By Savitri Persaud
Savitri Persaud was born in Guyana and spent part of her childhood in Moblissa, off the Linden Highway, and in Bellevue, West Bank Demerara. Savitri is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her doctoral dissertation examines discourses of disablement, mental health, and violence in Guyana and the Caribbean. This article is dedicated to her father, Seew Persaud.
Overheard years ago at a family function – it went something like this: “Nah nah, man! Like yuh ent undastan how de two ah dem come fuh dead. He beat and kill she and den he drink poison and kill he self. He head nah been good though! Man jus run off, trip out. Da is one real madman.” I stood atop the stairs and stealthily listened to the men in my family enjoy each other’s company as they clamoured over newspaper headlines, clinked glasses of rum, and slammed down dominoes in my grandmother’s Toronto basement.
Hearing Guyanese men gaff and gossip – imparting their opinions of what they believe actually happened and resulted in the murder-suicide of a married couple – gives one a glimpse into the desensitized ways that we engage with ordinary violence. By ordinary violence I mean the mundane and oftentimes invisible, yet systemically destructive commonplace in which our everyday material realities take shape. The men in my family reference this violence at multiple levels. Taken at face value, this casual parlance is indicative of the ways that we talk about and engage with violence against women, suicide, and mental health and psychiatric disabilities. We have grown so accustomed to women being murdered at the hands of their male partners; to these male partners then choosing to take their own lives; and to denigrating psychiatric disabilities when we use the familiar sentiments of “head nah good”, “running off”, and “tripping out” as ways of invoking those “madmen” and “madwomen” of our imaginaries. As Guyanese, this discourse does not leave us when we travel and make our homes in other parts of the world. In truth, this talk is a way of reaffirming our Guyanese-ness to ourselves and to each other – to our kin, our friends, and our extended community.
Let’s first talk about how “he drink poison and kill he self.” The recently released and oft-cited 2012 suicide statistics reported by the World Health Organization placed Guyana at the top of its rankings with a suicide rate of 44.2 per 100,000 inhabitants. This reality is nothing short of devastating, but what gives rise to such numbers? Accounting for suicide must begin with recognizing its numerous and multidimensional root causes. What are the social determinants of health to help us understand these numbers? Where do we place poverty and want, unemployment, violence against women and children, social exclusion, and the lasting legacy of colonialism when trying to make sense of this statistic? We have not yet begun to take stock of this nexus. Suicide is but one symptom in our culture of disablement where inequality begets inequality, spawning gradual and perpetual debilitating outcomes that influence the social, political, and economic wellbeing of people in Guyana and the Caribbean more broadly. Borrowing from Nirmala Erevelles’ excellent book, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic, we must talk about the acquisition of psychiatric disabilities in relation to the “actual social, historical, and economic conditions that influence people’s lives, conditions further mediated by race, ethnic, gender, class, and sexual politics.”
Addressing suicide rates is only one facet in recognizing the disparaging and violent ways that we talk about people with psychiatric disabilities. Not only is our discourse violent, but we also commit gruesome acts of violence against people that we call “mad”. We craft and bring into being the “madman” and “madwoman”; these figures that we invoke, whose behaviours and ways of being we deem so different from our own, to justify the brutality that we commit against the bodies of people with psychiatric disabilities. My doctoral research attempts to tackle questions of disablement and the ways in which culture informs how bodies deemed disabled and ‘mad’ are susceptible to violence when they are often relegated to the peripheries and social underbellies of Caribbean societies. I commenced this research in 2010 when studying the 2007 murder of Radika Singh. Singh was a 55-year-old woman with a history of psychiatric disabilities. On the morning of April 27, she wandered into the neighbouring village of Bare Root where some members of the community misrecognized her disability and wrongly depicted her as an old higue. Singh was bludgeoned, sexually assaulted, and murdered before her body was discarded at the side of a dirt road. Singh’s story is just one in our long history of violence against women and violence against people with psychiatric disabilities.
The cases of murder-suicide that are linked to domestic violence are a public tragedy – a quick Google search yields far too many hits. The murders of Nandanie Mohan, Tamesha La Toya Adams, Pettie Perez, Parbati Raghoo, Patricia Bacchus, Samantha Williams-Bagot, Sunita Lall, Vanessa Richmond-James, Greta King-Mortimer, Salima Mohamed, and all of the women slain by their partners (who have then gone on to take their own lives) must be counted. Where is the detailed record of these statistics? A discussion about suicide rates therefore necessitates a national dialogue about “how he beat and kill she.” The lives of these women count.
Returning to the opening (eavesdropped) passage, allow me to draw on a personal example to further explicate what I mean by a culture of disablement. I am the proud daughter of a sugarcane cutter. My father was one of those men gaffing and liming in that basement. He was born in Guyana and raised in Golden Grove, East Coast Demerara. When the union of his parents dissolved, they effectively abandoned him and his brother to the care of his paternal grandmother. With three people trying to survive on a pensioner’s income, the boys could not afford new school uniforms when the stitches in the old, threadbare ones stopped holding. He was forced out of school and began working at the age of nine. Without a formal education, my father assumed odd jobs of selling newspapers, running errands for stall owners in Big Market, and catching fish before the break of dawn. The boys often slept on the ships where they caught fish. Overtime, the inhospitable sea and its frigid waters began to affect my uncle’s hearing, leading to his progressive and permanent hearing loss. My father would go on to toil in the back dam harvesting sugarcane for years. This backbreaking and bone crushing work in the fields was further amplified when, at 21, he was stung in his left cornea by a marabunta (wasp) in 1986. He lost the majority of his vision in his left eye. He underwent several invasive procedures, including two corneal transplants. As a little girl, the exquisite glint of my father’s eyes, one brown and one blue, always caught my gaze but never perplexed me. With the onset of other compounding illnesses, the vision in both of his eyes rapidly deteriorated; my father is visually impaired. He experienced bouts of depression in Guyana and Canada. Immigrating to Toronto was a mixed blessing with its racism, comprehensive public healthcare, lack of employment prospects, and hopes of betterment for his children. He doesn’t speak of his eyes very often but occasionally he will tell me stories about his difficult upbringing; of the stifling abject poverty that he endured; of how he quietly sang songs to himself under the shade of green guava trees to fill his belly. This is what a culture of disablement looks like. How can I begin to grasp his disabilities, both physical and mental, without first recognizing his social positioning?
How then do we dismantle our disabling world, foster attitudinal shifts, and seek out material change? We can begin by thinking about how the everyday colloquialisms in which we pathologize people, even in the most playful and endearing of ways when we choose to say to others: “yuh mad”, “ah wha do yuh?”, “yuh crazy”, and “like you head nah good” are violent in their most basic form. We must also exhaustively address violence against women and all aspects of socio-economic inequality if we are to thoroughly understand the high suicide rate; otherwise, 44.2 per 100,000 inhabitants is an empty number. My father is not defined by his disabilities, but is he forever shaped and affected by our culture of disablement. My stake is personal. So when my Dad bestows his persistent advice, “Tek yuh education,” I nod and stare deeply into his blue eye. Our stakes are personal if we are to tackle our culture of disablement.
