Theater in the Bush: art, politics, and community in The Bahamas.

Strachan, Ian Gregory

There is no fight for culture which can develop apart from the popular struggle.--Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.--Paulo Friere, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed

The future of West Indian militancy lies in art.--Derek Walcott, "What the Twilight Says"

THERE WOULD BE NO POINT IN WRITING THESE WORDS TO EXPLAIN MY CONDUCT AND aspirations as an artist and an intellectual if, first of all, I did not believe that it was my duty to transform my community. As a Caribbean person of African decent and as a postcolonial person with a particular kind of training and perspective, I see the artist as a teacher, an activist, a catalyst, and dissenter; someone who, in the words of Edward Said (1996: 22), "belongs on the same side as the weak and the unrepresented." What I want is a more egalitarian society, a more tolerant society, a more democratic society--a society that is less exploited and exploitive. What I want is a life less brutal and cheap. I have for many years tried to make that world come into being through my art. I have been convinced that at some point art could change the world by changing people. This article describes my country, The Bahamas, and my vexed relationship to it; it describes my life in it, my life as an artist, my life as what some in my country might even call a "radical." I am amused by the term because, truly, in these prosperous Bahamian islands, most have lost all sense of what is truly at stake in the world.

This article gives a brief history of the Track Road Theater Company, which I established in 1996 at the age of 27. I will discuss the expectations, failures, and successes of the group's first 10 years. My vision of Track Road was to be a means of getting "avant-garde" theater to "the people" and of exposing them to politically progressive ideas. The operation of an amateur theater company with an anti-establishment bent in this small island society has been an education in censorship, class dynamics, systematic neglect, and popular indifference. It has also been a lesson in pragmatism. We have persisted and adapted in interesting ways. This article maps my own journey as a playwright and artist, and it offers a critical look at cultural development and the politics of identity in the post-independence Bahamas.

Let us first look at the cultural situation in my country. After over 30 years of independence from Great Britain, The Bahamas is still very much searching for its identity. The pace of social transformation and modernization since Black Majority Rule in 1967 and Independence in 1973 has been dramatic, and the nation is still trying to gain its bearings culturally. Always a marginal colony in the British West Indies, mass tourism has brought not only economic prosperity and development to the post-World War II Bahamas, but also the attendant problems of increased crime, overpopulation in the capital, depopulation and underdevelopment of the rural islands of the archipelago, the breakdown of the extended family structure, and the decline of many intangible forms of culture. To put it simply, tourism comes at a social cost (Pattullo, 1996: 80-101).

Slavery played no small part in convincing black Bahamians of their inferiority. British colonialism left Bahamians lacking in cultural confidence; we, like so many colonials, became mimic men--a phrase popularized, of course, by V.S. Naipaul (1967). Since Independence, we have exchanged English hegemony for the United States of America's cultural hegemony, partly due to our proximity (less than 50 nautical miles) and partly to the fact that the biggest U.S. exports have been its. cultural products: its music, movies, television shows, books, and mythologies. In the shadow of that behemoth called the "American Entertainment Industry," the seeds planted by our dramatists, poets, songwriters, and other artists have some difficulty sprouting and bearing fruit. Jamaican artist and scholar, Rex Nettleford (1993: 80-90), has explained that on this uneven cultural playing field, Caribbeans in general are engaged in a "battle for space."

The tastes of Bahamians in terms of their dress, food, and hairstyles have all been affected by the U.S. media, by our contact with the millions of tourists who have visited our country, and by the fact that many of our people have lived, worked, visited, or schooled in the U.S. As a result, many Bahamians have grown to doubt and mistrust things Bahamian and to prefer the glossier productions of the North. Indeed, many seem uncertain about what the Bahamian thing is.

This country of only 300,000 inhabitants has played host to a minimum of three million tourists every year since 1986 (Strachan, 2002: 114). In The Bahamas, visual artists have been influenced by the expectations of the tourist market, and popular music has adopted tourist themes--and been well received by the citizenry for doing so (Strachan, 2002: 136). Efforts are made each year to market the country's major folk festival, Junkanoo, to tourists. Culture, from the perspective of both the major political parties in the country, must be made to translate into tourist dollars. This seems far more important to policymakers than human development. However, some songwriters, poets, and playwrights have successfully told stories about our people for our people in the last 30 years. In particular, musical artists such as Exuma, Eddie Minnis, and KB and dramatists like James Catalyn and Michael Pintard have from time to time depicted Bahamian life and captured the popular imagination; but these breakthroughs increasingly seem like interruptions, moments of fitful wakefulness that disrupt a sweet collective dream. (1)

I have found the following reflection by Antonio Gramsci (1991: 209) useful when thinking about art and community in The Bahamas:

 The so-called "artistic" "national" literature is not popular in
 Italy. Whose fault is it? That of the public, which does not read?
 That of the critics, who are able to present and extol literary
 "values" to the public? That of the newspapers, which publish the
 old Count of Monte Carlo instead of serializing the "modern Italian
 novel"? But why does the public not read in Italy, when in other
 countries it does? Besides, is it true that in Italy nobody reads?
 Would it not be more accurate to state the problem in this way: why
 does the Italian public read foreign literature, popular and
 non-popular, instead of reading its own? ... What is the meaning of
 the fact that the Italian people prefer to read foreign writers? It
 means that they undergo the moral and intellectual hegemony of
 foreign intellectuals, that they feel more closely related to
 foreign intellectuals than to "domestic" ones, that there is no
 national intellectual and moral bloc, either hierarchical or, still
 less, egalitarian. The intellectuals do not come from the people.
 They do not feel tied to them (rhetoric apart), they do not know
 and sense their needs, aspirations and feelings. In relation to the
 people they are something detached, without foundation, a caste and
 not an articulation with organic functions of the people
 themselves.

Although Gramsci is writing about Italy of the 1920s and 1930s, this passage makes sense to me. Of course, indigenous art can reach and be valued by the masses; of course it stands the best chance of doing so if it comes from among them in the first place. Reggae and Hip Hop are two good examples. But what does the artist do if he is not using a popular local form? What does the artist do when he wants his art to promote change and the people do not see the need or lack the will to change? What does the artist do when his education and experiences make him a thing apart?

Junkanoo, the popular masquerade art of The Bahamas, has offered an uncritical mirror toward the society for the past half century. The music and painting of today's Bahamas sell the pastoral; the church, a powerful voice, teaches intolerance and Old Testament justice; the media houses recycle foreign fare and are intimidated by the politicians and the sponsors; the hotels and multinational trusts and banks do not need to support art to make a profit in this tax haven. Little in the way of political critique can be found in Bahamian art, whatever the medium. In this context, I felt it imperative to impose myself on the national discourse and advance a subversive agenda. Track Road drew young people who were equally as desirous of defying convention.

I established Track Road Theater in 1996, with the motto, "Building a People." I wanted to establish in The Bahamas a transformative theater. As Antonin Artaud (1958: 79) had put it, "the theater, utilized in the highest and most difficult sense possible, has the power to influence the aspect and formation of things." Mine would be a political theater, a theater that attacked the political cult of personality surrounding Lynden Pindling (who had been prime minister for 25 years, 1967 to 1992) and Hubert Ingraham (Pindling's successor from 1992 to 2002), the prejudice against Haitian immigrants, the false piety of the churches, and the new commodity fetishism of the nation. I had come of age in the 1980s, when the Pindling government had been discredited in the eyes of many and was implicated in the cocaine bonanza. Before studying in the United States, I had been a part of the Nassau student protests that erupted after the 1984 Commission of Inquiry into the drug trade. I had become a political animal while at the College of The Bahamas between 1985 and 1988 and I have been ever since. The two men who preceded me as president of the College of the Bahamas Union of Students, Zhivargo Laing and Darron Cash, went on to become a cabinet minister and a senator, respectively, for the Free National Movement, the party that toppled Pindling. I chose art.

I had begun writing plays for a national audience under the auspices of the Dundas Repertory Season in Nassau, the capital city situated on the island of New Providence. (2) The Dundas was led at that time by the fine Bahamian playwright and actor, Winston Saunders. (3) I wrote four plays for the Dundas Rep between 1990 and 1992, all of which were staged by their able artistic director, Philip A. Burrows. In 1991, I wrote a political play called No Seeds in Babylon that predicted the fall of the Pindling government, a year before it finally happened in 1992. It was a play about the racial and class divides, about slavery's legacies, about the marginalized, about a generation of men the social revolution had made millionaires not martyrs, about the manipulability of the crowd, and about a generation of young people who were angry but directionless. Dawn, the female student leader declares:

 In I-Land there is one party
 One ship leaning to the right, teetering,
 Waiting to capsize.
 In I-Land there is one fraternity,
 And its members divide and rule.
 Faces change. Men cross over.
 Buzzards still hang low in the sky (Strachan, 2001: 74)

In 1992, when the country sought to capitalize on tourism for the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landfall, I wrote a play called Fatal Passage. In it a fisherman tries to kill his best friend in hopes of stealing his land--land that he hopes to sell to foreign developers to build a hotel and marina. (If I re-stage this play, I'll make them cousins, not just friends.) The plan goes awry when Gideon, the betrayed, turns out to have survived the murder attempt and a bloodbath ensues. The play was meant to show the cycles of dispossession and betrayal that our history has created; it was meant to show the need for heroic commitment to the preservation of the community. It was the first and only time a play of mine was broadcast in its entirety on national television. After Fatal Passage, I decided I could no longer work with the Dundas, but needed to do my own thing.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

It was my view that the Dundas was too much a part of the establishment and had become too conservative. I was not convinced that enough of an effort was being made to involve the widest possible spectrum of people in the work that was being done. In particular, I didn't think the Dundas was committed to youth, despite the fact that they staged my work when I was just 21 years old. I saw my own emergence there as an accident rather than the logical consequence of any outreach strategy or developmental/educational approach. I felt it was too bourgeois, too connected to powerful political and economic elites. I did not simply want my works staged and for them to be attended by members of the middle class and expatriates who frequented theater. I wanted the whole nation to watch, listen, and pay attention. Yes, members of the working class had come to Dundas plays throughout the years, but I wanted to bring down Jericho's walls. I wanted to write a play that would force everyone who saw it to decide then and there that they would never live in the same way again and that they would work to change their country for the better.

I had returned from graduate school in 1995 convinced that I could emulate the achievements of a number of great dramatists of the African Diaspora: Derek Walcott, Amid Baraka, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. (4) What I admired about Walcott was the beauty of his language. He was far from militant and I doubted that his plays ever achieved true mass appeal in Trinidad; still, I mythologized his Theater Workshop. What I admired about Baraka was his bottomless anger and his determination to defy convention and make his art one with the struggle for black equality in America. Baraka boldly turned art into rite, into political act. He said, to hell with your expectations of theater, I am going to stage black men shooting white men. No plot. No characters. That's it. (I am thinking of a short piece like "Experimental Death unit #1"). Even if the work devolved into a hate-filled screed at times, I still admired the spirit of defiance. Soyinka was by no means a "popular" dramatist in Nigeria, but his work boldly indicted Nigeria's corrupt leaders. He was able to marry rage and artistic sophistication on stage. He saw his role as artist clearly: to speak truth to power. Ngugi's short-lived theatrical endeavour was for the peasants of Kenya, performed by the peasants of Kenya. Unfortunately for him, like Soyinka, the Kenyan government took him seriously. Both men were imprisoned by their governments. (5)

I named the group "Track Road Theater" as an acknowledgement and affirmation of the bush. The track road is an unofficial path; it is a mark in the landscape made by the people. No pavements, no lights, no street signs. In a sense, it was a means by which to affirm the way of life that predated the country's modernization and urbanization, or rather New Providence's modernization as the island capital. But I never intended to romanticize the past, nor was I wishing away progress and change. The track road was a strong childhood memory of mine. My friends and I spent many days in the bush, not in front of the television or computer screen. I wanted it to symbolize holding on to the things that are unique or special about us, even as we embrace modernity.

Becoming another permanently exiled Caribbean author has never appealed to me. I have accepted that remaining in The Bahamas means that most of the resources and opportunities available to Caribbean writers abroad will be denied to me and that my work may never be heard of beyond my own country's shores. This was the problem faced by even as great a poet as Martin Carter of Guyana, who never chose exile (Brown, 2006: 28-31). At best, I had hoped to be a migratory animal: leaving the island when necessary to take advantage of resources and opportunities abroad, but always maintaining my base, my home, in The Bahamas. It has been my view that large developed nations like the U.S., Canada, and England do not need more homesick intellectuals, but my country definitely needs every good brain it can find. Fortunately, I do not live in a place where having views that are displeasing to political leaders will land you in prison or, worse yet, disappeared. Of course, neither are they going to help you disseminate ideas that weaken their authority.

Theater is a dynamic social art form. You can reach the elites and you can reach the underprivileged. I have written all my work for Bahamians first and foremost, so my choice to remain in The Bahamas makes sense to me, despite the hardships and limitations. I have mentioned great playwrights of the Diaspora that have influenced my thinking, but truly, the most profound model was Bob Marley. He was the artist of the people, for the people, and for the world. His music was birthed out of the streets of Kingston and embraced by the nation and the world; his was a prophetic voice.

Unfortunately, my dreams of turning The Bahamas on its head through the theater were somewhat farfetched and naive. Turning my back on the Dundas meant I was cutting myself off from financial support. It also meant we had nowhere to rehearse and could only practice in the actual space we would be performing in for as many nights as we could afford. I had come to see the Dundas as trying to bring Broadway to Nassau. In my righteous zeal, I told myself that the people did not need cushioned seats, VIP seating, air-conditioning, and black-tie opening nights. I was going to take theater to the people. I was going to speak the truth to power. I even remember declaring on one radio show that I was going to be doing "experimental theater." In truth, the only experimenting we did was to try to stage a production with $400.00 (U.S.). It would be years before we tried anything remotely daring in the aesthetic sense. Many "big" productions in Nassau can cost $15,000 to $30,000 (U.S.), particularly if actors and staff are paid. Ours would be a bare-bones theater: minimal set, crude make up, and simple costumes. There was no money for anything else.

But I was right to an extent. Most people did not need elegant sets or sophisticated lighting to enjoy theater. They simply needed a story that would draw them in, and convincing acting. Most Bahamians had grown up with church plays, which were simple and required the viewer to use his/her imagination. My cast was drawn almost entirely from the students I taught at the College of The Bahamas and we started rehearsing in vacant classrooms. Yet small audiences did come to that hot, stuffy hall with horrible acoustics (the college's auditorium). We kept the cost of tickets below $10, if I remember correctly, and we did what publicity we could. Truly, I didn't know much about marketing in 1997.

To take theater to the people, I decided we would perform No Seeds in Babylon in the heart of the Nassau "ghetto"--on the park grounds in Mason's Addition. It is an old working-class neighbourhood made up of mostly wooden clapboards. I figured that if we just showed up and performed, a crowd would gather at the sight of us. A half-hearted effort to put up flyers may have been made the day before. I had a sneaking suspicion that I would need more than flyers, though. I knew deep down that some sort of incentive was needed, but I told myself there was no time.

We attracted a few passers-by, but retained an audience of two: a woman who threatened to take her clothes off a number of times and a man whose running commentary nearly drove us to distraction. It was a complete failure from the standpoint of outreach, though the actors had a ball. But how could it have been any other way? First, Mason's Addition was the stomping grounds of the legendary Saxon's Superstars Junkanoo Group and we had made no overtures to the group's leaders in terms of asking for their help and involvement. We had no one from that community in our play, so there was no natural link between the neighborhood and us. Third, we had not identified a single community leader who could assist us in drawing people to Mason's Addition. Finally, we failed to use the usual devices that draw crowds to a spot without them being forewarned: loud music and free food or drinks.

In 1998, we staged my new play, Black Crab's Tragedy, which was essentially a satirical treatment of the careers of Lynden Pindling (called Sting) and his successor Hubert Ingraham (called Loudmut). I wanted to attack the practice of hero worship in our politics and make the people see how complicit we were in our own predicaments, thanks to the colonial and postcolonial habit of patronage. As Fanon (1967: 197) had put it, "we ought not to cultivate the exceptional or to seek for a hero, who is another form of leader. We ought to uplift the people, we must develop their brains, fill them with ideas, change them and make them into human beings."

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In the Bahamas, many feel comfortable stealing from the state: whether it is public funds or refusing to give an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. There is a culture of bribery, particularly at election time, and a culture of responsibility shirking. A culture of fear also permeates our small society--fear of accountability and the ramifications that might ensue from seriously holding people accountable for their betrayal of the people's trust. Equally potent is the fear of taking responsibility for improving one's own situation. How can we grow as a people if we constantly seek a political savior to fix it all for us? My wish was to reveal these charismatic leaders as men who, for all the good they did, also benefited tremendously from their choice to "serve the people." They were monsters in a sense, but they were monsters we had fashioned. Here Anne-Tiffany, the daughter of one of Sting's rivals, describes the problem:

 I was just a teenager but I think you know what I hoped for. I
 wanted to see him destroyed. I wanted to see him disgraced. Laughed
 at and mocked like they had laughed at and mocked my father. But
 what is one to think after that, to believe? You stand before the
 crowd. You empty the pockets of the man they entrusted with their
 lives. And there, in the light of day, stolen goods fall clanking
 to the ground. And you expect screams of rage. You expect the crowd
 to gnash its teeth. But they laugh. They laugh. They don't laugh
 because the culprit swore he was innocent and he was exposed as a
 liar. No. They laugh in recognition. And each raises from his
 pocket something they have stolen. And they shout at you. It seems
 they shout in one voice. "Is that all he did? Is that all?"

The Bahamas is an archipelago, and I thought that if I could not get politically charged plays on television--in truth I did not even try, assuming the worst--then I could at least travel to the other islands in the archipelago to ensure that our message was heard.

Our inter-island travel succeeded if there was someone on the island who was a community leader, someone committed to the success of our visit. If the community could be given an incentive for coming out to the play, such as a portion of the ticket sales supporting a local cause, then success was more likely. In Exuma, where this was the case, we performed to packed houses. Truly, even our free shows in Exuma were standing room only. In Freeport and Abaco, we performed to no more than five people a night because we had no reliable support in these communities with a vested interest. As usual, for my actors, who were mostly college students, these trips were loads of fun. For me, they were hugely disappointing.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Our next production (I could only manage one a year and keep my real job as college professor) was Diary of Souls in 1999. It was written to prick the conscience of a society of mostly African slave descendants who were subjecting other slave descendants (Haitian immigrants) to prejudice of a kind reminiscent of the very white racism that kept them subjugated for over 100 years after slavery's abolition in 1834. In the eyes of black Bahamians, the Haitian is too black, too ugly, too smelly, and too foolish to be considered an equal and a brother or sister. This is partially about class, but is also evidence of a "free" people internalizing European ideals of beauty, even internalizing an essentialism that locates virtue and worth in all things white and makes the peasant of the north of Haiti--who is very "African looking"--ugly, filthy, devil worshipping, violent, and criminally minded. Thousands of Haitians are intercepted by the Bahamian Defense Force each year and are repatriated. Many others escape detection and are employed throughout the nation, mostly doing the jobs Bahamians consider beneath them because they would prefer to wait tables and work roulette tables.

Diary of Souls was based on the true story of Haitians who died at sea after the Bahamas Defense Force intercepted them in July 1990. The Defense Force began to tow an overcrowded Haitian sloop in the Exuma Cays and, according to the Coroner's Inquest, the boat capsized in the choppy waters. Word spread quickly that there was a government cover-up; that many more Haitians died than was reported; that some marines were having trouble coping with what happened out on the water. I saw this as an excellent vehicle through which to demonstrate the humanity of immigrants. They are people who love, dream, and grieve like we all do. I also wanted to depict the suffering of the Bahamian marine who unwillingly had a hand in the accidental deaths of men, women, and children and was rumored to be suffering from hallucinations.

I elected to stage Diary of Souls in a very small, intimate space: C.W. Sawyer Primary School's little auditorium. The school stands at the outskirts of the Yellow Elder government low-cost housing community; the Defense Force boat alleged to have intercepted the Haitians was also called the Yellow Elder. But again, with all the work involved in staging, I did not find the time to reach out to the Yellow Elder community and no one from that community came to the play. I met with some pastors of the Creole Pentecostal churches and with the pastor of the Catholic Creole church, Queen of Peace. Despite my hope that the Haitian community would come out and see that some Bahamians did care about their situation, they did not attend in any appreciable numbers. I was told later that if I wanted them to come, I needed to stage the play in Creole. They may have stayed away because of mistrust or fear. Those who did come to see the play were the English-speaking children of Haitian immigrants. Perhaps one day I will get a Creole translation of the play done, recruit actors from the Creole churches, and achieve my goal of engaging the community of Haitian nationals in The Bahamas. We were able to create a dialogue after each performance by inviting a guest speaker to discuss Haitian-Bahamian relations with the audience. These went well, probably because the audiences were small. It was not enough to stage a play with a progressive stance; we needed to engage people in a dialogue. As Friere (1997: 71) explains, "dialogue ... requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human."

When I caved in, left C.W. Sawyer, and rented the Dundas, all the people who had wanted to see Diary of Souls but were afraid their cars would get broken into, or that they would be robbed at gun or knifepoint, finally came and we had fairly large crowds. The switch to the Dundas ought to have taught me a lesson, but didn't. It should have taught me that even producers of subversive plays need a business sense and must consider location. The next summer I staged Deon Simms' one-man show, Slaps, in the college's Student Union Building. On average, three people attended each night. I even put an ad in the paper announcing that the last show of the run was free and still there was no response. That was my turning point. I was romanticizing the working class and had a romantic idea of myself as an artist. Putting too little thought into how to win a mass audience, I had paid too much attention to the art and not enough to selling that art in a marketplace where the consumer had many choices. Indeed, I was not really thinking about the marketplace at all. We were trying to take theater to the people, but we were not organically linked to the communities we wanted to reach.

Also, we were missing a crucial fact: in the capital, the working class loved to get dressed up and spend their money in parts of the city where they could not afford to live. They loved to go to high-end locations and hang out, liked hotel ballrooms, nightclubs in the tourist district, and the cinema. On top of that, in this society of conspicuous consumption, the poor and the middle class were suspicious of events that were priced too cheaply. Working-class youth regularly paid $35 or $40, even more, for reggae and soca concerts and booze parties. They were not likely to get dressed up to come see a play for $8 in a hot school hall; it would seem too "small time"--not to mention boring. So, if we could not take theater to the people, we would need to entice them to come by packaging and promoting the work in the manner they were accustomed to from the concerts and nightclubs they frequented. We needed to think like capitalists. The biggest sign of our new willingness to lend prestige and glamour to our productions was when--having remounted Diary of Souls in 2004 and taken it on an international tour--our Bahamian premiere was held under the patronage of the Governor General. Moreover, we decided to eliminate profanity from our plays as much as possible to attain ratings that allowed parents to bring their children.

Three hugely successful theatrical performers in The Bahamas sold out shows night after night: James Catalyn and Friends, Terez Davis (aka Dynamite Daisy), and Michael Pintard. In his career of over 20 years, Catalyn had stuck to comedic skits and had worked out a system for informing his loyal followers of upcoming shows. Terez Davis also relied on comedy and had a network of support in the churches. Michael Pintard's tireless marketing assured that everyone on the island knew that one of his comedy shows was going on. He had spent years visiting schools and reading his poetry. Since I could not see myself doing comedy only and our young actors were perennially awful at selling tickets, we decided to pay closer attention to the location of our shows and to adopt the Pintard approach: we needed to achieve advertising saturation in the city. A few years passed before we actually pulled it off.

For the next two plays, we decided to perform in a hotel ballroom and charge $20 a head. We staged two brazen comedies, Island Sex by Nickeva Eve (2002) and Charles Huggins' The Hold Up (2001). Both plays had come out of a playwright's workshop I had conducted. Island Sex was a farce about prostitution, marital infidelity, and corruption in the church. The Hold Up was a play about crime in The Bahamas, about class, and about the hypocrisy of church leaders and the pomposity of politicians. It benefited from a dispute we had with the Plays and Films Control Board, which functions under the Ministry of National Security. The Board's chairman withheld a rating for The Hold Up and decided instead to make recommendations to help Charles Huggins "improve" his script. In one script we sent him, he went so far as to put notes in the margins such as "This is not funny." We held our ground and he eventually capitulated. In return, we used his negative remarks in our ad campaign. These two plays were the most commercially successful of our first six years. Other improvements flowed from taking care of the little things, such as offering audiences easy access to tickets from a number of venues around the island.

Around this time I became convinced that I needed to raise the stakes for our theater company. Each year brought new hopes that I could finally take the country by surprise and make them speak our words while in their living rooms, on their jobs, or in playgrounds or bars. Yet the immediate impact I craved was lacking. I began to think increasingly about our national masquerade, Junkanoo. This event is broadcast live across the nation and is also attended by thousands of people. It is a dream come true for guerilla theater. About four years before I actually tried anything, I put my thoughts on paper:

 In a society such as ours, a society of the spoken, a society of so
 many vocal rituals, drama is the ideal art form. So much of
 everyday life in Bahamian society carries the flare of performance.
 In the theater arts, with a live audience, the artist (actor,
 playwright, director, choreographer) has a chance to touch the
 people in the most dynamic of ways. Perhaps the only art form that
 can be more compelling than a day in Nassau's streets and backyards
 is an art form that uses the street as its stage. Though I work now
 in various spaces, I believe the finest chance for the playwright
 to speak to and with his/her people is at that grandest of shows:
 Junkanoo, and on the most pivotal of stages, Bay Street. Junkanoo,
 historically rooted in resistance but becoming more and more
 bankrupt of social or political vision, provides the dramatic
 artist with a national, spontaneous forum like no other. Junkanoo
 is already street theater, but what must be done
 is on occasion to make of Junkanoo a play. A play that moves and
 dances and beats and blows, a narrative that can travel the parade
 route and catch the whole nation by surprise, a narrative that
 provides them with a new avenue of self-perception and conception.
 There is no other moment in our national year when the masses of
 people are congregated as they are on Bay Street during Junkanoo.
 Surely there are stories to tell that can hold the nation's
 attention if we can muster the courage to expand our performative
 horizons and move beyond the mundane "themes" of the masquerade
 contest.

On New Year's morning in 2003, we went to Bay Street and performed a piece called "The Death of Junkanoo." Junkanoo is a masquerade with West African origins and features heated goatskin drums, crepe paper, Styrofoam and cardboard costumes, and brass instruments. It takes on Boxing Day (6) and New Year's Day. We told the organizers we were going to perform "The History of Junkanoo." In our narrative the Devil persuades the Sponsor and the Politician to kill Junkanoo. Once they have done the deed, they are put on trial for murder, found guilty, and put to death. An Angel raises Junkanoo from the dead and the story begins again. The performance repeated further on down the route. When we hit Rawson Square, the site of the House of Assembly, the live commentator on the street shouted "Oh no, what is this?" Then the national television station went to commercial.

The following year, we attacked the current craze in the churches: the prosperity teachings popularized by the U.S. evangelicals. We called it "Pleez Jesus Gimme a Escalade." This time the television cameras sought us out and we were interviewed in Rawson Square before performing. A televangelist runs a game show called "Pray for Dollars." Believers pray fervently for a "blessing." The televangelist spins a wheel and someone wins the Escalade. Jesus is asked to present the keys to the winner, but he refuses and instead helps the Abused Wife, the Blind Man, and the Old Man with the crutch, all of whom were ignored by the Believers who were on their way to the game show. Our efforts in both parades were met with a mixture of puzzlement, profanity, and amusement.

It is gratifying to know that we are pushing the envelope in Junkanoo. I hope other groups will catch on and feel safe enough to make more pointed statements on Bay Street. The difficulty is that sponsorship has compromised the parade. Money rules the day. Spectators who cannot afford to pay for bleacher seats are barred from Bay Street by chain link fencing. (This parade was free for over 100 years). Junkanoo has become a competition in which beauty determines success-and beauty has become very expensive. Track Road itself could not have survived without sponsors and donors and we have become increasingly dogged about pursuing support and requesting exemptions; but we have not allowed this need to muzzle us.

Track Road Theater has been one of the most consuming, painful, and yet rewarding experiences of my life. Introducing young Bahamians to the discipline of acting and the demands of serious theater has introduced me to their lives: tragic, trapped, hilarious, abusive, wonderful, aimless, and driven. It has brought home to me as never before the tremendous void that exists in our society when it comes to the cultivation of the creative and imaginative capabilities of our youth. To put it bluntly, very little is happening for them. They grow up in a smothered nation that tells them there is nothing to say, nothing to be done. Their hunger for a voice, their hunger for a life is tremendous; their need to be shaped, inspired, challenged, and given hope is beautiful and frightening. I am not persuaded that there will be future generations of questers, of talented, relevant actors and artists, writers, dancers, musicians. It will not happen unless those of us who have made some headway abandon selfishness and cynicism, and work diligently at mentoring those who come after us. It is a special kind of young Bahamian that dreams of acting: one who will stand before the crowd, a Bahamian crowd--so jaded, starved, and needy--to bare and bear all. Who must be nurtured, given air to breathe, soil to take root in, and space to rise. It should be a part of our entire national philosophy of education to generate such creativity in our youth. Instead, we raise consumers, cable watchers and table waiters, and we wonder why we display no will to alter our social, economic, and political realities.

The answer is not Broadway, but the bush. By saying that, I am not advocating some nostalgic return to a Bahamian past of fetching water, chasing chickens, and unlocked doors--not to mention poverty and marginality. I use the bush here metaphorically to represent a style, a mode, a rhythm, a sound, an art, one that comes from within. An art that is rooted in what we have and what we live. For those of us who grew up in the bush, who ran the track roads, this is not an affectation. It is there that "the Bahamian thing" is. In finding that Bahamian thing, we will find universality and be truest to what all humanity experiences. This is not shallow nationalism. I am talking about an art that comes out of the landscape and seascape where we find ourselves, just as the richest aspects of our lives come out of our imaginative, self-propelled interactions with that landscape and seascape.

I have no illusions, however. The isolation of the artist is real in the Bahamas, as is no doubt true throughout the Caribbean. I am not imagining that we can transform the nation once and for all in a cleansing fire of heightened, symbolic action or of lyricism. Perhaps I reveal nothing new to the Bahamian audience in my plays. Perhaps they know all what I tell them already. I fail miserably at granting them what they seem to wish: a guarantee that things will get better or a chance to see all the loose ends brought together. I suspect any dream of a Bahamian future that is not hard, complicated, and painful is a deception. Yet there is a power in speaking out loud what everyone knows, but will not say in open air. There is a liberation in hauling the stupidities of our day out into the sun, a power in demonstrating the unending human will to resist oppression and to search for better. Writers, by virtue of their effort to imaginatively shape everyday experience into a coherent narrative, lend special visions to "the known," provide interpretations of reality that can create linkages, associations, and even illuminations for their audiences that are otherwise inaccessible.

We need a keener historical sensibility, an understanding of how the deceptions, violations, betrayals, and obstacles of the present are an inevitable outgrowth of the atrocities of the past. We need a knowledge of, and appreciation for, the methods of survival, resistance, and creative overcoming that we have inherited throughout our suppressed histories. Then we can act more discerningly than we did before, choose more wisely, less blindly, and work with a clearer sense of where we came from and where we want to go.

Writing, of course, though an action (at times a revolutionary action) must be matched by other forms of people-building. Such building is essential in societies kept incomplete like our own. Yes, institutions are needed. And the intellectuals, dreamers, actors, and workers among us must build them, properly and carefully, or the Bahamian nation is doomed before it even starts. But can we build stable, sustainable institutions that are not themselves part of the establishment?

What, then, is the future of Track Road Theater? In 2005, we staged my adaptation of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novel, Devil on the Cross. Although the title alone was enough to frighten off many potential audience members, we also made marketing mistakes for which we paid dearly. In 2006, we staged our most commercially successful play ever, Da Market Fire by Emille Hunt. The play is a comedy based on the true story of the destruction of the Straw Market downtown in Nassau on September 6, 2001, and parodies the most popular talk show host in the country. We have had to turn people away. We are experiencing true popularity. The play is not controversial in any way. It was only the second time we were able to pay actors even a small stipend.

What Track Road really needs is a home, its own building, so that we can run our plays longer and create a community center with outreach programs. With our own building, we might seriously reach the stage where actors, writers, and directors can earn a living through our art.

In our continuing effort to reach the widest possible audience, we are now branching into filmmaking. We have just completed our first full-length project: a documentary entitled Show Me Your Motion. It was shot on digital cameras and explores issues of Bahamian identity through a discussion of children's "ringplay" games--an amalgamation of European children's songs and rhymes, risque African dance, and indigenous lyrical inventions. I wanted a seemingly sedate subject. It is really a film about class, globalization, sexuality, and patriarchy. Still trying to catch people by surprise. Still trying to be mainstream and anti-establishment at the same time. Still trying to bring down Jericho's walls.

REFERENCES

Artaud, Antonin 1958 The Theater and Its Double. New York: Grove.

Baraka, Amiri 1969 Four Black Revolutionary Plays. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Brown, Stewart 2006 "The Truth of Craft." The Caribbean Review of Books (February): 28-31.

Catalyn, James 1986 Laughin' at Wesef. Nassau: Nassau Guardian.

Fanon, Frantz 1967 The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove.

Friere, Paulo 1997 Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Gramsci, Antonio 1991 Selections from Cultural Writings. Cambridge: Harvard.

Naipaul, V.S. 1967 The Mimic Men. London: Penguin.

Nettleford, Rex 1993 Inward Stretch, Outward Reach: A Voice from the Caribbean. London: Macmillan.

Ngugi, wa Thiong'o 1982 Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary. London: Heinemann.

Pattullo, Polly 1996 Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean. Kingston: Ian Randle.

Pintard, Michael 1995 Still Standing. Nassau: Guanima Press.

Said, Edward 1996 Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage.

Saunders, Winston 2005 "You Can a Horse to Water." Judy Stone (ed.), You Can a Horse to Water and Other Plays. London: Macmillan.

Soyinka, Wole 1972 The Man Died. New York: Harper and Row.

Strachan, Ian 2002 Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

2001 "No Seeds in Babylon." Erika J Waters and David Edgecombe (eds.), Contemporary Drama of the Caribbean. St. Croix: University of the Virgin Islands.

Walcott, Derek 1999 What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

NOTES

(1.) For information on Eddie Minnis, Exuma, and KB, respectively, visit the following sites: http://eddieminnis.com/,www.vhl.com/artists/az/exuma/ bio.jhtml,www.jonesbahamas.com/?c=156&a=8278. For examples of the dramatists, see Catalyn (1986) and Pintard (1995).

(2.) The Dundas Civic Centre was its own sort of miracle, having evolved entirely without government funding. It was owned and operated by local theater companies.

(3.) For an example of his work, see Saunders (2005).

(4.) For examples of their work, see Walcott (1999), Baraka (1969), Soyinka (1972), and Ngugi (1982).

(5.) Soyinka was imprisoned in 1969 for his opposition to the Biafran War. Ngugi was imprisoned in 1977 after the staging of his play "I Will Mary When I Want."

(6.) Boxing Day is a holiday celebrated in most British Commonwealth countries on December 26, the day after Christmas Day, or on the next weekday after Christmas.--Ed. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_Day).

IAN STRACHAN is a playwright, poet, and novelist. He is also Chair of the School of English Studies at The College of the Bahamas (Oakes Field Campus, P.O. Box N-4912, Nassau, The Bahamas; e-mail: istrachan@cob.edu.bs).

His latest book is Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, 2002).