I've officially decided what I'm going to call the next article:

On Race, Class, and the Tyranny of Worldviews

Put that in your pipes and smoke it.

This is an apology for anybody, if there is anybody, who checks this blog on a regular (read weekly) basis. I have not been very productive lately ( and that is an understatement). Life, and work, are getting in the way.

I have several articles on burners. I'll leave you with a list of the ideas before I finish this post. However, this post is my way of saying keep watching this space; I will be back.

I've been fortunate lately for having had my articles moved from the Thursday Guardianto the Weekender. They've gained a new audience there. The advantage of that is that I'm able to run some of the older articles -- those from 2003, which were first run on Mondays in the Guardian.

I've posted most of those on Bahama Pundit. They're already here. All of my articles are here.

The disadvantage of this is that I don't have anything new to post on this blog.

Apologies. I hope to update more frequently -- weekly -- in the new year.

Ideas of articles I'm working on (working titles):

On Building a National Theatre
On By Any Means Necessary
On the Politics of Race OR On Losing Independence OR On the Conspiracy of Theory (same article, no right title yet)
On Intellectual Property
On By the Way Culture

If you have comments, feel free to respond.

Oh, and --

Merry Christmas.

It's said that one of the things that sets Bahamians apart from other West Indians is our tendency to avoid emigration. We travel a lot. But unlike Jamaicans, Haitians, Trinidadians, Barbadians, Guyanese and others, we always come home. We Bahamians have been fortunate enough to have had economic prosperity for so long that we've built a society out of people who travelled abroad for education and came back to contribute to their country. It hasn't hurt that most of us who have come back have learned that, to some degree or another, life is truly better here. We may pay more for a pound of butter or a leg of beef, and the cost of a gallon of gas may make us swear, but we have the unenviable advantage of being the architects of our own destinies -- a rare condition indeed for descendants of Africa, wherever they may be found.

I've lived long enough now to watch with some amusement the return of many of my contemporaries who made the final life move. The last ten years have brought with them the return to Nassau many of my friends and family who swore that they would never come home. But the air is cleaner, the drives are shorter (despite traffic), the views are prettier, and, for many of them, business is better in the Bahamas.

So it may surprise many of you who are reading this column that more and more I have been considering the attractiveness of exile.

The Barbadian novelist, George Lamming, once wrote a book called The Pleasures of Exile. He knew what he was talking about. His is the generation of West Indian writers on which the whole genre of Caribbean literature in English is built; his contemporaries number among them V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, the Caribbean Nobel Prizewinners; his fellow Bajan, the great Kamau Brathwaite; Wilson Harris, one of the earliest postmodernist novelists; Samuel Selvon, one of the funniest men ever to put pen to paper; and Michael Anthony, without whom BJC students of literature would have nothing to read. What every one of these writers share with Naipaul, with the exception of Anthony, is that they left their islands to become great. They had to. Their exiles established their careers.

Now. The Bahamas has a great track record when it comes to retaining its citizens. We are not a people-exporting nation. But neither are we a great cultural force in the world. And I am not at all sure, at this point, that the two things are completely unrelated.

Bahamian cultural products fit overwhelmingly into two main categories. On one level, we make things we think the tourists will buy. When we produce Junkanoo statues and paintings of Poinciana trees and candles made of gelatine with sand on the bottom, we imagine we're catering to the tourist market. But how many of us have taken the time to do market research and find out? How many of us know somewhere deep down, that what we're selling is really junk that has no real connection to our souls, that are just products knocked out for commercial purposes, to be sold to wealthy people who are ignorant of who we really are?

On another level, our most popular entertainment is self-referential. The plays that populate our stages these days are more often than not commentaries on recent local events, and speak only to people who are very, very like us. They don't last; they don't travel well; when removed from their contexts, they are curiosities, little more. The same thing goes for our contemporary music. Ultimately, our cultural production falls into two categories: trinkets that we sell to foreign people who don't know any better; or in-the-moment social commentary that has limited appeal to anyone who isn't us.

It's no surprise, therefore, that we aren't a culture-exporting nation. We don't have all that much culture that can be exported. Instead of placing our culture and its products in a global context and measuring it by international standards, we tend to insulate ourselves and expect what we produce to exist in a vacuum of its own. And when people arise who challenge what we think should be, we marginalize them, as we did Tony McKay and Amos Ferguson, underestimating their very greatness by the limitations of our own experience.

But I'm coming to understand that the value of exile, as places like Trinidad and Jamaica and Guyana have learned is that when you leave your homeland you're able to put your culture in a global context. You're able to judge it from a perspective that is informed by more than the standards and expectations of people exactly like you, and those standards are often highly critical. All too often it's exiles, not locals, who can really see what's good and strong in their culture.

When you travel, when you pull up your roots and move somewhere else, your culture becomes important to you. You carry it with you, and you develop it, delve into it, produce it, simply to survive. It is no accident that Jamaican culture has become the world culture of the twenty-first century. Jamaicans don't have the luxury of staying at home; more Jamaicans live outside Jamaica than live in the country, and they have carried home with them. In so doing have infected the world. By exporting people, Jamaica has exported itself.

We Bahamians, on the other hand, are comfortable and overfed and making good money. We don't do exile. And for us, it seems, SUVs and digital cable and good meals on Sundays is enough. We have material riches; culture is a luxury we believe we can live without.

And so the attractiveness of exile. Ours is a society that is so stifled by the material that it has no room for the language of the soul. And so, for those of us for whom life is more than conch salad and self-referential writing and recycled Junkanoo and the same story sung to the same tune, options are limited. Like Sidney Poitier almost sixty years ago, exile for us looks very attractive indeed.

There are times in a writer's life when realism just won't do. That's true even when that writer is an essayist who writes commentaries on what she observes. But the writing of essays isn't the only thing that God intended writers to do; and so I hope you'll forgive me if I take a moment to tell you the tragic true story of Mr. Sam Ahab, a relatively young man who, as a child, wasn't really trained up in the way he should go, and so who as an adult found himself a-wander in a wilderness every bit as hot and hostile as the Arabian Desert was for the old-time Israelites -- and blind as could be to the pillars of cloud and of fire leading the way.

Now Mr. Sam Ahab was a man of many talents. In this he was rather like the servant who had been given talents by the master who was going away on a trip to a far land. But that's as far as it went. In this story, Sam Ahab inherited his talents from his father, Mr. Sam Ahab Senior, who had received the original five and invested them. Unlike his father, though, the wise investor, Sam Ahab Junior was too cautious or too careless to do much investing. Instead, he did what one should never, ever do with talents: he dug a hole in the ground and hid them in it, and went off to enjoy life's other treasures. Many of these, like the talents, he'd inherited from S. Ahab Senior; and off he went like the prodigal son to spend them in search of warmed beds, loot, and feasting.

First of all, he went to visit the Pom-Poms, who looked at what he had to offer and told him it was of little value. Then he travelled among the Nacirema, who looked at what he had to offer, took what was best from it and claimed it for themselves. Then, poor and without dignity, he moved on to visit the Naeb-Birac, who were as poor as he was, poorer sometimes, but still proud of themselves.

And then, not unlike the Prodigal Son, Sam Ahab Junior found himself wandering in the desert, cleaning pig pens for a living. The only difference between him and his Biblical counterpart was that he didn't realize that this was what he was doing; the pig pens he cleaned were very nice pig pens, pig condos, in fact, with many and various very nice pigs. But pigs they were. And Sam Ahab cleaned away, believing that because the pig pens were bigger and better than some of the homes belonging to the Naeb-Birac and others, they were not pig pens at all.

And little by little, Mr. Sam Ahab forgot that he had been given talents in the first place. He forgot he was a rich man, the possessor of many talents. Thing is, if he had remembered, he probably wouldn't know where to find his talents anyway; he'd buried them in a hole in the ground, after all, and we all know what happens to buried treasure. Maps get lost, vegetation grows over the spot, and sometimes thieves come along and dig it up.

Poor Mr. Sam Ahab, stuck cleaning pig pens and forgetting the talents he inherited from his father. What will he do if and when the master returns and asks about the status of his original gift? Will it be enough for Sam Ahab Junior to explain that his father had doubled the talents, or will he be chastised for his own carelessness? Perhaps he'll suffer the same fate of the unfaithful servant in the parable, and the master will take his talents away to him and give them to the ones who were more industrious than he was. I don't know -- but I'm pretty sure the master won't be pleased.

Now I'm sure you're wondering just what drug I'm on, penning this story of servants and prodigals and deep-buried treasure. Perhaps you're wondering what to make of this fable. No doubt several of you have cast down the newspaper in disgust, certain now that this writer has finally lost her mind; some of you may be on your way to the toy store even now to purchase some marbles you can share with me out of sympathy.

But before you do that, just consider this.

Consider the fact, first of all, that this story is both tragic and true.

Then consider the fact that our country is made up of hundreds of islands, each of them different, each of them resplendent with talents, with people young and old who could, if encouraged, multiply those talents in ways we cannot even imagine.

Then consider the fact that despite this truth, we seem to believe that those talents will multiply without our doing anything about them at all. And so we invest virtually nothing in the research, strengthening, or celebration of those talents. We have no great libraries to preserve our writing and show our children what the generations before them have produced. We have no public theatres to provide outlets for our actors and playwrights and designers, and we are allowing our private ones to starve slowly to death without comment. In a nation where making music was once second only to breathing, we have no concert halls, no conservatory, no programme at all that will enable us to keep the best of us alive. Our young people are supremely gifted; and we have given them no tools to enable them to take those gifts to the world.

Like Sidney Poitier almost sixty years ago, the most gifted of our people have to fend for themselves if they have a thirst to create. The luckiest of them are leaving our country in droves, assisted in part by the scholarships and grants we so gratefully give, seeking training and fame and fortune elsewhere, in idioms that are foreign to them and add nothing to the world. And that is a shame.

Ladies, and gentlemen, we are Mr. Sam Ahab. We have taken the talents multiplied by our fathers and buried them in the ground, apparently happy (like him) to clean up after the wealthy, unaware that we are wandering in a desert from which there may be no escape. We have forgotten where and what our treasure is, and have left it vulnerable to the thieves are even now seeking to ransack it. When the master returns, what will we have to show him to ensure that he doesn't take our talents from us and give them to nations who take better care of the gifts he has given?

There's a lot of talk these days about free trade, market forces, and so on. Even I've talked about it. How can we not? The world is changing, has changed, and unless we change with it, we'll be left behind.

Half a century ago, when colonies were becoming countries and the world's leaders were no longer exclusively of European descent, becoming a nation was the most important step you could take. Gaining a voice on the world stage, being able to apply for membership to international bodies, being able to create and express one's sovereignty -- these were the things people fought for, these were what nations celebrated.

Half a century ago, though, the greatest forces were not economic, but ideological. The world was divided into two major groups. On the one side were the communist countries; on the other, the so-called "free" world.

Now these titles come loaded. Many people who don't know any better tend to assume that communism embodies all that is evil: totalitarian government, atheism, state-controlled production. By the same token, they assume that the opposite of communism is democracy, rule by the people, and that democracy incorporates freedoms of every kind -- of speech, of religion, and of the markets.

But it's not as simple as that. The communist ideal is fundamentally democratic; the democracy practised by the Soviets in Russia was not hugely different from the Electoral College system that elects American presidents. Nor was totalitarianism a necessary condition for communism, although the fact that most communist states were established by revolution meant that totalitarianism was often the result.

No. The true difference between the communist world and the "free" one was not ideology; it was economics. The proper opposite of communism is not democracy; it is capitalism. Communism was Marx and Engels' answer to the capitalist ideas outlined by Adam Smith and others.

You see, communism claims that the labourer is the owner of his or her labour, and that he or she ought to have some control over saying what that labour is worth. (If that sounds very much like union talk, it should; almost all early trade unionists were Marxist). Capitalism, on the other hand, proposes that the person who puts up the capital sets the price. Capitalism, moreover, proposes several fundamental rules that have governed global economic theory for centuries. They are as follows: one, prices are affected by supply and demand; the shorter the supply, the more the demand, and the higher the prices. And two, if given the chance, the market will regulate itself.

It's these last two assumptions on which the ideology of free trade in this era of globalization rests.

Free trade, we are told, is the hope of the future. If and when barriers to trade are removed, the best products will flourish, prices fall, poverty will diminish, and national borders will no longer be barriers to human interchange. Competition, not regulation, ensures consumer choice and quality control. The freer the markets, the greater the choice for the consumer; and the more powerful and happy the world will become. And in order to create the environment in which free trade can flourish, governments must enact fewer controls.

Now there is some truth in all of this economic Darwinism. There is little doubt that in many cases, increased competition means more choices for consumers. There is also little doubt that increased competition brings about lower prices. However, there are a few things missing from this scenario for my liking.

In the first place, there can be no such thing as a free market when a minority controls the infrastructure on which the market rests. To put it in more concrete terms: say there's a market that takes place every Monday, Wednesday and Friday in a building downtown. Vendors can come freely to the market and trade. The ones who will be successful will be those who have balanced supply and demand with their own pricing. The competition between them all will regulate what those prices should be. Fine. But they all have to pay for the space in the market that they take up. In this way, the owner of the space is taking less risk than they are, but is assured of an income every time they come, even when they don't make any money. Now when the owner is also a competitor, that gives him or her an extra edge. Compare that to the hardware and software -- the technology, the computers, the telephones, the satellites and the programmes -- that enable the global market to exist. If your economy is not a producer, of these items, you have begun at a disadvantage, and your trade can't be free.

On another level, too, neither supply nor demand is random. Despite economists' dearest wishes, politics (the exercise and balance of power) cannot be removed from economic transactions. Take the example of Venezuelan oil. In a truly free market, the supplier with the best prices and the most favourable deal ought to be able to negotiate directly with consumers. Trouble is, there are two categories of players in the oil scenario. One category consists of economic entities -- the oil conglomerates, most of them multinational with a strong US base. The other consists of political entities -- regional governments. Once again, if the market is truly free, both categories should have equal access to the supply. However, the political category is subject to political pressure in a way that conglomerates are not.

And then, there's the issue of demand. Free trade advocates speak as though demand is the result of human action, not of design. But this is not entirely true. Suppliers don't leave the purchasing of their products up to bare chance. Instead, they invest sizeable portions of their operating capital on the creation of demand -- a practice more commonly known as advertising. Demand can thus be manipulated to benefit suppliers. Once more, those people most able to flood the market with ads are those who are more likely to succeed.

When we talk about free trade, then, it's important to keep all the issues in mind. It's important not to be fooled by the rhetoric of the power-brokers in the marketplace and believe everything they say. To me, the concept of "free trade" is akin to the concept of equality in Orwell's Animal Farm. All trade is free; but some trade is freer than others.

The ostrich is a lovely bird. Big. Flightless. Beautifully feathered (as we should know, as many of their feathers adorn Junkanoo costumes). Fast.

And much maligned.

Ostriches, according to legend, ignore danger by burying their heads in the sand. (The fact that they do not do this in actuality is neither here nor there; what matters today is that people think they do.) So, according to legend, instead of running or fighting when they're threatened, they simply stick their heads underground and wait for the problem to go away.

The ostrich, not the flamingo, should be our national bird.

I'm not talking about the size of ostrich eggs, or the fact that an ostrich can outrun even Tonique Williams-Darling (they can apparently clock up to 31 mph in speed), or even the fact that an ostrich could be turned into a great Junkanoo costume. I'm talking about the head-burying thing.

We Bahamians could beat the ostrich at its own game. And I'm not talking about politicians here. I'm talking about us all. After all, politicians these days react far more to interest group interests or public pressure than they initiate great things. So the more we dig little holes in the sand for the heads of our leaders, the deeper they'll bury them.

Let's just list some of the issues that are pressing our nation today. Perhaps most urgent is the question of what we call euphemistically "the immigration problem", but which we all know is really the massive presence of Haitians in The Bahamas. They have changed the landscape of our country, we complain. They've changed the personality of our people, who are imagined by Bahamians older than me to be passive and non-violent by nature (though I'm not so certain about that). They crowd our public services, they use up our taxes, they're eroding our culture.

Now I am not at all convinced that the issue is as simple as all that, but for the sake of this article, let's just say it's so. What's been our reaction to this problem? We haven't changed our solution in almost forty years. And the problem has not only not disappeared, it's got worse, far worse. The reason for its worsening is not that Haitians are bad people. It's that we have not accepted, or implemented, a solution that will actually work. Our heads are firmly planted in the sand here, and our tails are waggling in the air.

But that's not the only issue that affects us. Another one is the question of world trade. Whether we sign treaties or remain isolated, we have to deal with it -- not simply at the Ministry of Finance's level, but at the level of every vendor in the nation. And in fact, it's rarely the vendors who have to be educated about world trade; after all, they obtain their wares, most of them, from all over the world. It's the bureaucrats and lawmakers who need to be inserted into the global context so that our laws and our regulations become relevant again.

But are we engaging with the issue and struggling with it and talking about it and carving out a solution that will ensure that we will remain as prosperous in the next fifty or so years of our history as the mid-century Sands-Christie economic model allowed for the last half a century? (If you don’t know which Sands and which Christie I'm talking about, go read up on Bahamian history of the twentieth century and find out. Hint: Not Michelle; not Perry.) No. We're digging holes for our politicians' heads, and sticking them firmly into them. Don't look at regional affiliations, we're shouting; we don't want no foreign workers. And so: heads buried, tails waving, we stench in the mid-twentieth century, with the millennium racing past us.

I could go on to talk about Junkanoo, which has reached a crisis of its own -- desperately in need of a new model of governance, but stymied by the reluctance of politicians, civil servants and Junkanoo leaders alike to let go of even a little of their power, and sponsorship and public support eroding . Or I could talk about Bahamian culture in general, which is in dire need of some kind of statutory, institutional body to oversee its development. In a world in which our children have been enculturated by television and film to be fractured North American clones, we continue to believe that it is possible to administer cultural activity from an understaffed division in a ministry whose first interest has, from its creation, been sports. Or I could talk about the cumbersome and ineffectual nature of our educational system, which was created by duplicating the worst of the colonial model and which eradicated the best. Today, we choose rather to assign police officers to high school campuses instead of seeking fundamental reform.

Our collective heads are buried so deep in the sand that we are blinding ourselves with the sediment.

It's a myth, you know, that ostriches bury their heads in the sand. Ostrich lovers decry the myth as a slander of enormous proportions.

But not to worry.

We Bahamians can bury our heads with the best of them. Our heads are so firmly planted in the dusts of the desert that we had better learn to love the taste of sand.