by Simon
•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com
Liz Frogan, Chair of the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund, offers a down home definition of heritage. She has little patience for those superficial and cocktail party explanations that tend to equate heritage with works of art or artefacts under a spotlight in a museum.
“Heritage … can be beautiful but it is often ugly. It can induce pride but quite often shame. It is not just soothing; it is also toxic and troubling. It is not just ancient; it is also contemporary. … And it is not just buildings; it is landscape and natural species and industrial structures and intangible things. …Our heritage is what makes us distinct.”
This distinctiveness combines a sense of place and identity, the two being as intimate as the pulp and the seed nestled together in a guinep pod. Bahamians do have an appreciation for much of our heritage.
Daily life and commemorative rituals remind us that our nationhood and culture are much richer than 35 years of independence and can be more sustaining than the latest and quickly vanishing fad we just imported.
The vexing reality is that we do not have a deeper and broader appreciation for a culture often suffocated by truly foreign elements, as much as it is starved by our own indifference to a uniqueness of place and identity, which is the best source of authentic Bahamianization.
This is not a call for a Mao style Cultural Revolution that attempts to build a wall around Bahamian culture. Even if we had the capacity to build one, it would be a waste of cement and bricks. Had we done so in the past, much of what we celebrate in our culture today would be sealed off.
As Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott insists, he and we are heirs to all that is human. But our humanity loses its flavour if it fails to take account of how all humanity is uniquely rooted in various peoples and across cultures.
A truly global citizen, a truly cosmopolitan person, feels at home celebrating his or her own unique culture and is also genuinely appreciative of the uniqueness in another’s culture.
Unfortunately, much of our cultural schizophrenia stems from many of us often feeling more comfortable mimicking the uniqueness of others, rather than appreciating our own indigenous boil-up.
Walcott has more to say -- in his 1992 Nobel Prize Address, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory -- about the collapse of our sense of place and identity that tends to mush much of our Caribbean culture into a form of Play-Doh which we hand over to others to mold as they will.
“What is the earthly paradise for our visitors? Two weeks without rain and a mahogany tan, and, at sunset, local troubadours in straw hats and floral shirts, beating ‘Yellow Bird’ and ‘Banana Boat Song’ to death.
“There is a territory wider than this – wider than the limits made by the map of an island – which is the [limitless] sea and what it remembers.”
If we want to provide our visitors with a different, more compelling and perhaps as economically viable vision of our Caribbean and Bahamian archipelagoes, we need to have a more compelling vision by and for the people of the Caribbean.
Unfortunately, many of us define ourselves by the stock images in our publicity brochures and by the popular cultures of those to whom we earmark most of our tourism promotion dollars.
The hypnotic embrace of the lowest common denominators of other cultures, fed to us intravenously through MP3s and other instruments of mass messaging often leaves us culturally adrift and tend to dull the senses needed to reawaken our Bahamian Imagination.
That Imagination requires a horizon broader than a trip to i-Tunes to download Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter II or a trip to the closest Florida Target to purchase the latest round of goods hyped by commercials and imagination numbing sit-coms on cable or satellite television.
I recently heard of the story of a young Bahamian boy of single digit age who has a broad American accent. The mentors of a youth programme he recently began to attend wanted to know how long he had lived in the U.S.
The disturbing answer: he’s never lived there; he picked it up from his American tutor – years of U.S. television. If that is his and one of our primary horizons, his and our imaginations will follow foreign fashion.
But as Walcott insists, “There is a territory wider than this.” A dear friend told me that when he conducted youth programmes in the 1970s, he would regularly take the participants to Rose Island. It was the first time many of the kids had ever left the island or been on a boat.
Upon arriving at Rose Island, a boy of six or seven asked, “What country is this?” What’s past is still present. In 2008 many of our kids have never left New Providence and many of those who have, have never ventured into the literal and imaginative depths of the country.
If we want to provide our youth with a broader horizon and inculcate a Bahamian Imagination we will have to titillate their senses with lived rather than virtual reality.
Fortunately we are an archipelago of archipelagos with more opportunities for adventure and learning than PlayStation 3 and more to see, touch, smell, hear, taste and feel than games played from the confines of a chair.
Here’s a modest yet ambitious programme which will cultivate lifelong skills and habits which will require more daring and dexterity than the fakery of Grand Theft Auto. We should teach every Bahamian child how to swim and how to fish and more.
A Bahamian who cannot swim or fish is unable to take advantage of the rich marine pleasures of our country which millions of tourists and Bahamians from more economically privileged backgrounds have enjoyed for years.
Teaching our youth the basics of swimming, fishing and other outdoor education skills is only preparation for a series of expeditions they may take to explore the natural and built wonders of the Bahamas.
Some of these adventures will be on the land and on the sea and some under the ocean. It will include sailing, sea kayaking, scuba diving, camping, snorkelling, hiking and community service through environmental protection.
To get a sense of how many play stations there are for our kids, first recall that the Central Andros National Park alone encompasses 286,080 acres.
By comparison, the Washington D.C. park system in the U.S. which includes federal and district parks, contains only 9,300 acres. Our national park system covers over 700,000 acres or about two acres for every Bahamian.
We also boast one of the world’s longest barrier reefs and greatest number of blue holes on earth. The vast majority of these are virgin territory and are filled with archaeological, geological and historical wonders.
One of these is Sawmill Sink in Abaco in which researchers have found animal fossils which may range in age from 1,000 to 4,200 years. They also discovered there what they believe are the remains of a young boy that may be at least 1,000 years old.
But the horizons and possibilities extend further. If we want to inculcate a richer Bahamian Imagination and consciousness in our youth, we should provide them with opportunities to sail and explore our Commonwealth. We should give them a chance to rig a boat and catch and prepare fresh fish.
By the way, teamwork, anger management and conflict resolution are best taught in real life situations rather than in class room role playing. Rather than shelling out $400 or more on a PSP to simulate a foreign virtual unreality, parents may want to invest some funds to stimulate a new Bahamian reality.
Give them a chance to see a sunset from atop Comer Hill (Mount Alvernia) in Cat Island or witness the flight of flamingos over Mathew Town, Inagua, descending onto Lake Rosa which is the size of New Providence. Give them a chance to explore the ruins on Long Island or walk through history on Long Cay or visit Preacher’s Cave in Eleuthera.
The best way to give our youth a chance to help to replenish and renew our Bahamian Imagination, is for us to help them to discover those historical and cultural and land and sea horizons and treasures which they never fully realized they possessed as Bahamians. In so doing, we will also awaken within them internal horizons and dreams they also never fully appreciated that they possessed as human beings.
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Posted by: darnettama | September 17, 2009 at 04:08 AM