On Being Bahamian

Just recently, during the lead-up to the FNM convention, the question was raised about whether race was still an issue for the Bahamian electorate. Of course it is. Race is the only marker of identity that is consistently invoked by Bahamians when we imagine ourselves.

Note: I say consistently. When describing oneself as a Bahamian, one either flashes one’s skin colour as a badge of identity, or else one defends oneself for not having that badge; for in the popular imagination, to be Bahamian is to be black. People who are not obviously black tend to spend a lot of time explaining why they are Bahamian even though their skin isn’t. One’s race is usually the very first thing that is considered when assessing whether one is a “true true” Bahamian or not.

Let me show you what I mean. Last summer, a friend of mine (I’ll call him John) was returning home from a trip abroad. In the airport, he took out his passport (Bahamian), and went to stand in the “Returning Residents” line. The immigration officer looked up and saw him there.

“You can’t come through here,” she told him.

“I’m a Bahamian,” he said.

“You can’t come through here,” she repeated.

“But this is for residents,” he replied. “I’m a resident.”

“No,” she said, “you have to go through there.” And she directed him to another line, for Visitors. Obediently, he joined it. When he got to the immigration counter, the officer looked at his passport.

“You can’t come through here,” she said. “You’re a Bahamian.”

I imagine that his reaction to her that day confirmed it.

I’m reminded of something that happens to me, either overtly or covertly, every time I teach a class at COB. At some point in the semester, someone, confused by my light skin and my straight hair, will ask me the inevitable question:

“Where are you from?”

Now sometimes I can be very slow. Normally I see the question coming a mile away, and am ready to answer. But the last time this happened to me, I was on a completely different wavelength. I’d been musing on the composition of Nassau’s population, and was marvelling that my brother and I were really quite unusual as Nassauvians our age go, as both sides of our family come from New Providence. So my answer, quite predictably, was:

“Nassau.”

This seemed to perplex the student who asked. But not to be outdone, he followed it up with another question.

“Where were your parents born?”

When I informed him that my parents and grandparents were all born and raised in Nassau, it perplexed him still more. I didn’t quite understand why until sometime later in the semester, when the same class had occasion to discuss race and Bahamian identity. At some point in the conversation I realized that the people this student was referring to as “white Bahamians” and “Conchy Joes” were not the same people that I would label “white” or “Conchy Joe”.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “When I think of white Bahamians, I think of people who are one hundred percent descended from Europeans.”

“That’s not Bahamian,” he informed me.

“That’s not?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “that’s paper Bahamian.” He went on to explain the following: Bahamians are descended from Africans. Some of the people who are descended from Africans don’t like that fact, and because they are also descended in part from Europeans, they identify with their European heritage, and call themselves “white”. Real Bahamians are not white. Real white people are not Bahamians.

“I see,” I said. This was beginning to explain a lot to me: like why John had had his experience in the “Returning Residents” line in the airport. Now John is a bona fide member of an unimpeachably Bahamian family, one with at least two hundred years of residence in this archipelago, if not more; and yet he is not recognized by his fellow citizens as being one of them. He is, you see, white.

The ironic thing about this idea that the “true true” Bahamian is black is that if we measure one’s “Bahamianness” by the depths of one’s roots, it is white Bahamians who have the deepest ones. The Eleutherian Adventurers, the people who settled the issue once and for all of who lived on these islands and what language they spoke, were predominantly white; and they arrived 135 years before the Loyalists brought the slaves who changed Bahamian demographics forever.

So where do we get the idea that “Bahamian” means “black”, and why?

The answer my inquisitive student gave me was this. The Bahamas became independent in 1973, and it was a black government, the PLP, that brought Independence about. Because Bahamian nationhood is a black invention, the real Bahamian is black.

It was a good answer. But I wasn’t convinced. By that reasoning, American must mean white, because the Declaration of Independence was the creation of a group of white men, several of them slaveholders. By that reasoning, black and Hispanic and Asian Americans are not American because they have a different heritage from the founding fathers. Or, to bring it closer to home, since many of the founding fathers of the Bahamian nation were the children of West Indian immigrants, the real Bahamian should be similarly descended from West Indians.

No; as an answer, it doesn’t quite cut it. It may help provide an idea of where the popular conception of “Bahamian” comes from, but it doesn’t justify that conception. I suspect that the explanation goes a lot deeper than that.

You see, the identity of a nation is a funny thing. We may think it creates itself, but in the absence of a concerted, centralized effort, individual citizens get their own ideas about what is and what isn’t “national”, and in the end we surprise ourselves with the vastly varying ideas of what defines us as a group.

And for a long time now we have been letting our nation create itself.

The result is a bit of a muddle. While those of us who were around to watch the old flag fall (and to cheer the raising of the new one) may have no confusion about what “Bahamian” may or may not be, we cannot assume the same is true for our children, or for theirs. If we don’t discuss who and what we are, and actively teach the history of the nation comprehensively to every schoolchild, the youth who are coming up will fill in the blanks with their own realities. And if those “realities” are not shaped in some way by the reality of the Bahamas’ multicultural population, if the only common thread in those realities is the blackness of the Bahamian public, we will create a Bahamas where one citizen will not recognize her fellow Bahamian when he is staring her in the face, and will tell him that he can’t come through here.

On Independence

When I was a little girl, my mother used to tell me: “If you aim for a star, you might hit a tree.” Being a rather literal-minded child, I used to imagine myself in a gigantic catapult, aiming at Polaris, and crashing into the dilly tree in our back yard on the way.

The point is you need to dream big dreams to accomplish even a little bit of them. The bigger your dreams, the higher your goals, the further you are going to go. But if you begin with small goals, you will go nowhere at all.

“If you aim for the tree,” she’d tell me, “you’ll probably hit the ground.”

I want to tell you three stories about dreamers and their dreams. The first one is about my mother herself. Her mother, my grandmother, was a woman for whom the word “no” did not exist. She was born in the first decade of the twentieth century, and had three big strikes going against her: she was brown, she was a woman, and she was poor. But she had dreams. She decided to send her children, both of them, to the best university she could think of. That university was Cambridge, England.

Now at that time, sending her son was remarkable enough, but my grandmother decided her daughter was to go as well. When she told the woman in the Colonial Office that this was her dream, that good lady looked at this Afro-European woman and her Afro-European girlchild and laughed. When my mother got into Girton College, Cambridge, my grandmother showed that woman the acceptance letter.

The second story is about three men who in 1953 began a revolution that would change the face of the Bahamas for good. William Cartwright, Henry Taylor and Cyril Stevenson, recognizing the dire need for change in the Bahamian social situation, and understanding that such a change could not happen with the political system the way it was, introduced party politics to the Bahamas by forming the Progressive Liberal Party.

They couldn’t know how revolutionary their action was. None of the three was particularly black. They were members of the so-called “coloured classes”, and they had more access to social status and educational advancement than many darker-skinned Bahamians. They could only hope, but not predict, that the PLP would serve as a catalyst that allowed the black Bahamian masses to unite behind heroes of their own skin colour, and they certainly could not possibly have imagined that a scant fourteen years after the foundation of the PLP, that party would take over the government of the Bahamas, or that within twenty short years, the Bahamas would become an independent nation. But they dreamed nevertheless, and the result of their dream was the creation of a nation.

The third one is about a book, written by Patti Glinton-Meicholas, A Shift in the Light. It is a tribute to the generation that produced her – the nameless generation of people who made it possible for the Lynden Pindlings and Milo Butlers of the PLP to succeed. These people had the courage to dream about a better Bahamas, and to act on their dreams, and because of them, this July we Bahamians will celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of our independence. They were far less blessed materially than we were; but what they lacked in possessions, the characters in Glinton-Meicholas’ book made up for in integrity, honour vision that many of us don’t have.

So I’m led to ask myself: now, thirty years after Independence, what are our dreams? Who among us are the madmen who have the gall to imagine the impossible, and who are willing to make sacrifices to see the impossible through? There is no doubt that we have come a long, long way since 1973. Economically, we’re far better off. Politically, we’re maturing. Educationally, we’ve created a system that gives every Bahamian the opportunity to finish high school, and we’ve built a college that offers excellent value for the dollar.

But just how big do we dream?

Patti Glinton ends her novel with the suggestion that we, the children and grandchildren of a whole nation of dreamers, of the people who dared to vote for the absurd — a group of black and brown men who had the effrontery to think they could run a country — have let our forefathers down. We’ve let them down by abandoning the habit of dreaming, and by clinging instead to what we have already got.

I’m not so sure she’s wrong. Our wealth has made us prisoners. We’re far more interested in keeping our riches than in creating or buying into any dream that we fear could threaten our way of life. Instead of aiming for stars, we turn our backs on them because to reach that high might cost us what we’ve already got. And so we crawl along, our eyes never leaving the ground.

Instead of imagining true social independence — an independence that allows us to think for ourselves, to come up with our own indigenous solutions to our own indigenous problems — we hire consultants from the USA, Britain and Canada to find the solutions for us, instead of asking the consultants we grow right here.

Instead of imagining true intellectual independence — an independence that allows us to view the world through our own eyes — we discourage Bahamians from becoming writers and filmmakers and artists and musicians, and instead import information from abroad, thus allowing people in the USA, Jamaica, Canada and Britain to form our opinions for us.

Instead of imagining true material independence, where we recognize what it is that we do that is better than other people’s (we grow better oranges and bananas and pineapples, for one thing, we grind better grits, and our tomatoes have taste, our cabbages are huge and our onions are strong), we prefer to buy food that have stickers on them to assure us they were imported from abroad.

And instead of imagining true individual independence, which requires us to recognize how special each one of us is, we set up rules and regulations and trammels that help us pinpoint the failings in one another; we spend a lot of time magnifying motes and knocking one another out with planks. And secretly, inside us, we tell one another by our actions that because we’re Bahamian we are not as accomplished, as innovative, or as creative as those people who live in Europe or America or anywhere else.

Thirty years after Independence, and fifty years after the foundation of the PLP, our houses and our wallets and our cars are bigger, but we have grown smaller than our fathers. Where they dared to dream the impossible — that black men could rule themselves — we appear to be unable to dream even the attainable. We refuse to aim for the stars, because we believe that even the tree is too high for us; we might miss it altogether, and then we might lose our riches. And so we cling to the status quo, we offer no challenge to what is around us, and we stifle our dreams.

But we cannot afford to do that. Thirty years is just the beginning of a nation’s journey. If we have no dreams, where on earth will we lead our children? Just think. If the founders and builders of the PLP had stifled their dreams, where would we be now?

On Culture Shock

Well, the first thing I should say on this topic is that I lived out of the country for eight years.

Not that my absence was planned. In 1992, I took advantage of a scholarship that was being offered in honour of the Quincentennial and went to England to pursue graduate studies; in 1995, the scholarship ran out. I moved to Canada to take up a job that would help me finish my dissertation while being fed and kept warm.

Then came the millennium. Not wishing to allow a new century to see me living away from home, I applied for a job at the College of The Bahamas, got it, ended my exile, and came home.

Returning to the Bahamas was something of a culture shock.

Not on the surface: on the face of things, Nassau, at least, was buffed and shining and spiffy. New schools and clinics were everywhere, government buildings looked crisp and clean, Bay Street had reversed itself and was otherwise charming. People’s cars were spanking new, and the extensive construction activities and the general beautification of the environment suggested that there was money in the country.

And then I began to teach. And this culture — my culture — began to shock.

The students in my classes were teacher trainers. They were overwhelmingly female; I think I had three males across the three classes, and those three were enrolled in the same section. Two of the classes were advanced-level courses. These were not the classes that created the shock I want to tell you about, though they had their own peculiarities. One of the classes was a second-year course in Bahamian literature, and the students enrolled in that one were people who had come up through the education system in the eight years that I had been away. It was these people who created my shock.

Here is why. These students appeared to believe — because more than one of them wrote — that white people are superior to black people. This they wrote, to their surprise and mine. (I read the words out to the class after I’d recovered from my horror, and they were similarly horrified at themselves). When I asked them why they thought this, they denied it at first, and then, confronted with their own words on paper, became bewildered as I was.

These students were schooled in an independent Bahamas, thirty years after the attainment of majority rule. They have never known a white government; rather, they have been raised in a country whose first black government often made skin colour a prerequisite for reward. How is it, then, that a generation born and raised in what is arguably the most economically successful black nation in the independent world can still believe that to be black is to be inferior?

They had answers, of course. They said that they believed it because in their experience, white people received better treatment than black people; they received better jobs, better loans, better schooling, and better salaries. I had no idea whether this was true or not; after all, I’d been away for eight years. So I just kept asking questions.

I asked them, for example, how many white people they had actually seen get the better treatment. It turned out that they were talking about tourists or fair-skinned black Bahamians, people who had “a little colour”. In their minds white Bahamians — Bahamians descended from European stock — don’t exist.

I asked them who was giving these people better treatment. It turned out that the people responsible for the discrimination were black Bahamians very much like them.

And then I asked them this, to which I have not yet received an answer. Why is it that they, the young citizens produced solely by the Bahamian nation, are so unsure about their own worth that they still expect people who look like they do to be treated worse than people with different citizenship and lighter complexions? I thought majority rule and Independence were supposed to get rid of all that.

What is particularly sobering about that experience is that these young women are going to become teachers of the next generation of Bahamians. Now if they believe, as they seem to do, somewhere in their consciousness, that the skin colour they were born with makes them somehow second-class in the world, what will they be teaching the children in their care? And how then do we break the pattern of self-denigration?

I have some ideas. Some of them are complex, and deserve a column of their own; some of them are pretty simple. I’ll try and deal with a couple of the simple ones briefly.

The first thing that comes to mind is that people learn more by example than by direction. We have paid plenty of lip-service to Bahamianization over the past thirty years, so much so that it has become a mantra to many of us, who believe that the ultimate qualification one can have for any position is having the correct passport; but we have not put our money where our mouths are. All too often, Bahamians are not hired to do difficult or specialized work, work that really matters. All too often, when we are presenting ourselves to the world, we invite or hire people from beyond the Bahamas to help us do it. The message that sends to the public is that Bahamian workers are not good enough to meet international standards.

The second thing is that we tend to place our emphasis on things that make a profit in purely numerical terms; we measure the worth of too many things by how much money or public attention they generate. This is ironic, because many of the best things that Bahamians create are expensive, largely because they are labour- or time-intensive.

Bahamian straw work is a case in point. The 1994 visit to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival confirmed that it is some of the best, if not the best, straw work in the region. It is one of the few indigenous crafts we have, handed down to us by our African and Amerindian ancestors. It is a concrete example that can demonstrate to our teachers-to-be that black people are not inferior. Yet about 80% of the straw sold in the straw market is foreign. The reason? According to the president of the Straw Vendors Association, cruise ship passengers do not buy expensive Bahamian straw. Now this is probably true; but there is more than one way to respond to that fact. For people don’t buy things, they buy ideas; and if we begin to sell the quality of our product as well as the product itself, we may just surprise ourselves. And for now? While it’s true that the monetary turnaround that bulk straw work generates is far higher than that gained by selling native straw, how many of us consider the intangible losses that come from choosing not to promote our own?

My point is this. We cannot continue to do this without paying a psychological or social cost. As my experience with my student teachers showed me, nations aren’t built solely with money, and self-confident citizens are not made on dollar-profits alone. If we can cash in our earnings at the end of the day and yet raise children who, thirty-six years after majority rule, still believe that white people are superior to black people, then we have lost far more than we have gained.