bahamianpride
04-25-07, - 11:37 AM
Dear Beloved Community
Helen Klonaris
A Love Letter
I just finished my Master of Fine Arts thesis. Turned it in yesterday. And no matter how far away I am from you, beloved community, I always end up writing to you, for you. Love letters. Fighting letters. Wrestling with you letters. Love letters just the same. I called it “Following The Sun”. Because that is what I do. I am following the sun to see where it is she will take me. Following her so I can come home. Watching her with her big shining self sink under the water only to be resurrected every morning, every blessed day. And in those pages, the ones I gave to my writing advisor to grade, I spoke about you. Oh, at first I thought I was speaking about me. But it turned out that I was really speaking about the ‘us’. How we are inseparable. Born up out of an in between place. A small place in between big places. Not West Indian, not American. Here’s some of what I wrote:
“Lately I have been meditating on in betweeness. That place that is often without a name, or a name that doesn’t count, between places with names, ones that really do count. I’ve been meditating on identity getting stuck then loosing itself, borning itself out of the in between place. Like, what it means to be a Greek girl growing up in The Bahamas in the moment between colonial rule and independence; between Black and Anglo cultures on a small island that is not part of America, yet is not perceived as being (does not really perceive itself) of the West Indies either, (despite the fact that when Columbus landed in what he thought was India, he was setting down anchor and foot on land that now makes up part of the southern most tip of the Bahamian archipelago, a fact which many of us still think of as honorable.) How she grows up between Greek and Black and Anglo definitions of woman and womanishness; in between churches and notions of God; in the soundlessness between lies and truth. How sexuality is itself a place in which she gropes towards language, within her own body and out loud. How US or northern or first world definitions of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ and ‘bisexual’ do not necessarily fit the experiences of Bahamian and Caribbean sexualities, and how the words she needs come from an in between place, in between mainstream Bahamian thinking about sexuality, and US or first world thinking and languages.
And as I am writing this, I am thinking about how much identity is based on who discovered what and named it: geography, race, gender, sexuality are all notions and definitions some ‘discoverer’ claimed as truth, and that truth has become ‘stories’ which governments and religious institutions are invested in maintaining for the good of some bigger story. For example, tourism depends on a heterosexist story to sell its products – in the Bahamas’ case, that product is us, the islands, the people who live here and what we can produce to sell to the tourists themselves. Pictures of tourists are always of male and female couples; beaches are described as “virgin” and “unspoiled”, targeting, one can only imagine, the male heterosexual tourist to come and partake of this ‘feminine’ landscape. Our colonial legacy of ‘paradise’ is a relentless and adaptable story that pushes into the now, so that we are dependent upon it for our daily bread, our schools, our houses and any alternative story that tries to make itself heard is considered by many as fundamentally against the survival of this small place, and its advocates as counter cultural and counter religious.
I’m asking myself then, What is the independence the Bahamas and other Caribbean countries are bent on protecting, enshrining, when our borders were drawn in the first beginning by English and Spanish and French colonialists who stole these islands from their indigenous societies, used up and murdered in the process, sectioned these islands off according to what was profitable for them, and called them ‘countries’? How race too, fashioned within the same colonial context, is a sectioning off and an essentializing of human qualities and traits, so that the definition of black is not supposed to include white, nor white include black in our definitions of self, people, community: and again too, definitions of gender and sexuality are guarded with electric fences, lest we wander off that territory which is designated as female into that which is male; the heterosexual into the realm of homosexual; and how imagination becomes unsanctioned space which only heretics and apostates inhabit, at their own peril. That in between place where identities risk merging and perhaps mutating, becoming hybrid or new creatures that are against cultural and religious laws.”
Beloved community, I have to interrupt what I wrote in my thesis to tell you that this is the beauty of it… that in the Bahamas, (as much as I like to rail against the ways we don’t) we have wandered away from the sanctioned borders, into spaces we were never meant to wander into. (Imagination is alive!) I see that now. Especially from the place I’m standing, or sitting in, as I write you this letter. This place being America, where those electric fences are no joke.
What I mean is, when I criticize us for our homophobia, or our racism, when white people who should know better say things like “I didn’t come that route…” I am criticizing us from a place you, my beloved community, taught me to inhabit. The in between place where identities risk merging and perhaps mutating… As a second generation Greek girl who can never go ‘home’, who is still arriving in this new place, small place, older than time place, I look to you and see that I am not alone, never have been alone, here where we were falsely divided, we have, in spite of those divisions, come to trade words and signs and become one another, see and hear like one another, even across our particularities and the pushing and pulling where colonial narratives keep us wary of our own dreams and each others’, of the spirits we used to call by first names, last names, who were family too; in spite of the nuances of gender, of bodies, of desire, we learned how to make family out of difficult circumstances. The in between place. These are the places between what is named, like ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘male’ and ‘female’ – I grew up in and out of these in between places. I have become an in between place myself. That’s why living in San Francisco, with all its freedoms, its wealth, its privileges taken for granted, I am not at home. I am in self-imposed exile from my in between place. From you.
“Where I come from,” I wrote in my introduction, “‘literature’, or the act of creating stories out of a community of signs and symbols and desires, is a joint act, is always collaborative and it has been largely oral. The writer of stories in the Bahamas is still a relative newcomer. Especially when she is considered morally disruptive: a woman loving woman; a woman talking about ‘God is a woman’. Her solitary endeavors are often viewed with suspicion, or not viewed at all. Yet, even when this writer sits down at a table alone, she is never alone. Her beloved community is loud, excessively so, even in their silences. She is always talking back to them; answering their questions, including the ones they haven’t yet asked; accepting their good natured barbs, and their arms that open wide to welcome her in, hold her there for a moment, so she is remembered to all her selves.
She won’t let them loose, even when they quarrel. “Small things”, is what they tell each other, after the ruckus has died down, as if to say, there is something deeper and wider than the stories we have inherited. We know this without necessarily speaking it; and knowing this is sometimes confusing, but in the end it is what propels the dreamer to go ahead and dream something, something rare, something out of order, something we will gasp at, one day, and exclaim, ‘Could you imagine?’”
helenklonaris@gmail.com
Helen Klonaris
A Love Letter
I just finished my Master of Fine Arts thesis. Turned it in yesterday. And no matter how far away I am from you, beloved community, I always end up writing to you, for you. Love letters. Fighting letters. Wrestling with you letters. Love letters just the same. I called it “Following The Sun”. Because that is what I do. I am following the sun to see where it is she will take me. Following her so I can come home. Watching her with her big shining self sink under the water only to be resurrected every morning, every blessed day. And in those pages, the ones I gave to my writing advisor to grade, I spoke about you. Oh, at first I thought I was speaking about me. But it turned out that I was really speaking about the ‘us’. How we are inseparable. Born up out of an in between place. A small place in between big places. Not West Indian, not American. Here’s some of what I wrote:
“Lately I have been meditating on in betweeness. That place that is often without a name, or a name that doesn’t count, between places with names, ones that really do count. I’ve been meditating on identity getting stuck then loosing itself, borning itself out of the in between place. Like, what it means to be a Greek girl growing up in The Bahamas in the moment between colonial rule and independence; between Black and Anglo cultures on a small island that is not part of America, yet is not perceived as being (does not really perceive itself) of the West Indies either, (despite the fact that when Columbus landed in what he thought was India, he was setting down anchor and foot on land that now makes up part of the southern most tip of the Bahamian archipelago, a fact which many of us still think of as honorable.) How she grows up between Greek and Black and Anglo definitions of woman and womanishness; in between churches and notions of God; in the soundlessness between lies and truth. How sexuality is itself a place in which she gropes towards language, within her own body and out loud. How US or northern or first world definitions of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ and ‘bisexual’ do not necessarily fit the experiences of Bahamian and Caribbean sexualities, and how the words she needs come from an in between place, in between mainstream Bahamian thinking about sexuality, and US or first world thinking and languages.
And as I am writing this, I am thinking about how much identity is based on who discovered what and named it: geography, race, gender, sexuality are all notions and definitions some ‘discoverer’ claimed as truth, and that truth has become ‘stories’ which governments and religious institutions are invested in maintaining for the good of some bigger story. For example, tourism depends on a heterosexist story to sell its products – in the Bahamas’ case, that product is us, the islands, the people who live here and what we can produce to sell to the tourists themselves. Pictures of tourists are always of male and female couples; beaches are described as “virgin” and “unspoiled”, targeting, one can only imagine, the male heterosexual tourist to come and partake of this ‘feminine’ landscape. Our colonial legacy of ‘paradise’ is a relentless and adaptable story that pushes into the now, so that we are dependent upon it for our daily bread, our schools, our houses and any alternative story that tries to make itself heard is considered by many as fundamentally against the survival of this small place, and its advocates as counter cultural and counter religious.
I’m asking myself then, What is the independence the Bahamas and other Caribbean countries are bent on protecting, enshrining, when our borders were drawn in the first beginning by English and Spanish and French colonialists who stole these islands from their indigenous societies, used up and murdered in the process, sectioned these islands off according to what was profitable for them, and called them ‘countries’? How race too, fashioned within the same colonial context, is a sectioning off and an essentializing of human qualities and traits, so that the definition of black is not supposed to include white, nor white include black in our definitions of self, people, community: and again too, definitions of gender and sexuality are guarded with electric fences, lest we wander off that territory which is designated as female into that which is male; the heterosexual into the realm of homosexual; and how imagination becomes unsanctioned space which only heretics and apostates inhabit, at their own peril. That in between place where identities risk merging and perhaps mutating, becoming hybrid or new creatures that are against cultural and religious laws.”
Beloved community, I have to interrupt what I wrote in my thesis to tell you that this is the beauty of it… that in the Bahamas, (as much as I like to rail against the ways we don’t) we have wandered away from the sanctioned borders, into spaces we were never meant to wander into. (Imagination is alive!) I see that now. Especially from the place I’m standing, or sitting in, as I write you this letter. This place being America, where those electric fences are no joke.
What I mean is, when I criticize us for our homophobia, or our racism, when white people who should know better say things like “I didn’t come that route…” I am criticizing us from a place you, my beloved community, taught me to inhabit. The in between place where identities risk merging and perhaps mutating… As a second generation Greek girl who can never go ‘home’, who is still arriving in this new place, small place, older than time place, I look to you and see that I am not alone, never have been alone, here where we were falsely divided, we have, in spite of those divisions, come to trade words and signs and become one another, see and hear like one another, even across our particularities and the pushing and pulling where colonial narratives keep us wary of our own dreams and each others’, of the spirits we used to call by first names, last names, who were family too; in spite of the nuances of gender, of bodies, of desire, we learned how to make family out of difficult circumstances. The in between place. These are the places between what is named, like ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘male’ and ‘female’ – I grew up in and out of these in between places. I have become an in between place myself. That’s why living in San Francisco, with all its freedoms, its wealth, its privileges taken for granted, I am not at home. I am in self-imposed exile from my in between place. From you.
“Where I come from,” I wrote in my introduction, “‘literature’, or the act of creating stories out of a community of signs and symbols and desires, is a joint act, is always collaborative and it has been largely oral. The writer of stories in the Bahamas is still a relative newcomer. Especially when she is considered morally disruptive: a woman loving woman; a woman talking about ‘God is a woman’. Her solitary endeavors are often viewed with suspicion, or not viewed at all. Yet, even when this writer sits down at a table alone, she is never alone. Her beloved community is loud, excessively so, even in their silences. She is always talking back to them; answering their questions, including the ones they haven’t yet asked; accepting their good natured barbs, and their arms that open wide to welcome her in, hold her there for a moment, so she is remembered to all her selves.
She won’t let them loose, even when they quarrel. “Small things”, is what they tell each other, after the ruckus has died down, as if to say, there is something deeper and wider than the stories we have inherited. We know this without necessarily speaking it; and knowing this is sometimes confusing, but in the end it is what propels the dreamer to go ahead and dream something, something rare, something out of order, something we will gasp at, one day, and exclaim, ‘Could you imagine?’”
helenklonaris@gmail.com