Introduction

Tell Me a National Story:

Orality and the Formation of Bahamian National Identity

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.

To underscore the difference between this Bahamian trend and that of its neighbours: as early as 1970, a scant eight years after Jamaican independence, Rex Nettleford could write: ‘...these essays imply an invitation for the Jamaican readership to turn its mind critically to its own society...’ and proceed to publish a book of scholarly articles exploring the Jamaican ‘national character’ (1970: 9). On the other hand, when Patrick Rahming, architect, poet, songwriter and thinker, published a collection of critical essays nineteen years after Bahamian independence, he entitled it The Naive Agenda: social and political issues for the Bahamas through the eyes of a confessed dreamer (1992). Despite his good intentions, the book is less a work of scholarly papers than a collection of speeches, articles and letters to the editor penned over the course of two decades.

It is therefore impossible to seek evidence of Bahamian national identity in the literary output of the nation. The examination of Bahamian literature as a concrete, tangible, fixed manifestation of Bahamian identity, has little value. Literature, often regarded as an essential tool of nationalism, occupies a peculiar position in the construction of Bahamian national identity, for it appears to reflect, rather than shape, the ideas of the time.

In his discussion of Bahamian literature, Anthony Dahl points out that

The chief mode of communicating [the] nationalistic project in contemporary Bahamian literature and in the narrative especially, is through the story-telling mode ... the narrative voice ... seeks to link up with the communal voice of the griot, thus merging the autobiographical or omniscient point-of-view with an oral tradition that is transpersonal, transindividual and collective. This transpersonal element is stressed by the artists themselves as when [one] thanks his grandfather for [a] story ... or when [another] claims communal authentification for the story ... [A third] presents himself not as the author, but as the agent of transmission of traditional cultural material, thus at the same time transpersonalizing that material and lending it more authenticity as a cultural product [and a fourth links] the written work with the oral tradition and with the communal history of the Yoruban slaves in the Bahamas. (1988: 186-187)

Overwhelmingly, Bahamian writers, perhaps without realizing it, place themselves in a similar mode. While there are exceptions, the vast majority of the books produced in the Bahamas are those that invoke this communal voice, that speak directly to the reader, that collapse the distance between author and narrator — even in apparently scholarly works — so that one feels that the writer and the reader are engaged in dialogue. In gathering the actual literate indicators of Bahamian identity, one looks to songs, stories, plays and the like; it is in these genres, and not in those locked between book covers, that symbols of identity reside. These forms rely upon performance to be most effectively shared. In the Bahamas, orality, expressed through performance, and not writing, distributed through print, legitimizes creation.

Print-capitalism and the formation of national identities

In Imagined Communities, Anderson discusses the ‘three institutions of power’ that helped solidify the nationalist enterprise — the census, the map, and the museum, which ‘profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined ... the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry.’ (1991: 164). Such institutions stand atop the pervasive power of print-capitalism, which permits the conceptualisation of the nation, defined by Anderson as ‘an imagined political community’ whose members delineate their belonging in relation to their fellows, despite the fact that they ‘will never know most of their fellow-members, or even hear of them’ (1991: 6). National identity, proceeding from this imagined community, is the fictive commonality that exists among the members of a group that is too large to be linked otherwise. This commonality distinguishes the members of this group from the members of other similar groups; nations are not only imagined, but they are also ‘inherently limited and sovereign’ (Anderson, 1991: 6).

If the ‘nation’ is a fabrication, how does it appear real to nationals and nationalists? For Anderson, it is the process of imagination that gives the ‘nation’ its power. All communities, from the lineage to the clan, are imagined communities. However, whereas communal links ‘were once imagined particularistically — as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship’ (1991: 6), nations construct themselves in more general, abstract terms. The older religious communities and dynastic empires were conceived of as though they were a series of centres without margins,[1] constructed ‘particularistically’ — the former through one’s orientation to the deity, the latter through one’s allegiance to the ruler. By contrast,

... the very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when, and where, three fundamental cultural conceptions ... all lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds ... first ... was the idea that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth ... Second was the belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centres ... Third was a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical. Combined, these ideas rooted human lives firmly in the very nature of things, giving certain meaning to the everyday fatalities of existence, and offering, in various ways, redemption from them. (1991: 36).

Thus the conceptualisation of the nation represented a markedly different way of imagining one’s community than the ways that previously existed. Nationalism was a product of a new modernity that, based on the proliferation of print culture, contrasted sharply with the ‘traditional’, and national identity was a ‘profoundly new way’ of thinking about oneself and one’s relation to others.

I am going to argue that one of the difficulties faced by the Bahamas, thirty years after Independence, in forging a national identity that transcends large groups (Glinton-Meicholas, 2003), is that, despite all the trappings of nationhood, the Bahamas in fact occupies a psychic space that has more in common with Anderson's 'particularistic' organization of pre-national states than with the broad literate base of true nationalism. And I shall argue that this is the case because, thirty years after Independence — in part thanks to our prosperity, our proximity to the USA media giant, and our geography — we are still very much an oral nation. Granted, our exercise of orality takes the form of what Ong (1982) has called secondary orality — orality grounded in technology — but it is orality nevertheless.

The oral and the literate in the Bahamas

In his reflections on the oral and the literate traditions, Jack Goody (1977; 1986; 1987) contends that the very act of using the Roman alphabet requires a particular type of discipline; a certain organization of thought is necessary to meet the constraints of such a linear, progressive form of communication. Because ideas must be collected, ordered, and then put down, the very act of writing — confining thought to a single word at a time — is necessarily reductive. One must choose carefully what one wishes to say (and equally what one wishes to leave out), and arrange hierarchically those thoughts which survive this selection (Goody, 1977: 123). Literacy thus creates an abstraction of thought from thinker, an alienation of the product of the mind from its producer, and encourages the objectification, the formalization, of thought. Objectification in turn permits the examination and analysis of thought as thought; it allows the decontextualisation of the products of the mind. Context is subsumed and writing takes on a cloak of universality, a semblance of truth, which depends for its authority on the very groundlessness of the written word.

The act of speaking makes different demands. Speech is a shared activity, involving both speaker and listener, and it requires an audience if it is to communicate. Not surprisingly, then, orality emphasises the communal over the individual. The contribution of any individual is invalid until it is shared with the community, for without the community, the individual is silent. Unlike writing, oral communication is immediate and transitory. One cannot recapture what has just been said once the utterance is past; thoughts must be amended as they are delivered not by removing ideas, but by adding to them. A linear progression of thought is not necessarily advantageous to a speaker, for often the ability to improvise, to interject, to think on one’s feet, is essential to maintaining the attention of listeners, who may easily become bored by a resolute sticking to a particular topic. The immediacy of the context encourages more informal relations among people, and the transitory state of the exchange means that speech often involves far more than words, unlike writing, which often becomes pure wordplay. Gestures, examples, demonstrations, actions are all part of the domain of the oral presentation. Speech is as much performance as it is content. Obviously, not even this performance may be fixed and repeatable, for each audience is different; each delivery, therefore, will conform to the demands of its listeners. Flexibility is an integral part of good speaking. In oral communication, context is everything.

If the understanding and the function of history in an oral society depends not upon itself, but on how it informs and affects the present (Connerton, 1995 [1989]), then what matters is not some verifiable event in the past, but what that event means for the now. This aspect, theorists of orality argue, is partly the result of the medium of the transmission of histories in oral societies — through bards and griots by means of performance, rather than by catalogues of facts in archives — and it is partly the outcome of a different understanding of time and place (Goody, 1986; McLuhan, 1962; Ong, 1982). The primary repository of history in an oral society is not a book, but a person, the griot, whose job it is to recount the past for the inhabitants of the present. While literate historians function by reinterpreting the ‘facts’, griots function by adjusting the content of their histories to fit current conditions.

All of this is true in the Bahamas, where prominence is given to speakers — politicians, preachers, talk show hosts — and not to writers, and where the fundamental values of the society are those that scholars associate with oral culture. National identity in the Bahamas, then, while it exists, takes on a very particular form.

National Identity: tales told to self and other

Tourism and Bahamian national identity

National identity in the Bahamas, I argue, is an assortment of tales told, not myths of nation. According to Anthony Smith, ‘myth exaggerates, dramatises and reinterprets facts’; for him, myths are ‘widely believed tales told in dramatic form, referring to past events but serving present purposes and/or future goals’, and thus ‘nationalism’s peculiar myth of the nation may be seen as a particularly potent and appealing dramatic narrative, which links past, present and future through the character and role of the national community’ (1988: 2). The tales to which I refer may or may not be widely believed, nor necessarily ‘told in dramatic form’; while they are readily observable for the researcher to find, they may or may not be part of Bahamians’ conscious stockpile of national markers. I choose to call them tales rather than myths to emphasise their fluidity, their very lack of authority. These tales rise above the ocean of possible identities like islands, and Bahamians move among them (and others) like sailors on a familiar sea. But they are, in the end, tales to be taken or left at will. They have their strengths, allowing Bahamians a kind of freedom and adaptability that citizens other nations may lack; on the other hand, they allow us to play chameleons supremely well, with the result that new generations of Bahamians are being poorly integrated into the national polity.

Part of the ambiguity surrounding the question of a Bahamian ‘national identity’ lies in the fact that that identity is constructed in not one, but many different official ways. If we were to regard the construction of identity as a tale, for example, we might observe that Bahamian national identity involves many tales. Not all of these are comprehensive, and they are designed for a wide range of audiences. Some are very specific, others more general, but they serve the same purpose in the end: the outlining of what is Bahamian.

It is possible in the Bahamas to point to two main sets of tales. The first is the set told within the boundaries of the nation, the tales told by Bahamians to one another to invoke a sense of unity. The second, equally prominent and sometimes difficult to distinguish from the first, is the set of tales told to strangers about the Bahamas. The latter set of tales always exists within any country, but it does not always have the prominence that it does in the Bahamas; for in a nation that makes its income from the exchange of services of all sorts with the outside (tourism, banking and foreign investment — in real estate and the tourist industry, less so in manufacturing — are the legitimate sources of income, and smuggling of various kinds accounts for much of the rest) the tales told to the ‘other’ are as much a part of the national consciousness as the tales told to the ‘self’. What is more, as each set of tales affects and shapes the other, it is difficult, if not impossible, to state decisively where one leaves off and the other begins.

For Foster, the relation of capitalism to nationhood is as fundamental to the existence of the nation as are print-capitalism, concrete symbols or invented emblems and traditions. As he points out, ‘the nation’ is a resource itself — ‘fought over in contests between local populations and state representatives to control the material and legal means ... for participation in the global capitalist economy’ (Foster, 1995: 6). It is also a commodity to be packaged and sold ‘to foreigners such as investors and tourists’ (1995: 6). Participation in the global economy is crucial to any nation’s survival. In the Bahamas, capitalism is not only fundamental to definitions of nationhood, but it is consciously inscribed on Bahamian society in many ways. Nation is commodity. What gets preserved and put into the nationalist set of tales, then, is more often than not whatever can best be sold; thus the more commodifiable an object or custom, the more central it becomes. Small wonder that the tales told by Bahamians to one another and to outsiders slip from one into another. Bahamians consume the idea of the Bahamian nation just as foreigners do.

National Identity: tales told to the Self

Within the Bahamas, representations of the national self tend to be embodied in emblems which are flexible and accommodate change. The most touted national symbol is Junkanoo, the Christmas festival which resembles Trinidad’s Carnival. An extravaganza of colour, sound and movement, Junkanoo (like any festival) changes and yet remains the same. Like the statues in the square, Junkanoo occupies the centre of the city; but unlike the statues, it is different from year to year. The parades begin in the darkness of the early morning, and last until full light. They are a competition between different groups for supremacy of artistry, music and performance, but the spectacle created by the combined efforts of the various artists is a unified whole; innovations in the building of costumes and the arranging of music resonate from parade to parade and multiply rapidly, creating a festival in constant flux. The foci of the festival are the lead costumes, huge sculptures of cardboard and styrofoam, which present and represent different facets of Bahamian reality; they are concrete images of identification. But they are not permanent monuments. According to custom, they appear once only; once shown, they have traditionally been discarded.

Other images are placed on the stage or in the pulpit. In these settings, ‘nation’ becomes ‘people’, ‘family’, or ‘community’. The archipelago is ‘a family of islands’; the Bahamas is presented as ‘a Christian nation’. While the titles may not vary, the conceptualisation of them does; in the island family, different islands may be senior members at different times, and different church congregations may be privileged as emblematic of the nation as a whole, depending on situation. During some political seasons, the central emblems of the island family or of Bahamian Christianity may be the islands of Andros or Cat Island and the Baptist and Pentecostal churches, all symbolic of the black working class, or they may be the middle-class icon of Abaco or the centrality of the Anglican church; the details change, but the form remains the same.

‘National culture’ is defined for the most part not in books or historical objects, but in the discussions that take place in high school debates, politicians’ speeches, and on the air; in such exchanges music, food, language and dances feature prominently. They are assisted by stage performances which emphasise iconic figures and stock situations — conversations about ‘culture’, embodied in the comic skit, are a favourite, as are satirical sketches about various events. Familiar figures and settings reappear in such performances: the mother, the drunkard and the wise elder are common, and most often in such plays the action takes place out-of-doors, in a yard, on the dock, on a street or in the market. The stage also serves as a showcase for such ‘real’ Bahamian culture as certain types of songs, such as traditional hymns and spirituals as well as long narrative songs which recount specific historical events, and certain traditional dances; most of all it provides an arena in which Bahamian dialect can be spoken publicly without censure.

Other symbols are invoked. For politicians in competition for votes, the myth of the natal community, the connection with the ‘grass roots’ are favoured; all candidates invoke personal histories that tell of triumph over adversity, most commonly poverty and racial discrimination, to become what they are. It is the rare politician who will publicly admit to having been comfortable in childhood; even if a man is not particularly darkskinned (and therefore is unable to play the race card too freely), he will refer to his father’s sacrifice to send him to school or to his mother’s life of hard work. Again, the emblem of family is employed. The parents of political leaders, Prime Ministers in particular, are often familiar figures in the national consciousness. In more general conversation, ‘Bahamian music’ is touted, although there is a lack of consensus across generations as to what ‘real’ Bahamian music actually is; folk historians point to indigenous inventions and adaptations, such as the rhyming spiritual and the junkanoo song (Bethel, 1978), while they dance to Bahamian merengue and calypso and their children listen to reggae and rap. Common to all the definitions of ‘culture’, however, are the symbols of language and food. All ‘true’ Bahamians speak dialect (Glinton-Meicholas, 1994), and all share diets of fish, chicken and various ‘native’ dishes, most prominent among them the national delicacy, conch (Glinton-Meicholas, 2003; Minnis, 2003). The media in which conversations about ‘culture’ take place are remarkable for their similarity; for in the Bahamas, such debates tend to be exactly that — debates, conversations, talk. Discussions are heard onstage, in pulpits, at political rallies, on the air, but they are rarely carried on for any considerable length of time in the printed media. The one exception are the newspapers, which are known for printing verbatim the content of politicians’ speeches, and which publish letters to the editor which often take up discussions and render opinions in written form. All in all, those images which are officially conjured up as representative of the ‘Bahamian national identity’ are in many ways ineffectual as markers of national unity.

National Identity: tales told to the Other

The stories told to outsiders have traditionally stood in contrast to those told to Bahamians. The vast majority of Bahamian revenue is generated by interaction with foreigners; the main industries, tourism, banking and foreign investment, depend at least in some measure upon the Bahamas’ representing itself as up-to-date and technologically advanced. The concepts which are the stock and trade of the Bahamas’ presentation of itself to the outside world — the domain not of actors or preachers but of the Ministry of Tourism — describe an alternative Bahamian identity. Central to this identity is the image of paradise: for the tourist, the idea of the exotic destination, the tropical wonderland; for the investor, the tax haven, the sunny clime. These images, though divergent in some respects, nevertheless have one point in common: Bahamians are rarely prominent in them.

The festival of Junkanoo may provide a good example. Although it has long been used emblematically as a symbol of Bahamian ‘culture’, appearing since the 1970s on stamps, posters, tourist brochures and airline magazines with clockwork-like regularity, it is only the occasional tourist who attends the Junkanoo parades. Part of the reason for this lies in the fact that tickets are sold for seating along the main streets, and that these tickets, like those to major sports events in the USA, are sold out well in advance. But perhaps part of the reason is that Junkanoo is a fundamental part of the tales Bahamians tell themselves, and as such cuts to the heart of what it means to be a Bahamian person. The tales told to the other are generic in nature, ignoring the personal in favour of fitting into a broader, globally-fashioned mould. It is telling that despite the apparent importance of Junkanoo as a cultural attraction, the administrators of the parades make little accommodation for tourist attendance.

On the other hand, countless visitors are subjected to the presentation of ‘floor shows’ in hotels and cabarets which incorporate an ersatz Junkanoo with more ‘traditional’ (and more imaginably ‘savage’) performances: limbo, fire dancing and, sometimes, steel bands borrowed from Trinidad — a virtual conglomeration of all the images the tourist expects to find in ‘paradise’ (Strachan, 1995; 2002). The Bahamian festival of Junkanoo, inextricably linked in the Bahamian imagination with Christmas and New Year’s Day, is thus remade on the visitors’ behalf. The tales told to visitors are censored; Bahamians and Bahamian activities, as Bahamians themselves understand them, are not normally part of them.

Even here, though, the tales take two distinct forms. One must consider the audience to whom each story is pitched; the tales generated by the Ministry of Tourism for potential investors differ fundamentally from those told to run-of-the-mill tourists.[2] In the first instance, the tales emphasise the similarities between the Bahamas and the western world. To potential investors the nation is represented as modern, affluent and stable; stress is placed on the natural beauty of the islands, the enviable climate, the tax-free policies of the government, and the complete integration of the Bahamas into the global community. The people who do appear in this set of tales are sophisticated, businesslike, educated. Dialect is never used. Clothing is western and stylish; ‘natives’ never appear; the Bahamian businessman wears a suit, the Bahamian businesswoman smart dresses. The following is a fine example of the kinds of issues that take prominence in such promotions:

Looking for a home with year-round sunshine, a spectacular ocean view and all modern conveniences within an hour’s flight from the U.S.?

Then consider The Bahamas for your dream home. The islands are a natural greenhouse for lush, tropical greenery. The average year-round temperature is 72 degrees Fahrenheit. A near-constant southeast breeze tempers humidity and makes the environment one of the most comfortable in the world.

English is the official language of The Bahamas. There are hospitals, clinics, good schools and major international banks, familiar brands in American food chain stores and a rich cultural life. (Buying real estate in Paradise, 1997. My emphases.)

To sell the nation to the tourist, the Ministry features those qualities which it considers most appropriate to visiting westerners. Attributes considered ‘typical’ of tropical vacation spots are highlighted (Strachan, 1995: 226ff). It is here that the greater symbolism of the flag is most applicable; the Bahamas is presented as an aggregate of bright beaches, sunshine, and spectacular waters. The following is typical:

Ours is a nation of islands and cays blessed with sunny skies, powder-white and pink-sand beaches and incredibly clear aqua-blue waters. These consistute The Islands of The Bahamas which lie scattered across 100,000 square miles of the southwest Atlantic Ocean, from the tip of Florida to the edge of the Caribbean, near Haiti.

... We invite you to share in these riches, guaranteed to soothe your body and restore your soul. We offer you the calm and excitement of water sports — whether beneath the surface or at water’s edge. And when you’ve had your fill of swimming, boating, fishing, diving and more, we have championship golf and tennis, and many other ways to entice you on land ("The Islands of The Bahamas: general information," 1997: 73).

In short, it is promoted as a tropical playground where people are ‘natives’ and form part of the scenery; references to what Bahamians consider their ‘culture’ are often explicitly left out. When included at all, traditional dance and music are commodified, and those customs which are assumed not to sell — for example, the strong emphases on family and worship which are common to most Bahamians — are ignored. Dialect becomes a colourful and homogenised part of the experience; for instance, Bahamians are presumed to address one another as ‘mon’, a word coined by Americans to characterise any inhabitant of the English-speaking Caribbean. Religion, far from being central, is replaced by a sort of touristic hedonism that often contravenes the very things religious leaders support, opposing family values by emphasising guilt-free sex, encouraging all the vices (greed, gambling, and excess of all kinds).[3]

What is more, those metaphors which are so freely employed by Bahamians in their tales to themselves undergo a subtle transformation. Food as a symbol of Bahamianness provides a case in point. The food served to visitors is very often elaborate and sophisticated, and incorporates imported ingredients, with the exception of certain seafoods; it is rare, for instance, to find a Bahamian vegetable on a plate served in major restaurants. Similarly, the use of live performance — on stage and in the pulpit — to promote what is quintessentially Bahamian is replaced with the glamorous imagery of the mass media. ‘Nation’ is transformed into ‘destination’ in glossy photographs, magazines, posters, travel brochures and television commercials. Again, the ideas of home and family are supplanted by a hedonistic, abandoned individualism.[4] In recent years, the islands as individual destinations has received more attention than the sense of the island ‘family’; the slogan ‘The Bahamas: A Family of Islands’ has been replaced by the idea of ‘The Islands of The Bahamas’, and a dedication on the part of the Ministry of Tourism to promote each island as a single entity. Ideas of community, of being in a place where one knows and is known, are contradicted by the sense of anonymity promoted by regular tourist advertisement.

These touristic images of the Bahamas appear to be at odds with the images that Bahamians present to themselves. However, one is not independent of the other. The tales told to self are no more authentic than the tales told to other; rather, they are two sides of the same Bahamian coin.

National Identity: Tales told to Self and Other

Bruner, considering the two-way engagement of tourists and ‘natives’ in Bali, contends that the encounter, despite popular western conceptions of it, is never a unidirectional event. Pointing out that the ‘exotic’ is shaped by the visitor’s expectation of it, he examines the incorporation of the touristic into the Balinese construction of identity, and concludes that, rather than being destructive to Balinese ‘authenticity’, the tourist encounter creates its own reality in what he considers the ‘touristic borderzone’ (Bruner, 1996: 157-58). As is the case with any nation dependent on the global capitalist community for its survival, one set of tales affects the other. The tales told to the Bahamian self have always been shaped by the tales told to the foreign other; likewise, the latter are subject to the vicissitudes in the fortunes of the former. Tourists have been part of the Bahamian ethnoscape for well over a century, so much so that the most foreigners are automatically classified as ‘tourists’, no matter what their context. Bahamians’ self-identification is often inseparable from the image of themselves that they provide for the visitor.

A deconstruction of these images could lead one to conclude that Bahamians have a poor sense of self. Take, for example, the monologue given by Ronnie Butler during the bridge of "Burma Road". He builds it around the chorus, which commemorates one of the pivotal incidents in the Afro-Bahamian struggle for self-government, the Burma Road Riots of 1942.[5] That he sings this song for tourists provides us with a fine study of the levels of irony inherent in many portrayals of self that are filtered through the touristic lens. The original song was composed in 1942, during a time of great oppression. Butler's appropriatation and recording of the song took place in the 1970s, at a time when he was a regular performer in hotels. The recording from which I got my transcription is a digital re-release of the 1970s version, and is targeted now at the Bahamian market. Here it is:Here it is:

I’n ga lick nobody

Cause I got guinea corn hominy, yes indeed, stew shad and johnny cake, guinea corn hominy and lard, you must get some a that. Listen. I watch these fellas coming round here, ordering these big-time dish, they talking bout steak and all them kinda thing and thing like that. Well lemme tell you. I know them long time. I know when we used to go in the bush, catch couple of crabs, carry them home, get out the old iron pot in the back of the yard on t’ree rock, boil them crab, get lil bit of flour, cook it half done, and eat crab fat and dough! Yeah! Now they round here talking bout steak and thing? Listen. You should hear them when they ordering these big-time drink, talking bout zombie and slow gin fizz and thing? I don’t get it. Cause I know when we used to go in the market, buy couple sourlime, carry it home, squeeze them in one them old peaches can half full a water, throw lil sugar in that and drink switcher! That’s right! Listen. I know them long time. Listen. Lemme tell you. You gotta get some old yam and some old pumpkin, some old sweet potato, some old cabbage, some old carrot, some old salt beef, and old dry conch, throw that in the pot mongst some peas, let that boil down together, then you get one pound of flour, throw that in one pan, throw some salt and water in that, mix it up with you hand, and boom! Peas soup and dough boy! That’s right! Listen! Lemme tell you. I’m a native son, you see. I know where it’s at cause that’s where I’m from. Over the Hill. In the bush. Down Burma Road. Well, lemme tell you something. You gotta get dis good old native food. Peas soup and dough boy. Guinea corn hominy and lard. Steam conch and johnny cake. Boil crab and hominy. You gotta get some peas and rice and steam jackfish. You gotta get some stew fish and potato bread, and thing like that. You see? Listen. Now, just to go off the course for lil bit here, I got some friends, have a habit of coming in wearing big-time shirt, fella come here the other night, tell me say, ‘Boy,’ he say, ‘I wearing a twenty-five dollar, custom-made shirt.’ And I look at him and laugh, cause I remember when all of we used to thank God for Robin Hood flour! That’s right! Flour bag! And then he have the heart to come and tell me say he wearing ninety-five dollar alligator-skin shoes. Well, I’ll be doggone — listen. I remember when we used to go to high mass Sunday morning wearing high top tennis with no socks on, and God help you if it rain, cause toe jam’ll kill you! Listen. Lemme tell you. You gotta go in the bush. Over the hill. Down Burma Road. That’s where it’s at. Believe it or not folks, that’s where it’s at. I know most of you tourists out there don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, we’re talking bout the Bahamian thing. Yes indeed. (Ronnie and the Ramblers, n.d.).

On the surface, this monologue is a satirical commentary about the ridiculous juxtaposition of the ‘native’ and the ‘modern’ — a fairly common theme in conventional thinking about development, tourism and the role of the ‘west’ in the ‘Third World’, a theme which is, indeed, a favourite of western anthropologists and local intellectuals alike, who deplore the ‘false’ assumption of modernity by the ‘native’. Despite the apparent ‘authenticity’ of this meditation, however — symbolised by the dialect in which it is couched, the references to traditional Bahamian experiences, particularly the invocation of the simplicity and the poverty of Bahamian food and clothes — the monologue is in fact an artifact of the tourist encounter. The creative context of the occasion is, presumably, a tourist-filled room; the singer has made his living by entertaining visitors, and the song preserves the intimate connection between the performer and his audience. Indeed, in its first presentations it would have taken place in exactly that context: in a hotel cabaret peopled by foreigners. Yet today the song is appropriated by Bahamians. The singer is widely recognised as the foremost living Bahamian popular musician, the ‘grand old man’ of Bahamian music. His monologue embodies this tension. It is spoken to the visitor; the tourist is directly addressed in it, and there seems to be a sort of complicity between the performer and the tourist which appears to exclude — even to ridicule — the westernised Bahamian. But it is delivered in dialect, the vocabulary and rhythms of which are semi-intelligible to visitors, and in this regard it may be regarded as directed to Bahamians, who will be the only people who understand it fully.

If this is one level of irony — Bahamian dialect being employed to create a satire about Bahamians for non-dialect-speaking tourists — there are others. If we step back from the context of the song and consider the context of the singer, we realise that the performer/author, the ‘over-the-hill boy’, is in fact a man who lived for some time in a villa on Paradise Island (an island invented precisely for the tourist). The re-issuing of this song during the 1990s, on CD and tape, then, could be seen as much a reflection of our present prosperity as of our past poverty. Despite his insistence to his audience about his ‘bush’ origins, his reality, like that of most nostalgic Bahamians, is as far removed from those origins as is that of the ‘fellas’ referred to in the monologue.

The speech takes the irony further still. Its occurrence in a traditional song celebrating the power of the black Bahamian worker appears absurd in itself, and seems to trivialise the symbolism of the Burma Road Riots. In singing the song to the visitor, the singer appears blind to the possibility that the successes of the riots are being subordinated in a new disenfranchisement of the Bahamian people, a new dependency — not on native white, but on the white foreign tourist.

Yet the situation is by no means that simple. It is conceivable that the popular Bahamian conception of the situation, being itself oral and therefore fluid, is not so rigid. To assume that the speaker’s contempt for his friends lasts beyond the performance is to assume fixity in a context where flux predominates. What is significant here is the pragmatic mixing of all elements for a particular effect in the moment. In evoking the ‘real’ Bahamas, perhaps in an effort to create the ‘authentic’ for the tourist or present the ‘exotic/native’ to the visitor, the monologue weaves all the tales told to the self, together with the attitudes with which they are told, into a song sung for the other. In this it is an inverted precursor to all the reconstructions of the ‘authentic’ Bahamian self which have occurred during the 1990s, starting perhaps most consciously with the 1989 revue Dis We Tings (Bethel, Burrows, & Lockhart-Edwards, 1989), which drew heavily on ‘traditional’ Bahamian songs which were in fact written for performance in nightclubs and other tourist attractions. In their efforts to tell tales to themselves, Bahamian artists and performers have drawn heavily on the tales told to the tourists.

This is the positive side of our oral tradition: our ability to think on our feet, to spin new tales out of new ones, to employ the sleight-of-hand achieved annually by those who remake junk anew. However, there is a danger to be had in celebrating it too far, and it is this. Orality builds communities and groups, focusing on the face-to-face, the contextual, the present. Nations, however, are founded on great, abstract, literate principles — the ideals talked about by Patricia Glinton-Meicholas in her presentation at this conference. Our orality underpins and strengthens our culture, and helps to explain why we are who we are. However, if we are to create a nation in which all Bahamians can find a place, if we are to survive in a global world — as I have argued elsewhere (Bethel, 2003) — we have to be prepared to invest in, to create, a store of concrete symbols around which a nation can be built. We need to spin our own 'myth of nation', imagine our community on paper as well as in the air.

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[1]I am indebted to Marshall McLuhan (1962) for this term.

[2]The two sets of tales may be found side by side on the Ministry of Tourism’s homepage (http://www.interknowledge.com/bahamas) Geographia Travel Services 1997.

[3]I am greatly indebted to Strachan’s work with regard to the promotion of the Bahamas as ‘paradise’ to the outsider. For a full articulation of it see Strachan, 1995: 167ff; 2002.

[4]That Bahamians recognise this commitment to anonymity is evident from the words of the following song: ‘I don’t know where you come from/Ya far from home, gal, have ya fun/Your indiscretion will be concealed/It’s all in the package deal.’ Rahming 1995].