Tourism - a different perspective

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Top Ten Caribbean Works of Fiction (again)

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So there's now an interesting exchange going on in the comments of Geoffrey's post, where the fundamental question of how to choose the top is being debated.Frances-Anne, who, from her reference to Trinidad, isn't likely to be who I thought she might be, says:

1) I resist the idea of "best" in this context (creation) as it reminds me of school in Trinidad "Good better best, never let it rest til we make our good better" that whole anglican ethic of competition and never being good enough, that pit us against each other to be judged by someone called "Cambridge". So I'm suspicious of this judging of "best", who is judging and by what standards?2) as has been reflected above Caribbean literature though in its flowering right now, has not been widely read, so people's choices will be determined not by "best" or even "favorite" but by what was forced on them at school or if they were lucky university. Reducing choices for the most part to Naipaul, Rhys, Lovelace, and Lamming, and only in general one of each of these. Not representative.

It's a basic point, and one well worth debating. But from my point of view, canons start somewhere. At this stage, I believe that we have to start with Naipaul, Rhys, Lovelace and Lamming, just because they are the ones that get forced on us (what about Anthony? What Caribbean schoolchild hasn't read A Year in San Fernando or Green Days by the River -- Cricket in the Road being eschewed by people like us Bahamians, to whom cricket is a foreign language). The fact that we "all" have these four in common makes them representative, and is worth exploration. The questions that follow — why these four? What do they represent? What does their selection tell us? — are equally important, and even fundamental to our understanding of our Selves.What's more, the fact that we have "all" read these writers means that we are all writing in response to, or inspired by, these four. This fact is not incidental, and it's why I support the teaching of Dead White Male writers to people who want to be writers. Because the vast majority of European literature was developed in the shadow of the Bible and Homer and Shakespeare, it is fundamental for people who wish to continue in that mode to read them. For us in the Caribbean who intend to continue working with the written word as word-on-page, they are part of our canon too, or they should be. We can't understand Lamming without knowing Caliban; we can't understand Walcott without understanding Homer; we miss part of Achebe's messages if we are ignorant of Yeats, and we can't even appreciate Brathwaite as we should without a familiarity with Eliot.I believe canons are there to tell us about who we are, what we regard as literature, and — more fundamentally still — to help us understand the others. I don't believe that our oppression should make us ignore them. Know thine enemy makes as much sense today, among us all, as it ever did.

Top Ten Caribbean Works of Literature

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I linked earlier (though late in the game) to Geoffrey Philip's semi-formal survey of the top ten works of Caribbean fiction.The process was two-tiered. The first part prepared a shortlist of twelve Caribbean works to be considered. This was done by a process of online nomination -- you could enter any book you thought was worthy of the honour -- and ended on the weekend. This part is a process of voting.I find the list interesting, if a little skewed. I admit that I misunderstood the purpose of the list, and tried to restrict my nominations to books I've actually read. Result: one big gun, in particular, is missing from the shortlist that should have been there -- Wilson Harris. But if I'm honest, I have never had the strength to finish his novels, as wide and meandering as the Demerara and as dense as the Guyanese interior. The list also betrays the probable age of the submitters -- it's weighted towards the mid-twentieth century.Anyhow, go vote for your top ten Caribbean works of fiction.

In Brazil, singers are ministers

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For those of you who aren't familiar with either Brazilian music or Brazilian politics, imagine a world where the Minister of Culture is a practising musician, and a world-famous one at that.This story tells the tale.For those who can't read it, here's how it begins:

ON Wednesday the Brazilian minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, is scheduled to speak about intellectual property rights, digital media and related topics at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. Two nights later the singer, songwriter and pop star Gilberto Gil begins a three-week North American concert tour.Rarely do the worlds of politics and the arts converge as unconventionally as in the person of Mr. Gil, whose itinerary includes a solo performance at Carnegie Hall on March 20. More than 40 years after he first picked up a guitar and sang in public, Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira is an anomaly: He doesn’t just make music, he also makes policy.

Amazing Grace

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On February 23, 2007, the film Amazing Grace opened worldwide in the USA.For people who don't know (and I'm assuming that there must be many of them here in The Bahamas, for reasons I'll tell you later), this film is, among other things, a look at William Wilberforce's abolitionist movement, the one that focussed Britons' eyes on the inhumanity of slavery, and which led the British Parliament first to abolish the transatlantic slave trade (whose bicentenary we celebrate this year) and, ultimately, to abolish slavery in the British Empire (1834), and to free the slaves (1834-1838).I have to say all this because nowhere is the film showing in The Bahamas.Now I have no idea why this is. One good reason, of course, is that commercial films in The Bahamas are controlled by a single conglomerate: Galleria Cinemas, which owns four commercial theatres in Nassau and Freeport, and which usually decides what the Bahamian public sees or doesn't see. So it is entirely possible that Galleria, looking at the costumes in the movie, thinking about the "dryness" of the subject, decided to pass on the film.This is something they do fairly regularly. As with many purveyors of mass entertainment in The Bahamas, the assumption is made that we are an undifferentiated mass of ignorami, and that no one will spend money on shows or performances that engages thought or reflection. (This attitude is as true of people producing live entertainment as it is of people importing films.) And so many films that I would like to see pass us by. It's one of the reasons that I don't go to the cinema; it's one of the reasons that our DVD collection is so vast. And it's one of the dangers -- a main and looming danger -- of having a monopoly governing commercial film distribution in the country. At least when RND Cinemas were still in operation, you had two sets of people making decisions, and sometimes those decisions would be different. Competition, what.There is, however, another, more sinister possibility. And it's this.The Bahamas Films and Plays Control Board viewed Amazing Grace and decided that it was not something that Bahamians ought to see.Now I don't have time to go into the implications of this. They are, I can assure you, rich with irony and fundamentally alarming. I'll come back to this blog to do this. But I'll leave you with these thoughts.

  • Ours is a nation made primarily up of the descendants of slave-owners and their slaves.
  • Ours is a nation whose political history is grounded uniquely and solely in the British Empire (yes, our social history is American. For the purposes of this discussion, that's irrelevant).
  • Ours is a nation that never tires of referring to itself as "Christian" (even though some of us, who respect and worship the Almighty in relative quiet, would like to take one step back to avoid the lightning bolt when it falls upon us for gross hypocrisy and overweening hate).
  • Amazing Grace is a movie about how the British Empire moved towards the abolition of the institution of slavery and the emacipation of the slaves.
  • The movers and shakers behind the Abolition crusade were Christians, and it was Christian principles that they used to argue their case and it was in the name of Christ that the battle was won.

Draw your own conclusions.

With all the talk about Bay Street Development

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... we might want to take a leaf from the Bajan book. Here's a great post from gallimaufry.ws about the beautification of Bridgetown, with pictures of the results.Here's a sample:

I took a stroll through town today and took some photos, and in the process realised just how much the city has been transformed. Places I used to avoid because they were so ugly and unattractive have become far more appealing. It’s really great.
independence square

The photo above is of Independence Square. A few months ago it was a run-down car-park. Now it’s an open space that can serve as a theatre, and with a statue of the nation’s first Prime Minister as its focal point (you can see the base of the statue from this angle, but not the statue itself; I should have chosen a better angle). I think it will look even nicer once the landscaping is really established.

We talk a lot -- about monuments, about beautification, about what-have-you. But we are not yet truly committed to put money behind the talk; we still tend to have a sense of waste about the spending on money on things that don't have apparent practical benefits -- or things, from another perspective, that don't have short-term, tangible returns.As though the long-term benefits that contribute to national and personal pride are irrelevant.

The LitBlog Co-Op reads Ngugi

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If you're a Bahamian nationalist, a Caribbeannest, a pan-Africanist, or just someone who doesn't believe everything that you see on TV or hear on the radio, you ought to be reading Ngugi wa Thiong'o.Ngugi is the reason I decided, decades ago, to begin writing plays. Ngugi, who was originally christened James in the colonial Kenya of the early 20th century, was once a novelist himself -- one of the greatest in all Africa. When Achebe ruled the west coast, Ngugi ruled the east. He was a Marxist, a Kenyan nationalist, and, during the war of liberation (otherwise known in the empire as the Mau-Mau Rebellion), chose to reject his Christian name in favour of the Gikuyu Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He wrote four great novels in English, and then decided two things: one, that he would no longer write in the colonizer's language, and switched to Gikuyu, and then that he would no longer write novels, because the masses of people he was trying to reach inhabited an oral society, and theatre would reach more of them than novels.He impressed me, and I began writing plays.Now, after over 20 years, Ngugi has written another novel. And it's available in English. And it's been featured over at the LitBlog Co-Op, here, over the past month or so.

Ideas and comments from around The Bahamas on culture

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... and Junkanoo:Ian Strachan on culture

Mr. Smith: When you wrote "God’s Angry Babies" which was very sympathetic to the illegal immigrant population, my information now is the significant amount of sympathy that was there before has been some what eroded by the new image of the new illegal migrant. Any impact from that group on the new Bahamian?

Mr. Strachan: I think that the history of Haitian migration in the Bahamas is a lot longer than the casual observer might imagine. Really, the connection stems back 100 years, what we have now though is a more pronounced separation in terms of living conditions between the Bahamian of the 21st Century and the Haitian peasant who is risking his life to come here, their living conditions haven’t changed much in 50-70 years.

Mr. Smith: But there is also a new Haitian.

Mr. Strachan: I think he is a new Bahamian. That’s my view.

Maurice Tynes on Junkanoo

I have not participated in the junkanoo parades for a number of years. While sitting in the bleachers and watching the parades during this period, I have not been impressed. It appears that the groups, or their leaders, are losing and may have lost their creative edge. The regurgitation of themes, the similarity of costumes from year to year and from group to group, and the seeming difficulty of groups to define or stamp a unique brand has led me to this conclusion. The management and administration of the parades need major overhaul. For one thing I do not believe that junkanoo leaders can or should head the Junkanoo Commission. There seem to be too many inherent conflicts. It appears that one or two junkanoo leaders have the arrogant view that they own and should control every aspect of the parade. I believe that the postponement of the Boxing Day Parade was a direct result and manifestation of this arrogance. How could you postpone a national cultural parade twenty-four hours before the scheduled start of that parade? A weather system could stall, dissipate or radically change direction within twenty-four hours. We do harm to our cultural development locally and internationally when we make these selfish decisions. We all appreciate the time, effort and Labor of love that go into preparing for the parades, but the spectators have as much right to ownership of junkanoo as the leaders. The Junkanoo Commission should be headed by persons who are unattached to junkanoo groups and who have knowledge of junkanoo and possess the highest integrity. We do have such persons in the Bahamas. Some of these persons may have at one time been part of a junkanoo group, but have been unattached to the group for a number of years. Junkanoo groups should be represented on the Commission but in an advisory and consultative capacity.

Lynn on being an artist on the plantation

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Lynn Sweeting writes a wonderful post on art and the artist in a tourist economy.Some of you may be wondering why I called it the plantation. If you have, you're new to this blog, and you certainly haven't heard of Ian Strachan's book, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. It's worth a look if you haven't.Here's what Lynn has to say:

It so happens that for ten or fifteen years I was a house slave on the tourist plantation, I was a Maryann sifting sand in a comfortable place. I wrote and published many stories for the tourism masters. Some said I was good at it. I was rewarded with a little public acclaim, and a trophy. I quite forgot I was a slave. I remembered again (or realized for the first time) when a story I wrote for the masters turned out to be a complete lie, and was causing outrage in Exuma. Obediently I had written that this community was happy that a huge influx of foreign yachts was coming through their harbor, thanks to a new marketing campagne. The truth was that these enormous boats were causing an environmental disaster, pollution was threatening to ruin a pristine ecology, and for added outrage, the people aboard these floating hotels never had to set foot in town, they spent not a penny. The islanders were in an uproar to see a story in the paper that erased them so effectively and so cruelly. I was horrified, and ashamed. That was the last story I ever wrote as a house slave on the tourist plantation.

Now, from one point of view, it's important that we tell good tales to our visitors, that we describe the happiness that comes from the five million-plus tourists who come to our shores. The trouble is, as Lynn describes above, we run the risk of obscuring the truth by telling these tales. Worse, the message we give ourselves is that our experience is worthless, our experience doesn't count; what matters is the packaging, and nothing more.I could write about how the Ministry of Tourism often falls into the trap of selling packaging and nothing else, but I've bashed that venerable institution quite enough on this blog. You only have to go back a few months to see the last discussion, and since we haven't moved much further from that point, I'll leave it alone (if you want to find the discussion, just put "tourism" into the search box up there and browse on your own time). This time I'll just let Lynn speak for herself.

What culture's good for -- in real terms

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Now this is a radical idea.

All of sub-Saharan Africa receives just over $1 billion per year from the US in economic aid. If everyone in the United States gave up one soft drink a month we could double our current aid to Africa. If everyone gave up one movie a year we could double our current aid to Africa and Asia.We have an even better idea:If every American would buy 10 songs by African Artists -- We would DOUBLE the amount of money the US is currently sending to Africa. This is what we mean by 'Tune Your World'.

Geoffrey Philp on Caribbean Culture

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Well, it's not exactly Geoffrey; he's quoting Oliver Stephenson. But what he says has resonance not only for today, but also for here.

The question is, when will we start to recognize the power and wealth in our cultural arts? Hasn’t history taught us anything? How long are we going to dwell on “a prophet is never appreciated in his own lifetime?” Indeed, our artists are truly the visionaries,, of any society.How much longer are we going to dwell solely on bauxite, tourism, cigars, rum and ganja as our mainstay? There should really be no excuse for any talented West Indian to be wandering the streets of Port-of-Spain, Kingston, Georgetown, Kings Town or Port-au-Prince neglected.An initial incentive must be given to the cultural arts for our artists and would-be artists. Not just a shoddy cultural arts program, not lip-service, but something solid and tangible that one can actually experience in its reality. Scholarship programs should be offered by foreign investors, like the scholarship programs that some bauxite companies offer to those interested in engineering and chemistry. The same should be done for the arts.In Jamaica, it is true that there is a new cultural arts center where people are being trained in dance, music, drama and painting, but then where do these people go with their acquired skills after they have left the institution? Where do the musicians, singers, dancers and playwrights go? They either take the sheet of paper that they have received to try and find your standard 9-to-5 job, or they go abroad.We in the Caribbean treat our cultural arts with such condescension that it is not only heart rending, but pathetic. Our artists in the Caribbean suffer whether we want to accept this or not, it is fact.

More here.

Belated Happy New Year

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And there're many reasons why 2007 is an important year for The Bahamas:

  • Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (March 25, 1807)
  • Sixty-Fifth Anniversary of the 1942 Burma Road Riot/Uprising (June 1-2, 1942)
  • Sixty-Fifth Anniversary of the introduction of the Secret Ballot in New Providence (1942)
  • Forty-Fifth Anniversary of the First Votes cast by Women (January 10, 1967)
  • Fortieth Anniversary of Majority Rule in The Bahamas (January 10, 1967)
  • Thirtieth Anniversary of the First Woman Elected to Bahamian Parliament (July 19, 1977)

And here's a specific reason why 2007 is an important year for my family:

  • 20th anniversary of my father's death (August 24, 1987)

We thought you'd like to know.

Peter Minshall on the Commercialization of Carnival

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Here.

“The Savannah stage has done so much harm,” says Minshall. It has evolved to suit the needs of the bigger Carnival bands (i.e.: commercialism), and in the process, has “cut out the light for anything small to grow.” As the big bands got bigger and made more money, the expression became more shallow, to the point where costumes are now no different from Las Vegas showgirls. “We have sold our soul,” says Minshall sadly, as we pay homage to “the cheapest of the cheap: American standards of entertainment.” T&T Carnival has become a celebrity thing and mas’, in its purest sense, is not about celebrity. In fact, it’s the antithesis of it.

We should take heed. For those of you who don't remember, when Minshall was here, two years ago, he was blown away by the vibrancy of Junkanoo, by the fact that it's a parade created by the participants, by the energy and the people-ness of it all. And for people who don't know, Trinidad and Tobago has closed the Savannah grandstand down for renovation; CARIFESTA was held at the National Stadium, not at the Savannah as a result, and Carnival 2007 will have to find a different venue as well.

In our calls for the "improvement" of Junkanoo, we should look to Trinidad and Tobago not only for inspiration in terms of organization and engineering, design and sound, but also in terms of their mistakes. There's no good reason why we should repeat mistakes that have been made in the past. The reasons will only be bad — powermongering, or selfishness, or greed.