On The Mind (1 December 2003)

List the things you consider markers of what is "Bahamian". Go on. Put the newspaper right down, take up a notepad, and write down ten things.

Done?

OK. Now count and see how many of those things have anything to do with the mind.

Let's see. Chances are you included Junkanoo, rake-n-scrape, conch, peas-n-rice, sun-sand-n-sea, Christianity, the way we talk, maybe Androsia.

Chances are that you didn't include anything that demands much in the way of thought.

You see, the popular imagination of what is "Bahamian" generally ignores our minds altogether. This is not the same with other nations' identities. The British have Shakespeare and Newton to raise to the world, and their universities are considered to be the best on the planet. The Americans have Broadway, the Ivy League, Edison and Ford. In our region, Jamaica has the erudition of Michael Manley to call upon, as well as the political rigour of Bob Marley's lyrics; Trinidad has created a literature that any country might envy and raised up a Nobel prize winner. St. Lucia, small as it is, has spawned two Nobel Laureates. The Bahamas? Not to worry. We have Atlantis.

This is not to say that intellectuals don't exist here. On the contrary; Bahamian history teems with peculiar geniuses. Etienne Dupuch was the leading newspaperman in the region, single-handedly thwarting a royal cover-up and saving a scapegoat's life. Half a century ago Stafford Sands created an economic model for this country that the whole world is coming, late in the day, to adopt. They are not all dead, either; a brief conversation with Arthur Foulkes, Sean McWeeney, Patricia Glinton-Meicholas, Patrick Rahming, Theresa Moxey-Ingraham, Paul Adderley, Marion Bethel, Gail Saunders, Michael Eldon, or Desiree Cox (among countless others) will quickly prove otherwise. But if you want to be sure to live in perpetual obscurity in this country of ours, just aspire to intellectualism.

The sad fact is, we don't place much emphasis on the products of the mind. We have the best hotels in the region, but we have no national library. Our government spends millions of dollars promoting our beaches, but nothing at all on publishing much other than official documents. Our approach to education is mercenary. What is important is the marketability of skills, not the training of minds. Too many PhDs at the College of the Bahamas spend their best hours teaching Bahamian students the basic critical skills our high schools have not taught them, and the subjects that expand the mind and spark students' creativity are undersubscribed and underfunded. Too many Bahamians believe that the purpose of college is get a degree, and not an opportunity to explore the world of ideas and to learn how to think.

It's a question, I believe, of priorities. We are a people who will gladly spend upwards of $150 on a plate of food that will leave us by the end of the evening, and refuse to pay for the use of a piece of music or a poem. We will anxiously fork over the cost of a pair of tennis bearing the name of some American basketball celebrity, but we will avoid at all costs paying half as much for a central textbook. We will offer foreign investors millions of dollars' concessions to build bigger and better resorts, but we will balk at asking them to divert a percentage of their profits towards libraries, museums, or schools for our most creative students.

As a result, we are fast becoming a nation of wealthy and shallow beings. Our persons end at the flesh; we desire bigger houses, better cars, nicer clothes, and (it appears) no minds at all. The plays and movies that draw crowds are those whose anaesthetic qualities are foremost; The Landlord will run forever, Fatal Passage will flop. We seek pleasure at all costs. We stay away from mining the depths of our emotions or discovering the complexity of our beings, because to do either of these requires us to use our minds.

Perhaps we believe that intellectual activity is somehow not Bahamian (or not black). I have often heard people refer to the products of the mind as being "elitist" and therefore somehow to be avoided. To buy that idea, however, is to buy the myth that thought is the property of the privileged. To believe, as many of us do, that thinking is a white person's pastime, while feeling is the prerogative of the African, is to accept uncritically the myth that one's skin colour determines what goes on in one's head. The image of the happy, music-loving, childlike native was one more lie invented to justify imperialism and slavery. It was not our invention, but we will have bought into it completely if we do not recognize the place of and need for concerted intellectual activity in our society

And we are missing the real point. None of these things is separate. Our minds and our bodies are connected one to the other; we cannot truly appreciate things we do not engage with both intellectually and emotionally. Thought deepens emotion; emotion humanizes thought. Without both, we cannot be completely human or truly great. The refusal to engage deeply with ideas is perhaps the greatest obstacle in our path to becoming a fully-fledged nation. As long as we live life on the surface of things, skimming like mosquitoes on the skin of life, we will never be able to control our surroundings, to understand our situations, or to realize our full potential.

What we need to teach ourselves and our children is that sometimes the greatest satisfaction of all comes not from using our bodies, but from using our minds. Contemplation, engagement with ideas, thinking through a complex idea until we understand it, mastering concepts hitherto unknown to us, and using this foundation to maybe come up with some ideas of our own — these are all intensely pleasurable. It is true that it is far far easier to react to something funny or scary or adrenaline-packed that someone else has prepared and packaged for us; but if that is all we are prepared to do, then we will render ourselves powerless in this world. If we are to succeed, if we are to survive, it is the world of ideas that we need to master.