DAY THREE: TEA MEANS TEA


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Central America Caribbean » Bahamas » Nassau » Bahamas
March 29th 2008
Published: March 29th 2008
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I got my invitation to the tea party when I was at the Ministry of Tourism in Thursday, after my first, abortive attempt to enter Ansbacker House. What I really wanted was the Office of Tourism (I was looking for a map) but when I arrived, mistakenly, at the Ministry, a young lady asked me who I was, then took me up to an office, where her boss asked me who I was again, weighed it up, then handed me an invitation to the Governor-General’s residence for tea. Here’s some advice: if you want to impress people in government Ministries, wear a button-down shirt and tell people you’re a writer.

I just found out that Headless was incorporated thirty days ago. It doesn’t make much sense. It really doesn’t. I should have asked the long-nailed lady in the Registrar’s office more questions. She could have tapped further into the database for me, gone further back, deeper into the shady bowels of Bahamian offshore (bad metaphor: I’m in a rush). But I was too surprised at the so-very-recent date of Headless’s incorporation, and now it’s Saturday and the Registrar’s is closed.

Yesterday (Friday) evening: the state funeral that I got caught up in the morning was still going on, and Nassau’s traffic was worse than usual. Buses on Nassau are small, and you can hail them. Trips cost one dollar. The driver asked us if we wanted a detour to beat the jams. Others on the bus were running late for their cruise ship. Some panic-tinged discussion took place. The detour was made, and I consulted my map and invitation to see how this affected me. Shit. The party was not at the Governor’s residence. A line of explanation in the invite said that the residence was being refurbished, and the tea party had been moved to the Hilton hotel. The lady at the ministry had told me ‘four prompt’, which just goes to show that the British really left their mark here on the Bahamas. She also suggested some better shoes. It’s exactly four when I arrive at the British Colonial Hilton Hotel, a little out of breath after making it back from the detour stop on foot.

The tea party is in the ‘Garden of Serenity’, a leafy, shadow-dappled garden on the shores of the sea, which is bright turquoise and staggeringly beautiful in the heat of late afternoon. I wander across the pristine lawn, well-shod and a little sticky in the heat, and I see that I am the only one in a jacket, although thankfully there are no pot-bellied slobs in Bermuda shorts and T-shirts, de rigueur on the streets of Nassau, and also in my hotel. Ten circular, linen-draped tables are filling up with people in smart casuals. They take tea parties seriously here. I live in Spain, and any kind of reception or social event of this kind would naturally involve wine and/or soft drinks. It had never occurred to me, until I saw the cups and saucers, that it would be tea.

There are many possible explanations for the new mysteries surrounding Headless. At least, I think there are. But until I go back to the Registrar’s offices I won’t know for sure. Even if I do go back, I need to ask claw-woman the right questions. What I need, in fact, is an expert in offshore, someone who can get me up to speed on how to investigate a company incorporated four weeks ago, but which seems to have had a longer history than that... Someone has gone to an awful lot of trouble here - incorporating companies costs money. And, on top of that, it was the Gibraltar office of Sovereign that instigated the process of incorporation just four weeks ago. That’s the same office that got so upset with my paymasters goldin+senneby last year, when they were investigating an offshore company registered by Sovereign in Gibraltar called Headless...

The cups are filled, although coffee is thankfully available. I am a writer in a button down shirt and jacket, and this somehow gets me at the top table, at which are sitting two retired Bahamian ladies who have an air of venerability. People fuss around them, and the organizers of this afternoon’s tea party, the Ministry of Tourism, seem to be eager to please. The lady to my left is Mrs. Beverly Wallace-Whitfield, Assistant Director of MMPMAC (the Policy Management Cener here), who carries the British honorary title MVO (Member of the Victorian Order), bestowed on her by the Queen of England. She doesn’t tell me this, but it gets announced by the master of Ceremonies, to great applause. Every society has its upper echelons, I guess, and this afternoon I’m having tea with the Bahamian version. Quite amazingly, Mrs Wallace-Whitfield once lived in Hull, the city where I did my postgraduate studies. We swap Hull stories, as a guitar duo starts playing.

Acéphale was a secret society founded by Georges Bataille in the 1930s. It must have been very successful, because it has remained very, very secret, with almost no information available about it. We do know that it published four issues of a magazine between 1936 and 1939. The artist André Masson designed the cover image, a headless man. It parodies Leornado De Vinci’s vetruvian man, the renaissance image of the harmony and balance of the Universe and the human body within in: as above, so below, the harmony of the Universe itself (above) is reflected in the harmony of Man (below). Bataille’s idea was to reverse this, as below, so above, to throw out Christianity in favor of a ground-based religion of myth and human vigor, rather on the lines of Nietzsche.

After some introductions, plates of sandwiches appear, as well as what seem to be mushrooms rolled in soft tacos then sliced into sections. I stock up on sandwiches as I talk to the venerable ladies. I mention that I am here to look into the offshore sector, but that it is harder than it appears. Have you tried the internet, a New Zealander woman asks. Miss Whitfield MVO is more helpful, as is her friend, and between them they give me several names to call. It’s all a matter of the button down shirt and the writer thing.

Miss Bahamas 2008 then appears in a bikini. Part of the tea party, which is for honored guests of the island as well as notable residents, includes a fashion show. Six young, slender girls model a series of local-designed dresses and swim wear. They also model elaborate hats (it’s still a custom for women to wear hats to church here). The girls model the hats wearing full-body black leotards. It’s like having friendly jaguars stalking rather alluringly between the tables (in big hats). Miss Bahamas 2008 does the best job of smiling momentarily into the eyes of everyone, making us all feel as if she’s looked with especial interest at us. Very good technique. It turns out she’s Miss Youth Bahamas, or Miss Teen Bahamas or some such, and is representing the islands in Peru in the near future.

Georges Bataille and his friends disliked the Surrealists because they did not reject hierarchies. Hierarchy is deeply Christian (cf Catholic Church), and the Acéphale also saw hierarchy as deeply fascistic. The headless man, the ‘headless’ of the very name Acéphale, conveys the idea of a man without a head, a man escaping thought, of having no internal hierarchy or thought-center. A headless organization. Headlessness can come in many forms. The internet (would you believe it) is full of images of headless bodies. You no longer need to put a severed horse’s head in someone’s bed to scare them: just printout one of these images... But ‘headless’ might mean an organization with no head, no central authority, something perhaps left to drift, or a secret cell, a secret society with secretive aims. Headless might simply mean without a heading, with no title, no clear identity: no letterhead! What kind of company chooses an identity which rejects identity IN ITS IDENTITY? And who registers it on the Bahamas?

We stand to sing ‘March On Bahamaland’, the national anthem. There is a short prayer, and after it a quiz. Some rather embarrassing dancing follows (‘Feeling HOT, HOT, HOT...’ etc.). To conclude proceedings, the lady from the Ministry gives thanks to everyone, including me. I have become Mr Bartlet, the free-lance writer. This information actually garners some brief ahhs from the audience, and I am asked to stand and show myself; I think these are expressions of mild interest/surprise rather than of pity.

‘Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison, he has found beyond himself not God, who is prohibition against crime, but a being who is unaware of prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he is made of innocence and crime; he holds a steel dagger in his left hand, in his right hand a severed heart, aflame like the Sacred Heart. He is not a man. He is not a God either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster.’
Georges Bataille, The Sacred Conspiracy


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1st April 2008

Nicely done.
I like your writing style; very fun to read with descriptions like the black jaguars in hats! By the way, what kind of shoes did you end up wearing to the tea party? La Familia Collin
5th April 2008

shoes
thanks for your comments! I wore smart black business shoes.

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