By Corey Gilkes
June 19, 2013 – www.trinicenter.com/Gilkes
They
say the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over
expecting different results. Regarding Trinis, that will have to be
revised to include people who do NOTHING, close their eyes in denial and
either expect different results or that the issues will somehow work
themselves out – what the late Lloyd Best called “unresponsibility.” On
Monday a boy who hadn’t even begun to live yet had his life taken away
in a fight reportedly over a girl in the same school. Over the last
couple days I listened to several talk shows and was almost lulled to
sleep by the usual hand-wringing and cries of “oh how could this have
happened,” “lord, wha dis place coming to” yap, yap, yap and all manner
of nonsense.
You’d swear this is something new.
Why, why, WHY do we religiously refuse to learn from the past? Matter
ah fact, dais a big part of the problem right dey; we pay no attention
to our history – or anyone else’s – except perhaps to romanticise it,
talking some escapist nonsense about the old time days. In the editorial
of yesterday’s Newsday, for instance, we see that “(t)he moral moorings
of yesteryear have loosened, leading to a break-down of individuals,
families, communities and nation.” f***ries.
Susan Craig-James in her examination of the Butler Rebellion of 1937,
drew links to the earlier riots of 1919 and made mention of the fact
that the colonial authorities and print media studied nothing about the
conditions that led to the events of 1919 – and the 1903 Water Riots
before it – and spoke with stunned surprise about the spate of violence
in 1937 as if there was no backdrop, no lead-up, no causative factors,
no relation to the events that had gone before. Similarly, a lot of what
I heard on radio and read in the papers was mostly a lot of
reactionary, emotive, hypocritical, moralistic rubbish. There were some
welcomed rational, informed views but they were sparse to say the least.
And of course yuh know what were the remedies right? That’s right, more
scanners, more metal detectors, more security, more police presence at
schools…and yes, more prayers.
Now people like Dr Morgan Job have valid points when they argue that
we need to stop “blaming” (more correctly, hiding behind) history,
enslavement, colonialism, European/Euro-American imperialism. As we
become older and older as an independent and republican nation these
reasons become excuses and pathetic ones at that. However, in attempting
to deal with the problem in our society, we obviously must examine the
root causes in all the various dimensions – something I am yet to see
done in a meaningful way by the academics outside of the gilded ivory
towers (or even in it from what I’m hearing) – and I don’t know that we
should be letting the coloniser and the imperialist off the hook yet.
There is in our society a strong, deeply embedded culture of violence
that existed since the Caribbean was settled and colonised. Ours is a
society that has violence as its foundational bedrock. Colonialism was
established and maintained through physical and psychological violence
(our laws still reflect that, drafted under the lie of maintaining
“good” order) through a patricentric expression of power that
emasculated and enslaved everyone. Even the colonisers were prisoners of
their own violent, illegitimate rule. But the feelings of impotence
were especially felt by the colonised as various aggressive expressions
of masculinity kept them shackled while at the same time instilling in
them, especially the males, the valuated ideal of violence as an
appropriate form of settling all conflicts and asserting one’s manhood.
We’ve never properly dealt with it so wha allyuh did expect woulda happen?
How them people at Newsday and other media houses could talk this
nonsense of loose “moral moorings?” It is those same ideas of morality
that lead us to this point. All the sanctimonious bible-wavers and
holders of sundry sacred books from other faiths take note, this means
you, the blood of this boy is on your hands too. None of this is new,
none of it started to happen a few years ago. Our foreparents were no
less violent in dealing with domestic and romantic issues; in the late
19th and early 20th century, for instance, there was a rash of killings
in the cane-cutting plantations as male Indian indentures killed each
other and the women too over spurned love. For that matter, home was one
of the very few places where that emasculated African and Indian male
got to vent his rage. And, as Dr Job says at times, with the coming of
Independence we moved from Picton as Governor-General (ie, the
embodiment of the powerful maximum leader and possessor) to the Prime
Minister as Picton. So those values of predominant masculinity didn’t go
anywhere. They stayed very much in our collective psyche. Earlier this
year we got a gem of kaiso reminding the sanctimonious among us that our
culture of violence was a “tainted legacy” from earlier generations fed
on war movies, gangster movies and westerns all glorifying violence and
raw masculinity. This included the ideal of aggressively pursuing a
woman and “taking” and possessing her as private property.
And that brings us to the sexual-shaming aspect.
Do not take this to mean I know the young girl was sexually intimate
with either or both of them; I don’t know anything at all about that and
I do not care either for that is not important here. Yeah, I said it,
that’s not important. It was appalling to hear of certain callers and
posters on the social networking sites labelling the poor young girl who
is apparently part of this “love triangle” a “ho” as one grown woman
specifically called her. Furthermore, according to the Newsday, the
young girl already traumatised by the tragic incident was “booed” and
blamed for causing the death of the boy and the incarceration of the
next.
First off, apparently these moralists have forgotten – or never
experienced – that time in adolescence when you are discovering the
giddiness of young love and wrestling with all those feelings, the
changes in your body and coming to terms with emerging sexuality. But
this is a society that does not hold proper, open, mature, informed
analyses of sexuality and relationships in a world radically changed
from the realities of 2-3000 years ago in one tiny part of the world or
even 300 years ago, so we cyar go dey…else dem young people go be
encouraged to become sexually active.
Another thing that struck me as I followed the callers, talk show
hosts and posters was how easy the conversations shifted to the old,
archaic narratives that assume the innate predatory sexuality of males
and the need to protect young girls from that while at the same time
keeping an eye on them anyway because THEIR natural selves enticed males
to lose control. The need to rigidly police young people’s movements.
How enlightening, I could have sworn I was living in the 1890s.
Even more obscene were the comments condemning and even threatening
the young girl (and those who are in similar situations) for “playing”
two guys at the same time. Have they given any thought to what effect
they are having on that young girl who, in addition to this trauma, has
to contend with all the teachings that inculcate guilt for emotional
attachments outside of a monogamous context coming back to haunt her?
The ones that remind her that her body, especially her genitals, are
dirty? With the exception of a few callers, no one bothered to indict
the highly poisonous ideas that shames people for harbouring emotional
attachments for more than one person; the egregious idea that’s premised
on monogamy-is-the-only-morality; the dehumanising mindset connected to
this exclusive monogamy model that views one’s partner as an inanimate
private sexual possession. If what is reported in the Newsday is factual
is correct and then that rotten hypocritical moralising has already
taken hold in the minds of the generation that’s supposed to be cleaning
up the shit we are leaving behind. But I knew that already; sitting
down in Rituals in UWI I remember hearing a very young man a few weeks
ago speak of his cousin as “ho”…and why? Because once a girl sleep with
more than three men, she’s ah ho…and this is in a place of higher
learning eh.
So now we have three destroyed families. Wha we going and do bout it
outside of the usual hollow hand-wringing? All this is the logical end
product of the way we’ve been socialised to view romance as a
competition to win and keep someone’s “heart” – in reality, their body –
instilling such poisonous ideas of the “one,” the Soulmate, dressed up
very nicely and sweetly over the centuries, as the sole legitimate
(moral) model for intimate and sexual interactions. To support this we
mine from a culturally schizophrenic muck bathed in perfume and
disguised as “divine” teachings that at best now tolerates sex and
intimacy but all the while has a bogey lurking around the corner to make
us feel guilty for having such desires. Then, you pray to cool that
“dangerous” desire. Up to today, some of the comments in the online
editions of the newspapers bleat about this tragedy as a result of us no
longer instilling god-”fearing” values into the young. So deep runs
this patricentric, authoritarian cultural idea that the best way to keep
people in line is through fear. Calling to mind the irrepressible
Egyptologist Dr Yosef ben-Jochannan in his inimitable, irreverent style
of looking at things, prayer never cooled off a vagina or softened a
dick.
And doh come round me with no ol talk about the music; I don’t
readily accept this nonsense of the “dirty” music encouraging dem
chirren to do dey slackness. Yeah, plenty of them soca, rap and
dancehall lyrics crude, crass, at times even misogynist. But all they do
is reflect the reality of what are the prevailing values in the
society. Years ago the late great Mighty Penguin sang “A Deputy
Essential” and all them priests and pastors wanted to burn him in
effigy, but all he did was to sing about what was already a reality (and
frankly, if more people had internalised it, here might have been a
less violent place. Listening to the lyrics, he encapsulated what some
psychologists take an hour to say). Yuh feel “dirty” music started with
Busy Signal or Iwer? Go on YouTube and type in Lucille Bogan “Till the
Cows Come Home” and that was in the 1920s, go check out Shakespeare, as a
matter of fact open yuh damn bible (now THAT’S a handbook for
encouraging violence and raunchy lyrics, don’t take my blaspheming words
for it, Song of Solomon anyone?).
Are we going to send away for foreign advisors to come and tell us
this too? We might as well because we are already averse, indeed
dogmatically opposed, to listening to our own voices to rectify our
problem ourselves, to feed off of our unique experiences, to examine the
social structures our ancestors brought with them while at the same
time marrying that to contemporary understandings of the complexities of
human sexuality. I wait to see what the gilded academics do with this.
Source: www.trinicenter.com/Gilkes/2013/1906.htm
