On the Attractiveness of Exile

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

On the Tragic True Story of Mr. Sam Ahab

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

On Why Free Trade Isn't Always Free

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

On the Taste of Sand

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

On the Boxing of Life

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

On Sin and the Refugee

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

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

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

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

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

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

And refugees are always "Them".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On What Government's Supposed to Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Jobs

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

On Woodwork and Worms

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

On Professionals

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

On Merit

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

On Danger

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

On Free Trade

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

On Parties

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

On Why We're Third World

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

On Asking the Right Questions

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

On the Plantation

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

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

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

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

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

Sound familiar? Let me put it another way.

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

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

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

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

Sound like an institution you know?

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

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

On Citizenship

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

On Demolition

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

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This is my test blog, established to test CSS code, etc.Playing around courtesy of UrbanGiraffe.com.Yay.