On Tiefing

There's an old Bahamian proverb that goes something like this: "Tief tief from tief make God smile."

Well, when He looks down upon The Commonwealth of The Bahamas some days, the good Lord must be grinning from ear to ear.

I'm not just talking about your typical kind of tiefing here. We all know that certain material possessions are part of the public domain. From flowers on gravesides to toilet paper in offices to new-brand garden furniture, the owners are roving, ready to collect.

No.

I'm talking about intellectual property here. I'm talking about the tiefing of ideas.

This is a concept with which I dealt often when I was a COB lecturer. As a teacher of English, one of my jobs was to assign research essays to students. The process worked like this: students had to go and uncover information about topics that interested them and then write an essay about it. But in so doing they had to be mindful of three things:

1. Where they got their information;
2. The author of that information;
3. Showing where the information stopped and their own ideas began.

This proved to be extremely difficult for many. For them, "research" consisted of going to a library or the Archives or the internet and copying verbatim what they found there. Or, better, it meant calling a Bahamian expert on the telephone and asking them everything they knew about a topic, and then writing that down.

Sometimes they might be inventive, rearranging the ideas a little bit, quoting one or two passages and incorporating the rest into the body of the paper. Sometimes they would not be inventive at all, but would simply download the information wholesale and submit it as their own work.

They'd be hurt and confused when I'd give them a zero for these essays and threaten to report them to the Academic Board.

You see, there's such a thing as intellectual property. These days, it's the most lucrative kind of property there is. We live in the information age. Wealth no longer rests in the hands of the persons who own the factories, who move cotton or coal or steel. The Jet Age is long gone; the Concord has been grounded. No longer is it important how fast a person can get from point to point, whether a plane is capable of breaking the sound barrier or not. Even the ability to launch men and women into space is no longer a crucial skill. Whether or not we can travel light years or move at warp speed is immaterial; we can send data at the blink of an eye.

Knowledge is most certainly power; and the person who "owns" information is in a powerful position indeed.

This is why the stealing of intellectual property is punishable. In college, it's called plagiarism and can get a student expelled from an institution and blackballed by any other. In the real world, it can get a person stripped of his or her degree and fired from his or her job.

It can get a person prosecuted for fraud. It can get a person sued, successfully, for breach of copyright, and ordered to pay the owner of the idea whatever a court decides is the appropriate payment.

Ideas — and particularly ideas in written form — are in fact commodities that impart power to the owners. In the university, they are the way by which academics make their reputations, and shape their careers; in the marketplace, they provide artists with a way to earn their living. In today's world, those ideas themselves, not to mention the words in which they're expressed, belong to the people who dreamed them up and wrote them down.

They are not public. They do not lie there simply for other people who haven't done much thinking about the topic to come along and pick up and present as their own.

In the world of the information age, ideas are perhaps the most valuable property anyone can own. This is why stealing someone else's words, or their song, or their tune, or their design, or their movie script, or their dance steps, is so very serious.

Here's what really interests me. When we take others' intellectual property and passing them off as our own, we are in fact saying that our ideas aren't worth very much at all. They can't be; otherwise why would we have to tief someone else's? What's more, when we steal others' ideas we seem to suppose that (a) what we're doing is not tiefing, (b) no one will notice that we've copied/downloaded/lifted the idea anyway, and (c) if someone should notice, nobody will care. This supposes that no one's ideas are worth all that much.

In a small country like The Bahamas, this is a dangerous state of affairs. The more we go around stealing others' ideas, from their styles of music to their stories to their songs and their words and their designs, the more we are leaving our own ideas open to be stolen. And in this world of globalization, we become more and more vulnerable to that kind of robbery. What we have is valuable because it's unique. And the more time we focus on tiefing from others, the less time we spend guarding our own.

After all. You know what they say. Tief tief from tief make God smile.

On Research

There are few things more confident than a Bahamian in an argument. And often there are few things more wrong.

You don't believe me? Speak with a politician. Disagree with him or her, if you dare. Or read any newspaper. Listen to any talk show. Attend one of any number of churches. Provoke an argument, and listen.

Do more than listen. Take a notepad with you. Jot down the things that the writers and the speakers tell you. Then go look those things up in the library or on the internet, and see what you find.

I'll bet you plenty that you'll find, more often than not, that what you've just heard (and may have chosen to believe) is so far away from reality that it might qualify as old story.

This is because we Bahamians have developed the habit of pontificating without researching our topics first.

Before I go on, let me clarify what I mean by research. I don't mean collecting a range of opinions or arguments that agree with our own. I don't mean talking to a whole lot of people about the topic in question and cobbling their ideas together with ours. And I don't mean looking for documentary evidence that supports the answer that we started out with, even if it means having to chop up sentences to create quotes that work for us.

What I mean is examining a topic with an open mind: approaching the subject with a question, not an opinion; collecting many different viewpoints and facts about the subject, reading through them, and getting some general idea of the range of opinions that exists on that topic.

I mean approaching a subject with enough humility to admit the possibility that what we thought about it might just be wrong.

As a people, we're really not good about research. Not even the people whose bread and butter comes from finding out, from seeking the range of facts about a particular event or issue — for example, journalists and teachers — make a habit of researching facts. Short-cuts are so much simpler. Rather than finding out as much as possible about a person or an issue, it's far easier to just ask a speaker for a copy of his speech, and then print it — errors and all — in the newspaper. Instead of questioning the "facts" in the latest textbook and seeking to verify them with independent investigation, it's so much easier to teach everything that's in the textbook, even when the information is irrelevant or wrong.

We are a people who accept plenty at face value.

We are a people who can be very easily conned.

Let me give you some examples. Over the past week alone, listening to the radio and the television, I've collected the following so-called facts:

The British Colonial Hotel building is over 100 years old (A radio news report).

Haiti was never colonized, which is why the country is in the state it's in (A caller on a radio talk show).

Homosexuality is unnatural and not found in the animal world (A sermon given at a recent family-values rally).

I went off and researched each one, and discovered that not one is so. Here's what the research actually revealed:

It's true that a hotel called the Colonial was built on the site of the present British Colonial in 1899. However, it burned to the ground in 1922 in one of the most spectacular and disastrous fires of its generation, and had to be rebuilt in time for the 1922-1923 season. The original hotel was wooden, and none of it remained after the fire. The new hotel was stone, and that is the building that still stands.

The research also raised the following bit of information: the song "Do A'Nanny", which was made popular by Ronnie Butler in the 1960s, was in fact about the Colonial fire, and some of the original words included:

The hotel burn down to the ground
No more dancing in this town
Eh-eh, do a nanny do.

As for Haiti, she was most definitely colonized. Sainte-Domingue was the pride of the French Empire, and produced more sugar for France than any other colony. But some years after the French Revolution in 1789, the slaves in Haiti had their own revolution, when they rose up against their masters, expelled the French, and set up the first Black Republic in the New World.

In fact, the reason that Haiti is poor is that the neighbouring slave-owning societies refused to trade with this new Black republic. In order to recognize Haiti as a country, the Europeans imposed such a fine on the nation that the government is still still paying it today.

And with regard to homosexual animals, scientists have discovered many creatures who mate with partners of their own sex. In fact, some long-term studies of animal societies appear to suggest that whenever animal populations become too large, and overcrowding occurs, the incidence of animal homosexuality rises, which leads some scientists to argue that homosexuality is a natural response to overcrowding.

Yes indeed. There are few things more confident than a Bahamian in an argument.

Just do the research before you believe anything he or she says.

On Bahamian Music

Well, Independence is over, and it was a musical celebration. From the performances of Bo Hog and the Rooters to the Bahamas Baptist Mass Choir, the celebration was sung, danced, and played.

This is unusual, and not. It was unusual because despite our belief that we celebrate everything with performance, it's not strictly true; for quite a while now Junkanoo has been at the centre of our performing tradition, and other art forms have been peripheral. And it wasn't unusual because music is so deeply embedded into the Bahamian psyche that we don't even notice it.

Not long ago, Rex Nettleford, Caribbean cultural guru, confirmed this. What he said was this: the Bahamas has the best singers in the Caribbean.

This was something I never knew, or didn't believe, or had forgotten. You see, presumably like many Bahamians, I take singing so very much for granted that I simply assumed that what we do here is normal — if not in the world, at least in our region. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had an idea that music comes naturally to human beings. It comes naturally to everyone I know.

And then I thought.

When I lived abroad, I discovered that people elsewhere don't take music for granted. People who could sing or play an instrument seemed to be regarded as semi-geniuses; being musical wasn't something that everyone could be, and singing was certainly not something that everyone could do.

I didn't think much of this. I just thought the people I had met were underexposed, listened to too much canned music, hadn't learned how easy it was to make music of their own.

After listening to Nettleford, though, I began to think that maybe what we consider normal here in the Bahamas — being musical, singing, making music — is not.

After all, he was simply echoing what I had been hearing from non-Bahamians over and over again — from British people, Americans, Canadians: that Bahamians are unusually musical people. When Nettleford, a West Indian, said that too, I took notice.

I took notice because we really don't care. We take the ability to make music so very much for granted that we don't believe that we can do anything much about it. Instead of celebrating the fact that being musical is a Bahamian thing, and celebrating all forms of music, we do our best to box our music in.

We actively seek to label it. Is it Junkanoo? Goombay? Rake-n-scrape? It can't be all of them, can it? We don't know, but we want to find out so we can put it in its box. And so we can exclude those forms that aren't "Bahamian". Reggae isn't. Hip-hop isn't. Classical isn't. Jazz isn't. Folk isn't. Country and western — not even close.

We dumb down our complexities. Our Junkanoo rhythms have become more and more unidimensional, our melodies variations on the same basic tune, our most popular harmonies the simplest chords imaginable. We make our music on computers, limiting ourselves to other people's styles, cut up and doled out for us to use.

We pigeonhole our performers and our sound, so that many of the most musical are considered "not Bahamian". Such was the case during the ZNS coverage of the National Youth Orchestra that the Orchestra was introduced as playing something unfamiliar, something foreign.

And we know next to nothing about the richness and glory of the Bahamian musical history.

How many of us know, for instance, that one of the most influential men in American folk music was a Bahamian guitarist by the name of Joseph Spence? That what made Spence famous was the fact that he tuned his guitar differently from the global standard? That the unique Bahamian guitar style is based on a system of chords that may be indigenous to Andros? That Andros is the birthplace of yet another unique form of Bahamian music, rhyming, which is our own particular take on the chant-like storytelling-to-music that manifests itself in rap, hip-hop and dub?

That Goombay is a name taken from the specific Bahamian drum made from stretched skin over a barrel, whose use appears to be dying out in Nassau, being replaced by tom-toms made in Japanese and American factories? That the name was given to Bahamian music by a white Bahamian, Charles Lofthouse, some of whose arrangements we still sing today?

That country and western singers sing the same songs that we sing, generally at funerals? That we share some spirituals with Black America, but that we sing them completely differently?

That some of the best musicians of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s were brass players, members of the big bands who appeared in the Bahamian nightclubs, and that the National Youth Orchestra is the continuation of a tradition that is not only Bahamian, but specifically Nassauvian?

I could go on, but I'd run out of space. Let me just say this. For a musical nation, we know far too little about our own musicality. I think it's time for us to celebrate it. For me, any music produced by a Bahamian, no matter what its sound, is Bahamian.

It must be. Being Bahamian is music enough.

On Absurdity

Sir Vidia Naipaul, Nobel prize-winning Trinidadian writer, depicts the Caribbean as a place where no real achievements take place. For Naipaul, the Caribbean is a dumping-ground of civilization, a mixed bag where great cultures drop their baggage. "Nothing good ever came out of the Caribbean," he once wrote — a great irony, of course, because he is a Caribbean man, a brilliant writer, and he comes complete with the self-loathing that is more Caribbean — and more Bahamian — than we like to admit. Of course he's wrong. The Caribbean is a small region, but it has produced three Nobel laureates in the space of twenty years.

However, Sir Vidia has a point. It's not that nothing good came out of the Caribbean. Rather, it's that Caribbean people — people who live daily with the legacy of slavery — appear to be extremely tolerant of the absurdities of life. We can put up with more idiocy in our daily lives than many other people dream of.

Let me give you an example.

You're on the road, heading to work. You've taken all precautions — left in good time, taken the best route, and you're well on your way.

Up ahead the traffic's come to a complete stop. And it doesn't move for ten minutes. Fifteen minutes later you understand why: some brilliant planner has decided to repair a sidewalk at eight o'clock in the morning and has blocked off several feet of a downtown street lane. Bottleneck. Traffic jam.

The same thing happens another day, only when you reach the source of the problem, you discover that it's a garbage truck, trundling along on its merry way, engineering sanitation for the town in the midst of morning rush hour.

Absurdity.

The solution is extremely simple, mind you. All that needs to happen is for an ordinance to be passed prohibiting such activity during peak traffic hours, and for that ordinance to be enforced. I have heard rumours that such laws exist. If so, I imagine that they have been used for kindling; it's been so long since they've been enforced, they may as well have gone up in smoke.

Perhaps the reason for this lack of enforcement is the sense that we Bahamians (being good Caribbean people, although we like to pretend we're not) are well equipped to tolerate the absurd. We cuss. We laugh. We let fate take its course; we let the Holy Spirit move us.

And the absurdities remain exactly the same.

Maybe I'm spoiled. Maybe it's those eight years living in other countries that makes me think that we don't have to live like this, V. S. Naipaul's Caribbean curse notwithstanding. I'm not trying to imply that people in other countries don't have their own absurdities with which they have to contend; but there are more avenues available for them to address their absurdities, and at some point the people who live there stop, throw up their windows, and lean out into the night to yell: I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!!!

When was the last time we Bahamians did something like that?

I believe the reason we have such a high threshold for the absurd — why we continue to accept it, why we do not insist that things should be different, why we laugh at the fact that (say) someone spends good money paving the road this week, only to have someone else come along them next week and dig the road up again — is that we are the survivors of one of the greatest and most absurd institutions known to humankind.

The concept that a human being can be owned is as absurd as the idea that a pound of flesh can be taken from a living person's arm without shedding a drop of blood; and yet our ancestors, black, white and in between, lived with that reality for hundreds of years. A mere proclamation of emancipation does not erase the strategies developed over generations; and freedom has not yet erased all of the traces even now.

I think we are able to tolerate these little everyday absurdities, because we are the descendents of those who survived the big one. But the fact that we can survive it is no reason why we should.

The time has come, I believe, for us to choose what kind of a life we want to lead. Do we want to continue to inhabit the absurd world of the post-slave society, or do we wish to celebrate our freedom by creating something new and fresh and sensible of our own?

If it's the latter, then we cannot simply laugh or pray at the absurdities of our everyday lives; we have to rise up against them, to fight them, to name them like the child named the Emperor's nakedness, and cast them out.

So I'll start.

The idea that unions and politicians force organizations to pay overtime to workers when creating shift-work would meet most people's needs: absurd.

The idea that we can plan adequately for major national events, visiting dignitaries and travels abroad by starting work a month or less in advance: absurd.

The fact that we have extended "local government" to all the islands in the archipelago, but have no municipal authority in Nassau, where two-thirds of the population lives: absurd.

It's time to opt for freedom now. Let's make sure this thing go with sense.