Accounting for ourselves
As we approach the end of the year, we do the accounting of our lives. How many steps forward? How many backward? And no matter how many times we’ve done it, how stuck we are, and how many tops we are spinning in mud, we still do the accounting. How many young boys are dead? How many gangs? Number of illegal guns. Number of murdered women. Cost of a WASA leak over ten years. Price of bread? Cost of flooding? Hours spent in traffic? Hours spent with our heads in our hands.
This year I got to do the accounting of why we are stuck in the place we are, and why we stay and love this place anyway.
While I was in England the writer Monique Roffey asked me a question for an interview published in Granta magazine. It was a tricky question. It was a hard question. Thinking about the answer allowed me to do this year’s accounting.
Excerpt from Granta Magazine
“Monique Roffey: The outside world often reduces the Caribbean to a ‘paradise’ holiday destination. And yet child marriage was only outlawed in 2017; we are only just striking homophobic laws from the colonial statute books; Trinidad has 500 murders a year, and one in three women suffer domestic abuse. What would you say to anyone who wants to visit Trinidad?
“Ira Mathur: Yes, this is all correct. Taken out of context, imperialists may say we are unfit to govern ourselves. Yet all the problems you state are born of empire. Many of our issues come out of the traumas of slavery and indentureship. Families were broken up, and institutions of power were built on violence. Up to 60 years ago, non-Christians had no access to education. It wasn’t until the 1970 Black Power Revolution that social movements started to address fundamental issues like the skewered power structure, where the people with money were white and Christian and had access to education and steady employment
“The murder numbers are frightening. They occur in specific neighbourhoods between gangs fighting for the spoils from the transshipment of illegal drugs destined for Europe and the US. The drugs originate in South America and are shipped through Central America and the Caribbean. Young unemployed men are paid in guns and drugs in exchange for transshipping services, driven by demand from Europe and the US.
“We realise that to stop these murders, the demand needs to be stopped, either through policing operations within countries that receive drugs or legalising those drugs, which would eradicate the illegal trade. All countries along these transshipment routes– Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala, Honduras and our neighbouring Venezuela–have the same problem. So crime is not a daily experience of all people, although people in Trinidad tend to be cautious after dark, and like all countries, there have been incidences of horrific crimes.
“The new colonialism is financial exploitation. Small island states are still affected by decisions made in capitals out of our control. Whether it’s this financial exploitation, internalised trauma of racial and physical abuse, destroyed family structures, or the cumulative mental trauma of all these things–people internalise this. Where Trinidad falls down is the accessibility of guns and the endlessly slow justice system that leaves many perpetrators unchecked.
“Remember, we are a young country. This year we will be 60. We are still recovering. Until Independence, there was no system of formal secondary education for the majority of the population; that only came in the seventies with the oil money and with Dr Eric Williams’ declaration that the future of our nation was in the book bags of our children. It’s a process.
Racism was baked into our psyche and culture. Any psychiatrist will tell you individuals who suffer trauma individualise and perpetuate it. Like individuals, societies do the same, but we continue to heal, process, celebrate and survive. In terms of visiting Trinidad, it’s a phenomenon that many people, from diplomats to personal trainers, never want to leave.
“I think the overwhelming impression of Trinidad is its multicultural, endlessly unravelling historical complexity and the astonishing loveliness of its landscape. I notice that it rouses extreme emotion, not dissimilar to the reaction of many who visit India. You either hate or love Trinidad, but you are never indifferent and always leave changed.”
End of excerpt.
I’ve always thought indifference was the closest state to death. One week before Christmas I wish for us all (even when we spin top in mud) that we remain animated, that we continue to marvel at ourselves, at our islands, and hold a steady state of hope.