Bahama Pundit

Dalai Lama Renaissance Premieres at Bahamas Film Festival

by Larry Smith

This past Sunday morning, while most Bahamians were squirming in their pews as angry preachers yelled fire and brimstone, I decided to watch a two-hour feature documentary, presented by the Bahamas International Film Festival, about a cheerful, soft-spoken man called Tenzin Gyatso.

Of course, that is not his real name. He was named Lhamo Thondup at birth, but if If you are a Tibetan Buddhist his true, true name is Gendun Drup - the first Dalai Lama, who was born in 1351. Tenzin is said to be Gendun's 14th reincarnation. As such, he is the world's most famous Buddhist monk, the spiritual leader of six million Tibetans, and a celebrated Nobel peace prize winner.

He was enthroned as the Dalai Lama in 1950 at the age of 15, and fled Tibet nine years later when the Chinese communists took over the country. He now lives in the Himalayan mountains on the Indian side of the border, and was the first Dalai Lama ever to travel to the West. He became a popular figure in the 1980s.

The film - called Dalai Lama Renaissance - was produced in America by the Wakan Foundation for the Arts and narrated by actor Harrison Ford. Although it won the best documentary award at the Monaco Film Festival recently, as well as more than a dozen prizes at other festivals, it didn't attract much of an audience here.

On Art and Truth

by Nicolette Bethel

Ours is a society of liars.

Now before you throw down the paper in disgust and pick up the phone to call your local hit man for me, stop a minute. I'm not talking about the everyday kind of lie, the "my-dog-ate-my-homework" or "no-you-gave-me-a-twenty-not-a-fifty" kind of lie. I'm talking about something far more fundamental than that, something that perhaps we don't think or talk about because we have never been taught to.

I'm talking about the fact that ours is a society that places very little real emphasis on the arts.

Gambier Homecoming Festival Address

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

Thank you for inviting me to this opening ceremony of the Annual Homecoming Festival on Gambier Day (August 3) and for the opportunity to share some thoughts with you.

I have lived many places in the Bahamas -- from Inagua to Andros, from Chippingham to Hawkins Hill, and places in between -- but for most of my life my family and I have been living right here in the Gambier neighbourhood.

I cannot lay claim to a connection with the founding fathers of this Village. The boat that brought my African ancestors landed somewhere else. But I can claim to be a resident and a neighbour for nearly 40 years. We are one.

And so I am proud to see the flowering of awareness and the determined efforts to take hold of, to conserve, and to celebrate our cultural and historical heritage here in Gambier.

On Raisins and the Sun

by Nicolette Bethel

I'm sitting in Starbucks, listening to a jazz rendition of "Sponger Money". I must admit it sounds good. And it feels good to hear an international take on a Bahamian song. But I'm also wondering a couple of things.

The first one is what the thing is called. Is it called "Sponger Money" on the label, or does it have a different title -- Spanish, maybe, or something unrelated in English?

The second one is who the song is said to be by. Now I don't know the answer to that one, as I have not done the research necessary to find out who wrote it. I can hazard a guess -- perhaps it was Charles Lofthouse, who wrote several songs in the first part of the twentieth century. More likely, it was an anonymous person, maybe a man on a sponge boat, or a woman clipping sponges on the wharf. I do know of at least one person who arranged the song: my father, E. Clement Bethel.

The third one (correct, this is a Bahamian "couple"), intimately connected to the first two, is who's getting the royalties for the song.

The Aromas of Christmas - in Guyana and the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

My house reeks of garlic and vinegar.

It always does at this time of year. That's because the wife has an almost religious compulsion to make Carne de Vinagre e Alhos, a traditional Portuguese Christmas dish.

Not that she's Portuguese, I hasten to add. Actually she's from Guyana - and mostly Amerindian, with admixtures of African, Dutch and Welsh.

In Guyana, Carne de Vinagre e Alhos is better known as garlic pork. It involves pickling for several days a few pounds of chops in vinegar spiced with salt, hot peppers, garlic and thyme, and then frying the meat on Christmas morning. Served with pink gin it's better than bacon, I have to say.

On Making a Living Doing What You Love

by Nicolette Bethel

When I was a child and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would invariably answer, “A writer”. The responses I got were various. “Oh, that’s nice,” some people said. They didn’t mean it one bit. Others laughed as though I’d told the greatest joke this side of Vegas. Others stared at me as though I’d just said something foreign, as though my tongue had not formed words that were English at all. And one person – my geography teacher – told me, “Oh, no, you’re too good for that. Writing will never earn you any money. Why don’t you think about being a lawyer or something like that?”

But a writer I wanted to be.

On Tourism

by Nicolette Bethel

I want you to do me a favour. Take a minute and write a short paragraph describing The Bahamas.

Done? Good. Now let me guess: you wrote about the beautiful blue water, the white sandy beaches, the coconut trees, and the warm and friendly people. (Those people who didn't pick any of these things skip two paragraphs and read on.)

Now tell me how many times you went to the beach in the past year, how much of that gorgeous water you swam in, how many coconuts you ate from the shell, and how many people you were warm and friendly to on the way to work this morning.

We are living a myth. It's not our own myth. It is a myth created beyond our realities by people who live in cold cities with industrial economies, who dream of endless sunshine and warm water and sand that's as white as a wedding. Most of us live out of sight of the sea, and have to drive or catch bus to get anywhere near it. Most of us relate more to our fruit trees and our shade trees than we do to the coconut palm — we rest in the shade of silk cottons and ficus, we grumble at the dirt dropped from our beautiful and troublesome poincianas, and we snack on jujus and guineps far more than we feast on fresh coconut these days. Our coconut water is as likely to come from the food store as from the shell; and as for the sun — well, very few of us spend more time out in it than we have to. And as for the friendliness of the people: well. Warm and friendly we may be, but we're also stressed-out and overworked and underpaid and forced to sit in more traffic than is good for any human.

Tourism created the myth. We sell it, but we don't live it. In the words of Marion Bethel: in our air conditioned service, we are blessed waiters of grace divine.

But it doesn't have to be like that.