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 suare 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 uestions 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 auatic 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 inuiries 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. Nonetheless, The Bahamas has become LUCAYOS 3 consumed with its need to nationalise or to fortify its identity in the face of Haitian migration and the influx of Haitian Creole. 2 I hope to illustrate that Haitian migration is indeed a significant factor in the Bahamas, which has an impact on the way Bahamian identity is constructed and nationalism played out within the country. Ultimately, to point out that through increased migration and numbers of Haitians being born in the country, there is an escalating amount of animosity towards Haitians and resistance to any further Haitian migration. Finally, I intend to show that more work needs to be done on the cultural phenomenon. This paper looks to interrogate the idea(s) of identity and culture and cultural nationalism(s). The paper departs from the premise the Bahamas is a ‘monocultural’ idea of nationalism. This promotes an idea of reaction to ‘other’ identities and aggressive self/nationalism identification. The project questions movement and cultural influences and the impact of migration on these. But, according to authorities in the Bahamas, it is important to prevent migration from getting out of hand. The government needs to take a no- nonsense approach to migrations and by so doing stop people from coming into the Bahamas and undermining Bahamian culture. However, there is an established Haitian culture within the Bahamas that thrives through generations of children born to Haitian parents in the Bahamas. Many of these are, however, not Bahamian and so remain stateless until they can be ‘regularised’ (in the Bahamas or Haiti) at some point in their lives. This paper looks at migration as a ‘free’ flow of people through the region and into the metropolis, like Miami, because of its geographic proximity. To be a ‘free’ flowing body does not, however, mean that movement is easy or that borders have become any more porous or fluid than they were in the past. The reverse has actually occurred. After 11 th September 2001, I would argue that movement ‘free’ or otherwise has become increasingly circumscribed, more limited, particularly into the US. I will also argue that in spite of this or because of this movement has increased and this is where the premise begins. As movement increases ways in which we articulate that movement must also transform. Also, the results, processes or consequences of that movement also alter our vision, frame of reference and language, for example words that once meant one thing but whose meaning has shifted to become more hybrid less ‘uni’-cultural. These facts have an impact on the ways we ‘see’ migrants, or don’t ‘see’ them and also on the manner in which cultures respond to migratory flows, for example, how the Bahamas deals with the flow of Haitians in to its ‘national’ space. What we hope to point out here is that this is an area fraught with misunderstandings, misinformation and misrepresentations. It is a young area of study and is not necessarily viewed positively by the Bahamas government or population. The work uses theories of transnationalism combined with the notion of the Caribbean as a LUCAYOS 4 repeating island and the theme of a constructed nationalism to explore the realities of Haitian migration and its impact on Bahamian national identity formation. It has come to my attention over the past few years that while the Bahamas is a part of the region, there is little understanding of what the social realities of the country are. Migration, particularly Haitian migration, has been and continues to be a paramount concern in the Bahamas. I would therefore argue here that this migration, increased in the 21 st century, has had a huge impact on Bahamian ‘identity’ and on the subsequent ways that this ‘identity’ is constructed. Haitian migration has created a move towards defining Bahamianness in a ‘newer’ and more exclusionary way than before. While the Bahamas becomes multi-ethnic and even more creolised its self- reflexive vision becomes more limited. So, while increased migration has served to make the culture more creolised it has simultaneously served to make the country more ‘closed’. I intentionally use identity in the singular as a misnomer or indicator of Bahamians’ concept of the Bahamas having ONE culture that does not provide any space for the ‘multiplicity’ of gender, class, age, ethnicity or race, of even a national culture that is by necessity already diverse and somewhat discordant. (It must be borne in mind that due to being an archipelago, many islands hold unique cultural identities). But taking these as givens, this concept as a uniform ‘national’ identity is where this study bases itself. As the Bahamas becomes more ‘global’ or transnational, developing new infrastructure—usually foreign-owned, its society also becomes increasingly creolised. As the Bahamas has always had a large Haitian presence and so much of it is already creole, its reaction to increased Haitian migration is a result of a fear that it is being taken over by a foreign language, but also by an undesirable presence as evidenced in the ways ‘Haitians’ are constructed as ‘other’. The data for this study is gathered from newspaper reports, official government statements, census reports, radio show and television broadcast, and a combination of comments and expressions from people, ‘Bahamian’ and ‘Haitian’ as well as a ‘collection’ of events that have been significant and/or those that have seemingly had no impact on the local cultural landscape. One of these events was the 2005/6 parade of Haitian ‘residents’ or the Haitian parade that has sparked a huge hue and cry about migration, and the Bahamas being for Bahamians. For many, the problem with this parade was the waiving of Haitian flags instead of Bahamian flags. It has also been instrumental in inflaming ‘passions’ on both sides of the community. Similar to the ‘riots’ in Nassau village in late January early February of 2005, the repercussions of this demonstration of ‘Haitianness’ has very significant cultural nuances. The paper looks at the official numbers and tries to extrapolate from them reasons for the reaction to the Haitians’ presence in the Bahamas and where the fear comes from that they are ‘taking over’ the country. It does not, however, draw any conclusions except to recommend further study. LUCAYOS 5

The historical considerations are important to understanding the problems that must be considered with gathering information on migration and on Haitian migration in particular. Because so much of the Haitian migration to and through the Bahamas is illegal, numbers are not reliable. In speaking to one Immigration official it was made clear that the Bahamas had a problem with numbers because the only ‘true’ number of Haitians we could glean from what we had was the number of:

1) Work permits applied for 2) Numbers captured before making landfall 3) Numbers caught in immigration/police raids

(These last two groups would then be repatriated to Haiti and would thus count in the numbers repatriated, which would provide another figure for the statistics).

Statistics from the 2000 census According to this census, the Bahamas had a population of 265.157 people. I will not break down the numbers between men and women, because it does not seem necessary for the purposes of this part of the study. There were 21.426 Haitians, followed by 3.919 Jamaicans, followed by 115 Cubans. The disparities between the three groups are obvious and beg many questions. Certainly, these numbers do not include illegal residents. How many illegals there are, we cannot venture to guess. Certainly, there are more than the number of Haitians, Jamaicans and Cubans ‘living’ in the Bahamas. Numbers of nationals from the Dominican Republic were only exceeded by Barbadians, who were followed by Dominicans and then Grenadians. Also, according to records kept by Bahamas Immigration Department these are the numbers of individuals repatriated broken down by nationality. 3

In 2004: 2500 Haitians, 334 Jamaicans, 106 Cubans. In 2003: 3512 Haitians, 606 Jamaicans, 240 Cubans, 128 from the Dominican Republic; In 2002: 5462 Haitians, 551 Jamaicans, 68 Cubans; In 2001: 6298 Haitians, 954 Jamaicans, 59 Cubans. (Bahamas census 2000)

Also, the ways in which people identify themselves is not necessarily trustworthy. Moreover, at this point, with increased anti-Haitian sentiments due to increased migration this is particularly untrustworthy. But this anti-Haitian sentiment which has become known as the ‘Haitian Problem’ as Dawn Marshall illustrates in her book of the same name as some important historical consideration that must be taken into account. Up until recently, though, Marshall’s work was the sole testament to the fact that there was a problem or even a reality of Haitian migration to the Bahamas. In LUCAYOS 6 the last few years, however, there is more work being done on Haitian migration, although this is usually done from outside the Bahamas, either as individuals undertaking post-graduate studies who are non-Bahamian, or Bahamians at foreign universities and/or at the request of non-governmental-international organisations who encourage the Bahamas to cooperate in such studies. The College of the Bahamas has recently participated in such a study, but up to January 2006 Cabinet had still not released, or given permission for the use of the data. One particular obstacle to any study of this nature in the Bahamas has traditionally been the government, whichever government happened to be in power. Haiti begins its life as ‘other’ shortly after its slave uprising at the end of the 18 th century that culminated in the 1804 revolution, at which point many of the white settlers and plantation owners in the Bahamas particularly, and the West Indies in general, due to the region’s closeness, feared contamination of the blacks if they were to hear of the successful revolution. Their fear was that this contamination would make the Negroes completely ungovernable. Ironically, these sentiments have been co-opted by later governments, appropriated and internalised as a ‘rational’ fear of alterity represented by Haiti’s assumed depravity. Migration of other Caribbean people has also caused a stir in the Bahamas. Historically, Barbadians, Guyanese, and Dominicans came to the Bahamas, but never in such great numbers as other islanders. Barbadians, for example, came as police officers, another colonial device for dividing and controlling the colonised masses. This leaves Jamaicans as the group who are second to Haitians in their migratory numbers to the Bahamas. It seems necessary to establish that the Bahamas has had a ‘problem’ with illegal migration since before independence in 1973, which dates back to the United Bahamian Party’s attempts to control Haitian influxes into the Bahamas as early as the 1960s. The way the first PLP government dealt with the Haitian problem was through a news blackout that left people rather clueless as to what was going on, except for what they could ‘see’. Then, there were trade embargos with Haiti and on Haitian products that lasted through the 1980s and into the 1990s. But there is more migration to the Bahamas than Haitian migration. To date, it has simply been that Haitian migration receives more attention because of its scale. The expression of similar sentiments can be witnessed almost daily. Certainly, there is more migration than would seem from what is ‘seen’, but the problems begin when migration is on any sizeable scale. More recently then, Cubans and Dominicans have had more sizeable migrations, but the Dominican migration has been less visible and more easily controlled, and it revolved around fishing and poaching or (mis)understandings of national boundaries. This further illustrates the binding nature of tides and free flows that the Sargasso Sea has on the Caribbean. This leaves the Cuban migration(s), which have been less documented until the early to mid LUCAYOS 7

1990s when a policy shift in Cuba—somewhat reminiscent of the Mariel Boat lift of the early 1980s (1982)—and worsening conditions led to larger than normal numbers arriving in the Bahamas or passing through the islands’ water ways on route to Florida. 4 This illegal migration has been coupled with a legal migration or movement of Cubans to the Bahamas as medical service providers and performers that occurred in the mid- 1990s and a later trained professionals agreement for groups like teachers and Speech Therapists where there was a local need that could be helped by the Cuban government. This later agreement was under very different conditions than the earlier medical professionals and performers as so many of the latter groups ‘disappeared’ into the fabric of society or into the dark of night. Meanwhile, there has been a steady, if somewhat reduced, number of Cubans coming into the Bahamas and being housed in the Carmichael Road Detention Centre. 5 This has lead to huge international and national criticism against the Bahamas government and immigration and its treatment of immigrants, the most recent of which was over three Cuban professionals who were held in the Detention Centre for over ten months without any indication of their future. The US claimed them and so did Cuba— which resulted in an international standoff, ‘resolved’ by the Bahamas sending them back to Cuba, but further damage to its image as a violator of human rights was already done. Certainly, then the former Prime Minister has some ground on which to stand in his criticism of the current governmental policies as they relate to migration and immigration, as he said that his government did not experience such problems. This brief section should have, hopefully, illustrated the long-standing and complex nature of the immigration problems in the Bahamas and to some degree historically and culturally contextualised the situation to be discussed here. Certainly, there is a massive difference in the perceptions and treatment of Haitians and Cubans that has always been criticised. Furthermore, the distinction has always been seen as a racial one.

A point on Positioning of the Subject and the Researcher One important fact that needs to be established, though, is the ‘visibility’ or ‘invisibility’ of immigrants within the society. Do people actually see immigrants, and if so, do they recognise them as such? As this research has been underway, it became apparent from people’s responses that a number of individuals do not ‘see’ many of the immigrant groups within the community. When asked about Cubans or Dominicans in the Bahamas people respond that they are not aware of any, and they may be members of other immigrant groups responding in such a way. This then leads to the question of which groups are ‘seen’ or perceived and which groups are not? And which groups are disassociated from being immigrants or simply not perceived because they do not seem local or appear to be tourists—thereby slipping under the radar. However, Haitians have not been able to achieve this because of the way they have been constructed and LUCAYOS 8 perhaps also because of their socio-economic position. Many of the other groups have not been perceived as immigrants because ‘immigrants’ are perceived as ‘other’ and through their socio-economic positioning they escape this paradigm. Similarly, there have been a number of ‘legal’ temporary migrating groups present in the Bahamas, who only due to share numbers have not escaped being perceived by the locals, but who are not perceived in the same way as the Haitians are. These groups include Mexicans and Indians—for example—who were brought in to do ‘skilled’ manual labour, on large hotel construction projects. 6 This has similarly been the case with domestic workers and site managers who move into the region without permits, but who are not perceived as immigrants because of their colour/socio-economic position. It is only when one inhabits a particular position that one is able to ‘see’ these many and disparate groups of migrants. Barring these groups from full participation on linguistic grounds helps (dis)associate them from mainstream society. Thus the group’s economic exclusivity is also important as it lends to further marginalisation or lack of perception. Thus, there are different types of information gathered, contingent on the researcher’s position either as insider or as outsider and thereby being within the confidence of the group or not. This has also always been a problem with gathering ‘credible’ information on the Haitian presence in the Bahamas. Because one is perceived as an outsider and of the group’s position as ‘other’ within the society there is an enormous level of distrust of inquiry into anything viewed as potentially misconstrued and thereby harmful to their safety. So, information such as census data, I view with a degree of suspicion. This suspicion of official numbers is only heightened when combines with the authorities’ immigration raids on clinics that result in immigrants, legal and illegal, being more clandestine in their movements. Ultimately, raid on public clinics leads to immigrants’ distrust of the medical facilities and thus their refusal to use these facilities, which will have a detrimental effect on general health. There had been a seemingly unwritten code not to raid such establishments, as to do so would be counter-productive, as with schools and hospitals. The sentiments expressed on the above mentioned radio show are rather restrained compared to others on other chat shows over the last week to ten days. While, if we take Benedict Anderson’s premise that national identity is often formed in the media, then a great part of the discussion or discourse around national identity as produced and presented by the media—print or otherwise—is significant. National identity becomes a sacred space where battles are fought to establish who has the right of access. The project supposes that migration relates to identity formation and is no longer as uncomplicated as it was once assumed to be in earlier decades. The migration paradigm was broken down into sending and receiving cultures with the theory that migration was, for the most part, limited to one-way-out. This certainly has changed over the last twenty years, which is due in part to increased possibility of movement LUCAYOS 9 and also increased political and/or economic instability and imbalances between the countries involved. The country most identified as high on the sending list in the 21 st century is Haiti. And this has been so for at least twenty years. What has changed recently is the way migration and immigration is being discussed throughout the world. Any given day on BBC World there can be a portion of the news dedicated to migrants crossing from West Africa and trying to gain entry into Spain and thereby into Europe in the search for a better life. One result of the increased flow is more hard and fast attitudes to migration and reactions against migrants. This has been evident recently in the US, with their new policies on migration and Immigration taking front page in the international press as well as their own. In the US case, the reaction is mostly in response to ‘Mexican’ migration north of the border, but this lumps a great many Latin Americans together under the false title, Mexican. The heightened flow of Latin Americans into the US has had the effect of inflaming anti-immigration sentiment and anti-immigrant hatred, which is playing itself out in new ‘laws’ that will further problematise the migrant’s presence in the US. The demonstrations and counter- demonstrations and work stoppages of the last two months have been viewed around the world as presented on CNN, CNN en español , BBC, for example. What does this mean for the region? Or, more precisely, what does this mean for attitudes to migration and immigration in the Bahamas? It seems to mean that the former’s policies will have a great influence over the latter’s. Thereby, surfacing increased hostility to migrants in the Bahamas is an understandable parallel effect.

Constructing the Other Haitians are always constructed as ‘other’ based on physical characteristics and, arguably, socio-economic position. Patricia Glinton-Micholis points this fact out in her book How to Be a True, True Bahamian , which, while being a satire, is also very true and—as are most satires—critical of the system. There, she argues that in order to be Haitian one must be dark skinned black and under five foot five and not able to speak English well. This construct has been very clearly illustrated across the Bahamian press. By using these physical characteristics the ‘other’ becomes easily identifiable. This compounded with the linguistic factor is a ‘fail-proof’ way to identify Haitians from Bahamians. If someone has a heavily accented English then, he is most likely Haitian, particularly if he meets the other physical characteristics. These are combined with an affinity for colourful or ‘loud’ polyester clothes and for walking down the streets with an extremely sharp cutlass in hand. The very act of walking under the hot sun or riding a bicycle already marks the person as other because this is seen as very un-Bahamian, particularly if it involves working under the hot sun. These are all logical characteristics derived from experience. They help lead to a conclusion, then, that the Haitian is poor as compared to the Bahamian and ‘black’ as compared to the Bahamian. LUCAYOS 10

Therefore, ‘Haitian’ is an insult that is saved for dark-skinned individuals and considered particularly demeaning. The construct is then a composite of physical and non-physical characteristics that are visible and lead to exclusion from the group. The Haitian, based on these factors, can never be light-skinned or speak faultless English, as Glinton-Micholis points out. This speaks to the very idea that stereotypes are constantly functioning to separate groups and also are fluid in nature, meaning that they can be altered from time to time to include other characteristics or to exclude old, outdated factors. These considerations become important upon examining later generations or the second-generation migrant, the children of those who immigrated to the Bahamas and were born and raised there. That these individuals are physically and linguistically ‘different’ from the first group signifies that they are no longer Haitian. Also, the one-and-a-half generation, to borrow a term from the Cuban-exiles in the US, children born in Haiti but raised in the Bahamas also do not fit into the group ‘Haitian’ as constructed by the common stereotype. The lack of identification with Haiti as a ‘home place’ becomes more complicated as more and more generations are born in the Bahamas and also Haitian migration to the islands continues to be a factor, or grows in importance. Bahamians have constructed the stereotypical Haitian to be exclusively Creole speaking and shorter than most Bahamians, for example. As more Haitian-Bahamian children are born, these stereotypical characteristics are diminished. However, while the contemporary stereotype is now distinct from the way it was considered and constructed by the colonial masters, it remains similar. Haitians are still viewed as evil, based on a number of characteristics such as their supposed ascribing to the practice of ‘Voodoo’. This is seen as the ultimate threat by the non-Haitian, and has remained one of the significant markers of différènce as the way of separating them from us and as a basis for their ‘depravity’.

Early Consideration on Culture and Creolisation The Bahamas is fast becoming a ‘melting pot’ where increased creolisation has been the reality of the late twentieth century early twenty-first century transnationalism and migration. Here I will use two or three examples that I refer as cultural markers of créolité, or an unhappy mix, because the transculturation is certainly not peaceful or seamless. The first example is the post-Duvalier, Baby Doc, display of Haitianness that occurred in 1986. One week in early 1986 the Haitians in the Bahamas got wind of the fact the Duvalier along with his wife, Michelle, had fled Haiti, freeing the country from his cruel dictatorial hand. There was quite a hubbub about it, but the rumour turned out to be unfounded. That is until a few weeks later when Duvalier did indeed flee Haiti, under US steam. Duvalier’s departure sparked huge celebrations and a groundswell of LUCAYOS 11 nationalist fervour with talks of return to Haiti. The Haitian flag appeared everywhere there were Haitians or Haitian-Bahamians present, flying proudly as if to announce the possibility of a future of freedom for all those Haitians living in the Bahamas and accepting their exploitation and otherness at Bahamian hands. There were motorcades and loud jubilant meetings. The hopes died away after the first anti-Aristide coup, but the hope of rebuilding the republic were never completely extinguished. Bahamians were caught by surprise by this spontaneous expression of Haitianness. Since then, the numbers of Haitians in the Bahamas have increased with more signs of social integration, but simultaneously signs of adamant cultural separation. The Bahamas-Haiti football (soccer) match, a few years ago seemed to be another moment of peaceful merging. But, of course, the Haitians won and, while the match did not descend into chaos there was a distinct cultural articulation of together but apart. After so many generations of marginalisation perhaps no more can be expected.

Later Expressions of Unease On a radio chat show on Tuesday 30 May 2006, the guest (Dr Johnson) argued that there needs to be Maintenance of Immigrants Act Idea of assimilation put forth by Bahamian public towards Haitians. This assimilation is necessary to prevent the development of a subculture (even though there is an already thriving subculture). The idea is that if they bring a number in excess of a certain number, they can maintain a subculture. Numbers must be maintained below a certain percentage. No policy in place to assimilate immigrants into the Bahamas. He ultimately feels that there needs to be a moratorium. Haitians should sue the government for being falsely arrested. These fears and concerns are ironical as most of what the doctor claims to be trying to prevent has already occurred. Meanwhile, the Minister of Immigration, Shane Gibson, approved ‘raids’ on immigrants, which were carried out in areas where the authorities feel that immigrants predominate. A medical clinic was ‘raided’ by officials recently, which causes distrust among the immigrant community, which in turn will cause them to refrain from visiting clinics and thereby promote illness among a community. This has lead to former Prime Minister Hubert Ingram’s condemnation of the former PLP government’s handling of the immigrant situation, saying that his government did not stoop to late- night raids, or to raids on schools and clinics. Upon return to power in 2007, however, Ingraham’s government has been extremely vigilant in returning migrants to their home country(ies) through daytime raids and arrests and even the continued raids of clinics and local jitneys, among other places. If we take the two recent events of raiding the medical clinic and the Haitian parade as important cultural markers, they provide material for consideration as creole culture and self-critical analysis of the Haitian-Bahamian reality that confronts the country in 2006. These two events come fast on the heels of the riots in Nassau Village LUCAYOS 12 in 2005. According to the reports in The Tribune the riots were sparked by police expressing anti-Haitian sentiments in a predominantly Haitian ‘ghetto’ when called to quiet a disturbance. The rioting and violence went on for a few days and required an ‘arbitrator’s’ presence to temporarily calm the flames. Since the Nassau Village riots, sporadic outbursts of anger have continued to mark the Bahamian landscape. As Haitians and Haitian-Bahamians are increasingly marginalised, they respond through acts of aggression and resistance. Certainly, police and immigration raids on clinics means that the government has criminalised the presence of Haitians in the Bahamas. This coupled with raiding of schools means that instead of attempting to create any sort of harmony among the already splintered groups, the government is fanning the flames of passionate separation. This separation will, unfortunately not be pretty. There are far too many generations of interconnected families and new migrants to facilitate an amicable resolution to xenophobia. While the minister goes against the established delicate balance of being hard on immigration but not raiding schools and clinics in order to make the situation worse, talk shows take up the gauntlet and inflame the listeners and this in turns encourages more government action. And the cycle goes on. Apparently, what most inflamed Bahamian national pride and anger, was that fact that the Haitians, who arguably claim to want to be in the Bahamas, paraded with Haitian flags, an affront to the ‘nationality’ of the adopted country. As the situation in Haiti worsens, more exiles and/or refugees go to the Bahamas seeking safe haven. Perhaps the recent elections and new President from the Haitian exile community in Boca Raton will establish some order within the disorder. Certainly, order in Haiti will go a long way in helping reduce the tensions in the Bahamas. Meanwhile, the US is becoming tougher on migration and immigration, arguably the same trend evidenced in the Caribbean, especially in the Bahamas and Cayman Islands, is similar to the anti-immigrant propaganda and programmes in the US. The best example of the anti-immigrant sentiment in the US could arguably be the laws implemented in Arizona in 2010 that would allow law enforcement official to stop and detain any ‘suspicious’ looking person. Meanwhile, the Latino community’s reaction to such marginalisation and criminalisation has been large protests and peaceful demonstrations. This response is closely related to what many Haitians attempt to do in the Bahamas. Their efforts, however, are viewed as anti-public interest and provocative. Sadly, as migration increases, the islands ‘get stuck’ with increasing numbers of refugees who are unable to gain access to the US, which is usually their desired destination. The Islands seem barely able to handle the levels of migration already existent. Increased migration only adds stress to the fragile economic balance creating more concern over the future and jobs and economic prosperity. But there are certainly other considerations that must be taken into account if such an argument is to be LUCAYOS 13 employed. Furthermore, that public opinion should seemingly so directly influence Public policy seems to some problematic and simply too reactionary. Also, in order for such small country-economies to be able to support such large numbers of migrants, they need help from the international community.

Future Considerations Culture and cultural mixing or the repeating island of similarity is more a part of our discourse while also causing more discord. Could this be a necessary or natural reaction to cultural creolisation? Heightened nationalism, as seen in the US and Europe as a result of the increase in the presence of the ‘other’, may go hand in hand with increased migration or a sense that a culture is under threat, whether the threat be real or imagined, cultural or economic. The anti-migration, anti-Haitian discourse always refers back to their différèrence as viewed by the ‘mainstream’ Bahamian. This plays into the idea presented above of the Bahamian identity, despite the nuances and complexities that differ from island to island and community to community, being a uniform ‘identity’. The construct of ‘other’ is apparently inescapable for Haitians and keeps them imbricated in a space just beyond acceptable. Ironically, again, the current construct builds on ‘old’ fears articulated by white planters and colonial masters, so that Haitians pose a threat of violence through ‘Voodoo’, and illness through their reputation for having the highest rate of AIDS in the region, which are conflated with Haiti’s poverty and many Haitians’ darker skin colour to render them undesirable. Perhaps the most poignant and salient study of this dynamic as it specifically relates to Haiti and Haitians is Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power (2003), where he shows how the community is disempowered through years of othering and systemic and systematic marginalisation and exploitation. Arguably, his construct underscores the polemics of the Bahamian-Haitian community. The ‘irony’ of colonial constructed blackness as a signifier of ‘otherness’ seems lost on the citizens of The Bahamas. The other considerations with the apparent transnational boom in the region prior to the 2008 economic crisis are; where is the labour force coming from to answer the call for workers and, where will they go afterwards? In the Bahamas this transnational boom is literally that, having nothing to do with the country and its nationals except as being the backdrop for the development of a super resort. The labour force needed will most likely be brought in from other ‘third world’ or developing countries, as has been done before, and particularly when dealing with ‘local’ unskilled labour, will come from Haiti or the Haitian community in the Bahamas. Meanwhile, the country has a pool of low-skilled and semi-skilled workers in need of employment who will be replaced by Chinese labourers. A similar trend can be seen in the Turks and Caicos Islands, where the recent upsurge in tourism and development has demanded a larger labour force than the Turks Islanders can manage, a demand that has been answered in part by the Haitian community there and by Haitians in LUCAYOS 14

Haiti. Since the mid 2000s the Turks and Caicos has experienced significant unrest due to government corruption that has cooled their tourism development. This is certainly so since the UK took over the country’s governance with direct rule from London in 2009-2010. One of the arguments used against importing regional labour in the Bahamas is that the money from this labour force does not remain in the country, which causes internal strife. Larry Smith in a 2010 article shows this belief to be erroneous. The Bahamas already charges for work permits, a fact that some look at with disdain, as a way of generating income in a non-income-tax-paying nation. As a way of using the current construction boom to the country’s benefit, the government could recruit labourers from Haiti rather than China, as a way of promoting regional development and stability, especially in the wake of the January 2010 Haiti earthquake. Moreover, legally employed Haitians must pay National Insurance and must buy goods in Bahamian shops, which indeed puts money back into the economy. If the government and immigration were to function more efficiently and effectively perhaps they could capitalise on this short-term reality. However, the real problem lies in the fact that said development, after its initial outlay in labour—and mostly unskilled—will have little if any positive result for the local economy as jobs will be given to foreigners, not refugees, and the money will certainly not stay in the country. What, then, happens to the labourers who provided the initial development? Some may return to Haiti. As economic migrants their interest is in making money in order to return home. But others, who are not looking to return to poverty and political instability, will attempt to remain beyond their work permit allowance. This creates further socio-economic stress. And, while the government is good at selling the land to foreign investors, it is not good in negotiating long-term efficient trade in labour and sustainable development for the country, a scan be seen by the recent influx as well as reported future increase in Chinese labourers. The Caribbean, and particularly the Bahamas, has come a long way from the traditional views of migration as one way out or as economic-temporary migration that will return to its home upon completion of the contract. There are new realities that face the region and the constituent nations. We have to look at migration differently. There is certainly a more triangulated effect nowadays that there, arguably was in the past. Certainly, as Elizabeth Thomas-Hope establishes they look to old patterns of migration, but the new patterns are worrisome. As political and economic chaos and instability increase in the region so does migration, and thereby so do internal socio- cultural problems, as evident in the Bahamas. However, migration has become more complex too, being always, now, a relation of cultural influences, or spheres or influence, where migrants travel between cultures continually or move products and information between them. That is to say that the receiving culture has just as much impact on the sending culture as the sending culture does on the receiving culture. LUCAYOS 15

Thus, the Bahamas’ Haitian community has as significant an impact, economic, cultural and social on Haiti as Haitians have on the Bahamas. The same can also be said for the Haitian communities in South Florida. As such the figure of the US is a paramount participant in cultural trade or migration. The Haitian community in the US is a significant part of the communities in the former two countries. 7 Cultural spheres of influence are always extending out and simultaneously closing in on themselves. While Bahamian nationalism excludes Haitians from within its parameters, it cannot exclude the second and third generation Haitian-Bahamians. However, while these sectors of society exist, it does not necessarily mean that they are open to Haitian migration to the Bahamas. Some of them have decidedly anti-immigrant attitudes that coincide with those of Bahamians or sometimes are more vehemently anti-Haitian than their Bahamian countrymen and women. The problems seem endless. Notwithstanding this fact, they will not be surmounted by xenophobic reactions to migration. While anger and violence are easy tools to employ in the face of increased migration, a more assimilatory approach may have to be considered in order to move beyond the impasse that seems to be blocking the Bahamas from progressing culturally. New language needs to be created to deal with the new realities and challenges presented by transnationalism and increased migration that seem to go in tandem with globalisation. Certainly, these are trends that are encouraged by globalisation and the ‘reality’ of the global village. There will always be flows from an area of lower concentrations of ‘free’ or available capital to an area of higher concentrations of ‘free’ capital. This is even truer for a region that is already inherently creole, where movement has always been a natural reality even if it has not been called migration. Language difference should not be conflated with other socio-economic and physical characteristics to create what could be seen as the Bahamas’ underclass. However, Prime Minister Ingraham has capitalised on this language difference in his 2007 campaign, using interpreters to reach the Haitian community and thereby increase voters for him. How ironic and obviously ambiguous to address an unwanted community when it benefits the person in power, but to ignore and marginalise the same community when it is not in that person’s interest to deal with said community. The government has continually capitalised on the community’s perception of Haitians as ‘others’ to suite their needs. By continually returning to these constructs of the Haitian as ‘other’ because of colour/ethnicity, poverty, religion and language, the Bahamas is creating more social problems than it is aware of. An escalating murder rate and increasing crime and disenfranchisement among the lower classes would bear this fact out. Despite the Bahamas being a majority black country, its policy for dealing with Haitians is to redeploy similar stereotypes as used by the colonial masters against them, notwithstanding the racist nature and historical background that was functional in their formation. It is ironic that blackness vis-à-vis Haitianness is ultimately equated with poverty and thus used as a trope to marginalise them. While this paper does not draw LUCAYOS 16 any conclusions about the future, it does point out that through the continual perpetuation of these cultural stereotypes and the refusal to discuss peaceful ways of trying to resolve ‘the Haitian problem’, the Bahamas risks creating more social unrest and ultimately doing what it says it does not want to do, create a subculture, but a subculture constructed through the formation of an ‘underclass’ that just so happens to be based on blackness and poverty. 8 Ultimately, more needs to be done on working to prevent migration, not on creating public policy to deal with migration once the migrants have arrived in the receiving country. This need has only been increased in the wake of the 2010 earthquake and the Cholera outbreak. If we examine trends in numbers of arrivals, the direct forward and backward links between events in Haiti and increased migration would be crystallised. The Bahamas government must become proactive in working to manage these events rather than simply reacting to them after they have already unfolded. A proactive policy and implementation would entail building capacity at home in the Bahamas as well as in a destroyed system in Haiti. By addressing economic and political problems in the sending cultures—such as Haiti—on the part of the International Community that is so quick to criticise countries like the Bahamas for poor treatment of immigrants, a larger amount of public funds can be reserved for improving treatment of those who do actually migrate into the receiving culture. One answer is thus to improve the situation in Haiti and by so doing discourage outward migration. Further, the reconstruction effort post the earthquake provides a prime opportunity for the region and the international community to really do ‘put their money whether their mouth is’ and invest in rebuilding or building Haiti anew. This effort would answer and address many problems in Haiti as well as abroad. Said re- development would certainly be a positive step for CARICOM, of which both Haiti and the Bahamas are members. Without this type of effort, Haitian migration will continue to pose a problem for small countries and for CARICOM as a whole. We must remove Haiti from its prison of subalternity and subjectivity.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism . London/New York: Verso, 1991. Print. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration . London/New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Post-Modern Perspective 2nd ed. Trans. James E. Maraniss. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Print. Department of Statistics. Report of the 2000 Census of Population and Housing. Nassau: Author, 2002. Print. LUCAYOS 17

Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor . Berkley: U California P, 2003. Print. Glinton-Miecholas, Patricia. How to be a True, True Bahamian . Nassau: Guanima, 1994. Print. Marshall, Dawn. The Haitian Problem: Illegal Migration to the Bahamas . Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1979. Print. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality . Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Print. Smith, Larry. “Not Their Brother’s Keepers” The New Black Magazine. Web. 28 January 2011. < http://thenewblackmagazine.com/view.aspx?index=2245> Thomas-Hope, Elizabeth. Caribbean Migration . Kingston: U West Indies P, 2002. Print. Young, Robert J.C. “The Overwritten Unwritten: Nationalism and its Doubles in Post- Colonial Theory.” (Un)writingEmpire Ed. Theo D’Haen. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998, 15-36. Print.

NOTES

1 It must be noted though that there was a trade embargo established between the Bahamas and Haiti for many years, during the 1970s-1980, into the 1990s. Unofficial trade did still continue. 2 To this end, at least in part, it has opted out of the CSME, even under the new FNM government. 3 I have not included all Caribbean groups repatriated nor have I considered gender or age in the groups repatriated. I have also not detailed the numbers as broken down by month. I have only given this information, as this is what was available when I was at the Immigration Department. These numbers cannot really be considered as reflective of the numbers that actually land illegally and manage to either set up communities in the bushes or disappear into the fabric of society. I think these numbers also indicate why there could be some resentment towards Haitians migrating to or through the Bahamas. 4 This is, of course, evidenced in Florida as well, at the same time and results in the change in Florida/US Immigration policy during the Clinton administration which led to the ‘wet foot, dry foot policy’ that came after 1994. 5 This policy was altered in the mid-1990s when the Detention Centre proved too porous to contain people and there was a near riot over conditions and all detainees were transferred to the Fox Hill Prison, which, in turn, led to great criticism because of the mixing of ‘innocent’ immigrants with hardened professional criminals and resulted in the detention centre being re-fashioned and then re-inhabited. But there was simultaneously a complaint about the Cubans and Haitians being held together under the same conditions. This was due, in part, to the fact that Cubans had until their numbers climbed too much received ‘preferential treatment’ because private residents had looked after their needs. Criticism on the government’s inequality to migrants also resulted from this apparent conflict of interest, which was complicated by the increase in the number of Cubans arriving. 6 While this is well known, I hesitate to include more concrete information for not wanting to incriminate any individual or cause other problems. LUCAYOS 18

7 Again, the emphasis here is on the communities in South Florida, even though New York houses an extremely important Haitian/Haitian-American community. 8 It cannot be sufficiently emphasised that those born in the Bahamas to a non-Bahamian mother who may not be married to a Bahamian will not be Bahamian. Likewise, those born of both parents who are non-Bahamian are not Bahamian. They are entitled to apply for citizenship. But there are a large number of stateless persons in the Bahamas because of the nationalist laws. LUCAYOS

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Oceanic Dreams in the Art of Newfoundland and Labrador

Jonathan Butler

The island of Newfoundland lies at the extreme eastern edge of the country of Canada, the United States’ benevolent neighbor to the north. To the people of Newfoundland, Canada is not necessarily “benevolent,” and anyone familiar with the troubled history of their relations can attest to the deep levels of resentment and wrong-doing long preserved and regularly remembered since that fateful day in 1949 when the officials in charge of counting the ballots deemed a slim majority had voted for Newfoundland to join Canada in the referendum held over that issue, a decision as widely in dispute today as it was when the vote was first counted on April 1, 1949.1 Like a lot of island cultures, Newfoundland’s is one of distinct singularity, so much so that artists and writers from the rest of Canada—and indeed the rest of the world—flock like so many seagulls to the island, since anyone with a passion for their work who has heard of the place intimates all too soon some of the magic, some of the spiritual energy which flows like common currency among the inhabitants, artist and merchant alike. The culture’s store of myth and self- knowledge is fed largely by the ocean which informs to an unimaginable extent the vision Newfoundlanders have of themselves: an isolated people who have somehow made a home on a storm-buffed rock in the brute Atlantic, fiercely independent, welcoming of strangers, but uncompromising in their vision of themselves as a people shaped and formed like the cliffs and shorelines by the very ocean itself which was for nearly five hundred years their primary source of sustenance—before Canada’s appropriation of the colony and the eventual demise of the fishing industry. (The word “moratorium” has been widely used to describe the government-enforced ban on fishing due to low cod stocks, and is a clear signifier of the magnitude of what has been done.) In the years and decades following confederation, Newfoundland’s inshore fishery was gradually wiped

1 Evidence of the continued acrimony is everywhere. The writer of this essay was part of a literary conference last summer—Winterset, 2009—held in Eastport, Newfoundland, which chose as its theme the issue of Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada to mark its 60 th anniversary. As part of the opening night’s panel, I was astonished to witness fervent declamations and repeated protestations that Newfoundland had been “sold” by its (then) leader Joseph Smallwood. The publication of Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams has clearly reignited the fires of a debate that have been smoldering for more than a half-century. Johnston himself was an invited member of the panel that evening but was unable to attend (perhaps not so unfortunately for him) due to illness. LUCAYOS 2 out by egregious breaches of foreign trawlers. Such vessels snuck in under the cover of night, greedily scraping the ocean’s bottom, so far inside the 200-mile protective boundary Canada had “secured” for Newfoundlanders through international “agreements,” that entire cities at sea could be seen off the coast at night, the lights of foreign trawlers dotting the horizon in numbers seemingly as vast as the stars in the night sky above. It was a sight, for Newfoundlanders, fraught with sorrow, anger, and, with increasing awareness, profound lamentation for a permanently lost means of traditional livelihood. The depletion and eventual destruction of Newfoundland’s fisheries was not the only source of outrage for this island people in the years following confederation. A process of centralization instigated by the Smallwood government witnessed the abandonment of coastal communities and an entire way of life that had its drawbacks, certainly, but also its strengths, and not everyone was willing to leave this way of life behind. The appropriation of the Churchill Falls hydroelectric project generated millions of dollars for Canada, whose government sold the power to neighboring New York State at a huge profit (profitable, that is, at the time; now the multi-decade deal is looking pretty dismal for Canada—which matters not a jot to Newfoundlanders who have seen no profit whatsoever). In short, there has been much to grieve over for Newfoundlanders who knew a way of life prior to 1949 that was, according to many, “sold” in the referendum of 1949. The island’s artists have reacted to Canada’s abuses, perhaps not so unpredictably, in the different ways artists tend to react: some have protested with outright political messages not so deeply embedded in their art; others have sought refuge in an ancient mythology, an atavistic invocation of a pre-political time; still others have taken store of what’s been lost, what’s been gained, and still count themselves lucky to be islanders at all, the slow caress of the ocean remaining for them all that it ever was, history and politics be damned. The ocean is both source of remembrance and source of forgetting, a way to enforce a perceived separation (and thus a sense of identity), and a way to escape the banality of politics altogether. 2 What it is, without question, is an indomitable presence that seeps its way, as water always does, into the blood of the people

2 One must be clear what one means by “politics.” There are those —myself among them—who maintain that the only real politics today is the politics of the environment, that we need to understand we are all in this together, nationalities cast aside, that we are desperately searching for a new vocabulary with which to view the world as home, not an “other” to be plundered. In this sense, a number of poets today are actively engaging this “green” politics in their work, as the field of eco-criticism well illustrates. Chief among them is the poet John Burnside in Scotland, Tim Lilburn in Canada, and lesser-known but equally vital poets David Gravender in the U.S., and, relevant to the present study, Boyd Chubbs in Newfoundland, Canada. LUCAYOS 3 who live with it, and so finds its way into their hearts and the cultural imagery which constitutes the work of the artists who live there. Newfoundland poet Des Walsh is highly representative of the first type of artist, one who clearly wears his heart on his sleeve (“for daws to peck at,” goes the Shakespearean adage, but we can well substitute “mainland Canadians” here). His plays and poems are lyrically vituperative laments of what his people have suffered. Walsh, at his best, can barely stifle his rage; at his worst, he ventures into the obscene, with perceived justification for doing so. The ocean for Walsh is a barrier he is happy to see in his travels around his home “nation” of Newfoundland, a symbol of self-containment which permits of some measure of identity preservation, even a half-century after Newfoundland’s so-called voluntary confederation with Canada. (It is no coincidence that Walsh has a fear of flying, as the relatively short, 90 minute flight to mainland Canada from Walsh’s home in St. John’s is about 16 hours shorter than the ocean route—by ferry—from Argentia to North Sydney, Nova Scotia).There are, to be sure, romanticized interludes with the ocean in Walsh’s work, but for the most part his poems and plays amount to a sustained politics of protestation, or, in keeping with his vulgar leanings, a perpetually raised middle finger westward across the ocean (where is to be found Ottawa, Canada’s capital city). Walshs’ poem “Oh Canada” is exemplary of both his extremes, and captures poignantly the logic of his argument with Canada, a logic evident in mournful images of loss and decay:

I have seen the damage from Trepassey to Plum Point, the beached bones of nationhood corroded like dreams of plenty. This is not part of my memory, of fish and gardens, of boiled singing mackerel and steaming plates of enough, for us and the bold barking dogs. The rust-teary eyes of pride fall away into unkempt weed-happy meadows where no animals move under the weight of the moon, no lovers under the weight of each other. Look at us now Oh Canada. We are indeed the songs of weather, bleating across the Gulf, no sheep-shorn melodies left, little dignity LUCAYOS 4

left to die for, no spires to erect.

I have seen the damage and I hate you for it. I hate your maple leaf and your anthem. And for those who accuse me, those of us who are left with the truth say to you with honour and passion, damn you and your thievery, damn you and your cold, calculating colonialism. And while guarding what’s left of our pine-clad hills, we bend over and moon the Gulf, Oh Canada, and ask you to kiss our collective arse. (33)

The tone at the end here is unmistakable, an irrepressible sense of injustice permeating every image, every accusation. And while the opening images suggest a deep vulnerability, an incurable woundedness, the poet summons for himself and his people a form of collective courage, not without a good measure of humor, at the end of the poem. What is key here is the role the ocean serves, that protective boundary which makes the parting image of obscenity both safe and ceremonial—far from the genuine gesture of danger which the act represents in the film Braveheart , when the high-spirited yet outnumbered Scots moon the vast ranks of the English from across the hardly-safe distance of one end of the battle field, a truly incendiary gesture which might well get them killed in an even more gruesome manner than was originally intended for them. No Newfoundlanders die in Walsh’s poetic vision, but their hearts are broken—and for a poet, that amounts to the same thing. Walsh’s poetry inhabits a crucial cultural space for Newfoundlanders. It is both rebuke for still-to-be-redressed wrongs perpetrated by a greedy, colonizing power, and yet also celebration, a form of praise for the preservation of identity allowed by the protective embrace of the Atlantic Ocean. The period following the moratorium of the cod fishery in Newfoundland was followed by an exodus of Newfoundlanders to mainland Canada in order to find a new form of employment. The major centers of Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton saw huge influxes of Newfoundlanders who might have otherwise gone into the fishery after their forefathers. The poem “Hotel Intercontinental, Room 311, April 18, 1995,” written for a fellow Newfoundlander, captures well the balance which Walsh’s work preserves between mourning and tribulation. The setting is Toronto, Canada’s virtual capital city in terms of commerce and population.

LUCAYOS 5

From your house to Brunswick and Bloor you turn right, I think that’s east. East is home, past pounds of concrete and steel, past generations who think themselves from the coast to the home of real heroes, where one hundred miles of ocean separates Canada from perfect language. (26)

There is a curious inversion here which gives you the true Des Walsh, a poet so unimpressed by the arrogance of Canada’s colonial claims on his home nation that he sees the colonizing dialect as inferior to the dialect of his homeland. The ocean here is once again a locus of differentiation, a gap between the pure and impure, the perfect and imperfect. Walsh stands upon the shorelines of his nation—Newfoundland—and looks out to an ocean which he sees as a protective extension of his homeland, a comforting cloak to keep the character of his homeland alive and warm. The brute Atlantic is a buffer for Walsh, a means of keeping the Canadian wolf at bay. Boyd Warren Chubbs, on the other hand, is more the mystic, a man drawn to the mythical quality of his island home, the mist-shrouded coastline and craggy cliffs which comprise his home environs. Chubbs is astounded, as true mystics are, by the simple earth under his feet, and seeks to prove nothing in his verse so much as the bearing of witness to his miraculous being here amongst the seaweed and rocks—and he does so with the lyrical reverence of a an archbishop at High Mass on Easter Sunday, sounding out each “Agnes Dei,” in his own poetic tongue, the transmutation of syllables deceiving no one but the most inattentive reader: church, for Chubbs, is a crow at the window, a gull on a high perch, the slow lapping of water on the rocks; and every moment of his being here is sacrifice and redemption both. Consider the contemplative mood of “Somewhere Behind Memory and Sound”:

Halfway between the harbour and cliffs, where blackberries, bursting and famous, straggled in patches on their low, tough moss, he sat on a rock and watched a wind, the fast and surly one from the sou’west, throw the sea turbulent theologies

Somewhere behind memory and sound, Before moss and alders, flies in hoards; before hunters, lovers and gulls across LUCAYOS 6

the short program of summer could chase or find their kind, it was this love-strange way— the sea, the rocks—with, against; here, beyond (33)

The poet is deeply rooted in the geography he describes here, bonded with it in a way that creates its own terms, its own ontology. Watching the wind “throw the sea turbulent theologies” is a way of invoking a creation paradigm—using his own language, of course, as mystics are inclined. (One is reminded of Blake’s dictum: “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Chubbs would nod his assent here as an obvious given). The ocean, for Chubbs, is a place of creative energy in both literal and symbolic terms, and its mysterious relationship to the land is hinted at in the phrase “love-strange way,” a description for how the world was before the landscape was settled by “hunters,” “lovers,” or even “gulls.” The poem invokes a primordial sense of being here, an atavistic intimation, as if it weren’t the mind of the poet at work in writing the poem, but the very cells of his body responding to an ancient message encoded deep within his DNA. “We are lonely for where we are” (17), writes Canadian poet and revered essayist Tim Lilburn, a soul steeped in the contemplative tradition, though writing for a great deal of his life from the prairies in the west of Canada, and now teaching and writing in Victoria, British Columbia, a world apart—four and a half time zones—from his fellow lover of land and ocean, Boyd Chubbs. Lilburn is that rare sort of artist equipped with both poetic aptitude and noetic insight into the nature of his own tradition. It is not common for a poet to be able to explain how he does what he does, the muse an understandably un-queried source of beneficence, the happy poet grateful for the visit alone, never mind the logic of its operations. Lilburn, however, has spent some time looking into the matter, his inquiry yielding up considerable fruit in the form of a collection of essays, Living in The World As If It Were Home . His remarks shed much light on the workings of Chubbs’s work. “Poetry,” he writes, “is consciousness dreaming of domicile at the core of the foreign world, the mind deeply homesick and scheming return, the tongue contorting itself toward uttering what such a return might be like” (6). In Chubbs’s work, such a prelapsarian yearning is often evident, as the above lines illustrate so well. In a sense, Chubbs’s poetry can be seen to be as fiercely political as Walsh’s work but in a totally different way: Chubbs envisions a politics of the earth, of the elemental make-up of the landscape. In “Where Fog, A Solid Jig,” the omnipresent element every Newfoundlander is accustomed to, fog, is described in a ritualistic manner suggestive of an ancient, mythical alchemy:

LUCAYOS 7

where fog, a solid jig upon the coast, clapboard healer, migrant doctor for the drunken earth and sea, baptized the place, did it all, consumed it, wrapped it deep in physics, wrapped it with ghost sea, ghost swell and the mute voice of being, made it an island—its captives, a tribal sound (39)

The images here are bursting at the seams with import and connotation, merging in such a brief space to provide fodder enough for an epic narrative. The island and its people—even their dwellings, as “clapboard healer” is a reference to the clapboard houses that line the hilly streets of the poet’s home city of St. John’s—are literally entombed by the healing presence of fog. And it is indeed a healing presence, spiritually nourishing the populace as the diction clearly implies: “migrant doctor” having “baptized the place,” “wrapped it deep in physics.” The “mute voice of being” is the identifiable vocabulary of the mystic’s notation, coupled as it is in poetic form with the paradoxical appearance of linguistic form to explain the inexplicable. What cannot be refuted is the extent to which Chubbs sees the coastline as constitutive of the people who live there. The fog, created by the presence of colder water near the warmer land (or vice versa in winter), becomes part of the people in a mythic, primordial fashion that transcends simple identifications with culture or politics. The “drunken earth and sea” is a place of forgetting (as fog itself also tends to remove things from sight, and thus from memory), where the only reality is the present, self-forgetful moment. This is the mystic’s sense of things, and it is inextricably bound up with place, as the poem clearly shows. Chubbs doesn’t need a politics of island culture, because his poetry inhabits a space before such notions could ever exist. In a very real sense, this is the genuine politics needed in our time—a politics of place, rooted in the very earth one inhabits in a clearly visceral way. Such a politics carries within it all the imperatives necessary for the ecological navigation required in our time. One can see such an interest at work in the poem “Child and Age” (from The Winter of Remarkable Oranges ) where the physical landscape, through the elision of conventional grammatical structures, enters the poetic imagination as something indistinguishable from self:

The universe is the size of my skull, Time, width of the wall I write upon, All items on the list LUCAYOS 8

the equal of a kiss: sky of home in my head; a capstan pulling providence from its bed; suite of songs, haulin’ songs, across the reef, fish, hymns, and bakeapple leaf

Child and Age share the same page Hear what the birds say: Same wings, beak and claws Raised by this divinity of laws Within this body, though a diminishing fire, I’m sustained by a kiss, the first desire (40)

Never careful with punctuation or grammar, Chubbs has no time for anything other than the connection of self to place, memory to landscape, imagination to the geography out of which it has sprung. There is no place in this poetry for rules or regulations of any kind, and while such a leaning carries its own solipsistic dangers, the richness of Chubbs’s imagery finds a resonance in readers that more than compensates for the moments when poetic style supersedes concern for the shared understanding of a community of readers. Indeed, one might proffer the argument that many of the painstakingly pondered images Chubbs finally settles on constitute a gift of their own to the ever-expanding repertoire of his community’s collective sense of self. The visual art of Christopher Pratt has for several decades been appreciated as among the very best the island has to offer. Indeed, Pratt has been acknowledged as much throughout the rest of Canada as he has on his home island (and one might argue: even more throughout the rest of Canada). International recognition has also been bestowed upon his work from many quarters. Pratt’s prints and paintings are renowned for their seemingly distanced, calculating measure of the ocean’s horizon, a flat line that registers more as a geometrical statement than any emotional statement of the meaning of home. This is perhaps a harsh claim, but it is true enough. Whatever emotion simmers within the heart of Christopher Pratt, little of it appears on the artist’s canvas.3 What is evident is a highly-refined intellect at work, a consciously heuristic paradigm of assessing the geography of his particular perspective in mathematical terms that have distinct cultural implications. Such implications range from the personal to the political, as they do for any artist. What they have in common, however, is a sense of the ocean as

3 Pratt’s poetry, on the other hand, provides an astounding contrast, and is rife with emotional content. See his collection A Painter’s Poems (Breakwater Books, 2005). LUCAYOS 9 liminal, as a juncture at which the known meets what is beyond. This is, of course, a natural connection, first evident to the naked eye of our most distant ancestors as they peered out to a marine horizon beyond which they feared was the end of the world, a steep drop into nothingness—a fear which lasted up to Columbus’s day, when even his own mother thought her poor boy was headed for an abyss. For Pratt, however, there is typically no fear of what lies behind, no dark cloud, no range of diminishing color to suggest anything other than the limit of perspective. (See the discussion below for a notable exception.) The ocean’s horizon is merely an end-point, a reminder that what we see—the range of the domestic—and therefore, for Pratt, the range of our concern, is within this field. The ocean is an integral part of Pratt’s vision of things solely as reminder that we live on an island—for better, or for worse—and that our understanding of things must necessarily, to a large extent, be introverted, concerned primarily with an interior that can be known—but also, of course, remain unknown —only to ourselves. Therein lies the paradoxical nature of an island people: welcoming of strangers, yet doubtful that they can ever truly be one of us. Our visual art—and indeed our waking/walking reality—conditions this assumption within us: seeing out only to an ocean horizon, there is no sign of an “other” who might begin to have the first clue of what we look like on the outside, let alone the inside. Consciously or unconsciously, Pratt’s art is a work of introspection, of a seeing within in terms one might assume to be familiar only to the privileged few who live on the island (or on an island, one might suggest, as islanders who meet other islanders from even half-way around the world seem to sense, quite often, a distant kinship, an unspoken agreement on the arrangement of things). This would not be true at all, however. In his thoughtful introduction to Christopher Pratt: Personal Reflections on a Life in Art , David Silcox writes "Christopher Pratt's images from outport Newfoundland and Labrador both identify his place in the geography of the world and distinguish his paintings from (those of) other contemporary artists. Paradoxically, they also make him one of Canada's most universal painters, for even those with no prior knowledge of this distinctive locale are able to forge an immediate personal link with his haunting, piercing, symbolic images" (7). It is not so difficult to explain what is so universally attractive in Pratt’s work. Although without question an islander whose perspective is overwhelmingly conditioned by the horizon of the ocean, his work conveys as much a querying of the beyond as it does a particular vision of island life. The ocean, as already suggested, is a liminal place for Pratt, is an endpoint that both encases the concerns of his world within definable limits while also permitting of speculation about what lies beyond—which is a universal concern, naturally. This is LUCAYOS 10 sometimes done with the use of light and color, a painter’s primary signifiers, naturally. In “Shop on an Island” (1969), an interior of an edifice is shown with a window at the painting’s center, light coming in that intensifies the higher up the observer’s gaze goes. There are empty shelves to the right, but the light coming in through the window and between the thin posts of the balustrade counterbalance the emptiness with a promise of future prosperity. The ocean’s horizon lies far away outside the window as both endpoint and source of future beginnings. Whoever will arrive on that island must, after all, travel from across the sea. The ocean is thus a regenerative source once again as it contains within it the possibility of commerce traversing its surface from the other shore.

Shop on an Island (1969)

The ocean’s symbolic import assumes a much different shape in Pratt’s recent piece, “Monument to the American Empire: The Ruins of Fort McWilliam” (2007). Newfoundland, it should be noted, was of key significance during the second world-war: it was the nearest land mass to the Germans as they crossed the Atlantic Ocean. St. John’s harbor features a very slim entry point known as “The Narrows,” across which an underwater steel net had been put in place in the early 1940s to prevent the penetration of German submarines into the harbor where they might have launched an attack on the city whose center and environs housed a number of American bases. The ocean, during the years of the war, thus became a source of potential menace, harm, enslavement to a foreign force. Pratt’s piece captures this sentiment perfectly: the ruins of a fort appearing to the viewer with the ocean’s horizon far off behind it. Two walls remain of the fort, one furthest from the viewer and closest to the ocean beyond—the front wall for any invading enemy—and the side wall on the right for the observer, or to the left for the invader. A series of horizontal lines marks the back wall, highlighting the construction of the edifice, it’s “constructedness” as a defense for the perils of what may come from beyond the sea. LUCAYOS 11

Monument to the American Empire: The Ruins of Fort McWilliam (2007)

The ocean is unquestionably a source of peril here, a threat underlined by the darkness of the horizon which is also mirrored at the top of the piece in the sky. If time is added as a dimension to this piece along with its spatial existence, one could argue that the dark horizon of both ocean and sky represent past and future. Pratt himself has fond memories of the security the Americans offered Newfoundlanders with their presence on the island. 4 The piece, however, betrays a period of deep concern, even fear. The two remaining walls indicate that the time for complete protection is over, and what remains for the future is unclear. Precisely whom Newfoundlanders now have to fear is not known—Canadians, as they are for Walsh?—but the means by which such imagined enemies must arrive is certainly clear in this piece. Pratt himself admits to the manifold meanings the ocean has for him. He is conscious of its constant presence for him, even if not always certain of its particular meaning at the time: "The sea is almost always present in my work, even when it isn't seen. I know it is behind the hill." Such an awareness permeates his work as a sense of open possibility, of multiple signification, even where just such an absence of the sea suggests its close proximity nevertheless. The wide open sea can certainly be seen to represent freedom. But if this is true, consider the silkscreen “Gulf of St. Lawrence” (1994), in which four sheep, three white and one black, graze behind a chain-link fence with the Atlantic’s horizon beyond them. More specifically, the three white sheep are grazing and the black one, in the rear of the group, has his head lifted in a questioning manner. It is not much of a stretch to see the four sheep as the Atlantic provinces, the black one being Newfoundland, of course, the black sheep of the family. If the ocean represents freedom, the chain-link fence represents an erected barrier

4 This I learned in a telephone conversation with the artist in August, 2008. LUCAYOS 12 to that freedom—confederation with Canada? One can only conjecture. Pratt’s visual images don’t translate quite as transparently to a political medium as do the poems of Des Walsh.

Gulf of St. Lawrence (1994)

The boat is also a common subject in Pratt's work. It could easily be said that boats define part of what Newfoundland means to him. As already observed, for most of its half-millennium-long history, Newfoundland and Labrador have depended on the fishery and the sea, so boats are naturally an important part of this connection. “Pratt is an avid boater and racer himself and this has had a great impact on his work.” He says that "sailing on the ocean is an awe-inspiring experience; you sense the roundness of the world, feel open to the universe, unsheltered. It conditions your understanding of everything. The boat is an island on the sea with its onboard life-support systems, just as our planet is in space” ( Drawing from Memory ). Pratt is also very interested in and attracted to the shape of a boat out of water: “Like an iceberg, the most interesting part is hidden under the water. It is only when a boat is not in the water that you are able to see the keel and rudder or the shape that enables it to glide through the water” (Drawing from Memory). This interest in the shape of the boat, a focus on its steering mechanism, is a powerful symbol of the direction Newfoundlanders are headed in, of the importance of assuming responsibility for that direction. Pratt seems to be suggesting that if the boat is a symbol of our power to navigate the world, let us be ever-conscious that we are the ones who should be steering. Living on an island is not merely an influential element in one’s constitutional make-up, it is a defining one. For poet and painter, wordsmith and etcher alike, consciousness of place is a given and thus the role of the ocean is an integral part of working, of being here. In philosophical terms, the ocean assumes an ontological role, not merely an epistemological one, in work and life both. The artists of the island of Newfoundland feel an undeniable awe for the ocean’s relentless effect on the inhabitants who live there, on their vision of the world LUCAYOS 13 and of themselves. Its symbolism shifts in the ebb and flow of these artistic visions, but its presence—inexorable, resolute, irrevocable—remains constant.

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Works Cited

Chubbs, Boyd Warren. Through Solomon’s Lane . Truro, Nova Scotia: Mokushan, 1991.

_____. The Winter of Remarkable Oranges . St. John’s, Newfoundland: Breakwater, 2004.

Christopher Pratt : Drawing from Memory . Retrospective Exhibition at The Rooms, St. John’s, Newfoundland, summer 2007.

Lilburn, Tim. Living In the World As If It Were Home . Toronto: Cormorant, 1999.

Silcox, David P and Merike Weiler. The Art of Christopher Pratt . Toronto: Quintus, 1980.

Walsh, Des. The Singer’s Broken Throat . Vancouver: Talon Books, 2003.

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Modern American “““Water“Water MusicMusic””””:: Three Works by Samuel Barber Jean Kreiling “The river is within us, the sea is all about us . . .” --T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”

The challenge of articulating our visceral connections to bodies of water has drawn the creative efforts of countless poets, painters, and musicians. Among the musical products of this artistic inspiration, Claude Debussy’s symphonic poem La Mer and Felix Mendelssohn’s overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage may rank as some of the best known. But American composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981) once made a claim for the superior expressive powers of vocal music, asserting that “a song can say what nothing else can” (3). In his three vocal works with water-related texts, Barber skillfully illuminates three different relationships between a body of water and the human condition. His unaccompanied choral piece To Be Sung on the Water, op. 42, no. 2; his song “Sea-Snatch,” op. 29, no. 6; and his work for solo voice and string quartet, Dover Beach, op. 3, demonstrate both the composer’s musical versatility and his keen literary insights. Barber’s skillful text-setting results in syntheses of words and music that evoke not only the beauty and power of water, but also its timeless capacity to reflect human emotion. The music of Samuel Barber brought him substantial acclaim in his own lifetime, and continues to be heard frequently in the concert hall. Though his style is generally considered conservative, even Romantic, a comprehensive assessment of his output must acknowledge its more forward-looking qualities as well: its free use of dissonant harmonies, its flexibility of form and meter, its ventures into serialism and polytonality. Barber’s music might best be termed eclectic; it exemplifies what one scholar dubbed the “stylistic pluralism” of the arts in the twentieth century (L. Meyer 178). In this Barber anniversary year, the centennial of his birth, his profile among twentieth-century American composers remains high. His vocal music, in particular, constitutes a substantial and much-admired contribution to the repertoire. An exceptionally well- read individual, Barber set texts from an international assortment of old and new sources, including ancient Greek drama, surrealistic verse by Polish and Filipino writers, the lyrical poems of A. E. Housman, and the difficult prose of James Joyce. The texts of the three pieces considered here typify that variety in both their sources and their styles. Words by twentieth-century American poet Louise Bogan are set in To Be Sung on the Water, lines by a medieval Irish monk appear in “Sea Snatch,” and a well- known poem by Victorian writer Matthew Arnold became the text for Dover Beach.

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Barber is probably best known for his melancholy Adagio for Strings, and the works designated here as his “water music” also plumb the darker emotions—and yet the composer’s own experiences with water seem to have been happy ones. Barber grew up in inland West Chester, Pennsylvania, but he spent childhood summers on Lake George, New York, with his uncle, composer Sidney Homer, and his aunt, opera singer Louise Homer. The Homers offered a “lively cultural oasis” for the young composer (Heyman 16), and their support and encouragement played a crucial role in Barber’s pursuit of a musical career. As an adult, Barber lived for several years in Mt. Kisco, New York, in a home overlooking a lake, and he spent considerable time in the Italian village of Cadegliano, near Lake Lugano. During shipboard voyages to Europe, he wrote enthusiastic letters to his family; a 1928 letter makes clear the profound impression made by the sea upon the young composer:

I sit on the forward bow of the boat looking toward Europe . . . There is a quiet swell on the sea and we shoot gaily into the sky and then far down into the waves, with a delicacy of nuance that is never monotonous . . . Our whole life is . . . drenched by fantasy (Heyman 53).

Barber’s interest in texts about water might be attributed to such experiences, but it also represents just one element of his extraordinarily wide-ranging literary tastes. His thoughtful interpretations of diverse texts resulted in a great diversity of musical styles, which draw on influences as different as Debussy and Stravinsky. But it seems that Barber was influenced most of all by the texts themselves; each of his vocal works demonstrates a thoughtful response to a distinctive literary expression. The composer himself once claimed, “ . . . if I’m writing music for words, then I immerse myself in those words, and I let the music flow out of them” (Gruen 21). Those verbs “immerse” and “flow” seem particularly apt for the vocal works involving water scenes, each of which immerses the listener in a different sort of watery flow. Of the three pieces to be considered here, the most recently composed but perhaps least known is Barber’s choral work To Be Sung on the Water, published in 1968 (Collected Poems 111). The composer apparently considered adding this piece to the galley scene in his opera Anthony and Cleopatra (Heyman 474), but the piece has a more contemplative than dramatic character. That quality ably accommodates the work’s text, a pensive poem by Louise Bogan (1897-1970). Once called by The New York Times “one of the best women poets alive” (Frank 409), Bogan spent most of her adult life in New York City, working as an editor and critic for The New Yorker. The body of water referenced in her poem may have a connection to one of the rivers near which she lived during her childhood: the Androscoggin River in Maine, the Salmon Falls River in New Hampshire, or the Shawsheen River in Massachusetts. Although the words “oar” and 3

“stream” clearly set a river scene in “To Be Sung on the Water”), Bogan’s biographer links the poem to a shipboard love affair the poet had during an Atlantic crossing (Frank 310). Another biographical hint to the poem’s meaning might be found in these lines from a letter Bogan had written a few years earlier, concerning her romance with poet Theodore Roethke: “He is just a ripple on time’s stream, really, because he is soon going to Michigan. . . . I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling about” ( What the Woman Lived 84-5). While one might read here an attitude of sophisticated cynicism, Bogan apparently took to heart her romantic disappointments: she was twice institutionalized for depression during the breakup of her second marriage (Novak 18). Bogan’s poem begins with the word “beautiful” (111), an epithet that appears to apply either to the natural scene observed by the speaker or to some more human subject, or both. But beauty soon turns out to be transient—something that cannot be saved, something “less than the guiltless shade” and “less than the sound of an oar” (111). Although Bogan leaves details of the scene indefinite, the two appearances of the phrase “our vows” hint that lovers are confronting, and perhaps acquiescing to, the ephemeral nature of their romance. The key word “pass” recurs four times, apparently alluding to both the movement of water and the progress of time. The repetitions of “pass” capture a paradox easily observed in water: the sense of repeated movement with no destination, the simultaneity of change and constancy. For those who have made “vows,” the shifting waters may suggest both pleasure and its impermanence. Indeed, Richard Wilbur finds in this poem “a mood of consent to passion upon whatever bitter terms may be necessary” (Smith 115). While three recurrences of the word “less” hint at dissatisfaction, Bogan’s tranquil tone comments more than it complains. Both “less” and “pass” must certainly have been chosen for their sibilant sounds, significant contributions to the poem’s picture of rippling water. Throughout, the poem’s imagery hints that waves, shadows, and lovers’ vows are all subject to ceaseless transformation that ultimately changes nothing. Barber’s setting of Bogan’s poem offers a musical parallel to this imagery, with the river’s tiny wavelets evoked by an almost constantly repeated three-note rocking motive that creates a steady but directionless sense of motion. 1 In addition, the distribution of vocal parts supports the notion that Bogan’s poem concerns an uneasy love affair. The rocking motive is first sung by the men, supporting longer melodic ideas in the women’s parts, and then the roles are reversed, as the sopranos and altos take up the rocking motive, accompanying longer phrases sung by the tenors and basses. While the contrasting but supportive roles of the male and female voices may represent the apparently romantic “we” of the poem, one might hear the stylistic

1 All references to Barber’s To Be Sung on the Water, op. 42, no.2, correspond to the G. Schirmer edition (New York, 1969). 4

differentiation between those vocal parts as a suggestion of an unbridgeable distance between them. Significantly, one study of Bogan’s poetry has cited her awareness of “the lack of communication between the sexes” (Ridgeway 140). In the words sung to the nearly perpetual three-note rocking motive, one can hear the mixed emotions provoked by the river scene, i.e., appreciation for its loveliness and resigned submission to its changeability: the almost constantly repeated phrase “Beautiful, my delight” seems to express both an affirmation of pleasure and a persistent plea. Barber’s harmonic and tonal choices reinforce the poem’s atmosphere of shadowy drift. Because of a lack of strong cadences, the work’s minor key seems subdued rather than decisively somber; harmonies sound less goal-oriented than atmospheric. One might hear a distant connection to the gentle blur of Debussy’s Impressionist harmonies. The final chord of the piece lacks a third—the pitch that would determine its major or minor quality—and the melody ends not on the tonic pitch, but on the less conclusive dominant pitch. With regard to form, Bogan’s poem and Barber’s setting differ considerably, though they both produce an overall sense of imperfect symmetry. The poem’s two similar stanzas differ slightly in both length (five lines and seven lines) and rhyme scheme (ababa and cddedde). Both stanzas begin with the word “beautiful,” and both share a somewhat irregular trimeter. While both stanzas mix the elements of calm and disturbance, the first concentrates entirely on the natural scene, while the second turns to more human concerns, with “our vows” mentioned twice. Barber’s setting expands Bogan’s second stanza with the repetition of three of its lines, and then repeats Bogan’s first stanza (also expanded), thus concluding the piece with a recollection of the original contemplation of nature. While the resulting text has a rounded, ABA’ shape, corresponding to music’s ternary form, the structural divisions in Barber’s setting are less clear-cut than that label implies. Barber’s “B” section does offer elements that contrast with the restrained “A” section: more forte (loud) sounds and more high pitches suggest the speaker’s agitation about past vows, while giving weight to the repeated word “less.” But the “A” and “B” sections also share several features: the recurring rocking motive, the same key, and the alternation of roles between the women’s and men’s voices. Barber has artfully manipulated one of music’s most common forms, softening the sharp contrasts and symmetries of ternary form in response to the continuities of his text, especially its steady focus on water. Ultimately, both the poem and the musical setting convey an impression of fluid uncertainty. Bogan leaves the particulars of her story unspecified, and Barber underscores this indefinite atmosphere with his harmonic and formal choices. Even Barber’s several reiterations of the last phrase of text, “once more,” seem ambivalent. These final measures of the piece may express the reassurance of repetition, or instead 5

gently insist that repeated gestures do not lead to resolution. Through the ambiguous stances of both words and music, the piece projects an air of unsettled meditation. In contrast, the song “Sea-Snatch,” composed in 1953, depicts an unrelenting mood of fear and violence, and a single-mindedly fierce body of water.2 This song portrays the ocean rather than a river, and a particularly rough sea at that. Using just a single voice and a piano accompaniment, Barber created an ambiance of great power and energy, reminding us of the sea at its most dynamic and intimidating. “Sea-Snatch” comes from a group of songs collectively titled Hermit Songs, ten settings of short texts from anonymous Irish manuscripts of the eighth through the thirteenth centuries. Despite the remote origin of the words, this song cycle has become “a favorite of many singers and among the most performed of Barber’s works” (Heyman 341), a tribute to the composer’s skillful handling of the medieval texts. It was during the Middle Ages that Ireland’s oral literature, having been transmitted over many generations, was recorded in writing for the first time by monks and scholars in the country’s monasteries (K. Meyer ix-x). Barber delved into several sources for his Hermit Songs texts, acknowledging in his score three published collections of Irish poetry as well as translations made especially for the composer by Chester Kallman and W. H. Auden (Barber, Songs 74). The composer described the texts he chose as “small poems, thoughts or observations . . . [that] speak in straightforward, droll, and often surprisingly modern terms of the simple life these men led, close to nature, to animals, and to God” ( Songs 74). Many of the texts mention service to God or Christ, but others are less austere, reflecting the emergence of “personal poetry” in eighth- and ninth- century Ireland (Flower 42). One text contemplates promiscuity, another celebrates the companionship of a monk and his cat, and a third describes a feast including “a great lake of beer” (Barber, Songs 75). Some of Barber’s earliest works on the Hermit Songs can be observed in manuscript sketches housed at the United States Library of Congress. Several of these sketches consist only of fragments and partial scoring, allowing some conjectures concerning the composer’s methods and intentions. No sketch exists for “Sea-Snatch” itself, but evidence from other sketches demonstrates Barber’s respectful attention to the texts, an attitude that presumably extended to all the songs. Of the thirty-two separate sketches related to the Hermit Songs , ten include words and melody only (no piano accompaniment). Some of these show repeated revisions to a melody, in apparent efforts to accommodate a line of text—rather than revisions to the text to suit a melody (Kreiling 257-260). Even more significantly, six of the sketches contain words only, and two consist mostly of words (Kreiling 252-253). In addition, Barber’s notes include

2 All references to Barber’s “Sea-Snatch,” op. 29, no. 6, correspond to the score in his Collected Songs for High Voice (NY: G. Schirmer, 1980), pp. 90-91.

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references to two sources of Irish poetry not included in the list he provided in his score (Kreiling 253). These manuscripts demonstrate the broad scope of Barber’s reading, even within this small niche; they also suggest the primacy of text in the genesis of Barber’s songs, and his determination to give words their best possible musical settings. The words of “Sea-Snatch” belong to an extensive tradition of Irish nature poetry. Notably, the text’s original title was “The Wind,” and its only explicit connection to the sea is the word “drowned.” Although Barber’s score acknowledges one collection of Irish literature as his source for this text (Jackson 138), the song’s title probably comes from another collection (one he had tapped for three other Hermit Songs texts), in which a nearly identical version of this poem appears as the first of six “Sea Snatches” (O’Faoláin 64-5). One scholar notes that Irish nature poetry specializes in brief, impressionistic imagery (K. Meyer ix-x), and “The Wind” certainly fits that description. In fewer than three dozen words, it creates a vivid impression of a merciless, wind-driven sea, depicted entirely through its actions, with verbs like “crushed,” “drowned,” “consumed,” and “swallowed” (Jackson 138). In Barber’s setting, several musical elements give voice to this perception of the sea. Dynamics begin forte in this song, and hardly dip from that level, ending fortissimo. The very shape of the vocal lines mirrors the roughness of the sea and the agitation of its victims, with much more angularity and a wider range than in the flowing melodies of To Be Sung on the Water . And unlike the gently rocking figure that lurked in the background throughout To Be Sung on the Water , the piano accompaniment of “Sea- Snatch” features equally repetitive but louder and more extensive waves of pitch. That Barber intended a pictorial effect can be inferred from his tempo marking, which includes not only the common Italian indication Allegro con fuoco , or fast, with fire, but also the English word “surging.” In the percussive sound of the piano and its persistent repetition of disjunct lines, one might hear a reminder of Stravinsky’s ”primitivistic” style. Both the piano part and the striving, almost strident tone required of the solo singer add forceful elements not heard in To Be Sung on the Water . Twice the singer must perform brief but dramatic melismas, with several pitches sung to a single emotive syllable, “O.” (This element, too, contrasts with “To Be Sung on the Water,” whose text is set strictly syllabically.) Even the text’s reference to the King of Heaven did not inspire Barber to adopt a more solemn tone; instead, the uniformity of the music’s violent sound emphasizes the poem’s conflation of natural and divine power. Unlike Bogan’s poem, the very brief text of “Sea-Snatch” has no regular rhyme or meter; it consists, in fact, of a single sentence. However, rhyme-like effects result from the repetition of the same grammatical structure three times at the start—“It has broken us, it has crushed us, it has drowned us”—and from the appearance of the word “Heaven” in the middle and at the end of the sentence. Barber’s setting, also very brief (lasting less than a minute in performance), calls attention to these rhyme-like effects. 7

The three short phrases are set to similar melodic phrases, and “Heaven” is sung to an almost identical pair of pitches each time it appears. As in To Be Sung on the Water , Barber chose a minor key for “Sea-Snatch,” an unsurprising decision, given the dark drama of the text. In “Sea-Snatch,” however, the sinister possibilities of the minor mode are more thoroughly exploited, with especially low pitches in the piano part, frequently dissonant harmonies, and cadences in which the voice part ends decisively on the tonic pitch. Barber’s music calls our attention to the raw emotion of the words: instead of the nuanced meditation of To Be Sung on the Water , this song expresses a primal sense of terror. Paralleling his procedures in To Be Sung on the Water , Barber revised the original text for “Sea-Snatch” by repeating the first phrase of text after the contrasting second phrase. Moreover, Barber’s setting of “Sea-Snatch,” like To Be Sung on the Water , mirrors the resulting textual shape with an ternary (ABA) form in which the so-called “B” section is not a complete contrast to the A section. In the middle passage of “Sea- Snatch,” the piano part remains very similar to that of the song’s first section, while the voice part differs mostly in its intensity. The singer’s line remains more consistently in a high range of pitch, and it also has an occasional rest, creating brief pauses—as if for breath—at the commas in the line “the wind has consumed us, swallowed us, as timber is devoured by crimson fire.” The burning “timber” in that line is a new image not hinted at in the first half of the text, a new perspective on the same fierceness of the sea. Thus, the “B” section of Barber’s music parallels both the text’s turn to a new comparison and its continuing focus on destructive power. As in To Be Sung on the Water , the ensuing return of the opening words and music may be heard as an emblem of the water’s return. However, the gently unsettled river of To Be Sung on the Water seems to embody a sort of kindred spirit that reflects human lives and emotions. In contrast, “Sea-Snatch” portrays the recurring assaults of an alien other referred to only as “it”: the ferocious, wind-blown sea. Much calmer water appears in Barber’s Dover Beach, one of the composer’s earliest and most acclaimed works, setting the famous poem by Matthew Arnold (1822- 1888). In Arnold’s poem, two different bodies of water—the Strait of Dover and the Aegean Sea—both provoke contemplation of the bleak possibilities for humanity. Like “To Be Sung on the Water,” “Dover Beach” suggests parallels between natural and psychological cycles, though “Dover Beach” offers more descriptive details and more fully developed philosophical ideas. These texts and that of “Sea-Snatch” might all be considered variations on a theme: the aimless ripples of a river, the savage waves of the ocean, and, in “Dover Beach,” the sea’s “tremulous” lapping at the land (144) all convey the helplessness of the individual in the face of fruitless repetition.

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Occupying a formal middle-ground between Bogan’s rhymed and metrical verse and the anonymous prose text of “Sea-Snatch,” Arnold’s “Dover Beach” combines irregular but noticeable rhyme with a flexible but often iambic meter. Unlike the other texts, Arnold’s “Dover Beach” provided Barber with a ready-made ABA design, at least in its perspective and ideas, a pattern that Barber’s music follows. (Barber made almost no alterations to the much-admired original text, only changing “glimmering” to “glimm’ring”). In the first section, the poem identifies both beauty and melancholy in the present scene: the cliffs of Dover, the moon, and the sea, which though “calm,” carries an “eternal note of sadness” (144). In the second and third stanzas, the speaker considers distant perspectives. The second imagines a historical parallel, in Sophocles’ despairing contemplation of the Aegean Sea, and the third proffers a metaphor: the once-full but now “withdrawing” Sea of Faith (144).. The final stanza returns to the present, whose melancholy aura has been further darkened by the intervening images. Now the speaker hopes to cling to his companion, in an effort to tolerate a joyless world disguised by false “dreams” (145). Arnold’s thought-provoking poem has drawn the creative attention of several American and British composers. The “Dover Beach” page from a website titled “The Lied and Art Song Texts Page” lists eleven settings, including a lost work from 1899 by well-known British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (Duyster). Apparently, Vaughan Williams had made more than one attempt to set the poem; upon hearing Barber’s version, the older man reportedly told Barber, “I tried several times to set ‘Dover Beach,’ but you really got it!” (Ramey 2). Barber’s attraction to the poem may be attributed in part to its synthesis of Romanticism and modernism, comparable to the mix of Romantic and modern tendencies in Barber’s musical style. One literary critic calls the speaker in “Dover Beach” an “embodiment of Romanticism in its most alluring and devastating form—that of existential despair” (Buckler 36). Another scholar, while citing Wordsworth’s influence on Arnold, deems the latter poet “distinctly more ‘modern,’” citing in particular Arnold’s “critical and disparaging” references to nature (J. Beach 397). Indeed, the texts of all three pieces under consideration here find in nature neither solace nor a satisfying distraction from mortal worries, but instead confirmation of man’s uncertainties or miseries. Barber’s Dover Beach, composed in 1936, calls for solo voice and string quartet. 3 The unusual use of a string quartet to accompany the voice draws notice not just because of the instruments’ distinctive tone colors, but also because the strings provide an especially legato (smooth and connected) sound appropriate to the image of flowing water of the poem. Barber clearly did not design the string parts as an entirely subordinate accompaniment to the voice; he once explained that in this work, “nobody is boss—not the singer, not the string quartet. It’s chamber music” (Heyman 102). A

3 All references to Barber’s Dover Beach, op. 3, correspond to the G. Schirmer edition (NY, 1936). 9

singer himself, Barber sang Dover Beach on a 1936 RCA recording that won him praise for his skills as both a composer and a performer (Heyman 107). Both the vocal part and the string parts offer several musical parallels to the repetitive circularity of the tidal movements so central to the poem. At the start of Arnold’s poem, the speaker looks across the water to the French coast, recalling Barber’s description of his own gaze across the water toward Europe during his first transatlantic crossing. In the poem, a “fair” moon, the “glimmering” cliffs, and the “sweet” night air all enhance the view (144). In Barber’s setting, the vocal part and the string parts both undulate gently among just a few pitches, piano (softly) and legato . The string parts, more specifically, consist of short figures that move continuously but always return to their initial pitches, imitating the waves that inevitably return to the coast. Fittingly, these string figures traverse a slightly wider span of pitch than do the rocking motives in To Be Sung on the Water, which represent a river’s smaller ripples of water, and a much narrower span than the fearsome waves in the piano part of “Sea-Snatch.” The opening passage of Dover Beach has a mesmerizing quality, its repetitive motion oddly serene, though darkened by the minor key. But even in the first stanza of Arnold’s poem, hints of discontent appear as the speaker scrutinizes the scene before him. The light from the French coast appears only intermittently, and the surf creates a “grating” sound as it carries pebbles into and away from the shore (144). Barber’s setting of these lines expands the short undulating figures into longer arcs, with wider ranges. Since the text has not contradicted its opening description of the sea itself as “calm,” these longer, more dramatic musical lines seem to hint at an increase of inner, rather than outer, turbulence. As the speaker hears the waves “begin, and cease, and then again begin,” the singer’s line ascends to a relatively high pitch, then slows at the word “cease,” and then descends, in a prolonged musical evocation of wave-like motion. Both Barber and Arnold might also have been thinking of the raising and dashing of hopes. By the end of the first stanza of Arnold’s poem, the waves explicitly bring “the eternal note of sadness in” (144); the music calls attention to these crucial words with poignant dissonances, a descending vocal line, and a gradual slowing of tempo. As Arnold’s second stanza turns to Sophocles and the Aegean Sea, the music’s nearly constant motion ceases, initiating a “B” section that parallels the poem’s shift in focus and style. Just as Arnold alludes to Sophocles in a more expository, less lyrical tone, Barber gives the voice a more declamatory line and the strings a less colorful, less active accompaniment role. In its plainer music, this section underscores the starkness of Sophocles’ vision, his perception of the “turbid ebb and flow” of human misery. The changes in poetic and musical style also suggest the geographical and temporal distance between this scene and that of the poem’s first stanza. The historical perspective, and 10

the stylistic shifts signaling that perspective, seem so essential to the work that the composer’s own admission concerning this section seems surprising:

Originally, I cut the middle part about Sophocles. Soon after Dover Beach was finished I played it at the Owen Wister home in Philadelphia, and Marina Wister exclaimed, “But where’s the wonderful part about Sophocles?” . . . She was quite right, and so I wrote a contrasting middle section. The piece was the better for it. (Ramey 2).

Temporal distance also informs the third stanza of the poem, concerning the “Sea of Faith,” which was “once” full (144), in a long-ago past when faith had not been subjected to the strains of advancing science, political crises, and modern doubts. Now this “Sea” appears to be constantly ebbing, no longer brightly clothing the shore, but instead always withdrawing, leaving the world “naked” and vulnerable (144). For this devastating notion, the music turns to new rhythmic figures—more active than the immediately preceding style, and more widely ranging than the repeated undulations of the opening. The vocal part takes on a more explicitly dramatic flavor, reaching some of its highest pitches; dynamics also feature new intensity. Arnold’s poem appears to offer a remedy for man’s spiritual isolation at the start of the last stanza, with the line, “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” (145). Some commentators interpret this exclamation as a claim that human love can save us (Jump 80; Machann 331), while others deem it only an illusory gesture, given the depth of the speaker’s spiritual crisis and the fact that the plea goes unanswered (Pratt 82; Racin 52- 53). Barber’s setting of these lines suggests both the significance and the desperation of this entreaty, with high pitches in the vocal part and a forceful string accompaniment marked con agitazione. But it can be argued that neither Arnold nor Barber leaves much doubt concerning the inadequacy of this briefly proffered strategy. The poem moves immediately from this supplication for human fellowship to its bleakest expression of disillusionment, asserting that the world only appears to be a “land of dreams” (145), and in fact offers us no comfort at all. At this point, the music begins an altered recollection of the original “A” section, with repetitive, circular motives reminding the listener of the earlier “note of sadness.” The continuous motion of the music is interrupted only by an extended downward phrase for the poem’s list of all the world lacks: it has “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain” (145). In the recurrences of the little word “nor,” one can hear both insistence and fluidity, qualities also heard in the extended length of the vocal descent. Finally, the speaker in Arnold’s poem characterizes his environment as a battlefield for “ignorant armies” (145). While the poem’s final stanza does not clearly connect this battlefield to the coastal scene of the first stanza, Barber’s musical setting 11

does make that link explicit. The music concludes not with a violent passage to imitate a literal armed conflict, but with the relentlessly undulating motives from the very beginning of the piece. The sounds of constantly moving water are interrupted only briefly by two sustained, loud chords on the word “clash.” In the return of the watery sounds heard at the start of the piece, one can hear the return of the poem’s initial perspective: the present day and an assessment of the scene outside the speaker’s window. Barber’s decision to reinforce perspective rather than imagery represents a significant interpretive choice. Literary scholar Dwight Culler claims that the lack of sea imagery in Arnold’s final stanza “is the very point of the poem,” the “Sea of Faith” having retreated permanently (40). John Racin concurs, pointing out that while Sophocles heard the “ebb and flow” of human misery, the speaker of the poem hears only the sea’s “long, withdrawing roar,” with no ensuing return (51). But Barber’s setting supports an alternate view, one expressed in this assertion from J. D. Jump: “that which [the sea] symbolized is still powerfully present in these last lines” (80). More literally, Barber’s music mirrors Murray Krieger’s observation of the poem’s “tragic sense of eternal recurrence . . . the endless battle without victory and without truce between sea and land” (16). Except for the momentary harmonic “clash,” the audible suggestions of the water’s small but ceaseless movements continue as before, the sea apparently impervious to the speaker’s passionate sorrow. These final measures of the piece confirm its prevailing tone of distress tempered by resignation. In Arnold’s sea, apprehended through the interpretive lens of Barber’s music, we perceive either a cruel instigator of our recurring hopelessness or an indifferent reflection of it. In Dover Beach, the “battle . . . between sea and land” also pits faith against despair, human interaction against essential isolation. To Be Sung on the Water sets a scene of smaller scale, with a more elusive human component, but it too portrays recurring conflict, as it counterpoints the possibility of “delight” against a reality of impersonal impermanence. In “Sea-Snatch,” water precipitates a less subtle conflict, an ominous battle in which the sea poses an explicit physical threat. But for many of us, oceans and rivers elicit more positive emotions, and the “eternal recurrence” of their waves and ripples may strike us as reassuring rather than “tragic.” In fact, Barber’s own water-related experiences seem to have been positive, as already noted. In his choices of texts for these works, Barber reveals not his autobiography, but his taste for challenging and imaginative literature—here including both poetry and prose, both metaphor and literal description, both emotional subtlety and raw drama. The words of To Be Sung on the Water and Dover Beach also reflect, more specifically, the composer’s “lifelong propensity for nostalgic texts” (Heyman 477), and those of Dover Beach and “Sea-Snatch” represent his abiding interest in British and Irish literature, the source of more than half of his vocal texts.

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Even in its consistently dark tone, Barber’s “water music” confirms T. S. Eliot’s assertion in “The Dry Salvages” that the sea (and perhaps by extension a river as well) “has many voices” (36). Barber’s settings of words about water make audible its capacity to reflect our human complexity: our ambivalence about love, our fears, our disappointments, our restless discontent. Perhaps most strikingly, these thoughtful syntheses of words and music underscore the telling paradoxes of motion and constancy, beauty and tragedy, intimacy and loneliness. Considered together, these pieces span most of Barber’s career, and they exemplify his life-long preoccupation with the creative challenge of expressively fusing music and words. In each of these works, a familiar yet intriguing dimension of the human condition appears in a vividly portrayed body of water.

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Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. Poetry and Prose. Ed. John Bryson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Barber, Samuel. Dover Beach, op. 3. New York: G. Schirmer, 1936.. ———. Collected Songs for High Voice. New York: G. Schirmer, 1980. ———. To Be Sung on the Water, op. 42, no. 2. New York: G. Schirmer, 1969. ———. Preface. Seventeen Songs by Sidney Homer. New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1943.. ———. The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry. New York: Macmillan, 1936. Bogan, Louise. Collected Poems 1923-1953. New York: Noonday Press, 1954. ———. What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-1970. Ed. Ruth Limmer. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Buckler, William K. “Radical Reconstructions of Three Arnold Poems: The New Sirens, Resignation, and Dover Beach.” The Arnoldian 8/2 (Spring 1981): 200-239. Culler, Dwight A. Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. Duyster, Peter. “Dover Beach” page from website “The Lied and Art Songs Text Page.” Web. 1 May 2010. . Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. 1943. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1971. Flower, Robin. The Irish Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. Frank, Elizabeth. Louise Bogan: A Portrait. NY: Knopf, 1985. Gruen, John. “And Where Has Samuel Barber Been?” The New York Times. October 3, 1971. Heyman, Barbara. Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Jackson, Kenneth Hulstone, ed. A Celtic Miscellany: Translations from the Celtic Literatures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951. Jump, J. D. Matthew Arnold. London: Longmans, 1955. Kreiling, Jean L. “The Songs of Samuel Barber: A Study in Literary Taste and Text- Setting.” Diss. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1986. Krieger, Murray. “‘Dover Beach’ and the Tragic Sense of Eternal Recurrence.” University of Kansas City Review 23 (1956): 73-79. Machann, Clinton. Matthew Arnold: A Literary Life. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Meyer, Kuno. Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry. London: Constable and Co., Limited, 1911. Meyer, Leonard. Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. 14

Novak, Michael Paul. “Love and Influence: Louise Bogan, Rolfe Humphries, and Theodore Roethke.” Kenyon Review 7/3 (Summer 1985): 9-20. O’Faoláin, Sean, ed. The Silver Branch: A Collection of the Best Old Irish Lyrics, Variously Translated . New York: The Viking Press, 1938. Pratt, Linda Ray. Matthew Arnold Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000. Racin, John. “’Dover Beach’ and the Structure of Meditation.” Victorian Poetry 8/1 (Spring 1970): 49-54. Ramey, Philip. “A Talk with Samuel Barber.” Notes to recording, “Songs of Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem.” New World Records NW 229, 1978. Ridgeway, Jaqueline. “The Necessity of Form to the Poetry of Louise Bogan.” Women’s Studies 5 (1977): 137-149. Smith. William Jay. “Louise Bogan: A Woman’s Words.” Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Ed. Martha Collins. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. 101-118.

LUCAYOS 1

Swimming the Divide between West and South: Audience, Identification, and the Rhetoric of Empowerment and the Case of Free Swim

Raymond Oenbring

Into that ring my younger daughter dived Yesterday, slithering like a young dolphin, Her rippling shadow hungering under her, With nothing there to show how well she moved but in my mind the veer of limb and fin Transparent absences! Love makes me look Through a clear ceiling into rooms of sand; I ask the element that is my sign, “Oh, let her lithe head through that surface break!” … Across the seamless silk, iron umbrellas And a brown palm burn. A sandaled man comes out And, in a robe of foam-frayed terry cloth, With a Roman graveness buries his room key, Then, mummy-oiling both forearms and face With sunglasses still on, stands fixing me, And nods. Some petty businessman who tans His pallor a negotiable bronze

Derek Walcott “The Hotel Normandie Pool”

Introduction: Representations of Swimming in Postcolonial Discourse In postcolonial literature and letters there have been two enduring representations of the act of swimming and the locations where swimming takes place. In the first of these representations, swimming pools have been construed as symbols of the white man’s continued dominion and the hollowness of the postcolonial landscape. We clearly see this representation of swimming pools in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children , where at the Breach Candy Swimming Club in Bombay (now Mumbai) “pink people could swim in a pool the shape of British India without fear of rubbing against black skin” (53). Similarly, in his 1992 Nobel Prize lecture “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” St. Lucian poet, playwright, and scholar Derek Walcott claims that the Caribbean willingly presents itself as a swimming pool for the developed world, particularly the United States, to treat paternalistically, as a middle-class comfort located in the backyard. Specifically, Walcott states that “in our tourist brochures the LUCAYOS 2

Caribbean is a blue pool into which the republic dangles the extended foot of Florida as inflated rubber islands bob and drinks with umbrellas float towards her on a raft” (par. 43). 1 Scrutinizing visual representations of the Caribbean in past and present tourism discourse, art historian Thompson’s chapter “Diving into the Racial Waters of Beach Space in Jamaica” in her 2006 volume An Eye for the Tropics looks at the historical events leading to one particularly famous moment in the history of Jamaican race relations: black Jamaican journalist Evon Blake’s 1948 dive in the racially segregated pool at what was then Jamaica’s premier hotel, the Myrtle Bank. Specifically, Thompson argues that the “incident highlights the unspoken racial and class politics that governed the use of space in the hotel and other tourist-oriented and elite-frequented areas on the island” (205). The second enduring representation of swimming and its locales in postcolonial discourse imagines the act of swimming as symbolic of the local Caribbean population’s struggle in the current global order, treating swimming as a decidedly ‘authentic’2 act. Walcott invokes this in his poem “The Wind in the Dooryard” commemorating the 1974 drowning suicide of Trinidadian poet Eric Roach, a man who lived the life of the outsider, marginalised poet but was unsuccessful in the large-scale changes he wished to effect. Walcott describes Roach’s death as follows:

He went swimming to Africa But he felt tired; He chose that way To reach his ancestors (58)

Here the poet’s drowning is treated as a journey, a pilgrimage back across the ocean which his kidnapped ancestors were carried across in chains.3 A similar ‘authentic’ understanding of swimming is expressed in Bahamian writer Ian Strachan’s Diary of Souls, a play critiquing the attitudes of Bahamians toward their impoverished Haitian brethren set in the aftermath of the sinking of a boat full of Haitian immigrants under tow by a Bahamas Defence Force vessel under questionable

1 Also notice how in the poem “The Hotel Normadie Pool,” a portion of which serves as the epigraph to this piece, the tourist, a “petty businessman,” is described as a Roman: imperious.

2 I recognize that ‘authenticity’ is a very problematic concept, with a sordid history in (post)colonial discourse and power relations. However vague, I believe it is appropriate here.

3 Scholar of postcolonial poetry Patke, however, argues that Roach’s goal in Walcott’s poem is not Africa, but rather “to a new Caribbean, a blue basin whose history is erased, at least in the world recreated by poetry” (Patke 209).

LUCAYOS 3 circumstances. In Diary, the deceased ‘souls’ of the piece are haunted by vivid images of their experience and the drowning deaths of their friends and families (e.g., 13). Strachan contends that the entire play serves as a metaphor for the Bahamian-Haitian economic and social relationship (9). Conversely, Bahamian writer Nicolette Bethel’s magic realist short fiction “The Baldness of Cynthia” takes a less tragic tack for emphasizing the ‘authenticity’ of swimming; the piece construes learning how to swim as empowering for the title (female Caribbean) character.

The Case of Free Swim The recent (2009) award winning documentary about children and adults learning how to swim on a rural ‘family island’ in The Bahamas Free Swim at first appears a heart-warming, totally unproblematic story of empowerment and environmental awareness—a story unoffending and inspiring to both Bahamians and the Western liberal audience that will for certain prove to be the film’s primary audience. Set in impoverished south Eleuthera, 4 the documentary deals with a surprising, and for many Bahamians embarrassing, fact: that despite being surrounded by crystal clear turquoise water, the very water that brings visitors to their shores, a significant portion of Bahamians cannot swim. What’s more, many Bahamians are afraid of the water, the same crystal clear waters that attract tourists. (Indeed, according the World Health Organization, The Bahamas has the fourth highest rate of drowning deaths per capita in the world [WHO Statistical Information System].) 5 Through interviews with both young and old, native Bahamians and expatriate professionals working on Eleuthera, the fifty minute film offers a serious analysis of the current socioeconomic and environmental problems faced by locals on south Eleuthera and by extension the Bahamas as a whole using swimming as a primary entry point. Along the way, the film follows a group Eleutheran students as they progress through swimming lessons put on by members of the non-profit organization Swim to Empower, in the process lifting their spirits, and for many of the students, their grades, as they become, the film claims, empowered to control their environment through the simple act of learning how to swim. Two students, Helena and Joanna Sweeting, even lose their taciturn, withdrawn ways. The main thesis of the film: that the simple act of learning

4 Eleuthera stands for freedom in ancient Greek. The title Free Swim is clearly intended to evoke both this and a commonly used term to describe time periods at public pools where no events are scheduled and guests are able to use the pool as they please: free swims.

5 Many Bahamians view not swimming as a phenomenon largely endemic to those living in Nassau. Nevertheless, Free Swim takes place in Eleuthera, and many of the locals there admit swimming rarely to never. LUCAYOS 4 how to swim can empower people to take greater control of their environments and their lives. A beautiful and technically accomplished piece considering the small budget and the fact that the primary filming was done by a crew of one person, Free Swim jumps from scenes of the beautiful Bahamian landscape to analyses of island life made by everyday Bahamians and expatriate professionals. Accordingly, the exposition is lyrical rather than linear, fragmented rather than direct. Mostly the interviewees appear to speak for themselves. The children are charming and funny, and the local adults seem very aware of their economic and social surroundings and intelligent despite the fact that most lack extensive formal education. One element of the film that is impressive is how the documentary deftly manoeuvres between both the ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ representations of swimming common in postcolonial discourse; in Free Swim swimming is construed as both as a tourist activity, a symbol of the inane tourism economy, and as a symbol of the local population’s current economic plight—as well as a way out of it. Like many Caribbean islands, the major economic activity of Eleuthera is tourism, a venture that has recently fallen on difficult times, leaving many to wonder how to develop the economy so that it is less susceptible to rises and declines in visitor numbers. In an emotional climax of the film, a local Bahamian woman speaks of the current economic situation using a swimming metaphor, invoking the ‘authentic’ representation of swimming. She states that “we just have our head above water, but we aren’t yet swimming.” At the same moment, viewers watch as a particularly lovely and powerful wave caresses a sandy Eleutheran beach. A similarly effective element in Free Swim is when the film presents clips from archival tourism development videos from the 1970s, the time of the tourism trade’s expansion, side by side with shots of the currently decrepit state of former resorts. In a especially memorable instance a white tourist jumps off a diving board into an immaculate new resort pool, in footage that seems to our cynical contemporary eyes familiar with parodies of decades-old promotional footage almost like a self parody, before the scene shifts to pictures of a similar resort pool in the present: the resort is obviously closed; the diving board is rusted; the tiles of the pool are missing; the water is green; crud is floating in the pool. Similarly, Free Swim shifts between scenes of white tourists relaxing on their highly controlled sections of beach and wading in demarked sections of the sea, and locals learning how to swim in rocky, yet still beautiful open ocean coves. The end result of this juxtaposition is a synthesis, a productive use of both the both representations of swimming common in postcolonial discourse. While it is clear that both the filmmakers behind Free Swim and volunteers for Swim to Empower are well intentioned, critical viewers of Free Swim will see two problematic narratives at the core of film. (Interestingly, both of these narratives were noticed and critiqued by students in my first year composition classes at The College of LUCAYOS 5

The Bahamas when they viewed the film.) First of all, the impetus to swim is totally driven by foreigners. The film, to quote one of my more insightful students, violates the principle of cultural relativism. Indeed, the agents of change in the piece are members of the organisation Swim to Empower, 6 a non-profit set up by former students of the Island School, a decidedly expensive private school located in south Eleuthera specializing in exchange years for affluent North American high school students interested in environmental and social issues. (It should be noted here that all of the Swim to Empower volunteers are white and all of the students participating in the swimming lessons are black.) 7 Presenting idealistic white American college students returning to south Eleuthera, where they attended the Island School to teach the local impoverished black population a skill that they them a skill that they, pitifully, lack, may smack to many of white man’s burden ,8 the idea that it is the duty of white people to encourage people in developing countries to adopt Western ways so that they can take their place at the table of civilization (for a discussion of the notion of white man’s burden from a contemporary cultural studies perspective see Driscoll [2009]). What’s more, the film also relies upon a problematic sentimental narrative of empowerment. Specifically, the film intimates that students are taking charge of their futures merely by the simple activity of learning how to swim, irrespective of the surrounding economy. 9 While it is an alluring idea to Western liberal audiences that the problems of marginalised peoples might easily be solved with a little bit of education and love, it is clear that children learning how to swim does not affect the surrounding economy. (It is, furthermore, an alluring idea to Western liberals that they can take some time off from their normal, banal, materialistic lives to spend a period of time empowering marginalised peoples in a sweltering underdeveloped country— especially in a place as lovely and ‘exotic’ as The Bahamas—before they return back to their lives in the developed world to live out the rest of their days with the comforting knowledge that they are on the side of the angels. We might call this the holiday messiah trope .) What’s more, the suggestion that the children are being empowered merely by

6 For more information on Swim to Empower, see the organisation’s website: www.swimtoempower.com

7 However, it is a stated goal of Swim to Empower to have the program eventually run by Bahamians for Bahamians. Swim to Empower currently uses local students as teachers’ aides. What’s more, students participating in Swim to Empower programs often teach one another during lessons.

8 The notion of white man’s burden has a long history of discussion, but stems originally from a poem by Anglo-Indian writer Rudyard Kipling. Kipling writes:

9 By comparison Bethel’s short fiction “The Baldness of Cynthia” — while similarly relying upon a narrative of healing through swimming — is much less sentimental and problematic.

LUCAYOS 6 learning how to swim seems inconsistent with the rest of the film as a significant portion of Free Swim is devoted to describing how the economic situation of the people of Eleuthera is determined by fluctuations of the tourism market; that is to say, much of the film offers structural critique of the economic situation of the island. While the people behind Free Swim are clearly well intentioned, the piece begs the question as to whether the first world activist filmmakers can make meaningful interventions in developing countries or make representations of developing world peoples aimed at outsiders without appropriation or the sentimentalizing of the story of those peoples. The question at issue can in many ways be seen as an update of the long simmering controversy over the reality of testimonio for the era of independent film and streaming video. 10 An originally uniquely Latin American genre designed to give a voice to the voiceless, the term testimonio is now broadly used to describe when marginalised, sometimes illiterate people residing in conflict zones tell their stories to educated activists who compile and edit the stories for release. To put this another way, testimonio is the joint rhetorical project of a marginalised narrator/informant and a traditionally educated activist/compiler, an editor who, as Beverley [1996] puts it, “according to norms of literary form and expression, makes a text out of the material” [34]. Testimonio has, however, been critiqued by numerous scholars for making pretensions of providing access toward unmediated direct ‘ truth’ (see, for example, Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans ). The primary concern of these critiques is that the compiler may imbue the informant's narrative with the values, beliefs, and rhetorical forms of literate culture as they package it and edit it for publication—not to mention the fact that the entire genre exists solely for the enjoyment

Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child. (“The White Man’s Burden”)

While most scholars believe that Kipling mean these words sincerely, some authors have argued that Kipling is being ironic and intends to some extent to parody the colonial mindset (see, for example, Snodgrass). (For a discussion of the notion of white man’s burden in the contemporary context see Driscoll’s “White Dude’s Burden.”)

10 Indeed, the whole film can be watched online here: ( http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/1658/Free- Swim ).

LUCAYOS 7 of the lettered (see, for example, Beverly [1996] and [2004] and Achugar [1989]). That is to say, testimonio is a fantasy produced for the consumption of the developed world. I contend that although Free Swim does invoke several problematic cultural and sentimental narratives, these faults can and should be forgiven by critical audiences due to the fact that the film’s narratives can potentially craft a potentially beneficial mythology inspiring to both Bahamians and the Western liberal and activist audiences that are the primary target of the film. Indeed, to suggest that Free Swim is culturally insensitive is to misunderstand the motivations of the people behind the film. What’s more, even though the rhetoric of empowerment itself is problematic, it can help to coordinate action and communication between first world activists and peoples in the developing world. Indeed, I believe that Free Swim can in many ways be seen as a model of culturally sensitive documentary, one that deals honestly with important issues in ways that keep both Western and developing world audiences engaged, while at the same time avoiding unreflective appropriation and sentimentalizing of the stories of developing world peoples. (As an instructor of composition at the College of The Bahamas [COB], much of my interest in Free Swim stems from using the film as a teaching tool in the classroom. As a result, I focus in parts on my experience showing the piece and my students’ response to it. What’s more, as a rhetorician rather than a traditional literary or cultural studies scholar, I approach the issue using a distinct critical vocabulary. Accordingly, much of the critical vocabulary I use stems from the rhetorical tradition [e.g., the notions of audience and, following the work of Burke [1969], identification 11 ].)

Plunging Deeper into Free Swim Behind Free Swim is American filmmaker and media activist Jennifer Galvin, the director, producer, and cinematographer of the documentary. While Galvin’s current primary area of work is filmmaking, it is worth noting that she also self identifies as a scientist (“Free Swim: Our Team”). Indeed, Galvin has a doctoral degree in Public Health from Harvard and a Master of Public Health from Yale University (“Free Swim: Our Team”). In interviews Galvin often construes her work as using filmmaking as a way to communicate scientific knowledge. Galvin states in an interview, for example, that “having spent time in the academic environment and in the non-profit world, I saw

11 For a recent example of Burke’s notion of identification being used by contemporary rhetorical scholars see Utley and Heyse’s (2009) analysis of Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech.

LUCAYOS 8 the need for scientists like me to use their backgrounds in a more creative and communicative way” (“Filmmaker Q&A”). 12 While it may be easy to critique Galvin, an American filmmaker, and label her a mere holiday messiah , it is clear that she is sensitive of her task and that she does not wish to appropriate the story of the Bahamians she interviews and follows (the same can clearly be said of the individuals behind Swim to Empower as well). 13 Galvin notes in an interview, for example, that “documentary filmmaking is all about real people, in real places, in real time. There’s a high level of sensitive professionalism that is required to gain the trust of the story and oftentimes the story takes unexpected paths. I try to let the story speak for itself and to allow the characters to use my camera as a vessel for their voices and actions” (“Filmmaker Q&A”). Here Galvin asserts that she follows the paths led by subjects, letting their ideas and concerns guide the story. Note how Galvin suggests—using an appropriately nautical metaphor—that she wants the people she interviews to “use my camera as a vessel for their voices and actions.” 14 Galvin also claims that the film is shot in the truth-revealing verite style (“ Free Swim Press Kit” 2). Nonetheless, it is clear that Galvin’s concerns and ideas do guide the film, not the least of reasons being that what the interviewees discuss is in response to Galvin’s questions; it is clear that the film, although at times appearing to lack a centre of gravity and a centre of focus, is much more than the raw footage of interviews held together with music. Moreover, although the issues that Free Swim deals with are embarrassing to some Bahamians, the film attempts to be both careful and considerate in its work with the topics. The film wades sensitively into several of the most important and lively discussions about the present economic, environmental, and social state of the Bahamas. Among these are the fact that overreliance on tourism has made the Bahamas vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of arrivals of visitors; that the country currently imports almost all of its food and goods; the depopulation of the family islands; the decline of fish and conch populations; and the psychology of postcolonial society. It should be noted, moreover, that the film does attempt to explain why many Bahamians never learn how to swim; the film is not mere cultural chauvinism. These reasons include: the fact that Bahamians have a more utilitarian understanding of the sea (i.e.,

12 As a rhetorician of science, one of my primary areas of research is in how scientists use language and media in the achievements of particular ends. As Galvin self-identifies as a scientist, one might construe the present study as a contribution to the rhetoric of science tradition.

13 For example, members of Swim to Empower in the film state that they only wanted to have the program if the local Bahamians wanted to have the program.

14 What’s more, the companion book to Free Swim edited by Galvin entitled We, Sea consists entirely of poems written and pictures taken by local Eleutheran students. LUCAYOS 9 they see it as a source of food rather than a place of recreation); Bahamian children have traditionally been required to come to their parents’ places of work after school, rather than the beach; that black women’s hair requires significant maintenance after swimming, much more than white hair; and that more and more of the shoreline has been bought up by non-Bahamians, preventing working class Bahamians from accessing the most desirable beaches (this is especially the case in Nassau). While all of these reasons are understandable, the film also includes one more, less understandable (and quite amusing) reason why many Eleutherans choose not to swim: many claim that they are too busy, a reason that seems quite comic to outsiders given the famously slow-paced nature of family island life. Indeed, at one point a boy makes such an assertion and at the same time we see a shot of the boy relaxing in a hammock. Not just limited to interviews with local Eleutherans and expats, the film also includes observations by Bahamian academic and cultural writer Patricia Glinton- Meicholas, a co-founder of the Bahamas Association for Cultural Studies. Using some of the very terminology of cultural studies critiques, Glinton-Meicholas notes in the film that “there’s so many countries of the world that deny themselves greater wealth. They develop a mythology to deal with the people and to keep them marginalised. The people who are discriminated against because of the mythology come to accept the mythology and align themselves to it.” (Indeed, shortly afterward the documentary shifts to a discussion by a young woman of the apparently persistent myth in The Bahamas that blacks cannot swim.) Glinton-Meicholas’ point is that marginalised people often accept the very stereotypes and myths about themselves that keep them on the periphery. Later on Glinton-Meicholas invokes the concept known in critical race studies as white privilege , stating that “a white person in a postcolonial society enjoys certain advantages and access. And even though we have had majority rule for some 35 years, there’s a lot of catching up to do when you have a slave past.” As this quote suggests, Glinton-Meicholas believes that the cultural codes and the material situation of the colonial past still have major effects upon the Bahamian people in the present. Accordingly, the local black population lack the privileges granted to local whites and foreign whites living and working in The Bahamas. To be sure, the divide between white and black is an important one in Free Swim. Indeed, at the core of the film is a particular traumatic event within local cultural memory, an event symbolic of the divide between white and black: the drowning of a local boy after he attempted to swim to shore when his boat ran out of his fuel. Another boy on the boat, who was a much stronger swimmer, was able to make it to shore. The boy who survived was a white non-Bahamian; the boy who drowned was a black Bahamian. Although many local Bahamians describe the event as shocking, it did little to change attitudes and practices regarding swimming on Eleuthera. However, one interviewee intimates that there would’ve been more of an uproar (and possibly LUCAYOS 10 suggestions of foul play) if the white non-Bahamian had drowned and the black Bahamian had survived.

The Questions of Audience and Representation As many scholars have noted, the Western postmodern notions of the environment and nature appreciation are terms largely at home in wealthy, developed nations where significant sections of the population have the time and resources to engage in recreational activities (see, for example, Guha’s critique of wilderness preservation in the developing world [cf., similar critiques in political scientist Lomborg’s famous piece The Skeptical Environmentalist ]). In these rich Western countries people have the time and resources to enjoy nature; they understand nature primarily as a means for aesthetic and spiritual fulfilment rather than something to be used and tamed in order to build the standard of living of the country. Conversely, in developing countries the environment and nature appreciation are not generally given the emphasis that they receive in developed nations, except as part of discourses aimed at maintaining nature in a clean, green, and pristine state to support the tourism sector (for more, see Strachan’s discussion of paradise mythology in Paradise and Plantation ). Indeed, in developing nations the environment and nature appreciation are not generally treated as what rhetorician Burke refers to as god-term s (see, for example, Burke’s The Rhetoric of Religion ): that is, vaguely defined notions to which one is expected to pay deference (e.g., freedom and justice ). Third world critiques of attempts to preserve ecological habitat in their countries call Western attempts to spread their environmentalist agenda at the expense of economic development “eco-imperialism” (e.g., Mahathir & Lutzenberger [1992]). To put this another way, these critics charge that Western environmentalists are attempting to promote the material relations of postmodernism in regions where the project of modernism never took place. 15 This divide between how Western and developing world peoples view the environment manifests itself in Free Swim in multiple ways. For example, a local Bahamian given the moniker ‘Friendly Bob’ notes the dichotomy between how Bahamians and tourists understand and view the Eleutheran waters. He clearly states “we like to get the stuff out of the ocean, but I don’t really think [we] care too much about going in there. We leave that for the tourists to do.” (Many people in the film note that Bahamians, as they are constantly surrounded by the same lovely waters, lack a culture of let’s go to the beach and go swimming.) Indeed, those Bahamians whose livelihoods involve fishing in the film tend to view the ocean as primarily as a place to

15 This debate has played out in The Bahamas in the form the ban on harvesting sea turtles. LUCAYOS 11 get stuff out of, with many other Bahamians being afraid of the water and its seemingly mystical contents. That is to say, many Bahamians fear the sea due to their lack of control of it; they see the ocean as a dangerous unwelcoming place. While the material situation of Bahamians clearly plays a primary role in determining their relationship toward nature, it is clear that Bahamians’ ideas regarding the sea are determined in part by what they have learned about from American movies and media. That is to say, Bahamians’ experience of their environment is constrained by many of the same simulacra that constrict Western ideas about tropical waters. For example, Free Swim notes that a reason why many Eleutherans are afraid of the water is due to the influence of American movies such as Jaws. Moreover, on more than one occasion in Free Swim local students who have never directly seen underwater environments describe their impressions of what undersea ecosystems might look like using ideas seemingly lifted from American children’s movies. One student, for example, claims he had a dream where he played some jams on the clams , a thought likely inspired by a line in the song “Under the Sea” from Disney’s The Little Mermaid where Sebastian the crab with a lovable Caribbean accent singing the praises of underwater life claims that each little clam here, know how to jam here . Indeed, it is clear that Bahamians’ self-understanding is clearly created to a significant extent by Western media; how Bahamians understand themselves and their surroundings is clearly constrained by films and media aimed at a developed world audience—media that Bahamians also enjoy. Accordingly, Bahamians are not used to realistic filmed representations of their country aimed at an outsider audience. What they are familiar with are the sanitised “It’s Better in The Bahamas” commercials that the government of The Bahamas floods US airways (and thus Bahamian television) with, in which attractive white couples frolic on immaculately clean beaches and in sparkling resort pools (“It’s Better in The Bahamas”). As an instructor of freshman composition at The College of The Bahamas, I routinely receive papers in which students critique this false image propagated to support the country’s tourism product, so I was surprised how strongly many students reacted to seeing the much more accurate representation of life in the rural Bahamas provided by Free Swim : they were embarrassed. Although students critique the false, sanitised images of the Bahamas promoted by the government to maintain and grow tourism, many are not able to accept more realistic images of their country. (Indeed, while south Eleuthera is certainly one of the poorer regions of the country, it is not noticeably poorer than Bain Town, a district of the capital city Nassau that borders the northern boundary of COB’s main campus.) In order to ensure that audiences everywhere understand the film, most of the local Bahamian interviewees in Free Swim are subtitled, with their speech being ‘translated’ into Standard English, an interesting act of representation. (Most of the Bahamian interviewees speak a mesolectal version of Bahamian Creole [that is a mid- LUCAYOS 12 level variant, not the strongest or the weakest forms].) While for several of the interviewees translation into Standard English is necessary to ensure total communication, especially for audiences unaccustomed to the unique tones of Bahamian English, for several of the interviewees the ‘translation’ seems unnecessary. 16 However, what my students picked up and railed against in the film was not the fact that the filmmakers translated people who didn’t need to be translated, seemingly marking them with the flag of non-English speaker; what my students picked up on was that the filmmakers would show what my students consider to be unsophisticated family islanders to the outside world at all. Indeed, many students expressed the sentiment that the filmmaker should have found people to interview who speak Standard English properly (this is despite the fact that the vast majority of Bahamians, and indeed the vast majority of my students, do not speak Standard English in normal day-to-day speech). In fact, several students were convinced that the primary reason why the filmmaker made the film must have been because she derives enjoyment from looking down on ignorant Bahamians.

The White Messiah Narrative In a recent, now famous 2010 op-ed on the global blockbuster Avatar, New York Times columnist David Brooks critiques the film for its crass use of a commonly relied upon, highly sentimental formula in Hollywood movies, what he calls the white messiah fable : a member of the white developed world leaves their hollow materialistic society only to take a leadership role over a group of noble savages of a different skin colour who live with greater intimacy to nature. Brooks finds this formula at work in many Hollywood movies, including Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, and the children’s environmental film Fern Gully. 17 Brooks suggests that this white messiah fable is compelling to Western audiences because it stimulates fashionable liberal ideas like environmentalism and appears socially conscious, but is ultimately condescending to marginalised peoples. Particularly, Brooks states that the white messiah narrative is compelling because “the formula … gives movies a little socially conscious allure. Audiences like it because it is so environmentally sensitive. Academy Award voters like it because it is so multiculturally aware” (“The Messiah Fable” par. 6).

16 For example, the distinctly Bahamian preference for usage persons is changed to the more internationally preferred form people.

17 It is, of course, interesting to note that although Brooks’ thesis might easily be supported by the most radical cultural studies critic, Brooks himself is one of the few conservative voices on the New York Times editorial page.

LUCAYOS 13

However, Brooks notes that ultimately the white messiah fable isn’t about Western care for marginalised peoples; it is about Western narcissism. Brooks claims that the white messiah fable:

rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. … It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration. (par. 17)

As Brooks notes here, the white messiah fable is not about sincere concern for non- Western peoples, but rather is indicative of “our journey to self-admiration.” Similar critiques of representations of marginalised and non-Western peoples have been made in academic studies as well. However, what is of particular interest to the current study are critiques of representations of marginalised and non-Western peoples in Western activist and developmentalist discourses. As Perry (2004) claims, in order to increase interest in their NGO’s task among Westerners, NGOs working in the developing world, even those with entirely good intentions, often provide oversimplified or moralised depictions of developing world peoples, regularly ignoring how cultural practices in those developing country are viewed locally. A similar critique of the ways in which NGOs represent children in developing countries is made in sociologist Manzo in her “Imaging Humanitarianism” (2008). Manzo claims that “the tropes of innocence , dependence and protection have a … long lineage in colonial ideology” (636). While it may be a bit harsh to suggest that Free Swim engages in a sentimental white messiah narrative or to suggest that it is promoting a colonial ideology by its frequent representations of Bahamians as innocent and fearful—not the least of reasons being that it depicts real rather than imaginary events—we must remember that all moments of cultural exchange are coded through representations, representations always already suffused with ideologies. That is to say, it is impossible for those in the developed world to get direct access to reality of the developing world; we can never get beyond what have been called “fantasies of cultural exchange” (Williams). While it is clear that Free Swim does attempt to appeal to its primarily Western audience through appeals to the trope of innocence and the white messiah narrative , the true questions we should ask in order assess the value of the film should be regarding the actual effects these problematical representations have upon the audience(s) of the film. Do these tropes solidify problematic ideas about the developing world? Or do they primarily function to help facilitate communication between the developing world and the developed world? I believe the answer to be the latter. LUCAYOS 14

The Rhetoric of Empowerment Whether induced by the filmmaker or not, many of the children in Free Swim express a similar idea: that participating in the lessons put on by Swim to Empower has had a much greater effect upon their lives than merely teaching them how to swim. Indeed, this idea is a leitmotif of the piece. For one, the film implies that many students who have gone through the program have had their grades improve. Presumably referring to newfound success in school, one student notes that swimming “helps you going. Just think about swimin’ and you could achieve.” Another student claims that you should “try your best, never give up, and reach for the star which you’re looking at. Reach for your goal. Never give up. Perseverance,” before continuing, “once you know how to swim, you’re straight from there.” As I have noted, the film even claims that the lessons put on by Swim to Empower have caused two Eleutheran students who had previously been unwilling to speak to suddenly become talkers. Here this film is clearly invoking a messianic trope (think Christ making the blind see [e.g., Mark 8:22- 26]). However, the evidence presented in the film to support the claim that the two students’ lives have changed is questionable at best. The idea that Western activists’ interventions ‘empower’ developing world peoples— and, indeed, the entire neoliberal notion of empowerment itself—have been critiqued by numerous scholars (see, for example, Gore [1999] and Flower [2008]). As sociologist Isserles notes in her “Microcredit: the Rhetoric of Empowerment, the Reality of ‘Development as Usual,’” an analysis of the ideologies undergirding programs that give small loans to developing world females, “the popular rhetoric employed by development specialists and institutions—specifically those that emphasise women’s participation and empowerment—seems disconnected from actual practice” (38). That is to say, the idea of empowerment is alluring to those in the West interested in development in the South, despite the fact that it may have little effect on the ground in the developing world. Indeed, it seems clear that children learning how to swim does little to effect the surrounding economy of Eleuthera; it seems very unlikely that the trajectory of students’ lives can be altered in a substantive way simply by learning how to swim. (This is not, however, to say that quality of life can solely be determined by economics.) Promoting a self-reflective, decentralised notion of empowerment, social worker, sociologist, and activist VanderPlaat argues in “Locating the Feminist Scholar: Relational Empowerment and Social Activism” that activists and those committed to social justice “are quick to align themselves against oppressive systems, but it is not entirely clear what we are doing there” (773). As VanderPlaat suggests, empowerment as an ideal is easily advocated but difficult to actually practice; the idea of empowerment is something that feels good to Western liberals, but which has a questionable reality. Nonetheless, it is clear that there is something particularly LUCAYOS 15 captivating about the rhetoric of empowerment. It can serve to inspire both Westerners desiring to improve the state of developing world peoples and to help developing world peoples maintain hope for a better day.

Conclusion: Identification and Swimming the Gap I have learned that swimming is more than a life skill—it is leadership opportunities, overcoming a fear, a reason to achieve, newfound passion, something to be proud of, curiosity and conversation. (Brenna Hughes, Swim to Empower)

In the closing minutes of Free Swim Swim to Empower instructor and founder Brenna Hughes suggests in the film that the organisation focuses on swimming because it is a

way of experiencing this whole other part of the world, in most of the world; through understanding ocean ecosystems, and especially people in coastal communities it is empowering, cause you understand your environment and you understand what’s there and nothing’s off limits to you.

As this quote suggests, the rhetoric of empowerment in part relies upon the notion that the act that is understood to be empowering awaken marginalised person to their ability to exert control over their environment. This idea can be seen more directly in the rhetorical formulations of Kenyan environmentalist, ecofeminist, leader of the pan- African NGO the Green Belt Movement Wangari Maathai, and winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Wangari Maathai, a developing world activist who has been quite effective at raising awareness of her project in the West. Maathai claims, for example, in a 1999 interview with the UNESCO Courier that “the act of planting trees conveys a simple message. It suggests that at the very least you can plant a tree and improve your habitat. It increases people’s awareness that they can take control of their environment, which is the first step toward greater participation in society” (“Wangari Muta Maathai: Kenya's Green Militant”). 18 As this quote suggests, Maathai construes tree planting, the central task of her NGO, as something with benefits for the environment, but just as importantly, with benefits for the self-concept of individuals everywhere. This symbolic elevation of the central task of one’s organisation is common among developmental and environmental discourses. Indeed, Galvin expresses similar

18 For more on the Maathai’s rhetorical formulations see Oenbring (2010). LUCAYOS 16 sentiments regarding the benefits of learning how to swim. Galvin, for example, describes Free Swim in an interview as follows:

Free Swim is an empowering film that combines the individual human experience of learning to swim with larger societal topics, exploring complicated socio- economic and environmental challenges with which communities worldwide struggle. These include the influences on community function by the media, drowning, tourism, education and ecological health – to name just a few. (“Filmmaker Q&A”)

As this quote states, Galvin connects “the individual human experience of learning how to swim” with broader socio-economic and environmental issues. Note important it is to Galvin that audiences worldwide are able to connect with the act of swimming; while Free Swim is ‘about’ people in The Bahamas learning how to swim, its ultimate goal is to stimulate discussion about the environment and our place in it for audiences around the world. Originally entering rhetorical studies through the work of Burke (1969), the notion of identification has been taken up by numerous rhetorical theorists to describe how language can serve to create commonalities between peoples. It is a notion that seems very appropriate here. In an article describing the post-racial rhetoric of Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union Speech” rhetoricians Utley and Heyley describe identification as “a strategy of building common ground between individuals in order to reduce the division amongst them” (156). Clearly identification is a rhetorical goal of Swim to Empower and Free Swim ’s symbolic elevation of the practice of swimming: they aim for audiences around the world to be able to relate to the individual activity of learning how to swim, and thus greater identify with the strands of analysis and critique that they are attempting to bring together in the piece. As most people can identify with the individual human activity of learning how to swim and with the challenges of staying afloat in water, audiences can apply their own experiences to their viewing of the movie; they can identify with the children’s struggles to swim, and by extension the socio-economic and environmental issues affecting The Bahamas and the broader postcolonial world. This identification based upon swimming is one of several ways that the film attempts to facilitate communication between the developing and the developed world. (One might also argue that we watch the Bahamian children learning to swim in the film, while feeling the same genuine concern as the narrator of Walcott’s “Hotel Normandie Pool” feels for his daughter.) As I have noted, there has already been an extensive debate in the literature about the value of a body of work aimed at empowering marginalised peoples through the rhetorical work of a Western activist working with a local population: that is the debate over the value of testimonio . As aforementioned, the primary critique of LUCAYOS 17 testimonio is that the genre serves as a fantasy for the consumption of Western peoples. Supporters of testimonio have argued, however, that the value of the texts lies not in whether they are ‘true’ or not, but whether they can promote valuable transformative change. As Beverley (1996) suggests, “what is at stake, however, is the particular nature of the reality effect of the testimonio , not simply pointing out the difference between (any) text and reality. What is important about testimonio is that it produces if not the real then certainly a sensation of experiencing the real” (34). I would like to argue that the same standard be used for Free Swim . Although it is certainly possible to make legitimate critiques of the colonial ideologies and narratives haunting the film, one’s final assessment of the film should be based on what changes (positive or negative) these colonial ideologies can effect in the film’s Western and local Bahamian audiences. The ultimate effect of the film seems, however, to be valuable. That is to say, the ‘reality effect’ that Free Swim is hawking seems to be a useful (or at least relatively benign) one. Similarly, although empowerment may be an illusion, it can be a valuable illusion both to developing and developed world peoples. A comparable debate has played out over uses of the notion of econfeminism in Western academic and activist writing. The question at issue is whether the romanticised, essentialistic hagiographic representations of developing world ecofeminists (e.g., Wangari Maathai, Vandana Shiva) that seem to be pervasive in Western discourses of ecofeminism empower or disempower developing world people. Viewing essentialised ecofeminism as both a valuable political tool and a necessary means to facilitate communication between marginalised peoples and the Western world, Sturgeon (1999) defends academic ecofeminists’ essentialised depictions of non- Western women and their supposed greater intimacy with nature, arguing that:

The deployment of essentialist visions of women within ecofeminist rhetorics can be a Western appropriation of romanticized ‘indigenous’ peoples, but it can also be an attempt by disempowered Third World women to intervene in the policies and plans of international political elites. It is a tactic that can create 'two-way streets' between Western feminists and Third World feminists. …. That is to say, even though essentialisms may be part of the dominant and oppressive ideology, they can facilitate communication among subordinate groups and provide new tools for resistance to power (257)

Here Sturgeon describes the language of ecofeminism as possible political tool for the empowerment of developing world activists and peoples, allowing them to ‘speak’ to the international community. I believe that the same standards should apply to films such as Free Swim that rely upon problematic notions such as empowerment in the interest of giving hope to those in developing world and inspiring those in the developed world to effect change in the developing world. Indeed, the rhetoric, nay LUCAYOS 18 the mythology, of empowerment is a captivating concept, one that may cause Bahamians living on the margins of the global economy to continue to hope, and one that may cause members of the first world to want to change the situation of marginalised peoples. As I have argued, just as Free Swim successfully synthesizes the ‘authentic’ and the ‘inauthentic’ aspects of swimming in the postcolonial world, the film also bridges (or more appropriately swims) the gap between the Western and developing world audiences. Free Swim truly balances the goals of making a meaningful intervention in a developing country while at the same time being respectful of the local culture. The film successfully balances between the need to entertain while avoiding unreflective sentimentalising or appropriation of the stories of marginalised peoples. The film, to use Galvin’s own words, attempts to capture “daily life in a coastal world, avoiding both a romantic vision of island lifestyle and an overly academic approach to environmental and public health topics” (“ Free Swim Press Kit” 3). This is the reality of Eleuthera today. While tourists remain in their demarked and controlled sections of the sea, many of the children of Eleuthera are now free to swim wherever their hearts desire.

Works Cited

Achúgar, Hugo.“Literatura/literaturas y la nueva producción literaria latinoamericana.” Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana 15 (1989): 153-165. Print. Beverley, John. “The Margin at the Center.” The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Ed. G. Gugelberger. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 70-83. Print. ——. Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Print. Bethel, Nicollete. “The Baldness of Cynthia.” Unpublished Ms. The College of The Bahamas. Brooks, David. “The Messiah Complex.” New York Times 10 Jan. 2010, sec. A. Print. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Print. ——. The Rhetoric of Religion . Berkeley: U of California P, 1961. Print. Driscoll, Mark. “White Dude’s Burden.” Cultural Studies 23.1 (2009): 100-128. Print. Flower, Linda. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Print. Free Swim. Dir. Jennifer Galvin. Reelblue, 2009. DVD. Galvin, Jennifer. Interview. “Filmmaker Q&A.” 17 Mar. 2010. ——. “Free Swim Press Kit.” 17 Mar. 2010. LUCAYOS 19

——, ed. We, Sea. New York: Reelblue, 2009. Print. Gore, Jennifer. “What We Can Do for You! What Can “We” Do for “You”?: Struggling over Empowerment in Critical and Feminist Pedagogy.” The Critical Pedagogy Reader. Eds. Darder Baltodano and R.D. Torres. New York: Routledge, 2003. 331 -350. Print. Guha, Ramachandra. “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique.” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71-83. Print. ——. “Radical American Environmentalism Revisited.” Philosophical Dialogues: Arne Næss and the Progress of Eco-Philosophy. Eds. Witoszek and Brennan. New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 1993. 473-9. Print. Isserles, Robin. “Microcredit: The Rhetoric of Empowerment, and Reality of Development as Usual”. Women’s Studies Quarterly 31.3 (2003): 38-57. Print. “It’s Better in the Bahamas (1984).” YouTube. 2009. 17 Mar. 2010. “It’s Better in the Bahamas (2009).” YouTube. 2009. 17 Mar. 2010. Kipling, Rudyard. “The White Man’s Burden.” 17 Mar. 2010. The Little Mermaid. Dir. Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Pictures, 1989. Lomborg, Bjørn. The Skeptical Environmentalist . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. Mahathir, Mohamad, and Jose Lutzenberger. “Eco-imperialism and bio-monopoly at the Earth Summit.” New Perspectives Quarterly 9 (1992): 56-59. Print. Manzo, Kate. “Imaging Humanitarianism: NGO Identity and the Iconography of Childhood.” Antipode 40.4 (2008): 632-657. Print. Maathai, Wangari. Interview with Ethiragan Anbarasan. “Wangari Muta Maathai: Kenya's Green Militant.” UNESCO Courier Dec. 1999. Oenbring, Raymond. “Strategic Essentialism and the Representation of the Natural: The Case of Ecofeminist/Scientist Wangari Maathai.” Agency in the Margins: Stories of Outsider Rhetoric. Ed. Anne Meade Stockdell-Giesler. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2010. 287-306. Print. Patake, Rajeev. Postcolonial Poetry in English. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. Perry, Donna. “Muslim Child Disciples, Global Civil Society, and Children’s Rights in Senegal: the Discourses of Strategic Structuralism.” Anthropological Quarterly 77 (2004): 47-86. Print. Reelblue. Free Swim website. 15 Mar. 2010. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. New York: Penguin, 1991. Print. Snodgrass, Chris. A Companion to Victorian Poetry . Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Print. LUCAYOS 20

Stoll , David. Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans . Boulder: Westview Press, 1999. Print. Strachan, Ian. Diary of Souls. Nassau: Carasee Books, 2006. Print. ——. Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. London: U of Virginia P, 2002. Print. Sturgeon, Noel. “Ecofemist Appropriations and Transnational Environmentalisms.” Identities 6 (1999): 255-279. Print. Swim to Empower. Swim to Empower website. 15 Mar. 2010. Thompson, Krista. An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Print. Utley, Ebony, and Amy Heyse. “Barack Obama's (Im)Perfect Union: An Analysis of the Strategic Successes and Failures in His Speech on Race.” Western Journal of Black Studies 33.3 (2009): 153- 163. Print. VanderPlaat, Madine. “Locating the Feminist Scholar: Relational Empowerment and Social Activism.” Qualitative Health Research 9.6 (1999): 773-785. Walcott, Derek. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture. 15 Mar. 2010. ——.“The Hotel Normandie Pool.” New Yorker 5 Jan. 1981: 30-31. Print. ——. “The Wind in the Dooryard.” Sea Grapes. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976. Print. Williams, Gareth. “The Fantasies of Cultural Exchange in Latin American Subaltern Studies.” The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Ed. G. Gugelberger. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 237-247. Print. World Health Organization. Statistical Information Service. 15 Mar. 2010.

LUCAYOS

Playing Conquistador and Searching for El Dorado in Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps and Derek Walcott’s Omeros

Carmen Ruiz-Castaneda

Although Alejo Carpentier and Derek Walcott write their seminal novels nearly forty years apart and in different languages, The Lost Steps and Omeros represent two odysseys through space and time that engage with similar projects of demythologizing the Caribbean and creating an inclusive cultural sphere that would incorporate both their intense love of place and their peripatetic spirits. In their works, Carpentier and Walcott play with the idea of history, deciphering the palimpsest that informs the Caribbean experience and underwrites a sense of cultural citizenship and personal identity, the El Dorado both are seeking. This paper will seek to analyze Walcott’s and Carpentier’s imagery of the female body as landscape and site of resistance through the epic journeys of male protagonists in search of identity and origins. In both texts, the landscape is conflated with a central female figure. For Carpentier’s unnamed narrator, the exploration of the uncharted lands of the Orinoco figures as his newly emerging consciousness of history and his sexual relationship with Rosario. For Walcott, the quest for historical consciousness and a Caribbean identity is explored through the characters of the poet-narrator and his white colonial counterpart, Major Dennis Plunkett. Both Plunkett and the narrator obsess over Helen as an embodiment of St. Lucia. Ultimately, these explorations, ostensibly about representing Helen and those like her, become discoveries about the male historical self. The reality of Helen and the island remain resistant to the male writers’ characterizations and intrusions. Walcott uses the identification between the poet-narrator and Plunkett to critique the possibility of ever fully owning or naming the landscape and those who live upon it. Carpentier’s protagonist encounters a similar difficulty in his relationship with the landscape and with Rosario. Ultimately, El Dorado cannot be found; but in the texts themselves, Walcott and Carpentier provide a new way of looking at a literary geography and Caribbean identity. In The Lost Steps and Omeros , Carpentier and Walcott look at the issues of a Caribbean identity from the perspective of the traveler. Neither Carpentier nor Walcott, though fiercely loyal to their homelands, feel that they need to physically reside on the land to claim Cuban or St. Lucian identity. In their narratives they explore the idea of a return to the land and a re-identification with the land and the people through the quests of their semi-autobiographical narrators. Walcott’s narrator, however, is secure in his Caribbean identity, but questions how and why his craft represents the society to

LUCAYOS which he claims to belong. In contrast, Carpentier’s narrator looks to find justification and fulfillment in a life that feels empty and artificial. In order to more clearly understand the ways these male protagonists identify themselves through women, it is valuable to understand what they imagine their quests to be at the outset of the novels. In The Lost Steps , the narrator is described as belonging to both Europe and the New World; his father is European and his mother is from the Caribbean. However, the narrator is primarily identified with Europe because of his education and early detachment from the lands of the mother. The nameless narrator feels trapped in a futile and useless life over which he has no control. His scholarly and musical aspirations have given way to the mindless creation of music for radio and television commercials. By day he feels “saturated with poor music used for detestable purposes,” and at night, he pursues hedonistic pleasures in order to forget his artificial existence (15). The pursuit of commercial ventures instead of the artistic/intellectual pursuits causes a state of schizophrenic partitioning in the narrator: “Between the I that I was and the I that I might have been the dark abyss of the lost years gaped. We lived together in one body, he and I, upheld by a secret architecture that was already—in our life, in our flesh, the presence of our death” (22). After expressing his discontent to the museum curator, Carpentier’s narrator sets off on a quest for an elusive instrument of pre-Columbian origin that will prove his theory of “ mimetism-magic-rhythm ” (20). Initially reluctant to go on the quest, the narrator heeds the instigation of Mouche, his mistress, and undertakes the journey, coming to believe in it whole-heartedly as a way of pleasing his intellectual father, the curator, and reestablishing himself within the constructs of the productive academic world. In the pursuit of this golden ticket out of emptiness, the narrator finds a different way of existing that precedes the academic and the artistic. Becoming disenchanted with anything that smacks of human artifice, the narrator longs to be in a place similar to that of the Caroni who Carpentier described in El Libro de la Gran Sabana : “Here the man of the Sixth Day of Creation contemplates the landscape that is given him as his own home. No literary evocation. No myths framed by the Alexandrian line” (qtd. in Gonzalez-Echevarria 174). For the narrator of The Lost Steps , as for Carpentier, the new world becomes a site of genesis. However, this search for wholeness can proceed not only through a process of division from the old world and its intellectual allusions, but also through the conquest of a demanding and seemingly untouched landscape. The Lost Steps is a labyrinthine series of journeys that bring to the fore the different gender roles inherent in the conquest of the Americas. The Lost Steps foregrounds the confrontation between the narrator’s phallus and its corresponding phallic journeys and the space of woman as embodiment of the new world and as site of resistance. Walcott’s Omeros also foregrounds gender roles in the conquest and colonial experience of the Americas, as his narrator shares similar anxieties with Carpentier’s narrator, despite some revealing differences. For one, Walcott’s poet-narrator is not sent

LUCAYOS to St. Lucia on a quest. The island was once, and potentially still is, his home. The nature of the quest evolves as a response to the beauty of the landscape and its inhabitants, though Helen in particular, serves as his muse. This journey into the past of the island also becomes a journey into the personal past of the narrator as he engages in dialogue with his father and finds that the personal is also the social. The father’s words admonish the son to take time into account when executing his poetic mission, saying, “Do just the labour which marries your heart to your right hand” (1.12.2). As in The Lost Steps , the father’s words indicate an anxiety about fulfilling one’s artistic destiny. The father also directs the son to the way that will most fruitfully exercise his poetic gift. The poet-narrator notes: “He spoke for those Helens from an earlier time” (1.12.2). These Helens are the coal carriers who were “not the fair, gentler sex” but “darker and stronger” and thereby denied a place in literary history. The father’s injunction to the son is that he “give those feet a voice” (1.12.3). Giving a voice to the dispossessed that neither over-romanticizes their poverty nor caricatures their flaws becomes the poet’s quest. Yet, like Carpentier’s nameless protagonist, the poet-narrator has a second self onto which he displaces the anxieties of a colonial education that separates him intellectually and physically from the people. The poet-narrator’s alter-ego takes an unlikely shape as Major Dennis Plunkett, a pensioned British officer who has lived in St. Lucia since the end of the Second World War, but does not quite feel he belongs. Walcott foregrounds the relationship between Plunkett and the poet-narrator in one of the few direct authorial intrusions in the text:

This wound I have stitched into Plunkett’s character He has to be wounded, affliction is the one theme Of this work, this fiction, since every I is a fiction finally. Phantom narrator resume. (1.5.2)

The positioning of the quest for identity and a history for the dispossessed is at the heart of Omeros . Plunkett is a man without an empire whose identity as a member of a hegemonic group is fast disappearing. His double, the poet-narrator, has never belonged to the ruling class of an empire and is now trying to formulate a history out of the silence and fragments left by the same empire. The poet-narrator’s quest is to find a way to reconnect with the land after the separation caused by education and travel, which makes his position similar to Plunkett’s, in that he has had access to the educational benefits of the empire. The poet-narrator’s critique of Plunkett is also a critique of himself. Neither can escape the Homeric allusions evoked by Helen’s name and beauty, nor can they help displacing her story with their own. In The Lost Steps and Omeros , the narrators attempt to fix themselves in history and place by displacing their anxieties and desires onto an objectified female presence

LUCAYOS that serves as the “Other” they can possess and control. Given the cinematographic elements of both texts and their emphasis on the male’s possessive gaze of the woman, Laura Mulvey’s work on voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia is particularly illustrative of the ways in which : “woman then stands… as a signifier for the male other, bound by the symbolic order in which a man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of the woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning” (59). 1 Mulvey continues, “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness ” (63). The leading ladies of The Lost Steps and Omeros are captivating as renditions of the male imagination, but are also masterful constructions that contain the seeds of resistance to the gaze. Carpentier’s narrator surrounds himself with women who exude “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 63). His wife Ruth plays the leading role in a Civil War drama and his mistress Mouche constantly manipulates situations to be at the center of attention. In their volatility and voluptuousness, the narrator finds respite from the boredom of his everyday existence, although he does not find satisfaction. Walcott’s Omeros takes the figure of Helen of Troy, the original pin-up girl, and places her within a West Indian context. In a revealing comparison, the poet-narrator describes the transformation: “Change burns at the beach’s end. She has to decide / to enter the smoke or skirt it. In that pause / that divides the smoke with a sword, white Helen died” (1.3.2). Helen is no longer the flaxen-haired Grecian beauty, but an ebony princess who once worked as a maid in the Plunkett household. While the physical characteristics may have altered, the quality of the gaze has not. Helen serves as the standard of beauty and erotic desire through which the men of St. Lucia attempt to define themselves. However, the use of women to define a male position brings to the fore dangerous castration anxieties in the male that must be neutralized in the narrative. Mulvey identifies two forms of controlling the castration anxiety aroused by the identification of a male protagonist with a female object. The first avenue is “voyeurism” which “has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjugating the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative” (65). The second avenue is ”fetishistic

1 Use of film theory here is particularly useful because of the ways in which both Carpentier and Walcott construct their texts in cinematographic ways. Carpentier uses the lush imagery of the Baroque, layering images upon images in ways that precede modern music videos. The protagonist of The Lost Steps is also intimately aware of the process of cinematographic representation as his primary occupation is that of music director for a production company. Walcott himself has characterized his style in Omeros as influenced by the medium of film: “I had been working on film scripts as well, and I think that there’s an element of a scenario of a film script in there, certainly in terms of the width of the thing and the possibility of a cinematic version of some aspects of it” (int. with Presson 190).

LUCAYOS scopophilia” which “builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself” (65). Throughout the second half of The Lost Steps , the narrator plays at being a conquistador in a way that foregrounds the sexual nature of his quest both in respect to the land and to Rosario: “I entertained myself with a childish game…we were conquistadors who had set out in search of the Kingdom of Manoa…My role was that of Juan de San Pedro, the trumpeter, who had taken himself a woman in the sack of a town” (Carpentier 158-159). The narrator creates the game in response to the feeling of being watched and judged as inadequate by Rosario and the other men on the journey. By casting himself as a conquistador, the narrator relieves his castration anxiety at being the object of the gaze and turns that controlling and punishing look on to Mouche. His French mistress comes to symbolize all the effete manhood that he had striven for in the city, and which leads to ridicule in the elemental new world. Mark Millington notes: “The negative depiction of Mouche operates consistently through the attribution to her of all that he wishes to cast off or leave behind…she is the repository for the cultural practices and values…which he vilifies” (351-352). Mouche’s intellectualism, sexual difference and promiscuity—attractive qualities for a mistress—become a threat to his manhood in the jungle. She cannot be contained and constantly changes her persona to fit the environment with varying degrees of success. A condition that becomes evident as the narrator describes his disgust for a type of literature that has “as its objective the degradation and distortion of all that might contribute, in hours of difficulty and discouragement, to a man’s finding compensation for his failures in the affirmation of his virility, achieving its fullest realization in the flesh he divides” (Carpentier 99). Rosario, instead, is described as a woman who was “all woman and nothing but woman” (Carpentier 199). By divesting Rosario of all but elemental womanhood, he may then claim elemental, Adamic manhood for himself. In Rosario, he finds a woman that he can comfortably control within his gaze and makes a fetish of her. This is a process that causes him to reevaluate his thoughts and behaviors in order to make himself virile in her eyes: “I was afraid of … making her the object of attentions that might seem to her silly or unmanly” (Carpentier 113). Rosario’s position as a fetish is evident from the fact that the narrator does not ask Rosario what would make him appear manly before her, but infers it from the landscape and the tasks he assumes the other men to be engaged in, projecting his own conception of manhood onto Rosario’s desires. His contact with the Adelantado, Yannes, and Fray Pedro de Henestrosa among others leads him to fashion an archaic vision of manhood far removed from the effete intellectual circles of Mouche’s studio in New York. These men respectively found cities, dig for gold, and convert savages. The narrator tries to fashion himself into a man of action as a way of bolstering the fetishistic notion of Rosario as a subordinate woman.

LUCAYOS

However, his language seems almost a caricature as he says, “A man seemed more of a man in the Lands of the Horse…A mysterious solidarity was established between the animal with well-hung testicles which covered its female deeper than any other and man” (Carpentier 114). 2 This statement divests the narrator’s desire for woman of its romantic connotations, emphasizing instead its violent and selfish nature, and pointing to an extreme castration anxiety in the sense of overcompensation. The narrator imagines a couple making love under the shade provided by the horse, affirming the man’s virility and the woman’s position as object (114). After the narrator and Rosario consummate their relationship, the narrator’s words explicitly objectify and claim ownership over the woman’s body: “I had sown myself beneath the down I stroked with the hand of the master, and my gesture closed the cycle of the joyful commingling of bloods that have met” (Carpentier 153). The relationship between Rosario and the narrator as one of master and slave is further reinforced by the appellation she supposedly takes for herself: “She called herself ‘your woman’ ” (Carpentier 180). The narrator attempts to give these words the appearance of naturalness by saying that they are Rosario’s self-appellation, but the narrator’s consciousness of race nonetheless gives it a sinister connotation. His description of Rosario soon after meeting her not only reinforces this idea of race consciousness, but also gives a physical representation of years of miscegenation: “Several races had met in this woman: Indian in the hair and cheekbones, Mediterranean in brow and nose, Negro in the heavy shoulders and the breadth of hips…this living sum of races had an aristocracy of her own” (Carpentier 81). This passage seems to celebrate the idea of mestizaje in Rosario, but his acceptance of the Adelantado’s division of the races, “‘We were three men and twelve Indians’” suggests a degradation of her personhood due to her mixed origin (Carpentier 159). The relationship between Rosario and the narrator must be seen as taking place in the shadow of the horse where the woman signifies the Other. The sadistic element of voyeurism becomes more explicit in Omeros as the viewing of Helen’s body and a creation of a narrative for that body are the pretext for both the narrator’s poem and Plunkett’s history. Mulvey writes that “sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end” (65). Plunkett and the poet-narrator are both obsessed with mystifying Helen by placing her within a narrative. Plunkett and the narrator imagine narratives for Helen, narratives that simultaneously show their desire to forgive Helen for

2 The image of the horse comes to Carpentier’s narrator as he looks at the statue of one of the heroes of Latin America sitting astride a powerful stallion. The image of the man on horseback as the dominant influence of culture is repeated in Omeros when the narrator sees a “bronze horseman” at the wharf in Port of Spain and remarks that “We had no such erections / about our colonial wharves, our erogenous zones / were not drawn to power” (5.37.3).

LUCAYOS transgressions, real and imagined, and to seek her pardon and approval as well. The poet-narrator writes: I remembered that morning when Plunkett and I, compelled by her diffident saunter up the beach, sought grounds for her arrogance. He in the khaki

grass around the redoubt, I in the native speech of its shallows; like enemy ships of the line, we crossed on a parallel; he had been convinced

that his course was right; I despised any design that kept to a chart, that calculated the winds. my inspiration was impulse, but the Major’s zeal

to make her the pride of the Battle of the Saints, her yellow dress on its flagship, was an ideal no different from mine. (6.54.2)

Plunkett tries to change history to a metaphor, but that is futile, and dangerous. History has its consequences and Plunkett himself bears the wound. The poet narrator alters the image of Helen of Troy “in self-defense” as a way of protecting himself against the weight of literature, and the absence of representation. The poet-narrator cannot but see Helen through the perspective of the Greek Helen. Yet, the father’s injunction that the narrator write about the land and the faceless people of the land speaks of the debt he owes Helen in the yellow dress and all other Helens. The image of Helen as object of fetishistic scopophilia and voyeurism can also be read as the contested image of St. Lucia in the representations by the narrator and Plunkett, literature, and history. Though Plunkett may have decided to write Helen’s history at the same moment as the narrator, the castration anxiety that causes him to begin the work stems from a different source. In a particularly vexing moment for the aged imperialist, Helen reverses the gaze with which she is constantly fixed. The moment occurs when he comes into his bedroom unexpectedly and finds Helen trying on Maud’s jewelry: “He was fixed by her glance / in the armoire’s full-length mirror, where, one long arm, / its fist closed like a snake’s head, slipped through a bracelet” (2.18.1). In this moment and by her beauty, Helen overpowers Plunkett causing him to lose identification with his own tribe and turn his head “back to her past, her tribe” (2.18.2). The loss of power speaks to a castration anxiety in Plunkett, as a woman, a black woman, has been victorious over him: “All History’s appeal / lies in this Judith from a different people” (2.18.2). Helen’s arm plunges through the space in the bracelet as a metonym for the space of the master. The images of the arm as both serpentine and sword-like, in the

LUCAYOS allusion to Judith, heighten the phallic overtones of the encounter. Plunkett is transfixed by the gaze that comes to him obliquely through the mirror. In effect, Plunkett has been caught staring and Helen utilizes this moment to effect a role reversal. As Mulvey states, “Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like” (63). This moment of reversal incites feelings of castration anxiety and intense longing for the body that has transfixed him. Plunkett’s search for the island’s history becomes a way of containing Helen’s phallic role reversal and satisfying his own desire to possess the Other. Helen’s beauty figuratively castrates the poet-narrator as it did Plunkett. The image of Helen, beautiful beyond imagining, stuns the poet-narrator into silence both times he sees her. In the first instance, at the hotel poolside, the narrator is struck dumb and cannot even ask about the woman walking by. A tourist asks the question that a waitress answers with a sneer (1.4.3). The second encounter the narrator has with Helen occurs on the beach while she is selling tee –shirts. Again as with Plunkett, the encounter results in a gendered role reversal in which the poet-narrator is emasculated by Helen’s phallic presence. The poet-narrator relates, “her face shook my heart, and that incredible / stare paralyzed me past any figure of speech” (1.6.3). For the narrator who defines his masculinity by his creative output, being at a loss for words is the ultimate castration anxiety. Her departure is just as strongly coded and bolsters her position as a threatening female presence:

and just as a pantheress stops swinging its tail to lightly leap into the grass, she yawned and entered a thicket of palm-printed cloth, while I stood there stunned by that feline swiftness, by the speed of her vanishing, and behind her, trembling air divided by her echo that shook like a reed. (1.6.3)

Part of what castrates the narrator is the orgasmic silence left in Helen’s wake. The silence seems pregnant with meaning, but inaccessible. In order to reach the meaning behind the silence, Plunkett and the poet-narrator employ different but comparable strategies that allow them figurative access to the secrets behind this feminine silence. Plunkett couches his narrative in the terms of a benevolent colonialism that places him as the giver of history to Helen at the center. In order to do so, the major reacts against a Western dialectical model of history that states that “A few make history. All the rest are witnesses” (2.19.3). In book one, Plunkett describes his motivation for finding a history for Helen as the off-shoot of pity, a way of making up for the female lack, and the lack of the subjected Other: “Helen needed a history, / that was the pity Plunkett felt towards her. / Not his, but her story. Not theirs, but Helen’s war” (1.3.3). As the male in possession of the written History, Plunkett validates his

LUCAYOS manhood and superiority to the subjected Helen. He is the white man, an educated soldier in the British army; as such he has access to history and can bequeath it to the underprivileged Other. Still, the Major is yet another faceless white man in the history of the empire. Helen’s lack of history is figured in economic terms, as the poet-narrator writes “but the bill had never been paid. / Not to that housemaid swinging a plastic sandal” (1.3.3). Plunkett validates his manhood as the source of recorded history. Yet, Robert Hamner notes that:

Walcott makes the Major conscious of the type of Eurocentric hegemony that Edward Said warns against in Culture and Imperialism : ‘Only recently have Westerners become aware that what they have to say about the history and cultures of “subordinate” peoples is challengeable by the people themselves’. (64)

The major’s consciousness of this alternate source of history stems not only from the contradictory historical documents of St. Lucian history he has found, but from his own experience of being the Other when Helen transfixes him with her gaze. The poet-narrator, in effect, takes on the position of the dispossessed literary historian who rewrites history from the position of the forgotten. The father’s injunction is central in this construction: “Your own work owes them / because the couplet of those multiplying feet / made your first rhyme. Look, they climb, and no one knows them; / they take their copper pittances, and your duty” (1.13.3). Similar to Plunkett, Helen’s beauty and stately bearing transfix him, placing him in the silent objectified position. Helen does not acquiesce to the male power of the narrator, nor does she satisfactorily return the gaze. In order to contain Helen’s castrating power, the narrator reduces her to an object of fetishistic scopophilia that is multiplied by the eyes of all the characters in the verse novel. The poet-narrator is in a position of power and is able to provide images of Helen from the perspective of many different characters. In book one, Walcott masterfully constructs a scene in which Helen walks through the lobby of a hotel and through the pool to the beach, thereby exposing her to the gaze of Lawrence the waiter, Maud, Plunkett, the narrator, the waitress and the tourists. These multiple viewpoints lift the image of Helen out of the single narrative of any one viewpoint and call into question any attempt to fix her meaning as a symbol, but also displace her potential for agency. The poet-narrator’s inscription of Helen into his own narrative can be read as a response to Plunkett’s creation of history for the dispossessed, as the narrator identifies himself as one of the historically marginalized. The poet-narrator also hopes to claim Helen for his own, but rather than voyeuristically imagine her as embedded in a historical and personal narrative, he removes her from linear time through fetishization. The fetishistic scopophilia then becomes a historical necessity, a way of validating the

LUCAYOS lives of those who may no longer exist. This historical fetishistic scopophilia appears to be less threatening not only for the male imagination, but also for the female subjectivity it aims to represent. Yet, Walcott questions even this ostensibly noble position with the fact that “There in her head of ebony, / there was no real need for the historian’s / remorse, nor for literature’s” (6.54.2). Neither position is correct as Walcott states in an interview about Omeros : “one reason I don’t like talking about an epic is that I think it is wrong to try to ennoble people. And just to write history is wrong. History makes similes of people, but these people are their own nouns” (143). Plunkett and the narrator couch their sadistic narratives in a language that appears to validate the position of the other, but also stems from a need to validate the male self in the face of objectification and marginalization. The identification of the landscape as feminine is another way that the male protagonists contain the castration anxiety caused by the female. Women are seen as reproducers of human beings, not culture. As Sherry Ortner states, “Woman creates naturally from within her own being, whereas man is free to, or forced to, create artificially, that is, through cultural means, and in such a way as to sustain culture” (77). The protagonists of The Lost Steps and Omeros leave the land of their mothers in order to establish their own identity, but upon return, must renegotiate their status as adult children and potential suitors. While such a position suggests Oedipal overtones, the identification of land as female serves as a way of containing and controlling the feminine with the male gaze. In The Lost Steps , Carpentier clearly maps out this connection between woman/nature and man/culture in Yannes’s introduction of the Adelantado: “To penetrate this world, the Adelantado had had to find the keys to its secret entrances: he alone knew of a pass between two trees” (126). The two trees figure as the protective legs of a female landscape guarding its private space. Once through the pass and into the channel, the fecundity of nature appears overwhelming and self- generating. The closeness of the passage, its moistness, and its apparent impenetrability creates a cervical space that the phallic canoe penetrates. Once through the dense jungle, the Adelantado’s settlement appears to exist in a womb-like space where time stands still. In this space, there is no room for cultural production. The narrator must beg and plead for paper to write his Threnody . Once it is completed, he must also recognize that there is no means of ever hearing his own production in that Adamic space. Thus, the very “naturalness” of the female landscape, which draws Carpentier’s narrator in as a validation of his masculinity, curtails his ability to create. The landscape’s regenerative and devouring effects are also seen in the capital where “For hundreds of years a struggle had been going on with roots that pushed up the sidewalks and cracked the walls (Carpentier 38). The power of nature asserts itself against the “boundary lines of the main avenues—drawn with the points of swords by the founders of the primitive city" (Carpentier 38). Thus, personifying the landscape as female undercuts the drive to possess that propels such identification.

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Walcott also codes the landscape of St. Lucia as female, but in a much more seductive and alluring way. The island is described in gorgeous and eye-catching imagery, worthy of a pin-up girl, which is not surprising given the turn towards a tourist economy in the Caribbean. The island seduces Plunkett away from England in his youth, and he reminisces about this experience as he covers the island with Maud in the Rover: “England seemed to him merely the place of his birth / how odd to prefer…these loud mouth forests on their illiterate heights, / these springs speaking a dialect that cooled him” (1.10.3). Plunkett prefers the island because it has given him peace, unlike England that dragged him to war. Yet, the landscape that gives him peace also reminds him of Helen. Every time a butterfly rises out of Maud’s garden, Plunkett feels the desire for Helen and her power over him. The landscape and its representations become a surrogate for Helen. Looking to escape her in history, Plunkett “edged the glass over the historic print, / but it magnified the peaks of the island’s breasts” (2.19.3). Helen’s figuration of the land extends to the other eyes of the poet-narrator as well. Achille feels that the island’s turn away from the authentic and traditional forms of livelihood, such as fishing, to the more artificial demands of tourism replicates Helen’s infidelity. In anger, he travels away from the island, “but he found no cove he liked so much as his own / village, whatever the future brought, no inlet / spoke to him quietly, no bay parted its mouth / like Helen under him” (7.60.1). The “hooked moon” and “twin horns” speaks to a castration anxiety, the same anxiety over Helen—the historical Helen, who cuckolded Menelaus. In a sense, the island cuckolds its many possessors, always turning over to another. Although the incursion of tourism can rightly be interpreted as another form of possession, the island’s “infidelity” signals a survivalist adaptability. 3 Helen in the yellow dress cuckolds Hector, Achille, the narrator and anyone who tries to possess her. In one of the few sections where she speaks in her own voice, Rosario, like Helen and the St. Lucian landscape, resists the narrator’s attempts to control her completely when he proposes marriage: “A legal wife, in Rosario’s opinion, was one for whom the husband could send the police when she left the house where he was free to indulge his infidelity, his cruelty, or his drunkenness. To marry was to come under laws drawn up by men and not by women” (Carpentier 226). She rejects the narrator’s attempts to own her on other than her own terms, and the narrator finds himself at a loss: “She disconcerted me with arguments employed by her sisters, and probably her mother, which may account for the secret pride of these women, who feared nothing” (Carpentier 226). The women have learned that survival as a woman requires accommodation and evasion. The woman must make a place for the man on her own

3 For an in-depth discussion of the presence of tourism in Omeros see “Forgettable Vacations and Metaphor in Ruins: Walcott’s Omeros ” by Natalie Melas ( Callaloo 28.1 (2005): 147-168).

LUCAYOS terms as much as is possible or risk its being invaded on the conqueror’s terms, a threat that all too often is realized. Rosario’s resistance to being completely conquered provides a measure of resistance for the Caribbean; she is the composite, the Other that will not be colonized completely, giving her a measure of freedom and power, albeit a limited one. 4 The narrator’s game of conquistador comes to an abrupt end shortly after this argument with Rosario. Nicasio, the leper, attempts to rape an eight-year-old girl in Santa Monica de los Venados and the narrator finally comes to a more complete understanding of his position: “The disgust and indignation I felt at the outrage was unspeakable; it was as though I, a man, all men, were equally guilty of this revolting attempt because the mere fact of possession, even willing, puts the male into an attitude of aggression” (Carpentier 230). The game becomes all too real when Marcos asks him to shoot the leper, and the narrator balks, unable to kill the man in whom he recognizes himself. The narrator’s quest comes to an end through the deus ex machina of the plane sent by his wife Ruth. The quest for origins cannot be completed, and the narrator’s psyche remains divided. When the narrator tries to return to Santa Monica de los Venados, he finds that the rising waters hide the entrance. He then retreats into the deracialized position of the artist: “None of this was for me, because the only human race to which it is forbidden to sever the bonds of time is the race of those who create art” (Carpentier 278). The novel ends with a new beginning, but not only for the narrator. Rosario too is given a new beginning in Santa Monica de los Venados. Contrary to what the narrator has thought or hoped for her, she did not wait for him; rather, she finds a husband in Marcos with whom to start a new life. As Yannes says, “she no Penelope. Young, strong, handsome woman needs husband. She no Penelope. Nature of woman here needs man…” (Carpentier 276). Rosario continues to forge her destiny, deciding her own fate instead of waiting for Odysseus. The narrator interprets Rosario’s independence as an inability to conceptualize history and differentiates himself from her through his position as an artist. In Omeros , the poet-narrator’s and Major Dennis Plunkett’s quests to possess Helen come to an end through death, but with a difference in that the artist and the historian do not remove themselves from the people, but rather solidify their ties with them. Plunkett becomes conscious of the impossibility of possessing Helen through the death of Maud, because Maud, not Helen, is the first colonized woman that the major

4 I am thinking of the resistance described by M. NourbeSe Philip in “Dis Place: The Space Between.” “Jean, Dina, Rosita and Clementina, piti Belle Lily, Boadicea and all the other jamettes decide—if the space of silence—the silence of the space between the legs has to be fractured by massa and his word, then they would at least decide who would facture it. / This is some progress. Perhaps” (95).

LUCAYOS has tried to possess. Maud 5 is Irish and even when she gives herself completely to him, he cannot penetrate her or know her. He puts it off in pursuit of the dying pleasures of empire on another colonized green island. Maud then, for Plunkett, is also a woman of color, and her Irishness in her music, religion, and traditions is characterized as exotic. Frustrated that he cannot make her more English, Plunkett almost slams the piano cover on her fingers when Maud plays Airs from Erin , but he cannot Anglicize her any more than he can Helen or her history. Plunkett can only be reconciled with Maud on the question of Ireland in death, as Irene Martyniuk notes: “This admission, that Ireland is heaven…finally brings him peace. Only now, with Ma Kilman’s answer, can he finally accept his wife as Irish” (145). It is crucial that Plunkett’s reconciliation with Maud occurs with the help of Ma Kilman, as his acceptance of her African beliefs not only allows him to reconnect with Maud, but also with the people of St. Lucia. After the séance, he is able to look at Helen without the burden of representation: “when he thought of Helen / she was not a cause or a cloud, only a name / for a local wonder” (7.61.1). Ma Kilman also precipitates the end of the narrator’s quest by healing Philoctete’s wound. This healing extends from the gangrened leg throughout the island, finally reaching the poet-narrator who says, “I felt the wrong love leaving me…I felt her voice draining from mine” (6.49.3). The wrong love is the selfish need of the artist for the poor to remain the same. As the poet-narrator confesses in book six, “Didn’t I want the poor / to stay in the same light so I could transfix / them in amber in the afterglow of empire, / preferring a shed of palm-thatch with tilted sticks / to that blue bus-stop?” The desire for stasis is antithetical to the creative desire and growth and healing must follow death. The narrator receives official sanction for his reintegration with the community in his descent to the underworld with Seven Seas: “My light was clear, its homage to Omeros my exorcism” (7.59.1). Helen’s role as the muse for the narrator gives way to that of the sea-swift as the poet-narrator says, “she sewed the Atlantic rift with a needle’s line” (7.63.3). Julie Minkler’s identification of Helen as the muse of Walcott’s Omeros also applies to the sea-swift: “This new woman…has taught her ‘Caliban’ the way of belonging anew…not to a person, but to a present that draws its energy from the past, a past that, although no longer Adamic (i.e. god-sent and male- propagated), nevertheless musters the divine” (276). The Lost Steps and Omeros both end with the image of continuity. Sisyphus’s vacation comes to an end, and “the sea was still going on” (7.64.3). The fears of castration that Mulvey posits on the male gaze are similar to the fears of objectification

5 Even the name Maud seems to be chosen specifically to illustrate this point. Maud Plunkett recalls Maud Gonne, Yeats’ muse and obsession whom he also figures as Helen in “No Second Troy.” Maud’s Irishness is also a way of expanding the references of the post-colonial world. In an interview with Edward Hirsch, Walcott says, “the Irish…were the niggers of Britain” (qtd. in Martyniuk 142).

LUCAYOS in the colonial experience. By presenting the relationship of the artist to the land in terms of a male gaze that is resisted by the female, Walcott and Carpentier revitalize the idea of resistance. To the end, Helen resists possession as do Rosario, Maud Plunkett, Ma Kilman, and others. Rosario prohibits the narrator’s control of her sexuality by refusing to marry him. Helen also rejects marriage as a way of being inscribed by the laws of a patriarchy that will not allow her freedom. The identification of the woman as Other by Walcott and Carpentier and her resistance to male forms of identification and domination translate into a site of resistance for the colonial other. Even though the resistance of the female signals the futility of the narrators’ identity quests, it is not the end of the quest for the authors. In the ambiguous and shape-shifting position of the woman, both find alternative forms of exercising resistance in historical understanding and are presented as fruitful avenues for change. Both Carpentier and Walcott end with the hope of a future generation. Although the ambiguity of the father may create a small army of Telemachuses looking for origins, the children are nonetheless adopted by Achille and the Adelantado’s son who will raise them in the ways of hybridity. Achille, not the narrator and not Plunkett, has the last word. This word is not expressed in language, but in action. As Walcott says, “The difficult part is the realization that one is part of the whole idea of colonization. Because the easiest thing to do about colonialism is to refer to history in terms of guilt or punishment or revenge… the rare thing is the resolution of being where one is and doing something positive about that reality” (Presson interview with Walcott 193). Achille has moved beyond the constructs of guilt, punishment, and revenge and positively tries to affect his reality by being father to Helen’s child and providing not only a home and shelter but also a heritage.

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Works Cited Carpentier, Alejo. The Lost Steps . New York, Knopf: 1956. Gonzalez-Echevarria, Roberto. “The Parting of the Waters.” Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. Hamner, Robert D. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott's Omeros. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Martyniuk, Irene. “Playing with Europoe: Derek Walcott’s Retelling of Homer’s Odyssey .” Callaloo 28.1 (2005): 188-199. Millington, Mark. “Gender Monologues in Carpentier’s Los Pasos Perdidos .” MLN 111.2 (1996): 346-367. Minkler, Julie A. “Helen’s Calibans: A study of gender hierarchy in Derek Walcott’s Omeros .” World Literature Today 67.2 (Spring 1993): 272+ Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Feminist Film Theory: A Reader . Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 58-69 Philip, M. NourbeSe. “Dis Place—The Space Between.” A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays . Ontario: Mercury, 1997. Presson, Rebeka. “The Man who Keeps Alive the English Language: An Interview with Derek Walcott.” Conversations with Derek Walcott . Ed. William Baer. Literary Conversations Ser. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. 189-193.

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“Water and Sustainable Living in The Bahamas:

An IInterviewnterview with Sam Duncome, EEEnvironmentalEnvironmental Activist and FFounderounder of ReRe----EarthEarthEarth.”.”.”.” 111

by Ian Gregory Strachan

Ian Strachan: Let us start with a basic question. Here on the island of New Providence two- thirds of the Bahamian people live and make their living. Where do we get our water from?

Sam Duncombe: Well we get our water from rain. We don’t have any rivers, any lakes and so what ends up happening, when it rains it percolates through the limestone into pockets under the earth, which are called aquifers or water lenses. If you look at an aquifer like a glass of water, there is usually salt water at the bottom and fresh water at the top. So it’s an oil and water type of thing. And the way we get our water is essentially drilling through the earth till we hit the pocket of water, fresh water. We also get water from reverse osmosis. We also barge water in from Andros to New Providence.

Ian Strachan : I was about to say that we talk about water lenses and digging wells. But isn’t the fact that there’s not enough water on the island of New Providence in these water wells to support all the people that live here? So we are essentially shipping water from Andros. Is it because the water supply is not there or is it that the water on the island of New Providence is compromised in some way?

Sam Duncombe : Well, I think it is a little bit of both. In some places the water has been over pumped. So you’re actually pulling out salt water. It’s too salty. In some cases it’s been polluted by oil or salt intrusion through digging through beaches and creating canals and marinas. We don’t have the volume of water in New Providence that would supply 270,000 people with drinking water. But when you go to an energy intense system like the reverse osmosis plant to create your water, the reality is that we are not paying the true cost of water anymore. Because it costs such a lot of money to actually run that plant.

Ian Strachan : Is this why essentially the Bahamas Water and Sewerage Corporation has been operating at a loss for so many years? Because Bahamians aren't really paying the true cost of water?

Sam Duncombe : We are not paying the true cost of water. I think that in general we also are wasting when it comes to water. I mean, how long do you have to water your grass? We are doing silly things for a country that has scarce water. And we do have scarce water according to the UN studies.

1 This interview was conducted on September 1, 2010.

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Ian Strachan: Do you get the sense that the average Bahamian is aware we that we live each day in conditions of water scarcity?

Sam Duncombe : No . I think that people who have water pressure problems, they actually understand that. But you know it’s not translating. I think part of the thing is that we don't pay the true cost of water. And so when you are not paying the true cost of water you cannot care about how much water you use. And we need to start factoring the conservation issue into how we use water because it’s going to become a problem. I mean, it is already a problem; it’s going to become an even bigger problem, down the road.

Ian Strachan : But do you think that people who live in areas that have been affected by the dry spells, people that live in the eastern district of New Providence for instance, and who have complained about this over the years, do you think they see it as a problem of scarcity, or do you think they see it as a problem of delivery?

Sam Duncombe : In New Providence about 50% of the water is lost through bad piping. So that's a significant part of the problem. Our infrastructure is very old and needs to be upgraded, and so that’s a big problem.

Ian Strachan : What impact are the privately owned wells having?

Sam Duncombe : Private wells have an impact on ground water resources because, at this point in time, there is no real regulatory body that says, Ian has a well, we are going to tax him for the water, or bill him for the water use. All over this country private citizens and businesses are using private wells. So you are extracting water out of an aquifer and you don't know how big the aquifer is; you don't know how many other people are tapping into that aquifer. You don’t know how many people’s septic tanks are leaking into that aquifer, so that is kind of a bigger problem in the sense of the pollution issue. We really don't know at the end of the day how much private wells are affecting the water supply, but they are.

Ian Strachan : People might say, why make me pay for this? I have a pump. I bought my pump. This is my land. I dug a hole in my land. The water is under my house. It is my water. Why should I pay these fees?

Sam Duncombe : Well water resources really belong to the government and we are all the government, right? And the thing is that if you are going to be affecting ground water levels by using ground water and it is not regulated so that we understand how much water is actually being used, (because I think the reality is we don't know how much water is coming out of private wells). Why shouldn't you be taxed? I mean water is a national resource.

Ian Strachan: What do you say to people that argue, look, water is a human right; why are you trying to make me pay for something that is fundamental to my existence just like air? Obviously there've been conflicts over the privatization of water in parts of the world. We do have class divides. Do we want everybody to pay? Is that fair? 2

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Sam Duncombe : The reality is that the Water and Sewerage Corporation has to exist. They have to be paid. Either that or we tax something else. I still believe that if you put no price on water it is going to be wasted. I do understand what you are saying and I have not actually figured that out in my head in terms of people who are desperately poor. They need to be able to have access to water.

Ian Strachan: And maybe that's why water is under priced right now.

Sam Duncombe : I’m sure that's part of the reason. Trying to keep it in a price bracket.

Ian Strachan : So you don't marginalize the poor. But again, maybe if you are able to pay, you should pay.

Sam Duncombe : Absolutely, I think you should pay. I haven't looked at how they structure it. But I know it is for the first X amount, it’s this much and then over that it's X amount per gallon over that. By conserving water you could actually be lighter on your pocket book. And maybe for people who are in desperate financial straits, up to a certain level of income, up to a certain amount of gallons, you could have reduced rates; but if you go over board, you need to pay over board.

Ian Strachan : Let’s talk about the ways we are polluting and may not be aware of it.

Sam Duncombe : There’s a sewerage issue, there's mechanics dumping oil and various other chemicals. There’s the amount of chemicals we use in our homes that are not biodegradable but are toxic. Pesticides on your lawns or herbicides or fungicides. All of those products eventually end up in the water table or in the sea. And it’s something that really needs to be looked at in terms of legislating what chemicals you can use. Well there are certain things that basically should not be allowed. Most people don't read. If you buy a chemical to spray weeds, for example. The impacts on fish are like almost instantaneous. It is so toxic to fish. So here's a little tip. If you are using one of those products, instead, if you put vinegar in a spray bottle and spray the weed it will die. We have become captured by these industries that sell us all of these disgusting products that we don't even give it a second thought. It would not be on the shelf if it was not okay, is our thinking. Let me tell you right now. If you’re spraying for bugs and stuff, just remember whatever is killing the bugs is gonna ultimately kill you. Because there are a lot of nasty chemicals in those products.

Ian Strachan: Is privatizing the Water and Sewerage Corporation going to necessarily bring about a better result for the Bahamian people?

Sam Duncombe : NO!

Ian Strachan: A private company is definitely going to charge you for the real cost of water.

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Sam Duncombe : The bottom line is that when you have foreign entities in charge of your essential services, you are setting yourself up for a real bad ride. Suppose, for example, they decided well, something’s broke and we can't deliver water and it is going to take us a week to deliver water. It is going to take us a week to get it together. There would be nothing that you can do about it. I think that a government is going to be a little bit more caring about making sure things happen for people as opposed to a foreign entity or an outside entity. To them it is money, that’s the bottom line.

Ian Strachan : Are there are things that we are doing that increases the risk to our fresh water aquifers?

Sam Duncombe : Well, climate change, with scientists saying that storms are going to increase. That does increase the risk absolutely. When you have climate change you have sea level rise and think about that oil and water in a glass, the oil being the sea water. When the sea water rises essentially what it would do is push the fresh water to the surface and it will evaporate. So it’s a compounded problem at that point. We have no control over climate change at the moment. But the government knows where the aquifers are. They need to keep people off of them. In New Providence the largest aquifer is on the last quarter of the island at the west. The Albany development went through the beach to create a marina which impacted the water table. And not only that. They are putting a golf course on top of the water table. And while they say they are going to line the ponds, essentially at the end of the day, when you finish spraying all those chemicals on the lawn, eventually that is going to percolate into the water table. When I say it is the largest, I mean it is a big blue deep hole. My concern is that we've got Albany, we got the South Ocean Golf Course already. We've got the Bahamas Electricity Corporation’s Clifton Pier Plant out there, and we’ve got loads of development happening out there; so we need to be careful about how we do things. If you are going to be creating all of this, you are changing the landscape. Deforestation plays a big role in terms of degrading water supplies.

Ian Strachan : And it affects your rain fall.

Sam Duncombe : And it affects your rain fall. One of the reasons we get rain is because we have a pine forest. We need to keep our eye on them and we need to preserve whatever of that, that we can.

Ian Strachan : Let’s talk about reverse osmosis. You would think, one thing we do have of is lots and lots of salt water. It would seem to make sense to convert that into drinkable water. On the surface it would seem to make perfect sense since you have unlimited supply.

Sam Duncombe: What happens is sea water is sucked in, they add different chemicals to the sea water to kill all the micro organisms, then it is pushed through a filter at a very high pressure. It takes a gallon and a half of sea water to make a gallon of fresh water. But that half a gallon that is left is essentially very, very briny water with chemicals in it and I don't know exactly what the 4

LUCAYOS chemicals are. Then that briny water is deep well injected into the ground. They say to a hyper saline pocket of the ocean. My thing is, you got that mix of chemicals that is going on because you added all of those chemicals to kill those microbes; that’s been injected into the water; how is it affecting the microbes that are in salt water that is receiving it. What happens when that heavy briny water mixes with regular salt water? I don't necessarily have the answer to that but there has got to be a step in between that extracting that salty, chemical-filled brine out, and depositing it back into the sea. I don't know that answer is.

Ian Strachan: Generally, how do you feel about expansion that kind of project? Do you think that is the way to go?

Sam Duncombe : I think in some cases it is going to be the only way to go. For our southern islands, for instance, where they don't get a lot of rain. Maybe that is the way to go for them. But for the northern islands where we get 63 inches of year compared to 24 inches in the south, we have options. I would like to think that if we mandate that any new construction would put in a rain water tank and maybe you get a rebate for that, it would help. Because anything that you do that the government doesn't have to facilitate at the end of the day, is a savings to the government, so maybe we could spilt the difference. Because it reduces the demand on the government supplying more water.

Ian Strachan : Is it safe to drink the rain water?

Sam Duncombe: No, you would have to filter it or chlorinate it as well. Chlorination has its own issues, but again if you chlorinate it you would get rid of the bacteria in water because bacteria does collect in water. You would have to clean it up before you drank it for sure. You have to consider, there are lots of pollutants that come with rain because rain is mixing with all the emissions from power plants, cars, and BP oil. All of that is going to play a role in terms of how clean your rain water is at the end of the day. What direction the wind was blowing when it started to rain, as well.

Ian Strachan: Let’s talk about the impact of the kinds of development we see, tourism development especially, on our supply of water. It obviously creates a larger demand: the large hotels, gulf courses. Then, of course, there is the actual construction. The creation of canals, the dredging. Obviously resort construction creates jobs. But there are all these collateral effects.

Sam Duncombe: The average Bahamian uses 45 to 50 gallons per day according to the reports. The average tourist uses 100 to 220 gallons of water per day. So when you consider that impact and when you talk about 4 million visitors a year, you are talking about on average 11,000 people in the Bahamas, everyday using that amount of water. So it is a significant impact and it seems to me that it’s getting a bit better, but there’s also a big hush, a sense that we can't ruin the bubble the tourists are in. And we can't remind them that we don't have a lot of water. Can you please take a shorter shower? Can you please keep your towel so it is not washed everyday? Why can't we do that like in other hotels? 5

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Ian Strachan: Because this is “Paradise.” They don't want tourists to know about our water shortage. Tourists are paying $300US a night in some cases. They want a clean towel every day. So we pay a price for that fantasy.

Sam Duncombe: Oh we absolutely pay a price for that fantasy. You know again when you have huge developments that create marinas. Now if the marina is not on a water table or is not in a wet land, I have less of an issue with it. But when you impacting water resources . . . The same thing, no golf courses on top of water tables. We just need to be sensible about what we allow to happen.

Ian Strachan : Did the government of the Bahamas really have at its disposal the right information in your estimation before it went into the Albany project, which is taking place in the area where New Providence’s largest aquifer is located?

Sam Duncombe: Yes they had. I don't know if you remember but Water and Sewerage was never officially asked to sit in on that project. Now they say that they had other people consultants doing it, but on the biggest water table in the capital? On New Providence I want the main body looking after my water to weigh in. I want the main body to say this is absolute insanity. You must be crazy. And that didn't happen. I don't get that.

Ian Strachan : Have you been able to access any environmental study for the Albany project?

Sam Duncombe: They do have their environmental impact study on the BEST (Bahamas Environmental, Science and Technology Commission) website. I think they had a portion of their environmental management plan on the website. When you’re shoving a development down my throat, my first reaction is to say, well no. If you are going to be that unreasonable about it. The FNM had just come into power and the PLP government had basically given the okay to go. The FNM did have two meetings out at the Lyford Cay (St. Paul’s) hall. Had they really listened to the concerns of the people there, maybe things would have been different. Why couldn't Albany and South Ocean combine a golf course? Why couldn't Albany and South Ocean combine a marina? They could have a portion of the marina where the Albany people go and a portion of the marina where the South Ocean people go. It was not rocket science and yet there was no interest in any kind of dialogue to make those changes. Also, if they had done the marina from the west they would not have destroyed the beach. But now they have destroyed Adelaide Beach as well, and over time, according to their own environmental impact assessment, the beach is going to erode.

As long as the government, (and it doesn't matter which government it is), continues to deny people’s rightful access to information and documentation for projects that they thinking of doing, we’re going to continue to have these battles. It should not be that a project is a done deal without coming to the communities that are going to be impacted by it or a project that will impact the Bahamas as a whole. What do you know about this area? What's going to be impacted? How can we minimize that impact? If we don't start doing that we are going to 6

LUCAYOS continue to have developments that are built on top of aquifers and we’ll continue to have mangrove areas that are destroyed.

Ian Strachan: That was my next question. The wet lands. In terms of the impact of developments that filled in wet lands.

Sam Duncombe : There’s a connection between the wet lands and fresh water. They know there’s a connection between them, but they're not exactly sure how that works. Beyond the fresh water issue with the wet lands there’s the basic issue that wet lands protect lands from storm flooding. They absorb water somehow and stop it from going further inland. They are hugely important to nursery fish like grouper; fish that we eat and fish that are part of the ecosystem, particularly the reef. It seems like we’ve known this for years. But the fact is that anywhere along the southern New Providence you go, there’s one development after another development after another development, that has impacted mangroves; it’s crazy!

Ian Strachan: What about waste? Our waste management and the impact that it might have. There are wet lands right near our largest national dump. You have a protected area now, Wilson Pond, literally right across the street from a landfill here in New Providence.

Sam Duncombe : Yes, a report that I read a few years back, actually said that the average Bahamian produces the same amount of waste as the average American. Something like 7 pounds per day per person. That is way too much garbage. We are very throw a way society. And going back to concern about waste management and polluting the water table. If you’ve got a half of gallon of paint left, it is going on the garbage ’cause you don't need it anymore. The little quarter inch of bleach at the bottom of the bottle, is going in the garbage. The oil, the pesticides, you name it; it is all going to one place. If the pits are not lined properly that will get into the ground water. There’s no two ways about it, and I would venture to say, Wilson Pond is probably a very dirty place.

Ian Strachan : I just think about motor oil alone. And I am saying to myself where is all the motor oil going? When I'm finish changing oil in my automobile, I put them back in the bottles. But I end up putting it right back in the dump. And it is collecting with everything else. Should there be somewhere I could take?

Sam Duncombe : Well that would be part of the hazardous waste site that would do it. The other thing was that again 2 -3 years ago the government was asking for proposals to do waste to energy plant to supplement a portion of how BEC produces energy with alternative energy. One of the big contenders was waste to energy plant. Now I've heard some weird stuff in this process that another company was allowed to come in after the bidding process was finished. Certainly 2 years into it. How do you allow another company to jump in at that stage is just beyond me? But the idea would be that the waste would be collected and sorted to some extent and then burnt at very high temperatures and then it would go through a series of scrubbers to eliminate as much emissions as possible. Yes there would be emissions but on a smaller scale. A 7

LUCAYOS much more steady scale. That dump is probably gassing all the time, so, certainly for this island, it is something that we need to do.

Ian Strachan : The thing that is on everybody's mind is this environmental nightmare in the Gulf, British Petroleum’s Deep Water Horizon oil spill. I guess they were lying about how much oil was being spewed into the Gulf. How is this going to affect the Bahamas? That is what everybody wants to know. Well, everybody should want to know.

Sam Duncombe : There are a couple of things. Crude oil is toxic. It stinks and it’s essentially toxic. I think the biggest crime in my mind was that they sprayed I don't know how many millions of gallons, of dispersant on it. When I say dispersant, think about your dish washing liquid, but don't think about some non-toxic dishwashing liquid, really nasty chemicals.

Ian Strachan : The US government told them to stop doing it and they kept doing it, I seem to remember that.

Sam Duncombe : They were actually spraying at the source, 5,000 feet down.

Ian Strachan : As well as on the surface.

Sam Duncombe : As well as on the surface. And the idea behind that was to hide as much of the problem as possible.

Ian Strachan : And now they you can't see very much of the oil on the surface but you can smell it.

Sam Duncombe : There is a 22 mile long plume that stretches from where the rig was towards Pensacola. 22 miles long under water. I forget how deep it is.

Ian Strachan: Does BP realize they have to do something about that? Or do they feel that since it is not on the surface their off the hook? Catastrophe is done, thank you very much.

Sam Duncombe: I think that they’re going get out of this much as they possibly can. You know when this happened they basically went out and secured the services of a bunch of lawyers and scientists; so they own them. Anybody who could've spoken in a scientific capacity or legal capacity was already captured by BP. This 20 mile long plume is filled with tiny, tiny, droplets of oil and the dispersant (Corexit) that they were spewing all over the place. So what they created is now a situation that's impossible to deal with.

Ian Strachan : It's a chemical bomb. A moving chemical bomb under water headed your way.

Sam Duncombe : To me I find it is quite terrifying that these nasty chemicals have been released into the Gulf; that pretty much they’re going to be, if they have not already been, taken up by the jet stream which hugs the eastern coast of the United States. I was speaking to scientists who've told me that there’s an exchange of water between the Gulf Stream and the west coast of

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Andros every 144 days. So we've already had that exchange at least once. Part of what scientists were monitoring in the Gulf was that these plumes are going up under the sea beds in the ocean and travelling along aquifers. They’re actually starting to affect the ground water as well. Andros is where we get a lot of our water from.

Ian Strachan : Is it safe to say the west coast of Andros is probably the most important environment site in the country?

Sam Duncombe : Well it is very important, that's for sure. It is one of the places that has had the least amount of human impact. It's home to tons of species. And it is very important. One of the currents of the jet stream that I saw took it up along the West End, Grand Bahama also and it kind of sat up in the corner of West End, Grand Bahama. So that’s the big concern too. Essentially water has no boundaries. It doesn't say well this water belongs in the Gulf so it can't mix with the Atlantic. We are in the Atlantic and the Gulf eventually is a part.

Ian Strachan: And what about the marine life?

Sam Duncombe : There were three sperm whales that washed up in Eleuthera a while back.

Ian Strachan : I was trying to figure out what happened there.

Sam Duncombe : I don't know. I have no idea. Did they come from the Gulf and were poisoned in the Gulf and ended up dying here? There's was huge cover up going on. They were basically scooping dead animals out of the Gulf of Mexico and taking them to a site of disposal so the public would not know the enormity of what they had done. Huge fish kills. Dolphins and whales were absolutely affected. Huge sea bird kills. They were giving us numbers like a thousand birds were killed. Give me a break! Come on. That's just not possible. In Alaska 21 years ago when the Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled, 21,000,000 gallons, or thereabouts, the Pacific herring has never recovered. There are certain species of birds that have never recovered. A large portion of the killer whale population just died off. And not only that, people are getting sick from the smell that comes off the oil. They basically cause chest problems; in some cases they cause liver problems, kidney problems. And people in the Gulf were told to clean up oil with no proper gear on. They went out and they are sick. And people in Alaska were sick.

Ian Strachan: What are the possible scenarios in terms of our own impact? The worst case scenario. Can we see some portion of this underwater plume reaching our shores. Is that possible?

Sam Duncombe : I don't see how it isn't possible. It’s north western Florida where the eastern end of the plume is now . The thing is by the time the loop current picks it up and by the time the Gulf Stream rolls it out, it might be severely diluted. You may think, “I don't see that big cloud,” but you are getting bits and pieces of the cloud. It's like bio-degradable plastic. If you leave it out in the sun long enough, you’re not going to have one bag to pick up anymore. You’re going 9

LUCAYOS to have thousands and thousands and thousands of tiny little pieces of plastic, which are also a problem. Now they already know that’s a problem. Because what you’re doing is you’re introducing this extra chemical into a natural ecosystem. So birds will be picking it up; if it gets into the water fish will be eating it. They can't eat plastic and similarly, animals in the Gulf are ingesting the oil. In some cases it is just killing them, because it's going through their gills.

Ian Strachan: How long does a spill impact the water and the wider environment?

Sam Duncombe : They say eventually the oil that sits on the surface that is not sprayed by all these dispersants does naturally break up. I don't think it ever goes away. Twenty-one years later you can go to where the Exxon Valdez ran aground and you can dig holes. And I think they dug 12,000 holes 6,000 holes had oil in them.

Ian Strachan : And they didn't dig that deep.

Sam Duncombe: They've seen changes in crabs that live amongst the rocks. They've seen changes in fish, they've seen changes in birds and obviously that's going to happen in the Gulf. It’s worse because they've broken up the oil in such tiny little droplets that you can't do anything about it anymore.

Ian Strachan : How are we going to know if our fish are tainted? How are we going to know if our crabs are changed? What is our plan? What is our long term plan?

Sam Duncombe : Now here is what I know: when the Oil Contingency Team was out there and about, they were going to Cay Sal Banks, the west side of Andros; well they had done a lot of assessment testing in the west side because they had done research with the Nature Conservancy a couple of years back. Again 2-3 years back, so they do have some means to make an assessment there. They were focusing on Cal Sal, Bimini and Grand Bahama. The reality is that assessment does need to go on for the next 25, 30, 40, 50 years.

Ian Strachan : A government minister was recently on the front page of a daily saying that our government was not going to permit oil exploration at this time. That we need to protect our environment.

Sam Duncombe : What does “at this time” mean? I mean, in 10 years are they going to allow it? The reality is oil drilling is never going to be safe. In a country that has over 300 days of sunshine, I think we need to start looking at powering ourselves alternatively. First of all the place that they said they wanted to do exploration was just off Cay Sal Bank. The pristine area that everyone was running around trying to assess and figure out. If it's such a pristine area and if it is so important for fisheries why are we contemplating drilling there?

Ian Strachan : ’Cause that's where the oil is.

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Sam Duncombe : I don't think we should do any oil exploration. Because oil exploration in and of itself is detrimental to the fish, to fish eggs. It has been known to rupture fish bladders and essentially they die. It ruptures fish eggs because the huge air guns they use send an enormous charge toward the sea bed and it reads the sea bed so they can figure out where the oil may or may not be. But that's a huge noise that they’re blasting into the ocean. That has the capacity to destroy fish eggs, to kill fish. It disrupts whale and dolphin behavior. It could probably easily deafen whales and dolphins. It will cause whales and dolphins to get off of their migratory paths, where they may be going to breed or to feed. It's not as though, oh it’s just oil exploration; it’s a whole package. The human race has gone on the wrong train. That’s kind of the bottom line. We’ve been powering ourselves with solar energy forever. The whole earth exists because of the sun. And we need to look at that resource and start applying that resource to our daily lives. The sun can't have a spill and the winds can't have a spill. I am a firm believer in the Chief Seattle quote that says, "We don't inherit the earth from our fathers, we borrow it from our children." I think that we owe future generations. The planet we inherited was already dirty. But what I'm saying is that we've dirtied it even more.

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Water: The Next Frontier? ::: A Review of the Film Blue Gold

Marjorie Downie

Blue Gold: World Water Wars a 90-minute documentary film based on the book by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water adds to the environmental urgencies of our time. The film foregrounds the paradigm shift in attitudes to water from an ancient right and common good to an economic commodity harnessed to aggrandize its owners. Comparisons are made between water and gold or oil to highlight the danger to society and civilization itself not only from water pollution and scarcity but also from those intent on privatizing the ownership of the world’s water.

The film documents the attempts—in some cases highly successful ones—of large global conglomerates like General Electric and Proctor and Gamble to purchase and control the water resources of various countries. It exposes the ways in which such organizations have been aided and abetted by the World Bank which claims to have the interests of so-called “developing” countries at heart. Water is seen as the next frontier in the environmental crisis that faces the planet and is increasingly becoming the site of confrontations between governments farmers the citizenry and corporate powers. The relationship between control of water resources and power over the “have-nots” is graphically illustrated.

The film begins by reviewing the importance of water to the planet and to the human body and the unpleasant consequences of water deprivation. Images of drought cracked earth and bodily dysfunction create a graphic depressing view of a world suffering from water scarcity. The story of the decline of ancient Mayan civilization as a result of damage to the hydrologic cycle is used to support the idea of water’s importance to civilization itself. Clips of a young schoolgirl reciting the normal processes of the water cycle highlight the simplicity of the process while implying how easily it can be disrupted by short- sightedness and environmental abuse.

The dangers to health and reproduction are also elucidated. We are told for example that water pollution can lead to lower sperm counts in men and miscarriages in women. Such illnesses as polio hepatitis and tuberculosis are rampant in one polluted river at the border of Mexico and the United States— border guards take 18 different medicines in case they fall into this water! LUCAYOS

Hospital wastes sewage and chemicals are some of the substances that pollute the world’s fresh water resources—which constitute only 3% of the world’s water as the remaining 97% is salt water—one of the interesting factoids this film makes available to us. (Another: It takes 350000 liters of water to manufacture one car.)

The point is made that wetlands purify water but as the world’s wetlands are repurposed this source of purification is taken out of service a fact of which we here in the Bahamas should take particular note as we continue to build on our wetlands. The film reminds us that 60% of the world’s wetlands have been destroyed in the last 100 years. Ground water is being mined faster than it can be replenished. The depletion of the watershed has already led to the sinking of certain areas and cities as in parts of Mexico.

The process of desertification is accelerating as a result of ground water pumping and citification. As more of the landscape becomes “hardscape” it becomes difficult for ground water to return to the earth. The earth literally gets too hard for the water to get back into the ground. Deforestation also contributes to desertification as fresh water runs off into the sea. Large dams are another big part of the problem. Over 50000 large dams have been built around the world. One expert compared dams to a heart attack choking the arteries of the earth.

The film exposes some very interesting political issues including how rich countries multinationals and even individuals have been able to harness water for economic gain. It shows how for example the World Bank controlled by the big four (the US Canada Europe and Japan) forged an alliance with the big three water companies to force poor countries to privatize water in exchange for debt relief. Governments essentially had to give away their water rights to private companies in exchange for debt relief. Corruption has played a big part in this. Vicente Fox CEO at Coca-Cola before becoming President of Mexico gave huge concessions to Coca Cola to use scarce fresh-water resources for its profit-making enterprise. In some African countries a bottle of Coke is significantly cheaper than a bottle of water. Corruption has even allegedly contributed to the apparent assassination of protestors.

The precedent-setting sale of water resources in Michigan to Nestle a private company illustrates the danger of allowing a region’s water to be exported out of that region. Such practices result in the drying up of that ecosystem’s water. Removing water from an ecosystem is shown to be a dangerous practice. Water is also being moved out of rural areas and into cities or other countries. Roses LUCAYOS grown in Kenya with scarce water resources effectively move water from Kenya to Europe where the flowers are sold. Kenyans are told this is the solution to their debt problem but in the meantime their freshwater lakes are seriously depleted.

The film shows that the answer to the water problem does not necessarily lie with technologies such as desalination or nuclear energy. Desalination is expensive uses fossil fuels and eventually contributes to environmental degradation; there is no plan to deal with nuclear waste.

According to the film some water wars are being presented as religious conflicts. In Bolivia even rainwater was at one point privatized. Citizens were told they had no right to catch and store rain water as water rights in that country had been sold to a private company. In China water is being “stolen” from the clouds as technology is used to make the rain fall before the clouds get to the next village. Some parts of the earth are already experiencing serious water shortages causing the collapse of cities and ancient ways of life.

With water being treated like oil some of the world’s rich families appear to be buying water resources as investments for the future. The Bush family has purchased large tracts of land in water-rich Paraguay apparently in an attempt to control significant water resources close to the United States. 500 US Special Forces have been deployed to Paraguay; some suspect they are there to protect these resources.

While the film focuses on the serious dangers to all on the planet as a result of these developments fortunately it also indicates what people can do to reverse the damage. It stresses the importance of mobilizing the populace to protect water resources from greedy multinational corporations and damaging environmental policies. People must say no to the privatization and commodification of water and return it to the status of a common good.

Hydrologist Dr. Michal Kravcik argues that a simple remedy can ensure water remains around one’s home. He recommends irrigating the land with rain water and creating little water catchments by digging holes in the ground that will facilitate the trapping of water. This he says is a “simple cheap solution to a complex problem.” Other solutions are to stop removing ground water in large amounts localizing food systems decommissioning dams using hydroponics to grow food removing car pollutants limiting regional populations to that which can be sustained by the available water system living within the limits of our LUCAYOS water means and demanding that water be treated as a human right and a public trust not a commodity. Technology can also play a part. For example permeable pavements can be utilized in cityscapes to enable rainwater to return to the earth.

The film uses an impressive number of experts and activists from around the world to support its claims. Executive producers Mark Achbar and Si Litvinoff have created a disturbing thought-provoking film that asks us to become militant in questioning what is happening to our water resources and taking individual and collective action to preserve them. This well-documented film is a disturbing but timely reminder that water is synonymous with life itself and that we need to protect the source of life on our rare blue planet. LUCAYOS

Zong! :The Transformation of Language into Sacred Space

Helen Klonaris

The book Zong! (2008) by poet M. NorbeSe Philip invokes the memory of Africans enslaved on the Dutch ship Zong in 1781, 150 of whom were willfully thrown overboard on the way to Jamaica so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance. If they had died of more natural (sic) means on board the ship, the insurers would not be responsible for the owners’ loss in profit; if they died overboard, as a result of rebellion or other unforeseen calamities, then the owners could be compensated. The legal battle for compensation was, however, lost by the ship’s owners, not because the act was seen as murder, it was not; but because the throwing overboard of 150 Africans (read: cargo ) was seen as unnecessary and avoidable (189). Philip uses the only accounts available, legal documents that recorded the ship owners’ legal battle with the underwriters in Liverpool, as the found text for the work of Zong! and was guided by one particular ancestral voice, Setaey Adamu Boateng, in the telling of a story, which Philip tells us “cannot be told” (189).

I begin reading Zong! out loud. “w w w w a wa” (3). Very quickly, I am whispering, my voice and breath ragged. The letters far from each other sound like voices calling out from the water, like voices mourning. There is a sense in which words are not the thing here, that words must get out of the way for something else to come through. White space fills these pages, like water. I want to weep or vomit. Something is pushing, rising up or out and I don’t know what it is. What I feel is an urgency in the coming apart of words to tell a story, or let a story emerge, a story that is lost in the water . I must keep reading even though I dread the reading, and pause, every page, every few pages, to re-compose. There is a way in which the meanings of words, meaning itself, is coming apart inside me, to let something else through. I go back to the page: “the weight in want/in sustenance/for underwriters/the loss” (5).

Words moving away from words, leaving words, making space for what? Grief? The silent story? The loss of life? Of meaning? One aspect of meaning Philip is questioning is the concept of time, the idea that this story took place in the past, and that the past is over:

this is not was or LUCAYOS

should be this be not should be this should not be

is (7)

If the past is with us still, and the water is still vibrating with story that cannot be told , how to break into existing language and find what is true there? How can she/we make sense of what happened? What meaning can be made out of what is known? Philip asks, How to make meaning using the language of the people for whom Africans and ‘property’ meant the same thing? Can there be justice in, within, the framework, structure, words of such a language? Philips answers her questions by forcing language apart, an exercise in violence that, she tells us, mirrors the violence done to the Africans aboard the ship Zong (193). She wants to see what may exist beyond that language in the many gaps that have opened up.

As I go deeper into the text, I am thinking about how I have to loosen/lose what I know (how I read, how I understand) in order to experience the text:

“question the now/the this/the that/the frenzy” (30) “there/is was/is is/should/and/have been/there is/was/there” (38) “the might have in existed” (40) “is/justice/Africa/is/the ground/is/negroes” (42)

But I can’t help it; I’m looking for (justice) meaning in these words. “Is” is no longer just a verb, but a noun that is also an adjective: “is justice” is not a question, becomes a statement, a declaration of justice based on is-ness ; the is-ness of what exists beyond the language of European law. Philip and Setaey Adamu Boateng are asking us to revision ‘the evidence’, to revision what we are told exists; i.e. the ‘might have’ in ‘existed’(40).

The text becomes more and more dense; my search for meaning amongst words more and more at risk. The words keep coming apart, harder to read. How can there be meaning? I must stop reading. I can make no sense of the words, the pieces and bits of surviving fragments (of words). My head spins with the un-meaning of them. I wade through them, like so much water, trying to get to something recognizable; a piece of an LUCAYOS idea, a surviving body part; but what if nothing is recognizable? I have to stop. Catch my breath.

I think: it takes courage, or something fierce, to keep reading. The courage to step over board into meaninglessness –the enormity of, vastness of meaninglessness– is painful. All that is familiar –a name, the wholeness of a sentence, (of a body, a human being) – has been stripped away; the terror is deep; what Philip is asking of us: to step overboard (willingly, we can choose) and experience the loss of what contains us (language, its rules, its customs) what we’ve come to know, expect – the safety of structures we’ve inherited; no, not safety; how dangerous it is to imagine that language is safe. I think: how language is set up in my guts and bones, how I have been taught (since I learned to read on Dick and Jane primers) to trust it, and how it lives in my skin (which is olive, but white for all intents and purposes) my muscles, invisible, framing my points of view. Philip’s own distrust of language, well founded, forces her to pull it apart, to expose it, draw attention to its insides, to the stories/silences/murders/massacres that have been hidden there (195). In the reading of her text, I stop trying to compose myself. (My composition is broken). I stop pretending I am not disturbed: I am disturbed, ill-at- ease, dis-configured. In order to continue I must allow a coming apart inside me. I have to allow a space (a period of time) of not knowing, of confusion, of disorientation, before I can be an acceptable witness to the lives and deaths of people whose story is lost in the water.

Reading Zong! is its own journey. Again, I’ve stopped, marked the page, folded the book closed on my bed. But I can still see the water, the swell of it, the terrifying depths, murky metallic blue; I can still taste salt air stuck at the back of my throat. This isn’t a story. Between these pages, it’s something else: a radical act, physical, embodied, because language is of the body; a mutilation of language (193), a holy vivisection to expose its parts, and a healing that is not easy or gentle: reading Zong! is dangerous. The journey is fraught. In part, because Philip is exposing the danger in ignoring the deliberate trickery of a language that is birthed by and gives birth to a system that “could enable, encourage even, a man to drown 150 people as a way to maximize profits” (195). At the same time, Zong! compels us to consider the grief at the bottom of the ocean that is unspeakable, a grief that defies narrative, storying, and yet which calls and calls to be heard and seen; all the better, perhaps, that we may see with clearer eyes this ‘present’ in which we are living.

Days have passed and I open Zong! once more. The pages that follow are waves and waves of broken words images sounds utterances that conjure in me a feverish and chaotic dream state, dreams in which partial and incongruent images and sounds jerk and pull and jar in and against familiar oceanic rhythms. English words and syllables LUCAYOS are interrupted and joined by Fon and Shona and Yoruban words: “the oba sobs”, the king sobs, repeats, weaves its mourning through the disorientation of meaning, and I can only begin to imagine the disorientation of the African women and men, and children, there were children, on board the Zong and those who died in the water.

In these pages more than in the preceding ones, I sense less and less Philip’s voice or sensibility and instead feel the voices of African women and men surfacing: urgent whispers, moans, cries, sometimes forming a chorus of sound, other times single voices calling and answering to each other; calling on each other and on God, Olú ; calling on divinity whose names are many. And, because I do not expect it, what I do not immediately accept (of course I do recognize it, I notice that I do) and therefore try to do away with in my own mind, is the voice of Europeans, or a particular European male, whose words are woven within and between those of Africans (204). It would be simpler to see these pages as the voices of Africans calling on us to witness to them, finally; but the European voices moving through these pages as well cause the text to become an even more complex calling: a cacophony of words voices meanings that forces us to push past any essentialist gropings for understanding and towards an opening out of which, through which, we might allow new life language to emerge.

In the final pages of Zong! I am quiet. I find myself listening to words differently than when I began. I hear how they might be spoken by several voices at once, or in counterpoint to one another, so that there are multiple threads of meaning that exist alongside each other and in relation to one another, and all at once: …how do i ge/t this to y/ou if only I c/ould write on wa/ter my sins ha/ve the sea say to yo/u what I can/not I he/ar only the ro/ar of r/aw water t/he sea s voi/ce a fis/t to the he/ad if you hap/pen upon my s/in the sea gi/ves up it s d/read secret w/ho can bear t/o hear the bo/nes of g/od lie here… (171-172). Philip tells us that she was attempting in Zong! to “exaqua,” to exhume the bodies, the bones, of the dead from their sea water grave (201-202). By taking language apart, word by word, letter by letter, Philip has created an altered space –a sacred space– in which the voices of the dead and the dead themselves come through to tell their own stories. In the pages of Zong! for moments I joined the dead in that altered space, and, leaving it now, my body remembers.

LUCAYOS

Review of Jamaica for Sale

Ian Gregory Strachan

Esther Figueroa and Diana McCaulay’s 2008 documentary film, Jamaica for Sale begins with a trick. Audiences are asked to rise for the playing of the Jamaican National Anthem. I provide here the first verse, although in the film you only hear the music:

Eternal Father, Bless our Land, Guard us with thy mighty hand, Keep us free from evil powers, Be our light through countless hours, To our leaders, great defender, Grant true wisdom from above, Justice, truth be ours forever, Jamaica, land we love, Jamaica, Jamaica, Jamaica, land we love

I call this maneuver by the directors a “trick” because while this music is playing one is not treated to beautiful vistas of the coastline, to views of rivers and waterfalls, flowers, fruits, wildlife, or historic buildings, monuments, or salt-of-the-earth citizens. The viewer stands and is made witness to tourism’s harsh interventions onto the Jamaican landscape: tall iron fences, wetlands being filled in, dusty roads and construction sites, barbed wire on beach front, barbed wire in front of signs selling luxury homes in gated communities, the imposing entrances of said-same gated communities, a sign that says “Scenic View” in front a view that’s blocked by a tall wall, a sign that says “Trespassers will be Prosecuted” and finally shots of the cruise ship “Carnival Conquest” behind barbed wire fencing. The shot of the cruise ship is most appropriate, since this film is about the conquest of Jamaica, the conquest of Jamaica by tourism. Not just any tourism but the worst kind of coastal mass tourism development.

The film moves from this opening montage to scenes of disgruntled workers protesting their poor pay and working conditions on the construction site of the Fiesta Hotel, and then to news footage of an incident in which part of the hotel collapses, injuring workers. We are then given views of the encroachment of resorts along the north coast of Jamaica, resorts, which, according to the commentators in the film, are out of scale for the island nation. One such development, according to a local environmentalist and small hotelier, has destroyed a nesting ground for birds and will seriously compromise a turtle nesting site. “We have to give way for some development but how much are we gonna give?” asks Hugh Moncrieffe. LUCAYOS

The film then takes an ironic journey down memory lane, providing archival footage of the heady days of Jamaican independence and juxtaposing this to the long history of tourism development in the country. Or to express this in another way, the film juxtaposes the promise and expectation of Jamaican independence to the empty promise of prosperity through tourism development (a promise made and remade by Jamaican leaders). The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that the filmmakers see large scale tourism development as more of a betrayal of the hopes of independence than a fulfillment of the same. Interviews with crafts people, construction workers and hotel employees send the message that the benefits to the working class are minimal as far as tourism is concerned. Meanwhile we are told that coastline development has severely damaged reefs and mangroves and this has in turn seriously hurt the livelihoods of those who make their living from fishing. Even glass bottom boat operators are hurt because there are few fish to see.

Indeed, the film develops its thesis that Jamaican mass tourism is unsustainable by way of repeated oppositions. Images of angry workers protesting “slave wages” are juxtaposed to pristine vistas of white tourists sunning themselves on white sandy beaches and playing golf on lush green grass. Images of former prime ministers granting hotel developments tax breaks are juxtaposed to those of the shanty towns where many hotel employees must live. At one point we are told that 50% of rural Jamaicans have no access to piped water and most have no sewerage treatment facilities.

Most of all, the film highlights the high price Jamaica is paying in terms of environmental damage as a consequence of large scale, virtually unregulated coastal development. “The long term effects of the operation of their sewage systems, their laundry, their pools, waste water, it’s inevitably going to lead to the degradation of the marine environment on a scale unprecedented,” says conservationist, Wendy Lee. She notes that “the decision makers in the government, the people who actually give permits for these huge resorts or invite them here in the first place, really do not appreciate the importance of the marine environment or the coral reefs. They don’t appreciate it either as part of our natural heritage, or as an economic income earner through the dive industry or the value of coral reefs for protecting the shore line.”

Adding insult to injury is the fact that Jamaicans are being denied access to their beaches and in some instances must pay to swim. At one point the film gives us scenes of a town meeting at which community members confront hotel developers in an effort to identify access points to a beach in St. Ann’s. The developers insist they are complying with the law and that the beach is accessible; the citizens insist the access points don’t exist. LUCAYOS

Nothing hits you in the gut quite as well as the filmmakers’ use of a 1982 song by Barbardian calypsonian, The Mighty Gabby. The song is called “Jack,” and was apparently written about a corporate lawyer for the Barbados Tourism Board. I’ve included a few verses here:

I grow up bathin in sea water But nowadays dat is pure horror If I only venture down by di shore Police tellin me I can’ bathe no more

Cause Jack, don’t wan’ me to bathe on my beach Jack tell them to kick me outta reach Jack tell them I will never make di grade Strengthen security, build barricade Dat can’ happen here in dis country I want Jack to know dat di beach belong to me

Dat can’ happen here Over my dead body Tell Jack dat I say Dat di beach belong to we

Tourism vital, I can’t deny But can’t mean more than I and I My navel string bury right here But a touris’ own could be anywhere Yes Jack, don’t want me to bathe on my beach Jack tell them to kick me outta reach

Jamaica for Sale is a moving piece of filmmaking. It is an unrelenting, and thoroughly convincing exploration of the collateral damage of Jamaican tourism. Its strong message overpowers its technical flaws. Is it a one-sided take? Certainly, but that doesn’t discredit this film.

I found myself wondering where the voices for alternative, less harmful forms of tourism were to be found, and I realized that they were slipped in there surreptitiously. The filmmakers speak to a few small hoteliers who help tell the story of how the big resort investments are making Jamaica’s north coast an ugly mess. It’s largely left to the viewer to figure out that smaller and locally owned is always better. To be fair though, the filmmakers contrast some of the absurdities of Jamaica’s policies toward beach LUCAYOS access to the more sensible approaches taken in Barbados, so they do present some alternatives.

The parallels are obvious to any Bahamian who watches this film. The differences are equally as apparent. Bahamians have fared much better in terms of benefiting from mass tourism, in large part due to our considerably higher wages. But concerns about the environmental destruction caused by coastal development, the strain tourism causes on local resources like water and fuel, and the decreasing access to beachfront and land generally should all ring true for us here in “Paradise.”

LUCAYOS

Jellyfish Season

Easter by Uncle Cyril mean swimmin from de time de sun get hot enough till yuh fingers quail up an yuh lips crack wid all de salt. Nate mudder an Auntie Carmen treadin water, wearin badin caps, bright badin suits, red an yellow. Uncle Mackie swimmin in a circle roun an roun a group a women, an Nate hear dey laughter echo up de beach. Early in de mornin is a bad time cause de water dotted wid jellyfish-- big an see-through, like plastic bags-- man-a-war, wid green an purple an red tread floatin roun it, like de rays a de sun. Now is nearly noon, buh here an dere Nate spot one. Sometimes it dead, limp, an de colours pale. Buh some a dem alive. He dive, wriggle near de bed an burs to de surface. Dive again. He keep his eyes open in de salt, watchin fuh starfish, stingray. Uncle Mackie tell him he skim inches over a san shark once, so he lookin out fuh dose too. Den he feel it. It cling to his belly, sen a prickin like a hundred needles roun his middle, den leh go sudden. He watch de body, white jelly, treads floatin behin as it dart away. He want to cry buh he hol it, paddle pas Auntie Carmen an his mudder to de shore an stan up dere quiet wid his back to de sea. “Wha happen, boy,” his mudder shout behin him. He hear her wadin towards him, den she put her hans on his shoulders an turn him roun to face her. “Gawd!” she say, as she watch down. Welts criss-crossin his belly. Nate ca hol it no more, so he cry, an she take his han an walk wid him inside. Dey bade him an dress him in his pyjamas, put him in de bed an draw de drapes. When he try to sit up, his head feelin light. His mudder hol a glass a lime juice fuh him to drink. She ress her han on his head an sigh. Auntie Carmen ahks if dey should take him by de doctor. Nate mudder say, “He need sleep more dan anyting. De tablets will help, an we could check him every hour or so.” Nate eyes tryin to stay open buh dey only closin down.

******

He wake wid his skin burnin, ca tell wha time it is. Behin de door de house quiet, buh he could hear waves on de beach. Somebody come in de room an sit on de edge a de bed. She holin a small clay bowl in bote hans. “Ma?” “Not yuh mudder, chile,” Nate granmudder move de sheet dat coverin him an unbutton his pyjama shirt. She dip her fingers in de bowl an rub someting cool over his belly. “Seaweed,” she say. “Yuh have to grine it up. It not like de seaweed da’s grow near de shore. It from way out in de ocean. Where de fish so big dey could turn over de fishermen boats if dey want. Yuh should see it, huge. Bennin wid de currents, purple, an red an green,” she smile, get up an wipe her hans on de towel near his bed. Nate ca take his eyes off a her. He fin he cryin. She shake her head at him slow, ben an

1

LUCAYOS pass her cool fingers over his forehead. “Doh min, chile, yuh’ll feel better in de mornin.” “Stay, Gramma,” Nate say. “Till yuh fall asleep,” she answer. He take a deep breat an roll over on his side. When Nate wake he could smell bread bakin. Everybody in de kitchen, even Uncle Cyril, an Nate hear him say, “Ah sleep like a baby las night.” “Ah went to check on de boy a few times,” his mudder say, “an he was ressin peaceful.” Den Mackie speak: “Buh eh-eh, Ah now remember ah dream a Mammy las night.” “Doh tel mih dat!” Nate mudder say, “I dream a Mammy las night too.” Nate get up from de bed an gawn by de window. He pull open de drapes an sun fill up de room. De water like it scatter wid small, shiny stones, an far far, one boat, jus a black speck, headin out fuh de ketch.

Michelene Adams

2

LUCAYOS

Fate of the Box Fish

Pen coco fish pen pen coco fish pen chant native boys walking crouched in the green salt water near the shore mirroring the disfigurement of an ailing civil servant struggling to make ends meet after forty two years of committed deprivation

The brine meets them knee high just below the jagged edge of frayed cut-off jeans. The salted wind blows at their backs rippling the water forward like a drum major pulling.

The poor fish the poor box fish boxed in on either side by hollowed pink lip conch shells whose incessant hallowed cries perennially fall shy of hosts dead! Died to the slow hymns of uncapped waves washing against the incline shore.

Old men, in any other vocation – retired – bicker higher up the moss stained ramp near the sea wall separated by a table of sea honed two by four and ply.

Pen coco fish pen pen coco fish pen is the constant refrain echoing off the dilapidated cars

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passing up and down the Queen’s Highway. This fish, not the wiliest of God’s creation perhaps an anachronism from a time forgotten seeks escape toward the shore line

The trio march softly in unison and stealth arms flailing low and gingerly in the clear green sea water Bolero builds to crescendo in singleness of minds the noose tightens around the fish like the clench of a conch’s horn as it is plucked from the barge

Finally realising its folly makes one frantic dash toward open sea but instead gasps for life on the dusty dry bay behind the concrete wall victim of six cutlasses of speed and fire.

Perhaps vengeance for the crack of the whip still lodged in DNA perhaps spite for the wail of tamarind switches still fresh and green. The box fish is blinded by the piercing sling of a six penny nail. The howl of a million silent voices deafens the sea-scape screams of fish and crawfish, conch and sea crab, whelks and curbs reach across the horizon summoning forbearers to sing their salt song.

The boys answering the call nonchalantly release the fish into the shallows it swims off toward the touch

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of the shells then the stern of a boat, then the round of a water glass, in all directions reminding me of my son’s toy car of Christmas past.

With galvanised ferrite eyes it cannot survive the tumult of the insidious sea but the boys have left the box fish to its will, to its fate. Now single file along the sea wall – searching – for more ramps, more fish and more chants of: Pen coco fish pen pen coco fish pen.

Philip Armbrister

LUCAYOS

Shine Can

When I returned I was surprised to see the shine can still in use still refrigerated frozen with ice, an iconic symbol of West End life of island life.

Nothing satiates like chilled ice water from a cold shine can.

Philip Armbrister

LUCAYOS

SHORELINE OF PARADISE

before them no one has loved. romanced the waters lapping at the dawn. romanced the sea pulling back on the moon. nothing (or no one) lives there or nearby. each grain of sand in right relation to itself & other grains the sky trees & water. sea-crabs seaweed nesting turtles trojans chicken bones & foil casuarina needles off stage

of aerial shots of a virgin shore. symmetry of sea sand & victory palms. the primal portal to paradise placid waters until the universal couple appears in bikini & gossamer & briefs.

beyond the frame one native footstep from these waters of paradise a seawall shores up coast & road against the groan & climax of waters. children sparkle in a sea of sun spots & shadows of deserted Haitian sloops. a woman holds a man’s fingertips straddles & floats her thighs to his. another man sifts sand into cement.

walls cannot hold back the enterprising waters the arrival of migrant flipflops & toxic waste the erosion of shore. the lonely blues of still waters do not stop the export of image LUCAYOS

& myth forged-in-paradise & assembled offshore.

Marion Bethel

LUCAYOS

NEUTRAL BUOYANCY

I

Waiting out the weighted sinking into the dark. Pulsing temples. I drop. Discordant with drone of jetskis. In my shortsightedness I look to the sky. Meditate the puff of clouds. The unforked tail of seagulls. I float. Herenow is all there is. A whiff of sulfur in the air. I jump up again. To toedance & finger the sand at my back. Zero buoyancy is good.

Floating. A dread of drifting out to sea. (To hell, maybe). Floating in the shallows always. Over well-worn sand. Head pointed to shore. Beachward ahoy! My feet steer like a rudder. I believe. Not out to the deep please. Not over the deepseadark to the curve of sky and knife edge flat of water where the cruise ships tip over.

Amphitheatre of ocean and lightblue heaven. Staging indigoblue swimmers & dogpaddlers & sandsitters. Skiing & skidooing. Sailboats blackrubber tires & sloops. Castlesand losses & triumphs.

The sun was bedazzled by it. A lump of shit drifting near me as I try to float. Wide-eyed like a fish. It brings me to this. I drift. Right into the bathtub with Archimedes. Our waters overfloweth. We begin our eurekas. He leaves naked to tell the wide world. I soak in discovery of the force of gravity. And a mass of mess equal to weight of water. I could have learned this law with a mango seed afloat.

Nostrils above water. Chin points up and head tilts just enough. Body still vertical. A manatee snob of sorts. Muscles relax. I breathe lightness into limbs and lungs. A gentle arch in my back. My broad chest a life vest of its own design. Torso and legs surface like a submarine. I float. Whole. Like a branflake on skim milk. Positively buoyant.

II

Summer of ’95. I descend with Frances. June 24. Her sunbleached hair. A swirling blonde compass point for me. We go down. Off the western coast of Nassau. Porpoise Pens. My lungs an accordion on their own.

I had dreamed of this for nine months. An ocean. During my all-day sickness of hyperemesis gravidurum. Ptyalism. Dehydration to the bonemarrow. Dreamed an ocean of minnows. Smelt the tangy raw death of seaweed. Decaying plankton and algae and conch. Seabreath of rotten eggs. A dream of total seapresence.

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Masked with prescription goggles for shortsight. My first dive. Breathe. No withholding of breath. We swim out from shore. Sand and more glorious sand. Then the black ahead. Keep breathing. The dark of my childhood. Rises up like a city from a pop-up book. A few finstrokes away. I tread water. Refuse to empty the water trapped in my mask. Back- pedal. Frances beckons in water language. Come. I blink and keep breathing.

I am in ocean. Over my head. The determined squeeze of water. My body in a pressure cooker of sea. Earplops and stops.

I’m sinking. Oh my god! Frances, see me sink. Bubbling bubbles. My knees about to scrape the coral. Adjust weights. A brain lies down there. Keep breathing. I rise. Just enough. Hanging in water. The darkblack beneath me. Alone with eternity. A yellow tail snapper watches me. Wide-eyed. I drift over coralfingers and coy seafans and sleepy nursesharks. Jumbo contraceptive sponges. A stingray passes. Undulating. Waving a gracious hi & bye.

This seabounty is the dark of deep. I do not float. Nor sink. I am. Suspended in oceantime.

Marion Bethel

LUCAYOS

Sevenling: Ocean

Ocean is spirit is secret is myth. It is history, graveyard, remembrance. It’s cloth of timelessness, mantle of memory, cloak of iniquity. It’s maker of widows, it’s taker of children. It strips flesh, salts wounds, turns brains into coral, silts skull-holes with sand.

On soft night it whispers: I’m Ocean, God’s hand.

Nicolette Bethel LUCAYOS

Hydrology of Reconciliation

The river has backed up into the arroyos where Now kingfishers watch and strafe the fish. The reservoir upstream was full; there Had to be a release of water. I wish All our dilemmas were solved so graciously. The water finds its level, extends its grace To thirsty land, coasting toward the sea, Dispensing old rain to each adjacent place. When part of the mind is about to overflow And part is suffering psychic dehydration One needs that overcharge to freely go Downstream to bring refreshment, restoration, So all will prosper, heal, and gladly grow. One hopes to learn to regulate the flow That regulates what beatitude we know.

R. W. Haynes

LUCAYOS

Blessing

If out of the blue, bird-drop stay jus-so

and fall on you, don’t wipe it off.

Never mind the A-A that jump from your mouth,

make you stand dead on spot, when touch, warm

like fresh-lay-egg hit home. Let that utterance be

like when a language reach and shake-up old speech.

If one bright morning, sky-messenger

swifter than eye-catch rain on you

even though the sky turn-off her water

and cicadas bawl ‘til they blue, welcome the blessing

with an Ahh – release that call open-arm praise tree into being. Jennifer Rahim LUCAYOS

The Beach is a Graveyard

All aquas and teals threaded with swatches of Turquoise indigo emerald Where purple and yellow and silver swiftly through the shallows play. Beckoning beauty sunlit divine Don’t be fooled – The beach is a graveyard.

The scavengers come here to play. Collecting dead bodies Pearlescent pale pink and peach Shells seem like treasures, gifts from the sea They are empty soulless remains To fill pockets and buckets. They rest dull on shelves at home They are what’s left, a natural urn.

Drowned vessels, boats become jungle gyms, monkey bars Entertainment for stealthy mollusks For hands and feet, a false reef, The silent history only the rusty diesel engine speaks. The lost bodies bloom coral from their mouths. Still and quiet in the deep.

Cool salty waters bathe rocks and toes, deceptively gentle, Concealing its teeth beneath waves foaming prettily Like bunches of white roses at a wedding, Like the many skirts of a bride. The sand knows what lies beneath Buried for all and none to see. No black, no caskets for the salty remains, Just the comforting “ssshhh, ssshhh” of the waves.

And we, bathing in the warm shallows, Confess to each other the beauty of the beach.

Maelynn Bacchus Seymour-Major