This 'MAN' Thing

21, Apr 1999
'It seemed as if what was being promoted in this new stage of struggle for greater control over our lives, for greater democracy, only a mere eight years after formal Independence was granted, was that the colonial, the "boy", had to become "man"

There suddenly came a time when no male person of T&T, whether youth or adult, responded positively any more to that much over-used term of endearment and acknowledgment "boy".

"So how yuh going, boy?" triggered from the person addressed an abrupt admonition or rebuke: "Not, boy MAN!"

There was now this emphatic homage being paid to everyone's sense of being "man". Language was actually being changed to express a new, deep desire, moreso a new need. Social transformation was indeed happening.

It is not possible to recall any such widespread belligerent demand for, and claim to, "manhood" prior to 1970 that watershed year in our history that signalled a new epoch of militant socio-political awakening in which African and Indian citizens of T&T were both to begin to embrace more potent images of self even if, in the case of the latter, it was triggered in response to the action by the former, whatever may have been the stimulus to the process, its validity was by no means diminished.

It seemed as if what was being promoted in this new stage of struggle for greater control over our lives, for greater democracy, only a mere eight years after formal Independence was granted, was that the colonial, the "boy", had to become "man".

Symbolically, the politics of the day had come to define "boy" as a sociological and psychological degenerate form of "man". At the same time, all this was being reinforced by the Rastafarian concept of "I and I" that, not surprisingly, became popular throughout the Caribbean.

The concept of "I and I" recognised the likeness of God in every man and therefore fitted perfectly the emphasis that was being placed on "man" as a specific stage in the attainment of strength through spiritual, cultural and political growth.

The new language was teasing at the ideal of a full social and cultural revolution, a total debunking of the whole system of relationships and arrangements that existed, and the outright rejection of all the Afro-Saxon and Indo-Saxon values that prevailed among those who ruled the society in the very image and likeness of the European masters they had displaced.

But if, according to the new language, "boy" was a bad word, a symbol of negative and corrupted growth, much like "Knee-Grow" in the USA, how was one then to address a 12-year-old male?

Simple: "small man" or "youth man". One suddenly began to hear such terminology all over the country.

The meaning of it all dawned on me and became part of my consciousness one day while walking through El Dorado, Tunapuna, alongside my then ten-year-old son, Dedan, who was riding his bicycle. This teenage girl flew past in her halter top and cycle shorts and shouted at him, "Small man, leave yuh father and come ride with me."

It takes an experience like that to make one suddenly become aware of what one had been hearing for quite some time without the power of its meaning registering.

And it is not that this "man thing" was not around from time immemorial. It merely took on new meaning and new dimensions as the politics of the time changed. In the late 1950s and 1960s, in communities such as San Juan and Tunapuna, men killed men for "putting them under".

To "put under" signified an attempt to make another feel less than a man. It was then all about a macho pride that seemed more important than material things in a measure of manhood.

All the badjohn titans of yesteryear with their exotic names would persistently put their lives on the line due to this uncompromising sense of manhood. "Who is me?"; "I is man" or "I name man".

Such questioning and the appropriate response were on numerous occasions the catalyst to many bloody feuds that came sometimes to pit entire communities against one another.

But the further development of the musical capacity of the steelbands around to which the badjohns gravitated the sponsorship of these bands by corporations and government; the involvement of college students whose numbers had been boosted by free education; the new responsibilities that came with all this; and the new possibilities of employment with the opening up of the economy forced a move away from such simplistic interpretations of manhood to more socio-political definitions that were to culminate in the social idealism of the 1970s.

The fact that power was not won by the people's movement meant that the programme of social transformation was halted.

So that today we have ended up with a hybrid situation, a mixture of what existed before 1970 with semblances of the underdeveloped ideals of the new necessity that came after 1970. The resulting confusion is horrific.

Women, who formed the bastion of the organisational thrust both in the struggle for political independence and in the 1970 movement, witnessed the teasing towards a new sense of manhood.

Powered by the dynamism of ideas of equality whose time had come, women launched their own demands and their own programmes for the assertion of new relationships.

Today, they have become the tragic victims of social violence perpetrated by husbands and lovers. All the basic relationships of society, now predicated on open violence, have therefore broken down.

Teachers require armed guards in order to teach, and A-level students are in jail on charges from robbery to narcotics to murder.

It means that all forms of authority are at sea, lacking validation and legitimacy.

What we shall make of this society eventually depends a lot on what we succeed in doing with the minds of the "small men".