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Lucayos Vol 2 2010.Pdf LUCAYOS LUCAYOS ::: WATER EditorEditorssss’’’’ Introduction Lucayos is a biennial peer reviewed journal of literature, culture and the arts produced by the School of English Studies, College of The Bahamas. It provides a forum for academic exchange and scholarship, and intellectual debate, while also providing a space for creative expression of the liberal and fine arts. It affords scholars, intellectuals, practitioners of the writerly and visual arts, and cultural critics another space in which to disseminate their knowledge and ideas. “Lucayos” is the name of both the original peoples of The Bahamas and the islands themselves. It evokes the pre-colonial harmony between people and the natural environment, between people who worshipped their gods and had reverence for the world in which they lived. The selection of the name name “Lucayos” was deliberate, its relevance enduring. It is particularly appropriate in our second issue, for it acknowledges the inseparable link between people and the physical world in which they live, between people and the waters on which their lives depend. Cognisant of the archipelagic nature of The Bahamas, with its 700 islands and cays and 225, 000 square miles of sea, and conscious, too, of the ever increasing importance attached to water on planet earth, the editors chose water as the thematic underlay of the second edition of Lucayos. Water is the source of life. It enables existence, survival, fertility. It is a space of movement, creating communities and cultures. It is a site of trade and transport, of transactions of goods, services and people. A site of cross-cultural encounters, it bridges differences of class, ethnicity, race, religion and gender. It is a location of possibility, affording opportunity for new ways of seeing and being. Travelling on, through, over or under water has forever altered the way we perceive our world, our planet. It is revered, a sacred space, signifier of the spirit, and the sublime. Its influence on our material and spiritual selves is represented in texts and testimonies of all sorts, in art, film, literature, media, criticism. Water is its own paradox. It can be both literal and metaphoric bridge, yet often constitutes a physical and cultural barrier. It can impede the unfortunate traveler, individual or tribe. Bodies of water which traditionally ferried people and goods to and from their homelands have undergone radical changes as technology, complicit in humankind’s insatiable thirst for progress (or what the West has defined as progress), has forever altered the flow of water in counties, countries, continents. Its scarcity LUCAYOS heralds increasing tensions among ethnic and national communities. It is, as it has always been, both source and site of conflict. How does the artist celebrate its beauty while conscious of its power and ability to consume, destroy? How does the postcolonial scholar read water’s claim on identity formation? What, then, is an “Is/land?” How does water complicate our ability to articulate who we are? These questions inform some of the essays and creative works included in the 2010 issue. We are grateful to the scholars and the creative writers whose texts are included here. We are grateful to Antonius Roberts for his permission to reproduce a selection of his aquatic paintings. Finally we are grateful to all who submitted papers on a diversity of subject and look forward to further submissions for the 2012 issue. We extend an invitation to all to visit our website www.cobses.info/Lucayos and welcome early submissions—essays, creative pieces, reviews—for the next issue on Bahamian and postcolonial literatures, cultures and the arts. All articles should be typed and double-spaced with notes at the end. Articles should conform to MLA documentation style. Submissions and inquiries should be sent to: The Editors Lucayos School of English Studies The College of The Bahamas P.O. Box N-4912 Nassau, The Bahamas Or by e-mail to [email protected] Marjorie Brooks-Jones Daphne M. Grace Raymond Oenbring Ian G. Strachan December 2010 LUCAYOS Binding Tides: Race and Migration in the Bahamas Ian Bethell-Bennett Migration, forced and free, has become a way of life. Living with new migrants or seeing migration presented is a constant reminder of the world’s ‘new’ transnationalism and the wide reaches of globalisation. But it is also an indication of global poverty, of transnational subjectivity and subalternity. The Caribbean has a different relationship with migration. As the islands and countries of the region have traditionally been so fluid in the movements of their people it always been an inherently ‘creole’ region. In The Repeating Island Antonio Benítez-Rojo argues that there is a repeating rhythm, a polyrhythm that connects the region, creating a meta- archipelago. The Caribbean is, as Benítez-Rojo calls it, a repeating island, a meta- archipelago with similar polyrhythm that creates similar cultures in spite of linguistic disjunctures. This image is helped along by employing the sea, the tides and the crafts that ride along them to link islands and main lands and facilitate migration and cultural creolisation. We might use this image to go further into cultural discussion using Homi Bhabha’s notion of a Heimlich manoeuvre of home and the unheimlich manoeuvre of outside in relation to how cultures view insiders and outsiders and also how they construct themselves in relation to those outsiders. This notion of links and in/outsiders is important to examine through Aihwa Ong’s use of anthropology. The practices of an elite transnationalism . to subvert the ethnic absolutism born of nationalism and the process of cultural othering that have intensified with transnationality. My anthropology is thus situated obliquely to the hegemonic powers of Home and Exile. By oscillating between Western belonging and nonbelonging, and between the local and the global, anthropology as a mode of knowledge can provide a unique angle on new cultural realities in the world at large. (24) Indeed, nationalism is ‘to blame’ for a great deal of the confusion, the ‘bad-blood’, between Haiti and the Bahamas. Had it not been for the successful culmination in 1804 of the revolution perhaps there would not be such a war to cast Haiti as the most demonic of all countries. But nationalism is not responsible for the entire ‘mess’ that has been made of the country and its people. I will borrow here again from Ong’s terms, using the terms transnationality and transnationalism as she defines and employs them. “I am concerned with transnationality—or the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space—which has been intensified under late LUCAYOS 2 capitalism. I use transnationalism to refer to the cultural specificities of global processes, tracing the multiplicity of the uses and conceptions of ‘culture’”(4). These elements of Ong’s terminology are particularly key in this study as they pave the way to an understanding of the ‘creole’/decreolised nature of Bahamian/Haitian identity. On any given afternoon in Nassau one can drive down West Bay Street and find a number of Haitian sloops anchored off shore, waiting to go back to Haiti; some take freight, others simply lie at wait for the next sailing. These are the new floating signifiers of transnationalism. They are the indicators that the Caribbean—already a highly creolised region, becomes even more open to migration and the resultant creolisation that this implies. These signifiers or cultural markers are also signs of a cultural shift in migration. They represent a change in the realities that we live in the islands. These Haitian or Haitian-Bahamian sloops carry cultural influences back and forth between the two places and, compounded with other forms of migration, move information into the US and other migratory centres. One such centre is Miami, and this leads to what could be called a triangular effect in the migration pattern and sphere of influence. It is important to establish that ever since the times of the Middle Passage the Caribbean has always been societies of movement and flow, hence the need to read Caribbean or West Indian cultures as migratory or creole—without the implication that the cultures are temporary or unsubstantial. If trade has always been a reality for the region, then trade routes would have ultimately also been significant in the formation of identities and cultural spheres of influence. Certainly, we should not need to point out in the 21 st century the enormous impact trade and trade routes have on cultures and cultural identities. Therefore, if this is accepted, then Caribbean trade, like trade between Cuba and the Bahamas, or Jamaica and Cuba, and most certainly the Bahamas and Haiti, would result in tremendous and very significant cultural influences being traded between these cultural spaces. 1 Trade also meant that languages were influenced, and, at times when there was no mutually intelligible language, one was created in the form of a contact language or a trade language called a lingua franca . Moreover, many Caribbean creoles and pidgins resulted from this cultural contact. It therefore is interesting that in the 21 st century with globalisation underpinning most of our negotiations and socio- cultural and economic transactions so much stock can be invested in a country’s ‘identity’, a monolingual, mono-cultural identity. But perhaps this is more so due to the threat of globalisation and the presumed cultural loss that is foreseen as a result. Ironically, too, the fact that the Bahamas, a member-country of CARICOM, could be, along with so many of the other countries, so concerned about national borders and nationalism in the course of arguing for regional unification is only a further expression of the xenophobic nature of countries, particularly of nascent countries who have had little time to express themselves as nations.
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