On Developments, Speculation, and the Bahamian Nation

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

Hezekiah's Independence

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Some time ago (end of June, I do believe) I attended a book launch at Chapter One, COB's bookstore.  The book was Hezekiah's Independence by Freeport writer Keith A. Russell.Now Keith Russell (known formally as Dr. Keith Russell) is the author of three novels (Hezekiah is his third) and is one of my favourite Bahamian novelists.  He deals with tough stuff in his work — dispossession, identity, injustice, all the stuff that you expect a Caribbean writer to deal with — but he does so in a readable fashion, in lovely prose, and in a very Bahamian way. The Disappearance of J.D. Sinclair tells of an island boy who comes to Nassau and doesn't make good (for reasons, Russell argues, that are beyond his control).  When Doves Cry is harrowing, beautiful, and tragic — not going to tell you anything else except that it's set in the Turks and Caicos and Haitian communities in Grand Bahama — communities that exist on the fringes of Freeport.Hezekiah's Independence (I'm quoting the bookbackblurb here) tells the

engaging tale of four generation of men—a slave who stole himself, a farmer, a poet, and a teacher ...

I'll just post a little from the book itself.  Then you go on over to Chapter One Bookstore — or, if you're in Freeport, track Dr. Russell down — and buy yourself a copy.

When I was young I used to run with Olympic contenders, he says.I sat straight in the chair at the little kitchen table and put down the newspaper.  He turned and stared in my direction for a moment, then returned his gaze to the opening of the door.In Alexandria, during the war, we had to find things to occupy our time.  To kill the boredom and shorten the long meandering days.  Someone came up with the bright idea of having races.  I was the fastest runner of any regiment stationed in Alexandria.  I might have been the fastest in the entire war.  At first, we would race for food or cigarettes or to get off work detail.  Then the officers took an interest.After that, we raced for regiment pride, or to boost moral, to banish facing the truth.  We were considered not fit to fight.  My secret was that right after my first win, I was racing to be counted, to have a measure of respect.  And not just for me.  I never told them, though, that back in Abaco there were young men who would leave me twenty yards behind in a hundred-yard-dash.  But no one ever came to see them.  No one that makes the rules anyway.  They didn't get a chance.  They didn't count.  those flowers never got to bloom.  And every day, even now, that makes me sad.

Why blog? To know what freedom is

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And to know what it isn't.On Global Voices, a lengthy translation of a Chinese blog is featured.  The purpose:  to point out the lack of freedom that still exists in China, where the state has the power to intimidate and uses it, even (or especially) to the point of attempting to silence legitimate questions being raised about AIDS infections.An excerpt:

June 20My first time to be tailed by twelve people in three carsAt home after work I was puzzled. Half thinking about what to cook, half thinking why on earth I was kept under house arrest yesterday. All day today I was followed by two to three cars and about eight to twelve people.Who am I? I pondered, half washing vegetables, half thinking. I’m a newly-wed housewife. I’m twenty-two years old. Height just falls short of 160 centimeters and weight just below 45 kilograms. My appearance is nother pretty nor ugly, my face is pale. I like kids, that’s why I volunteer in the AIDS village helping to raise over two hundred orphans. I love writing, and every day pour my heart on onto my blog. Until my husband disappeared, then instead of biting my nails I started writing the facts and not emotions. Weak and sickly, post-meningitis leftover problems often make me forget people and things. Because of this I can’t do anything with out my hands, some paper and a pen. Thoughts are simple, temper is stubborn, tend not to see the big fish eating the small fish, or people taking advantage of other people, often cry when feeling incompetent.What did I do? Every day I go to work at the company and earn my rice bowl. Every day I volunteer for the AIDS work organization. Every day I write in my blog and express my state of mind. I rush about weeping trying to get my missing husband back. On the eighteenth I was announced as the Victims’ Family Members Award. Hearing Chen Guangcheng’s wife voice and news on the telephone, I can’t take it and quietly start to cry.Yesterday morning just after six a.m. Hu Jia left home, planning to go to the hospital in the morning to get some medicine and in the afternoon go to the ‘The Blind man Chen Guangcheng Incident’ press conference. At seven I gave him a phone call and learned that he was still down below in the courtyard, arguing with two dozen-odd built guys. I went downstairs only to see that they were the Beijing central and plainclothed Tongzhou district State Secrecy Bureau [SSB] detachments. Among them were those who took part in kidnapping Hu Jia for forty-one days, police responsible for the small community police station as well as some faces I didn’t recognize at all. These secret police circled around Hu Jia, trapping him in, and closed the iron gate to the outer yard. Not only did they violently stop Hu Jia from leaving, they also forbid me from leaving. Early that morning the neighbors heard a loud ruckus, and slowly came from all over to crowd around and watch. One of the SSB guys said, “no matter what happens, the two of you cannot go out today.” What kind of reasoning is this? No legal documents, no displaying of credentials, just the lone one-liner, “the two of you cannot go out today” can deprive us of our freedoms? Previously, even when Hu Jia was under house arrest and then later missing, I had never been put under house arrest. Why? I demand an answer but the SSB guy pretended he didn’t know, just spat out some mumb-jumbo. I phoned some friends, and they all said the friends and lawyers who were supposed to be at the Chen Guangcheng Incident press conference were under similar conditions, being held against their will all over town, forcing the press conference to be called off. But Hu Jia was out of medicine, prescribed by the doctor such that it could only be gotten at the hospital. After fighting for over hours, we refused to leave the courtyard. Neighbors far away could all hear the arguing. Seeing that we weren’t willing to budge, the SSB guys made some phone calls to their superiors and in the end had no choice but to take Hu Jia to the hospital to fulfill his prescription, but only on the condition that I stay at home. Hu Jia had to be taken in an SSB detachment police car, and a few SSB people in a few other cars followed him there, rushing him back home as soon as his prescription was filled and not allowing him any contact with the outside world.This morning when I went downstairs to go to work, I noticed a car following me closely, all the way to the office. No matter where I went, there were earpiece-wearing people watching. At lunch I stepped out of the office only to notice there was one more car following me now. To put it another way, there were twelve people in three cars tailing me. Of these twelve there were men and women, all of whom were taller, stronger and older than me. One modern white car’s license plate number was 京F B8233, one license plate in front but none in the back. One grey Mazda with a front license plate number 京F E6034, but the rear license plate was not clear. One deep gray Japanese Bluebird car with the number 京F C9288 in the front and 京E 09288 in the back. I phoned a friend, he asked if I was scared. Not scared, I said, just quite anxious.***Sitting in front of the computer, breathing deeply, calming myself down. What are they afraid of? Why would they be afraid of a powerless girl? Things have been so abnormal recently! My husband was kidnapped by the police for forty-one days, something until today nobody has taken responsibility for. Big, solemn Shandong province. Not only is it afraid of a blind man, it’s also afraid of his bare-handed wife, kidnapping, beating and putting them under house arrest, dragging the weak young new mother away along the ground. Now they seek to harm this blind man with a fake accusation and send him to prison. The most abnormal is how jittery the great capitol Beijing has gotten just over the telling of a blind man’s encounters. The city wide illegal obstruction of people’s personal freedoms is the most ironic. Of the friends put under house arrest, half of them are outstanding Beijing lawyers, more than a few of whom have PhDs in law. So who is there still able to safeguard the sanctity of the law? The most absurd part is that as those friends whose personal freedom was illegally constricted regained their freedom, in a random spot on Beijing’s east side are twelve people and three cars following closely a young, weak woman. Are they so scared of a woman not yet even twenty-three years old?Since 2004 my husband, Hu Jia, has experienced being tailed, put under house arrest, beaten and kidnapped countless times. But today is the first time they’ve targetted me with restrictions and tailing, which I think is very disgusting. To be disgusted is the instinctual reaction any woman would have in these circumstances. Try and think. No matter where I go there are always pot-bellied men wearing earpieces following closely and eavesdropping, taking cameras and video cameras and sneakily filming me, watching me with sleazy gazes as they phone back to make reports. Even when I’m in public toilets they look in the direction of the toilet to see ‘what conspiracy I’m up to.’ When I go home, they park below my balcony. If I don’t close the curtains, they watch everything I do. This is what I mean by disgusting.This behavior of theirs makes me feel ashamed. Every month I work my butt off for less than 2000 yuan in wages, and I still have to pay taxes to the government. But this money is actually used to support a group of tall sturdy guys in tailing and surveilling every movement and action of small, weak people like me. How much are twelve people’s wages? How much for twenty-four hour surveillance and overtime pay? How much is the gas for three cars? Even more so, how many resources are being consumed to keep the air conditioning in their police cars running non-stop on these hot days? How much does it cost for the cameras, video cameras and listening devices used to spy on me? And the mobile phone charges? I don’t dare go on thinking. I feel ashamed for my country. I also feel sorry for myself, using my taxpayer’s money to support components in the state apparatus in monitoring the weak.I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Many friends why they can’t open my blog. I also cannot open my own blog. My husband Hu Jia forces a smile and says ‘those police aren’t following me, now they’re following you. What does that say?’ I’m young and I don’t have any influence, so I don’t know why, and my followers won’t give me an answer. I can only ask my friends to help me figure it out.

It's worth a read.

The Political Brain

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Michael Schermer over at Scientific American has written an article that describes what happens to the brains of politicians when they talk. Here's an excerpt:

During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, while undergoing an fMRI bran scan, 30 men--half self-described as "strong" Republicans and half as "strong" Democrats--were tasked with assessing statements by both George W. Bush and John Kerry in which the candidates clearly contradicted themselves. Not surprisingly, in their assessments Republican subjects were as critical of Kerry as Democratic subjects were of Bush, yet both let their own candidate off the hook.The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning--the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--was quiescent. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in the processing of emotions; the anterior cingulate, which is associated with conflict resolution; the posterior cingulate, which is concerned with making judgments about moral accountability; and--once subjects had arrived at a conclusion that made them emotionally comfortable--the ventral striatum, which is related to reward and pleasure.

This is nice to know, and it makes me wonder what my friend, neuroscientist Dan Glaser, would have to say about it. The thing is, it isn't news; nor is it limited to politicians. It's basic human behaviour. Indeed, the article begins with a quotation from Sir Francis Bacon, the father of modern scientific reasoning, who said what the neuroscientists have observed almost 400 years ago. So I'm not sure what the point of the observation is, except to show that physical scientists have finally been able to see (and hence prove?) what students of humans (writers, theologians, philosophers, social scientists, parents, teachers, and servants) have known forever. Well, good for them.The study simply confirms, in living colour I imagine, that people don't reason when they don't have to. When they have made up their minds about things they then leave their minds open only to that information that fits their theories about the world. Scientists have been doing it for centuries. They call it the scientific method, and they throw out all received wisdom when they go about finding out about stuff. This isn't a bad thing, by the way; it allows scientists to explain how all sorts of things happen, and helps us do a number of interesting things to make our lives easier as a result; but it doesn't do very much to explain why. We know for sure, and can prove with diagrams and computers and other instruments how people conceive babies and what happens in the brain when people have strokes and how cholesterol clogs blood vessels and what they put in cigarettes, but we don't know a thing more about why. But that's another story.So what the neuroscientists have done is to show what parts of the brain become engaged when politicians talk. They can prove in living colour what Bacon and Shakespeare and Sophocles and Euripides and the writers of the Bible (and other holy writ for that matter) knew long before they died and turned to dust: that people like to shore up their opinions by noticing only the stuff that supports them. It's something you learn for sure when you go and teach College English courses at COB, by the way; students have to be taught to reason, taught to look for the information that's out there that says that their opinions are wrong.So. Scientists can say which parts of the brain light up when these guys and these guys pick only those bits of information that fit their theories about, when these guys and these women write their articles, and when I post new stuff on this page.All I can say is it's nice to have pictures.(Thanks, Books, Inq., for leading me to this article!)

Checks and Balances

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I caught a bit of Issues of the Day yesterday, an interview with US Ambassador John Rood. One of the questions touched upon the American government's policy to effectively blacklist or quarantine countries whose governments do not fall within US expectations of proper conduct. The Ambassador seemed to support this activity, stating that all countries "do what's in their best interest" (true enough, as far as that goes) and that the US was only acting in its best interest.One of the greatest things about the US, however, is that its constitution and its government can help to save it from itself. The whole point about the structural balance of power inherent in the American system is so that no branch of government can get above itself. The problem with postcolonial countries is that our minds fit very well into caps of subordinance, and we tend to fall very quickly for the idea that we can't do anything about American abuse of power, especially when it takes place in the name of homeland security.This report from P.E.N. suggests otherwise, and is an illuminating example of one reason the US deserves to be a great country (hint: it's not because the US is the strongest country in the world). It also shows that part of its greatness is that there are limits to the US's ability to bully others, built in to its system.To wit:

PEN Freedom to Write and International Programs Director Larry Siems emphasized that Professor Ramadan’s ordeal is just one of many cases where international writers and scholars have been denied visas or turned back at the border, apparently for ideological reasons, including at least three instances in the last three months. “Today’s ruling makes very clear that our government is not allowed to pick and choose our nation’s international visitors based on their political views. We hope it has an immediate effect not only for Professor Ramadan but also for the many other writers and intellectuals from abroad who have been turned away or discouraged from visiting the United States.”

Instructive.

Sexual Selection

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On Monday past, a group of people gathered at the College of The Bahamas to debate the topic of censorship, inspired by the controversy over Brokeback Mountain. Featured speakers were COB lecturers Michael Stevenson, Ian Strachan, and Canon Kirkley Sands, one-time chair of the Bahamas Plays and Films Control Board, as well as Patricia Glinton-Meicholas and myself.Although the discussion stayed mostly on topic, and didn't get bogged down in the whole homosexual red herring, the idea of the unnatural quality of homosexuality was raised.Well -- as anybody who has owned dogs can attest -- the homosexuality of animals is quite evident if one sits around and looks hard enough. I've seen enough female potcakes dry-humping one another not to have made that argument myself. And now, scientists who have studied the sexuality of animals have proven that the universal heterosexuality of nature are as much a construction of our own minds as anything else.The article is here.An excerpt:

Male big horn sheep live in what are often called "homosexual societies." They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males "effeminate."Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in "penis fencing," which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there's a vertebrate out there that does it. Nevertheless, most biologists continue to regard homosexuality as a sexual outlier. According to evolutionary theory, being gay is little more than a maladaptive behavior.

And again:

Given the pervasive presence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, same-sex partnering must be an adaptive trait that's been carefully preserved by natural selection. As Roughgarden points out, "a 'common genetic disease' is a contradiction in terms, and homosexuality is three to four orders of magnitude more common than true genetic diseases such as Huntington's disease."So how might homosexuality be good for us? Any concept of sexual selection that emphasizes the selfish propagation of genes and sperm won't be able to account for the abundance of non-heterosexual sex. All those gay penguins and persons will remain inexplicable. However, if one looks at homosexuality from the perspective of a community, one can begin to see why nature might foster a variety of sexual interactions.According to Roughgarden, gayness is a necessary side effect of getting along. Homosexuality evolved in tandem with vertebrate societies, in which a motley group of individuals has to either live together or die alone. In fact, Roughgarden even argues that homosexuality is a defining feature of advanced animal communities, which require communal bonds in order to function. "The more complex and sophisticated a social system is," she writes, "the more likely it is to have homosexuality intermixed with heterosexuality."

And again:

Of course, most humans don't see sex as a way of maintaining the social contract. Our lust doesn't seem logical, especially when that logic involves the abstruse calculations of game theory. Furthermore, it's strange for most people to think of themselves as naturally bisexual. Being gay or straight seems to be an intrinsic and implacable part of our identity. Roughgarden disagrees. "In our culture, we assume that there is a straight-gay binary, and that you are either one or the other. But if you look at vertebrates, that just isn't the case. You will almost never find animals or primates that are exclusively gay. Other human cultures show the same thing." Since Roughgarden believes that the hetero/homo distinction is a purely cultural creation, and not a fact of biology, she thinks it is only a matter of time before we return to the standard primate model. "I'm convinced that in 50 years, the gay-straight dichotomy will dissolve. I think it just takes too much social energy to preserve. All this campy, flamboyant behavior: It's just such hard work."All quotes courtesy of Seed Magazine.

Hee. Turns out fundamentalist Christians are in the same boat regarding the "nature" of sexuality as fundamentalist Darwinist evolutionists. Who'd'a thunk it?

Can you say obscenely busy?

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Which is what I've been for the last week or so.Perhaps it's not as obscene as it sounds.  Perhaps it's been constructively busy.  Perhaps it's the last time that our being understaffed at work is going to be a problem (whoops, there goes my head, laughing itself off again).  Perhaps.But last week I was in Trinidad again, which entails a day's travel either way, and yesterday I was in Freeport, which requires a whole day of work -- flying out at 6:00 a.m. and returning (lucky for me) at 7:00 a.m.  But yesterday's trip was very productive.Gave me plenty to think about, though.  And a strong idea of how to think about it.Later.Can you say Cultural Policy?

On Tourism and Sustainable Development

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

The vulnerability of small-island states

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In case people aren't aware, this week The Bahamas plays host to an international conference (another, yes) on tourism and sustainable development in small island developing states (SIDS). The outline of the conference is here:http://www.world-tourism.org/regional/americas/sem_bahamas/bahamas.pdfIt's an interesting conference. If you look at the outline of the conference you'll see. The first session is on vulnerability and resilience. Tourism can be good or bad; the problem is how we deal with it. The key is policy — the specific commitment of the government to make sure that the potential benefits are received.At the moment, though, we seem to be in a hurry to create a picture-perfect industry, and we are taking shortcuts. We choose to be governed by the agendas of our investors without considering the long-term, the large picture — and we forget (if we ever acknowledged) that the investor's interest is private. It is not the investor's job to make sure that the Bahamian interest is met, or that the development his project brings is sustained over time; it is the government's job. And (to go back to my initial bugbear) if the government has established an agency whose job it is to develop and manage the tourist industry, then it is that agency's job to consider the long-term and the large.But not their sole responsibility. So once again, I'm going to refer my readers to the Draft National Cultural Policy, which seeks to set out some guidelines for the role of tourism in the development or location of culture. Because we need to make sustainability a priority — and this in the face of casinos on Cat Island, Four Seasons exclusion on Exuma, and marinas and speculative second-home developments throughout our Bahamaland. Without policy, there is no sustainable tourism at all.Conference website

A Tourist's Comment

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provides some evidence that we are not dealing with our tourist product the best way. Sharmayne says:

I [am] an African-American and spent my vacation on Paradise Island. I could not wait for some local friends or taxi came to take me away from the place. Maybe it is a paradise….for whites. For me it was slightly boring and lacked culture. I will definately not stay there again….my main reason for visiting (my eight time) is to be enveloped in Bahamian culture.

The comment is addresses this post, here.

The buck's gotta stop somewhere

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Yes, I'm still on the topic of tourism and culture.

The reason I'm so antsy about this, Idébu (you would say passionate, and you did, and why do you have to have that pesky accent aigu in the middle of your name?) is that there is a prevailing thought Out There that tourism destroys people's cultures. It's a very old thought. It's one of the reasons that our Caribbean neighbours chose in the beginning to reject the tourist industry as a major force for their development, and it was drummed into our heads all throughout school when I was coming up. Tourism is bad for a country because it destroys the culture and turns citizens into servants. Marion Bethel, the Bahamian poet, has even written a poem about it.

But I have always fought that idea. Since they first told me that tourism destroys countries and economies and citizens, I've disagreed. Because in The Bahamas, while tourism did bring several ills, it also brought many good things too; it gave Bahamians access to cash money when all they had was credit in white people's stores; it created infrastructure when there was none, it turned our major festival, Junkanoo, into a parade with pretty costumes rather than a parade with scary costumes, and it educated many people's children.

Now I am Going Back here. The Bahamas is a global pioneer in the tourist industry; tourism in our country is almost 200 years old. Together with the Mediterranean and (strange to say) Switzerland, The Bahamas has one of the few societies whose people have been making money off the tourist dollar for far longer than the industry has had a name.

As that is the case, it is impossible to separate tourism and tourists from the Bahamian self. We have been offering hospitality not only long before we knew ourselves, but literally since the abolition of slavery. Europeans were visiting Nassau for their health and for the winter since the 1830s, and Bahamians were offering them tours of New Providence since then. Tourism on a bigger scale started in 1860 when the Royal Victoria Hotel was built, the pride of the nation, and provided Bahamian musicians and artists with a place to go and make their performances happen. Of course many of the sights have changed -- we don't have the Mermaid Lake anymore, where phosphorescence would light up the wake of the boat and the trails of the oars, and the Blue Hills are being cut down for construction purposes, and many of the homes in which those tourists stayed have been demolished or disfigured, and the Royal Victoria, that architectural wonder, burned to the ground twenty years ago. But the forts are still there, and so are the Botanical Gardens, which were opened in part to provide tourists with a sense of Bahamian flora and fauna.

Tourism even helped fund the Bahamian civil rights movement. That was in the 1950s, during the post-war nightclub era, when tourism created Bahamian performers of world class status. Freddie Munnings' Cat and the Fiddle was a meeting place not only for Bahamian civil rights activists, but for the Americans as well; through Sidney Poitier, Andrew Jackson and Martin Luther King and others met with Lynden Pindling and the pioneers of Majority Rule within the confines of that club. And the fact that Freddie Munnings was independently wealthy -- one of the richest Black Bahamians at that time -- enabled him to help fund the fight for the abolition of the colour bar that prohibited Black Bahamians from entering selected establishments.

And tourism reinstated Junkanoo and made it an arena which was right for the developments dreamed about by men like Gus Cooper and Percy Francis and Brian Gibson and Phil Cooper and Winston Rolle and others.So why is tourism now the reason that all of the above are compromised, stymied, or dead?

So maybe it's not MOT

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but if it isn't, it's all of us.  The comment thread that follows the previous post (about tourism and its detrimental effect on culture) raised several points of importance, including the fact that agencies have to be convinced of the quality of Bahamian work before they engage Bahamians to do the work.Hm.

Why Tourism is detrimental to our culture

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And by tourism I don't mean the industry; I mean the Ministry.The main reason -- and I will have to wait to cool off for a little while before I write about it in earnest -- is that the Ministry of Tourism appears to have very little real respect for Bahamian cultural workers.Granted, in the past two years, the Ministry has bought into the idea of cultural tourism. But in so doing they commodify our culture. They have not, however, invested in any appreciative way in the things that they wish to promote. The government as a whole invests precious little of its overall budget on culture in general, but that's another story; it's getting better. But Tourism -- the Ministry, and the people who pull the Ministry's strings -- don't spend their money at home.This story, I don't mind telling you, angered me this morning. It angered me because you can't tell me that there aren't Bahamian professionals who are perfectly capable of making a documentary about The Bahamas -- or, if the point is to have the documentary made in Italian (I don't know why), of working along with Italians to make such a documentary. It angered me because it is one in a long line of such examples. I learned yesterday of a Bill to be placed before Parliament -- apparently -- whose purpose is to give film crews tax breaks to come to The Bahamas; were Bahamian filmmakers consulted? I read the beautiful insert placed in yesterday's Guardian by BahaMar which outlines the plans for Cable Beach -- plans which pay lip service to Bahamians and their culture but plans which are clearly more geared towards creating Las Vegas on New Providence, complete with international performers, than towards building our culture.The tourist industry does not have to be detrimental to our culture. But it is -- simply because, as usual, the people who make the decisions about our culture are overwhelmingly either not-Bahamian (Italian documentary crews, foreign hotel owners) or not-interested (how many of the Ministry of Tourism personnel who make decisions about cultural tourism etc have taken the trouble to expose themselves to the local cultural scene?).The time has come for a major change in the way we do business. I encourage everyone who reads this blog (all three of you) to go download the Draft Cultural Policy, and make your input. Because if we don't, we will be defined, occupied and sold by people who know nothing about us and care even less.

Christianism and other perversions of faith

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I have the great fortune of being a subscriber to Time.com.  Now that may not mean anything to many people, and it may mean something politically suspect to others, but for me it means that I have the opportunity to access and read a very interesting op-ed article on the political movement that has called itself "Christianity".It's a movement that has very little to do with actually loving and following Christ, apparently, which is a personal choice and commitment and which -- in part thanks to Gutenberg and Martin Luther and the Protestant revolution -- can be carried out in the privacy of one's own home and the privacy of one's own head.  (Catholics, lest you get offended, admit that without Luther and Gutenberg most Christians would still be relying on clerics to tell them what and how they should believe instead of having the option of reading Scripture for themselves.  Admit it.)   Rather, it interests itself in what people -- believers and unbelievers alike -- do, and opts (as it did here with Brokeback Mountain -- yes, I am still harping on that) to force everyone to behave as believers should choose to behave.Andrew Sullivan, op-ed writer for Time, has proposed that a distinction be made between Christianity, which interests itself in following Jesus Christ and in believers' personal responsibility to please him in their lives, and Christianism, which is a political movement.  Here's what he has to say on the subject:

... let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.That's what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back.(for fellow subscribers to Time.com, here's the rest of the article)

Of course, he's situated it in the USA and limited his observations to American political parties.  He's American; can't kill him for that.  That aside, though, his observation rings true for us as well, for those who believe that pastors have the right and the responsibility to set the agenda for all Bahamian citizens, regardless of their personal faiths and beliefs.I'm a Christian too, and I definitely don't believe that pastors have any such rights or responsibilities.But then, one of my favourite parts of Jesus' Gospels is the "Woes" (Matthew 23).

On Censorship

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

It's been a while

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since I visited Laila's blog, but I thought this post was pertinent to us here and now.Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist, and considered one of the finest contemporary writers. What she has to say about the current American immigration policies should have resonance for us, because it is equally true of our ambivalence.When she writes

Should we desire in our midst a group of people only when they’re willing to do for less pay the work that our own citizens find too grueling, too demeaning, or too hazardous? The moral question aside, what does it say about our own societal structure that we cannot within our own borders make these jobs more appealing and more humane for our own citizens?The bottom line is we’d like our immigrants to be disposable, to work when we need them, then disappear when we don’t.

she's spot on.Laila's postThe Danticat article