On Big Winds

Anybody who knows me well knows that I have a thing about hurricanes. I've had it for a good quarter century, and it has led me to conclude that we Bahamians do hurricanes well.

Either that, or Americans do them badly. I am always amazed at the death tolls and the property damage that hurricanes do in the USA — often the same storms that we have experienced here in the Bahamas, and sometimes even at greater force. And that leads me to my topic today. What is it about us that enables us to weather storms relatively well?

Well, first off, I don’t believe it's because we're God’s modern chosen. I'm not discounting the power of prayer by any means, but for me to believe that would have me believe that the only reason we have been spared is that we're better Christians, and God loves us more than other people. And I'm not prepared to accept that. I don't believe that there were no good praying Christians in the Twin Towers, or that there are no good Christians in Jamaica, Nicaragua or the Carolinas.

Anyway, we aren’t spared the storms. The Bahamas is a big place, after all, and while some islands are less likely to be hit than others, some place in the Bahamas is hit by a hurricane at least once every one to two years. That’s enough to make it routine.

A better reason is our geographical position. Like the East Coast of the USA, we are fairly well positioned to weather those biennial storms for the simple reason that most hurricane systems tend to break up over mountainous terrain. Because we are technically located outside the Caribbean chain, and are set off from the Caribbean Ocean by three large, mountainous islands, many of the hurricanes that hit us are often just big storms with fits of bad temper that come along to spit or blow on us after they have flattened our Caribbean neighbours.

But every now and then — every sixty or seventy years — hurricanes form in the North Atlantic, and those are the ones that we need to be worried about. The major storms that have hit the Bahamas fall into this category — the Great Hurricanes of 1866, 1929 and 1932, as well as the more recent Andrew, Floyd and Michelle. Unlike the more common Caribbean storms, they come out of the North Atlantic, slam into us, and then strike land in the USA. And when they make landfall in the States, they cause unfathomable damage.

Now I’m curious. What is it about the Bahamas that leads us to weather storms more successfully than the Americans? What is it about us that allows us to suffer two Category Four hurricanes in two years with — what? — two fatalities combined and relatively minor structural damage, while Isabel, which had downgraded to a Category Two by the time it struck the US, to make off with 30-40 lives?

One woman, the wife of an American customs official, thinks it’s genetic. As she and her husband prepared to evacuate Nassau in anticipation of Hurricane Isabel, she told a friend of mine: “You people know how to deal with these. We don't.” In other words, it goes with the skin colour, the hair texture, the navel string buried somewhere under a mango tree.

I don’t think it’s that either.

I think it's partly the fact that we don't have mountains or rivers to worry about. Most of the American fatalities in hurricanes are deaths by drowning, which happens when rivers and lakes flood because of high tides and too much rain. Many of the Caribbean and Central American fatalities occur in mountainous places when heavy rains cause mudslides and wash away whole sections of hillsides, including houses and the people in them.

I think it's also partly because we have a healthy respect for acts of God. We know what the Almighty did to Sodom, Gomorrah, the Egyptians, and the whole of Noah's world. Not for us, then, the idiocy of strolling along the beach during the storm to watch the waves or surf the surge. Not for us the reporters swathed in waterproofs, hanging onto telephone poles and headgear while screaming into their microphones: "AUTHORITIES ARE WARNING PEOPLE TO STAY INSIDE. AUTHORITIES HAVE IMPOSED A 12 O'CLOCK CURFEW." We watched Sesame Street. We saw Kermit the Frog standing out in the snow saying "Someone is standing out in the snow." We watched it, and we got the point.

Just take this example. Three of the deaths caused by Hurricane Isabel were from the electrocution of men sent to fix power lines. Now I remember sitting on our front porch in the aftermath of Hurricane Michelle. Our immediate neighbourhood — the people on our street and around the corner a little bit east and a little bit west — was without electricity for nearly two weeks, one of the longest power outages without a good reason, like fallen trees, broken lines, or flooding. Our trouble was a transformer that thought it was a firework. After some time and hundreds of phonecalls, BEC was finally able to spare a truck, and sent some men along to fix it. One of these was a Freeport Power and Light worker, who'd come to Nassau to help with the restoration of power. He rode up in the cherry-picker and began to work on the transformer. He wore two pairs of gloves on his hands, and the top pair was white. One of the guys from BEC asked him what they were for. His answer: because the Americans had trained the Freeport Power and Light workers to work on live lines. The gloves were to protect him from electrocution.

"Man," said the BEC worker from his spot near the truck, "we just turn the power off. Safer that way."

This is not to say that we should not be careful when big winds come our way. Not at all. It is because of our vigilance — our stringent building codes, our willingness to move to hurricane shelters when necessary, our habitual cutting of trees that are near power lines, BEC's policy of turning off the electricity at the power plant before things get really bad — that we have fared so well.

However, a word to the wise. The Bahamas has not been struck by a full-strength Category Five hurricane in many years. And while we do storms well, we also do them late. We like to leave things to the last minute. Too many of us rely on plywood that has to be bought and nailed up to cover our windows, or prefer to stick it out in our houses when we should move to shelters. We do hurricanes well, but we shouldn't let that go to our head.

I'm going to close with a little information about what happened in the perfect storms of 1929. In 1929, the storm surge was so high it washed over Hog (Paradise) Island. Eight people died. In the 1932 Great Abaco Hurricane that hit Abaco, the entire settlement of New Plymouth, Green Turtle Cay was wiped outand many died.

So let's not relax just yet; let's take heed from our past, and plan on doing them even better tomorrow.

On Federation

Great minds, they say, think alike. Well, I’m not claiming to have a great mind, but I’ve been struck by the fact that one of the recent discussions that’s been happening on air and in cyberspace is one in which I have an abiding interest. It’s the idea of extending local government, of decentralizing our administration as far as possible, of broadening democracy by giving all Bahamians an immediate stake in their government. Thanks to Vince Ferguson, Steve McKinney and others, these ideas have entered the public’s consciousness.

I have long been dissatisfied with local government as it exists in the Bahamas. What I want to talk about today is similar to local government, but bigger. I’m going to propose that we Bahamians start thinking about becoming a federation.

I can hear the scoffing now; the idea of federation for the Bahamas must seem absurd. A federation, after all, is usually a union of pre-existing bodies who agree to come together to form a single greater body. When governments are federal, they usually unite several pre-existent states. The Bahamas, you might argue, is not like that. It has always been administered as a single unit; the islands are separated by water, not by politics. If ain’t broke, why fix it? Why risk all kinds of problems we never bargained for?

Well, for several reasons.

The first is size. The Bahamas is physically the largest country in the Caribbean region. In fact, the entire landmass of the Bahamas is comparable to that of Jamaica or Wales; and when you pour the sea into the mix, the size of our country is similar to that of Guyana. At the same time, The Bahamas is remarkably underpopulated. Two and a half million Jamaicans and three million Welshmen occupy the same landmass that we have here in the Bahamas; our population officially stands at just over 300,000 — the size of a tiny American city. And as long as all government and infrastructural services are based in that capital, we are going to stay that way.

That brings me to the second reason: Family Island development. Each administration has a different strategy. The early PLP focussed on providing much-needed infrastructure; the FNM on setting up local government; the new PLP on directing foreign investment towards the islands. However, what no government has yet recognized is that the success of these top-down initiatives is bound to be limited. They tend not to involve the people who will be most affected by them, unless it is in a very restricted capacity, or very late in the game. And as a result, young Family Islanders continue to move to the cities in search of education, jobs, and a twenty-first century life.

The third reason is overall national cultural development. The way in which the Bahamian nation is currently administered recalls the way in which the British Empire was administered nearly a hundred years ago. A group of bureaucrats in a metropolis make decisions that affect people in far-flung territories. The reasons behind those decisions very rarely have much to do with the inhabitants of those territories, unless it is to provide them with jobs (and to secure loyalty and votes in the process). One case in point is the disbursement by politicians in Nassau of Crown Land in the Family Islands to international investors. The short-term returns may appear considerable; but in the long run (as Nassauvians have learned with the loss of Paradise Island and other major beaches), more may be destroyed for future generations than is built up.

In short, central government has stultified the growth of the entire country. It has made Nassau both richer than the rest of the country and hopelessly inefficient; Nassau can no longer rule itself, let alone the entire archipelago. If the nation is to continue to grow and prosper, a complete devolution of power from the centre must take place.

And I propose a federation instead of local government. In its present form, local government achieves very little for most islands except collect taxes for the consolidated fund. Rather than administrative districts, islands or groups of islands would form states or provinces, each with its own elected leader, legislature and judiciary. In Canada, each province has its own Parliament, its own Premier and its own Lieutenant-Governor to administer local affairs; each American state has a Governor, a Senate and a House of Representatives. Each Bahamian state could be similarly constituted.

But that is the easy part of the concept. The difficult bit is deciding which affairs would be the responsibility of the federal government, and which would be controlled by the states. In the vast majority of cases, federations maintain control over customs, immigration, defence, finance, and foreign affairs. In addition, most write federal laws that override the wishes of individual regions, and deal with issues that go beyond local jurisdictions. Federations also maintain national law enforcement bodies — in the USA the FBI and the DEA are examples, in Canada the RCMP. Social security and welfare systems may also be nationally controlled, and federal governments generally bear responsibility for the communications systems that unite the country — the interstate highways in the USA, the railways, the airspace; in the Bahamas we would have to add the shipping lanes as well. Some federations also maintain jurisdiction over, or set standards for, education, healthcare, land use and broadcasting. However, what very few federations control are utilities, commerce, economics and the like.

So what would be the benefits for the Bahamas? In the first place, only a radical move such as federation is likely to move large portions of the urban population to the Family Islands. Current initiatives are too narrow in focus, too one-dimensional to work; the emphasis is placed on tourism and foreign investment because the decision-makers live in Nassau and tend not to be familiar with all the possibilities available to each island. But the devolution of central power to local state governments would enable Bahamian states to create work for lawyers, doctors, educators and bureaucrats, thus attracting high-level white-collar workers as well as construction workers and servants. Different islands could also create specific industries and businesses, generating local cadres of CEOs, and taking the responsibility for creating jobs out of Nassau politicians’ hands.

In the second place, vital services such as utilities, healthcare and (to some degree) education would follow population moves. State governments would ultimately have more control over their own destinies than presently exists. Cat Island and Long Island farmers could negotiate their own exports, much as Spanish Wells fishermen and Abaconian citrus farmers already do, without having to be stymied by the current practice of packing houses and the Produce Exchange. Court cases and punishment, at least for certain crimes, could all occur locally, thus leaving the Nassau judicial system for its own crimes; Fox Hill Prison might become the federal penitentiary in such a scenario, and relatively minor crimes could be handled in the communities in which they occur. Local communities could build their own hospitals, thus extending upper-level healthcare beyond Nassau and Freeport. The possibilities abound.

And so I propose that we think about working towards federation, and do it in the way that Canada, Australia and the USA did it before us: in stages, with the more populous territories leading the less populated ones. We already have administrative districts, and Freeport has a measure of autonomy that even Nassau does not share. Many of the northern islands could benefit immediately from being given similar autonomy, and certain central and southern ones might surprise us with their development if accorded similar freedoms. A few islands might have to be territories administered by neighbouring districts until they acquire sufficient population and infrastructure to govern themselves, but I believe that in the long run such a move could only benefit them, and the country as a whole.

But then I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.

On Theatre

On Saturday past The Landlord closed. The play ran for a month, for sixteen performances, and audiences kept coming. Now this seems to fly in the face of current wisdom about Bahamian theatre. These days, productions are usually put up for what amounts to a flash in the pan, a blink of an eye: two to three days over a weekend. The most ambitious stay open for a week, sometimes two. The Landlord was a leap into the unknown, and it flew.

Part of the reason for this was the play itself. It's a very popular comedy, and every time it's performed it draws crowds. Part of it, too, was the buzz that was created by people who saw the play, liked what they saw, and talked about it: a review or two, some letters to the editor, and a fair amount of radio airplay. But the big reason, I believe, is that Bahamians are hungry for theatre.

I'm certain that many of us will be surprised at that idea. After all, there's a trend in our society to regard theatre as something that only white people, rich people, and students need; "true-true" Bahamians watch TV and go to the movies. It's certainly a trend that has for many years been advanced, consciously or not, by prominent members of the society, politicians in particular. Bahamians, we're taught, don't get into that artsy-fartsy stuff.

It's a nice myth. I just don't think it's true.

Now before I go on, let me get a couple of things out of the way. I'm a founding member of Ringplay, the company that produced The Landlord. I'm also a playwright, I've done some acting and directing, I run lights for shows, and my father and my husband and my brother-in-law and some of my best friends were and are theatre people. I have a vested interest in believing that Bahamians are hungry for theatre. But I don't think that my belief is simply a figment of my imagination. Here's why.

In the first place, the idea that Bahamians (and by that we mean, of course, black, grass-roots Bahamians) are too poor to go to the theatre, or that theatre is simply not Bahamian, is absurd.

It's economically absurd because it's the rare person who watches only ZNS these days. Most people who have television pay considerably more on a monthly basis for cable, or for DSS, than the cost of one or two theatre tickets. As for the movies, what we save on the cost of admission the movie company gets from us at the concession stand. And how many of us watch movies without popcorn and hot dogs to help us through the show? I won't even talk about what it costs to see international performers who give concerts here. I'm told that the fake tickets to see 50 Cent were $60 apiece.

And it's culturally absurd because despite our tendency to believe that theatre is somehow foreign to Bahamian culture, history tells a different story. Remember, we're primarily an oral society. Theatre is a fundamental part of the way in which we communicate our ideas to one another. In days gone by, schools and churches and yards and parks were theatres, and people came together on a regular basis to see what each other had to say. Theatre — the on-stage, people-in-the-audience kind of theatre — is intrinsic to Bahamian identity.

In fact, until this most recent generation, it has been impossible to dislodge theatre from that identity. When I was growing up, in the 1970s, theatre was everywhere. Every weekend brought with it a concert or a play or a recital of some sort. Almost every church had its own kind of performance; Sunday School presentations were high points in the year, and Christmas and Easter pageants were common. Most high schools put on annual theatrical productions; the Teacher's Training College had its own theatre group; and numerous community organizations were active. The biggest production of the year was the annual final presentation of the winners of the National Arts Festival, which showcased the best music, drama and dance performed by people of all ages throughout the Bahamas. When I was growing up, theatre pervaded every corner of Bahamian society, as it had done in every generation before. All of our world was a stage.

The strength of the Bahamian theatrical tradition is a truth that the rest of the Caribbean recognizes, even though we don't; Caribbean cultural guru Rex Nettleford has proclaimed that the Bahamas is without a doubt the regional leader in theatre. So what's wrong with us? Why is the success of The Landlord such an unusual thing? Where has our theatre gone? And where is it going today?

Some people argue that today, the true site of Bahamian theatre is Junkanoo. After all, Junknaoo is an annual spectacle of every element of the stage: music, dance, drama and the visual arts. Twice a year, every year, Bahamians, Nassauvians particularly, are exposed to this fabulous theatre of the street. Whenever Junkanoo travels, it's a show-stopper; people who have never seen it are invariably bowled over by it. This is where we invest our money, our time, our emotional resources. If we have Junkanoo, why do we need the stage?

Now there is a lot of truth to this view. Junkanoo is indeed a wonderful amalgamation of the performing arts, and it is a heady medium for self-realization. But that does not mean that Junkanoo is all the theatre the Bahamas needs. It's too exclusive, for one thing, too big-city, too inaccessible for many of us. And it's primarily competitive in its current state. In fact, as a friend of mine has pointed out, it functions more like big-league sports than like a cultural expression. The competition, and not the content, is the be-all and end-all, and after each parade, the focus of discussion is on who won and why, not on the ideas that were advanced on the street. The function of Junkanoo as theatre cannot meet all our needs.

Theatre, you see, holds a mirror up to society. In the words of John Russell Brown, who compared theatre to its other sister art form, film:

"A play uses the same elements as life itself; onstage there are real men, women, and children; there is talk, noise, and silence; light and darkness; movement and stillness. What is seen in the mirror may be unlikely or immediately exciting, but it will always be made of the same material found in reality, and it is experienced using the same kind of consciousness: it is sensed by every means we use in lived experience. There is nothing in our world — what we experience by being alive — that cannot be placed on a stage."

We are hungry not for spectacle, because Junkanoo provides that, or for action, because movies give us that, or even for excitement, because the foreign acts who visit give us that. What we are hungry for are pictures of ourselves.

Junkanoo as an expression of theatre, then, is not all we need; nor are television or the movies. If these are the only places we look for our theatrical fixes, we will continue to go hungry, especially if we are mere spectators and not performers ourselves. Television and film are not about us, and Junkanoo incorporates every art form but literature. We are hungry because what we take to be theatre is either foreign to our lived experience, or far, far bigger than life. Theatre in the twenty-first-century Bahamian society provides spectacle and performance rather than the communication of complex and subtle ideas. And it is for this communication that we are hungry.

Bahamians, you see, are theatre people. You can see it in the way that many of us speak; you need only to tune in to My Five Cents, where roving reporters point a camera, shine a light, and deliver stars to the world, to see the evidence of that. The proliferation of preachers, politicians, lawyers and talk show hosts provides more proof; all of these people are secret actors at heart. Even the conversation of women in the straw market or of men on construction sites is theatre. So why are we not cultivating this?

What we have created in this generation is a society of spectators. Because we have allowed our native tradition of theatre to become dormant, even to die, theatre it is no longer central to the lives of Bahamian children. Today, too many of the students in the Bahamas have not experienced the terror and the thrill of standing up alone in front of a bunch of people to speak lines they have learned as though they mean something. Is it any wonder that so many of our young people lack the self-confidence they need to make them honest, thinking, productive individuals?

Theatre is a mirror, theatre is the stuff of dreams. And to quote a line from one of the greatest Bahamian plays, You Can Lead a Horse To Water: "When a man dreams dreams, ain't nobody supposed to destroy them but him. If anyone gotta mess up it got to be him."

We need our mirror.

We need our dreams.

On Class

I once taught a student who wanted to write a research essay on poverty. As she developed her ideas, it became clear to me that she was choosing to do so because she thought of the average Bahamian as poor, and of herself as an average Bahamian. I asked her a couple of questions, such as how she defined "poor", and how she justified the idea that Bahamians (in general) were poor people; her answer was that most people she knew did not have enough money to pay all their bills. When I asked her whether there was a more basic standard of poverty (Michael Jackson, after all, apparently has trouble paying his bills, but is by no stretch of the imagination poor), she disagreed. Poverty for her was the state in which the majority of black Bahamians found themselves. The fact that she had attended a private school, was employed in a very respectable position, and attended a church whose wealth was patently visible, seemed to make no difference to her belief that she was poor.

She is not alone. Again and again, I run into students who believe that the majority of people in the Bahamas, themselves included, are poor. Now when I consider that there are 500,000 trips from the Bahamas to South Florida a year, (there are only 310,000 Bahamian men, women and children, according to the 2000 census); that Bahamians spend hundreds of millions of dollars in South Florida and still seem to have enough money left over to keep the malls and Palmdale in business; and that the number of registered vehicles in New Providence alone appears to be over 150,000 (this in a total urban population of roughly 200,000) I have to wonder just what size this "majority" is.

I have come to the conclusion that the biggest reason behind my students' belief that they are poor is that most of them consider themselves "grassroots". According to received wisdom, Bahamian society is structured fairly simply, with "white people" at the top, "grassroots Bahamians" at the bottom, and a handful of "connected" black people in the middle. These groups are separate from one another, and they generally oppose each other's interests.

Now this three-class structure, and the principle of the conflict of the classes, is a fundamentally Marxist view of the world. According to Marx, society is divided into classes who are defined by their economic positions. At the top of society are the people who control all the economic and political resources. At the bottom are a group of people who control nothing except their own labour. These people sell their labour to the upper classes, and are in turn exploited by them. Between them, acting as a sort of buffer, is a group of people who are neither employed directly by the upper classes nor directly exploit the working classes.

I believe that this perspective is outdated in its application to twenty-first century Bahamian society. On the one hand, while the majority of Bahamians in 1967 and even 1973 might fairly have been categorized as the proletariat ("grassroots" or "poor"), today I suspect that that number has been reduced; in the Bahamas of the twenty-first century, many Bahamians have become employers themselves. If nothing else, we employ immigrants to do the labour that we prefer not to do, hiring ourselves Haitians and Dominicans and Jamaicans and Filipinos to do the "dirty" work that our parents and grandparents would have done. In addition, large numbers of Bahamians are attaining the college educations that enable them to move out of the working classes; most people aspire to white-collar jobs in which they have some control over their labour; and many of us choose to be self-employed. At the same time, a number of Black Bahamians have entered the upper strata of society, and control some of the means of production; it is a mistake these days to assume that one's ultimate boss is going to have a white face. Indeed, given the fact that, for over thirty years the presence of white Bahamians in Cabinet, the national decision-making body, has been a rare occurrence, it is time we recognized that Bahamian class structure cannot easily be defined along racial or economic lines.

The fact that we still use these outdated perspectives, however, I believe blinds us to the real distribution of power that exists. While the Marxist view of social classes may not work very well when applied to Bahamian society, it certainly makes sense on a global scale, where a handful of multinational corporations control a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth, and where the vast majority of the world's population lives in what is a very real poverty that goes far beyond a simple inability to pay all one's bills. In Haiti, for example, when vendors sell tourists oranges they offer to peel the oranges for them — not simply to be nice (or in the hopes of getting a tip) but so that they can keep the orange peel, which they use for making jam, or tea, or countless other things. In some parts of Latin America, the numbers of people who live on the city dumps are large enough for those settlements to be cities unto themselves, and it is not uncommon for beggars and street people to outnumber the white-collar workers. Given the fact that the Bahamas is the 39th richest country in the world, and 51st in terms of the purchasing power of the Bahamian dollar, the idea of "poverty", when applied to the average Bahamian, takes on an absurdity that verges on insult.

In the Bahamas, I suspect that far fewer of us are "poor" than we imagine. According to Marxist theory, as soon as one becomes an employer, one is no longer a member of the proleteriat; therefore all of us who hire Haitians to do our yards or Jamaicans to watch our children cannot legitimately consider ourselves poor. We may not all be upper class, but many, many of us must find ourselves comfortably in the middle. And along with our middle-class status come some of the more constricting middle-class values: a creeping conservatism, a growing selfishness, a judgmentalism of others that we use to protect what we already have.

And this preoccupation with ourselves means that those people among us who are really poor are falling through the cracks. For where large numbers of us are concerned not only with finding clothes to put on our backs, but also with which designer made those clothes, with not only ensuring that our children have tennis to play PE in, but with the maker and design of those tennis, the idea of "poverty" takes on a more sinister meaning. By crying "poor-mouth" when in fact we are overfed, overdressed and overindulged, by assuming that our skin colour or our neighbourhood or our church affiliation define us as "poor people", we grow selfish, and become blind to the very real poverty that exists in our society. For instance, I met a woman, a single mother who is struggling, whose eldest child is gravely ill. She can get no help from Social Services because she is "white", and we are conditioned to believe that people whose skins are pale are incapable of being in need of financial help. Similarly, we know that there are homeless Bahamians among us, but we lay the blame on them. Many elderly people are destitute; the mentally ill are imperfectly provided for, and young single mothers often live below the poverty line. Yet the rest of us, so convinced of our "poverty", or lulled into thinking that God blesses his faithful with material wealth and punishes the sinner with destitution, all too often ignore those who live among us in real need.

There is an email going around. It gives a link to a website, which carries a message that might help us put our positions into perspective. This is the link:

http://www.thesustainablevillage.com/miniature_earth/miniature_earth.htm

This is part of the message:

Imagine that we have turned the population of the earth into a small community of 100 people, keeping the same proportions we have today.

If you keep your food in a refrigerator
And your clothes in a closet
If you have a roof over your head
And have a bed to sleep in
You are richer than 75% of the entire world population.

If you have a bank account
You're one of the 30 wealthiest people in the world.

25 of that hundred struggle to live on US$ 1.00 per day or less...
47 of that hundred struggle to live on US$ 2.00 per day or less.

Given these statistics to contemplate, how many of us are really poor?