by Mervyn Claxton
Comment provoked by a report that 50,000 criminal deportees have been sent back to the Caribbean in the past ten years
A causal connection has been convincingly established between criminal deportees of El Salvador nationals from the U.S. in recent years and the subsequent spike in violent crime in the country, including the great increase in the number of criminal gangs. It would appear that a similar cause and effect situation exists in the Caribbean. I was unaware that the issue of criminal deportees had been raised by Caricom leaders with Obama during the latter’s visit to T&T last April.
The great discretion on the subject (as evidenced by the absence of any publicity or public discussion of the issue) is, perhaps, yet another manifestation of the general indifference, on the part of Caricom citizens, of such a crucially important social problem, something I find most puzzling. Just as important is the misplaced focus by Caricom leaders on criminal deportees instead of the conditions in Caricom societies which generate crime. Transplants, whether physical, social, or cultural, can survive and thrive only if favourable conditions in the recipient society/country exist for them to do so. That principle applies to transplanted criminals.
Only when Caricom leaders cease treating the symptoms of the many serious problems which our societies face and begin tackling, instead, the roots of those problems would the need for alternative development policies become clear and unavoidable. But politicians, as distinct from statesmen (which our region sorely lacks), tend to pursue their narrow political interests. As long as Caricom citizens and civil society groups continue to either remain silent on important socio-economic issues (through passivity, resignation, or apathy) or merely content themselves with pro forma protests rather than stimulating a public debate on such issues with a view to proposing feasible alternative policies, business will continue as usual and nothing will change. In the course of my research on conditions propitious to, and the causes of, social and political change, I examined a number of revolutions and social explosions. A recurrent factor in all of them was the blindness of the “bourgeosie” to the grave danger of continuring to ignore or dismiss explosive conditions in their society.
James Baldwin
In 1963, James Baldwin published “The Fire Next Time” which he hoped would help prevent the racial conflagration he saw coming. Whether Baldwin’s book helped to open the eyes of the white power structure to the explosive situation in American society is not subject to proof but it most certainly galvanized the civil rights movement. The passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been attributed, in part, to the enormous impact his book made. Baldwin warned in his book that should his effort fail the words of a slave song might come true: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, / No more water, the fire next time!” Who will be Caricom’s Baldwin? Who will come forth to warn Caricom society of the Fire Next Time?
Mervyn
Criminal Deportees To Caribbean Tops 50 Thousand Mark In Decade
CaribWorldNews, WASHINGTON, D.C., Fri. July 17, 2009: Over 50,000 convicted Caribbean-born criminals, who have called the U.S. home for many years, have been shipped back to the Caribbean in the past decade under tough U.S. immigration laws, a CaribWorldNews analysis of new Department of Homeland Security data reveals. The number of criminal deportees sent back to the Caribbean between the decade of 1999 and 2008 totaled 50,589, DHS statistics released this month and analyzed by CWNN reveal. Last year, the number was at 4,343, a slight increase from 2007, when the total was 4,315. However, it was an improvement from 2005, when the total rose to 5,149, the highest for the decade.
Dear Mervyn:
As a writer and critic I offer you the hope that the artists of the Caribbean of all genres are doing, among other things, exactly what James Baldwin and others in his time did. Artists have always done this, being commentators and shapers of our societies as much anyone else as you know. So The Mighty Gabby, Barbadian calypsonian and balladeer sang in the 1970s in his meditation on history and his present in one he called “1937 Riots”, last verse:
The reason I tell you this story is plain,
is cause I believe we going riot again
if we leaders don’t preach what is true
and find some work for my people to do.
While to my mind it is unsafe to insist on a direct and defensible link between a piece of art and specific artist and a shift in social direction, I do know that the complaiscent DLP government of Barbados in the mid 1970s lost a place they had held for 15 years and ended up as only a three person opposition. The prediction or machination (what you will) I heard personally delivered from the mouth of a popular street character (itinerant) known as Gearbox while he held audience on the steps of the National Insurance Building downtown, opposite the most trafficked bustand in Bridgetown. He had an exceptionally loud voice and would make a characteristic extended “Yaaaaar!” sound at the end of any prouncement. That day he said, “Barrow feel somebody dead and lef Barbados fah he! Yaaar!” The surrounding streets broke up in laughter. After all, it was our Gearbox and we Bajans is laugh. And thenn we is vote out the father of independence a year or so at the next elections and lef he with only 2 other people beside heself in Parliament on he side for five years and then with some more people for another five.
Seems to me my Trinidad and tobago could long do wih a Gearbox.
The spoken word poets among the young people are doing it, some calypsonians are doing it, some of we crossover poets are doing it, some visual artists are doing it. We doing it. Some of us doing it on the Call-in programmes and the papers. The NGO sector is actually doing it. What we have now is an interesting situation. The politicians are us. The heads of the UN agaencies are us. The ones who decide which artists are heard often or given platforms, including publishing are us. And too, a lot of us artists and leaders are comfortable and disconnected from the people, who are actually not all or even in the main indifferent to the social problems of the Caribbean. For goodness sake, we live them!
I held a friend from a local woman’s organisation a few years ago who all left off whatever each was doing and accompanied her to the funeral home while she and I leaned forward and she peered a second time at the decomposing body of her family member in the black bag to try to identify him by his six fingers on one hand because he had been shot in the face and left ten days in the rain in the canes by a suspected deportee from the USA criminal justice system. We looked and he had six fingers. And I wrote in no particular kind of anger or even sorrow, but with a terrified detachment:
Maybe the body’s husk
is but a chrysalis we weave
and wrap to warm
our naked spirit, that at
some point undresses,
and we burn into the depths
as stars.
Maybe our varied and temporary beauty
is but grass;
is harvested some importunate
and utterly impetuous day,
only to scatter the seeds of our bright souls
into the welcoming and everlasting
nebulae.
2001
It was because I saw the medical school rendering of the body down to its awesomely symetrical musculature and i did not do it, the occasion, or his way of passing justice. My friend kindly had the poem printed on the funeral programme and in the front of one of her very influential books on understanding power. And my friend is us and she continues to engineer the transformations that she can and even those people tell her she can’t.
Maybe there is need to call for the artist to render the work that will defend us all, and i know you are not one dimensional in your vision. But I recall for you that transformation is as much a miracle of continuous everyday struggle as it is the explosion. It is as much the foolishness of political party politics in a leaderism parliamentary stylie, as it is a revolution that would unget this miscreant Caribbean. I say this as a reminder to myself when I cannot stand the now.
It is also, i think, the small voices of ordinary sorrow and support as the story told to me by an un-named Barbadian returnee from The BBC who works voluntarily with school children with problems. The young girl who was falling asleep at school inappropriately, when drawn out by my friend told her, “My mother going to stop when the bills are paid. And i is sleep with two pairs of tight tight jeans on and a knife, and i planning to kill the first one that come touching me.”
Ordinary sorrow and support in the bearing of it are far from an indifferance. Far.
Guidance,
Margaret kawamuinyo
Margaret,
First of all, I readily acknowledge the important role calypsonians have always played in the Caribbean through their trenchant commentaries on social issues. Such commentaries invariably make us laugh, as Gearbox did in your anecdote. But I doubt very much that anyone would argue that such commentaries crystallize the thinking of the community on the issues they sing about, in a manner which stimulates an awareness of the urgency of the situation, sufficient to create a groundswell capable of galvanizing the community to take action.
I agree in principle with your statement that “it is unsafe to insist on a direct and defensible link between a piece of art and specific artist and a shift in social direction.” Artists/writers/thinkers, who have been associated with such social shifts in the past, did not create them ex nihilo. Their work, possibly because of new insights it revealed, or the establishment of an interconnection with other social issues which made the public see the issue in question as one of concern to the society as a whole and not merely to a segment of society, served to crystallize sentiments, ideas, and opinions that alrady existed. The work of the artist/writer/thinker in question is thus a catalyst which galvanizes the community to take action.
Apart from Baldwin, two other examples come to my mind of writers who have been justifiably associated with important social shifts – Rachel Carson with her book “Silent Spring” (1962), and Betty Friedan with ” The Feminine Mystique”, (1963). Carson”™s book, which warned the public about the long term effects of chemical pesticides, has been widely credited with launching moderrn environmentalism. It sensitized Americans to environmental issues and was the catalyst which gave rise to the ecological movement, setting in motion a course of events which led to a ban on the domestic production of DDT and the creation of a national grasroots movement demanding that the government take action to protect the environment. Similarly, Betty Friedan’s book is widely credited as the catalyst for the modern feminist movement. It struck a nerve in (admittedly mainly white) middle-class women throughout the nation. Its effect, was so overwhelming that it astonished Friedan, herself, as she related in her book “It Changed My Life”, published in 1976. The book’s title was the most repeated phrase Friedan heard from women throughout the country, in describing their reaction to her book.
Carson and Friedan were not only the authors of ground-breaking books but also activists in promoting their respective causes. Carson testified before Congress on the urgency of environmental protection. Friedan founded the National Organization for Women and, with other feminist leaders, she persuaded President Johnson to sign Executive Order 11246 which created affirmative action programmes that opened up job possibilities for millions of women. Both wrote several books on their respective causes but it was those two books I cited which touched a national nerve. Carson’s book stimulated a national debate on the use of chemical pesticides ““ exactly the type of debate that is sorely needed on the issue of violence in the Caricom countries.
The protest activities of the calypsonians, crossover poets, visual artists, the NGO sector, and street corner comics, which you cited to show that people are not at all indifferent to the problem, appear to be essentially expressions of concern, disgust, or frustration at the situation. Can they turn out to be the catalyst which manages to touch the nerve of Caricom society, galvanizing it to take action, as the books of Baldwin, Carson, and Friedan have allegedly done? Is there any indication, from the impact they have had so far, that such an outcome is imminent or even likely. Moreover, in their respective areas, Carson’s and Friedan’s books not only provided a critical analysis of the situation they described but also proposed remedial action. Can this be said of the activites you cited?
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to predict which event, in a given problematic situation, will prove to be the change-producing catalyst, but one of the features common to the three catalytic books mentioned above is that their impact was immediate. Can one say the same for any of the various protest activities you mentioned? If that is not so, as I very much suspect is the case, it is unlikely that any of those activities you mentioned would provide the catalyst needed.
Presidential Executive Order 11246 was signed in September 1965, only two years after the publication of Friedan’s book and a year BEFORE she founded the National Organization for Women (1966). One of its provisions stipulated that contractors with 50 or more employees and contracts of $50,000 or more must implement affirmative action plans to increase the participation of minorities and women in the workplace if a workforce analysis demonstrates that they are underrepresented, in terms of the population statistics of the area from which the workforce is drawn. The law banning DDT was passed in 1972, ten years after Carson’s book was published, but the latter’s public impact was immense and immediate. The decade-long interval between the publication of Carson’s book and the adoption of environmental legislation, must be seen in the context of the fervent opposition of the very powerful chemical industry to any legislation at all. As such, ten years can be considered a relatively short interval for such ground-breaking legislation. Universal health care, which would be ground-breaking if it comes to pass in view of deep-seated American hostility to redistributing wealth, has been pursued without success ever since Roosevelt, several generations ago.
There are two factors that differentiate the issue of violence in the Caribbean from the two issues for which Carson and Friedan successfully fought. Both Carson and Freidan opened the eyes of Americans to a problem which most of the people they touched had not really thought about and, those who had done so were generally unaware of its dimensions. Furthermore, once the two authors articulated the problem in a manner that crystallized people’s understanding of it, the measures required to deal with the situation became evident. It would be difficult to come across any Caricom citizen who is unaware that violence is a problem, even though their appreciation of its seriousness might differ. Most importantly, unlike the two American issues, the measures required to combat violence in Caricom society, effectively, are far from clear.
I have always argued that merely criticizing/condemning a particular situation or problem is not an adequate response. It is incumbent on those who are aware of, and concerned by, the situation/problem to seek feasible, effective measures which can be proposed to address it. Has any of the authors/instigators of the activities you mentioned suggested any measures of the kind? If, not, those activities cannot justifiably be cited as an appropriate response to the problem I raised in my message. What we need in Caricom is an individual or a group of individuals who would articulate and illustrate the gravity of the problem as well as its interconnectedness with other issues of importance to Caricom society (such as development, for example) that violence poses to the Caricom societies, in a way that could crystallize people’s understanding of it and touch a nerve in the population. That individual or group of individuals should also be prepared to play an activist role similar to that of Carson and Friedan. Such an effort should be accompanied by a comprehensive critical analysis followed by a coherent set of measures to deal with the problem. Those measures should be the subject of a wide-ranging public debate that would, hopefully, create a broad consensus which Caricom governments would find it difficult to ignore.
I am aware that many economically “better-off” Caricom citizens consider that, either a high level of violence in a society is the price one must pay for progress or that such violence is “manageable” and they can shelter from it in gated residences. Nothing is further from the truth. High levels of violence are evidence of “regress” not “progress”. It is perfectly possible for a highly industrialized country to possess a society with extremely low levels of violence. Japan, and Singapore are examples of such societies. Cuba is an example of a society that scores high on UNDP’s Human Development Index, and which also has low rates of violence. An analysis of the reason’s for Cuba’s achievement in that respect might well inform the proposed solutions of a Caricom Baldwin, Carson, or Friedan, who eventually emerges to play the catalytic role required. The level of violence might be “manageable” at the current time for those sections of Caricom society who can retreat to gated complexes but that is not possible in the long term. The level of violence, unlawfulness, or civil conflict in a society tends to increase exponentially, thus making it possible for a Tipping point to be reached before those who think they are “safely” ensconced in gated residences realize what is happening. If and when that happens, widespread social breakdown occurs and no one in the society would be able safe. That situation has occurred in a number of African societies and, here in our region, Mexico might not be too far away from that abyss. But Mexicans are perfectly aware of that grave danger and the government is actively combating it. What is Caricom doing?
Mervyn