On the Speaking of English

It's about time, I think, that we recognize as a nation that the language we speak is not English.

Not so long ago, a columnist in The Punch took a letter issued from the Ministry of Education to task for its poor use of English grammar. Of course, anything emanating from the government ministry charged with teaching the next generations must be perfect. But simply criticizing the grammar in the letter missed the real point.

The real point is this. English is a foreign language to us Bahamians.

I'm not aiming to be flip or insulting here; I'm deadly serious. The language we speak in this country is not English, but something quite different. Professors of linguistics call it a creole — Bahamian Creole, to be exact. They recognize that while it disguises itself as English by using English vocabulary as a vehicle, its structure and its rules are fundamentally different.

I believe that we recognize that we have a different flavour to our language. We celebrate it in the few bits of vocabulary that we have retained from our pasts: words like jook (which is, as all true Bahamians know, quite different from stab), or yinna (which we sometimes express as y'all or you-all, and which distinguishes the singular you from the plural). But what we don't recognize is the fact that we speak a different language altogether.

We don't recognize it for a number of reasons. One of them is the fact that we were so well colonized that the language we speak, which is completely legitimate, was (and still is) categorized as bad or broken English. Another of them is our national prejudice against our Haitian neighbours that leads us to associate creole with all the negative connotations we associate with Haiti.

In linguistics, the word creole has a far more universal meaning. A creole is, quite simply, a mother tongue that originates from the contact between two or more languages. In the Bahamas, the language we speak, Bahamian Creole, is the language that was created in the slave societies that founded our modern one.

During slavery, many tactics were used to maintain order. One of them was to avoid at all costs placing slaves of the same background together. As a result, many Africans were separated from people who were familiar to them, which meant that they were unable to communicate with one another except with the language of the masters. At first a basic language of communication was created to cover all those areas of overlap — a work language, one full of commands and concrete words, but one whose use was limited. Linguistics professors call this language a pidgin, and we still find pidgins today in the languages Bahamians use to speak to the Haitians they hire.

Later, those languages expanded to include all areas of life, including abstract and philosophical ones, and they became the creoles we speak today. We use English words, but we retain the African grammar that our ancestors brought with them when they came.

What is interesting about African languages is that they almost all have certain things in common that make them fundamentally different from European ones. The three most prominent are the creation of plurals, the creation of possessives, and the conjugation of verbs.

In European languages, each of these tasks is achieved by modifying the word in question. You've got one DOG, but two DOGS; the bone that belongs to Mark is MARK'S BONE; and Mark GIVES that bone to the dog. If he did it yesterday, he GAVE it to the dog.

In African languages, however, nouns and verbs remain the same. When Africans want to indicate possession, tense or number, they use other words to help, or they indicate it by context. How this translates into Bahamian Creole is like this. You've got one DOG, and Mark has two DOG. We know he has more than one because we said it already; he has two. (Duh). In our language, and in the African ones from which it derives, two dog is perfectly correct.

The bone Mark owns is MARK BONE. We don't need to change the noun to show whose it is; the context tells us. Sometimes, if we want to emphasize it, or if we want to get rid of "bone", we say MARK OWN. Simple.

And if we want to tell people what Mark did with the bone, we say MARK GIVE the bone to the dog. That remains the same, whether it's happening now or happened last week; if we want to indicate when Mark gave the bone to the dog, we say when it happened.

But in English, we have to change the nouns and the verbs to do the same work. English, you see, may be the official language of our nation, but it is a foreign language to us.

Hence the all-too-common awfulness of some of our published writings; hence the absurdities of overcorrection that we hear on the radio and the television. What we are witnessing are people trying to speak English correctly, but applying African rules. The result is a mangling of both our languages.

Until we recognize that English is a foreign language to us, as it is for the Greek and Chinese and Haitian immigrants who settle our shores, and teach it as such (perhaps teaching also the formalities of Bahamian Creole at the same time), we will continue to be almost universally challenged by three very basic rules of that grammar: noun plurals, noun possessives, and the conjugation of verbs.

And until we recognize this fact, we will continue to be plagued with the kinds of absurdities that appear in our newspapers and news reports with depressing regularity.

On Being a People

We need our artists.

It's not enough to be a creative people; it's not enough to be a tourist destination; it's not enough to have majority rule; it's not enough to be the wealthiest independent country in the Caribbean. Without our artists, we are as poor as an Untouchable in Bombay.

Poorer, probably. At least Untouchables know who they are.

I had the pleasure this evening of attending a presentation being given to the National Cultural Commission on culture and tourism by the Director-General of Tourism. As usual, the discussion was lively. As usual, it was loud. But among the many jewels of the conversation that arose from the discussion was this. The Director-General told the story of a young Bahamian who was engaged to sing the Bahamian national anthem somewhere abroad, on live television, and who began the song with the words "Oh, say can you see."

Now you may be thinking, oh, that's horrible; or you may be laughing as hard as you can; but chances are you're wondering what that has at all to do with artists. After all, what an artist does has very little to do with whether a young Bahamian knows the difference between the Bahamian national anthem and the American one. Right?

Wrong.

What an artist does is absolutely fundamental to the difference.

Now understand that when I say "artist" I'm talking about much more than the person who sits in front of a canvas and paints (although if you've visited the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas lately you'll know how much that kind of artist can say.). I'm talking about visual artists, and sculptors, and Junkanoo artists, and musicians, and artisans, and dancers, and actors, and storytellers, and directors, and writers.

We need them all.

We need them all because without them, we have absolutely no touchstone to remind us what it means to be Bahamian. Who we are as a people depends almost entirely on the artists among us.

You see, being a people in this day, age and place depends almost entirely upon our ability to tell a story, and to tell that story right. Ours is a society composed of many different people with many different backgrounds, origins, dreams, and goals. All too often, though, we go about our business unaware of our complexities. There was a time when the Bahamas was a white nation; black people were "natives", and made up part of the scenery and backdrop against which Real Life played out. There was a time, too, not so long ago, in which the Bahamas was for black people only; white people were considered interlopers, visitors, tourists. We're continually given the impression that The Bahamas is a Christian nation, as though atheists, Rastafarians, Muslims, Buddhists and Vodouisants are not part of us. We are always looking at only a piece of the puzzle. And many administrative decisions are made without taking our complexities into account.

But our artists tell the real story; this is why we need them.

There's a theory that claims that art holds up a mirror to nature, and by looking into the works of our artists we can see ourselves. There's a measure of truth to this theory. I can attest to it, having just come back from New York where I had the pleasure of seeing several shows, each of which reflected some little bit of the society that made it and the society it represented out to its audience.

But there's another side to the theory as well. It's that nature is also a mirror of art. This is particularly true when we look at the mass media — at television and cable and satellite, at the internet, the music industry, the fashion industry. Art's both something to produce and to consume; and where there's a vacuum, stuff will rush in. The result is that without our artists, we cannot be a people. Rather, we'll be an extension of the people whose art we consume en masse — of Americans, of Jamaicans, of someone else.

Hence the young Bahamian who sings the "Star-Spangled Banner" for the Bahamian national anthem.

Hence the witness who, standing up in court, pleads the Fifth; or the Rasta who, though born and bred in Englerston, speaks with so thick a Jamaican accent that the pollsters ask him to show his passport to prove his eligibility to vote.

As a people, we need our artists to examine us in all our differences and complexities and teach us back to ourselves. And we need our artists to be full-time observers of who we are. We need dancers who do not simply execute steps in time to music or interpret the words that are being sung in the song, but who can tell us a story about ourselves. We need writers who will go beyond the hibiscus and the banana and speak of the hurts and pains of all Bahamians, otherwise we will never know what it is that separates us and what unites. We need artists who (like the people in the current national exhibit in the National Gallery) can look at our warts as well as our beauties and be unafraid of placing them on display — and we need people who are willing to be challenged by looking at their work. We need actors who are able to dig into themselves so that they do far more than declaim the printed word with unnatural stress, but so that they become the people they portray so they can show us back ourselves.

To be a people, we need to face our souls.

We need our artists to spread our souls out for us to see.

On Being a City

I'm writing this from the Big Apple, the City that Never Sleeps — New York City. What strikes me most about being here, aside from the expected, like the vibrancy, the culture, the bustle — is the fact that New York's concept of itself as a city, is fundamental to all it does.

And that set me thinking. Why doesn't Nassau have the same sense?

The answer's obvious, but absurd: Nassau doesn't have a municipal government.

The obvious reason is that Nassau is the seat of the national government, and therefore by default doesn't appear to need its own government.

The absurdity of that is that Nassau, the capital city of The Bahamas, a city of almost 200,000 persons, has less administration than Freeport or Marsh Harbour or even than George Town or Deadman's Cay.

We do have a number of Ministries, each of which has its head office in the capital city. We do have a parliament that is composed of elected officials, each of whom represents a specific constituency. Each constituency is carved out every five years by people who report to this parliament. The majority of the constituency lines are drawn on New Providence. Thus the residents of the city of Nassau, who make up two-thirds of the national population, are governed in segments that may or may not have anything to do with the needs of the city itself.

Now it seems to me that there is the danger of a conflict of interest in this. The conflict need not be anything sinister; it may be as simple as a competing need. At this very moment, it's the fact that the northern Bahamas is devastated by Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne. At the same time, plans have been set in motion for the renovation of Bay Street, a major facelift for the City of Nassau, which includes a permanent home for the Straw Market, among other things. One or the other of these projects has now got to be put on hold; one or the other of them has to be given priority. Both are important. But because the government that is responsible for the renovation of the city is the same as that which is responsible for the well-being of the entire country, they cannot be adequately dealt with at the same time; the self-same government is responsible for both.

Now I am not saying that activities for Nassau should not be put on hold while the more immediate needs of the people in the Family Islands are met. What I am saying is that the current system of government we now have makes it an either/or situation when it doesn't have to be.

You see, the city of Nassau suffers not only from not having its own government, but it also from not having its own budget. Utilities, services, works, and so on are dealt with by the agencies that are charged with running the whole country. Now in this case, Nassau generally comes out on top; the vast majority of the work done by the public corporations, or by the Ministries of Works, Health, National Security, Education, and so on, affects those of us who live in Nassau. In times of crisis, however, that money has to be diverted elsewhere. We have no provision to meet the needs of both.

If Nassau were a municipality, money that should have a specifically local application for the city of Nassau (local licences, real property tax and so on) would not get mixed up with money that should go to the nation as a whole (customs duties, departure tax, and the like). Currently, however, the apportioning of all that money is in the hands of the national government. It was a system that didn't work all that well in colonial times, and it has no real reason to start working well now.

Just imagine, for instance, what would have happened if Hurricane Frances had devastated Nassau as it did Freeport or as Hurricane Jeanne did Abaco. Now imagine that San Salvador, Cat Island, Eleuthera, Abaco and Grand Bahama also suffered as much damage as they have done. How long do you think it would take for the national government (which is also Nassau's local government) to get around to meeting the needs of the people on those islands?

I'm not making this scenario up, by the way. In 1866 and in 1929, hurricanes devastated the capital while also affecting other islands. In neither case did the islands get the help they needed; Nassau had been crippled, and was unable to serve their needs. In fact, Nassau was so devastated by the 1929 hurricane that in 1932, when the Great Abaco Hurricane flattened Abaco worse than Jeanne did, the people there were left to fend and rebuild for themselves. Nassau could not help.

There is no good reason why the needs of the city should be looked after by a government elected to see to the needs of the entire country. There is one powerful one; the creation of a government that is responsible for meeting the immediate needs of two-thirds of the Bahamian population will considerably weaken the clout of the average politician.

It's a real reason, but not a very good one. As I am not a politician, I believe (perhaps naively) that politics should not supersede everything else. I believe that election to parliament and gives one a far greater responsibility than simply to get elected again in five years' time; it gives one the chance to do something fundamental, something seminal, for the long-term development of the Bahamas.

I believe that there is no more fundamental thing than real local government, which includes the creation of the municipality of the city of Nassau. The parliament and the cabinet who creates that will allow the national government to get on with governing the nation, rather than meeting the needs of the city — even if that creation affects their members' power in the short run.