Diary of a mothering worker. March 6, 2024.

Post 527.

FOR INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day, commemorated for more than 100 years on March 8, this column is a roar of solidarity from Trinidad and Tobago to women everywhere.

It is written in the black and white of a keffiyeh and joins the world’s majority in demanding an immediate ceasefire and an end to the dispossession and decimation of Palestinians. It grieves that most Israeli victims are women and children, and that whole generations and families have been taken. It affirms that the Nakba is not a historical event, but an ongoing ethnic-cleansing project of colonisation.

It stands shoulder to shoulder with ordinary women at the forefront of peace and anti-weapons movements who are fearlessly and unapologetically impolite about geopolitical hypocrisy. It rallies them to protest everywhere and in every way. For, in this time when nation-states’ conscience has been abandoned, what act to decry genocide can possibly be too radical?

This column refuses to forget the women of Iran who cut their hair, threw their head coverings into fire, and marched for freedom from violent religious fundamentalism. The hundreds of teenage girls beaten, disappeared, tortured, or killed. It sings to them as they imagine their fists in the air in the streets, as they shout “azadi!” (freedom!), as they continue to confront compulsory veiling laws; risking punishments that include expulsion from university and imprisonment. Though the world has let you down, these words are ever on your side.

To schoolgirls in Afghanistan, with a persistent hunger for reading, for music and arts, for science degrees. May you create a land of hope as you grow. May your secretly taught knowledge strengthen you as you dismantle walls of repression. May you blaze a trail over thorns and turn stones into stars. As you chorus, you are not a puppet of others, but in charge of your own fate and capable of blossoming on your own. From the other side of the global south, from where I sit – Muslim-descended and in a university – this column accepts nothing less for you, certainly not in the name of piety.

Far from headlines, women and girls of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen and Sudan are surviving conflict, destroyed infrastructure, starvation and terror by the tens of millions while men spend on military arms, territory and power. We know that armies are built to capture fossil fuels, minerals, metals and mining interests; Mother Nature’s gifts seen through the eyes of vulgar greed. Hold on, one day your hands will again be scented with sandalwood and decorated with henna. Although this column cries with you, don’t give in to sorrow. Your babies will be well-nourished, your children’s schools will return, your fields will flourish, and your families’ dreams will rise from war’s rubble and ruins.

This column is a poem whose stanzas cross borders without permission as do women migrants from Venezuela to Cuba. It observes how capital can move, but labour is immobilised, leaving poor workers with little chance to compete with Wall Street. It watches women holding separated families together. It hears girls detail the gendered risks of being on the move on a starless night with dark coves or barbed wire or locked rooms ahead. It carries a placard that reminds that no human being is illegal.

¡Ningún ser humano es ilegal!

This column speaks softly and lovingly to the women and girls of Haiti; plundered by France, denied sovereignty by the military boot of American imperialism, and violated by peacekeepers. It affirms their right to lead in ending man-made violence and fear. It recognises that to be female and to be LBGTQI increases vulnerability to sexual violence in contexts without justice. It sings praise to grassroots women’s organisations providing healthcare, food, family, empowerment and healing.

Medam, nou salye nou. Women, we salute you!

As we march on Friday at noon from Woodford Square to a global theme that emphasises counting women in and greater inclusion of women to accelerate progress, we must remember women at the edges of the dew. We must question what is meant by progress. We must transform power as it is organised today, as it devastates girls and women’s lives, as it disconnects us from our sisters because they are different, more marginalised, or far away.

This column is graffiti chalked anywhere women please. It says we are here, as we have always been, to champion care, defend peace, stop war, broker reparation and reconciliation, challenge politicians, grow gardens, and to write letters of love and solidarity.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. February 20, 2024.

Post 526.

SUNDAY’S headlines that describe the death of a pregnant teen during police execution of a warrant reinforce a vulnerability I’ve been mulling over since a 16-year-old girl was shot in the stomach and her boyfriend, Daniel Riley, was killed in April 2023. Since then, I’ve been particularly interested in how teenage girls are being drawn into gun violence, shootings, reprisals and gang warfare.

Teenagers are being killed by assassinations or in exchanges of gunfire which happen when they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, or with or near targeted people – usually adult men.

Among youth, these deaths are mainly happening to teenage boys, which signals a specific risk of being killed that starts for men when they are minors. Masculinity and gun violence fuel greater lethal risk in boys’ lives.

Think of Anim Persad, 15, and Olumn James, 18, who were killed in November 2023 while at a parlour, and in the path of a spray of bullets. Think of Roshan Adam Ali, 16, who was killed while two other teenage boys, one 18 and one 13, were shot. Think of Andre Singh, 16, shot along with two others. Think of Denelson Smith and Mark Richards, killed in their school uniform. Gangs and guns are therefore also issues of child protection.

It’s important to nonetheless note the specific sexual vulnerability of girls. Their risk is feminised and fundamentally different from that of boys as teens.

This is why if you scour headlines, the phrase “pregnant teen” comes up in stories of teenage girls being killed. I’m thinking of Shantel Byer, 16, of Tunapuna. How can we forget Danielle Yearwood, 19, of Valencia?

About one in ten births is by a teenager in TT. Mainly, these are young women from working class families, and the fathers of their children are older and/or low-income men. This is a fairly steady ratio that has not significantly decreased.

When the Government refuses to teach about sex (whether in terms of sexual abuse and forced sex or the need for contraception when sex is consensual), it is adolescent girls who pay the price. When it doesn’t provide sexual health information to teens as a standard part of adolescent healthcare, this too is a policy failure with costs to girls.

There’s a religious lobby pressuring the Government to not teach comprehensive sexuality education. There is little care for how it might help these teens. Ever vote-conscious, the Government has backed away from leadership when it is most needed. Thus, the rate of teenage births being about nine per cent of all births is not about to significantly decrease.

As communities become more unsafe, and men take greater risks to make money, this is an issue to which we should pay attention. At the intersections of men in gangs, with guns and trading drugs, are unions with low-income teenage girls.

As crime increases, so too will risks to these adolescents. Think of Ameena Thomas, 17, who had been married to 33-year-old Carlile Hamilton before she was killed. He had also been shot but survived.

There’s been some attention to this in Caribbean scholarship, but not enough. A 2007 qualitative study in two urban communities found that adolescent girls in insecure socio-economic contexts find safety and security in having a “badman” as a partner. Badmen have status, money and power, are armed, and can protect young women; sending a message to other women and men that she should be treated with respect as his queen.

Men in these relationships target and control teenage girls by “breeding them,” which locks them into a relationship of dependence, even if the men (eventually or simultaneously) have other women partners. Pregnancy is also a marker of adult womanhood. As the study described it, through their relationships with badmen, girls get maximum respect. In reality, they have minimal control.

Girls can pursue their own educational or occupational opportunities. However, if these are not within sight, they can end up in relationships which they think (or which appear to promise) financial support.

Data on adolescent girls who experience early and unplanned pregnancy also emphasise that they often have histories of family violence, sexual abuse, forced sex, and insufficiently-met economic and emotional needs.

By the time they end up in headlines, there’s been a journey where interventions are non-existent, inadequate or irrelevant.

All this to say, I think we need a careful and gendered analysis of how our country is killing teens.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. February 7, 2024.

Post 525.

Photo by Maria Nunes

3CANAL, come down. Come down! With the power of the word in the riddim of the word, they called, and 10,000 spirits waiting to fly out their skins or adorned in finery of home-made mas, answered. We coming. We coming! We go paint the town.

And for 30 years, early morning before the place brighten, giving dignity to all that was made dutty, we forged we own sacred self in the ablution of morning light. Out of darkness, our power and beauty renewed.

Doh worry what nobody say, that is what we did. Ase. Namaste. Alhamdulillah. Give Jah thanks and praise. And now, for the last time, we wake and ready ourselves. Clear de way!

Our beloved are bats, jamettes, jumbies and devils. Who wave flag, wine down low, pelt waist or play a mas, every woman is Queen. For one night, in a nightie or behind a mask, every man is King of the J’Ouvert. The road is serious business, oui.

Ancestors’ children, isn’t this how we tell dem dis body, dis desire, dis land is mines? When vibration raise, a living ritual commences to free the town. A revolution moulded from mud, salt, powder and madness. Yuh hear the truck? Dat is we, coming down.

As we plan for a literal las’ lap, newspaper archives must record the existence of 3canal who, for three decades, offered a Jouvay (J’Ouvert) band without equivalence in TT.

Don’t talk about rope, premium drinks and VIP. The band was special because it reminded us that this ritual born in darkness each year is for renewal of political consciousness, an ethos of resistance, the endlessly anarchic power of art, affirmation of all that was colonially-defined as vulgar, devilish and outlaw, connection to ancestors and to community, and love for one’s own self. For, toiling bodies in a wholly unjust world deserve their right to respite, pleasure and joy.

For that, we must thank rapso warriors Roger Roberts, Stanton Kewley, Wendell Manwarren and John Isaac, for making us sing and shout while our bodies shook away judgement and despair. We must pay respect to the iconic Laventille Rhythm Section, and to the band’s producers, drummers and DJs.

Thirty years of original music to so many who felt they did not fit in anywhere – who had survived violence, who were denied and silenced by respectability, whose dreams were daily exhausted by Babylon and whose creative spirits were nearly broken by the head-decay-shun of schooling.

We were those grateful somebodies, propelled by percussion and iron, chanting alongside the truck, coming through a portal with our arms outstretched, seeing ourselves reflected in their verses like a mirror lit by the sun as it rose over the Hill. We could be weself. We could love in the open, permitting a freedom that knows no law or sin. We could share a dream of a world with no more might is right, and no more wrong and strong.

It was kaiso pointed at the politricks of serpent masters, vampires, deceivers and mocking pretenders. And, it was mas, mama. Actual mas with cloth and wire and zip and feather and leaf and broom and stick and flag, each and every one unlike the other. It was a Jouvay to serenade our unlovely and fuel our anger.

You have to understand how important these decades were to protecting and nurturing a tradition of popular theatre, individual creativity and protest by the downpressed. Show me any other Jouvay band where that was the heart of the matter. It have none.

In the band, I could play St Peter waiting at the gate for Black Stalin. I could play Grim Reaper gathering mooma’s sons already in their graves. I could play Kali as an Indian woman making embodied art from sacred mythologies and jahajin legacies. This year will find me, amidst sailors and powder, in a deep-blue robber hat traversed by indenture ships for all they stole as we crossed the kala pani. Where else could any of us do this and storm the stage before dem pretty bands, in all our power and beauty?

Full respect in order, one last time, we gather. We will shine like pearls. We will want to cry like we go dead. We will roar. We will dance across the stage like angels, blessing both the end and the hereafter. On your new dawning, 3Canal, love outpouring, we salute you for every one of those 30 glorious, fore-day mornings.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. January 31, 2024.

Post 524.

INCREASINGLY, parents are concerned about discussion of sex or gender with children and adolescents. They are also concerned about school-based studies that ask about gender or sexual orientation and experiences of, for example, family violence, sexual coercion or bullying.

The fear is that these will make children become interested in sex or identify as LBGTQ.

Surveys do not expose children to sexually explicit material, and simply asking multiple-choice questions about whether an adolescent is sexually active, has been sexually abused or is being bullied (or bullies others) doesn’t make it suddenly happen.

Surveys do not influence morality. They measure it, by measuring respect for others, engagement in abusive behaviours, and the extent of family and other support systems.

Rather than influencing children to have a particular view, surveys gather the range of views held by those being surveyed. They are not teaching instruments, but learning tools. They show what children and adolescents have already been exposed to, and inform how we counter harm, harassment and misinformation.

The survey may take 30 minutes to complete. Children are in school and with peers for seven hours a day, on the internet for several hours each week, and with family on evenings and weekends. These are the agents of socialisation that teach them how to behave and what to value. There is virtually no potential for or history of grooming or influencing students through such data collection.

In contrast, this evidence is crucial for understanding children’s vulnerabilities and how best to approach child protection through a national and preventative approach.

The benefit of working through schools is that an entire generation can be targeted so that wider transformation of social norms and practices occurs. School surveys provide children’s own perspective on what the greatest number, including those in the most vulnerable contexts, need to be safe, well and supported.

Decades of data tells us that about one third of adolescents (more boys than girls) become sexually active before the age of fifteen. Many report their first experience as nonconsensual or coerced. It is therefore important to teach about consent and coercion so that adolescents know they can say no and to not be silent about victimisation. Those adolescents who are sexually active need information to help them make healthy decisions about sex and relationships, contraception, partner violence, and trusted adults to whom to turn for advice.

Those adolescents who are sexually active need information to help them make healthy decisions about sex and relationships, contraception, partner violence and trusted adults to whom to turn for advice.

If we don’t provide such information, children turn toward the internet, sexually graphic literature, pornography and their peers to answer questions. If your Standard 4 or Form 1 child has any access to the internet or interacts with peers, do not expect them to be innocent about sex.

Most parents still do not speak to adolescents about sexual practices, consent, feelings, desires, relationships, contraception or pornography. This is why it is important for schools to meet adolescent needs for education and guidance.

Earlier National School Climate Surveys showed that about one-third of bullying in schools is gender-based.

Reducing violence in schools (and society) requires transforming our beliefs about masculinity and femininity to promote greater acceptance, equality, inclusion and non-discrimination, and safety for children regardless of their sex, gender or sexual identity.

The 2016 and 2019 surveys showed that LBGTQ youth exist. Knowing that some students identify as sexually diverse encourages policies to ensure the safety of all students from gender-based bullying, the effects of which are long lasting and have an impact on everyone, not just LBGTQ students.

Tolerance and acceptance improve outcomes for all, especially for boys, regardless of their sexuality or gender, as fears of homophobia compel males to enact violence to prove masculinity.

The 2016 and 2019 school climate studies stressed the need for age-appropriate comprehensive sexual education, since students reported experiencing sexual abuse and sexual assault, with many of them unable to properly understand or articulate what they had experienced, demonstrating a gap in their knowledge about their bodies and their rights.

Parents are being discouraged from allowing their children to participate in the 2024 National School Climate Survey being done by the Ministry of Education.

I urge those parents to read the surveys from 2016 and 2019, which have been very useful for advocates for child protection (publicly available on silverliningtt.com).

The ministry must also be commended for continuing to gather this vital data, though a more effective communication strategy is necessary to allay fears and promote participation rates which will give an accurate, updated picture of what is happening in families, schools and communities, for children’s sake.

This column was written collaboratively with Dr Krystal Ghisyawan, primary author of the 2016 and 2019 school climate studies

 

Diary of a mothering worker. January 9, 2024

Post 523.

I WRITE on day 95 of Israel’s war on Gaza, with Al Jazeera reporting 23,000 Palestinians killed, including more than 9,000 children, and 59,000 others injured, including more than 18,000 children. Save the Children reports that more than ten children a day, on average, have lost one or both of their legs in Gaza in the last three months.

On New Year’s Day, I watched another video of an infant, lying like Jesus in a creche, being pulled from under rubble and carried unconscious to a hospital.

On January 3, the governments of the US, the UK, a range of European countries, and Bahrain, Japan, New Zealand, Republic of Korea and Singapore issued a statement through the White House condemning Houthi attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea. The statement used words like “unacceptable,” “innocent lives” and “illegal attacks.”

Imagine, said the world, that these governments thought commercial vessels (with 12 per cent of seaborne-traded oil and eight per cent of the world’s liquefied natural gas) deserved stronger words and greater consensus than innocent civilians, including children. This is even though Israeli withholding of water and food from Gaza is predicted to kill even more Palestinians than air strikes.

On January 8, Isaac Herzog, Israeli president, posted about US vice president Kamala Harris stressing US commitment to “Israel’s right and duty to defend itself. This “right” has been challenged on multiple grounds, whether in terms of the status of Gaza as already occupied by Israel; Israel’s shutting down of access to water, food, medical care, humanitarian aid and fuel; its destruction of hospitals, refugee camps and shelters, schools and libraries; its forced expulsion and displacement of Palestinians; and its violation of the principles of international humanitarian law.

Amidst such global hypocrisy and doublespeak comes South Africa’s urgent lawsuit against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

South Africa’s position is that it has an obligation as a state party to the convention to prevent genocide.

It is asking for emergency or provisional measures which order Israel to stop any genocidal acts taking place and to take reasonable measures to prevent genocide and incitement to commit genocide, including suspending its military assault on Gaza, to comply with its own obligations. It is supported by several countries – including, from our region, Bolivia, and by hundreds of human-rights organisations.

Israel will likely be arguing for an inherent right to self-defence, that its military bombardment has been in accordance with international law and that Hamas’s violent capture of hostages and killing of Israelis and others also constitute genocide. Indeed, though not falling under the ICJ’s jurisdiction, the fundamental rule of international humanitarian law is that parties in an armed conflict must never attack civilians.

In 2004, in relation to the construction of what Palestinians call the “Wall of Apartheid,” the ICJ rendered an advisory opinion disagreeing with the argument of self-defence, finding the 708-km West Bank barrier a form of de-facto annexation of the occupied Palestinian territory and a violation of international law. South Africa’s case runs for two days, starting tomorrow.

The decision won’t be delivered for some weeks, but it is important to note that the court does not have to determine whether Israel violated the convention, just whether the acts described can fall under the convention’s provisions. The court’s decision is binding on every member state of the convention, though not enforceable, and has interesting implications.

Other member states are legally required to respect the decision and could launch further procedures.

The decision will further embolden the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s investigation of alleged Israeli war criminals. The US will have to publicly ignore it if it vetoes another UN Security Council resolution calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, which will further shred its global moral authority, already in tatters.

A decision on provisional measures could take weeks. The broader decision on the merits of the case could take years, and, if the court sides with South Africa that there are gross violations of human rights, it should have implications for the US’s (and other member states’) financial and military assistance to Israel, as the court will have affirmed its obligation to take affirmative action to prevent genocide.

The South Africa application makes for dread reading. Its 84 pages document decades of deliberate decimation and dehumanisation of Gaza and of its people. Its facts are overwhelming and indisputable.

Tomorrow, be part of the world that will be watching.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 27, 2023.

Post 522.

AS an anthropologist, I often turn to the vast literature on the Caribbean to understand national hullaballoos and cultural responses. So, here’s your post-Christmas read on spirituality and power in our republic of complex religions and beliefs.

I’m not concerned with the truth of recent allegations that Massy Holdings Ltd mandates employees to attend retreats which include learning to contact the dead and self-heal with white light energy. Instead, let’s look anthropologically at these allegations.

In reportedly undertaking training which included necromancy and Obeah, Massy, which has denied the allegations, would have been as truly Caribbean as a company could be. Culturally speaking, nearly everyone in the region, regardless of officially-identified religion, believes in jumbies, spirit possession, the power of the dead (and veneration of ancestors), seers and divination, and healing practices which are unauthorised by dominant religions.

The roots of the word Obeah are Ashanti, coming from “Obeye” meaning spiritual leaders (sometimes described as witches and wizards), and accessing the occult has long been associated with sourcing strength, building community, providing cures, ensuring justice and causing harm. Historically, African Obeah women and men also held power and prestige, much like Delphi Sphere Consulting seems to have today.

However, engagement with the unseen and energetic are not just African, but also Hindu, Muslim and Christian. Indeed, the spiritual is a domain of what Keith McNeal, scholar of Afro- and Indo-Caribbean transcendental practices, calls “transculturation,” where there is significant mixing and multidimensionality.

Like Carnival, which brings together people of all religions in what soca music often describes as a spiritual experience, belief in the supernatural has become national culture and, translated into business speak, such culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Writing of Hindus, Vidya Naipaul brilliantly nailed the kind of ambition that led Ganesh, the main character in his novel The Mystic Masseur, to turn to mysticism and religious healing. These enabled Ganesh to successfully con his clients, who were willing believers.

Moving from the literary, anthropologist Kumar Mahabir has documented Indo-Muslims’ belief in Sheikh Sadiq, a jinn who possesses people and who is subject to Hindu mantras and Muslim prayers. Mahabir interviewed one 77-year-old lucky enough to see Sheikh Sadiq, whose manifestations were only visible to women.

Reading marvellous realist texts, such as David Dabydeen’s novel Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008), scholar Aliyah Khan describes Mahabir’s interviewee and Dabydeen’s novel as two of many examples of Muslims’ “magical negotiation with indigeneity and environmental space.” In other words, whatever voodoo you do is a mode of becoming and belonging to the Caribbean.

CEPEP-employed Pentecostals believe in healing with hands just as much as middle-class, new-age, Reiki enthusiasts. People drop rum in a corner for the thirsty on the other side. They jharay for jaundice. They put blue bottles and barrels in agricultural gardens to ward off maljo. They mount stickfighting bois and perform secret rituals before becoming visible as jab jabs and blue devils. However, these are typically considered peasant or proletarian customs.

The Massy allegations, had they been true, would have instead revealed how economic elites were (allegedly) just as deep in practices that continue to carry a colonial stigma of backwardness, low culture and illegality. Corner block talk knows it has always been so. Thus, popular response, comprising memes, Tik Tok videos and Christmas lime picong, was hardly condemnatory for Massy execs had simply been shown to be “one of we.”

Upper classes (who were once white elites, but now include an oligarchy of all ethnicities) were brought into intimacy with the everyday and popular; down a notch from air-conditioned and upper-floor financial wizardry. Despite their business-suits and millions, they were just like schoolgirls from Moruga, for whom the paranormal and superstitious were real.

Yet, Massy’s preference for foreign over local Babalawos, pundits and healers, had it been true, would also have been about a capitalist refashioning of Obeah, not as low and disavowed superstition, but as a technology of successful Caribbean modernity.

Elite practices and profits are typically considered mysterious, untrustworthy, corrupt and advantageous. It makes sense then that outcry would be less about dead-dealing and light-healing than misuse of forex, particularly as small and medium businesses have been crippled by lack of access to the very foreign exchange (and successful capitalist modernity) which appeared inequitably available to Massy.

Anthropologist Daniel Miller describes Christmas as the ultimate national festival, celebrated by everyone regardless of religion in ways typically Trinidadian/Tobagonian. It’s a good moment to highlight that, interspersed with such rituals, is a landscape of supernatural ongoings which also expose just how much our divided society secretly shares across class, religion and ethnicity.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 13, 2023.

Post 521.

I’M WRITING this in blue and golden afternoon light, following the funeral of a childhood friend, who ended his life. Funerals are complicated and surreal, full of loss, tender memories and reminders about how hard and precious each day can be.

Family and friends hold each other close, and people who have lived long know that even while a community comes together around one of its own, so much isn’t said, so much remains to be felt, so much is still to be accepted and understood. One who is loved is always loved, even after they are gone, though grief accompanies remembering.

I’m home now, wondering how to feel about the day. The sky is gently turning orange over the central plains, and I hope that his spirit rose in the pyre’s flames and smoke, and has found peace in an atmosphere filled with such beauty.

Depression is difficult to comprehend and requires great compassion, a kind of bigness of heart that recognises that we may share the same spaces, but experience them very differently. It requires not judging someone’s inability to cope with what has been described as a remorseless foe with whom one struggles every day, and sometimes loses the war.

Depression also has no single face. It affects rich and poor, those who appear to be full of laughter, and those who have become more silent. It can result from circumstances and trauma, but also be genetic and related to brain chemistry. Suicide may be less about mental disorder than about unhappiness. Each person can tell their own story.

People may want others to know or they may prefer privacy and confidentiality. Those contemplating suicide sometimes perfect a mask which can be hard to see through. Despite struggling, they may not want to cause worry. Reaching out may be a call for help or an expression of hopelessness and unbearable pain. There are not always clear signs.

On the other hand, families may not want to overly interfere or may simply have no idea that they should intervene, when or even how. Hindsight is always rife with difficult insights and feelings.

As I write, I know many who can identify. As you read, be gentle with those whom you know and yourself. The world is being changed so that we can talk openly about mental health, so that neither those living with depression or their families need to remain silent or feel stigmatised. These incremental gains could save lives. It’s why I’m writing this column at the close of a strange, sad and unsettled day.

I reached out to Maria Divina O’Brien of Mindwise, an inspiring NGO seeking to reduce stigma and to improve mental health awareness, services and resources in the region, through collaboration with a range of partners, including the Ministry of Health and PAHO/WHO.

The non-profit has a specific focus on design and use of digital technologies, community engagement, youth development, film and new media events, and volunteer recruitment. It’s led by a handful of young professionals who have developed a National Mental Health and Psycho-Social Support (MHPSS) Directory of Services of TT as part of the Technical Working Group of our MHPSS network. Just type FindCareTT.com in Google.

They are developing a Youth Gatekeepers Suicide Prevention Programme with regional and local youth leadership organisations as partners. As well, their goal is to create more community spaces and resources for mental healthcare in order to provide help where people are.

In particular, their continued partnership and work for the PAHO/WHO #DoYourShare campaign is precisely about breaking silences that leave others wondering how they did not know and how much more they might have helped if they did.

With 15-29-year-olds being a primary at-risk group post-pandemic, Mindwise has created the First Citizens Sustainable Minds Volunteer Programme, sponsored by First Citizens, together with PAHO/WHO, Google Women Techmakers, UWI and NALIS.

For Maria, suicide is preventable through sustainable solutions like http://www.preventsuicidett.com and http://www.findcarett.com. Passionate about creating sustainable mental health, she gave me greater understanding and hope.

When you are children together, you do not know how adulthood will unfold and how each person’s story will end. It’s odd to be on the other side of such knowledge now.

Yet, as night descends on family and friends’ goodbye, my final feeling is that, in all he was and all he gave, even someone who has chosen to end life lives on in innumerable, beloved and undying ways.

 

Diary of a Mothering Worker. November 23, 2023.

Post 520.

SIXTEEN DAYS of Activism to End Gender-Based Violence is a visionary feminist campaign started by the Women’s Global Leadership Institute more than 30 years ago.

Amid this effort, we should remember that violence against women and girls is complex and ubiquitous.

In public imagination, such violence has been reduced to ending male-partner battery and perhaps also child sexual abuse, which affects girls to a greater extent than boys and is perpetrated mostly by heterosexual men.

Survivors and women navigating the police and judicial system to secure orders of protection and to see perpetrators made responsible for their crimes will tell you that there’s been insufficient change.

Women in relationships will tell you that male controlling behaviour over women’s mobility, freedom, networks, leisure and time are normal, and are hardly named as violence by either women or men, though women may feel dominated and even fearful at home.

Women also continue to be killed by men’s lethality. Anissa Rajgobin-Ageemoolar survived an attempted murder by her ex-husband just last week.

However, violence against women is about more than who women “choose” or whether women leave relationships. Violence perpetrated mainly by men against women is a part of all women’s lives from birth to death, and takes place within as well as beyond homes, within as well as across borders, and within and across multiple contexts.

It is also a fundamental part of gang violence and criminal activity as gang members engage in ritual group rape (“parry”) of young women from their communities (supposedly with their consent, though this argument can only be made if you ignore all the power relations involved).

Sexual assault as part of robberies is what women fear as they lie in their beds, just as they fear ending up decomposing in the Aripo forest as they go about their everyday lives. Recently, we’ve also seen assassinations of women or women being shot as “collateral damage” in gang members’ fallings-out or disputes in the drug trade.

Gangs, guns and crime have made women more vulnerable to all forms of violence. Who can forget gunmen killing 16-year-old Angelie Riley’s unborn baby as she slept on a bed next to 21-year-old Daniel Riley? This tragic example also illuminates the multiple vulnerabilities of adolescent girls, which exacerbate the risks to which they are exposed.

Women also experience violence as migrants, particularly those who work in the sex industry, those who are held in captivity to pay off debts and those who are minors. Police officers have been arrested for alleged involvement in human trafficking and child prostitution. Minors and young migrant women aged 15-19 have been found in raids from Westmoorings to Tunapuna to Chaguanas.

This is a global issue in which women may be corrupt and complicit as recruiters and managers, but where men dominate as consumers, power-holders and beneficiaries.

Violence against women is also a fundamental part of civil war, and has been experienced by women from Bosnia to Sudan to Palestine today. It is embedded in religious fundamentalisms where the enslavement of women is institutionalised, including with the support of women zealots. Survival of and escape from her sexual enslavement, and her efforts to advocate for survivors of genocide and sexual violence, are what made Nadia Murad become a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

In Afghanistan under the Taliban, and particularly during the pandemic, adolescent girls and girl children were increasingly forced to marry as parents searched desperately to alleviate their economic burden. This has only become worse, as all but primary schooling for girls has been banned. In Iran last year, dozens of teenage girls were tortured, disappeared or murdered for rebelling against dictates that they cover their hair.

For lesbian and transwomen, who face prejudice and transphobia, lack of access to state citizenship, protection and services makes experiences of violence even more stigmatising and isolating. Hardly noticed in our midst, Indigenous women across the Americas are missing and murdered at far higher rates than non-Indigenous women, and face intersecting factors such as poverty, homelessness, racism, sexism, and the legacies of imperialism.

Denial of human rights, the costs to women’s health and experience of menstruation and reproduction, the unequal burden of care and exclusion from the highest levels of economic and political power are all contexts of subordination through which violence flows the way that rain falls through the air.

Seen through women and girls’ eyes, nowhere is safe. I could provide example after example, page after page. We must therefore make the most of just these 16 days.

 

Diary of a Mothering Worker. November 15, 2023.

Post 519.

IRONIES ABOUND in the ongoing Israeli destruction of Palestine.

On some US news stations, there is a focus on the Israeli and other hostages violently captured by Hamas.

However, the thousands held in Israeli detention centres are not called hostages by the media. Indeed, an exchange release was one of the reasons for Hamas’s violent action.

Al Jazeera reports there are more than 5,000 Palestinians, including 33 women and 170 children, held in Israeli prisons under various military orders. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, more than 12,000 Palestinian children have been detained by Israeli forces. If we referred to them as hostages, violently captured and held in conditions of terror, how might that differently frame the situation today?

One of the repeated on-screen hypocrisies has been the morally bankrupt (though financially profitable) position of Western states on this crisis. How can the US utter a word against Russia’s goal of annexing parts of Ukraine? How can it support Taiwan in the face of China’s claim? Political nuances are being obliterated while (or, perhaps, so that) defence contractors make billions.

On the weekend, BBC broadcast Britain’s King Charles solemnly commemorating veterans and victims of World War II. Yet the images that most remain etched in our minds are not just fighting on the front, but freeing of captives from German concentration camps, the majority of whom were Jews persecuted because of virulent anti-Semitism.

Today, Palestine is a concentration camp dispossessing millions and killing thousands. Language has rightfully shifted from the effective image of an open-air prison, which conveyed the ubiquity of surveillance, domination and immobility, because a prison implies Palestinians committed some kind of crime.

Rather, the parallel with the concentration camps of WWII is that Palestinians today, like Jews, people living with disabilities, those of other ethnic groups and those from LBGT communities during World War II, are considered to be without the right to exist or a place to call home.

A concentration camp therefore names the necropolitics or genocidal formation of a state power and its territory-thirsty leadership, once in the form of Adolf Hitler and now in the form of the extremist Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yet even in the midst of remembrance, the ironic connection between the two moments – then and now – is severed, both by the press and by politicians.

In this way, “then” and “now” are ironies of disconnection.

The 1970 days of Black Power in the Caribbean have been lauded as the height of student radicalism, particularly at the UWI, which named Daaga Hall after an 1837 mutineer named Daaga. Ironically, it’s also orderly to keep such challenge to authority in a nostalgic past, where it cannot threaten in the way that students would have then. Caribbean students were staging sit-ins, occupying buildings and protesting without permission from those in power, whether in governments or universities.

Today, students are calling for universities and governments to be divested of Israeli funding, are walking out of classes, and are defying university and government administrations. Columbia University suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace for holding unauthorised protests that did not comply with university policies. The student groups pushed back by calling the decision an “appalling act of censorship and intimidation by the administration.”

At St Augustine, students engaged in their own protest action, chalking on walkways traversed by their peers. Their messages included, “Caribbean students stand with Palestine,” “Queers for Palestine,” “Hindus for Palestine,” and “Muslims for Palestine,” and much more. Students are also building intersectional coalitions across social media spaces, beyond the control and politically left of older conservatives.

In this way, they speak alongside other Caribbean feminist groups such as Intersect Antigua. Feminitt Caribbean also extended “unwavering solidarity with the people of Palestine” and called for “support to civilians in Gaza and the West Bank – as LGBTQ+ people, people who menstruate, and those who are pregnant are at extreme risk of violence…”

The al Shifa hospital remains under fire while the Israeli army, without irony, claims it is Hamas headquarters. Shutting off its power and water constitutes a war crime. What more is required to ignite an era of dissent and protest against these historical and geopolitical ironies and their unconscionable mounting casualties?

One can only hope that, with the return of words such as “genocide,” “apartheid,” “concentration camp” and “settler colonialism,” youth and students are being radicalised against the status quo, those holding power and how they use it – for that is what “now” most desperately needs.

 

Diary of a Mothering Worker. October 31, 2023.

Post 518.

THROUGH OUR children, parents learn so much. For example, Ziya just started triathlon training, less than two months now, and it’s been a steep learning curve for me. A bookish sort, who spent my teens reading, and who spent my twenties in performance poetry and feminist organising, sports was like learning a foreign language with a different written script. 

I knew zero, whether about laces or bike sizes or even what materials are best to wear. And, suddenly, I was around seasoned athletes competing since their teens, or coaches who might consider my most basic of questions to be obvious knowledge anyone should have. 

One thing has been gratifying to see, however, is the kind of TT people who gather around sports. Those who provide advice you didn’t even know you needed, those invested in all children’s confidence and fun in addition to them doing well. 

In a society that often feels as morally bankrupt as ours, particularly at the top, I was a latecomer discovering a space – besides the feminist and social justice one I’ve known for 30 years – which values qualities associated with determination, camaraderie, community and excellence. No one is perfect, but everyone shares ethical ground. Some issues are complex, but often it is very clear what is unjust and unfair or right from wrong.

Sports has always been like that, where it’s not just the best athletes, but the best characters and teams that shine, setting an example for others. Children learn to aim to be champions, but to also cope with not placing in one or another competition, for in life you can’t win every battle, and still must conduct oneself with dignity, generosity, humanity and grace. 

Think of Serena Williams’s horror that a referee could think she – one of the greatest athletes of all time – was cheating in a match. Think of Gianmarco Tamberi and Mutaz Barshim who agreed to share a gold medal each rather than compete in a jump-off at the Tokyo 2020 games. Their Olympic motto was: Faster, Higher, Stronger, Together. 

Though it’s early days, I’ve also begun to discover the dark underside of how sports works. Indeed, our dark human underside bedevils everything we do, and rises wherever there is power and status to be fought over, hierarchies to be established, and inequities that are put into play to give some advantage over others, even among children and schools. 

We should all be familiar with this. We live in a society that works on who you know, which lodge you belong to (if you are a man), which political party you support, your family name, or whether you are the one favoured for opportunity over others. Think of how national gymnast Thema Williams’s successfully fought in court the “biased and flawed” decision of the TT Gymnastics Federation to pull her out of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. 

Sports sets who children become later in life, and if it’s a space of poor team principles, it normalises callous and divisive conduct in adulthood, whether among the poorest or town’s wealthiest. 

Sports spirit can therefore be crucial for transforming our downfall in TT. Here, you could be both unethical and a poor choice, but be returned to a board, because machinations protect your position.

People set out to occupy top posts or get shortlisted, regardless of how they get there, how they behave while there, who they bully or oppress to keep that status or who they exclude or treat as a “lone wolf” to demoralise an adult or child who appears too much like a threat. 

What enables that to happen, and continue, is the complicity of others. Those who should know better, but find excuses, justifications, technicalities, friendships or suddenly invented rules to allow a community or a nation’s moral compass to be off centre. 

Brazen behaviour occurs because those who know choose silence in the face of what is not right; perhaps because they benefit, are intimidated by a more dominant personality or because there isn’t anywhere to go once you challenge a clique.

Position, whether on a political, state or sports podium, is considered a victory, but must be honourable or others will always see it as a farce. Sports has the opportunity to teach children its highest ideals or dark underside. Schools and teams, led by adults, are setting lifelong examples and have responsibility to teach what is right. 

We now reach, but Zi must know. Medalling matters, but integrity is always gold.