On Fact and Fiction

My recent article on generation property raised at least one very interesting response. The facts were thin on the ground, we were told. Much of what the article covered was fiction. For example, there is no such thing as generation property. The law does not recognize it as fact. Whatever takes place outside the law is illegal. End of story.

Know this: Facts are made by people in power.

Facts, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, are bits of knowledge or information based on real occurrences, or things that are determined by evidence. But how do we distinguish what is real? How do we decide what constitutes evidence? Do we go by what people say? Or do we wait for someone to write something down, and then rely on that?

The common answer to these questions is to assume that it's easy to tell fact from fiction; one is true, and the other is false. We know that one is true because, well, the evidence proves it. Fiction, on the other hand, is a product of the imagination.

There's a problem with this assumption. It's this: the very process of writing anything down, whether it be a story that comes from out of your own head or what a witness told you five minutes ago, is fiction.

It's easy to assume that the entirety of reality can be, and is, contained between the covers of books. After all, this is what we are taught; the whole of human wisdom is contained in books, and it is often to the written word that we turn when we want to find evidence, to find proof.

But consider this.

Writing is a distillation of reality, not reality itself. The process of writing is a selective one; not everything that exists in reality makes it into writing. The process of selecting what goes in and what does not is a process that is carried out by human beings. It is one that has a hierarchy attached to it; some things are important enough to be preserved in writing, and some things are not. And someone — the writer — selects.

And wherever that writing takes place, a fiction is occurring — even in the writing of laws.

Legality and illegality, therefore, are not fixed entities; they are defined by the powerful. Laws are written documents, created by men (mostly) in power (definitely) and written by specialists whose language no one else comprehends. It is possible to state the following fact: According to Bahamian law, there is no such thing as generation property. But is that as far as it goes?

I'm going to say no. For because they are written documents, even laws are fiction as well, in the sense that they are transformations of reality into the written word. They are composed, made up; they are drafted and revised, and days are spent debating exactly the right word to be used in exactly the right place to ensure that there are no loopholes — or, more precisely, that only the right loopholes are left.

The dangerous thing about laws is that they are fictions composed by the strong to govern the actions of the strong and the weak alike. And the stronger you are, the closer you are to the writers of the laws, the more you can tailor the laws to suit your own needs.

It is for this reason that historians say that history is written by the victors. The winners of any battle create the "reality" that lies behind that battle. I chose to be an anthropologist, and not a historian or a lawyer, precisely because (as a writer) I knew intimately that what is enshrined in writing is only part of the story. The historians who study the Bahamas, and the lawyers who administer the legal code, are dealing with a very small part of reality. To assume that this is all that there is to being Bahamian is to negate everything that has not yet been written.

Consider the stories that have been written about the history of our own islands. One story is that when the Spaniards sailed through the Bahamas in 1513, they found no people. This is the story as written in the history books, and it is on that "fact" that we base our belief that the Europeans wiped out the Lucayan people of the Bahamas.

But what is our lived reality? There are Bahamians who claim direct ancestry from Lucayan Indians. Until the 1990s, there was a woman in San Salvador who identified herself as a full-blooded Arawak. And Guyanese immigrants to the Bahamas, people in whose country full-blooded Arawaks still reside, can look at certain Bahamians and see the resemblance.

Who do we believe? The written history of the Bahamas or the oral testimony of Bahamian people? The written history was penned by the people who held the power at that time; the oral history is the story of the vast majority of Bahamians, white and black alike.

As an anthropologist, I take my knowledge, my facts, from the lived realities of ordinary people. The vast majority of them are invisible in the literature of our country, and invisible in our laws. The reality of the majority of Bahamians, especially those who live beyond New Providence, is too often absent from our written records. But despite it all, that reality exists.

The fact is that, in the same way that many Bahamians are "illegitimate" under the law, many Bahamians own land "illegally". And the fact is, we call this land ownership "generation property". The way in which it is administered is not something that has been made up; it may not be written in a law book, but it is the way in which the people who own it regard it, and for them it is fact. Surely it is time for our law-makers to recognize it and write it into being.

Not to delve too deeply into history, after all, but — under which law did we get these islands from the Lucayans in the first place? Which fact was it that made them ours?

On Cultural Production

There's a lot of talk about globalization these days.

We talk about it as though it's something new and potentially dangerous. Globalization is coming, we say, as though it's some kind of demonic force that is going to take us over. And we worry about the free movement of people, our ability to compete in the global job market, our ability to stand up and be counted when it comes to the global scene.

We've got a problem.

Because you see, there's at least one area in which we Bahamians (and all Caribbean people) can compete on a global scale.

It's the area of culture.

Now we've become accustomed to thinking of culture as a series of events, rather like pearls, which are strung out along the calendar. We see it as a financial challenge, but not a source of financial gain. We don't see it as a product that we can market and sell.

And we have no idea how wrong we are. One word:

Reggae.

Think about it. A week ago, a caller on a talk show implied that Bahamian artists were wasting their time trying to research and preserve their own culture. Rake-n-scrape and Junkanoo aren’t what sells; everyone knows that. What the world wants is hip-hop and reggae.

Reggae. The cultural product of our neighbour, of our next-door neighbour but one. Imagine if the Jamaicans had had the same lack of confidence in their music thirty years ago that we Bahamians have in ours today.

The caller has missed the point. What "the world" wants is not simply hip-hop and reggae. What "the world" wants is music that can speak to the heart, to the soul, to the parts of us that haven't had everything we wanted, that aren't overweight and suffering, that don't have designer shoes on our feet and silk shirts on our backs, that swelter in the heat and don't have the benefit of air-conditioning.

And that experience isn't simply limited to American street society and Trenchtown. It's throughout the African diaspora. It's found everywhere that human beings were torn from their roots and forced to forget who they were, and who found ways of remembering themselves through music, through art, and through festival.

It's rake-n-scrape. It's rhyming, the way we Bahamians do it. It's rushing, both in the streets, and around our churches. It's the double-rack, the heel-and-toe, the anthem, the story-song that we use to keep one another entertained. It's that real Bahamian guitar riff, it's the way the stomach jumps when a real bass rhythm is played. It's the rescuing of trash, the conversion of ordinary, undervalued objects like cardboard and paper into works of art. It's the way we laugh when the cowbells start, the way we dance when we hear the beat.

What "the world" wants is stuff that's raw, that isn't over-processed. What "the world" wants is something that makes "the world" remember its own humanity.

And what "the world" wants we have.

In March of this year, I had the pleasure, as part of my new position as Acting Director of Culture, of attending a meeting of the Regional Cultural Committee of Caricom. It was an enlightening meeting, but what was most revolutionary was a presentation on cultural production.

The packaging and marketing of our cultural products, we were told, is the key to economic prosperity in the future. We can't compete with the rest of the world in agriculture; we don't have enough land for that, and we don't have any control of the market. We can't compete in industry or manufacturing; in the Bahamas, certainly, the cost of living is too high. We can offer a tourist product, but if we become boring and predictable, we may lose our edge; everyone is offering tourism these days.

But no one else has our culture.

And culture sells.

Our challenge, therefore, is not to try and become carbon copies of Jamaicans and American urban culture. Our success in those areas is bound to be limited; for we will be simply mimic-men, parrots, reproducers of cultural styles that are not really our own, and the world will know. While we may feel comfortable with reggae and hip-hop, we must realize that that comfort will allow us to be consumers of the styles only; there's limited room in the industry for imposters, and we are unlikely to become major producers of it.

Our challenge is to listen to those styles carefully, and to know ourselves. We must listen to what sells not to copy it, but to analyze it; to see what it has that our music does not. And then we must listen to our music, not just to the people who are popular now, but to our fathers and grandfathers and their fathers, to draw upon all the richness that is ours.

And then we must take what we learn from both, and create — and package to sell — our own.

This decade, it's hip-hop. It won't last forever; it was preceded by rap, which was preceded by funk and R&B. "The world" will be looking for a new sound, a new edge.

It's about time we were ready to give it to them.

On Generation Property

There is a lot of talk these days about generation property, the practice by which Bahamians have owned land throughout the archipelago throughout the ages. It's a problem, we're told; it impedes development. Time for us to fix the system.

Well, good. Just as long as we don't fix the system by making it just like every other land-owning system in the western world.

Keep in mind the following points. First, generation property is an oral way of organizing people's relation to land. The principles that govern the custom are fundamentally different from the principles that govern every other system of land ownership; and any bid to deal with the system must recognize and respect this fact.

Second, generation property is a strategy that has provided the descendents of slaves with access to land that is unprecedented in the Caribbean and Latin American region.

Third (and this point is closely related to my second), generation property has provided black Bahamians with the ownership of prime land in a region where the second-class position of people of non-European descent is pretty universally entrenched.

These are the main benefits. But what about the disadvantages — the inability of people who live in the capital to profit from their landholdings in far-off islands, or the inability of Family Islanders to generate cash from the land that they own?

Let me answer that with a story: the tale of The Creek, New Providence.

Once upon a time, it's said, long before Fox Hill and Gambier and Adelaide, well before the Loyalists had come to the Bahamas with their slaves, there was a settlement in the eastern part of New Providence called The Creek. The heart of this settlement congregated around the northern part of the area we now call Fox Hill, and took its name from the body of water that is now known as the Fox Hill Creek. Where these people originated is not known. We do know that they were a community of Free Coloured people, and some of their descendants believe that their ancestors included the Lucayans who inhabited New Providence before the Europeans came. The presence of the ancient structure we call Blackbeard's Tower on Creek land indicates the age of the settlement, and Creek people will tell you that they have been on New Providence for a very long time indeed. They will also tell you that there was a time when their forefathers and mothers owned all the land from the north coast to the south coast, from Johnson Road all the way to Yamacraw and the sea. Their property was generation property, and was passed from generation to generation, with all the owners living upon and profiting from the land jointly.

But The Creek no longer exists. In its place are the communities we know as the Eastern Road, High Vista, Mount Vernon, Sans Souci, Camperdown and Winton — upscale communities for the private and the privileged, whose homes can fetch in the millions, if you believe the prices you see on real estate websites, and whose property very few of the descendents of Creek families can afford.

How did this happen? Well, the popular story is that during the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s real estate developers stole the land from the owners, parcelling it up and selling it at great profit to those people who could afford to buy lots in a beautiful and fertile part of New Providence. It's a good story, but it's not strictly true. What did happen was that land developers ignored the custom of generation property and applied the legal definition of real estate to the areas they wanted to buy. What that meant was that they identified the single owner of the property — in law the eldest male in the family, and approached him with the offer to survey and register his land. That done, they identified tracts of land that he appeared not to be using, and offered him cash money for it — huge amounts of money that he had no other way of obtaining. What he didn't know was that those huge amounts were but a fraction of the money the developers could make from the resale of the land.

The problem wasn't the crookedness of the real estate developers, or the unscrupulousness of the uncles and grandfathers who sold their relatives' land without compunction. The problem was that the principles that governed generation property were fundamentally different from the principles that govern every other kind of land ownership in the Bahamas.

The western (European) way of dealing with land regards land as a commodity, something that an individual can own and sell at will, that can be valued according to the laws of supply and demand. This is a particularly literate way of looking at the world. Land can't move, and therefore can't really be sold; what is sold in these cases is pieces of paper that confer on individuals the right to own, sell and profit from a specific parcel of earth.

The custom of generation property regards land as a resource that must be administered and protected, but that cannot be owned or transferred. Families belong to the land, and not the other way around. And where land and people go together, the land can never be sold.

What the latter provides is access to land forever for generations of Bahamians yet unborn.

The challenge before us, as I see it, is to find a way to ameliorate the disadvantages of the custom while retaining the greatest benefit — the ownership in perpetuity by black Bahamians of prime property. Our challenge is to write a law that recognizes the principle of perpetual and communal land ownership for ordinary Bahamians, while at the same time enabling those Bahamians to profit from the land they own. Perhaps that will involve the creation of family corporations; perhaps it will make provision for the long-term leasing of generation property to second-home owners.

The answer is not to find ways to survey and parcel off and sell the land. Cash money can only go so far, and the beauty of our islands and the desire of rich Americans and Europeans for sun, sand and sea is worth far, far more than Bahamians can ever pay. Once sold, land is gone forever; and to take it from our grandchildren is not within our rights.

On Being Human

Imagine this: you wake up one Sunday morning, and you are in a world without art.

When you go to church, the building you enter is an ordinary building. Nothing distinguishes it from the buildings around it. Inside, people are clad in uniforms. There are no suits, no hats, no dresses or gloves. The pastor looks like everyone else. Everyone has the same hairstyle, male and female alike.

There are no Bibles, for this is a world without literature.

There are no hymns or anthems, for this is a world without music.

The offerings that are given are plain pieces of metal or paper; coins have no designs on them, nor do dollar bills, for this is a world without art.

There's an attitude that's prevalent in the Bahamas — and, for that matter, in the world — that tends to regard art in all its forms as a luxury, something that we can live without. We believe, more or less, that human beings are machines, programmable to live without beauty, without creativity, without imagination. We believe that being employed and fed and housed are the most fundamental things we need in life, and we make it our business to amass enough money to continue to employ and feed and house ourselves.

Art is a frill. Or so we believe. And the real world is a no-frills world.

We couldn't be more wrong.

The thing is, I believe that art — which I'm going to define really loosely as the need to make beautiful, the need to create, the need to express oneself — is as fundamental to the human spirit as food or water or shelter.

You see, human beings are far more than simply mouths to feed and bodies to house. It's not enough to simply be alive; we need a reason for living. As a friend and colleague of mine would say: when you've finished spending all your money on house and food, what are you living for?

The answer, I'll argue, is art. Art and music and dance and creativity. For those people who might disagree with me, who might classify that answer as humanist (and therefore dismiss it as not being God-centred), bear with me for one minute. I regard the exercise of our creativity as the hallmark of our humanity. After all, every animal eats and drinks and finds shelter. Only we humans make art.

And the exercise of our creativity is also one of the most godly things we humans can do, we who were fashioned in the image of our Creator. To create, I believe, is the highest form of worship; it was God who made us creative beings in the first place. As a result, I believe that the desire to make things beautiful, to express ourselves emotionally, is one of the most fully human and most fully godly things we can do.

It's no accident, I'm sure, that when we worship, in whatever form we worship, whether we're Christian or Mormon or Rastafarian or Muslim, we worship by drawing on the arts. It's no accident that we sing hymns to the Almighty, that we seek to make our temples beautiful, that we prettify ourselves when we go to worship, that we read some of the most wonderful literature there is, written for all posterity in sacred books that are more complex than anything our children study in school.

We humans need to create as much as we need to eat. And so when we worship, we exercise every facet of our creativity. And, I will argue, when we exercise our creativity, we are also worshipping.

If you doubt me, consider this. The ancient Greeks regarded the act of creating a holy act. They believed in seven spirit-beings who moved human beings to create different kinds of art: they called these spirits the Muses, and it is from that idea that we get the word music. The Greeks recognized that every human truly engaged in a creative act loses himself or herself in the creative process, becomes possessed for a time by the art itself. I believe that it is through that process that we humans can touch our God.

So why, I wonder, have we Bahamians made our creative urges so peripheral to our existence? We alone of all our neighbours have invested appreciably little in the development of the arts. We marvel at the extent of our talent, but don't see the need for investing in it, regarding the exercise of those talents as frivolous or futile. In fact, we are almost hostile to the idea of their development, labelling those who are committed to that process as "soft", or "elitist", or "critical". Rather, we expect to be able to produce wonderful art on demand, without training or standards, because we appear to believe that gifts from God need no honing at all.

But our reasoning is flawed. If we have gifts, we are given them raw; it is up to us to sharpen them, to use them, to get to know everything we can about them, to exercise them to the fullest extent of our ability. The truest expression of our gifts does not come when we use them blindly, in their naked form. To ignore them, to let them remain as they always were, is akin to the burying of the talents by the faithless servant. To avoid investing in them for whatever reason (because our Master is a hard man? Because we believe the arts to be "soft" or for people who are not like us?) is to disrespect the gifts that we have been given, and ultimately, to disrespect our God.

The truest expression of our gifts is to exercise them, as an athlete does her body, to understand them as well as a professor knows his subject, and to develop them through theory and training and practice. And it's in that expression, in that development, it is in the desire to perfect our creativity, that we reflect most nearly the image of our Creator.

Thus the Bibles and the beautiful churches and the hymns. Our talents provide us with the most perfect worship. It's in the expressing of them that we are most fully human. And the exercise of them is one of the greatest gifts we humans can give to God.