On Fact and Fiction (27 May 2004)

My recent article on generation property raised at least one very interesting response. The facts were thin on the ground, we were told. Much of what the article covered was fiction. For example, there is no such thing as generation property. The law does not recognize it as fact. Whatever takes place outside the law is illegal. End of story.

Know this: Facts are made by people in power.

Facts, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, are bits of knowledge or information based on real occurrences, or things that are determined by evidence. But how do we distinguish what is real? How do we decide what constitutes evidence? Do we go by what people say? Or do we wait for someone to write something down, and then rely on that?

The common answer to these questions is to assume that it's easy to tell fact from fiction; one is true, and the other is false. We know that one is true because, well, the evidence proves it. Fiction, on the other hand, is a product of the imagination.

There's a problem with this assumption. It's this: the very process of writing anything down, whether it be a story that comes from out of your own head or what a witness told you five minutes ago, is fiction.

It's easy to assume that the entirety of reality can be, and is, contained between the covers of books. After all, this is what we are taught; the whole of human wisdom is contained in books, and it is often to the written word that we turn when we want to find evidence, to find proof.

But consider this.

Writing is a distillation of reality, not reality itself. The process of writing is a selective one; not everything that exists in reality makes it into writing. The process of selecting what goes in and what does not is a process that is carried out by human beings. It is one that has a hierarchy attached to it; some things are important enough to be preserved in writing, and some things are not. And someone — the writer — selects.

And wherever that writing takes place, a fiction is occurring — even in the writing of laws.

Legality and illegality, therefore, are not fixed entities; they are defined by the powerful. Laws are written documents, created by men (mostly) in power (definitely) and written by specialists whose language no one else comprehends. It is possible to state the following fact: According to Bahamian law, there is no such thing as generation property. But is that as far as it goes?

I'm going to say no. For because they are written documents, even laws are fiction as well, in the sense that they are transformations of reality into the written word. They are composed, made up; they are drafted and revised, and days are spent debating exactly the right word to be used in exactly the right place to ensure that there are no loopholes — or, more precisely, that only the right loopholes are left.

The dangerous thing about laws is that they are fictions composed by the strong to govern the actions of the strong and the weak alike. And the stronger you are, the closer you are to the writers of the laws, the more you can tailor the laws to suit your own needs.

It is for this reason that historians say that history is written by the victors. The winners of any battle create the "reality" that lies behind that battle. I chose to be an anthropologist, and not a historian or a lawyer, precisely because (as a writer) I knew intimately that what is enshrined in writing is only part of the story. The historians who study the Bahamas, and the lawyers who administer the legal code, are dealing with a very small part of reality. To assume that this is all that there is to being Bahamian is to negate everything that has not yet been written.

Consider the stories that have been written about the history of our own islands. One story is that when the Spaniards sailed through the Bahamas in 1513, they found no people. This is the story as written in the history books, and it is on that "fact" that we base our belief that the Europeans wiped out the Lucayan people of the Bahamas.

But what is our lived reality? There are Bahamians who claim direct ancestry from Lucayan Indians. Until the 1990s, there was a woman in San Salvador who identified herself as a full-blooded Arawak. And Guyanese immigrants to the Bahamas, people in whose country full-blooded Arawaks still reside, can look at certain Bahamians and see the resemblance.

Who do we believe? The written history of the Bahamas or the oral testimony of Bahamian people? The written history was penned by the people who held the power at that time; the oral history is the story of the vast majority of Bahamians, white and black alike.

As an anthropologist, I take my knowledge, my facts, from the lived realities of ordinary people. The vast majority of them are invisible in the literature of our country, and invisible in our laws. The reality of the majority of Bahamians, especially those who live beyond New Providence, is too often absent from our written records. But despite it all, that reality exists.

The fact is that, in the same way that many Bahamians are "illegitimate" under the law, many Bahamians own land "illegally". And the fact is, we call this land ownership "generation property". The way in which it is administered is not something that has been made up; it may not be written in a law book, but it is the way in which the people who own it regard it, and for them it is fact. Surely it is time for our law-makers to recognize it and write it into being.

Not to delve too deeply into history, after all, but — under which law did we get these islands from the Lucayans in the first place? Which fact was it that made them ours?