grrlscene

Post 219.

We are stewards of our nation.

Each morning, waking to a fresh opportunity to refuse a dark time for now or the future.  The alternative to boom and bust cycles may not feed our glittering fantasy of El Dorado, but it can fire hope amidst an oncoming bruising and battering for self-preservation.

The question of where to cut and to invest are ours, not the government or the Prime Minister, but we citizen’s own. We must look around our communities, at ourselves and with our representatives, and insist on our own budgetary priorities. For this reason, I appreciated the Prime Minister’s address, particularly the presentation of numbers and his direct challenge to the business community to share profits. All of us have to find more ways to go local and spend wisely. In the last decade when even workers were only drinking Johnny Walker, we were clearly living beyond our means.

My first choice for investment is the environment and renewable energy. Our natural resources will sustain wealth for generations, even centuries. And, when it comes to our air, seas and rivers, we will not get a second chance. Trinidad is full of permaculture and environmental management specialists who can tell us how our environment produces food, community and profit. Planning should anticipate how cost saving, health and wealth generation could look in seven generations. For such sustainability, now is the time to invest.

Culture is also on my priority list. Not the millions won in a night by soca stars, but investment in the yards of pan and mas making. Over years of doctoral ethnographic research with mas camps, I came to understand the incredible way that they sustain traditions to land, language, life lessons, and making a living. Going for wide dispersion of available funds to create community around the families and schools of jab jab, or blue devil, moko jumbies or Indian mas can also help with tackling issues of boys and masculinities.

On the supply side, the governments’ plan to stimulate jobs through the construction sector, e.g. plumbers, masons and joiners, will disproportionately benefit men. This has social costs, and reproduces women’s economic dependence, and their clustering in low waged sectors. Such explicitly gendered effects have to be empirically understood if this is pursued, along with strategies to equalize access of qualified individuals of both sexes to a construction boom. The location of a Gender Division under the Office of the PM should provide exactly such cross-sectoral policy analysis and direction. Also keep in mind that while taxes, particularly on land, are necessary, sales tax always affects women more because of their greater responsibility for food provision and making groceries.

Beyond economic policy, the government’s primary focus should be on containing corruption through measured change in effective public service monitoring and evaluation, passage of whistleblower legislation, and successful prosecution of cases. Sheer waste and mismanagement of money account for billions bled from schools, hospitals and NGOs. Governments like to say that people don’t show up to town hall and regional corporation meetings, but people know the consultation process can also be both insult and joke. Still, even if it is only through a media that powerfully tackles fiscal scandals, we must insist on government for the people, which means suturing waste and corruption in 2016.

Wherever you are when the year begins, may you experience it with safety and joy, and carry a sense of togetherness in your heart in the days ahead. May we remain pensive, grateful and blessed, drawing on our best sources for long term sustainability. Let us be guided by ground up lessons on opportunities for our islands to navigate predicted rough seas.

“Who are the magnificent here? Not I with this torn shirt”, you may say. Even with scars upon our soul, wounds on our bodies, fury in our hands and scorn for ourselves, to quote Martin Carter, it is possible to turn to the world of tomorrow with strength. The sources of such strength are all around us to recognise.

My new-year tune is Nina Simone’s song, ‘Feeling Good’. There is a new dawn. There is always a new day. Tomorrow when you awake, look it up and press play.

Post 218.

I’m hoping that the partner of Ricardo Jerome, who is the mother of his child, and who was documented being savagely kicked and beaten in a public place, remains safe during the time of his court-allowed visits for Christmas and New Year’s Day.

I was astounded by magistrate Debbie-Ann Bassaw’s decision, wondering what allowing a batterer family time means. Does violence break the family contract or does fatherhood justify continued belonging regardless of how brutal the violence? Do mythic ideals of family, fatherhood, motherhood and Christmas trump hard realities of accountability and safety?

Can a boy child and his mother who have, in their own home, been witness to and victim of repeated brutal domination have a family Christmas defined by trust, care and love? What kind of love is so violent? And, what does such violence teach about family and love?

Anyone who has experienced family violence knows that it becomes normalized. It’s easy to learn to love those who are not nice to you, who are abusive to you, who neglect your rights and rightful feelings, and who love you in ways that hurt. It’s easy to become disassociated from your emotions, to forget how to differentiate your needs from others, and to lose familiarity with being in control of your life. Standing up for yourself comes with all kinds of self-blame, even if preventing such violence isn’t your responsibility.

Women stay for many reasons, none of which are ‘liking licks’, but rather compassion for their abusers, hope for change against all odds, deep self-devaluation, dependence and fear. Trauma isn’t lived in logical ways, and it takes great space and time away from those relationships to see a self that is possible outside of their rigid frame.

In deciding to send this woman-beater home, whose interest was being served? And, what was at stake in his partner saying yes or no, presumably in the moment, as she was called by police when the matter came up, wasn’t given sessions with a counselor first, and was made responsible, and therefore blamable, as woman and mother. This in the context of one daily newspaper even putting her status as ‘victim’ in quotes in its headline as if it’s a matter of debate. If not victim, then what?

Was there any psychological assessment done of batterer, partner and son to determine if this was the right protocol? Was that information available before the police called Jerome’s victim? Decades of data point to the difficulty women face in denying their abusers access to them, to the repetitive violence through which women stay before finally finding capacity to leave, and to women’s greater risk for their life when they really do break the pattern in which they are entrapped.

How could responsibility for that decision be placed on a woman who has not yet managed to powerfully refuse and permanently escape persistent abuse?

Here, the state should have honoured the protection order without question. You don’t send batterers back those they regularly beat up, and think that won’t add to a cycle of tolerance for relationships that leave bruises. The state should be the one to say no to violence with impunity, and that means refusing to allow abusers back into families without having to show real, sustained change. And, if family time is so cherished, safe spaces should be provided by state services for families to meet under supervision, over the course of counseling and not at home. It’s not in a child’s interest to see such trauma and torture overlooked by any of those concerned.

Do you remember being a boy or girl child and how much your heart trembled by hurts no one wanted to talk about, or wanted to excuse or pretend were over the next day? Do you remember what is like to carry such emotional confusion without resolution, and to be caught in your parents’ dysfunction, powerless to do anything to make it go away? Amidst these unresolved tensions, is such a family and home really safe?

Today, before Christmas, harms like this weigh on my heart. I wish true peace and love to all. May the New Year support and sustain us in the right start.

Post 217.

Post 216.

Photo credit: Nadia Huggins

For last Sunday’s #POStoParis march, I suggested Ziya’s sign should say ‘Stop Climate Change’. After all, the march from Nelson Mandela Park and around the Savannah was in solidarity with hundreds of thousands gathered across almost 180 countries to convince world governments, particularly China, the US and India, to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. These are considered to be at the heart of global warming’s effects: bleaching and death of coral reefs, melting of Arctic icebergs, intensifying of both storms and droughts, and increases in asthma and other illnesses.

Zi went for something with effective keywords, but incomplete sentence structure: ‘Consequences of pollution for Trinidad and Tobago’. The propagandist in me blinked at her ambiguous messaging. The grammarian in me decided to let it go, she’s five. The mother in me noted that her teachers’ efforts to give lessons about consequences, usually in relation to keeping quiet or one’s desk clean, had traveled across her brain to map onto pollution, and indeed its consequences.

Negotiations are currently happening in Paris at what is officially called the 21st Conference of Parties (COP 21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Simply put, widespread hope is that whatever role carbon, methane and man-made pollutants are playing in harming our earth will be reduced, with an eye to the delicate balance sustaining health and life on our planet.

Wherever you fall in the climate change debate – that it is man-made and happening, that it isn’t man-made and nothing definitive is happening – these are important moments for creating a public open to rethinking our approach to plastics and recycling, industrial emissions and waste, and protection of key areas for conservation.

Sunday’s march followed one organized last year by IAMovement, a new group led by visionary young people. Their nascent efforts follow a long tradition of environmentally conscious organizing in Trinidad and Tobago, usually by small groups of committed individuals making a larger difference than expected, whether in relation to reforestation of the Northern Range or protection of the Nariva Swamp. Larger than last year, this time only about four hundred people came together to show such ecological consciousness remains alive.

There were many children, but visibly missing were those from Trinidad and Tobago’s vulnerable classes, from Sea Lots and Beetham Gardens. Also missing were fishing communities from Caroni and Mayaro, as well as unions like the OWTU who haven’t yet asserted power, as workers, to reduce the ecological costs of their industries. So, one of the challenges for this still-small public is to continue to grow nationally.

Those that are poorest remain the worst affected by climate change, such as when food prices rise because of drought. Governments most take on these issues when masses march, for decisions are rarely made because they are right but because they matter to voters. The quality of our air, rivers, seas and ecosystems is perhaps our most truly unifying issue, for generations of children could suffer, despite schooling, neighbourhood, jobs or colour, because we were too busy feting or fighting to focus on our duty to future citizens.

Toward a Paris agreement, Trinidad and Tobago has developed a Carbon Reduction Strategy for power generation, transportation and industrial sectors. The strategy is meant to be consistent with a National Climate Change Policy. Its goal is to reduce emissions from these sectors by 15%, and transportation emissions by 30%, by 2030.

This is an underwhelming step in the right direction, based more on our ranking number 62 in the world if classified by national greenhouse gas emissions than the other, inconvenient truth that we are the second highest producer of emissions per person. Transport contributes less than ten percent of such pollution. So, how will we actually decouple emissions from economic growth in a petro-state?

Turns out, Zi’s keyword was dead on. What will be the consequences of the COP21 not reaching consensus on reduction of carbon emissions, alternatives to fossil fuels and protecting forests? Are there consequences for a government which fails to fulfill our own carbon reduction strategy? And, in the end, who will face the consequences of man-made climate shifts? See what is missing from Zi’s sentence. Then, see what answer fits.