On Christian Values

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

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On Marriage and Family

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

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On Patronage

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

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On Art and Truth

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

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On the Passing of Good Men

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

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On the Ghetto

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

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On Elitism

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

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On Populism

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There's a joke I once heard about the Bahamas government. If you ever find a good institution within it, don't tell anybody. As long as it's secret, it'll be fine. But if it ever becomes public knowledge, run. Somebody with power will come along and redeploy the equipment and the personnel and share all that goodness around.You see, we live in a society that believes in populism. Baldly put, populism is the practice of supporting the rights of the common person against the privileged elite. It's a political philosophy that has governed the Bahamas since 1967. There's no need to wonder where it came from; for almost three hundred years the needs and desires of the majority of the people were systematically ignored, to the benefit of a few. In reaction, the Bahamian governments that followed majority rule made it their responsibility to meet the needs of the people. And so we have eschewed elitism, making it a cardinal sin. We have all embraced populism.And embraced it to the point of absurdity.

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On Tourism

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I want you to do me a favour. Take a minute and write a short paragraph describing The Bahamas.Done? Good. Now let me guess: you wrote about the beautiful blue water, the white sandy beaches, the coconut trees, and the warm and friendly people. (Those people who didn't pick any of these things skip two paragraphs and read on.)Now tell me how many times you went to the beach in the past year, how much of that gorgeous water you swam in, how many coconuts you ate from the shell, and how many people you were warm and friendly to on the way to work this morning.We are living a myth. It's not our own myth. It is a myth created beyond our realities by people who live in cold cities with industrial economies, who dream of endless sunshine and warm water and sand that's as white as a wedding. Most of us live out of sight of the sea, and have to drive or catch bus to get anywhere near it. Most of us relate more to our fruit trees and our shade trees than we do to the coconut palm -- we rest in the shade of silk cottons and ficus, we grumble at the dirt dropped from our beautiful and troublesome poincianas, and we snack on jujus and guineps far more than we feast on fresh coconut these days. Our coconut water is as likely to come from the food store as from the shell; and as for the sun -- well, very few of us spend more time out in it than we have to. And as for the friendliness of the people: well. Warm and friendly we may be, but we're also stressed-out and overworked and underpaid and forced to sit in more traffic than is good for any human.Tourism created the myth. We sell it, but we don't live it. In the words of Marion Bethel: in our air conditioned service, we are blessed waiters of grace divine.But it doesn't have to be like that.

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On Carts and Horses

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Now that the silly season is over, the year has been spared, the halls undecked, the paychecks spent and the A-groups robbed, it seems a good time to lay out something I've been thinking about for quite a long while. I touched on it last week in my article about the sport of Junkanoo, but I didn't elaborate; so here's the elaboration, for what it's worth.These days, when we think or talk about Junkanoo in public we have a tendency to think and talk about things that are in fact incidentals. If we describe it to people who have never seen it, chances are we'll talk about the costumes. We may mention groups and performance, and we'll probably talk about the way in which all of Bay Street rocks when a big group comes down the road.We talk about the costumes. Or the B-52s. Or the brass section. Or the choreographed dancers. Or the bellers. Or the bleachers, for heaven's sake, or the tickets, or the way in which the fans respond. Rarely do we talk about the heartbeat of the thing.Rarely do we talk about the rhythm drum.

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On Junkanoo

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Well, it's official. Junkanoo is not a cultural event. It's a sport. Complete with winners and losers, gamblers and fixers, points and penalties and appeals.Think about it. In all the debate that we hear about Junkanoo every year, how much do we hear about the event itself? About the innovations in the art, the changes in the music, the use of colour, the presentation of the performances?The answer: virtually nothing.What we hear instead are insults to the judges, to the committee, to the Ministry, to the winning groups, to the losing groups, and to anyone who ventures to say anything remotely sensible about the whole. All that matters to the group, the press, the public, is who won and lost the parade. A sport, plain and simple, in which the referees are perpetually suspect and the umpires always under siege. Somebody get rob; somebody do the robbing. But we rarely hear anything about the art of Junkanoo.

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On National Identity

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When I was a little girl, my grandmother - who had been raised on the Royal Readers - used to ask us how we got so tall.  We'd always say we didn't know.  She would say:  "Oh, you just growed, hey? Like Topsy?"We inhabit a society that seems to believe (like Topsy) that things like culture and identity just grow.  We don't appear to believe that we need to do much to help them along; they come up, like seeds from the ground, and they become whatever they are supposed to become all on their own.The fact that we believe this shows just how far we've come from our farming roots.  People who grow things for a living know that seeds sown don't "just grow"; if they do, you can't predict the outcome.  There are all sorts of things that can happen to them along the way, as Christ's Parable of the Sower makes clear: the sun can scorch ‘em, birds can swallow ‘em, thorns can choke ‘em, stones can kill ‘em.

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On Creativity

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Recently, I've been watching a series of documentaries on the making of different blockbuster films. The first set was the collection of "Making Of" addenda to the Indiana Jones DVD trilogy, in which Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas talked about the process of creating special effects without the aid of computer graphic imaging. The second set was the supplementary information accompanying The Lord of the Rings DVDs.It's the latter that inspired me most. Lucas and Spielberg, for all their innovative spirits, are Americans working in Hollywood, and as such they are part of the media establishment that dominates the world. But The Lord of the Rings is the product of a relatively unknown film director, Peter Jackson, from a little-known country, New Zealand. In his creative madness, he decided to take on a project that no one believed could be done: turning the seminal fantasy of twentieth-century literature into a live-action movie. And he does it! What's more, he does it by taking hundreds of impossible things and making them possible: like shooting the trilogy as one long movie, like creating elves and hobbits and uruk-hai and ents who so are believable onscreen we never think of them as anything other than people, like shooting in locations that look the way many people imagine Tolkien's Middle-Earth.And I asked myself: why can't we do that here?

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On the Mind

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List the things you consider markers of what is "Bahamian". Go on. Put the newspaper right down, take up a notepad, and write down ten things.Done?OK. Now count and see how many of those things have anything to do with the mind.Let's see. Chances are you included Junkanoo, rake-n-scrape, conch, peas-n-rice, sun-sand-n-sea, Christianity, the way we talk, maybe Androsia.Chances are that you didn't include anything that demands much in the way of thought.

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On Discipline

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Almost a month ago, a group of Chinese acrobats came to Nassau and performed for Bahamian audiences. There were sixteen of them. Their average age was twelve; and they held their Bahamian audiences spellbound with their feats.One night -- the last night of the run, as is typical of performances in Nassau -- the side of the Kendal G. L. Isaacs Gym towards which the acrobats were performing was filled to capacity; there was standing room only, unless we wanted to open up the performance and turn the stage around, and seat people on the opposite side of the gymnasium. The acrobats performed, earning their "oohs" and "aahs". They were not alone; two Bahamian martial arts schools performed as well. In each case the performers demonstrated a level of discipline that was both remarkable and admirable.But the Bahamian audience did not.

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On Slavery

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Well, there's a dirty word for you. Slavery -- something that we would like to forget, or to deny, or to lock down in our history books and sanitize forever. We really don't like to talk about it. At all.

But we need to talk about it. Because even though it was abolished in 1834, it reminds alive and well today. And if we think we've left it behind, we've got to think again.

Now let me make something clear. This is not going to be a diatribe about race and racism. We have been raised to think of slavery as something that has to do with black people -- Jemimas and Toms -- all working on a plantation for a master, subjected to his whims and fancies, never free to go anywhere without his leave or direction. Now this form of slavery did indeed exist, and was most insidious. The enslavement and the dehumanization of people based on physical appearance and geographical origin was probably the most disruptive method of slavery, and the most complete; whole societies were built upon the social and economic structure of the slave plantation, and the legacy of that error remains with us today, among the descendents of both the masters and the slaves. But what I am going to talk about today is something a lot less easy to categorize, and therefore much harder to fix.

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On Mediocrity

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When I was a high school teacher, the thing that shocked me more than anything wasn't the rudeness of the students, the wildness of their lifestyles, or the paycheck, or anything that people suggested would shock me. What really shocked me was the fact that I taught students -- bright, articulate students -- whose aim in school was to pass. All they wanted was a 50% for their work, nothing more. They seemed to be quite satisfied with that.In fact, the most frustrating question I've heard as an educator is: "Why you give me this D?" -- as though grades were things I picked out of the sky. My answer -- the answer of most lecturers who "give" Ds -- was always: "I didn't give it; you earned it all by yourself." My question is: if students don't want Ds, why do so many of them work so hard to attain them?

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On Race

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Before I begin, let me make one thing quite clear. I'm writing about race, not racism. The first one is the idea that human beings, like animals and plants, are members of different groups that are physiologically and genetically different. The second one is making distinctions -- social, political, economic and otherwise -- based on these differences.I'm writing about race.It's an idea that has been around for a while, but not forever. It's an idea that can be traced back to a specific political point in history -- and by history, of course, I mean the history of the world, and not of the Bahamas. The idea of "race" was invented, and its invention had a function. That function: to conquer the world.

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On Service

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I've got a question. Why is it that in this country, service is a dirty word?I'm not talking about the kind of service that we charge money for, the kind of service that makes us a "service" economy -- though I could be. I'm talking about the kind of service that regards it as an inherent part of any blessing to give a bit of it away -- not to the pastor who hooked us up to the Good-Things Pipeline, but to people who have given us nothing, because they have less than we have.I'm talking about loving our neighbours as ourselves.

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On History

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October, we are learning, has been dubbed Bahamian History Month. As a result, the airwaves have been resonating with talk about national heroes, honours, and heroes' parks.At the same time, though, I'm sure there are some Bahamians out there who are observing these activities with a jaded eye. What national heroes? What's all the fuss about? Why shove aside Columbus, for heaven's sake, who is a hero of universal magnitude (having put our islands on the European map) for a clutch of Johnnies-come-lately in three-piece suits?Too many of us, still, thirty years after independence and thirty-six years after we began to govern ourselves, believe that things Bahamian are second-class, gauche, nothing much to write home about. And too many of us who think that are black.

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