Emancipation, or What's so awful about being the way God made me?

Trini Attilah Springer writes about Vybz Kartel's self-mutilation, all in the name of "freedom":

Like a ghoul out of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video that used to give me nightmares back in the 80s, Kartel haunts my mind, and I try to resist the desire to dance, because I can hear his words and they are far more terrible than what he has done to his face. It’s kind of funny when you really think about it. Vybz Kartel, the voice of emancipation for young people. In keeping with the level of hilarity that exists in this country. Because if you don’t laugh, the likelihood is that you might spend all your days weeping. Or hiding. Or hiding and weeping. If nothing else Vybz Kartel with his cake soap and his tattoos and his unfathomably banal lyrics represents either the failure or the success of past generations to pass on a sense of what a diaspora African identity is supposed to be. But this is what freedom is about I guess. To be so confident in your blackness that you attempt to erase every trace of it.?To be so sure of yourself that you feel no qualms about moving from disguise to disguise. Until there is no difference between you and the mask. The mask is you.?The mask is real. The mask is permanent. But that’s okay because it’s white and white’s alright.?That is true freedom. That is true emancipation. Because blackness is the prison that black people fear the most.

via Vybz Kartel – the new face of freedom « Four Fingers and a Thumb 2.0.

On Emancipation Day

Wanted to post something all day yesterday but was working to finish one of the two reviews and so I didn't. (I did finish the review though!)This is the beginning of what I wrote:Today is Emancipation Day. It's the last public holiday for the summer, but that's not really the point of the day. On August 1, 1834, slavery in the British Empire came to an end. (The conditions that attached to slavery didn't end then, but that's another story). I'm not entirely sure that we truly understand the significance of the day, but that's also another discussion. This year, in 2011, neighbourhoods, communities and families are planting trees.It's a first step. But for emancipation really to have been achieved, we need to emancipate our minds from a number of things. The first of these is the idea that many of us have—that far too many of our "leaders" appear to promote—that we Bahamians cannot do anything without outside help. That we cannot trust the man sitting next to us, or the woman in the next room, but that we can trust the stranger coming in from overseas. That we ourselves do not need to prove ourselves trustworthy because, well, Bahamians don't know any better anyway.For true emancipation, we need to believe in something bigger than ourselves, and something less scam-distorted than the "god" we hear so much about. (Believing in God is all well and good, but if it's just to make sure we get material reward in this lifetime, then it's not God we're really believing in at all). Something like truth, or honour, or service, or community. Something that makes the enslavement of our ancestors and their subsequent freedom worth all the suffering they endured. Something that would make them proud to have survived what they did on our behalf.So plant trees—and water them. What was begun yesterday must continue for the rest of the year, even the rest of our lives. But we need to understand that this is only a beginning, and a symbolic one at that.

An oldie but goodie: Kei deconstructs dichotomies

Reading round the web in search of wisdom on/by Kei Miller (for this review that Nicholas has surely contracted hitmen to squeeze out of me), I found this,

A description of the successful “page” or “sit-down” poet is, perhaps, someone who has typically published poems in a few major journals, who has a couple books published by a well-respected press, who preferably knows how to hob-nob with the best of them, and is invited to give readings by the National Poetry Society of America. In all likelihood he is, like most sit-down poets, a bitch, and probably, as a day job, holds a faculty position at some stuffy 500 year-old university. In other words – me.The “stage” or “stand-up” poet, on the other hand, has probably won a couple slams and is invited to give performances on BET. He is youngish—not yet thirty—and has funky hair. He would ideally like hip-hop and reggae and fit into that strange demographic America has invented to describe all things non-middle-class and non-white: in other words, he would be “urban.” He is completely social – gregarious even. If he went to university at all, he didn’t finish; he dropped out at the same time the university asked him to leave, and decided then he would become a poet, ranting against the system and all kinds of oppression. In other words – me.That these two descriptions should inhabit one body is perhaps the source of my schizophrenia, because typically I’ve learnt only to embrace the first. So consider this: although I almost never need to look at a book or a printed page to recite any of my poems, I have begun to take blank sheets of paper up with me to podiums, to shuffle through and glance down occasionally at their emptiness, all to give the illusion that I am reading – to remind the audience that I am not performing, or slamming, and that literature is coming, only inconveniently at that moment, from where I stand. Really, at my essence (I’m trying to declare) I am a sit-down poet.via Kei Miller: 91st Meridian V6 #2 International Writing Program, The University of Iowa.

Yeah. One day when I've dented my to-do list satisfactorily, I'll say something about it. But if not, or till then, this is worth some thought, if not a real hard read.

On a different note though

Stuff published this year includesFour poems in Avatar Review (featured poet)Two poems in Anthurium Issue 8One poem in Lucayos Issue 2so all is not may not be lost.

Too damn much to do

Still catching up on deadlines from the beginning of the year.Here's the thing. Walking a tightrope of obligations has this difficulty: if something should throw you off, it's really hard to get back up again.Among other things, I'm working on:

• A long, long overdue review for the Caribbean Review of Books (Nicholas will finally get this out of the way)
• Another review for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (will I make it?)
• Shakespeare in Paradise search for sponsors
• Directing Dis We Tings for Shakespeare in Paradise
• finishing off this issue of tongues of the ocean and preparing for issue 9
• thinking about courses for next semester, which starts in *gulp* three weeks or so
• thinking about the next set of Essays on Life I want to write, on democracy
• putting together poems for publication
• A whole bunch of other stuff that people keep inviting me to do. Moral of this story: don't. I may not exactly say "no" but you won't get what you want from me. Give me another six months or so to get caught up!

Attention, Government of The Bahamas:

It's a new century. It's the age of culture.When are we going to be joining it?YouTube - Il Volo - EPK.This is the kind of opportunity you are letting your citizens miss. With vision, boys like Osano Neely and Matthew Walker could have done this. Without vision and support, all we can do is bend over and take foreign investment in places where the sun don't shine.Am I angry?You bet.Always.

Those Disastrous, Unforgettable Elections of 1977 « P. Anthony White… online

For those Bahamians who have never heard of a third party that made a difference in Bahamian democratic elections, go read P. Anthony White. To wit:

... perhaps the most celebrated – and most wrenching for many – of all general elections held in the modern Bahamas were the historic polls of 1977, when the electorate was stretched in three political directions. But let us historically backtrack for a spell.via Those Diastrous, Unforgettable Elections of 1977 « P. Anthony White… online.

It's interesting and instructive, specially as I've spent the evening with several Bahamians younger than me who have never heard of the BDP.(What do they teach people in schools these days anyway? To what use is our quarter of a billion education budget put?)White's site is the best one for this subject, and one of the only ones that gives the BDP a fair shake. Now the 1977 elections were the first ones I really remember. (I remember bits and pieces from earlier ones, like the UBP spray-painted in the road of my neighbourhood when I was a very very young child in 1967, and the discussions about Independence in 1972, which bored me to tears, what with the White Papers and the Green Papers and the Referendum yaddaya.) In 1977 I was in high school and old enough to give some thought to who I might vote for when I was eighteen, so I paid attention.And there was lots to pay attention to.Here's the background in a nutshell:

... by about 1975, there came the famous split in the Opposition, and Cecil Wallace-Whitfield was once more at the centre of it all, surrounded by many who had been with him from the days of the Free PLP.The other side was formed into the Bahamian Democratic Party. When the 1977 elections were called, both sides offered complements of candidates, some very familiar political faces.

The result: the opposition was divided and the PLP won the election by a landslide.But go read about it. And take notes. And realize that the elections coming up have every chance of being equally memorable -- not necessarily in the same way as the 1977 elections -- but memorable nevertheless.And go ask yourselves and your teachers and your ministers of education why this historical moment has never come up in all our discussions about third, fourth, fifth and (I hear) sixth parties circling the barrel for the coming elections.

From Facebook and Ken Clarke:

IF your political system and process depends on and is controlled by money and significantly controlled by those who have money, while the overwhelming majority of your people have absolutely no way of ever being in position to have that kind of money and thus influence that process; can you still call that a democracy?

I wouldn't call it that. Stay tuned and see why.

Bahamas Press » Plans by FNM to allow foreigners the right to vote in Parliamentary Elections in The Bahamas?

Writing about politics is usually such a bore, I don't generally engage in it. Politicians don't much care what Bahamians have to say anyway, so it's usually also a waste of time. And the media -- Bahamas Press and its so-called "wutless" competitors alike -- tend to sensationalize the trivial in this regard, rarely engaging in the kind of analysis or debate that changes things or leads to a broadening of democracy that it becomes difficult to carry on political conversations. But this headline grabbed my attention enough to get me to read the story, and the section regarding the comparison between the UK's voting policies and ours was so very misleading that it seemed important that there be some sort of response.It's not that I'm against the ideas of non-citizens voting in elections. In another country, under different circumstances, I would entertain the discussion, perhaps even raise it. But in this country, where non-citizens have more rights and privileges than Bahamians in almost every other way, I find the idea insulting.I happen to believe that the principles of democracy go far beyond voting. Voting is one way in which the citizenry participate in their government. The politician placed in power therefore has some kind of obligation to that citizenry, an obligation that has to do with meeting the needs first of all of all the people. Now this is something that Bahamian governments in general have done very poorly, in particular over the last fifteen years or so; ours has become a nation that puts Bahamians last in virtually every arena. For some reason unfathomable to me, we Bahamians elect and re-elect politicians who despise their country and their people and take every opportunity to find ways to disempower us all, politicians who lie down and become carpet when they meet people from abroad, but who stand up and become granite when faced with their fellow-countrymen, politicians who insist on behaving as though we are all as stupid as they imagine we are, as they have trained us to be.You will notice that I refer to them as "politicians". "Leaders" seems to give them too much credit. But I digress.Here's the bit of the BP article that struck me as disingenuous.

According to the FNM source, “In Great Britain right now, if you are a resident not born in the UK, but is working there, you can vote in National Elections. In fact, the privilege has been extended to member states of the EU. When it comes to UK Parliamentary elections, not only members of territories can vote, as like residents of The Turks and Caicos, but citizens from all Commonwealth Countries and British Territories can indeed vote in any Parliamentary General Election in the UK,”BP’s resident CEO, Alexander James, who resides in Cardiff, also participated in the recent UK elections, as he is a resident there. James is from the Bahamas and is a born Bahamian; so the idea is not far-fetched.According to the UK Electoral Services Department, Commonwealth Member States, including local citizens of the Bahamas, Jamaica, Rwanda, Zambia, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa and others all can register and participate in British Parliamentary elections.via Bahamas Press » Plans by FNM to allow foreigners the right to vote in Parliamentary Elections in The Bahamas?.

While there is some truth to the idea that "foreigners" can vote in UK elections, there is far more truth that democracy in the UK and Europe is so much more far-reaching than democracy in The Bahamas that the concept of considering allowing anyone but Bahamian citizens the right to vote at this time is ludicrous; the problem with referencing the UK in this matter is that we have not referenced the UK in the provision of services to our citizenry, and we have not put the matter into context.So here's some context.The UK is part of the European Union. There are several tiers of government in Britain: local councils, (i.e. true-true local government, not this travesty we "have" here), national government, and the European Parliament. The purpose of allowing non-nationals to vote has to do with the levels of service and privilege that devolve to the inhabitants of the UK as a result. Voting in Europe in general, unlike voting here, is not a matter of handing unbridled power to a small handful of people to do what they will with for five years, as it is here. The role of government in the UK is far more complex, with different tiers of responsibilities and different services provided.In our so-called nation, the idea of Bahamians receiving services from any tier of government is, to put it kindly, a bit of a laugh. We only have one tier, and it spends most of its time offering services to foreign investors. No wonder the idea of allowing those investors the right to vote has come up.Let's take it further. When I was in the UK during the 1990s, I was able to vote and be active, should I have wanted to, in local elections. I had a Canadian friend who campaigned for the Labour party, who worked in council elections, who voted, who did everything that the politically active do. Technically, as a member of the British Commonwealth, I was also able to vote in council elections; my aunt, who was living in Cambridge at the time, was also able to do so. But here's the thing. We were all paying taxes to the council, to the local government; living in the area obliged us to do so. Voting in council elections was part of our right to say how our taxes were to be put to use -- and they were. Resources were allocated to everyone, including the very least fortunate -- and this was in Maggie Thatcher's Britain, even though John Major was the titular head of it. It was possible to apply for government funding or services in every arena I can think of. As a student, I was obliged to register with the nearest surgery for medical purposes, and that surgery sent me notices on an annual basis to tell me to come in for my check-up. I cannot remember whether my German friends were permitted to vote in those elections, but I think they did -- these were the earlier years of Britain's engagement with the EU, pre-Chunnel, so what is permissible now may not have been then. But I can tell you who were not permitted to vote in any election: my American friends, even though they too paid taxes and received services. This so-called British magnanimity was not boundless.The thing I'm getting at is that the concept of allowing non-nationals to vote in British elections was one that had a philosophy behind it -- something that I do not expect our politicians to have. The philosophy was this: the job of the government is to provide services for its people (not *just* to seat its behinds in power). Local councils had the task of making their cities and regions liveable; they collected their own taxes and disposed of them accordingly. Those people who received those taxes were given a voice regarding the disposal of those monies.The idea of offering "foreigners" the vote here, though, has fundamentally different roots. In The Bahamas (and in the Caribbean in general) governments seem to forget their obligations to their citizenry. They don't refer to us as citizens, and they don't treat us as such; they provide very poor service, and they make very obvious distinctions between Bahamians and non-Bahamians in every arena. Non-Bahamians roads are paved; non-Bahamians' harbours are deepened; non-Bahamian businessmen get tax concessions; non-Bahamians get tax breaks, get the right to build in national parks, get appointments with Prime Ministers, get to call shots, get to influence government policy -- all without the vote. To give them a vote seems to be more a ploy on the part of the politicians who serve them to get themselves re-elected.And against this I take a stand.Here's my fifty cents. When the Bahamian governments we elect find some way to meet the needs of all its people, no matter how small or insignificant we are imagined to be (and our politicians, make no mistake, consider us, the Bahamian citizens, very small and insignificant indeed), then let's allow them to think about this. But until I see democracy enacted throughout this nation in ways beyond simply having a vote every five years, then let's put the kibosh on this so-called idea.

The Global War on Drugs Has Failed, Leaders Say

Let's think about how we can make twenty-first century policy that makes some sense now -- like considering exactly what is recommended here -- the legalization of certain drugs.

A new report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy excoriated traditional approaches to reducing drug abuse, saying, "The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world." The commission, which includes such world leaders as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, recommended that governments begin to consider the legalization of some drugs and the end of criminalization for drug users.via The Global War on Drugs Has Failed, Leaders Say.

And no, I am not a pot-head. But let me tell you this: you try take my caffeine away from me, them's fightin' words.Off to the coffee shop now to get my fix.

Jackets: made in Jamaica - Lead Stories - Jamaica Gleaner - Wednesday | May 25, 2011

Thing is, this says as much about the ethnocentrism and patriarchal nature of the US Embassy as it does about Jamaican (read Caribbean) family structure.

The embarrassing information on the number of jackets was contained in a diplomatic cable captioned 'fraud summary' and covered the period March 2009 to August 2009.According to the leaked diplomatic cable, the US Embassy in Kingston "often requests applicants to undergo DNA testing because their fathers' name is either not on the birth certificate at all, or was added many years after their birth".In the summary on the "use of DNA testing", the Americans also noted, "In many cases, these fathers have never lived with their children or played a role in their lives until they go to immigrate."The diplomatic cable also stated that the embassy's fraud-prevention unit was working with the Immigrant Visa Unit to update its DNA procedures as a result of the processing change.The pervasiveness of misattributed fatherhood in Jamaica is not new.Data from a study conducted in early 2002 by Dr Sonia King in the Pathology Department at the University of the West Indies revealed a rate of one in three.

via Jackets: made in Jamaica - Lead Stories - Jamaica Gleaner - Wednesday | May 25, 2011.

Hopes Unrealized In Independent Jamaica : NPR

Hoo, boy, do I want to get my hands on this!!!

But almost 50 years later, "a lot of Jamaicans feel that since the Union Jack came down, there has been largely disappointment," writer Ian Thomson tells Weekend All Things Considered guest host Noah Adams. Parts of Jamaica are a vacation paradise, but much of the country is crippled by violence and corruption.Thomson traveled all over the island, and everywhere he went, people asked the same question: What has Jamaica done with its independence? Thomson chronicled his search for the answer in his new book, The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica.It's a difficult question for an outsider to answer. One woman challenged Thomson directly at a meeting of the Jamaican Historical Society. "You visitors are always getting it wrong," she told him. "Either it's golden beaches or it's guns, guns, guns. Is there nothing in between?"Thomson says that despite the grim picture he paints of conditions on the island, he also did his best to depict the good alongside the bad.

via Hopes Unrealized In Independent Jamaica : NPR.

On Moral Illiteracy

for Jackson

Recently I listened to German author Bernhard Schlink on the BBC's World Book Club discussing his novel The Reader. It's a book about the Holocaust, told, as he says, from the perspective of the second generation of Germans who have lived with that atrocity in their cultural and historical reality, and it explores their share of the guilt. For him, that guilt is shared by anyone who loves or respects someone who was active in the Holocaust (I'm simplifying horribly) unless you are also able to call them to account for their share in the war.He writes from the perspective of one who knows. In his life, growing up in Germany after the war but before the complicity of most Germans in the Nazi atrocities was publicly acknowledged, he knew, admired and loved many individuals who had been personally responsible for, or who had at least taken part in, the wartime genocides. At some point in his life he was forced to make a moral choice. Should his love and admiration for these people obscure the atrocities in which they were complicit, or was it his responsibility to call them to account for their actions?The Reader puts this question on the table. On one level, it's a book about literacy and illiteracy; one of the main characters cannot read or write. Schlink was asked whether he'd intended that to be symbolic or metaphorical, whether he'd intended that trope to represent the blindness of the German people as they ignored the genocides being carried out by the Nazi government. His reply had two sides to it. On the one hand, he said, he was not writing a book from a symbolic point of view. The illiteracy in the book was simply illiteracy--an inability to read. But on the other hand, he added, it was possible for a nation, a group, a people, to breed a sort of moral illiteracy--the inability to behave in ways that were morally acceptable. He used that to account for the parsons and priests and doctors who supported the Nazi regime, who were complicit in the torture and murder of millions, who participated in, encouraged, taught, and celebrated the actions of Hitler and his government. Education and profession were no barriers to atrocity, he argued. What was lacking was not knowledge; it was morality.So here is what I believe about my country. I believe that we suffer from a profound moral illiteracy, and that this pervades our society from top to bottom. Our approach to life is simple and simplistic at the same time; all that matters is what is good for me right now. We feel no collective sense of outrage at anything that is palpably wrong; we do not even discuss the inherent rightness and wrongness of any issue, but choose to implement what is most convenient. We mouth Christian principles, and are happy to use them to justify oppression and cruelty; we press carefully selected Bible verses into service to justify why, for instance, it should remain legal for a man to rape his wife, but do not examine the same scriptures for the concurrent instructions about men's responsibilities to love and honour their wives, or spouses' responsibilities to one another. We turn blind eyes on other instances to ministers of the cabinet and of the gospel and all others who abuse the weak socially, sexually, morally, and physically. We celebrate and glorify hard men of every kind, but despise kindness and compassion. And when it comes time to make hard choices--do we do what is right or what is popular? Do we honour bullies who destroy or value people who seek to build up the common life? Do we work to achieve what is hard but best, or do we settle for what is easily within our (very short) reach?--we make the easy ones every time.In this we are not all that different from many of our Caribbean neighbours, or even from the USA, for which money and finance have more value than human life. It is not fashionable to hold principles. It is not good business to put people first. It is not profitable to seek to be our brothers' keepers, and poverty is in terribly bad taste. The moral illiteracy that I think we share does not end at our borders. It is a North American malaise too, but we in the Caribbean have developed too few traditions that can help combat it, and almost no institutions that provide support for moral stands. For, as Schlink observes, to make the hardest moral choices, "You need an institution to support you. If you are on your own it becomes very difficult."The problem, I believe, is rooted in the fact that our societies in the Caribbean were never designed to be societies at all. Our region is unique in the modern world in being the one place whose sole purpose was to provide cheap goods, generate capital, and extract raw materials to fuel the prosperity of metropolitan centres. This was not always our function; but over the course of five centuries our indigenous populations, societies and structures were first eradicated, and then explicitly re-created to achieve those goals. And we live in the world that remained.Academics write often about "the plantation", but their discussions are remote and not yet as resonant as the legacy of that "plantation", among whose ruins we still live. The concept of the total institution that was slavery in the Caribbean has not entered the popular discourse on any meaningful level. We have been taught, and still imagine, that we have some kind of autonomy about the societies we build in its wake. We do not. Until we do what Schlink and his modern Germany have done—confront the horrors in our history, and call the perpetrators to account—we cannot hope to build anything new. The foundations on which we build are the bones of our ancestors, and they are too uneasy to allow anything to remain.As it exists today, the plantation discussion does little more than provide radicals with the language of critique, and conservatives with a philosophy against which to fight. In our world, we appear not to recognize complexity. We believe that victims are justified by their victimhood, and that they cannot ever become oppressors themselves; we believe that responsibility is one-way, and that skin colour is a badge of power, or of oppression. We do not hold the discussion that recognizes the shared responsibility of us all—that remembers that even of us who consider ourselves "victims", we share in the blood of our oppressors, that we are literally their descendants, or that for many of us who consider ourselves free of the plantation, to share in wealth is to continue to benefit from the forced labour on which this "New World" was constructed. We do not talk about the Africans who sold other Africans to Europeans for guns and ammunition to expand their empires at home, nor do we do not talk about our ancestors who, as the offspring of planters and their slaves, became owners of slaves themselves. We do not recognize the echoes of slavery that  resound everywhere in the global media, local government policies, and the things on which we spend our revenues, both public and private. And we most certainly do not recognize its echoes as we act again and again out of the moral hollowness that is perhaps slavery's greatest consequence.It seems inconceivable to me that we do not recognize the echoes of that evil institution in the way in which we think about development, about nationalism, or about democratic principles, in the way that we talk about and to one another, and in the way that we still—still, after two hundred and seven years after the first slave independence—put almost anything  above human beings. But we do not. We can perhaps take some bitter comfort in the fact that we are only following the lead of the world in this; after all, while the Holocaust has been recognized as a crime against humanity for the entire lifetime of the United Nations Organization, and inspired the 1948 Convention against Genocide, it took that same august body until 2001 to declare the institution of slavery an equal crime. But this is no real excuse.This is the moral illiteracy that plagues the New World in the lengthening shadow of the plantation. Human beings continue to come second to other, "greater" projects. It is to this view that every government in the Caribbean region appears to subscribe, perhaps unwittingly, but subscribe nevertheless, if our collective investment in our human capital is to be any guide. I believe that it is time we, the people of this region, call them out on it. It's time for us to learn, and teach, the moral alphabet to those we elect to represent and lead us, to our children, and most of all ourselves. 

Ward Minnis' The Cabinet

Ward Minnis' new play, The Cabinet, is a popular success. It's got a sure-fire premise, being a cynical look at party politics. Never mind that the action is set in the fictional "Archipelago Islands", featuring the leaders of the Peas N Rice (PNR) party and the Flamingos; the audience all know Minnis is talking about The Bahamas. Moreover, he's providing us with a thinly disguised take on the recent general elections in 2002 and 2007, with the Flamingos' fall from power (carefully engineered by Reginald Moxey, their leader, played by Chigozie Ijeoma) and the ascension of the PNR, led by Jerome Cartwright (Ward Minnis), and then Moxey's return to power thereafter.It's got a ghost for good measure, and it doesn't hurt that it's of a dead Prime Minister—the late Sir Lymon Leadah (Ian Strachan). It's got a sweet but ineffectual stand-in for power, Kendrick Johnson (played by Matthew Wildgoose), a conniving and manipulative female sidekick, Latoya Darling, M.P., played by Sophie Smith, and a defeated second-in-command, Fenton Green (Arthur Maycock). It's got laughs. It's got some seriously clever moments. It's got a solid premise—that the ghost of Sir Lymon Leadah helps to engineer a dastardly plan to allow Reggie Moxey to "keep his word and break it at the same time". It's got conflict. It's got characters, and it's solidly acted to boot. It's a play, and a funny one at that.But.When I go to the theatre, I want to be entertained, yes, but I want to be captivated too. I want to be removed from my everyday life by more than the darkness of the theatre; I want to be told a story that surprises and delights (or appals, if it's that kind of play). I want to enter a different world.And this is where The Cabinet fell short for me. The story was just too familiar. Now I may be in the minority here, but if I'm going to spend two hours and twenty minutes at a live production, it'd better deliver a little more than just laughs. I'm looking for a story that tells me something new; I'm looking for a play that goes beyond naked predictability.To be fair, the first five scenes of The Cabinet promised something more. These are the scenes in which the dramatic tension is building, and even though the story is familiar, the spin placed on it is fresh enough to intrigue. Lymon Leadah's ghostly appearance to a drunken Reginald Moxey makes for a strong beginning, and the vulnerability of Moxey at that moment is a strong way to start a tale about an almost-dictator and his machinations. As those machinations unfold, moreover, and Moxey attempts to propose his plan to the bumbling Kendrick, the tension builds; for Kendrick isn't as much of a pushover as Moxey expects, and Matthew Wildgoose's Kendrick reveals a self-deprecating integrity that inspires a sliver of respect along with our laughter at his muddles. To this point, the Archipelago Islands are not The Bahamas, and we are willing to accept that different things might happen there.Jerome Cartwright, Kendrick Johnson and others may be inspired by real people in our political past, but Matthew Wildgoose and Ian Strachan in particular make it clear in their protrayals that they are not actually pretending to be Tommy Turnquest or Lynden Pindling onstage. What lets the play down is the character of Reggie Moxey, who can be nothing but Hubert Alexander Ingraham in disguise; Ijeoma's playing of it, which consists of an extremely clever impersonation throughout, leaves no doubt. And thus the damage is done. Instead of leading the audience to invest in a story that may parallel our own but has enough twists in it that we are pushed beyond the everyday, the play simply goes over well-trodden ground.After the opening, then, it is too easy to let one's focus slip. If one knows recent Bahamian history, there's no tension at all. There's no subtext, there's no suspense. The only reason to remain sitting in the audience is to see what gems the writer and the actors will deliver next.And this is a shame, because although there are gems throughout—such as when Cartwright, the Leader of the Opposition/then Prime Minister/then Leader of the Opposition, waxes eloquently off into neverland ("I have consulted extensively and attenuated bureaucracy"), or when Moxey delivers lines that are well known from other, more famous contexts, such as "I have heard the voice of the people. Who am I to argue with the will of the people?"—the writing alone cannot sustain one's full attention. What happens instead is that the actors—Ijeoma in particular, but Minnis himself at times—take refuge in the easy laugh to bring the audience back on board.There are issues with the production as well. Some of these may come down to the script itself, which starts well but loses its way in the middle, and never quite recovers its equilibrium thereafter. After the set-up, the dramatic tension lags as the result of too many small scenes going nowhere fast. This could have been addressed both by judicious trimming of fat that didn't move the story along, and by intercutting one scene with another to pick up the pace and add layers of activity. The real question, it seems to me, is how Reggie Moxey is going to pull off the sleight of hand that enables him to run for more than two terms while at the same time gaining the trust of the citizenry; the main conflict, as written, is between Leadah and Moxey in a game of political wits. The play would have been made even stronger if Moxey's adversaries were not so one-dimensional, if there seemed to be some doubt, even though the audience "knows" the story, that he would succeed. Instead, we appear to have to take it for granted that because Ingraham always gets his own way, Moxey must as well.Other issues come down to technical choices. There's no real need, for instance, for there to be a blackout after every single scene, especially when there are three playing areas onstage; actors can simply cross from one location to another without losing momentum. Such a strategy would also have eliminated the need to find so much scene-change music, much of which seemed to have very little to do with the story at hand.More thought could certainly have been given to the layout of the stage, which had Reggie Moxey's dining table centre stage, necessitating its movement upstage and downstage to keep it from blocking the other playing areas. Given that there are two political parties represented, and two political leaders, it would have made perfect sense to have set the leaders' homes stage right and stage left, leaving centre stage as the Prime Minister's office; a simple platform would have elevated that office and resolved sight issues all at once.Those who attended The Cabinet over the last two weekends and enjoyed it may find these criticisms picky, even petty. They are necessary, though, because the play itself has so much going for it. It's got the story, it's got the characters, and it's got the timing to make it succeed for the moment. But what it should be looking to do is to last, to be able to be revived, not at the end of the month, but in five or ten years' time, and produced by a different cast doing different things. This is, after all, a play, something that has characters in conflict with one another working to achieve catharsis in its audience. And I'm afraid that under those circumstances it's not enough to write a play that inspires us just to laugh. What is required is the production of a funny work that also gets us to think.

Just ourselves and immortality

Because I could not stop for Death,He kindly stopped for me;The carriage held but just ourselvesAnd Immortality.--Emily Dickinson

Yesterday we buried Mummy. Or to be more precise, we held a memorial for her and then interred her ashes in my father's grave, as she always wanted. She was cradled in a box, an urn, which was made by her niece Margot, out of cured coconut wood from Indonesia. Fitting, I thought, as Mummy's name -- Keva -- was chosen for her by my grandmother, who had met the daughters of Governor Allardyce, who were named Viti and Keva, names the Governor had come across when he served in the far east.The service was bouyed up by music sung by the Nassau Renaissance Singers and the Highgrove Singers, both of whom are keeping the Bahamian tradition of classical choral music lovingly alive. They sang pieces by John Ruttter, music that we played for Mummy in the ICU when we visited her, and pieces set to music especially for her, and pieces we gathered up in her memory. They sang my father's other song -- not "When the Road Seems Rough", which we sang at his funeral 24 years ago and which has since slipped into the Bahamian vernacular to such an extent that my mother grew very tired of it, grew tired of the emotional upwelling that always accompanied it, but "Praise". Her students sang for her and played for her -- Sparkman Ferguson and JoAnn Callender and Cleophas Adderley. Many people paid verbal tribute to her. We sang her favourite hymn, the hymn sung at her wedding, "Immortal, Invisible", and a Good Friday hymn (Mummy loved the Holy Week services) and an Easter hymn. We sang our grief to the rafters, and afterward we went to her house and we ate and drank in her memory.I have no idea whether it was as she would have wanted it, but I think she would have been pleased nevertheless. There was more drama surrounding her death than she would have liked, and more pomp surrounding her memorial than she would have chosen, but her public service made her a public figure and both came with the territory.So here's to Keva. Here's to Keva. Here's to Keva Marie.

R.I.P. Keva Marie

R.I.P. Michael Hartley

The Caribbean Review of Books • A bimonthly review of Caribbean literature, art, and culture

Just to remind people who may have forgotten, the Caribbean Review of Books flourishes online. Check out the year-end posts!

The 2010 CRB books of the year . . .Eleven standout books published last year, as chosen by the CRB’s editors: four books of fiction, three of poems, a biography, a book of literary essays, works of anthropology and cultural studies, and an album of photographs.via The Caribbean Review of Books • A bimonthly review of Caribbean literature, art, and culture.

A poem from Mama Lily

The Magic Mirror Tempts Lily's White Daughter (1951)A reading of "The Magic Mirror Tempts Lily's White Daughter (1951)", one of the poems in Mama Lily and the Dead.

New year, new challenges

The semester began this week, and as usual it's like getting on a skateboard at the top of a really long hill that starts with a fairly gentle downhill slope that turns into a steep drop as you round the midterm corner. So you start with the knowledge that before you know it, the wind will be making your cheeks shiver and your eyes brim with tears, and you'll be heading towards a landing that could be harder than you expected.I will try being a better blogger, but the same situation that held me back in the second half of last year still obtains: my mother is suffering from cancer and we are spending all of our energies helping her fight, or live with, it. The operative word is "live". Some days are better than others; some months have been better than others. I'm happy to say that the year began much better than we expected, and Mummy is holding her own, with grace.A little word about what I'm teaching this semester. Besides the requisite introductory courses, there are two others that have not yet failed to excite me when I take them on: a course in social research methods, and a course in advanced English skills. What I like about both of them is the fact that they are courses that teach skills rather than content, and so there is room for a variety of interesting approaches.Here are my approaches, then. In the Social Research course, my students take part in a long-term ongoing piece of research about the economics of Junkanoo. Junkanoo is a well-researched topic in The Bahamas, but what is missing from the canon is a discussion about the economic impact of the festival. It's not cheap! Plenty money is spent on it -- but what is the return? (Please note I'm not assuming that there isn't any return. On the contrary; I'm supposing that there is a large return, but that we haven't worked out yet what that might be.) The students who enrol in my course engage in research projects that add to this study. Every semester I get excited about what they will discover.In Advanced English, the skills of writing and reading critically are developed while students engage in studies about Bahamian culture and society. Last year I decided to design a set of readings and discussions about democracy and The Bahamas, and the last time I taught the course, a year ago, it worked out really well. Once again, I'm excited about where we'll go this semester with it.I hope that I'll be able to contribute to these discussions from time to time here on this blog. Keep your eyes open. Assuming I will find the balance between the personal and the professional challenges, this year on this blog should be interesting.Finally, I'm also working on another book of poetry. Poinciana Paper Press's publication of Mama Lily and the Dead will soon be accompanied by a much less illustrious collection of my early writings, this one self-published (via Lulu). No promises about the greatness of the collection, but it'll be around for anyone who (like Obediah Michael Smith, who inspired it) wants to know what I was writing twenty-odd years ago.So! there it is. Happy new year to all.