Paradise and utopia
Art is beauty captured in verse, wood, stone, picture, chalk, pastel, charcoal, ink and acrylic. Art makes us think, feel, see and fear. We fear what we do not know, and we fear more what we see but do not like or understand. We see where we live, but cannot process that it is not dystopic; it is a real paradise, not a paradise of imaginary creation.
Our culture resides there. There is break between that and utopia. Our utopia is built in Paradise, and the art in the Seventh National Exhibition (NE 7), Antillean: an Ecology, shows this.
Utopia gives us a dream of what is beyond the rainbow. Dystopia is the inverse of that - what is not nice about our worlds. Art tends to create utopias and challenge them at the same time. Art uses beauty to sell itself as utopia, which is a part of the dream of paradise. We are all sold on the dream of Paradise.
In our case, we were told that our islands were not Paradise because they did not have shopping malls and major, high-end developments with hyper time and hyperlinks that open before one click, sending us into the future. So, they or we knocked down the trees, paved the white-top roads with pitch black tar, dredged our mangroves--killing our wildlife, and brought the kitchens and bathrooms inside all homes. But we refused to create alternative sources of power (oil is king--while it destroys our fish and conch), we refused to live in harmony with where we are because utopia created an image of Paradise.
Coleridge writes in the poem "Kubla Kahn": "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree...". In The Bahamas, we were sold a prefabricated package of hermetically sealed and sanitised spaces; note the line in the poem that reads "So twice five miles of fertile ground/With walls and towers were girdled round. In The Bahamas, hotels and pleasure palaces have replaced most old Bahamian buildings. Coleridge writes: "And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills / Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree..."
But these gardens are not for our enjoyment. Our side of the bridge has few green spaces or gardens or lovely trees. NE7 (2014) and Transforming Spaces (2015) have brought disquiet to our minds because they show race and economy, class and color in ways that are not pretty or easy to swallow. They have brought to mind this idea of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater". Historical monuments give us a place identity can use to reject its past. History is always an irony in Paradise, where the only time is the present. We become enraptured in our own construction of a pleasure den of holiday making and organized, beautiful living.
The local unreality
The grunge and the grime of everyday life live not in a paradise built on ideas of fun and abandon. Our lives, sewn into hard work under the watchful eye of poverty, do not compare to the joy of the picture we paint. The palm-lined, broad, pothole-free streets are not for our consumption. Our imagination is meant to be locked in the standpipe and pothole of Quackoo Street, the incredible silk cotton tree that stretches across the road and shades the clapboard houses that lean in house yards we still claim not to see and that do not exist. They may be free of the zinc-piling, corrugated iron walls that enclose them in other Caribbean states, but they are as present here, often headed by an old woman who either owns and rents or simply functions as Grammy or Mama.
Generations of families, often headed by women, inhabit these spaces where children run, skip and play around dirt yards, visiting or resident men sit and drink "rum" at 11 a.m., hit dominos and cuss. Women are usually at work as maids in the glitz of the other world, and their potcakes lie in wait for their return under the cover of dark. Children see parents who come home and then head back out to job number two or three and then to the club because they are still exploring their youth while loosely parenting a brood of youngsters, without clarity of direction nor the certainty of success in putting food on the table. BEC has fried the fridge that stands near the front door on the dirt ground surrounded by beer bottles and plastic thank-you bags.
Many of these homes no longer rely on the general current unprovider because the price of life has risen too much of late and the hair of other races from other places is more important than the basic necessities. Wires crisscross from tree to house to pole to tree and back around, as power from some source other than direct connect pushes the 52-inch flat-screen LCD that entertains from the cover of the porch, away from the possibility of rain. It is mobile, moving from shack to shack as the revellers change location.
The excitement is whistling in their hands as they slam dominos onto makeshift tables. Just under the surface of this masculine gathering is the memory of the last night of dominos and the gunshots that killed a close friend. They are in mourning? This loss is common. One of their boys gets shot and everybody knows the shooter, but no one knows anything when the police arrive from the big green station on the western end of the road.
This tranquility is infrequently punctuated by a pink-hued lot of scooter riding folk, exploring the 'true, true' Bahamas. They must be lost. Cameras adorn necks and backpacks sit on backs as they whiz uncaringly through the tangles of life that exists outside the dream of five-days-and-four-nights. They have crossed over the bridge that separates the dream from this unreality.
The lying devil lives on this side of that bridge, hidden from view by the invisibility cloak of forgetting or disassociation. The Obeah tree still stands forgotten in the front of that yard on Anyname Street; what may be missing are the bottles intentionally hung from its branches. They have been replaced by a less obvious practice, but no less African-derived worship. But we blame the Haitians. They brought blackness into our world.
Is it their poverty? Is it their height? Is it their fierce sense of identity that we fear? They now live cheek by jowl with us in many places, yet we argue that they all inhabit squalid shantytowns that cause every manner of cultural decline.
Fear of blackness or political change
When the Mace and the hourglass flew out of the window on what is now called "Black Tuesday", the fear of blackness and the anxiety that goes along with it did not. The fear of Haitian revolt in a small, white-controlled, black-dominated tropical colony, which would become a Crown colony, was real. The small crew of planters and law enforcers from the Crown feared this descent into blackness that the fleeing Haitians represented and they fed this to us.
Paradise is built by eclipsing that local unreality above. Paradise, much like Thomas De Quincey's Opium Eater and Kubla Khan's Xanadu, exists at a cost. Our paradise lives in us, only we do not see it. Our desire is always for the other paradise across the bridge. It is much like the world of Disney, who would not like to inhabit it?
Perhaps it is a blindness of the post colony and its government that we cannot see our world and ourselves. We are distraught at the thought that our home does not measure up, only we do not discuss that with ourselves.
Shame and embarrassment hold us hostage to the terrorists who reoffer the colonial dream in independence costume. We choose not to recognize the Greeks among us, nor the Syrians who have inhabited the space for decades. Nor do we see the Jews or the Cubans, Dominicans and Peruvians. We save our scorn and scathing condemnation for the black devils, because we have been told that black is bad. Little do we think, realize or concentrate on the controls placed on whiteness.
In earlier decades, many Italians from the south were not considered white. Many of us now see them as white. Race is constructed. It is human and not economic. The bridge that segregates Nassau from Paradise can also unite the two. Why have we sat back and allowed the devil to take away everything from us through details that we choose not to see or read? Yes, the devil is certainly busy and he/she may be (or is a liar) too, but she/he does not have to be in control of the boat.
As a country exuding creativity, filled with a rich cultural diversity and ethnically rich, we have bought into the idea that we cannot learn from and then create our own from European models. Derek Walcott would disagree with us! However, we do not have to let those models and ideas of who we are and what we do imprison us. It does not have to bar paradise from us. We must learn to live in peace with who and where we are. The old song, "I want to be rich" has unlimited meanings; it is not limited to financial wealth or to 'tingsiness'.
The beauty and culture of our country is not cloaked in the paradise myth, though we can coexist with that. It is in us accepting that we are bigger and richer than some high-rise tower gated by a moat and built to crumble after 25,000 miles. We are a nation of black, yellow, brown, white, old and young, men and women, mixed and more mixed up like conch salad. We can still see the roots of slavery and enslavement, of colonialism and hatred of blackness, of the devil associated with Africa and Haiti being too close to Africa, of always aspiring to get to that place that is really not real, where we do not exist.
Paradise was not made for us.
Read, listen or feel. We may inhabit a corner of Paradise as the myth presents it, but the Dominicans sing it well when they say that there is no light for an electrocardiogram in the Hospital in Santo Domingo. The cost of living rises again, and the idea of blackness threatens to undo so much, yet they embrace their culture and celebrate themselves. Of course, they have their color and class politics in Santo Domingo as much as in Havana, but they celebrate themselves.
Cuba celebrates every aspect of Cuban culture. Can The Bahamas follow this model? Paradise was not built for us; we can choose to inhabit it, but always remember that we live in the real paradise of joy and pain, a reality where the silk cotton tree reaches across the road and the eyes of poverty are always watching.
Our paradise is not the multi-storied dream of pleasure, we only serve there.
"And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise."
- Coleridge
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