Diary of a mothering worker. December 14, 2022.

Post 485.

FOUR DAYS ago, on December 11, armed Iranian security forces violently arrested Tehran University student, Mahdieh Suleimani, taking her into custody without charges. She is 22 years old. She is the same age as Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody on September 16, after being arrested by “morality police” for improperly covering her hair.

Following Mahsa’s death, protests exploded across Iran, in many ways led by teenagers, young women and students who have shaken Iranian authorities with their generation’s fearlessness. Women and girls refused to wear their hijabs, burned them in fires and cut their hair.

Angry secondary schoolgirls mobbed officials, hounding them out of their school compound. One principal, Zahra Lori, died from “security pressures” after refusing to hand over the names and footage of students holding a sit-in in their school. She had been summoned many times and dismissed from her position. She defended her students with her life.

Young women have protested at a cost to their bodies and lives. In October, Nika Shakarami, 17, was killed at a street protest where women were burning their hijabs. Amrita Abbasi, just 21 years old, was kidnapped by Iran’s security forces and tortured, and brutally physically and sexually assaulted. She was taken to hospital, but kidnapped again by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps before her parents arrived. She hasn’t been seen since October 18.

Across the country, since September, many young women have also died from blows to the head from security forces during protests. As we do for victims of gender-based violence, it is important to say their names: 16-year-old Sarina Esmailzadeh, 17-year-old Arnika Qaem Maghami, 21-year-old Negin Abdolmaleki, 17-year-old Sadaf Movahhedi, 16-year-old Sarina Saedi, 22-year-old Marzieh Doshman Ziari, 16-year-old Maedeh (Mahak) Hashemi, 15-year-old Asra Panahi, 21-year-old Pegah Ghavasieh and 22-yer-old Maria Ghavasieh, and more.

Fourteen-year-old Parmis Hamnava tore Khomeini’s picture from her textbook and was beaten by state security forces in her class and in front of her classmates. She died from internal bleeding, and she’s not the only one. It is estimated that dozens of children have been killed.

Not only young women have been blinded, beaten, shot at, arrested or killed, but the ages of these young women, some just teenagers, and the numbers of children also detained, demands our solidarity as we reach the end of 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence and Human Rights Day on December 10. The two are intertwined here.

These Iranian girls are facing such violence because they are rebelling against patriarchal state power, and a religious social and political order, administered through gendered forms of repression, which is why Mahsa Amini’s death felt so personal and political.

In solidarity with the protests, Iranian university students tore down walls that created gender-segregated dining halls, refused to attend classes and are demanding the unconditional release of all arrested students, cancellation of arrest warrants for the released students, the lifting of recent academic suspensions and the withdrawal of the security forces from campuses.

Although public anger has been brewing in Iran for a long time, and the current resistance is nationwide, this is a generation that has clearly had enough of inequality, terror and injustice. They build on the legacy of an earlier generation of women who took to the streets in 1979 to march against Ayatollah Khomeini’s decree making veiling of women mandatory.

It reminds us that women’s anger at injustice is a flame they hand down to their daughters to tend until they too combust in fire. If not by one generation then by another, we have always had to fight and win feminist battles this way.

This is a complex, historically multifaceted movement supported by women and men of all ages, and women have been resisting restriction and denial of their rights for decades, as do women everywhere.

However, part of the momentous radicalism of the current Iranian feminist revolt for regime change is how much it is powered by the young. Such a blaze is brilliant, terrifying and hopeful to see.

Schoolgirls have been hanging signs that read “woman, life, freedom” in classrooms. These words, “zen, zendegi, azadi” originally emerged from Kurdish women’s movements in Turkey, Syria and Iran. Originally “jin, jiyan, azadi” in Kurdish, they became the rallying cry these last months.

Young women are fighting to end their tears behind bars. As they bloom more powerful from their wounds, as they build another world without fear for students and for their future, as they change rusted minds, may their revolutionary wildfire rise and rise.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 7, 2022.

Post 484.

ENDING VIOLENCE against women and girls is the aim of the annual campaign 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, from November 25-December 10.

Today, I focus on how violence drives girls’ adolescent unions and reproduces violence in girls’ lives.

Adolescent unions are common, with at least one in three adolescents in Trinidad (28.4 per cent) becoming sexually active between 13 and 17 years old (38.8 per cent in Tobago). Of this group, more than half first had sexual intercourse before the age of 14.

As reported by the 2017 Global School-based Student Health Survey, there was a much higher incidence of sex among boys than girls.

However, 25-36 per cent of women whose first sexual experience occurred before age 15 (12 per cent of total respondents in the 2018 Women’s Health Survey) were more likely to report having been forced into this act than women whose age of first sexual experience was 15 years or older. Early sexual initiation for girls is too often violent and non-consensual.

Besides normal adolescent sexual curiosity and desire, family violence is one of the drivers of such early unions. Growing up in a home with violence between parents, against mothers or against children leads girls to seek escape and feelings of safety in others, or to consider later violence in their own lives to be normal. Addressing the vulnerabilities associated with adolescent sexuality requires ending domestic violence, which causes intergenerational dysfunction and trauma.

Girls also search to have unmet needs for love, care, encouragement and attention met through early unions. Their unmet needs may be economic and include food, shelter, school fees, transport costs, clothes and phone top-up.

Low-income girls also develop complex coping strategies as they grow in insecure neighbourhoods dominated by men in gangs. Girls recognise that they are attractive to older men because they seem easier to control. Such power imbalance is eroticised, becoming part of what men seek.

This makes poor girls especially vulnerable to predatory adult men whose dominance and income can seem reassuring, though these relationships can become controlling, threatening and violent.

Marriage and union data suggest that one in ten girls enter unions before 18 years old. Among women who reported at least one experience of physical violence in their lifetime, it was prevalent among 47 per cent of those who were married or lived with a partner before 18, versus 28 per cent of those in a union at 19 years old or older.

Current partner violence – meaning happening within 12 months of the 2017 WHS data collection – was one in ten for those in a union at 18 or younger, versus one in 20 for those whose first union was 19 or older. Early unions correlate with higher levels of intimate-partner violence in girls’ lives. This is why we must teach girls (and boys) about gender-based violence through health and family life education in schools.

Programmes that focus on abstinence and virginity in sexual health education miss the fact that experiencing child sexual abuse also leads girls to early unions. In TT, one in five women reports experiencing sexual abuse before the age of 18. Further, one in four women who were first married or cohabiting with a male partner by the age of 18 or younger also experienced sexual abuse before she was 18. Child sexual abuse is a driver of and correlates with adolescent unions.

Early unions are themselves considered a form of gender-based violence because they increase risks of partner violence, unplanned pregnancy, school dropout, burdensome care responsibilities, economic dependence and poverty. Whether visiting, transactional or cohabitational, they can (and do) harmfully affect girls’ human rights, equality, development, well-being and independence.

Given the data and established risks, it’s also a form of state violence (rather than morality) to deny sexual and reproductive health-rights information, resources and services to adolescents without parental consent.

The family, which should be a primary protective institution, was widely and consistently flagged as a driver of early unions, and uncomfortable with protective approaches that include comprehensive sexuality education. Transforming social norms that reproduce fear, shame and denial about the realities of violence in adolescent girls’ lives is therefore key. Significant work is needed with men and boys to reduce male sexual entitlement, and predation and rape of girls. Men in families have roles to play too.

Adolescent unions are both driven by violence and increased risk of violence against girls. Making the connection between adolescent sexuality and violence against girls and women is necessary.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. November 30, 2022

Post 483.

ONCE, CRISES were considered exceptional.

Hurricane season came each year, but severe hurricanes were not frequent. Flooding was expected in some areas, but not to such an unprecedented extent as experienced this year, and as predicted to continue. Indeed, climate-related disasters overall have doubled globally.

The covid19 pandemic was an exceptional crisis, from which the shadow pandemics of unemployment, hunger and family violence nonetheless continue to reverberate. It is forecasted that a combination of changing temperatures, melting ice and forest loss will double the chance of such pandemics in our lifetimes.

We have disaster management plans, but are overwhelmed by scale and severity, unable to plan for loss of crops, unsure about where roads will crumble next, and incapable of compensating people for loss of their belongings and homes. We are also not yet prioritising protecting hillsides and mangroves, and it’s certain that there was poor maintenance of river courses and drains, but that’s not only what is happening here.

We have to act as if crisis now defines our epoch, as if it is no longer exceptional. Then our policies and approaches will plan for this new reality, and be aware of how it exacerbates social and economic inequalities. It requires a major shift in how we think about everything we are about to face.

Currently, neither gender inequalities nor climate-related crises, nor their intersections, are taken into account in Vision 2030 or the Government’s Roadmap to Recovery post-pandemic report, and current policies to reduce risk and manage disaster are more than ten years old.

They read as if prepared for exceptional moments of crisis, not when states of exception – impassable roads, submerged houses, slipped hillsides, school closures, loss of workplace productivity and increased food prices from climate-related disaster – become a frequent norm.

What is called the Anthropocene, or the epoch when man has caused potentially irreversible impacts on the planet, is no longer waiting until 2030 or 2050. All our planning has to start with the fact that it is here.

One bread-and-butter area where there needs to be better disaster planning is in terms of childcare. On Monday schools were closed because of expected rain and flooding, but public servants were expected to work so that the state machinery could function. Similarly, shop clerks may have been expected to show up for work on the Eastern Main Road in Tunapuna or High Street, San Fernando. Nurses had their shifts at hospitals. Banks, where the majority of staff are women, were open.

As feminists asked many times during the pandemic, who is then expected to look after children? There are implicit and gendered assumptions about family and its safety, and the availability of care in the State’s approach, which relies on an at-home component of disaster response. Not only are these responsibilities unequally borne by women, children’s vulnerability to abuse and neglect can be exacerbated by state policies that do not take this into account.

We can expect further school closures as rainy seasons potentially become more severe. What are the gendered assumptions, and assessment of risk to children, underlying disaster response policy? What is our understanding of who provides family care, what kinds of care, and at what cost in a crisis? Let’s remember that there were nearly 800 reports of child sexual abuse between January 1 and September 31, 2021, during the pandemic, because homes are not safe spaces for many children.

Disasters also have mental health effects. Just as the impact of the pandemic on children was ignored when they were returned to schools – leading to unprecedented scenes of fights – how is mental health being factored in for a generation growing up in a climate crisis that no previous generation knew?

In its 2014 Technical Note, the IDB observed that there is an “absence of mechanisms to exchange lessons learned across communities on successful community-level disaster resilience experiences.” This is definitely something that can happen in preparation for the future because communities know what is needed and what works, they know the vulnerabilities among the aged and disabled, and they know what they have been calling for that the State failed to follow-through.

Disaster risk reduction and response require this: identifying the different needs of women and girls, men and boys, and people of diverse gender identities, and putting redress of the underlying causes of vulnerability at the centre of disaster risk reduction strategies. Once, we could have treated disasters as exceptional. Now, that’s no longer what we can do.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. November 22, 2022

Post 482.

WITH murders on the rise, we need to focus on efforts at peace-building that have been effective across the region.

Gut reaction is for heavier policing and securitisation. Yet more manpower, firepower and armed patrols, and better surveillance and detection toward convictions, can only go so far.

Any real strategy has to both protect the population and solve the problem, which also requires addressing root causes.

I’ve opened with the word peace-building rather than crime-fighting because those efforts that address risk of violence are as important as those that respond to violent outcomes.

Interventions must be different and specific at the points of risk, outbreak, escalation, recurrence and continuation of violent crime. The reasons why violence occurs may be different from why it escalates, and the goal is to move backward from increasing killings to fewer moments of outbreak and less risk.

This is the only way to create a pathway from violence back to peace.

Understanding this level of detail as necessary protects the population from believing quick-fix announcements that score political points, but gloss over details, evidence and impact.

The conditions for youth risk created by traumas at home from family violence are often connected to socio-economic precarity and poor school outcomes, and escalated through access to weapons, gangs and legal and illegal sources of income.

Let’s be clear that we are discussing male youth, and that any assessment of causes needs also to challenge dominant ideals of manhood that value violence as a source of identity and status.

Opportunities for positive self-expression and community cohesion, and a sense of having some power in the world, are well-known responses.

There are also the basics: skills training and certification; apprenticeship and internship opportunities which provide a stipend while providing experience; and programmes that involve the whole family, targeting parents as well as providing resources for food, transport and schooling.

Often, this is the work of community organisations, operating on a shoestring and mostly women’s labour. They are the very fabric of peace-building, not efforts at its edges.

For example, the Cashew Gardens Community Council has described the success of reaching children through an environmental programme which gives them “a feel for what is going on in the planet and a push to work harder for a better world,” as well as through a homework centre, which “has improved their behaviour and communication and so the disputes are not there.”

This peace-building pathway treats opportunity for leadership and a sense of community as key.

Keeping children in school through homework centres has other benefits. As the National Commission on Crime Prevention pointed out for St Vincent and the Grenadines, getting children back into schools means that criminals don’t have children to hide guns in their backpacks or to tell them when police are coming or doing searches. Gangs, they found, make more mistakes when children are all in school and can’t be used.

A risk-aware pathway also provides safe spaces and safe adult relationships for youth.

As a National Council of Women worker in St Vincent and the Grenadines put it, “Children come here on a morning…for a hug and for me to tell them that I love them. A young man once told me in 18 years, they never told him that they love him.”

A member of the Caribbean Ambassadors and the Cadets in St Vincent and the Grenadines similarly reported, “Sometimes it is showing them love and appreciation…so our home becomes an extended family.”

Community Police in Belize echoed this, saying, “Gangs bring in the children by making them feel their needs are being taken care of.”

However dysfunctional and mixed with toxicity, subordination, discipline and fear, gangs are where boys “feel a lot of love.”

An official in Probation and Child Protection spoke about how the TTPS addresses this: “You cannot look at the crime the child is committing, you have to look at the risk factors they have faced. They are children,” and staff have to be trained to show them respect, and “not deal with fire with fire.”

Children also need school-based trauma reduction to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from community violence, seeing dead bodies, witnessing family killed, and hearing gunshots at night.

In Jamaica, Fight for Peace trains people in communities in psychological first aid to supplement gaps in social services provision.

It sounds naïve, but more love is what at-risk boys need. I feel people’s terror, but want us to remember it’s always and ultimately about building peace.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. November 9, 2022.

Post 481.

WHILE WE weather rain and wonder at the daily threat of flooding, the COP27 meeting is taking place in Egypt and feels very far away. 

COP means Conference of the Parties and refers to countries that signed up to the 1992 UN climate agreement. At that time, 154 nations signed the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, which committed governments to stop catastrophic human impact on our atmosphere. This is the 27th meeting about global warming, which was long predicted. 

That was 30 years ago. Lobbied by the fossil fuel industry, governments dragged their feet, and today the effects can be felt everywhere, whether in drought, flooding or heat waves.

We know the oil companies calculatedly crushed the science and social movements around climate change, through lies, denial and campaigns to spread doubt. Politicians were bribed, all in the name of greed. 

As Exxon enters Guyana like a conquistador, there’s a global movement to prosecute Big Oil for crimes against humanity because they knew and they didn’t care. They raked in billions, their CEOs became millionaires, and now it’s time they pay. Governments, that are in bed with these companies, won’t agree, but this is a movement of ordinary people around the world that’s long overdue. 

What you should know is that the poorest, most discriminated, most disadvantaged and youngest will suffer most from the impacts being discussed at COP27, so this is a bread-and-butter issue. Gone are the days when concern about the environment could be stereotyped as a middle-class concern. 

The big issues are getting the big polluters – the US, India, Brazil, Indonesia and China, for example – to agree to reduce emissions and use of coal, and stop deforestation by 2030. 

However, this year, major debate is on what is being called “loss and damage finance.” This is money that comes from Europe and the US, for example, to help countries recover from floods, hurricanes and other effects of climate change, not just to prepare for it. 

Think of every household in TT that has experienced unprecedented flooding, and what that costs families and the State. Multiply it by Pakistan, St Lucia, Belize, Philippines, and more. Think of how the GDP (gross domestic product or the market value of an economy) of Grenada, Dominica, Barbuda and The Bahamas were devastated overnight by hurricanes. This is money to help recovery, and it’s needed everywhere. Who has felt it, knows. 

Fertile land becomes submerged in hours, crops are lost, mosquitoes breed, cholera threatens and food becomes more expensive, leading to greater hunger. Note this well as we wring our hands about crime. Gangs thrive in climate chaos when there’s greater unemployment, hunger, insecurity and desperation. 

Alternatively, we are facing drought in the dry season, which also raises the price of garden produce. In East Africa it has become catastrophic, with children experiencing starvation by the millions. Once, these problems felt like they occurred in other places, not here. Now, we know that it’s just a matter of time, extent and impact. 

This global crisis is forcing us to recognise that we are one people on one planet, unable to see what’s happening far away as disconnected from the muddy water rising over streets or the money that can’t stretch to buy what it used to. 

It is also making us realise how political parties that divide us are doing direct harm, for they perpetrate distraction when we need to be united in our fight against their stalling and their lip service. 

The next government should be elected on how it is going to carry the country through the climate crisis at a time when oil and gas dependence is under attack, when food insecurity sits at our dinner table, and when men in suits are finally acknowledging that climate chaos could be irreversible. 

Mia Mottley, our Caribbean woman at large, is showing us that we don’t have to be little on the world stage. She’s facing down Big Oil and the World Bank, debt payments and loan interest rates. She’s footing it onto every platform demanding access to finance and technology to make immediate change. 

If, by contrast, you are heading toward describing this as the end of times which only prayer can help, stop. There’s prayer, but as long as there is life on the planet, and not just ours, more important is our collective power to demand moral responsibility and political action. COP27 reminds that we can and must accelerate necessary momentum.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. October 5, 2022.

Post 480.

“THERE ARE no millionaires where we come from,” sings local band Freetown Collecive, describing those who have grown up as the have-nots “in the middle of corrupted people.”

The hook names a raw truth about this place, which is its inequality, its contempt and its rampant complicity. We should hear these lyrics amidst the song’s beautiful melody, because there are many millionaires, many of them enriched by bloated state contracts, some of them in the House of Parliament, driving million-dollar cars, making decisions for the rest of us.

Whatever wage increase they accept, I want to express my solidarity with public servants and unionised workers, teachers and nurses, who have demanded more. The increase will not match inflation, making them poorer today than in 2013. There will be no millionaires among them.

These are two women-dominated areas of labour, meaning we can expect women working full-time jobs, possibly as main or single earners in their families, to be poorer than they were ten years ago.

These are also two of the most valuable jobs in our society. The first because they care for our children, who are our most precious resource, and the second because they care for us and our loved ones when aged and ill. That they earn less and have fewer benefits than politicians must feel as if they are on the front line in a class war.

The disconnect between political elites and the masses resounds, echoing off headlines, and it cannot be drowned out by shouting about how people are ungrateful. Those who have held power, which is primarily but not only the PNM, are responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, stolen, unaccounted for, misspent and frittered away. Colm Imbert himself spent $200,000 on confetti to open a bypass, such was his self-congratulatory spending at our expense, and so it has gone for decades.

We are told to tighten our belts today because of “unresponsibility,” poor decision-making, failed promises and quid pro quo. Not a soul who has read the newspapers in the last 60 years can disagree. This is why people are angry.

Were things different, citizens would understand the buffeting impact of the pandemic, the war over Ukraine and a global downturn. They would understand banding our belly, together, if it felt as if there were less division and less disconnect, more respect and more shared sacrifice.

People rightly felt insult was added to injury when told we use too much gas because we get up late on mornings and choose to drive at expensive times. This from politicians who can cut through traffic with a privilege that ordinary commuters do not enjoy. This from decision-makers who rule against flexible working arrangements, as if nothing was learned from two years of the pandemic. Imagine millionaire lawyers-turned-MPs talking of coal pots. Is there a single bike lane in Trinidad? It seems too farcical to be real.

What country are our governors living in? Is it the same one where food prices have soared? Is it the same one with hours of traffic to get to and from Port of Spain? Is it the one where unemployment and labour precarity are increasing with no end in sight?

I hear ministers talking about how much is spent on welfare, scholarships, transportation, training programmes and medicine. I agree. There’s massive social protection that helps many, but these are not gifts. In a wealthy economy, where we have no excuse for poverty, these are social rights, ensuring the democratisation of what we have gained.

With all that we have earned as a mere million-plus people, we should all have been millionaires, not grateful for a few hundred dollars of disability grant or a wage increase that dissolves at the cash register. Where has all the money gone?

It’s as if those ruling are living in a world where ordinary people are considered pampered, spoilt, wasteful, greedy and lazy; always dreaming a lot of dream. This from those who have taken no pay cuts in solidarity with workers. From those who can seek healthcare abroad. From those parking up in their Porsches and Benz. From those who can afford cheese.

Freetown Collective continues, “Bills due and meh pocket still feeble. Bread woulda make but the flour full of weevil. Hungry to kill, belly thin like a needle.”

These are lyrics of daily worry and rising crises. They speak to a reality that is making people poorer. They explain widespread public sentiment. Millionaires should not respond with such contempt.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 28, 2022.

Post 479.

HAZEL BROWN was a gift to the Caribbean and the world. She was a world-changer.

She was everything she was known to be: fierce, sharp, caring, enthusiastic, tireless, visionary, difficult, single-minded, loving, creative, curious, dramatic, insightful, empowering, cantankerous, generous, strategic, joyful, inspiring, determined, deeply political and absolutely one of a kind.

For nearly 30 years, I learned and grew from just listening and watching her, from being in the spaces she created and nurtured, and from being encouraged, instructed and mentored time and again. To know her was to learn from her.

She was always full of plans and ideas. She had an encyclopaedic insider knowledge of Caribbean feminist history because she had been thinking, watching, listening and influencing for 50 years, and was a pioneer of her generation from TT, allied with similar Caribbean women and men from across the region.

There is hardly an issue about which she wasn’t concerned or didn’t speak out at one time or another. Her analysis and advocacy was intersectional before the term became popular, because she was aghast at injustice of any kind.

She was unapologetically for the rights and empowerment of women and girls, domestic workers, low-income consumers, breast-feeding mothers, women in local government, housewives, and so many more.

She was a pan-Africanist even as she consistently gathered against the alienating tide of racial stereotyping and division.

As a young Indian woman who grew up in her shadow, she treated me as one of her daughters, with affection and patience, knowing I’d do whatever she told me to do, and I think feeling a sense of accomplishment when it was very clear I was trying to walk in her footsteps, something I think she felt about all the young people she influenced. We had laughs, connection, serious discussions and times when I hope I made her proud.

Hazel would often talk about how she understood the power of the State, and local government, from sitting in Port of Spain City Council meetings when she was ten years old. She had a scholarship from the mayor’s office to attend school and he would have to sign her report card at the end of term. So she would sit listening until it was her turn for his attention, thus gaining her first understanding of politics.

In June, I called her so she could tell Zi this wonderful story. Seventy years separated them, and Hazel was sharing a memory from when she was Ziya’s age, which I hoped would both inspire and educate. What a gift to have heard that story from Hazel herself, I told Zi, not yet knowing how true those words would be.

I came of age with her as an ever-present advocate, organiser, writer, protester, baby-doll masquerader, marcher, global leader and truly fearless Caribbean woman. With her goes a feminist era in which she lived and which she helped define. Today, the world isn’t the same. She was a gift we had for a time.

I know she knew how much I admired and appreciated her, and how much affection and respect I had for her. The journey was full of lessons and love.

I cannot imagine her resting, now that she is freed of her body. I can only see her shaking us up in the night so we wake with a fervour to get up in the morning and take our placards to the road. I can only imagine her appearing in spirit in the shimmering heat amidst her beloved baby dolls on a Carnival day. I can only picture her rattling the visitors’ gallery in the Parliament when politicians do foolishness.

I know I will sense her in the wind on International Women’s Day. I think I will hear her voice in my ear for decades, telling me what I should do, what we must do. I cannot imagine her, even gone from this life, without her boots on. She had a fighting spirit that I do not think would be ready to move on when there is still so much to be done.

I send her family, friends and sisters in struggle and diverse allies my sincerest condolences.

May we continue to fight in her name, with her spirit and with the sense of power she wanted us to know was ours. Then, I think, her indomitable spirit may agree to rest in peace.

Hazel Brown, I mourn and celebrate you. I thank you. You live on in us. We know there is still much work to do.

…………

Original Post September 22, 2022.

It’s taken me some time to find the words and I am not yet certain these are the right ones. Hazel Brown was a gift to the Caribbean and the world. She was a world changer.

She was everything she was known to be: fierce, sharp, caring, enthusiastic, tireless, visionary, difficult, single-minded, loving, creative, curious, dramatic, insightful, empowering, cantankerous, generous, strategic, joyful, inspiring, determined, deeply political, and absolutely one-of-a-kind.

For nearly thirty years, I learned and grew from just listening and watching her, from being in the spaces she created and nurtured, and from being encouraged and instructed and mentored time and again. To know her was to learn from her.

She was always full of plans and ideas. She had an encyclopaedic insider knowledge of Caribbean feminist history because she had been thinking, watching, listening and organising for fifty years, and was a pioneer of her generation from Trinidad and Tobago, allied with similar Caribbean women and men from around the region.

There is hardly an issue about which she wasn’t concerned or didn’t speak out at one time or another. Her analysis and advocacy was intersectional before the term became popular, because she was aghast at injustice of any kind. She was unapologetically for the rights and empowerment of women and girls, domestic workers, low-income consumers, breast-feeding mothers, women in local government, housewives, and so many more. She was a pan-Africanist even as she consistently organised against the alienating tide of racial stereotyping and division.

As a young Indian woman who grew up under her shadow, she treated me as one of her daughters, with affection and patience, knowing I’d do whatever she told me to do, and I think feeling a sense of accomplishment when it was very clear I was trying to walk in her footsteps, something I think she felt about all the young people she influenced. We had many laughs, many moments of connection, many serious discussions, and moments when I hope I made her proud.

Sending her family, friends, sisters in struggle and diverse allies my sincerest condolences. I came of age with her as an ever-present advocate, organiser, writer, protestor, baby-doll masquerader, marcher, global leader and truly fearless Caribbean woman. With her goes a feminist era in which she lived and which she helped define. Today, the world isn’t the same. She was a gift we had for a time.

I know she knew how much I admired and appreciated her, and how much affection and respect I had for her. The journey with her was full of lessons and love.

I cannot imagine her resting, now that she is freed of her body. I can only see her shaking us up in the night so we wake with a fervour to get up in the morning and take our placards to the road. I can only imagine her appearing in spirit in the shimmering heat amidst her beloved baby dolls on a Carnival day. I can only picture her rattling the visitors’ gallery in the Parliament when politicians doing foolishness. I know I will sense her in the wind on International Women’s Day. I think I will hear her voice in my ear for decades, telling me what I should do, what we must do. I cannot imagine her, even gone from this life, without her boots on. She had a fighting spirit that I do not think would be ready to move on when there is still so much to be done.

May we continue to fight in her name, with her spirit and with the sense of power she wanted us to know was ours. Then, I think, her indomitable spirit may agree to rest in peace. Hazel Brown, I mourn and celebrate you. I thank you. You live on in us. We know there is still much work to do.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 21, 2022.

Post 478.

FOR MORE than 20 years, I have been learning about sexual and reproductive health and rights information and services, and their value. 

They can help women and men to choose when and by how much they grow their families. They can protect children from child sexual abuse, unwanted and early sex, relationship violence and unplanned pregnancies. 

They are critical for reaching those who experience discrimination because of their class, ethnicity, disability, gender identity or sexual orientation, and cannot access healthcare that respects their rights and dignity.

What I’ve learned is that facts and data are key. 

There are decades of research that show the benefits of family planning. Across the region, there is also overwhelming data that health and family life education (HFLE) programmes and comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) (and the two are not the same), enable adolescents to understand their bodies and reproduction, delay sex and pregnancy, identify and disclose sexual abuse and sexual violence, and better negotiate contraception and sexual safety when they are ready to consent to love, sex and intimacy. 

These are also the only programmes that provide trusted adults who can provide answers to adolescents’ questions about their bodies, desires and fears, and correct myths they may hold about sex, power and relationships, when the majority cannot openly speak with their parents or may be in abusive families and turn instead to their peers and the internet. 

Speak to teachers about HFLE and hear their stories about how much such a national curriculum is needed, and the trauma, violence and unhealthy sexual experiences they are encountering among students every day. 

Thousands of children report child abuse every year and thousands more are in violent homes. The innocence of childhood is a myth for those most vulnerable. Today, we understand the value of teaching about “good touch” and “bad touch” in age-appropriate ways and from preschool. Similarly, it would be irresponsible of the State to not have such educational programmes in place for children and their peers. 

In every country in the Caribbean where they are actually asked, adolescents want these programmes and speak about how they would help them to better understand themselves, their peers, adults and their families, media messages, and the world around them. These are quite simply the facts. 

In contrast, as I’ve written about before, those who oppose comprehensive sexuality education appear continuously willing to misinform the public. 

The latest videos circulating feature Umar Abdullah boycotting the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)’s office. He and his supporter describe IPPF, whose mandate is to “ensure people are free to make choices about their sexuality and wellbeing, in a world without discrimination,” as trying to take the souls of children, promoting eugenics (think of the Nazis), legalising paedophilia, promoting socialism, turning children into sex objects, bowing to Satan, stopping boys from being boys and girls from being girls, and trying to trade in body parts from foetuses. Such insanity would be laughable if it were not so seriously believed.

All these accusations are completely untrue. They do not reflect Caribbean history or reality. They mislead about SRHR information and services that actually help protect people, particularly women and children. In these decades and in my own research, I have never encountered anything of which IPPF is being accused in TT. 

More disappointing, because until now I thought he could be relied on to be careful with truth, was another video circulating where Archbishop Jason Gordon accuses the UN of pushing Caricom to approve of children’s right to change their gender identity, forcing parents to lose their right to parent their child and to lose moral authority over their family. Gordon goes on to accuse CSE of stimulating and encouraging children to experiment sexually. 

Again, none of this is true. Gordon also seems to have no clue about why there are necessary efforts to provide access to age-appropriate information to protect adolescents today. 

Unlike the archbishop, I actually have a 12-year-old, and I want her to have access to information that she or her peers may need, and it’s absolutely essential that it be considered a rights- and youth-sensitive national approach to public health. 

If you want to know the approach that is guiding advocacy for CSE, start by reading the International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education: An Evidence-Informed Approach published by UNESCO in 2018.

Fear-mongering is not in children’s interest nor does it protect children’s rights.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 7, 2022.

Post 477.

NEARLY anyone writing a journal entry or documenting life in TT this week would record the beginning of the school term. It’s the first September since 2019 that children and adolescents are starting class in person. Tens of thousands, who survived widely unequitable and disparate experiences of the pandemic, entered their new school year. There was anxiety, but also anticipation and relief. 

Children are coming together from the most unequal conditions in decades, depending on whether they had internet and device access, whether there were conditions of unemployment, ill-health and violence in their homes or whether they even spent time with other children and playing outside. 

Though imperfect, schools can again be the great equaliser of opportunity as both working class and wealthy sit at desks in some of the same classrooms. 

Ziya started secondary school looking small, small in her slightly big school uniform bought, as parents do, to last the school year. I thought about the lessons I wanted her to learn as I watched her walk for the first time into her school, feeling excited and being brave. 

First, be kind. Second, be yourself. Third, try every opportunity. Fourth, don’t give up when it gets really hard. Five, have fun. With children, keep it simple. Too much talking and they stop paying attention. My mother felt compelled to give advice in Latin, calling to tell Zi to carpe diem. Essentially, seize each day. 

Adolescence, after all, is a journey of transitions and discovery, defined by building reciprocal peer relationships and tough but rewarding preparation for early adulthood. It can be a minefield for the shy and socially awkward, but also a time for laughter and exuberant peer culture.

At UWI St Augustine, all three years of undergraduate students newly converged on the campus. This is unprecedented. It’s fascinating to think of campus life as fresh to an entire student body now able to gather again, as so many young people should. As other Caribbean countries opened much earlier, from pre-school to graduate school, this is a TT-specific reality.

Childhood changed over this time. The pandemic increased digital mediation exponentially, increasing children’s connectivity over Roblox, Discord, Snapchat, Minecraft and other apps and platforms at earlier ages. There are hardly online and offline worlds for those under 20. They are living across both and each is creating the interactions and selves in the other. 

Parents of pre-teens and teenagers will be familiar with the new task of setting rules for their phones. Pre-pandemic, getting a phone in later adolescence was a privilege. Now, children as young as ten have their own phones and are in contact with each other through WhatsApp. 

Parents say it’s for safety, but it’s another doorway to the internet, with all of its dangers and risks. I could write a whole column on parents’ rules for phones, from the time at night when they must be put down to whether children can sleep with them in their rooms to how much parents monitor what their teen is saying and viewing. 

After two years on devices, children are afraid they won’t make friends or be part of peer groups if they can’t communicate digitally. More than ever before, they now have phones before they have the emotional maturity and capacity to responsibly manage how distracting and addictive they can be. It’s an historic moment for anthropologists examining post-pandemic, digitally-penetrated childhood and adolescence in small, modern societies.

It’s also important to record this moment, and the preparation parents put into it, as well as the emotions whole families experience, because we can get lost in understanding public life through headlines that focus on state and governance. 

Yet, the majority of people’s daily lives are consumed with the momentous trivialities of managing their families and homes, affording living costs, beating traffic and ushering children through education and extra-curricular activities. These don’t make headlines, but they matter most in our day-to-day. 

Additionally, CSEC and CAPE results were announced this week, with social media platforms alive with congratulations to both parents and students. As always, we must also think of those now left without a clear academic path.

No diarist would let this week pass without a focus on school: new beginnings, hard-earned successes, persistent inequalities, remedial and psychological challenges, teachers’ realities, and parenting conversations. 

A massive population, with their nervous and joyful hearts in their crisp school uniforms, finally walked away from us and into their new classrooms on a much-awaited, post-pandemic September morning.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. August 31, 2022.

Post 476.

HOPE SPRINGS eternal, but hopeless floods the nation. It’s a hard time to think about celebrating independence when it feels like we are becoming worse off than we were. We have frittered the dreams we held at independence. 

Is there anyone who feels hopeful about the years between now and our 75th anniversary? 

We produce brilliant athletes, creatives, professionals, inventors and activists, and committed and caring communities that surround them. They keep our sense of possibility alive, reminding us that we can be both small and great, and that our best selves set a world standard. 

However, we must also be honest. Beyond the symbols of nationalism that make us feel proud today, whether military parades, marching bands, congratulatory speeches or fireworks, what is our stake in making TT a place where people want to live tomorrow?

I think of celebration of our independence only partly as commemoration of the greatness of these past decades. I think of it also, and more importantly, as the baton we are handing on, from one generation to the next, and the inheritance we have protected over our years as custodians. 

I think of the nation as a garden that we tend for those also in our care and for those to whom we will one day give this living, breathing complex ecosystem. I think of commemorations as a grounding and a reasoning, when we ask ourselves what we are doing with this responsibility. 

I’m sceptical of pomp and ceremony, even as I recognise the effort that goes into it and its value. One mother, driving a taxi, told me that she insists her children, from ages eight to 24, line the streets of Port of Spain to watch the parade each year, to be awed by the impressive glint of sun off uniform buttons and the horns and symbols that vibrate her children’s chests, shaking loose a little tight-throated emotion. For her, it’s a chance to teach pride in their country. 

It’s understandable, for there are not many such moments or places that make visible and beautiful the idea of independent nationhood. I was glad for her that there are such displays, noting that they become moments of tying love for family with love for country, when both may otherwise be wearying and hard. 

I’m not that kind of nationalist. It’s not about lack of pride, it’s about concern at the way that nationhood gets mixed up with state power, and love for country becomes mixed up with loyalty to state authority. 

On an anniversary of independence, we mark transition from being a colony. We also mark decades of self-rule. We present how we see ourselves now. We breathe into a vision for who we want to be and what we still must achieve. 

We must also ask ourselves about exclusions, and what our independent status means to those without equal access to the freedoms and protections of the very citizenship we are celebrating, such as LGBTI communities. We must ask ourselves about inequities, and what independent status means to neglected rural communities where flooding results from near-abandonment by the very state being celebrated today. 

We must ask ourselves about fear at a time when citizens are in terror both in and outside their homes, because of failures and corruption that connect politics to ports, to police. Institutions are how a state touches the lives of its nation of people, and are how they most experience its rules and their rights. 

We string up flags, as a state does to mark its birth, but working institutions would bring more daily pride and reciprocity, making citizens less likely to undermine the bureaucracies that alienate them, making government much more of, by, with and for its people. 

Reasoning even further, isn’t it time we see the nation as more than its people, but also as its land and sea, its mangroves and coral reefs, its wildlife and its migratory species? Haven’t we moved beyond becoming modern “hell or high water” on obsolete terms, based on closed-door agreements with foreign capital? On our 60th anniversary, what do we consider worth most protecting for the next 60 years? 

Like slowly receding waters ready to rise again, the country is rippling with despair. We can celebrate our small greatness and our best examples of brilliance, and come together in pride, but we need hope to spring from the places of exclusion, inequality, alienation and threat, for the rewards of self-governance to spring eternal, precious and shared.