By Savitri Persaud
Savitri Persaud was born in Guyana. She is pursuing her Masters degree in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto.
Editor’s Note: Last week’s column promised to share some research findings from Trinidad and Tobago on the apparent paradox of escalating violence amidst increased legislation. We will return to this next week.
“Woman’s headless body found in suitcase,” reads a Kaieteur News headline written after the discovery of Neesa Gopaul’s mangled body in a creek off the Soesdyke/Linden Highway. It was later revealed that this headless body had a head, a head that was bludgeoned beyond recognition. Now picture this body – the body of a 16-year-old child, the body of a girl, just a few years younger than me. For me, this is a painfully haunting thought. I constantly find myself retreating from the image of Neesa Gopaul; the frozen image of her brutalized body that I have conjured in the foreground of my mind, and later the real image of the young, brilliant, and vital girl who appeared in the newspapers after her remains were positively identified. And yet, as I try to run from these images, I am running with them. As a nation runs from the faces of domestic violence – Neesa Gopaul, Alexis George, Bridgette Gangadin, Nekecia Rouse, and on and on – we are running with them, and in our hapless efforts we pretend not to see how we have packed them in our suitcase as we make our mad dash. We eventually come to realize that we have packed these articles of violence – the literal articles of violence that we encounter every day in our newspapers, and by extension in our nation, in our local communities, in our homes and our families – when we recognize that we have no place to run because we bring with us what we were running from.
We need to take collective ownership of this suitcase as we stop what Red Thread, in a letter to the Stabroek News last week described as “defensiveness, scapegoating, and political game-playing.” ‘Shame on the caseworkers’, ‘shame on the faculty at Queen’s College’, ‘shame on Neesa’s family’, shame, shame, shame… As of late, this is the kind of rhetoric that has been disseminated throughout media outlets, capturing the attention of the nation. Much can be said about who should be blamed and shamed for the gruesome murder of Neesa Gopaul; however, in the aftermath of this crime, should we engage in the discourse of ‘blame’ and ‘shame’ in this way? What do we achieve from this kind of engagement? Pinpointing specific parties that ‘should’ve’, ‘would’ve’, and ‘could’ve’, is often a knee jerk response that attempts to deflect the ways in which we are all complicit in the violence committed against women and children; the ways in which we are all collectively responsible for these tragedies. We do not want to remember when we are shamed and blamed; on the contrary, we want to forget, but wanting to forget is not forgetting.
We want to free ourselves from the burden of holding our suitcase when we drop it in the dusty corner of a room and try to go about our business. We stumble across our suitcase everyday. We know it’s there. And when yet another incidence of violence splatters the headlines and there is a flurry of letters to the press expressing indignation and outrage, we anxiously retrieve our suitcase and open its latches. When these crimes are viscerally grotesque we sometimes try to begin the process of unpacking. Sometimes we go as far as taking out a few of the violent articles, leaving our suitcase open for days, weeks at a time. But ultimately, we repack all of these items back into our suitcase as we close up its latches and place it right back in that corner. With every lull, we decide to flee from the convictions that prompted us to unpack, and we once again start to repack. With every unpacking and repacking, we are forced to add a few more articles of violence to our suitcase, and my how our suitcase continues to grow! Thus, as I wrote in a column back in May of this year, this “flurry of action reveals itself to be inaction, until the next headline announces another victim.”
Sometimes, we bury our suitcase in what we think is a recess of our mind, but in actively burying it in a place we call a ‘recess’, we know exactly where to retrieve it. In fact, our burial place is no more of a ‘recess’ than the corner of that room in our house, our nation. Neesa Gopaul’s murderers placed her body in a suitcase and discarded that suitcase in what they considered to be a ‘recess’ of the nation, in a creek near the now abandoned Emerald Tower Resort. But even in death, this child’s voice could not be drowned under the weight of the water that crushed the suitcase that encased her body and the weight of the dumbbells attached to the suitcase. When this suitcase surfaced, Neesa continued to speak to us in ways that were reminiscent of how she defended herself and others around her in life. Last week’s column observed that Neesa Gopaul was silenced by community indifference before her killers silenced her. But for me, and even in death, Neesa is not silent.
Let us retrieve our suitcase from the muddy creek and start to unpack. Let us open it up and confront the articles buried inside it. Let us unpack the stories of Neesa Gopaul, Alexis George, Bridgette Gangadin, Nekecia Rouse, and all of the women, children and men who are the victims of violence. It is in these moments of remembrance and uneasiness that we are compelled to unpack and bring about substantive change. These are our sociological hauntings of domestic violence that we must confront, or else we are doomed to repeat this pattern of action and inaction, of trying to unpack but ultimately repacking. Let us critically engage with the ways in which we are engulfed by apathy. We need to stop being complicit in the silence that shrouds violence. Let us unpack…
