Diary of a mothering worker. October 27, 2021.

Post 439.

“If this continues without any control, we will all pay the price for the destruction.”

– Luisa Laita of the Aishara Toon Village, quoted in the South Rupununi District Council’s 2018 report on Wapichan environmental monitoring. 

THE REPORT highlights how extractive industries violate rights to life, health and a healthy environment, food and water, cultural identity, freedom from forced displacement, equality and non-discrimination, and community consent, information and redress.

What are extractive industries? Goldmines in Guyana, oil and gas extraction in TT, bauxite mining in Jamaica and planned copper and mineral mining in Haiti are but some examples.

These industries are worsening the global climate crisis and threaten natural resources for food, water, fishing, farming, and both traditional and climate-resilient livelihoods.

As the Wapishan point out, such violation of human rights and the right of nature also causes community-level distress, trauma and spiritual pain. Indeed, courts are increasingly recognising the rights of rivers and forests as living ecosystems.

The Caribbean’s voice on these issues was heard for the first time at yesterday’s historic Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) hearing on the Impact of Extractive Industries on Human Rights and Climate Change in the Caribbean.

The hearing was proposed by Jamaican activist and women’s- and human-rights lawyer Malene Alleyne and environmental filmmaker Esther Figueroa, to resist rising fossil-fuel extraction and mining activities across the Caribbean. Such human-rights strategies are gaining momentum globally and regionally.

Two constitutional cases were filed against mining projects in Jamaica. There’s a landmark case challenging fossil fuel plans in Guyana. In The Bahamas, environmental organisations have challenged approval for oil drilling.

There are also wide challenges to the Environmental Impact Assessment process, such as in Trinidad and Tobago, for lack of public participation in decision-making, lack of access to information and failure to take social and environmental costs into account.

People once thought environmental degradation and climate change were not bread-and-butter issues. Now we know they are connected to food prices, drought, hurricanes and flooding, and forced displacement. Usually the poorest are the ones hardest hit. These actions are therefore in defence of an equal right to life and a future for us all.

Alleyne and Figueroa’s request to the IACHR describes “the destruction of biological diversity; pollution and the contamination of crucial ecosystems; the erosion of food and water security; and the devastation of rural livelihoods and traditional ways of being.

“The impact on Indigenous, Afro-descendent and rural communities is near apocalyptic given their dependency on the natural environment for physical and cultural survival. In Guyana, for example, gold mining operations are destroying forest cover and causing extreme mercury pollution in rivers traditionally used by Indigenous Peoples for food and drinking water.”

For Guyana’s Indigenous Peoples, there is also state failure to recognise customary lands and their boundaries.

“In Jamaica, the near 70-year-old bauxite-alumina industry has wiped out entire rural communities; destroyed prime agricultural lands; and contaminated rivers, causing fish kills that dislocate the livelihood of fisher folk.”

A 2019 World Bank study on Marine Pollution in the Caribbean concluded that in the Eastern Caribbean, TT contributes the largest industrial-pollutants load to the marine environment.

The annual cancer risk from consuming fish from the Gulf of Paria is almost six times higher than international standards. According to Fishermen and Friends of the Sea, to date, those responsible for the 377 recorded oil spills between 2016 and 2019 have never been held liable.

In Haiti, Kolektif Jistis Min and the Global Justice Clinic published a 2014 report documenting issues of forced displacement in predominantly subsistence-farming communities in northern Haiti where mining companies hold permits.

The hearing’s objectives were to show the impact of extraction on economic, social, cultural and environmental rights and its threat to Caribbean ecosystems, emphasise the dangers of non-participatory decision-making by Caribbean states, and advance a necessary vision for “a new earth-centred, rights-based approach to development in the Caribbean in Harmony with Nature.”

As well, the hearing intended to highlight outdated laws, weaknesses in monitoring and enforcement, corporate flouting of regulations, obstacles to information and failures to provide sufficient redress to affected people, who lose their livelihoods, homes, health, crops and access to drinkable water.

As one Jamaican in Figueroa’s film about Cockpit Country put it, “I see it as not only an ethical but a theological responsibility to preserve and protect the environment.” To return to Luisa and yesterday’s hearing, if we don’t support all available strategies to resist extraction, we can all expect to pay the price.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 22, 2021.

Post 435.

IN A BASEMENT classroom in New College, University of Toronto (U of T), Prof Arnold Itwaru changed our lives in a way that only a teacher can. It was 1994, and he looked like Karl Marx, already aged with a grey bush of hair haloing his face and head. 

He would hold Caribbean students enthralled. I’d race back to my dorm, impatient to tell friends everything he said. In this way, he influenced even those he never taught. 

I’d mimic his grand gestures, his hand spiralling in the air like he was conducting the crescendo of an orchestra, rising to his toes, with passionate fervour. It wasn’t a caricature, it was awe that a smallish Indo-Guyanese man could blow my mind open, leaving me questioning everything. Without him, I wouldn’t be the educator that I am today. 

Caribbean Studies was in its inception years at U of T, growing for those hungry for insights from and about what we thought of as home. Prof Itwaru would walk in, without pretence, and unpack imperialism, empire, language, media, literature, and disciplinary knowledge itself. 

He could be argumentative, but he was also deeply invested in the power of education, teaching to transgress, and decolonising minds. He wanted us to think hard about what it means and requires to be free. Through him, I read Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, Franz Fanon, Earl Lovelace, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and many more by 19 years old. 

It set my path. How could it not? He made us learn to watch our words, not to speak of mastering a subject for its normalising of master-slave relations and unequal power. He taught us that Star Trek was a fantasy of empire. One friend briefly stopped eating with a knife and fork. I refused to wear an academic gown, otherwise required at my college, founded in 1851, threatening action if I had to carry such a symbol of white, elitist knowledge on my post-colonial shoulders. 

Wearing one now for UWI graduations, I tell his spirit not to worry, is a mas I play with all the irony and resistance we understand so well. 

He was insistent that jackets and ties were the colonisers’ uniform. Thus, I did not own a single jacket until two decades later, when Prof Paula Morgan, fully understanding, gently suggested I would need one black jacket as head of department. I told my students about mimicry as a tool for subversion in the master’s house. 

One jacketed dean would comment that I should dress more formally. I’d feel pity for this man who never sat in Prof Itwaru’s class, just as I’d wonder at our politicians in Parliament, empowering an independent nation, dressed in capitalists’ clothes. 

So many examples, I laugh looking back. People now champion their decoloniality, but 25 years ago, we were taking that idea as far as 19-year-olds could, entirely because of Arnold Itwaru.

He taught me only one class, in Semester 1, from September-December. We had to submit an essay and I very earnestly went to his office to tell him that I could not write the paper because I had no nation-language to express myself innocent of empire, for the modern Caribbean is so thoroughly colonial, it seemed we only have the master’s tools. Arnold Itwaru nodded back earnestly. Like I had arrived at a shore where he had been waiting. I remember my agonised undergraduate heart singing. 

For an entire semester, and for a second one when I wasn’t even in his classes, I went to his office nearly weekly, consuming books that were beyond any syllabus and talking with my friends in smoky dorm rooms about existence and resistance. My mother had to withstand me calling up one afternoon to ask if she wanted me to get a degree or an education. 

Finally, in May, Prof Itwaru said to hand in something. It wasn’t an essay; there were sentences, fragments, poetry. That night, I dreamt he gave me a D. He gave me an A. My college gave me an award for my student contribution. I graduated, determined to return home. I entered rooms in a jacket, like a midnight robber. 

Twenty-five years later, who I am inside owes an uncountable debt to this unique, headstrong, radically-intellectual, Indian Caribbean man. I am saddened at his passing, that I did not thank him enough or before. He was a gift to students. 

Professor Arnold Itwaru, travel well, knowing that your restlessness for Caribbean freedom lives in us, on and on.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. June 30, 2021.

Post 425.

THERE’S AN emerging legal definition of ecocide. This means that ecocide, or the large-scale destruction of nature, is being made an international crime, like crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Which of us hasn’t been watching our hurtle towards biodiversity destruction and climate disaster without thinking someone, somewhere needs to get those who have made such decisions out of office, and away from power. Frankly, they should be put into prison. I’m not joking, and neither is the Stop Ecocide Foundation.

Led by the men who dominate both corporations and governments, we have stolen a livable planet from children, filled oceans and rivers with plastic, and burned fossils as if predicted heatwaves and hurricanes were a hoax. We have seen the doubt created about science, but putting the environment at the heart of international law is both decisive and clear. The time isn’t now, it’s long past, but this translation of demands for accountability into hard penalties is reason to strengthen organising and hope.

The draft law defines ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.” Enshrining ecocide in international law would enable rich and powerful individuals, such as heads of corporations and governments, to be put on trial at the International Criminal Court or in any ratifying jurisdiction for this crime of recklessness.

Those with responsibility for deforestation of the Amazon or oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, could be prosecuted by the court. Major organisations, such as the World Bank, would not want to invest in or give loans for plans which are potentially criminal. Government decision-makers who oversaw environmental abuses, like President Jair Bolsonaro, could finally face the justice sought by Indigenous people of Brazil.

This change in norms, and its challenge to profit with impunity, will trickle down to transform everything we do, forcing us to think about how our actions impact the species around us, and hold each other accountable. The major problem with this legislative move is that the biggest polluters, the US, China and India, are not signatories to the treaty, and other countries such as Russia have withdrawn.

Still, there is a war against the next seven generations, and one we must also fight to protect those species at peril. The World Wildlife Foundation’s 2020 report showed that population sizes of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have dropped by 68 per cent on average globally, and as much as 94 per cent for Latin America. It’s not just that species have a right to live, it’s that their demise signals shifts that determine ours. Every weapon counts.

Everywhere in our region, and around the world, people are recognising that ecocide is as abhorrent as genocide, and that the two are deeply intwined, for our destruction of our climate and our ecosystems will ultimately cause loss of millions of lives.

This is not just a theory. We’ve seen devastating impacts increase overnight in the severity of hurricanes, and we will see it in the impacts of floods, droughts and rising sea levels. We are a region set to be climate migrants, with little indication that we can halt ourselves from reaching this end.

This growing action to use the courts can only bolster the power of far-sighted environmental movements all over our region, from those resisting mining in Jamaica to those who recently lodged the case against ExxonMobil in Guyana. People are continuing to fight back against both corporations and governments, and profit models that cost the commons more than could ever be recovered in wealth, even if that wealth was equitably shared, which it is not. These movements are clear that we need development, but also that such development cannot be at the cost of poisoned rivers or opportunities for sustainable livelihoods from forests and oceans. We can make opportunities for different kinds of jobs and, more importantly, a chance for our children.

Islands in the Pacific and, for example, the Maldives in the Indian Ocean are on board. At home in the region, we must press – because lives depend on it – for our own governments to neither waffle nor oppose.

Given the small-mindedness of our own fossil dependent development model in Trinidad and Tobago, that will take effort by many of us, but there’s another generation that sees the obsolescence of governments that, to this day, have no diversification plan. The time is coming for you, too, to go.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. January 6, 2021.

Post 405.

Now facing one of the driest economic seasons in 25 years, we need revenue generation, but also strategies to conserve both state finances and the sustainability of our communities. Covid19 led to quick decision-making, in relation to virtual courts, that could save $80 million. It also led to timely and merciful release of prisoners. We can choose the right strategies. As always, it is a question of political will.

Prison reform is one of those strategies, and there are decades of good recommendations to implement. Incarceration is costly to both governments and GDP, but it also costs families and communities of those who are never able to rehabilitate their lives, heal from childhood or family trauma that put them at risk of criminality in the first place, get drug treatment, safely escape the risks posed by gangs, or find legal decent employment.

As old slave colonies, Caribbean countries made early investments in prisons. Indeed, for enslaved and indentured workers, plantations were prisons. As a recent regional Caribbean report, “Survey of Individuals Deprived of their Liberty: Caribbean 2016-2019” (IDB 2020), outlines, it is therefore not surprising that, today, “six of the 15 countries with the highest incarceration rates worldwide are Caribbean islands.”

This includes The Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Suriname, and TT. Yet, incarceration has not made us safe. The Bahamas, Guyana, Jamaica, and TT “all have homicide rates more than three times the global average.”

Notoriously, our prisons also have high numbers (between 23 per cent and 50 per cent) of non-convicted people who may be first-time offenders or committed for non-violent or petty drug offences. If you have ever known anyone on remand, there are no social programmes, goods which must be bought at the prison are expensive for families, violent and non-violent offenders may be housed together, and court delays mock the right to justice on time.

In fact, prisons are hardly part of producing greater justice at all. The majority of those imprisoned are poor men with unemployment rates higher than the general population. They have been failed by unhealthy but dominant masculine ideals, by schools which they leave with lower rates of literacy and fewer livelihood skills, and by nations that accept class and race inequalities, and their harms, as the status quo. It is no coincidence that jails are full of poor people rotating in and out of hell.

Disturbingly, family problems – from domestic violence to a need to look for work during adolescence, abandonment or separation of families or being expelled from home – were key issues that prisoners had in common. As the IDB report emphasised, “Inmates who grew up in deprived settings – characterised by family violence, drug and alcohol abuse by parents or caregivers, incarceration of family members, early separation from their household, and criminal gangs in the neighbourhood – were more likely to commit a crime and showed higher levels of recidivism.”

It is so serious that “41 per cent of inmates surveyed in the six Caribbean countries were recidivists” and “40 per cent of prisoners that recidivated were imprisoned within a year of their release. In Guyana, Barbados, Suriname, and The Bahamas, roughly a quarter lost their freedom again in less than six months.”

This is a direct outcome of insufficient prison rehabilitation and reintegration programmes, pre- and post-release support, incentives for employers, and programmes that keep prisoners connected to families. Most incarcerated people have children, and children with incarcerated family are at higher risk themselves. In four countries, Barbados, Jamaica, The Bahamas, and TT, such cyclical incarceration began with juvenile detention. If we can protect adolescents from risk of criminality, and even adolescent ownership of firearms, and adopt non-carceral solutions, we can stop the cycle.

This requires investment in prevention in at-risk communities, which is also less costly and more humane than the social damage, and police suppression, of crime and violence. It also requires that we recognise how the violence and overcrowding among inmates create further conditions for violence, as men adopt hyper-masculine identities to survive, ally with gangs for protection and then are indebted upon release, and return to their families with anger, mental ill-health, and experiences of violation.

We must ask ourselves whether we value punishment, like the plantation whip, so much that we will continue an approach that increases incarceration and crime, or whether we will do whatever it takes to make our small societies safer, more just, more peaceful and more loving at this difficult time. Read the report. It’s clear what we ought to do.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. March 10, 2020.

Post 365.

Here as in Guyana, we live with myriad injustices, but continue to assert a sense of expectation that state institutions – such as the Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC) or the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) – will protect us from the likelihood of fraudulent politics which undermine democratic agreement and inclusion.

It is to our credit that, against all odds, we remain invested in rule of law and are provoked into anger at its blatant violation. When that anger turns to violence, however, much more than democracy is threatened.

In their Letter to the Editor, Karen de Souza, Josephine Whitehead and Danuta Radzik, representing Guyanese NGOs Red Thread, Help and Shelter, and Child Link, wrote,

“We are alarmed at the acts of intimidation, the threats, and verbal attacks including sexual threats to women and girls, the physical violence, the reports of property invasion by groups, attacks on police officers and schoolchildren and ethnicity-based attacks being reported in several communities. Recent reports of the loss of life of one young person points to escalating violence which must cease immediately. We condemn and call on all Guyanese to condemn and refrain from all racial and ethnic slurs and actions, to respect the rule of law and keep the peace. We call on all political parties to abstain from provocative statements, ensure that their supporters do not violate the fundamental rights of any citizen and keep all protest action free from any kind of violence or intimidation. We call on the police and security forces to protect the rights of all Guyanese and carry out their duties without bias in accordance with the law of Guyana.”

Invested in each other as one Caribbean family, we are also aware that the precedent set by one signals a risk to us all. In recognition of this, the Caribbean women’s movement and its allies, from at least seven countries, issued a statement echoing the words of these and other Guyanese women. The statement reads:

“We, Caribbean advocates for social justice and gender equality, join in solidarity with the people of Guyana in calling for compliance with the rule of law and specifically with the election procedure in Guyana. A damaged electoral process will negatively affect the likelihood of social cohesion in a country scarred by ethnic and political polarisation. The people of Guyana and indeed the Caribbean deserve better from political actors.

They deserve political leadership with integrity and that honours the collective will of the people. We particularly share our deep concern for the safety and security of all Guyanese and call for peace and calm in all communities. Not one more life should be lost.

We support the call of CARICOM for the lawful completion of the electoral process in Guyana by ensuring the tabulation of results in all regions using the Statements of Polls and the offer of the Chair of CARICOM, Prime Minister Mia Mottley, to personally assist with dialogue, if needed, once there is acceptance of the results of the lawfully declared elections.

All parties should do their part in ensuring an engagement that is transparent, accountable and which builds trust. Political parties should dialogue with civil society and build consensus on the way ahead. We call on the political leaders to issue a common call for peace, respect and community-mindedness, showing their concern for all people and their safety and well-being.”

No electoral win can be a victory when safety, harmony and dignity, however inessential these seem, immediately become threatened too.

As long-time Guyanese activist  Vanda Radzik wrote last week, “What we see unfolding before our eyes is the poison that emanates, in a heightened way, from the recurring contest between two forces – hell-bent on “winning” power – at the expense of our nation. Being drawn into foolish political, largely race-based camps, with hatred and fear stitched into the fabric – for winner and loser, alike – is a recipe for disaster. It has to be stopped in its tracks now.”

Watching how quickly abuse of power and process devolved into public confrontation in Guyana and noting that, in our Local Government election, there were complaints about insults and abuse from supporters of the major parties on Nomination day, we should not only wet our roof but avoid irresponsibly starting fires in the backyard of our own racial and political tensions.

Trinidad and Tobago’s major parties should therefore re-affirm commitment to the Code of Ethical Political Conduct for the upcoming general election. Meanwhile, we look on at Guyana’s election imbroglio and hope for peaceful resolution.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. June 27, 2018.

Post 290.

Once, Hindus were not allowed to legally marry under Hindu rites because marriage was only legitimate if it was Christian. Spiritual Baptists were not allowed to practice their religion because it was associated with African community and spiritual customs. Muslims could not commemorate Hosay, for the gathering of masses with sticks and drums so threatened authorities that the Muharram massacre of 1884 occurred.

Vagrancy laws were notoriously used to confine indentured Indian workers to sugar plantations, preventing and punishing escape and rebellion. Once, and perhaps still, you could get harassed and locked up just for being Rasta.

These are all struggles which show how violent and oppressive the law and those who enforce it can be, particularly against the poor and those deemed to not fit in or to be out of place. These are all examples of individuals and communities trying to live as they choose, committing no harm to others and being criminalised anyway. Finally, these are all histories of those among us who successfully sought freedom and protection from injustice.

We would be talking history if this wasn’t the story of individuals and groups still dreaming of an equal place in the region, still dreaming of what you may take for granted; the chance to live without threat, discrimination and harm.

Tomorrow, the Caribbean Court of Justice is considering these very dreams of equal belonging. In McEwen et al v The Attorney General of Guyana, a case is being made to strike down as unconstitutional an 1893 law against cross-dressing for an ‘improper purpose’ in public.

In 2009, seven persons were arrested for being ‘males’ wearing ‘female attire’ in a public place for ‘improper purpose’. These were trans or gender non-conforming persons who, not-unusually, pleaded guilty given the small fine and absence of lawyers. They were fined under this 19th century vagrancy law.

‘Females’ appearing in a public place, for a supposedly ‘improper purpose’, in ‘male attire’ can be similarly convicted, which seems excessive, bizarre and outmoded. What is an “improper purpose”? What is “male attire”? It’s not even clear in the law.

This same legislation criminalises practicising witchcraft. In TT, similar summary offences legislation could get you sentenced to imprisonment for a month for pretending to tell fortunes or imprisonment for three months for bathing in the Maraval River. And, God forbid you are found singing or dancing with rogues and vagabonds, a constable has a right to forcibly carry away all gongs, tambours and chac-chacs.

Such loitering or vagrancy laws have also been used against LBGTI persons who are often arrested without being charged or told of the charges or advised of their rights, who have experienced humiliation and violence during detention, and who are convicted of minor offenses for being on the street or dressing how they choose. In other words, simply for being who they are.

It’s like when police rough up fellas on a block who have committed no crime, but are treated as criminals because of their skin colour, hairstyle or clothes, and who could get hard slap for resisting such profiling. Such advantageousness happens to those whose race, class and gender get them cast as illegitimate, threatening, and subordinate.

Curiously, when four of those convicted in 2009 challenged the constitutionality of the 1893 offence, the Acting Chief Justice in 2013 ruled that cross-dressing in Guyana was perfectly legal, just not for an improper purpose. Yet, in 2016 and 2017, after the CJ’s judgment, various trans women were prevented from attending magistrate’s court dressed in ‘female attire’, as if going to court amounts to an ‘improper purpose’.

At the CCJ, McEwan et al will be arguing that that the law is too vague to be valid or applied without enabling dangerous and arbitrary application by police, that their rights to protection of the law, freedom of expression and non-discrimination have been infringed, and that the law therefore violates constitutional and human rights as positively upheld in Guyana. It also exacts conformity as the price of equality, and reproduces both impunity and social exclusion.

Once, colonial powers decided who we should be and punished us for wanting to decide for ourselves. The CCJ judgment will set a precedent for a region rising up against the savings clauses which keep such colonial laws in place and penalise marginalised communities.

There is now none but ourselves to free each other, whether from poverty, stereotyping or an inhumane justice system. Imagine shaking off colonisers’ boots and walking in the footsteps of those who sought inclusion.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. November 17, 2017.

Post 260.

You haven’t encountered gangster until you’ve met the Indo-Caribbean grannies of Toronto’s Jane and Finch area. Originally from locations such as Berbice, Wakenaam and Beterverwagting in Guyana, these wizened ladies helped to fill the audience at Thursday’s University of Toronto launch of the collection, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, which I co-edited with Guyanese scholar Lisa Outar.

In their sweaters and wool hats, their sharp gaze was nothing less than inquisitive and intimidating. They looked like is two good whack for any backchat, for belonging to the wrong kind of mafia, for dotishly playing gunman like you have nothing better to do, or for not knowing how to conduct yourself like a fearless and good-speaking beti when your family sacrifice to send you to school.

Especially when you edit a collection with a lofty word like ‘thought’ in the title, you have to be able to convince nanis and ajis, with more common sense and experience than you, why that book matters. That’s what we set out to do in an event less like an academic book launch, and more like a chutney fete. Not because there was rum and ‘Coolie Bai’, though there was roti and coolie boys, but because the gathering was community-centered, multiethnic, multigenerational, and joyfully inclusive of multiple expressions of sexualities.

There was the girl, just seven, dancing in garara and gold after women musicians played sitar and tabla, and while a young woman painted, because art and film give us language when words fail. There were bright, next generation students, confident, political and completing PhD theses. Now playing the role of mentors, were mothers with professional careers, able to be there because grandmothers were at home with our children. There were Indian women writers whose ideas provided a home, since the 1980s, for nurturing our thinking about Caribbean theory. In this choka, were feminist badjohns with their solidarities and their laughter, who teach with love across racial divides. Then, in the centre, were these matriarchs, representing their community organization and its challenges to immigrant experiences of violence and poverty.

So, why should the collection matter? It’s a jahahin bundle, crossing oceans with many inheritances knotted in its pages. Tucked within are the legacies of Indian women in the Caribbean, and all the ways that they and indentureship have transformed us all in the region. It’s a remembering of foremothers who wanted more and pursued better for themselves and those who came after. It’s a warm enfolding of douglas and other mixes who are just as Indian too. There are cuttings of everything from carnival freedoms to matikor celebrations, from trance spiritualities to poetry. Finally, it’s a package tied with the gold threads of feminist work to live without violence, inequality or hunger, and to live with respect for matriarchal leadership and power.

And, were we able to talk good and show that education might not alienate us from our cultural histories as much as empower us to remake their relevance anew? ‘Is how much fuh this book?’, shouted one granny, at question time. And another, later, “I getting one too?”

So, in this collection’s travels from Guyana to Trinidad to New York, this week’s encounter is with the elder women of Jane and Finch’s concrete suburbs, our toughest crowd yet, who we managed to convince that another book mattered.

They left with copies because they came up and asked after, knowing it was deserved, and we were too honoured and terrified to say no. Lisa and I just handed over books, forget their cost or sale. Despite our degrees, when facing steely-eyed, no-nonsense grannies, who could wield a bilna like a gangster, we default to betis who know you just keep quiet and do what you are told. Our jahajin bundle was an inheritance from them, and our book might be the rare kind in which they recognize themselves as knowledge-bearers, feeling warm pride amidst Toronto’s cold.

 

 

 

 

Diary of a mothering worker. May 10, 2017.

Post 247.

Seen from the air, Guyana’s forested beauty is epic. The plane’s shadow buzzed over the treetops like a gnat, insignificant in afternoon sun and in comparison to such wondrously vast tree cover.

In between, bare red rock or white sand pockmarked the surface where old forest had been razed. Mining, quarrying or logging is making some rich in the present while leaving children in the future without this inheritance, for all your generation has to give is this one precious planet.

Such wounds seem small from the plane window, but are matters of life and death, of community traditions and contemporary rights, for Indigenous women continuing to resist in Guyana even as I write.

The taxi driver couldn’t figure out where all Guyana’s money went, for a country with gold, diamonds and timber should be the wealthiest in the Caribbean. ‘It don’t make sense’, he told me.

Not in Trinidad either where our resources made some rich while leaving the place poor: hospitals dirty, public transportation insufficient, prisons over-crowded, landfills unregulated, families violent and schools failing a third of the youth.

Given deals struck with Exxon and other companies, will Guyana’s oil just pass through the country like a dose of salts? If only others could learn the Trinidad lesson that wealth makes you shallow, wasteful, corrupt and consumerist as a nation; changes values so that the main ethic becomes private gain; and erodes attention and commitment to public responsibility, public utilities and public space.

As we drove, I tried to reconcile a Guyana I knew as a teenager when my mother joined Caricom.  At the same time back then, I moved to Barbados to start secondary school at Queen’s College, leaving Trinidad to become, first, a nowherian and, later, a regionalist.

It’s as a regionalist I listened to Christopher Ram, after a television interview in a neglected studio building, talk about his time in the Grenada Revolution and the hurt he still carries at its death.

It’s hard to imagine a generation from across the Caribbean traveled to Grenada to contribute to one island state’s aspiration to get independence right. It’s difficult to identify how much that aspiration was crushed and never quite returned. From Jamaica to Guyana, you can meet people who know what the fire of hope feels like and who carry the failures of that political experiment like the loss of a loved one, in their mind’s eye when they look into distance.

Arriving in Georgetown, there were areas I didn’t recognize. ‘We get modern’, said the driver, ‘we almost like foreign’.  There are better-lit highways, burgeoning suburbs, big cars, money laundering and ostentatious religious buildings. At best, the poor people, who remain the majority, struggling with VAT and joblessness, can hope to one day inherit the earth, but not tomorrow, next year or the next decade.

Such a dream deferred isn’t good enough. So, it’s important to cast our lot with those who remain indefatigable, rather than defeated, often women, often feminists.

One of them is Vanda Radzik, who drew the University of Guyana and the Women and Gender Equality Commission together to launch the collection, ‘Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought’, which I edited with Lisa Outar, a Guyanese born feminist scholar.

I first met Vanda thirty years ago, as I became aware of the anti-violence, ecological sustainability and economic empowerment work of the Guyanese women’s movement. Today, I’m simply and inadequately, like that small plane over such vast terrain, carrying these women’s legacy, trying to always remember and learn from their dream for a different future.

Similarly, the book collection’s premise is that Indo-Caribbean feminist thought requires us to look back as part of gathering our resources for the work ahead. The ways we imagine alternatives to all forms of oppression are richer when they draw on multi-ethnic, woman-centred, solidarity-based legacies of indentureship. This is the real wealth that arrival bequeathed.

The book is being launched in Guyana this week, and on Tuesday at 6pm, in UWI’s Law Faculty Auditorium, in Trinidad. All are welcome, for all these complex and tenuous threads, from Guyana to Trinidad to Grenada to elsewhere, some of which you may be gently holding over all these decades, are woven together there.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 8, 2016.

Post 226.

As we approach end-of-year local government elections, and political parties’ women’s arms are mobilized in campaigns, rallies, and constituency offices, it’s a good time for such political bodies to flex some muscle and establish their expectations.

The domestication of political party women’s arms, sometimes called auxiliaries or leagues, is well documented across the region. Women’s arms are primarily drawn on in the lead-up to elections, then usually side-lined after, rather than being at the decision-making table in terms of appointments to Cabinet, boards and other state posts, and in terms of policy positions to be pursued. They are warm bodies needed on the streets to validate parties’ and candidates’ moral legitimacy, community relevance, and vote-enticing sensitivities to women.

It’s a powerful time, particularly for working class women, who know they are playing a crucial and visible role, and who bring that valuable nexus of cooking, cleaning-up, and campaigning skills and contacts when the battle for votes hits the streets. While usually male financiers stand on the side-lines making and breaking deals, I guarantee that campaign-, rally- or constituency-level momentum is not possible without largely lower and middle-income women’s and housewives’ labour, for they perform the majority of organizing work behind the scenes.

Such capacity and power shouldn’t just amount to ‘helpfulness’, but instead accrue analytically sound, badass might. Women’s arms are expected to stay within the boundaries of acceptable issues and rights for women, avoiding, for example, advocacy regarding the right to love of lesbian young women and the basic decency of safe terminations for others seeking abortions, despite their illegality.

The definition of womanhood they enact is linked to wifehood, motherhood and grand-motherhood, rather than to women as an independent constituency of sexual, economic and political beings, who, by now, should substantively occupy at least half of all political decision-making positions in the country.

They symbolize the moral centers of their party, selflessly concerned about and responsible for maintaining respect for the status quo, social order and public good, even when a gender policy is desperately needed to guide state programmes and spending regardless of whether some religious leaders realise that or not.

Within them, women learn when to stay quiet and when to speak, when to know their place, how to appropriately assert power, and how to not annoy men and elite women in the party with their non-negotiable challenges to class hierarchy, sexism, sexual harassment, homophobia and corruption, both in the party and in the society. While men present the risk of political and sexual indiscipline, the women’s arm is steadfast and loyal, like a good wife.

In this context, imagine the almighty commotion in political parties’ yard if women’s arms were seen as too fearless, too feminist and too fierce in their collective defense of women’s interests, rather than doing it nicely, despite women being currently documented as clustered in low-wage and insecure work, facing higher levels of unemployment and earning on average half of men’s wages in the economy. All good reasons for righteous rage.

Yet, there is potential for women’s arms and the women leaders they bring together to exercise power differently, in ways that are decisively committed to transforming unfair gender relations, not because party elites approve, but because its real women’s lives we are representing for here, and we are not giving party structures a choice about whether to respond. We are giving them targets, measurables, deadlines and penalties. Women’s arms should be that autonomous, unapologetic force within a political party that calls those with the most power to account for their advancement of gender equality internally, nationally and regionally.

If this occurred, there would be 50% of women amongst senior ranks, not just women clustering at the bottom. Party school would consist of training, mentoring and strategizing on how to empower women to act as transformational leaders and build male allies who defend solidarity rather than supremacy. Especially when we know a major obstacle is fear of men losing control over their women, and generally having less collective power in a society where women gain access to positions and roles which were previously the exclusive domain of men (Vassell 2013).

Given that fear, which adds to a climate where it can be risky to support girls and women instead of elite men, it wouldn’t be up to individual women to secure such progress, but up to the commitments embedded in the structures and processes of the party. No one should then resort to the easy explanation that ‘women are their own worst enemies’. Rather, the most influential party elites, particularly the men, would be assigned to ensure such progress, and come to account at the next women’s arm meeting.

What such a women’s arm would be is a strong, women-led, social movement, which successfully holds the state and political-economic elites accountable for our economic conditions, our gendered realities, the failures documented in Auditor-General’s reports, and the continued vast, avoidable destruction of our island ecology. For, the role of a women’s arm is to represent for women, particularly working class women, understanding their everyday struggles, needs, rights and dreams, using the power of the party. And, that’s what they should assess. The extent to which they secure sexual harassment and gender policies, economic and political empowerment, and gender parity within the party and nationally, without fear of that being seen as too radical, or, worse, imposition of a special interest concern.

There is inspiration for such an approach to women’s arms from across our region’s history. Thus, party school should teach about women in the Haitian, Cuban and Grenadian revolutions, in public resistances to slavery and indentureship, in riots over bread and water, in struggles to change laws regarding marriage, violence and labour, and in challenges to male dominance in organizational leadership.

It would highlight that Afro-Caribbean women have long been mass movement leaders and Indian women were never obedient, quiet and docile, but as far back as indentureship, were individually and collectively seeking economic and sexual autonomy. It would tell you about women such Audrey Jeffers, Daisy Crick and Christina Lewis, even Gene Miles, who blew the whistle on party corruption, reminding us today that we still have no ‘whistleblower’ legislation.

It should share the strategies women used to make abortion legal in Barbados since 1983 and in Guyana since 1995. It would highlight the story of the Jamaican PNP Women’s Movement which, in 1977, evolved from being an ‘auxiliary’ to the PNP, to an ‘independent’ grouping within the Party with progressive leadership that addressed a wide range of issues facing women. They recognised “the importance of organising women as an independent lobby or pressure group capable of transforming itself into an agency for fundamental change” (Beverly Manley). It would seek examples from Costa Rica and Panama, where women have pushed their parties to develop, implement and monitor a gender strategy that is integrated into party development frameworks.

Holding the party accountable for achievement of political, economic and sexual equality, equity and empowerment is the rightful agenda of a women’s arm. The substance of such an agenda would impress and attract many women voters, strengthening the negotiating power of a women’s arm when needed.

Make sure that muscle on the campaign trail results in such power after, with Local Government councilors understanding that they should give back for what they gained. “We do not wish to be regarded as rebellious” said Bahamian Dame Doris Louise Johnson, “but we would point out to you that to cling sullenly or timidly to ancient, outmoded ways of government is not in the best interests of our country”.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 1, 2015

Post 205.

Last Friday, the University of Guyana finally launched its own Institute for Women, Gender and Development Studies.

Working at a gender institute myself, I could anticipate its limitations and opportunities. There is only so much small staff with activist passions, but with priorities of teaching and research, can do in a society with big gender problems. However, such an irreplaceable space also provides the kinds of consciousness-raising, mentorship, and commitment to women’s rights and progressive men’s movements that our societies surely need.

Having once joined at the beginning of a graduate programme that changed my own life, it was a reflective moment to be in Guyana, almost twenty years older, and hoping that as many students as possible will have the empowering experience I did.

I felt the same respect and awe for the work ahead as I got to know Renuka Beharie, coordinator of the fledgling Institute for Women, Gender and Development Studies at the Anton de Kom University in Suriname. She did not even have a full time secretary, but, after many hours and much sacrifice, I could only imagine how many would think of her the way I do about the pioneers in Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and beyond who similarly built the gender studies institutes that generations of us will inherit.

Sometimes people wonder about the point of spending money to travel to events that seem to achieve little or signal only an uphill battle, but I was struck by the sense of regionalism sparked each time we meet up and connect to our work across borders and seas.

I had heard Hazel Brown talk many times about wanting the government to establish a Commission for Women and Gender Equality, and found a 2010 pre-election newspaper clipping where the PM promised she would. Yet, it felt so much more real when I met the commissioners in Guyana, who continued to hope to bring women together across party lines, who were pushing the government to approve a national gender policy, and who spoke openly about the fact that the new government’s appointment of only 30% of women to state boards, with some boards having no women at all, wasn’t good enough.

On the flight there, I sat next to a young woman, twenty years younger than me, who was so passionate about her work with the Trinidad Youth Council, and who said all the right things about good organizing, that my heart lifted, and I self-consciously felt myself filling the shoes of those older activists who go to civic meetings and talk about how nice it is to see all the young people there.

Having been nurtured by a progessive youth movement, and seeing how many from there continue to exercise leadership however we can, I was certain of the passionate possibilities for a young woman interested in social change, the guidance available, and the power of her oncoming experiences.

As we talked, it turned out she had never heard of this person, Hazel Brown, something I didn’t think was possible for any activist, youth or not, in T and T. Here was a wake up call for women’s and youth movements, a reminder we must make an extra effort to reintroduce every generation, especially of young women, especially of activists, to the makers of our too-quickly forgotten history. I wondered if you asked fifth form students around the country to name one women’s rights activist, who they would name, and if no one, why.  What would that say about the value of such women’s work in our country?

I invited the young woman to an evening gathering of NGOs, hoping that being in the room with women like Vanda Radzik, Jocelyne Dow, Karen de Souza and other Guyanese stalwarts in the struggle for Caribbean women would in turn spark her connection to Caribbean feminism’s regionality.

That one day in Guyana rested on my mind throughout my first class at UWI this week. How did you end up here I asked? Students wanted to understand feminisms, their rights, themselves and power relations in their families. Gender studies institutes were founded, and continue to be, to provide precisely the knowledge that each generation, discovering injustice, finds that they need.