We were raised by the belt

Colin Robinson

Authority, I keep arguing, is one of our greatest ills. Its seduction of order is what we keep desperately imagining will make right all the chaos that our freedom has let loose because we failed to ensure that justice was in place. Force and laughter were the only things that had held things together for most of our history of sufferage in this place. We had always invested simultaneously in the deep dominion of rules whose existence was their own justification and in our virtuosic craft at outsmarting them and sublime playfulness at their parody.

Perhaps justice was in our dreams back in the 1960s when we first set out down the road of forced nationhood. But at least by 1970, those dreams had been ruptured. Patronage had carried us some distance further, dangling the hope that opportunity and access would trickle down to us once we ensured our tribe of loyalty and power. Or perhaps for a minute there was simply enough to go around, and few enough who benefited outrageously, that it didn’t matter. Even the rules.

Or maybe it was always the hope—like an SEA parent—that the nature of injustice was such that it would always offer up a small number of opportunities to leave others behind in a system that could not work for all, but just might for you.

We always relied on rules, though, as something to fall back on to legitimate injustice and inequality, to offer a counterpoint to our white fear that forging change would be as humiliating and lonely as atheism.

We never imagined rules could be about delivering fairness and equality.

There’s another dimension to all this that is just as critical, however. Authority isn’t just a cognitive framework for us; it’s deeply embedded in emotion. At the core of our love affair with authority is beating children as an article of faith. Suffering violence delivered, sometimes feverishly, at the hands of those who swear (and often show) that they love us the most is how we are taught authority in our earliest years. To the point that we are unable to imagine any other way to pass on respect for it. And we swear licks is as tonic as castor oil.

“Ca a lil licks never kill nobody, lewwe be real. Cause you never had a really good childhood if you never geh a really good cuttail.”

All the celebration on this page and elsewhere in the paper of the poignant treatments of sexual diversity and justice in last month’s national poetry slam final leave me with a little guilt that, two months since its delivery, Marcus Millette’s performance is the one of the 59 I listened to that most haunts me.

“We have a way we does discipline children in the Caribbean,” his poem sets out. “After we break a broomstick on they back, we does ask: What you crying for? …then when they cry again, we does say: You better hush your mouth before you really get something to cry for. … As children we learned to pretend…like we don’t feel anything, so by the time you reach adolescence you supposed to know to remain silent when pain unbearable, whether it’s emotional or physical. Because depression and mental illness is white people ting. …you too big to be all up in your feelings.”

Millette’s piece is fairly blunt, but his unvarnished delivery unpacks a truth most men can’t—mapping the source of our emotional stuntedness, wrapping a leather belt of punishment into a noose of self-harm, leaving a similar black-and-blue bruise, in a different place.

By “instilling in children that anything you feel will eventually pass, because is just a little pain, ent, and pain don’t ever last,” he argues we overlook the national crisis of mental health this emotional death and learned silence are wreaking, “how the country sick, stick-shift stuck in reverse as we try to move forward but revert back…lack of remorse with no room for discourse…”

Pretending away our own pain is precisely how we learn to pretend away the injustice meted out to others. And, of course, we mask it all with a laugh. “One day this might even be a funny story, so take a second to laugh, as I put your problem second-to-last. We have that kind of culture for comedy…”

As I keep saying the same things over and over in different ways with my lines here, searching like each stroke of the belt for sense, I hope the lines that I, like Marcus, am trying to draw between empathy and authority, violence and justice, laughter and the insufferable, feeling and a future, will lead us all somewhere. Somewhere different than the national chorus of “Hush your mouth and don’t say nothing.”