On February 11, 2009, the first Day of Absence was observed in the Bahamas with the above tag-line. This event was the brain child of Nicolette Bethel, prominent Bahamian anthropologist, scholar and playwright. With a demonstration at the College of the Bahamas and numerous blog posts, interviews and radio appearances, the Day of Absence captured the imagination of the Bahamian arts community.
On December 31, 2009, Bahamian writer and artist Ward Minnis, (me, a.k.a. mainslave) will release a comprehensive critique of the Day of Absence on this website, and also an abridged version at Bahama Pundit.com. In the essay I question many of assumptions upon which the Day of Absence was based, and while I agree that it filled a need, I argue that it should not continue in its present form.
On January 12, 2010, at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas at 6:30pm, the merits of both the Day of Absence and its critique will be debated between Nicolette Bethel, myself and the Bahamian art community at large.
What is the role of the artist in Bahamian society? What part, if any, should the government play in the arts? Have Bahamian artists been absent from the wider society?
This is the guest editorial that appears in the Spring / Summer 2009 issue of The College of the Bahamas Alumni Magazine.
Way back in 2003, I presented my views on Bahamian national identity at a wonderful little conference held at The College of The Bahamas. In my presentation I used the metaphor of the “Bahamian-detector†to describe the process we go through to determine what is true true Bahamian and what isn’t. My problem, then and now, is that we are slowly wiping ourselves out of existence.
See, national identities are contrary and complex things. They are imaginary entities that exist in our heads that have tangible real world effects. If I had to define what it is, I would say that national identity is the sum of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. In the process of figuring out what tales are to be told, both the teller and the audience are brought into being. Of course, this also means that the stories are constantly changing, that there is eternal conflict over which story should be told and when, and the audience isn’t sure, from one minute to the next, if any of it is meant for them.
The Bahamian national story, and the concept of self embedded within it, has gone through some dramatic rewrites in the last fifty years. Before 1967, the rulers were the minority white population and they defined us as British-not-American and not-West Indian. After 1967 we were told that we were Black-and-British-but-not-American and-not-West-Indian. After independence it turned to Black-and-kinda-British (maybe we’ll just keep ‘em for their awards) not-American and not-West-Indian and sure-as-hell-not-Haitian.
We have had to figure out who we are on the fly while the ground was shifting beneath our feet. All while we felt under siege, first by Buckra, then by Britain. Once we wrote them out of the story, we felt under cultural attack by America and then by immigrants. And we have had to deal with all this while always having a tale or two to give to tourists who were looking for an authentic holiday experience. The end result of all that bombardment is the story we now have; a story that is more about what it isn’t than what is. This, in a nutshell, is the problem.
What’s wrong with the current national story, and the Bahamian that exists within it, is its narrowness. That story’s only Bahamian is charcoal black, male, aggressively heterosexual and he lives over-the-hill. He is a bush medicine expert who talks endlessly about going back to the island while eating scorched conch and fish after church on Sunday. He spends most of his time in the Junkanoo shack and on the walls of his clap-board home you will find post-card paintings of Poincianas…
That story is completely out of touch with reality.
Is there room in the national narrative for a Bahamian who grew up middle-class-affluent in the suburbs? Or can a white Bahamian find themselves represented there as anything other than a tourist? Can Bahamians with Haitian blood even exist in that tale without becoming a cuss word?
The problem here does not lie with those Bahamians who are excluded; the problem is the story itself. We need to see that the conception of self that that story perpetuates is slowly strangling us to death. Bahamians are black, white, gay, straight, Haitian, Jamaican, American, Jungless, upper-lower-middle class and everything else in between. We are not one thing, we are many, many interesting, contradictory, beautiful things. We can’t keep denying parts of ourselves, hating our own face, our own skin, our own lives and expect to go anywhere worth a damn.
Dick Cheney has been busy. He spoke last Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute just a few moments after Barack Obama had made his wide-ranging policy talk at the National Archives.
Cheney criticized Obama on his National security policy, his desire to close Guantanamo and his reluctance to use the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation progam.”
And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness and would make the American people less safe.
— Former Vice President Dick Cheney
This is simply breath-taking. How can he seriously defend torture? How can he defend the indefensible? It defies reason.
First to label the Bush administrations techniques, such as waterboarding “enhanced interrogation” implies that they work better than regular interrogation. There is no evidence that they do. In fact they produce lots of bogus information because the person being, yes I’ll say it, tortured, will say anything to make the pain stop. This is very well documented and should not even be up for debate.
Second, many of the inmates at Guantanamo, like most of the people who were thrown into detention in Iraq at places like Abu Ghraib, those who have been labeled as terrorists, have never even been charged with a crime, much less tried and convicted for anything and have limited or no access to legal counsel. So to say that these people are “terrorists and murderers” denies them the whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing. Have you heard of it Mr. Cheney? And to throw that out you also throw out due process, habeas corpus and most of the basis of western law. Yes Mr. Cheney, they are “innocent victims” until you can actually prove that they did something.
Third, how any of this enhanced torture makes Americans more safe is completely beyond me. It most likely does the opposite. A new study by Jim Walsh and Jim Piazza from the University of North Carolina indicates “that governments that abuse rights actually experience more terrorism.”
Cheney’s position perhaps also assumes that torture is the only morally dubious thing that the United States has done recently. Wish it were so.
Then there is Obama. Yes. It is a good thing that he is trying to close down Gitmo. Unfortunately the so-called Democratic congress might not let him meet his year-end deadline. And yes, he has banned enhanced torture. These are good things. But what else did we learn from his speech?
Well we learned that he also supports indefinite detention of some prisoners without trial. Huh?
In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so going forward, my Administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.
— President Barack Obama.
So, let’s get this straight. There are people there that can’t be tried because of bad evidence (perhaps obtained through torture) or even no evidence but despite the lack of evidence you’re just going to keep ’em locked up. Forever. Just in case.
And since there is no framework for indefinite incarceration you are going to invent one. And since more people are going to be involved this time around that makes it right?
How can you invent an appropriate legal regime for something that is, by the standard of your own laws, illegal? How can you expect to maintain your laws by finding legal ways to break them?
Simply breath-taking.
But what troubles me most about the double whammy of speeches from what is supposed to be the left and the right is what was not included.
We are confronting some of the most complicated questions that a democracy can face. But I have no interest in spending our time re-litigating the policies of the last eight years. I want to solve these problems, and I want to solve them together as Americans.
— President Obama.
I find it amazing that both speakers have such large blind spots. Blind spots big enough to cover the rest of the world. “The policies of the last eight years” includes not only Americans, but also wars in two other countries with Obama opening up a war in a third. “The policies of the last eight years” include wars that were by international law illegal, wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of people. How can that only be about Americans?
It is the arrogance so plainly on display that is perhaps most indefensible of all.
Stephen Marche of the Weekend Post got off on the wrong foot apparently. He’s pissed at Greg Gutfeld’s remarks about Canada on a late night Fox TV show. You can watch the offending video above.
In a nutshell Gutfeld essentially calls the Canadian army “soft” in response to the announcement that the Canuck troops are “at the limit” and need to take a year off “to restore [their] full fighting capability.”
But does Mr. Marche go a bit too far in macho protestations?
Canadians are one of the rudest peoples on Earth. Outsiders simply don’t understand that “sorry” means “go screw yourself.”
Well. I have to really rethink my entire five years in this country now. All this time I felt when someone bumped into me by accident on the bus, and they turned and said “sorry” they actually meant “sorry.” Here it was they were really telling me to “go screw myself.” I’ll have to keep that in mind and wear a nice scowl on my face when I hear it again, cause now I know what they really mean.
Although, the converse to that is also true, cause when I accidentally bump into a Canadian, I will really enjoy saying “sorry” now. Ha ha. Nice to finally figure out the language. Thanks Mr. Marche.
But wait. There’s more.
If you took the Canadians out of American comedy, it would be like taking African-Americans out of the NBA: still the same game but you wouldn’t recognize it and you wouldn’t want to watch it.
There is a lot of lunacy in that statement. Yes, Canadians have produced a lot of great comedians. Jim Carrey, ironically now a US citizen, comes to mind. But he ignores the point that like the NBA, American comedy is also dominated by blacks. What would happen if you took all of the black people out of American comedy Mr. Marche? Would you like to watch that? No Bill Cosby, Sinbad, Eddie Murphy, Bernie Mac, Chris Rock, Katt Williams et al?
The crowning nut on the fruit cake though has to be the equation of Canadian comics, all of the ones he names are white, to black athletes. Maybe Mr. Marche really has bought into Canadian multiculturalism and is so color blind that he doesn’t see the inappropriateness of his own comparisons.
Even if you put that aside, he’s still off. Yeah, I’ll say it, Canadians are not as important to American comedy as black athletes are to the NBA. Bad analogy.
What amazes me though is how Canada gets its knickers in a collective twist whenever its ‘macho-ness’ is called into question. Look here Canada (and you too Mr. Marche). You can’t have it both ways; you can’t be perceived as the nice guy on the block, Mr. Humanitarian, Mr. International Do-gooder, and be the macho Terminator at the same time. It just doesn’t work like that.
Happy New Year! I present for your consideration a very interesting perspective by Sir Ken Robinson on the (mis)uses of education. Definitely worth your time.
Since it is the capital of Canada, Ottawa has a lot of Museums. I have visited none of them. However, their signs do lend themselves to humor once you take them out of context.
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?
A few weeks have passed since the historic US election on November 4th and the dust is still settling. Derek Walcott wrote a poem, Alice Walker wrote a letter and everybody in between is wondering what this election actually means.
I thought I would share with you some of the best commentary on the election and the impending Presidency that I had read around the net.
This article / interview from CNN is quite interesting. Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a one-time script analyst on the Cosby show, looks at the impact of Obama as a symbol for young black children:
We’re going to have a generation of children — if he’s in there for eight years — being born in 2009, looking at television and images, hearing before they can talk, absorbing it in their brain and being wired to see the visual images of a black man being president of the United States and understanding very early that that’s the highest position in the United States. – Dr. Alvin Poussaint
When Barack stepped inside the Oval Office for the first time, he had to be thinking, “How on earth am I going to undo this legacy?”—crimes against the Constitution, crimes against human rights, crimes against US and international law, war crimes, shock and awe, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, extraordinary rendition, torture, Arabs as terrorists, the separation of powers thrown down the toilet, a US police and surveillance state, a monster financial crisis caused by excessive deregulation.
Quite so.
Again from the Real News Network a video interview of 2008 Presidential candidate Ralph Nader speaking on an Obama presidency. They filmed this as the results of November 4th were coming in. A tad ironic, but as always Nader is spot on with his analysis:
NADER: That’s the first tip that you get: you see who he surrounds himself with.
The interview is in three parts, so collect them all!
So, while, you know, we can argue and scream—and I’m not a fan of the possible Hillary Clinton appointment to the State Department—you know, the transition team does include people who are genuine policy advocates, who, if they get a chance to have any authority, could indeed be agents of change. – David Corn
Exhibit B: Um. Look again.
I think, you know, you have Obama, the orator, and you have Obama’s rhetoric. And then you have what I think is more important, which is who is he surrounding himself with and what are his actual foreign policies. – Jeremy Scahill
Very interesting stuff.
We will know soon enough what an Obama Presidency will bring, but in the meantime, I agree with Scahill and Nader that the best way to see the future is to examine closely the pasts of the people Obama puts in key positions of authority.
Scahill has more detail in his article here. And David Corn’s view from the other side of the fence is here.
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.
Bahamians are a sensitive lot when it comes to identity. I am one of the foremost sufferers from this anxiety of being. This comes from my mulatto / mangra / light brown skin.
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.
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.
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?
