With that in mind, enjoy the following:

Memo from Canada to the third world: This way please.

Just one catch…

Do you think we can we get rid of this one in 2009?

And although it seems heaven sent
We ain’t ready, to see a black President
– Tupac Shakur

They might be ready now.

In a few hours, assuming there isn’t a repeat of the drama of 2000, it should be clear whether or not the United States will elect a black man as President for the first time in its history. Judging from the polls and from all that I have heard it seems likely that Barack Obama will indeed win.

But I’m not here to talk to Americans about their own business. I’m not an American citizen so I can’t even cast a vote. However, as the United States is presently the most powerful and the most wealthy nation on the face of the earth, their election result will have an effect on the rest of the world. This is what I want to discuss.

Michael Parenti, in his book Democracy for the Few, describes the US election process as “the greatest show on Earth.” This time, however, they really have outdone themselves. This show has gone on for years. From the early speculation about who would run for the Democratic nomination to the long battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton, and the last minute wild-card insertion of Sarah Palin, there has been no shortage of drama. However the lesson Parenti wants you to draw from all the political pyrotechnics is that it’s all a diversion.

Did you ever wonder how a country as massive as the United States can only have two parties? That in a country with 305 million people there are only two choices? Well unbeknownst to the majority of Americans, they do have more choices. Have you heard about the Green Party presidential candidate, a black woman named Cynthia McKinney? What about Libertarian presidential nominee Bob Barr, and Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader? Yes. I’m not making this up, they are all running for President of the United States today along with Obama and McCain. Why haven’t you heard about these people? Simply put, they have been made invisible by design.

To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, the Democrats and Republicans are essentially factions of the same party; The Business Party. The two parties collude to maintain a monopoly on the American political system. Take the debate process for example, did you know that the Obama and McCain campaigns have negotiated a contract that determines who participates in the debates and even what the topics raised will be?

So, what is the debate structure that they agreed upon? What topics are off-limits? George Farah of Open Debates, a non-profit organization with a self-explanatory name, says

“We don’t know the extent of the rules, because, precisely because, the Obama and McCain campaigns have absolutely refused to release the detailed contract that dictates the terms of [the] debate.”

In other words, it’s a secret contract. The game isn’t so scary when you can make all the rules. One of those rules though is obviously the exclusion of third parties voices.

But isn’t the United States a democracy? Perhaps “Plutocracy” is a better word for their system. Parenti says that “the two-party [American] electoral system performs the essential function of helping to legitimate the existing social order.” To boil it down even further, Americans don’t even have two choices.

This is not to say that there is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, because there is. It’s just not so wide a difference as is commonly thought. Instead of night and day, think of the difference between raspberry and strawberry ice-cream. If Obama wins, a few extra dollars of the budget will go to social projects and poor people, while the billions that fund their enormous war machine will continue essentially unchanged.

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What is important is not so much what men say when they are anxious for power but what they actually do once that power is conferred on them.
– Robert M. Spector

Barack Obama is a phenomenon. His speeches have inspired people to a degree that I have never seen before. If I didn’t know better I would think that every black person on the planet will be voting with their hearts today. Take a look at this website, it was set up by a Nigerian friend of mine showing Obama posing as myriad fictional and historical heroes. I have a Bahamian friend who has compared Obama to Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King Jr. He nearly went as far as to compare Obama to Jesus Christ.

With catchy slogans like “Change we can believe in,” “Yes, we can,” the operative word being “believe,” Obama has developed and nourished something that is akin to a global cult following. Delusions of Obama as the world’s messiah are fair to no one, least of all to him.

He may well turn out to be a “great [US] president”, but we, in the rest of the world, need to remember that US presidents don’t work for us. They have their own country’s national interests, however they define them, to look after. We need to remember that the foreign policy of the United States is not something that is about to change. Remember that if Obama was really about changing the status quo, he would never have made it this far.

Which brings me to one of the few reasons I appreciate Bush. He has really done well exposing US foreign policy for what it really is: the maintenance of Empire. The war of aggression in Iraq is not some aberration, this has been going on internationally since 1898, and if you ask the Indians and the Mexicans, they would tell you it started a long time before that.

When charismatic presidents take office, Bill Clinton for example, it’s easy to forget that their eloquent words and high sounding rhetoric are a veneer that can mask truly horrific deeds. Whoever becomes the next president will be no different. The Empire must be maintained.

To quote Tupac one last time: “And still I see no changes.”

As it stands the Bahamian identity is constructed as black, ghetto and male. This construction ignores, deliberately I believe, the 20 percent or so of the country that happen to be white. I have inadvertently asked a few white Bahamians “so, where are you from?” It’s polite conversation with a tourist but it’s the surest, most direct way to insult a native.

To be called white in the Bahamas is another way to say that you do not belong. Those who don’t belong are tourists. Visitors. Just passing through. Seaweed. Driftwood. In Nassau the quickest insult is usually to call me “white boy”. Hit a shot on the basketball court and I will hear “buhy! You let white-boy-archah score on you” or something to that effect. They know that I’m not white, but my skin-color places me in a liminal space. I’m not white, but to their minds I’m not black enough.

This color line is tricky. It’s no where near as rigid as the “one drop” rule that governs blackness in the United States. The Bahamian black/white line is a fluid boundary that varies in different islands and even in different settlements / villages on the same island. For example on the same island of Eleuthera, I am read as black in Tarpum Bay and white in Lower Bogue.

I self-identify as black. This is simply because I also self-identify as Bahamian. And to be Bahamian means that you must be black. Now there are myriad ways of performing blackness in the Bahamas, so even if you don’t have the correct pigmentation, you can find other ways to fit in, but lets leave it there for now.

Fast forward to Canada and here I am read without question as black. Now, the Canadian identity, crudely put, is a young white man brandishing a hockey stick in one hand, and a cup of Tim Horton’s Coffee in the other. He says “eh?” in between sips and ice-checks. Now with my Bahamian baggage already in tow, you can understand why I reject the label of Canadian. The Bahamian identity I want to hold on to won’t allow it. But my presence here has begun to complicate who I think I am; two recent experiences come to mind.

The first happened at a writers retreat over the summer in Trinidad. On the first day of the workshop, as the introductions went around the room I mentioned that I was a Caribbean person in exile in Canada. There was shock from the organizers. How could I, a member of the Caribbean diaspora, have made it into the program they asked? The workshop was only open to people from the Caribbean and not to people who came from elsewhere.

Surely, I thought, they must be joking. I have only been in Canada for five years, and this only to study at University. I hold nothing more than a study permit. Surely they can’t take my Caribbean-ness, my blackness away from me for this? Yet, they did. I protested and argued that I surely was not a Canadian, but the label stuck. Much to my chagrin.

The second experience happened a couple of weeks ago, at the MA student orientation in Canada. A white first year MA student says to me with a mischievous gleam in his eye,”you know a word that I like to throw out in my tutorials… Nigger.” The air was suddenly sucked out of the room. Needless to say I was taken back. I had never seen the “N-word” so close before. I really didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t directly calling me a N… of course, but he knew what he was doing.

My own shock took me by surprise, especially since the word in both Bahamian creole and Haitian creole translates as the politically / racial neutral “man.” So, yes, “white niggers” do appear in Bahamian creole, although the speaker will most likely correct themselves afterwards. In Haitian creole there would be no correction. Was I offended? Or did I merely want to be offended?

I give you all of this because I’ve been thinking a lot about identity recently. It’s the first and most important question you need to ask yourself: Who am I? Honestly I’m not sure any more. After studying theories of nationalism and seeing first-hand the artificialness of national identities, I can clearly see how these “imagined communities” are more at the service of the state than anything else and have little basis in reality.

Through my study of Eastern thought I see what they mean when they talk about identity as “maya” / illusion. When I look in the mirror, what do I see? Do I see what I want to see? Can I only see the story that I am telling myself about myself: My name is, I was born in, I am. Can I even see myself anymore? Have I ever really seen myself?

In the Bahamas we have this strange habit, and I don’t know how many other societies do this, where we let the body repose. This basically means that the dead body is made up to go on display and just sits there in the coffin.

This is seriously freaky shit. The coroner basically becomes a taxidermist. Sometimes they make the face look all rubbery and fat and they put on too much make up. In this case, with my grandmother, who died in December, they made her up so that she looked like she was still alive. I swear that I saw her breathe.

Why they do this, I will never know or understand.

The service was interesting. Nice, as they say. This was the first time that I stepped foot inside a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall since I left that religion five years ago. Nothing had changed. Nothing but the paint on the walls and some of the plants lining the driveway, but that same feeling was there.

I felt a lot of eyes on me though. Judging, probing eyes looking for flaws. It’s so awkward now.

Mum had converted to Jehovah’s Witness in her later years, I’m not sure exactly when. Let’s say the last fifteen years or so. At the time, I was one of them too, so it was a happy day when she got baptized.

When I left the church, she never cut me off like the others did. She always said she was praying for me everynight and when I grew my hair and braided it she never liked it, but at least she talked to me.

Somehow she found a way to stay in the JW church and get her cake too. Birthday cake that is. As JW’s aren’t supposed to celebrate birthdays or Easter, or Christmas or just about anything, she was able to keep one foot in the door and the other with her ‘worldly’ family till she died. A real smart woman. I still wonder why she converted. I wonder what her reasons were. Guess I can only speculate now.

Even after all this time, I still don’t know what to feel. Death is a funny thing. To get through a day of this life we build up walls of clichés, throwing around little stock phrases to stand for actual thought, to simulate actual feeling. Death breaks that wall down and leaves you as you really are. Naked, alone and afraid.

I never know what to say at funerals. I never know what to do. All I have is a terminated relationship and a hell of a lot of questions. Could I have done more? The answer is always yes. Did I ever want to?

That one takes a bit longer to answer.

The game starts off slowly as you gradually get the hang of the falling pieces, fitting them into each other, while you try to make something solid out of it all. In essence the game says, ‘deal with this random-ness,’ which also seems to be one of life’s main messages. What makes the game such an apt metaphor is that you don’t really know what’s coming next, except for the very next brick. Life, of course, gives no such warning. This ‘not knowing’ makes the game both fun and frustrating as you could be waiting a long time for that ideal piece to complete the structure you started…

“If only that long one would fall!”

How many times has that happened to you? You wait and wait for something particular, something you always wanted to fit into a certain space in your life, all while you are still keeping up with what is relentlessly falling on top of you. Sometimes that special piece never comes, or as it happens, when you have finally given up on it ever appearing, then it decides to show up.

The game speeds up the better you get at it, unlike life, which seems to follow its own capricious rhythm – which for me always seems to be at that breakneck, trying-to-kill-you pace. But you just have to deal with it, and get stuff done, taken care of, make it disappear, because if you don’t, stuff just piles up on top of you until you can’t take it anymore, have a nervous breakdown, and well, have to start the game over.

If only it were as easy to start life over as it is the game. In some ways it is and in many ways it isn’t. Depends on how enslaved you are to the particular game you’re playing.