On National Identity
Recently, I've been watching a series of documentaries on the making of different blockbuster films. The first set was the collection of "Making Of" addenda to the Indiana Jones DVD trilogy, in which Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas talked about the process of creating special effects without the aid of computer graphic imaging. The second set was the supplementary information accompanying The Lord of the Rings DVDs.
It's the latter that inspired me most. Lucas and Spielberg, for all their innovative spirits, are Americans working in Hollywood, and as such they are part of the media establishment that dominates the world. But The Lord of the Rings is the product of a relatively unknown film director, Peter Jackson, from a little-known country, New Zealand. In his creative madness, he decided to take on a project that no one believed could be done: turning the seminal fantasy of twentieth-century literature into a live-action movie. And he does it! What's more, he does it by taking hundreds of impossible things and making them possible: like shooting the trilogy as one long movie, like creating elves and hobbits and uruk-hai and ents who so are believable onscreen we never think of them as anything other than people, like shooting in locations that look the way many people imagine Tolkien's Middle-Earth.
And I asked myself: why can't we do that here?
If you're tempted at this point to list the reasons why we can't, put yourself at the very top of the list. We can't because we think we can't.
And we can't because we have paid almost no attention to building an infrastructure that will help us turn can't into can.
In fact, ours is a society that seems designed to stifle the creative spirit. This is, of course, a legacy of colonialism and minority rule; the last thing you want when hanging desperately on to power is to breed a citizenry who can think outside the proverbial box, who can come up with unusual solutions to problems, who can make innovations and put them into action. No; what one wants is a trainable, docile population who do exactly what one tells them because they believe every word one says. Creative thinkers in this context are dangerous and need to be shut down.
Now while this is a normal, predictable state of affairs for a colony or a society terminally ruled by a small proportion of the population, that does not explain why it's still the case today. Rich as we have become over the past fifty years (economically, we're the third richest nation in the western hemisphere, and the fifth richest society), we are poor when it comes to creative output — poorer, in fact, than we were when we were not free. We're independent, we're democratic, we're wealthy. Why, then, do we continue to inhabit a society unreceptive to creativity?
If you don't believe me, if you're tempted to point to Junkanoo as evidence that we applaud our creative spirit, answer me these things.
Where are our schools of drama, dance, music, art, or Junkanoo?
Where are the after-school programmes that enable children to give free expression to their creativity?
Who are our inventors?
Where are our research laboratories, our backyard workshops?
Where are our theatres, our film studios, our record companies, our concert halls?
Why is Junior Junkanoo more popular among the primary and middle schools than among the senior high schools, and why is there no participation in that festival from the private high schools?
How many young Bahamians are encouraged to follow in the footsteps of Bert Cambridge, Nat Adams, or Duke Errol Strachan? Of Paul Meeres, Hubert Farrington, or Patrick Johnson? Of John Chipman, Nattie Small, or John Berkeley Taylor? Of Sidney Poitier, Cedric Scott, Philip Burrows or Pandora Gibson-Gomez? Of Henry Christopher Christie, Raymond Waldin Brown, Susan Wallace, or Keith Russell? Are young Bahamians even taught who these people are?
How much time is spent in schools taking tests, studying for tests, and teaching to tests? How often are children allowed to explore a problem or a question, rather than being asked to find an answer virtually right away? How often do children get to draft an essay before having to hand it in for grading?
How often do we reward people for achieving excellence in the arts? How often do we reward mediocrity?
In short, what have we established in our thirty-year-old nation that allows us to develop our creativity to its fullest?
Creativity is the ability to look at the world in a fresh way — being able to see the same thing as everyone else, but thinking of something different, as one website puts it. It is not the same thing as talent; talent is the raw material, but creativity is what that talent becomes. The process is some of the hardest work around. Without spaces to exercise our talents, without training to allow us to begin that work, our talents are drying up and going to waste.
And so we are a people whose talent is boundless, but whose creativity is far too limited. Our ancestors looked at stones and saw farms; they looked at cast-off items and saw instruments and costumes. How many of us look at rocks and see something more than rocks?
We need to make a change. I suspect that for a talented people, the absence of outlets makes criminals. After all, the breaking of laws sometimes implies an unwillingness to accept the world as it is delivered to us, and a desire to make it better. Not all dreams deferred shrivel up like raisins in the sun. Some of them blow up, like gas tanks.
It's the latter that inspired me most. Lucas and Spielberg, for all their innovative spirits, are Americans working in Hollywood, and as such they are part of the media establishment that dominates the world. But The Lord of the Rings is the product of a relatively unknown film director, Peter Jackson, from a little-known country, New Zealand. In his creative madness, he decided to take on a project that no one believed could be done: turning the seminal fantasy of twentieth-century literature into a live-action movie. And he does it! What's more, he does it by taking hundreds of impossible things and making them possible: like shooting the trilogy as one long movie, like creating elves and hobbits and uruk-hai and ents who so are believable onscreen we never think of them as anything other than people, like shooting in locations that look the way many people imagine Tolkien's Middle-Earth.
And I asked myself: why can't we do that here?
If you're tempted at this point to list the reasons why we can't, put yourself at the very top of the list. We can't because we think we can't.
And we can't because we have paid almost no attention to building an infrastructure that will help us turn can't into can.
In fact, ours is a society that seems designed to stifle the creative spirit. This is, of course, a legacy of colonialism and minority rule; the last thing you want when hanging desperately on to power is to breed a citizenry who can think outside the proverbial box, who can come up with unusual solutions to problems, who can make innovations and put them into action. No; what one wants is a trainable, docile population who do exactly what one tells them because they believe every word one says. Creative thinkers in this context are dangerous and need to be shut down.
Now while this is a normal, predictable state of affairs for a colony or a society terminally ruled by a small proportion of the population, that does not explain why it's still the case today. Rich as we have become over the past fifty years (economically, we're the third richest nation in the western hemisphere, and the fifth richest society), we are poor when it comes to creative output — poorer, in fact, than we were when we were not free. We're independent, we're democratic, we're wealthy. Why, then, do we continue to inhabit a society unreceptive to creativity?
If you don't believe me, if you're tempted to point to Junkanoo as evidence that we applaud our creative spirit, answer me these things.
Where are our schools of drama, dance, music, art, or Junkanoo?
Where are the after-school programmes that enable children to give free expression to their creativity?
Who are our inventors?
Where are our research laboratories, our backyard workshops?
Where are our theatres, our film studios, our record companies, our concert halls?
Why is Junior Junkanoo more popular among the primary and middle schools than among the senior high schools, and why is there no participation in that festival from the private high schools?
How many young Bahamians are encouraged to follow in the footsteps of Bert Cambridge, Nat Adams, or Duke Errol Strachan? Of Paul Meeres, Hubert Farrington, or Patrick Johnson? Of John Chipman, Nattie Small, or John Berkeley Taylor? Of Sidney Poitier, Cedric Scott, Philip Burrows or Pandora Gibson-Gomez? Of Henry Christopher Christie, Raymond Waldin Brown, Susan Wallace, or Keith Russell? Are young Bahamians even taught who these people are?
How much time is spent in schools taking tests, studying for tests, and teaching to tests? How often are children allowed to explore a problem or a question, rather than being asked to find an answer virtually right away? How often do children get to draft an essay before having to hand it in for grading?
How often do we reward people for achieving excellence in the arts? How often do we reward mediocrity?
In short, what have we established in our thirty-year-old nation that allows us to develop our creativity to its fullest?
Creativity is the ability to look at the world in a fresh way — being able to see the same thing as everyone else, but thinking of something different, as one website puts it. It is not the same thing as talent; talent is the raw material, but creativity is what that talent becomes. The process is some of the hardest work around. Without spaces to exercise our talents, without training to allow us to begin that work, our talents are drying up and going to waste.
And so we are a people whose talent is boundless, but whose creativity is far too limited. Our ancestors looked at stones and saw farms; they looked at cast-off items and saw instruments and costumes. How many of us look at rocks and see something more than rocks?
We need to make a change. I suspect that for a talented people, the absence of outlets makes criminals. After all, the breaking of laws sometimes implies an unwillingness to accept the world as it is delivered to us, and a desire to make it better. Not all dreams deferred shrivel up like raisins in the sun. Some of them blow up, like gas tanks.
