By Christian Campbell

"We air dirty laundry in the high winds for all to see," writes Bahamian poet Aurora Ferguson, "but we are people of buried secrets; we are pebbles black in backyard bushes who try to keep our own gossip, our own secrets tight-lipped."

In her grand long prose poem, "Sea", Ferguson makes the landscape speak, navigating through the Bahamian personality. She uses nature as a model, as a mirror too great to hold up. Yes, we are sweet contradiction, fast and private at once. We are a masquerade people. Public discourse in The Bahamas, dictated by the preacher and the politician, is undeniably conservative, rarely straying from a neo-colonial, fundamentalist Christian tradition.

Thankfully, the discourse is no longer hermetically sealed. The curbing of PLP victimisation policies and the opening up of the airwaves and other media during the Ingraham regime have brought us a few steps closer to a more productive and democratic zone of dissensus. I am in no way interested in political tribalism but I am devoted to politics as an artist and thinker insofar as politics, at bottom, means not "PLP vs. FNM" but "to do with power." I am political because I feel empowered to say whatever is most necessary and most pleasurable to say.

A week ago I attended an extraordinary conversation entitled "A Dialogue on Festival in the Workplace: A Transformation Process" under the theme "Enhancing Productivity, Joy & Fulfillment". The dialogue was organised by Roosevelt Finlayson who runs MDR, a company designed to focus on strategic change and organisational celebration through intercultural/performance management and the creative process, and Michael Diggis, associate of MDR and Managing Director of Jackson Burnside Ltd.

Finlayson and Diggis are completing a joint PhD in Organisational Psychology at Tilburg University in Holland. The concept of the dialogue is taken from their PhD Thesis, "Festival in the Workplace: A Transformational Process", in which they "study festivals to understand their transformational essence and apply this knowledge in the workplace to develop a model of a positive and productive workplace culture."

The guest for the conversation was meant to be pioneering Trinidadian Carnival artist and head of the Callaloo Company, Peter Minshall, though he fell ill at the last minute and could not travel. Fortunately, he sent his associate in his place, Kathryn Chan, Trinidadian visual artist and designer, and former fellow of the Bunting Institute at Harvard University. The dialogue was also blessed by the presence of the King and the Godfather of Junkanoo, Percy "Vola" Francis and Winston "Gus" Cooper.

The conversations and ideas of this dialogue were fresh and frustrating, since we never have enough time to get the fullness of reasoning sessions like this one. It just makes sense, to think of how we can use the Caribbean festival as a paradigm for transformation and translate the alchemy and the apotheosis of our festivals into all aspects of Caribbean society. If we can do this, we will be unstoppable. This celebration of Junkanoo and Carnival, my two heritages, my two cultural landscapes, took me back to twelve years old, when I wrote my BJC project, entitled "From African Roots to Caribbean Culture: Junkanoo in The Bahamas and Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago" (a title which my Englishman-teacher said, 'sounded like it came out of a book,' when it came right out of my head).

The jewel of the conference came the next day, Friday morning at a small-group breakfast conversation. There we had a veritable conch salad of dazzling thinkers and creators: Finlayson, Diggis, Chan, Laurena Finlayson, Jackson Burnside, Arlene Nash-Ferguson, Angela Reid, Nicolette Bethel, Olivia Saunders, Darren Bastian, Chris Justilien, Philip Simon, Trevor Bethel, Simmone and me. It was a decidedly pan-Caribbean space with old Bahamian families from around our archipelago - Chan who is Trini, Reid who is Jamaican, Justilien who has Haitian parentage, Simon who also claims Haitian heritage and me, of Bahamian and Trinidadian parentage.

This morning grounding was held, ironically, as Chan pointed out, at the British Colonial Hilton hotel. We are all people trying to live creative, productive, alternative lives in a land where we define our sense of selfhood by the number of visitors we have per year. We traversed an ocean of discourse, from Junkanoo to colonialism to intra-Caribbean relations to tourism to Bahamian identity to Africa. I realise that the organising principle of our conversation was the challenge of defining ourselves from within, on our own terms.

For a long time I have meditated on a particular fragment of phrase, an aphorism: "Behind God back." It is the imagery that always baffled me: God's impossibly massive lapis lazuli back, and behind it is what?

I am ever amazed by the mastery and mystery of folk wisdom. "Behind God back" is spoken all over the Caribbean, from the blue holes of The Bahamas to the oil lakes of Trinidad. I marvel at the many possible meanings of the phrase. The first meaning points to a place that is remote or far away. Behind God back, so far that God can't see you, that you are not in God's sight. Not worthy of being recognised. When I asked my cousin, the Cat Island writer and cultural activist Sylvia Laramore-Crawford, about the term, she told me "unseen" and "off the beaten path," like Cat Island. She said that Cat Island is either not mentioned or the last to be mentioned by our leaders, and she is right. Instead of dwelling on Government's amnesia, Crawford helped to make "God's back" a home, by planning cultural events with her late husband: North vs. South basketball tournaments, an all-male spelling competition, an arts exhibition, the Rake 'n Scrape Festival, the Cat Island Awards Committee, Cat Island Writers Society and more.

Christian Campbell is a poet, cultural critic, lecturer and journalist. The author welcomes comments: runksphd@yahoo.co.uk

To go behind God's back is also to revolt, to be sacreligious, to break the rules, to go beyond a boundary, as the Trinidadian ideologue C.L.R. James put it. Beyond the boundaries dividing pleasure and politics. And for we who have made America 'God,' deux ex machina, this saying can also point to our very predicament, the outpost, in the shadow of America, on their side. I asked another Bahamian about "Behind God back," and though they did not recognise the term, they imagined that it could mean "under God's protection or shelter," "to fear God." So I add to that, "to have God's back," to use African-American vernacular, and "to do the work of the divine."

The Bible, too, offers another angle through which to read and use this language. In Isaiah 38:17, Hezekiah, King of Judah says, "Behold, for peace I have great bitterness: but thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption: for thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back."

My friend and mentor, African-American poet-critic Elizabeth Alexander, writes in her important book The Black Interior: What unites these essays is an idea, a metaphor, of what I call 'the black interior,' that is, black life and creativity behind the public face of stereotype and limited imagination. The black interior is a metaphysical space beyond the black public everyday toward power and wild imagination that black people ourselves know we possess but need to be reminded of.

Tapping into this black imaginary helps us envision what we are not meant to envision: complex black selves, real and enactable black power, rampant and unfetishized black beauty. What do we learn when we pause at sites of contradiction where black creativity complicates and resists what blackness is 'supposed' to be? (x-xi).

I quote at length to illustrate the fact that our projects are certainly kindred. "Behind God Back," too, is a space that goes behind the masks of public persona and stereotype, to the soft, singing, gnashing, red-eyed Bahamian selves.

The brilliant and sorely under-recognised Guyanese critic Gordon Rohlehr writes in "Articulating a Caribbean Aesthetic: The Revolution of Self-Perception" from the groundbreaking collection My Strangled City and Other Essays: The 'revolution of self-perception' really began with the inner resistance of the slaves to the self imposed on them by the plantation system and slavery. In its most fundamental form it was the refusal to be a thing, an object, a tool, mere chattel: the negation of a process of reification (1).

It is this oceanic struggle, the "revolution of self-perception", with which I wish to participate. It is the private conversation with self made public, in Rohlehr's word, "the submerged self": The positive aspect of this revolution involved the constant affirmation of the validity of the submerged self, the self – to borrow Edward Kamau Brathwaite's phrase – in maroonage: the marooned, submerged and often subversive self (1-2).

So here I ask: What happens in The Bahamas, masquerade islands, when the submerged self emerges?

I have named this space "Behind God Back" with all those resonances humming through. Yes, I would like to break silence, our festering secrets, but I would like to also make silence, heavy and deep, like the one-drop pauses between goatskin drum runs. Our whispering is shaped equally by our African heritage of masking and our English heritage of Victorian propriety. I wish not to spurn my ancestors, but to question them, to reason with them. This new moment requires new modes, new positions of identity. Here I am interested in thinking about both the act of masking and the desire for the mask itself.

As I retreat into my internal shack, stocked with secrets, half-built masquerade, I invite you in, just this once. I am a poet and critic, a culture worker all in all. I have yet to rush, have spent very little time in an actual shack, but I drink the pleasures and teachings of junkanoo like ambrosia. As I seek to suture the splits between pleasure and politics, I stand on the grounds of African religiosity in which there is no difference between the sacred and the profane. I seek to celebrate and confront, question and surprise, to tell Bahamian stories, like that early morning grounding, like a rushout, like mas. I hope to offer a space here like that one, opened up to all, with that kind of vibes and sharing, that kind of life-giving sound.

Christian Campbell is a poet, cultural critic, lecturer and journalist. The author welcomes comments: runksphd@yahoo.co.uk