Tell Me A National Story (Nassau, 2003)

In many ways, the nation is an ideal of the nationalists which has come to be accepted by very many people, and equally an abstraction and construct. But it cannot be defined apart from the conceptions of the nation entertained by nationalist and other participants, for these conceptions reflect the experiences and processes of the historical and present situations in which so many find themselves. (Smith, 1988: 9-10)

If one believes, as Smith does, that a national identity of any worth resides in a narrative/symbolic ‘myth of nation’, then the palpable absence in the Bahamas of a readily observable symbolic product poses considerable problems. Throughout the post-colonial world, literature is seen as a cornerstone of new national identities (Bhabha, 1990; Lavie & Swedenborg, 1996). In the Bahamas, however, to apply such an approach is difficult. The Bahamas stands virtually alone in the Commonwealth Caribbean nations in having a significant absence of a national literature. That is not to say that a nationalist rhetoric does not exist in the Bahamas, or that there is no Bahamian literature to speak of. Paradoxically, there are both; yet the two appear separate from one another. Unlike Trinidad, where novels abound (Harney, 1993; 1996) and the proliferation of academic papers ensure that Trinidadians’ self-conceptions are constantly and consciously made and examined (Eriksen, 1994), the relation between literary representations of the Bahamian condition and the public conception of that condition is tenuous at best.

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