MORE than ten years ago I took a Latin-American comparative film class
at the University of the West Indies, Mona and my professor shared a
perspective on culture that sticks with me to this day. He asked the
class one simple question. Who is an American?
Naturally, the class bellowed out the only seemingly intelligent
answer: Someone who is a citizen of the United States of America
(USA). To our surprise this answer was incorrect. The answer my
professor was looking for was, any national of the American
continents.
He was making a point about American cultural hegemony. Point being
that the cultural dominance of the United States has enabled the US to
claim ownership of a title that is in fact the property of citizens of
three different continents: North, Central and South America. And by
virtue of their ownership (of that title) most other people living in
the Americas are denied claim to that identity. I am reminded of that
lecture every time I use or hear someone use the term American.
The dynamics of the American identity raise a number of important
issues when it comes to culture. Notable is the relationship between
the culture of a people, and the way in which they define themselves
and articulate who they are to other groups of people.
These are matters for serious contemplation by Bahamians, given that
our geographic, political, economic and historic relationship to the
United States has had an invasive impact on the culture of the
islands. Sadly to say, our socialising institutions create few
opportunities for Bahamians to engage in these subject matters.
I plan to address this issue in greater detail in the future, but I
mention it now simply to make the argument that culture matters. It is
both the frame of the car and the functional parts that make it drive.
Culture is not something to passively observe or mindlessly consume;
it is something to be interrogated and articulated; constructed and
deconstructed.
Several years ago, before my encounter with the UWI, I counted myself
among the many who would confidently say, albeit ashamedly, that we
have no Bahamian culture. I would willingly accept the myth that “we
have no culture”, and as Jackson Burnside used to say, I would be
“prepared to defend [my] ignorance and deny [my] very existence”.
Thankfully, I see more clearly now. Today I no longer have to contend
with the denial of my own existence, but I do have to contend with a
cultural war that threatens to make me culturally extinct.
The super power in this war is an invisible beast with powerful
anti-cultural agents. They take the form of countries, corporations
and individuals and take refuge under the guise of capitalism,
consumerism, materialism, corporate culture, Western culture, American
culture, European culture, white culture. The beast is not undefined
culturally. It is highly active and highly influential. One of its
greatest strengths is to domesticate and homogenize everything in its
path.
The Bahamian athletics team recently travelled to Daegu, South Korea,
for the World Outdoor Championships. One of the chief complaints was
the taste of the food. This problem only lasted as long as it took to
find KFC and McDonalds. Unfortunately, a homogenised world where
everyone’s cultural taste buds are atrophied to the point of
dysfunction is the way of the world today.
Bahamians fret about being culturally eclipsed by Haitian and Jamaican
culture. They are simply red herrings in the cultural war. On the
other hand, they revere American culture, which in fact is public
enemy number one.
As a Bahamian woman, a Caribbean woman, and an African woman from West
of West Africa, I have a major problem with that. I am committed to
the resistance because between cultural continuity and cultural death
there is only one viable option. So culture definitely matters.
Fundamentally there is no cultural continuity without a connection to
the past. So I look at the Bahamas today with grave concern, because
the most powerful force behind our cultural evolution is a
degenerative culture that is not serving the needs of the people. A
fitting description of the modern Bahamas is financially rich and
spiritually poor; good land a plenty, but barely any good sense to
find.
Just look at the way Bahamians work a plot of land. It is symbolic of
the kind of cultural evolution we have opted for. We uproot every tree
in sight, cover almost every square foot with concrete or asphalt and
then create artificial landscaped areas to plant imported vegetation.
We are so far removed from our cultural heritage that we are strangers
to ourselves. At some point, we will lose ourselves completely if we
do not start taking this matter of culture more seriously.
Mr Burnside delivered a lecture many years ago in which he said we
could “lose contact with our collective soul” if we interrupted the
process of handing down information, beliefs and customs from
generation to generation. He said this process connects us to our
ancestors and assures cultural continuity. So why then do we treat our
cultural heritage as something for the museum instead of a source of
inspiration for our evolution as a people?
When you travel to the family islands, every now and then you are
blessed to encounter an old time Bahamian house with a detached
kitchen. There is an incredible thermal science behind this spacial
design. You will also encounter structures with snow-white lime. We
produced high quality lime to build our structures in hand-made lime
kilns from recycled conch shells and other raw material.
Our built environment had many secrets to share about sustainability,
because living in sync with the land and the environment was an
important part of who we were, heralding back to pre-colonial Africa.
Those ways have given way to modernity, but in whose interest?
Let us take the matter of the dead. African scholar Malidoma Some
tells us: “Different cultures have different relationships with their
dead and I know very well that in a culture of skyscrapers and high
technology, dead people don’t walk. Instead, they are placed in nice
expensive caskets and driven to the cemetery in elegant black cars.
They are put quickly out of sight so that life can go on. Why do the
dead walk where I come from? They walk because they are still as
important to the living as they were before. They are even more
meaningful, as the breadth and depth of our funeral rituals show.”
Mr Some’s words are relevant to the Bahamas. If we were to trace our
roots to the life source, what would we learn along the way about our
relationship to the dead and how would that influence the evolution of
culture?
In the not so distant past, our children rarely spent any time
indoors. This was not because of a lack of technology, because rich in
technology we were. The engineering of box carts, sling shot guns,
kites, model boats, tops and any number of children’s toys is a
valuable example of our indigenous technology. But there was something
more important going on than a parade of the scientific mind.
The way in which our children played reflected an important element of
our cultural reality. It reflected our relationship to the land and to
each other. Child play was communal and it fostered creativity,
resourcefulness and industriousness.
Adults also spent most of their time outside, even if only on a
verandah, using the house primarily for sleeping. The tools they used
for cooking even reflected a spirit of community. The mortar and
pestle is a case in point, where to bruise corn usually called for a
group effort.
Through a colonial lens these traditions were made to look
meaningless; like relics of the past with no place in modernity. As a
result, the road we chose to walk into modernity led to a more
individualistic, compartmentalized, materialistic, and consumption
oriented way of life. And it continues to lead us towards our cultural
demise.
So I ask again: In whose interests do we serve in severing our
relationships to the past? Cultural continuity does not preclude an
evolution of technology, or a move into modernity. It calls for
technology to respect and reflect the spirit of a people. It calls for
culture to be deeply rooted in the spirit of a people.
So because culture matters so much to me, I dedicated an entire column
to talking sense on culture matters, which conveniently allows me to
critique just about anything under the sun.
Pan-African writer and cultural critic Khalila Nicolls is currently a practicing journalist in The Bahamas.