Derrida, Minister's Black Veil and Scarlet Letter

Derrida says in Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, that "the center is not the center". It exists both inside and outside the structure of totality. Obviously, Derrida wasn't one to focus on specificity.

But anyway, the main point I got from his essay is how the genesis of the sign, and thus, signification, is absent.

Which is how Minister's Black Veil is relevant. This minister in Salem just kind of starts wearing this black veil that completely covers his face and refuses to take it off. The townspeople, subsequently, start questioning him. However, it is clear that there is no realistic, accurate interpretation by the townspeople of his veil. It is considered dark and sinister, but its interpretation is completely based off even more baseless significations - that is, the idea of black and dark being evil. It just keeps going on and on.

Similarly, in the Scarlet Letter, the interpretation of the scarlet A on Hester's chest is completely baseless. And even more so, the town uses Hester as a physical representation of shame and suffering, comparing their own sins to her own to be relieved, although they have no right or reason to. They are personifying their own sin in the form of her public torture.

It's clear to Hawthorne that it doesn't matter whether the sin is hidden or plain clear, however - people will still attempt to personify their own sins onto others. The minister's veil is an image of a sin that is a mystery, which is why it is considered evil. Despite this, the congregation that the minister converts share this mystery of sin, as they hide behind that veil with him. However, even though Hester's sin is blatant on her chest, it is still ridiculed. Thus, whether the town has any reason to ridicule someone or not, they will use someone else's torture to signify their own purity.

Holder of the World vs. Scarlet Letter

Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World is widely considered a modern revision of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter due to it's many uncanny similarities to the 19th century novel - Hesters, single mothers, suggestions of witchcraft, illegitimate lovers and significant letters.

Long story short: Beigh, the narrator of the novel, is searching through her ancestor's history and comes along Rebecca Easton and her daughter, Hannah. Hannah, however, is not brought up by her parents, but by a Puritan family; and, after a marriage in which her husband supposedly dies (twice) and a move to India, she becomes the white lover of a Raja and is with child when he dies. Thus, she becomes a single mother.

The narrator suggests at the end of the story, "Who can blame Nathaniel Hawthorne for shying away from the real story of the brave Salem mother and the illegitimate daughter?" I think the real question is, what makes her think she did a better job?

Hawthorne did not stray or shy away from the real story - he made it quite clear. Hester raised and protected her daughter, Pearl, to the best of her abilities. She fought to give Pearl her own mind - not raised in the same Puritan society that ridiculed and ostracized them. Rebecca not only abandoned her daughter to the same Puritans that Hannah will eventually run from, but there is also a memory of Rebecca instilling a specific idea into Hannah's brain at an early age - A is for Act - almost like a lesson. Lastly, Gabriel and Hannah selfishly attempt to escape their lives in the United States and are equally unhappy in India. But Hester remains in Salem, despite her alienation, staying strong.

I feel like Jane Juffer would have something to say about that. Single mothers are ostracized, but they still do they best they can to bring up their child, whether by themselves or within a community.

Yes, Mukjherjee does do a better job at opposing the idea of Puritan ideology - the idea that "suffering is good" - the rebellion of Hannah is more apparent than of Hesters. But I feel that Hawthorne does a better job at truly demonstrating the idea of a single mother's life - making the best out of the worst situation and raising a child to be his or her own, despite the hypocrisy that surrounds her and the beauty that brought her into this world, despite the shame is is taken from it.

Using Stereotypes as Tactics/Strategies

Jane Juffer says in her book Single Mother that tactics are "determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power" (Juffer 36). That is, a tactic is a response when something is out of your control, whereas strategy is created as when you assume your own power.  

Binyavanga Wainaina writes in How to Write About Africa a satire of common stereotypes made by the western world about the continent. His essay, in which he makes such obviously inaccurate statements, is a movement to act against the ignorance of many people. He says of media, "be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed", because often that is the impression we are given.

"In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book."

So what is it that Wainaina is really doing with these stereotypes? He's obviously not just being sarcastic. Through his remarks, we as readers know he is not being serious on the surface, but that between the lines he is making a point. He can't do anything about it in a radical way, so he assumes a tactic - responding to the media in the only way he can to grab their attention. No one, otherwise, will hear the voice of reason and believe that Africa actually isn't what it's stigmatized as.

A similar kind of example is used in Season of Migration to the North by Tayib Salih. The character, Mustafa Saiid, puts on a mask, as Frantz Fanon famously puts it, using his race and the romantic stereotypes that come along with being Arab to get what he wants. The absurdity of some of his statements are clear - he over-dramatizes the sensuality of his bedroom with bright colors and speaks of magic carpets to seduce women, a few of which eventually die from "longing". But this is a tactical response of his hatred against western culture and its stereotypes and misguidings of his identity.

Politics and Space: Non-differentiation between church and state

Its political season in the Bahamas - election day has just been announced and now its time to get all riled up to support those I'd like to see in power. As I am abroad and won't be home for elections (which I can only say breaks my heart since I spent 2 hours on my birthday in a pharmacy waiting on a line to get my voters card), the best I can do is support my favorite party or candidate. There have always been two major political parties - the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) and the Free National Movement (FNM) - just as in the United States, as well as independent candidates and less well known parties which are hardly ever even acknowledged. Now here is where it turns funny - I've said before that everything in the Bahamas is about who you know - who you are is completely dependent on who your parents are, and that stream of thought follows into politics. During political season, your identity  is often determined by who you vote for. If your grammy is an FNM, your daddy's an FNM, and if your friend's a PLP, her mother will be too. Very rarely will you find someone who does not support the party that their family do, and that passes down from generation to generation. It gets really ugly if you do: it demonstrates lack of loyalty, you'll get beat, disowned - just don't go there (just kidding, sort of).

"Sea of Red" FNM supporters at a Rally

 Now people get really out of hand demonstrating their "loyalty" and it gets pretty dirty. There are rallies and motorcades to show your support, yes, but it really becomes more of a competition based on the name of the parties themselves and the citizens support, rather than the actual candidates. If you see a sea of red shirts, you know your in an FNM crowd; if you see yellow, you're in PLP territory. And they will do anything to defend or promote their party. On the FNM website, there is a picture in an article here showing PLP supporters simulating violence against the FNM's on an official branch's facebook page - PLP in yellow watching a car run over an "FNM" dummy in red. You may say, its just a red shirt right? How are you so sure that's what they are trying to say? Because it's always that serious.

FNM spokesperson says in response, "As the country is seeking ways to reduce violence, PLP supporters are promoting the idea of violence against political opponents. The PLP would be better served spending their time putting out a plan, than engaging in this kind of behaviour". And with this kind of behavior, we do wonder who is actually capable of leading the country. The truth is, despite who I support, that neither party is.

There are comments (well justified) that suggest that people are all in a frenzy about supporting a color, rather than an actual candidate and that the parties condone this behaviour to gain support - the blind leading the blind, because neither party is really doing anything to help the country progress. In fact, its only choosing the best of the worst, because neither government will do what it needs to do. But that's always been the case in the Bahamas. Most citizens are too loyal to support anyone else - until recently. This season, there is a new party, one that has surprisingly gained a large amount of supporters in a small amount of time, called the Democratic National Alliance (DNA). Their selling point is essentially what President Obama's was during his campaign, that he could bring what other parties couldn't, we need a change, it's time for a new era, etc.

The problem is that the leader is young and hardly has any experience - and because of that, older voters will not vote for him. Further, these new generation of leaders can speak 'yes we can' all they want - the Bahamas is not in a position where it is prepared for a change because of the way our government works. As long as the Bahamas doesn't separate church from state, little can be done, because decisions are made for the wrong reasons and by the wrong people. Lines are blurred because the spaces of government and the church aren't different. Yes, the Bahamas is supposed to be a Christian nation, but in religion only. And not even the DNA, our so called agents of change, have made that differentiation. This is shown when we look at the biographies for each constituency's candidates: for my constituency, Yamacraw, we are informed here that Maurice Smith is "a born again Christian" and "a member of Abundant Life Bible Church, with a continuing mandate of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ". Please, please, tell me. How is this relevant to how he is going to help run the country? I applaud him for his faith, which I support, but I don't want to vote for him because of it. It's because it's what Bahamians want to hear, apparently.

We've learned in class that there is a relationship of space in terms of power and power relations. Focault's Discipline and Punish tells us in his example of the non-differentiation in the spaces of prisons and schools that its the ideology that's the biggest connection between the spaces. We want things to merge because the ideas we have for both of the spaces to be the same, even if we don't realize we are doing it. But the church was not meant to rule the state if the government is going to be doing their jobs. The DNA knows that they have to continue merging church and state in order to be considered. But the only way the Bahamas is going to progress is by separating the two. None-the-less, they are using a strategy in which they reorganize the idea of government, where the normal ideas of politics and government aren't condoned, which I must commend them for. In reference to Steve's comment in class, rather than wearing "combat boots" to the dance, they are having a completely different dance all together. They are, at least, trying. Until they get their act together though, I'll stick with what I know.

There's no way you'll guess who I want to vote for

The Hunger Games, Racism and Representation

I'm pretty sure that everyone by now has at the very least heard of The Hunger Games. If you haven't read or watched it, beware of spoilers. In fact, you should probably just stop at the end of this paragraph. Consider this paragraph as my blog for you, the single person in North America who has not at least read the book or watched the movie. The world famous trilogy and subsequent movie phenomenon ranked in the United States as the third-best debut in box office history. Despite the novels getting mostly positive reviews, the movie received an onslaught of negative ones that had nothing to do with the story-line itself. These criticisms had completely to do with racism, outrages against the casting of two subordinate characters appearing all over Facebook and Twitter.

Rue, played by Amandla Stendberg, 7th from the left.

Quick Recap of book: Post-Apocalyptic world, selected children (tributes) have to compete in the Hunger Games as punishment for a past rebellion, and fight to the death until there is one victor. Katniss, the main character, forms an alliance with Rue, another tribute.

A friend of mine brought to my attention a blog that was written here and then upon some further research here, about these racist comments. But what I really wanted to comment on on this blog was on how representation skews our perceptions of what we think or don't think we enjoy - whether that's race, sexual orientation, or any other "norm" that may be somewhat different (including congressmen wearing hoodies). And that is where everything started connecting. When watching the documentary The Celluloid Closet in class, we learn that we think that this idea of being gay is wrong, because the normal representation of sexual relationships is heterosexual, but what we don't realize is that what we were taught to believe as an accurate image created by Hollywood, is actually skewed. Similarly, we act in the same way when it comes to race.

Back to the movie: People said that they didn't enjoy the movie because Rue, a character that plays a significant role in the movie - not in actual screen time, but in quality - was black and they felt that *SPOILER* when she was murdered, it wasn't as sad as when they thought she was some pure innocent white girl. This is all, of course, despite the fact that she is described in the book as having dark skin and dark eyes. God forbid the director and producer of the movie actually follow the casting descriptions, or that readers actually read the book if they are going to complain about it. My question is, regardless of what she looks like, when did purity and innocence become represented by blonde white children?

Ah yes, that face is obviously the epitome of evil.

"Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn't as sad...",
"Why does rue have to black not gonna lie kinda ruined the movie",
"Why did the producer make all the good characters black"
These are all quotes print screened from Twitter. (See, again, here for more of these quotes - it will make you question why your even living in the first place). It's sad, really. Amandla Stenberg is absolutely adorable - I have no idea how you can cast anyone anymore innocent-looking than that. But these people tell you exactly how, exactly what they think it represents - have a blonde white girl play the role.

I don't even know what to say here. I am become increasingly and increasingly more irritated and disbelieving of the ignorance of society. You don't care as much about the murder of a child because she was black? Because she's not the image of purity that you were expecting? Because she wasn't the image of innocence that you thought the character should have been represented as? This is the problem with representation - society has an image of something in their head and become offended when they can't understand, in their ignorance, that that image isn't true. We think that the image of innocence is this particular idea, and so there is no room for any other form of it, even if the only difference is something as insignificant as race. Thus, we don't desire or like anything else that doesn't fit that standard, or even take a step back and consider, maybe we are the ones with the wrong perception here.

Other, other or "Other"

Jacques Lacan, the french psychoanalyst and psychiatrist that I touched on briefly in a previous post, is a Freudian that focuses a lot on language, the unconscious, ego and the self. In The Agency of the Letter..., despite being Freudian, he refutes Freud's idea of the unconscious as instinctual, suggesting that "the unconscious is structured like a language". It is not separate from the conscious, or an 'other' of the conscious, but as complex and structured as the conscious itself. In fact, it is so sophisticated that it is "the discourse of the Other", and therefore the "locus in which speech is constituted".

There is a distinction between Other and other that must not be confused, however. The little other is simply a reflection of the ego; its not really even an other at all and is actually something like another "I". It seems as if Lacan is suggesting that there is someone thinking in our place and that is a metonymic chain of significations that represents our identities. But, the big Other is a completely other idea. It is representative of our unconscious, which is the recognition of our desire and vice versa. He goes on further to say that it connects or other and ourselves.

This is such a compelling concept, considering what the word "Other" actually signifies. Particularly in post colonial studies, the "Other" is something that is obviously, not ourselves - when we are describing the other, we are actually identifying who we are not based on the characteristics (like ethnicity) that we are. Without the "Other", we cannot define ourselves because we have nothing to compare ourselves to. For example, I don't know that I am white until I see a black person to compare myself to; this realization comes with the concept of otherness and binary opposition. But the point is, the word "Other" represents something that is not ourselves - so why does Lacan suggest that the Other is a part of ourselves?

In the Second Sex, french female existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, argues that women have been defined as the "Other", relative to men in the same way that slaves were othered by their slave-owners. Further, she says, "humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself, but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being", and further, "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other." She also points out that Julien Benda, a french philosopher in his Rapport d’Uriel, states that "Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man" - she wants significance by herself, but cannot attain it. My question is, does this lack of autonomy of the other, mean that they are really part of something else - that being ourselves?

Could she have possibly gotten this idea of autonomy from Descartes and Lacan? Descartes, in saying, "I think, therefore I am", suggests that the "I" is no longer autonomous. Our thinking process doesn't happen autonomously; it is determined socially and as a product of our culture - our desire, that is. Lacan suggests, "I think where I am not; therefore, I am where I do not think" - thus, the real me is beyond my thinking. So, maybe all others are the same.

Pink Floyd and Signifer/Signified

Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss professor of linguistics, was the primary contributor in laying down the foundation for the signifier/signified theory and the relationship between signs. French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, have further contributed to this theory of deconstructing language in their studies of the genesis of signs and the structure of language itself. However, what is the most interesting part, I think, about signifier and signified is not trying to understand where it comes from, but its dependence on social and cultural aspects. It is completely tied in with both the development and the following of practices and norms, because if as Derrida makes clear in Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, there are multiple meanings to every sign, many of which aren't completely universal.

So, how do we know that when we are referring to a particular object or idea, that the person we are speaking to understands exactly what we are referencing? Something like that comes with familiarity from within our own culture and generation. If I speak to an American, chances are they aren't going to understand some signifying words that I am referencing. But when I am speaking to a Bahamian - for example, when giving directions I'd say, "you know, over by thingum them," - they understand that I am referring not just to one particular individual (which is odd enough, basically calling someone a thing), but often they know exactly who I am talking about, from existing references directing them in the conversation. Another examples is the use of the word "trolley". When I use that word in the Bahamas, the signified that I am thinking of is the object I collect my groceries in at the food store. But when I mention it in the Minnesota, they will think I am referring to something like a rail in San Francisco. The problem is that I don't know what meaning to take it for, if I hear it, until I take into account who I am speaking to. Derrida is obviously right - signifiers have an unlimited chain of references. But, we can limit their meanings, and thus understand what is being said, if we place ourselves in the culture or time period context that it is being used in.

Nazi Hammers

Sometimes that is not enough though. Knowing what context the signifier is being placed in will not always tell you the meaning - further analysis is necessary. Such an example is present in work done by the famous band Pink Floyd. Their movie The Wall shows how signified/signifier is flawed by providing signifiers that do not match it's signified in any sense, until we have properly analyzed the case.

In a clip from their music video, Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 above, there are a set of hammers which are marching in unified form. Under closer inspection, when we watch the video, we notice than the hammers are marching in the same structure and formation as the Nazis in their very real marches during World War II. However, when someone sees a hammer, they don't think of Nazis (at least... I should think they wouldn't) - the reference doesn't match. So, what do we do?

The rest of the video shows us that the teachers become the hammers at one point. They "hammer" these students into becoming exactly the same, into this unity and lack of individuality, so that they are "just another brick in the wall". That's when the hammers multiply, and they become this neo-Nazi symbol. They march like Nazis and represent this uniformity in society at that point and time, which demonstrates the same lack of individualism that each Nazi (and in this case, citizen) was supposed to have, because in that lack of identity, we follow whatever a leader is telling us in search for direction. Further, the group uses the hammer as a logo in the same way that the Nazis used the swastika. Perhaps what Pink Floyd is getting at when there are not soldiers marching, but actually hammers marching, that the people have lost so much of their individuality, that they are now just logos without any distinguishing factors. Something that should have no meaning in relevance to dictatorship at all, has become Pink Floyd's version of a neo-nazi symbol. Just as the letter A in the Scarlet Letter did not fulfill its purpose, other signs have a way of fulfilling a different meaning as well.

Lies and Levis

Karl Marx  points out in Capital  that we have a "fetishism" with the commodity. And, Naomi Klein reiterates that point in her work, No Logo, when she says that society has an obsession not with the product, but with its branding. We see a logo on everything, and it is because of that that we want the product. What it costs to get there doesn't matter; we are just following the trend that society has set.
Levi's Strauss and Company is an example of a famous corporation well known for their name and logo in the jean making industry. It one of those "big-time" companies that makes tons of money because of the fact that people want their brand. However, what exactly are we advertising by wearing these brands?

Oh yeah... this is what we are advertising

In the early 90's, Levi's withdrew from dealings with contractors in China because they could not guarantee that suppliers would follow their codes of conduct, mostly concerning a "pervasive violation of human rights" (according to the Wall Street Journal). During the second half of the decade, Levi's began a series of drastic employment cuts. First, they closed down 11 plants in North America and laid off approximately 7000 workers, which according to Contemporary Issues in Business Ethics, was about one third of it's employees within the United States in 1997. Then, in 1999, Levi's announced that they would lay off another third of their domestic employees - another 6,000 jobs were lost and 11 plants were closed down. All of this was under the pretense of keeping production levels at its current percentage, because competing companies had much lower labor costs than they did. Bruce Raynor, the vice president of the union said that "he did not believe it was feasible for Levi's to expand domestic production since most of its competition abandoned the U.S. market for cheaper labor costs years ago" (176-177).

The truth is that at this time, many multinational corporations were going into developing countries looking for the same cheap labor that Levi's refused to be apart of in the early 90's. A lot of this kind of cheap labor came from sweat shops and such, that subjected those poor and desperate for work and underage children in developing countries to dangerous conditions, being underpaid and forced to work extremely long hours without rest. Additionally, they are forced to comply with high production rates under the fear that they may lose their jobs and their only source of income for their families. Other labor, as we ironically refer back to Focault, came from prison labor and those under workplace abuse.

Despite all of this, Levi's began to feel the pain of their initial withdrawal from China. Almost five years after they left, in 2001, they claimed that there were suppliers in China that could be found that would follow human rights, child labor and counterfeiting laws and announced that they would return. Chinese dissident Henry Wu criticized their decision saying, "human rights conditions have not improved, only the business climate had". We could say that Levi's just gave in to the demand of the economy, that they really tried their best in serving their international employees. However, when we look at the fact that Levi's is now following a new trend, I think its because they were longer able to keep up with the good publicity that high labor costs gives them.

According to the New York Times, Levi's is now, in 2012, trying to minimize it's water usage in jean production, as a typical pair of jeans "consumes 919 gallons of water during its life cycle". Their goals are to be both environmentally friendly and to prevent the possible scarcity in cotton that may be caused by climate change and result in the jeopardy of the company. However, with the sudden peak in sustainability as an interest, its really no surprise that Levi's is following other giant retailers in this direction as it did in the past. In 2005, large well-known brand companies like Gap and Adidas founded the Better Cotton Initiative, to "promote water conservation and reduce pesticide use and child-labor practices in the industry". Countries like India are at a risk for shortages and companies that aren't trying to help preserve "precious" water, are given bad publicity.

So, lets look at this for a moment. Their plan for preservation of human rights didn't work out too well (I guess that trend wasn't powerful enough to improve sales). But, being eco-friendly has become primary importance. My "hippie" friend, as she likes to be called says to me as we discuss this fact, "That's right. I'm not interest in human rights; I'm interest in eco-rights. That's what I look for when I pick out my jeans". Is that the new trend now? Who cares about human beings when we can be preserving the planet?

Really, I'm in awe here. What causes hundreds of large corporations to change their ideology from human rights to saving trees? Both Marx and Klein tells us the answer. It's because society is obsessed with the commodity, they are obsessed with brand and trends. Making money is what is important; if good publicity brings the corporations their profits, they will do what they must to obtain it. And society, having this fetish with the brand of the product, is just supporting it. This sounds familiar - are we looking at an ideology here?

Modern Punishment

Michel Focault describes at the beginning of his book, Discipline and Punish, a scene by which a murderer was publicly and inhumanely tortured and executed. After the grotesque picture he paints, he describes a very strict and specific schedule created by Leon Faucher 80 years later for a prison in Paris, thus comparing the very drastic change in structures of punishment by the judicial systems during the short time span. Focault mentions how strange it was for physical discipline to just disappear completely. Under the pretense of humanization, public spectacles of torture became no longer acceptable and eventually public executions began to decrease. But, he satirically asks, "how important is such a change, when compared with the great institutional transformations, the formulation of explicit, general codes and unified rules of procedure; with the almost universal adoption of the jury system...?" (7). In other words, why bother analyzing the distinctive motive behind this change, when the majority of society has essentially already accepted and adopted a "better" institutionalized method? One where the justice system holds a unnecessary portion of power, buildings detain the convicted, and science solves everything. Focault indicates that we should be looking for the answer.

The Guillotine - looks like the event of the year

I found this question really interesting, because living in the Bahamas all of my life (and this is in no way everyone's view, but it is the majority), I was brought up believing the capital punishment was the primary way to deter crime; as the crime rate continued to increase, so did this ideology. Hanging used to be a public spectacle and then all of a sudden it disappeared. In the past, Focault explains that there is a reason why we moved in a new direction - attacking the soul. But why is it that we have dismissed punishment of the physical kind and now look for a motivation - an intent - in an attempt to both punish and reform the human soul, rather than punish the offender based on the actual crime committed? First and foremost, according to Focualt, this change is a direct result of the judicial system's attempt to physically separate the judges and the executioners from the actual punishment, somehow making it morally acceptable to them (in my opinion, probably because of the church). By making the punishment more humanized, more individualized, they were relieved of the burden of physical punishment and the shame of being considered the villain, while criminals were pitied. Second, in punishing the soul and not the body, discipline became more about reforming the individual and making them a better person (that's debatable - its possible that they just wanted some kind of mental breakdown show, in my opinion). Therefore, scientists with knowledge of the mind were given power to define a persons offense based on their normalcy - placing the crime in context rather than as just the offense, as if the crime had some kind of authorship that we had to review to truly understand their actions. Furthermore, they were able to provide what they felt was appropriate sentencing as such. Incidentally, no executions have occurred in Britain since 1964.

The Privy Council - even within the Bahamas,
its apparent who still has power

Similarly today, there has to be a reason why the Bahamas (along with other former British colonies) have decreased the amount of actual executions since it's independence - especially considering the Caribbean has approximately four times as much of a death row rate than in the United States (statistics according the Leonard Birdsong in his blog on death penalties in the Bahamas here). The Bahamas was once an active contributor is both advocating and utilizing Capital Punishment. However, since independence in 1973, only sixteen people have been executed, six of which have occurred within the past 10 years and the last execution having took place in 2000. The Privy Council ruled  in 1993 in its famous Pratt & Morgan decision that inmates could only be executed within the constitution after holding them on death row for more than five years. In direct defiance of the ruling they did not approve of, the Bahamas executed a man exactly 5 years after being placed on death row, making the country the "first Caribbean nation to conduct an execution" since the ruling was placed and the first execution within 12 years according to the International Journal of Bahamian Studies. According to the same journal's research, "As many as 100 people who had gathered at the prison cheered when their execution notices were posted".

Consequently, in March of 2006, the UK-based Judicial Committee of the Privy council mandated that the mandatory death penalty was "unconstitutional" within in the Bahamas and Amnesty International further engraved the suggestion in stone when they regarded it as "the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights". Since this ruling, no executions have taken place, although criminals continue to be placed on death row.
However, with the crime rate in the Bahamas rising to heights beyond what we've ever experienced, the use of the death penalty and and the removal of the Privy Council as the country's highest court is continually being reconsidered, despite the fact that such an overt separation would lead to political problems.

It is clear in the Bahamas' insistence in continuing with capital punishment that they have no problem in using physical punishment to illustrate a point. Focault mentions that the prison system creates such an illustration because a restriction of liberty and food and sexual deprivation are physical restraints. However, imprisonment in the Bahamas is something a bit more. Her Majesty's Prison (better known as Fox Hill Prison) is nothing to be messed with. From my own house, approximately 2 miles away from the prison, I can hear the alarms that indicate their stringent time schedule. The cells are like holes in a wall, where in medium security detainment, five to six men occupy one small, concrete light-less cell (once the sun goes down, there is nothing but darkness). Men defecate in a bucket in a corner, and in combination with the lack of windows or any airflow and the heat that comes with the climate, it hardly makes for healthy living conditions. Fox Hill imprisonment is more than just a restraint of liberty, it truly is a physical punishment, where not only one's dignity, but one's health and security can be at stake. Furthermore, the judicial system that sentences them are not organized. Citizens are put at risk everyday when buses full of prisoners are carried to the courts to possibly be sentenced that day, as seen in the video below (sorry, its sideways).

This leads me to ask, what is the motivation now? Why does Britain expect that the Commonwealth of the Bahamas follow restrictions on the death penalty, when England itself didn't completely forbid the sentence until 1964? Why are they asking, when the Bahamas became politically independent in 1973? Focault says that "paradoxically, England was one of the countries most loath to see the disappearance of the public execution" (14). Its ironic that the same power that was used in the slave era to execute based on racial control and was so unhappy to see public execution disappear, is now attempting to abolish these executions when the country is independent. Whats more interesting is the double edged sword here - continuing capital punishment will demonstrate our independence from England. However, Sir Arthur Foulkes, the current Governor General and representative of Queen Elizabeth II in the Bahamas, states here that "it is not inconceivable that sometime in the future the Bahamas may be barred from certain international organizations or otherwise sanctioned if we continue to practice capital punishment". Unfortunately, it appears that abolishing the death penalty will be necessary for international political acceptance and such can lead to continual dependence on England, which considering their past in needing power control, doesn't seem too far-fetched.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar... only sometimes though

I really had no idea what I wanted to write about. Up until last night I was drawing a blank. A friend actually suggested I write a blog about not writing a blog - I almost surrendered to that idea. So when I went to the Walker Art Center last night, I bowed down to the art gods for giving me the kind of lightbulb revelation that I needed. Okay, no.. not really, but I almost reached that point.

A little something like that..

I realized that the artist, like the author, has an intention - a story - to share (at least in most cases). Whether or not we think that their intention holds any importance will decide how we interpret the art and determine what we may potentially be missing out on.

 I went to the Walker for a performance of El Pasado es un Animal Grotesco, which although I found extremely crude and surreal, I still ended up loving in a way. There really was no way to react to it; even having already prepared myself for the worse, I didn't know how to respond. So I was surprised that when looking amongst the displays with some free time, there was a really interesting, provocative and oddly profound art display called Poison & Candy by Frank Gaard. The display features more than 200 works, many of which gave me the same impression as the play - you know there is something deep there, but you are too busy trying to control the mini-explosion in your mind to really find it. I won't go into detail as to what exactly two of these particular painting were of (there's a picture below of the more friendly piece) - because there is no real way to aesthetically describe them without offending someone. But many of the particular "objects" painted had names written on them. And not just any "proper names". These are names of artists, writers and literary theorists that any one who has the mildest peak of an interest in Literature, Philosophy, Psychology or Art (among many other topics) will recognize: Matisse, Picasso, Lacan, Nabokov, and ironically, Focault.

Frank Gaard : Satanic Housekeeping

There are a few questions that rose from seeing these paintings: Why are the names there? How do I interpret this? Are each of the paintings classifications of a certain genre of artists?  And lastly, what is the artist's intention for us to find? The painting to the left, "Satanic Housekeeping", has a few of the artists I mentioned before. We can see that there is Vladimir Nabokov, author of the famous novel Lolita, Jacques Lacan, renowned psychoanalyst and literary theorist, and of course Michel Focault, theorist and author of What Is An Author? If I look at these names, I see a certain trend. The question is, are we supposed to recognize this trend? There has to be a reason that the artist chose these particular people - these particular names that hold some meaning. Focault seems to have an idea; he tells us that the "proper name", in relationship to the writer, is not just a proper name. He says, "The author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and culture" (Focault 107). In other words, the author's name represents something, a homogeneity or an affiliation with something.

I really, REALLY, don't get this one.

I could have looked at the little card that tells you what the painting is about, but I, unfortunately, was too enthralled and failed to do that. So, with that said, we can only speculate what it means. Does the meaning of this painting lie in the author's names? I think so, but I can't say so for sure; it is only my interpretation. In my opinion, we can look at it's title "Satanic Housekeeping" and see how that has any significance toward these names. If I look at Gaard's other works in the gallery, personally I see another, less decisive and perhaps a not really understandable concept, which could actually be the authors intention.

But does any of this really matter? Roland Barthes says in his essay, The Death of the Author, that once the writer is done writing, he figuratively dies. His voice no longer holds any relevance, and his intention - whatever it may have been - holds no purpose because giving a text an author only "[imposes] a limit on that text...to close the writing" (Barthes 147). It is the reader's interpretation that is now important. We can take this theory and say that our interpretation of the art is most important, but I think it is rather presumptuous of us to think that the artist wasn't trying to share something with us. If we listen again to Focault, he also says that, "it is not enough to declare that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work itself" (Focault 104). Without the artist lies the opportunity for false interpretations and rather copious amounts of insignifcant meanings to arise.

Oh yes, how very profound...

From another point of view, we can look at a text, or even the particular artwork above, and think that there is nothing there to see. Someone can look at that picture and see just underwear with names on it. I definitely felt that way with a lot of the pieces in the other parts of the gallery: a video of a cat drinking milk, a cardboard box in the middle of the floor, two cigarettes, and my favorite - the frame that framed nothing (which funnily enough, a friend of mine says in response, "How profound!").

There is a phrase attributed to Freud's psychoanalysis theory (although noone really knows for sure if he has even quoted it). It is: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". It's meaning is pretty straight forward - sometimes what you are trying to interpret isn't there at all; there was no meaning intended. Unfortunately, if we look at life that way, everything seems pretty bland, and a lot of authors like Focault and Barthes are no longer relevant either.