What is it that holds the people of this hemisphere together, if anything? Is it the shared participation in the general pattern of eradicating the indigenous population? Slavery and colonization? The exploitation of natural resources? Or the unfettered capitalism of the past century? If so then how are these islands any different than other Caribbean countries, or Central and South America? And, for that matter, why is any of this history so different than what happened in the United States? It isn't, which brings me to language and it's concomitant constructions of the world, or, at the very least, to those stories that circulate--like genesis myths--in the mother tongues.

In the Pan-American version of the origin of universe who looms larger than Columbus?

Well, if you're Bahamian, the answer is Merv Griffin, that cartoonlike figure from the history of television game shows... or is it talk shows? Griffin's investments in Paradise Island, a strip of land separated from Nassau by little more than a few hundred yards, headline the gambling center that the island has become. The rapid development of Paradise, the construction of casinos, hotels and a toll bridge linked to New Providence, offered a powerful incentive to keep the huge luxury liners tied up in Nassau. His 'munificence' can't be credited with all of this but it's his name that's on the marquee.

For the moment I'll pass over the Loveboat world of exotic tourism, as well as the cast of international white trash that steer it and return to books. I confess the Bahamas hold some bad memories for me. I'm not keen on conjuring up that pall of animosity that was Kate in the year before we threw up our hands. Our 1990 interlude in New Providence was an inescapable disjunction between a mealy reality and the touching pretense that all was right in the world. The pervasive sense of alienation in which I drifted still carries too much pointless, albeit vivid, emotion to want to drag up wholesale.

However, the abstract idea of estrangement isn't without its attractions. Particularly its first recognition, a phenomenon that often appears to us like an archeological excavation. We can only approach it by going backwards in time, uncovering layer after layer of deposits, trying to remember how we came to feel this way. Even though we may never comprehend that defining moment, we can take some solace in pointing to when we believed we first felt divorced from ourselves.

This is exactly why Columbus looms so large in the stories of the New World, for with his arrival nostalgia blossomed, self-consciousness dawned, and morality ran like sand through our fingers.

For some of these reasons Michael Dorris (1943-1997) may have chosen to write a juvenile book. Morning Girl (1992) is about the Taino Indians that once inhabited the island chain. My guess is that only a Native American would end his story with the heroine Morning Girl welcoming Columbus on shore, October 11, 1492.

I assure you that reading backward is filled with pitfalls. The search for a pristine past (whether in childhood or history) will always lie in the shadow of the present. Dorris was not wholly unaware of this.

There have been scores of children's books in the past ten years seeking to capitalize on the trends of multiculturalism. These anthologies, or individual works, are testing the market for the children's literature by or about 'the other' Americans. On one level Dorris' book is of the same ilk but...

The narrative proceeds in alternating chapters told first by Morning Girl and then by her brother, Star Boy. Star Boy does not sleep at night. He says of himself: I don't like it when there's nothing to hear, nothing to taste, nothing to touch, especially when there's nothing to see. Those times I don't know where I am. The first night I woke up and noticed that everyone was invisible, I held perfectly still and disappeared. I became nothing, too, and I didn't know how to get back.

Not a little of this book is an imaginative effort to conceive of identity in the period before Columbus. In a culture without mirrors Dorris puts great stock in the act of naming to find oneself. But the haunting experience of reading of this book now, in the wake of his suicide, derives from trying to grasp how to name Dorris.

How fateful that contact with the Spanish proved for the Taino. I have read one estimate that the entire population was either killed or enslaved and transported elsewhere within twenty years--200,000 native people.

By 1600 Spain's control of the Bahamas was eventually lost to Great Britain. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, one of those odd and recurrent micro-chapters of New World migration took place. In a mirror image of the Tory flight into Canada, a smaller band of loyalists left the southern states, with their slaves, and resettled in the islands. This interesting chapter of forgotten history is portrayed in Robert Wilder's Wind From the Carolinas (1964). The novel is one of those huge historical fictions that spans a half-dozen generations. It reminds me of Kenneth Roberts' novels, not only for the recreation of the Revolutionary War period, but also for the high quality of the storytelling. Granted, the sheer size of the novel is daunting--well over five hundred pages of fine print--but it reads fairly quickly. What it lacks in poetry or narrative complexity it makes up for with knowledgeable details about boats and Bahamian farming as well as imaginative historical depictions. The books ends during the 1920's when the Bahamas served as a major conduit for the illegal importation of alcohol during Prohibition.

Deep Sea Fishing

However, there was one story that I fastened onto with great interest, partly in self-defense, insomuch as I did not want to think about my own misfortunes, but also because it was one of those genuinely rare moments in someone's life when the great waves of consciousness roll onshore. It involved an islander, a man of mixed race. I met three generations of his family all of whom spoke with the clipped dialect of the people of New Providence. He made his living taking tourists out fishing on charter trips. He was dark skinned with straight, India ink hair and strong arms. At the time he was a little over forty, by no means old, but no longer a handsome youth. Not like this languorous girl who was with us on the boat for example. In his glory days though, when the hotels on Paradise Island were first rising above the palm trees, he was the number one "beach boy." By this he meant to convey that his sexual conquests were legendary. He spoke so vehemently, with such a pained air of complete seriousness, it was impossible to laugh--either at or with him. This curious earnestness may have stemmed from the fact that it had recently come to his attention the past was no joke.

After we caught a few small tuna we all agreed to go swimming off a small sand bar where there were unbelievable coral formations. Diving in that crystal blue water with mask and snorkel, amid the tropical fish and the brain coral, I had underwater thoughts about staying forever, like the sunburnt mate, a scruffy looking American about my age. His story had been summed up in the unconscious admission: "...and that was fifteen or twenty years ago."

When I hauled myself back into the boat the girl was sitting on the rail, her straight black hair pulled back and wet, the smooth brown skin glistening, one leg bent, revealing the sensual arc of her near naked bottom.

She was a sophomore at a college in Toronto and was traveling with her boyfriend. Her story commenced twenty years before when her mother came down to the Bahamas for a week in the middle of a cold northern winter. And now, two decades later, this man who owned the boat was meeting his daughter for the first time.

If there is a moral here I don't know what it is. The man's wife was understandably immobilized by mixed emotions. She had her stepdaughter and the boyfriend over for dinner but didn't know what to say or do. Everyone in the family remarked on the amazing resemblance between father and daughter. The girl herself appeared to have been swept by a great calm but whether this was a result of the climate or the reunion I cannot say. As for her father, he seemed deeply distracted. He spoke of the usual things but stamped even trivial observations with great philosophical weight, as if he were trying to assure himself that he could recognize his own life.

-June 15, 1997

© Copyright 2003 Eric Metcalf