On Absurdity

Sir Vidia Naipaul, Nobel prize-winning Trinidadian writer, depicts the Caribbean as a place where no real achievements take place. For Naipaul, the Caribbean is a dumping-ground of civilization, a mixed bag where great cultures drop their baggage. "Nothing good ever came out of the Caribbean," he once wrote - a great irony, of course, because he is a Caribbean man, a brilliant writer, and he comes complete with the self-loathing that is more Caribbean - and more Bahamian - than we like to admit. Of course he's wrong. The Caribbean is a small region, but it has produced three Nobel laureates in the space of twenty years.

However, Sir Vidia has a point. It's not that nothing good came out of the Caribbean. Rather, it's that Caribbean people - people who live daily with the legacy of slavery - appear to be extremely tolerant of the absurdities of life. We can put up with more idiocy in our daily lives than many other people dream of.

Let me give you an example.

You're on the road, heading to work. You've taken all precautions - left in good time, taken the best route, and you're well on your way.

Up ahead the traffic's come to a complete stop. And it doesn't move for ten minutes. Fifteen minutes later you understand why: some brilliant planner has decided to repair a sidewalk at eight o'clock in the morning and has blocked off several feet of a downtown street lane. Bottleneck. Traffic jam.

The same thing happens another day, only when you reach the source of the problem, you discover that it's a garbage truck, trundling along on its merry way, engineering sanitation for the town in the midst of morning rush hour.

Absurdity.

The solution is extremely simple, mind you. All that needs to happen is for an ordinance to be passed prohibiting such activity during peak traffic hours, and for that ordinance to be enforced. I have heard rumours that such laws exist. If so, I imagine that they have been used for kindling; it's been so long since they've been enforced, they may as well have gone up in smoke.

Perhaps the reason for this lack of enforcement is the sense that we Bahamians (being good Caribbean people, although we like to pretend we're not) are well equipped to tolerate the absurd. We cuss. We laugh. We let fate take its course; we let the Holy Spirit move us.

And the absurdities remain exactly the same.

Maybe I'm spoiled. Maybe it's those eight years living in other countries that makes me think that we don't have to live like this, V. S. Naipaul's Caribbean curse notwithstanding. I'm not trying to imply that people in other countries don't have their own absurdities with which they have to contend; but there are more avenues available for them to address their absurdities, and at some point the people who live there stop, throw up their windows, and lean out into the night to yell: I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!!!

When was the last time we Bahamians did something like that?

I believe the reason we have such a high threshold for the absurd - why we continue to accept it, why we do not insist that things should be different, why we laugh at the fact that (say) someone spends good money paving the road this week, only to have someone else come along them next week and dig the road up again - is that we are the survivors of one of the greatest and most absurd institutions known to humankind.

The concept that a human being can be owned is as absurd as the idea that a pound of flesh can be taken from a living person's arm without shedding a drop of blood; and yet our ancestors, black, white and in between, lived with that reality for hundreds of years. A mere proclamation of emancipation does not erase the strategies developed over generations; and freedom has not yet erased all of the traces even now.

I think we are able to tolerate these little everyday absurdities, because we are the descendents of those who survived the big one. But the fact that we can survive it is no reason why we should.

The time has come, I believe, for us to choose what kind of a life we want to lead. Do we want to continue to inhabit the absurd world of the post-slave society, or do we wish to celebrate our freedom by creating something new and fresh and sensible of our own?

If it's the latter, then we cannot simply laugh or pray at the absurdities of our everyday lives; we have to rise up against them, to fight them, to name them like the child named the Emperor's nakedness, and cast them out.

So I'll start.

The idea that unions and politicians force organizations to pay overtime to workers when creating shift-work would meet most people's needs: absurd.

The idea that we can plan adequately for major national events, visiting dignitaries and travels abroad by starting work a month or less in advance: absurd.

The fact that we have extended "local government" to all the islands in the archipelago, but have no municipal authority in Nassau, where two-thirds of the population lives: absurd.

It's time to opt for freedom now. Let's make sure this thing go with sense.