ABSTRACT
With song, percussion, wind and string instruments, the warm nights burst into colorful spectacles as flames leap from burning logs, turning the darkness into day along the beach in Nassau, the Bahamas. Dancers, both men and women, perform captivating choreography, their bodies brightly painted and bedecked in fabrics, feathers, shells and a wide range of homegrown and imported articles from the Bahamas. Defiantly triumphant, twelve immigrant casuarina trees stood firmly rooted, unlike the other trees that fell in the storm. But the hurricane that raged across the Bahamas, like a mother rampaging for her abducted daughter, stripped the casuarinas, branch by branch, leaving just twelve trunks standing. The casuarina forms had for innumerable years harbored these female forms within. They had grown inside these plants and become rooted in the air, water and soil of the Bahamas, waiting for the right moment to emerge.
