On Independence (19 May 2003)

When I was a little girl, my mother used to tell me: “If you aim for a star, you might hit a tree.” Being a rather literal-minded child, I used to imagine myself in a gigantic catapult, aiming at Polaris, and crashing into the dilly tree in our back yard on the way.

The point is you need to dream big dreams to accomplish even a little bit of them. The bigger your dreams, the higher your goals, the further you are going to go. But if you begin with small goals, you will go nowhere at all.

“If you aim for the tree,” she’d tell me, “you’ll probably hit the ground.”

I want to tell you three stories about dreamers and their dreams. The first one is about my mother herself. Her mother, my grandmother, was a woman for whom the word “no” did not exist. She was born in the first decade of the twentieth century, and had three big strikes going against her: she was brown, she was a woman, and she was poor. But she had dreams. She decided to send her children, both of them, to the best university she could think of. That university was Cambridge, England.

Now at that time, sending her son was remarkable enough, but my grandmother decided her daughter was to go as well. When she told the woman in the Colonial Office that this was her dream, that good lady looked at this Afro-European woman and her Afro-European girlchild and laughed. When my mother got into Girton College, Cambridge, my grandmother showed that woman the acceptance letter.

The second story is about three men who in 1953 began a revolution that would change the face of the Bahamas for good. William Cartwright, Henry Taylor and Cyril Stevenson, recognizing the dire need for change in the Bahamian social situation, and understanding that such a change could not happen with the political system the way it was, introduced party politics to the Bahamas by forming the Progressive Liberal Party.

They couldn’t know how revolutionary their action was. None of the three was particularly black. They were members of the so-called “coloured classes”, and they had more access to social status and educational advancement than many darker-skinned Bahamians. They could only hope, but not predict, that the PLP would serve as a catalyst that allowed the black Bahamian masses to unite behind heroes of their own skin colour, and they certainly could not possibly have imagined that a scant fourteen years after the foundation of the PLP, that party would take over the government of the Bahamas, or that within twenty short years, the Bahamas would become an independent nation. But they dreamed nevertheless, and the result of their dream was the creation of a nation.

The third one is about a book, written by Patti Glinton-Meicholas, A Shift in the Light. It is a tribute to the generation that produced her – the nameless generation of people who made it possible for the Lynden Pindlings and Milo Butlers of the PLP to succeed. These people had the courage to dream about a better Bahamas, and to act on their dreams, and because of them, this July we Bahamians will celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of our independence. They were far less blessed materially than we were; but what they lacked in possessions, the characters in Glinton-Meicholas’ book made up for in integrity, honour vision that many of us don’t have.

So I’m led to ask myself: now, thirty years after Independence, what are our dreams? Who among us are the madmen who have the gall to imagine the impossible, and who are willing to make sacrifices to see the impossible through? There is no doubt that we have come a long, long way since 1973. Economically, we’re far better off. Politically, we’re maturing. Educationally, we’ve created a system that gives every Bahamian the opportunity to finish high school, and we’ve built a college that offers excellent value for the dollar.

But just how big do we dream?

Patti Glinton ends her novel with the suggestion that we, the children and grandchildren of a whole nation of dreamers, of the people who dared to vote for the absurd — a group of black and brown men who had the effrontery to think they could run a country — have let our forefathers down. We’ve let them down by abandoning the habit of dreaming, and by clinging instead to what we have already got.

I’m not so sure she’s wrong. Our wealth has made us prisoners. We’re far more interested in keeping our riches than in creating or buying into any dream that we fear could threaten our way of life. Instead of aiming for stars, we turn our backs on them because to reach that high might cost us what we’ve already got. And so we crawl along, our eyes never leaving the ground.

Instead of imagining true social independence — an independence that allows us to think for ourselves, to come up with our own indigenous solutions to our own indigenous problems — we hire consultants from the USA, Britain and Canada to find the solutions for us, instead of asking the consultants we grow right here.

Instead of imagining true intellectual independence — an independence that allows us to view the world through our own eyes — we discourage Bahamians from becoming writers and filmmakers and artists and musicians, and instead import information from abroad, thus allowing people in the USA, Jamaica, Canada and Britain to form our opinions for us.

Instead of imagining true material independence, where we recognize what it is that we do that is better than other people’s (we grow better oranges and bananas and pineapples, for one thing, we grind better grits, and our tomatoes have taste, our cabbages are huge and our onions are strong), we prefer to buy food that have stickers on them to assure us they were imported from abroad.

And instead of imagining true individual independence, which requires us to recognize how special each one of us is, we set up rules and regulations and trammels that help us pinpoint the failings in one another; we spend a lot of time magnifying motes and knocking one another out with planks. And secretly, inside us, we tell one another by our actions that because we’re Bahamian we are not as accomplished, as innovative, or as creative as those people who live in Europe or America or anywhere else.

Thirty years after Independence, and fifty years after the foundation of the PLP, our houses and our wallets and our cars are bigger, but we have grown smaller than our fathers. Where they dared to dream the impossible — that black men could rule themselves — we appear to be unable to dream even the attainable. We refuse to aim for the stars, because we believe that even the tree is too high for us; we might miss it altogether, and then we might lose our riches. And so we cling to the status quo, we offer no challenge to what is around us, and we stifle our dreams.

But we cannot afford to do that. Thirty years is just the beginning of a nation’s journey. If we have no dreams, where on earth will we lead our children? Just think. If the founders and builders of the PLP had stifled their dreams, where would we be now?