[01.01] - Paradise Paradox

Escape. Relax. Tranquil. Pristine. Paradise.

Shoot. Stab. Kill.

Can The Bahamas, resolve its dual identities?
They do exist and they do contradict each other. How else can we describe the fact that the Bahamas is both beautiful and bloody?

It struck me as ironic that in 2005 our country was ranked the 5th happiest place in the world. That year, we had 52 homicides and yet we’re so happy? Huh?

I was abroad when I got news that a friend was stabbed to death in front of her children. So when an acquaintance who’d learned that I’m from the Bahamas cooed, “Oh, you’re so lucky! Isn’t that nice?” I was in no mood to cheerily chime the Ministry Of Tourism-sanctioned, “It’s Better In The Bahamas!” and do a Bahamahost jig.
Nor do I dance the Paradise Polka at 2007’s 79 murders, or of the chances of this year’s total topping that.

I love The Bahamas and not just because it’s home.
I love eating a warm sugar apple off the tree. I love big trees, seagrapes, the smell of night jasmines blooming in sync, the sound of the noisy cicadas when the grass is high and their high-pitched whine scores a July morning, even when it’s a Sunday and I want to sleep in.
I love how guavas smell when they fall off the tree and start to ferment a little, the way when it rains so heavily that a single drop splats and makes eight more drops and how the big rain stings your skin.
I love the fact that mango rum is cheap and mangoes are free, if you can liberate them from the right person’s tree.
As cheesy as it is to resort to the beaches, I love those too. I particularly love how you can fall asleep in the shade on the sand, go in the water year-round, how you can always see the bottom and ride those big waves over on Paradise Island.
I love how the aloes grow big without trying and how you can brew a nasty remedy to knock-out a cold, for free, right from your back yard.

This love isn’t blind though and neither is yours. We know about the traffic. We know that the relaxed, island approach manifests itself as an irritation for anyone actually wanting to get something done. We also know that you can’t drive more than five minutes, most places in Nassau, without passing the scene of some not-too-distant death and that if there was a stone monument put up for everyone murdered in the last eight years, there’d be no room to walk.

Ideally, you pick your times for entertaining. You don’t invite people over when you’re in the midst of renovating your living room, or the night after scandal’s broken loose in your house. Right after a tragedy, you don’t invite people over for dancing and the roasting of a fatted calf.

However, we’re known for tourism and that means no matter how many people were buried for stupidity, we’ll be cranking the doors open and dishing the smiles out. At what point does it become too much sugar-laced salt rubbed into a large, festering wound? How do we resolve this contrast of beauty in the face of ugly?
I’d like to sum it up in a catchy phrase or tell you what my answer to this conundrum is but I don’t have one.

Faking and feigning takes its toll. At some point -if there’s ever to be any change so that Bahamians can honestly and truthfully see the paradises promised in those Promised (Is)Land tourism promotionals- we’re going to have to start being honest about what kind of paradise we’re truly in and take a real, realistic look for ourselves so that when we hear ‘It’s Better In The Bahamas’ we don’t give a little sarcastic snort and think “for whom?”

- ja**ly