Theater in the Bush: art, politics, and community in The Bahamas.

• Date: 22 March 2007
• Author: Strachan, Ian Gregory
• Published date: 22 March 2007
• Author: Strachan, Ian Gregory

There is no fight for culture which can develop apart from the popular struggle.--Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.--Paulo Friere, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed

The future of West Indian militancy lies in art.--Derek Walcott, "What the Twilight Says"

THERE WOULD BE NO POINT IN WRITING THESE WORDS TO EXPLAIN MY CONDUCT AND aspirations as an artist and an intellectual if, first of all, I did not believe that it was my duty to transform my community. As a Caribbean person of African decent and as a postcolonial person with a particular kind of training and perspective, I see the artist as a teacher, an activist, a catalyst, and dissenter; someone who, in the words of Edward Said (1996: 22), "belongs on the same side as the weak and the unrepresented." What I want is a more egalitarian society, a more tolerant society, a more democratic society--a society that is less exploited and exploitive. What I want is a life less brutal and cheap. I have for many years tried to make that world come into being through my art. I have been convinced that at some point art could change the world by changing people. This article describes my country, The Bahamas, and my vexed relationship to it; it describes my life in it, my life as an artist, my life as what some in my country might even call a "radical." I am amused by the term because, truly, in these prosperous Bahamian islands, most have lost all sense of what is truly at stake in the world.

This article gives a brief history of the Track Road Theater Company, which I established in 1996 at the age of 27. I will discuss the expectations, failures, and successes of the group's first 10 years. My vision of Track Road was to be a means of getting "avant-garde" theater to "the people" and of exposing them to politically progressive ideas. The operation of an amateur theater company with an anti-establishment bent in this small island society has been an education in censorship, class dynamics, systematic neglect, and popular indifference. It has also been a lesson in pragmatism. We have persisted and adapted in interesting ways. This article maps my own journey as a playwright and artist, and it offers a critical look at cultural development and the politics of identity in the post-independence Bahamas.

Let us first look at the cultural situation in my country. After over 30 years of independence from Great Britain, The Bahamas is still very much searching for its identity. The pace of social transformation and modernization since Black Majority Rule in 1967 and Independence in 1973 has been dramatic, and the nation is still trying to gain its bearings culturally. Always a marginal colony in the British West Indies, mass tourism has brought not only economic prosperity and development to the post-World War II Bahamas, but also the attendant problems of increased crime, overpopulation in the capital, depopulation and underdevelopment of the rural islands of the archipelago, the breakdown of the extended family structure, and the decline of many intangible forms of culture. To put it simply, tourism comes at a social cost (Pattullo, 1996: 80-101).

Slavery played no small part in convincing black Bahamians of their inferiority. British colonialism left Bahamians lacking in cultural confidence; we, like so many colonials, became mimic men--a phrase popularized, of course, by V.S. Naipaul (1967). Since Independence, we have exchanged English hegemony for the United States of America's cultural hegemony, partly due to our proximity (less than 50 nautical miles) and partly to the fact that the biggest U.S. exports have been its. cultural products: its music, movies, television shows, books, and mythologies. In the shadow of that behemoth called the "American Entertainment Industry," the seeds planted by our dramatists, poets, songwriters, and other artists have some difficulty sprouting and bearing fruit. Jamaican artist and scholar, Rex Nettleford (1993: 80-90), has explained that on this uneven cultural playing field, Caribbeans in general are engaged in a "battle for space."

The tastes of Bahamians in terms of their dress, food, and hairstyles have all been affected by the U.S. media, by our contact with the millions of tourists who have visited our country, and by the fact that many of our people have lived, worked, visited, or schooled in the U.S. As a result, many Bahamians have grown to doubt and mistrust things Bahamian and to prefer the glossier productions of the North. Indeed, many seem uncertain about what the Bahamian thing is.

This country of only 300,000 inhabitants has played host to a minimum of three million tourists every year since 1986 (Strachan, 2002: 114). In The Bahamas, visual artists have been influenced by the expectations of the tourist market, and popular music has adopted tourist themes--and been well received by the citizenry for doing so (Strachan, 2002: 136). Efforts are made each year to market the country's major folk festival, Junkanoo, to tourists. Culture, from the perspective of both the major political parties in the country, must be made to translate into tourist dollars. This seems far more important to policymakers than human development. However, some songwriters, poets, and playwrights have successfully told stories about our people for our people in the last 30 years. In particular, musical artists such as Exuma, Eddie Minnis, and KB and dramatists like James Catalyn and Michael Pintard have from time to time depicted Bahamian life and captured the popular imagination; but these breakthroughs increasingly seem like interruptions, moments of fitful wakefulness that disrupt a sweet collective dream. (1)

I have found the following reflection by Antonio Gramsci (1991: 209) useful when thinking about art and community in The Bahamas:

The so-called "artistic" "national" literature is not popular in Italy. Whose fault is it? That of the public, which does not read? That of the critics, who are able to present and extol literary "values" to the public? That of the newspapers, which publish the old Count of Monte Carlo instead of serializing the "modern Italian novel"? But why does the public not read in Italy, when in other countries it does? Besides, is it true that in Italy nobody reads? Would it not be more accurate to state the problem in this way: why does the Italian public read foreign literature, popular and non-popular, instead of reading its own? ... What is the meaning of the fact that the Italian people prefer to read foreign writers? It means that they undergo the moral and intellectual hegemony of foreign intellectuals, that they feel more closely related to foreign intellectuals than to "domestic" ones, that there is no national intellectual and moral bloc, either hierarchical or, still less, egalitarian. The intellectuals do not come from the people. They do not feel tied to them (rhetoric apart), they do not know and sense their needs, aspirations and feelings. In relation to the people they are something detached, without foundation, a caste and not an articulation with organic functions of the people themselves. Although Gramsci is writing about Italy of the 1920s and 1930s, this passage makes sense to me. Of course, indigenous art can reach and be valued by the masses; of course it stands the best chance of doing so if it comes from among them in the first place. Reggae and Hip Hop are two good examples. But what does the artist do if he is not using a popular local form? What does the artist do when he wants his art to promote change and the people do not see the need or lack the will to change? What does the artist do when his education and experiences make him a thing apart?

Junkanoo, the popular masquerade art of The Bahamas, has offered an uncritical mirror toward the society for the past half century. The music and painting of today's Bahamas sell the pastoral; the church, a powerful voice, teaches intolerance and Old Testament justice; the media houses recycle foreign fare and are intimidated by the politicians and the sponsors; the hotels and multinational trusts and banks do not need to support art to make a profit in this tax haven. Little in the way of political critique can be found in Bahamian art, whatever the medium. In this context, I felt it imperative to impose myself on the national discourse and advance a subversive agenda. Track Road drew young people who were equally as desirous of defying convention.

I established Track Road Theater in 1996, with the motto, "Building a People." I wanted to establish in The Bahamas a transformative theater. As Antonin Artaud (1958: 79) had put it, "the theater, utilized in the highest and most difficult sense possible, has the power to influence the aspect and formation of things." Mine would be a political theater, a theater that attacked the political cult of personality surrounding Lynden Pindling (who had been prime minister for 25 years, 1967 to 1992) and Hubert Ingraham (Pindling's successor from 1992 to 2002), the prejudice against Haitian immigrants, the false piety of the churches, and the new commodity fetishism of the nation. I had come of age in the 1980s, when the Pindling government had been discredited in the eyes of many and was implicated in the cocaine bonanza. Before studying in the United States, I had been a part of the...