On National Identity (15 December 2003)

When I was a little girl, my grandmother — who had been raised on the Royal Readers — used to ask us how we got so tall. We’d always say we didn't know. She would say: "Oh, you just growed, hey? Like Topsy?"

We inhabit a society that seems to believe (like Topsy) that things like culture and identity just grow. We don’t appear to believe that we need to do much to help them along; they come up, like seeds from the ground, and they become whatever they are supposed to become all on their own.

The fact that we believe this shows just how far we’ve come from our farming roots. People who grow things for a living know that seeds sown don’t “just grow”; if they do, you can’t predict the outcome. There are all sorts of things that can happen to them along the way, as Christ’s Parable of the Sower makes clear: the sun can scorch 'em, birds can swallow 'em, thorns can choke 'em, stones can kill 'em.

Like the Word of God in the human heart, nations don’t just grow. As with everything worthwhile, in fact, some effort must be expended in directing the growth that may occur on its own, otherwise the outcome is far from predictable. National identity doesn’t just happen; it must be built, painstakingly, expensively, or else it will be tangled, shallow and vulnerable.

Recently I've been writing about a variety of things — intellectualism, creativity, discipline, mediocrity, service. At the back of my mind while writing them has been this vexing question of identity. We are thirty years old, and many of us are wondering why we don’t have more to show for our generation of independence. Where are our heroes? we ask. Where are our honours? Our monuments and mementos and all the things that make a nation a nation? It's become fashionable to lament the fact that we are a society that has no real sense of self, no real touchstone that we can use to say "I am Bahamian" other than the material goods of which we are so proud, but which, after all, are almost all from abroad.

This, of course, is not accidental. The result of rushing anxiously ahead to get where we are economically and materially is that we have been scattering the seeds of culture as we run — scattering them, not sowing them, and certainly not tending them as we should have been in order to ensure that the national identity we grow in the process is something that we need or want. And now that our thirtieth year as a nation has given us space to stop and breathe and look around us, we realize that there are too many thorns and shrivelled plants in our field.

You see, national identity is the sum total of all sorts of things that are unfashionable in the Bahamas (why they are unfashionable is another story). In the first place, it is imagined and nurtured by thinkers, people who spend their time reflecting on a nation is or should be, to study it as it grows, and to report back to the community at large. In nations that are healthy and flourishing (not just rich), these thinkers, whether they be writers or philosophers or griots, university graduates or people on the street, collect and guard the stories that tell others who their heroes are and why. And people listen to them.

But our society appears to regard thinking in such an aimless fashion a waste of time; and so we admonish our children to take up occupations that are lucrative, productive, and recognized. As a result, we are losing much of the richness of our past as the people who lived it are dying, their stories left untold.

In the second place, a national identity is kept fresh by creative artists who constantly recognize, refashion and retell the national stories so that we can all know them, and so that they will be relevant to all groups of people in every generation. The creative artist retells these stories interpretively, infusing them with the new life of the imagination, rather than allowing them to go stale by repeating the same old things all the time. Creators re-imagine, re-interpret; they don’t copy and reproduce. Again, though, we regard the exercise of the imagination to be an unprofitable occupation, and leave it up to the most dedicated of us to do in their spare time, while the rest of us get on with the “real” business of life, much of which involves copying to the point of absurdity whatever our northern neighbours do.

In the third place, that identity is strengthened by people who are willing not only to work for pay, but to serve — to serve their nation and their neighbours without asking for any reward. Without such citizens, even the greatest story withers and dies, because it becomes mercenary, commercialized, safe; it is people who are willing to give more than they can ever receive who keep nations alive. And finally, without standards of excellence and the inculcation of the discipline it takes to achieve them, half-heartedness and confusion rule the day.

What has been in the back of my mind as I’ve written these articles is that our nation is not a productive field, but a patch of thorns with the occasional fruitful tree or beautiful flower here and there. We have to search hard and long to find those, and most of us don’t have the time.

The result? The national stories we tell today are those that were told once thirty years ago, and which have been trotted out again and again ever since. They have not grown richer or fresher with the telling, but they have grown smaller and smaller, less and less perfect with age. The identity we have to show for our independence is fragmented, mediocre, and weak; small wonder our children are looking elsewhere for a foundation upon which to build their lives.

It is time we recognized that national identity is not a luxury, nor is it an accidental by-product of a group of people who are materially comfortable and extremely well fed. We can no longer hope to “just grow”. So we sow, so shall we reap; our field is far too full of weeds. Our future now depends upon our ability to sow with care and reap with prudence; to research and create, to serve one another, and to demand perfection in everything we do.