diary of souls — Nicolette Bethel

Hurricane Dorian and its aftermath have rendered me silent. Writer’s block doesn’t come to me often but it comes when it comes with a vengeance.

Perhaps somewhere else at another time I will be able to express what I have been feeling since September 2019. It is a mixture of disgust, disappointment and despair, along with the sense that never have I felt less satisfied to have been right about the inadequacy of government. The way in which we have not handled, or even acknowledged the homan toll of the hurricane (apart from publishing the dollar costs of the storm—as if they matter in the face of the human costs) has dismayed and terrified me. It terrifies me because hurricane season comes every year and nothing, nothing, that we have done since the hurricane has prepared us to face this year or next year or the year after. If a hurricane like Dorian hits our capital we will be lost, and nothing that we have done collectively or individually will change that. No dome towns, no tent cities, no shantytown demolition is an adequate response. It terrifies me. It makes me sick.

And the way we treat one another, the way we are so content, so proud, to throw the most vulnerable among us away like filth, to denigrate them, to rejoice in their suffering, to compound that suffering, all in the name of “national security”, makes me furious.

The only solace I’ve had is theatre. Thanks to renee caesar, we have been working since December on a production of Ian Chinaka Strachan’s Diary of Souls. Written about the way we Bahamians, we god-fearing, holy-ghost, sanctified Christians, treated the dead almost thirty years ago, the play was a protest and a challenge then, and it is more than ever resonant now. Ian Strachan wrote it to expiate our collective guilt for the way we treated our fellow human beings, our brothers and sisters, our womb-mates from across the sea at an awful moment in time.

Working on it has been healing.

Again thanks to renee and Short Tales, we have been working with a wonderful team: T-Day Jeudi, Sony Jean-Jacques, Esther Louis, Cade Darling, Brent Burrows, and Shireen Seymour on stage. The set was built by Jason Evans. I told him my vision: the psychiatrist’s office centre stage, with the beach in front of it, and the hole—the mass grave—behind it.

I wanted the audience to know and never forget that no matter what we do, how we deny it, how we pretend that we are different and separate, our fate and that of our Haitian neighbours who live beside and among us, who pass through our waters, who live with us and who have shaped our lives and culture even as we have shaped theirs (for the Duvaliers who created the conditions that drove their people to our shores were Bahamians), are entwined. We may close our eyes but we will never escape that fact.

I wanted the set to show us that. The Bahamians in the middle are watched throughout the play by the Haitian souls trapped in a limbo of our creation.

And look what Jason and his team did with that vision. When I shared it, he asked one thing: “Can I bring sand on the stage?” And look what he did. Sand, and palm trees, and flotsam, and trash. The hole and the beach.

And then there is lighting, designed by Ayoka Seymour and me. We discussed the moods and the colours, the effects and the moments, and off Ayoka went. With music selected by renee and me, and run by Joshua Haeward II.

Theatre heals. Our medium is human experience and human emotion. We show what humans do to one another, and the consequences of their actions. We put it in the same space as you, and you will share the emotion with us. Come and see it. Challenge yourself to be changed.