On Consideration

When I was sixteen, I had the opportunity to spend two years at the Lester B. Pearson United World College of the Pacific. These were revolutionary years for me. The college was founded on principles of internationalism, something about which we learn very little in this country as a rule, and it had lofty ideals: its ultimate goal, as part of the United World College Movement, was to promote world peace. It did this by offering scholarships to students from all over the world, seeking especially to include young people from countries who were enemies, and making them live together for eighteen months of their lives. The idea, put very simply, was that if you live with someone long enough, and get to understand them, their situation, their lives, you will be less likely to want to blow them off the face of the earth.

Now I must confess. I was impressed by all the lofty idealism, and the experience of sharing my life with people from every continent of the globe was unique. But it was not this that changed me so fundamentally.

You see, when I was sixteen I was sent to a school that had no rules.

Well, I shouldn't put it quite like that. The Pearson College that shaped me had, in fact, three rules. It was made very clear to us, however, that two of them were rules that had been imposed on the college from without, and they existed because they had to. The first of these was no drugs; drugs were against the law in British Columbia and in Canada, and breaking this law resulted in immediate expulsion. The second was no getting pregnant. The majority of the students were on international visas, and the complications to be faced by a non-Canadian student giving birth to a Canadian child were nightmarish.

It was the third "rule", though, that changed my life forever. It was this. Everything we did, every action we took at the college, was to be governed by consideration for other people. Before you judge someone else, we were told, before you take an action that will affect another person, walk around in his moccasins for a while.

Now it would seem as though this is a mighty silly rule. From a certain perspective, it's not really a rule at all. There are punishments for breaking rules; and how can one punish someone for not acting out of consideration for other people? How can one even know what the motive for an action is? And it's an especially silly rule to expect to govern two hundred teenagers away from home for the first time. I must admit, by the end of my stay there, I was completely fed up with "consideration" and all the difference that it didn't make to people's behaviour. But I couldn't know just how profound would be the effect of that rule on the rest of my life.

You see, when you're asked to govern your behaviour according to how it will affect other people, you learn something far more valuable than the ability to abide by rules; you learn how to take responsibility for your actions, to consider the effect of your life on the lives of those people around you.

I've been thinking a lot about the principle of consideration in recent months.

I think about it when I'm teaching, and people come late to class. Being good Bahamians, these students never fail to announce their arrival with a cheery greeting to all and sundry; after all, they've been well brought up, and one should never enter a room without acknowledging the other people in it. That they are also interrupting the lesson in progress seems not to cross their minds. No one, apparently, has taught them that it might be nice to enter the room before the scheduled activity has started, so that you can greet the people without simultaneously disturbing the class. I think about it when I've paid good money to attend a movie or a play. Invariably there are latecomers, and they invariably have to step over others to get to their seats, disturbing the people around them, blocking others' views, or, in the worst cases, interrupting what's taking place on the stage or the screen. I think about it when these students or patrons leave their cell phones on the loudest and catchiest ring possible, and when they see fit not to turn the phone off when it does ring, but to answer it and interrupt affairs still more. And I think about it when I've done my best to get to an event on time, only to have to wait for several chunks of hours for it to begin. (Oddly enough, that never seems to happen in church; Bahamians always seem to arrive early when God is involved, and church services almost always start on time.)

I think a lot about it when I'm on the road — when, for example, I'm driving along, and someone pulls out into traffic just in front of me, and proceeds to cruise along at fifteen miles an hour, forcing me to slam on my brakes to avoid an encounter that's closer than I'd like. I think about it when the jitney right in front of me stops a good four feet from the curb, proceeds to let two people off and take another on, travels ten more feet, and stops again; I think about it when the man in the truck four cars ahead slows down to shout some urgent message to his cousin on the other side of the road, and the two of them catch up for fifteen minutes, while the cars pile up behind them. I think about it a lot at those four-way stops or those blinking streetlights that you come across at unexpected intersections, especially when the cars coming along the cross-road are bigger or older or scruffier than mine.

And I think about it when I hear people talking blithely about What To Do With Haitians and Other Immigrants. These solutions almost always involve Sending Them Back to Their Own Country, or Razing Their Homes To The Ground, or Locking Them Up for Breaking the Laws of Our Land. Rarely, if ever, do solutions take into account the disparities in wealth between our countries, or suggest that we Bahamians, some of the richest people in the region, might consider freely sharing our blessings.

When I left Pearson College, I was completely fed up with the idea of consideration. It just didn't work, I thought. People need to have rules. They don't really care about others and their feelings, and it's futile to expect them to. If you don't have rules against it, they will dirty all the cups in the dayroom and leave messes for other people to clean up. They will throw their bright red clothing into the washing machines with your whites, and they will put your priceless sweater in the dryer and never think twice about it. Worse, they'll probably laugh at you if you complain about it.

But I was wrong.

The thing about trying to live your life according to the principle of consideration is this: rules don't change people. They merely give them parameters within which to act, and teach them how to get around them. They don't provide individuals with any sense of personal responsibility, and they do very little to make the world a better place for everyone not just a few.

So I think I'm going to look around me this week. I'm going to take up someone else's moccasins, walk around a little bit. And then I'm going to see what effect that has on the way I act after that.

On Oral Culture

Have you ever been to a funeral, been handed the lovely funeral booklet with the dead person's photo on the front and the obituary inside, read that obituary to pass the time because you got to the funeral an hour early to ensure you got a seat, and then wondered why you had to sit through the obituary yet again, when some grieving relative or friend read the printed piece verbatim from the booklet?

It drives some people nuts. It's repetitive, they say; it's unnecessary. Why read out loud what's already been printed on the page?

I believe that that habit isn't something to become irritated about, but something to celebrate. There's a theory out there that argues that the way in which people communicate has profound effects on their culture. And you see, we Bahamians live in an oral culture. That means that what's printed often doesn't become valid until it's read or performed out loud.

To communicate by speaking, you need at least two people: the speaker and the listener. People who go around talking to themselves are considered crazy, after all; so oral societies tend to place more emphasis on the group more than on the individual in the group. After all, communication can't take place till you find someone to communicate with.

To communicate in writing, you need only one person. You may think that you need a reader and a writer, but in fact the two can be the same person: people who keep diaries don't write for anyone but themselves. And so literate societies tend to place more emphasis on the individual than on the group.

When you speak the communication is instant. If the speaker falters, forgets what he was saying, the message is lost. If the listener happens not to be paying attention, the message is lost.

When you write, though, you get the chance to spend time with the words on the page. You can go over them, check them, fix them, play with them till they are just right. When you read, you can stop reading when you become tired or inattentive and pick up where you started from.

So what cultural traits do these trends generate? Well, look at it this way. A writer produces a text that is fixed. The effect on her audience is not immediate. Take this column, for instance. I'm sitting here on a Friday morning writing words that many people won't see until Monday, and I will go over what I'm writing time and again before I send it out. I need to. If I say one thing at the beginning of the column, and another at the end, I can be sure that people are going to notice, and will stop me in the road and tell me I contradicted myself.

Speakers, on the other hand, have a different task. Their primary goal is to hold their audience's attention until the end, and what they actually say is not as important as how they say it. It is quite possible to talk for four or five hours, and hold your audience's attention the whole while, and have a message that could have been delivered "dry" in twenty minutes. Hitler used to do this all the time, and many Bahamians have mastered this skill as well. This is not a bad thing; it is an art, and it is a fundamental one in a society that communicates primarily by speech.

Oral societies consider face-to-face communication to be the most powerful form of contact. Letters are useful things, but they really don't mean anything until they are followed up with the phone call or (even better) a face-to-face meeting. This is an important thing for bureaucrats and politicians and advertisers to remember; nothing works in the Bahamas like word of mouth.

This commitment to face-to-face discourse affects really basic activities, like what you do when you enter a room with other people in it. In the Bahamas, the polite thing to do is to greet all the other people there — something that many foreigners find extremely difficult to do, having been raised in societies that teach that it is rude to speak to strangers before they speak to you.

Oral societies adapt readily to change. Oral communication is not predictable — you may have to change your speech mid-stream depending on the response you get from your audience. Bahamian society changes very quickly indeed, usually without our realizing it, and Bahamians adapt readily to that change. It may not just be fickleness that allows us to switch our T-shirts when the government changes; it may also be our fundamental orality. It's a new day, and we live in it.

Oral societies also think about and respond to history differently from literate ones. In the absence of a written history, we tell tales about the past that reflect the context in which they are told. All these tales will have truth in them, but they are also likely to be incomplete; their purpose is to serve the people that they are being told by and to, and not to serve the past. Now while this is true of written histories, there is a difference; writing allows these histories to be gathered together so that a more complete picture may emerge. Because oral societies change so quickly, however, partial stories are often all exist.

In the fall of 2000, I taught a course that looked at the development of the modern Bahamas from the 1950s to the present. When I began it, most of my students had no concept of the positive role played by the PLP at that time; many, indeed, didn't even know that the FNM began as a splinter group called the Free PLP. They had grown up under an FNM government that taught them, whether consciously or not, that everything the PLP had done until 1992 was corrupt, destructive and wicked. Then Sir Lynden Pindling died, and a completely different tale emerged. In a week's time, Sir Lynden and his party had gone from being national villains to national heroes, and few of my students remarked on the difference.

Being an oral society has given us many strengths. We are warm people; our habit of speaking to people we don't know makes us appear warm and welcoming, and serves us well with visitors. We are also flexible people, and adapt well to change; this may help to explain in part some of the Bahamas' success in a region where economic failure is prevalent. We don't hold onto obsolete ways of life if we believe they will hold us back.

But we also have to watch out for some pitfalls. Oral societies work best when they are small-scale groups of people who all know one another and have many ties. It is very difficult to build a nation on face-to-face communication, which quickly turns to nepotism and who-ya-know, with a flipside of victimization. Reliance on phone calls and personal contact makes the workings of a bureaucracy difficult; and the dependence on what people tell us rather than on what we discover for ourselves can make us gullible and open to manipulation.

So let us celebrate our strengths as an oral culture, and watch out for the weaknesses. And the next time we go to a funeral, and hear a mourner read the printed obituary out loud, let us hold back our irritation and celebrate it instead.

On Print and Power

There's an email making the rounds (I received it several months ago) entitled "Blacks Don't Read". Being Black, I read it. The general message of the email is simple and thought-provoking: that one of the reasons that African-Americans are still second-class citizens in their country is that they don't read.

The email isn't talking about illiteracy — the condition of being unable to read, or of having never learned to do so. It's talking about choosing not to read when one could choose to do so. And it's arguing that the consequences of making such a choice are, fundamentally, political.

I think it has a point.

A couple of years ago, I sat down to watch a special episode of A&E's Biography on the 100 most influential people of the millennium: politicians, inventors, writers, artists, composers, religious leaders, soldiers. One by one the people I considered likely to be at the top of the list were eliminated, until at last I was stumped: who would be named the most influential person of the last thousand years? The answer: Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press.

Now this intrigued me, especially as I embarked upon a tertiary-level teaching career in which I was regularly astonished at the fact that so many of my students, like the African-Americans of the email, don't read. It's not that they can't read; it's that they choose not to. They see no use for reading. It's boring, they say. It's hard.

Now some would ask the question: what's wrong with that? In our culture, we communicate primarily by oral means, and place value on what people say, and on what we hear, rather than what we find out through print. As a result, we don't raise our children to place value on reading or writing.

Fair enough. But there's just one problem. In 2000, a bunch of thinkers in the most powerful country in the world picked the obscure inventor of the printing press to name the most influential person of the millennium. That suggests to me that it's not a question of culture. It's a question of power.

Think about it. The man who took a mechanical press designed to squeeze the oil out of olives, created movable type, and used that contraption to issue the first printed Bible was considered to be more influential than Gandhi, Hitler, or Columbus; than Newton, Einstein, or Freud; than Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, or Alexander Graham Bell; than Martin Luther or Martin Luther King, than Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo or the Wright brothers, than Bill Gates or whatever genius invented the Internet.

Why? Because one of the most basic foundations of power in the world comes from knowing information and controlling it.

Before Gutenberg's printing press, ideas were disseminated by word of mouth. The most important of them were preserved in writing. Laws were written, the Bible was written, and the names of people who had to pay taxes were written. But in a world without print, what was written was an arcane collection of information that only a limited number of people could see for themselves.

The printing press revolutionized the world by allowing ideas that were written to be reproduced so that more people could see them. In so doing, it also helped create a world which could be democratic, egalitarian and independent, because individuals had access to the information that empowered them.

In a world without print, the power that comes from knowing information and controlling it is concentrated in the hands of the very few. In a world without print, not many people read; even fewer write. In a world without print, most people rely upon a handful of educated people to keep them informed. The rest of society is at their mercy.

And to all intents and purposes, the Bahamas is a world without print.

Now don't get me wrong. We are not living in the Middle Ages, in a pre-Renaissance society where the masses of people can't read. No; we are living in the modern Bahamas, in a postcolonial society where reading is considered old-fashioned, European, unimportant.

In other words, we live in a society that chooses to inhabit a world without print. Publishers of Bahamian work are few and far between; Bahamian writers are the most obscure of all artists in the country; and, a full generation after Independence, there is no national library, no public collection of writing by and about our people that we can use to raise our children on, to give them an identity, a touchstone of print in a world where print is power. We live in a society where money is spent lavishly on street festivals and fireworks for rallies, but frugally on books and artists and libraries. We live in a society where opinion is formed in churches, at political gatherings, and on radio talk shows. Oh, we have newspapers, for sure; but they tend to be compendia of other people's words, and hard, analytical reporting is difficult to come by. We live in a world in which the printed matter we get is produced by other people, and not by ourselves.

And so we live in a society that has chosen to relinquish the power that comes from print. In this our society is much like the pre-Gutenberg world. Too many of us believe things and think things that other people have told us, and not things that we have proven for ourselves to be valid. When one reads a book, one has time to reflect, to find other books, to check facts, to make up one's own mind; the exchange is simply between the reader and the book. But when one listens to a speech or a talk show or a sermon, or watches news on TV, the ideas fly past so quickly that one cannot question them, and one is swept up in the emotion of the moment, and has far less control, eventually, over what one believes.

By rejecting any real kind of control over the products of print, we Bahamians have created a society that depends far too heavily for its information, its "truths", on a handful of powerful people. Very few of those powerful people are Bahamian. For by rejecting control over the products of print, we Bahamians have chosen not to produce much information of our own.

Oh, we'll consume it, all right, if it's marketed to us, and especially if it comes from abroad. Just look at how many of us flock to see Hollywood movies, spout what we have learned from CNN or Fox or NBC Nightly News, inhabit a world shaped by the North American media giant. But we don't produce our own information. The production and dissemination of ideas is not a "Bahamian" thing. We are an oral society, and everything we have to say is encompassed in Junkanoo.

So where does that place us on the scale of power and influence in the global world? If we read and produce and disseminate no information of our own, where does that leave us?

On Culture

Just recently I had the pleasure of teaching a young man who proclaimed that Wendy’s is as Bahamian as the Bamboo Shack. The reaction I get when I tell people about him is the same every time: a look of disbelief, a laugh, a scornful comment along the lines of "He mussee ain know who he is."

It’s obvious to those of us who know better. Our culture is unique! It’s conch, it’s fish-and-grits, it’s Junkanoo and rake ’n’ scrape and steam pork chop on a Thursday afternoon when you hungry-hungry, and it’s dialect and straw work and beating a goombay drum. It’s peas-n-rice, macaroni and cheese, potato salad, fried chicken and Kool-Aid on Sunday. In the words of Ronnie Butler, it’s guinea corn hominy, yes indeed, stew shad and johnny cake, guinea corn hominy and lard. You must get some of that. It’s Blue Hill Water Dry, and ringplay, and Over-the-Hill, and up south, and Gussiemaes; it’s flour bag and George Symonette in wompas, Dr Offff and KB and Showtime in Rawson Square.

It sure isn’t Wendy’s. What! That boy jes ain know who he is.

The thing is, I think he does know. Those of us who are tempted to denounce him and dismiss his proclamation are missing the point he’s making. For so long we’ve been taught to approach culture as something to do with things — with food, performance, Junkanoo, music, art, dance, you name it — that we’ve bought into that myth. Because we've been taught to believe that culture consists of objects, we get very defensive when people mess with our objects, believing that if you take them away from us, we're in trouble.

But objects aren’t culture. Objects are expressions of culture, concrete manifestations of the ideas, attitudes and habits that unite a group of people. Culture is that big amorphous constellation of shared experiences, habits and behaviours that drives us to make the decisions we do. Culture is the sum total of who we all are. It's what we know, how we act, what attitudes we hold, and what things we believe in. In other words, everything we do — not just those things we're taught to recognize as “cultural” — is part of our culture.

Imagine culture as in iceberg. Some of it pokes up out of the water, catches the light, and takes your breath away (if you’re lucky) because of the sheer wonder of it, its strength and beauty and grace. When you see it you say "Oh, that's our culture," and as long as you can see it you know where you are. But like an iceberg, most of culture exists below the surface. Like an iceberg, what you see is just the tip of the whole.

Like an iceberg, culture can sink the Titanic if it's ignored.

We need to be careful that culture doesn't sink us. We've become so accustomed to dealing with the surface, we don’t realize that the unconscious exists. For us, Wendy’s is American, the Bamboo Shack Bahamian, and heaven help the young man who can’t get that straight.

I'm not so sure it's he who needs the help. I'm thinking it's the rest of us.

I'm thinking that we run the risk of giving away our real culture to spare a few objects that we have identified as “ours”: Junkanoo, peas ’n’ rice, rake ’n’ scrape, Bookie and Rabbie, and whatever other “Bahamian” thing is the flavour of the month. The difficulty with focussing all our time and energy on objects, though, is that we become accustomed to defining ourselves according to things. And things are fickle, and they change on us.

To begin with, most of what we claim as Bahamian isn’t solely ours. John Canoe/Junkanoo is found throughout the Caribbean in various forms. Peas ’n’ rice is a variation on a number of West African rice dishes, and is eaten almost everywhere West Africans went. Rake ’n’ scrape is a whole lot like zydeco in Louisiana; and Bookie is a Haitian invention. Then again, these things have the habit of changing. Junkanoo today is a far cry from what it was a couple of decades ago, and in rake ’n’ scrape, electric bass guitars and saws have taken the place of the tin tub bass and washboards.

What makes these things unique isn’t what they look like; it’s why they’re there. By focussing too much attention on the surface while ignoring what’s going on underneath, we run the danger of missing the real thing altogether. We’ll stare too hard at the tip of the iceberg, and we won’t realize the rest of it’s there until we’re scrambling for the lifeboats.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be identifying, promoting, and supporting the things we’ve decided to call Bahamian. What I am saying, though, is that simply cataloguing these things without understanding why they are specifically Bahamian is not going to do us much good in the long run.

You see, it’s possible to eat all the conch you like, to dance merengue till the morning come, to recreate the Fergusons of Farm Road for our children to enjoy, to teach them to make whelk soup (even though whelks are mighty scarce these days), to make a reference to Junkanoo in every second breath, and to be an American at heart. It’s equally possible to eat pizza and pasta, to dine on salads, to go to the opera, to attend wine tastings, or to make a north-south sound when singing and still be fundamentally Bahamian. The secret isn’t in what one sees on the surface; it’s in what lies beneath.

Let’s go back to Wendy’s. On the one hand, what’s Bahamian about it? It doesn’t serve Bahamian food, and its parent company rests deep in the heart of the United States. So how can any sane person claim it for the Bahamas?

Simple. Bahamians eat there all the time, and fast American food has become a staple of the average Bahamian diet. If we were to add up the number of times we ate a meal from Wendy’s in the past month, and compare it with the number of times we ate from the Bamboo Shack, we just might surprise ourselves. Wendy’s meets many of the needs of our modern lifestyles so well — it’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s convenient, and it has drive-thru windows — that it has entered our unconscious without our even noticing, so much so that it has become part of our culture. To protest that it isn’t is to get distracted by the tip of the iceberg.

Before we claim some things as Bahamian, then, before we dismiss others as not, before we pump money into preserving something that gives us our “identity”, I suggest we take a lesson from the young man who named Wendy’s Bahamian. Like him, we need to focus on more than what we see on the surface. It’s why we do what we do, and not what we do itself, that makes the difference; and until we understand this basic truth, we’re just navigating in the dark.