Waiting for a Bahamian Language

In 1948 a group of Caribbean young men boarded a ship bound for England. They were ‘returning’ to their ‘mother country’ – a country they had never set foot on, yet they were intimately familiar with – to study and hopefully learn the literary skills they needed to write like the English authors they so admired. They were not the first to ‘return’ to the ‘mother country’, nor the last. But it was typical of the Caribbean that the residents had to leave their homes for their ‘home’ (meaning England or America) in order to secure an education. These young men and women would eventually produce some of the Caribbean’s most powerful literature – most of it dealing with their “troubled quest for identity and liberty” and “with re-creating the space of the Caribbean as a lived in space” (Windrush). Most of their works you won’t find in the library or at your local bookstore.

The Caribbean writers who represent the Bahamas are just emerging in the last few centuries–working themselves into history, preparing the path for future generations, creating a presence, a voice, an identity for themselves. The authors writing in the past century touch on many troublesome aspects of Bahamian culture: the American influence in the form of materialism and tourism, the lack of a historical presence in the countries youth, the never ending influence of centuries of European tight control of the islands, and the problematic issue of race and just what makes a Bahamian a Bahamian.

The literary pioneers of the Bahamas are creating a literary language in an attempt to save an endangered culture. They are striving to produce a literature of the Bahamas that will provide its peoples with a sense of identity, a sense of historical culture, and a sense of self. Marion Bethel speaks in an article “Bringing Myself into Fiction” of “the voids they (Bahamian writers) are compelled to fill, the issues they have to clarify” (Sanz 11). These voids include issues of colonialism, slavery, culture, and, most importantly, identity. The writers of this new literature are faced with obstacles however. These obstacles include the troublesome problems of tourism, imported ideologies and technology, and racial identity.

Some of the existing and emerging Bahamian writers are the descendents of the Loyalist pioneers. Many are descendents of the slaves who were imported from far away regions—Africa, Europe, the United States. The works being produced by Bahamian authors have the names Bethel, Albury, Knowles, Symonette, Cartwright, Rahming…all names you will find on the census records of the Bahamas as far back as the 18^th century.