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Countries / Caribbean

Bahamas

works
6
6 books
period covered
1918–1997
language of writing
English

In 1918, an American anthropologist published a hundred and fifteen tales collected on a single island of the Bahamas, and gave for each one the name, the age and the village of the person who had told it to her. Elsie Clews Parsons transcribed the local speech without correcting it, indicated the hesitations and the laughter, and added a comparative apparatus referring to Jamaica, to Cape Verde, to Sierra Leone and to Nigeria. For the time, it was a methodological revolution: the storytellers become identified authors, with their age and their village, instead of remaining anonymous sources.

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The archipelago lent itself to it, and the island of Andros more than any other. Seven hundred islands stretched between Florida and Cuba, a population issued from the slave trade but also from American loyalists who came with their slaves after 1783, and an economy that long lived off shipwreck: the inhabitants salvaged the cargoes of ships run aground on the reefs, an activity profitable enough to make Nassau a prosperous port. There followed the smuggling of alcohol to the United States during prohibition, then tourism and offshore finance, three economies founded on American proximity.

That American proximity explains a late and not abundant written production. The country has been independent since 1973 and its literature has formed since then: Susan Wallace published in 1970 poems in Bahamian speech, Telcine Turner wrote in 1994 a play about a father ready to sacrifice his daughter to his career, and Paul Albury produced in 1975 the history of the country written by a Bahamian. The price is attraction: American culture is fifty miles away, the local literary scene is small, and many authors publish elsewhere.

What awaits the reader is a literature close to the oral, attached to the sea, to the small island communities and to what is left unsaid between neighbours. The play that opens this page ties, in three acts, self-interested alliances around an ambitious father ready to sacrifice his daughter to his career, and it is still on the secondary school syllabus.

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A way to begin

Woman Take Two

Telcine Turner · 1994

A comedy of suspense in three acts, still on the syllabus of Bahamian secondary students.

The entry See the author

In the Bahamas, Harold Davies, an ambitious man, is ready to sacrifice his daughter Sonia to his career. Beverly Humes and her fiancé Lionel Joseph are caught up in his schemes, while Merline Evans brings her folk wisdom and the maid, Matilda Bacombe, watches it all go by.

Timeline

  1. 1970–1975Writing the archipelagoSusan Wallace in Bahamian speech; Paul Albury tells the islands' history.
  2. 1987Woman Take TwoTelcine Turner publishes the founding play of Bahamian theatre.

Reading keys

1Names and kinship
  • Family names are British or American, inherited from the owners or the loyalists, and indicate no European ancestry.
  • Families are spread across several islands, the Family Islands, and the name of the island of origin places a character socially as much as the surname does.
  • Families are often matrifocal, with a grandmother who brings up the children while the parents work in Nassau or in Florida.
  • The Haitian community, large and precarious, bears French names and occupies a difficult legal position.
2What is said and unsaid
  • The fate of the Haitian immigrants, their status and the expulsions, is the country's most sensitive subject.
  • Dependence on tourism and on offshore finance, and what it imposes, are little approached head-on.
  • The period of alcohol smuggling, then that of the drug trafficking of the nineteen eighties, are awkward memories.
  • Bahamian speech is not the language of official writing, and using it is a decision.
3Religion and the unseen
  • Protestant Christianity is very much in the majority and much practised, with Baptist and Anglican churches present in every village.
  • Obeah, forbidden by law, is consulted discreetly for healing and protection.
  • Bush medicine, a local pharmacopoeia transmitted orally, is a common knowledge that the narratives mention.
  • The spirits of the dead, and the chickcharnies of the forests of Andros, mischievous birds that bring misfortune to whoever mocks them, belong to the island stock.
4Colours, rites, mourning, feasts
  • The wake, the setting up, is held at the home of the deceased with songs and narratives, and the burial is followed by a collective meal.
  • Black and white are worn in mourning.
  • Junkanoo, a masked parade on the night of 26 December and 1 January, with its crepe paper costumes and its cowbells, is the national event.
  • Rake and scrape, music played on a saw and an accordion, accompanies the village festivals.
5Shared references
  • The hundred and fifteen tales of Andros published in 1918, with their named narrators, are the documented corpus and a source of local pride.
  • Anansi and the trickster cycle link the Bahamas to Jamaica, to Ghana and to Suriname.
  • The chickcharnie of Andros and the beliefs of obeah form the local supernatural stock.
  • The narratives of shipwreck and of salvage constitute an economic and narrative memory of their own.
6Misreadings to avoid
  • The Bahamas are not an island but an archipelago of seven hundred islands, some thirty of them inhabited, with distinct cultures.
  • The country is Caribbean by history and North American by geography and economy, which explains its particular cultural position.
  • Junkanoo is not a reprise of the Rio carnival but a tradition of its own, born of the celebrations permitted to slaves at Christmas.
  • Bahamian speech is an English-based creole, distinct from Jamaican Patois, and not a variant of Southern American English.

Tales and mythologies 1

A selection to begin with 4 / 6

Show only

  • PoetryBahamian SceneSusan J. Wallace · 1970Three years before independence, a poet from Grand Bahama writes as people speak in the islands.Literature
  • EssayThe Story of the BahamasPaul Albury · 1975Two years after independence in 1973, a Bahamian writes the history of his country from the inside.Literature
  • PoetryGuanahani, My LoveMarion Bethel · 1994The past of the Bahamian archipelago told in poems by a Nassau lawyer, at the end of the twentieth century.Literature
  • NovelGod's Angry BabiesIan Strachan · 1997A Bahamian youth between a working-class district, family and political corruption, twenty years after independence.Literature

See all 6 works