On Death

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

On Foreign Investment

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

On Innovation

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

On King Canute

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

On Golden Chains

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

On Immigration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You tell me.

On What We're Good At

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

On Nine to Five

I was sitting in traffic the other day. Sitting in traffic, by the way, is something I would prefer not to do. It's a supreme waste of time, particularly on this island which is only twenty-one miles long. And a question bubbled up to the surface of my mind. It was this. Why am I sitting in traffic?The answer, on the face of it, was so simple one would have to be simple not to get it: Because it's a quarter to nine in the morning.It was far too simple an answer for me, I can tell you. My mind is an unruly thing. Another question came burbling up. But why?The answer came from Out There, wherever That might be: Because people work nine to five.My response was: no, they don't. And I meant it.Now, I'm not talking Sting-time here, though I could be. No; what I mean is this. People's brains don't simply turn on at nine in the morning and turn off at five. Thinking isn't something that knows the hours on the face of a clock; thoughts come when they come, and there's not a lot one can do about it. Contrary to what we've been trained to think, work — and particularly twenty-first-century work — is not best done in eight-hour blocks, with an hour in the middle for lunch.So why do we insist that work involves reporting to a building at nine o'clock and leaving it at five?To answer that fully, we have to have some idea of the origins of the twin concepts of labour and production, which incorporate the idea that a person can exchange what he or she does with hands or brain for money. Now, the thought that what I produce is separable from me, something I can sell at a price determined by someone else, has the kind of peculiarity that becomes greater and greater the longer you examine it, but never mind that.Quite simply, it's an idea that became current during the industrial revolution, when the creation of factories and mass production changed the way that work was regarded. In a factory, you see, individuals are hired for the use of their hands and for their presence, and very little beyond that. Especially after the production line was invented, the only purpose for employing human beings in a factory was to make sure the machines did their jobs as they should. But in economies that rely on other kinds of production, labour is not something that you can separate from people. One carpenter is not just as good as another, nor are two masons alike; you pay for the quality of the work produced, and not for the body that produces it. Even in an agricultural society, labour is only saleable during periods in which it doesn't matter who does the work, such as harvest time; during the rest of the year, skills matter.In short, the creation of factories created the concept of work as being something separate from the human being. Before that time, one did one's work where one found oneself; work spaces and home spaces overlapped, and workdays were determined by the projects one had to complete. On the farm, for instance, an eight-hour day means very little at all. You work till you finish what you have to do! If you finish it in four hours, good for you — and if it takes you twelve, well, there it is. Similarly, for an artisan or an artist, work is measured by the completion of a job. There's no value in sitting down from nine to five in one's workspace if it produces nothing at the end of the day.Now this makes sense to me. Work should be measured by achievement, by what is accomplished in a sitting, not by how long one spends on the job. Thing is, our society appears to believe the myth that a job is something detachable from a person. Someone asking for "a job" is more often than not asking for a place to be sent for eight hours a day, five days a week, with a pay check coming every now and then. What that job is hardly seems to matter. If one reports on time, leaves on time, and pushes the requisite amount of paper or cement around then that pay check just keeps on a-coming.Now this, I submit is odd. Even odder: far too many of these jobs appear to have to start at nine in the morning and end at five at night.What I don't get is this. It's perfectly possible for a person to be present in body between nine and five and doing no work at all — and it's equally possible for a person to be in traffic, or in bed, or in the shower, and to be working harder than the person at the desk. Inspiration doesn't know hours; anyone who has been woken up at three in the morning with an idea that just won't quit knows that this nine-to-five deal is a scam, an artificial set period that make it easier for accountants and bosses to deal out the dollars, but which really has very little to do with work.I have been a bureaucrat, a hotel worker, a writer and a teacher in my life. There's nothing magic about nine to five beyond the magic imparted by traffic jams, stress, and air pollution. I had the great fortune to have been employed in a twenty-four hour service industry at the beginning at my career, and so learned early that even working eight hours a day doesn't mean you have to work nine to five; I worked every shift my position allowed, from seven-to-three to four-to-twelve. As a teacher, I learned that being in the classroom for six hours a day is no measure whatsoever of how hard one works. People who believe that teachers have it good (they get off at three/they have long vacations) should try it. During those six hours, there is no downtime; you're lucky to get to sip some tea. Even when one leaves the classroom, one continues to work as long as one is awake, preparing, marking, thinking. And as a writer, I know that my brain does not turn off when I leave the office. Oddly enough, it seems to turn on.The thing is this. We no longer live in the industrial age. In this country, we never did. The age of the internet erodes all boundaries. Nine to five is obsolete. Isn't it about time we recognized this fact, and gave some thought to changing the horrid nine to five?

On the Stopping of Bucks

It wasn't me.It's not my fault.Whatever it is, I didn't do it.We live in a country, or in an era, or in a culture, or in something, where personal responsibility is hard to come by. Very few of us have ever done anything wrong. No. We make mistakes; none of us is perfect. When we transgress, it's always because of some external force. The road was slippery. The tree stepped out in front of us. Our finger slipped on the trigger and we miss and shoot the man. Or, we grow up poor. We didn't have the advantages you have. We don't know no better. The neighbour made us do it. The devil made us do it. God made us do it.We live in a society in which bucks are passed around and around, where if we watch them we are liable to grow dizzy with the movement. If we listen to ourselves, we are all leaves floating in the wind, corks a-bobbing on the sea. We have no volition of our own; we are at the mercy of circumstance.It is a rare, rare thing to find someone who will say, as American President Harry Truman once became famous for saying: the buck stops here.No. Around here, bucks don't often stop. Nothing is ever anyone's fault. We play the politics of blame so well we have almost forgotten how to engage with issues. The result: we become so busy pointing our fingers at one another when we notice problems that we never get around to fixing any of them.Let me begin with the freshest controversy: Junkanoo. It's January, after all. Now I shall say first off that this year has been one of the better ones with regard to blame and finger-pointing — at least so far — because to some degree there are fewer scapegoats around. This year the Junkanoos, particularly the competitors, held a lot of the responsibility for the parades. The Junkanoo Corporation of The Bahamas was given the authority to deal with the training of the judges and the tallying and the administration of the parades, and for the most part things went very well. Except. On Boxing Day, someone overlooked the biggest competitive category at all.Now we must admire the way in which that mistake was handled. The Chairman of the Parades Management Board took full responsibility for it. It may not have been directly his fault, in that he didn't overlook the Overall Group Costume category personally, but he took responsibility for it because it was his job to be responsible for it. Applause, Ken — well done. What he didn't say, but could have, was that the overlooking was a collective thing: that it wasn't something that one person or one group messed up on, but that it was something that happened in an open room in full view of the group observers who had come in to monitor the judging and the tallying of the parade. The Chairman wasn't the only person who had the responsibility of ensuring that the right things were provided to the judges; every group who sent an observer shared in that responsibility. And it would seem to me that because not one of them noticed the error, the responsibility must be shared.That's a concrete example, and a recent one, of how bucks get passed — and how they get stopped. We’re about to enter a two-year period of buck-passing now, and we can prepare ourselves for some spectacular examples. The general elections may not be around the corner, but they're down the road, and already bucks have begun flying around. It's always easy when one is in opposition to point at the weaknesses in the government's actions — and for the government to throw the weaknesses back at the opposition. No problem ever has an origin (beyond the actions of The Other Party) — and no problem has a real solution (beyond the deliverance of The Only Party). Buck-passing at its best.The thing is that reality works against us all. While we're so busy passing the buck — from NJC to Ministry to JCB, or from FNM to PLP to UBP, or from little man to big man to the Devil/God — problems are multiplying. When no one is responsible, everything crumbles.There is a branch of mathematics and physics that argues that no action that is independent, that even the smallest activity has repercussions elsewhere in the world. It's called chaos theory, and it demonstrates that the flap of a butterfly's wing in the Amazon can create tornadoes in the mid-western USA. According to this theory, the most careless, harmless action can have massive results far away. Of course, (and as usual), the scientists are arriving late at a point that theologians have known forever — since Cain, if we go in for the Old Testament. We are our brothers' keepers; we are all responsible for what happens around us. To pass the buck is not to duck responsibility at all; it's to ensure that nothing ever changes, nothing ever improves.Of course, it's not our fault — is it? We exist on the borders of the United States of America, after all. And they had this culture long before us.We can't help it, right?Wrong. As soon as we shoulder the responsibility we all bear for the society in which we live, as soon as we accept the buck, we can help it — and we will.

On New Tings

Bahamians, it's said, love new tings.To some degree, that's true. Just let a new restaurant open up. You better hope they got valet parking, because without it you'll never get near the place. You better eat before you go, because you won't get a table until well into the digestive process, and your stomach will start in on itself. And you better find out if they take reservations, because without them you may have to wait a week or two to even smell the door.Or just let a new car come on the market. Even better, let it be a big car, expensive, preferably with some gold on it somewhere — on the logo, maybe, or where lesser makers would put chrome. And then watch the roads, and count to see how many of them appear within the next month or so.Or just let a new service be provided for (say) a cell phone — or even let a new cell phone hit these shores. You'd be surprised (maybe you wouldn't) how many people invest in it.Or just let a new place of worship open its doors. Better yet, let that place of worship come complete with a new building or even a new style of service, and watch to see how full that place will become within a week or two of its establishment.But just don't mess with our overall way of life.I've got a couple of things in mind here, and most of them have to do with my ministry — two in particular. The first is National Youth Service. And the second is Junkanoo.You see, the idea of National Youth Service, which comes onstream at last this year, this month, has been kicking around for longer than many of us have been alive. (I use that "us" advisedly, by the way; I'm a little older than the idea, but only just.) It was first advanced by the brand-new Progressive Liberal Party shortly after they came to power, and discussions intensified about it right after Independence. Nothing happened back then, because the idea was too foreign, too new, and the populace resisted so strongly that the government dropped the idea. It resurfaced back at the end of the 1980s, when it became apparent that the so-called drug scourge had affected a whole generation of young Bahamians, many of them men; but once again the electorate struck back. No service for my good child, was the refrain. (Some people read that as no mixing — of classes, of races, didn't matter, but never mind that now.) And so it is that almost forty years after the idea was first introduced, National Youth Service is finally becoming a reality.Now some may argue that the reason it hasn't happened before is that the time was not right, or that the pitch wasn't right, or that — well, something wasn't right. I'm not so sure that those reasons aren't correct, but I'm not so sure that they are, either. I'm not so sure that it matters. What matters is that we did not like this new ting. And so we fought back against people of greater foresight and vision until it became absolutely clear to many of us that this was something we had to do, or else.And then there's Junkanoo. Well, there've been plenty of new tings happening in that festival lately, from the introduction of $75 dollar tickets to the institution of a new management structure. It's not entirely clear that Bahamians are overwhelmed with these changes. While some people flock to the best seats, many others — many of them relatives of the very people rushing in the streets — can't afford a good spot, and are excluded from full enjoyment of the achievements of their loved ones. And while the new management structure seems to have made the group leaders happier by raising the level of trust between the people operating the parades and the people competing in them, from the outside — or from the bottom — it's hard to tell that anything's different at all.You see, I'm not so sure that the adage that Bahamians like new tings goes much beyond our surfaces, or far beyond our stomachs (and even then, we're picky about what we put there). If a new ting comes attached to a new way of thinking about the world, a new way of seeing ourselves, we run like the blazes in the opposite direction. If we return to Junkanoo for a moment, consider what's really new about it. When was the last time we say something really revolutionary in someone's presentation, or in someone's costume or design? When did someone go out on a limb and bring something truly radical to Bay Street?The answer lies in the groups who don't get all that much airplay, who don't feature big in the public imagination: Colours, who build small, audition their members, score their music, and paste according to a limited palette of colours; Barabbas, who invented a new way of carrying cowbells and started a whole craze in drumming; the Fox Hill Congoes, a group who are almost gone from the public mind, but who introduced the legions of big bass drums to the parade.The fact that we don't celebrate these groups for their innovations, but rather ignore their new ideas or ridicule their difference and continue to pick our winners from the tried-and-true pairing of SaxoValle suggests to me that we really don't like new tings as much as we think we do.You see, the new tings we love best are those that come from away. New ideas, new habits, especially those proposed by Bahamians, are harder to catch on. We'll change clothes and hairstyles and vehicles and televisions and furniture and eating places and preferred vacation styles, but we're a whole lot slower to welcome new ways of doing the things we take for granted.The trouble is, until we wake up, look hard and embrace innovation, we are going to lose more and more of ourselves. Cultures thrive on change. Without innovation, our culture will continue to assimilate changes that come from beyond. And we'll find that the new tings we do like are going to come more and more from the outside, and will speak less and less to us about our selves.

On Being Caribbean

Peter Minshall is in town.For those of us who don't know who Peter Minshall is, or who may imagine that his contributions may have very little to do with our lives, being so plugged into the energy of our northern neighbours, it's time to think again.Think, for instance, Trinidad. Think Carnival. Think big themes, social commentary, giant puppets, super-costume; and then think Junkanoo.Minshall is the foremost designer in Trinidad's Carnival, where his work has revolutionized the way in which people regard and think about their festival. His creations are not simply pretty, you understand; sometimes they are frightening, shocking, or horrifying — but they always make you think. And his contribution is not limited to Trinidad. He's been invited to design the opening ceremonies for not one, but three Olympic Games: Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992, Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996, and part of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies in 2002.His influence on Bahamian Junkanoo has been profound, but it isn't what people may expect. While we often think that the brass lines and the tricks and the feathers are all "Trinidad" or "Carnival" imports, they're not where Minshall's made the most impact. No; Bahamian Junkanoo leaders were in Trinidad in 1983 when Minshall's shocking presentation, "The River", which provided a commentary on the rape and murder of purity, harmony and nature by technological man, appeared, and were there again, with Committee members, in 1986, when "Rat Race", a meditation on modern urban Caribbean life, appeared. No; where Minshall's influence on our Junkanoo has been greatest has been in the area of theme.There's a category in the judging process for Junkanoo that's called Execution of Theme, and it's here that Minshall's influence can be seen. Of all the groups who rush, it's the Valley Boys who have mastered this best. While other great groups like the Saxons and One Family and Roots have long been executing their themes in purely artistic fashions, using — often brilliantly — the designs of their dancers and their bellers and their back lines to illustrate their theme, starting in the second half of the 1980s the Valley Boys took a leaf from Minshall's book and began to perform their themes. Who can forget the moment when the Valley Boys' free dancers, all costumed in Defence Force camouflage, threw themselves onto their bellies at Charlotte Street and began to crawl? Or when, for their Wedding, the Valley Boys released balloons at the rollover, and danced down Bay Street, to cut the wedding cake in Rawson Square?For Minshall, you see, whose background is theatre, Carnival — and by extension Junkanoo — is the theatre of the street. Caribbean people, like Africans and Asians and unlike northerners, perform in the outdoors, in the open. The great Caribbean performance spaces are not the grand theatres and opera houses of New York or London; rather, they are the fields and parks and streets of cities.What are we doing with ours?I ask because it seems to me that we have been given the task of caretaking a special gift — the gift of performance, the gift of communicating with our whole bodies, of turning our selves into instruments for the expression of the human soul — but that we seem to be far more interested in who gets to administer the arena for this gift, or in who wins the competition that accompanies it. And that winning is everything. It doesn't matter whether what wins has lifted us out of ourselves, or has simply rerun what was done last year and the year before; it doesn’t matter whether the whole thing, the art of Junkanoo is moving forward, taking us with it, or whether it's sliding into irrelevancy. We've been given a gift to look after, and we're wasting it on politics and competition.What Peter Minshall has to teach us isn't how to build costumes or even how to put themes out on the street, though we'd certainly do well to learn both from him. No. The message he comes bringing is that we are Caribbean people. We can quibble all we like about the veracity of that fact — we can argue that if the Caribbean Sea stops at the southern shores of Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico it means we're outside the Caribbean, or we can claim that because Columbus, God bless the man, first set foot on one of our islands, it knits us up inextricably with the Caribbean — but the truth of the matter is that Junkanoo says it all.For Minshall, you see, the essence of the Caribbean being is hybridity — that glorious mixing that happens with cross-fertilization and jumbled-up genealogies. Like Caliban in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, we are strangers in our own lands, speaking with words that are foreign to us. Our fullest expressions happen beyond words — in the language created by music, by art, by our bodies in the dance. Junkanoo is the ultimate site of these expressions — or at least, it's supposed to be, and it can be. It's for us the most sacred work that any of us can perform. But Junkanoo, weather or no weather, is not invincible; if we play with it too much, we can lose its truth and be left with an empty shell.And so let us celebrate our Caribbeanness by recognizing the sacred trust that draws us all together: the trust that has us all, from Nassau straight down to Port of Spain, engaged in the creating of that wonderful theatre that is Junkanoo and Carnival. And let us respect that trust so much that we forget our differences and our competitions and our postponements, and concentrate on the work itself.

On Sovereignty and Second Homes

There is a village in Jamaica called Martha Brae. It is located today in the heart of the tourist playground of the island's north coast, and if you look its name up on the internet, most of the links that come up will be tourist-related. Most of them will speak of Martha Brae as a river, and will say nothing about the village. Most of them expect tourists to be living in Montego Bay, the nearest city. But as is the wont of the tourist industry, which is in many ways the plantation writ new, very few of them will lead the curious to anything that talks about the people or the culture of Jamaica.We live in a world of unequal wealth and power. We happen to live in a part of that world that balances on the cliff-edge of prosperity. There are few, if any, sovereign Black nations that boast more than The Bahamas does in the way of wealth, comfort, infrastructure and standard of living. Nevertheless, our wealth, our way of life — which the vast majority of us take for granted — are more precarious than we imagine.The recent study on poverty levels in The Bahamas indicates that 9% of the population lives below the poverty line, which is calculated at $7.84 per day ($2,863 per year). It further reveals that the distribution of the Bahamian poor is uneven; that the poorest Bahamians live on the southern Family Islands, where the poverty rate is 21%. A closer look at the statistics proves interesting. Only 6% of the total population of poor Bahamians lives in the Family Islands; the majority of the poor live in the cities of New Providence and Grand Bahama. Moreover, the gap between the two largest ethnic groups whose people live in poverty is wide; 25% of the Haitian/Haitian-Bahamian population live below the poverty line, compared to 8.7% of Bahamians.Now when compared with the poverty rate of the Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole, which stands well over one-third, we are doing well. That isn't to say that we must be complacent about our poverty rates; the fact that 76% of our poor live in our cities, where our affluent also live, suggests that we have plenty of work to do. But I would also suggest that we consider something else. The study calculates poverty in terms of cash income, and assumes that one needs cash to purchase everything that one needs. Now as far as Nassau and Freeport and perhaps Marsh Harbour go, that is true. But in the case of the southern islands, where the cash poverty rate is the highest, that is not so.You see, people in the Family Islands still fish and farm. Now that may be a foreign idea to those of us who — like me — make their living by getting into cars or buses and travelling to jobs, the most preferable of which involve sitting in air-conditioned offices making contact with other people by telephone, and spending our cash to eat our breakfasts, lunches and dinners. But foreign as it may be, many Family Islanders still have less need for cash on a daily basis than we do here in New Providence. So while $7.84 a day per person may not buy very much in New Providence, and while it may buy even less on a Family Island, the need to spend that $7.84 is less crucial. As long as Titta is growing her corn and grinding it into grits, as long as Pa is fishing — off the rock or on the shoals, doesn’t matter, or Co'n Slim is conching, as long as the whole family is crabbing when it rains, the basics of nutrition are cheaper in cash terms than they are in the cities. Bahamians in the southern islands may be poor, but they don't have to starve.Not yet, anyway.It's important, when looking at statistics and working out what to do about them, to remember that numbers aren't people. Numbers lie there on the page and let you look at them, while people get up each morning, pray to God, and go about their business. Bahamians have been doing that for centuries. It's important to remember that the last sixty years of our history mark the first time that two whole generations of Bahamians have had the ability to live a better life than their parents had. And it's important to remember, and to celebrate, what it was that allowed us to survive back in the days before the tourist dollar never done.It was land.You see, The Bahamas has only become cash-rich since we've discovered the benefits of prostitution. I am not talking about the literal exchange of sexual favours here. For the past sixty years, we've been placing a price tag on land — the very thing that saved us from poverty in the past. These days, we're selling everything that we previously considered useless, from the powdery white and pink sand that can't grow anything good to eat, to the arid hills that have no water beneath them, to the marshland that is impossible to farm, to the mangrove stands that are difficult to fish. Our newest policy: to sell off empty land throughout the Family Islands to wealthy northerners for their second homes. The idea is to get chunks of cash for land that isn't being used, and to generate jobs for the locals, thus raising their daily cash income. It's a bit like mining; you go into spaces no one would ever go to dig out the gold, and get rich quickly in the process.It's a good idea, especially for politicians, who work in five-year increments and rarely calculate beyond the nearest election or two. But, like most easy things, it's a bad idea in the long term.You see, the village of Martha Brae is a very special place, because it is a plot of land that Jamaicans who were formerly slaves bought for themselves. They bought it collectively, painfully, over a period of years; but it means everything to them because there after slavery was no good land left for the ex-slaves to live on. The best land on the island was owned by people who lived far, far away. Martha Brae was an affirmation of independence, a celebration of freedom and sovereignty, and poor as the inhabitants are, they have the dignity of their history, and they have their pride.We, who are still land-rich, must be careful in our quest for quick cash. Our zeal to eradicate the poverty rate in the Family Islands must not lead us to make the mistake of thinking that cash is the only way of measuring wealth. We must always remember the fundamental truth of all ex-slave societies: that prosperity built on servitude is not prosperity at all.

On the Invention of Santa

Santa, they tell me, used to dress in green. He also used to walk around on foot, wear a long robe, and visit children on December 6th. He didn't originally come from the North Pole (wherever that is), or have reindeer, or carry toys; he was Turkish, believe it or not, and while he was the patron saint of children, he was also the patron saint of sailors, scholars, merchants and thieves.Christmas is coming, and, like it or not, we're being flooded with images, stories, and concepts that affect us and our children. Now I'm not one of those people who believe that Santa is an anagram for "Satan", and make a whole lot out of that fact (after all, "God" is an anagram for "dog" and vice versa, and "evil" is simply "live" spelled backwards — we can do a whole lot with this game); but it's always useful to know where the things that take prominence in our lives come from, and what purpose they used to serve.It's useful because by doing so we're able to loosen some of the power these things have over us, and claim some of it for ourselves.Santa Claus is one of these things. Here, on the fringes of American culture, Santa is as much a part of our Christmas imagery as anything else. While we may not make him as central to our celebrations as Americans do — we're Christians, after all, and for many of us that means that we want to focus on the religious aspects of the season, not the secular ones — we still find his image and his colours everywhere we turn. So it'll be useful to get some idea of where these two things originated.Santa Claus as we know him has three main origins. The first is the story of Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, a Christian who lived in fourth-century Turkey. His entire life, it's said, was lived according to Christian principles. Nicholas dedicated his life to the service of God, and spent his inheritance on helping the sick, the poor, and the suffering. According to legend, he loved children — he gave good ones presents, and bad ones got switches instead. He walked on foot, and didn't drive any sleigh at all. He died on December 6th, and that date is celebrated as his day in parts of Europe.The second is nineteenth-century America. In the early nineteenth century, the major influence on Christmas ritual was Dutch, like many of the early settlers. Santa Claus is the Americanization of the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas — Sinterklaas. But the first images of this person portrayed a fat bearded elf who squeezed himself down chimneys, the kind of person who appears in the poem "The Night Before Christmas". But that Santa wasn't the one we know today. He didn't wear a red suit, he didn't wear a cap, he wasn't a big fat man; he was a little fat elf.The third is Coca-Cola. Ever notice how Santa's the colour of a Coke label? Well, there's a reason for that, and it's that the red suit trimmed with white fur was an invention of the Coca-Cola company. The idea was to sell more soft drinks, but what ended up happening was the selling of the idea itself. Santa's red costume is the product of one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. And as for his home in the North Pole (which is a block of ice anyway, as the North Pole is located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean) and his elves and his sleigh and the reindeer, they are all inventions that have been tacked on throughout the years.What's my point?Well, think of it this way. Santa Claus may be an American invention, and one that has spread, like American culture, to most countries of the world in some form or another, but he's a composite of a number of different concepts from another different places. Like Bahamians, Americans come from elsewhere. Like the Lucayans, the native Americans have been killed off and driven away, and their traditions do not form any part of mainstream American life. American culture, like ours, is a hybrid culture, something created out of the various bits and pieces the various peoples of the USA brought with them. Santa Claus is only one example; there are lots of others.My point, then, is this. Just as Santa was imagined and re-imagined over the years, so we Bahamians can create our own traditions out of the fragments of our histories. Just as the Americans dug into the various mythologies of Europe to come up with their image of Santa Claus, infusing it with bits and pieces they added themselves, so we can create our own festivals and traditions.So Christmas is coming. Every screen that we face reminds us of that fact, and there's a sense of urgency in the air. Traffic is thickening on the roads; it took me as long to get home the other night as it did to get to work that morning, probably because I happened to be heading in the same direction as the mall. Flights in and out of the country are booked, and people are already having their luggage bumped because the gifts are piling up in the cargo holds. Christmas is coming, Santa is out, and we're spending our free money on gifts.Isn't it time we created our own traditions and symbols to help us celebrate this very special time in our very own way?Christmas is coming. Joy to the world.Peace on earth, goodwill to all men.

On Colonialism

There's a song out there that those of us who were around on July 10, 1973 could once be heard singing. My favourite part of it goes like this:We been standing up to a different flag, Union Jack in the skyBut we ga have our own flag come the 10th of JulyThe chorus is less subtle. "Independence," it sings,Independence for the Bahamas,Independence, people, come sing a new song.Well, that was then, wasn't it? And this is now. We are singing a different song, all right, but I'm not so sure that it's all that new. And we're certainly standing up to a different flag, but it's still red, white and blue.You see, colonialism isn't simply a matter of governors and who gets to vote and prime ministers and having representation at the United Nations. All of those things are important, but in the end they're trappings. They do for a nation what jewellery does for a woman; they adorn, they define, but they can't really make her into anything if there's nothing there. A woman of substance, is accentuated by those trappings; but a jungless is nothing but the bling.I want to write about colonialism, because it seems to me we're more colonized than we ever were before. Last week I talked about Thanksgiving, which is only one manifestation of that. This week I want to give you a couple of other things to think about.For instance.There's the story of the witness in a criminal trial who, when called to testify, chose to plead the Fifth in his defence.There's the story of the man who, when stopped by American Immigration at the airport and asked for his passport, asked, "What I need a passport for? I only going to Miami!"What's so peculiar about these two incidents?They're all elements of American law, of the American culture, that are not part of our legal system. That is not to say that our legal system is inferior — not at all. But it is different. Our Constitution has never been amended, and so to plead the Fifth (which offers Americans the right to avoid self-incrimination) is irrelevant here in The Bahamas — just as we most definitely need passports to go to Miami. The freedoms guaranteed our press are not absolute; we have laws about what can and can't be printed. In Canada and Britain, their presses are enjoined not to print any material that can lead people to hate; here in The Bahamas, we have prohibitions about obscenity. But far too many of us assume that there is no difference between our rights and those accorded to Americans.The fact that we have trouble distinguishing where the border falls between our nation and the American nation tells me that we have not got rid of our colonial past. No; we have brought it with us into the present, and we have simply exchanged one garment for another.Now some of you may be thinking what's wrong with putting on the American cloak. After all, the USA is the most powerful, the richest, the greatest country in the world, right? (Well, no, not necessarily; it might be the most powerful country, but it isn't the richest, and it could be argued that the fact that Bahamians have better access to basic health care than Americans should suggest that there are limitations to the United States' greatness.) But that's not my point.My point is that we are not American. Certainly, we are brothers under the skin; we are far closer to the States, and to the Southern States, than our Caribbean counterparts, because most of our ancestors came from there. But our paths and theirs were different. In our country, the slaves and their descendants ended up in the majority; in the USA, people of African descent make up about twelve per cent of the population. In our country, emancipation came in 1834; in the USA they had to wait until 1865, and fought a bloody war to achieve it. In our country, people of colour could vote (as long as certain conditions were met) from before Emancipation occurred; in the USA, those rights were abandoned and had to be fought for, complete with martyrs, during the 1950s and 1960s.And what we don't recognize, or perhaps don't know, is that the American Civil Rights movement drew its strength and inspiration from us. So why should we be prepared, now, to surrender our sovereignty to American culture?Colonialism, you see, doesn't come in just one form. It can be social and political, as it was when the British were in charge; or it can be economic and cultural, as it is today. The latter is more subtle. The Americans don't have to be here physically for us to be colonized. Their television, their products, their food, their outlets, their computer programmes — all of these are making us American from the inside out.The problem isn't theirs at all; it's ours. We have retained the habits of colonialism. We like having someone bigger and stronger and wealthier to tell us what to do, and we seem to find comfort in the fact that we aren't as good as They are. We got rid of one colonial master, only to invite in another.I'm reminded of a comment Jesus made, about the unclean spirit that, having been cast out of a man, wanders around until it decides to return to the place from which it came, bringing seven other spirits more evil than itself.It would do us well to remember that. In the words of Our Lord, if you get rid of the spirit, but keep the same mind, the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.

On Thanksgiving

Let me tell you a story.It's a very Bahamian thing to do, you know, tell people stories. I could start mine in a number of ways. I could, for instance, start like this:I'll tell you a story bout Jackinanory …or I could start like this:It once was a time a very fine timethe monkey chew tobacco and he spit white lime…The point is, it's a Bahamian thing to do, to tell people stories. Remember that for later.Anyway, here's mine. A couple of years ago, I was teaching a class — a very large class of sophisticated, well-employed people. It so happened that I was giving a test on a Thursday evening near the end of November. I announced my intention a week or so in advance. In the class before the night of the test, a stream of people, one after another, came up to me. Every single one of them had the same request: could we postpone the test? The reason being given was simple. Thursday was Thanksgiving, and they were going to be on holiday, eating their Thanksgiving turkeys somewhere that was not the class.Now, being a good Bahamian — I watched our flag going up that flagpole at midnight on July 10, 1973, and I saw the blessing the Good Lord sent down upon it, stirring the air around it so that it opened out in a soft breeze that had not touched the Union Jack until that point — I flatly refused. My students were horrified."Are you American?" I asked them. "Do you have dual citizenship?"I was truly interested; I don't like people who make assumptions, and I didn't want to be guilt of one myself.As I remember it, not one of them was."I went to school in the US," said one brave soul."Well, I went to school in Canada," said I, "but you don't see me celebrating their Thanksgiving on Columbus Day." (I do not think I said Discovery Day; I don't think I can fix my mouth to say that.)I then took the stand that if they wanted to pass the class, they had to take the test. The worst thing they could've done was tell me they wanted to go home and celebrate a foreign holiday; it straightened up every patriotic bone in my body. There was a great outcry, but I stuck to my guns."If there's one thing I hate," I told them, "it's a group of independent Black people taking over an American holiday."And it's not as though it's anything to be proud of. Even Americans are learning to be critical of their Thanksgivings. Not that there's anything wrong with giving God thanks; that's what Harvest is for, as my good colleague Sebastian Campbell has already eloquently pointed out. But the implications of Thanksgiving, even for Americans, are pretty iffy, to say the least. They become even more iffy when people whose history is a whole long story of oppression insist on adopting the holiday.You see, American Thanksgiving is a celebration that remembers the Pilgrim Fathers. Now who were these people? They were a group of white settlers who, fleeing religious persecution in Great Britain, set up camp on a land that was already inhabited. As the story goes, each Thanksgiving was another chance for them to thank the Good Lord for keeping them alive for another year.On the surface, it doesn't seem all that terrible. But look at it this way.The Pilgrim Fathers did for the mainland of the USA what Columbus did for our islands. Their settlement, like his landfall, ultimately resulted in the devastation of the populations of native people who occupied, farmed and ruled the land that was North America. Each Thanksgiving, therefore, implies that the Pilgrim Fathers were giving thanks to God for helping them kill off a few more Indians, for helping them take over a little more of the land that belonged to the Six Nations (whose descendants tell us that they celebrate the oldest living participatory democracy on Earth). The states in which the Pilgrim Fathers landed have very few reservations at all; almost all their native people have been assimilated into the dominant, invasive population.It is for this that we give thanks.I don't accept it. I was born and grew up among a people for whom oppression is a daily part of life. I don't merely refer to people of African descent; all of us have experienced oppression in one form or another. As inhabitants of a tiny country on the edge of the greatest nation in the world, we are more than familiar with oppression. We should identify with the oppressed everywhere — not with the oppressors.I believe that those of us who do not carry an American passport but celebrate Thanksgiving like the Americans choose to identify with oppressors. To do so denies our very essence, erases our history a little more. To buy into this holiday, which commemorates people whose settlement of New England began the massacre of the Native peoples of the USA, tells me that we have very little solid sense of self. We ignore the fact that among us still walk Bahamians in whose veins run Native American blood. Some of us — Bowlegs and Wildgooses, among others — still carry Native American names. And for any one of us to celebrate American Thanksgiving on our soil obliterates who we are.E bo ben, my story done en.If you ax me for another, I'll tell it again.

On Zero

We're all familiar with the idea of the American Dream. Who isn't? In the musical Miss Saigon, which was written by two Frenchmen about the Vietnamese war, there's a song that bears that name. And for those of us who live on the periphery of that grand ol' country to the north, the American Dream pervades almost every cranny of our reality.You see, the American Dream is part of the myth of the American nation — the idea that a person can go from rags to riches in the grand ol' USA. And it's a myth that's founded on a sort of reality. Examples of successes abound, from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump and John H. Johnson. We don't talk all that much about the failures.The idea of the American Dream (let's call it the A.D. from here on in) is a simple one, a strong one. No matter who you are, what you start with, the USA is the Land of Opportunity, the one place in the world where hard work and innovation can move you from nothing to something, can take you from zero to a million in the short space of a lifetime.What we don't talk much about is the Bahamian Dream.Thing is, it exists. More than that, it's a far more dramatic reality for the majority of Bahamians than the American Dream could ever be. To hook into the American Dream, we Bahamians would have to emigrate, fight for status, and then dive into that fast-flowing stream that is American business life to struggle with all the other hopefuls to try and come out victors. This doesn't mean that many Bahamians don't partake in the dream; every day young Bahamians leave this country to go (mostly) to the USA, where they believe the opportunities are greater and the possibilities for living out the A.D. more plentiful.But look at our Dream this way.The present black Bahamian upper class is comprised of people who were born into poverty, or of people whose parents were raised with next to nothing in their pockets. For some of them, they have gone from zero to a million in the space of three and a half decades — the precise time it's been possible for a Bahamian of any complexion, but especially of African heritage — to participate creatively and meaningfully in the economy. We can name our own successes: entrepreneurs like Tiger Finlayson and Franklyn Wilson and Myles Munroe and Neil Ellis spring immediately to mind.They are not alone. Between 1967 and now, countless Bahamians of eminently humble backgrounds and limited prospects have drastically improved their standard of living. Men and women who, when they were born, could look forward to little more than a basic education in one of the few public schools have become doctors and lawyers and politicians and preachers and stars.In June of this year, the Pompey Museum downtown reopened for the first time since the fire of Sepember 2001. In commemoration of the 170th anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves in this part of the world, and of the 2nd centenary of the struggle against slavery in general, the first exhibit in that museum featured an actual slave ship that was recovered off the waters of Key West.If you haven't yet had the chance to visit the Pompey Museum and see the exhibition of the Henrietta Marie, know that it will close at the end of November. And know, too, that if you miss the opportunity to go, the point of this article is going to be blunted in some small way.You see, the Bahamian Dream is, to my mind, a far, far greater dream than the American one. It's not how far we can go that impresses me; it's how far we have come.The awful thing about slavery, I believe, isn't the condition in which a slave finds himself. It's the fact that there is no self. Slavery is the institution of taking from a human being the most basic thing that make him human: the right to own himself. The physical conditions that complement slavery are to some degree incidental. Many Bahamian slaves lived in conditions that we might imagine that slaves on the American mainland and the rest of the Caribbean should envy. Not all Bahamian slaves lived on plantations. Those who lived in Nassau might not even live with their masters; some were permitted to live in their own quarters Over the Hill, and they might even have their own plots of land that they could use to grow food.But their lives were not their own. Nor were their spouses, their children, or their labour. Their apparent material security was fragile. If their master died, or fell upon hard times, they could be sold into a completely different situation. There was no security, no room to plan for the future, no real hope, even, to place faith in the present.The Bahamian Dream is so powerful, to my mind, because as a society, we started not from zero, but from a negative number. To be a society based on slavery, and whose hierarchies perpetuated the inequalities derived from slavery for another 130 years, and to have created from that a society in which we can grow our own millionaires is a dream indeed.But let me not sound too smug, It's possible to have a society in which a group of people benefit from a change as fundamental as majority rule, but in which that group do not pass on the benefits to those who come behind. And I believe that, in some ways unlike the USA, we run the risk of becoming that kind of society. The achievements of the first generation of Independence were remarkable; but are we perpetuating them? As I write, too many young Bahamians are choosing not to return home because they are finding our society closed to their contributions. Could it be that the Bahamian Dream is as fragile as a slave's sense of self?

On the Speaking of English

It's about time, I think, that we recognize as a nation that the language we speak is not English.Not so long ago, a columnist in The Punch took a letter issued from the Ministry of Education to task for its poor use of English grammar. Of course, anything emanating from the government ministry charged with teaching the next generations must be perfect. But simply criticizing the grammar in the letter missed the real point.The real point is this. English is a foreign language to us Bahamians.I'm not aiming to be flip or insulting here; I'm deadly serious. The language we speak in this country is not English, but something quite different. Professors of linguistics call it a creole — Bahamian Creole, to be exact. They recognize that while it disguises itself as English by using English vocabulary as a vehicle, its structure and its rules are fundamentally different.I believe that we recognize that we have a different flavour to our language. We celebrate it in the few bits of vocabulary that we have retained from our pasts: words like jook (which is, as all true Bahamians know, quite different from stab), or yinna (which we sometimes express as y'all or you-all, and which distinguishes the singular you from the plural). But what we don't recognize is the fact that we speak a different language altogether.We don't recognize it for a number of reasons. One of them is the fact that we were so well colonized that the language we speak, which is completely legitimate, was (and still is) categorized as bad or broken English. Another of them is our national prejudice against our Haitian neighbours that leads us to associate creole with all the negative connotations we associate with Haiti.In linguistics, the word creole has a far more universal meaning. A creole is, quite simply, a mother tongue that originates from the contact between two or more languages. In the Bahamas, the language we speak, Bahamian Creole, is the language that was created in the slave societies that founded our modern one.During slavery, many tactics were used to maintain order. One of them was to avoid at all costs placing slaves of the same background together. As a result, many Africans were separated from people who were familiar to them, which meant that they were unable to communicate with one another except with the language of the masters. At first a basic language of communication was created to cover all those areas of overlap — a work language, one full of commands and concrete words, but one whose use was limited. Linguistics professors call this language a pidgin, and we still find pidgins today in the languages Bahamians use to speak to the Haitians they hire.Later, those languages expanded to include all areas of life, including abstract and philosophical ones, and they became the creoles we speak today. We use English words, but we retain the African grammar that our ancestors brought with them when they came.What is interesting about African languages is that they almost all have certain things in common that make them fundamentally different from European ones. The three most prominent are the creation of plurals, the creation of possessives, and the conjugation of verbs.In European languages, each of these tasks is achieved by modifying the word in question. You've got one DOG, but two DOGS; the bone that belongs to Mark is MARK'S BONE; and Mark GIVES that bone to the dog. If he did it yesterday, he GAVE it to the dog.In African languages, however, nouns and verbs remain the same. When Africans want to indicate possession, tense or number, they use other words to help, or they indicate it by context. How this translates into Bahamian Creole is like this. You've got one DOG, and Mark has two DOG. We know he has more than one because we said it already; he has two. (Duh). In our language, and in the African ones from which it derives, two dog is perfectly correct.The bone Mark owns is MARK BONE. We don't need to change the noun to show whose it is; the context tells us. Sometimes, if we want to emphasize it, or if we want to get rid of "bone", we say MARK OWN. Simple.And if we want to tell people what Mark did with the bone, we say MARK GIVE the bone to the dog. That remains the same, whether it's happening now or happened last week; if we want to indicate when Mark gave the bone to the dog, we say when it happened.But in English, we have to change the nouns and the verbs to do the same work. English, you see, may be the official language of our nation, but it is a foreign language to us.Hence the all-too-common awfulness of some of our published writings; hence the absurdities of overcorrection that we hear on the radio and the television. What we are witnessing are people trying to speak English correctly, but applying African rules. The result is a mangling of both our languages.Until we recognize that English is a foreign language to us, as it is for the Greek and Chinese and Haitian immigrants who settle our shores, and teach it as such (perhaps teaching also the formalities of Bahamian Creole at the same time), we will continue to be almost universally challenged by three very basic rules of that grammar: noun plurals, noun possessives, and the conjugation of verbs.And until we recognize this fact, we will continue to be plagued with the kinds of absurdities that appear in our newspapers and news reports with depressing regularity.

On Being a People

We need our artists.It's not enough to be a creative people; it's not enough to be a tourist destination; it's not enough to have majority rule; it's not enough to be the wealthiest independent country in the Caribbean. Without our artists, we are as poor as an Untouchable in Bombay.Poorer, probably. At least Untouchables know who they are.I had the pleasure this evening of attending a presentation being given to the National Cultural Commission on culture and tourism by the Director-General of Tourism. As usual, the discussion was lively. As usual, it was loud. But among the many jewels of the conversation that arose from the discussion was this. The Director-General told the story of a young Bahamian who was engaged to sing the Bahamian national anthem somewhere abroad, on live television, and who began the song with the words "Oh, say can you see."Now you may be thinking, oh, that's horrible; or you may be laughing as hard as you can; but chances are you're wondering what that has at all to do with artists. After all, what an artist does has very little to do with whether a young Bahamian knows the difference between the Bahamian national anthem and the American one. Right?Wrong.What an artist does is absolutely fundamental to the difference.Now understand that when I say "artist" I'm talking about much more than the person who sits in front of a canvas and paints (although if you've visited the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas lately you'll know how much that kind of artist can say.). I'm talking about visual artists, and sculptors, and Junkanoo artists, and musicians, and artisans, and dancers, and actors, and storytellers, and directors, and writers.We need them all.We need them all because without them, we have absolutely no touchstone to remind us what it means to be Bahamian. Who we are as a people depends almost entirely on the artists among us.You see, being a people in this day, age and place depends almost entirely upon our ability to tell a story, and to tell that story right. Ours is a society composed of many different people with many different backgrounds, origins, dreams, and goals. All too often, though, we go about our business unaware of our complexities. There was a time when the Bahamas was a white nation; black people were "natives", and made up part of the scenery and backdrop against which Real Life played out. There was a time, too, not so long ago, in which the Bahamas was for black people only; white people were considered interlopers, visitors, tourists. We're continually given the impression that The Bahamas is a Christian nation, as though atheists, Rastafarians, Muslims, Buddhists and Vodouisants are not part of us. We are always looking at only a piece of the puzzle. And many administrative decisions are made without taking our complexities into account.But our artists tell the real story; this is why we need them.There's a theory that claims that art holds up a mirror to nature, and by looking into the works of our artists we can see ourselves. There's a measure of truth to this theory. I can attest to it, having just come back from New York where I had the pleasure of seeing several shows, each of which reflected some little bit of the society that made it and the society it represented out to its audience.But there's another side to the theory as well. It's that nature is also a mirror of art. This is particularly true when we look at the mass media — at television and cable and satellite, at the internet, the music industry, the fashion industry. Art's both something to produce and to consume; and where there's a vacuum, stuff will rush in. The result is that without our artists, we cannot be a people. Rather, we'll be an extension of the people whose art we consume en masse — of Americans, of Jamaicans, of someone else.Hence the young Bahamian who sings the "Star-Spangled Banner" for the Bahamian national anthem.Hence the witness who, standing up in court, pleads the Fifth; or the Rasta who, though born and bred in Englerston, speaks with so thick a Jamaican accent that the pollsters ask him to show his passport to prove his eligibility to vote.As a people, we need our artists to examine us in all our differences and complexities and teach us back to ourselves. And we need our artists to be full-time observers of who we are. We need dancers who do not simply execute steps in time to music or interpret the words that are being sung in the song, but who can tell us a story about ourselves. We need writers who will go beyond the hibiscus and the banana and speak of the hurts and pains of all Bahamians, otherwise we will never know what it is that separates us and what unites. We need artists who (like the people in the current national exhibit in the National Gallery) can look at our warts as well as our beauties and be unafraid of placing them on display — and we need people who are willing to be challenged by looking at their work. We need actors who are able to dig into themselves so that they do far more than declaim the printed word with unnatural stress, but so that they become the people they portray so they can show us back ourselves.To be a people, we need to face our souls.We need our artists to spread our souls out for us to see.

On Being a City

I'm writing this from the Big Apple, the City that Never Sleeps — New York City. What strikes me most about being here, aside from the expected, like the vibrancy, the culture, the bustle — is the fact that New York's concept of itself as a city, is fundamental to all it does.And that set me thinking. Why doesn't Nassau have the same sense?The answer's obvious, but absurd: Nassau doesn't have a municipal government.The obvious reason is that Nassau is the seat of the national government, and therefore by default doesn't appear to need its own government.The absurdity of that is that Nassau, the capital city of The Bahamas, a city of almost 200,000 persons, has less administration than Freeport or Marsh Harbour or even than George Town or Deadman's Cay.We do have a number of Ministries, each of which has its head office in the capital city. We do have a parliament that is composed of elected officials, each of whom represents a specific constituency. Each constituency is carved out every five years by people who report to this parliament. The majority of the constituency lines are drawn on New Providence. Thus the residents of the city of Nassau, who make up two-thirds of the national population, are governed in segments that may or may not have anything to do with the needs of the city itself.Now it seems to me that there is the danger of a conflict of interest in this. The conflict need not be anything sinister; it may be as simple as a competing need. At this very moment, it's the fact that the northern Bahamas is devastated by Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne. At the same time, plans have been set in motion for the renovation of Bay Street, a major facelift for the City of Nassau, which includes a permanent home for the Straw Market, among other things. One or the other of these projects has now got to be put on hold; one or the other of them has to be given priority. Both are important. But because the government that is responsible for the renovation of the city is the same as that which is responsible for the well-being of the entire country, they cannot be adequately dealt with at the same time; the self-same government is responsible for both.Now I am not saying that activities for Nassau should not be put on hold while the more immediate needs of the people in the Family Islands are met. What I am saying is that the current system of government we now have makes it an either/or situation when it doesn't have to be.You see, the city of Nassau suffers not only from not having its own government, but it also from not having its own budget. Utilities, services, works, and so on are dealt with by the agencies that are charged with running the whole country. Now in this case, Nassau generally comes out on top; the vast majority of the work done by the public corporations, or by the Ministries of Works, Health, National Security, Education, and so on, affects those of us who live in Nassau. In times of crisis, however, that money has to be diverted elsewhere. We have no provision to meet the needs of both.If Nassau were a municipality, money that should have a specifically local application for the city of Nassau (local licences, real property tax and so on) would not get mixed up with money that should go to the nation as a whole (customs duties, departure tax, and the like). Currently, however, the apportioning of all that money is in the hands of the national government. It was a system that didn't work all that well in colonial times, and it has no real reason to start working well now.Just imagine, for instance, what would have happened if Hurricane Frances had devastated Nassau as it did Freeport or as Hurricane Jeanne did Abaco. Now imagine that San Salvador, Cat Island, Eleuthera, Abaco and Grand Bahama also suffered as much damage as they have done. How long do you think it would take for the national government (which is also Nassau's local government) to get around to meeting the needs of the people on those islands?I'm not making this scenario up, by the way. In 1866 and in 1929, hurricanes devastated the capital while also affecting other islands. In neither case did the islands get the help they needed; Nassau had been crippled, and was unable to serve their needs. In fact, Nassau was so devastated by the 1929 hurricane that in 1932, when the Great Abaco Hurricane flattened Abaco worse than Jeanne did, the people there were left to fend and rebuild for themselves. Nassau could not help.There is no good reason why the needs of the city should be looked after by a government elected to see to the needs of the entire country. There is one powerful one; the creation of a government that is responsible for meeting the immediate needs of two-thirds of the Bahamian population will considerably weaken the clout of the average politician.It's a real reason, but not a very good one. As I am not a politician, I believe (perhaps naively) that politics should not supersede everything else. I believe that election to parliament and gives one a far greater responsibility than simply to get elected again in five years' time; it gives one the chance to do something fundamental, something seminal, for the long-term development of the Bahamas.I believe that there is no more fundamental thing than real local government, which includes the creation of the municipality of the city of Nassau. The parliament and the cabinet who creates that will allow the national government to get on with governing the nation, rather than meeting the needs of the city — even if that creation affects their members' power in the short run.

On Reciprocity

We all know the saying "There's no such thing as a free lunch". For some of us, it may be a rather cynical way of looking at the world. After all, what about things like altruism? Magnanimity? Salvation? If there's no such thing as a free lunch, well, there really ought to be.We anthropologists approach the saying from a rather different angle. The fundamental job of anthropology, you see, is to try and identify what is universal about the human race by examining its diversity. The anthropological study of economics is built around the idea of exchange, which we regard as a social as well as an economic transaction. And one of the few universal rules that anthropologists have discovered (it's right up there with rules like the universal incest taboo — all societies believe it's wrong to sleep with or marry close relatives — or the universal practice of marriage — which is a social and economic union between one or more males and one or more females) is the fundamental law of reciprocity.It's the law that says, well, basically, there's no such thing as a free lunch.You see, anthropologists regard exchange — the exchange of gifts, of goods, of services or of people — as being far more than simply the exchange of objects. Exchange, for anthropologists, is a social event. Simply put, economics is a marker of relations between people.Let me explain this with a few examples.1. A man sees a pair of shoes in a shoe store, fishes into his wallet, takes out some cash, hands it to the cashier, and walks away with the shoes in his hand.2. A homeowner hires an immigrant to weed the yard. The immigrant works all day in the hot sun, but when the time comes to be paid, the homeowner is nowhere to be found.3. A woman raises her children the best way she knows how. She works overtime, she puts them through school, she makes calls on their behalf, she struggles and struggles until they make successes of themselves.In each of the cases above, the exchange has a social component. In the first one, the social exchange is cut short. The man sees the shoes, picks them out (during which time he may or may not engage with the salesperson), pays for them (during which time he may or may not engage with the cashier), and leaves. The social exchange is neutral; the players involved in it are as indifferent as they can possibly be to one another.In the second, the social exchange is one-sided, uneven. A person is hired to do a job, but is never paid for that job. The relationship between the players is one of power and powerlessness; one person gets what he or she wants without paying for it.In the third, the social exchange is long-term. On the surface, it appears that the mother is giving far more than she is getting in return. However, what she is doing by investing her time, money and effort into raising her children is creating a social exchange that will last over time. Ideally, she will get some reward in the end, whether it be something as intangible as love and gratitude, or whether it be as concrete as her children's building her a house in which to live and taking over the paying of her bills.Exchange, you see, is far more complex than it would appear.So what does all of this mean on the ground?Well, think of it this way. The law of reciprocity covers three main kinds of exchanges, and these kinds of exchanges apply to different kinds of social contexts.Balanced reciprocity, where the value of the exchange is carefully calculated and paid for as soon as it takes place, is the kind of exchange that happens generally between acquaintances, or among strangers that we consider to be more or less equal to ourselves. It's the kind of exchange that happens every day in stores, in offices, at gas stations, and the fact that we fundamentally expect it to be basically a fair process is underscored by our outrage at the practice of price gouging.Negative reciprocity is where one person gets more out of the deal than the other. Usually it signals an unequal relationship. Stealing is the kind of negative reciprocity that occurs when one person, generally the thief, considers himself or herself to be situated in an inferior position from the victim; cheating is the kind of negative reciprocity that occurs when one person considers himself or herself superior to the victim.Generalized reciprocity best describes the kinds of exchanges families carry out with one another, and it's the kind of exchange on which societies are built. The practice of sacrificing our own desires for the welfare of other people, or the practice of giving without counting the cost fall into this category. In either case, what is more important than the gift itself is the creating of social relationships.So you see, lunch is never really free. Sometimes it's a rip-off; the giver has some food to off-load, and decides it's cheaper to give it away. Sometimes it's a bribe; the giver is looking for payback. Sometimes, it's a sacrifice. But it's never something that can be accepted and left behind.In this time of need and of giving, it's well worth remembering the anthropologist's law of reciprocity. In times like these, the only moral kind of giving is the kind we call generalized reciprocity, where the gifts are given as symbols of a social connection that exists and that is important. Let's give without expecting anything concrete in return — not favours, not votes, not thanks. Let's give very simply because we are all Bahamians, and when one hurts, we all hurt.