On The Ghetto (19 February 2004)

I once taught a young woman who informed me that even though she was born and raised in “the ghetto”, she still came from a respectable family. Her parents were together, she said, and they were law-abiding and ambitious. She’d defended herself from criticism or ridicule before any such thing had come her way; the implication was that she expected people to believe that no one from "the ghetto" could be respectable at all.

I didn’t ask her what she meant by “the ghetto”. I can say that I was a little surprised that this American word had replaced our own names for our own neighbourhoods, but I didn’t think more of it until this year, when I was informed that tourists who have booked rooms at Dillet’s Guest House sometimes have difficulty getting taxis to drop them there. Some have had the experience of being set down at the Fish Fry and left to walk through Chippingham; Dillet’s is in “the ghetto”, and no place for a tourist or (apparently) a taxi driver.

Not only has the American word replaced our name for the area, but White America’s concept of what a ghetto is (a place for minorities, a place for poor people, a rough environment, a place no respectable tourist would be caught in, dead or alive) has overtaken our Black Bahamian understanding. I’m not going to ask how or why. I want to talk about the result. Words, you see, have power. The old adage about sticks and stones may bring comfort to a child who’s upset by having been called names, but it couldn’t be more untrue; words are far more powerful than weapons. Words define who we are. And by referring to the place in which we grow up as a “ghetto” we are creating for ourselves an image that defines us.

So what exactly is a ghetto? The word is not American but Italian, and it came into existence to refer to specific neighbourhoods in Renaissance Italy that were reserved for Jews. The purpose of this restriction was primarily religious. These Jewish Quarters had some things in common with gated communities; they were often surrounded by walls and would be entered by gates that were locked at night. Behind these walls Jewish society, culture and economy often flourished. Although these neighbourhoods were reserved for a specific minority, they were places of rich cultural heritage, strong economic activity, steely family ties, and beauty. As Jews assimilated into European society, they moved out of the ghettos, and by the 1900s they had largely disappeared.

It wasn’t until the Nazi movement in the 1930s that the word “ghetto” took on the pejorative aspects that we associate with it today. The anti-Jewish campaign inspired by Hitler re-established the Jewish neighbourhoods. Jews were turned out of their homes, stripped of their possessions and businesses, and forced to settle in run-down urban areas. These ghettos not cultural havens. Rather, they had all the worst aspects of the most awful city slum: poverty, disease, and terror. They were holding pens for the doomed, places where these people were sent to live and work, and from which they could be rounded up or massacred.

At end of the Second World War the word crossed the Atlantic to the United States of America and was used to refer to poor parts of US cities where non-White Americans lived. By ascribing all the worst oppression of Nazi Europe to American inner cities, those who used the name negated all the greatness that had come out of those areas.

And plenty of greatness had already come out of them. Much of African-American culture originated in Harlem. I’m not talking about hip-hop and gangsta culture, which tend to internalize and perpetuate the most negative aspects of the “ghetto” mentality. I’m talking about the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that inspired Cubism and the African art movement, that celebrated jazz and pan-Africanism and Garveyism and created great African-American intellectuals and celebrities like Robeson and Baker and Hurston and McKay and Hughes. By calling these culturally rich neighbourhoods “ghettos”, White Americans stripped them of their power for Blacks.

Much of the same thing has happened in Nassau. Anthropologists talk about cognitive maps, which are ways in which ordinary people orient themselves in the world, and which give them their identities and their power. When our cognitive maps included the various towns and neighbourhoods of Ova-da-Hill, when they could locate the birthplace of Lynden Oscar Pindling and Orville Turnquest and Milo Butler and countless others who have made this nation what it is today we were stronger, because we understood the strength, historic and economic and cultural, of the areas from which we came. But by lumping all of these places together and denigrating them as “the ghetto”, we have weakened ourselves.

And we stripped our neighbourhoods of their power. Ova-da-Hill is far, far more than just an old part of town. It is a source of our national strength. Back in the day, we didn’t define ourselves by constituencies. Our homes and identities were not left to the vagaries of election strategy. We set the boundaries of our neighbourhoods. The names of our roads were our names. We knew which church named Church Street, who the Lewises and the Taylors and the Dillets were, which meetings gave Meeting Street its name, why corners had names like Dog Flea Alley and Burial Ground Corner. And because we knew this, we knew ourselves.

One more story. I work with a man who has taken on the task of restoring his grandmother’s home in Hospital Lane. His grandmother was one of those freedom fighters from the 1950s on whose shoulders many of us stood to get where we are today. He’s taking his time; it’s an old house, and it’s going to be a long process. To give himself some inspiration, he put up a plaque on the house, commemorating her part in the struggle.

The result of his action was unexpected. Taxi and surrey drivers bring their fares by the home and point it out as part of their informal city tours. That’s interesting enough, but here’s the best part. Schoolchildren who pass the house stop and ask him what the plaque means. When he explains and tells them of his grandmother’s part in our history, they look at one another in wonder and ask him: “You mean to say somebody that important come out of the ghetto?”

The answer, of course, is YES. And they still can.