In Search of Suburbia
While the first wave of Suburban dwellers naturally had close connections and ties to their families in the inner city and the way of life that they left, their children on the other hand have had a completely different Bahamian experience. This means then, that presently in the Bahamas there is a generation of young people who have only had a Suburban experience, and cannot relate to the Bahamas their parents grew up in. In this category, I must include myself. Obviously we cannot be blamed for our lack of experience in the inner city, however I find that it is this same lack of knowledge that often leads to our being criticized for not having an appreciation for ‘Bahamian Culture.’ Culture in this instance being equated with the inner city way of life as our parents experienced it, or the ideal Bahamas that supposedly exists in the out-islands. It is this shoddy understanding of ‘culture’ which has created a generation of people who are ‘not Bahamian enough’.
What then is culture? It would be difficult if not impossible to disengage a discussion of culture from that of history and National Identity; for if a Bahamian does not know his past and his ‘culture,’ he can’t be a ‘true-true Bahamian.’ Our relationship with culture determines our identification with a nation, and our identification with history helps us answer, at least in a general sense, the question of ‘why are we here?’ For a person to say that they are ‘proud to be Bahamians,’ it shows that there is a strong attachment and internalization of what that individual sees and believes to be Bahamian national identity.
According to Richard L. Bernal , ‘Culture É binds societies together,’ for without cultural expression, National Identity has no foothold on which to grow. Patricia Glinton-Meicholas defines culture as the ’sum of the historical and physical experiences of a people, and how they interact to create endemic group attitudes and behaviors.’ This means that culture is a fusion of a people’s history and how they as a people have coped with that history, or put another way, culture is created by people surviving and reacting to their environment.