Ringplay Productions

No, the two, sin and refugees, don’t normally go together. At least, not officially. Sin is sin, and refugees are, well, they’re just unlucky.

I’ve been working this week. By that I mean I’ve been going to work. All week, since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. That means I don’t get up-to-the-minute coverage. That means I don’t watch the death toll mounting. That means I don’t see the dire situation in New Orleans particularly on an hourly basis.

But it doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it.

Let me share a cliché. There aren’t words to express those thoughts. Let me just say that they have to do with devastation, desperation, and the horror of knowing not only that a city, a state, a country are so unprepared for the magnitude of disaster and the absolute terror that comes with knowing that the worst imaginable has happened and your leaders don’t seem to give a — well, can’t seem to get it together to help you. Let me also say that somewhere in the back of my mind is also the colour of so many people’s skin. The number limits on refugees that have so carefully been set by, say, Texas (one of the biggest states in the American nation) and other neighbours seem terribly petty to me.

So what has all this to do with theatre, and Bahamian theatre at that? Well, it’s because many Bahamian plays treat, in part or in whole, the question of refugees and sin. Sam Boodle’s The Landlord slaps us with it, makes us laugh at it, but we take the ideas home. Woman Take Two does the same thing, treats the idea of refugees and sin (ours? theirs?), turns it upside down. The only upright person in Turner’s play is the Haitian, but even he’s corrupted in the end by the stalwart Bahamian businessman. And then there are more recent plays: Ian Strachan’s Fatal Passage, which deals with refugees and death by water and sin and drowning all through, though refugees aren’t the focus; Strachan’s Diary of Souls, which is all about refugees and sin, about purity and liberation and death.

The Children’s Teeth deals with the idea as well.

I’m watching Louisiana carefully. I’m watching the reaction of Americans to their own domestic refugees, their own fellow Americans. The people who want to escape New Orleans are not Haitian or Mexican; they’re American. But it doesn’t matter one bit. It’s not the nationality that matters, it seems. It’s the sin of being a refugee.

This post ended up as one of Nicolette Bethel’s Essays on Life, and the full essay may be found here.

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