“What? Nobody got shot?”

Representations of Caribana violence in the Toronto print media

Research Project, April 10, 2007

Group members:

Shane Bentham

Franciene McLeod

Edward Minnis

Nassim Shirvani

The festival of Caribana is marking its 40^thanniversary in the city of Toronto this year and it has become quite the cornerstone of a typical summer of fun within the city. This is deservedly so because, coming from modest origins, Caribana is now the largest outdoor festival in North America, and generates well over 200 million dollars in local revenue. It attracts over two million people from all over the world, to the point where hotel rooms are often booked out a year in advance for the next parade (Trotman 177). 

Caribana is often pointed to, usually by the government and the festival organizers, as a symbol of successful multiculturalism, of what is possible for a diverse city like Toronto. Despite this however the annual festival and parade has a perceived aura of fear and imminent violence. The Toronto Star reported that a staff sergeant ”addressed some 30 officers about to start their shift [at Caribana], he told them that [it] was not quite the festival they had heard about. He suggested they had nothing to fear.” (Barahona A9) Is Caribana really so dangerous that the police who manage the parade are scared for their lives and require a pep talk just to walk the streets? Or is this merely the effect of the mainstream media that wishes to paint this predominantly black cultural festival with a negative brush? This essay will argue that the Toronto media goes out of its way to represent Caribana as a violence plagued bacchanal despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Note: I wrote this essay in 2001 for English 120 at the College of the Bahamas. It was published the following year in the course booklet as a “Sample Informal Argumentative Essay.” The essay has some baby fat that needs cutting, and I hope to get to that later, but I offer it here as a quick read that encapsulates most of my ideas about culture.

Has Wendy’s started selling ‘conch snacks’, you ask? How can an American fast food chain ever possibly hope to be considered Bahamian? While I agree that the idea may sound shocking, I believe that because of its importance in the lives of Bahamians today, it is possible to say that Wendy’s is just as Bahamian as Bamboo Shack. But before I explain my position, allow me to clarify a point: when I say Wendy’s, by extension I’m referring to the other major fast food restaurants such as Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), and McDonalds. It naturally follows that by referring to the Bamboo Shack I can be making reference to any well-known Bahamian Restaurant, like Castaways, Dirties or The Palm Tree.

The first objection any red-blooded Bahamian would raise about the above claim would be the menu. Obviously the food that these fast food restaurants serve is not considered traditional “Bahamian cuisine”. You cannot, and probably never will be able to, go into a Wendy’s and order a conch snack, or go to McDonalds and order a dish of sheep-tongue souse. However, the questions I ask are these: is the food served the only test of Bahamian-ness’? Just because something is not indigenous to the Bahamas, can it be considered Bahamian? Are there any other factors that contribute to something’s being considered Bahamian, or a part of Bahamian culture?

For the purpose of our discussion, it would help to have a clearer definition of “culture”. Patricia Glinton-Meicholas in her essay “Uncovering the Bahamian Self”, defined culture as “the sum of the historical and physical experiences of a people, and how they interact to create endemic group attitudes and behaviors.” What this means is that culture is a fusion of a peoples’ 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. So, despite what Bahamians in general may think “their culture” is, it really is a dynamic fusion of past and present that does not remain static. It is constantly evolving taking into account the complete environment that makes up the modem Bahamas and our reaction to that environment, including the general lifestyles that we as a people lead.

”The things that make us what we are”

National Identity, Tourism and “The Fergusons of Farm Road”

1970–75

In the 1900s, the Bahamas remained an isolated backwater colony of the British Empire.¹ Its economic history to that point has been described by some as a series of ‘booms and busts’. ² Episodes of short-lived prosperity were followed by long droughts of poverty. However, when prosperity returned in another period of ‘boom’, it was always by a different name; Ship wrecking gave way to blockade running during the American Civil War then onto rum-running during US prohibition then sponge harvesting and so on. ³ No economic activity seemed that it could endure in the shallow soils and shallower seas of the Bahamas for very long.

So too with tourism when it was introduced to the islands in the 1850s, when the government began to actively promote the industry, it was at best a seasonal activity that lasted only during the winter months of the year. ⁴ The colonial government invested in the tourism product over the years which meant increasing the number of rooms available, building hotels, securing steamship transport from the United States, yet by 1900 the visitors to the Bahamas “were still counted in the tens and hundreds.”⁵

In the 1950’s Bahamian lawyer and businessman and Chairman of the Development Board,”⁶ Sir Stafford Sands saw the promise of the still seasonal industry and was determined to make Tourism a year-round occupation.⁷ With the introduction of air conditioning to Bahamian hotels the hot and humid summer months could at last be colonized by northern sun worshippers who began coming to the country in droves.⁸ The response was outstanding; by 1975 the Bahamas the highest per capita GNP (Gross National Product) in Latin America.⁹

In Search of Suburbia

A work in progress

Allow me to introduce you to a device that I have become acquainted with recently. It is called the ‘Bahamian detector’. It’s a hypothetical top-secret device and its still going through rigorous testing. What it does is register the amount of ‘Bahamian-ness’ present in any person, place or thing. Its scale starts at a high of ‘True- true Bahamian’, and a red light goes off whenever it detects something that isn’t. The device has a rather broad mid point, but there are no markers on it for those, shall we say, ‘grey areas’.

The powerpoint presentation