On Paradise (3 June 2004)

Last week I wrote about fact and fiction, raising the question of how we know what's real and what's not, what's fact and what's fancy, and how much we rely on books to form our "knowledge" about the world.

This week's article stems from that, but takes it in a different direction.

This week I want to write about paradise.

It's an idea we hear a lot when we talk about the Bahamas. But I suspect we don't think enough about it when we hear it; we take it for granted, but we don't really question it. But we should.

My good friend Ian Strachan, whose writing every thinking Bahamian should seek to read, has put out a book called Paradise and Plantation, on tourism and culture in the Caribbean. Of course, his main focus is on The Bahamas, because ours is a culture fully steeped in the idea of paradise. You'll notice, though, what he links paradise with. In Ian Strachan's world, the idea of paradise is the flip side of the plantation.

I think I agree with him. It's not that I believe that tourism is a bad thing in itself; but I do believe that there's something fundamentally unhealthy in having a unidimensional tourist product, one that's designed to sell an environment, to push an idea.

You see, as I've discussed before, ideas and images often have a kind of power that we don't expect them to have. We are used to thinking of the world in terms of "real" and "not-real"; in the "real" world are things, the stuff that matters, cars and houses and people and cash. In the "not-real world", though, are ideas and words and thoughts. And these, unlike sticks and stones, can never hurt us.

That's where we go wrong.

It's ideas and words and thoughts that define the "real" world for us, that give us the values we place on the things we spread around that world. Let me see if I can give you a couple of examples.

Example number one. You find yourself on a stretch of beach. The sun is blazing overhead, the air is hot, the sky is the kind of blue that burns. You do one of two things: you spread out your towel and lie down on it, hoping that when you get up you will have changed colour or soaked up some health; or you take your towel, put it on your head, and go looking for the nearest shade.

The first reaction is the kind you might have if you thought of the stretch of sand as a beach in paradise. The second is what might happen if you regarded it simply as a piece of land you have to cross, a rough and sandy hell.

Example number two. You invite a stranger into your home. You ask him to sit down, and you offer him a cool drink and something to eat. You do one of two things: you go to the kitchen, take out the switcher you made earlier that day, serve up a bowl of fresh conch fritters (full of conch), and hand it to him with a smile and a friendly chat. Or you hand him a menu, limp back to your station (it's been a long and tiring day), and prepare to be tied to his table until he's finished his meal or you're finished your shift.

In the first place, the stranger is a guest, and you are the host. What you do for him is simply an extension of your hospitality. In the second, the stranger is a tourist, a paying visitor, and you are a server.

In each scenario, we've got the same situation, maybe even the same instance, but there are two different ways of looking at it. One is through the eyes of a person who came looking for paradise; the other is through the eyes of the person who lives there. And in the differences between them lie the seeds of inequality, of discontent.

The problem with the idea of paradise, you see, is that there are no people in it. There are beaches and hotels and shadows that slip in and provide you with drinks and food when you need them and disappear when you don't. "Paradise" isn't just a place; it's a feeling, an extended rest, a neverland where you go to not do work. Oh, there might be natives in that paradise, but they aren't really people. Rather, they are imagined as modified happy savages, who go about their business in a simple, rather childlike way, but who don't have the same cares and hopes and fears and responsibilities that real people have to worry about.

Because, you see, the idea of paradise wasn't invented by us. How could it be? Our experience doesn't really lead us to regard these islands as earthly Edens. Those of us who toil in the fields or out on the sea have a healthy respect for the constant sunshine and those turquoise waters; the one can burn up all our crops (as is the case this year, with this drought), and the other can turn on us and drown us anytime it gets ready. Most of us don't see paradise, anyway, when we look around us; we see the heat off the road, the mosquitoes, the prickles, the sand in our shoes chafing our toes, the salt itching our skins. No; paradise is the invention of someone who lives far, far away.

It's a con, and a very old one at that. It's the ultimate advertiser's trick; and the first advertiser to use it was Columbus himself. When he wrote "These islands are very green and fertile and the breezes are very soft," he was creating the very first sales pitch for the Bahamas. It was all very well and good to get Ferdinand and Isabella to invest in his future trips. But it was an idea, an image, and its purpose was to sell.

So we must be very careful of using it to sell ourselves. We can employ it to bring the visitors here, but we must be wary of buying the myth. For when we do, we run the risk of implicitly accepting the idea that Bahamians are not really people; that we are "natives", and our purpose in paradise is to decorate the place, give it an "island" flavour. We run the risk of believing that we purpose of our existence to supply all the "real" people's needs.

It's a dangerous idea, after all. If we believe it, we will continue to invite people in to take over our best beaches, to set the prices on the property we owned, to turn us from hosts into employees and servants, and to recreate the plantation in a land that's free.