Dear Editor,
I would like to thank Dr Randy Persaud for taking the time to keep the domestic violence epidemic in public view, in his letter of August 12 to Kaieteur News (‘Why over-politicise domestic violence?’) accusing me of sidelining the issue with diatribes and attempting to score political points in my Stabroek News column of August 10 (‘Stop the slaughter’), and of not taking a dispassionate and objective position on the matter (for the record, I am absolutely passionate and most definitely not objective about violence, so am delighted with that label here).
Persaud misses the point when he accuses me of stooping to cheap personal attacks and sidelining the issue by referring to the allegations made by Varshnie Jagdeo against her husband, Bharrat Jagdeo. Had he read carefully, he would have seen that I was making the point that, with the exception of this case, most of the reports that make the headlines involve the poor, leading to the erroneous, patronising and deeply harmful conclusion that domestic violence does not exist among the middle and upper classes, and is a poor people problem. This was not a comment on the merits of this case. Perhaps I am wrong; lest I be accused of singling out anyone, might Persaud alert me to other recent reports in the media involving middle or upper-class Guyanese that I could have referred to that I Dear Editor,
I would like to thank Dr Randy Persaud for taking the time to keep the domestic violence epidemic in public view, in his letter of August 12 to Kaieteur News (‘Why over-politicise domestic violence?’) accusing me of sidelining the issue with diatribes and attempting to score political points in my Stabroek News column of August 10 (‘Stop the slaughter’), and of not taking a dispassionate and objective position on the matter (for the record, I am absolutely passionate and most definitely not objective about violence, so am delighted with that label here).
Persaud misses the point when he accuses me of stooping to cheap personal attacks and sidelining the issue by referring to the allegations made by Varshnie Jagdeo against her husband, Bharrat Jagdeo. Had he read carefully, he would have seen that I was making the point that, with the exception of this case, most of the reports that make the headlines involve the poor, leading to the erroneous, patronising and deeply harmful conclusion that domestic violence does not exist among the middle and upper classes, and is a poor people problem. This was not a comment on the merits of this case. Perhaps I am wrong; lest I be accused of singling out anyone, might Persaud alert me to other recent reports in the media involving middle or upper-class Guyanese that I could have referred to that I might have inadvertently missed? While this is how I used the reference to the President in my column, I would also argue strongly against any notion that while poor people are to be named – usually on the front page – those in high positions should be treated by a different standard.
Persaud also argues that domestic violence is largely a cultural issue. In my column I referred to some of the broader cultural questions (the legitimisation of violence as an expression of love, the abuse of children in the name of discipline, wider cultures of impunity in Guyana) but made other links that have not yet been fully considered, approaches that are increasingly being taken by women and women’s movements across the world. At any rate, culture does not live in a vacuum. The way we make meaning out of our lives, our cultural expressions, the way we relate to each other, can never be isolated from the world, the society, the economy we live in. Barbadian novelist George Lamming has put this beautifully when he says “labour and the social relations experienced in the process of labour constitute the foundations of culture… the way we see, the way we hear, our nurtured sense of touch and smell, the whole complex of feelings which we call sensibility, is influenced by the particular features of the landscape which has been humanized by our work.” So who is living in a shell here?
Finally, political scientist Randy Persaud seems to suggest that I have politicised the issue of domestic violence. Let me state unequivocally that domestic violence is not cultural in the narrow sense that Persaud seems to prefer. Domestic violence is not personal. Domestic violence is deeply, deeply public and political. If there is one thing that women’s movements across the world have shown us in their ongoing struggle to refuse to be complicit in the domestication of this issue that affects us all, it is that the personal is, and always has been profoundly political. And any attempt to pretend otherwise only continues to silence the voices of women and others who want a comprehensive response to violence.
Perhaps Dr Persaud needs to examine his own ideological stance.
I will leave for another occasion my comment on Dr Persaud’s claim that the policies of the present Guyana administration are not neo-liberal.
Yours faithfully,
Alissa Trotz
Editor’s note
Dr Randy Persaud’s letter which appeared in Kaieteur News yesterday, arrived many hours after our letter columns closed for the day. Since it was also carried as a column in the Guyana Chronicle yesterday under the caption ‘Why over-politicise domestic violence?’ we have not repeated it here.
