Exorcising Historical Trauma: Black & White of Monuments & Memory

Dear Mayor, and noble and other honourable citizens of the colourless world,

I see there is a call for suggestions on how to treat with the colonial legacy and monuments – which must be close to the millionth such call to which I have responded.

But now aware that there will be no action along the lines that I have used, tried and tested with other similarly trauma-inflicted communities of our region, I am not even tempted to point out that most times I feel like I have been talking to stone or that we only reaping the whirlwind that will continue to gather strength as we add fury to savagery, I propose the following as a preliminary list for your immediate action to assuage the bloodthirsty masses.

I am sure these would meet with nods and applause of approval from noted historians, educators, leaders, opinion leaders and the like from whom you seek counsel. This list is to exorcise the ghosts roaming Port of Spain, while I compile the much larger list for exorcism across the country, and beyond.

Dear Mayor, I come, you see, Mr Mayor, to not praise, but bury Columbus, along with the colonial legacy embedded in our psyche, landscapes and institutions and monuments of memory.

My Mayor, I am sure you would agree with me that we ought not to stop at just pulling down the Columbus statue – now wearing the brand of ‘murderer’ through the efforts of his new age brand manager and supporters. If you give me a pail of paint, Mr Mayor, I would add the word ‘first’ before murderer. That may further deflect attention from the hundreds of live murderers roaming our streets whose victims cannot get justice and so meet with the approval of your erudite advisers, and maybe if we murder the murderer statue we would stop having so many murderers too, eh.

I promise I would not use the paint to write what I have discovered of how the story of Columbus – along with much of the story of us – has been distorted by the geopolitics of European and other historical lenses, that I have spent the last few decades tracing from his first landing, through these parts and to his final resting places in Santo Domingo and Seville. I agree he is a nice target on which we could all concentrate our colonial hate, so I would bury with his statue my research findings – photos, videos , documentation and interviews with people who do real, not armchair research, as nobody interested in that.

Just tell me when and where you are going to dispose of and depose this murderer from his stony pedestal and we would make a bonfire atop it along with all the literature that has emerged out of the colonial experience as writers and thinkers have tried to grapple with the trauma which if we read could provide us with some ways of dealing with or own. Really, they serve no purpose now that we want to fill the shoes of the savages with more savagery so let us burn all them books. I will add them to my list of seditious banned books that I have been reading in secret that filling my head with all these stupid notions of reformation, restitution, redemption and reconciliation and the like.

After, you have finished with Columbus, we could take a little LiTTour down to the foreshore. Don’t worry, I would take all the enlightenment out of the LiTTour about the vast potential in each of the elements that could invoke a Reading Revolution in the way our ancestors defied and survived.

I realise nobody really interested in that because it might make we children too bright and they would want some real change and that would mean people in offices like yours would have to work for your supper. Instead, I would regurgitate the dogma that would please yours and the ears of your erudite advisers so you could instruct the city on how to please the burgesses.

In that vein, Mr Mayor, please instruct your minions to return the reclaimed foreshore to the sea, immediately. That reclamation, you must agree, was among the first of barbaric acts of the colonials in violating our pristine island environment that has seen subsequent and ongoing reclamation and destructive quarrying of the mountain ranges and the crippling of Naparima Hill – worshiped by First peoples of the Americas -t o build the city of San Fernando. But I aint going South yet eh, let’s focus on ridding Port of Spain of colonial trash first.

With the foreshore, we must also topple the prime agents of colonisation, the Churches, numero uno being with the Cathedral of Immaculate Conception; thence the Trinity Cathedral, and the others I have earmarked in LiTTscapes and on the map for preliminary target. We could do it just as the Grey Friars (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland was pulled down like and by a thief in the night. While we here, don’t forget the many other buildings in the city that are potent remnants and reminders of the persistence of colonial rule into today through new masters – the restored Cabildo that is appropriated as a place of law; the Red House, which is the seat of the colonial West Minister style politics we still practice – that has to go, because it useless, don’t you think. And as that goes, of course, City Hall, the ungoodly seat of your own office, should go too with the spanking new President’s House, the Trinidad Hilton which was the first Governor’s House, the Royal Victoria Institute now housing the National Museum and Art Gallery and its sister Fort Andres.

Off with their magnificent heads – All of the Magnificent Seven, as they have been built with the proceeds of exploitation from the legacy of slavery. That may not find favour with your fav architects of conservation because there would not be anything for big contracts to constantly restore while we will the real Other Magnificent Seven into ignominy. I not worried bout that, they will die peacefully and be interred in the natural processes of earth changes that occur with time, without leaving any void in memory or making anyone the wiser.

Further, I recommend for immediate action, digging up Woodford Square.(Psss, you might find much more bones under there than the ones nicely and ceremoniously laid to rest with restoration of the Red House. Don’t ask how I come to that knowledge when all them erudite historians who stood around offering final rites don’t know. I can’t tell you that I do my research on the ground, not through doctored colonial documents, planted with information the old colonial massas wanted to pass on. Woodford Square with its imprint of the nicely laid out Union Jack embedded in its design, is Queen Lizzie’s way at laughing at us that she gone but she still here – you didn’t know that eh? Well, if I wasn’t constantly distracted by these people calling for heritage advice they not going to use because it free, I could finish meh Letters to Lizzie on all the ways she gone but she still here and spill the beans on all who secretly wish she still here too! Traitors! Off with their heads!

While you are at Woodford Square, don’t forget the other squares and public parks, like Lord Harris and Victoria – who was dem again? I would do some social media crowd-sourcing and we would flesh out that list, because nobody know who dem be anyway, ’cause nobody lorning about them, and nobody lorning anything about all the other people who really build the nation through a Learning Revolution of MultipleChoice and not the ones we like to call ‘fathers of the nation’ who only plant hate and animosity between people. Remind me to add the Queen’s Park Savannah, the Queen’s Park Oval along with the colonial game of cricket and the like, all of which are revered in LiTTscapes – no wonder nobody here want to read it. And we not settling for a name change eh – dig them up completely to erase them from memory!

Mr Mayor, I would also strongly recommend smashing all them colonial roads as Lady Young, Lady Chancellor and Saddle Road. After all, we got rid of the railway because it was too colonial, and, toobesides, because we like to sit in sweltering traffic three-four hours a day to and from work in the city, because no one really adjusted to work-from-home with the Corona Virus hoax that was only really to allow dem to finish the Curepe Overpass so we could move the traffic further east to justify having to construct more roundabouts and overpass you know why – the trafficking! That Corona Virus ent nothing like the waves of other diseases Columbus and his kind bring to help the genocide of the Tainos here.

I trying not to stray, eh Mr Mayor, but I just feel I should give some justifications because your town meetings surely going demand why this and why that on the list. The whole of Woodbrook on it. It must go, and all its streets named after them white Germans and them quaint little ginger bread houses with French lattice work that the Queen’s people tell we we should admire and aspire to own one and become massa too as we learn to hate we cow shed, mud house and houses on stilts in lagoons. While we at it, give back the Queen she patent for Angostura Bitters because that was for them Germans too – Seigerts.

The rum distillery have to come down – the sugar factory gone ahready anyway, and they importing next people rum and re-labeling it, so why not. Don’t bother about returning babash making to the small Moruga and other babash makers so we could partake of we own brew, we get used to the other stuff the Queen used to make we forefathers buy every Saturday payday to make we a nation of drunkards best demonstrated in the quintessential expression of we – Carnival. Them all now occupied with growing four heads of legalised marijuana.

As you dig out the eyes and flatten the nose and botox the lips of any who inherited their illegitimate grandsires’ physical features, also make sure every John, Paul, Dick, Harry, Pedro and Paulo change they name too.

I didn’t plan on touching Carnival and all the colonial characters that mocking slaves in there and all them other colonial-inspired holidays like Indian Arrival and Baptist and Emancipation Day eh, and all the cultural elements that still buried in we all kind of orthodox and unorthodox religious practices, and I ent start to add all them colonial schools, prestige or no prestige. Why they still here? And why they still teaching we English, eh? We is self governing people who could celebrate mindlessness as we well damn please, eh!

I ent even get to how you should really send all dem Europeans and other whites back where they come from; all the descendants of slaves back to Africa and all others who came after back too. Leave the First People lands to their rightful owners! My jahaji bundle done pack, but I will leave that for another day – when the four ganja plants my ancestors bring here give me some leaves for tea to invoke meh nirvana so I could levitate back; when you legalise babash; and when people stop arguing about removing the Sedition Act that make me a criminal for reading. I aint have no court clothes, nor bail money, so you would have to do with me what we shudda do to Columbus long time ago – throw we in the sea to drown, with all the baggage that came with us.

Yes, we should all abandon this ship, La Trinidad, the island named by Columbus, with its coat of arms of fake ships and all and find some place that don’t have barbarians killing each other, oppressing people, treating others like less than themselves, and being unjust to their fellow beings. You cud hum with the marches catching fire among Les Miserables of the world, made popular in  a movie on one of the world’s biggest uprisings: 
https://youtu.be/ojoC-Kbzpo8

That long list, Mr Mayor, is just a first part of my recommendations for you to please the burgesses, and any of them could just come here and pirate the list and pass it off as their recommendations to you. I used to that.

Anyway, Mr Mayor, if you swing the axe right, you might even get a senatorial seat in the next parliament, oui!

We could do all that, Mr Mayor, or if you too believe that then was then, and now is now, and maybe we learn a thing or too from history and the march of civilisation and we want to turn a different corner towards peace in the Post Pandemic Planet, you know where to find me…

Dr Kris, a woman with many letters and many more words, of no known fixed place of abode, could sometimes be found gazing into the void of history without memory in the waterless fountain in Woodford Square since the last Mayor left she waiting on ah LiTTscapes bench that the previous Mayor promised for the CiTTscapes LiTTours … Fellow displaced persons and aspirants to the People’s Parliament gathered around heard her humming ah catchy tune and started to sing too:

Note from the Author: As a researcher, trying to piece together the past from the fragments that remain from the mass destruction of documented records, art and other representations of knowledge, I cannot endorse destruction of any kind. Well aware of how heritage memory exists within outside and beyond physical objects of representation, to endorse any attempt to wipe out history is to become the colonial savage that ravaged cultural treasures and wrested intellectual property. It is an admission of failure – of our education and other social systems and institutions to prepare next generations with ongoing challenges of diversity that absorbs pre and post colonial conditions.

Treating with heritage trauma surfaced continuously among young and old, in my work in heritage education across the Latin American and Caribbean region. It is painful and wounding even to try to build cultural confidence and strengthen cultural resilience among the diverse communities as I encountered in my work with the estranged and marginalised First Peoples of Mayans and Tainos, the Maroons who dug their heels out of slave chains and settled in remote hillside hideaways, and the subsequent populations stripped of identity and personhood.

It is very real, and the process of exorcising and exonerating our troubled history is not to be treated lightly. To suggest that tearing down a statue will heal the wounds is an insult to the wounded.

Educators are yet to confront the harsh truth that the formal education system, as an offspring of colonisation, is not fitted to treat with such historical trauma, as are many of our institutions.

One must therefore not mistake the satirical mode of this piece as a trivialising of the issue. It is a mechanism, I hope, through which some light may seep through to a very murky dimension of our development and which must begin with self-reflection. Our writers and thinkers have been doing that, unheeded, through generations and I have met with no interest in redressing this.

The renewed focus on colonial trauma that has surfaced from the exposure of the traumatising death of George Floyd during a police exercise in the USA presents racism in monochromatic tones of black and white. But for the inheritors of the post-colonial world, that is a gross over-simplification of the centuries of internalised, entrenched and recurring intergenerational transmission of the historical trauma that is an endemic condition of post-colonial societies. In the confines of small island spaces of the misnamed West Indies, it surfaces and confronts in myriad ways, not the least of which is the multihued skin tones that reflect the absorbed intergenerational trauma. Beyond the focus on monuments and literature, attitudes and habits passed on ritualistically replicate implantation and casual acceptance of oppression, racism, violence, exploitation, corruption and piracy as par for the course in everyday life. It is embedded in psyches and passed into institutional set-ups, systemised in law, politics, education, media, cultural forms, and the very many ways of being and doing that inhibit development our achievement of equity.

It is, too, in mannerisms, gestures, attitudes and behaviours that have been passed down through generations. Indeed, it is ingrained in the sheer joie d’ vivre and exuberance which characterises our cultures and which exists side by side with a near fatalism that hovers over our communities. Where do we start and what then do we remove when we think or talk of exorcising the past? Or how do we treat with it?

Would massacring stone statues and banning literature treat with the genetic memory, embedded in the DNA of the native people’s whose populations were decimated in genocide, or the African slaves’ whose selfhood was harsely eroded and erased?

The fist-shaking at a nondescript statue of Christopher Columbus that few knew existed, till now, is one of the manifestations of anger and aggression that has surfaced and that has filtered down to our corner of the world to accompany the surfacing bile of the generations of oppression represented in the death of George Floyd.

Alongside the global protests of Floyd, I am not sure how many has, but I have also heard the frustrating screams of older and next generations for some new way forward, for meaningful change. Anger misplaced deflects from admitting and addressing the failure of our social, political, cultural and education systems and the real changes required to readdress the trauma of history, heritage and energise next generations into new trends of intercultural understanding. And that is local as it is global.

Just a simple search – use of any online search engine, google, bing, etc – for knowledge shows in which direction the world’s knowledge is skewed. Historical truths are replicated on the web to favour colonial cultures. Attempts by some of us to correct inaccuracies in crowd-sharing online ‘pedias run the risk of us and our IPs being blocked. On-going colonially rooted biases and prejudices of what constitutes inferior and superior knowledge is now entrenched in the internet. For instance, just do a search of this day in history, any day, and see whose histories are represented on the net, which cultures and which regions. As we champion changes in the larger systems, we can only also begin to reflect on our own part in constructing that system and start change with ourselves, one at a time.

In the next few postings I will share some of the experiences of exorcising and treating with heritage trauma and learnings across the region.

Dr Kris Rampersad is an independent international specialist in culture and gender sensitive development. More about Dr Kris Rampersad here

Do You Hear the People Sing from Les Miserables

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again

When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again

When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes

Will you give all you can give
So that our banner may advance
Some will fall and some will live
Will you stand up and take your chance?
The blood of the martyrs
Will water the meadows of France

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again

When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes

Source: Musixmatch Songwriters: Herbert Kretzmer / Claude Michel Schonberg / Jean-marc Natel / Alain Boublil. Do You Hear the People Sing? lyrics © Alain Boublil Music Ltd., Productions Bagad, Boublil Alain Editions Musicales Sarl

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