…fathers in families
While in school, your Eyewitness was forced to plough through DH Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”. He soon realized it could’ve well been named “Sons, mothers and fathers”. What with Paul’s intense relationship with his mother, which supposedly prevented him from ever “committing” to his girlfriend! Your Eyewitness had a blast regurgitating Freud’s “Oedipus Complex” theory and nodding knowingly!! Even though he thought the supposed desire to kill one’s father ridiculous, and Freud a loony!
With “Father’s Day” today – your Eyewitness received two bottles of his favourite vino, which of course he had to test for quality control! – his mind wandered over these supposedly seminal relationships in his life. Note that we dub them “seminal”, rather than “germinal”. You didn’t get that? “Seminal” from dad’s “semen” – male and authoritatively assumed to be the “foundational” element in life, while the female “germ” needs to be “seeded” to produce anything!!
In Guyana, life sadly hadn’t progressed far beyond Hobbes’s “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” life that was slavery and indentureship, where the male was emasculated. Our independence was supposed to change all of that, but has actually made it worse; but the hunger, homelessness and nakedness Burnham delivered made fathers more frustrated.
If you didn’t do your chores with alacrity, you earned some well-deserved slaps behind your ears! Your Eyewitness suspects that, with all this new “woke” insistence on denouncing those blows as “child abuse”, things are different for fathers. The present generation might be experiencing Freudian turmoils that make them hate their fathers because they’re “competitors for their mothers’ love”. As you can tell, your Eyewitness always found Freud to be a fraud!
But seriously, folks, aren’t the “hands that rock the cradle” supposed to “rule the world”? Meaning, if mothers rear children, aren’t they the ones who should have the greatest influence on how they behave later in life? Even if we concede that nature (inheritance) also plays a role…surely, father’s influence is quite diffuse. Will he go back to the caveman days and start bopping folks over their heads with clubs!? And maybe this is what is going on with all the wife abuse, choppings and beheadings going on?
So, how exactly does Father’s Day do to improve relations within the typical Guyanese family – when fathers are still absent? How different are those husband-wife dynamics from the ones in “Sons and Lovers”? Like Mrs Morel, do Guyanese wives have real respect for their husbands – who’re forced to demean themselves in their everyday lives to cope with the “big ones” in society?
Does the bonhomie and good cheer of fathers give them respect – when they can’t deliver the “fine things in life” with savoir-faire?
…Enmore
As your Eyewitness predicted, not much attention was paid to the Enmore Martyrs this year. Some will say sugar is gone from Enmore, and ain’t doing so well elsewhere – but that completely misses the point, innit?? Cuffy fought those Dutchmen 261 years ago in the Canje coffee plantations, but we still commemorate his feat annually at his monument, don’t we? What’s the connection, you ask, dear reader? Well, even though the rebellion was defeated – and we don’t grow that much coffee any longer – it set an example for us through the ages: that we should stand up for our freedom.
And isn’t that what was done at Enmore? The workers there were standing up against the sugar barons – who were the power behind the Guyanese colonial state. By taking that stance – even though they knew they were gonna be shot – they forced Britain to send the Waddington Commission, which eventually led not just to improvement in sugar workers’ living conditions, but to the universal franchise and our independence!!
Let us all now praise Enmore!!
…South Africa
Coalition’s the word in South Africa – as in India – after their elections. Their inability to improve the lot of the poorest led to their governments losing their majority. Will DA joining the ANC lead to greater equity?
