On Marriage and Family (25 March 2004)

You learn something new every day.

I would never have guessed how sacred a tradition marriage was to the Bahamian psyche until this past week or so, when the institution discovered more apologists than it can truly handle. I wouldn't talk about the family. All of a sudden we Bahamians are champions of marriage and aficionadi of the nuclear family.

Well, child. You coulda fool me.

After all, the findings of the Youth Advisory Council report that 57% of all households in our nation are headed by a single parent, and, on average, 55% of all Bahamian children are born to unmarried women.

After all, the former government was so concerned about illegitimacy, which applies to the majority of Bahamian children, that it wrote a bill regularizing their status in society.

After all, Jeanne Thompson's play Father's Day, about a man who has a wife and two sweethearts, hit so close to home it made some uncomfortable.

But in all of the discussion last week and this, you'd think that we all grew up in, and perpetuate, the so-called "ideal" family: one father, one mother, and a kid or two.
You'd never guess that we knew anything about outside-chirren, grammies, aunties, co'ns, baby-fathers, tittas, common-law unions or sweethearts.

Where did we get the idea that "traditional marriage" (one man, one woman, the children they produce together) is a Bahamian ting?

I'm going to suggest that what we appear to believe as right, God-ordained, traditional, perfect, is in fact nothing more than the adaptation of a particular society (western Europe) to a particular economic, social and historical point in time (the industrial revolution). Different societies have different needs, and they have different families.

There is nothing "natural" about the family structure of one man, one woman, and their children. When we look at the variety of healthy family forms around the world and throughout history, all that the title nuclear family indicates is the bias of the people who named it.

So when I listen to all the various pronouncements on what marriage is, what it does or should do, its natural functions, and so on, I don't hear God talking. No; the families of the chosen people were huge, sprawling, with many mothers and children clustered around a father — the polygynous families of shepherds. Instead, I hear the voices of our colonial masters. The nuclear family is their adaptation.

Here are the facts. There are dozens of family forms. Some are polygynous; one man marries several women, and they bear his children. Some are polyandrous; one woman marries several men, and bears theirs. Some are consanguineal, which means that the central unit in the home is not marriage, but blood; a mother raises her children surrounded by her blood relatives (mothers, aunts, sisters, brothers). Some are conjugal, and the central unit is the husband-wife bond. Some are dyadic; there's a mother and children and little else. The nuclear family isn't even the most common family out there; joint families of various kinds are commoner.

Even the idea that a marriage takes place between one woman and one man isn't universal. There are situations in some societies (West Africa and native North America among them) where women may take wives, or men husbands. What is interesting in these situations is that the people who are allowed to do this are often special, privileged members of society — female chieftains or businesswomen in West Africa, shamans and priests in North America. Anthropologists find nothing new or heretical about same-sex marriages; they are simply another adaptation to the world in which they're found.

So let's get it straight. This idea that a family must consist of a man and woman who are married and their dependent children is just one more of the myths that were fed to us by the people who wanted to remake us in their image. They told us the myth to keep us off-balance, to never allow us to feel confident that we were fine as we were; it was foreign to us then, and remains so to us today. Our families — most of them coming from Africa, but some from rural Europe and Asia — were almost never nuclear. Many African societies favour polygynous households, while rural European and Asian families are multi-generational, and encompass grandparents and cousins and scores of other relatives. The nuclear family adaptation is the product of the urban, industrial European environment, and hasn't yet worked well for us.

But even if it could, we haven't got it right. So my final question is this: why are we spending so much time and energy discussing gay marriages, which don't exist in our society and are likely to affect a tiny minority of us if they ever do? It's not as though we've got this nuclear model down! I'm keeping the 57% of single-parent households firmly before me as I say that, and I'm thinking about the 55% of our children whose mothers are not married. I won't even talk bout sweethearting, outside-chirren, and the rest.

I'm guessing that if anything's eating away the fabric of our society, it's the fact that we profess to believe that something is good for us, but we haven't got the guts to commit to living that way.

Seems to me that if we do believe that the nuclear family is the best one to have, we'd better start making it work. Either that, or we'd better stop straining at the gnat. The camel's already halfway down our throat.