On Amnesia

I sat down to write on 9-11 with the commemoration activities for the World Trade Center bombing going on in the background. From time to time I would look up at the television or pull up a website and be reminded of the magnitude of what happened on September 11, 2001. Three years have passed, and no American — no citizen of the world — is allowed to forget that date.I couldn't help but contrast the American commitment to remembering with our own approach to significant dates in our history. We all know the saying unless we know where we have come from we cannot know where we are going, and we have become very good at mouthing it. But putting it into practice is a far different matter.I say this because we are nearing the end of 2004, a year which has — or should have — particular significance for Bahamians. When we talk about freedom, democracy, liberation, or any other lofty ideal that has basic resonance for post-colonial peoples, the significance of this year is fundamental. Let me explain why.August 1 marked the 170th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.January 1 was the 200th anniversary of the creation of the state of Haiti, a republic that was founded by slaves who fought, successfully, for their freedom against one of the greatest European empires of the time.September 29 is the 275th anniversary of unbroken parliamentary democracy in The Bahamas.Now I ask you.How many of us, besides the intellectuals and oddballs like myself, have any real awareness of these events?I'll wager you this. If I were to walk into any classroom in this country and ask the students there to explain to me the importance of September 11th, I would find no shortage of people who could do so, just as I suspect that the numbers of people who could tell me of the achievements of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks or Malcolm X would far exceed the numbers of people who could tell me about Cyril Stevenson or Milo Butler or Arthur D. Hanna.And I bet if I asked them, or anyone on the street, or regular callers to radio talk shows, or other average Bahamians — why 2004 was a significant year, they would have a similar difficulty. You see, we Bahamians are generally able to speak to the triumphs and challenges of our immediate experience, but when it comes to remembering the triumphs and challenges of the past, we are hard-pressed.Unlike our American neighbours, who approach the dates that are important to their history with a sense of reverence that subsumes everything else, we in the Bahamas practice a kind of collective amnesia that enables us to move forward at a rapid and bewildering pace, but that erases from our identities the memory of those things that make us who and what we are.The year 2004, you see, is a year whose significance goes far beyond the glory and devastation of August and September. In addition to the dates I listed above, there are others. For example:In 1844, the Nassau Guardian was established, which marks 160 years of unbroken press coverage in the Bahamas. The fact that 2003 was the centenary of the establishment of The Tribune has its own significance. For 160 years, Bahamians have had the opportunity of being fed news, of being served by writers who enable us to look at ourselves in all our aspects.In 1929, Nassau and Andros were struck by a hurricane even stronger and more devastating than Frances. Like Frances, the hurricane of 1929 parked over the capital for days — three days and nights to be exact — but unlike Frances, it was estimated to be a Category 5 hurricane. No building in the capital was unscathed. The impact on the Bahamian economy was far-reaching. The cost of rebuilding Nassau was such that none of the other islands that were affected by the various hurricanes that struck the Bahamas between 1926 and 1932 could adequately be supported. This fact, combined with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929 and the resulting Great Depression, changed the demography of the Bahama Islands forever.It behooves us to remember these events. 275 years of unbroken parliamentary democracy, 200 years of the struggle against slavery, 170 years of emancipation, 160 years of consistent press coverage, 75 years since the devastation of the capital by the 1929 hurricane — these dates matter. They matter because they form the bedrock of our existence, whether we know it or not, and they matter because they tell us who we Bahamians are: a people born from slavery and colonialism, a people who have faced adversity and who have triumphed without outside help, a people who have plenty to celebrate in our past, our present, our selves.Next week we will celebrate. We will acknowledge our most recent athletic achievements, and we will use our celebrations to expand our local hurricane relief efforts even further. Let us do both with our whole hearts. But let us also take some time to look behind us, to mark our milestones, to reflect on our past and on our ancestors.And let us mark this date in our history somehow as well, or else our commitment to amnesia may mean that in five years' time the events of this year may have faded into the background as well. And to do that will serve none of us well.

On Selfishness

Just lately, I've noticed a tendency for us to become selfish, or, at kindest, self-absorbed. You'd think that material prosperity would make a people more generous, not less; surely the more one has, the more one would want to share. But it doesn't appear to work that way. The more we accumulate materially, the more we seem to demand.Here's why I say this. During the passage of the hurricane, which, when it hit the Bahamas, was a strong Category Four, I listened with some disbelief to the people who phoned into radio stations to complain that they had no water or no electricity or (I laughed out loud at this one) no cable service.What struck me was the fundamental selfishness of such observations. The people who called in to complain seemed to have no concept that Bahamians other than themselves have to put their own lives at risk in order to provide such services. And what struck me even more was that the response to these complaints was not the outrage I expected, but an encouragement of them, a discussion of the inability of our utilities to provide Bahamians with the kind of service that Bahamians had come to expect.It was a hurricane, for heaven's sake, a time when safety comes before comfort. Electricity is shut down to keep people from being unnecessarily electrocuted; water is turned off to avoid contamination. In the middle of an act of God, it would seem that prayer is a more appropriate response than gluing oneself to a television screen.I was reminded of the Americans who asked me, when I was a front desk cashier in a local hotel, whether I thought the travel agent would refund them their money because it had rained for the whole time they were in the Bahamas. Only I tend to forgive tourists more, because, well, they're tourists. And at the time I thought how I never thought I'd hear a Bahamian make such a complaint, because, well, Bahamians know better than to expect the weather to accommodate their whims and desires. But this last storm has proven me wrong.Then there were the people who took advantage of the heavy weather and the desertion of the streets to go and rob businesses, or the men who dressed up as policemen and used the storm to gain entrance to the homes of unsuspecting citizens whom they robbed.It takes a special society, to breed people who prey on others in the midst of misfortune. The nation that produces citizens who find nothing wrong with complaining that they are uncomfortable when others are losing their homes, or with pretending to offer help when all they are intending is harm is a nation in which selfishness rules, in which neighbours mean nothing.Contrast these attitudes to the defiance and the pride demonstrated by the man who must be the greatest leader this region has ever known, no matter whether one agrees with his politics or not — the man who brought first world health and educational standards to a country not 100 years out of slavery — Fidel Castro. In preparing his people for Ivan's onslaught, he declared that he would not accept aid from any country currently levying economic sanctions on Cuba. By being willing to suffer material deprivation for the sake of a principle, he demonstrated to his people that there are things more important than comfort in this world. It's a lesson we Bahamians would do well to learn.You see, self-sufficiency and independence are hard things to come by these days. It's far easier to be materially comfortable and financially dependent on someone else. But there's something to be said for the kind of independence that Castro preaches; for it's one thing to declare oneself politically independent, to have a flag and an anthem and a head of state. But it's quite another to demonstrate oneself willing and able to survive a storm and to look after oneself.We’re very good at waving our flags and donning our colours. But if we can't survive for long without electricity and running water, there's not much to be said about the ability of our nation to survive over time.And survival is the thing at which we Bahamians were once very good. Until only sixty years ago, we were one of the poorest countries in the region. Ours was not a colony that produced profits for Mother England; even white Bahamians were poor. Whatever "superiority" they asserted resided in the colour of their skin, not in the girth of their purses. Despite our poverty, however, we were rich: in selflessness, in community, in our abilitiy to survive. It's a part of our culture that's rapidly disappearing; but it's a part that we would do very well to preserve.You see, it's all very well and good to ask Caricom for help with the rebuilding of Grand Bahama and Abaco in the wake of Frances. But even our northern devastation pales in the face of the decimation of Grenada; and we must remember that Bahamians, by and large, are people with means, and Nassau escaped the worst of the damage. I believe that before we beg others for help, we must offer some ourselves.The good Lord said that it was is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. I begin to understand what exactly He meant. Now I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a Grenadian at this moment, with 90% of the capital damaged, including the hospital, the disaster management headquarters, the parliament buildings, the prison, and the Prime Minister's home. The magnitude of the rebuilding effort boggles my mind. I believe that even though we have suffered our own damages, as the richest nation in Caricom, we must have some obligation, to contribute at least something to the rebuilding of the capital there. I would be a far prouder Bahamian if, while we talked about helping Grand Bahama and Abaco, we spared a thought for and sent a coffer to Grenada and our other neighbours.

On Monkey See

My grandmother's house was built in the late 1860s out of materials salvaged from ships destroyed in the Great Bahama Hurricane of 1866. The house is made of wood, raised on limestone blocks. It weathered the five awful hurricanes of the 1920s, and stood. It weathered Betsy in 1965, and stood. It took David in 1979, Floyd in 1999, Michelle in 2001. For the last few years it has fallen prey to vandals, being unoccupied and the estate not fully settled.My grandmother's house weathered the 24 hours of Frances, and still stands. Not a shingle is gone from the roof. The damage to the outside is the result of termites and vandals.I'm writing this article because I have had the privilege of living in old houses all my life. I realize my experience is unusual for many Nassauvians. We urban-dwellers have developed the tendency to bulldoze things that bear the weight of history; we seem to prefer to pull down and rebuild rather than to shore up and restore. Why fight with termites and dry rot and having to replace wood as time goes by when it's just as easy to build something fresh and new?My grandmother's house is testimony as to why. Our ancestors knew what they were doing when they built their houses. And I'm not talking about the fancy houses downtown here; I'm talking about the clapboard houses that we see everywhere in the older parts of town. If those houses have had any basic care throughout their histories, and have not been used as quick-rent-earners by rapacious landlords, who take out more than they put in (and let's face it, some of us are guilty of this), chances are they are still standing now, when many newer houses have failed in some way.Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers knew what they were doing. They were building houses for themselves and their families to live in, not to sell to people they might not know at all. They cared about what they were building. It had to be strong, and it had to last. And so they took their time with their work. They took pride in it; and they were concerned about the quality of it.They didn't build their houses on mortgages from banks that hurry the process; they built them out of their own savings, and often with their own labour or that of their friends and neighbours. It might take them years of living in one room or two, years of working on the house until it was finished, but they made sure what they did was good and strong.And third, they knew what country they were living in.They knew that they were building for a land with torrential rain and regular hurricanes, some of them extreme.They knew that they were building for a country with a long, hot, humid summer, and they had no air conditioning to cool it down.And they did what any intelligent human being would do: they designed houses that fit our climate, our dangers, and our lives.Take a look at the houses our ancestors built. Drive through Grant's Town and Fox Hill and Bain Town and down Shirley and Dowdeswell and East Bay Streets, and look at the principles of building they used. Note the things they all had in common, even after the Second World War, when ordinary people began building with concrete and stone. Note what we Bahamians built before we started looking north and copying What The Americans Did.Our old houses have porches. They keep the people and the houses cool.Old houses are raised up on blocks. To get into my grandmother's house, you have to climb up six or seven steps; the floor of her porch is level with the top of her wall, nearly four feet off the ground, and floor of the house is one step up.Old houses have shutters on their windows. The push-out kind have a double purpose: they provide shade for the inside and protection for hurricanes.Old houses are built to let heat out, not hold it in: with have high ceilings and higher roofs, and ample cross-ventilation. My grandmother's house had a door at the front and a door at the back, and a passage down the middle. Most days when the front door was open (the back door always was) there was a lovely breeze wafting down the passage, no matter how hot it was outside.Our ancestors were the experts in building for the kind of country in which they lived. So why have we all but given up their ways? Why are we dying to inhabit the kinds of houses our northern neighbours do?Well, the old people have a saying: monkey see, monkey do. We have a penchant for copying the Big Guys, as though we have no technology worth anything ourselves. And so we have gone in for building low, squat boxes with low ceilings and roofs, high windows which give no breeze to any part of the body that really needs it, and nowhere for water to go but into the house itself. There's no cross-ventilation. Now that we can afford it, we do what the Big Guys do, and burn up fossil fuel air conditioning our places, rather than letting God do our air conditioning for us. And when hurricanes come along, instead of leaning out of our windows and pulling our shutters to, as Grammy and Granpa used to do, we line up for plywood (like the Big Guys) and lose our tempers when the lumber yards run out. And when we go too far (as, I'm told, Grand Bahama did for a time, by having different building codes from the rest of the Bahamian nation), we run the risk of suffering as the Big Guys do when hurricanes hit.Come on, Bahamians. We are people, not monkeys. Our ancestors were in this region long before the Americans even owned Florida. We're the experts here. The only reason we copy Americans is that we don't know how good we are. It's time to acknowledge our strengths, and to celebrate them. Not to do so isn't only injurious to our self-esteem; it's hard on our economy, and it impacts our very lives.

On Culture and Trade

FTAA. WTO. Globalization. These are all words that we're becoming familiar with. But what do they mean?This week I had the fortune of attending a meeting of the OAS that looked at the economic implications of culture. Turns out that the world is suddenly waking up to the fact that culture has an economic existence. The trouble is, it's also a world that's embarking on adventures in free trade.What does this mean? Well, three things that are most relevant to us here in The Bahamas. The first is that culture is no longer considered a luxury that eats up money and gives back little in return, which is how most countries in the world have regarded it for many years. Rather, culture is regarded as an engine of economic development, a means for the eradication of poverty. And this view isn't coming from cultural practitioners alone; economists are also pointing this out.In Mexico, where the meeting took place, for instance, culture accounts for 6.7% of the Mexican GDP, which is a serious chunk of Mexico's economy, which focusses on manufacturing and industry as well as tourism. In Brazil, culture generates 6% of the GDP, and 5% of all jobs. In the USA, culture produces 7.75% of the GDP, and is responsible for 5.5% of jobs. Whether or not culture is valued or supported, it generates income for its country.The second is that, at the same time as countries are beginning to recognize the economic value of culture, its contribution to the wealth of a country, the principles of free trade are threatening to weaken local cultures. This is because at the moment, the principle of the free market includes cultural products. Under the WTO agreement, and under the FTAA which follows WTO principles in the main, countries do not have the right to pass trade laws that give preferential treatment to their own citizens.To bring it home, what that means is that (for example) if The Bahamas signs on to the FTAA or the WTO, it will not be legal for the government, or any Bahamian artists to place limits on, say, the importation of foreign music or musicians. Limiting foreign acts because they are foreign will not be an option. Bahamian musicians are already marginalized in their own country, a nation that welcomes more than 4.5 million tourists annually; only a select few are able to find work in their own professions. The implications of free trade in cultural goods and services are such that their ability to do so will be even further curtailed.The third is that free trade implies a sort of open season on Bahamian products in the marketplace. Unless we are very careful and vigilant, things that we consider fundamentally and uniquely Bahamian — which may also be things that could be profitable in a free market — are vulnerable to being patented or copyrighted by people outside of The Bahamas. In the worst case scenario, we Bahamians will have to make, use or sell those things that we consider traditionally ours; in the best case scenario, we will not be positioned to make money from them in the international arena.Take the example of the Trinidadian steel pan, traditionally handmade in Trinidad, and a sizeable industry. Not long ago a company in Germany or Japan obtained the patent for the mass-production of steel pans, thus earning the right — in the global market — to produce Trinidadian steel pans in factories and thereby to corner the European market. While Trinidadian panmakers may still benefit from their hand-made pans, they have no claim to the profits that are made off the factory-produced instruments whatsoever.In the Bahamas, we are very cavalier about our cultural products. From those consumers who say that there's no value in Bahamian music, choosing instead to invest their money in American hip-hop or Jamaican reggae, to the people who regard all of our indigenous cultural wealth, from Junkanoo techniques to the various styles of plait, we have a healthy disregard to the wealth at our fingertips. Young people are not interested in mastering the traditional ways of doing things, opting for the faster, the easier, the flashier; straw vendors prefer the fast turnaround, buying mass-produced bags from China instead of supporting local Bahamian straw-workers.But know this. While we may not be aware of the potential monetary value of Bahamian culture, be sure that Americans and others are. If we are not careful, we will find ourselves like the Trinidadian panmakers — our Junkanoo trademarked by an American, our drums mass-produced in Pennsylvania, our straw-work marketed out of Miami. And the money from these things will be lining the pockets of others, and not of ourselves.So we need to wake up. We need to recognize the economic value of our cultural products. We need to find ways of preparing for the free market by protecting what we have, trademarking and patenting and copyrighting what is ours. We need to become more active on the international scene, negotiating, with other countries, for the exemption of cultural products from the free market.We need to know who we are and what we're worth. And we need to take the steps to let the world know we know.

On Performance

The recent visits of the Jabulani South Africa Troupe, which was well received by Bahamians in Nassau, Freeport and Harbour Island, and by the Yangzhou Chinese Puppet Troupe has put me in mind of a fundamental, and often overlooked, reality.Bridges are built by means of performance.Think about it. Here we had two groups of people from lands far away from our own. They mounted productions that they performed in pubic spaces, and the messages that they got across were understood by many in the crowd. In both cases, they were messages of joy, of pride. The Chinese shared with Bahamian audiences, the vast majority of them in Freeport, their ancient and complex culture, while the South Africans communicated their ride and joy in this their tenth year of democracy.And we understood them.Human beings, you see, have a universal language. It's a language that's currently underused here in the Bahamas, but it's rooted so deep within us that we can't escape it. It's the language of performance, and it's the one language that can be understood around the world.The language of performance is the language of human beings standing up before others and communicating their emotions, their thoughts, their philosophies, by the way they move in space, the way they face their audiences, the way they possess the stage they inhabit. Performance is the place where music, art, movement and literature can come together in such a way that together they communicate to large groups of people. To some degree, music and art and literature on their own are merely objects, commodities, unless they are accompanied by a person who delivers them. CDs, books and paintings, divorcable from their contexts, provide some insight into the people, the societies, that surround their creation. But when that message is delivered by living human beings, then it can be appreciated in its fullness.Now we Bahamians come from a society and a culture that is fundamentally rooted in performance. Only one generation has passed since children on the Family Islands would be entertained on a nightly or a weekly basis by ol' story told to them by their elders; not even that long stands between Nassauvians and their traditions of school plays, church hall concerts, recitations and festival performances.One of the greatest benefits of living in a society of performers is that everyone has the chance to demostrate his or her individuality. In performance, no one is anonymous; everyone is given a chance to express himself or herself, to know he or she is alive. Performance provides individuals with a chance to be noticed, an opportunity to be praised.You'd think every society would encourage its children to become involved in perfomance activities. But oddly enough, performance no longer seems a priority for the parents and elders of today.It's not that people are no longer moved by live performance. The recent successes of the Independence celebrations, of Michael Pintard's Woman Talk, and of the Jabulani and the Yangzhou troupes, give the lie to that. Even the fact that people are addicted to church services that feature preachers as riveting in their behaviour as any actor, and, at election time, to political rallies, reveals further that we Bahamians respond on a visceral level to orators, actors, dancers, politicians and other performers. But it is equally true that performance is no longer given pride of place in our everyday lives.This came home to me when the South Africans performed; they often called upon ordinary Bahamians to join them on stage. There was something very remarkable about those who did: they were either Bahamians of a certain age — thirty years old or more — or they were visitors to the islands who came with the intention of leaving inhibitions behind. The few young Bahamians who were pulled into the performance space appeared awkward and shy, and they went through the motions in an agony of self-consciousness that betrayed a longing to return to the anonymity of the crowd.And where, I ask myself, did this come from? How did we, a nation of natural performers, breed a generation of young people who would rather be invisible than face an audience? And even more important, have we begun to appreciate the level of culture loss that this would seem to imply?It's important we recognize that this change is not accidental. First of all, we have closed off all performance arenas. Our churches, which at one time hosted weekly recitations in their halls and required every child to participate, have brought that performance into the sanctuary and have turned services into shows in which only the initiated may participate. Our schools, which once put on regular plays, musicals, talent shows and beauty pageants seem to have deemed such activities frivolous wastes of time and money, and leave them for only special schools to do. Television and electric lights have replaced storytelling ; GameBoy and Nintendo have imposed a world other people imagined onto our youngest and most creative Bahamians. Even Junkanoo has changed. No longer is it acceptable to simply rush in the streets. Instead, young people who want to take part must become parts of large groups where their anonymity and passivity is not challenged.We have closed every door that affords our children the opportunity to face their fears and express themselves in a positive, public, individual way. We have become a nation of spectators. Our children no longer learn how to perform.It's time, I think, for us to reclaim this bit of our culture. It's time to recognize how fundamental performance is to our self-esteem, and to give it the respect it deserves.

On Tiefing

There's an old Bahamian proverb that goes something like this: "Tief tief from tief make God smile."Well, when He looks down upon The Commonwealth of The Bahamas some days, the good Lord must be grinning from ear to ear.I'm not just talking about your typical kind of tiefing here. We all know that certain material possessions are part of the public domain. From flowers on gravesides to toilet paper in offices to new-brand garden furniture, the owners are roving, ready to collect.No.I'm talking about intellectual property here. I'm talking about the tiefing of ideas.This is a concept with which I dealt often when I was a COB lecturer. As a teacher of English, one of my jobs was to assign research essays to students. The process worked like this: students had to go and uncover information about topics that interested them and then write an essay about it. But in so doing they had to be mindful of three things:1. Where they got their information;2. The author of that information;3. Showing where the information stopped and their own ideas began.This proved to be extremely difficult for many. For them, "research" consisted of going to a library or the Archives or the internet and copying verbatim what they found there. Or, better, it meant calling a Bahamian expert on the telephone and asking them everything they knew about a topic, and then writing that down.Sometimes they might be inventive, rearranging the ideas a little bit, quoting one or two passages and incorporating the rest into the body of the paper. Sometimes they would not be inventive at all, but would simply download the information wholesale and submit it as their own work.They'd be hurt and confused when I'd give them a zero for these essays and threaten to report them to the Academic Board.You see, there's such a thing as intellectual property. These days, it's the most lucrative kind of property there is. We live in the information age. Wealth no longer rests in the hands of the persons who own the factories, who move cotton or coal or steel. The Jet Age is long gone; the Concord has been grounded. No longer is it important how fast a person can get from point to point, whether a plane is capable of breaking the sound barrier or not. Even the ability to launch men and women into space is no longer a crucial skill. Whether or not we can travel light years or move at warp speed is immaterial; we can send data at the blink of an eye.Knowledge is most certainly power; and the person who "owns" information is in a powerful position indeed.This is why the stealing of intellectual property is punishable. In college, it's called plagiarism and can get a student expelled from an institution and blackballed by any other. In the real world, it can get a person stripped of his or her degree and fired from his or her job.It can get a person prosecuted for fraud. It can get a person sued, successfully, for breach of copyright, and ordered to pay the owner of the idea whatever a court decides is the appropriate payment.Ideas — and particularly ideas in written form — are in fact commodities that impart power to the owners. In the university, they are the way by which academics make their reputations, and shape their careers; in the marketplace, they provide artists with a way to earn their living. In today's world, those ideas themselves, not to mention the words in which they're expressed, belong to the people who dreamed them up and wrote them down.They are not public. They do not lie there simply for other people who haven't done much thinking about the topic to come along and pick up and present as their own.In the world of the information age, ideas are perhaps the most valuable property anyone can own. This is why stealing someone else's words, or their song, or their tune, or their design, or their movie script, or their dance steps, is so very serious.Here's what really interests me. When we take others' intellectual property and passing them off as our own, we are in fact saying that our ideas aren't worth very much at all. They can't be; otherwise why would we have to tief someone else's? What's more, when we steal others' ideas we seem to suppose that (a) what we're doing is not tiefing, (b) no one will notice that we've copied/downloaded/lifted the idea anyway, and (c) if someone should notice, nobody will care. This supposes that no one's ideas are worth all that much.In a small country like The Bahamas, this is a dangerous state of affairs. The more we go around stealing others' ideas, from their styles of music to their stories to their songs and their words and their designs, the more we are leaving our own ideas open to be stolen. And in this world of globalization, we become more and more vulnerable to that kind of robbery. What we have is valuable because it's unique. And the more time we focus on tiefing from others, the less time we spend guarding our own.After all. You know what they say. Tief tief from tief make God smile.

On Research

There are few things more confident than a Bahamian in an argument. And often there are few things more wrong.You don't believe me? Speak with a politician. Disagree with him or her, if you dare. Or read any newspaper. Listen to any talk show. Attend one of any number of churches. Provoke an argument, and listen.Do more than listen. Take a notepad with you. Jot down the things that the writers and the speakers tell you. Then go look those things up in the library or on the internet, and see what you find.I'll bet you plenty that you'll find, more often than not, that what you've just heard (and may have chosen to believe) is so far away from reality that it might qualify as old story.This is because we Bahamians have developed the habit of pontificating without researching our topics first.Before I go on, let me clarify what I mean by research. I don't mean collecting a range of opinions or arguments that agree with our own. I don't mean talking to a whole lot of people about the topic in question and cobbling their ideas together with ours. And I don't mean looking for documentary evidence that supports the answer that we started out with, even if it means having to chop up sentences to create quotes that work for us.What I mean is examining a topic with an open mind: approaching the subject with a question, not an opinion; collecting many different viewpoints and facts about the subject, reading through them, and getting some general idea of the range of opinions that exists on that topic.I mean approaching a subject with enough humility to admit the possibility that what we thought about it might just be wrong.As a people, we're really not good about research. Not even the people whose bread and butter comes from finding out, from seeking the range of facts about a particular event or issue — for example, journalists and teachers — make a habit of researching facts. Short-cuts are so much simpler. Rather than finding out as much as possible about a person or an issue, it's far easier to just ask a speaker for a copy of his speech, and then print it — errors and all — in the newspaper. Instead of questioning the "facts" in the latest textbook and seeking to verify them with independent investigation, it's so much easier to teach everything that's in the textbook, even when the information is irrelevant or wrong.We are a people who accept plenty at face value.We are a people who can be very easily conned.Let me give you some examples. Over the past week alone, listening to the radio and the television, I've collected the following so-called facts:The British Colonial Hotel building is over 100 years old (A radio news report).Haiti was never colonized, which is why the country is in the state it's in (A caller on a radio talk show).Homosexuality is unnatural and not found in the animal world (A sermon given at a recent family-values rally).I went off and researched each one, and discovered that not one is so. Here's what the research actually revealed:It's true that a hotel called the Colonial was built on the site of the present British Colonial in 1899. However, it burned to the ground in 1922 in one of the most spectacular and disastrous fires of its generation, and had to be rebuilt in time for the 1922-1923 season. The original hotel was wooden, and none of it remained after the fire. The new hotel was stone, and that is the building that still stands.The research also raised the following bit of information: the song "Do A'Nanny", which was made popular by Ronnie Butler in the 1960s, was in fact about the Colonial fire, and some of the original words included:The hotel burn down to the groundNo more dancing in this townEh-eh, do a nanny do.As for Haiti, she was most definitely colonized. Sainte-Domingue was the pride of the French Empire, and produced more sugar for France than any other colony. But some years after the French Revolution in 1789, the slaves in Haiti had their own revolution, when they rose up against their masters, expelled the French, and set up the first Black Republic in the New World.In fact, the reason that Haiti is poor is that the neighbouring slave-owning societies refused to trade with this new Black republic. In order to recognize Haiti as a country, the Europeans imposed such a fine on the nation that the government is still still paying it today.And with regard to homosexual animals, scientists have discovered many creatures who mate with partners of their own sex. In fact, some long-term studies of animal societies appear to suggest that whenever animal populations become too large, and overcrowding occurs, the incidence of animal homosexuality rises, which leads some scientists to argue that homosexuality is a natural response to overcrowding.Yes indeed. There are few things more confident than a Bahamian in an argument.Just do the research before you believe anything he or she says.

On Bahamian Music

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

On Absurdity

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

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On Development

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

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On Imagination

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

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On Government

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

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On Paradise

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

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On Fact and Fiction

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

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On Cultural Production

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

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On Generation Property

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

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On Being Human

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

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On Self-Reliance

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

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On Self-Esteem

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

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On Democracy

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

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