11 February 2010
The idea behind the Day of Absence is political because all of the above are connected. The oppression shared by Haitians in The Bahamas (and the Americas), and by African-Americans in the USA in the pre-civil rights era is the same oppression that makes the arts irrelevant to us today. They all stem from the same origin: the need to justify the widespread enslavement and maltreatment of a group of people in order to create an empire or a world for oneself. The first is the economic end-product of that original sin, if you like. The second is the political end-product. The third — the place, or lack of place, of art in our society is the psychological by-product.
In order to enslave an entire “race” of people, you have to displace them, you have to deprive them of their possessions, you have to deprive them of their rights, and — most insidious of all — you have to deprive them of their sense of who they are. The last is, like art in The Bahamas, invisible, and so it is the hardest of all to counteract. You have to tell them, and tell them so they come to believe it, that they have no culture, that nothing good ever came out of their country of origin, that they are fortunate to have been enslaved, so that they might learn culture and art from the enslavers. (For those who find this language offensive, I apologize, but if you know some other way to say it without lying about it, I’m interested to see it).
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8 February 2010
Is the Emperor naked? Is Art really absent? Nicolette makes it abundantly clear that, “We Bahamians have cultivated the habit of supporting certain cultural endeavours simply because they are produced by Bahamians, regardless of quality. We have suppressed our critical faculties. We have come to expect sub-standard work from Bahamians, so much so that the very adjective “Bahamian” stands for mediocrity.” While this sad case of affairs is undeniable, it is also true that there is an abundance of individuals and organizations that, in spite of the culture of the “Emperor and his court”, produce diverse expressions of the highest standards.
This is a blow that Nico strikes on the defensive in her “Second Response” to Ward’s stinging critique. She asks two questions, how good are we? And, how do we get better? She also argues that most of us choose to present the culture of mediocrity to make the argument that we are not that good. She turns that argument on itself and begs us to focus on the positive. There is no argument from any of us that for a country of our size we have produced an enormous volume of excellent Artwork of all kinds.
Ward argues, however, that when we think of “the world of Art”, we are thinking mostly of artists generally from outside our borders. This is a very important issue, in his mind, because he says, ” The reality is that most, if not all of the images and products that filter our way from great foreign cultural creators, such as the United States, have been produced by professionals who have already been paid. To ask the right question therefore, is to ask, what would the Bahamas be without Bahamian Art?”
I agree with Ward that the metaphor of absence must be questioned. Ward says. “We do not need any more absence. We need to make our presence felt”. We particularly need to make our presence felt to ourselves, so that we, Bahamians, would not automatically conclude that to get quality creative production or design, we need to look outside of ourselves.
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