On Culture (2 June 2003)

Just recently I had the pleasure of teaching a young man who proclaimed that Wendy’s is as Bahamian as the Bamboo Shack. The reaction I get when I tell people about him is the same every time: a look of disbelief, a laugh, a scornful comment along the lines of "He mussee ain know who he is."

It’s obvious to those of us who know better. Our culture is unique! It’s conch, it’s fish-and-grits, it’s Junkanoo and rake ’n’ scrape and steam pork chop on a Thursday afternoon when you hungry-hungry, and it’s dialect and straw work and beating a goombay drum. It’s peas-n-rice, macaroni and cheese, potato salad, fried chicken and Kool-Aid on Sunday. In the words of Ronnie Butler, it’s guinea corn hominy, yes indeed, stew shad and johnny cake, guinea corn hominy and lard. You must get some of that. It’s Blue Hill Water Dry, and ringplay, and Over-the-Hill, and up south, and Gussiemaes; it’s flour bag and George Symonette in wompas, Dr Offff and KB and Showtime in Rawson Square.

It sure isn’t Wendy’s. What! That boy jes ain know who he is.

The thing is, I think he does know. Those of us who are tempted to denounce him and dismiss his proclamation are missing the point he’s making. For so long we’ve been taught to approach culture as something to do with things — with food, performance, Junkanoo, music, art, dance, you name it — that we’ve bought into that myth. Because we've been taught to believe that culture consists of objects, we get very defensive when people mess with our objects, believing that if you take them away from us, we're in trouble.

But objects aren’t culture. Objects are expressions of culture, concrete manifestations of the ideas, attitudes and habits that unite a group of people. Culture is that big amorphous constellation of shared experiences, habits and behaviours that drives us to make the decisions we do. Culture is the sum total of who we all are. It's what we know, how we act, what attitudes we hold, and what things we believe in. In other words, everything we do — not just those things we're taught to recognize as “cultural” — is part of our culture.

Imagine culture as in iceberg. Some of it pokes up out of the water, catches the light, and takes your breath away (if you’re lucky) because of the sheer wonder of it, its strength and beauty and grace. When you see it you say "Oh, that's our culture," and as long as you can see it you know where you are. But like an iceberg, most of culture exists below the surface. Like an iceberg, what you see is just the tip of the whole.

Like an iceberg, culture can sink the Titanic if it's ignored.

We need to be careful that culture doesn't sink us. We've become so accustomed to dealing with the surface, we don’t realize that the unconscious exists. For us, Wendy’s is American, the Bamboo Shack Bahamian, and heaven help the young man who can’t get that straight.

I'm not so sure it's he who needs the help. I'm thinking it's the rest of us.

I'm thinking that we run the risk of giving away our real culture to spare a few objects that we have identified as “ours”: Junkanoo, peas ’n’ rice, rake ’n’ scrape, Bookie and Rabbie, and whatever other “Bahamian” thing is the flavour of the month. The difficulty with focussing all our time and energy on objects, though, is that we become accustomed to defining ourselves according to things. And things are fickle, and they change on us.

To begin with, most of what we claim as Bahamian isn’t solely ours. John Canoe/Junkanoo is found throughout the Caribbean in various forms. Peas ’n’ rice is a variation on a number of West African rice dishes, and is eaten almost everywhere West Africans went. Rake ’n’ scrape is a whole lot like zydeco in Louisiana; and Bookie is a Haitian invention. Then again, these things have the habit of changing. Junkanoo today is a far cry from what it was a couple of decades ago, and in rake ’n’ scrape, electric bass guitars and saws have taken the place of the tin tub bass and washboards.

What makes these things unique isn’t what they look like; it’s why they’re there. By focussing too much attention on the surface while ignoring what’s going on underneath, we run the danger of missing the real thing altogether. We’ll stare too hard at the tip of the iceberg, and we won’t realize the rest of it’s there until we’re scrambling for the lifeboats.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be identifying, promoting, and supporting the things we’ve decided to call Bahamian. What I am saying, though, is that simply cataloguing these things without understanding why they are specifically Bahamian is not going to do us much good in the long run.

You see, it’s possible to eat all the conch you like, to dance merengue till the morning come, to recreate the Fergusons of Farm Road for our children to enjoy, to teach them to make whelk soup (even though whelks are mighty scarce these days), to make a reference to Junkanoo in every second breath, and to be an American at heart. It’s equally possible to eat pizza and pasta, to dine on salads, to go to the opera, to attend wine tastings, or to make a north-south sound when singing and still be fundamentally Bahamian. The secret isn’t in what one sees on the surface; it’s in what lies beneath.

Let’s go back to Wendy’s. On the one hand, what’s Bahamian about it? It doesn’t serve Bahamian food, and its parent company rests deep in the heart of the United States. So how can any sane person claim it for the Bahamas?

Simple. Bahamians eat there all the time, and fast American food has become a staple of the average Bahamian diet. If we were to add up the number of times we ate a meal from Wendy’s in the past month, and compare it with the number of times we ate from the Bamboo Shack, we just might surprise ourselves. Wendy’s meets many of the needs of our modern lifestyles so well — it’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s convenient, and it has drive-thru windows — that it has entered our unconscious without our even noticing, so much so that it has become part of our culture. To protest that it isn’t is to get distracted by the tip of the iceberg.

Before we claim some things as Bahamian, then, before we dismiss others as not, before we pump money into preserving something that gives us our “identity”, I suggest we take a lesson from the young man who named Wendy’s Bahamian. Like him, we need to focus on more than what we see on the surface. It’s why we do what we do, and not what we do itself, that makes the difference; and until we understand this basic truth, we’re just navigating in the dark.