In Shakespeare in Paradise, we do world-class theatre and we do it while we hold down jobs because WE CANNOT PAY THE PEOPLE IN IT. We pay people what we can: with transfers of knowledge, a safe place to be, with tickets and t-shirts and books, by exposing them to international and professional performers. With opportunities. With food. Sometimes, we can give them a little money.
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“o moon, i’m gone, i cried, and fell upon the earth,
yes, she said, but death is mother of rebirth.”
I write today to honour, to remember, to mourn my friend, classmate, editor, fellow poet Lynn Sweeting.
I was out to dinner on Thursday night with lifetime friends, people who, like me, had known Lynn from our school days and who had grown up with her, together, apart, together again.
We were members of the QC Class of ‘79. Like me and Salina Eldon (whose family I was at dinner with), we went through both primary and high school together. But unlike Salina, whom I met in Grade One, Lynn and I also were at nursery school together, something she reminded me of sometime last year during the pandemic, when we were discussing a nursery school photograph. There was Lynn, and there I was too.
Last time I saw Lynn was during the election of 2017. She was spending more and more time in her house (the same house she grew up in, the same house I had always known). I never thought we wouldn’t see each other in person again.
This is not going to be a long eulogy. All I have to say about Lynn is that I honoured and admired her unquenchable spirit, her burning integrity, her vision, her righteous anger as a differently abled woman in this violent, unequal society of ours.
And I salute her for her vision, her art, her poetry. Let her words remember her.
tongues of the ocean NOVEMBER 1, 2009
(for the woman of difference)
Listen darling, I rode to my old friend’s cliff-top wedding in a wheelbarrow,
And everything was groovy,
I made a joke about Diane making me walk through the bush
My entire life,
Everybody laughed.
My lipstick was red, my Indian skirt to the floor was green,
I made that wheelbarrow look good, honey,
I was the prettiest crippled girl anyone had ever seen.
I am showing you this story
(see the Goddess in a wheelbarrow,
see the sun gone a lavender colour all the way
to his very edges,
see the broken pot where
the most beautiful of all the ferns will grow…)
to let you know,
you have the power
to spin bad luck
into green seeds
that do your soul so good
when you go planting.
Little sister let me tell you,
They’re going to stare anyway,
So give them something to look at,
A little womanish attitude,
A little glitter on your tennis shoes.
Some continue the campaign of lies against you
Even when you prove them wrong,
(She never walked around the room on her toes,
She doesn’t miss what she’s never known.)
Fear is the meaning of their favorite song,
but not the meaning of yours.
Love up your own self fearlessly.
Imagine the forest restored
and never forget
to bless your lovely wheelbarrow at the wedding.
tongues of the ocean JUNE 5, 2011
these are the days
for caring about the poem,
let it be round,
softly curved like a moon,
washed in sandbank green,
tongue of the ocean blue,
let it bite your tongue
like mango in salt sea,
let it bring you to your knees
like the sight of a lost mother
coming through the door,
like blue sky raining,
like blood upon the floor,
let it reek of roses
as if grown among roses,
crabgrass and holy bones,
let it say everything
I dare not say
in a voice I’m content
to call my own.
tongues of the ocean JULY 31, 2011
she carved
the divining chair
from mahogany wood
with strong hands
and a good knife
then took her seat
in the midnight heat
of the island moon
she crossed over
into the other world
upon the duho
winged thing
and back again,
when her trip was done
she raised her voice,
having stories to tell.
in my dream
she stepped through
a green curtain
into the living room,
remember me,
she said, and
remember yourself,
so much depends on this.
And finally, heartbreakingly, most aptly:
tongues of the ocean JULY 1, 2012
i feel like i have lived a thousand years,
i said to moon when she was fat and full,
when she grew dark i knelt and bled my tears
from wounds called eyes into a silver bowl.
i poured them down upon the plum tree root
as she went waxing through the midnight sky,
and though i never heard the drum and flute
young again i was, with wings to fly.
i saw her hanging with the noon’s sun king,
she never tried to make me understand,
nor did she ask for faith or blind believing
when eclipsed i couldn’t see her reaching hand.
o moon, i’m gone, i cried, and fell upon the earth,
yes, she said, but death is mother of rebirth.
Walk good, Lynn Sweeting, ancestress. Death is the mother of rebirth.
Fifty years ago, there was a debate raging in The Bahamas. It was your pretty typical Bahamian debate. One group of Bahamians were agitating for full self-determination, in this case political independence from Great Britain. The other group of Bahamians were arguing that we were “not ready” to govern ourselves.
I was nine years old at the time. That didn’t make me old enough to really understand what was going on, but I could feel the passion in those around me, and I appreciated it was kind of a big deal. On the one side were people on my father’s side of the family, who, along with my mother and my uncle, were super-proud and super-nationalist. They argued that the only way to be ready was to take the plunge. On the other side were people on my mother’s side of the family, who suggested that we needed to learn how to govern ourselves before we could govern ourselves. That independence so early was foolhardy and we would make a mess of things. We weren’t ready.
This is a debate that I have heard again and again and again over the course of my life. No matter what the topic, it seems, no matter how we look at it, no matter how long it has been since we took the plunge and headed for independence, we are still making the same old argument. Fifty years on, there are still groups of Bahamians who take the stand that “we” are “not ready” to do … whatever it is we know we ought to do.
Right now, what’s most pressing for me personally, as an Associate Professor at the University of The Bahamas, the only Bahamian university in the entire world, the same debate has had a major impact.
What, it seems, “we” are “not ready” to do, fifty years after Independence, is lead our own university.
Bahamians are not qualified enough, experienced enough, exposed enough, whatever enough, to lead a Bahamian university. Apparently knowing something about one’s country is, well, not enough.
These days, we seem governed by this maxim: the first choice is foreign, the second choice a Bahamian who lives in foreign, the third choice a Bahamian who stays here.
It wasn’t always so. In 1974, when the College was founded, we sought to be led by the best among us.
But times, it seems, have changed.
Almost a year ago, after an international call for applicants to serve as the next President of the University of The Bahamas, the inaugural UB Board of Trustees and its search committee sat down to deliberate on who would be the best choice. By summer they had narrowed it down. After having screened over 70 applicants (so I’m told), several of them Bahamians with creditable experience (one of them the former Provost of the University of The Bahamas), the shortlist was released, as follows:
Sir Anthony Seldon, retired Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University
Dr. Erik Rolland, Dean of Business Administration at California Polytechnic & State University
Dr. Ian Strachan, President of the Northern Bahamas Campus of the University of The Bahamas
Three men.
Two white men.
Two non-Bahamian men.
For the Bahamas’ national university. 47 years after its establishment.
In the part of the twenty-first century when Me Too and Black Lives Matter are making other lilywhite, Eurocentric universities around the world rethink the people they put in charge, we here in The Bahamas seemed to think that a shortlist like this was acceptable.
But wait, I said to myself: at least they have Ian Strachan on this list. After all, who could be better suited for the job? He’s been being groomed for it at least since 2012. He was elevated to VP status seven years ago. He was mentored directly by a former UB president. He was promoted to Vice-President of the Northern Bahamas campus, presumably to continue grooming him for the top job of the whole university—and in that capacity built that campus even after its destruction by Hurriane Dorian. And round about the time he submitted his application for the presidency, he was elevated to President of the Northern Bahamas Campus. It’s a no-brainer, right? This man, this graduate of the Bahamian public school system and this product of the College, is going to be our first Independence-era, homegrown, home-educated President. What better message can any governing body send to the nation they are representing than that?
Dr. Ian Strachan, President of UB North Campus
Not so fast, Nicolette.
Apparently, plenty of people—led by the Board of Trustees of the University of The Bahamas, but followed, it seems, by many others—think that retired vice-chancellors of private British universities or serving deans of state polytechnics are as qualified to lead The Bahamas’ only national university as a man who grew up here, was educated here, gained international experience in stellar HBCUs and eastern seaboard colleges (Ivy Leagues among them), returned here, wrote his dissertation about here, published his books about here, built critical political awareness through theatre and discussions here, is raising his children here, is planning to send those children to the very university he wants to head—here.
More qualified, in fact, because the job has been offered to the Dean.
Not the Bahamian President.
The best is foreign.
Second best is Bahamian who lives in foreign.
Third best is Bahamian who stays here.
But maybe there’s more.
Maybe that word “foreign” is code. We live in a world, after all, that Europe made. We live in a world that was shaped in such a way to build a pyramid of worth and value that had Europe at the top and Africa at the bottom, and if we’re not careful, we will continue to build that pyramid forever.
Because I ask myself this. What does a dean of business administration of a polytechnic university have that makes him more suitable to lead a national university in a postcolonial nation than a president who already works there?
Could the answer possibly lie in the one attribute that Ian Gregory Strachan does not have? A white skin?
Is that what makes a dean more suitable for a growing, challenged, complicated, difficult, postcolonial black national university in a growing, challenged, complicated, difficult, postcolonial black nation than a president?
Does whiteness really still trump local expertise, commitment and vision?
Does it drown out the achievements of the man who has given his career to his nation and his institution, who has raised a drowned campus from its sediment?
If you white, you all right.
If you brown, stick around.
If you black, hang back.
Fifty years on, we are, apparently, still not ready.
But I might be wrong. Judge for yourselves. I’m giving the last word to the man who was and remains my pick to lead the University of The Bahamas and prepare the next generation of Bahamians for the next fifty years of Independence. You listen. I might be wrong. You tell me.
Heading to Harrisburg tomorrow, god willing (and COVID allowing), to participate in the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference IN PERSON!!
Shakespeare in Paradise is taking a contingent of four. There, we’ll be participating in some sessions, attending others, and making connections preparatory to bringing the conference home to The Bahamas in January 2023. One year to go. Need to start counting like Junkanoo artists do.
It’s been a long silence.
It’s been a long year.
It’s been one long writer’s block.
I’m still here.
Photo by Brandon Mowinkel on Unsplash
Here’s what last week in American politics has taught me:
Democracy is alive and well; and
Democracy works.
Now I’m not referring to the outcome of the election, though for anyone who knows me well enough will know that I am happy/relieved/satisfied that the Trump presidency is likely at its end.
I’m referring to the election process itself.
Let me explain myself a little bit.
Fascism in the background
I wasn’t prepared, four years ago, for the Trump election. I’ll be very clear. The election of Donald Trump, to my mind, signified a fascist turn for the USA. By fascism I mean a governing philosophy that thrives on the glorification of strength and violence as a means of establishing power, the silencing of criticism and the avoidance of dialogue, the stripping of rights and dignity from those who are different. On emphasizing social divisions as a means of consolidating power. On elevating one group of people by trampling on others. On celebrating exceptionalism, the idea that that the favoured group deserves its favour because of some inherent superiority within itself—“our” greatness versus the shit-hole-ness of others. And on the bolstering of that favoured group through force: deploying armies, creating internment camps, building border walls.
Photo by Mert Kahveci on Unsplash
This turn towards fascism helped elect Donald Trump. Trump didn’t create it: he is its embodiment. And in return, whether intentionally or by the way, the Trump reality legitimizes that fascist vision. The result? A state some members of the non-favoured groups took to calling AmeriKKKa.
Lest you think that I am singling out the USA, look around. Fascism is rising everywhere. Its voice is being heard in Brazil, in Great Britain, even in places like The Bahamas where we are ruled by men who are not white. We see it in the violence with which we talk about our Haitian brothers and sisters, in the bruises that Bahamian children and women carry under their clothes, in the words and rhetoric we use to dehumanize those people in our midst who are not heterosexual or cisgender, in the infantilizing of the citizenry in the way we impose our lockdowns. We see it in the separation of the Bahamian children of Ham, locked down in their homes and neighbourhoods, from the wealthy and white who move freely behind their walls and gates. Blackness is contagion, whiteness the badge of good health.
If one is a social scientist, the revival of fascism in the twenty-first century is not something that surprises. Fascism is often a predictable response to massive social change. It offers comfort to those for whom the world works well. It offers the promise promise that the world that has made you comfortable will be kept in place by hook or by crook—by force, even genocide, if need be. It stabilizes the world that is tipping, even if only for a little while.
And the west is tipping.
A diminishing west
Courtesy of https://imgbin.com/
Western society, built on guns and whips and ships and planes and bombs and factories and machines as much as on medicine and education and engineering, (and not so much on liberty, equality and fraternity)—is by definition a white male supremacist arrangement. It is individualistic and acquisitive. It rests on possession, on conquest, on dominion over nature (which many people misread as domination). It amassed its wealth not so much by merit and hard work, but by invasion and conquest, kidnapping and genocide, forced labour and forced migration and the establishment of centuries-old, states-wide death camps other people call plantations. And it’s modelled its religions in its own image, ultimately replacing Catholicism, with its paternal God, its veneration of motherhood, and its soft and suffering Christ, with a muscular, well-armed, masculine Christianity: a kind of Teddy Roosevelt of a religion, speaking not all that softly and carrying a really big stick packed with gunpowder.
This world was justified by the idea of civilization as a ladder, with the dark-skinned at the bottom and the white man at the top, bearing the burden of civilizing the rest of the world, by force if need be. And it was bolstered by a population explosion that made Europeans the largest group of people in the world for roughly a century.
This is the world western civilization made.
But in twenty-first century western society, this world that favoured the white, the male, the heterosexual, the hypermasculine, and the Christian is eroding. Something else, something alien, is pushing that world aside.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, the reality that gave western civilization its power has been changing the world over. Slowly. Surely. Inexorably.
There has been, first of all, a shift in population. White men are a world minority now. To use the words of the innocuous children’s hymn that sowed racist seeds in our tiny minds, the red, the yellow and the black far outnumber the white in the global population.
This shift in population brings with it a shift in culture. The dominant narrative about the world and our respective places with it is now a hurly-burly of disparate voices, of different stories. Now, as we move into this century’s third decade, that change is bearing real consequence within democracy itself. As the population of white people, particularly of white men, shrinks, so does their democratic power. The world created on the myth of white supremacy, the world that was shaped and dominated for the past five centuries by the European man, is disappearing.
It’s a change that is evident throughout the USA. And that change is terrifying those who remain.
It’s the zombie acopalypse, embodied.
And so, fascism. And so the existence, the popularity, of Trump.
The Trumpist response
Donald Trump, for all his buffoonery, his bluster, his cartoon-friendly vanity and bullying, is a symbol of these dying times. He is, for those threatened by their growing irrelevance in and centrality to the world, a saviour.
I wasn’t prepared for his election. It frightened me. The world is changing, but it’s not yet changed. And times of change are dangerous times. All too often people die in them.
I tend towards pacifism. I support gun control. I would rather have dialogue with a enemy than attack straight away. But I have quietly told every non-white friend and family member I could reach in the USA to arm themselves, because they can. It’s a dangerous time if your skin is not white. Trump as president personified that danger.
Because I look at the world in this way, I fully expected four more years of Trump. Not on his own merits, but because I was not convinced that the American democratic systems were still robust enough to withstand they way they were being assaulted by the American fascist turn. I have watched so many of the checks and balances of the American system overturned or ignored, watched as the fourth estate—the media, that last bastion of a democratic government—grow so fragmented by algorithms and economic profiling that there was no ground left for the dialogue on which democracy thrives.
I had lost the audacity of hope.
The triumph of democracy
Photo by Obi Onyeador on Unsplash
This week has taught me something different.
It’s reminded me of why democracy is so powerful.
Why it works.
Why it’s so frightening to would-be despots and tyrants who want to control the world.
The self-same things that put the cracks in the American system are the very things that can repair it: the individual voice, the individual’s power, the individual vote.
American politicians may have abandoned the democratic systems and principles, but the American people have not.
This is why I was not at all impatient that the counting of the vote took—is still taking—so long. It is taking as long as it is supposed to; the checks and balances built into the American democratic system are working, even working well. Let the counting continue, I say. Let the run-offs take place. Let the voice of the American people be heard, and heard in full. Let the voters prevail.
It doesn’t matter to me that so many people voted for Trump. The United States of America is still a democracy, and that is what democracy is: one’s right to hold one’s belief, and to choose according to that belief, no matter what the outcome may be. That half the country supported Trump is no surprise to me at all; white Americans are still a majority—just—and they are trying to hold on to what they have. They have that right.
But so did the people who voted against him as well. And that, too, comprises half the country. It’s a challenging time, and democracy may be strong enough to weather it after all.
Last words
Am I happy that Biden and Harris have prevailed? I am. Happy, surprised, and very cautiously hopeful.
Am I dismayed or surprised that the struggle was so long and drawn out and hard fought? Not in the least.
That struggle is what democracy is all about. And the peace that accompanied it is even more important than the struggle itself.
Democracy lives. Let us watch the whole process, and learn.
And then let us do everything we can to make the democracy we have here at home do the best job it can.
Photo by Niyazz/iStock / Getty Images
There isn’t much to say about the vote to extend the emergency orders, except this:
There is nothing legitimate about a vote that extends extra-constitutional powers when it’s cast by 37% of the house of representatives of the people of The Bahamas.
Understand me. I am not objecting—at this moment—to the extension of the Prime Minister’s powers. I’ll leave that for another time.
I am objecting to the fundamental lack of respect shown by the vote itself for the citizens of The Bahamas, the role of parliament, the rule of law, the decisions of the very competent authority whose powers were extended by the vote, and of the supreme law of The Commonwealth of The Bahamas.
Let me break it down.
The parliament of The Bahamas is a lawmaking institution. Each member of parliament is a lawmaker—not in his or her own right, but a lawmaker who represents 4000-5000 Bahamian citizens.
The lawmaking institution has two houses:
the lower, elected chamber, whose members are the direct representatives of the people, elected by those people to make laws on their (our) behalf;
the upper, appointed chamber, whose members are selected for their seniority, their wisdom, their statemanship, and their supposed ability to ensure that the laws they review and pass are the best that can be crafted by the lower house.
Shouldn’t lawmakers uphold their own laws?
Shouldn’t lawmakers who are also representatives of the people seek to act as a check against unrestrained and inordinate concentrations of power?
Shouldn’t lawmakers always, even though they are also members of political parties, remember that every vote they cast represents the 1-2 per cent of the Bahamian population whose interests they serve?
Is that not the “honour” that makes them honourable members of the House of Assembly?
I want to know.
Because the vote that just “passed” in the House of Assembly, with 14 yeas and 24 absences in the lower house, was dishonourable.
It was unrepresentative.
From one point of view it was also, technically, illegal—it required the breaking of the law to cast it.
And, in practical terms, it flew against the very interests of parliament itself.
Why?
The vote was called half an hour after the curfew set by the Competent Authority had passed.
The vote was called in the absence of the vast majority of the members of cabinet, who are in quarantine.
The vote that was called, therefore, limited the decision to that 37% of the members who were willing to break the edicts of the competent authority, since those members of the House of Assembly who followed the law of that authority were excluded from the vote.
Fourteen votes were cast. The fact that they were all in favour of extending emergency orders is, to my mind, irrelevant.
To make any constitutional change, we are required to get either 50% + 1 of the members of the House of Assembly, or to get a full 2/3 of the members, depending on the change being sought.
Fourteen people is not half of the membership of the House.
Fourteen people is not even half of the membership of the governing party.
In a vote that called to continue to remove parliament from its role as the primary governing and lawmaking agency in the land—to hand that responsibility over to one man alone—thirty-seven per cent of the members cannot be construed as consent.
It is not representative of anything. Not the FNM administration, not the members of parliament, not the Bahamian people.
Don’t bring the technical reality that only ten members of the house are required to be sitting to make quorum. This was not an ordinary vote. It was a vote that had constitutional ramifications. It was a vote that suspended the powers of the House of Assembly to act on behalf of the people it represents as the maker of laws.
There is nothing democratic, nothing honourable, nothing legitimate about the result.
The government should not have called for it.
The speaker should not have allowed it.
The senate should not have entertained it.
The attorney-general should condemn it.
The governor-general should not honour it.
The fact that there is so little outrage about this is most concerning of all. The extension of the emergency orders is extra-constitutional—even, one could argue, anti-constitutional. And extending emergency orders on this travesty of a vote, without challenge to the outcome, opens the doors to dictatorship.
Watch that house.
Watch this space.
I welcomed the tiny miracle of my wallet because it made me believe just a little that maybe miracles could happen on a larger scale, and maybe a generation of leaders will rise up—soon—with the vision and courage and determination to make the country better not just for themselves and their families and the people who worship them but for us all. Every citizen. Every resident. For us all.
Read MoreThe main issue of concern about this second wave of COVID-19 infections is the fact that it is spreading, rapidly, through community contact. The way we’ve addressed this is so far by limiting citizens’ ability to come into contact with one another—through the use of curfews and lockdowns. But as we’ve seen, these solutions are no longer ideal, and they’re no longer working. So what else can we do instead?
I’ve given it some thought and have come up with ten suggestions.
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Photo by fpm/iStock / Getty Images
note to all: the below was written over a period of 18 hours from last night shortly after the announcement to this time today. In that time, several things have changed, including the rolling back of the lockdown. Nevertheless, the observations hold. I am posting this now in the hopes that we will use this error to craft something more appropriate and workable for everyone, even the least among us.
—————
I was an early supporter of lockdowns.
During the first one, I was all for them. Restrict movement, distance socially, cover your face, wash your hands ... all of it. I was relieved and happy when we shut the country down, especially the borders. I was happy when the borders were closed. It made me feel safe.
This lockdown is not the same.
I doubt seriously it will achieve what it’s supposed to achieve. Times change, people change, and lightning doesn’t strike twice. These are things politicians seem to have a hard time understanding.
Know this:
We got it right the first time.
We got it right, flattened the curve, slowed the spread, limited the infections to three islands, controlled the death rate, contacted the infected. We did well.
And then we got it so very wrong.
Here’s why opening the borders was such a bad idea. It’s not just that people travelled to Miami, where the infection rate was high; it’s not just that we allowed people from Florida to land all over our archipelago. It’s that we didn’t understand what was so unique about us and our COVID-19 infections in the first place.
During the first wave, the primary source of transmission was community spread.
That means that the vast majority of those who tested positive in the first wave of CV19 got it from other Bahamians. The majority of them didn’t have a history of travel. The majority of them hadn’t gone anywhere at all. We didn’t ask them the right questions at the time—or if we did, we didn’t publish the results—questions like, where do you work? What do you do? Questions whose goal was to work out how the virus was contracting and—more importantly—how it was spreading.
Community spread is a red flag. It means that the virus is local, that it isn’t spread (as it was in other Caribbean nations) primarily by visitors. But it also means that, in an archipelago of islands separated by sea, it is relatively easy to control.
And control it we did.
And then we lost control. Because with community spread, the plan for controlling a virus in a chain of islands cannot include opening the borders, allowing indiscriminate travel, leaping from restriction to freedom in the space of a few weeks. That’s a sure way to ensure exponential rates of infection.
But that’s what we did. Now, our infection rate is only to be expected. The genie has escaped the bottle, and there’s no putting it back in again.
So here we are, facing lockdown again. I don’t expect this lockdown to work the way the last one did. I expect it to backfire instead. Sure, it may work in the Family Islands. Family Islanders do not live side by side at in clumps of 3500 people per square mile, and Family Islanders can find ways that they can eat over a seven-day period. If they fish for subsistence, who’s going to stop them? If they load up on pears and dillies and mangoes and other seasonal fruit, who’s going to stop them? If they catch crabs while they’re walking and shoot pigeons or even slaughter chickens or goats, who’s going to stop them?
But in New Providence? Rather than controlling the spread in New Providence, I suspect that this lockdown going to ratchet the numbers up.
Why?
Three main reasons:
1) Trust
2) Ignorance
3) Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
Maslow’s Hierarchy
I’ll start with the last one first. All the others follow on from it.
Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who studied human motivation: how and why people make choices in their daily lives. People do not act irrationally. Their choices make sense in context. When the choices are easy, with limited consequence, like what to eat for dinner or which shirt to wear to work today, they may vary, and there’s really little need to develop predictors about what choices will be made.
But when the choices are hard, when they are life and death choices, we really need to know.
Maslow proposed that human beings will weigh up situations and make the choice that meets their most immediate needs. What are the most pressing needs for any human being? Food, water, shelter. What are the next most pressing needs? Security and safety. After that come other things.
According to Maslow, when faced with hard choices—like whether to starve because you can’t get food, or whether to risk arrest and a fine in trying to get that food—human beings will risk the arrest and the fine. This is because safety is a less immediate need than food and water. The need for food trumps the fear of being caught. The fear of dying from a disease you might never catch is not a hungry person’s top priority.
This is why it is futile to assume that this lockdown will work the way it did in the first few months. In the first few months, people had something to fall back on. The lockdown was gradual. People still had places to work, places to live.
But now, Bahamians’ desperation has hardened. Individuals who have had no work since March have very little to lose. A fine and an arrest are not deterrents; there are no deterrents. If people cannot eat, or if people are facing eviction because they cannot work, they will do what they can to avoid the more certain outcome. Look at it this way. You’re locked down for seven days with no food in the house and a family to feed. Out there, the police are on patrol and the virus is running rampant. But in here, your children are crying and your stomach is screaming at you. What are you going to do?
What’s more, the fact that no one in positions of authority seems to have seriously considered this (you will note that almost all of the food distributors are charities, private organizations, not public agencies, despite that fact that every single man, woman and child pays taxes to our government with every single purchase we make) induces rage. Bob Marley said: A hungry man is a angry man, and to this we must pay attention.
This is not lack of discipline, and it is not unruliness. It is real, it is need, and it is fundamentally human.
Locking down our society after five months of economic hardship, on a Monday (i.e. not a payday), with no official notice beyond WhatsApp voicenotes, shows a profound ignorance of, and disregard for, human beings’ basic needs. And the fact that this lockdown was implemented without offering any further avenues for providing food and medication and water than those we blundered into providing during the first lockdown shows a gross disregard for the citizens of our nation. After five months of addressing the spectre of COVID, we seem to have learned nothing more than we started with.
And that is unconscionable.
Because of that, people will transgress this lockdown (are already doing so). Because they have to. And for that they should not be blamed one whit.
This lockdown will not achieve what it is intended to. It might in fact have the opposite effect. And the outcome is entirely predictable.
Ignorance
What stands out to me very clearly right now is ignorance.
I’m not thinking about the ignorance of the individual who chooses to break curfew, or even of the one who refuses to wear a mask. I’m talking about the real, studied, inexcusable ignorance of those in positions of power and authority about how this pandemic and the lockdowns have affected the Bahamian people. I call it ignorance because while we are touting the “science” and the “data” about the number of people who got sick and who are hospitalized, we appear not to have collected the data on what else has happened as a result of the pandemic and the lockdown.
We haven’t focused on any data about how many people are out of work, how many people are receiving NIB cheques (or are trying to), how many people are hungry, how many people are threatened with eviction or who have been evicted because they have no way of paying their rent. We are so very good at telling one another how many tourists landed in a given year or how many jobs some foreign investor will give us, but we have not published with any sense of accuracy how many people are hurting because of the first lockdown, or in what ways they are hurting.
Do we even truly know?
Even when it comes to the disease itself, which is where we seem to have the best data of all, our knowledge is lacking. We may have asked the questions to trace those people who were infected; but did we use the data gained to understand the way in which Bahamians are spreading the virus? Did we utilize social network analysis to start to understand the webs of connections and thereby begin to predict how a second outbreak might behave? What did we do beyond identifying, tracing and testing contacts? Did we use the data we were gathering to help us plan our responses to a second wave or a third? Did we seek to understand why we didn’t see the virus on Family Islands, why we saw it in Nassau and Grand Bahama? What did we learn from the first wave?
Because not all of it was bad. There was a burgeoning of small businesses for a while: some people lost work but others were able to make money, to find more clients than ever before. But who was tracking that part of the economy? Who was cataloguing the good news? I ask because as we enter another lockdown, it seems clear to me that no one has analyzed that data. No one has catalogued it, and no one certainly is using it to inform how we can maintain the safety of health officials and ordinary Bahamians at the same time as we boost those sectors of the economy that the lockdown benefitted.
How might we have used that data to craft a different kind of lockdown, one which marries the medical, the social and the economic, to allow for us to keep people socially distant without making them hungry and desperate? How can we learn from the successes of the first period to find ways to boost other parts of the economy? Ordinary Bahamians have been throwing out ideas, working anecdotally. But the people who have the data? The people who could get it and use it to inform our actions? It seems not to have made a dent on them, the people advising the competent authority. As the ignorance—and the incompetence—of the decision-makers about this part of the economy grow clearer and clearer, ordinary people are losing respect for those decision-makers, and for their decisions, too.
And because of that, this lockdown will not achieve what it intended to.
Trust
Which brings me to trust.
This is the big one. The largest difference between this moment in the pandemic and the last one is that we have lost our trust in the people who are handling the situation. Back in March and in April, people waited to hear from Drs. Sands and Dahl-Regis and Forbes and Brennen because we believed what they told us. Why did we believe them? Well, for one thing, they were not afraid to say they didn’t know. They were clear about the situation; they explained it was new, it was changing, and they assured us that they were doing their best to be informed by best practice in crafting the national response. They gave facts. They attempted to explain. And when things changed, when their information changed, they shared it with us. They adjusted the response, and they explained how and why. They did it proactively, after having done research; they didn’t wait for public protest and outcry. Sometimes, even, they made adjustments before the world did (witness Dr. Sands’ decision to have us start to wear masks). And when they made mistakes, they apologized and they corrected their course. We felt confident that they cared, and they were doing their best to help us get through the pandemic together.
Press conferences no longer have that kind of impact. They are not discussions; they are lectures. We are admonished, not informed. And nothing changes. Decisions are made that are palpably idiotic—like allowing travel to and from one of the most infected states in one of the most infected countries in the world without any reasonable or rational precautions, or allowing rich foreigners to travel all over our country while prohibiting citizens from leaving their homes—and then we try to dial back the clock, ducking and weaving and tossing off blame.
And the trusted voices of the first lockdown have faded away, have moved aside. In their place we have men who are resistant to engaging the public. Who do not welcome questions, probably because they are not experts in the field, and they don’t have all the facts at their fingertips. Who react without giving us any confidence that they have really thought their way through—that they’ve examined alternatives and considered implications and crafted ways to mitigate the sacrifice for which they call. We’re now lagging behind the world’s response; the WHO is saying that extended lockdowns are no longer best practice, but we are extending lockdowns. There is no nimbleness, no creativity, no learning from past successes or mistakes to make it easier for us to survive these drastic days.
In our country, whose population is smaller than most major world cities, it should not be impossible to put in place and enforce serious quarantines. It should also not be impossible to make quarantine comfortable for those who have to engage in it; we have sprawling hotel resorts that are closed down to all other business. We are good at tracing contacts; but what we are not good at doing is getting those contacts stay put. The result? We are being dealt with the way a poor teacher deals with a few naughty students in a class. The students are not singled out and handled; instead the whole class is thrown into detention.
The result is inevitable. Today, too few Bahamians still trust the competent authority to exercise competence. We are convinced—because the actions of the competent authority have convinced us—that we are in this thing on our own. That we do not have the support and the assistance of our government. That our government is really only concerned about appeasing the wealthy and powerful and leaving the small woman to fend for herself.
And when that happens, people make up their own minds. They take things into their own hands. They make their own decisions according to their own needs because that is what people do. Without reasoned, rational plans, we will do our own thing.
That’s what we’ve been doing all August long, and I have no good reason to expect that the rest of the month, lockdown or no lockdown is going to be any different. Instead, I predict that it will simply get unrulier. We’re fighting for our lives. And the enemy for more and more of us is our government, not COVID-19.
Photo by Mattia Faloretti on Unsplash
It’s August. Emancipation time. Come.
Let’s talk about slavery.
Please note: I’m using the old word, the word that we used to use. Before I’m done, I’ll have moved onto the new one: enslavement. There’s a story behind and around those words, and we’ll get to that. But for now:
Let’s talk. About slavery.
There’s so much being written, so much being said, about how we are faring in this new, contagious world. And there is much to be said. I just finished reading this meditation. It resonated with me, made me wonder whether there was anything to add; thanks, Nahaja. I agree, I agree with these words:
“Out of 184 countries, we are ranked 184th as it pertains to our COVID-19 response and ability to recover. The world is marking our manner.
Before these 2 weeks of a national lockdown are completed a strategic plan, with goal posts and milestones, should be presented to the Bahamian people that will give us something as a people to work toward.”
and these ones:
“The people are restless, aimless and frustrated because leadership is not giving us a mark to focus on other than be COVID-19 free which most of us know is a practical impossibility.”
But I want to depart in one specific way.
The fact that what the world thinks of us is what should be driving our efforts to make a change in the way we do business is why we must talk about slavery.
Now, don’t get me wrong here. I don’t want to talk, not at this moment, about the plantations, about our demographics, about the way in which enslavement affected us in The Bahamas. I most certainly do not want to talk about the lie that slavery was “better in The Bahamas”. Not yet. Not yet.
I want to talk about slavery, and how the weight of it is flattening us, even today.
What troubles me here is the blankness of our society, the fact that we, Bahamians, do not yet see ourselves as worthy of real notice from ourselves. We need to rely on the judgement of the outside, we need to call upon the gaze of the outsider, the tourist, the world, to consider ourselves worthy of being treated and taken seriously, like the full human beings that we are.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not buying into our blankness. But it is tightly woven into the tapestry that we use to call ourselves “Bahamian”. Deep down, so deep down that we are not even aware of it, we Bahamians do not regard ourselves as human. As people. As good as any other people who walk this earth (except, perhaps, Haitians, than whom we are better … but only just).
You want to argue with me? I’ll win.
Three examples:
The University of The Bahamas
Until 2016, until the moment at which it finally became a reality, we did not believe that we were worth enough to establish a university. A university? Why waste the money? All we need is a college, a place for training.
The implication, which we never uncovered, which we never examined, is that only people have universities. Only people can think. We Bahamians don’t need a university because …
we are not people.
we need not think.
Local government
By which I don’t mean what we call local government, which is really local tax collection on behalf of Big Brother Nassau. By which I mean the right of each part of the nation we inhabit to determine the well-being of itself. By which I mean the devolution of power, so that people who live in Exuma or Abaco or Andros or Ragged Island are not so slavishly (see the word I used there?) dependent on decision-makers in Nassau that they cannot utilize their time, talents, connections or supporters to develop, or flourish, or even recover from hurricanes.
Local government? We don’t have it.
Why? because self-governance is for people.
Which we are not.
The arts
Or, the lack of support for them. The government of The Bahamas thinks so very little of us as a people who have the right to and need for beauty, self-expression, glory, that there are now no national places of training for anyone at all. Once upon a time we had a National Dance School, but that was a waste of money and space, because the arts are for people.
And we?
We’re not people.
Finally, if you don’t believe me, ask our elders. What is it that we say when someone gets too biggety, too bumptious, too ambitious, too desirous of a better way of life?
…
Oh, right.
This is what we say.
Who you think you is?
You mussee think you is people.
I rest my case.
This is why we must talk about slavery: an institution that depended on the stripping of the humanity from the people it captured and enslaved and put to work to generate the capital that built the modern world. In order for that institution to survive, it had to remove all humanity from those whose labour it was stealing. But not only that. It not only had to remove the humanity from them, from us, from the outside; it had to remove all belief in that humanity from us, from them, from the inside out.
I will bet that this statement—you mussee think you is people—did not cross the Atlantic with us. It did not come from Africa. It is entirely a product of the society that enslavement made: a society in which we settle for little because we have been convinced that we deserve nothing.
And so. Is it any wonder the people we elect to lead us treat us as though we deserve that nothing? Isn’t it the case that we get the governments we deserve? We chose those people who confirm, in pronouncement, practice and policy, that we are not worth the space we take up in our islands. We chose the people who are convinced that our islands don’t need hospitals, that we don’t really need our university to be funded at a greater rate than our prison. We chose the people who determined that the rich and the white and the private boat and plane owners cannot possibly be carriers or spreaders of COVID-19, and thus they can move freely on an ocean that is barred to us, land on our airstrips and enjoy the beauty of our nation. They are not just better than the rest of us: they are people.
The rest of us?
Liberated chattel.
Isn’t it time to talk about slavery? And how it persists, through the beliefs and values we place on ourselves? Let’s not blame our politicians too much … after all, we put them there. What they do for and to us are what we have determined we are worth.
So let’s reckon first of all with ourselves.
Let’s recognize that we are, actually, people.
That we deserve to be treated as well as any other human being on earth.
Let’s internalize that. And refuse to be represented by any individual who does not recognize and respect that in us.
Let us emancipate ourselves, and take a stand
for our humanness.
Let us think we are, and then be,
people.
Facing Down the Pandemic
In an unequal world
I began this meditation with a consideration of where we are with regard to the Bahamas’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are some good things. The elements that the government can control it is working on. Our response has been both proactive and nimble—it’s informed by data, it’s very open to suggestions from the public. It’s designed by experts. It changes with the changing times.
But there are too many elements beyond our control that will have an impact both on how we fare and how we survive long-term.
The first is the very structure of the government itself. It’s over-centralized and fundamentally colonial. Too much power is concentrated in too few places, and not enough authority is shared. Nassau is the be-all and end-all of all decisions, but the majority of Nassauvians have visited Miami more often than they have set foot on any other island. Without true devolution of power to local authorities, we’re stuck. We’re stuck with big-country problems and small-island imaginations.
The second is our leaders’ lack of experience in crafting policies for the public good. The—I’ll use Gilbert Morris’ word—cronyism that governs our politics guarantees that it is all too often not merit or ability but perceived loyalty that results in nomination for political seats. Talent gets selected almost by accident. Too many MPs and ministers are given power with very little understanding of the responsibility that comes with it, and worse, with no accountability other than having to run for election every five years. It’s a toxic system, and precarious.
And the third is the uneven development of The Bahamas, which stems from the first two, and which is unconscionable almost fifty years after independence. We live in a nation where we have nineteen major airports but only three hospitals, two of them in the same city. There is no public air ambulance system that serves our island populations. Airlift is slow and expensive. The price one pays for living outside New Providence or Grand Bahama can literally be death.
I ended the last meditation on the fundamental inequality that is our reality: the laissez-faire economy we have adopted, which leads government to take a back seat and allow the “market” to reign with little guidance or control. This model has left decision-makers so unused to making their decisions according to the common good, so practised in ignoring the actual lived reality of Bahamians, that now, faced with a crisis that comes up from the community and spreads through the community, we are at risk of making grave errors.
We saw that this past week with the introduction of the total lockdowns. So little notice of the shift from the regular curfew to the total lockdown was given that people panicked, flooded stores, and ignored social distancing entirely. A move that was intended to slow the spread of the virus almost certainly ensured that in two weeks’ time, we must see a spike in the number of infections.
Now don’t get me wrong here. Locking down our society is really the only option we have to tackle the community spread of the coronavirus. What is most remarkable about our experience of COVID-19 is that, unlike so many of our Caribbean neighbours, the vast majority of the cases identified are the result of community spread. This makes lockdown inevitable.
I realize that there are those who will argue that the only long-term solution is the development of “herd immunity”; but they argue this without grasping what that process actually means in human terms. It’s one thing for epidemiologists who work in labs to propound the theory; and, quite likely, in theoretical terms, they’re correct.
But in human terms? The concept is difficult for any democratic government to contemplate.
Because here’s what it means in human terms.
It means letting the virus run its course. Letting it infect the population at will. Returning to the world in which “nature, red in tooth and claw” does the dirty work for us.
It means letting the virus carry off those who are too weak to withstand it; the survivors will probably be immune. And their immunity will be the seed of the new society.
In The Bahamas, there’re some problems with that:
Our population is fundamentally unhealthy.
We have a very high rate of obesity, and obese people appear less able to survive the virus
We have high levels of diabetes and hypertension, and people who have diabetes and hypertension are less able to survive the virus
We have elevated levels of respiratory disease in New Providence, and people who have respiratory diseases are less able to survive the virus.
Our population is poorly served by hospitals. I mentioned this already, but here’s what it means in concrete terms:
While we have a solid health care system as far as basic needs go, the clinics and the nurses we have scattered throughout our archipelago are in no way prepared to treat COVID-19. To treat it, we need hospitals with Intensive Care Units. Of these we have only three.
Of those three, only two are functioning well enough to really begin to tackle the coronavirus challenge. No one has said it out loud, but the Rand was seriously compromised by Hurricane Dorian and has not yet regained full functionality. More than that, we also know that it was challenged even before Dorian to meet the needs of the Grand Bahamian population.
Finally, the two hospitals in New Providence are located within one block of one another, and are located far away from many of the residents of New Providence. Our island is not large, but it is congested. The strain that would be placed on those two hospitals if we were to go the route of allowing herd immunity to develop would, quite simply, break our health system.
3. The people who are most at risk of contracting the virus are healthcare workers.
This means that if we let it run its course, we risk losing the doctors and nurses who keep us healthy in ordinary times. The only way around this is to shut down the hospitals as well, and let nature do its do.
What democratically elected leader—what kind of leader, in any situation—could seriously contemplate this? The only people with such luxury are lab scientists. People charged with looking after the business of other people don’t really have this option.
So forget the herd immunity scenario. It’s an idea that works well in labs, but the democratic politicians who decide to go that route would be signing the death warrant for thousands of the people they represent. It is not feasible.
So locking down the society—completely locking down—is the best option we’ve got.
But it’s not perfect.
Last Monday, when I listened to the PM announce this weekend’s lockdown in the House of Assembly, my feelings were mixed. The first feeling was: yes, this is the right move. But the second feeling was: but no, it’s the wrong way to do it.
What was clear to me, listening to the announcement of the expansion of the emergency order, is that while the PM and the Minister of Health are being advised by the medical profession—by scientists—they are not receiving parallel advice from social scientists—people whose expertise lies in how people behave: in ordinary times, in times of crisis.
Doctors deal with disease—things catalogued and categorized by the behaviour of microbes, with treatments and protocols that are designed to change the course of the disease. Most doctors trained in traditional western settings are taught to analyze, diagnose, and treat diseases, but not to engage with people. Doctors’ jobs are focussed on the thing they can most control—the diseases which are subject to swabbing, isolating, studying, culturing, examining under microscopes, finding treatments or cures, testing, controlling, eradicating.
People, alas, are the wild card in this equation.
The problem with treating people is that spark of independence, that unpredictability, that resides in each individual. And while in the normal course of events this can be dealt with one-on-one—with stern warnings about your life, with chastisement and changes of treatments and other doctors’ tricks—it doesn’t work when dealing with groups of people. Crowds—what social scientists call aggregates, what Shakespeare called “the mob”—behave differently from individuals, but just as unexpectedly. So you can devise a protocol for limiting community spread of a disease all you want. What you cannot do is guarantee that the community will follow it—or how they do so if they do.
This is what social scientists study. This is what we do. Social scientists, and particularly those of us who deal with human culture and behaviour—sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, criminologists, political scientists, social workers and counsellors—know that groups of people don’t follow the same logic that obtains in the lab. So when working on solutions, it’s not as simple as just telling the group what to do.
It’s how you tell them that matters.
The great thing? We’re learning. This government is learning, and—and this is staggering, giving the general impermeability of politicians—our leaders are asking for help. Our Prime Minister and our Minister of Health have put out a public call to citizens for ideas. Something fundamental is shifting. With all the bad, something unique is happening here.
Lockdown is important, and lockdown is necessary. But it isn’t always safe. It may be the best thing for society, but for many of us it is a terrible thing for individuals. Our homes are not all equal, and our home lives are not all secure. We are not all able to regard lockdown as something that will save our lives; for some of us, it may well end them.
I’m one of the fortunate. Our house isn’t very large and our garden isn’t either, but it is secure, it is walled, have an office from which to work, I have vegetables in my garden. My job is secure and I am getting paid this month. My husband is supportive. We are both well, so far. Being locked down for me is an annoyance, nothing more. And sometimes it’s actually a gift; I get to sit in my garden and read and, sometimes, write.
But I find myself thinking more often than I find comfortable about those who are not so well situated. Whose homes are uncomfortable, even unsafe. Whose families are dysfunctional and violent. Those people who have to leave every day simply to get food and water; whose lives are outside most of the time because they still occupy yards; who are still living in overcrowded and tense conditions because they were left homeless from the hurricane. Most of these people will get no paycheck now. And I wonder how the lockdown is affecting them, and what is being planned at the levels of leadership for them.
Our leaders have a hard job.
Impossible really; we don’t know what’s coming and we have to take the best decisions we can under the circumstances. We will not get it all right. And we have a responsibility to be critical when we mess up—because our country is too unequal and too many of our governments have allowed and even encouraged that inequality to develop and grow.
We have to guard against tyranny, we have to guard against normalizing our lack of freedom. We are too close, even 200 years later, to the fundamental unfreedoms our society was built on, and we have to resist it at every turn.
I remain concerned that many of the rules of the lockdown risk criminalizing poverty as we have criminalized misfortune. So as we learn, and as we adapt, and as we change, let us be mindful of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
While I’m working on my next post, let me give this woman some love.
From Good Tickle Brain by Mya Gosling
Yeasss. It’s a Shakespeare cartoon. Smart & funny. If you want more, check the whole site out.
Started writing this on April 5 so here are the most recent cases on that date. These numbers will have changed by the time you see the graphic.
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt as though the people in charge have taken the role of statesmen seriously.
I didn’t feel it after Dorian. In fact, I was so disturbed by the government’s poor handling of that crisis, I could barely write in the aftermath.
But I do feel it now. The two disasters are night and day.
What makes this one different? Well, we’re fortunate that our prime minister is a doctor. We’re also fortunate that our health minister is one of the best surgeons in the country, and surgeons are masters of making tough decisions in difficult times—making impossible choices under pressure. This disaster speaks their language.
Dr Merceline Dahl-Regis
Add to that the fact that the health officials are familiar with dealing with, and controlling, the spread of communicable diseases. We have very strong protocols in place already. One of the things that we never seem to talk about, because we are not used to dealing with Bahamian successes, is the success that our nation has had in dealing with the prevalence and spread of HIV-AIDS—and our success in treating those cases that do exist. The Bahamas has a high rate of HIV-AIDS.[1] But we have a relatively low mortality rate for that disease. We had a robust contact-tracing system already in place before COVID-19; our healthcare workers throughout the system know what to do and how to do it. The protocols which we developed to handle that HIV-AIDS are helping us now.
The people in charge of the COVID-19 response, then, are not new to handling epidemics. Indeed, those people who have criticised Dr. Merceline Dahl-Regis over the recent weeks have been schooled in her credentials in this very area. Our PM and Minister of Health are the right people to be in place at this time. Dr. Minnis possesses training that enables him not only to understand what is happening on a global scale, but also how to respond—to understand the difficulty of what has to be done if we are to have a chance of handling the pandemic with any semblance of success. No one has to explain the mathematics of epidemiology to him. No one has to convince him that the only way we can prevent the potential human toll of this disease is to prevent people from leaving their homes. The lockdown is drastic, but it is also necessary. It’s the best strategy in the attempt to control the spread and the impact of the virus.
“Health is not a commodity ... some things should not be used for profit.”
But.
All the above being said, we have systemic weaknesses in our nation and our government that will impact our ability to get through this crisis.
The first one is the deeply unequal nature of our society. For a generation, we have followed the general wisdom of the world that argues that a laissez-faire economy is good for all. In other words, after a generation in which government intervention shaped virtually every aspect of life, government policies shifted away from that stance, choosing rather to negotiate deals with foreign investors which would provide benefits from all Bahamians through their very existence. The initial runaway economic success of Atlantis was like a drug for all politicians after the 1990s; all manner of ills could be solved by turning over Bahamian land to foreign developers and letting the developers take on the task of finding jobs for Bahamians, putting in infrastructure, developing those corners of our archipelago which are hard and expensive to reach.
At the same time, the privatisation which seemed to work so well in the tourism industry was carried over into other sectors. Successive governments divested themselves of public utilities with differing levels of success: our telecommunications company, together with its network (questionable), the management of our electricity (poor), the management of our water (fair), and the management of our waste (excellent). Indeed, the only two sectors now which have not been effectively privatised are the health and education, which is, perhaps, fortunate at this time. In times of crisis, we are reminded what the function of government is. We are further reminded that health is not a commodity, and some things should not be used for profit. The value of the laissez-faire economy has its limits.
The society and economy that have flourished in the wake of this tradition—which is, in the end, wonderful for politicians, who can sit back and divest themselves of a lot of responsibility and live off the fat of the foreign investor and measure their economic success in terms of gross revenues from tourism and foreign investment rather than the relative wealth of the ordinary Bahamian citizen—have grown more and more uneven, more and more unequal. Today, The Bahamas is the second most unequal nation in the Caribbean. Economic success for a few is not the same thing as economic success for all. Indeed, as someone who was born on the cusp of the era of greatest inequality—the time when one’s skin colour determined one’s ability not only to rise in our nation, but even to survive—I recognize elements of the society around me, where the wealthy minority lives in enclaves where the ordinary may not go, where more and more people struggle to feed themselves daily, and the majority (our former flourishing middle class) are living precariously on the edge of ruin every day.
Add to this the inequality on which our entire nation is founded: the overdevelopment of New Providence and the underdevelopment of the rest of the archipelago. Those of us who live in the capital are close to all those things that have made our nation the (former) economic powerhouse of the Caribbean: the schools, the hospitals, the shops, the restaurants, the recreation, the arts, the transportation, the foodstores, the security forces, the jobs. But New Providence is only 1.5% of the total landmass of The Bahamas. The 30% of us who live elsewhere in The Bahamas—who populate the Family Islands (odd, isn’t it, how we’re using that seminal terminology now, in the time of crisis? No specious talk of “out” and “outer” now; odd how we return to “family”)—are deeply, deeply unequal.
We have seen that already. In Bimini, contracting COVID-19 was a death sentence because of the inadequacy of Family Island health services to handle critically ill patients, and because of the challenges posed by transporting the ill from one island to another in a time of total lockdown. In that situation, the protocols put in place to save lives may actually have cost one. The unfortunate truth about this is that we must expect more such deaths. Our system—our concentration of development on one small island, the fact that we have only three hospitals in the northern part of the nation, two in New Providence and one in Grand Bahama, and no hospitals at all in the south—guarantees it.
This isn’t unique to us, by the way: the world is learning this, too, the hard way. In Italy, they have learned it already.
Francesca Milandri, “A letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future”, The Guardian, 27 March 2020
So where does that leave us? Stay tuned. And wait and see.
____________
[1] Use caution when viewing the Wikipedia entry for HIV-AIDS in the Caribbean; it is about 10 years out of date. (back)
What’s so cool about rereading A Journal of the Plague Year during the COVID-19 crisis is how little humanity has changed in 3 centuries.
“...it was a most surprizing thing to see those streets which were usually so thronged now grown desolate, and so few people to be seen in them, that if I had been a stranger and at a loss for my way, I might sometimes have gone the length of a whole street ... and seen nobody to direct me ...”
Not to mention the kind of discussion that happened at the same time as the plague: what people saw or thought they saw, read or thought they read, the visions and the signs that they talked about.
“I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave every day of what they had seen; and every one was so positive of their having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and unmannerly on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other.”
Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year—by which he referred to the great plague of 1665—the last year in which the bubonic plague broke out in London (plague year conspiracists, beware selective dating) was one of my favourite books when I studied 18th century literature some thirty-five years ago.
Defoe’s book cover, from 1963
Me, Tuesday night (born 1963)
In it, an unnamed narrator, whom we learn to call “the saddler”, provides what he calls a first-hand account of the Great Plague of London. On first glance, the book is what it says it is: an account of the plague year. But we realize by page 2 it’s actually a memoir, and as we read further (if we’re paying attention) we realize that it’s not even that. It’s fiction, rising (maybe) out of an assemblage of facts.
Or maybe it’s lies. We’re never too sure. There are tables and lists and first-hand accounts all through the book. But here’s the thing: the more “facts” the saddler lays out on the page, the more sure we become (as we continue through the book) is the more likely the facts are, in fact, fake. Some are impossible. All we do know is that the more definitive the saddler gets, the less likely what he says is to be true.
Sound familiar?
“...It seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent it ... but all was kept very private.”
I’m going to be rereading this book as we move through our lockdown, as we move into the predicted surge of cases. I’ll post bits and pieces here as we go on. If you’ve never read it, go look it up. It’s fiction, yes. But it’s also uncannily true, the way literature, in its most imagined, is truer than anything we see on the news.
“From the hygienic comfort of the twentieth century, the terrible calamity which Defoe described with such accurate, vivid realism seems remote, an experience that can never be repeated. But such suffering can still visit mankind—the great influenza epidemic of 1919 killed far more people. The terror for Defoe’s London last in the awful concentration of the disease. In his pages a metropolis does before or eyes; the streets empty; grass grows where life reigned. A Journal of the Plague Year is a tale of horror, told by one of the great masters of realism.”
J. H. Plumb, Cambridge University, 1960
introduction to the Signet Edition of A Journal of the Plague Year
Image courtesy of James Yarema, Unsplash
It’s what? Day 14 in our lockdown mode. We went from a 9 PM-5AM curfew to a 24-hour curfew, and our numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases moved from 1 on March 15 to 15 today. On average, that works out to about one new confirmed case per day.
It’s scary, but I can’t waste time being scared. I was, two weeks ago, specially because I’d spent the weekend in Eleuthera and sat in Governor’s Harbour Airport for four hours waiting for a plane that was very delayed, surrounded by people who were heading home from Ride For Hope. I’d rather spend my days on thinking: about if, and how, this is going to change the world permanently, and how we can take this interruption in the normal state of affairs to make the country we live in a better place.
Mastering the online
What’s the first thing we’ve learned? Let me bring it home. The university closed before the lockdown was instituted. In other words, on Sunday March 15 (the Ides of March, coincidentally), the university community received an email that told us that face-to-face activity was to cease as of the following day. We were to work on moving all activity to the online environment. This meant that all activity—and primarily instruction and meeting—was to move online.
We’ve been attempting to expand our online offerings and activities for some time now—certainly ever since we became a university back in 2016, but even before. But the systems on which the institution has been built—and, more critically, many of the people who operate those systems—are not nimble. Our transition has been slow. Over the past two years, we have mastered the art of meeting via Zoom, or patching people into face-to-face meetings using Zoom, or communicating between our main campuses and our research centres through Zoom, but we have not done all that much online instruction. The switch was challenging for faculty, especially given the ticking of the semester clock that drives our instruction. When you have to prepare and deliver face-to-face classes, it’s not easy to add the creation and mastery of online classes at the same time. Teaching in the two environments is different, and planning has to adjust.
This past fortnight, though, we have had to do it. People who have never taught remotely before are placed in the position of learning. The advantage to the lockdown is that there is nothing else to do; the competition between the face-to-face and the online has been removed. Online is all there is.
Maybe what we’ll get out of this is a faculty and a staff base who have far more facility in online activity than we might ever have imagined.
There’s more, of course; more stuff to learn, more stuff that we have already learned. But that’s for another day.
Image by Markus Spiske courtesy of Unsplash
Two years ago I was asked to sit on a government committee that was formed to look at establishing local government for New Providence.
Maybe I shouldn’t say this, given political parties’ apparent inability to work with one another for the good of the citizenry as a whole, but I had earlier been asked to attend meetings hosted by the IDB exploring the issue. The very first documents we received had been generated by the IDB consultant on this issue. So this is not a new concept.
Further, most countries in the world—indeed, all functioning countries—have local government. In other words, most functioning countries separate the powers and responsibilities assigned to different political and civic authorities. There are national-level politicians, whose primary purpose is to create legislation on behalf of the citizens they represent. And there are local politicians, whose primary purpose is to put in place basic amenities and oversee the kinds of things that make life bearable at the local level of the citizen.
The Bahamas has only one type of politician: the national-level ones. But we also place high expectations on those politicians—expectations that on one level (the level of our personal need and comfort) are entirely reasonable, but that on another level are entirely misplaced. They’re misplaced because we have no room in our system that obliges or enables the politicians we elect to the House of Assembly to fulfil those expectations. MPs are legislators who are selected by smaller segments of the population, organized in constituencies. In simple language, they write laws. That’s it. While they may inform the legislative process by speaking on behalf of the people who elected them, MPs are responsible to the nation as a whole. They are not local government officials, responsible to the communities they serve. It’s best to be clear on this right now.
It’s best to be clear on this, too: We need local government officials to make our country function for the citizens.
So when the Minister of Local Government decides, unilaterally, not to advance a government-mandated report prepared by a government-established committee to fulfil a critical election promise by the political party who nominated him to represent a constituency, he is betraying us all. He does not have the luxury of personal opinion. He serves the citizenry. And local government is what we need.
My Lenten observations, as longtime followers may recall, tend to have to do with taking on tasks rather than giving up pleasures.
I have already shared that I have been unable to write since the passage of Hurricane Dorian; too many ideas have been welling up, ideas fuelled by anger and disappointment.
This Lent the pledge is to write something once a day. Not everything will be worth sharing widely. But each piece of writing will be part of an exercise to get past the block and exercise—for the benefit, I hope, of our nation—the gift of writing that was given me.
Forty days of writing. Establish, Lord, the work of these hands.
Photo by Brent Burrows
Hurricane Dorian and its aftermath have rendered me silent. Writer’s block doesn’t come to me often but it comes when it comes with a vengeance.
Perhaps somewhere else at another time I will be able to express what I have been feeling since September 2019. It is a mixture of disgust, disappointment and despair, along with the sense that never have I felt less satisfied to have been right about the inadequacy of government. The way in which we have not handled, or even acknowledged the homan toll of the hurricane (apart from publishing the dollar costs of the storm—as if they matter in the face of the human costs) has dismayed and terrified me. It terrifies me because hurricane season comes every year and nothing, nothing, that we have done since the hurricane has prepared us to face this year or next year or the year after. If a hurricane like Dorian hits our capital we will be lost, and nothing that we have done collectively or individually will change that. No dome towns, no tent cities, no shantytown demolition is an adequate response. It terrifies me. It makes me sick.
And the way we treat one another, the way we are so content, so proud, to throw the most vulnerable among us away like filth, to denigrate them, to rejoice in their suffering, to compound that suffering, all in the name of “national security”, makes me furious.
The only solace I’ve had is theatre. Thanks to renee caesar, we have been working since December on a production of Ian Chinaka Strachan’s Diary of Souls. Written about the way we Bahamians, we god-fearing, holy-ghost, sanctified Christians, treated the dead almost thirty years ago, the play was a protest and a challenge then, and it is more than ever resonant now. Ian Strachan wrote it to expiate our collective guilt for the way we treated our fellow human beings, our brothers and sisters, our womb-mates from across the sea at an awful moment in time.
Photo by Brent Burrows
Working on it has been healing.
Again thanks to renee and Short Tales, we have been working with a wonderful team: T-Day Jeudi, Sony Jean-Jacques, Esther Louis, Cade Darling, Brent Burrows, and Shireen Seymour on stage. The set was built by Jason Evans. I told him my vision: the psychiatrist’s office centre stage, with the beach in front of it, and the hole—the mass grave—behind it.
I wanted the audience to know and never forget that no matter what we do, how we deny it, how we pretend that we are different and separate, our fate and that of our Haitian neighbours who live beside and among us, who pass through our waters, who live with us and who have shaped our lives and culture even as we have shaped theirs (for the Duvaliers who created the conditions that drove their people to our shores were Bahamians), are entwined. We may close our eyes but we will never escape that fact.
I wanted the set to show us that. The Bahamians in the middle are watched throughout the play by the Haitian souls trapped in a limbo of our creation.
And look what Jason and his team did with that vision. When I shared it, he asked one thing: “Can I bring sand on the stage?” And look what he did. Sand, and palm trees, and flotsam, and trash. The hole and the beach.
And then there is lighting, designed by Ayoka Seymour and me. We discussed the moods and the colours, the effects and the moments, and off Ayoka went. With music selected by renee and me, and run by Joshua Haeward II.
Theatre heals. Our medium is human experience and human emotion. We show what humans do to one another, and the consequences of their actions. We put it in the same space as you, and you will share the emotion with us. Come and see it. Challenge yourself to be changed.
