The Role of Writers in Society.

The Bahamas Literary Festival held a literary forum on “The Role of Writers in Society” on Thursday September 18th 2008 at The College of the Bahamas’ Chapter One Bookstore. I was invited to be a part of the panel discussion that included other notable literary persons, such as Dr. Nicolette Bethel, Obediah Smith and Dr. Ian Strachan. The following speech was my contribution to the discussion.

By Alexandrio Morley
BlackFood News Reporter

The Role of Writers in Society

I must be honest; when I first received an email invitation to be a part of this panel discussion I was rather surprised. I said, "Right now they then send this invitation to all kind a people and ain nobody send back a response yet.” My problem is that I have never and still don’t see myself primarily as a writer. I write because I believe in revolution; individual and collective revolution. I believe in change. And in order to bring about that change I believe that we have to tear away all the illusions and myths that stop us from understanding our present condition.

 My starting point is that before I am a writer, I am a black man, a son and a brother. I am a cousin, a boyfriend and to my friends I am a friend. I am also a Pan Africanist and a socialist.  I am all of these things first and then I am a writer second. I say that this because I believe that the role of writers is no more or less important than that of a carpenter, a mason, a doctor, a historian or a scientist. I strongly believe that we all have a part to play in the total liberation of black people worldwide and writing is just one of the forms of struggle in which we express ourselves.

 Firstly, I believe that in order to speak about the role of a writer in a society one has to first define and describe the kind of society we are talking about, because writers are not made out of thin air. They come from within the society that they write about and the function and purpose of a writer is conditioned by the environment in which he or she lives. If we first describe the society that we live it will help us better understand the role of writers in a society.

So how do we define our society? I am a student of history and there are certain facts about this society that cannot be disputed. The story goes that Christopher Columbus landed on the island of San Salvador in 1492 and that he was greeted by the Lucayans who inhabited these islands at that time. These were the first Bahamians. Their mistake was that they were too friendly and they were also ignorant about the intentions of these European settlers. Within 25 years the native peoples of these islands were almost completely exterminated throughout the Bahamas and the entire Caribbean region. They died from the diseases of their white settlers and their numbers rapidly decreased due to the fact that the European settlers had enslaved the entire native population, whereby many of the Lucayans were forced to dive for pearls and work in gold mines in Hispaniola.

So Fact 1 is that this society was initially built on an unequal foundation that included an oppressor group and an oppressed group.

In 1647, during the English Civil War, a group of religious loyalists who brought with them their black slaves, from Bermuda landed on Eleuthera and thus was found the first permanent settlement in the Bahamas.

During the rest of the 17 century the islands of the Bahamas provided a good source of shelter and refuge for pirates and wreckers. In 1717, the Bahamas became a British Colony and the First Governor General Woodes Rodgers drove out and expelled the infamous pirates but most pirates became privateers, i.e.; pirates who worked for the government of the day.

So Fact # 2 is that this country has a history in which the ruling class of the day has voluntarily combined with the criminal elements in the society for profit.

After the American Revolution at the end of the 18 century, the British government issued land grants to a group of British Loyalists who settled in the Bahamas, and again they brought their slaves with them. The settlers tried their hand at cotton cultivation. They were successful for a while but that too came to end. Many of us are the descendants of those slaves that were brought to work on those plantations.

In 1807 Great Britain outlawed the slave trade because they wanted to wreck havoc on the slave trade of France and Spain. And then in 1834 the slaves were emancipated. The European monster needed a new place in which to rape and plunder and they decided that instead of transporting the Africans from their home land they would colonize Africans in their very own localities. Thus followed the epoch of the colonization of Africa and the West Indies.

Now, these are just some of the fundamental characteristics of our society and it is within this long history of inequality and corruption that we as writers write.

However, there are many people, writers included, who have spread mistruths and lies about black people during the periods of slavery and colonization. They say that blacks never resisted. They say that we sold our brothers to each other and that therefore we are responsible for our own exploitation. They say that if the white man had not come to Africa we would not have been civilized.

I am here to tell you that any such statement is a lie. And I know it is a lie because black writers, men and women, have always understood the power of the word and speaking truth to power. Whether it was the written word or the spoken word, our people have a deep history of radical black revolutionary writing and thought that has shed light on our past and present condition.

I could not imagine what this world or my world would be like if I had never read CLR James, the author of the Black Jacobins. Just imagine how less we would have known if Frantz Fanon had not written the “Wretched of the Earth.” Or imagine what it would be like if Richard Wright had not put pen to paper and told us about the “The Native Son”. What if Angela Davis had not written “Women Culture and Politics.”

Without these persons we would not be able to listen and learn from our ancestors. And that’s what writing is. It’s a double act in one. It’s talking and it’s also sharing with the collective. The writers that I spoke of were revolutionaries and they understood that our people’s greatest weakness is that we have been separated and torn apart from each other. Children were separated from mothers. Wives were taken away from their husbands. Communities and tribes became fragmented. Blacks were flung to the four corners of the world due to the slave trade.

I believe that the most revolutionary thing that we can do is to find ways to better communicate with each other. Walter Rodney said it best. He said that we as a people have to ground; i.e. we have to sit down and talk. Writers are the medium through which that collective conversation takes place. And that’s exactly what we are trying to do at BlackFood.org.

But, our current problem is that most of what we digest as readers is from writers who do not care about our upliftment or progress. The New York Times, OK Magazine, The Punch, The Tribune or even those trashy romantic novels that we consume. None of this stuff is about us and all of it is through the eyes of our former and present oppressors.

Ask yourself if these newspapers and writers really feed your passion for knowledge of self and the world.

Walter Rodney once said that: “It is time that we started seeing through our own eyes.” That time is now. I encourage you to pick up the pen, grab the mic, or bellow out a tune. Whatever rocks your boat. The aim is to express yourself. The aim is to bring about change. The aim is revolution.

And writers are the soldiers on this battlefield who carry small flashlights (pens) to illuminate the obstacles that we face and map out the direction for a new Bahamas and a New World.

Thank you. ♦bf

Look below for a picture of the event: