SUNDAY 17 DECEMBER, 2017 –
UWI TODAY 100
TH
ISSUE
11
PROFESSORIAL LECTURE
Paula Morgan is a Professor of West Indian Literature and Culture at the UWI St. Augustine. Her inaugural professorial lecture, “Healing the hurts of my people slightly:
Discourse of societal violence and trauma,” was delivered on November 16, 2017. The full lecture can be found at
noise of unruly hooligans. There was police harassment
alongside confiscation of instruments, skirmishes and
violence against the players. According to Stephen Stuempfle
in
The SteelbandMovement: The Forging of a National Art in
Trinidad and Tobago
, even greater violence was generated
by inter-band rivalries. In the 1940s conflicts frequently
broke out over female supporters of the bandsmen – many
of whom were engaged in prostitution – when they were
seen consorting with men of rival steelbands. Competition
for the attention and earnings of these women, which has
been imprinted on the national psyche by Sparrow’s Classic
“Jean and Dinah” was a major source of inter-band rivalry
and violent skirmishes, on Carnival days and year-round.
The Soca Warrior post conflates anti-establishment
resistance with bloodshed for a just cause as reflected in the
assumption that “men died to play.” This romanticization
feeds into the logic of the following statement: “Now, in
its birthplace, people are simply being killed and a pivotal,
iconic band has to tear up roots.” The word
simply
implies
that people are being killed for no just cause.
By constructing the panmen as victims of the
hegemonic order and of a younger generation of bad-
johns, the online commentator recognizes only intragroup
violence and communal breakdown threating a cherished
national cultural icon. In this discursive construction, there
is no acknowledgment of intergenerational communal
responsibility for what the area has become; there is no
acknowledgement of the impact of the socio-symbolic
location of Laventille in the national psyche; there is no
acknowledgement of the impact of scapegoating and
denigration; racism and classism; poverty, overcrowding
and underdevelopment. Yet the online commentator makes
another leap. “And where once the pan identified Trinidad
and Tobago, it is now a symbol of what we have become.”
The equation goes like this: if Laventille’s cultural inventions
are national symbols of accomplishment, pride, resistance
and cultural assertiveness, then Laventille’s lacerations,
violence and eruptions in crime, are symptomatic of the
contemporary state of the nation.
The psychic disease and the grim social conditions
whichWalcott envisioned as a legacy of empire have proven
resistant to healing despite decades of independence. The
nascent violence then, reflected in traumatized, displaced
and dispossessed Afro-Caribbean warriors, has ripened
into full-scale urban gang warfare. Much of the aggression
is turned inwards. Ascendancy is marked out in turf. Rival
gangs slaughter each other, largely untroubled by police
intervention. Entire communities are being held to ransom.
Children and infants are being felled by stray bullets or in
revenge killings. Vigilante justice is taking root.
The literary and popular representations point to the
notion of place as archive or symbolic repository. Laventille
has come to be a significant locus of meaning for all, rooted
in latent personal and communal histories which reflect
the traumatized consciousness of entire nation. The deeply
rooted psychic lacerations generated by the known, as well
as the silenced and submerged abuses of the colonial and
neo-colonial social orders travel underground like rhizomes,
linking people-groups into complex networks of relations
and of unresolved hurt. These roots of rejection, bitterness,
acrimony and loss crop up where we least expect them.
It explains in part why every contestation over national
emblems proceeds with fresh rancour as the unhealed
wounds erupt and suppurate anew, generating fresh pain.
I contend that it is trauma’s re-experiencing, created by the
inability to take in all at once the enormity of the suffering
and loss in its entirety. It is trauma’s hyper-arousal which
generates an intensity of response which is disproportionate
to its catalyst. It is trauma’s uncanny repetition which causes
this complex of issues to crop up repeatedly, intra- and inter-
generationally. For a substantial cross-section of our society
it is simpler to resort to avoidance of thought and feeling
and distancing of shame through collective amnesia. It is
more painful to deal with
hypernesia
– trauma’s intrusive
memory of haunting ancestral presences which intrude
centuries later.
If discourses of collective trauma have the power to
generate a sense of collectivity, which in turn can fix its
adherents into notions of victimhood, they can also be
mobilized in the interest of empowerment and agency in
terms of redress. In relation to the community of Laventille,
there is an urgent imperative to address material deficiencies
and social services. There is need for a new conversation
which addresses victim blame while acknowledging shared
responsibility for action and therapeutic intervention. Even
more so there is need for spiritual invention to bring peace
to warring hearts, individuals and communities.
But my major contention today is that the collective
trauma for which the city on this hill acts as a symbolic
repository or archive, is a national condition which we
share with post-colonial nations globally. Therapeutic
intervention is required if we are to be healed. Distancing
ourselves from its historical and contemporary processes,
archiving them in troubled communities, perpetuating
group hostilities based on race and class will bring us no
good. Collective memory is always selective. Knowledge
and cultural workers nationwide need to reshape collective
memory and formulate empowering group memories with
which emerging individual memories can intersect. And
because the body remembers, this memory work should
also be undertaken in visual modes and embodied modes
of dance and performance. The UWI has been instrumental
here through its consistent recognition of the people’s
philosophers through the award of honorary doctorates.
Professor Patricia Mohammed’s recent film
The City on
the Hill
is also exemplary of positive refashioning. Most
significantly there is need to formulate a new foundational
narrative, to reconstitute the torn social fabric, and to realize
the potentialities of a new future.
“Therapeutic intervention
is required if we are to
be healed. Distancing
ourselves from historical
and contemporary
traumatic out workings,
archiving them in troubled
communities, perpetuating
group hostilities based on
race and class, will
bring us no good.”
