for Jackson

Recently I listened to German author Bernhard Schlink on the BBC’s World Book Club discussing his novel The Reader. It’s a book about the Holocaust, told, as he says, from the perspective of the second generation of Germans who have lived with that atrocity in their cultural and historical reality, and it explores their share of the guilt. For him, that guilt is shared by anyone who loves or respects someone who was active in the Holocaust (I’m simplifying horribly) unless you are also able to call them to account for their share in the war.

He writes from the perspective of one who knows. In his life, growing up in Germany after the war but before the complicity of most Germans in the Nazi atrocities was publicly acknowledged, he knew, admired and loved many individuals who had been personally responsible for, or who had at least taken part in, the wartime genocides. At some point in his life he was forced to make a moral choice. Should his love and admiration for these people obscure the atrocities in which they were complicit, or was it his responsibility to call them to account for their actions?

The Reader puts this question on the table. On one level, it’s a book about literacy and illiteracy; one of the main characters cannot read or write. Schlink was asked whether he’d intended that to be symbolic or metaphorical, whether he’d intended that trope to represent the blindness of the German people as they ignored the genocides being carried out by the Nazi government. His reply had two sides to it. On the one hand, he said, he was not writing a book from a symbolic point of view. The illiteracy in the book was simply illiteracy–an inability to read. But on the other hand, he added, it was possible for a nation, a group, a people, to breed a sort of moral illiteracy–the inability to behave in ways that were morally acceptable. He used that to account for the parsons and priests and doctors who supported the Nazi regime, who were complicit in the torture and murder of millions, who participated in, encouraged, taught, and celebrated the actions of Hitler and his government. Education and profession were no barriers to atrocity, he argued. What was lacking was not knowledge; it was morality.

So here is what I believe about my country. I believe that we suffer from a profound moral illiteracy, and that this pervades our society from top to bottom. Our approach to life is simple and simplistic at the same time; all that matters is what is good for me right now. We feel no collective sense of outrage at anything that is palpably wrong; we do not even discuss the inherent rightness and wrongness of any issue, but choose to implement what is most convenient. We mouth Christian principles, and are happy to use them to justify oppression and cruelty; we press carefully selected Bible verses into service to justify why, for instance, it should remain legal for a man to rape his wife, but do not examine the same scriptures for the concurrent instructions about men’s responsibilities to love and honour their wives, or spouses’ responsibilities to one another. We turn blind eyes on other instances to ministers of the cabinet and of the gospel and all others who abuse the weak socially, sexually, morally, and physically. We celebrate and glorify hard men of every kind, but despise kindness and compassion. And when it comes time to make hard choices–do we do what is right or what is popular? Do we honour bullies who destroy or value people who seek to build up the common life? Do we work to achieve what is hard but best, or do we settle for what is easily within our (very short) reach?–we make the easy ones every time.

In this we are not all that different from many of our Caribbean neighbours, or even from the USA, for which money and finance have more value than human life. It is not fashionable to hold principles. It is not good business to put people first. It is not profitable to seek to be our brothers’ keepers, and poverty is in terribly bad taste. The moral illiteracy that I think we share does not end at our borders. It is a North American malaise too, but we in the Caribbean have developed too few traditions that can help combat it, and almost no institutions that provide support for moral stands. For, as Schlink observes, to make the hardest moral choices, “You need an institution to support you. If you are on your own it becomes very difficult.”

The problem, I believe, is rooted in the fact that our societies in the Caribbean were never designed to be societies at all. Our region is unique in the modern world in being the one place whose sole purpose was to provide cheap goods, generate capital, and extract raw materials to fuel the prosperity of metropolitan centres. This was not always our function; but over the course of five centuries our indigenous populations, societies and structures were first eradicated, and then explicitly re-created to achieve those goals. And we live in the world that remained.

Academics write often about “the plantation”, but their discussions are remote and not yet as resonant as the legacy of that “plantation”, among whose ruins we still live. The concept of the total institution that was slavery in the Caribbean has not entered the popular discourse on any meaningful level. We have been taught, and still imagine, that we have some kind of autonomy about the societies we build in its wake. We do not. Until we do what Schlink and his modern Germany have done—confront the horrors in our history, and call the perpetrators to account—we cannot hope to build anything new. The foundations on which we build are the bones of our ancestors, and they are too uneasy to allow anything to remain.

As it exists today, the plantation discussion does little more than provide radicals with the language of critique, and conservatives with a philosophy against which to fight. In our world, we appear not to recognize complexity. We believe that victims are justified by their victimhood, and that they cannot ever become oppressors themselves; we believe that responsibility is one-way, and that skin colour is a badge of power, or of oppression. We do not hold the discussion that recognizes the shared responsibility of us all—that remembers that even of us who consider ourselves “victims”, we share in the blood of our oppressors, that we are literally their descendants, or that for many of us who consider ourselves free of the plantation, to share in wealth is to continue to benefit from the forced labour on which this “New World” was constructed. We do not talk about the Africans who sold other Africans to Europeans for guns and ammunition to expand their empires at home, nor do we do not talk about our ancestors who, as the offspring of planters and their slaves, became owners of slaves themselves. We do not recognize the echoes of slavery that  resound everywhere in the global media, local government policies, and the things on which we spend our revenues, both public and private. And we most certainly do not recognize its echoes as we act again and again out of the moral hollowness that is perhaps slavery’s greatest consequence.

It seems inconceivable to me that we do not recognize the echoes of that evil institution in the way in which we think about development, about nationalism, or about democratic principles, in the way that we talk about and to one another, and in the way that we still—still, after two hundred and seven years after the first slave independence—put almost anything  above human beings. But we do not. We can perhaps take some bitter comfort in the fact that we are only following the lead of the world in this; after all, while the Holocaust has been recognized as a crime against humanity for the entire lifetime of the United Nations Organization, and inspired the 1948 Convention against Genocide, it took that same august body until 2001 to declare the institution of slavery an equal crime. But this is no real excuse.

This is the moral illiteracy that plagues the New World in the lengthening shadow of the plantation. Human beings continue to come second to other, “greater” projects. It is to this view that every government in the Caribbean region appears to subscribe, perhaps unwittingly, but subscribe nevertheless, if our collective investment in our human capital is to be any guide. I believe that it is time we, the people of this region, call them out on it. It’s time for us to learn, and teach, the moral alphabet to those we elect to represent and lead us, to our children, and most of all ourselves.

All right, I know that many of you have no idea what the title means. And it doesn’t matter terribly. I’ll decode: ASA stands for Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth. I’m currently attending a conference in Belfast and am struck by the centrality of one recurrent theme: the theme of peace, of terror, of reconciliation.

Of course it’s no accident that these themes recur in Northern Ireland, where the peace settlement is gaining history of its own. What is striking me, though, is that Europeans (and others) are deeply engaged in the process of peace and reconciliation, so much so that they have provided fertile ground for study at the anthropological level. Again, I realize that that doesn’t mean a whole lot for many of us, but I’ll do my best to explain.

Maybe, first, I’ll try and explain why this concerns me. part of it is the sense — which I’m finding remarkable — that groups of people who perpetrate mass injustices, violence, terror, oppression on other groups of people are now for some reason taking responsibility for those actions, are now working out a course of reconciliation, attempting healing so that their states, their societies, can move on. For example: the Australian government officially apologized to the Aboriginal people for their oppression during the early colonial period; the South African government carried out Truth and Reconciliation Tribunals in the post-apartheid period; the British government recently apologized to Africa and the Caribbean for their involvement in the transAtlantic slave trade.

What was very interesting for me, though, was a paper on the effects of injustice and abuse of power given by Vincent Crapanzano on the plight of the Harkis of Algeria in the post-independence era. What interested me was that his study actually uncovered the process of hurt as well as the potentiality for healing, and in this way it helped to illuminate concretely for me what is questioned by so many on this side of the world — why, since slavery was abolished so long ago, and since colonialism has been eradicated, we still talk about the legacy of both. Answers to that question were provided in these papers, which showed fairly coherently what happens to a group of people in the aftermath of brutality and oppression, and how healing does not occur as soon as the offense has come to an end. It showed how healing must be a conscious, engaged, moral and difficult endeavour. And it showed it in anthropological terms — that is, by pondering the possibility of cultural universals, untying the question from the too-easy myth of “race”, and talking about human processes.

And this is important to our part of the world exactly why? Well, while I’d hope that it was pretty obvious to people reading, I’ll spell it out. Two reasons.

First: as a people, as a “nation”, we have not dealt with our own hurt and victimhood, our own history of brutality and oppression. We have not talked about what it meant to be enslaved or marginalized in our own country, about what it meant to be separated into “natives” and “residents” and although the generation of people who were faced with the concrete reality that their skin colour or cultural heritage limited what they could achieve, what they could do, is aging, the psychological residue of that lingers on in every doubt that we raise, collectively or as individuals, about what Bahamians deserve, or can do.

And second, as a people, as a “nation”, we are actively engaged in oppressing another group of people, in some ways as radically and as blatantly as we ourselves were oppressed in the past. And ignoring that fact will not make it go away. We must learn that oppression is not only a product of “race”; being here in Northern Ireland, I recognize forcefully that whiteness is not a barrier to oppression, and I am reminded — as though I’d ever forgotten — that denying that people of the same race can oppress one another (black Bahamians vs black Haitians for instance) does not mean that oppression does not occur. What it means is that we lie about it, that’s all. And if we are not careful, if we do not learn from others, we are running the risk of perpetrating, over time, the kind of victimhood that divides nations.

I will write more about this, but first I want to get hold of the papers that were presented at this conference and read them to internalize their observations. I just know this. We need to gain a sense of consciousness as a nation about oppression and victimhood. We need it to walk into the future with clear eyes.

In the Tribune today, Adrian Gibson comments on the Elizabeth by-election:

With no easily certifiable winner and throngs of voters who shunned the polls, the Elizabeth by-election has revealed voter discontent and, at this juncture, shown-up both the FNM and the PLP as poor political salesmen.

The Elizabeth by-election, featuring a virtual tie, ensuing recounts, hordes of lawyers and the possibility of an election court challenge, appears to have been the most contentious by-election campaign in recent history and has caused a political circus in that constituency.

The by-election was a nail-biter, initially yielding a razor-thin margin of victory for the FNM’s candidate and a thoroughly inconclusive outcome.

via The Tribune.

No offense, Adrian, but “poor political salesmen”? I don’t think so.  More like irrelevant, condescending, cowardly, and out of touch. How can you sell the vision you don’t have? How can you represent a people you don’t respect? How can you expect greatness out of a people when your supporters behave like hooligans and you are too afraid to correct them?

Neither major party has outlined any clear position on governance and their concepts of the Bahamian future are mired firmly in the past. Neither major party seems to think enough of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas and its citizenry to demand standards of behaviour that showcase the parties and the nation at their best, preferring apparently to reinforce and reward our worst. Neither major party has shown the courage it needs to correct the clear failures inherent in our system (like our outdated, bloated, inefficient and misnamed “civil service”, our overreliance on tourism and foreign investment at the expense of real investment in the Bahamian citizenry, or our crucial need to address and rethink the question of (im)migration in The Bahamas, or the  overpopulation and underrepresentation of our capital city at the expense of the entire country). Both seem to believe that ad hominem attacks on their rivals, bombast and one-upmanship will satisfy the people they are sworn to serve. Neither seems to have cottoned on to the fact that Bahamian people want, and expect, far more.

The BDM has gained some loyalty but is not much better when it comes to vision. Rodney Moncur for the Workers Party is as he always was: radical, irreverent, interesting, but ultimately divisive. The NDP may prove to be an exciting new force, especially with its bid for more direct democracy with regard to parliamentary representation, but cautious (or jaded) voters will demand more before they throw their full support behind them.

What the by-election suggests to me is that the time is ripe for people of conscience and conviction to take a chance and stand up as true representatives of the Bahamian people — that committed independents and new parties may well be a force to reckon with in the coming General Election, that anything is possible in this post-Obama world, that yes, we can reaches beyond the US borders.

If you’re a follower of this blog, you’ll know that about a month and a half ago there was considerable activity here online about the Day of Absence concept. For those who don’t know or don’t remember, here’s a short refresher, both about the original idea and the critique that it sparked.

Thirty-six years after independence and forty-one years after majority rule, creative workers in our country are unable to find work in the areas in which God has gifted them. There are virtually no avenues in The Bahamas to enable creative people to develop and hone their talents, or to enable them to make use of them when they are developed. Our greatest brain drain is arguably in the area of the arts; like Sidney Poitier over sixty years ago, Bahamians who want to exercise their talents in the cultural industries are faced with the choice of pursuing their callings as hobbies at home, or of leaving home to make a living by their gifts elsewhere. And we are all the poorer for it.

Nicolette Bethel, “Day of Absence: 11 February”, Blogworld, January 30 2009

The idea behind the day of observance was to sensitize people — Bahamians primarily, but anyone, really, who regards the arts and cultural activity as luxuries, upper-class frivolities that have no place in the real life of adults — to the centrality of the arts. In a nutshell, it asks people to imagine a day without art. To imagine life without music, design, decoration, colour, rhyme, story, or dance. To imagine worship without these things; to imagine working or living or moving from place to place without them; to believe the lie that art is a luxury.

And then to consider according art and artists the respect that they deserve.

The critique interrogates that very idea of respect. Articulated by Ward Minnis just in time for the new year, it questions the call to respect artists, particularly in The Bahamas, when artists themselves appear not to respect their craft as they should. It also questions the idea of absence, suggesting that good art, conscious art, art that challenges rather than anaesthetizes is already absent enough in our nation, and calling for a Day of Presence. And it queries the political resonance of the title of the day, resisting the parallel with the place of African-Americans in the pre-civil rights era. Here’s just a taste of it (but to fully comprehend it, you must go and read the whole thing on his blog Mental Slavery):

The metaphor of absence is in error. We do not need any more absence. We need to make our presence felt. The dissonance at the centre of the proposal leads to more explaining than is necessary, and the point gets lost. Most important, the metaphor misses the problem that we, as an artistic community, have. Ours is not simply an issue of being taken for granted; the roots go far deeper than that. A day of hand-holding isn’t going to get us where we need to go.

Ward Minnis, “Trying to Make a Dollar out of Fifty Cents”, Mental Slavery, December 31, 2009

The debate began, and sparked responses from me on this blog, here:

Day of Absence 2010: First Response – Clarity

Day of Absence 2010: Second Response – Quality

Day of Absence 2010: Third Response – Investment

This post is to pick up where we left off (you’ll notice that the last response also happened to be the same date as the Haiti earthquake) and for me to say, in full certainty, that once again, on February 11, 2010, I’ll be observing the Day of Absence.

Watch this space. There’s more to say. And feel free to come and join the discussion if you feel so moved.

All right, enough responding to the inappropriate reactions of Bahamians to the Haitian earthquake. You know what the old people say: don’t mind the noise in the market, just mind the price of the fish. So what the fish costing these days?

I thought I’d start a list of things that ordinary Bahamians are doing. As often happens, people involved in doing good are too busy working to make noise, and so it’s easy to get distracted by the more vocal among us and imagine that we Bahamians are not giving or assisting. So I thought I’d make a list of what we are doing. I am absolutely certain that I will miss many people out, so I invite anyone who wants to add to this list. Let’s make it as long as we can. (I’ve got a list over on FB too but let’s push it here to the blog, where it can last for a long long time).

We can start with these:

• The Tribune, Ways to Help Haiti
  • Red Cross accepting non-perishable foods, water, blankets, sheets, towels, cots, clothing and packing boxes. Help will be sent to Haiti and Inagua (which is preparing to receive refugees)
  • Salvation Army looking for medical personnel and accepting donations of goods and money
  • New Providence Community Centre (NPCC) organizing mission trip and working through their connections in Haiti and Dominican Republic; accepting donations of money
  • Christian Council overseeing and coordinating relief and maintaining contact with churches in Haiti to ascertain needs
  • Grand Bahama Haitian Bahamian Society accepting donations through Jetta Baptiste’s Multi-Service Centre, Freeport
  • Haitian Embassy has opened up an account through Royal Bank of Canada
    More details available from the original article
• Rotary Clubs in Bahamas already sent in supply flights
  Methodist churches in The Bahamas already have a team on the ground in Haiti to assist relief efforts
  Bahamian government, through NEMA, is coordinating teams of doctors, counsellors and construction workers to go to Haiti in the days and weeks and months to come (in conjunction with CDEMA)
  
• Bahamian government established a Haiti emergency assistance fund
• CARICOM efforts in Haiti may to be coordinated from Bahamas Embassy in Port-au-Prince, which was not damaged in the quake
• Freeport and Nassau being used as ports of call for transshipments of goods to Haiti in conjunction with Florida
• Massive relief efforts ongoing in Grand Bahama
• Private pilots providing supply flights to Haiti
• Sky Bahamas airline organizing relief assistance
• Bahamas Society of Engineers working with Methodists to send assistance

In keeping with the survey of Caribbean blogs that tell us that here in The Bahamas we are not alone, here’s a taste of what the CHOGM attendees (including our own Prime Minister, who appears to believe that the building on Shirley Street we call the National Centre for the Performing Arts is good enough for the Bahamian people) had to experience in Trinidad and Tobago. The photograph is from the inside of their spanking-new National Academy for the Performing Arts (which takes one’s breath away). The commentary is less flattering, though. Go have a read.

To say it got mixed reviews is an understatement. Some people loved it. Others hated it. I wish I had seen all of it. But of what I saw, the following moments from the opening cultural show for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting stood out most …

* P L E A S U R E *: Those unforgettable moments from the CHOGM opening

There’s an affliction that strikes countries whose histories come out of colonialism. It’s one of the legacies that dangles on, like a dying but not-quite-dead jellyfish, wrapping its tentacles over whatever it can reach, spreading its venom to newer and newer generations. It’s the sense that what happens in your space of the world, what takes place in your territory, is not quite real. It isn’t really happening to proper people. What is real, or important, or of anything significance at all, happens Over There — in the Real World, where Real People Live. Where we inhabit are the realms of the shadow people.

This post was prompted by, but is only partly about the closure of Starbucks COB. It’s also about bigger issues: about the way in which we treat ourselves, about our expectations that we citizens have of our country and our development, and the way in which those expectations are exploited by those people who enter the political arena. It’s tangentially about the way in which we behaved like adults when following the US presidential elections one year ago, but how we revert to childishness when we follow our own (although the idiocies presented us by our own politicians are no different from the mass of idiocy force-fed to American citizens, and, in many cases, are less egregious (can anyone say Rod Blagojevich?)). But it’s fundamentally about what lies at the core of this tendency, and it’s this: somehow we think we are only good enough for second-class everything. Somehow, we believe that the good stuff should be saved for our visitors, put on display for the real world. Somehow, we don’t actually think we’re real.

Let me put it another way. We don’t think we deserve stuff that other people consider ordinary. Now this doesn’t simply affect us here in The Bahamas. It occurs throughout the Caribbean and Africa, with notable exceptions. In this, we mirror our colonial pasts, when the good stuff was saved for sending to the motherland (or serving to her representatives) and the dregs were good enough for us.

We see evidence of this situation in many of the homes in which we grew up, where we had one room in which we put all our goodies — the best furniture, the best decor, the good china, the pretty drapes — and which we used only when visitors came by — and only very special visitors at that. Some of us kept the dining table set with our china and silverware, making that space a kind of museum for our good stuff. Many of us kept the plastic on the furniture. In some cases, in houses that were built in the second half of the twentieth century particularly, we even had a separate entrance for different sorts of people: friends and relatives and family would enter through one door (usually the kitchen or side door) and only visitors would walk through the front.

Now as far as that goes, it’s an interesting cultural adaptation to a history of violence and subordination. By itself, it isn’t remarkable. It’s even got many good qualities about it — there’s always a space in one’s home that is ready to entertain visitors, there’s room for hospitality, there’s order, there’s good sense.

But where it becomes dangerous is when we take that practice outside our homes and apply it to the society at large — to our core institutions, to our city, to our nation as a whole, as we do — reserving the new and the shiny for the special visitors (or the people at the top), like having a special conference room for the Minister in many agencies, and another “conference room” for ordinary mortals; or reserving the use of a newly renovated building for special occasions and special people; or deciding, implicitly, that a certain level of comfort or service, a certain quality of experience, is “good enough” for ordinary Bahamians, and that the kindness and warmth and smiles are only turned on for foreign visitors.

(more to come)

I recently discovered noellenicolls.com, yet another blog by a conscious young Bahamian woman. I was drawn to it by this, a travelogue of one women trailing the length of a Bahamian island. It didn’t hurt that the island was one I know better than most — Long Island — but what kept me was the blog itself. Here’s now it’s described:

Discover the world inside my head on the pages of this prayer book, in the love letters to my Man of Steele. Prayer Book is my ‘politics’ blog that examines the thoughts and questions I have of myself, of God, and the world. Steele Chronicles are stories about the late great R. Kirk Steele. Travelogues are tales of my adventures around the world. Reading Room is a taste of the mind candy I ingest from the world’s wordsmiths.

And here’s where the inspiration came from:

The inspiration from for the original Creative Extremes, which was intended to be a current affairs blog, came from Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”.

I recommend it. Go have a read, and sink right in.

It came to my attention last month that our government was planning to postpone, once again, the hosting of the Caribbean Festival of Arts, if it had not yet done so. Announcements to that effect would be made very soon, I was told. The fact that such announcements have not yet been made may make this post obsolete. I rather doubt it, however.

It should be no surprise to anyone at all that I think this is a terrible idea. It’s not just because I would like to write for a living and make that living in the country in which I grew up. It’s also because it’s flying in the face of what international agencies focussed on development economics suggest is the place of culture in that development.

For those of us who don’t know, or who haven’t noticed, the world has changed. As I write, indeed, at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, the US President is opening the door for negotiations with Cuba, which, as we all know, is the only viable competitor for The Bahamas’ prosperity in the Caribbean region. In fact, it’s possible to argue that the only reason The Bahamas has maintained its supreme position in the region has been because the fifty-year long US embargo of Cuba, has coincided with the latest Bahamian boom. But now, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton is visiting Cuba, and the Obama administration is making very clear noises that the embargo will soon be lifted.

At the same time, for the first time in almost twenty years, the Bahamian government’s plan for prosperity — foreign investment, foreign investment, foreign investment — is not bearing fruit. Why not? The reasons are various. Perhaps the biggest is the reason Barack Obama himself gave for changing the way the USA has done business for the past generation or so — that trickle-down economics, or the spreading of the wealth accumulated by the rich and mighty — does not work. It no longer works in the USA, which is the greatest nation in the world; and it has not worked in The Bahamas as an engine of development for a country that has not yet invested in itself.  Oh, it has done well in providing a couple of decades’ worth of get-rich-quick money for a smattering of people. But as we are noticing, where the sharing of wealth is dependent on the goodwill of the greedy, little gets shared. And so our current “wealth” is almost wholly dependent on the goodwill of the foreign investor, who is interested in the people of this nation only as workers — as block-layers, lifeguards, toilet-cleaners, cooks, drivers, or middle managers who have no ability to affect or shape company policy.

It is not foreign investment that economists and development agencies are suggesting is the engine of economic development in the 21st century; it’s culture. If you don’t believe me, go and look it up. Culture is no longer regarded as peripheral to development. It has been recognized as a viable, resilient, sustainable and renewable source of economic gain. A quick look at any international economic arrangement negotiated since 2002 will illustrate this truth. International agencies everywhere, from the European Union to the Organization of American States to the United Nations to the World Trade Organization, are recognizing the place of culture on the economic agenda.

But here, in The Bahamas, for a generation and a half — the entire time since Independence — our national policies have been shaped by a group of men and a handful of women whose actions and behaviour cumulatively suggest that they would rather erase Bahamian culture than invest in it.

Despite our so-called prosperity, we are the only Caribbean nation that cannot demonstrate our government’s pride in what makes us us. Part of this is because Government policy since 1992 has focussed on conning foreign investors to put in infrastructure that (we are told) the government cannot afford. The result? Despite soaring tourist arrivals (and, presumably, soaring demand for authentic Bahamian cultural products), the cultural industries are in effective decline. Those foreign investors in whom we’ve placed our trust? They don’t care whose culture visitors consume, as long as the profits flow to into their coffers.  What we should have learned by now is that no people — or their representatives — can depend on someone else to develop their own cultural resources. We have to do that job for ourselves.

But we don’t. The recurrent budget allotted by our goverment to culture, despite all the fussing about a so-called Ministry of Culture and the appointment of Ministers of State, only crossed the $2 million line in the 2008-2009 budget year. The government agency charged with the development of Bahamian culture is not a Ministry, nor is it a Department; it is a Division, which means that even that $2 million is not administered by anybody in that Division. (It isn’t administered by the Minister, either, for anyone who remains fooled into thinking that this may be so.)  The Chief Financial Officer in any government agency is the Permanent Secretary, or the Director of any Department that has a budget head; and the Cultural Affairs Division is so far away from having a budget head that it would be laughable if it were not so frightening. That $2 million is inscribed in a single line item under whatever budget head the Division is attached to (Office of the Prime Minister (Head 14) one year, Education (Head 38) the next, Youth, Sports and Culture (Head 47) the next). And that $2 million is expected to support festivals throughout The Bahamas, maintain a “national theatre” (which is so far from being either thing that it demonstrates the depth of the contempt that our governments have for us) run a National Arts Festival, finance sundry cultural events throughout the year, and run the $1.5 million festival of Junkanoo.

Stand this up against the over $91 million we allot to the Ministry of Tourism, much of which is spent outside The Bahamas. I was once told, laughingly, by a senior official in that Ministry that the budget I was given to work with (that was back in 2004, when the budget was maybe $1.2 million, give or take) was what Tourism managers were given to make mistakes with. We can afford Miss Universe, which will benefit Atlantis; but we cannot, it appears, afford CARIFESTA, which will benefit us all.

But it is not Miss Universe, which is a cultural brand developed elsewhere, with economic returns for the owners of the brand that will develop the Bahamian economy.

According to international agencies and economists the world around, it is our culture.

This is why the planned postponement of CARIFESTA, if it is indeed so planned (and if it isn’t, the lack of any progress towards the hosting of that festival in 2010 indicates that a decision has already been made, if not announced), is the terrible idea that it is.

I have yet to be convinced that Miss Universe will benefit the Bahamian economy substantially, other than in the collection of departure taxes, which will be funnelled into agencies that spend their monies outside the nation anyway. I am sure it will keep the Kerzners happy. I know, however, that I and mine will certainly not benefit in any way from Miss Universe; nor, I imagine, will most other people in the cultural industries, unless their name be Ronnie Butler or K.B. and unless they be set to open for whatever international giant that comes to perform. I do not think that food vendors or writers or poets or improv performers or even the broad Junkanoo community will benefit in any substantial way from Miss Universe, not to mention the car rental agencies, the restaurants and watering holes on the Bahamian side of the bridge, the small hotels and guest houses, the vast majority of taxi drivers and the tour bus companies not sanctioned by Atlantis, the street cleaners, the road-repairers, the marching bands, the graphic designers, the t-shirt makers, or the film community.

These are the people who will benefit from CARIFESTA, however, which is unsuited to be housed at Atlantis, that most inauthentic institution, that theme park for the unsuspecting, which only resides among us, but is not of us.  The influx of visitors, and the type of visitors that will make up that influx, will be interested in us, who we are, what we do, and will spend money on what is most Bahamian, will not be conned into overspending on what is fictional at best.

And yet (I’m told) our leaders believe that to host the Festival will be a waste of money in the end.

I know this much. Economic evidence from around the world exists which proves our leaders wrong. And common sense suggests it too. Our development will not happen at the hands of foreigners; it is in our own hands, and the hands of the governments we elect to lead us. We can read the reports for ourselves, and accept the idea that culture is the economic sector in which to invest for nations that are still developing; or we can share the delusions of our politicians, which confuse the grandeur of the monstrosities the foreign investors build (and usually protect behind gates and bridges and visitor passes) with development of a nation and of a people. We need to make up our own minds. From here on in, it’s up to us.

I’m in New York City this week. I’m in New York today. It’s part of a regular pilgrimage we make to the city every year if we can make it; above all, my husband’s a theatre director, and this is part of his investment in his career, this is part of his own research. Since we’ve been married it’s been part of mine, which has been good for the playwriting side of me.

But being in the US on election day, especially this election day, is historic.

This election is historic. It’s already been so — the fact that two major contenders for president were visible minorities, albeit in the same party. Whoever wins will make history — the first black president, the first female vice-president, the oldest president. But history has already been made.

What’s historic for me in my adult life is the participation of the American people in the vote. Since Reagan, which was the last time that I remember an election generating as much discussion as this one, there’s been a distancing between the average citizen on the streets from their leadership. Perhaps it was the result of the contempt shown for good sense by the nomination of a B movie actor as Republican Presidential candidate back in 1980, I don’t know; it certainly seemed like that to me. So it’s true I was seventeen at the time, and frightened for the world. So it’s true that it was a terrifying time for those of us who didn’t have any say, for those of us who weren’t moved by the smooth delivery of the man who would be president (and why wouldn’t he have a smooth delivery? He was an actor, after all, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but he made his living all his life by being able to deliver lines.) But the election of Reagan marked, it seemed to me, watching from the outside, an abdication on the part of the majority of the American people of their right to participate in the democratic process.

As Gil Scott-Heron observed in his commentary on that election:

Well, the first thing I want to say is:

Mandate my ass! 

Because it seems as though we’ve been convinced that 26% of the registered voters, not even 26% of the American people, but 26% of the registered voters form a mandate or a landslide. 21% voted for Skippy and 3, 4% voted for somebody else who might have been running. 

(“B-Movie“)

Being on the outside in American elections, watching a fraction of the American people go to the polls and elect leaders whose impact resonated far beyond the borders of the USA, and suffering the consequences of those choices, has not been easy. As a result I’ve distanced myself from all of the elections. Why work myself up about something I can do nothing about? Why worry about how “they” stole the election in Florida (twice) when I could have never made a difference anyway? And more recently, why get worked up about this presidential race when I could never do anything to affect its outcome?

I know the answer to the last question. It’s been answered again and again around the world, and yes, I voted in the if-the-world-could-vote poll, and yes, I voted for Obama. But I’m above all a Bahamian, and Bahamians above all are pragmatic people, and fundamentally what matters is what have we learned from this process? What have we learned from the involvement of ordinary Bahamians in the Obama campaign? What have we learned from the real chance of real change, and how will that affect us at home?

Because our last election was a joke. I’ve said what I can say about it; we voted based on hype, rather like we go to see movies at Galleria, more than on anything of substance. We never questioned our candidates about anything likely to affect us and our nation in the long run. We never demanded from them what we have seen from the American candidates. We never dissected the spin, if spin it was; we never educated ourselves in any general sense on issues, on anything that might actually matter. No. We preferred to go along with what the newspapers said, with what the talk shows said, voting from emotion rather than reason, allowing both parties to get away with sheer idiocy that has very little to do with the world in which we find ourselves. 

And how much do we really, even now, understand about the world in which we find ourselves? In our Bahama-for-Obama frenzy (which, understand me, I share), how much do we understand what that means for us? How much do we really appreciate about the implications of a victory for Barack, which is (at the risk of jinxing a sure thing) the likely outcome of this vote today? It goes beyond the glib Democrats-are-bad-for-our-economy platitudes (which are pretty shallowly-based it seems to me, and have not really considered the idea from the point of view of history; was Truman bad for our economy? Kennedy? Was Roosevelt throughout his career, or was it only at the beginning when he repealed the idiotic Volstead Act?) 

Here’s the thing. How can we, after this election, which has already been historic no matter what the outcome, in that it’s likely to be one of the few American election in half a century or so where far more than 26% of the registered voters turned out, go back to thinking of ourselves in the same way? How can we maintain the sense of victimhood that allows us to get away with the systemic mediocrity, institutional cowardice and bullying that have marked our preferred way of doing things for well over twenty years? How can we continue to allow ourselves to doubt ourselves after this?

You tell me.