Migration, Memory and the Marketplace in Bahamian Art
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COMMENTARY Goin’ Back ta Da Islan’: Migration, Memory and the Marketplace in Bahamian Art Ian Gregory Strachan The College of The Bahamas1 ABSTRACT Wake up early one mornin’ Kiss my Mamma goodbye Goin’ back ta di Islan’ I say, don’ worry Mamma, don’ cry Ronnie and the Ramblers, “Crown calypso” (1969, track 8) We are who we are Children of the hot lands We build fires every Christmas And pray in earnest for cold weather Jerome Cartwright, “Cold snap” (1993) I told of never coming Winter; The boats dancing gaily in a blue bay; Then I sang of flowers blooming, the wild ocean booming, Thunder walking the streets of the islands in May Robert Elliot Johnson, “The wanderer” (1972) INTRODUCTION addresses our sense of alienation from our These three extracts provide an introduction island landscape as a result of the North to our subject: the factors affecting the Atlantic’s cultural colonialism. And the last representation of the Bahamian landscape in poem, by Robert Elliot Johnson, demonstrates art. Together they seem to triangulate the the extent to which Bahamians speak in the subject. The lyrics from a song performed by language of the tourist brochure when one of our most celebrated calypsonians, describing their country to outsiders. Ronnie Butler, explore the irrepressible Migration, memory and the marketplace do nostalgia for a simpler rural past that not exhaust the list of factors shaping our art, permeates much of Bahamian secular music but they are principal players in its produced after Independence in 1973. The production. second, a poem by Jerome Cartwright, We shall see that there are important 1 Ian Gregory Strachan, Vice President, Office of Communications, The College of The Bahamas, P.O. Box N-4912, Nassau, Bahamas e-mail: [email protected] Acknowledgements: A version of this paper was published in Yinna, vol. 2 (2007), pp. 29-46. APA reference: Strachan, I. G. (2014). Goin’ back ta da islan’: Migration, memory and the marketplace in Bahamian art. International Journal of Bahamian Studies, 20(1), 52-62. Retrieved from http://journals.sfu.ca/cob/index.php/files/article/view/213/267 I.G. Strachan, 2014. Journal compilation The International Journal of Bahamian Studies, 2014 I. G. Strachan. Goin’ Back to de Islan’. 53 connections between the Bahamian nostalgia still alive to many that The Bahamas is less for the rural Family Island past and touristic “real” as a nation, when compared to our idealizations of Caribbean island life. neighbor, the United States. This inferiority Whereas Africa often becomes the subject of complex is not unique to Bahamians; many longing and idealization in Jamaican reggae English-speaking Caribbean societies suffer music, in Bahamian music Da Islan’ is a more from it (Cliff, 1995; Naipaul, 1969b). What compelling object of idealization, nostalgia, happened to Bahamians during British romanticism and yearning. The three forms of colonial rule was a kind of alienation from the artistic expression we will examine are poetry, very land on which they lived. Bahamians music and painting. dreamed of one world and lived in another, The romanticization of the pastoral place is meaner, cruder one. The same can be said of not new in human history. It goes hand in many of today’s American cable, satellite, hand with the nostalgia for childhood, for a Netflix and DirectTV watchers. Since time of greater innocence. Since the literature Independence, Bahamians have come more of antiquity, City people have pined for the and more under the influence of the United Country, where it was believed people knew States, as had the entire world since the end of each other and knew how to get along, where World War II. For instance, the majority of one was safer, where it has always been tourists who come to The Bahamas are of imagined that life was easier, there was less United States provenance. suffering, less violence, less greed and evil The Bahamian problem of place is further (Williams, 1973, p. 17). We must remember complicated by the fact that Afro-Bahamians that many people often think that the present descend from slaves who never wished to day is worse than the Good Ole Days and that come to this country, who had a home that things will get worse before they get better. was elsewhere, in Africa. The loss of Africa, So what are the factors affecting notions of some have argued, has contributed to a sense home and homeland in The Bahamas? First, of restlessness and a lack of connection with we acknowledge that those two terms do not the land among Caribbean people. We are a necessarily mean the same thing, particularly people, in other words, who mourn the loss of in an archipelago where all of the citizens of that which we never knew; in this century we the country do not live on the same land mass perhaps have no archaeological link to the (Bethel, 2000). We must remember that, like land. There are no ruins to look upon. We many Caribbean nations in which internal cannot trace our ancestry in these islands back migration moves from the rural to the urban into the mists of antiquity. Our African past, locales, The Bahamas has undergone a even our past in these islands rests on what, in dramatic population shift which has left the the American context, Michael Dyson refers Family Islands under-populated since the to as the “ash heap of dismemory” (1993, p. 1960s and 1970s, motivated by the search for 32). educational and employment opportunities in We must also bear in mind that despite the capital. But notions of home are universal suffrage and independence, the complicated by other factors. In the era of formerly enslaved and colonized people still colonialism under Britain, it was the Mother do not feel that they are in full possession and Country and its landscape (like its history, its control of the institutions that employ them, songs and traditions), which were idealized, or of the economy that feeds them. The State the subject of fantasy, of reverence. In the is not the same as the Community in the eyes post-Independence Bahamas, the notion is of the people. Rather, it is often viewed as an The International Journal of Bahamian Studies Vol. 20, No. 1 (2014) I. G. Strachan. Goin’ Back to de Islan’. 54 adversary—something to use whenever Walcott could recollect in a recent essay that possible, but more importantly, something there was something terrifying and exciting around which to maneuver for one’s about writing the word “breadfruit” on a piece individual best interest. There is little thought of paper in 1945 (1996, p. 26). One was of hurting the nation with one’s illegalities, elevating in art that which was too mean, too one’s mediocrity, indiscipline or low mundane, too native to be celebrated in verse. productivity, only of helping oneself and Of course, the Bahamian artist’s one’s family, and avoiding the law.2 representations of home are informed by yet These circumstances contribute to a disregard another colonizing force, that of tourism and for the landscape among many, a lack of its highly marketable conception of the reverence for the place on which they walk. Bahama Islands as places not only of natural This is characteristic of a people who still feel beauty but also of bliss, innocence, no stake in the place in which they find forgetfulness, and tranquility. themselves, no need to ensure its preservation There are a number of ways in which the fact for future generations. The rampant pollution of migration becomes manifest in Bahamian and widespread disregard for historic art. The forced migration of blacks from buildings and land formations attest to this. (I Africa becomes the subject of consideration say this being fully aware of the phenomenon for a number of Bahamian artists, particularly of Family Island generation land, which poets and musicians, but some visual artists as ensures that all black Bahamians can comfort well. Second, migration becomes a subject of themselves with the thought of imaginary Bahamian art through calls for tourists to wealth and acreage beyond the limits of come and taste the sweet island life. This is desire, but which actually remains a key to the most overt in our music. And third, the disinheritance of the masses, as the heirs to disenchantment with the urban experience of these hundreds of acres remain in debt and New Providence and the nostalgia for what is crammed into Nassau duplexes and perceived as the more peaceful and Government low-cost subdivisions.) community-oriented experience of the Family It is against the backdrop of this tradition of Islands become another subject of the art, colonial and neocolonial negation of their particularly popular songs. own landscape’s right to exist as a real place, It should be noted that Africa has not been against this tradition of disinheritance, and ignored in post-Independence Bahamian art. this sense of exile while at home, that A number of artists have drawn attention to Bahamian artists engage in the necessarily our history of forced migration through political act of representing and celebrating slavery. Poems such as Robert Elliott Home and Homeland as they wish to define Johnson’s “East Street,” and “Sailing West” them, rather than remaining the coerced (1972), Livingston Malcolm’s “In the witnesses of someone else’s celebrations of Distance of My Mind” (1979) and Christian place, of culture, the involuntary witnesses of Campbell’s ironically titled poem “Paradise” the developed world’s preoccupation with its (1999), display a consciousness of the loss of own triumphant march toward the Western Africa and the legacy of slavery.