On Being Caribbean

Peter Minshall is in town.

For those of us who don't know who Peter Minshall is, or who may imagine that his contributions may have very little to do with our lives, being so plugged into the energy of our northern neighbours, it's time to think again.

Think, for instance, Trinidad. Think Carnival. Think big themes, social commentary, giant puppets, super-costume; and then think Junkanoo.

Minshall is the foremost designer in Trinidad's Carnival, where his work has revolutionized the way in which people regard and think about their festival. His creations are not simply pretty, you understand; sometimes they are frightening, shocking, or horrifying — but they always make you think. And his contribution is not limited to Trinidad. He's been invited to design the opening ceremonies for not one, but three Olympic Games: Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992, Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996, and part of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies in 2002.

His influence on Bahamian Junkanoo has been profound, but it isn't what people may expect. While we often think that the brass lines and the tricks and the feathers are all "Trinidad" or "Carnival" imports, they're not where Minshall's made the most impact. No; Bahamian Junkanoo leaders were in Trinidad in 1983 when Minshall's shocking presentation, "The River", which provided a commentary on the rape and murder of purity, harmony and nature by technological man, appeared, and were there again, with Committee members, in 1986, when "Rat Race", a meditation on modern urban Caribbean life, appeared. No; where Minshall's influence on our Junkanoo has been greatest has been in the area of theme.

There's a category in the judging process for Junkanoo that's called Execution of Theme, and it's here that Minshall's influence can be seen. Of all the groups who rush, it's the Valley Boys who have mastered this best. While other great groups like the Saxons and One Family and Roots have long been executing their themes in purely artistic fashions, using — often brilliantly — the designs of their dancers and their bellers and their back lines to illustrate their theme, starting in the second half of the 1980s the Valley Boys took a leaf from Minshall's book and began to perform their themes. Who can forget the moment when the Valley Boys' free dancers, all costumed in Defence Force camouflage, threw themselves onto their bellies at Charlotte Street and began to crawl? Or when, for their Wedding, the Valley Boys released balloons at the rollover, and danced down Bay Street, to cut the wedding cake in Rawson Square?

For Minshall, you see, whose background is theatre, Carnival — and by extension Junkanoo — is the theatre of the street. Caribbean people, like Africans and Asians and unlike northerners, perform in the outdoors, in the open. The great Caribbean performance spaces are not the grand theatres and opera houses of New York or London; rather, they are the fields and parks and streets of cities.

What are we doing with ours?

I ask because it seems to me that we have been given the task of caretaking a special gift — the gift of performance, the gift of communicating with our whole bodies, of turning our selves into instruments for the expression of the human soul — but that we seem to be far more interested in who gets to administer the arena for this gift, or in who wins the competition that accompanies it. And that winning is everything. It doesn't matter whether what wins has lifted us out of ourselves, or has simply rerun what was done last year and the year before; it doesn’t matter whether the whole thing, the art of Junkanoo is moving forward, taking us with it, or whether it's sliding into irrelevancy. We've been given a gift to look after, and we're wasting it on politics and competition.

What Peter Minshall has to teach us isn't how to build costumes or even how to put themes out on the street, though we'd certainly do well to learn both from him. No. The message he comes bringing is that we are Caribbean people. We can quibble all we like about the veracity of that fact — we can argue that if the Caribbean Sea stops at the southern shores of Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico it means we're outside the Caribbean, or we can claim that because Columbus, God bless the man, first set foot on one of our islands, it knits us up inextricably with the Caribbean — but the truth of the matter is that Junkanoo says it all.

For Minshall, you see, the essence of the Caribbean being is hybridity — that glorious mixing that happens with cross-fertilization and jumbled-up genealogies. Like Caliban in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, we are strangers in our own lands, speaking with words that are foreign to us. Our fullest expressions happen beyond words — in the language created by music, by art, by our bodies in the dance. Junkanoo is the ultimate site of these expressions — or at least, it's supposed to be, and it can be. It's for us the most sacred work that any of us can perform. But Junkanoo, weather or no weather, is not invincible; if we play with it too much, we can lose its truth and be left with an empty shell.

And so let us celebrate our Caribbeanness by recognizing the sacred trust that draws us all together: the trust that has us all, from Nassau straight down to Port of Spain, engaged in the creating of that wonderful theatre that is Junkanoo and Carnival. And let us respect that trust so much that we forget our differences and our competitions and our postponements, and concentrate on the work itself.

On Sovereignty and Second Homes

There is a village in Jamaica called Martha Brae. It is located today in the heart of the tourist playground of the island's north coast, and if you look its name up on the internet, most of the links that come up will be tourist-related. Most of them will speak of Martha Brae as a river, and will say nothing about the village. Most of them expect tourists to be living in Montego Bay, the nearest city. But as is the wont of the tourist industry, which is in many ways the plantation writ new, very few of them will lead the curious to anything that talks about the people or the culture of Jamaica.

We live in a world of unequal wealth and power. We happen to live in a part of that world that balances on the cliff-edge of prosperity. There are few, if any, sovereign Black nations that boast more than The Bahamas does in the way of wealth, comfort, infrastructure and standard of living. Nevertheless, our wealth, our way of life — which the vast majority of us take for granted — are more precarious than we imagine.

The recent study on poverty levels in The Bahamas indicates that 9% of the population lives below the poverty line, which is calculated at $7.84 per day ($2,863 per year). It further reveals that the distribution of the Bahamian poor is uneven; that the poorest Bahamians live on the southern Family Islands, where the poverty rate is 21%. A closer look at the statistics proves interesting. Only 6% of the total population of poor Bahamians lives in the Family Islands; the majority of the poor live in the cities of New Providence and Grand Bahama. Moreover, the gap between the two largest ethnic groups whose people live in poverty is wide; 25% of the Haitian/Haitian-Bahamian population live below the poverty line, compared to 8.7% of Bahamians.

Now when compared with the poverty rate of the Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole, which stands well over one-third, we are doing well. That isn't to say that we must be complacent about our poverty rates; the fact that 76% of our poor live in our cities, where our affluent also live, suggests that we have plenty of work to do. But I would also suggest that we consider something else. The study calculates poverty in terms of cash income, and assumes that one needs cash to purchase everything that one needs. Now as far as Nassau and Freeport and perhaps Marsh Harbour go, that is true. But in the case of the southern islands, where the cash poverty rate is the highest, that is not so.

You see, people in the Family Islands still fish and farm. Now that may be a foreign idea to those of us who — like me — make their living by getting into cars or buses and travelling to jobs, the most preferable of which involve sitting in air-conditioned offices making contact with other people by telephone, and spending our cash to eat our breakfasts, lunches and dinners. But foreign as it may be, many Family Islanders still have less need for cash on a daily basis than we do here in New Providence. So while $7.84 a day per person may not buy very much in New Providence, and while it may buy even less on a Family Island, the need to spend that $7.84 is less crucial. As long as Titta is growing her corn and grinding it into grits, as long as Pa is fishing — off the rock or on the shoals, doesn’t matter, or Co'n Slim is conching, as long as the whole family is crabbing when it rains, the basics of nutrition are cheaper in cash terms than they are in the cities. Bahamians in the southern islands may be poor, but they don't have to starve.

Not yet, anyway.

It's important, when looking at statistics and working out what to do about them, to remember that numbers aren't people. Numbers lie there on the page and let you look at them, while people get up each morning, pray to God, and go about their business. Bahamians have been doing that for centuries. It's important to remember that the last sixty years of our history mark the first time that two whole generations of Bahamians have had the ability to live a better life than their parents had. And it's important to remember, and to celebrate, what it was that allowed us to survive back in the days before the tourist dollar never done.

It was land.

You see, The Bahamas has only become cash-rich since we've discovered the benefits of prostitution. I am not talking about the literal exchange of sexual favours here. For the past sixty years, we've been placing a price tag on land — the very thing that saved us from poverty in the past. These days, we're selling everything that we previously considered useless, from the powdery white and pink sand that can't grow anything good to eat, to the arid hills that have no water beneath them, to the marshland that is impossible to farm, to the mangrove stands that are difficult to fish. Our newest policy: to sell off empty land throughout the Family Islands to wealthy northerners for their second homes. The idea is to get chunks of cash for land that isn't being used, and to generate jobs for the locals, thus raising their daily cash income. It's a bit like mining; you go into spaces no one would ever go to dig out the gold, and get rich quickly in the process.

It's a good idea, especially for politicians, who work in five-year increments and rarely calculate beyond the nearest election or two. But, like most easy things, it's a bad idea in the long term.

You see, the village of Martha Brae is a very special place, because it is a plot of land that Jamaicans who were formerly slaves bought for themselves. They bought it collectively, painfully, over a period of years; but it means everything to them because there after slavery was no good land left for the ex-slaves to live on. The best land on the island was owned by people who lived far, far away. Martha Brae was an affirmation of independence, a celebration of freedom and sovereignty, and poor as the inhabitants are, they have the dignity of their history, and they have their pride.

We, who are still land-rich, must be careful in our quest for quick cash. Our zeal to eradicate the poverty rate in the Family Islands must not lead us to make the mistake of thinking that cash is the only way of measuring wealth. We must always remember the fundamental truth of all ex-slave societies: that prosperity built on servitude is not prosperity at all.

On the Invention of Santa

Santa, they tell me, used to dress in green. He also used to walk around on foot, wear a long robe, and visit children on December 6th. He didn't originally come from the North Pole (wherever that is), or have reindeer, or carry toys; he was Turkish, believe it or not, and while he was the patron saint of children, he was also the patron saint of sailors, scholars, merchants and thieves.

Christmas is coming, and, like it or not, we're being flooded with images, stories, and concepts that affect us and our children. Now I'm not one of those people who believe that Santa is an anagram for "Satan", and make a whole lot out of that fact (after all, "God" is an anagram for "dog" and vice versa, and "evil" is simply "live" spelled backwards — we can do a whole lot with this game); but it's always useful to know where the things that take prominence in our lives come from, and what purpose they used to serve.

It's useful because by doing so we're able to loosen some of the power these things have over us, and claim some of it for ourselves.

Santa Claus is one of these things. Here, on the fringes of American culture, Santa is as much a part of our Christmas imagery as anything else. While we may not make him as central to our celebrations as Americans do — we're Christians, after all, and for many of us that means that we want to focus on the religious aspects of the season, not the secular ones — we still find his image and his colours everywhere we turn. So it'll be useful to get some idea of where these two things originated.

Santa Claus as we know him has three main origins. The first is the story of Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, a Christian who lived in fourth-century Turkey. His entire life, it's said, was lived according to Christian principles. Nicholas dedicated his life to the service of God, and spent his inheritance on helping the sick, the poor, and the suffering. According to legend, he loved children — he gave good ones presents, and bad ones got switches instead. He walked on foot, and didn't drive any sleigh at all. He died on December 6th, and that date is celebrated as his day in parts of Europe.

The second is nineteenth-century America. In the early nineteenth century, the major influence on Christmas ritual was Dutch, like many of the early settlers. Santa Claus is the Americanization of the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas — Sinterklaas. But the first images of this person portrayed a fat bearded elf who squeezed himself down chimneys, the kind of person who appears in the poem "The Night Before Christmas". But that Santa wasn't the one we know today. He didn't wear a red suit, he didn't wear a cap, he wasn't a big fat man; he was a little fat elf.

The third is Coca-Cola. Ever notice how Santa's the colour of a Coke label? Well, there's a reason for that, and it's that the red suit trimmed with white fur was an invention of the Coca-Cola company. The idea was to sell more soft drinks, but what ended up happening was the selling of the idea itself. Santa's red costume is the product of one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. And as for his home in the North Pole (which is a block of ice anyway, as the North Pole is located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean) and his elves and his sleigh and the reindeer, they are all inventions that have been tacked on throughout the years.

What's my point?

Well, think of it this way. Santa Claus may be an American invention, and one that has spread, like American culture, to most countries of the world in some form or another, but he's a composite of a number of different concepts from another different places. Like Bahamians, Americans come from elsewhere. Like the Lucayans, the native Americans have been killed off and driven away, and their traditions do not form any part of mainstream American life. American culture, like ours, is a hybrid culture, something created out of the various bits and pieces the various peoples of the USA brought with them. Santa Claus is only one example; there are lots of others.

My point, then, is this. Just as Santa was imagined and re-imagined over the years, so we Bahamians can create our own traditions out of the fragments of our histories. Just as the Americans dug into the various mythologies of Europe to come up with their image of Santa Claus, infusing it with bits and pieces they added themselves, so we can create our own festivals and traditions.

So Christmas is coming. Every screen that we face reminds us of that fact, and there's a sense of urgency in the air. Traffic is thickening on the roads; it took me as long to get home the other night as it did to get to work that morning, probably because I happened to be heading in the same direction as the mall. Flights in and out of the country are booked, and people are already having their luggage bumped because the gifts are piling up in the cargo holds. Christmas is coming, Santa is out, and we're spending our free money on gifts.

Isn't it time we created our own traditions and symbols to help us celebrate this very special time in our very own way?

Christmas is coming. Joy to the world.

Peace on earth, goodwill to all men.

On Colonialism

There's a song out there that those of us who were around on July 10, 1973 could once be heard singing. My favourite part of it goes like this:

We been standing up to a different flag, Union Jack in the sky
But we ga have our own flag come the 10th of July

The chorus is less subtle. "Independence," it sings,

Independence for the Bahamas,
Independence, people, come sing a new song.

Well, that was then, wasn't it? And this is now. We are singing a different song, all right, but I'm not so sure that it's all that new. And we're certainly standing up to a different flag, but it's still red, white and blue.

You see, colonialism isn't simply a matter of governors and who gets to vote and prime ministers and having representation at the United Nations. All of those things are important, but in the end they're trappings. They do for a nation what jewellery does for a woman; they adorn, they define, but they can't really make her into anything if there's nothing there. A woman of substance, is accentuated by those trappings; but a jungless is nothing but the bling.

I want to write about colonialism, because it seems to me we're more colonized than we ever were before. Last week I talked about Thanksgiving, which is only one manifestation of that. This week I want to give you a couple of other things to think about.

For instance.

There's the story of the witness in a criminal trial who, when called to testify, chose to plead the Fifth in his defence.

There's the story of the man who, when stopped by American Immigration at the airport and asked for his passport, asked, "What I need a passport for? I only going to Miami!"

What's so peculiar about these two incidents?

They're all elements of American law, of the American culture, that are not part of our legal system. That is not to say that our legal system is inferior — not at all. But it is different. Our Constitution has never been amended, and so to plead the Fifth (which offers Americans the right to avoid self-incrimination) is irrelevant here in The Bahamas — just as we most definitely need passports to go to Miami. The freedoms guaranteed our press are not absolute; we have laws about what can and can't be printed. In Canada and Britain, their presses are enjoined not to print any material that can lead people to hate; here in The Bahamas, we have prohibitions about obscenity. But far too many of us assume that there is no difference between our rights and those accorded to Americans.

The fact that we have trouble distinguishing where the border falls between our nation and the American nation tells me that we have not got rid of our colonial past. No; we have brought it with us into the present, and we have simply exchanged one garment for another.

Now some of you may be thinking what's wrong with putting on the American cloak. After all, the USA is the most powerful, the richest, the greatest country in the world, right? (Well, no, not necessarily; it might be the most powerful country, but it isn't the richest, and it could be argued that the fact that Bahamians have better access to basic health care than Americans should suggest that there are limitations to the United States' greatness.) But that's not my point.

My point is that we are not American. Certainly, we are brothers under the skin; we are far closer to the States, and to the Southern States, than our Caribbean counterparts, because most of our ancestors came from there. But our paths and theirs were different. In our country, the slaves and their descendants ended up in the majority; in the USA, people of African descent make up about twelve per cent of the population. In our country, emancipation came in 1834; in the USA they had to wait until 1865, and fought a bloody war to achieve it. In our country, people of colour could vote (as long as certain conditions were met) from before Emancipation occurred; in the USA, those rights were abandoned and had to be fought for, complete with martyrs, during the 1950s and 1960s.

And what we don't recognize, or perhaps don't know, is that the American Civil Rights movement drew its strength and inspiration from us. So why should we be prepared, now, to surrender our sovereignty to American culture?

Colonialism, you see, doesn't come in just one form. It can be social and political, as it was when the British were in charge; or it can be economic and cultural, as it is today. The latter is more subtle. The Americans don't have to be here physically for us to be colonized. Their television, their products, their food, their outlets, their computer programmes — all of these are making us American from the inside out.

The problem isn't theirs at all; it's ours. We have retained the habits of colonialism. We like having someone bigger and stronger and wealthier to tell us what to do, and we seem to find comfort in the fact that we aren't as good as They are. We got rid of one colonial master, only to invite in another.

I'm reminded of a comment Jesus made, about the unclean spirit that, having been cast out of a man, wanders around until it decides to return to the place from which it came, bringing seven other spirits more evil than itself.

It would do us well to remember that. In the words of Our Lord, if you get rid of the spirit, but keep the same mind, the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.