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COLUBUS’ S GHOST: TOURISM, ART AND ...

Columbus’s GhostTourism, Art and National

Identity in the Bahamas

ENCUENTROS

IDB CULTURAL CENTER June 2000 No. 37

Lecture by

Ian Gregory Strachan

IAN GREGORY STRACHAN

IDB CULTURAL CENTER

General Coordination and Visual Arts: Félix AngelGeneral Coordination Assistance: Soledad Guerra

Concerts and Lectures: Anne VenaCultural Promotion in the Field: Elba Agusti

IDB Art Collection: Gabriela Moragas

The Cultural Center of the Inter-American Development Bank, an international finan-cial organization, was created in May 1992 at the Bank’s headquarters in Washington,D.C., as a gallery for exhibitions and a permanent forum from which to showcase out-standing expressions of the artistic and intellectual life of the Bank’s member countriesin North, Central and South America, the Caribbean region, Western Europe, Israel andJapan. Through the IDB Cultural Center, the Bank contributes to the understanding ofcultural expression as an integral element of the economic and social development of itsmember countries.

The IDB Cultural Center Exhibitions and the Concerts and Lectures Series stimulate dialogueand a greater knowledge of the culture of the Americas. The Cultural Promotion in theField funds projects in the fields of youth cultural development, institutional support,restoration and conservation of cultural patrimony, and the preservation of cultural tra-ditions. The IDB Art Collection, gathered over several decades, is managed by the CulturalCenter and reflects the relevance and importance the Bank has achieved after four de-cades as the leading financial institution concerned with the development of Latin Americaand the Caribbean.

© Inter-American Development Bank and Ian Gregory Strachan. All rights reserved.


Ian Gregory Strachan

COLUMBUS’S GHOST:TOURISM, ART AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE BAHAMAS

Columbus’s Ghost: Tourism, Art and National Identity in the Bahamas was presented at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C., on June 30, 2000 as part of the IDB Cul-tural Center Lectures Program.

The television commercial and the maga-zine advertisement have become themost powerful avenues through which in-formation about the Caribbean is col-lated and packaged for the world to pro-cess and consume. They promise Bacchicrelease and then some: happiness, eter-nal youth, sexual adventurism, non-stopsunshine, and partying. Tourist advertis-ing, which maps and commodifies the re-gion for the world consumer, is not usu-ally of the Caribbean. It is usually thework of foreign advertising firms enlistedby the tourist ministries of local govern-ments, and contains scenes that Ameri-cans and Europeans—certain classes ofAmericans and Europeans—want to seeof “the islands,” as they are homoge-neously known. Or, at the very least, itcontains what local governments believetheir foreign clientele want to see. Ineither case, the commercial rarely seemsto veer away from a formulaic portrayalof the landscape and its fun-loving folkso as to depict what the people themselvesmay think their respective countries are

truly like. Or have some Caribbeanpeople come to believe the hype?

This brochure discourse offers an inter-esting version of “Paradise” to the hun-gry eye and able pocket book of the for-eign visitor: captivating aerial shots ofrocks plunging into deep blue-green wa-ters teeming with colorful fish that flour-ish amongst astounding coral reefs; awhite woman, alone, inviting, walking ona white sandy beach without footprints;lush green landscapes, smiling black na-tives chopping open coconuts, ready toserve, ready to please, gesturing with theirhands for you to come and join in the fun.But how much authenticity does thisworld have for the “native”? Is it as “real”as a stage prop or movie backdrop? What the television commercial doesn’tshow is that tourists are often kept as faraway from the local population as pos-sible, and that the parties, the bacchanal,are not meant for everyone. The televi-sion commercial does not show that thesea can also be rough and life-threaten-ing—Haitian and Cuban “boat people”


know all about that. It does not show thelives of the citizens who, in countries likethe Bahamas, are prohibited by law fromgambling in the casinos and discouragedfrom swimming on certain beaches setaside for visitors. The lives of the smilingcoconut chopper, of the man who keepsthe beach free of debris, of the womanwho cleans up after the revelers at poolside, remain concealed, un-illuminatedby tourism advertising. In this genre, thebeach itself is typical, unspecific, andcould be any sandy stretch in the Carib-bean, Florida, or the Pacific.

The revues that are performed in ho-tels and clubs that showcase “native cul-ture,” are often caricatured displays, re-moved from the communities of peoplewho were alleged to have created them.They typify what Derek Walcott, in hisessay “What the Twilight Says,” quite aptlylabels the “culture of the brochure”: na-tiveness packaged to enhance the touristexperience, replete with limbo dancing,fire spitting, and sure-footed walks onbroken glass. Governments even attemptto take carnivals and other folk festivals,which have historically been sites of grass-roots cultural resistance and commodifythem as sources of exotic entertainmentfor the tourist.

And when they are not producing theexotic, the natives are cultivating a colo-nial past that adds to the visitors’ senseof a quaint island atmosphere. They arekeeping alive the Royal Police MarchingBand, and preserving the plantationGreat Houses. Private concerns occasion-ally purchase such relics of slavery andturn them into inns for tourists. Seven-teenth- and eighteenth- century forts arerefurbished and the exploits of long deadpirates are heralded. The natives give

tours of the old colonial buildings; theygive vacationers rides by horse and car-riage, and perform the quadrille whiledressed in the style worn by slaves morethan a century before (straw hats, scarvesand all). Here, nostalgia for a time whenthings were “much simpler” is evinced.Proof is offered to the Northern leisure-seeker that the natives are indeed grate-ful for all that colonialism has given them,that the privileges they have won at theexpense of others are not begrudgedthem. In fact, as Mark Crispin Miller sug-gests in his analysis of Jamaican tourismadvertising, “Massa Come Home,” theywant their white masters to return andmake things fine again.

But however distant this imagined,heavily promoted, and staged Eden maybe from the everyday experience of themajority of Caribbeans, it is a fantasywhich the region’s nations—many ofwhom have achieved political indepen-dence from European colonial powersand represent the formerly colonized ma-jority—encourage their citizenry to main-tain for the benefit of tourists. Tourismis the cornerstone of the Bahamianeconomy. It is the largest source of pri-vate sector employment in the countryand has been a crucial part of the Baha-mian way of life for over a century. In-deed, the Bahamas is one of the most ex-treme examples of the Caribbean’s grow-ing dependence on tourism for economicsurvival. Tourism has afforded Bahami-ans a level of material prosperity enviedthroughout most of the region, and this,of course, stands as its principal virtue.

This paper focuses on how the lan-guage and symbolism of tourism adver-tising (paradise discourse) and the local ef-fort to maximize profits in the tourist

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workplace, inform Bahamian artistic pro-duction and, by extension, inform no-tions of what it means to be Bahamian.The media I focus on principally arepainting and popular songs.

In the field of popular music, thestate’s promotion of pro-tourism ideologythrough school curricula and state-runtelevision and radio, in combination withthe lure of the tourist marketplace, in-spire a touristic brand of music that is notonly consumed by visitors but by locals,as well. In the field of Bahamian art andcrafts, the impact of tourism is equally asapparent, if not more so.

My comments today are taken fromlarger work entitled Paradise and Planta-tion that focuses on the five-hundred-year-old tradition of describing the Caribbeanas “Paradise.” This tradition is initiatedby the Spanish explorers in the fifteenthcentury. It was Columbus, after all, who,seeing the Tainos of the Bahamas ap-proach him bare chested and withoutiron weapons, declared them innocent,incapable of deceit and by extension, in-habitants of Paradise. This metaphor/myth now characterizes the language ofCaribbean tourism advertising—albeitwith a few arresting alterations. Such ac-complished Caribbean writers as DerekWalcott, V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid,Michelle Cliff and Paule Marshall havealso wrestled with this tradition of para-dise discourse, and what they have madeof it is also a part of my research.

First let us look at a bit of the historyof paradise discourse in the Bahamas sothat we can get a sense of the weight thistradition brings to bear on the artists whoemerged in the Bahamas since the 1960s.The material I am referring to was all pro-duced after 1851 (when tourism began

its march to social and economic su-premacy in the colony) and prior to the1950s (at which juncture modern masstourism was born). American and Brit-ish travel writing, memoirs, and folklorestudies composed during this period,though quite distinct from tourist ads aswe know them, were nonetheless a fore-cast and laid the ground-work for bro-chures, and for many indigenous artisticrenderings of the landscape and people.In addition to articles written since thenineteenth century in such publicationsas Harpers and Scribners, I am referring totravelogues like Charles Ives’ Isles of Sum-mer (1880) and William Drysdale’s InSunny Lands (1885).

Like the tourist brochures of today, thisliterature informed its readers that theyhad an exotic, tropical paradise rightwithin reach—in the American case, rightat their doorstep. Drysdale writes, “Whenthe voyage is made in midwinter nothingcan be more delightful than leaving snow-bound and ice-bound New York, and land-ing [in] three days in the height of sum-mer at Nassau” (p. 4). These works sel-dom failed to mention the amenities ofthe Royal Victoria Hotel and the varietyof diversions available to the visitor, fromfishing, hunting, sailing, and bathing, tobeing amused by the natives, or—the big-gest pastime of all—enjoying the warmweather and doing very little else. It is indiscussing the benefits of this last activity(or inactivity) that all these writers seem toagree.

According to Charles Ives, “the [eter-nal] curse that doomed man to a life oflabor, does not seem to have extended tothose isles of unending summer. In fact,”he adds, “it is only in such a climate asthese islands that labor is a curse and not

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a blessing” (p. 114). Ives writes,

Nobody appears to be at work. In sun-shine or shadow, having and wantingnothing, taking no thought for tomor-row, they live on like the birds fromday to day, not needing to take lessonsof the ant nor of any other of theworld’s greedy and grasping toilers. Allare merry, light-hearted and joyous;nobody frets and scolds; not a childcries; and the dogs, crouching besidetheir indolent masters, are literally toolazy to bark (p. 55).

The Bahamas is the place to go to un-wind, a place outside of real time and reallife, a place where the passions cannot beexcited, where it is fine, natural, to be lazy,where ambition is impossible to maintain,vice is negligible, and labor unnecessary.

Now the wealthy of an industrial soci-ety, in contrast to the Victorian preoccu-pation with work, are looking for diver-sions. Now they are tired of work, envi-ous of the lazy; they strive to be lazy, aswell. By the mid-twentieth century coun-tries like the Bahamas will become localeswhere consumers in the developed na-tions can escape work, spend leisuretime, spend money without worryingabout the rat race for money. Thesecountries are encouraged to appear un-der-developed, and “virgin,” even thoughthe average modern North Americantourist also wants all the technologicalconveniences he would have in his/herown country.

Winslow Homer made a number ofvisits between 1885 and 1898 to the Ba-hamas and was among those who roman-ticized black life there, particularly as itrelated to labor. Homer painted a num-

ber of works which showed that he hadsome appreciation for the precariousnessof native life in the face of natural forces,particularly hurricanes. Nor was he un-aware of the fact that black labourers onthe sea did not work for themselves butwere subject to the directives of the whitemerchant class. Nevertheless his portray-als are predominantly of scantily clad,physically perfect, anonymous blackmales engaging in work which (contraryto reality) was not at all taxing or exploi-tive. This suggests that he saw thesepeople as living in a primitive, harmoni-ous, natural, Eden-like state. Paintingssuch as “Turtle Pond” (1898), “TheSponge Diver” (1889), “The ConchDivers” (1885), “The Water Fan” (1898-99), and “Negro Cabins and Palms”(1898) are compelling examples. Manyof these subjects seem as if they coulddive for conch, catch turtles, and retrievesponges, or just as well not do so.Catherine Anne Craft has noted the“exoticizing attitude” of Homer’s Baha-mian watercolors and his tendency, byignoring the unpleasantness of their ex-istence, to place these descendants ofslaves in a “paradisiacal world in whichnature’s bounty renders all man-madeimplements unnecessary” (pp. 14-16).Winslow Homer’s 1898 watercolor, “Un-der the Coco-Palm,” now held at Yale,celebrates the elemental innocence of thenative, here embodied by the child en-joying coconut water in the shade: thequintessence of island ease. Like theyoung, dark, sculpted black men almostentirely submerged in the sea, existing “innature” as Craft puts it (p. 17), this boyis the landscape.

The cultural behavior of the black na-tive of the Bahamas was of great interest to

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travel writers as well. The liberality withwhich today’s tourism industry borrows,bottles, and caricatures the culture of thepeople is not surprising when we considerthat white visitors have treated black Baha-mians as exotic parts of the landscape sincethe mid-nineteenth century. In fact, An-thony Dahl contends that up until the early1950s, “the black appears in [Bahamian]literature as just another curious elementof the landscape of a Bahamas looked uponas a sleepy, sun-drenched, idyllic, tropicalparadise” (p. 59).

The “fetishization” of the “marketwoman”—that staple of Caribbeanbrochurism—is typical of the travel litera-ture of this period. Like all the colorfulBahamian figures, “the smiling marketwomen,” Anthony Dahl explains, have nolife, no meaning, no history, beyond thefact that they add local color (p. 98). Herfruits are a symbol of the abundance ofparadise; her colorful dress, her brightsmile, her warmth, her swinging hips, aresymbols of Eden’s vitality and exotic fer-tility. Her peculiar habit of holding fruitbaskets on her head adds to the exoticeffect. And to the hip-swishing turban-wearing market woman (a variation onthe American stereotype of the black Sap-phire) must be added the old or big fe-male vendor, that appealing cousin of theAmerican black Mammy. She is the an-cestor of the modern Bahamian bro-chure favorite, the straw vendor: alwaysshe sits on her chair, smiling broadly, herwares hanging around her or at her feet.“Come babies, come,” she seems to say.Perhaps she will offer the viewer a breaston which to suckle as in days of yore.Here the heavy-set market woman pre-sents herself in all her matronly glory Itis worth noting that many of the market

women depicted in the earliest illustra-tions and photographs were not smilingvisions of contentment, but by the timethe modern brochure comes along, suchlicense is revoked and the vendor mustput forth the proper face for the camera.

Part of the process of inventing theBahamas as a touristic paradise was thedelegation of eligible sights to see and theromanticization of aspects of Bahamianhistory that would give the visitor a senseof adventure. This process of creating“authentic” tourist destinations, of declar-ing places as “worth seeing,” of designat-ing a place as an instantly distinctive fea-ture of the Bahamian landscape, is relatedto what Benedict Anderson describes as“a history of colonial-era logoization”which affords “instant recognizability” tocertain aspects of the colonial landscape(p. 183). “Postage stamps, with their char-acteristic scenes—tropical birds, fruits,fauna, why not monuments as well?—areexamples of this stage,” states Anderson.“But postcards and school room textbooks follow the same logic” (p. 182).

The Bahamas becomes invented as aseries of postcard sights/sites. In thenineteenth century the illustration actsas predecessor to the photograph: theQueen’s Staircase, local forts, the hugeceiba or silk cotton tree, the flamingo,fish like the blue marlin, flowers like thehibiscus, animals like the iguana and thegreen turtle, the coconut tree: all of thesebecome emblems, logos of “The Baha-mas.” The Bahamian water itself willemerge by the mid-twentieth century asthe quintessential sight. The transpar-ency of the water on white sand becomesthe Bahamian geographical claim tofame and the cornerstone of the Baha-mian paradise product (Blake, p. 176).

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The paintings of Albert Bierstadt andWinslow Homer certainly helped in thisprocess.

Of course, the natives of the Bahamasare as much touristic emblems of the colonyas the nature of which they are a part inthe minds of many visitors of this period.Lazy black boys riding mule drawn carts,the “native hut” replete with inhabitants,black boys diving for coins, the street scenesof Grants Town: these were the staple post-cards and illustrations.

In his history of Jamaican tourism, ToHell with Paradise, Frank Taylor writes,

The concept of Jamaica as a paradisewas a fiction, widely and unequivocallyrejected by a black population that wasconstrained to abandon this so-calledparadise were they to improve theirmaterial lot in life. Jamaica was a fool’sparadise, for only a fool could enter-tain such notions of Jamaicans as care-free and contented. (p. 107)

But let us explore the parameters of astate-promoted, tourism-based self-con-sciousness, a Bahamian paradisiacal ideaof community and nation. The objectiveis to examine the dimensions of tourism’sinfluence in the cultural domain, itspower to shape the self-perception ofBahamians through its presences. Sopervasive and overpowering an industrymust, through its physical presence, eco-nomic presence, social presence, andmedia presence, impose itself on theimaginations of Bahamians, impose itselfin such a way that it begins to influencehow Bahamians imagine themselves, howBahamians imagine the landscape oftheir country, their community, and theirworld. And neither is such a phenom-

enon unique to the Bahamas, as ColleenCohen’s article “Marketing Paradise,Marketing Nation,” on the links betweenthe marketing of the British Virgin Is-lands as a feminized Paradise and theVirgin Islanders’ own expressions of pa-triotism, has shown.

Other than increased spending onmarketing and continued recruitment offoreign capital, how has the BahamianGovernment sought to secure the futureof this industry which has had an unde-niably positive effect on the material con-ditions of most Bahamians? Notions ofthe Bahamas as Paradise and of Bahami-ans as custodians of Paradise have be-come part of the ideology of the State,an ideology promulgated through whatLouis Althusser would have called “StateIdeological Apparatuses,” the schools andthe media in particular.

By the 1980s the Bahamas had alreadyrisen to the top of the regional ladderand was fighting to maintain its position.The Bahamian Government had becomevery concerned about the country’s grow-ing reputation as a place where touristswere treated inhospitably. Tourism re-quires an almost completely black work-force to serve a wealthier, healthier,mostly white clientele, which often har-bors notions of their own superiority andmany unrealistic, preconceived ideasabout the type of experience they will begetting for their money. Clearly, Major-ity Rule and the improvement of livingconditions (due largely to the tourismeconomy itself) have reduced the willing-ness of Bahamians to bend over back-wards to provide “Paradise” for white visi-tors. The trouble in the Caribbean is thatthe region’s history of slavery and thepresent social and economic realities

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which have resulted from that history,make an industry founded on white lei-sure and black labor more than an ordi-nary consumer-producer relationship.

In the mid-1980s, the Ministry of Tour-ism launched a sensitizing campaignwhich, it was hoped, would remind Ba-hamians of the importance of being goodhosts and which would encourage themto take pride in their work, rather thansee it as demeaning. In addition to in-dustry-wide programs and seminars,photo-ads portraying black Bahamians inthe hotel industry who were happy, smil-ing, and enthusiastic were produced anddisseminated throughout the country.These images appeared in hotel officesand staff cafeterias, in local businesses,in brochures and magazines, in schoolclassrooms, in libraries and in govern-ment offices. “The Bahamas: Our Prideand Joy,” became the rallying cry of offi-cials in the industry. The Governmentwas so committed to promoting tourismthat then Prime Minister Sir LyndenPindling, who had led the country fortwenty-three years and was considered aBlack Moses, dressed up as a bell boy atthe Paradise Island Resort and Casino onOctober 1, 1990 to show the people byexample what good service was all about.

It speaks volumes that, in 1999, undera new political regime, the Director ofTourism, Vincent Vanderpool Wallace,would remark in a Feb. 15, 1999 NassauGuardian article that worker attitudesmight again hold the country “hostage.”But if such overt efforts to indoctrinatethe people have had little success, thereare many other ways that tourism affectsthe culture and self-perception of thepeople and creates a climate wherein talkof Paradise is tolerated, at the very least.

Notwithstanding the contradictions be-tween an imaginary paradise and the livedexperience of most Bahamians, in a soci-ety so dominated by tourism, indepen-dent sources of community identity mustcontend with a state-sanctioned, fi-nanced, and promoted, and industriallypackaged brochure “mytho-reality.”

First, Bahamians have a distorted senseof the past. Like many colonized Cari-bbeans, their knowledge of the lives theirown ancestors led in the country is verylimited. Up to the early 1960s, the his-tory taught in Bahamian schools, and theliterature taught there as well, was Brit-ish. Colin Hughes makes the followingobservation in 1989 on this subject:

[T]he matter in which Bahamians takenational pride would be the beauty oftheir country; in particular are the shal-low sea which gave the archipelago itsname, and the colorful history that be-gins with Columbus’s discovery of theNew World and proceeds melodra-matically through the Puritans and pi-rates, loyalists and wreckers, blockade-runners and bootleggers. . . But Baha-mian history as it has been writtenso far is very much the history of thedominant white community, when itis eventually expanded to include thesocial and economic history of slaves,spongers, peasant farmers and fish-ermen, that part will lack the Satur-day matinee glamour which [is] at-tached to the earlier, incomplete ver-sion (p. 89).

We will return to Bahamians’ notionof the beauty of their country momen-tarily, but the brand of “historiography”Hughes describes, when commodified by

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tourism, has even more power to alien-ate. Tourism makes this romantic historypart of its paradise product. The nameof Blackbeard is kept alive by every tourguide. We now have Pirates Cove BeachResort, Blackbeard’s Cay and DiscoveryIsland. Businesses as diverse as those thatdeal in air conditioning, car rentals, andfrozen fish now include the word “Para-dise” in their titles. These are perfectexamples of how Anderson’s colonial“logoization” meets the market place.The largest hotel in the nation, SunInternational’s Atlantis (talk about my-thology), is located on what was once HogIsland but which, since 1962, has beenknown as “Paradise Island.”

In the Bahamas, where before they caneven collect their baggage or pass immi-gration, all arrivals to the Nassau Inter-national Airport are greeted by a smallband playing calypsoes like “Yellow Bird”and “This is My Island in the Sun.” It canat times become difficult to distinguishwhat aspects of Bahamian life exist fortourist enjoyment and which are off lim-its. Describing this state of affairs in the1960s, Gordon K. Lewis wrote that, “En-tire departments of local government, thepublic library, and the police, for ex-ample, are treated as tourist attractionsrather than public services” (p. 328). Asa case in point, there was a recent debatein The Nassau Guardian (May 2000) aboutwhether it would be in the public inter-est to change the police uniforms to bet-ter suit the climate and risk losing theappeal the colonial garb has for tourists.No one has been a more photographed,living landmark than the black Bahamianpoliceman in his colonial uniform.

It is fair to say that many parts of theBahamas have truly become part of a

stage. Bahamians live on it. They can-not escape the tourist. They will run intohim/her sooner or later. In 1993,3,682,260 tourists visited a country whichhas a population of under 280,000. (Thenumber of tourists first exceeded theBahamian population in 1937, whenthere were 34,000 tourist arrivals). Tour-ists are, of course, immediately recogniz-able. They wear the tourist uniform. Ba-hamians become defined in oppositionto the tourist. Bahamians know that whenthey see the tourist, the Governmenthopes that they will behave in a certainway: when driving, they should give wayfor the tourist pedestrian; when the tour-ist asks a question, they must be nice, mustsmile and give him/her the directionshe/she asks for without grumbling; if thetourist asks a question about a building’shistory, about the weather, they must beas cooperative as possible. They must beas cooperative as possible because thewelfare of the nation depends on it. Thisis not to assert that Bahamians would notwish to be cooperative to strangers if theywere not dependent on tourism. This isnot to assert that every Bahamian is pre-tending when he helps the tourist. Thepoint is that the Bahamian Governmentapplies pressure to its citizenry, makingit abundantly clear that anything butopenness, smiles, generosity and helpful-ness toward the tourist would be againstthe national interest and “unBahamian.”The Bahamas is not unique in this. PollyPattullo has noted seeing a poster inDominica in the early 1980s which read“Smile. You are walking a tourist attrac-tion” (p. 62).

Since the construction of the RoyalVictoria Hotel in 1861, the tallest man-made structures in the Bahamas have al-

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most exclusively been hotels. In the Ba-hamas, tourist posters are often the onlyimages of the country that cover elemen-tary classroom walls. Bahamian collegestudents abroad have tourist posters plas-tered on their bedroom walls. In the Ba-hamas, tourist advertisements are shownon local television as programming fill-ers. Other fillers educate the publicabout the history of key landmarks, land-marks designated touristic sites over onehundred years before. Snippets of foot-age show flamingoes marching, or fishswimming, or fishermen scaling fish asthey smile, or black boys on a dock smil-ing as soft music plays in the background,or idyllic shots of quaint Family Islandsettlements in Abaco or Harbour Island.As a result of all this, Bahamians have akind of brochure self-knowledge. Theposters of sunsets, of flamingoes, of cer-tain flowers, of certain seascapes, under-water and on-land scenes—all of whichare deemed beautiful by the colonizerand now the tourist—give Bahamians anidea of what is worthwhile and beautifulin their country. This is exactly the over-looked element in Hughes’s observationthat Bahamians are most proud of thenatural beauty of the country. We are notsaying that every glance at a sunset or thesea is one in which the Bahamian seesthrough the eyes of the tourist, of the for-eigner. Nor are we saying that Bahami-ans could not come to the conclusion ontheir own that certain aspects of the land-scape or seascape are “beautiful.” We aresaying that for over a hundred years, thesunset, the sea, certain birds, certain fish,certain flowers, the forts, certain lime-stone and coral formations, have beenfetishized, logoized, commodified by thetourist and the tourist industry, and that

these were the only images, along withthose of happy, welcoming natives—andoccasionally, working natives—that werepromoted by colonial governments, tour-ists and travel writers, through illustra-tions, stamps, postcards. We are saying thateven after nationalist governments assumepower this fetishization/logoization/commodification has continued, has in factproliferated with the advent of color photog-raphy and the electronic media. Bahamiancurrency, for instance, reifies various clichesof Bahamian “native” life, flora, and faunathat have been enriched by travel literaturesince the nineteenth century. In 1992,Christopher Columbus even graced thedollar bill in commemoration of his land-fall five hundred years earlier.

Though we must grant that every na-tion inspires love, loyalty, and sacrifice,the bombardment of the local commu-nity with touristic propaganda, coupledwith one of the highest standards of liv-ing in the region, largely through tour-ism and international finance and a longhistory of isolationism which dates backto the colonial period, makes the Baha-mian love of country a very peculiar one.One can argue that Bahamian nationalpride is to a degree a product of brochurediscourse, of touristic marketing; thatmuch of what Bahamians love about theircountry is what travelers and the touristindustry claim is worth loving. The battlecry of tourism in the seventies and eight-ies was, “It’s Better in the Bahamas.” Atthe close of the 1980s this was changedslightly to, “It’s Better in Our Country.”In 1996 the slogan is, “The Bahamas: ItJust Keeps Getting Better.” These sloganshave served not only to capture the at-tention of tourists but to capture theimaginations of Bahamians, as well. It is

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no surprise then that the governing partyFree National Movement used “Better,Better” as its campaign slogan in the Gen-eral Election of 1997.

An illustration of the extent to whichsome Bahamians may be uncritically em-bracing the paradise myth, is the localsuccess of blatantly touristic songs. Thesesongs, written and performed by Bahami-ans, are played regularly on local radioand enjoy considerable popularity. Suchpopularity must at some level be seen ascomplicity in the tourist fantasy. Thesesongs do not speak of the general Baha-mian experience but celebrate the tour-ist experience. Tourist-targeted songshave been Bahamian favorites sinceGeorge Symmonette’s “Lil Nassau,” in the1940s. Symmonette celebrated the tour-ist experience and invited visitors to cometo the Bahamas and live the life of a bigshot while on vacation. Since Indepen-dence in 1973, songs have offered thenatural beauty of the nation, the food, theculture and the friendliness of the peopleto the dollar-spending outsider for his/her enjoyment and consumption. A fa-vorite is King Eric’s “Once is Not Enough”(1983). Part of the success of such sac-charin songs is the fact that Bahamiansgenuinely love their homeland and knowthat others love it, as well. The thing be-ing celebrated is the wonderful, beauti-ful landscape, and hence the songs are asource of pride.

Once is not enoughEven twice you don’t see all uh we stuffCome back for some conchPeas and rice and guava duffCause when you visit the Bahamas,Once is not enough

. . . .Even Christopher Columbus in 1492Went home and came backJust like you folks should doBefore he died he thoughtThe Bahamas was the mostReturning each year but now as aghost.

Of course, seeing “Home” as a cher-ished landscape, as an idealized place, asa subject of nostalgia , can be complicatedin the context of the postcolonial Carib-bean society. In the era of colonialismunder Britain, and now in the era of neo-colonial dependence on the UnitedStates, the Bahamas is often situated onan imagined lower plain of existence. Itwas the Mother Country and its land-scape (like its history, songs, and tradi-tions) that were idealized, that were thesubject of fantasy, of reverence. (V. S.Naipaul of Trinidad and Jamaica Kincaidof Antigua have both written insightfullyon this issue.) In our present context,existing in America’s shadow, the notionis still alive to many that the Bahamas isless “real” as a nation than its powerfulneighbor and other First World coun-tries. This inferiority complex is notunique to Bahamians. What happenedto Bahamians during British colonialrule, then, was a kind of alienation fromthe very land on which one lived. Baha-mians dreamed of one world and livedin another, which was meaner and morecrude. The same can be said of today’sgeneration of cable satellite viewers. (Ofcourse, one could argue that Americansthemselves do not inhabit the rarifiedworld depicted on the silver screen or onthe tube). But this problem is what in-spired Bahamian poet Jerome Cartwright

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to write in his poem “Cold Snap”:

We are who we areChildren of the hot landsWe build fires every ChristmasAnd pray in earnest for cold weather

The problem of “place” is further com-plicated by the fact that most Bahamiansdescend from slaves who never wished tocome to this country, who had a “Home”that was elsewhere, in Africa. I speak his-torically here, and therefore I must say“most,” because a sizable share, perhapsan indiscernable share of our presentblack population, descends from BlackWest Indians and Haitians who came tothe Bahamas seeking better lives and didnot come here as captives. The loss ofAfrica, some have argued, has contributedto a sense of restlessness and a lack of con-nection with the land among Caribbeanpeople. We are a people, in other words,who mourn the loss of that which we neverknew. The West Indian, it is argued, hasno archeological link to the land. S/he hasno ruins to look upon. S/he cannot traceher/his ancestry in these islands back intothe mists of antiquity.

To this must be added the fact thatdespite universal suffrage and Indepen-dence, the formerly enslaved and colo-nized people of this archipelagic state stilldo not feel that they are in full posses-sion and control of the institutions thatemploy them and of the economy thatfeeds them, that the State is not neces-sarily the same as the Community in theeyes of the people. Rather the State isoften viewed as an adversary, somethingto use whenever possible, but also to ma-noeuvre around for one’s individual bestinterest whenever possible. There is little

thought of how one’s illegalities, one’smediocrity or low productivity may hurtthe nation. One’s energy is spent moreoften on helping oneself and one’s fam-ily, and avoiding the Law. Hence, succes-sive national inquiries into the problemsof youth development and crime in Ba-hamian society have noted the absenceof a spirit of volunteerism and commu-nity spirit among the citizenry. These cir-cumstances contribute to a disregard forthe landscape among many, a lack of rev-erence for the place on which one walksbeing characteristic of a people who stillfeel no stake in the place in which theyfind themselves, no need to ensure itspreservation for future generations.

It is against the backdrop of this tradi-tion of colonial and neocolonial negationof their own landscape’s right to exist asa “real” place, against this tradition ofdisinheritance, and this sense of exilewhile at home, that Bahamian artists en-gage in the necessarily political act of rep-resenting and celebrating “Home” as theywish to define it. This is why Nobel Lau-reate Derek Walcott could recollect in anarticle, “The Sea is History,” that therewas something revolutionary about writ-ing the word “breadfruit” on a piece ofpaper in the 1950s. One was elevating inart that which was too mean, too mun-dane, too native to be celebrated in En-glish verse. But to an extent, the Baha-mian artist’s representations of home areinformed by yet another colonizing force,that of tourism, and its highly marketableconception of the Bahama Islands asplaces of not only natural beauty, but alsoof purity, forgetfulness, tranquility, andfun in the sun all day long.

One of the most revealing, popular,brochure-songs has been Raphael

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Munnings’s “Bahamas Experience” re-leased in 1986.

Chorus: Bahamas experienceYou can find true romanceSo much to see so much to doCome along we’ll share with you

Take a ride in the skyYou’ll believe you can flyWalk on a beach or on the streetAnd smiling faces everyone you meet

Skipping over the oceanWind blows in your faceHook a big blue marlin fishLet him go again.Pink sand and mango tooBlue green waters forevermoreSee for yourselfIt’s oh so niceTruly this is paradise.

There are other such songs, likeMarvin Henfield’s “Come Down, It’sBetter in the Bahamas,” and The Es-quires’ “The Bahamas.” More re-cently—in 1999 to be specific—the fe-male artist Nita released a song called“O Lord” and also made a music videofor it that has appeared as a filler onZNS TV13, the country’s only televisionstation. In the video, Nita, band mem-bers, and dancers perform enthusiasti-cally on a beach wearing bright “native”costumes. (Few Bahamian music vid-eos do not display artists on the beachsince it the quintessential sign of“Bahamianess.”) Says Nita:

If the good LordNever went on holidayTell me why

He made the Bahamas.If the good LordNever used to come this wayTell me whyHe made these islands.

Considering that most Bahamian mu-sicians have had to make a living perform-ing for tourists, and that tourism is notonly our principal employer but is heavilypromoted by the State, it is no wonderthat some song writers have either takenthe initiative or been asked to composetouristic songs. In the capital city ofNassau it is impossible to hear a Baha-mian band play popular music on a nor-mal evening unless one enters a hotel oris in the vicinity of one. This has beenthe case for at least fifteen years.

That these songs have had tremendouspopularity among Bahamians speaks tothe extent to which Bahamians take pridein a touristic vision of the Bahamas as aparadise. This rhetoric has been met witha degree of approval, even if people re-ally know better. Such songs have fedBahamian national pride and are prob-ably not seen as being any different fromother songs expressing pride in the placeof our birth, like Smokey 007’s “You BornThere You Born There.” Few recordingartists have taken tourism to task and ad-dressed some of its negative social effects.Pat Rahming’s “Package Deal” stands asa significant exception with its critique ofmale prostitution in the touristic arena.

It is not the case, however, that themajority of Bahamians listen to touristicsongs all day. Reggae, soca, rap, and r&bare probably more popular on a day-to-day basis than Bahamian music on thewhole, although songs occasionally comealong that capture the local imagination.

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And the majority of secular songs com-posed by Bahamians promote having agood time more than anything else.

Perhaps the most passionate subjectin Bahamian secular recorded music isthe radical transformation of Bahamianways of life since Majority Rule and In-dependence; more specifically, thetransformation in the material condi-tions of black Bahamians and the waysour culture has been adapted as a re-sult of that transformation. Thesesongs mourn the loss of “Island life”;they reminisce about the “Good OleDays” in the Bahamas, before modern-ization and urbanization. They offer akind of cultural nationalism rooted inthe rural Bahamian past, rooted inpractices, foodways, and rituals whichpreceded the transformation of familystructures, the collapse of Family Islandsettlements, the overpopulation ofNassau, and the onslaught of an Ameri-can-style consumerism. These songsalso celebrate annual returns to theFamily Islands for regatta or homecom-ing celebrations that have become animportant part of Bahamian life sincethe major post-60s population shift,which resulted in 60% of the popula-tion inhabiting New Providence. Thesongwriters express pride in the beauty oftheir respective places of birth, all in con-tradistinction to Nassau and New Provi-dence. Ronnie Butler’s “Crown Calypso,”Exuma’s “Going to Cat Island,” Phil Stubbs’“Cat Island” “Down Home,” Eugene Davis’s“Do You Remember” and “Perservere,” theMagnetic’s “Andros Island,” Eddie Minnis’s“Nassau People” are examples.

In these songs, as in the general pub-lic discourse about life “On Da Island”certain notions appear consistently. The

expression “Da Islan’” becomes a meta-phor for a particular style of life, onewhich is to be opposed diametrically tolife on New Providence, or in the city ofNassau as it is broadly conceived. NewProvidence (which is almost always calledNassau) no longer exists as an “Island”in the popular imagination. It has theamenities and comforts, trappings andproblems of the Metropolitan City. “DaIslan’” is a place where there is no elec-tricity, or running water, where there isno crime, where everyone knows theirneighbor, where anyone can scold yourchildren if they are rude, where childrenare never impolite, where people worktogether as a community, where doors arenever locked, where there is no noise orgarbage, where there are no burglar bars,where people are Christians, men arefaithful to their spouses, etc. Many Ba-hamians over the age of fifty who talk ofthe Family Islands will also use the expres-sion “Home” to describe the island oftheir birth and first years even thoughthey have not lived there for three de-cades or more and seldom, if ever, return.We should also note that, because of theirlandscapes, visits to outlying New Provi-dence settlements like Adelaide andGambier elicit remarks like “It jus’ likeda Islan’ out here.”

The romanticization of the pastoralplace is not new in human history. It goeshand in hand with the nostalgia for child-hood, for a time of greater innocence.We must remember also that, as a rule,people almost always think the present dayis worse than the “good ole days” and thatthings will get worse before they better.

Clearly then, “Da Islan’” is a kind ofspatial and temporal metaphor: it signi-fies a particular space other than Nassau

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but one to which we claim familiarity andaffinity. It also represents a time that is“other” in two senses: to go to “Da Islan’”is to go to another time; and talk of “DaIslan’” is talk of the past of most Bahami-ans, a past which is lost to them. Talk ofthe past when there was no crime andmen were good, when children spokeonly when spoken to and learned theGolden Rule, is to inhabit the space of“Da Islan’.”

Even when Nassauvians say they canremember when Nassau people had re-spect for their elders and children weresafe walking home from school, they arein effect saying Nassau was like “Da Islan’”in this way. So then, a recent song likeSweet Emily’s “The Good Ole Days” isinhabiting the same nostalgic space as asong like “Down Home” by Phil Stubbs.A number of books have been publishedover the last ten to fifteen years docu-menting Bahamian ways of life prior tothe social and economic transformationsthat modernized the country.

Visual artists have plugged into theromanticization of life in the Family Is-lands, and, being cognizant of the appealof “the quaint” among people of the moredeveloped world who are searching forrelics of the pre-Industrial world, theyhave crafted images which simultaneouslyappeal to the Bahamian longing for a re-turn “Home” and the tourist wish for anEden. Their portrayals are of perpetualsunshine, beautiful flora, flamingoes andegrets, lovely wooden colonial homesbordered by bougainvillea, poincianatrees in bloom, quaint little harbors, pic-turesque regatta sloops with poised blackmale natives, noble old folk standing out-side their tabby houses. In other words,these paintings could easily be mistaken

for tourist postcards. And when artistswith this tendency depict Nassauvians,they again choose to represent them in-habiting that metaphorical “island” space.They may portray clapboards and poorchildren but they are colorful and pictur-esque; they are one with the palm treesand flowers, a part of the local color. Theblack Bahamian fisherman in NassauHarbour is part of this also: he is a livingtourist landmark, a representation of howclose to nature people in the islands are.In this way, a number of post-Indepen-dence artists are no different in theirportrayals of black Bahamians thanWinslow Homer one hundred years ago.Interestingly, with the exception of AltonLowe, none of the work of these artists,(Dorman Stubbs, Ricardo Knowles, EddieMinnis are the leaders of the field), ap-pears in this IDB exhibit “On the Edgeof Time: Contemporary Art from theBahamas.” These artists enjoy great popu-larity in the Bahamas and their work isprobably more visible than that of any ofthe artists focused on here, with the pos-sible exception of Amos Ferguson.

Dorman Stubbs’ watercolor entitled“Antique Reflection,” is a prime exampleof the selectivity rooted in the search forquaintness we find typical in portrayalsof Family Island homes. It is replete withblack natives, a standard mode of repre-sentation in nineteenth century illustra-tions. There is a fetishization of objectswhich come to symbolize the past. Thisis, of course, a feature of modern tour-ism the world over (MacCannell, p. 16).The latest monstrosity built by an AndrosIsland drug dealer or his lawyer are neverrepresented. In other works, DormanStubbs offers us the typical regatta scenethat so many artists have composed and

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photographers have shot in the lasttwenty years. Drunken men and womenin short shorts, and other, perhaps moreprofound, parts of the regatta experience,are never immortalised. Having attendedregattas, I know that few people careabout the boat race out on the water; it isperipheral. But this image is chosen asan emblem of Bahamianess, of our pastliving in the present.

Alton Lowe, a white Bahamian fromAbaco, paints many a peaceful Family Is-land harbor. Always the sun is shiningand the water is calm. He likes creatingportraits of old Family Island men andwomen, looking Family Islandish. Theold are naturally part of the picturesquepast in the present. And the Family Is-land must always conform to this senseof being an “elsewhere” time and place.Images which suggest modernity in theFamily Islands, that suggest that these is-lands exist in the same world and time asNassau, are excluded. These islands areto remain repositories of our cultural pastin the present; we need them to be so.This is the same sort of fabricated pasto-ralism to which the country as a whole issubjected, for the Bahamas must existoutside of time and the real in order tobe imagined as a tourist paradise.

There is a painting of that Bahamianlandmark, the poinciana tree, renderedin oil by Eddie Minnis. Minnis’ paintingsadorn many a bank and law firm lobby inthe Bahamas. Such images allow thesecompanies to be supportive of Bahamianart and at the same to lull customers intothat state of bliss most suited to the trans-fer of large sums of money. One wouldn’timagine that they’d put up paintings ofemaciated children, but the range seemsnarrowly limited to postcard art. (There

could easily have been a crackhead un-der Eddie Minnis’s poinciana tree.) Butseriously, the gaze in Minnis’s paintingseems the same as that of WinslowHomer’s “A Wall, Nassau”—island pasto-ral. And this has great commercial appealamong tourists, expats, and black profes-sional elites because it is not challengingor troubling. These images offer insteadan idyllic vision of the nation to the bour-geois eye.

Interestingly, some recent songs haveachieved the twin appeal I have been dis-cussing with respect to paintings. Theytap into the local longing for what is imag-ined as a less vexing time, and they ap-peal to the romance with “The Islands”with which the North Atlantic is smitten.Bahamen’s re-make of Ronnie Butler’s“Crown Calypso,” sung in what the per-formers must have felt assured was thekind of Caribbean accent American lis-teners would be familiar with or expect-ing, talks of going back to “Da Islan’s” andlists those islands, telling the visitor to“go” there. Certainly Bahamians don’tneed to be told which islands they can goto in their own country. In a differentkind of twist, Eugene—or Geno D, as heis also called— who recorded the song“Inagua,” seems to actually be encourag-ing Bahamians to become tourists andvisit the country’s “best kept secret.” Ituses the words of a blatantly touristic songby The Esquires, “The Bahamas,” by ask-ing, “Where ya gonna go nex’ year/ Whatya gonna do?” And instead of saying,come to the Bahamas, it says, come toInagua. Of course, not all artists havefallen into mystifying the Family Islands,mystifying the past, and mystifying thelandscape. There is a striking differencebetween Antonius Robert’s portraits of

15


the elderly (the repositories of our past)and the kind of sanitizing, romanticizing,“nativization” we see from Alton Lowe.The work of expatriate painter DavidSmith is notable because he subverts thetouristic image with representations of aBahamas which is anything but pictur-esque. He opposes the luxury and opu-lence of a tourism founded on black sub-servience to parts of the Bahamas notseen on postcards in works like “Piecesof the American Dream.”

And to be fair to our songwriters, theyhave not entirely glossed over the un-pleasantness of the past in their lyrics.Ronnie Butler’s culturally nationalistsong, “Burma Road,” calls for a return tothe bush but not without a bitter sweetsense of humor, as he reminds his listen-ers that Bahamians once wore bags forclothing. In Phil Stubbs’ “Down Home,”we find much nostalgia, but among hismemories of childhood in Cat Island, arecold nights sleeping in crocus sack blan-kets. “We didn’t have much / Ah but, wehad so much love,” he tells us.

The Bahamian artists of B-CAUSE,Brent Malone, Stan Burnside, AntoniusRoberts and others, committed them-selves to creating imaginative alternativesto postcard paintings, as the exhibit cata-logue for your “On the Edge of Time”explains. The Burnsides and John Beadleincorporate African mask motifs andJunkanoo color to form a compellingblack Bahamian spiritual and culturalresponse to colonialism. The irony is thattheir efforts are equally appreciated bytourists and expats as exotic objects forconsumption. Amos Ferguson’s intuitiverenditions of Junkanoo and the Burnside/Beadle collaboration precociously entitled“Enigmatic funktification,” are equally

commodifiable as tourist art. Junkano hasbeen a target of commodification and tour-istic consumption for nearly one hundredyears. Already, such art work is accompa-nying more typical touristic photographyin the terminals of the Nassau Interna-tional Airport. Furthermore, I thinkthere is something akin to Homer’s ado-ration of the primitive black Apollos inMalone’s sculpted black drummers andcowbellers of Junkanoo. And there iscertainly a questionable embrace of thestereotype of the Caribbean marketwoman in the art of Eric Ellis.

By way of conclusion, I should notethat artistic portrayals of the present-dayFamily Islands choose to ignore that manyof these places are poor and abandoned,that opportunities are very limited andthey are, in a sense, Nassau’s Third World.A great many Nassauvians talk about the“Da Islan’” but they could not bear re-turning to it tomorrow to live. In thesame way many visitors come to Carib-bean paradises that they really don’t mindvisiting but would not wish to live in per-manently. There is nostalgia for the posi-tive things about the past of the FamilyIslands but no one wishes to turn backthe clock and return to depending on themailboat for survival, fighting mosqui-toes, and not having the comforts of mod-ern life. Certainly, Bahamians are not tobe ridiculed too harshly for missing as-pects of our recent past. Upon leapfrog-ging into a modern, urban world, a gooddeal of trouble has come into Bahamianhomes. With the decline of a number ofthe customs of thirty years ago, Bahami-ans who can remember when red meatwas an event, shoes a privilege, and a toi-let a luxury, are feeling dizzy. Naturallythen, we seem to wish we could slow it all

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down. We wonder if we are not throwingthe baby out with the bath water and ourart, particularly our songs, express this.Few really wish to return to a time whenwomen could not vote, when blackpeople were political and economicallydisenfranchised, when the Family Islandswere the margins of a marginal colony.Thirty years ago when we lived “in bliss.”

The touristic idealizations in whichsome Bahamian art indulges starkly con-tradict the lived experience of the major-ity of Bahamians. They serve the needsof the peculiar Bahamian marketplacewell, but do they serve the communitywell, if what art should do is hold a mir-ror up to life and spur us on to growth?Perhaps in an economy and milieu likethe Bahamas, any art is doomed to be-come brochure art, any artistic vision, asouvenir vision. On the other hand, Imust qualify my statement for fear that Iportray tourism as a monolithic forcebending everything to its will. My expe-rience as a boy and a young man in theBahamas tells me otherwise. My desirehere has been to broaden our conversa-tion in the Bahamas about tourism, tochallenge my fellow artists to consider theefficacy of their work in the process ofsocial and cultural development.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Althusser, Louis. Essays on Ideology. London: Verso, 1984.

Anderson, Nancy K., and Linda S. Ferber. Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise.New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991.

Barry, Tom, Deb Preush, and Beth Wood. The Other Side of Paradise.New York: Grove, 1984.

Bethel, Clement and Nicolette. Junkanoo: Festival of the Bahamas.London: Macmillan, 1991.

Blake, Henry. “Try the Bahamas.” Fortnightly Review 39. (January 1886): 174-183.

Cartwright, Jerome. “Cold Snap.” From the Shallow Seas.Edited by Ileana Sanz Cabrera. Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1993.

Cohen, Colleen Ballerino. “Marketing Paradise, Marketing Nation.”Annals of Tourism Research 22, no. 2: 404-21.

Craft, Catherine Anne. “Journeys to Paradise: Winslow Homer and His Images ofCaribbean Blacks.” Master’s thesis, Univeristy of Virginia, 1989.

Curry, Robert. Bahamian Lore. Paris, 1929.

Dahl, Anthony George. “Literature of the Bahamas: The March towards NationalIdentity.” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1988.

Dandicat, Edwidge. Krik Krak. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Drysdale, William. In Sunny Lands. New York: Harpers, 1885.

Gould, Jean. Winslow Homer: A Portrait. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1962.

“Hands on for New Tourism Minister.” Nassau Guardian, October 2, 1990, p. 1.

Hendricks, Gordon. The Life and Work of Winslow Homer.New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979.

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Hiller, Herbert L. “Escapism, Penetration, and Response: Industrial Tourism and theCaribbean.” Caribbean Studies 16, no. 2 (July 1976): 103.

Hughes, Colin. “Symbolic Politics in a Racially Divided Society.” Modern BahamianSociety. Edited by Dean Collingwood and Dean Dodge. Parkersburg:Caribbean Books, 1989: 69-92.

Ives, Charles. Isles of Summer. New Haven, 1880.

Knowles, Odia. “Tourism Director Warns of Country Being Held Hostage by BadAttitudes,” Nassau Guardian, February 15, 1999, p.1.

Lewis, Gordon K. Growth of the Modern West Indies. New York: Monthly Review,1968.

MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Malone, Shelley Boyd. Nostalgic Nassau. Picture Postcards 1900-1904. A.C.Graphics, 1991.

Miller, Mark Crispin. Boxed In: The Culture of T.V. Evanston: Northwestern UniversityPress, 1988.

Pattullo, Polly. Last Resorts. Kingston: Ian Randle, 1996.

Raymond, Williams. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.

Taylor, Frank. To Hell with Paradise. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1993.

Walcott, Derek. “The Sea is History.” Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English.Edited by Frank Birbalsingh. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

“What the Twilight Says: An Overture.” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays.New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.

Watkins, Errington. “Don’t Suggest Change Without Alternative.” Nassau Guardian,May 20, 2000, p. 8.

Wood, Peter H. and Karen C. Dalton. Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The CivilWar and Reconstruction. Austin: University of Texas, 1989.

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Dr. Ian Gregory Strachan is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts atDartmouth. He is co-founder and vice president of the Bahamas Association for Cul-tural Studies; and co-founder of the Harambe Program, an after-school tutoring pro-gram for public primary school children. He is the author of the novel, God’s AngryBabies (1997), and of poetry published in The Caribbean Writer in 1999 and 2000. He hasproduced nine plays in the Bahamas, and lectures on African-based beliefs and ritualsin the Bahamas.

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Other publications available in the Encuentros series:

Houses, Voices and Language in Latin AmericaDialogue with José Donoso, Chilean novelist.No. 1, March 1993.

How the History of America BeganLecture by Germán Arciniegas, Colombian historian.No. 2, April 1993.

The International Year of Indigenous PeoplesLecture by Rigoberta Menchú, Guatemalan indigenous leaderand 1992 Novel Peace Prize laureate.No. 3, October 1993.

Contemporary Paraguayan Narrative: Two CurrentsLecture by Renée Ferrer, Paraguayan novelist and poet.No. 4, March 1994.

Paraguay and Its Plastic ArtsLecture by Annick Sanjurjo Casciero, Paraguayan historian.No. 5, March 1994.

The Future of DramaLecture by Alfonso Sastre, Spanish playwright.No. 6, April 1994.

Dance: from Folk to ClassicalLecture by Edward Villella, North American dancer and ArtisticDirector of the Miami City Ballet.No. 7, August 1994.

Belize: A Literary PerspectiveLecture by Zee Edgell, Belizean novelist and author of Beka Lamb.No. 8, September 1994.

The Development of Sculpture in the Quito SchoolLecture by Magdalena Gallegos de Donoso, Ecuadorian anthropologist.No. 9, October 1994.


Art in Context: Aesthetics, Environment, and Function in the Arts of JapanLecture by Ann Yonemura, North American curator of Japanese Artat the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution.No. 10, March 1995.

Approaching the End of the MillenniumLecture by Homero Aridjis, Mexican poet and winner ofthe United Nations Global 500 Award.No. 11, September 1995.

Haiti: A Bi-Cultural ExperienceLecture by Edwidge Danticat, Haitian novelist and author of Breath, Eyes, Memory.No. 12, December 1995.

The Meanings of the MillenniumLecture by Bernard McGinn, North American theologian fromthe University of Chicago’s Divinity School.No. 13, January 1996.

Andean Millenarian Movements: Their Origins, Originalityand Achievements (16th-18th centuries).Lecture by Manuel Burga, Peruvian sociologist fromthe Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.No. 14, February 1996.

Apocalypse in the Andes: Contact Zones and the Struggle for Interpretive PowerLecture by Mary Louise Pratt, Canadian linguist from Stanford University.No. 15, March 1996.

When Strangers Come to Town: Millennial Discourse, Comparison,and the Return of Quetzalcoatl.Lecture by David Carrasco, North American historianfrom Princeton University.No. 16, June 1996.

Understanding Messianism in Brazil: Notes from a Social AnthropologistLecture by Roberto Da Matta, Brazilian anthropologist fromNotre Dame University.No. 17, September 1996.


The People’s Millennium: The Legacy of Juan and Eva Perón Lecture by Juan E. Corradi, Argentine sociologist from New York University. No. 18, November 1996.

Brief Notes on Ecuadorian and U.S. LiteratureLecture by Raúl Pérez Torres, Ecuadorian Poet.No. 19, March 1997.

Society and Poetry: Those Who Come Wrapped in a BlanketLecture by Roberto Sosa, Honduran poet.No. 20, May 1997.

Architecture as a Living ProcessLecture by Douglas Cardinal, Canadian architect whose projectsinclude Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of the American Indian.No. 21, July 1997.

Composing Opera: A Backstage Visit to the Composer’s WorkshopLecture by Daniel Catán, Mexican composer whose operas includeFlorencia en el Amazonas.No. 22, August 1997.

Welcoming Each Other: Cultural Transformation of the Caribbean in the 21st Century.Lecture by Earl Lovelace, Trinidadian novelist and winner ofthe 1997 Commonwealth Prize.No. 23, January 1998.

Out of SilenceLecture by Albalucía Angel, Colombian novelist and pioneerof Latin American postmodernism.No. 24, April 1998.

How Latino Immigration is Transforming AmericaLecture by Roberto Suro, North American reporter for The Washington Post,and former Bureau Chief of The New York Times in Houston, Texas.No. 25, May 1998.

The Iconography of Painted Ceramics from the Northern Andes.Lecture by Felipe Cárdenas-Arroyo, Colombian archaeologist fromthe University of Los Andes in Bogota.No. 26, July 1998.


Celebrating the Extraordinary Life of Elisabeth SamsonLecture by Cynthia McLeod, Surinamese novelist and authorof The High Price of Sugar.No. 27, August 1998.

A Country, A DecadeLecture by Salvador Garmendia, Venezuelan novelist, and winnerof the Juan Rulfo Short Story Prize and the National Literature Prize.No. 28, September 1998.

Aspects of Creation in the Central American NovelLecture by Gloria Guardia, Panamanian fiction writer and essayist,and senior member of the Panamanian Academy of Language.No. 29, September 1998.

Made in GuyanaLecture by Fred D’Aguiar, Guyanese novelist and winner of theWhitbread First Novel Award, and the Guyana Prize for Fiction, and Poetry.No. 30, November 1998.

True Lies on the Subject of Literary CreationLecture by Sergio Ramírez, Nicaraguan writer and former Vice-president ofhis country.No. 31, May 1999.

Myth, History and Fiction in Latin AmericaLecture by Tomás Eloy Martínez, Argentinean writer and author of Santa Evita.No. 32, May 1999.

Cultural Foundations of Latin American IntegrationLecture by Leopoldo Castedo, Spanish-Chilean art historian.No. 33, September 1999.

El Salvador and the Construction of Cultural IdentityLecture by Miguel Huezo Mixco, Salvadorian poet and journalist.No. 34, October 1999.


__________________________________________________________ Spanish and English versions available

The Encuentros series is distributed free of charge to university and municipal librariesthroughout the IDB member countries. Interested institutions may obtain the series bycontacting the IDB Cultural Center at the address listed on the back cover.

The Female Memory in NarrativeLecture by Nélida Piñon, Brazilian novelist and author of The Republic of Dreams.No. 35, November 1999.

Le Grand Tango: The Life and Music of Astor PiazzollaLecture by María Susana Azzi, member of the board of the NationalAcademy of Tango in Buenos Aires, after her book of the same title,with Simon Collier (Oxford University Press, 2000).No. 36, May 2000.

Columbus’s Ghost: Tourism, Art and National Identity in the BahamasLecture by Ian Gregory Strachan, English Professor at the University ofMassachusetts at Dartmouth, and author of God’s Angry Babies.No. 37, June 2000.

Talkin’ Ol’ Story: A Brief Survey of the Oral Tradition of the BahamasLecture by Patricia Glinton Meicholas, founding president of the BahamasAssociation for Cultural Studies and recipient of a Silver Jubilee ofIndependence Medal for Literature.No. 38, July 2000.

Anonymous Sources: A Talk on Translators and TranslationLecture by Eliot Weinberger, essayist and translator of many booksby Octavio Paz, and winner of the PEN/Kolovakos Award forpromoting Hispanic literature in the United States.No. 39, November 2000.


Inter-American Development Bank

IDB CULTURAL CENTER

1300 New York Avenue, N.W.Washington, D.C. 20577U.S.A.

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