin Levy, who bought huge tracts of land in Hatchet Bay, Eleuthera, to start a dairy farm. He started big by Bahamian standards, and grew huge. By the time the Second World War rolled around (and go look up the dates if your history education was faulty and you have no idea when that was), the Hatchet Bay farms were producing enough milk and eggs and cream to feed a nation.And feed the nation they did — the nation as it existed in the capital city. At the same time that bootlegging was making the city rich, the out islands were struggling. The poverty that fell upon them in the post-war years was not helped by the rash of hurricanes — rather like the ones we’re having now — that swept through the colony between 1926 and 1935. Out islanders were migrating to the city in droves, settling areas like the Valley and Englerston and the Grove and Chippingham. The city of Nassau, whose public infrastructure stopped at the ridge we call the Hill, was straining under the growing population. One major concern was sanitation. Most of those who lived in the Over the Hill area — our ancestors — lived in one- or two-room houses with no plumbing or electricity, and everyone washed and lived in the yard. The country was wealthy, but many people were poor. And by the time the Duke of Windsor came to Nassau as Governor, the poverty and the well-being of the average Bahamian were starting to become serious concerns.Enter Austin Levy with his dairy farm and a plan to create a healthier population by providing people with fresh dairy products to build strong bones and teeth and to keep the illnesses at bay. In those days, the Bahamian diet consisted of fish, grits, and what people grew in their own back gardens. Lobster was dirt-cheap, an everyday dish, and chicken (which you killed and cleaned yourself) was reserved for Sundays. Fresh meat was to be had only on high feast days like Easter; eggs were things that came out of chickens, and milk was something you poured from a can.So Mr. Levy built a dock on East Bay Street where he brought his produce, and he erected little stone booths at intervals throughout the city, placing them on intersections where people could get to them. From the 1940s until the early 1970s, the milk stands were places where you could go to get fresh milk and eggs, things most Nassauvians had never had before. They were distinctive for their rounded corners and their walls half covered in thousands of tiny tiles, and for their service windows and their little steps that allowed people to purchase what they needed as they passed.Thanks in part to Mr. Levy and his milk stands, Nassau’s population became better nourished and healthier. Now I’m not claiming Mr. Levy was a local or national hero; what was good for Nassauvians was equally kind to his pocket. And so in the demolition of the milk stand at Mackey and Shirley Streets, history is repeating itself in a strange sort of way. The stand was put up by a foreign investor whose kindness to us helped his own bottom line; it was taken down with the assistance of another foreign investor whose helpful nature is equally good for business. Making traffic move more smoothly at Mackey Street will not only ease congestion on our side of the bridge; the hope, of course, is that it will affect Paradise Island’s traffic jams as well. This is not to say that any of this is a bad thing. It’s simply to tell us a little more about who we Bahamians are.And so the story of the milk stand: a story of our past, a story of our selves.

On Inertia

I’m in my third year of employment as a civil servant.  I started out in this profession, twenty-odd years ago.  I worked as a civil servant for three years, and left to enter the teaching profession.  Some people thought I was crazy; I was taking a pay cut, I was moving to apparently sub-standard working conditions (no air conditioning in the classroom, no secretaries to do work for me, no downtime — I was working in a small church school, where free periods were few and far between), I was leaving a job with Connections to go to one with None.I was as happy as a clam.Poor, yes, but happy.  The reason?  At the end of a day as a teacher, I had the sense that I’d got something done.  At the end of a week, that sense of accomplishment was palpable; at the end of a year, when students had shown what they had (or hadn’t) learned, it could be rewarding. And the pride I have in knowing that I shared in some small way in the achievements of a new generation of Bahamians is priceless.Twenty years later, I’m back in the public service.  My job is rewarding in a different way.  I’m never bored.  No two days are alike.  We’re living in an exciting time, a time of radical change.  There are tides sweeping through nations, especially little ones, and we have to be ready to ride them or drown.  It’s a good time to be a civil servant.The trouble is that the civil service isn’t ready to experience the good time.  The profession is governed by inertia.Now for those of you who don’t know what it means, here’s what Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has to say: INERTIA : indisposition to motion, exertion, or action : resistance to change.  These big dictionaries give you phrases to help you make sense of the words they define, and here’s what Webster’s gave: “social inertia, the tendency of animals to continue repeating the same action in the same place”.I couldn’t have said it better myself.The biggest problem with the civil service in The Bahamas is that it’s indisposed to action, resistant to change.  This is not unique to The Bahamas, by the way.  It is a fundamental tenet of bureaucracy.  It took me some time, for example, to get over my surprise that the Canadian bureaucracy is just as bad and the British bureaucracy is worse (whereas here, a who-ya-know or a well-targeted dollar can speed the process around here, there’s no way around those public servants).  But the problem is very real.The problem is simple.  Government is designed to protect the status quo.  (It is very often nothing to do with the party in power.)  Conservatism is hammered into the system from the ground up.  The System itself is god; there is no power higher than it.  Change itself goes in as change, and never comes out at all.Inertia.Now lest you think that I am advocating a complete doing-away with the structures that slow down movement, that absorb light and break it into a million tiny pieces, each darker than the first, that break up good ideas to make them “workable”, let me assure you that I’m not.  Governments are designed to manage the assets of nations.  They are set in place to curb the excesses of politicians, who are naturally enthusiastic and energetic people who want things to be done in a rush (because short periods of time in which to prove themselves).  In the Westminster system, the two tiers of governance are designed to complement one another and to ensure that countries survive from administration to administration.  Civil servants are permanent employees, people who are put in place to maintain stability.  They are supposed to guard the assets of the country, to take the long view, to think about what happens twenty years form now, while elected officials scramble to keep old promises or make new ones.  It’s not a bad system, on paper.The problem is that the world is moving too fast for it.  Paper is a wonderful medium, but it’s now obsolete.  In a world where — as someone involved in the mass media put it very recently — today’s technology can become obsolete next week, a system in which a single idea can take eight months to be decided upon is inadequate to meet the needs of our nation.  And a profession in which individuals still expect to remain employed for life, no matter how they perform or how much they actually achieve, is a dinosaur in a world where change is so rapid that universities have now taken on the challenge of preparing graduates to be able to switch careers twice or three times in a lifetime.The civil service as designed is crippling the development of The Bahamas. I’ve argued before that the version that we have in place was never intended to govern a free nation; what we have has grown out of an institution set up to manage the assets of an empire.  The system is too open to abuse by the malicious and too inflexible to accommodate creativity.  Good ideas are easy to kill; they can be buried in paper, or strangled by budget constraints.  Because inertia rules, change has to struggle to survive.The time has come to rethink our civil service — not to do away with it, because it is a necessary balance to the imperatives of the elected — but to dissect it, evaluate it, and rebuild it from the ground up.  It’s time for the civil service to be designed to achieve things — and not to maintain things as they have always been, world without end, amen.

On Emancipation

In 1833, the British Parliament passed an Act to abolish slavery in the British Empire. As of August 1, 1834, all slaves throughout the empire were to become free to some degree — if they were under the age of six, they would become free immediately, but if they were over six, they were to be apprenticed to their former masters. Apprenticeship was finally abolished on August 1, 1838.It is partly for this reason that Emancipation Day is a holiday in The Bahamas. It is a holiday throughout the former British slave colonies of the Caribbean as well — and the reason that Jamaica, for example, chose it as its Independence Day. We don’t celebrate our holiday on August 1, although we remember the date; rather, we have chosen to make the nearest Monday the holiday.Here, then, together with hot weather, rain, and hurricanes, the summer months bring the twin holidays that commemorate our freedom. As a nation, we have the opportunity of remembering how far we have come, of honouring our ancestors who — slave and master alike — were dehumanized by the institution of slavery and indentureship.So far, though, we have not made the most of this opportunity. Oh, we celebrate all right. We have a Junkanoo parade on Independence Day, and two Junkanoo parades on the August Holiday weekend. We have cook-outs (what better way to party than eating?) But that’s about as far as it goes. Indeed, considering the amount of time we spend speaking of such things, it’s possible to imagine that if a Bahamian child didn’t grow up watching American television, they might be surprised to learn that Bahamians were once ever slaves.And yet.As I’ve written before, slavery is not over in The Bahamas. I’m not talking about the kind of “slavery” that people like to raise when making these kinds of statements — a “slavery” that assumes that every Black Bahamian is subordinate to and poorer than every White Bahamian, that assumes that all Whites were slaveowners and all Blacks slaves, that believes that Black Bahamian slaves were captured in African jungles and transported to The Bahamas on slave ships — an image of slavery that has more to do with history as outlined in the ABC miniseries Roots than our own story, which is far more complicated and interesting. No. I’m talking about the kind of slavery Bob Marley recognized in his own people when he wrote and performed his “Redemption Song” — the mental slavery that continues to dominate our society.What do I mean by mental slavery? It manifests itself in a number of different ways. There are the obvious — the concept that Bahamians aren’t able to do things very well, and the resultant habit of looking elsewhere for models and expertise; the preference for hiring consultants from abroad to give advice that Bahamian experts have already considered and rejected; the willingness to privilege outside plans for development over local ones; the general contempt for anything home-grown, and the overconsumption of anything from across the sea. But as common as these tendencies are, I’m thinking of other, smaller, more insidious actions and habits that show the residue of slavery in our everyday lives.The biggest one is the apparent reluctance of the ordinary employee ever to make a decision. Decisions, you see, require that one take responsibility for those decisions, and if one is wrong, one gets in trouble. The result — particularly in the civil service, but not only there — is that for too many people, there is only one way of doing something. How many of us have found ourselves in a situation where we make a request that is unusual, that takes a salesperson out of her comfort zone, that surprises her, forces her to think? The result: roadblock.Another one, though, that I get to see often in my line of work, is the tendency of many people who are possessed with a good idea to seek first and foremost the kingdom of Government Money. Despite the fact that we live in a society which welcomes millions of tourists every year, in which money flows like water, in which Bahamians as well as visitors are willing to spend good cash on things they enjoy, we seem to believe that our enterprise must first and foremost be supported by handouts from the public treasury.A third is the paralysis that I also witness, as a manager of a department and as a teacher of students, among people who seem to be waiting for someone to tell them What To Do. They can’t — or won’t — act unless they get an order or a clearance from above.All of these are examples of the mental slavery from which we continue to need emancipation. Emancipation, you see, only begins with the awarding of political freedom. It is true that on August 1, 1834, slaves were given the gift of themselves; they were able, for the first time since their enslavement, to own their bodies, their loved ones, their offspring, and their possessions. But the residue of slavery lingers still. The political and physical emancipation of the slaves didn’t mean that there was a corresponding psychic and mental freedom that came with it. That has to be worked on.So it’s August; it’s our freedom time. Massa’s long gone. It’s time for us realize that every Bahamian who refuses to make a decision, every Bahamian who seeks a handout, every Bahamian who looks outside the country for validation, every Bahamian who believes that what we do isn’t good enough, is in need of emancipation still.It’s time we emancipate ourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.

On What Culture Isn't

As an anthropologist, one of the most valuable things I learned was to judge other people's cultures by their own standards, and not by my own.  The reason for that is that all groups of people evolve ways of life that work, more or less, for them.  What we call “culture” is what results when a group of people adapt to their particular environment, and in many cases it's the outcome of trial and error and finding out what works best in a particular situation.Because of that, we tend to judge other people's customs according to the things that work for us, without understanding that every culture has its own unique adaptations.  What good for the goose, to quote Winston Saunders, ain't gat to be good for the gander.  The application of one's own morality and understanding to everybody else in the world is called ethnocentrism, and it's responsible for a whole lot of evil.The entire history of European imperial expansion and the colonial project that accompanied it is an excellent example of this.  Wherever they went, the Europeans carried attitudes they had developed in their own countries, and, because they were convinced of their superiority and of their right to global conquest, they imposed those attitudes on the people they met and subdued.  From Mexico to Chile, from Vancouver Island to Florida, from Bermuda to Venezuela, and from Morocco to Cape Town, they carried out a programme of “education” that taught the people they conquered that the way of life they’d always known was wrong and “backward”, and that the way of life perfected by the Europeans was correct and progressive.  To be modern, one had to be more like Europeans.  To be oneself was to be primitive, animal, and savage.These days, we’ve got rid of part of this thinking.  We are far less likely to state that “white is right”.  We are very likely to assert our Afrocentrism and our black pride, and we celebrate those things we think are evidence of our cultural uniqueness.  And we embrace our so-called “African” heritage uncritically, without examining its value or its integrity.The problem is, our reaction is superficial.  We have changed the language we use.  We have turned our faces away from much of what we imagine smacks of our colonial past without understanding that our culture is itself unique, an adaptation that happened when Europeans and Lucayans and Africans and North American “Indians” and Asians met on these limestone rocks in the sea.  We have not examined the full picture, have not read the whole story; we have simply torn the cover off the book, and think we know who and what we are.But.  The language we speak is European — in vocabulary at the very least, if not in grammar.  The desires and the ambitions we have are western, the religion we claim is Europe’s, and our social structure, our laws, our calendar, our schooling, our economy, our judiciary, and our entire mindset are the products of colonial domination.  Even when we wake up and recognize that many of the things we are taught as children — that money is good, say, or that the best kind of profession to have is one that makes you wear nice clothes and work in an air conditioned office with lots of people around who call you “Sir” or “Ma’am”, or that people who work in the yard with dirt on their hands are lesser beings and should be treated with contempt — our reaction is shaped by the complete transformation our histories underwent in colonialism.So those of us who choose Islam over Christianity because of its deeper roots in Africa, those of us who embrace communism instead of the decadence of capitalism and the corruption of democracy, even those of us who turn ourselves over to Rastafarianism, the only Caribbean religion, are all reacting within the confines of a model that has been fundamentally shaped by colonialism, imperialism, Europe’s view of us all, and slavery.  And until we engage with this fact and understand the depths to which we have been affected, we will never truly embrace ourselves.So what is the solution?  Well, I’ll tell you what it’s not.  It isn’t reacting in a wholesale fashion to colonization by throwing away everything we imagine to be the trappings of that experience.  The blackest of us is not African, and the whitest of us is not European.  The Bahamas has been cooking up different cultures since at least 1492, and those five hundred years have created an interesting and special stew.  It’s a stew in which classical music has been simmering — and developing — side by side with the vocal harmonies, the call-and-response patterns, and the polyrhythms of Africa.  It’s a stew in which the dances of the aristocracy have married the drums and the footwork of the servants.  It’s a stew where the straw arts of the Native Americans converse with the basketry of the Africans and the headwear of the Europeans, and where the oral arts of us all have pulled from Haiti and the USA as well as England and Africa.The answer doesn’t lie in claiming everything that appears “African” either, for nowhere is everything entirely good.  When Chinua Achebe wrote his classic novel, Things Fall Apart, his purpose was to criticize both the English and the Ibo people of Nigeria.  He condemned the English colonizers’ destruction of traditional Ibo society while at the same time criticizing those bits of Ibo culture that he regarded as wrong — the killing of twins, for example, the treatment of women, certain punishments given to wrongdoers.  Today, African women are speaking out about age-old traditions as well, from female circumcision to the deplorable habit of fathers and grandfathers to take their female relatives’ virginity.What culture is requires serious study, requires the recognition, naming, and celebration of all that is good about us.  And so we need to focus our eyes inwards, for the habit of looking beyond our shores for things that are “good” is a colonial one.  Not until we can name our strengths and address our weaknesses will we know what culture is; but in the meantime, we need to make sure we know what culture isn’t.

On Developments, Speculation, and the Bahamian Nation

I have an uncle who was once Bishop of Nassau, The Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. When I was a child, he was Father Eldon, priest of West End, Grand Bahama. I never saw him. He came to Nassau on one or two occasions a year only, because he was living and working and teaching and building in the West End community. He left West End to be made Bishop in 1972, and what he did from there Anglicans other than myself will be able to say better.The point is this. West End, Grand Bahama, was the first place outside of Nassau I heard of as a child, because my uncle lived there. And he loved it with a passion others reserve for the places their navel strings are buried.I had the opportunity to go to West End for the first time at the end of the 1980s, where I visited a school friend from Freeport and where we drove out to the settlements that had been part of my imagination since I could think for myself, Eight Mile Rock and West End. The drive, as many drives in Grand Bahama were and remained until the flooding of that island during the hurricanes, was long and wooded: pines and their companion palms (mostly the favoured silvertop, the best material for our straw industry) for miles and miles and miles. It wasn’t the most auspicious or beautiful scenery, but it was ours. Not mine, specifically, but Bahamian, Grand Bahamian, and – by extension – my uncle’s.All that land. Just waiting to be developed.Well, development has come to West End. It’s developed every tree away from the South Side of the settlement, and, I’m told, it’s hungering for more.Now lest it seem that I’m standing in the way of Progress, let me step back a moment. (In truth, I actually don’t believe in Progress; but that’s another story, for a later date.) I’m not going to say that developments shouldn’t take place, that they shouldn’t happen; they do, and they should indeed. I’m not even going to say that clear-cutting of trees is wrong and shouldn’t take place; some things ought to be evident. What I am going to say is that if we believe that we can hand off our responsibility to determine what form that development should take place, we are making a fundamental mistake.And there’s more. The development in West End is not only foreign investment, it’s an investment that the people who are most affected have the least involvement in. While we can celebrate and publicize the size and the magnitude of the project, we need to consider very carefully the impact of the investment on the nearest community. The entire south side of a deeply-rooted settlement with a richer history than Freeport itself is going to be turned into second homes for non-Bahamians – for people for whom the richness of West End’s history will have very little relevance indeed. Like the ancient Freed African settlement of Delaporte or the fragmentation of the Fox Hill Creek, in five years’ time West End may become the bedroom community for people who may be hired as servants and gardeners for the super-wealthy and the over-privileged.And really, the problem doesn’t lie with the developers. It’s easy to blame them, because they are often interlopers, foreign, and rich. But really, it’s our problem. If we are going to pursue an economic policy that relies on external investment to take care of some of our infrastructural and employment needs, we have to understand both the benefits and the challenges of that policy. We have to look beyond the material and the economic, and understand the full implications of the thing.For instance, we need to recognize that while The Bahamas is economically sound all by itself (foreign investment or no, The Bahamas has been, and remained the third richest independent nation in the entire Western Hemisphere in purely economic terms; our per capita GDP places us ahead of every other country in the region except Canada and the USA), our quality of life is nowhere near so illustrious. We live in a high-crime society where many of our fellow-citizens feel displaced and unimportant, and consider that they have nothing to lose by responding violently to minor actions. We pay too much for basic necessities, our cities are congested (while Freeport may be an exception, Marsh Harbour’s traffic is growing, and George Town is laid out in such a way that its increased population has already placed challenges on the settlement that have yet to be resolved), we have no sensible means of dealing with waste, our environment is both beautiful but ecologically fragile, and our cultural identity is insecure.While unchecked foreign investment may yield high dividends to the Government in real and imagined financial gains, it does little to address the problems listed above. In fact, it exacerbates every one of them — with the possible exception of the traffic problem (which is solved in several cases, such as the West End case, by the application for, and approval of, the building of alternative ports of entry, thereby creating colonial-style enclaves of non-Bahamians in our very midst).And I am not so sure that I believe in half the dreams that are presented, in maps or publications or ads. We live in a global economy, after all, and we must not be carried away by the idea that Bahamian real estate is irresistible in its own right. We are simply an extension of an America land boom, which is rife with speculation and which is selling ideas and concepts, not development. Our desire for quick fixes is likely to end in more disappointment than achievement in the long run.What am I calling for here? A clarification and a firming up of the policy that governs our foreign investments. While it may have been wise a decade ago to invite all and sundry to consider The Bahamas as a good place to do business, we are no longer in a position to have to offer the kinds of concessions that brought the investors back. Foreign investment cannot remain an end in itself. Now that we are on the map, we need to remember what can only be the real purpose of that investment — the development, advancement and integrity of the Bahamian nation and its people.

On Tourism and Sustainable Development

In early June, The Bahamas played host to a conference to discuss tourism and sustainable development.  Now I don’t mind telling you that I found that more than mildly ironic — if there’s one thing you can’t say about the current state of the Bahamian tourism industry, it’s that it’s sustainable.  The fact that the conference was held in the conference rooms of what was once the largest and splashiest hotel south of Atlantic City only increased the irony for me; I can remember the days when, as the Carnival Crystal Palace, the floors used to light up like a rainbow at night while we Bahamians lit candles in powercuts and fanned ourselves in front rooms hot as the infernal hinges.You see, there’s a danger in being some of the oldest hands in the business.  We Bahamians are no strangers to tourism; we’ve been raised for generations to learn to keep the tourist in mind.  The problem about that is this:  it’s the people who have been successful for a long time who have the hardest time changing.And the industry is changing right under our feet. Tourism is no longer considered the weak country’s last resort, the poor land’s friend.  It’s no longer regarded as the ultimate destroyer of national pride and self-worth, the creator of inequalities, the ruiner of environments and the spoiler of morals.  No; tourism is now the largest global industry, and every country on the planet is doing what we’ve been doing for the past two centuries:  inviting tourists home.The Bahamian tourist industry is almost 200 years old, having had its roots shortly after the failure of the cotton plantations, when Nassau was touted as a health resort among British physicians.  When Adela Hart visited the city in 1823-1824, there were already houses on rent for visitors, select tours to be had, and rudimentary entertainment — she writes about her carriage trips out to the Blue Hills and the Pine Barrens, and talks about hearing Bahamians singing.  The first major hotel was built in 1860; and tourism first hit its stride in the 1920s, when Americans descended on Nassau, Bimini and West End in search of liquor and fun, and took off at the end of the 1940s.  We are old hands.  Generations of Bahamians have been raised to take part in the hospitality trade, and most of our development has come hand in hand with tourism.But the trouble is, we’re no longer unique.  Where we once had an edge, selling sun, sand and sea in close proximity to the USA, the spread of easy global communications has turned that advantage into a liability.  When anyone can get anywhere, even the most remote location, by plane or helicopter or boat, when Hollywood TV crews can invade the secretest islands in the Pacific or the heart of the Central American rainforests to create a prime-time game show (think Survivor, people), there’s very little real appeal left in coming to Nassau, with its souvenirs made in China, its straw work made in Haiti and Jamaica (and China), and its T-shirts made — well, maybe in China, with a little red, gold, green and “Hey Mon” pressed onto them for Caribbean flavour.These days, we — some of the oldest hands in the business, with a tourist industry that rivals only the tourist industries of the Mediterranean in longevity — must face the fact that the kind of tourism we practice here is passé, suitable only for the lowest classes of tourists: the excursion visitors, the cruise ship passengers, people with little money and less taste.  Our model isn’t working so well any more.  Though we welcome huge numbers to our shores, those numbers don’t translate into the kinds of profits in the hands of Bahamians as one might imagine.So what have we done about it?Well, we’ve tried to change our image.  Instead of being known only for casino packages and cruise ship dockings, we’ve created resorts that offer more; we’ve got the theme parks of Atlantis and the exclusivity of the Four Seasons as a result. And now, we’re targeting an even more upscale market.  Instead of just selling a few days on a beach and a few nights in a casino, we’re selling marinas and golf courses and second homes to the super-rich who desire luxury living in exclusive locations.It’s been very successful indeed.  But it isn’t sustainable.Sustainability, you see, has to do with the ability of a place or a people to support a certain activity over an extended period of time and under different circumstances.  The official definition, as presented by scholars and policy makers, is this: Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.  And if it’s one thing that our current approach to tourism is not, it’s sustainable.It’s not sustainable because it doesn’t involve Bahamians at the foundation.  It depends primarily upon foreign investment, and trusts the investors to make sensible decisions about the impact of their developments on the Bahamian landscape and people.It’s not sustainable because it doesn’t place the uniqueness of The Bahamas — our landscapes, our culture, our selves — at the centre of the deal.  Oh, it sells that uniqueness, rather the way that Madison Avenue sells the features of cars; but we don’t make that uniqueness central to the endeavour, so much so that it will be preserved.And it’s not sustainable because it takes place more or less behind our backs.  We close our eyes at night, and open them the next morning with a new horizon before us.  We have no connection to the tourist product, and the tourist industry has no real connection to us.And so the irony of the tourism conference last week.  But there’s a danger that goes further than any irony can.  Until we can look at the industry as it is, not as it was, and see that the people and the culture and the history of The Bahamas are as appealing to the new tourists as the sun and sand once were — and more,  that while sun and sea can be found elsewhere, we can’t — until we learn to respect ourselves and demand the same respect from the people we let in to do our tourism for us, the development that comes from our tourism may be phenomenal in the short term, but it will never be sustainable.

On Censorship

A couple of months ago, the entire Bahamian community was convulsed by the banning of the movie Brokeback Mountain. All sorts of people weighed in on the issue, but the argument never really got off the ground. The reason for that was that there were really two arguments going on. One was the question of homosexuality. This argument suggested that the Bahamas (government, Christian community or censorship board) was duty-bound to protect the public morality against the evils of same-sex love. The other was the view that adult citizens of a democratic nation should be given the opportunity to choose whether to expose themselves to those evils or not.Now there should be no doubt in my readers’ minds where I stand. I believe that the pulling of the movie was arbitrary, hypocritical and absurd. In all likelihood, it was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of a handful of influential people who assumed that the Bahamian public would not object. But I don’t want to talk about that. Not yet.Quite simply, the existence of the Bahamas Plays and Films Control Board is an anachronism. As many have pointed out before me, it is an organization whose banning of anything is absurd in a society where radio stations play uncensored lyrics on an almost daily basis, where Bahamians are featured – and feature themselves – in homegrown pornography on the World Wide Web, and where any “immorality” can be purchased in the privacy of one’s home by those people willing to pay the price.Now I am not saying this to call for the expansion of the scope of the Board, or of the Act which establishes it. No. What I am saying is that the time has come for Bahamians to recognize the incompatability of such a body with the age in which we live. Information of every kind is all around us, available to anyone with access to a radio, a television, a satellite or a computer. Banning the showing of a movie in this context is ludicrous.But it is more than that. The real problem with the banning of Brokeback Mountain is that it demonstrates that this same handful of anonymous, appointed and unaccountable Bahamians have the ability under the law to control and stifle Bahamian creativity. It’s one thing to talk about a movie set in the American mid-west, made by a Chinese director, featuring a love story that many Bahamians clearly find repugnant. But what happens when a Bahamian wishes to address a topic the Board finds distasteful? Should the law have the right to tell him that he cannot? The banning of a movie may be absurd. But the banning of a play is quite a different matter.It is not inconceivable, especially given the precedent set by the banning of Brokeback Mountain, that such a banning might take place. Indeed, there have been instances in the past where plays produced by Bahamians have been forced to change their presentations or face closure. The fact that, under the terms of the Act that establishes it, the Board has the obligation to vet any production, rate it, recommend changes or close it down has serious implications for the foundations of our democracy.That the Board and the supporters of the Brokeback banning are hypocritical is evident in the fact that The Da Vinci Code, a movie based on the heresy that Christ did not die on the cross, but married Mary Magdalene and sired a line of descendents who exist to this day – is currently showing in the self-same theatres from which Brokeback was pulled. But to focus on this hypocrisy misses the real point. As long as legislation remains on the books that permits an anonymous body to control what Bahamians watch, and worse, what Bahamians write and perform, our culture, and our democracy, are challenged.One final point. The discussion that was generated by the Brokeback affair raised the question of the very constitutionality of the Board. Now our Constitution protects the freedom of expression of the Bahamian citizen (Article 23). But it’s not an absolute protection. There are some limitations designed to protect defence, public safety, public order, public morality and public health, and it is permissible under the Constitution to regulate communications, public exhibitions and public entertainment.On the surface, then, the curtailing of absolute freedom of expression is permissible under the Bahamian constitution. Except here’s where it gets iffy. There’s a caveat to all of this protection of the public, and it’s this: one can regulate things in the interest of public morality, etc, “except so far as … the thing done … is shown not to be reasonably justifiable in a democratic society.”It’s iffy because what’s reasonably justifiable in a democratic society changes with time. The goalposts move. This idea makes reference to a global consensus on what is “democratic”, and that changes. Forty years ago it was not undemocratic for the state to put its citizens to death for certain offences; today, however, most democracies consider it undemocratic, even barbaric, to impose the death penalty indiscriminately. Twenty years ago it might have been fine to challenge artwork that was considered indecent, homosexual, or otherwise offensive to public morality; but today in democratic societies that is no longer the case. We are living in a world whose boundaries are not fixed, and we have to be prepared for them to move.I believe that the time has come to admit that the kind of legislation that permits a body of non-elected, faceless individuals to decide what the Bahamian citizen should be able to see is fundamentally obsolete.I believe that the time has come to recognize that the recent actions of the Bahamas Plays and Films Control Board are not reasonably justifiable in a democratic society.I believe that the time has come to revisit the Theatres and Films Act, to consider its place in this era of information, and, ultimately, to amend it to fit the age in which we live.

On Instant Information

In November of last year, my husband was offered a short-term job in Michigan as a guest director at a small liberal arts university. He went, of course. I stayed behind; I have my own job. But while he was gone, we were in communication on a daily basis – and we didn’t break the bank. The internet has made instant communication over huge distances possible, affordable – and commonplace.We live in the Information Age. The ability to communicate instantly and cheaply over huge distances has revolutionized the way in which human beings relate to one another, and has revolutionized the way in which societies interact. These days, it is possible to link to other human beings anywhere in the world by using satellites, cell phones, and the internet. The world has changed, and – without realizing – we have changed with it.But it appears we haven’t noticed this change. That this applies to us here in The Bahamas is not something that we talk much about. We conduct our business as though radio is the most efficient method of getting the word out, and appear completely to ignore the revolution going on around us.But the in-your-face power of the airwaves pales in comparison to the internet, which is the most radical form of communication there is. It’s radical because nobody owns it. Yes, people (mostly Americans) own the access to it; in order to get online, you have to open the portal provided by the computer, your Internet Service Provider (a.k.a. ISP), and do a bunch of things that some people find intimidating. But once you have done these things, you will find yourself in the biggest democracy on earth.It’s a democracy without borders. It’s a place where people who think alike can meet and discuss ideas without worrying about the kinds of things that people normally worry about – like where you’re from, which party you support, what skin colour you happen to wear – and for that reason it’s a place where it’s possible for petty barriers to melt away and for minds to meet.And for that reason it’s a place where revolutions take place, quietly.Let me illustrate, just briefly. In the 2004 Presidential Elections in the USA, a new power base made itself known: the world of blogs and blogging. Simply put for those people who have no idea what I’m talking about, a web log is a place on the internet where an individual can make his or her opinions known in an instant. It’s like a journal or a diary, but with one big difference: journals and diaries are traditionally private, and blogs are public. They attract readers and they start conversations.And the blog is only one place in which people make their opinions known. There are also chat rooms and internet forums and countless cyber-places where people can go and hang out, anonymously if they choose, and say what they think. The very facelessness of the internet makes it possible for individuals to say what they think without fear of reprisal. And there’s something else, too. The newness of the technology involved means that young Bahamians – those people who will be ruling this country when those of us currently in power are hoping to retire in comfort and to age in peace – are more familiar with cyberspace communication than they are with almost any other kind. They’re certainly more familiar with it than we are.So let me share a few truths about the Bahamian internet interface that might surprise those of us who were born before 1980.Bahamians are talking in cyberspace. They’re talking about politics, about culture, about race, about development, about all kinds of issues that we have developed the (erroneous) habit of imagining that Bahamians aren’t interested in. And the opinions expressed are varied, thoughtful, and sometimes revolutionary. An afternoon spent on a forum like (say) Bahamians Online will reveal more about current Bahamian thinking than any radio talk show. There are no borders to our thinking, no limits on what we discuss.But our institutions have not changed to reflect this fact.The recent furore over the banning of the movie Brokeback Mountain is a good example of that fact. That a handful of individuals can imagine that it is even possible in this twenty-first century to prohibit the showing of a film in the public interest demonstrates how out-of-date our governing philosophies are. The advent of cable television, which is not governed by the Theatres and Cinemas Act, made that action obsolete; the fact that over half of our population has direct access to the internet through their homes, and that those who can’t get online in their homes can do so in any number of cybercafes (and yes, I do know that they were established for another purpose) renders the banning ridiculous. Theatre and film are the mass communication forms of yesteryear. If we imagine that censorship is the way to protect the morals of the general public, we are losing the battle before we begin.The time has come, I believe, to face the fact that mass communication is no longer controllable, if it ever was. If we are to affect the way in which our children think, we have to engage our rusty reasoning skills and teach them, and ourselves, how to engage critically with information. It is no longer possible to imagine that public morality can be upheld through its control. No. The unbridled democracy of the World Wide Web means that our future relies – shock! surprise! – on our mastering the lost art of thought.

On Hate

A band of youths barricade the small house in which a Haitian man lives, and set fire to it so that he burns to death inside. Two young men grab a third from a bar, take him out to the country, beat him with a pistol because he is a homosexual, and tie him to a fence post to die. A gang of Hutu citizens drag their Tutsi neighbours out of their houses, carry them to a nearby field, and chop them to death with machetes. A group of Arabs hijack planes and fly them into a pair of tall buildings full of Westerners just arriving for work.These are all examples of the destructive nature of hate. I could go on, but I won’t, at least not for now. Instead, I want to talk about hate itself. I want to talk about it because in all our conversations — on the radio, in the newspapers, in the street, and, apparently, in the church — that is one thing that we don’t seem to talk about much. We say many things are taboo — homosexuality, godlessness, sin, and too much mixing with foreign elements for starters. The one thing we don’t seem to think is taboo is hate.Before I go much further, let me say that the hate I am talking about is the kind of hate that has no real reason for its existence. It’s the kind of hate that visits evil on other human beings not because of what they have done, but because of who they are or what they stand for. Where love wishes the best for another human being, and does all it can to build that person up, hate works in the opposite direction, doing what is both easier and more common — actively tearing down. And for all the talk of the Bahamas' being a Christian nation, there seems a whole lot of this kind of hate going around.Could the reason for this be that the word “hate” doesn’t come up all that frequently in the Bible? No; a quick look through my own concordance reveals many entries for the word and its derivatives. Among them are some strong directives in Leviticus 19 — "You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbour, lest you bear sin because of him", and Matthew 5 — "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Perhaps the word “hate” isn’t as prominent in Scripture as other words, words like “homosexuality” or “foreigners"? No; I turned to my concordance and counted. The New International Version offers one entry for “homosexual” or “homosexuality” (the King James Version has none). The same goes for “foreigners” — four entries for them in the King James, eight in the New International Version. “Hate” and its variants took up a column or two.So why is hatred becoming a Bahamian habit?I ask because in almost every instance of hate-mongering that I come across, there is also the refrain "The Bahamas is a Christian nation". Now I find this most puzzling. I was taught that we would know our fellow Christians by their fruits (Matthew 7), and I read in Galatians that the fruits of the spirit are love, joyfulness (joy), peace, patience (long-suffering), kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness (meekness), and self-control (temperance). Not hate.Hatred manifests itself in a variety of ways. It takes shape in the very small and mundane — in the way we treat children, for instance, ours and other people's. I'm not talking about legitimate discipline here, corporal or otherwise. I'm talking about the active tearing down of our children's psyches by words or actions or worse. One student at the College of the Bahamas wrote about how her mother constantly belittled her, so much so that she became an underachiever, a person who was unable to trust that anything she did had any value at all; her sister, tired of being told that she could never be anything but a slut, ended by striking her own mother. It is not our actions, very often, but the attitudes that we hold that do the most damage; the abuse that many parents heap upon their children may or may not physical, but it is far too often psychic, and it lasts far longer than the sting of the switch.We have become experts at condemning the homosexuals among us, for instance, or at shunning people we learn are living with AIDS, and we appear to be safe in our open hatred of these people. No matter how much we proclaim that we are "loving the sinner but hating the sin", our behaviour, from the calling down of judgement from heaven upon them to our refusal to handle objects that they have touched, edifies nothing, but rather works to destroy individuals' selves. There is no love in that.Often we behave in ways we ought to be able to recognize from our own history as slaves and servants. When we ascribe certain characteristics to whole nations of people — when we suggest that Haitians are inherently dirty, too unclean to use our cups and plates if we deign to serve them food, or when we imply that the tragedies of Pigeon Pea and The Mud were the result of the inhabitants' own nastiness — we are replaying the hatred generated by our own slave past. The way in which we choose to treat criminals has a similar genesis. Many of us seem to think that the housing of captured lawbreakers in a prison that has been listed internationally as inhumane is insufficient punishment, and that we ought to add regular beatings or hangings to the mix. This is not discipline. It is hatred, and we learned it from our ancestors or our masters.I believe our propensity towards hatred in the Bahamas stems from the fact that we have not yet learned to love ourselves, black and white alike. If we are black, we grapple with what we consider to be the shame of being descended from slaves; if we are white, we must live with the reality that our forefathers participated in a dehumanizing and evil institution. (Some of us who are black should learn to accept that reality as well; a fair number Free Black and Coloured Bahamians were slaveowners themselves.) Black and white, we still bear the scars of our slave past. According to Frantz Fanon, a psychologist from Martinique who studied the personality of the colonized individual, there are two major side effects of oppression. One is the tendency of the oppressed to want to ape the habits and mannerisms of the oppressor, finding in them both superiority and power. The other is a turning of the frustration born of that oppression against oneself. In the expressions of hatred that I hear so often on the radio and read far too regularly in the press I hear both. Our history has perpetuated hatred. Racism has made us racists against Haitians and other immigrants; the brutality of slavery lives on in our prisons and even in our homes. Perhaps we so loudly proclaim ourselves "Christian" in a desperate attempt to find something to love in ourselves.But in this, I believe, we miss the point. The Christ I serve did not come to earth in order to legitimize the hatred we humans have visited one upon the other since the dawn of time. His gospel is a message of love. This is why, until I see acts of love, not hate, proceeding from the faithful among us, or hear words that build up rather than tear down, I will not be buying the oh-so-Bahamian lie that our nation is a Christian nation.

On Being Rich

There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when young Bahamians used to talk about Development and Progress and all kinds of things that were easy to say and hard to lift off the ground if you really thought about them. The world was different then. There were choices you thought you could make – choices such as whether to build a democratic nation that relied on capital and free enterprise to drive its economic engine, or whether to work for the good of the common man and create a communist state. Dictators were all around us. Most of the Latin American continent was ruled by people who had not been elected in any fashion that democratic countries recognized. Cuba of course had Castro; and Haiti was ruled by the Duvalier dynasty.There was a joke that was told at that time. It really wasn’t a very funny joke. It was the kind of joke that had so much truth it made you laugh because if you didn’t you might cry or shoot someone. It went something like this.An aspiring politician sat down with three veteran leaders and asked them for the secrets of their success.The first one said, “Ah, my son. The secret of my success is this. I keep my followers poor and stupid, and then they must rely upon me for their every need. In this way I keep them loyal to me.”The second one said, “Ah, my son. The secret of my success is this. I educate my followers properly, and teach them to understand my way is the only way. Then it doesn’t matter if they are poor. In this way I keep them loyal to me.”The third one said, “Ah, my son. My two colleagues are brilliant men, but they miss the point entirely. Poverty makes human beings dream of better lives, and education teaches people to think. No. Better to make your followers wealthy, and teach them never to think at all. My people are loyal because they don’t know any other way to be.”The joke would always be followed by peals of laughter. It was funny because we recognized the styles of leadership all too well. The first one we associated with countries like Haiti and other dictatorships that relied on fear and oppression to stay alive. The second one we associated with places like Cuba, where ideology met every need and people were taught that sacrifice in the name of revolution was all that mattered. The third one?The third one we associated with home.The joke is no longer current these days. It’s lost most of its meaning – largely because, I think, it’s no longer a joke. Back in the 1970s, being rich was still a dream that many of us could hold onto. We were newly independent, most of us were attending high schools and colleges for the first time in our families, and those of us who chose to return home to Nassau had the pick of the professions – there was no glut of lawyers, no lack of a need for doctors or accountants. And so the people who were coming up at that time forgot the joke and concentrated in taking their positions in society, on building the economy, on earning the salaries that would make us wealthy.But we didn’t invest that wealth back into our country to make the joke remain a joke. And so it’s become reality.We Bahamians have succeeded remarkably in so far as material wealth is concerned. But we really haven’t done so well in the intellectual department. We’ve made money, true, so much of it that our GDP places us proudly in the top three national economies of the western hemisphere. But we haven’t made much impression in the department of deep thought.Now this has nothing to do with our capacity to think deeply as a people. No; drop by the Fish Fry or any bar or dominoes table at any place in the city and listen to the conversation you hear there. Today, as ever, ordinary Bahamians in ordinary places are as philosophical as any professor in any university. The problem is that that philosophy isn’t being propagated in such a way that the whole country can benefit from the discussions, and it hardly ever reaches the level of public discussion.And the public as a whole seems not to miss it. Those people who think deeply and argue logically and discuss big issues with good sense seem to be found in pockets whose discussions don’t reach the wider society, because we haven’t invested in channels to allow for that level of discussion. And the problem isn’t just the fault of the politicians. One of the side effects of achieving the get-rich-quick dream is the belief that money is all we need, that money, and material goods – cars and phones and flatscreen TVs and the latest footwear and Tommy fashions and so on – can replace the ability to think deeply as a nation.The result?Well, the politician in the joke isn’t so far wrong. The best secret to success as a leader – if by “success” you mean being a Man of the People, a Hero for the Masses, the Godfather From Whom All Good Things Come, and all-round demigod – is exactly as he said. The leader who keeps his people wealthy and ignorant has no need of being a dictator, no need for a secret police, no need for anything sinister at all. The population that is wealthy and ignorant is the easiest one to lead; it can buy what it thinks it wants, and it has no concept of what it actually needs.

On Impossible Dreams

This week, I want to write about dreams. It seems to me that we’re a country that has given up on dreaming. Oh, we talk a good game. Our favourite pastime is talking – whether it be talking to God, talking to our pastors, talking to our congregations or constituencies or followers. But when we finish talking we sit back and wait for our pastors or our God or whomever isn’t us to turn that talk into action.But our country wasn’t always like this. In the lifetimes of many of us, we have moved from being a backwater colony of Britain, governed by a minority of businessmen, to a wealthy and independent nation, governed by people who represent us all. Many of us still remember days when being black was synonymous with being poor – too poor to afford new clothes more than once a year, or to own more than one pair of shoes, two if you’re lucky – things that many young Bahamians can’t imagine.And we got here because some people dared to dream impossible dreams.My title is taken from a song that comes from the musical Man of La Mancha, which in turn is taken from Cervantes’ novel about Don Quixote, the Spanish nobleman who went off on impossible quests, always tilting at windmills. The thing about Don Quixote is that he seems mad when you look at him, always trying to do the impossible. The thing is, he always hopes he’ll succeed. But even if he doesn’t, at least he tried. As the last verse of the song says:And the world will be better for thisThat one man, scorned and covered with scars,Still strove with his last ounce of courageTo reach the unreachable star.We’ve got a few Don Quixotes of our own. I want to write about one of them today – Kayla Lockhart Edwards, who has lived her life dreaming so-called impossible dreams about Bahamian culture. For all her adult life, Kayla has been an inspiration for Bahamians involved in the performing and folk arts. This is because she believes – rather, she knows – that Bahamian culture is rich and full and so valuable that every citizen should be steeped in it. And so she’s dreamed impossible dreams to prove it.Not all of her dreams came true. When she dreamed of the school of the arts, her Institute of the Arts, established in the late 1970s after she left the Cultural Affairs Division of the then Ministry of Education and Culture, her plans for the country and its artists were great. They may have been premature – the Institute didn’t grow as planned, and eventually closed its doors – but the dream continues, so much so that a school for the performing arts made its way into the PLP’s Our Plan in 2002, and may even now be on the verge of becoming a reality.On the other hand, at the end of the 1980s, when she realized that we were raising children who didn’t know traditional Bahamian stories, songs, proverbs and ringplay, she brainstormed with Derek Burrows and came up with Dis We Tings – a theatrical revue that took audiences on a journey down memory lane, introducing the younger members to traditional Bahamian culture, and reminding older ones what it was like. The show was such a success it played to packed houses during its two-week run, and had to be revived six months later. She followed it up with two sequels – Dis We Tings II, and Dis We Tings III: Contract Voices, which dealt specifically with that period on Bahamian national history known as the Contract years.Kayla’s dreams came in all shapes and sizes. Some of them were big dreams, like the Institute and the Dis We Tings series. Some of them had big consequences. Dis We Tings brought Bahamian traditional culture back into people’s consciousness, and it’s possible to trace the nostalgic writings of Bahamian musicians back to that series of productions. The early 1990s were also a time when Bahamian artists and performers blossomed; some of that may have had to do with the energy that resulted from the change of government in 1992, but some of it was definitely the result of Kayla’s shows. In this category can also be placed her work with Bahamas Faith Ministries, her integration of culture and cultural activity into Christian ministry, which has changed the face of Bahamian worship irrevocably.But some of her dreams were small dreams, with results that won’t be measured for some time to come. These included all of her CDs, which are collections of traditional and original music, and poetry; her books and her television shows and plans for television shows. Many of her dreams have apparently gone nowhere.But the world has been better for them. We didn’t even know how much better until recently, when Kayla’s illness prompted a gathering of all her friends and colleagues in an outpouring of love and gratitude for all that she’s done through a lifetime of dreaming. This weekend’s concert, featuring the Kayla Edwards Chamber Singers and friends, is a testament to the miracles wrought by Kayla’s dreaming.All too often these days we react to dreamers of Kayla’s calibre the way that the Spanish countryside reacted to Don Quixote’s quests: by laughing, or ridiculing, or saying that the dreams they dream are impossible. But let us take a lesson from this great woman, who never let the impossibility of anything stop her not only from dreaming, but acting to make her dreams happen.And so we salute Kayla – our impossible dreamer. We know that her greatest dreams will come true; those of us she has inspired will all see to that. And the world will be better for them. It’s a promise. We will all strive to reach the unreachable stars.

On Blacks in Uniform

Just recently I had the privilege to spend considerable time visiting Paradise Island. In part, this was because I had several friends and acquaintances in town, and one of the sightseeing must-dos is to show them around Atlantis, as far as possible. In part, it was because of meetings that took place there over an extended period of time.I have to say that I travelled there without much of a second thought. This occurred to the wonder of some of my friends, who asked me whether I needed my passport to go there. I told them I didn’t need anything except to toss one dollar of my money into the till at the tollgate. (Ministry of Tourism officials, I learned, are provided with passes, which probably means that the government puts its money directly into the tollgate. I don’t know where that money goes. Perhaps it goes back to the government, which would defeat the purpose of my putting the dollar in – but never mind that.)There was the fact that in some places in the hotel my husband and I were asked for our room key or fat wads of our cash. As far as that goes, that’s fair enough; it’s the people hotel after all, and they have the right to charge for certain privileges. What you don’t pay for on the swings you’ll spend on the merry-go-round. No; within the confines of the four hundred walls of Atlantis, that’s fair enough.I didn’t need a passport. Most of the time I wasn’t going to Atlantis, or to Kerzner land at all. But what interested me was what I saw in the open air. Other people, especially those who worked there, needed a passport of sorts.Before I elaborate, let me explain a little about Paradise Island, which was the site of my recreation when I was a child. I grew up in the east of the island, and after the weather got warm my friends and I spent our free time on Cabbage Beach and wandering around Paradise like bands of bush urchins in our various brownnesses. When I was growing up, P.I. was mostly pine forest and mysterious trails leading off towards beaches and revelation (or, if you like, towards the beach facing Athol Island or towards the Holiday Inn). Now it’s a bustling city-unto-itself.Oh, people live there. It’s not all Atlantis. There are apartments and luxury homes all along the roads and side roads to the east. Kerzner has not got hold of every acre yet. But what struck me about most of the faces that I saw there, on Kerzner land and off, was this: either they were white, or they were black – and uniformed.I can hear you now. “That’s not unusual,” you’re protesting. “They work for people over there, and they have to wear uniforms as part of their work.” Or you’re saying, “Most service industries require their staff to wear uniforms or identifying clothing.” And you’re right, of course. Uniforms are both necessary and helpful; they instil pride in one’s position, they instil confidence among the clientele, and they may even be aesthetically pleasing overall.It’s not the fact that people are required to wear uniforms on Paradise Island that piqued my interest enough to write an article about it. I get the concept of uniforms, and I even like it in certain times and places. No; what arrested me was the fact that virtually the only black people I saw loose on Paradise Island – not driving cars, or sitting eating in the Hurricane Hole plaza, or behind the counters in Marina Village – were uniformed. Almost all the other faces were white.I can only presume that there’s something very comforting about black people in uniform. Uniforms make black faces look as though they fit in. They allow for categorization, and for control; each uniform tells you where this person is supposed to be, and who’s responsible for this person. All very comforting indeed.And all very odd, to my mind, in a country which gained majority rule without bloodshed, under the leadership of a party who stood for the achievement of equality for all Bahamians, regardless of the colours of their faces. Because the relegating to the black face to its appearance above a uniform smacks to me of a structure of class and race that Majority Rule was supposed to dismantle. It makes me think of slavery, of course; but to make that comparison is too facile and too expected for my main point. What it really suggests to me is that we have moved from an era where black faces were confined to uniforms because they were considered inferior to an era where black faces are confined to uniforms because it’s better for the bottom line.And it seems supremely odd that we appear to have no collective discomfort about this fact. Rather, we seem to be embracing it, welcoming investors who will replicate the “success” of Kerzner and Paradise Island, and spreading it all around this archipelago of ours. It seems crucially odd to me that we have had no true discussion of the implications of what I noticed on Paradise Island – implications that suggest that it’s all right for us Bahamians, particularly (but not exclusively) Black Bahamians, to be considered so out of place in our own country that we are expected to be uniformed to move freely around it.And it seems entirely odd that our governments – black, educated, wealthy, and stuffed with people of good conscience – have no problem with the concept at all.Perhaps we are all, fundamentally, prostitutes. If what it takes to provide jobs and “development” and a better performance on the tourist charts and money and children in private schools, then so be it.But I’m left very uneasy. History shows very clearly what the love of profit can breed. So I wonder. Is the phenomenon of blacks in uniform all that different from the past we thought that January 10, 1967 was supposed to erase? And by acknowledging the profit inherent in the practice, are we all that very different from the West African coastal businessmen who sold their people to slavers in exchange for guns and rum and cold, hard cash?

On the Upholding of the Law

This week, I want to write about the upholding of the law.Now, given the fact that we recently suffered a breakout and riot at Fox Hill Prison, you will be forgiven for thinking that this article is about that affair. And I hope you'll forgive me when I tell you it isn't. In fact, what I focus on in this article may strike you as a little trivial, given the magnitude of the recent lawlessness we've witnessed.But I don't think it is.What seeded this topic in my mind, you see, wasn't the riot, or the general indifference to petty crime all around us, or even the fact that even before January's over we've had several murders to keep our police from growing too bored.What seeded it was the fact that one day recently my father-in-law came to me and said, "I see they took the right house down."He was talking, of course, about the house that was supposed to have been demolished that day last February that my grandmother's house was bulldozed. I found that very interesting, because to take that house down -- even though it was the so-called "right" house -- was in complete contravention of the law.Of several laws, in fact.The first one is a law relating to antiquities. A number of houses in Nassau have been listed as being of specific historic importance to the national and cultural patrimony of The Bahamas. Most of them are in the downtown area, and most of them were owned by the great and the good of bygone days, but not all of them fall into that category. In fact, several of the houses along East Bay Street and Dowdeswell Street are the houses of simpler people, made out of wood, a good example of how more ordinary people lived. Many of them were built by their owners, not by forced or hired labour, and they provide us with all we have to tell us about the people who were here before us. Houses that are listed are prohibited by law from being demolished.The second is a law relating to demolition in general. In order for a building to be demolished, application has to have been made to the Ministry of Works for a demolition order, and the order must be publicly displayed before the demolition takes place. This allows people to know that at some point this building will be coming down, and limits the chance that any human being who has taken to using the building as a shelter is accidentally injured or killed in the process. It also allows for people's homes not to be removed while they are at work, and it theoretically prohibits horrible mistakes -- like the one that happened to my grandmother's house -- being made.I can hear you now: “So what? People do that all the time.”And people do it all the time. In fact, there’s a culture of taking down buildings secretly. I know as well as you do that Sundays are the preferred days for taking down buildings secretly, because most of the world is in church, and the chances of getting caught are slim.You know what we say. A crime is only a crime if you get caught. If you don’t, it’s smart action.The problem is, in this case, it wouldn’t really matter if you did get caught. This crime is the kind of crime that a wealthy person can afford to commit. There are laws on the books against taking down historic buildings, but there aren’t any real penalties for contravening the laws. If you’re caught (and no one seems to be caught) you can be fined. You can also be fined for doing what most people do, and what some are forced to do by the high cost of building in this town – leaving the building there to rot on its own. But there’s no other penalty but that.Sometimes it’s a better business proposition to take the risk and pay the price.So Cascadilla on East Street, a building that once defined much of what is excellent about indigenous Bahamian architecture, is rotting where it stands. It can’t be torn down (except by decree of the government, which as we all well know is above the law), and it’s expensive to fix up. And so it’s dropping down.And so the house on East Bay Street in which Miss Ivy Stuart-Kamler taught piano lessons to many of the people who later became piano teachers themselves was pulled down on a Sunday while nobody was looking.And so my grandmother’s house, which was one of the last standing examples of middle class black families’ homes, was bulldozed last February.And so on and on, despite the fact that there are laws against it. And nobody says a word.And that brings me to the recent prison break and riot, at the risk of indulging in emotional fallacies. Because there are parallels that exist. I’m told (and this tale could be wrong) that the break-out could have been avoided, because at least one civilian knew about it before it happened. But because our culture has made it our business to turn a blind eye to activities that break the law until they affect us personally, those civilians kept their information to themselves.The thing is, there’s a connection between white-collar crime and crime of collars of many colours. The connection isn’t in the magnitude of the action. There isn’t any real correlation, after all, between the murder of a prison officer and the demolition of a house. The connection lies within us. Every time we turn a blind eye to white-collar crimes which are committed in full knowledge of the law, it makes it much easier for us to ignore all the rest.

On Race, Class, and the Tyranny of Worldviews

I had trouble with the title of this one. I wanted to call this article "On Hegemony". To be truthful, I almost did. What stopped me, though, was the vision that assailed me as my fingers hovered over the keyboard -- the vision of my faithful readers picking up the paper, seeing the title, and throwing it down again unread.So I changed the title. But I still think that "On Hegemony" would be better. The word "hegemony" -- which sounds, by the way, like a cross between "hedge" and "anemone" -- refers to a way of seeing the world that's created by a small group of people who are in power. In the past, people might have called it "brainwashing", but it's far more friendly than that. Very specific and subtle ways of viewing the world are created by any number of means, from the spread of world religions to the sharing of philosophies to the coverage of news by the mass media. Hegemonies masquerade as truth, and they govern the way in which we see our world in ways that are often so subtle we aren't aware of them.In The Bahamas, hegemonies undermine our sovereignty in ways we may not even be aware. Because we are so ignorant of our own history and our social context, we are often governed by realities that are not our own. For instance, many of us seem unable to draw distinctions between the Bahamian experience of race and the American one. It has become commonplace to conflate the two. Especially among young Bahamians, who are far more exposed to American constructions of the world than they are conscious of Bahamian realities, there is a persistent belief that "white Bahamians" are controlling the lives of "black Bahamians". This is a belief that, to my mind, is an extension of an American hegemony or worldview that has very little meaning in our country.Unlike the USA, where there was one society of oppression and exclusion, in The Bahamas there were two separate societies. While it is true that for much of the first half of the twentieth century, there was an unofficial code in Nassau that permitted the existence of whites-only clubs and hotels and restaurants and bars, that code was never written into law.Now the difference may seem minor -- after all, when you can't go somewhere, what does it matter if the reason is a legal prohibition or a lack of welcome from the powerful? But it is fundamental. The passage of laws has the effect of enforcing a worldview in such a way that one has to become a criminal to want to change them. In The Bahamas, the racial debate of the 1950s and 1960s was a question of common sense and morality rather than a question of law.What existed in Nassau were two societies, each equally stratified by class. White Bahamian society was never the unified monolith that we like to imagine. While it is true that the richest Bahamians were White, they accounted for only a handful of White families in the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, some of the rest were so poor that the term "conchy joe" had been invented just for them -- they could afford to eat nothing but the conch they dived from the shore. Black Bahamian society overlapped with White Bahamian society economically. At the top were Black (and "coloured") Bahamians of relative wealth and standing like the Adderleys, the Norths, the Isaacs, the Dupuches, and the Butlers, an upper class of blacks that could share some of the economic and educational privileges of the upper classes of whites, but which could not share their social -- or political -- space. This didn't mean that they were excluded from the House of Assembly, either. The Hon. Paul Adderley, currently Acting Governor-General, is the fourth generation of MPs in the Adderley family. What it meant, though, was that until the 1960s their political power was neutralized by the political and economic bloc that was made up of that small group of White Bahamians known ultimately as the "Bay Street Boys".In this scenario was a third class of people, the "Out Islanders", who were all disadvantaged. If you were a white Out Islander, you would have more of a chance to make it in Nassau than if you were black, but your poverty and lack of connections often made that more difficult than the same kind of advancement would be for the Black Nassauvian upper classes. Race in The Bahamas was not the unifying entrée to power or oppression that it was in the USA.So for us to imagine today, in the twenty-first century, that "race" in The Bahamas was (or is) in any honest way comparable to "race" in the USA (which shares similarities with the Indian caste system), is a function of a hegemony, or worldview, that is as dangerous as it is invisible. It's dangerous because -- as I've said before -- it erases the differences that come from class, and that transcend many considerations of race.There's something else that we tend to ignore in the acceptance of that hegemony, something with which I'll leave you to think about, because I haven't made any fast conclusions about it yet. It's this: the people who disseminate the Bad-Whitey rhetoric that so many of us grow accustomed to swallowing, largely through channels like BET and Tempo, are white Americans. And they control, ultimately, the kinds of information and images that get broadcast.It's no accident, to my mind, that the debate that takes place about race these days is a pretty simplistic debate. It's a debate that focuses on victimology, and it obscures -- deliberately, I believe -- references to the strength and power and intelligence and dignity of people who are not white. By far most of the music and images played on so-called "black" channels are misogynistic and violent; on the other hand, most of the sit-coms that focus on "black" people are stereotypical in terms of the attitudes and achievements of their members. Tempo profiles the great entertainers, but does not feature so prominently great Caribbean thinkers like Eric Williams and C.L.R. James and Rex Nettleford and Arthur Lewis, or great African leaders like Jomo Kenyatta or Kwame Nkrumah or Julius Nyerere. To do so, I believe, would create a worldview in which people of African descent are far more varied and valuable to humankind than the current hegemonies allow.And so we have to be careful whose worldviews we consume. We need to be ready to question them, to analyze their messages, and not to be blinded by the colour of the faces they feature. Because it's just possible that those worldviews, those hegemonies, are the new masters -- and we are the slaves.

On the Attractiveness of Exile

It's said that one of the things that sets Bahamians apart from other West Indians is our tendency to avoid emigration. We travel a lot. But unlike Jamaicans, Haitians, Trinidadians, Barbadians, Guyanese and others, we always come home. We Bahamians have been fortunate enough to have had economic prosperity for so long that we've built a society out of people who travelled abroad for education and came back to contribute to their country. It hasn't hurt that most of us who have come back have learned that, to some degree or another, life is truly better here. We may pay more for a pound of butter or a leg of beef, and the cost of a gallon of gas may make us swear, but we have the unenviable advantage of being the architects of our own destinies -- a rare condition indeed for descendants of Africa, wherever they may be found.I've lived long enough now to watch with some amusement the return of many of my contemporaries who made the final life move. The last ten years have brought with them the return to Nassau many of my friends and family who swore that they would never come home. But the air is cleaner, the drives are shorter (despite traffic), the views are prettier, and, for many of them, business is better in the Bahamas.So it may surprise many of you who are reading this column that more and more I have been considering the attractiveness of exile.The Barbadian novelist, George Lamming, once wrote a book called The Pleasures of Exile. He knew what he was talking about. His is the generation of West Indian writers on which the whole genre of Caribbean literature in English is built; his contemporaries number among them V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, the Caribbean Nobel Prizewinners; his fellow Bajan, the great Kamau Brathwaite; Wilson Harris, one of the earliest postmodernist novelists; Samuel Selvon, one of the funniest men ever to put pen to paper; and Michael Anthony, without whom BJC students of literature would have nothing to read. What every one of these writers share with Naipaul, with the exception of Anthony, is that they left their islands to become great. They had to. Their exiles established their careers.Now. The Bahamas has a great track record when it comes to retaining its citizens. We are not a people-exporting nation. But neither are we a great cultural force in the world. And I am not at all sure, at this point, that the two things are completely unrelated.Bahamian cultural products fit overwhelmingly into two main categories. On one level, we make things we think the tourists will buy. When we produce Junkanoo statues and paintings of Poinciana trees and candles made of gelatine with sand on the bottom, we imagine we're catering to the tourist market. But how many of us have taken the time to do market research and find out? How many of us know somewhere deep down, that what we're selling is really junk that has no real connection to our souls, that are just products knocked out for commercial purposes, to be sold to wealthy people who are ignorant of who we really are?On another level, our most popular entertainment is self-referential. The plays that populate our stages these days are more often than not commentaries on recent local events, and speak only to people who are very, very like us. They don't last; they don't travel well; when removed from their contexts, they are curiosities, little more. The same thing goes for our contemporary music. Ultimately, our cultural production falls into two categories: trinkets that we sell to foreign people who don't know any better; or in-the-moment social commentary that has limited appeal to anyone who isn't us.It's no surprise, therefore, that we aren't a culture-exporting nation. We don't have all that much culture that can be exported. Instead of placing our culture and its products in a global context and measuring it by international standards, we tend to insulate ourselves and expect what we produce to exist in a vacuum of its own. And when people arise who challenge what we think should be, we marginalize them, as we did Tony McKay and Amos Ferguson, underestimating their very greatness by the limitations of our own experience.But I'm coming to understand that the value of exile, as places like Trinidad and Jamaica and Guyana have learned is that when you leave your homeland you're able to put your culture in a global context. You're able to judge it from a perspective that is informed by more than the standards and expectations of people exactly like you, and those standards are often highly critical. All too often it's exiles, not locals, who can really see what's good and strong in their culture.When you travel, when you pull up your roots and move somewhere else, your culture becomes important to you. You carry it with you, and you develop it, delve into it, produce it, simply to survive. It is no accident that Jamaican culture has become the world culture of the twenty-first century. Jamaicans don't have the luxury of staying at home; more Jamaicans live outside Jamaica than live in the country, and they have carried home with them. In so doing have infected the world. By exporting people, Jamaica has exported itself.We Bahamians, on the other hand, are comfortable and overfed and making good money. We don't do exile. And for us, it seems, SUVs and digital cable and good meals on Sundays is enough. We have material riches; culture is a luxury we believe we can live without.And so the attractiveness of exile. Ours is a society that is so stifled by the material that it has no room for the language of the soul. And so, for those of us for whom life is more than conch salad and self-referential writing and recycled Junkanoo and the same story sung to the same tune, options are limited. Like Sidney Poitier almost sixty years ago, exile for us looks very attractive indeed.

On the Tragic True Story of Mr. Sam Ahab

There are times in a writer's life when realism just won't do. That's true even when that writer is an essayist who writes commentaries on what she observes. But the writing of essays isn't the only thing that God intended writers to do; and so I hope you'll forgive me if I take a moment to tell you the tragic true story of Mr. Sam Ahab, a relatively young man who, as a child, wasn't really trained up in the way he should go, and so who as an adult found himself a-wander in a wilderness every bit as hot and hostile as the Arabian Desert was for the old-time Israelites -- and blind as could be to the pillars of cloud and of fire leading the way.Now Mr. Sam Ahab was a man of many talents. In this he was rather like the servant who had been given talents by the master who was going away on a trip to a far land. But that's as far as it went. In this story, Sam Ahab inherited his talents from his father, Mr. Sam Ahab Senior, who had received the original five and invested them. Unlike his father, though, the wise investor, Sam Ahab Junior was too cautious or too careless to do much investing. Instead, he did what one should never, ever do with talents: he dug a hole in the ground and hid them in it, and went off to enjoy life's other treasures. Many of these, like the talents, he'd inherited from S. Ahab Senior; and off he went like the prodigal son to spend them in search of warmed beds, loot, and feasting.First of all, he went to visit the Pom-Poms, who looked at what he had to offer and told him it was of little value. Then he travelled among the Nacirema, who looked at what he had to offer, took what was best from it and claimed it for themselves. Then, poor and without dignity, he moved on to visit the Naeb-Birac, who were as poor as he was, poorer sometimes, but still proud of themselves.And then, not unlike the Prodigal Son, Sam Ahab Junior found himself wandering in the desert, cleaning pig pens for a living. The only difference between him and his Biblical counterpart was that he didn't realize that this was what he was doing; the pig pens he cleaned were very nice pig pens, pig condos, in fact, with many and various very nice pigs. But pigs they were. And Sam Ahab cleaned away, believing that because the pig pens were bigger and better than some of the homes belonging to the Naeb-Birac and others, they were not pig pens at all.And little by little, Mr. Sam Ahab forgot that he had been given talents in the first place. He forgot he was a rich man, the possessor of many talents. Thing is, if he had remembered, he probably wouldn't know where to find his talents anyway; he'd buried them in a hole in the ground, after all, and we all know what happens to buried treasure. Maps get lost, vegetation grows over the spot, and sometimes thieves come along and dig it up.Poor Mr. Sam Ahab, stuck cleaning pig pens and forgetting the talents he inherited from his father. What will he do if and when the master returns and asks about the status of his original gift? Will it be enough for Sam Ahab Junior to explain that his father had doubled the talents, or will he be chastised for his own carelessness? Perhaps he'll suffer the same fate of the unfaithful servant in the parable, and the master will take his talents away to him and give them to the ones who were more industrious than he was. I don't know -- but I'm pretty sure the master won't be pleased.Now I'm sure you're wondering just what drug I'm on, penning this story of servants and prodigals and deep-buried treasure. Perhaps you're wondering what to make of this fable. No doubt several of you have cast down the newspaper in disgust, certain now that this writer has finally lost her mind; some of you may be on your way to the toy store even now to purchase some marbles you can share with me out of sympathy.But before you do that, just consider this.Consider the fact, first of all, that this story is both tragic and true.Then consider the fact that our country is made up of hundreds of islands, each of them different, each of them resplendent with talents, with people young and old who could, if encouraged, multiply those talents in ways we cannot even imagine.Then consider the fact that despite this truth, we seem to believe that those talents will multiply without our doing anything about them at all. And so we invest virtually nothing in the research, strengthening, or celebration of those talents. We have no great libraries to preserve our writing and show our children what the generations before them have produced. We have no public theatres to provide outlets for our actors and playwrights and designers, and we are allowing our private ones to starve slowly to death without comment. In a nation where making music was once second only to breathing, we have no concert halls, no conservatory, no programme at all that will enable us to keep the best of us alive. Our young people are supremely gifted; and we have given them no tools to enable them to take those gifts to the world.Like Sidney Poitier almost sixty years ago, the most gifted of our people have to fend for themselves if they have a thirst to create. The luckiest of them are leaving our country in droves, assisted in part by the scholarships and grants we so gratefully give, seeking training and fame and fortune elsewhere, in idioms that are foreign to them and add nothing to the world. And that is a shame.Ladies, and gentlemen, we are Mr. Sam Ahab. We have taken the talents multiplied by our fathers and buried them in the ground, apparently happy (like him) to clean up after the wealthy, unaware that we are wandering in a desert from which there may be no escape. We have forgotten where and what our treasure is, and have left it vulnerable to the thieves are even now seeking to ransack it. When the master returns, what will we have to show him to ensure that he doesn't take our talents from us and give them to nations who take better care of the gifts he has given?

On Why Free Trade Isn't Always Free

There's a lot of talk these days about free trade, market forces, and so on. Even I've talked about it. How can we not? The world is changing, has changed, and unless we change with it, we'll be left behind.Half a century ago, when colonies were becoming countries and the world's leaders were no longer exclusively of European descent, becoming a nation was the most important step you could take. Gaining a voice on the world stage, being able to apply for membership to international bodies, being able to create and express one's sovereignty -- these were the things people fought for, these were what nations celebrated.Half a century ago, though, the greatest forces were not economic, but ideological. The world was divided into two major groups. On the one side were the communist countries; on the other, the so-called "free" world.Now these titles come loaded. Many people who don't know any better tend to assume that communism embodies all that is evil: totalitarian government, atheism, state-controlled production. By the same token, they assume that the opposite of communism is democracy, rule by the people, and that democracy incorporates freedoms of every kind -- of speech, of religion, and of the markets.But it's not as simple as that. The communist ideal is fundamentally democratic; the democracy practised by the Soviets in Russia was not hugely different from the Electoral College system that elects American presidents. Nor was totalitarianism a necessary condition for communism, although the fact that most communist states were established by revolution meant that totalitarianism was often the result.No. The true difference between the communist world and the "free" one was not ideology; it was economics. The proper opposite of communism is not democracy; it is capitalism. Communism was Marx and Engels' answer to the capitalist ideas outlined by Adam Smith and others.You see, communism claims that the labourer is the owner of his or her labour, and that he or she ought to have some control over saying what that labour is worth. (If that sounds very much like union talk, it should; almost all early trade unionists were Marxist). Capitalism, on the other hand, proposes that the person who puts up the capital sets the price. Capitalism, moreover, proposes several fundamental rules that have governed global economic theory for centuries. They are as follows: one, prices are affected by supply and demand; the shorter the supply, the more the demand, and the higher the prices. And two, if given the chance, the market will regulate itself.It's these last two assumptions on which the ideology of free trade in this era of globalization rests.Free trade, we are told, is the hope of the future. If and when barriers to trade are removed, the best products will flourish, prices fall, poverty will diminish, and national borders will no longer be barriers to human interchange. Competition, not regulation, ensures consumer choice and quality control. The freer the markets, the greater the choice for the consumer; and the more powerful and happy the world will become. And in order to create the environment in which free trade can flourish, governments must enact fewer controls.Now there is some truth in all of this economic Darwinism. There is little doubt that in many cases, increased competition means more choices for consumers. There is also little doubt that increased competition brings about lower prices. However, there are a few things missing from this scenario for my liking.In the first place, there can be no such thing as a free market when a minority controls the infrastructure on which the market rests. To put it in more concrete terms: say there's a market that takes place every Monday, Wednesday and Friday in a building downtown. Vendors can come freely to the market and trade. The ones who will be successful will be those who have balanced supply and demand with their own pricing. The competition between them all will regulate what those prices should be. Fine. But they all have to pay for the space in the market that they take up. In this way, the owner of the space is taking less risk than they are, but is assured of an income every time they come, even when they don't make any money. Now when the owner is also a competitor, that gives him or her an extra edge. Compare that to the hardware and software -- the technology, the computers, the telephones, the satellites and the programmes -- that enable the global market to exist. If your economy is not a producer, of these items, you have begun at a disadvantage, and your trade can't be free.On another level, too, neither supply nor demand is random. Despite economists' dearest wishes, politics (the exercise and balance of power) cannot be removed from economic transactions. Take the example of Venezuelan oil. In a truly free market, the supplier with the best prices and the most favourable deal ought to be able to negotiate directly with consumers. Trouble is, there are two categories of players in the oil scenario. One category consists of economic entities -- the oil conglomerates, most of them multinational with a strong US base. The other consists of political entities -- regional governments. Once again, if the market is truly free, both categories should have equal access to the supply. However, the political category is subject to political pressure in a way that conglomerates are not.And then, there's the issue of demand. Free trade advocates speak as though demand is the result of human action, not of design. But this is not entirely true. Suppliers don't leave the purchasing of their products up to bare chance. Instead, they invest sizeable portions of their operating capital on the creation of demand -- a practice more commonly known as advertising. Demand can thus be manipulated to benefit suppliers. Once more, those people most able to flood the market with ads are those who are more likely to succeed.When we talk about free trade, then, it's important to keep all the issues in mind. It's important not to be fooled by the rhetoric of the power-brokers in the marketplace and believe everything they say. To me, the concept of "free trade" is akin to the concept of equality in Orwell's Animal Farm. All trade is free; but some trade is freer than others.

On the Taste of Sand

The ostrich is a lovely bird. Big. Flightless. Beautifully feathered (as we should know, as many of their feathers adorn Junkanoo costumes). Fast.And much maligned.Ostriches, according to legend, ignore danger by burying their heads in the sand. (The fact that they do not do this in actuality is neither here nor there; what matters today is that people think they do.) So, according to legend, instead of running or fighting when they're threatened, they simply stick their heads underground and wait for the problem to go away.The ostrich, not the flamingo, should be our national bird.I'm not talking about the size of ostrich eggs, or the fact that an ostrich can outrun even Tonique Williams-Darling (they can apparently clock up to 31 mph in speed), or even the fact that an ostrich could be turned into a great Junkanoo costume. I'm talking about the head-burying thing.We Bahamians could beat the ostrich at its own game. And I'm not talking about politicians here. I'm talking about us all. After all, politicians these days react far more to interest group interests or public pressure than they initiate great things. So the more we dig little holes in the sand for the heads of our leaders, the deeper they'll bury them.Let's just list some of the issues that are pressing our nation today. Perhaps most urgent is the question of what we call euphemistically "the immigration problem", but which we all know is really the massive presence of Haitians in The Bahamas. They have changed the landscape of our country, we complain. They've changed the personality of our people, who are imagined by Bahamians older than me to be passive and non-violent by nature (though I'm not so certain about that). They crowd our public services, they use up our taxes, they're eroding our culture.Now I am not at all convinced that the issue is as simple as all that, but for the sake of this article, let's just say it's so. What's been our reaction to this problem? We haven't changed our solution in almost forty years. And the problem has not only not disappeared, it's got worse, far worse. The reason for its worsening is not that Haitians are bad people. It's that we have not accepted, or implemented, a solution that will actually work. Our heads are firmly planted in the sand here, and our tails are waggling in the air.But that's not the only issue that affects us. Another one is the question of world trade. Whether we sign treaties or remain isolated, we have to deal with it -- not simply at the Ministry of Finance's level, but at the level of every vendor in the nation. And in fact, it's rarely the vendors who have to be educated about world trade; after all, they obtain their wares, most of them, from all over the world. It's the bureaucrats and lawmakers who need to be inserted into the global context so that our laws and our regulations become relevant again.But are we engaging with the issue and struggling with it and talking about it and carving out a solution that will ensure that we will remain as prosperous in the next fifty or so years of our history as the mid-century Sands-Christie economic model allowed for the last half a century? (If you don’t know which Sands and which Christie I'm talking about, go read up on Bahamian history of the twentieth century and find out. Hint: Not Michelle; not Perry.) No. We're digging holes for our politicians' heads, and sticking them firmly into them. Don't look at regional affiliations, we're shouting; we don't want no foreign workers. And so: heads buried, tails waving, we stench in the mid-twentieth century, with the millennium racing past us.I could go on to talk about Junkanoo, which has reached a crisis of its own -- desperately in need of a new model of governance, but stymied by the reluctance of politicians, civil servants and Junkanoo leaders alike to let go of even a little of their power, and sponsorship and public support eroding . Or I could talk about Bahamian culture in general, which is in dire need of some kind of statutory, institutional body to oversee its development. In a world in which our children have been enculturated by television and film to be fractured North American clones, we continue to believe that it is possible to administer cultural activity from an understaffed division in a ministry whose first interest has, from its creation, been sports. Or I could talk about the cumbersome and ineffectual nature of our educational system, which was created by duplicating the worst of the colonial model and which eradicated the best. Today, we choose rather to assign police officers to high school campuses instead of seeking fundamental reform.Our collective heads are buried so deep in the sand that we are blinding ourselves with the sediment.It's a myth, you know, that ostriches bury their heads in the sand. Ostrich lovers decry the myth as a slander of enormous proportions.But not to worry.We Bahamians can bury our heads with the best of them. Our heads are so firmly planted in the dusts of the desert that we had better learn to love the taste of sand.

On the Boxing of Life

It seems to me that in this society, we're very good at boxing. And no, I'm not talking about the Elisha Obed/Boston Blackie/Ray Minus kind of boxing here; I'm talking about the kind of boxing that creates neat little categories to fit things into and then proceeds to sort the messiness of life into those categories. We've got boxes for political affiliation, boxes for religious belief, boxes for skin colour, boxes for hair texture, boxes for work, boxes for home, boxes for school.We're very good at separating stuff. We're not so good at putting stuff together.Now it's not unusual that human beings categorize things. As human beings, we like to put things and people into groups. How we define our groups is what makes cultures different; what we consider to be fixed, immutable groups in The Bahamas, for instance, may be very different from what people in China or Zimbabwe or Jamaica consider to be fixed, immutable groups. Researchers have written very interesting papers on this habit, in fact; ask me about the bear and the barber sometime.It's a basic human need to organize the world into bits and pieces. It's so basic a need that people become very nervous about things that don't fit into the categories that we choose. Let's take the dietary prohibitions of Leviticus, for instance. The way in which the Hebrews were taught to distinguish those things that were good for them to eat from those that were bad was according to the acceptable categories of animals: things that have scales, things that creep, things that have hooves, things that chew the cud. Those creatures that don't fall into the acceptable categories are those that are unclean.The general rule of thumb about categorizing, boxing, is this: something that falls between the cracks, something that doesn't fit into boxes, is suspect. Some people argue that it's dangerous; and it is. It's dangerous to our organization of life, because it challenges our way of seeing the world.This in part explains why certain animals are fairly universally feared or reviled. Frogs, for instance, are worrisome in many societies, snakes even more so. Frogs live in the water and on the land, which makes them peculiar. Snakes are even more difficult to categorize, and therefore snakes the world over have peculiar power, for good and for bad.This goes for people as well, of course, and now we're getting closer to what I mean when I talk about boxing.Every society, in every age, has its own boxes for people. We box each other according to size, according to weight, skin colour, ethnic origin, political affiliation, religious belief, social class, even team affiliation or theoretical orientation.What we have to be careful about, however, is boxing ourselves.There's a danger, you see, with boxing. It's necessary, but it's also addictive. And, with all addictions, there comes a time when boxing things, people, beliefs and thoughts does more harm to us than good.That time comes when we begin to believe that the boxes are more important than the things we put in them. When we begin to believe that the categories we've created and the criteria we use to sort things into those categories are real, we become slaves to those categories. Rather than understanding them as tools to help us make sense of our world, we regard them as set rules by which to judge the world, and by which to judge ourselves.Let me give you an idea what I'm talking about.The first box I want to talk about is the box that says human beings must confirm to certain norms and behaviours. The assumption that all humans who live in similar groups make is that the way in which We do it is the only way possible, or right. Often We believe that that assumption is divinely sanctioned, and any deviation from it is not only mistaken, but evil. Anthropologists call this ethnocentrism, and every culture does it; the thing is, because we all engage in our own sort of boxing, every culture judges others' boxes as evil and wrong.Take, for example, our morality box. We seem to be fixed these days on the innate evil, the inherent immorality, of same-sex relationships. A couple of years ago we were worried about homosexual men; today we're discussing "lesbian gangs". The thing is, when we analyze our ideas on these subjects, we discover that they're not consistent. They're not consistent with one another, and they're not consistent with what we profess to believe. The Bible, to which we refer with pride and inaccuracy, makes far less fuss about homosexuality than it does about lying (bearing false witness), idolatry (having false gods), covetousness (wanting what others have and we don't) and adultery. Each of these is explicitly prohibited in the Ten Commandments, but homosexuality is not, despite its denigration elsewhere. Presumably if it were as important to the Hebrews as it is to us, Yahweh might have included it on the tablets of stone. It is included in a list of improprieties in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but so are a number of other sexual sins that we don't even mention: incest, rape, fornication, adultery.My point? It's important to us not because it's important to God, but because we've created a box for our sexuality and everything that falls outside that box is taboo. We don't make nearly as much fuss about grown men sleeping with their daughters and sons, their nephews and nieces, or about men of the cloth or the court or the podium soliciting junior high school children to give them disease-free sex. And we certainly don't discuss the very clear sin of adultery, one of the Thou Shalt Nots clearly etched in Moses' stones. After all, if we did, we'd have to build a very big box.So we have to be careful of the boxing we do. We have to remember that the boxing of life is a tool, not a decree. We have the ability to break out of boxes that don't fit us, and we have the ability to remake the boxes that no longer make sense. We have to be careful. Because some boxes smother and kill.

On Sin and the Refugee

Okay, I admit it. The two, sin and refugees, don’t normally go together. At least, not officially. Sin is sin, and refugees are, well, they’re just unlucky.

But the recent events along the Gulf Coast of the United States, and the social fallout that has followed, seem to suggest something different. There's a subtle battle of terminology that's been going on under the surface, in the background, upstage, behind the main action played out by FEMA and the President and the Mayor and the Governor, and it's this: nobody's all that sure what exactly to call the people who have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent floods.

Some people want to call them "evacuees". Some people want to call them "victims". Some people want to call them "survivors". Some people want to call them "displaced". What is pretty clear, though, is that many people—most prominent among them prominent African-Americans—are resisting calling them refugees.

Jesse Jackson's one of those who think that "refugee" isn't the right word. Al Sharpton's another. Both believe that to apply the word "refugee" to the New Orleans evacuees is racist. Both justify their positions by making reference to the fact that the victims of Katrina who have been pushed from their homes are citizens of the United States of America. The very obvious implication: Americans are Americans, and not refugees.

Now this does and doesn't make sense to me. The official definition of a refugee is someone who is forced to leave his or her home to seek refuge elsewhere. In its purest sense, the word refugee has no colour, creed or nationality; it is a word that describes an accident of history, the after-effects of some event or another that is beyond the control of the people affected. This makes the individuals who were forced to leave Montserrat in the wake of the volcanic eruption, the people who leave Haiti on a daily basis to find food and work and cash, and the New Orleanians who fled their own floodwaters members of the same category.

But there's another definition of a refugee, one that depends on the connotations and the uses of the word, one that isn't always shared by people in different segments of this earth we cohabit. It's this; the word "refugee" is generally applied by people in rich nations to people in poor nations who are forced to leave their lands by war, famine, poverty or disaster. It's a smug kind of word that reminds those people who use it that not everybody is equal. In these terms, it's not just a word that describes the condition in which these people find themselves. It's a word that categorizes groups of people into "Us" and "Them".

And refugees are always "Them".

The fact that African-Americans share this idea, that African-Americans are sensitive to the term and its connotations, that they may even accept the connotations of the world as real or right (as witnessed by their indignation that citizens of the USA should be called "refugees"), to my mind, simply reinforces the very real inequalities that divide our world. We Bahamians, we like to believe the African-American myth that skin colour unites us all. After all, we are all Africans in our genes, aren't we? We are all brothers. A mere accident of birthplace shouldn't make all that much difference in where we stand in the world.

But when it comes down to it, there are times, even in the United States of America, where (as we've all been reminded) racism is alive and well, when the lines are drawn, even by our black brethren themselves. What Jackson and Sharpton are doing, whether they realize it or not, is drawing the line for themselves. They may be Black, yes, their ancestors may be African like ours, but they are also Americans. And Americans, unlike the rest of us, cannot be refugees.

You see, there's a third connotation to the word "refugee" that I haven't dealt with yet. And it's the one I started with. Whether we like it or not, or admit it or not, there's a fundamental moral bias that adheres to the concept of being a refugee. Refugees, you see, are homeless people that we may hate or we may pity, but that we almost never respect. It's as though being a refugee is a sin, not a misfortune. It's as though being driven from one's home is some kind of divine judgement that follows some awful, awful deed. The way we react suggests that we may feel for those "poor people", but we'll never, ever reach them. This is what lies beneath the idea that "we" (Americans, Bahamians, the rich) couldn't possible be refugees. We didn't share their sin.

When I raised this idea for the first time on a blog (www.ringplay.com), a reader made a comment that took the idea further. This idea of sin and the refugee, he argued, is ingrained in our "Christian" nation from birth. As he says:

The very first account in the bibles of both Judaism and Christianity helps to bind “sin” with the “refugee”. The sinners were sent packing from their home—that perfect place of peace and prosperity—because they didn’t have their act together and did something dead wrong. They became displaced and had to end up catching hell because of “sin”. Because of sin they lost everything and even Nature turned against them. I mean even Satan was a notorious refugee. And we could go on and on with the examples.

“We” are sure the refugee, the migrant, the evacuee, or whatever we want to call them deserves the mess they're in—at least that’s what the collective psyche seems to be thinking. And to boot, we don’t want them spilling into our “pristine” environment, bringing the bad luck, doom, and god’s wrath with them—do we?

I’m watching Louisiana carefully. I’m watching the reaction of Americans to their own domestic refugees, their own fellow Americans. The people who want to escape New Orleans are not Haitian or Mexican; they’re American. But it doesn’t matter one bit. It’s not the nationality that matters, it seems. It’s the sin of being a refugee.