On Tourism

I want you to do me a favour. Take a minute and write a short paragraph describing The Bahamas.

Done? Good. Now let me guess: you wrote about the beautiful blue water, the white sandy beaches, the coconut trees, and the warm and friendly people. (Those people who didn't pick any of these things skip two paragraphs and read on.)

Now tell me how many times you went to the beach in the past year, how much of that gorgeous water you swam in, how many coconuts you ate from the shell, and how many people you were warm and friendly to on the way to work this morning.

We are living a myth. It's not our own myth. It is a myth created beyond our realities by people who live in cold cities with industrial economies, who dream of endless sunshine and warm water and sand that's as white as a wedding. Most of us live out of sight of the sea, and have to drive or catch bus to get anywhere near it. Most of us relate more to our fruit trees and our shade trees than we do to the coconut palm — we rest in the shade of silk cottons and ficus, we grumble at the dirt dropped from our beautiful and troublesome poincianas, and we snack on jujus and guineps far more than we feast on fresh coconut these days. Our coconut water is as likely to come from the food store as from the shell; and as for the sun — well, very few of us spend more time out in it than we have to. And as for the friendliness of the people: well. Warm and friendly we may be, but we're also stressed-out and overworked and underpaid and forced to sit in more traffic than is good for any human.

Tourism created the myth. We sell it, but we don't live it. In the words of Marion Bethel: in our air conditioned service, we are blessed waiters of grace divine.

But it doesn't have to be like that.

In 1994, I had the good fortune to travel to Washington D.C. with the Bahamian contingent to the Smithsonian's Festival of the Americas. For those people who weren't able to go, or who were too young to register that event, it was not unlike last year's Heritage Festival, only bigger.

The main players on that trip (let no one fool you) were the tradition bearers, groups and individuals who weren't normally the kinds of people who performed for the public, but who were chosen because they practised Bahamian culture almost unconsciously at home. Thus people such as the Johnson Family of Cat Island were selected to go, because they had developed a specific kind of singing style in New Bight that excited the researchers; people such as Kingston Brown of Andros, Cecile Dunham of Spanish Wells, Samuel Collie of Mayaguana and Pearl Hart of Nassau were picked because the way they did what they did (thatch roofs, make quilts, build boats, and dance the quadrille) was unlike anything that appeared in hotel floorshows in Straw Market stalls. What the Smithsonian Institute was looking for were people who lived Bahamian culture.

It is no surprise, then, that the majority of the tradition bearers who went to Washington were people over sixty-five years old; many of them are now dead. It may be some surprise that it was what these people did on the Mall in Washington — the tents in which the music and dance were performed, the porches on which the stories were told — that attracted some of the largest crowds of that week. (The other thing was Junkanoo). What the Americans wanted to see was lived culture, not the stuff that was packaged for tourists.

Now you may say: but those people weren't tourists. They were Americans at home in their capital, and what they liked in Washington they might not like here.

And I would say you're wrong. Washington D.C. is a tourist town. Many of the people who pass through are visitors, domestic tourists who want to see, touch and feel their own history. They are not consuming sun, sand and sea; they are consuming heritage. They consume it in Washington. They will certainly consume it here.

As I write, the Ministry of Tourism is hosting its First Annual National Tourism Conference. It's not a conference for hotels and hoteliers; it's a conference for us all, because the Ministry has recognized that it isn't enough any more to promote sun, sand and sea. Lots of people have that, and many countries with beautiful seas and beaches are also far more exotic and exciting that the Bahamas. The fact that we're close to the USA still helps us a little; but our proximity is counterbalanced by the price of our product. These days, it's often just as cheap — or cheaper — to go further, and tourists get more bang for their buck: in those more far-flung destinations, they get some culture as well as a beach.

We have to change our approach to the way we do tourism, and we have to change it now.

You see, people will pay for the very things we think we need to hide away. In the same way that the Americans in Washington flocked to hear the old people sing for them, tourists in the Bahamas will pay to visit Bain Town, Grants Town, Fox Hill, Gambier and Adelaide. They will purchase rides on mailboats, and brag about travelling the "native" way. They will buy our home-grown grits and go home with jars of cornmeal they watched the farmer grind and fan for them, and they will spend good money to rake their own salt. Unlike many of us, visitors would prefer to eat Bahamian bananas from the packing house than perfect yellow crescents with blue stickers on them; they would be charmed with tangerines or grapefruit from the tree.

There is no need for us to clear more bush, build bigger resorts, or create more theme-park hotels to draw the tourists here. All we need is to know ourselves, and to open our way of life to them. It is that way of life that is our richest resource; it is that we have to market in the global marketplace, where our prices are higher than other people's, where our proximity makes us too familiar. Who we are makes us unique. It is our selves that we have to offer to the world.

And the world will come.

On Carts and Horses

Now that the silly season is over, the year has been spared, the halls undecked, the paychecks spent and the A-groups robbed, it seems a good time to lay out something I've been thinking about for quite a long while. I touched on it last week in my article about the sport of Junkanoo, but I didn't elaborate; so here's the elaboration, for what it's worth.

These days, when we think or talk about Junkanoo in public we have a tendency to think and talk about things that are in fact incidentals. If we describe it to people who have never seen it, chances are we'll talk about the costumes. We may mention groups and performance, and we'll probably talk about the way in which all of Bay Street rocks when a big group comes down the road.

We talk about the costumes. Or the B-52s. Or the brass section. Or the choreographed dancers. Or the bellers. Or the bleachers, for heaven's sake, or the tickets, or the way in which the fans respond. Rarely do we talk about the heartbeat of the thing.

Rarely do we talk about the rhythm drum.

Now this seems odd to me, because it is the lead drum and the rhythms it plays that lie at the core of the whole thing. Without the rhythm drum there is no Junkanoo at all; all the rest is Carnival or Mardi Gras. All the rest — the spectacle and the performance, the bass and the brass, even the tickets and the bleachers and the attendance of the public — all these are frills, layers placed upon that core heartbeat that ties the festival to Africa through the conversation between the skin of the goat and the skin of the man.

Let me put it another way. You are putting together a demonstration of Junkanoo. What is it you need? If you present a lead costume or a dancer piece, all you have is sculpture. Costumes need to be danced before they come alive; all the tricks in the world can't breathe soul into them. And to what do they dance? Cowbells need a rhythm to play off; horns and whistles need a beat to give them purpose, B-52s need a pattern to anchor and brass combos are optional.

Without the lead drum, the tenor, the drum of middle pitch that is often substituted by the tom-tom, there is no Junkanoo.

So why are that drum and the role that it plays so rarely discussed?

I'm going to argue here that it's because we Bahamians have developed the habit of putting carts before horses. We have developed the habit at looking at end products and assuming that they are all that there is, rather like looking at icing and mistaking it for the cake. We have not recently cultivated the ability to identify the core of an issue. Rather, we tend to be easily distracted by frills and baubles, and, in getting caught up in these, miss the heart of the matter.

We have taken over the carts; the horses are left a long way down the road.

Junkanoo is not the only place where we see this tendency. We find it also among the parents who invest their money in book bags and footwear and neglect to buy the books; among the union executives who earn more than the President of the leading tertiary educational institution and believe that they are not yet making enough; and in the debates that take place about pay raises and benefits for workers in the tourism industry and others. I have not heard a discussion situating these debates in the whole of the Bahamian economy; rather, our focus is on the frills and baubles once again, on asking how the surpluses generated from the tourism industry can be used to pay the workers in the industry, rather than to enrich the working population at large.

Here's what I'm thinking when I say that. Tourism is our major industry. Surely its revenue must finance the entire nation of the Bahamas. Two of the most crucial services that any government must provide to its people are education and health; a third is security. It is these services that equip successive generations with the mental and physical tools that sustain the nation over time, and the orderly society in which to provide them.

It would seem to me, then, that if the country is being enriched by a successful tourist product, then some of that revenue ought to be channelled into these areas and not into the hospitality industry alone. I have no problem in the idea of offering salary raises to workers in that industry if the industry itself can afford it; but I do question the idea that those raises should happen in a vacuum. Why should someone who began working in the hospitality industry with little more than a high school diploma, someone who has not invested substantially in the training or educating of himself earn a higher salary than a teacher or a nurse with a first degree, or a policeman who places himself regularly in the line of fire?

Carts before horses. We are taking care of the luxuries before we deal with the essentials.

Part of the problem, of course, is that we pay no income tax. Now while I am not a proponent of income tax in this country — I happen to believe that there is a particular genius in the idea of taxing a population that consumes far more than it makes — I have to admit that when the government deducts a certain amount of money out of one's salary, it forces one to think, even tangentially, about one's place in the larger society and one's responsibility to the state. When people employed in the hospitality industry grow richer, we all grow richer; the benefits accrue through the taxation system to all. And those benefits may be channelled into those areas that really need them; the horses can be taken from behind the carts and put in their rightful places.

But we don't have income tax, and there's not much chance that we'll get it in the near future. So how do we start finding the horses?

Think of the rhythm drum in Junkanoo. Education, health and security are the rhythm drums of our society; without them we cannot function well. It's time we focussed on the most important elements in our lives, place the horses and carts in the right order and leave the frills and baubles alone until we have dealt with everything else.

On Junkanoo

Well, it’s official. Junkanoo is not a cultural event. It’s a sport. Complete with winners and losers, gamblers and fixers, points and penalties and appeals.

Think about it. In all the debate that we hear about Junkanoo every year, how much do we hear about the event itself? About the innovations in the art, the changes in the music, the use of colour, the presentation of the performances?

The answer: virtually nothing.

What we hear instead are insults to the judges, to the committee, to the Ministry, to the winning groups, to the losing groups, and to anyone who ventures to say anything remotely sensible about the whole. All that matters to the group, the press, the public, is who won and lost the parade. A sport, plain and simple, in which the referees are perpetually suspect and the umpires always under siege. Somebody get rob; somebody do the robbing. But we rarely hear anything about the art of Junkanoo.

It doesn’t honestly matter whether the cultural side of the event — the self-expression, the getting of “me”, the celebration of the art of being Bahamian — has grown or shrunk; all that matters is who won the parade. The Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture has asked the question: what price culture? and our answer, if Junkanoo is anything to go by, is nothing at all.

Because it’s not the culture that we care about.

Let me explain why I say this. Last year I taught a course on judging for people who wanted to get involved in the judging of Junkanoo. It was a course asked for by the Junkanoo Leaders Association, and was drafted by COB’s School of English Studies at the leaders’ request. It was administered by the School of Continuing Education at COB, and was monitored by the Junkanoo groups’ representatives on the National Junkanoo Committee. What was different about the course was that it took the approach that Junkanoo is like any other art form, and may be judged by universal standards that may be applied to art, music and performance across the board, and it sought to teach the judges criteria for assessing those elements that would permit the development of their objectivity rather than their application of personal taste. What was fascinating about the reaction to that approach was that some Junkanoo practitioners objected. They claimed, you see, that Junkanoo aesthetics are unique, alone in the world, and cannot be judged by universal cultural standards.

Not a cultural event, then. A sport.

Because music, art, dance, theatre, sculpture — all the things that are brought together in this one street festival, Junkanoo — do have universal applications, core elements that identify them as music, art, dance, theatre and sculpture everywhere that human beings live. This is the heart of anthropology: the idea that despite our infinite variations, human beings are fundamentally similar, and that at some point there is a common link between people of all nations, colours, creeds and backgrounds. Often that commonality is expressed in the universal languages of the arts. We may have to learn different vocabularies, different grammars, but the fundamental impulse is the same.

Not so, apparently, in Junkanoo.

During the course, for example, I learned that Junkanoo music cannot be judged according to universal musical rules. Junkanoo music is different from any other music in the world, and only Junkanoo musicians can judge it. Fair enough, then; so much for my father’s use of classical musical technique to transcribe Junkanoo rhythms. No need for musicians trained to hear and identify polyrhythms, melodic integrity, interesting use of harmony; anyone truly attuned to Junkanoo can tell whether something is good.

I also learned that Junkanoo art is so unique that only a Junkanoo artist can truly judge it. The aesthetic principles learned by studying fine art, whether that art be the use of colour and light, the use of shape and texture or anything else, are by the way; Junkanoo is a spirit, and follows rules of its own.

In fact, everything I learned when conducting the course, and everything I have observed since then, have led me to this one inevitable conclusion: Junkanoo is a sport.

It’s the only thing that helps explain to me why it is so basically different from every other cultural expression in the world. You see, to believe that there can be a cultural expression that is unique every way is to believe that the people who create this thing are fundamentally different from all other human beings on the planet. Of course, this is not what we believe; and so Junkanoo cannot be a cultural expression after all.

It must be a sport.

Sports, you see, have their own rules, and one sport is not like the other. It’s the rules that make the sport, not the techniques and skills and self-expression of the athletes. Junkanoo and Carnival may be similar, but they are not the same, and cannot be considered as such; they are as different as rugby and American football, as baseball and cricket. A golfer can’t play basketball. A carnival artist can’t do Junkanoo.

There are two more things that clinch the deal for me. The first is that other cultural practitioners in the country, those who are not part of the Junkanoo playoffs, have apparently decided that Junkanoo is no longer theirs; from Pat Rahming’s essays in the 1990s to Track Road Theatre’s New Year’s Day street performance, other cultural practitioners have concluded that Junkanoo (as a cultural expression) has died.

The second is that our government funds the thing. And that, as they say, is conclusive. Our country has spent virtually nothing in the thirty years of its independence on culture; but it spends millions of dollars on sports.

So it’s official then.

Let the games begin.