Kadooment? Junkanoo?

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This post by Dennis Jones about the Bajan Kadooment festival this year is interesting, specially in what it says about the similarities and differences between the two.Here's an excerpt:

We spent some time over the weekend arguing about the cultural content of Kadooment compared to Junkanoo (see link), which is a similar street event that takes place in The Bahamas (principally, in Nassau) over the Christmas and New Year period. I think every one of the Caribbean countries has strong feelings about its main people-in-the-streets event, whether Carnival, Kadooment, or Junaknoo or whatever. A lot of effort and energy is put in by all involved. In Barbados and Trinidad, for instance, costumes are mainly made for the performers to buy and wear. In The Bahamas, most performers spend a good amount of time making their own costumes (see picture of performer in Nassau).Each event has its own cultural richness, which comes from what people put into their part of the event (participating on the street or supporting from the side). It's funny, though, that the events seem to be mired in some sort of controvery each year, wherver they are held. In Nassau, one of the major controversies each year is about the judging. The festivals are also developing. Junkanoo costumes are essentially paper (now crepe) and card. Traditionalists may still feel that the event has good very far from its origins by moving from fringed newspaper, to now include beads, glitter, and feathers. If the style is to have costumes made for sale, so be it; this may give more people a chance to do what they want rather than finding scarce time to do another activity. It also creates another industry and that could be a benefit down the road (so to speak) when one thinks about ways of marketing the region's culture. Both events are now very colourful and energetic, and still manage to get a lot of people out of their homes to watch or jump each year. Junkanoo is also different in that the bands have their own music (with drums, horns and cow bells, which give the parade a very different kind of energy as the bands pass the crowds).

Seven Wonders of the World

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Well, the new Seven Wonders of the World have been announced.Not surprisingly, the Caribbean hasn't been included. Maybe one of the reasons is that we tend to think pretty small, with the result that we haven't created anything of the magnitude of the edifices listed here.  Maybe there are other reasons too, but let's just make a note of the fact for now.Bajegirl has chosen to rectify the oversight by posting her Seven Wonders of the Caribbean.  They are cool, but they're all natural.Needless to say, The Bahamas has not been included in that list. So let me just open this thread up for suggestions, and provide just three with which to begin:The Tongue of the OceanThe Andros Barrier ReefDeans Blue Hole, Long Island (words don't express)bluedean1.jpgAnybody want to play?

On CARIFESTA 2008

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This post can only serve as an announcement of some basic, bald information that has already been shared elsewhere.The Bahamas Government has taken the executive decision that The Bahamas will not be hosting the Caribbean Festival of Arts in 2008, believing that The Bahamas will be unprepared to host the Festival.Instead, The Bahamas has bid to host the Caribbean Festival of Arts in 2012.Related links:Bahama JournalNassau GuardianCaribbean Broadcasting CorporationAt this moment, I remain a civil servant. Please feel free to add your comments here if you like. I will be unable to respond to them. However, given my earlier posts on the topic, I believe that it is important that I acknowledge the decision of the Government on my blog.A broader discussion is occurring here.

The difficulty of writing a Caribbean Harry Potter

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And no, the above doesn't mean what you might think.In fact, this topic goes right back to the "images of savages". As Geoffrey Philp observes in his comment thread,

I was just speculating on how one kind of magic can be totally evil and another can have both good and evil, when if you look at them through archetypal lens, they share similar mythological constructs.

The difficulty in our context is quite different, though. In the first place, the Caribbean has yet to integrate its mythology into something that can have both good and evil connotations, because it's a jigsaw kind of mythology. I often think about Eliot when I think about the construction of our societies, which are literal waste lands salvaged from the residue the masters left behind when they left: these fragments I have shored against my ruins.In this kind of context, the hope of creating something with both good and evil sides to it is virtually impossible. Our ancestors -- the Calibans and the Sambos and the Coolies of our past -- were the demons against whom the angels (our other ancestors, the masters, the Europeans, the messengers-of-light) stood. We were all the Voldemorts, Harry's Xango-sign notwithstanding (and it properly should be an axe anyway; perhaps he's more like Zeus after all); our masters, were the warriors of good, not us.Until we can face up to this history of ours, name it, and beat it back into its proper place with our own fiery sticks, I wonder, as Philp does, whether a Potter-type story for children is yet possible for us.Course, Nalo Hopkinson's doing pretty well for us grown-ups. Go Nalo!

On ethnicity and literature

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An article in the UK Guardian addresses the question of race ethnicity and literature.The author argues: "Writers from Africa - or anywhere else - should not be required to be 'the voice' of wherever they happen to come from."This is a debate that's happening elsewhere in my reading, for some reason; here, on Very Like A Whale, Nic Sebastian asks, "Does belonging to an oppressed community require that one’s creative fealty be sworn to that community? What are the moral and spiritual imperatives here?"And when I gave my reading two weeks ago, someone (actually an old and dear poet-friend) remarked that my poetry was not "street". Well, I wondered, why should it be? First, I'm too old for that. When I was growing up, we had art from the "blocks", not the "street". And second, I'm not interested in it. There are more than enough people writing "urban" or "street" stuff just to fit into a mould that they imagine they're supposed to fit into because they come from a particular ethnic group or from a country that features that ethnic group, without even beginning to imagine the politics behind the creation of that mould.Those politics are for another day. But I thought that the article on ethnicity and literature posed an apt question, so go read it. Here's how it ends.

Authenticity should not be synonymous with the current trend or "voice" publishers are desperately trying to find. Surely all writers should be granted the right of imagination and the freedom of individual expression. But these fundamentals have been taken from international and British diaspora writers. In its place is a requirement to "represent" a particular community in which they have roots.A writer's background is just one of many influences fuelling their imaginations. It's not the defining quality, and we should allow writers' imaginations to roam freely around the world.

Forget the Song and Dance, Culture is Big Business

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In my travels as Director of Culture, I've had the opportunity to meet and talk with some dynamic Caribbean professionals who are passionate about the development of their countries and of this regions through the cultural industries. One of them is Josanne Leonard, a Trinidadian media consultant who is crusading for adjustment in policy and for the laying of a foundation on which to build those industries. She sent me the following article, which I'm reprinting in full below.

reprinted with permission

CUT THE SONG AND DANCE, CULTURE IS BIG BUSINESS

July 2007By Josanne LeonardThis is the age of the Creative Economy. And as if to parallel the era of the plantation economy that fuelled the empire, it's a time when our creative industries are increasingly a key factor in driving cultural and economic development in the more industrialised countries while gasping for air in the nurseries and creative enclaves of own Caribbean backyards.For the uninitiated, uninformed or unbelievers, creative industries in the Caribbean as elsewhere encompass activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the real potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. By way of definition, such industries would include:• Live and recorded music• Television, radio and internet broadcasting• Film, video and other audiovisual production• Performing arts and entertainment• Writing and publishing• Fashion clothing/design• Visual arts and antiques• Graphic design/software development/animation• Crafts and designer furniture• Advertising• Architecture• Educational and leisure softwareOne glimpse at this list would make the point that many of these are areas of creative enterprise in which the Caribbean has always excelled, notably in music, writing, and the performing arts. Yet we remain 'impoverished' with the perception that our development is so beyond our reach and not possible without the begging bowl. The reasons for this phenomenon are many but come to one crucial point….a lack of belief in ourselves, at least on the part of those who are charged with speaking on our behalf.Even as the intellectual property of the region takes flight to add value to external economies, the Caribbean is itself fast becoming a net importer of our own cultural content packaged and sold back to us from firms in the north. Such is our desperate need to be rubber-stamped and validated from the outside, even when it involves content and creativity born in the belly of the Caribbean.Inexplicably, alongside this occurs another piece of madness in which we spend huge sums on tourism budgets to promote festivals and films that rely on foreign artists, broadcast media and film companies. We pay for these with our scarce foreign exchange earnings (US dollars), own no media rights to exploit once the events are done and find ourselves blocked from merchandising any of the said images in any form. Conversely within the CSME, our artists and creative enterprises in the region have to contend with filling out forms to travel with their instruments/tools of their trade and, in some instances, are taxed. They pay duties and tariffs on paper, ink, digital technology, computer parts, instruments and the list goes on. Try sending a promotional CD or DVD to a radio or TV station or mount a traveling art or video festival within the CSME and one begins to understand that the cultural workers and the enterprises that support them have no real value in the economic life of the region. A sad consequence of inadequate or absent robust public policy needed to enable the development and investment in our creative sectors.But it's not just the governments who are missing the big picture. The Economic Intelligence gathering and market analysis of firms like PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Ernst and Young are producing the detailed global outlook reports that demonstrate clearly that many of today's most successful companies are broadcasters, publishers, entertainers and games designers, and they are growing fast. Because cultural/creative products are information-based, the rapid advance of digital technologies and the globalisation of communications networks and creative industries have put the cultural sectors among the fastest-growing in the world. Yet, with few exceptions, the traditional Caribbean private sector is yet to awaken to the possibilities of divestment and investment in the creative industries while our banks remain closed to the vast majority of creative entrepreneurs, most of whom are micro and small enterprises. In the more advanced economies of the world, these sectors are showing annual growth rates between 5% and 20%. The 'old' industrial giants of the 50’s and 60’s such as General Electric, Phillips, Sony and even a French water company now own some of the brand new names in the list of top transglobal firms: Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Universal and News Corporation. Today, culture is big business.Connecting the dots from our cultural sectors to industrial development can no longer be discussed in terms of platitudinous, condescending ideas about promoting or sponsoring the arts and culture; it must be put on the table in terms of policies and entrepreneurial strategies that focus on the quantifiable benefits of creative endeavours throughout the economy. We are compelled by external forces to move away from dependence on our traditional exports and in the case of T&T, to diversify the oil and gas-driven economy. This requires a revolutionary human capital approach to investing in the creativity in our society, rather than an exceptional industry approach with well-meaning but piece-meal 'handouts' for entertainment and cultural entrepreneurs. Its also means serious capitalisation manned (and woman-ned) by real industry professionals (not cultural supporters) for para-statal firms like the Cultural Industries Council in Jamaica and the Entertainment Company of T&T, as examples. The former will lead logically to sustained investment in education and training at all levels, industry development and fiscal investment while the other will perpetuate the 'plug-a-hole' approach. In this regard, Caribbean governments need to be thinking about what they must do to foster innovation and creative talent while developing enabling policies designed to keep our creative industries attuned to domestic and global realities.In June, here in T&T, as regional trade officials met to discuss the European Partnership Agreement (EPAs), two things were confirmed. Firstly, the EU market is virtually 'closed' to us in terms of market access for our audio-visual products and services, something industry experts have been trying to get culture and trade officials to understand ad nauseum. Secondly, there is no co-coordinated response and articulation of policy at the level of CARICOM states on Culture and Trade. This coming fresh on the heels of a Regional Cultural Committee Meeting also held in June 2007 in Havana, Cuba and three years after this issue was tabled by this writer at an RCC forum in T&T; two major regional gatherings of creative entrepreneurs, artists and professionals in 2004 and 2006 under the auspices of the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM) and numerous on-going consultations with Cultural Industries private sector professionals who have provided industry insights, market information and policy direction to many of the region's governments and bodies like Caribbean Export, UNESCO, ILO, CARICOM as well as to leading economic experts - only to be confronted with requests for more studies and talk shops.As a consequence we had no CARIFORUM positions to press for around the table in discussions with the EU negotiators even while some individual member states have been 'championing' the case for the creative industries in their domestic space. Jamaica has a new Ministry of Tourism, Entertainment and Culture, a reconstituted Cultural Industries Council (formerly the Entertainment Advisory Board), the Film, Music and Media Commission under Jamaica Trade and Invest (formerly JAMPRO); Barbados is about to table a Creative Industries Development Investment Act; Antigua and Barbuda has signalled its intent to produce a Cultural Policy; the OECS Secretariat has identified the Creative Industries as a plank of its economic development agenda and in this regard has had discussions with UNCTAD (which incidentally has no budget for work in this area) while ignoring the work being done in the region; T&T has the Film Company because film has been identified as a significant cultural sector in T&T though the data may tell us otherwise as well as the Entertainment Company of T&T which is yet to officially open its doors and we may yet see the newest incarnation of a Cultural Policy document.The point here is that with all of this activity, we have no public policy framework, fiscal incentives and indicators of enterprise development that make sense of all this hard work. This lack of dialogue filters down to the domestic level whereby various arms of government are not aware of the work of industry and thus a constant re-inventing of the wheel through the convening of various committees, task forces and the call for more studies and reports. Attempts to revive a creative industries private sector presence in one forum of CARICOM, the regional ICT steering committee, is yet to receive a response and at the highest organs of policy making, the COTED and COHSOD and inevitably the Forum of Finance Ministers, creative industries remain a talk shop item.While this may sound critical, it is meant to drive home the point about the need for meaningful dialogue. Finally, there's the need for cultural practitioners and entrepreneurs to do the 'hard wuk' required rather than wait on donor or government handouts. We are moving into a different world now- one where the raw materials are not oil, steel or gas even but information, where the most valuable products are ideas and knowledge, powered not by machines but by the imagination. The time has come for the islands of the Caribbean to seize the opportunities offered by the creative economy as a strategy for socio-economic inclusion and development, nurtured and fuelled by the renewable sources of our national creativity.In coming articles, we will examine some key aspects of the value chain of the creative economy – music, media, and telecommunications- as well issues of marketing and maximising our domestic and global competitiveness.Josanne Leonard is a media, communications and entertainment professional. This article appears in the July edition of the T&T Review, official publication of the Lloyd Best Institute of the West Indies. See my profile at www.myspace.com/josanneleonard. Email your comments to miribai@tstt.net.tt.

On Images of Savages, Part Three

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Don't tell me -- the horse is almost dead, and there's no sense in flogging it much more. I know. The thing is, while you may think that I've made my point about race and related subjects (several times over), there's still one more contribution I'd like to make.I'd like to catalogue the images that were associated with -- and that associated us with -- savages and savagery. The reason? They haven't gone away at all. We use them today. And we use them on ourselves.A lot of the time, it's not a white-black thing at all. Most of the time, we're so comfortable with the images of savages we've inherited from our slave-ridden, anti-Enlightenment past that we take them for granted and think of them as fact.By naming them, maybe we can begin to erase them once and for all.So here goes. A savage was considered to be a lower form of human being, a creature that stood between "man" and "beast", a sort of link between the rational and the instinctive, bestial world. This concept remained constant over the roughly four hundred years that non-Europeans were being coerced into being Europeans' servants and subordinates, although its origins were considered to be different.At first, the difference between Europeans and others was believed to be religious in nature. In the beginning, the debates were held over the existence of the savage soul. Early imperialists justified their actions in one of two main ways, and both were hotly contested at home. On the one hand, the people of the New World were soulless beings, existing halfway between animal and man (rather like angels existed halfway between man and God). According to this reasoning, their eradication was a holy cleansing, and many native Americans were murdered in this vein. On the other hand, though, the people of the New World were believed to have souls, but inferior and sin-ridden ones. According to this reasoning, the imperialists' job was to save them, to convert them and baptize them and turn them into Christians.Later, though, the differences were considered to have a scientific basis. Debates were held over the place of these people in the evolutionary ladder. Although the discussion had changed, the place of the so-called "savage" had not moved at all; non-Europeans occupied different rungs in the so-called "ascent" of man. Careful attention was paid to slotting the right group of people into the correct place in this staircase of progress. Europeans, quite clearly the most advanced of all "races", were at the top, and looked down upon everybody else. But who was closest to them? Were the Chinese, with their ancient wisdom and their revolutionary inventions, like paper and gunpowder and noodles, the next most advanced people, or were the East Indians, with their ancient religions? What about the "Red" Indians? The Africans? The Australian Aborigines and the Pacific Islanders?Generally, the criteria used to assign people to their place on this staircase of progress were simplistic, almost childish. Oddly enough, in many cases the amount of clothing a group of people wore entitled them to be classified as more or less advanced. Civilization was measured by the covering of skin, while savagery was associated with nakedness (the one exception to this, of course, were those groups of people classified as "Eskimo", who couldn't help but cover themselves from head to toe). In many other cases, the kinds of dwellings that people built were also considered to be markers of civilization -- whether a society had something that could be called "architecture" was used to separate man from savage. Other things, like types of technology, land use patterns, modes of subsistence, and religious systems were used to classify groups of humans into degrees of civlilization; and even today, we use these very criteria to think about "progress" and "backwardness". Farms that grow one or two crops and sell them to other people are considered to be more "modern" than farms that grow everything that individuals need and sell a little bit to get cash; these are thought to be "backward". The use of fertilizers and pesticides and tractors are markers of "progress", while more ancient (and sustainable) technologies -- like mixed-use farming, shifting cultivation (otherwise known as slash-and-burn agriculture) and natural weed and pest control are considered to be reactionary and anti-modern.Even more insidious -- and even more widespread -- was the almost unspoken association of the intellect with whiteness and the body with negritude. And this is something that still flourishes today. I could talk about Black American culture, but I don't need to; it's alive and well in The Bahamas as I write. In contemporary Bahamian society, using one's brain is considered "soft" or "white"; using one's body -- whether it be for sports, or for fighting, for sex, or for working on construction sites -- is black and manly.To carry the association further, and to state what many of us believe in our hearts to be true: white people make better scientists and inventors and writers and academics, but black people make the best athletes and dancers and lovers.  White people might be rich, but black people can fight.  White people are cold and calculating; but black people can feel.  On the other hand, white people are compassionate and "soft", and want to give everybody rights they don't deserve; black people are tough and know that punishment is far more effective than understanding.  White people are smart, rich, and weak; black people are stupid, poor, and strong.I could go on, but I'm running out of space.  My point?  That these are all images that were invented to justify the domination of groups of people, and not truths that we must live by.  People are people, and fundamentally people are all the same.  The differences are superficial; underneath, we are more alike than we think.  We don't need to remain bound by the images of savages that have been imposed upon us.  It's time we invented some civilized images of our own.

Acknowledgement of Inspiration

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Blogs are funny things. They inspire writing, but they don't always encourage the acknowledgement of other inspiration. Unlike academic writing, they are easy to dash off, seductive almost, not always conducive to the recognition of sources. Oh, they allow us to link to other blogs and websites. That's easy. But if a source is that outmoded invention, a book -- well.I've been writing and posting a series of essays on race and racism and our crippledness about it today, and calling that series of essays "On Images of Savages". I got the title from a book by the psychologist Gustav Jahoda. For anybody who wants to know more about this subject, I suggest you go look up the book, and buy it.You can preview it here, (for a limited time) and buy it from an online bookstore. Check it out. Buy it, even. You won't be sorry for the investment.

books.jpeg

By Gustav Jahoda
Published 1999Routledge
Archaeology
272 pages
ISBN 0415188555

In Images of Savages, the distinguished psychologist Gustav Jahoda advances the provocative thesis that racism and the perpetual alienation of a racialized "other" are a central legacy of the Western tradition. Finding the roots of these demonizations deep in the myth and traditions of classical antiquity, he examines how the monstrous humanoid creatures of ancient myth and the fabulous "wild men" of the medieval European woods shaped early modern explorers' interpretations of the New World they encountered. Drawing on a global scale the schematic of the Western imagination of its "others", Jahoda locates the persistent identification of the racialized other with cannibalism, sexual abandon and animal drives. Turning to Europe's scientific tradition, Jahoda traces this imagery through the work of 18th century scientists on the relationship between humans and apes, the new racist biology of the 19th century studies of "savagery" as an arrested evolutionary state, and the assignment, especially of blacks, to a status intermediate between humans and animals, or that of children in need of paternal protection by Western masters. Finding in these traditional tropes a central influence upon current psychological theory, Jahoda presents a startling historical continuity of racial figuration that persists right up to the present day.Far from suggesting a program for the eradication of racial stereotypes, this remarkable effort nevertheless isolates the most significant barriers to equality buried deep within the Western tradition, and proposes a potentially redemptive self-awareness that will contribute to the gradual dismantling of racial injustice and alienation.

Race, prejudice, and other things

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Over on Weblog Bahamas, Rick Lowe has joined the dialogue in a formal way. He's posted an essay of his that was published in The Bahama Journal some 10 years ago for consideration. I suggest you go read it, and remember there are always many sides to the same story. He provides one white Bahamian's perspective on the issue.He also has some pretty cool links attached to it. One of the coolest is this one, which is about Thomas Clarkson and his struggle to end the transatlantic slave trade.This is what dialogue leads to: perspectives you haven't really ever considered because you haven't ever asked to hear them. It's damn easy to assume stuff about the world, history, other people. What is hard to do -- and to accept -- is listen to other people's realities. But unless and until we force ourselves to face other people's realities, we will never go beyond our own.OK -- UWC-inspired platitudes over. Carry on.

On Images of Savages, Part Two

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The thing about writing about race and related stuff, it seems, is that it stimulates considerable discussion. I'm not at all sure that everybody who wants to say something has said it; but the number of comments I've received to my face and on the blogs where my essays appear suggest that there's a need -- if not exactly a desire -- to talk about this stuff.Even when people claim that there isn't.The thing is, though I started out by talking about race in the Bahamian context, this topic is far bigger than any of us. The real reason we have to talk about who we are, who we are assumed to be, and who we are expected to be is that what happens here in The Bahamas is one small piece in a huge global jigsaw. It's perfectly true that up to now many of our public discussions about this difficult topic have been politically motivated, and politically motivated on the most destructive level. One party says race is irrelevant, and this gains them points in some circles. The other party says race affects every element of our current life, and this gains them points in other circles. The problem is, a discussion such as this is not a discussion at all; it's a form of political campaigning that doesn't tell us anything at all about who and why we are.And so back to the images of savages.I didn't invent the term, by the way. I took the name of this article and the one before it from a book written by an anthropologist who traced the origins of racial stereotyping to ancient Europe, and who linked the development of the concepts we carry with us in our minds and our bodies to their roots. And he found some of those roots at a very interesting time in history -- during the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.For those who don’t know what the significance of those centuries is, consider this. These were the years in which Europe was reforming itself, moving from the so-called "Dark" Ages into the so-called "Enlightenment". Rather than getting rid of its own "darkness", however -- the ignorance, superstition, and fear that it considered synonymous with mediaeval times -- it instead shifted that "darkness" geographically outward. By the time Columbus was setting sail to find the short road to China, Europe had already prepared itself to see the people he would meet not just as having stepped onto a beach, but having stepped out of the past.By so doing, Europe had laid the foundation for the development of an idea of "savagery" that would enable them to categorize the people they met in the Americas as lesser beings, people who God intended to be conquered, to be evangelized, to be subordinated, and to be enslaved. And by so doing, Europe turned the conquest and rape of the New World into a divine project of civilization and transformation. The enslavement of Africans in the old world followed almost seamlessly behind.It's become commonplace to observe two things when defending the position that we really shouldn't be talking about this -- about things that are long past and faded away.The first is that none of this is relevant to us today. Slavery is over, and everybody's now equal. Crying victimhood does nobody any good, and casting blame doesn't help either. We're Bahamian, after all, and we run our nation now. Let's not cry about the past. Let's just deal with it.The second is that slavery has always existed, and people have always been slaves. It doesn't do us much good to focus solely on one kind of slavery; we have to acknowledge that the Africans themselves kept slaves, and even sold those slaves to the Europeans.There's a lot to be said for this position. Crying victimhood is not an answer to any problems, for while you can't always change the bad things that happen to you, you can control how you react to them. And slavery did exist, not only in Africa, but all the way up to Rome and Greece and even Russia. But there's a little more to be said.The institution of slavery that affected us most here in the new world was a slavery that was fundamentally different from the slavery that existed in the ancient world. While that had a place within the societies that practised it -- slaves were got through conquest or debt or some other process that was shared by the dominant society, and every member of the society, if they were unlucky, ran the risk of being enslaved as a result of war or misfortune -- TransAtlantic slavery involved the enslavement of other people far away from the societies of the enslavers, and enabled otherwise decent people to be complicit in a huge dehumanizing effort. What was not permissible in Europe was perfectly fine when practised on other people. In the words of "Rule Britannia": "Britons never, never, never shall be slaves"; but until 1834 people of other "races" could be, and were.In order to justify the enslavement of other human beings in a society that was engaging in discussions of humanity and civilization and progress, a distinction had to be made between types of human beings. Hence the promotion of the idea of the "savage" -- it helped make the Enlightenment practice of slavery fit with the ideas of freedom and equality that were being taught at the same time. And the results of that idea are with us today. While the institutions that that distinction created have been officially dismantled, the psychic residue of those institutions has not even begun to be addressed.I would argue that the current "gangsta" culture of the Black Americas -- which draws upon and embodies much of the worst of the imagery of savagery that was developed to describe people of colour -- is a playing out, an internalization, of those ideas of savagery that were used to justify the enslaving of Africans, the indentureship of Asians, and the subordination of mestizos and mulattos throughout the Americas. The word we use to describe our own ghetto young women -- jungless -- is derived, whether we admit or not, directly from that whole battery of images of animality, brute force, and stupidity that were projected upon the so-called "lesser races" during the enslavement, forced migration, and subordination of the people who were used to build the American colonies. I'll say it again, and without apology. We cannot even begin to address the problems that afflict us today, therefore, without understanding, and making peace with our past.

R.I.P. Barbara Yaralli, 1929?-2007

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I don't remember how old she was. She was around the age of my father's brother, Paul, who was born in 1929, which would make Barbara Yaralli around 77 or 78. She died yesterday at 5:30 p.m. in the States -- either in Indiana or Illinois, whichever daughter she was living nearby.I first remember meeting Barbara Yaralli when Yvette and Yasmin arrived on the scene -- sometime in the early 1970s, I think, round about the time when they all came back from Montreal, where they'd all been living till that time. I don't remember a time when they weren't living in the house on Jean Street, the fancy split-level house with the bedroom that looked out over the living room, and all the different rooms on different levels. When we were teenagers we spent plenty of time in that house, and it didn't seem to affect our relationship with Aunt Barbara in school -- when we were in the Music Room she was Mrs. Yaralli (or Misharali, as we called her), and when we were outside it she was Aunt Barbara. She took us all in, and we all hung out in her kitchen and dining room and living room and family room on their different levels, and ate from the pot she always had on the stove. Curry, or soup, or rice, but mostly curry, she fed us, and we loved her.Things change. We left school. So did she. She left teaching eventually, and opened a restaurant -- an Indian restaurant, which served curry. She closed the business. Yvette and Yasmin married American men, and moved away, to Indiana and to Illinois. She opened another business, making jams and preserves for the consumer market. She did fairly well on her own, but the house was too big. She sold the house and moved. She opened a little factory. She closed the factory. Then she sold the apartment and moved to the States to be with the girls.Yesterday, she died. Our teenage years died with her. R.I.P., Ba-Ya.Or, in the Bahamian way:Lay down, my dear sister. Lay down and take your rest.

On Images of Savages, Part One

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Recently I've been exploring the idea of race. It's not because I want to cause trouble. It's because I believe I don't have much choice. Despite the happy-talk about there not being any real problem any more, ours is a society plagued by self-loathing. As "blacks", we hate ourselves for being descended from enslaved Africans; as "whites", we hate ourselves (or our ancestors) for our involvement in the slave trade. We have all, for worse and for better, been impacted by the institution of transatlantic slavery; and yet we refuse to discuss in any meaningful way the consequences of that fact.I'm going to suggest that part of the reason for our silence on this matter -- and it's a silence that's as thick and as ominous as a summer day before a hurricane -- is that we have all been taught to believe the lies that supported the institution of slavery. These are the lies that were told to justify the enslaving of other human beings, and they are also the lies that were taught to the enslaved to keep them from fighting their state.One of those lies was this: that slavery existed as part and parcel of a vast civilizing project that God gave the European for the betterment of all humanity.According to this lie, slavery was a necessary evil that existed to save the "lesser races" from their savagery and to teach them how to be good human beings. The fact that the slaves were forced to work against their will, often to their deaths, and that they were bought and sold like less important horses and cows, was conveniently overlooked in this fiction. Slavery was on some levels God's blessing to the enslaved, the avenue by which He taught them how to be fully human.Utter nonsense, of course, but powerful anyway.This is one reason why, I believe, we're so afraid to address our past -- and one reason why I think we must. The way in which we look at the world -- at ourselves, at our relatives, our acquaintances and at strangers -- was shaped by a specific need to justify an unjustifiable system. If we let that world-view go unchallenged, we will perpetuate the lie from generation to generation.Let me illustrate. There's an article that I relished teaching to students when I was a lecturer at the College of The Bahamas. It addresses the Africanness of Bahamian culture, and it talks about a number of things that link us with the African continent: certain habits we have, the way we bury our dead, things we do when babies are born, the way we worship, and the things we believe about the dead and other strangenesses. I liked to teach it because the students' reactions were so profound. What surprised me most was how many of them stopped reading the article before they reached the end. When we discussed it, they labelled it "heathen" or "sinful", and tried to distance themselves from the author's observations. And their reactions were in direct proportion to the truth they found in the article. The more they recognized themselves and their own actions in the piece, the more they tried to distance themselves from it.I suspect that what was so unsettling about the article is that what they were learning about themselves -- about themselves and about this culture that we all share -- uncovered for them the fundamental Africanness of much of what we do. And this is an unsettling link, it would seem, because we are still perpetuating the lie that was told to justify the enslavement of our ancestors: that Africa was a primitive place, and it took the light of the European to guide it from its darkness to the light.This idea of the savage -- of the being who looked like a person but who wasn't fully human, but who might potentially be able to be trained to be mostly human -- went hand in hand with the project of slavery, and it's against this backdrop that we have learned to see ourselves.And this is why race still pulls our strings today. According to the tales told about our ancestors, civilization was considered to go along with white skin, and savagery was considered to accompany skins of different colours. The way in which we treat people whose skins are dark, as opposed to the way we treat those whose skins are light is residual.This state of affairs is not unique to us, by the way. All of the nations that have been constructed on the ruins of slavery are fighting the same battles, from those in which the descendants of the enslaved are a minority of the population, like the USA, to those in which those descendants constitute the entire country, like some of our neighbours to the south.I'm going to argue that we can trace the present racial and social inequalities of The Bahamas, the USA, Jamaica, Brazil, Canada, Australia, and even Africa to a single set of causes, and that one of these causes is the image of the savage, that person who was invented to help make the project of slavery more bearable to all concerned. Understanding those causes isn't necessarily going to fix the problem, but it may tell us where to look and how to approach it.But more on that later. For now, we need to remember that our inequalities are steeped in a history that is bigger than all of us. That's why there's no shame in talking about them. Unless we talk, we'll never understand them; and without that understanding, there may be no cure at all.

R.I.P. Ousmane Sembène

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sembene.jpgSembène, the Senegalese filmmaker and novelist, died after a long illness on Sunday past.Here's more on his passing:

Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese filmmaker and writer who was a crucial figure in the African postcolonial cultural awakening, has died at his home in Dakar, Senegal. His family, which announced his death Sunday, said Sembene had been ill since December. He was 84. (International Herald Tribune, June 12, 2007)

Here's more on his life and work:

Born on 1 January 1923 in Ziguinchor, Senegal, Ousmane Sembene is assuredly one of the most prominent figures in African film and literature. Yet little in his early experience seemed to predispose him to a career not only as a major literary figure but also as a literary figure, tout court. Primarily self-taught, Sembene has been exposed to various experiences and situations that have very often turned out to reverberate in his work. As early as the age of 15, he started earning his living as a fisherman. Beside working as a fisherman, Sembene has also served as a bricklayer, a plumber, an apprentice mechanic, a dock worker and a trade unionist -- jobs which many people may view as incongruent with, or even unlikely to be conducive to, the stimulation of literary talents. But it is this very experience which, paradoxically or not, greatly contributed in shaping Sembene as the great writer and filmmaker he has become. In this respect, Ousmane maintains that his education was a result of a training he received in "the University of Life" (qtd. in Amuta 137).

If you have never read or seen anything by him, make the effort.

Life, in its madness

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rears its head again.Last week I was in Cat Island for the Rake 'n' Scrape Festival. No, there is no web site for it. The weekend was good stuff -- more from the point of view of Cat Island than of the Festival, which was a let-down for all concerned. The Festival Committee recognizes the need for assistance, and now that the responsibility for heritage festivals has landed in our Ministry's portfolio it's our job to offer that assistance.What Ministry, you ask? Well if you haven't been following the post-election updates and if you aren't in The Bahamas, there's a new Ministry of Education, Youth, Sports and Culture and there's a Minister of Education, a Minister of State for Youth and Sports, and a Minister of State for Culture. An interesting turn of events, potentially very exciting. Normally people who work in culture the region around consider the placement of the department responsible for culture in a ministry like Education the kiss of death -- education is so big and unwieldy that it sucks the life of everything else out of it. We have received several condolences. But with a Minister of State it may not be bad; and there are rumours that this is a preparatory move towards the establishment of a full Ministry. That would be good -- as long as it's not one of those ephemeral Ministries that appear and disappear with administrations. Barbados had one of those for a while, but now Culture is under the Office of the Prime Minister. What is good is that all the related agencies are for the first time under the same umbrella, and that my section is now being called a Department, not a Division. That is a real step forward.This weekend I'm travelling again, this time to Cuba for a meeting and a conference. My first time in Cuba, peeps. I'm mildly excited, though I have been feeling the challenges of working in a Ministry again (rather than under the Office of the Prime Minister) -- the speed of official business has slowed down once more. Not sure how much more I can say; blogging about one's work is a risky business at the best of times, and when I'm working under General Orders it may be riskier than many. But it should be interesting for people to know what working for the Bahamas Government is like -- too many people have the misconception that when politicians change, things in general will change. There's a saying in the Civil Service: Politicians come and go, but civil servants remain in place -- even civil servants like me who do not want to retire from the government after decades of service. Often things are blamed on the elected representatives that should be blamed on the civil servants -- and vice versa, and so to know a little about the Service might be enlightening.Anyway, I started this post to say I'll be in Cuba over the weekend, and running around like a madwoman while I'm there, so if (when) the look of the blog changes, you'll know it'll be fixed next week.One more note. If you post a comment to this blog in my absence, know that it'll be held in moderation till I get a chance to get online and the time to deal with it. This blog's been getting too much spam lately, and the spam's been getting through, so I'm moderating all comments. Please be patient, and don't post the comment more than once! I'll see it eventually.Have a good weekend. I intend to do the same.

More On Why Race Matters

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Last week I wrote about why race matters in the twenty-first century Bahamas, and argued that unless we talk about our experiences as different human beings in this multiracial, hierarchical society, we will continue to relive old prejudices forever.This week, I want to talk a little about why race matters to me -- a Bahamian who, at different times and in different places in this Bahamas, has been categorized as black, white and coloured, and treated accordingly.Let me tell you a story.There was great rejoicing in my family when I was born. On one level, it was for all the usual reasons -- that I was healthy, that I was a first on both sides of the family tree -- the first grandchild in my mother's family, and the first girl in my father's. But there was another reason as well.There was great rejoicing among some members of my grandparents' generation because I was born so white.My mother's family and my father's family both were people of mixed origins. Their ancestors were white people, black people, and other people who ranged from Amerindians to whoever else happened to be in the mix. Their appearance ranged from dark brown with African features and hair (two fundamentally important markers of your lot in life) to coffee-and-cream with European attributes.In pre-1967 Bahamas, there were three social-racial classes of Bahamians: white, black, and mixed (or coloured). The social set-up was simple. There was a little ditty people used to chant to make sure that everybody stayed in their allotted station in life, and it went like this: "If you white, you all right; if you brown, stick around; if you black, stay back."Now, in case you think this was peculiar to The Bahamas, know that it existed throughout the English-speaking Caribbean, where people of European descent made up the minority of the population. They maintained their position at the top of the heap by creating what historians call the "race-class pyramid": a society organized with a few white people at the top, a whole bunch of black people at the bottom, and a motley group of people who didn't fit into either group in between. Now this in-between group consisted of all sorts: black people who had some education or some money and some social status to boot; people from the Mediterranean who didn't quite count as "white" but couldn't be called "black"; Asians of all sorts, from Chinese to Indian; and the mixed-up offspring of them all.In the rest of the Caribbean, where there weren't enough whites to go around, these people were often able to gain access to real power of a sort, becoming senior civil servants, doctors, lawyers, artists, merchants, university professors, and other professionals, and forming the bedrock of the kind of middle class that was found in Europe and elsewhere. It's from this group of people that many of the leaders of the Caribbean independence movement came. In The Bahamas, though, these people had far fewer opportunities.As I've pointed out before, the white population in The Bahamas was the largest of any colony (except Bermuda). What that meant was that (a) there were far fewer openings in middle-class activities for people of colour, although a few non-white Bahamians did make some economic gains; and (b) that there were no social opportunities at all. The most a fair-skinned person could hope for was to be able to qualify for a "nice" job, like serving in a shop on Bay Street, taking tickets in the Savoy Theatre, or working in a bank. Some very lucky women might, if they were pretty enough and smart enough, land themselves a white husband and move into white society. But for the most part, even the fairest Bahamian of colour had their family tree working against them, and couldn't expect to move very far.What that meant was that, if you wanted to get ahead, unless you were very confident or very smart or very stubborn, you didn't concentrate on getting a good education or working hard. Neither of these was going to get you very far anyway; the opportunities for education were limited, and the opportunities for doing something meaningful after that -- unless you were going to be a newspaperman or a teacher or a nurse or a member of the clergy -- were more limited still.What it meant was that if you wanted to get ahead, your best bet was finding a way to make your children lighter than you, so maybe one day, their children or grandchildren could be fair enough to matter. If that meant trying to seduce white men to sleep with you so you could have their children, or if it meant cutting yourself off from your black(er) family, then that was what you had to do.The point of all this reminiscing is this. It may seem that those days are gone forever, and that those attitudes have gone away. But they have not. Forty years after majority rule, there is still rejoicing among some of us when our children are born fairer than we are. Forty years on, there is still apparently a preference among (black) bank managers for people with bright skin to stand behind counters. Forty years on, markers of beauty still include straight hair and pointy noses. And so women pay for weaves and creams that fade their skins, and men still like long hair and light eyes. So before we assume that for those people born in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, most of this is ancient history, let us make no mistake. These attitudes have affected us all, and they are not irrelevant, no matter what hopeful stances many of us take. We have made some progress, it's true; but these ideas have shaped our society and they continue to inform who we are. It's not about black or white or African or European -- that would be too simple. It's about us, Bahamians, and until we tell our stories, we will continue to simplify the most complex issues, and we'll continue to live in a neo-colonial ex-colony, and not in a multicultural nation of which we all can be proud.

A brief note

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I'm travelling this weekend (Cat Island Rake-n-Scrape, yeah!) and so will be offline for four days. Given the issues with the theme, please be patient. I'll try and fix it so you don't get a blank page when the default is reverted to by the blog, but just in case you do get a blank page over the weekend, please be patient and check back on Sunday night, by which time I should have fixed it.In the meantime, I'll play with a couple of other themes, just for fun.  Bear with me.  I'm like the housemate who keeps rearranging the furniture.  If you really hate it, let me know and I'll try and curb my enthusiasm.Have a good Labour Day weekend.

On Why Race Matters

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It doesn't. Really.And if you believe that, I have a couple of bridges to sell you.I've written about race before, from two different perspectives. The first time I wanted to write about why race didn't matter -- about how all people are fundamentally human alike, and how the concept of "race" is an idea that is used to achieve various goals. The second time, I wanted to talk about racism, which occurs when humans act on what they imagine to be racial differences.Today, I want to bring it home. I want to discuss why race matters, here and now, in the twenty-first-century Bahamas.Now some of you may feel the urge to put the paper down, thinking "not this again". Before you do, consider this. We Bahamians love to avoid discussion of the very things that are most crucial to us. We have unacceptably high incidences of pregnancy, HIV and other STD transmissions, and sexual abuse among our young people, and yet we steadfastly refuse to talk about issues of sex and sexuality in any constructive and positive way. We have unprecedented numbers of stateless people living among us, and yet we refuse to discuss any sensible policy relating to immigration and citizenship. And, forty years after majority rule, we remain a deeply divided society that continues to remember and celebrate distinctions based on colour.So let's call a lie a lie. Race matters. And we need to talk about it in order to make it matter less.To begin with, in our multicultural society, minorities are virtually invisible. The Bahamas is different from the vast majority of English-speaking West Indian nations because of a relatively high percentage of native White Bahamians. In Jamaica, the percentage of the population that is of European descent is 0.2%; in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana both, it is less than 1%; even in Barbados, where native Whites occupy a substantial sector in the society, it is 4% (my figures are taken from the UK Foreign Office Country Profiles). In The Bahamas, accepted figures suggest that between 12% and 15% of Bahamians are of European descent.And yet, except for their involvement in political activity, the presence of White Bahamians in day-to-day Bahamian life is so slight that many young Bahamians are under the impression that the only people of European descent who live in this country are expatriates. For them, "white" Bahamians are people of visibly mixed heritage who refuse to acknowledge their African connections; European Bahamians simply do not exist.White Bahamians may be invisible; Haitian Bahamians are silent. Although we do not have specific figures, estimates suggest that "Haitians" make up perhaps 20% of the overall population. We have plenty to say about our "immigration problem", but we rarely, if ever, acknowledge that people of Haitian ancestry are here to stay among us. And as a result, many Haitians seem to disappear in Bahamian society, Bahamianizing surnames, speaking with Bahamian accents, and keeping what is most precious separate and apart and private.I could go on to talk about how we ignore other ethnicities that make up our population, but I think that the point has been made. Race matters in The Bahamas -- so much so that the people who are not of the accepted ethnicity choose to melt into the background rather than challenge the status quo.But when we place these concepts next to the fact that in the USA, 12.9% of the population is African-American, and realize that it is impossible to ignore the African-American experience in and contribution to the United States, we can come to only one conclusion about race in The Bahamas: race matters so much to so many of us that it prevents us from building a society.It matters because the black, English-speaking majority run the risk of being the only people who ever feel truly at home in this Bahamaland of ours.It matters because the appointment of a self-identified White Bahamian as Deputy Prime Minister has given White Bahamians a chance to feel as though they belong in The Bahamas again.And it matters because the appointment of that same self-identified White Bahamian as Deputy Prime Minister has for some raised the fear that the oppressive forces that were fractured in 1967 will return and change The Bahamas back to what it was before Majority Rule.It's time, I believe, for us to open our mouths and start talking to one another. Until we examine the things that shape our race relations -- like slavery, emancipation, labour's struggle, the fight for equality, and the massive influx of Haitian immigrants -- we can never hope to build a united society. Although it's no longer a matter of law or custom, there are still churches and clubs and parks and professions and schools that are avoided by whites or blacks. There is still very little opportunity for mingling, for getting to know the people beneath the skin. And we have to say so.It's time for us to ask hard questions -- like what makes some White Bahamians feel as though they don't belong in The Bahamas? Why do some Black Bahamians fear whites who hold political power so much? Why do we still refuse to accept the fact that Bahamians of Haitian parentage have a place in our nation?It's only in asking tough questions, starting arguments, and listening to one another that we will go beyond our current uneasy political unities and build a society that is unified. Let's begin by agreeing that race matters. To pretend that it doesn't is to trap The Bahamas forever in a cycle of prejudice, bigotry and hatred that will stunt the growth of us all.