Social performance art is a dynamic and changing social practice that breaks many of the traditional boundaries between the every day and the hallowed museum/gallery space where many people feel that are not welcome. It brings art and cultural expression out of these limits and opens it up to communities that may feel socially excluded from places that were seen to be reserved for the elite. Social performance brings exchange and interchange into stilted spaces, by breaking boundaries it opens up spaces, eyes, hearts and souls to the potential of art and artistic practice. It can also show how significant literature and art are in determining how people are viewed and how they view.
Last week we explored Meris' work in the Project Space Room at the NAGB. There are always many things left out when one explores work, show, music performance, play or film. So this week I want to approach Social Performance Art and the gaze from another perspective. And that serves as a warning, some of it will retread old ground, but in walking around the gallery with a class of students and in the discussions that predated this visit with other students, it has become painfully clear that the generation that is already working in the country but not out of college, have little to no idea of anything to do with Bahamian culture.
We have been bamboozled, run amuck on, hoodwinked and frankly blinded by our supposed First World Status. The First World is however reserved for those foreign-direct-investment-owned hotels that continue to exploit Bahamian workers and leave once they 'see' that they can no longer reap large profits off poor people.
I have been trying to figure out how to approach this discussion and can't because it is too complex and involves so many layers of silence, misinformation, and disinformation. We know that the educational system has failed when young Bahamians are unable to say where Preacher's Cave is, they may 'recall' the Eleutheran Adventurers but have no other context for them or the importance of that island in Bahamian history and to Bahamian development and identity. Cupid's Cay and Governors Harbour are places without any relationship to governance or development. We have apparently been westernized by our education to see ourselves as they see us or don't at all. In the preface to the 19th century The Land of the Pink Pearl states when asked about the Bahama Islands:
As my friend says, ** they are as little known in the West Indies as an Irish village,** whilst in the mother country their name is never heard outside the walls of the Colonial Office, unless it be among the supporters of the S.P.Gr. or the Wesleyan and Baptist Missions.
It is an epic tragedy when our students on whom the future of this 'backwater' rests are as ignorant of this postcolony as those who read about it as a place somewhere out there and whose vision of it was determined by the recountings they were sold from travellers who held it in a gaze that reduced it to blackness and mimicry. We have become our own worst enemies.
I found that Meris' work pulls this up short. Much like Swaby's work on her hair and her exotic being, we as Bahamians have also sought to exoticise those of us who do not have the same hair texture as the 'majority' or to render it almost unthinkable that we should not want to chemicalise, hot-comb or hide under weave our natural tresses. It is interesting that as the 19th century wound down, the works produced by these masters who controlled the image of the world and who would render pictures such as putting a black child into a tub of water and soap and have him emerge 'cleansed' of that dastardly darkness, somehow continue to hold local currency in a black people who do not care for things that might be too black.
We are taught to believe that negroes are lazy and have bad hair. We have been beaten, perhaps to death, into accepting the dominance of whiteness and light-skinned-ness. Our media sells nothing else. In the independent Bahamas, it is interesting that so much of what was soundly criticised during colonialism, as is seen below, remains:
With regard to free and independent representative institutions, if I have spoken the truth in the ensuing pages, it will be seen that they have utterly failed in The Bahamas, though they have certainly not had the result anticipated by Mr. Froude, for so far from the African race having become dominant, they are ground down and oppressed in a manner which is a disgrace to British rule.
The Froude mentioned above is the infamous James Anthony Froude who wrote The English in the West Indies. He argued that the blacks were unfit for much more than to be guided by the English, without whom, the blacks would have been destroyed by their weaknesses. What followed was a project of intense colonialism and religious indoctrination, so that we have arrived at a place where most young people no longer understand the intricacies of Bahamian culture or that it is distinct from one settlement or island up and down the length and breadth of the archipelago.
Mr. James C. Smith once asked me to come with him and see what "a lazy nigger could do with a bit of coral rock." He took me to visit one David Patten, a full-blooded African, who has created a farm of a few acres, on which he success- fully cultivates a great variety of things. But then he has been a well-to-do and well-fed man for years, and there is more in this question of feeding the African than appears at first sight. It is all very well to call him lazy, but he is by nature a large eater, and unless he gets a considerable quantity of food he cannot work. The present race are poorly fed, and their condition in this respect is not likely to improve. The casual observer imagines them to be well-to-do because in the Bahamas the negro can exist, and laugh and sing and dance and appear contented and happy and jolly on very little.
We as a people are rendered as a group who are happy with little and will sing and dance for the tourists, no matter how bad things get. We are bullied into performing for the tourist gaze. As Freeport falls apart and local production (of produce) is utterly devastated except through the foreign-invest direct saviour, we are faced with the inability to see ourselves other than as what we are told we are.
What we see now is a generation of artists who are using social performance art that redefines the strictures of performance and art, though building on both. In National Exhibition 7, Dionne Benjamin-Smith work "Beauty for Ashes" harkens back to colonial times and the creation of product marketing schemes that relied heavily on blackness and its obvious unnaturalness and inferiority to sell their products that proved their weight in gold by 'cleansing' the darkness off the darkies. Social performance art has begun to challenge this, as we see with Gio Swaby's NE8 project "I learned in passing."
However, we live this daily, notwithstanding the politics and policies that deny us space to be free and who say that we are anti-nationalists if we attempt to speak out. If we wear a puff or have hair that is less 'kinky' than some but kinkier than others, then something is wrong. We accept only some types of blackness, and these are always predetermined by the white gaze as established by Victorian cultural mores.
As we see the losing ground of Bahamian identity though some areas of music and art are resurfacing that deny the virtual strangulation of authenticity through cultural nationalism, we find people who open the ways for discussion.
When we have young people, who believe that women should not be 'allowed' to regulate or control their own bodies through birth control and that the state should prevent them from 'breeding' we have a problem. When the works of the Minnis sisters shows, we are reeling under the heavy pressure of poverty, the failure of the independence promise to not gentrify but promote social equity among Over-the-Hill dwellers and Front Street power brokers. Where we 'see' the realities that bring about school murders and gang warfare without judgment or the decree that young black men need to be imprisoned because we know this won't work to do anything but further destroy the social fabric that is unraveling through poor self-image and even worse exclusion from the national narrative.
In a world that defines us as dumb black folk, who need to be cleansed of our blackness or whitened into acceptability, as demonstrated by the Victorian images for Pears' Soap and Sunlight Soap which resonate with bleaching cream ads and ads for relaxers and 'straighteners' that wish us to wash that kink right out of our hair, skin, bodies, we are rendered silent and invisible.
Our job to undo so much of colonialism's deeds and, as Derek Burrows' narrative-destabilizing documentary on colourism, Before The Trees Was Strange highlighted, the postcolonial rule of tourism has managed the population into increasingly deeper submission, as Dr. Krista Thompson demonstrates in her book An Eye for the Tropics. It is also interesting that Lutz & Collins (1993) (The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes. Reading National Geographic) speak to this, but their work can also be used to challenge Caribbean development policy that makes us walking billboards for tourism's success and our submission.
The fact that so much of Bahamian culture is being erased from the minds of the young and that many of them will have to travel far away to find themselves is troubling. Our hair, lips and faces cannot measure up because we are too dark, too unruly, too wiry, too black, too unkempt, though as India Arie attests, 'I am not my hair.'
Social performance art may stand more chance of breathing life into the revelation that we can be people without tourism and the fact that we are ground down by unchanged colonial policy remains as true today, as it was when Powles' condemned it in the 19th century. Social Performance art and social practice have very important places in the world and the lives of Bahamians and we hope will positively transform lives. Perhaps Social Performance Art can break the barriers between blackness and anti-black whitening and lightening as evinced in ads for Sunlight Soap and Pears' in this our postcolonial reality.
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