The spirit of trash

Thu, Nov 10th 2011, 08:19 AM

First published December 11, 2008

Soda cans flattened by passing cars.  Screws, bolts, nuts, strewn across the street.  Candy wrappers of every color in the grass, in the dirt, gathered by the wind on the side of the road.  Beer bottles - Heineken, Kalik, Guiness - waiting for someone to gather and sell.  Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes with oily, ketchup-stained wax paper and dried bones rattling about inside.  A potcake's feast.  Vacant lots filled with old microwaves, mattresses, wheelchairs, toilet seats, plastic cups and containers, washing machines, fridges, ovens, paint cans, motor oil bottles, socks, shoes, broken toys, bicycle wheels, car tires and rims, ironing boards, dried-up Christmas trees, and mop sticks.  Garbage cans overturned, or made right again with no effort to put the spilt refuse back in the garbage cans.  Garbage cans that can't actually contain the amount of trash folks are trying to force inside so it's puking it up like a person who ate way too much.
And then the pièce de résistance: abandoned cars in various states of decay.  Some have no tires so they're up on blocks.  Some have doors missing.  Some have no glass left; they've either been taken or broken.  Some have been stripped so far that the only things left are what people can't use.  Some have been marked on with what passes, in this country, for graffiti.  Some have become part of the bush: plants entangling the bumpers, flowers and prickles sprouting through the rusted holes here and there, leaves shooting from the missing headlights.
Maybe you think I've described a local ghetto, some shantytown behind God's back.  What I'm in fact describing is my own neighborhood.  Maybe I'm describing yours too.  Then again, maybe I do actually live in a ghetto.  Maybe the whole blinkin' island of New Providence (with the exception of a few well to do neighborhoods and gated communities) has become one depressing 21x7 ghetto, right before our eyes.  Maybe the filthiness crept up on us gradually, the dinginess increased by small degrees, and now, even now, we don't actually see it.  We clean our cars, we buy our nice clothes, our expensive shoes and purses, we put on our Oakleys and Raybans, and we don't even realize that our neighborhoods look like caca.
Putting the obvious health risks of filth aside for a moment, what are our surroundings doing to us as a people spiritually, psychologically, and socially?  What would it do to you, to me, to all of us, if we were to take it all in, you know, really stare at our public nastiness for a bit?  How would it work out in the end if we turned off the music, stopped the conversation, rolled down our tinted windows, pulled off the shades and drove or worse yet walked really slowly so we could see it all, really see it all here in the nation's capital?  Well, since I've done it already, I can tell you that the gut instinct is to turn the music up louder, darken the tints even more and never ever look out the window again!  You think about moving, leaving town, going back to the island or migrating to the suburbs of WalMartland.  You just want to run!  No matter how you choose to look at it (if you choose to look at it) the dirtiness, the dinginess of our streets, buildings and neighborhoods is a major downer.  Last March, after living in Canada for seven straight months I came home and really saw my hometown, really saw it, as I hadn't seen it in years.  I had to fight off despair.
"Stressful Neighborhoods and Depression: A Prospective Study of the Impact of Neighborhood Disorder" is the name of a 2003 study in the Journal of Health and Social Behaviour that examined the correlation between stressful neighborhoods and depression.  Researchers did a long-term study that tracked a group of several hundred persons living in what were perceived as disadvantaged neighborhoods.  The data compiled for the piece, suggests that "Social disorganization may be deleterious to both physical and mental health...[and] perceptions of neighborhood characteristics (vandalism, litter or trash, vacant housing, teenagers hanging out, burglary, drug selling, and robbery) predicted depressive symptoms at a nine-month follow-up interview."  Every single one of those stress producing characteristics exist in my neighborhood, an area no one would categorize as "disadvantaged".  The only one that doesn't trouble me personally as I move through this area is teenagers "hanging out" -- but then again, I don't know this new crop of young males in my neighborhood so let me think about that some more and get back to you.
In the meantime, I have some questions.  What is the impact collectively on the spirit, the psyche and the self-esteem of a people, of living in a nasty environment, a noisy environment, a congested environment, a place where there's not enough green (literally and figuratively), not enough water, not enough shade, not enough quiet, not enough clean air, not enough healthy food, not enough order, not enough effort to fix blatant problems?  When landlords and homeowners can't or won't paint their buildings and keep them clean, when you and your neighbors dump trash in the vacant lot across the street, when idle boys paint lurid messages on the walls of abandoned buildings, when you or your neighbors refuse to move cars that will never ever, ever run again and let them decay in front of the yard, when the neighborhood mechanic piles up decrepit vehicles in his yard and the adjacent vacant lot because he might need a part someday or the owner refuses to 'come back fa he tings', what does it do to you emotionally, spiritually?  When I don't ask you to move that broke down car, you pretend it's a tree in front of your house because I'm scared you'll cuss me or I don't call the police when I hear and see suspicious behavior on that dead end street because they might figure out who called, what does that do to me?  Who are we if we live like this?  What are we?
And don't blame the blinkin' government!  The government cleans R. M. Bailey Park every week and yet when I went there with my kids on Sunday afternoon it was filthy and unsafe for little children.  We, the users, did that to R. M. Bailey Park.  We can change the politicians but how do we change a people?  How do we change ourselves?  Who owns R. M. Bailey Park?  Hubert Ingraham?  The government?  Who has responsibility for keeping it clean?  Ingraham?  Why don't we believe we own our public spaces?  Why don't we care about the appearance of anything we can't drive or wear on our bodies?  Who taught us to be filthy?  Who made us believe we don't own anything we can't carry with us everywhere we go?
What are we going to do about this?  And don't tell me we need more public service announcements 'cause they ain't workin'.  What are you, reader, going to do about this mess?  Clean up campaigns come and go and the garbage returns.
If you take in garbage is that what you put out?  What comes out of you comes from the core of you, from the heart, not so?  So then is this filthy, run-down, dilapidated, ugly, exhausted city a reflection of who we are on the inside, of the state of our souls?  Is the stunning beauty of Junkanoo real or is it just a self we wish we could be and the Junk of the other 363 days of the year is the real us?  If it's the latter then I'm ashamed of who we've become.
 
o IAN STRACHAN is Associate Professor of English at The College of The Bahamas. You can write him at  strachantalk@gmail.com

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