When being Jamaican is Useless


In Jamaica the man is a person who does not take chat or is so masculine that violence is the immediate response to any violation. But is that definition useful any longer?

Jamaica's Youth
The unnamed youth raped a girl. I refuse to use his name as he shares a first name with my nephew and that scares me; as well as, based on my own experience he can bare many names. The situation is obviously much more complex and much more complicated than the scary see a girl for the first time grab a girl throw her in the back of a car and rape her that many people imagine rape to be. The dynamics here are clear that there are nuances and his response to her was to use his penis as discipline. 

I have been sitting and looking at the fact that the unnamed youth is sick, and the girl has been made even more ill than she was before as have we for having been exposed to the video and to his post. We are all sick. Even in medicine treating the symptoms do not alleviate the illness, it sedates the symptoms. How do we help our crisis? Do we let it play out? How do we help to ease our trauma? How do we unite the broken fragments of the vase?  

The male female relationship is not at all harmonious. It cannot be, not by the way we are teaching our boys to handle women and not by the way we are teaching or women to handle our men. And not with our history of patriarchy and the way women are seen. He is a rapist. A rapist that doesn't think that he raped her. To him his only wrong was the second level of his discipline which was shaming her and posting it on Facebook. The sex was his right. And besides it had to hurt because she dissed him.

For him this cannot be rape although he strategical talked so nice to her last night, and ignored her no and stops because she returned to his house, simply because she violated him first, and in this culture violation begets violation. And so this was not rape. This was discipline not rape, this was a lesson she needed to learn.


Now in response to this violation Jamaicans have responded he should be murdered, raped, beaten, burnt and shamed because violation begets violation. The video must be re-posted because he must be found. How different are we than him?

There is a theory that says that "trauma creates a speechless fright that divides and destroys identity". When that idea is juxtaposed with the idea that what is within is without a basic Buddhist/ spiritual ideology, then trauma could not have entered the equation through the experience of the victim only. The young girl is not the only site of trauma. Therefore our response to the young man cannot be to empty more trauma unto him, because we have experienced trauma as well. It cannot be that. Although emotionally, there is a feeling that after that beating you would have purged the world of such an attitude or a presentation of such evil and therefore there will be peace. 

The tears I cry today are not only because of a young man raping a girl in a cruel and despicable heart breaking gut wrenching manner, but because his posts and those that follow subsequently has revealed more about my country and my people. This beautiful venom towards the raper boy could be and has been the violence that extends to towards any-one who does not agree with us, any-one who violates us, anyone who does not follow the logical order of what it means to be Jamaican (man or woman). To us it is a simple order. Do this or don't do that or you will be beaten. It is for me the underlying principle that leads to the group of people chasing the boys at UTECH or UWI because they violated “the thing”, over 70 people dead in Tivoli Gardens under the guise of searching for a Don, Mario Dean refused bail and beaten to death because he disrespected a female officer. The issue of violation of disrespect that is embedded so deeply in our culture.

The psychological and emotional short comings of a human who doesn't become an adult, just a boy/girl with rules to follow and feelings to handle, are not being developed in a culture that is much more nuanced than we admit in our upbringing. The simple “hey boy if she say no then leave her” rhetoric that even Vybz Kartel regurgitates is not working. Beating that into him cannot be a solution to the problem, either through shame or drumming it into his ear or the physical blows. It seems now the Jamaican definition of a man is again no longer useful.

The unnamed boy is in crisis. He hasn’t even begun to see the possibility of taking responsibility for his action. The unnamed Jamaican is in crisis.

Are there really infinite potential in this chaos after the unnamed people are arrested and the victim is offered therapy? Or would it really be better if he died, and we forgot? And what of the boys who are getting their lessons in the same way? 









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