Potter's Cay was once a booming center of commerce on New Providence. It housed markets as well as mail boats. Today, it remains one of the arteries of life in The Bahamas, though few choose to see it as such. Years ago, the market range was a hectic, vibrant, place where the Caribbean met The Bahamas. The market there provided locals with produce from the islands, when there were still large functioning farms there, and Cuba and Haiti, yet we have forgotten that. Haitian sloops would dock there as they sold produce and took on other goods.

Years later, we have forgotten this. We no longer see Haitian sloops that were once such a prevalent fixture on the Bahamian seascape. We have come to associate all sloops now with human smuggling, which is not the case. We have closed off these cultural avenues and opened up a gateway to the east. This gateway allows cheap goods to be imported and to swamp our small handcraft market. This we embrace.

Ironically, we still wish to claim our cultural identity while selling only imported crafts. Yet we are also blind to our surroundings. Have you walked on a beach lately and seen all the old shoes? Shoes and more shoes; we are surrounded by shoes. Ironic in a place where one time ago, many years ago, people would walk to school barefoot, shoes in hand, so as not to mess them up because they knew they couldn't afford more.

I would walk to the shop every few days with my great grandmother who was seven feet tall, at least she seemed that way when I was a child. She taught me many things, but one huge lesson was respect for people. No matter who it was, we would walk past and speak. She was adamant about that. She also said to treat all things with respect. Everything had a purpose and could feel.

We, as a society, have apparently forgotten this. We seem to think that our dreams are the only dreams that matter. Our shoes are the best shoes and no one else's can compare. Yet there are still others who glorify, cherish the one pair of shoes they have. The less they have, the more they appreciate what they have. We buy 10 to the dozen and still wish for more. Thus has our culture changed.

As a part of the 2015 Transforming Spaces Art Tour that showcased the art being produced in the country, the group visited The D'Aguilar Art Foundation on Virginia Street. The exhibition spoke of cultural transformation over time. We are no longer the people we were in 1973, nor are we the same people we will be in 2030. We are continuing to grow. Sadly, many of us have the idea that we, as Bahamians, are fixed. We will not change. Our art can only be one way. We can only speak one way. We can only look one way.

What does a Bahamian look like? This was a question that was asked two years ago in NE6, and people would say, "You don't look like a Bahamian". People say they know what a Bahamian looks like. Who says that there is a pattern that cannot change with time? A dressmaker must change his/her pattern from time to time to keep clients.

As more people move to the country, people change their faces, their noses and their eyes. They cannot look the same way someone did 30 years ago. Gone are the Obeah trees and Obeah men of yester year. Gone is a rich understanding of the Bahamian past.

Everything changes. Even shoes change and the experiences of walking in those shoes change as well. During the Holocaust, did the Jewish people who were being wiped out by Hitler's forces think that they would all be the same in the future? How many of them survived? Hitler's idea was to completely wipe out the Jewish people.

The shoes in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, for example, are a reminder of their suffering. Bahamians tend to forget this kind of suffering. We think that nothing compares to the problems we have today. Sadly, there are many who have it worse than we do. Art really does provide an escape valve when things are bad.

When society is crumbling and the economy is strangling people, art allows them to see at least some joy in their lives, in their days. This helps to reduce crime, violence and suicide.

Change

Art voices these horrors, these nightmares of exploitation and devastation. When Duvalier was in power in Haiti, thousands of Haitians were forced to flee for their lives. They were tortured and/or killed before they left. They created fabulous art.

People do not leave the home of love and peace to risk death on unsafe boats in shark-infested seas with no food or water. They come here and then we treat them like dogs. Our humanity loses its way. It may be painful, but best not to forget the tragedies of the past, so as not to repeat them in the future.

Shoes walk miles and carry the memories of those journeys. Though they may no longer be made to last more than one season, shoes hold memories still. Memories cover our shoes like the scars that cover our bodies and our hearts. We say that slavery happened in a distant place, not here and in a distant time far away from this time, unrelated to our sufferings. Yet, the Haitian people often show how quickly a country can arise from the shackles of slavery only to be banned from the table.

The French and the Americans made sure that Haiti, could not participate in international talks; they were not deemed to be a country. They were too black, too inferior. Sound familiar? We are now choosing to repeat history. The shoes can tell the stories.

As The Bahamas becomes a multicultural space, not because people want it to, but because time passes and people move and that cannot be controlled, the faces of the people change. We speak differently, yet we are Bahamian. We have Australian, German, Swiss. We now have parents from Guatemala, Honduras and Argentina, whose children are born and bred here.

They are Bahamian, even though they have other passports they can use. They are registered in both countries at birth.We still, though, refuse to allow Haitians to have children here, even when they are married to Bahamians who we will call Bahamian. We choose to deny these people their humanity. Art shows the need for humanity, the importance of beauty and the need to allow God and inspiration to come into our lives in real ways.

While our culture disappears to the pleasures of the Internet and the economies of scale, the economies of desire take over, we are sold into financial servitude, yet we cannot accept those neighbors from the south. When we talk about silencing the past, we talk about knocking down memories and stories that talk about who we are, our connections that go beyond the trip to Miami.

Our culture, or the culture we now embrace, is plastic and unloving. We choose to seek what we think is the promise of development in the north. The power of consumerism and having more but cheaper things has blinded us to the importance of family and home, of being together and meals at a table. It has blinded us to simple joys of life.

Those are replaced by the 60-inch, flat-screen television with surround sound. We can watch The Bahamas being featured in an ad on that TV, but we cannot participate in that space the ad shows because the walls are too high and the prices too steep for us to get in.

We talk about wanting to be first world, but what does that mean? Does it mean that we wash out our colored clothes in bleachy water and leave them to dry on limestone rocks so the sun can finish the bleach job? Does it mean believing the government's promises while living a totally unrelated experience of environmental destruction, more jobs leaving the country, more banks letting people go and more airlines outsourcing and downsizing their workforce?

What about the contamination in ground water that the government denies, covers up and lies about when questioned directly, but to the very people who are affected by it they remain silent? When all is said and done, we blame the Haitians. Why?

Our navel strings are buried here. Yet we choose not to see the damage being done to the little home we have. Once our country is sold, torn down and sanitized, where shall we go? Do we wish to become another immigrant in the great big melting pot to the north? Many plan to do this, yet they choose not to see how immigrants are treated there. They choose not to see where the lines are drawn nor how quickly they become hard and fast.

Globalization may be a reality, but it is a reality that allows some people to move as opposed to others. Capital can fly across borders and services can be supplied from the north to the south, but people moving from the south to the north find it harder every day to get accepted, to get in and to survive. In fact, globally, migration or the desire to flee the pain and suffering of home, often caused by decades of colonization is worsening. And once the colonizers leave, they do not bequeath economic control to us, but rather hold it in trust for their corporations, leaving us in constant and perpetual state of wage labor. And we blame the Haitians.

Migration and immigration did not change our culture. Life and time change our culture; hotels change our culture; the Internet changes our culture. Our reality, if we are not careful, will be so utterly eroded that we will soon have no place that belongs to us that we can survive in. That is not because there is invasion from the south, but because of devastation from within. Let us open our eyes and see the rich diversity of our home before it is gone, before Potter's Cay no longer exists or Arawak Cay becomes an exclusive tourist attraction empty of Bahamian soul. Our shoes tell many stories.

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