DECEMBER 2 marked the abolition of slavery, and we have just celebrated our 44th year of Independence.
As a country we have made remarkable progress. But why are people in this society so angry? Check out the supermarket cashiers, gas attendants, store clerks, road drivers, civil servants, private sector employees. As a matter of fact, who’s left?
After the brief Christmas cheer, attitudes will no doubt return to normal. I respect the efforts being made by the National Initiative for Service Excellence, but our problem, I think, is a fundamental one.
It is hardly ever my intention to apportion blame.
I am usually more interested in getting to the root of a problem, if I can. What lies at the source of our behaviour, since nothing exists in a vacuum? What is happening in the evolution of our Barbadian society and how is this education that we’re quick to boast
of shaping our behaviour, if it is at all? Are there forces out there beyond our control?
Since I can’t attempt to deal with all the above in one column, I’ll start with some thoughts that may be troubling. Let me say that I’m all for the idea of moving forward but sometimes it is necessary to dig up the soil of the past.
Barbadians will remember how the earth shook, uncharacteristically, in 2007. In BIM: Arts For The 21st Century, vol. 1 no. 2, local poet Margaret Gill captures the event in thought-provoking lines. She sees the land reacting to this/Miscreant Caribbean/With its/Unburied ghosts its/Singular sin echoing/ From Jinan to Sydney as/Pirates of the Caribbean… that unholy tribute/Drowns once more the silent scream/Of the unanointed Taino/ of the maligned kalingo/…Sea say, . . . I continually rock these dead people/And they will not go to sleep.
These lines echo the belief that until the land is purged of blood shed unlawfully, the resulting trauma and anger will remain. Genesis 4:10 lends credence to this view: after Cain has murdered Abel, the Lord God tells him: “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground,” (NKJV).
Cultures exist today that understand the need of expiation for past misdeeds if healing is to occur, hence their carrying out of certain rituals. While slavery has been the experience of many cultures, it may be argued that transatlantic slaves suffered the greatest of inhuman atrocities. Nowhere else were human beings treated as chattel.
The blood that was shed for over 400 years on sea and land cannot be purged by simply ignoring its reality. It is entirely possible that the bad energies released during those brutal years are still with us and manifest themselves in the anger passing from one generation to another.
We are quick to label our social ills, and with some justification: economic, sociocultural, sociohistorical, transcultural, and the list continues. What about the psychic or spiritual, which may be regarded as the deepest and truest part of who we really are? Who or what can heal these areas of ourselves?
With all the education that abounds in Barbados, with all the material progress we have made, we still struggle with the issue of identity, especially blackness. We still confuse service with servitude. The first, I suspect, is the reason for the way we treat each other; mark the difference in the attitude of the supermarket cashier, for example, when dealing with one of lighter shade.
As it relates to the second point, I am told that staff are being trained. Difficulties with management aside, it would seem, however, that many of these workers just cannot get past the mental hurdle that people who look like them are worthy of respect or courtesy. The wounding has been too deep.
I have not raised these issues in order to generate emotionally charged and empty rhetoric. As a concerned Barbadian, I am conscious of certain trends and thinking that are still very much with us.
Let’s get to the root. I am advocating that we put the issue of the past injustices including those of enslavement on the table for open discussion; not in a manner that seeks to blame, condemn or marginalise but in a serious attempt to expose the rot that still remains and so flush away as much of it as we can.
To continue to build a society that rests on such deep-rooted insecurities, mistrust, unforgiven violence and anger is an incalculable risk. The big bad wolf slouches towards such foundations.
• Esther Philllips is an educator, poet and editor of BIM: Arts For The 21st Century.