The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
John F. Kennedy
The “Ting and Ting” documentary was only part of a larger project. In a very un-Jehovah’s Witness way, my father, Eddie Minnis, is trying to define his legacy.
It’s only when you’ve gotten up in years that you even start thinking about things like legacy. It happens as you feel time running short and start worrying about how people will remember you, if at all. Thinking about ‘Legacy’ maybe as close as we get to grappling with immortality.
I’ve come to think of legacy as a combination of the things and people you leave behind and the stories that are told about them. We will all leave behind traces: people, artifacts – we can’t carry anything with us when we cross Jordan. What we do leave gets interpreted by the survivors and try as we may we can’t really dictate how other people will remember us. Legacy building projects are just attempts to frame our story the way we want, so that the future only gets to see our most flattering side.
Obviously the perspective of who is telling the story matters a great deal when it comes to legacy. For example, my view of my father and his life is probably going to be a lot different than that of my sisters.
For example, I embarked on this essay quest to add a perspective that I felt was lacking to the Eddie Minnis myth-making currently going on. Due to the societal taboo that comes with not wanting to talk about religion, it feels like we – the royal we here – are just prepared to give him a pass for being a good cult member for over 50 years.
I don’t think he should get a pass.
His being a Jehovah’s Witness leader has had real world consequences not only for him but for many others. Forget about the impact on his children. Not accounted for are all the people has he converted or assisted in converting to this cult. Ignored is the fact that he gave this cult legitimacy in the Bahamas by being one of them. Forgotten in the story that is being spun are all the lives that were ruined because of it. Swept away are all the years he himself lost chasing phantoms.
When we want to examine the legacy of Eddie Minnis, the scope for his life must be widened – we have to take in more than the art, the music and the Pot Luck. As we craft the stories about this great Bahamian that will become part of the national fabric we have to see a fuller picture. Doing so doesn’t take away from the all the beautiful artifacts he created but rather it gives them greater context.
1.
Stories are powerful. With constant retellings they become legend and then, if they are lucky, turn into myth. They become the fabric of our minds, of our nation – telling us the things about ourselves that we most want to hear.
The Minnis family narrative and the commercialized brand that is built on top of it has similarly taken on the quality of legend. It works so well because it has elements of a central Bahamian myth at its core. And just what is that myth? To expand on arguments I have made elsewhere, this myth contains within it a narrowly constructed identity – one that is black, male, straight, in touch with the old ways and the environment, god-fearing and in full control of family.
This myth tells Bahamians that we are in control of our destiny. That the answer to whatever ails us is somewhere in the bush – that our ancestors had all the answers – and that modernity has brought us nothing good but has only made us forget the old ways.
If we stretch the Minnis narrative like a canvas over this mythic frame, it seems to fit. It too is about control. It has the required over-the-hill roots for authenticity, the centre of the story is a self-taught local genius so in communion with his home land that he painted on the side of the road, one who found God in the process and is now the unquestioned patriarch ruling over wife and obedient children who follow in his footsteps continuing the family business without complaint.
The art continues the narrative’s theme – it is nothing if not reverence for the old ways, for the local environment, children pitching in to make ends meet and help out with the chores.
The Minnis family narrative fits so snugly within the contours of that myth that it amplifies it and makes it seem plausible. To make sure it fits we smooth out any rough edges with soft euphemisms. Instead of religious fanatics we say that they are “devoutly religious.” The term “community work” is used to describe their agenda of cult expansion. Instead of group that has cut off son, brother and grandchildren for wind we imply they are the quintessential loving family.
We are willing to sweep away reality so that we can have the thing we want – a story that tells us that we have heroes amongst us, larger than life people who rose from humble beginnings and conquered the world with nothing more than spunk and some down-home Bahamian charm who then spawned an entire other generation of heroes.
These stories are so potent that they swayed an entire national institution and art community into buying into them for over a decade. So alluring are these tales that the “Ting and Ting” documentary had to be chopped up into bits to conform to its shape when it dared to be something more.
As a young nation we want our heroes to be larger than life, to be mythical. We have to pinch ourselves to remember that the Minnis narrative is not real. Deep down we don’t want to know that our heroes could in fact be deeply flawed people and in this case one who sold a good chunk of his life and that of his family for a bag of empty promises.
2.
When you look at the Bahamian myth that I’ve described it’s hard at first glance to see the control that it exerts. Everything looks and feels so normal. It’s so Bahamian, so right. You only realize that it’s suffocating when you don’t fit into it’s rigid roles or try to step outside of the boundaries. It’s like being born into a glass cage – you won’t even know you’re trapped unless you push.
It feels as though I’ve railed against these cages my entire life. First pushing against the Minnis family narrative, then the cage of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and finally against the Bahamian myth. Layers upon layers of interlocking and reinforcing control and it has made it such that I have never really fit on any level. Therefore I’ve been in constant conflict for what feels like forever.
The fight always boils down to my deficiencies. It’s always that I am not enough. To my family and the Witnesses I wasn’t spiritual enough, wasn’t good enough; to my country I’m not Bahamian enough, not black enough, not island enough; and to the NAGB not even Minnis enough.
And because of all of these supposed deficiencies there is justification for erasing me. For example, I am removed from the Minnis family narrative because I don’t fit its current form. If the Minnis story is about family unity then how do we explain the black sheep? If the brand is about photorealism, where do we put an impressionist / modernist? If the direction of being Bahamian is to “go back to the island” then how do we account for this expatriate city dweller?
The easy thing to do is what they – my family, the NAGB – have done and that is to pretend that I don’t exist. But the current Minnis story is more fiction than anything else. Like the released version of the “Ting and Ting” documentary – it has been killed by the edits.
What should the Minnis family story be about then?
It can still about family – just not about the perfect family. There is nothing unusual about our family drama – family conflict is as normal and natural as rain. Only cults expect everyone to walk in lockstep.
It can still be about art, but it doesn’t have to be about a specific type of art. Pot Luck is clearly not photorealism or Bahamian nostalgia so dispensing with these labels actually makes it easier to include all of the family’s work.
At the core though, the Minnis family story should be about religion. This is the centre that they also keep pointing to. The cautionary tale hidden within the Minnis story comes to light only when we look at the fact that they are Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The cautionary tale hidden within the Minnis story comes to light only when we look at the fact that they are Jehovah’s Witnesses.
If we listen closely to this part of the story we learn what can happen when you hand over your agency to a foreign power. We see more clearly the dangers of fundamentalist cults to our community and the inter-generational trauma that this blind obedience can create. That we see and can show the warts on our heroes is not a sign of disrespect. It is a more mature understanding.
Such a story would of course be more complicated and nuanced than what we have now, but at least it would be honest. This version of the story doesn’t change the art or the music or the cartoons. It doesn’t need whole people to be removed just to make it make sense. I fit easily into this version of the story. My art fits – separate yes, but the similarities and influences are allowed to connect.
This story gives us context and perspective. For example it helps us understand why Pot Luck died young, how the music became stale and why the painting got frozen in time. My sisters art fits here too – and it gives clarity to the whole Bahamian nostalgia / modernism debate when you realize that they are coming at this from a completely different place. Their art is in service to a different god.
In the version of the Minnis family story that I am proposing, we come out of it as less than heroes but nothing more than what we actually are: human. We are imperfect, broken and often exceptional people who make mistakes, even catastrophic ones – just like everyone else.
3.
In the eyes of my parents and sisters and in the world of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, there is nothing that I could ever do that would make me anything other than a total failure.
In many ways they would prefer if I were a crack-head hustling on the streets of Nassau if – and this is the crucial part – if I still believed in the Watchtower and was trying to find my way back to their god. As far as their ideas and plans for me, what I am today is the very definition of worst case scenario.
And what am I today?
I remember when I was in grad school in Ottawa, when I thought that all I wanted was to come back home to the Bahamas. When I wanted nothing more than to be an island artist and still somehow walk in my father’s footsteps while making my own impression. I was an active blogger in the Bahamian arts community and was preparing the groundwork for a return.
After spending my life savings and more on staging my play however the calculus changed. The emotional cost of living in Nassau became too great, between the constant shunning from Witnesses I would meet – and I saw them everywhere I went – to my closest friend at the time abandoning the play and betraying me in the process, I suddenly found myself with no support network and no reason or desire to stay.
In many ways, I haven’t recovered since then. I find it odd that the same project can, at the same time, be both a rousing success and a crushing failure. In hindsight I can see that I had pinned unrealistic expectations on the production and there was no way that it could ever live up to my dreams. In many ways I was hoping for it to launch me into that iconic artistic career. It ended up being the place where I lost almost everything that I had so painfully rebuilt.
The old comparisons and yard sticks still linger though. How can I be a real Minnis if I am not a full-time professional artist?
I was still trying to be that kind of Minnis. Someone who made a living off of art – just from theatre instead of painting. I was trying to fit myself into the Minnis narrative despite myself.
In the years since I have had to reevaluate my criteria for life, for living, to create new definitions of success. I have had to do this because resumes hate gaps and my creative resume contains gaping chasms.
Healing from trauma, finding your way in a foreign land as an immigrant, raising kids, working on your marriage – these are not suitable excuses to a society obsessed with production. Until recently these were not even suitable reasons for me. The output is the only thing that matters – not the necessary living and surviving that needs to be done between creative risks; yet these are the very things that make the art possible and also, if we’re being real, these are the things that make the art interesting.
When a tree is cut down to its roots, how long before we expect it to bear fruit again? With certain kinds of trauma is any expectation too much?
Regardless of whatever comes now and in the future though leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses will be the greatest achievement of my life. Everything from then till now, and everything that is to come is built on top of that.
Leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses is the greatest achievement of my life.
Since I already lost everything there is nothing that the religion can do to me. I don’t have to worry if I am living up to the unrealistic standards of the Witnesses which are only benchmarks set by a group of old white men that I have never met. I don’t see the world through their apocalyptic black and white lens anymore either, I can think on my own, I can make my own mistakes and live my own life.
And when I really look at my life I feel like I’m the luckiest bastard in the world. My brilliant and beautiful wife is my best friend. We have the most unlikely love story. People born worlds apart and from polar opposite cultures finding each other in the frozen North. So different yet somehow we are able to get each other on the most fundamental level.
When I look at my three children, and I see the sheer joy in their faces – when my daughters talk about what they want to dress up as on Halloween or their building excitement for an upcoming birthday, or when my two-year old boy just runs around the yard on a warm Saturday morning – sometimes all this beauty is too much for me.
I know that they will never have to feel guilt for staying home on the weekend, shame at eating a piece of their classmate’s birthday cake, or hate themselves for not loving the big brother magazines of the Witnesses. I broke the chains for them so they never need to know what being in a cult feels like.
They are my legacy.
All told, my children have lost two grandparents and two aunts – but they have gained the world.
All of it.
All of the pain that I have endured and no doubt, will continue to endure is nothing in comparison. When I see that glimmer in their eyes, hear their oceans of laughter, feel the sunshine in their smiles – I have no doubt that I would do it all again.
A hundred thousand times over. In a heartbeat.
What am I?
In a word: We are free.
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