Art, culture and the best we have to give are on display across the islands of our nation. Yet we choose not to see the fantastic beauty and vibrant culture that we inhabit. We choose to see lack. We are not first world; we must become more first world.
Well, honestly, the art takes that thought and shames it. We are as artistic and creative as everyone else with a level of sophistication and flare that makes Bahamian arts stand out. However, we see the need to invite foreign investors in to tell us what we are lacking. Some of these investors, however, may allow us to shine. We must find them and focus on them. Our culture is rich and diverse. Let's celebrate it.
As we grow into the The Bahamas of the future, we seem poised to erase what was here in the past. We appear happy to dig out, root up, plow down, implode, explode, drill, bleach, bulldoze and wash away all aspects of our history.
We are interested in moving to the next level, to gaining more tourists, to earning more money, to having more things. The way we see to realize these goals is to change ourselves into the next best Miami. A copy of anything is never as good as the original, no matter how good the copy.
We are becoming a Marina Village on steroids. As we mash up everything historical or cultural, we are actually throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. The old people always said, "a shut mouth catch' no fly". This meant that if one kept his or her mouth shut, he or she would have no problems -- no flies would fly in; there would be no bad taste. The other side of that is the fact that silence then means that we stand for nothing. We are complicit in our own devastation.
Our culture is not the resort on the shores, confining the poor blacks to a landlocked coastal-less existence. It is not the cement strip mall that grew out of three clapboard houses and their fruit tree-packed gardens, where the ground yielded cassava, sweet potato and some eddoes, before it was cast in concrete and hidden from existence. We are entombing a part of our personality, our very souls in a plastic existence that allows no space for bad hair days nor humanity of another sort - except a uniform commercialized trope.
The way we lived was our culture; it was our identity. It was also a part of our artistic expression. The doilies on the tables were made, not by a maquiladora in Mexico or Ecuador, but by the lady of the house or her mother, grandmother, daughters or granddaughters.
The multiple rugs layered on the floor in many different directions, ready to trip me, the grandson or great-grandson, posed no threat to the inhabitant(s) of the wood house on 'anyname' road, before it was knocked down. It surrendered its place in life to a vague memory in the graveyard of identity-less, character-less, artificially-cooled cement boxes. But we lust after the cement boxes of the future, even though they say nothing of who we are.
This was all the re-invention of an interior house space at the NAGB, which was showcased in Transforming Spaces 2015.
This year's Transforming Spaces was different from last year's in its free-themed approach. Each gallery's curator had an idea of what she or he wanted to portray in the space. Many of the spaces focus on culture and the culture of art, or what we will call cultural industries. This perhaps allows for a far more nuanced and dynamic interpretation of space/place and ethos to come through each location.
Remember, place is changed and defined by the way we live in it. The space is what we make of the place we live. Our culture brings the place alive, or it causes it to stagnate under the 'resortization' of place.
Transforming Spaces underscores the importance of Bahamian culture in tourism and development and the importance of The Bahamas as place and space that is unique, not a copy. It spoke to the need to be more than a resort. No one else can be like Bahamians; no other country will be The Bahamas. We forget that. In our desire to draw more tourists, we destroy who we are in favor of a whitewashed, silver-plated, gold-embossed idea of what we might be. This imitation only fades with time as the plate wears off and the tarnish sets in.
While the uniqueness will require maintenance, it does not require a complete 'do over' to fit in at the risk of looking like a cheap imitation. It's not like a perm that is hard to keep because it is not really meant to be the way it is. It's naturally occurring and robust; nature is always the best inhabitant of any space.
Once again the tour spoke to our cultural vibrancy. We are a unique people with a huge amount of artistic talent that we can explore. Baha Mar sees this, can we join in their charge?
On the Transforming Spaces tour, there were a few spaces and images that stood out in my mind, not because of any particular aspect, except because of the way they spoke to my upbringing in this space before it became obsessed with making itself into something else. I will focus on two or three here that will lead to another story of the other spaces.
What has always amazed outsiders about Bahamian culture is its resilience. In the face of harsh policing from colonial powers, Africans still managed to retain their culture. This makes many Bahamians uneasy because it is seen as bad. But burial societies, Asue and other such African-cultural norms speak to serious cultural entrenchment against concerted efforts at deracination.
Obeah too has survived, though we choose to ignore and/or deny it. This concept of denying the existence of Obeah, yet keeping it outlawed, made the exhibit at Doongalik that much more poignant. The rubber tree in front was adorned with bottles of various colors and sizes filled with whatever substance and strung from the tree branches. This was reminiscent of the years when City Meat Market on Rosetta Street had a house next door where the mango trees stood large and appealing inside the fenced-in yard. People were not deterred by the fences, but they were certainly abashed by the bottles hanging from the tree branches.
A sure sign of culture bred into the bone, despite whatever people say to the contrary. Of course, all of this exists in the sanitized space next to Paradise Island up the road from the famed Cable Beach. This is the reality we speak to, a hybrid culture, hybrid art springing from the encounter between the old world and the new, between Africa and Europe in the Americas.
"Before time" we lived between the two worlds and we knew how to negotiate that space. Nowadays, we wish to do away with our cultural inheritance in favor of something made to order, bought over the counter, where one size fits all that replaces our tailor-made ethnicity and cultural specificity.
Art does this. The art of living day to day, the art of cooking outside over a coal fire, in a brick oven, of roasting breadfruit, of corn roasted and johnnycake baked without gas can be remembered and preserved. These ways of living are now too below us. Gone are the days of cooking in the outdoor kitchen. They are not just gone but forgotten too.
The old-style construction with stone made from lime, no cement, is wiped out. That stone did not crack and fall away the way cement does, exposing the steel that has rusted within. Why did government rid Bay Street/Market Street of that old, smelly, colorful, hot market? Was it too cultural? Was it too black, Caribbean, under-developed? Why did they replace it with Super Value on Cable Beach?
When tourists come to Nassau, they ask for the market, not the made-in-China Bahamian straw market. They want the real market experience. They get this in Barbados, Dominica, Trinidad, why not The Bahamas? Why are we ashamed of what we had? Or was it not shame, just a desire to develop?
That tree adorned with bottles at Doongalik brought back many memories. When did Bahamian culture become something to be ashamed of? Perhaps it was always something we shunned, embracing the art of another country, their tradition and culture instead? It is easy to notice the juxtaposition of the rubber tree and the narrative of Paradise Island Bridge, where a young educated Bahamian knows little more of her culture than a tourist arriving in the country for the first time.
The ethnicity that we claim to want to showcase in our tourism window has been eclipsed by a sunset over calm beaches and foreign direct investment where nothing too strange can survive, yet the entire space is strange and unnatural. This peculiarity has become the new normal. This debate, discussion and vision is highlighted by the old clashing with the new. The old is being bulldozed and is losing.
Nicolette and Margot Bethel recapture the interior of their grandmother's home, which was bulldozed to make room for progress. While the bulldozing was a mistake, the cultural loss that was experienced from the destruction of such spaces can never be recovered. This is as we live through one of the biggest shifts in cultural expression and identification in over 100 years. Most of those in the generations born after the 70s will never have any idea of the beauty of the old Bahamas. They hold in contempt the old ways, the old houses, the old style.
"Old" to them means "crap". They have never seen it, nor have they heard about it. Their grandmothers' tales lay covered over with the silencing of a wax seal. They have been murdered by silence of generations of shame and embarrassment of who we are. The narrative of Paradise and the building of the nostalgic rendering of Grammy's house meet with Dede Brown's lady with the sea fan afro (at Liquid Courage Gallery), and demonstrate how Bahamian culture, much like Bahamian women suffer from serious inequality in The Bahamas.
Transforming Spaces shows that we are quickly losing what makes us not only world famous but also resilient. We are losing our identity to the high-rise of air conditioning and piped music with under-seasoned food; of pre-packaged, pre-hydrated, genetically modified food for increased cancer incidence among a society already suffering from high cancer rates. The cultural diversity, though is astonishing. From south Eleuthera to north, from New Providence to Abaco, there is no one Bahamian culture.
This makes us even more unique, even more rich and even more profound, as is the loss we are experiencing as we root out all that was left of our culture. As we bulldoze our homes and forests, we are losing not only the memories of Chickcharnees, but also the visual memories of a culture slowly fading into the recesses of a bygone age.
Art is a trigger for memory. It is also a tool for progress. What we have in Transforming Spaces is a combination of cultural expression. We can make a living from our culture, thrive through our culture and be carried on a world tour by our culture, yet we choose not to embrace it. This annual tour gives the city the chance to show that there is a tremendous talent here. Now, one of the UNESCO Creative Cities, Nassau is positioned to take off in cultural industries. But can we stop the bulldozing of our culture?
Much like the SLOW Cities movement in Italy, Nassau is creative. Bahamians are creative. What we must do now is remember that creativity, live in our creativity and show the world what a culturally rich and cultural place The Bahamas is. It is much larger than Carnival or even Junkanoo. It is as apparently insignificant as the way we cook, the way we talk, the way we eat, the way we walk. It disappears into the high-rise glamour of the resort. Where do we go next?
Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian
