On Marriage and Family

You learn something new every day.

I would never have guessed how sacred a tradition marriage was to the Bahamian psyche until this past week or so, when the institution discovered more apologists than it can truly handle. I wouldn't talk about the family. All of a sudden we Bahamians are champions of marriage and aficionadi of the nuclear family.

Well, child. You coulda fool me.

After all, the findings of the Youth Advisory Council report that 57% of all households in our nation are headed by a single parent, and, on average, 55% of all Bahamian children are born to unmarried women.

After all, the former government was so concerned about illegitimacy, which applies to the majority of Bahamian children, that it wrote a bill regularizing their status in society.

After all, Jeanne Thompson's play Father's Day, about a man who has a wife and two sweethearts, hit so close to home it made some uncomfortable.

But in all of the discussion last week and this, you'd think that we all grew up in, and perpetuate, the so-called "ideal" family: one father, one mother, and a kid or two.
You'd never guess that we knew anything about outside-chirren, grammies, aunties, co'ns, baby-fathers, tittas, common-law unions or sweethearts.

Where did we get the idea that "traditional marriage" (one man, one woman, the children they produce together) is a Bahamian ting?

I'm going to suggest that what we appear to believe as right, God-ordained, traditional, perfect, is in fact nothing more than the adaptation of a particular society (western Europe) to a particular economic, social and historical point in time (the industrial revolution). Different societies have different needs, and they have different families.

There is nothing "natural" about the family structure of one man, one woman, and their children. When we look at the variety of healthy family forms around the world and throughout history, all that the title nuclear family indicates is the bias of the people who named it.

So when I listen to all the various pronouncements on what marriage is, what it does or should do, its natural functions, and so on, I don't hear God talking. No; the families of the chosen people were huge, sprawling, with many mothers and children clustered around a father — the polygynous families of shepherds. Instead, I hear the voices of our colonial masters. The nuclear family is their adaptation.

Here are the facts. There are dozens of family forms. Some are polygynous; one man marries several women, and they bear his children. Some are polyandrous; one woman marries several men, and bears theirs. Some are consanguineal, which means that the central unit in the home is not marriage, but blood; a mother raises her children surrounded by her blood relatives (mothers, aunts, sisters, brothers). Some are conjugal, and the central unit is the husband-wife bond. Some are dyadic; there's a mother and children and little else. The nuclear family isn't even the most common family out there; joint families of various kinds are commoner.

Even the idea that a marriage takes place between one woman and one man isn't universal. There are situations in some societies (West Africa and native North America among them) where women may take wives, or men husbands. What is interesting in these situations is that the people who are allowed to do this are often special, privileged members of society — female chieftains or businesswomen in West Africa, shamans and priests in North America. Anthropologists find nothing new or heretical about same-sex marriages; they are simply another adaptation to the world in which they're found.

So let's get it straight. This idea that a family must consist of a man and woman who are married and their dependent children is just one more of the myths that were fed to us by the people who wanted to remake us in their image. They told us the myth to keep us off-balance, to never allow us to feel confident that we were fine as we were; it was foreign to us then, and remains so to us today. Our families — most of them coming from Africa, but some from rural Europe and Asia — were almost never nuclear. Many African societies favour polygynous households, while rural European and Asian families are multi-generational, and encompass grandparents and cousins and scores of other relatives. The nuclear family adaptation is the product of the urban, industrial European environment, and hasn't yet worked well for us.

But even if it could, we haven't got it right. So my final question is this: why are we spending so much time and energy discussing gay marriages, which don't exist in our society and are likely to affect a tiny minority of us if they ever do? It's not as though we've got this nuclear model down! I'm keeping the 57% of single-parent households firmly before me as I say that, and I'm thinking about the 55% of our children whose mothers are not married. I won't even talk bout sweethearting, outside-chirren, and the rest.

I'm guessing that if anything's eating away the fabric of our society, it's the fact that we profess to believe that something is good for us, but we haven't got the guts to commit to living that way.

Seems to me that if we do believe that the nuclear family is the best one to have, we'd better start making it work. Either that, or we'd better stop straining at the gnat. The camel's already halfway down our throat.

On Patronage

In the opening of the film The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone is visited by Johnny Fantone, a young singer who is trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood. Don Corleone has already helped Johnny to get where he is in Las Vegas, having made his band leader the offer he couldn't refuse. Now Don Corleone agrees to help him break into movies. Everyone who has seen that film knows what happens next: the blood in the bed, the terror in the night. Don Corleone has ways of getting what he wants.

Now The Godfather is a movie, and what's in it may not be the exact truth. But what interests me today is not so much the glamour or the horror of specific incidents, or even the tragedy inherent in those who (like Michael Corleone) are destined to be Dons, but the circumstances in which mafia-like organizations arise.

Put at its simplest, the mafia is a system of patrons and clients. All of the major players in a mafia story begin as ordinary men. None of them are part of the core power structure of a society: the lawmakers, the law enforcers, the priests, the big-money businessmen, or even the press. Their goal is to control these agencies, to work them to their advantage. Aficionados of The Godfather II will know without my having to tell them that Don Vito Corleone began life as a peasant in Sicily who emigrated to New York when his father was killed. He was a humble man, without education or connections, an immigrant in a society that was often hostile, and he made a way for himself through a system of patronage, a system of building relationships with people by giving them what they needed and building up debts of favour so that when they are called to respond they can't refuse.

Now let's bring that home. In The Bahamas, even our core power structure operates according to the system of patronage. In our society, what still matters is not what you know but who. Ours is a society that functions uncomfortably like the Mafia.

The thing about this state of affairs is this. Patronage works best in situations where power is unevenly shared out in society. The Mafia started in those parts of Italy which were always under foreign rule. Sicily was conquered by one outside European power after another, and was treated in many ways like a colony of those powers, producing food to feed the soldiers but receiving nothing in return. The Mafia grew up in those places as a means of protecting the Sicilian peasants from the foreign masters. In time, though, those peasants became as much in bondage to their Sicilian godfathers as they were to the foreigners; perhaps even more, because their masters were Sicilian like them, and were there for good.

In a society where people are not equal, and where the possibility of equality is beyond the reach of most, patronage is the way in which many people get ahead. The only way one can make it in such a society, one has to get oneself noticed by a powerful person.
The advantages of that are clear. One gets hooked up, one is able to tap into the power system, one gets some stuff that one needs in a fairly quick time. But what strikes me as odd is that in the Bahamas we are a free and democratic nation. We have not inherited an inflexible social system where people are doomed to remain in the social slot into which they were born. On the contrary; the masses of the Bahamian people fought a remarkable battle against inequality and discrimination, and won, and many of us have been able to overcome poverty and lack of status and enter the upper echelons of our society in a few short years.

So what is the use of patronage to us?

The disadvantages of systems built on patronage are subtle, but fundamental. In the first place, the person using the quick-and-dirty connection ties himself or herself to the person who does the hooking up to some degree or another. This was something that Johnny Fantone found out, to his detriment, further along in his career; it was something that all the main players in The Godfather discovered, including Michael the Godfather himself. Not only are these ties detrimental to the person; they are also ultimately, destructive to the society that is based on democratic principles.

Why is this? Well, because true democracy takes work. In order to maintain a properly functioning democratic society, one that enshrines the principles of equality and justice for all, all members have to be informed, aware, idealistic. We cannot hope to benefit from the freedoms offered by a democratic society without having to give up something for them.

Take the debate on the state of homosexuals in our society, for instance. Either our constitution provides for equality for all Bahamians, or it does not. If we choose to discriminate against one group of people, the entire system fails, and our democracy becomes a sham. But if we commit to the ideal of equality, we have to make room for people whose actions we often find socially repugnant. The cost of the American constitutional amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech protects the rights of racists to publish and disseminate messages of hate, as well as it protects the rights of people of goodwill; the sword of democracy cuts both ways.

Patronage, I believe, allows us to shift blame, to avoid responsibility, to make ourselves comfortable because we have no real stake in our own fates. It's a kind of passing of the buck that works well in the short run, but which in the long run erodes our own identities and rots the core of our nation.

That's the thing about patronage. It may seem like a good system, but it has its costs. There's no such thing as a free lunch; there's no such thing as freedom, liberty, or equality when patronage exists.

On Art and Truth

Ours is a society of liars.

Now before you throw down the paper in disgust and pick up the phone to call your local hit man for me, stop a minute. I'm not talking about the everyday kind of lie, the "my-dog-ate-my-homework" or "no-you-gave-me-a-twenty-not-a-fifty" kind of lie. I'm talking about something far more fundamental than that, something that perhaps we don't think or talk about because we have never been taught to.

I'm talking about the fact that ours is a society that places very little real emphasis on the arts.

Consider this (and forgive me for a minute if I slip into my role as Director of Culture).

The National Arts Festival opened last week. Granted, it was a low-key opening; the main people attending were the children from the schools being adjudicated that day. But the Minister of Culture declared it open, and several of the Ministry's senior staff stopped by to give the festival their blessing.

The media were informed about the opening. The media did not come. And I still have to explain to the average Bahamian-on-the-street what the Festival is, what it does, and what it stands for.

This for a festival that has been in operation since 1959 — longer than any major sporting event in this country, and as long as Junkanoo groups have been carrying themes to Bay Street.

Now I am not blaming the media for this state of affairs. After all, they have their priorities, and last week was a week full of hot topics. When one is covering the place of Caricom in the fall of Aristide, the resignation of a PLP Senator, and the deaths of various prominent people, the arts must really have last priority.

Mustn't they?

I'm going to say no. But better than that: I'm going to explain why.

You see, the development of the arts helps keep a society honest. This is because the arts provide avenues for communication. Communication doesn't just happen in speech, and it doesn't simply take place in words. Communication also happens musically, through shapes and colour, through the positioning of the body in space. The arts, therefore, provide an outlet for the kind of communication that moves from the individual to the collective, that affirms the individual's existence as part of the wider whole.

What is more, the arts provide a medium of communication for our deepest selves: that part of us that is primarily emotional and instinctive, that part we can't verbalize in any normal, coherent fashion. Even writing, which (because it uses words) is perhaps the most conscious and analytical of the arts, connects with emotion; when playwrights and novelists create people who act in ways that we recognize, we relate to those people emotionally. When poets craft word-images that speak to us, we receive them emotionally. Beyond that, when choirs sing, when dancers dance, when actors play parts so truthfully that we believe them, we react to them emotionally. And from those emotions our lives may be changed.

I have not yet seen The Passion of the Christ, and I don't know whether I am going to see it. This is because I am not sure that I can bear that much truth about a subject that has always upset me every time I imagine it. Everything I have heard about the movie tells me that it is artistic expression at its best; it is the life-changing kind of expression, perhaps because it is too honest, too disturbing.

You see, artistic expression, whatever it may be, requires a certain level of self-knowledge on the part of the person doing the expression for it to be successful. That's the first thing. After that, it requires a certain amount of courage for it to be shared. One cannot truly paint, or write, or act, or sing, or play an instrument, or take a photograph, or sculpt, or dance, or compose, unless one is willing to dig a channel to the core of one's being and reveal what one finds there in all honesty.

But in a society where we don't provide avenues for artistic expression, where the arts take last place, where they can be shunted aside for the bigger sports story or news story or whatever else happens along, that kind of communication cannot, and does not, take place.

Ours is a society that pays lip-service to the arts, but does so reluctantly. We pay service to them, but we don't pay money; we hold the expectation — unreasonable, surely, in a culture that does not question the millions paid to movie stars and gangsta rappers — that creation happens for free.

Ours is a society that uses the arts for practical ends: for the celebration of Independence, to show off for the Queen, to impress lesser Heads of State, and (of course) to sell to the tourists. But we do not use the arts for ourselves. We do not even believe that artistic creation ought to be paid for; I'd venture to say that there isn't an artist in the nation who hasn't been asked to deliver his or her services "for the love of country". (No one seems to expect that level of patriotic love from preachers, lawyers, doctors, bankers or even politicians.)

And ours is a society that is searching for constructive ways to teach its young people how to be civil, how to respect themselves, how to find ways of expressing themselves that are more constructive than pulling out knives and killing one another.

It is time for us to recognize what other nations are beginning to admit: that investing money and time and manpower in the development of the arts, in the training of the talented, in the employment of professional artists, is investing in the development of the self. It is time for us to pay our children and our artists and our performers the kind of respect that ought to be paid to people who have committed their lives to honesty. It is time for us to invest in the truth.

On the Passing of Good Men

The death of Brent Malone this week not only shocked me, but shook me. He was too young, for one thing. And for another, he was too special.

Those feelings are absurd, of course, and extremely personal. Death is the one thing that does not discriminate. No one is too young, too special, too bad, too good, too black, too white, or too holy to die. The delusions of some North Americans aside, it is the one sure thing.

But this isn't going to be about death, per se, but about the goodness of men who do what they were born to do, who recognize the gifts bestowed upon them by the Creator and who respect themselves and those gifts and their Creator enough to sacrifice money, social standing, parental approval, religious recognition, and material security for the exercise of those gifts.

Brent Malone was one of them.

He was a man who was called to create. Anyone who has got that call and is honest about it will recognize its inherent divinity. I say that with a sense of worship, not blasphemy, because I believe that the call to create, whether that creation be dance, or drama, or art, or music, or words, is part of our reflection of God's image. Those of us who are called to express the beauty or the anguish or the wonder or the terror of the world around us are blessed with some of the mind of our Maker, and when we ignore that call, we ignore Him.

And so the goodness of men like Brent.

He was called to express what he saw of his world through the medium of the visual arts, and he heeded that call with all the integrity of the blessed or the mad. He put down the nets that had been woven for him, and he studied fine art when for a Bahamian to do so in this country was lunacy. He lived the life of the artist, on a limb, taking risks that were neither necessary nor prudent when he could live the tried-true life of a shopkeeper. As an artist, he looked without fear at himself and the world around him, and obeyed that divine call. And in so doing, he gave us all ourselves.

I once met a woman who was a quadriplegic. She'd lost the use of her arms and legs — I don't remember how — and was confined to a wheelchair. The only part of her that still looked truly human was her head; the rest of her body was flabby and shapeless, where the muscles had been replaced by flab. She didn't care. Her Christianity had enough muscles for all of her.

She talked to me about false images, the collective images which we make for ourselves of what is right, or normal, or good, or Christian, or proper. She believed that any image that stands between us and our ability to see God's image in our fellow human beings or His wonder in the world around us is an idol. She knew what she was talking about. She was a veteran of the experience of being looked at as a freak because of her disability, and as a result she saw with part of the eye of God.

Brent Malone's images were true images. He broke the false gods raised up for us all, and painted what he saw. By choosing to acknowledge his own vision of the world around him, and by exposing that vision to the public in his art, he chose a life of more honesty and vulnerability than most of us can bear. By choosing to make his art his life and not his hobby, he demonstrated a kind of courage and a kind of faith that inspired the generations behind him. And by remaining, for as long as I was privileged to know him, humble and unaffected and non-judgemental and loving and interested in all of life, he was truly, truly himself.

Our society is all the richer for men like him. We have no idea how much richer, because we don't always understand the nature of their work. We are far too occupied with our idols, and with sorting through the treasures we have piled up on this earth really to notice.

These men are our giants, although we don't know or particularly care. They are our builders, our contractors, and the strength of our society rests upon the quality of their work. While so many of us preoccupy ourselves with exercising the politics of exclusion, with the creating of labels and affixing them to the images we have made of our world — God lives in this box, Bahamians in that, good Christian people can occupy this bus, but homosexuals or Haitians or heathens of any sort can't come in the door — men like Brent are quietly working to build a home that will hold us all.

And so I'm writing this article in celebration of good men like Brent Malone. I have had the good fortune to meet several of them: men who could have fame or fortune in other countries, but who have sacrificed that to stay here and give their gifts freely and without recognition to the society that made them. I was raised by one of them, and am married to another. These men, like Brent, live out their lives, quietly creating us, laying up for us treasures in heaven, while we surround ourselves with treasures on earth.

You see, many of us don't understand about heaven. We have swallowed a picture of the world that is the residue of a capitalist, imperialist, enslaving society. The heaven on which we're taught to focus is a heaven that has nothing to do with who we are really; much of that we consider taboo. Too many of us spend our lifetimes trying to be people we are not; and so we fill our lives with images that are false and destructive and small.

In this world, the greatest of us are those who can look around and see what is really there. Those of us who seek to express our deepest selves, to appreciate and to revel in beauty, to be honest before the public and to love every bit of ourselves are our true-true Bahamians, for they are the ones on whom our future is built. Brent Malone was one of us who did that, and I salute the passing of this good man.