No group of people can do well for long without stable homes, those incubators of the good friend, the solid citizen, the hero, the worthy spouse, even the good death. – David E. McClean (Black Humanity And The Crisis Of Home)
Mekking babies? Count me in. For the mekking part, that is. The part that comes before the babies. I love it, and as I have grown older I’ve gotten better at it. In fact, I plan to do some mekking tonight.
Laugh, but note this: the reason I particularly like the mekking part has to do with who I mekking with, the relationship, the spiritual connection, the commitment, the oneness with my wife, the nurturing embrace of home.
Yuh see, context is everything. So if babies come from my mekking, they got context.
Since Minister of Education Ronald Jones made the call for Barbadians to produce more babies so as to meet the future economic necessities of taxes and National Insurance contributions, others have weighed in.
Most have similarly focused on economic matters, though highlighting the financial burdens that would be associated with bringing more little ones into the world, especially in these recession times.
Others have supported Jones from the standpoint of the preservation of the black race – as part of the fight against those who have long sought to extinguish us.
Whatever the strand of the response, I have been struck by what seems to me to be a strange unconcern about the fabric of the society.
Yuh know this never ceases to amaze me: we fret about (or in scholarly tomes explain) how the white man frigged up our notion of family, children, sex, women and men – and he did!!! – but then, apparently without batting an eye, we craft own ways to frig up ourselves in the very same areas.
Thinking holistically
And since we know those evil slavers (and their white supremacist descendants) cared naught about the fabric of our society, why do our focuses and our practices, our omissions and our entrenchings suggest we are similarly minded?
It does not help to replace one bad story with another one (even if you are now the crafter of the new story).
How can we, the previously undervalued as beings, the erstwhile chattel, think of having babies in simply newer economic terms and simply newer “preservation of the enterprise” terms?
While these are important concerns, we can’t focus only on them. As the saying goes, when you say A, yuh got to say B. Neither Jones nor most of the others contributing to the discussion have shown much concern about some big Bs: home, family, parenting, social values.
I done know that we believe in obeah (my interpretation of our propensity to talk and talk and talk as though we believe that talk magically creates the desired end). But it is also clear that we don’t tend to think holistically. Or we take crucial things for granted. Hence we don’t often say A and B.
The same God who told the Jews to be fruitful and multiply was pun their case like a tight underwear about good familial living and social values. Don’t mention one without the other.
Unfortunately, the same Jones who linked children’s deviant behaviour with their having demons in “their souls” now apparently wants more “demons” in our midst. ’Cause nothing much has changed in the last two and a half years – if anything, the report would be that deviance has increased. Has the Minister of Innovation created grounds for a happy prognosis for the future?
Just mek babies? Without any concern that this is a society in which many, many face the prospect of an absent daddy? A society that objectifies and demeans women? A society that can’t wait to see how many women it can turn into “bumpers”? A society that promotes the idea of a good time as “jooking” a woman in a band?
Widespread disconnection
In a society that talks about sex almost exclusively in terms of avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and detached scr***** and not in terms of love and proper relationships and home and family and personal and social responsibility?
A society in which there is widespread disconnection from grandfathers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles and cousins (especially from the daddy’s side of the family), so that we have the situation where so many relatives relate to children only as “keepers” of them, not as participants in a special communion and as coaches and intimate partners in virtuous familyness, good citizenship and humanity?
(I overheard this youngish-looking grandmother telling a friend: “I tell she [my daughter] don’ bring that child by me – ’cause she want to go in After Dark, and I want to go in de Boatyard. I tell she ever since that if she cahn tek care o’ dem sheself, don’ lay down and get dem.”)
You want to talk about mekking babies? Yuh better also talk about mekking relationships, mekking gender equality, mekking homes, mekking families, and mekking a social fabric that would be a credit to this race (you know what I’m talking about).
In this case, without a doubt, when you say A, you got to say B.
How can we have a national conversation about babies without talking primarily about home and family and humanising values?
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email offwally@gmail.com.