Roots or Routes? migrations of identity in The Bahamas (1999/2005)

It is not at all uncommon for Bahamian intellectuals to assert that the Bahamas has little or no sense of national identity. Often discussions of the topic are greeted with raised eyebrows and comments like “National identity? and what is that?” or “We don’t have a national identity”. One woman told me that her sense of paucity of the Bahamian national identity was derived from what she had observed Bahamians do in Miami: as soon as they landed, they assumed American personae, took on American accents, and blended into the landscape — unlike their Jamaican counterparts, who remained actively Jamaican years after they had adopted American citizenship. Another person argued that “The outside, the American media, is really the thing that to me shapes the culture. ” And even this august body, the Bahamas Association for Cultural Studies, entitled its first annual conference Uncovering Bahamian Selves — implying that if a “Bahamian self” exists, then it is very well hidden indeed.

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Navigations: formality and informality in an archipelagic nation (Nassau, 2000)

The concept of national identity, for the researcher, suggests the presence of a state, complete with conscious, literate inventions of the self and officially created histories or metanarratives (Anderson 1991 [1983]). Yet written artifacts, together with uncontested histories, are, paradoxically, quite peripheral to the lived reality of Bahamians. That is not to say that, in a nation with a 95% literacy rate, books are not produced and consumed by the natives. Yet those books that exist reveal themselves as being so tangential to the consciousness of the average Bahamian citizen that nationalist writers consistently produce works that emphasize the difficulty of their task. In the Bahamas, ‘informality’ is common. The economy rests on it; oral, not literate, communication is favoured; custom often regulates individuals’ lives, rather than law; and the state, though central to political conceptions of the nation, is in many ways tangential to individual realities. And yet, in the face of all of this, the concept of national identity in the Bahamas remains strong. Why?

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Generation Property: a consideration of customary land tenure in The Bahamas (Nassau, 2000)

In The Bahamas, land ownership is tightly knitted with the idea of family. In the first place, the majority of land owned by Bahamians is located on those outlying islands of the archipelago known colloquially (and for years officially) as the Family Islands. The very name suggests an imagined kinship relation between the centre of the nation (New Providence, the site of the capital) and the peripheral islands. Craton suggests the attachment to the idea of ‘Family Islands’ may be more than sentimental. In his reading, the reference to family helps restore ‘the structures of kinship and community which are fading and being lost’ in the whirl of urban life (Craton, 1987: 108). While there is value in this interpretation — almost three-quarters of the Bahamian population now lives in either Nassau or Freeport, the two cities — there is more to it. Most urban Bahamians are immigrants from the islands, or descendants of such immigrants, and many still maintain some contact with relatives who remain ‘on the island’. These relatives, moreover, often occupy land that is not owned by them alone but collectively by the kin group as a whole. In this regard, then, the ‘Family’ islands are both where one’s family hails from, and where one’s family land — one’s generation property — is found.

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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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Junkanoo in The Bahamas: a tale of identity (Nassau, 2003)

Junkanoo, for Bahamians, is the ultimate national symbol. A street festival of West African origin held at Christmastime, it represents poverty and wealth, discipline and rebellion, competition and cooperation, creative genius and physical prowess. It is simultaneously viewed as the quintessential Bahamian self-conception and the best face turned to the visitor. Like street festivals everywhere, it can be classified as a ritual of rebellion,[1] a politico-cultural movement[2] or an annual invocation of the liminal. As a marker of identity, however, it provides Bahamians with a means of reflecting on current issues and criticizing social ills, while at the same time offering to tourists a spectacle full of colour, movement and sound; and it encompasses the ideals of family, neighbourhood and social commitment while accommodating individual self-expression.

In many respects, Junkanoo is similar to Carnival in Trinidad and elsewhere. Like Carnival, it is a street parade in which groups compete for prizes, with distinctive music and attire. These groups are judged on their costumes, music and performance; participants rush (parade) along the two main thoroughfares of the capital, Bay Street and Shirley Street. In recent years the majority of those who take part have belonged to one of approximately fifteen groups, about six of whom compete fiercely for cash prizes; these organize their presentations according to central themes, around which all the elements that they bring to the parade cohere. The rest, both individual competitors and small groups, participate for the fun of it.

Like Carnival, Junkanoo may be regarded as the culmination of the tales of identification told to the self (Bahamians) and to the other (tourists and other foreigners). Several scholars have examined the ways in which major street festivals elsewhere across the African diaspora similarly provide tales of identification. Bahamian Junkanoo tells the following tales of the self: it is simultaneously the central symbol of black Bahamians’ development, a metaphor for national progress, an affirmation of Bahamian creativity, an arena for social commentary and a ready tool for the education of the young. Perhaps the most enduring element of Junkanoo is found in the competition at the heart of the parade, a rivalry whose roots lie in the territories from which the groups originate. Here questions of place, land and identity are embodied in the practice of Junkanoo.

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Engendering the Bahamian Nation (Nassau, 2003)

On February 27 2002, Bahamians voted in a referendum to amend the country’s constitution. There were several issues to be decided, but the one that caused the most debate was the question of citizenship. Under the present constitution, the way in which Bahamian citizenship is conferred on the spouses and children of Bahamian women is, to say the least, irregular. The wives of Bahamian men are entitled to Bahamian citizenship; the husbands of Bahamian women are not granted any such entitlement, and have to apply for citizenship like any other would-be immigrant. Similarly, the children of Bahamian men, whether born in the Bahamas or not, are Bahamians at birth; the children of Bahamian women have a far more complex fate. If a woman is unmarried, and has a child outside the Bahamas, her child is born Bahamian. But if she is married to a non-Bahamian, and gives birth outside the country, that child is merely entitled to apply for citizenship between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, and may be refused. If offered citizenship, the child is then forced to renounce any other citizenship in order to receive Bahamian status.

The recent referendum has generated plenty of political hay, and I have no intention of adding straw to the pile. What interests me about this state of affairs is what it suggests about the way in which gender figures in the imagination of the Bahamian nation, and as such I shall use it as a case study to test the ideas I raise in my discussion. Before I do so, however, a little background about the imagination of nations, and of the Bahamian nation in particular, is in order.

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Bahamian Kinship and the Power of Women (Cambridge, MPhil, 1993)

Seven years ago, as an officer in the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Community Affairs, Nassau, I was struck by the high public involvement of women in Bahamian society. The officers I worked with were primarily women; the majority of those taking part in our programmes were girls. In 1987, a study conducted by the Ministry's Women's Affairs Unit and the Commonwealth Secretariat revealed that the proportion of Bahamian women in prominent public positions was higher than in countries where similar studies had taken place. In 1989, I began teaching in a small private high school. There too, girls out-performed boys, improving as they got older, while the boys' achievements declined. Young women, I realized, were being better trained to take up positions of public prominence than young men.
It seems possible that the domestic centrality of Bahamian women — the "matrifocality" of the Bahamian home — has influenced women's strength in the public domain. Roughly half the women I worked with in the ministry were mothers who had never been married, and one-quarter of my students lived with their mothers only. However, conventional theories of matrifocality shed little light on the situation: these single mothers are middle class women — white-collar workers in the ministry, or women who can afford their children's private education. Furthermore, women's prominence is considered no anomaly; my (middle-class) students, male and female alike, took it for granted.

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The Bad Behaviour of Language (March 1986, Toronto)

     For the twentieth-century reader, the problem of communication is a very modern concern.  The writers of the twentieth century have, in general, been acutely aware of the limitations and ambiguities of language, and the theme of communication is one which has been addressed by every major author of the period.  T.S. Eliot, for instance, wrote The Waste Land around the failure of modern man to communicate effectively; and indeed, if we leave aside the inability of the various personae in the poem to communicate among themselves, we are faced with the more immediate problem of understanding the poem as a whole.  A look at the notes at the end of The Waste Land, moreover, only confuses us more; thus in form as well as content, the poem illustrates its theme.  In James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the figure of Stephen becomes more and more remote from the reader until he slides into the cryptic, introspective scribble of his own diary.  Stephen Dedalus never manages, indeed, to communicate effectively with anyone outside himself.  Even when he is confronted with the outgoing character of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, the most he can do is urinate with Bloom; and we are led to suspect that communication for the artist, at least according to Joyce, may amount to little more than a communal pee.  Finally, for the writers of the Theatre of the Absurd, language is empty, and the attempt to communicate simply futile:  "Words, words," says Guildenstern, in dismissal.  "They're all we have to go on."

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