The presence of absence was disturbing. It is disturbing that I can continue to be absent, even though I know that I am present. I can continue to be invisible to all which people then call bad luck. But it is not bad luck; it is structural absence. The power structure has chosen what can be seen and unseen, what can be silent or what can be heard. Historically, blacks in the Caribbean could not be seen or heard, even though they were the economic producers.
In fact, they produced for the economies in Europe as much as the locals. What they grew here was consumed there. So, their bodies, their strength, their prowess was consumed in the metropole, although they were exploited here. By the time the products arrived in London, Paris, Madrid, they were cleansed of the taint of exploitation. The colonizers did not have to sit with the blacks at their tables nor near them, at least not the field blacks.
Silence is profound, and this kind of silence is even more profound because it removed the entire unit of production from the process. Labor is erased, much like the young women in Bangladeshi sweatshops. They do not exist, but the products of their labors do. In The Bahamas, our gardens are usually well-maintained and our kitchens clean, but the units of labor that 'cause' this are absent.
Absence means that people do not exist, except for themselves. In the Travon Martin case, the verdict showed the invisibility of the black population in the United States when it came to possibilities; but it highlighted the presence of black people when it came to being murdered, racially profiled and exploited - even in the 21st century, a period that is supposedly post-black. We are told that slavery is done, skin color is no longer an issue, even though blacks in Jacksonville,
Florida can be shot because they are listening to the "wrong" kind of music. Slavery ended, when? Ironically, blackness is as absently present as is whiteness in the Bahamian context. You are not Bahamian if you are not black. Yet you cannot be Bahamian if you are too black!
How does this work? There is only a level of acceptability to darkness. So, the history of the African presence is too black, yet the blackness of the country under majority rule is taken as a given but never really examined. Let's not dwell on blackness too much, lest we feel uncomfortable with our internalized inferiority.
In The Bahamas, despite living under majority rule, we rarely speak about true blackness. True blackness means accepting the culture of Africa and embracing the blackness that was an integral part of our history. We choose, though, to ignore the slaves who peopled the then colony and to somehow romanticize slavery and emancipation as being less hostile here than elsewhere.
What is more, tourism insists that we can no longer talk about the differences between whites and blacks because that makes for a charged environment and not for good tourism. We erase the history of us and plasticate it with a history that is comfortable for tourist consumption. We white-out struggle and poverty in favor of resorts and gated communities where history lies cemented under mansions.
The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas began its Seventh National Exhibition, Antillean: an Ecology, in December 2014, and it has been a revealing and troubling look at race and identity, among other themes, in our country. As a part of this, the gallery has sponsored a number of talks. It most recently sponsored the talk by Dr. Jonathon Holloway, dean of Yale College, (in fact, the first black dean of Yale).
The lecture took place on Monday, February 2 at 6 p.m., and was preceded by a performance of "Haitianize", an installation and performance work by Dr. Keithley Woolward of The College of The Bahamas. The performance/installation explores and problematizes the ways Bahamians see Haitians and the ways they/we refuse to see Haitians. We see them as dirty, having too many children, black, etc., yet we refuse to see their humanity. We deny that they are present, except through their absence, notwithstanding the reality that they have been residing in this country for over six decades.
The piece disturbingly troubles our perceptions of Haitianness and our understanding of our place in the cosmos. It comes at an interesting time when Haitians, much like under Roker in the 1980s, are being rounded up and detained--only this time, much of the activity is actually ultra vires the law of the land, (although lawyers will always talk their way out of illegality). Meanwhile, foreign direct investment (FDI) is buying up as much acreage as possible. Once again, the reality of the absent presence is poignant; although Bahamians are aware of the land sale bonanza, do we understand the significance and long-term impact that this has on people?
Dr. Holloway's talk presented a stark reality of silence and absence of black bodies and black history from the official discourse. While there are no museums of blackness or the black American experience, the black presence is profound, just highly ignored. He troubled the discourse on racial stereotyping and the production of history to make it palatable to tourist consumption.
Further, as racial profiling in a black country cannot be the same as it is in a majority white country like the U.S., so fathers do not need to have 'the talk' with their sons about their experiences with racism and segregation, the reality of police intimidation and brutality against poor, black youth remains a constant. How can this be?
Is the majority-rule Bahamas really post-racial? Or is it a country where neither whiteness nor blackness is really dealt with in a real way? They are left under the carpet of darkness and when someone too light marries someone too dark, the resistance is obvious. Though people 'try not to talk about it', Aunty or Grammy will say "Don't bring no black girl or boy home dat I g'a have ta strike a match to see". But to us, this is fine. We don't think about the damage this does to our own psyche.
Blackness is seen as less than. It is the absence of intelligence of potential, of brain power. Why do we perpetuate this myth that has been created in order to subjugate the former enslaved, to justify slavery, to justify why the master was "superior"?
Haitianize depicts Haitians as we render them - as untouchable, sick, diseased, demonic, poor. This is not what we believed, but what the myth of Haitians has become, and that myth, like the myth of blacks being inferior to whites that came from slavery, resonates with some people. Usually, though, it is used to maintain their position of power and control.
Race does not disappear because we no longer live in colonialism or because we are no longer enslaved. Race remains a marker of difference, and can be positive or negative, but it is always there. We cannot be post-racial, as only those who have what they would like to think of as absolute power and control, will argue that there is no longer race. However, all those who inhabit a skin that is not the same as the dominant group, live a different reality. They live a reality where race has gone nowhere. They cannot escape from their race nor the limitation or possibilities it exposes them to.
Living in a majority-black country does not mean that everyone understands the complexities of the colonial and slavery past. These things are virtually absent in the lived experiences of the people. The danger of this is that it allows the horrors of history to be repeated. Colonialism was awful.
The Belgians were famous for being particularly brutal during their colonial period. They put blackness on show. They opted to exploit what they saw as retrograde, as different, as inferior, in a museum for public consumption. This meant that people normalized the idea that blacks were inferior. Imagine, never seeing black people except in a museum or in an exhibition where they are posed as exotic animals, who are built for exploitation. The idea quickly sinks in that they must be what the exhibit says they are.
Art has power and museums have even more power to sway the way we think. The way an exhibit is hung or presented can completely alter the message the viewer receives. Museums did not change this way of presenting blackness for centuries. The world expos and fairs also sold the same image. When the image did begin to shift, the Atlantic world, particularly the Caribbean, became an exotic place for curing oneself of consumption while being waited on by blacks.
Slowly, the trend shifted, and exhibitions of blackness began to discuss the presence of blacks as opposed to ignoring their presence in 'white' art. The museum holds power. And the curator holds even more power to change, mold and manipulate a show to deliver a particular message or to create a certain outcome. Blacks are dangerous - they have a show that can depict that. Blacks are diseased - as U.S. policy began to exaggerate the disease of Haitians at the dawn of the AIDS pandemic.
Museums have changed in Europe. They have begun to embrace the absent presence of blackness. However, in this country, where slavery was real, we still do not really see the reminders of slavery around us. Those are erased in preparation for more and better resorts.
History is erased in order for development to occur. The only site left is Clifton. Holloway's lecture brought home the serious damage being done by eradicating the history of a black people. It matters little that the government may look like some of the people they claim to represent, they no longer see themselves like them. The erasure of history and recreation of mental slavery are simple enough. As a country built on the coast, historically dependent on it for survival, it is odd that we should cede so much of our coast to be developed out of our reach.
Yes, tourism is our bread and butter, but tourists do not inhabit this space, nor will they be here when life gets tough. We are creating an Atlantic World trope of inferior blackness that the Caribbean has trumped out. Holloway's lecture illuminated not only the vanguard work of the NAGB, and the curators of the NE7, but also the profound presence of absence of black history in The Bahamas.
We would not want to scare off the tourists now, would we? Tragically, Holloway also underscores that they want to see that history, and not in palatable morsels that are lovely and digestible. History is filled with unsavory events and bitter characters; that is no reason not to remember it.
The memory of the past has been so utterly wiped out that we are happy to render ourselves dependent on the new FDI master, so as to throw off the shackles of farming and fishing. Where are the slave graveyards if history and slavery were so benevolent here? Where did the African graveyards that are not white and brown disappear to?
Why would we pluck out our history if it only means that as a people, we have no idea where we are going? Holloway's talk and Haitianize, if not the entire show, bring all these to the fore and underscore that a nation without history, silenced by development, is rudderless on the sea of life.
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