Berbice Indians go to bed early, and get out of bed early. Until recently, there was no such thing as an alarm clock; the people relied on their natural environment to wake them up to start the day. The first sign that it was time to wake up occurred when the roosters started crowing at four o’clock in the morning, and the second was when the sun’s heat hit the zinc-roofed houses with no mercy.
To this day, everyone — especially housewives — knows it is time to get up and begin the routine of sweeping, cleaning, washing and cooking before the younger ones get up. In most cases, the men would get up a bit later, around ‘dayclean’.
I do not know the origin of this tradition, but suspect it has to do with Indian customs, according to the Laws of Manu — that emphasize wifely duties and the rhythm of plantation life, where things start early to beat the ‘bloody’ and ‘blasted’ heat, as so often heard in domestic village parlance. Little surprise, then, when females are matched out to males through an elaborate Indian wedding ceremony, the former know that their family and village expect them to carry on the hybrid tradition of wifely duties and plantation life. This expectation becomes more serious with the birth of successive children, sometimes as many as from ten to fifteen.
More and more children born to the family is seen as a sign of wealth in the presence of poverty. In some ways, the female’s fate is sealed as soon as she is married.
A typical day for village housewives is preparing food for the family without modern facilities, like stove and refrigerator, although this practice has become a thing of the past in many households. Cooking takes place on a mud-baked fireside, fed and fuelled with chopped limbs of dried wood. Cooking on firesides demands some skills, like how to regulate the flow of heat to avoid burning the food, but most challenging is the ability to dodge the clump of smoke which sometimes careens into the cook’s face. To be on the safe side, the cook would have to get her face out of the way first, and then mess with the burning firewood.
Though village life is safe and secure through the common purpose of family obligations that may set the tone for a decent existence, the unpleasant truth is that flare-ups do occur when one partner, mostly the male, does not have a full grasp of what it takes to be a family man.
Husbands believe that family duties lie essentially outside of the home — to bring home the beacon, to use the common US cliché. Domestic responsibility, including child-rearing, is not seen as a man thing to do. Roles and functions of the family are perceived and performed from the lenses of different perspectives, which may sort themselves out amidst ups and downs. This sort of a family dynamic does not exist only in fairy tales, but occurs also in the real world.
There is no urgent need here to offer a perfect spin as to what a functional family should be; except to say that a reasonable, right-thinking man would agree that a marriage, and whatever comes with it, is a shared responsibility. If disputed, I argue that husbands in this camp are out to safeguard their own narrow self-interests, which does not bode well as a model for young men.
While we may never know exactly what happens in the privacy of village homes, it is no secret that the use of alcohol has caused enormous problems, such as domestic violence, suicides, and road accidents. The gravity of this problem can be gauged by what happens in the public space, typically under the bottom houses, in the rum shops, and under shady trees. In these environments, alcohol consumption is not only a pastime, but a way of life that would take twists and turns intermixed with silence, loudness and happiness, followed by sadness in a single morning, or afternoon, or anytime in one day. I have seen men disclose and discuss their entire lives in one of these regular meet-ups, stagger out of the rum shops, walk on the road, and sing this: Oh my darlin’, roses are red, violets are blue, I love you, but why did you leave me?
If someone asks me to, in one sentence, describe village life in Berbice, I would say what Banwarie said, “Bear your chafe, buddy, bear your chafe.” ([email protected])
