Local Government

Two years ago I was asked to sit on a government committee that was formed to look at establishing local government for New Providence.

Maybe I shouldn’t say this, given political parties’ apparent inability to work with one another for the good of the citizenry as a whole, but I had earlier been asked to attend meetings hosted by the IDB exploring the issue. The very first documents we received had been generated by the IDB consultant on this issue. So this is not a new concept.

Further, most countries in the world—indeed, all functioning countries—have local government. In other words, most functioning countries separate the powers and responsibilities assigned to different political and civic authorities. There are national-level politicians, whose primary purpose is to create legislation on behalf of the citizens they represent. And there are local politicians, whose primary purpose is to put in place basic amenities and oversee the kinds of things that make life bearable at the local level of the citizen.

The Bahamas has only one type of politician: the national-level ones. But we also place high expectations on those politicians—expectations that on one level (the level of our personal need and comfort) are entirely reasonable, but that on another level are entirely misplaced. They’re misplaced because we have no room in our system that obliges or enables the politicians we elect to the House of Assembly to fulfil those expectations. MPs are legislators who are selected by smaller segments of the population, organized in constituencies. In simple language, they write laws. That’s it. While they may inform the legislative process by speaking on behalf of the people who elected them, MPs are responsible to the nation as a whole. They are not local government officials, responsible to the communities they serve. It’s best to be clear on this right now.

It’s best to be clear on this, too: We need local government officials to make our country function for the citizens.

So when the Minister of Local Government decides, unilaterally, not to advance a government-mandated report prepared by a government-established committee to fulfil a critical election promise by the political party who nominated him to represent a constituency, he is betraying us all. He does not have the luxury of personal opinion. He serves the citizenry. And local government is what we need.

Ash Wednesday, again

My Lenten observations, as longtime followers may recall, tend to have to do with taking on tasks rather than giving up pleasures.

I have already shared that I have been unable to write since the passage of Hurricane Dorian; too many ideas have been welling up, ideas fuelled by anger and disappointment.

This Lent the pledge is to write something once a day. Not everything will be worth sharing widely. But each piece of writing will be part of an exercise to get past the block and exercise—for the benefit, I hope, of our nation—the gift of writing that was given me.

Forty days of writing. Establish, Lord, the work of these hands.

diary of souls

Hurricane Dorian and its aftermath have rendered me silent. Writer’s block doesn’t come to me often but it comes when it comes with a vengeance.

Perhaps somewhere else at another time I will be able to express what I have been feeling since September 2019. It is a mixture of disgust, disappointment and despair, along with the sense that never have I felt less satisfied to have been right about the inadequacy of government. The way in which we have not handled, or even acknowledged the homan toll of the hurricane (apart from publishing the dollar costs of the storm—as if they matter in the face of the human costs) has dismayed and terrified me. It terrifies me because hurricane season comes every year and nothing, nothing, that we have done since the hurricane has prepared us to face this year or next year or the year after. If a hurricane like Dorian hits our capital we will be lost, and nothing that we have done collectively or individually will change that. No dome towns, no tent cities, no shantytown demolition is an adequate response. It terrifies me. It makes me sick.

And the way we treat one another, the way we are so content, so proud, to throw the most vulnerable among us away like filth, to denigrate them, to rejoice in their suffering, to compound that suffering, all in the name of “national security”, makes me furious.

The only solace I’ve had is theatre. Thanks to renee caesar, we have been working since December on a production of Ian Chinaka Strachan’s Diary of Souls. Written about the way we Bahamians, we god-fearing, holy-ghost, sanctified Christians, treated the dead almost thirty years ago, the play was a protest and a challenge then, and it is more than ever resonant now. Ian Strachan wrote it to expiate our collective guilt for the way we treated our fellow human beings, our brothers and sisters, our womb-mates from across the sea at an awful moment in time.

Photo by Brent Burrows

Working on it has been healing.

Again thanks to renee and Short Tales, we have been working with a wonderful team: T-Day Jeudi, Sony Jean-Jacques, Esther Louis, Cade Darling, Brent Burrows, and Shireen Seymour on stage. The set was built by Jason Evans. I told him my vision: the psychiatrist’s office centre stage, with the beach in front of it, and the hole—the mass grave—behind it.

I wanted the audience to know and never forget that no matter what we do, how we deny it, how we pretend that we are different and separate, our fate and that of our Haitian neighbours who live beside and among us, who pass through our waters, who live with us and who have shaped our lives and culture even as we have shaped theirs (for the Duvaliers who created the conditions that drove their people to our shores were Bahamians), are entwined. We may close our eyes but we will never escape that fact.

I wanted the set to show us that. The Bahamians in the middle are watched throughout the play by the Haitian souls trapped in a limbo of our creation.

And look what Jason and his team did with that vision. When I shared it, he asked one thing: “Can I bring sand on the stage?” And look what he did. Sand, and palm trees, and flotsam, and trash. The hole and the beach.

And then there is lighting, designed by Ayoka Seymour and me. We discussed the moods and the colours, the effects and the moments, and off Ayoka went. With music selected by renee and me, and run by Joshua Haeward II.

Theatre heals. Our medium is human experience and human emotion. We show what humans do to one another, and the consequences of their actions. We put it in the same space as you, and you will share the emotion with us. Come and see it. Challenge yourself to be changed.

Facing the Future: Staring Down Reality

Hurricane Dorian and after

The thing about disasters is that they throw all the cracks in a society, any society, into sharp relief. All the absurdities, the inefficiencies, the pettinesses, the stupidities, the failures: these are all laid bare. I’m not talking about individual flaws; I’m talking about the cracks in the system. 

The thing about disasters is that, tragedy aside, they create an opportunity to begin to fix what’s broken.

But in order to fix it, we have to acknowledge it. And that’s the hard part. Because one of the biggest things that’s broken about Bahamians and The Bahamas is that we are some of God’s greatest hypocrites. There’s a gap so wide between who we say we are and what we actually do that most days these days I question whether Jesus Christ Himself can bridge it. There’s the ideal Bahamas: Godfearing, Christian, warm, welcoming, peaceful, laid-back, loving. And then there’s the more everyday us:

“Bahamas for Bahamians.
Them boats need to be sinked. 
They roam like roaches. 
They nasty like that. 
C-section every female & tie off tubes. 
Sterilize every male. 
Please kill them duty smelly Haitians.”

Every one of the above statements I have lifted from social media or newspaper reports, and they are statements issued by self-proclaimed Bahamians who, shocked by Dorian into confronting the reality that we inhabit a society balanced on the backs of a half-visible underclass, are reeling from the exposure of that underclass, and reacting  against them. Some of the speakers are “good Christians”. Some are politicians. Some are pastors. And some are just ordinary Bahamians letting their opinions out through social media.

Don’t be too shocked. The reaction is not new, and it isn’t unique. People who study literature and history—those optional subjects that we don’t believe to be necessary to teach people in school—can recognize the reaction. The whole world is experiencing an existential shift—some people call it a crisis—and the “truths” on which we Bahamians have built our lives are melting.

“Truths” like God is a Bahamian.

“Truths” like people don’t die when hurricanes hit The Bahamas.

“Truths” like Bahamians are God-fearing people.

Like foreign investment can save our economy.

Like privatization can solve all ills.

Like we can turn to our governments in times of trouble, and big brother will reach out a warm black hand and rescue us.

Scapegoats and scapegoating

In other places, there are other melting “truths”, but the reaction is the same: a low-grade panic, a silent confusion, and a very public reaction: identify the cause of the troubles, and eradicate it.

And the cause of the troubles? Across human societies, it’s almost inevitably a group of people we can all unite behind blaming, hating, and (not infrequently), killing.

In Puritan America, witches.

In the American south, black people.

In contemporary China, the Uyghurs, and the people who follow Falun Gong.

In 1990s Rwanda, the Tutsi.

In 1990s Yugoslavia, the Croats.

In Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, the Jews.

In Trump’s USA, the former land of the free, the symbol of liberty and safe havens, “immigrants”.

“When the world loses its predictability ... societies hunt for the source of the problem and settle on people and groups ... whose persecution can serve as a channel to ease the collective distress.”

It’s a universal human practice. When the world loses its predictability, when society shifts and we can’t rely on the familiar and comforting, societies hunt for the source of the problem and settle on people and groups who can safely be blamed, and whose persecution can serve as a channel to ease the collective distress. The practice doesn’t solve anything, but it does provide distraction. It allows the community to turn away from its own shared pain and provides a measure of relief in the short term. 

Maybe I’m wrong to call it “relief”. It might be more accurate to say this: it’s a way to take action, a way for people who find themselves suddenly powerless to feel powerful again. Having control over other people’s life and death, over other people’s comfort and suffering—this provides a workable substitute for true power, actual control over one’s life. But the one thing that all societies who descend into this mire find out eventually is that in seeking to deflect damage and disaster by damaging and destroying someone else, eventually the society itself is destroyed.

In the social sciences we call this practice scapegoating. Anthropologists will argue that it happens all the time, everywhere, in every social group. Some theorists regard it as a normal part of a functional society. Scapegoating achieves several things at once. It defines and delineates boundaries, teaching group members who’s “in” and who’s “out”; it gives groups a chance to explain, understand and ultimately accept terrible happenings which may be otherwise beyond explanation; and it attempts to re-establish social stability in situations which are growing unstable.  It happens on a small scale in every social system. It’s a measure by which conformity is established and reinforced. It brings comfort and predictability. 

In anthropology, we once used the term “witch” to describe the scapegoat. The process of identifying a “witch” is a process by which solidarity is created. People get together and cooperate in defining, discovering, and calling out the “witch”. By inflicting suffering of one sort or another on those individuals identified as “witches”, the society finds satisfaction. It is a practice that happens again and again and again; and by studying who is identified as a “witch”, social scientists learn plenty about societies. They learn what the norms are, how the social group is defined, who gets to belong, and so on and on. Across the world, the same kinds of people fall into this category: women, the poor, the differently abled, the mentally ill, people of different ethnicities, people of different religions, outcasts, the elderly, the weak. In some societies it’s all of the above; in others, compassion may exist for some of these groups while others are attacked. By studying the particulars, we better understand the society as a whole.

But here’s what we have concluded across the globe. When societies are stressed or threatened with a fundamental change in their way of life, their economy, their culture, this practice escalates. Scapegoating, which normally affects individuals, is applied to whole groups. And the belief grows: if we can only get rid of this group, if we can only eradicate the people in it, we can get rid of the trouble.

Scapegoating allows us to fall into the trap of believing that all our problems will be solved if we can only destroy the scapegoats.

Hardened Hearts

But we would be wrong.

For as we seek to destroy the scapegoats, we little by little destroy ourselves. This happens for a number of reasons. The first one is well expressed in the Martin Niemoller poem, “First they came for the Socialists...”. We take comfort in the assumption that the problem will be dealt with if only the troubling element is removed. But when the element has been attacked and the problem still remains, the focus shifts. Another scapegoat is discovered. Individuals and groups are one by one identified, controlled, eradicated; but the problem itself is never fixed. And the society devours itself.

“... it’s impossible to brutalize another person without first turning them, in our minds, into brutes who deserve their suffering.”

But the second one is more insidious. It comes from the fact that in order to attack the “Other” (whoever that may be) we have to kill something in them. We have to turn off that part of our minds that recognizes them as people like ourselves; we have to strip them of the things that help us see them and feel their pain. We participate in their dehumanization. We have to; it’s impossible to brutalize another person without first turning them, in our minds, into brutes who deserve their suffering.

And the third one is the worst of all. In order to attack the “Other”, we have to kill something in ourselves. We have to silence that part of us that recognizes and acknowledges other people’s suffering, that part of us that urges us to reach out and help to heal it, not to make it worse. We have turn off that part of our humanity that expresses shock and grief and sorrow at the terrible things that happen to other people, because if we allow it to live, we cannot do the unthinkable. We cannot really sink those boats; we cannot really cut babies out of women’s wombs and sterilize the parents. We cannot really string those men from trees or chap up those children or burn those people alive in that church. We cannot pray for our brothers and neighbours and cousins to be killed simply for wanting to travel from one place to another, unless we deaden our own compassion, our own empathy. Unless we—to use the Biblical phrase which expresses it so perfectly—harden our hearts. Unless we allow our love—to use another apt Biblical phrase—to grow cold.

This is the reality we must honestly face: In order to destroy the Other, we must destroy ourselves.

Step carefully

But, you may ask. Wait, you may say. If we’re enacting a role that many others have acted before us, if we’re responding the way that social scientists can with some certainty predict, aren’t we just behaving naturally? Aren’t we just doing the inevitable?

Yes; and no.

Yes, because the inevitable occurs every day. We place boundaries around “us” and “our kind”. We set up categories and slot things and people into them, and in this way we create social and cultural meaning. Many of these categories are positive and provide confidence and value for their groups.

But the process is not static and it is not always benign. Because as we practise it, the process results in stereotypes (glib expectations about ability and behaviour that we impose on groups who are different from us), prejudice (the idea that the way others live their lives is inferior, evil, or wrong), discrimination (taking action on our prejudice and treating different groups differently), racism and ethnic hatred (deciding that our prejudice and differential treatment are justified because of the inferiority or unworthiness of the other), and structural inequality (creating structures that widen and enforce the differences, thus ensuring that the people we define as inferior remain inferior forever). 

And so—no. Because there’s a difference between delineating groups, identifying “self” and “other”, and using that practice to define different collectives within a society—and setting out actively to destroy, remove, or eradicate the “other”. The first process is the normal one, found in every society. The second, however, will ultimately destroy society itself. 

So here we are. We’re faced with the cracks and flaws that have always been there, but which we’ve ignored until now. We can’t ignore them any more, so we seek to fix them in the predictable, scapegoating way. We’re blaming our ills on “illegals”, the name we have created for the Haitians among us; and we’re believing that we’ll fix those cracks by removing the Haitians. Predictably, then, we see the rise of hate speech, hate action, collective justification of that hatred.

It’s a dangerous road, and a slippery one.

We would do well to step carefully as we go.

Hurricanes: Facing the Worst

It’s tempting to believe that what happened to The Bahamas in Hurricane Dorian was the worst scenario possible. Our two second most populous islands devastated. The hurricane sitting over Grand Bahama for over 48 hours. Complete destruction of whole neighbourhoods, loss of life still being calculated.

It’s tempting, too, to believe that somehow Nassau is immune, sheltered from the worst of hurricanes by neighbouring islands, or protected by some divine bubble that has saved us so far. It’s tempting to make claims like Grand Bahama is the island that is the most frequented by hurricanes in The Bahamas, that it’s risky to live in or invest on islands further away from the centre of our population, that it’s somehow safer to be in Nassau.

Understand me now: it is not.

Let me tell you this, too. Hurricane Dorian’s stalling over Grand Bahama was unusual, but it is not unheard of. Ninety years ago, an unnamed hurricane, not as strong or as organized as Hurricane Dorian (the world was not yet fully experiencing the impact of the age geologists are calling the anthropocene—the geological age most impacted by human activity), but quite bad enough to be a strong Category 4 hurricane, sat for sixty hours—almost three days—over Nassau and Andros. During that time many of the same impacts as were felt by Abaco and Grand Bahama affected the capital. Not a structure was left intact, and many collapsed completely. Grant’s Town was flooded and drownings happened.

That’s not all: the 1929 hurricane was the third direct cyclone hit New Providence in three years. There were three hurricanes which hit Nassau in 1926, one of which passed directly over the city, and one in 1928. These, too, were no baby hurricanes, but they were faster moving and the devastation was not as bad. The idea that Nassau is somehow immune to big blows, an idea that seems to have gotten traction since the passage of Dorian and others—and since we managed to weather Matthew without loss of life—is an idea we should dispose of right now.

Ever since Dorian hit our northern islands, I have driven around New Providence with my heart in my mouth. What if it happened here? I wonder. I drive through the densely populated areas of Bain Town and East Street, looking at the derelict properties, the neighbourhoods built on reclaimed wetlands, the little houses tossed together on narrow streets and think, what if?

We are reeling from the loss of life and property that we have experienced this past month. Our grief and horror is sharpening into hate, into unthinking enaction of impossible policy, and our hearts are hardening to stone. We Nassauvians are resentful of the burden placed on our city by those who have lost everything they had, including families and friends, and we are ungenerous.

But.

But for the luck … But for the grace there we go.

We are, therefore, wasting time in petty squabbles, on resentment of the sudden increase in our population, on impatience of the Family Islanders who are taking up our roads, our space, our air. Our invocation of political colours, of obsolete immigration policies that can only increase suffering and defy the Word of God (and here I mean the Old Testament exhortations to treat sojourners in one’s land with kindness and hospitality, not that wishy-washy love-thy-neighbour New). Instead of spending our energy in negativity ad hate, we need to focus our attention on what might have been.

Dorian could have hit a little further south, a tiny further west. Then we would be the ones scattering to the other islands, taking up their space.

Our city would be the one struggling to breathe over the stench of rotting flesh.

Our homes would be the ones to be salvaged from the filth and the mud.

“But,” you say. “It didn’t. And,” you say, “it won’t. Hurricanes don’t hit Nassau.”

I have no illusions as I write this. I’m well aware that when hate and false belief are on a roll there is little that can stop them but, well, war. But sometimes, for one or two people, a little reason may prevail.

Understand this. Hurricanes do hit Nassau. Ninety years ago, Grand Bahama was the one who was sideswiped; Nassau was the place that held the record for direct hits.

It is only a matter of time. We are wasting it as I write. What plans are we making for the inevitable?

Hurricanes: Survival and Change

Survival

When I was sixteen I joined a search and rescue team.

We were trained to do basic tasks like first aid, how to get to people who had fallen off cliffs, how to bring them up from those cliffs, or how to locate people who had got lost in the woods. These tasks had specific skills. All of us were trained in basic first aid and in CPR. But some of us had more extensive training. All of us were trained to abseil down cliffs and to climb back up them; some of us were trained to carry stretchers down those cliffs, to load injured people onto those stretchers, and to be hauled back up. All of us knew how to secure ropes to trees and set up belay stations to make these processes as safe as possible. And some of us were trained in how to conduct land-based searches, how to orient ourselves in the forest. We learned, before GPS, how to use compasses and maps to find our way through thick tree cover. We were taught how to conduct sweep searches and grid searches. We were taught what we were looking for, and what we could do, and what we were trained to find. We were taught how to organize ourselves, how to look after one another, how to make sure no one was left behind, above all how to ensure everyone left a crisis situation safely.

My point? We were trained to meet emergencies. We were taught the basics of what to do if we were ever called out by the RCMP to a site of a disappearance. We were drilled until such things were second nature to us. We were rostered and on call one week per month. We had a plan. We knew what we would do in the worst case. We were trained and ready. The worst case never happened, but we were trained in case it did.

Almost the worst case has happened to The Bahamas this month past, and we were not ready.

Scapegoats

It’s easy to blame the government, to vilify those people in power who have, once again, appeared to drop the ball. Scapegoats are always convenient in times of crisis, and pointing our fingers at them (or at the so-called “illegals”, or at the people who didn’t evacuate, or at the weather forecasters who didn’t know Dorian would become a Category 5 hurricane so fast, or at God) eases our pain just a little bit, in the moment.

But it doesn’t solve any problems at all.

Because we are all at fault.

Permit me for one minute to indulge in old-lady language. 

When I was growing up, hurricane season was a big deal. It was marked, every May, by a flurry of activity. Newspapers would produce hurricane supplements which were full of articles that gave instructions on what to do to prepare for hurricane season. Lists like the following would be produced:

1. Stock up on non-perishable goods

2. Ditto bottled water

3. Ditto on batteries, flashlights, hurricane lamps, kerosene oil, candles and matches

4. Put matches in waterproof containers

5. Check hurricane shutters

6. Trim trees from around roofs and electrical lines

7. Remove debris from yard and surroundings

8. Check roofs for leaks and conduct repairs around the house

Articles would be included in these supplements that explained how hurricanes worked and what the different categories meant. They would explain what effects would be expected to accompany each level of hurricane: what a tropical storm was, what a category 1 hurricane could do, what a category 5 could do. They would include stories of past hurricanes, listing the damage done and the people killed in the terrible storms of 1926 through 1932. They would provide a tracking map for a hurricane, since there were no satellite maps available to the ordinary citizen. They would list the names chosen for the hurricane season. They would explain what to do if a hurricane watch was called, and what to do if a hurricane warning was called. 

They would list the hurricane shelters, by area.

They would list the emergency numbers, by area: who to call in an emergency, and when it was possible to make a call in an emergency.

The same thing would happen on the radio. (In the Olden Days, there was only one radio station and everybody listened to it, especially in times of trouble.) Every day during Community Announcements—which always followed the news—the list of hurricane shelters would be read. By area. The shelters would be manned by volunteers from the Red Cross and representatives from the police. They would be stocked with blankets, cots, food, old clothing, lamps, oil—whatever you might need if people had to evacuate their homes. They were chosen from among the sturdiest buildings, often on high ground, and I believe they were inspected annually to make sure they were up to par. (We had a “par” then, go figure.) People were told to listen to the radio for instructions in the event they might need to evacuate. People living in low-lying areas were always advised to evacuate, and were instructed to listen to the radio for the evacuation order. 

But things have changed, and quickly. We have all changed. Despite the fact that we have been having devastating hurricanes in our country since the turn of the 21st century (and even the decade before), we have seemed to do away with the hurricane preparation. Beyond investing in plywood to be nailed into walls (a far cry from fitted hurricane shutters) and stocking up on tinned goods, we don’t really do all that much else.  Radio stations have proliferated, so community announcements take an altogether different form.  We are collectively all to blame.

And what is the result? A category five hurricane struck two centres of the Bahamian population, and we were not prepared. Our equipment was faulty; our systems failed; the shelters didn’t shelter, and too many people have been injured, have died.

We were not ready to conduct search and recovery. We were not ready to call in the troops, Bahamian and otherwise. We mobilized more quickly than we did for Joaquin or Irma, but we didn’t mobilize fast enough. And too many people have been injured. Too many have died.

*

Change

So we need to change the way we operate. We need to learn from the terror and destruction wrought from Dorian and prepare better in the future. 

There are people who say that there is little one can do when a category five storm makes a direct hit on one of our islands. I don’t happen to agree. There is a point at which one has to stop all human action and turn one’s fate over to God or the universe or Huracan, the great wind; but that should happen after all earthly preparations have been made. 

For instance: we need to select or create hurricane shelters that are worthy of the name: places where people can go and feel safe, not only from the winds and waters outside, but also from the other people within those walls. We need to change the way we prepare, stock, man and organize those buildings we call “shelters”; and we need to ensure that there are enough of them within clusters of population to make people willing to evacuate to them. It’s clear to me that there are not enough hurricane shelters of any kind in New Providence to serve our population of over a quarter of a million people, and I am not confident that those buildings identified as “shelters” will not, like some of those in Abaco, fall in and crush those staying there in the middle of a storm. 

Surely we can change that fact. 

For another instance: we need to organize and train volunteer crews of rescuers—people who, like the jet ski and small boat operators in Grand Bahama, are willing to go out in the immediate aftermath of a storm, some of them even during the storm—to save lives. Such people should be cultivated and encouraged, trained and even given subsidies to prepare them for such activity. Like the home guard during the British Blitz, these people could be volunteers trained and equipped by the government to enable them to be their neighbours’ keepers—a true-true public/private partnership.

For a third instance: we need to permit our government to invest in the best emergency equipment available, not the cheapest, and we need to support our government’s diversion of funds to those things that are necessary for the survival of our citizenry during a mega-storm: things like satellite phones and radios that will work under the worst conditions, things like the parts that keep RBDF vessels running in tip-top shape. We cannot count pennies when it comes to the lives of our people; but it’s clear that for too long we have been doing just that.

So. Like my sixteen-year-old self in the search and rescue team I joined, we need to start preparing—training—ourselves to handle what we are not sure will come.  For know this: we can prepare better for mega-storms. And, given the tenor of the times—we must.

I could go on, but I won’t, not right now. Instead, let me leave you with the vision of the storm that I’ve found most arresting: a photo taken by Jim Edds (@ExtremeStorms) at Hope Town from within Dorian’s eye. 

Hurricanes: Response and Call

Hurricane Dorian has moved away from The Bahamas, heading north along the American coastline towards Canada. Like Joaquin before it, Dorian took us by surprise. Not that the storm was coming. We were tracking it as it swept across the Atlantic and up the Caribbean chain. But that it grew so big and so slow so damn fast. A category five Atlantic hurricane has historically been a relatively rare event, especially a category five hurricane that makes landfall.

In retrospect, the rapid intensification of this hurricane shouldn’t have taken us by surprise. We have had ample warning from climatologists about the effects of warmer oceans and atmosphere on the formation of tropical cyclones. And plenty of words have been written on this very issue: personal meditations on what it means to watch a hurricane destroying one’s home, frank discussions about climate change’s effect on small nations.

But there’s no time for retrospection now, unless it’s the kind of retrospection that takes us back to mistakes made by others in the wake of similar crises. Watching my leaders flounder when faced with the magnitude of this disaster reminds me of the (non) response to Hurricane Katrina fourteen years ago. Back then I wrote this:

As I write, people are continuing to die in New Orleans, dying of thirst and heat exhaustion and illness and starvation. All week they have been dying, and what's worst of all is that they were dying in the very places that they went for help and relief: in the two major shelters that were available for them. For a week the city and the state and the nation have been bickering about who should do what, and when, and people have died as a result.

“On What Government’s Supposed to Do”—Essays on Life, September 8 2005

It’s not yet been a week since Hurricane Dorian brought the floodwaters to our own communities. And there is something unprecedented and unfair about a hurricane that devastates two islands in a small island developing state, and not just any two islands, but the two which housed our second and third largest communities. But that is not the point any more.

Because Bahamians are dying. Our response right now is too confused, too ineffectual, to stop it.

Truth? We were all unprepared. It’s true that we couldn’t have prepared for the kind of disaster that Dorian was—category five stationary over our second city. But we could have prepared evacuation routes. We could have planned better shelters. We could have taught people how to make hurricane kits, what to watch out for, how to plan for the worst. We couldn’t have imagined the worst, but we could have been ready to face it.

We were unprepared. But we don’t need to remain so. Social media is rife with people who have proposals about how to work, how we can make the process of recovery smoother. The problem? Instead of helping the citizens help themselves, government is getting in the way. It can’t help it; The Bahamas is full of so many inefficiencies and impediments to accomplishing even the simplest tasks that there is no way that business as usual will let us begin the recovery. We need to declare a state of emergency. We need to create a new, clear path of action.

It’s what government’s supposed to do.

Let's sit here and work out what exactly it is that a government's supposed to do. It's supposed to look after its economy. It's supposed to protect its infrastructure. And above all, it's supposed to be responsible for the people it represents -- not just the people who voted for it, or the people who support it, or even the people it hopes will vote for it one day in the future; but all the people it represents.

“On What Government’s Supposed to Do”—Essays on Life, September 8 2005

I was angry then; and I am angry now. So angry that I have become silent and speechless. I have tried to write many times but the words would not come. Because the same thing is happening to us here, in the wake of Hurricane Dorian. Our leaders seem dazed by the magnitude of the destruction, at the loss of life (so few people have died in The Bahamas in hurricanes in the twenty-first century; who even knew we could perish?), at the challenges they are facing. We are reactive people. Even though we have thus far been the wealthiest of independent Caribbean nations, we have not invested in systems designed to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, with its urbanization and climate change. For the better part of a generation, our leadership has ceded the responsibility for national development to foreign investors rather than taking that responsibility on itself. Now, in this crisis, we are left without a response.

And people are dying.

We’re floundering. The hurricane is gone, the world is sending aid, supplies are pouring in, but we’re unsure how to handle the opportunity. But business as usual will not cut it now. The longer we flounder, the more people will die. Unless we make a quick turn, the worst is yet to come.

We must learn from New Orleans, we must learn from Puerto Rico. We must learn from our fellow Bahamians, who are braver and more generous and more determined than anyone imagined. We must learn from our children, who are not talking, but doing. We must learn, and get out of the way. Remove the impediments to recovery. Let the people work. Help the people rebuild. Give the people the tools they need to fix this mess. Streamline the process. Maximize the potential. Get out of the way.

Because once the recovery is started, we have a greater task ahead. We have to start figuring out what disaster response plan we will have when the next monster hurricane comes—and sits for three days over Nassau. Because it has happened in the past. Don’t even begin to imagine it won’t happen again. We need to make that plan, because we are going to need it.

Nuff said now. I done.

James Baldwin on Writing - Via Brain Pickings

From 2016, an article that appeared in my Facebook feed today:

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/08/james-baldwin-advice-on-writing/

Emancipation Day Statement - Centre for Reparation Research

EMANCIPATION DAY STATEMENT

CENTRE FOR REPARATION RESEARCH. THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES 

1st August 2019

On August 1, 2019, Jamaica will join the rest of the current and former British-colonized countries in the Caribbean to mark the 181st anniversary of “full free”; that day in 1838 when our enslaved ancestors, especially those told to wait until 1840 for their freedom, signalled to the British colonizers that they saw through the scam that was “The Apprenticeship System” and would no longer stand for a delayed freedom. Indeed, a few colonies by-passed the Apprenticeship System, but only because they already had all the control over labour that they needed.

However one looks at it, the Emancipation Act was a racist Act. It was accompanied by planter compensation based on a calculation of the value of “property” - our enslaved ancestors’ bodied. “Property” was not entitled to compensation, and so the newly freed got “nothing but freedom” in Eric Foner’s words.

Sacred Space, Clifton, by Antonius Roberts

Despite a landless Emancipation; despite having to endure a post-slavery period marked by injustice and racial discrimination; despite being brutalised in the search for justice and the chance to actualize their freedom, our ancestors never gave up the search for true freedom. At every step of the way the ruling classes placed obstacles in their way, dividing and ruling to eradicate African unity to ensure their power and keep colonialism in place; and some fell for this strategy.

In this Decade for People of African Descent, we, their descendants, must struggle against this part of our history and endeavour to forge unity, peace, security and economic wealth for all. Of course, the post-colonial legacies of inequality, social injustice and structural discrimination threaten to destabilise our efforts; but we must never give up. Let us find a determined will to take the best of the past for the future, in the name of those who suffered in the cause of Caribbean Emancipation: Bussa, Nanny Grigg (Barbados), Sally Bassett (Bermuda); Charlotte, Angelique (Dominica), Chief Takyi, Samuel Sharpe, Dugald Campbell and Eliza Whittingham (Jamaica), Adelaide Disson, Roo and Bastian (Trinidad & Tobago),… and so many more. 

Prof Verene A. Shepherd
reparation.research@uwimona.edu.jm

Kamau Brathwaite Festival

Inspired by Christian Campbell, a celebration of the work and mind and art of the man I claim as the greatest Caribbean poet, Kamau Brathwaite. Here’s one of my favourites.

Legba

1

Today god came to church
like a lame old man on a crutch.

 He had fought in the last war
and has ribbons to show for

 it; knows Burma, Malaya and has been
to Singapore; gets a small pension

but apart from that
not very much attention.

His children eat dirt,
are pot-

bellied, knobble-
kneed sticks down

to their ball-
bearing ankles; 

the drifting sand
ruins their eyes; 

they go to school to the head-
master's cries,

read a black-
board of words, angles,

lies;
they fall 

over their examinations.
It is a fence that surrounds them.

 Those that are brown
enough, hobble

into a maimed world of banks, books, insurance, business.
There is not

much thanks from the rest of the hot
population.

2

And black black black
the black birds clack
in the shak shak tree

the slack
wing'd gaulin swings
through the fishnet air;

the pear
tree ripens, queen of the ring-
ing brambles; 

the jack 
bird sings, dream-
ing of jewels, eyes,

shell-less worms; the
sugar-cane screams
swinging under the steel

 cutlass;
bless us bless us
cries the shorn rain

cut from its thunder,
sting-
ing the cactus;

the drought
tickles the root
of the clammy-

cherry tree; doubt
ripples the fruit
lakes, snap-

ping the bamboo,
crack-
ing the blue.

—from The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy

Reparations Redux: A response to Geoff

My earlier post on reparations engendered some solid discussion over on Facebook. The discussion continued here on this blog. One of the comments sparked the following response.

---

Nicolette,
As painful as this subject is for many people who are intimately involved with the injustices extant today I enjoy engaging in the discussion and I thank you for your willingness to accept my contribution, if it is. I am cogent of the pain associated with this and respectful of it.

I’m happy you’re willing to discuss this. I am not expecting us to agree—I suspect we start from radically different assumptions—but I more than welcome the discussion.

I offer these rebuttals to your arguments because I believe your reasoning to be inconsistent and flawed.

Let me number your paragraphs for reference beginning with “I shared the article..” as number one. In this paragraph you wrestle with the issue of who shall pay reparations after having enumerated various positions above that.

Actually, I don’t wrestle with the issue of WHO should pay reparations at all. I don’t touch on the who.  I write in the passive voice for a reason. What I say is: reparations must be paid. The point of this paragraph is to discuss a fundamental principle: that reparation (the concept, without the “s”) for the wrong of slavery must (and, I believe, will) be paid. It’s you who is worried about the who.

But since you ask the following questions, let me answer.  

Presumably you would offer a pass to those whose intellectual abilities are insufficient to understand the issue.

No, I wouldn’t. It isn’t an issue that requires understanding. No one who inhabits the societies (economies) that benefitted from the institution of transatlantic chattel slavery is exempt. It’s a question of justice, of balance, or righting scales; it’s not a question of individual differences.

A Down syndrome sufferer say, may be exempt from making reparation?

No.

How about a Latina mother of three living on food stamps?

No.

In other words I suggest you may insist on payment of reparations based on the means of the individual.

No. Not talking about the individuals.

Further, you may offer a pass to people of African-American descent;

Strangely, no.

how could a slave descendant be culpable?

You’d be surprised. The institution was far more complex than you’re imagining. A number of people of African descent owned slaves—for various reasons, not all of them benign. So, people of African descent are not exempt.

And to whom would she make reparation? Herself? The choosing of who must pay looks a lot like racism.

My stance is based on a simple principle. Capital was raised to fuel the foundations of modern western society on the backs of people who were forced to work in inhumane conditions for no pay. That bill has come due, and must be paid. I don’t care who pays it. The societies who benefitted need to even the keel. For me, how the reparations are paid doesn’t have much to do with race. It has to do with capital, with history, with society. Race isn’t incidental; but neither is it exculpatory. Who pays isn’t the point. That payment is made—reparation, restitution, restoration—is what matters.

As for the democracy point. Democracy is a system of making decisions, not tied to policy itself. Plato’s Republic was a democracy yet it endorsed slave-ownership de facto. Aristotle owned slaves and thought it was good for them. He promoted democracy.

I think you miss my democracy point, or oversimplify it. By referring to the Greek form of “democracy” you (deliberately?) overlook the modern iteration of that idea, which would probably be pretty unrecognizable to the ancient Greeks. European thinkers of the so-called “Enlightenment” pondered and expanded upon the Greeks’ idea of government by the people, because they defined “people” by their humanity rather than by their ownership of property. The world we inhabit understands “democracy” very differently from the ancient world, and starts from the principle that all humans are equal, or should be.

History is full of similar examples. Democracy does not rise or fail because of slave ownership.

No; but slave ownership fell because of democracy.

If that is correct, then the job has only half been done. If we accept that the people who were enslaved, or whose ancestors were, were forced to work without compensation, and that economies grew and thrived upon that forced unwaged labour; and we accept that those people are human; and we accept that they are equal and therefore deserve to be paid for their labour (Marx, Smith, Hobbes), then there is a second shoe that still has to drop.

But of course you may believe that there was nothing wrong with slavery in its time—that the people who were enslaved were in actuality lesser beings who ultimately benefitted from their enslavement. That’s a position that has been popular in its day; but it’s a position that is the very definition of racist. It assumes that one group of people is inherently superior to another group of people, and whatever is done to the second, subordinate group is well done, because the perpetrator of what is done are, well, superior by nature.

You can define humanity and rights independently.

Yes, you can. But nothing that I’ve argued suggests that you should.

The argument against reparations is not itself racist. It turns largely on the issue of to whom would you pay reparations.

One argument against reparations does, yes.

The qualification of the recipients is the problem.

Why? What “qualification” is required?

There are no pure blood descendants of slaves left living.

First of all, how on earth can you know? I happen to live in a nation where it is entirely possible that there are some people who are exclusively descended from enslaved Africans. The likelihood is higher in other parts of our region. Second of all, what does “pure blood” even mean? This idea of “purity” invokes the unfortunate language of racial superiority. And it’s irrelevant anyway in the context of chattel slavery where you were born a slave, no matter what your parentage, if you were born to or by a slave.

The idea you (and others propose) that if you wait long enough the problem will go away and culpability will go with it. I don’t buy it. The culpability remains in the very lands inhabited, the very wealth exhibited, in the banks, the businesses, the schools, the capitals, the countries, the empires built on centuries of the unwaged labour of people who are now dead. It’s an old trick, but it doesn’t work. The guilt doesn’t go away with time. In fact, it may well grow. The wound, the sin, may well fester—but that’s speculation, so I’ll leave it right there.

What % of slave blood must you have to qualify? Is 2% enough? How about 10% or 33%? Where will you draw the line? Who would decide this? How about people of colour who never experienced slavery, nor did their ancestors? Or would you dole out partial payments based on the amount of African DNA in you? Btw, we all have African DNA in us. The whole thing gets arbitrary very quickly.

There is no arbitrariness in my position. Once again, you’re personalizing an issue that is beyond individuals, beyond “qualification”. A wrong was committed against the idea of humanity itself. The fundamental difference between transatlantic slavery and ancient slavery lay in three elements: the permanent and irreversible removal of the enslaved from their personhood, identity, culture, and lands; the permanent and legal definition of human beings as non-human chattel; and the creation of an entire system—the hierarchical system of race—to justify the first two actions. This rupture of the concept of a shared humanity among all people—which was necessary for slavery to be practiced by the well-meaning and the good—is the wrong of which I speak. REPARATION is required for the repairing of that rupture. I believe that it’s necessary for humanity as a whole to move on. Imagining that I am making room in my discussion for individuals is an error. I am not making any such room at all.

The very idea of enforcing reparations is racist. You are going to be looking for white people to make them pay. The whole concept is little more than retribution and blaming and yes it will be divisive, rather than healing.

I answered this objection above. You have concluded that my stance is racist. It’s not. It may be territorial; most of the wealth that was generated by the institution of slavery went from certain parts of the world to others. The conduits for that wealth extraction are still at work today. For me, then, reparation would involve sending wealth back across those conduits. Redistributive, not racist.

In paragraph two, “Aha, you say..” you write. “Our entire reality is racist.” You are correct. Race is one of the factors of selection in evolution. Physically it is the melanin thing that enables people of colour to thrive in tropical climates where they evolved. As civilized humans, we regard it now as immoral to judge based on skin colour.

Here, here is where we differ absolutely fundamentally. The position you put forward—that “race is one of the factors of selection in evolution”—is fiction. It is part of that fiction that emerged in Europe in the 19th century to help buttress the empires and justify (again for the well-meaning) the conquest and rape of the globe. The idea of “race” as you present it, as something akin to species and genuses etc, is nothing more than a construct. (This was evident the very moment a so-called “mulatto”, named after the barren mule, gave birth…) Those bundles of characteristics (which vary from society to society and from era to era) which we assume to be defining measures that can help us tell one group of people from another, which we assume to be linked one to another by culture, aptitude, inclination and morality—these are what is arbitrary. They are self-referential and self-defining, but they do not exist scientifically. Race is a fiction; racism—the creation of arguments, philosophies, separations, policies, structures and laws based on “race”—is real. And I link this creation of separations, policies and structures to the institution of slavery for which I expect reparation will ultimately be given.

That is not wrong, but it just shows how arbitrary morality is, hopefully we can work around it with education. I have lived in RSA under apartheid btw, I have dated black women, invited a black teammate to be my roommate, and regard myself as non-racist. I have traveled to 38 countries including the Bahamas and I think I have gained some perspective on this. (That is just about me, not about the issue or your argument.)

I accept that all of the above is about you. But if you read my comment above, it is not the race of these people that matters; it is racism, that thing that expects any of these people to be essentially different from you. I don’t (=try not to) expect external appearance to be a predictor of anything that an individual can achieve, do, say, or think. Racism, however, does.

Paragraph five. The crime was not monetary. There is no such thing. The crime was abduction, imprisonment, transport across international boundaries, and state lines for purposes of sex, and so on.

The main “so on” that you are collapsing is profit. Chattel slavery rested upon the redefinition of human beings as things—things without names, histories, families or agency. They were things to be owned, bought, sold, paid for. They were defined and insured as “cargo”. They were abducted not for the purposes of sex (that was an added benefit) but for the purposes of profit. They were traded by Africans at African ports for money and material goods. They were transported as cargo. They were sold by Europeans at American ports for money and material goods. The crime was most certainly monetary.

Therefore it is not so obvious that reparations should be monetary, though they usually are for ease of administration. You involve the whole human race in this, but ignore the entire HISTORY of the human race. If you deny the concept of a statute of limitations on this, you must go back millennia, even to the ancient Greeks.

I deny the concept of a statute of limitations for two reasons. One, because the evil that was sown with the enslavement of human beings and the creation of the concept of “race” and the system of racism to justify that enslavement persists today. So the crime against humanity is still being committed. In my perspective, it’s when reparation begins that the crime will eventually end. Only then might any concept of a statute of limitations begin. And two, because the economic imbalance of the world remains as it was created by slavery. For me, reparation is the levelling of that field. It is a redistribution of the wealth. It is a recognition of what was stolen, and the repayment of it. Simple, and not arbitrary at all. The crime persists because the wealth remains stolen. Return the wealth, then let’s talk about statutes and limitations.

To even think of unraveling the racial heritage of everybody involved is ridiculous, of course. But it means i think, that you mean to restrict this just to the slavery of the Americas since Columbus. Purely arbitrary, therefore many of your arguments lose force. But I am not dismissing the wrong done to these people, any more than I deny the wrong to Jews done by the Third Reich, but I do not endorse the idea of the whole world making reparations to the survivors of the holocaust, and their descendants, paid by non-Jews who were born even in this century, which is an argument of the same sort you seem to be making for the slavery issue.

You are at least consistent here. I think I’m consistent on the opposite side of the argument. My stance is not personal in any way.

Legally, there is the issue of actual loss. How can you determine the amount of actual loss …

Legality is simply a matter of the powerful sitting down to define the world in their favour and writing laws to make it so. Thus legally what is defined as “loss” is malleable.

But. Do you deny that great wealth was generated from the exploitation of the enslaved? And do you deny that this wealth remains concentrated in the countries that established and controlled the trade in human beings? There may be no legal definition of “loss” today; but that does not mean that there is no moral definition. And where there is a moral defition of loss, then legality may well catch up in the generations to come.

As I observed in my earlier answer and at the top of this one, you and I are approaching this discussion from fundamentally different premises. For that reason I’ve chosen not to engage further in the specific objections you raise, because I think I covered the fact that I’m not concerned with individuals or variables above. I’m concerned with a principle. So if you don’t mind, I’ll skip forward to the point in your discussion where you discuss the principle itself, even though you slide right back into the consideration of individuals.

Reparation simply perpetuates the atrocities of racial disharmony and solves nothing.

This is where it’s obvious that you and I start from fundamentally different premises. For you to continue to link reparation with race and racism when I have expressly said that it is not about race, both in my original article and in my rebuttals since, suggests that perhaps your argument does not start from the premise that human beings are equal. In your argument there may be some justification for what I will continue to refer to as the crime against humanity: the abduction and dehumanization of millions of people from their ancestral lands and forcing them to become the working property of other people to generate profit and capital and power. I have come across the argument that suggests that without the institution of slavery, Africans would never have been introduced to (fill in the blank) education/ medicine/ Christianity/ roads/ clothes/ civilization. It’s an argument firmly rooted in the white man’s burden version of white supremacy, but it is an argument.

The fact that you continue to think of reparation as a thing as opposed to a principle suggests that you missed the point of my essay. To regard the demand for justice as a “vendetta” suggests that you may not really imagine that much harm was done at all, because the concept of “vendetta” raises ideas of spite, of incontinence, of irrational violence, not of justice. It’s a word that is often used to describe applications of justice that differ from one’s own. It doesn’t trivialize the past; rather, it undercuts the wrong that was done and devalues it.

Whiteness, Racism & Reparation

On Friday, I shared a post that popped up in my Facebook feed with the one-word comment: “Discuss”.

This was the article: How To Tell If A White Person Is Racist With One Simple Question. The question in question is “Should our nation pay reparations to black people for the enslavement, mistreatment and economic exploitation of them and their ancestors over the past four hundred years?” The article is almost eighteen months old; if it were a human child, it’d be walking. I don’t know why it popped up in my feed on Friday past. One doesn’t ask these questions of Facebook’s algorithms (though perhaps one should). And it’s not a stand-alone. It’s part of a three-part meditation written back when the Trumpworld was still young enough to perhaps seem benign, if you squinted hard enough and had one glass eye. The other entries are these: A Reasonable Reparation and Paying My Reparations, both of which should also be read to inform the discussion. And it’s inspired by a different kind of essay, the kind that gets published in The Atlantic. The author of that one was Ta-Nehisi Coates.

What was interesting to me, and part of why I’m writing this entry (which may be a beginning of something perhaps), is that people took the one word to heart. Discussion was had—and, one hopes, is ongoing.

Photo by Christian Newman on Unsplash

I’ll see if I can attempt to summarize the breadth of the discussion so far. And I’m going to try and contextualize the discussion as far as I can, because context adds an interesting filter.

• There’s the observation that the article is oversimplistic, and that opposition to reparations does not mean that one is racist. This was an observation that was offered, and supported, by a number of people of all backgrounds (which is code, as far as this blog entry is concerned, for “races” as well gender, geographical placement, economic status, etc)

• There’s the complete affirmation and reinforcement of the position offered in the article. This, too, was a position taken by people of most backgrounds (remember the code outlined above), but more so by people of African descent or by women of non-African descent

• There’s the observation that the article is related specifically to the United States of America (which it is, because of course the world begins and ends at the borders of the USA)—with the implication that the argument might be different if it is applied in different post-slave societies with different histories. This was proposed by one or two people only

• There’s the argument that reparations are irrelevant or impossible (not entirely sure which) because slavery is over and modern-day people who did not directly benefit from it should not have to pay for the injustices of their (or, perhaps preferably, other people’s) ancestors. This argument was not so evenly offered by people of all backgrounds; while there was some diversity, this argument tended to be put forth by men of whole or part European ancestry

• There’s the argument that despite adverse circumstances in the past, despite a history of disadvantage, progress has been made either personally or collectively, and that progress eradicates or at least mitigates the damage done in the past. This argument tended to be advanced by men of mixed or non-African backgrounds

• There’s the argument that the lines are not so easily drawn outside the USA, which defined “race” with a mathematical precision that ensured the continued oppression of many people who would not be recognized as “black”—unlike, say, the Caribbean or other parts of the Americas, where society endured and made room for more mixing, resulting in variants of pigmentation rather than monoliths of race. This argument was advanced most commonly by non-American women

• There’s the argument that paying money for past wrongs is not a valid mode of compensation, because money is easily wasted. This was advanced by people of diverse backgrounds, most of them male

• There’s the argument that the discussion does not need to be had, and in fact can be divisive and potentially negative. This was advanced by male individuals of mixed descent

• There’s the argument that reparation is not about money, but about principle; money may be a fitting symbol, but it is not the point. This was advanced mostly by women.

One of the commenters asked me to write an article in a similar vein. Not sure I can do it, or that I haven’t already done it. But what I can do is begin a meditation inspired by the post and the ensuing discussion.

First things first: where I myself stand.

I shared the article because it was provocative, but also because I don’t buy the simple equation of anti-reparations = racist white person. In this regard I stand with those who raised the (obvious) question of what to do with/where to place those people who are not white and who don’t believe in reparations. I do, however, support the idea of reparations. No. That’s putting it mildly. I am utterly convinced that reparations for the institution of slavery must be paid. Moreover, I believe that they will be paid, eventually; if they are not, it is because the institution of democracy has failed, the concept of the human has died, and the ideas of human rights and humanity have become obsolete.

Boom.

At the same time, I would also propose that the argument against reparations is itself racist. But it doesn’t follow that people who make the argument must be racist.

Aha, you say. A contradiction, you say. Absolutely. It is contradictory, but it is nevertheless very possibly true. It’s true because we still inhabit a world that was only made possible by half a millennium of the forced labour of millions of people whose humanity was stripped from them and their offspring in perpetuity, and whose humanity is only being returned to them (us) piece by bitter piece as our voices confront the institution and the world that it made and dismantle it bit by bit. Our entire reality is racist, and that racism shapes us all. It dwells in our deepest unconsciousnesses, no matter what our outward appearance might be. It lurks in the easy associations we all make, again and again, as easily as breathing: associations that link blackness with savagery, sexual appetite, violence, idiocy, brutality, dishonesty, laziness, criminality, shiftlessness, dirt, vagrancy, ugliness and filth, associations that link whiteness with purity, civility, intelligence, justice, law, industry, thrift, cleanliness, beauty and right. It lurks in our complete obliviousness to the brutality on which the institution of slavery depended. It lurks in our inability to recognize the perpetuation of that brutality in the daily life of the twenty-first century, brutality that lives on for all of us in expressions as apparently benign as “good hair” or as destructive as the reference to people who may be young and black as different sorts of animals (heifers, dogs, bitches, bucks, monkeys, cats, etc).

Reparations are necessary to expose these associations. They must be monetary because the crime was, in its origin, monetary. The current issue is barely how that money should be spent; the current issue is that to repair the great wrong done to the entire human race by the institution of chattel slavery (not just one group within it) it must be paid. That is the first level of the discussion. The rest of the discussion—the place where the idea of reparations opens up doors to creativity and innovation—is still to come.

But this is where I stand. As long as we conceive of the discussion as one which highlights racism, we miss the point. The point is that the kidnapping, sale, and enslavement of Africans, together with the entire systematic and ongoing dehumanization of the very idea of Africanness that was necessary to prop up the institution of slavery in an age of enlightenment, is a crime that continues into the present day. Think of James Byrd being dragged behind that truck. Think of the children forced to live in filth and captivity at the US border. Think of all the different mundane acts of violence, great and small, we accept as normal in the Caribbean. Think of the currency of these ideas: that the ripping of people from their homelands and the stripping of their identities from them is something that can be past, buried and done with, or that the robbing of land from the people who inhabited it and their eradication from public consciousness is simply the way the world is.

These are the parameters of that crime, and they continue. They replicate. They are supported. The political and economic elements of that crime may have passed away, perhaps. But the systems of dehumanization remain in place, and remain largely intact.

And. That crime is enacted not only on the descendants of the kidnapped. What we fail to see in the discussion we’ve been having so far is that the crime is perpetuated just as much on the kidnappers as well. In order to dehumanize the “other”, the people who designed and perpetuated the institution of slavery had to dehumanize themselves. They had to transform themselves into torturers, rapists and murderers, and they had to do so systematically and legally. They had to leave no room for the kind of doubt that might cause the system to fail, and so they built societies that legitimized and rationalized those actions.

It is that which must be repaired. This is a reparation that is far larger than the United States of America (which, after all is not the world). It is a reparation that has to happen to begin to rebuild us all.

Reunited (& it feels so good)

It first happened in 2009. We had our thirtieth class reunion. The Queen’s College Class of ‘79 came together in middle age and began to get reacquainted with one another. And now it’s 2019, and we’ve been out of high school for forty years (forty …!!!) and it was reunion time again. Almost to the day we graduated, we had our reunion weekend.

And, as before, we were blown away with how much we liked one another. How much we still respected and loved one another. How many of us came in from around the world to get back together again for one weekend, with some sea and a couple of slices of sunshine between rainclouds, with meet-and-greets and a sunset dinner and a church service and a fun walk and a chill and chat. How we supported one another and how we cared about one another.

And the reunion wasn’t just our graduating class. It included all of us who were in this class, moving from QC Reception with Mrs. Lowe and Mrs. Albury, all the way up to our graduation in Grade 11. So unlike the earlier gatherings, this one included those who made part of the journey with us, but who slipped away before graduation. It was great to see old friends—and it was sometimes surprising who turned up.

And it made me think.

The cliché class reunion is an American one. It’s the stuff of countless TV episodes and movies, even of commercials, and it’s almost universally horrible. People endure their reunions, they don’t enjoy them. At least in the American narrative that’s the case. But that wasn’t the case for us—not at our thirtieth and definitely not at our fortieth.

So the question is this. What is it about our class that made us feel so connected and safe? What alchemy took place at Queen’s College between 1974 and 1979 — or even before, from 1967 onward — that created the space that allowed our class to bond and gel the way we did? Was it something that QC did? Was it the time—majority rule and independence, optimism and national pride? Was it the mix of people who were there? What?

It’s worth some consideration. But in the meantime …

Levels and playing fields

Read this in the newspaper today.

Untaxed vacation home rentals present unfair competition for hotels, as their popularity began to grow over the past several years, and Turnquest said the government was mindful of the uneven playing field that this has created.

Ummm…. how about this? Hotels present unfair competition for Bahamians. The playing field is so uneven that very little will help to level it. When small hotels are able to qualify for the exemptions that hotels of 50+ rooms can get (almost exclusively owned by NON BAHAMIAN corporations), then let’s talk about playing fields.

That said, paying VAT on those rentals is only to be expected. But to talk about it in terms of LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD? What have we been smoking?

as yet untitled

Professing and administering

It’s May. In a normal year, I’d be done. Teaching would be over for the semester, I would be working from home, focussing on research, creative writing, and theatre. I’d be working on my annual self-evaluation, a tedious (but necessary) process that involves reflection, self-expression, and documentation.

I’d be moving into full festival mode, writing grant proposals, deploying our small army of ad-sellers for the programme, reviewing images for our shows, creating content for the programme, developing the productions for the festival.

But I’m a Chair. The title is significant. As one of my colleagues insists everytime she sees me:

“Chairs don’t move!!”

So I’m in office every day, pushing paper, staring at screens, doing fiddly work that apparently has to be done. Writing emails, reports, requests. Signing forms. Being there for students and faculty with queries or in distress.

It’s madness, I tell ya. Madness.

Teaching & creating

So here’s where I find my sanity.

Two places.

Teaching

I’m teaching a class online this semester. More about that in another post—it’s worth an in-depth consideration. Students need it for graduation—not enough to have a regular class, but still. Had an online class meeting last night and I felt some progress.

New visitors to this blog—should that be visitors to this new blog? I dunno—will see a new tab at the top: Student Blogs. The students in this class—Selected Topics in Sociology: Spatial Justice—can submit two blog posts instead of a research paper, so I made a page for them. Let’s see what happens.

Creating

Many projects on the go, but the primary one is Short Tales 2019: a collection of ORIGINAL short plays, put together to make a single evening for Shakespeare in Paradise. We have 50 submissions, from which has to be crafted a single evening. It’s a job!

So. I also protect my sanity by working from home in the mornings and going to the office in the afternoons. It’s a compromise, and it keeps me sane. Mostly.

Shifting goals

Last month sometime I decided to make a change to my web presence. It’s taking time, but slowly taking shape. It’s all part of a gradual shift in my life in general, which is like this.

Last year I took on a new position at the university, which I’ve written about below. Now put this in context. For the past ten years I have been very happy in my job, teaching and researching and writing, and for service building a theatre festival. But a number of things have come to a head.

1. Shakespeare in Paradise has grown as much as it’s going to unless there’s a fundamental change in its administration. It needs full-time attention. At the same time, it can’t pay for full-time attention. So I have to fix my life and its existence so it can begin to pay for full-time attention. That will take a while, but has to be done.

2. Ringplay Productions have also grown — we’ve established the theatre season (piloted it this year, and realized that it could be done so …) and also needs full-time attention. Time to make the theatre a business rather than a service. Again, lives have to be fixed, etc.

3. I turned 56 this year. In four years, I’ll be entering the retirement decade. It’s never too late to make a change.

4. And finally, I want to write full time. Plays, poems, novels, books. Or to put it another way: I want to give my writing my first and best attention, rather than the other way round. And so I’m exploring the professionalizing of my web presence.

There you have it. First things first: I’ve moved my online presence to this single location. nicobethel.squarespace.com is the permanent address, but the other addresses that belong to me—nicobethel.net, nicobethel.com—will also bring you here. I am not totally sure what will grow here, but the seeds are being planted.

Change is good

And change is life.

I’m reconfiguring my life in cyberspace.

It’s going to be a bit messy for a while, but in time, things should grow neater, if not tidier.

Watch this space.

Ashes to ashes

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope

T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday I

It's Ash Wednesday.People—Anglicans and Catholics mainly—are getting ashes smudged on their foreheads in recognition of the start of Lent. People are giving up vices and bad habits—caffeine, cigarettes, meat, swearing, sex—for the next forty days. That's what Carnival is all about, after all: the merrymaking before one has to put aside meat. Carne (Lat.: meat) + levare (Lat.: to put away).

I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)

T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday I

I have, in my lifetime, given up a number of things. Some of them I'll list here: candies, junk food, potato chips, alcohol, caffeine (=coffee, tea and chocolate ... that was a year!!), playing computer games, swearing. Some years it's hard, like the caffeine year, and in those years it's rough on the people around you. Some years it's easier, and private, a compact you make quietly between you and your god.But I tend to prefer a different way of looking at Lent. Instead of giving up things, make a promise and keep it. Add things. Good things. Practice patience, or kindness, or generosity. Give things away. Promise to be more humane on Nassau city streets, for example. Less angry at other drivers. There is sacrifice involved in both. In giving up habits, one thinks more about why one does it. You pray more: for strength, for relief, for forgiveness.By adding things, though, by consciously striving to be more constructive, more loving, maybe you might change the way you move through the world.So. My Lenten fast is a fast of addition. And it's a private one. Not for sharing. Perhaps, though, other people will see the result. Every day.

Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday I

†

Featured image: Love photo created by jcomp - www.freepik.com

for colored girls who have considered suicide ... (a laying on of hands)

my love is too complicated to have thrown back on my face

Shange, "no more love poems #4" - for colored girls
lady in red

In rehearsal again. for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. In honour of Ntozake Shange, who died last year, and of Theresa Moxey-Ingraham, who also died last year, and who was in our original production of colored girls in 2014.This play, this production, gives me joy. And joy is important.

i brought you what joyi found & i found joy

Shange, "no more love poems #1" - for colored girls
lady in orange

My life over the past year has changed, shifted somewhat. One year ago, I almost died. My kidneys had an adverse reaction to medication/anaesthesia after an exploratory gynaecological procedure and shut down. Acute renal failure, they called it. An insidious way to die. Because I didn't feel as though I was really ill. I just felt unwell. For ten days, I vomited on a regular basis. I couldn't eat solid food; whatever I tried to chew and swallow came back up. I was weak, had a dull back pain that felt like trapped gas. I thought I was battling some strange stomach bug, or suffering from food poisoning. But it didn't get better.Ten days after the procedure, a diagnosis: renal failure. Admission to hospital for a week. Two rounds of dialysis to see if the kidneys would kick back in. They did. Then a month of recovery while I regained my strength. All this while on unpaid leave from the university to focus on research, writing, and Shakespeare in Paradise.While I was on leave, my colleagues in Social Sciences very thoughtfully and kindly elected me to be their chair. So when I returned from leave last August I took up residence in the chair's office in Social Sciences. A real life-changer: the chair's teaching load is one course per year.One course. Per year. The rest of the time is administration and paperwork—which I can do, but which I prefer to leave to other people. Thanks, Social Sciences.So the theatre is my saviour, as it always is.

we gotta dance to keep from dyin

Shange, "i'm a poet who" - for colored girls
lady in brown

coloredgirlscurtain.jpg

But this play.I originally directed it in 2014 out of a sense of duty. This sense came from two directions. One was the fact that our theatre company, Ringplay Productions, had just assumed the management of the Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts, and the first thing we did—the very first thing—was convert the building behind the big theatre, which had once been a rehearsal hall and a workshop, and which had spent the better part of a decade as somebody's church, into a black box theatre. At that time it was a flexible space, a literal black box that could be configured any which way you wanted. Something had to open it.Two years before that, I had taught a class, Introduction to Theatre, in which one of the plays we studied was Shange's for colored girls... . The students loved the play, so much so that they begged me to direct it. I wasn't ready then. We didn't have a theatre home, and rehearsal was expensive and challenging because we had no permanent rehearsal space. And I didn't feel right about directing the production for any of the big stages that we have floating around the place. colored girls is an intimate work. It is deeply honest and personal. Any performance of it needs no separation from the audience. So I held off.But the Black Box was different. It had six entrances to the performance space, all the way around the space. The performers and the audience had no separation at all. So I decided we would work there, in that space, on that floor, and that the women would perform in the centre of the space and the audience would sit in a circle around.So we produced it. It opened the Black Box, introduced Bahamian audiences to a different kind of theatrical immediacy, a different kind of experience. The women danced and moved among them. They touched the audience—physically, sometimes. If audience members fell asleep, as one poor man did, the women woke them up, with a sharp rap on the shoulder or the thigh. There were only two rows of seats all the way around the space. The performers could touch anyone in the audience, and vice versa. It was electric and wonderful and Shange's work was full of strength and power and healing.

i found god in myself& i loved her / i loved her fiercely

Shange, "a layin on of hands" - for colored girls
lady in red/orange

And it is again healing. The play conveys pain, and anger, and despair, and outrage, and hurt. But it also sings joy, and hope, power, and—above all—healing. These are things that slip away over the years, things that one forgets, things that one finds are swallowed up with the everyday.These are things that surprised me when I came to direct the play. Because I had read it, and I had taught it. And there were moments in the play I've always found luminous, powerful, which spoke personally to me: moments like "no assistance" or "somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff", powerful, angry, strong pieces.But there were also other moments I would skip over when reading, and groan silently when teaching: places where the words were too thick on the page, or where the stories seemed tedious or overwritten, or where there was just too much emotion. I won't tell you what they were, because they are no longer.Directing this play, watching the words embodied, playing with the delivery, finding the spaces and the secrets and the possibilities in Shange's words, putting those words to music, putting the poems in space—this process lifts me up, heals me, every time. Every time. This is a work that is meant to be performed. It is a work that has to be danced, to be moved. Voice is not enough for this work. It needs dance and music and colour. It is fully and wonderfully theatre, and directing it heals me.

i was missin somethinga layin on of hands

Shange, "a layin on of hands" - for colored girls
lady in blue/purple

A lot of this, I have to say, is thanks to the wonderful cast of women I worked with, both in 2014, and again now in 2019. In 2014, they were:

Arthellia Powell-Isaacs - lady in brownAleah Carey - rainbowTheresa Moxey-Ingraham - lady in yellowMyra McPhee - lady in blueClaudette Allens - lady in redErin Knowles - lady in orangeOniké Archer - lady in purpleMichaella Forbes - lady in green

We have lost three members of the original cast. Aleah Carey and Myra McPhee now live abroad. And last year, Theresa Moxey-Ingraham, our beloved Yellow, died. And so did Ntozake Shange. Both from illness; both before their time. Our revival this year is in their honour.So we're remounting this production with a few changes, and two new cast members. In 2014, we added a character, the Rainbow, whose youth and innocence was healing and challenging at the same time. She got lines from speeches assigned to Brown, Red, and took part in ensemble pieces. But now, without her, we are going back to the original idea, where the lady in brown (the amalgamation of all the colours, the colour of our mothers, the colour of Mother Earth) is the healer, the mother. And we are welcoming two new actors to the ensemble. This year's production features:

Arthellia Powell-Isaacs - lady in brownYasmin Glinton - lady in yellowValene Rolle - lady in blueClaudette Allens - lady in redErin McKinney (née Knowles) - lady in orangeOniké Archer - lady in purpleMichaella Forbes - lady in green

We have another challenge, too. The Black Box was renovated and reconfigured. Audiences had trouble seeing plays which were performed in the traditional set-up in the Black Box, so we introduced raised seating. This fixed the orientation of the performances and made it less flexible. We can't do the play in the round anymore. So we have had to adjust.So. The Black Box still has six entrances, but we now mostly use four. But we've opened up a fifth one and this performance will flip the script on the last one. Last time, the women performed in the centre of the circle. This time, the audience might be surrounded.Nuff said. You want to see it? Call the Dundas and book. Or check out Eventbrite and buy online. But don't be missin something.This is for colored girls who have considered suicide but are movin to the ends of their own rainbows.

The New Nationalism | By Robert Schertzer | University of Toronto Magazine

The New Nationalism | By Robert Schertzer | University of Toronto Magazine— Read on magazine.utoronto.ca/opinion/the-new-nationalism/