Dear Editor,
I write in response to the Stabroek News editorial of Thursday, October 18th last, entitled “Poverty” , which salutes two mothers, both of whom had been subjects of earlier articles in Stabroek News – Ms Vanessa Simon on September 30 and Ms Dorothy Blackman on October 14. Ms Simon, whom the editorial calls “mother extraordinaire” is described as a “39-year-old single parent with five sons (who) holds down three menial jobs” and Ms Blackman as “also a mother of five, (who) is a newspaper vendor, who scrimped, scraped and saved to send her third child to university and law school”.
Both women deserve all the praise we can heap on them. That is not in question. But I want to challenge two aspects of the editorial.
The first is an old story: whether we end poverty by collective organizing against exploitation or by individual hard work within the exploitative situation, whether what we need is poor people in their numbers rising up against “the privileged few who most often have treated them unjustly” or individual sacrifice which – according to the editorial – can start “a revolution against poverty”. (I find the timing of the editorial significant, but let that pass for now).
Which brings me to my second point. The editorial not only acknowledges the two mothers as extraordinary; it carries an underlying assumption that they are rare in the sense that poor mothers who work themselves to the bone (and sometimes into the hospital, the mental asylum or the grave) are hard to find. That is simply not true, and the stories of other women’s lives often show that the revolution against poverty cannot and will not be made only by individual hard work.
Many, many poor mothers work hard. A month or so ago, one of Red Thread’s founding members, Cora Belle, died suddenly at the age of 62 after a lifetime of hard work.
Nicola Marcus, her daughter, who is also a founding member of Red Thread, after attending the funeral of the mother of the pastor who had so recently officiated at the funeral of her own mother, said that listening to the tributes “it was like looking into a mirror”. What she meant was that the pastor’s mother was a mirror image of her own mother, who had often worked three jobs to ensure that her nine children and many other foster children survived and grew, as they all did.
Vanessa Simon herself was quoted in the Sunday Stabroek article of September 30 as saying that “she does nothing differently from the many women around her, who work hard to help maintain their families”.
The problem is that many mothers do all that work without achieving what Stabroek News thinks is “a revolution against poverty”. For today, I want to offer just one uncontentious example of why – one that Red Thread has written about before, very often: the fact that the economic model we are working with is fuelling unprecedented migrations. For us in Guyana, what this means is that a mother working under conditions of unbelievable exploitation as a security guard, a domestic worker, a shop assistant, or a cook, cleaner or waitress in a cookshop, often has no one at home, not even an older child, to care for the other children. The other relatives who would once have taken up the slack, including sometimes the other parent, are somewhere else in the country or out of the country trying to earn money. Worse, we have families without a single resident parent or guardian. We have mothers who are “catching dey hand” in one part of the country or another country altogether while their children catch their tail living on their own or moving from house to house, because both immediate families and extended families have scattered.
Only a fool would say there are no bad mothers among us; clearly there are. But there are far more who are “mothers extraordinaire”. Some succeed in raising their children on the “straight and narrow” and deserve honour. But when we ignore or demonise the others who also deserve our respect even though their hard work does not lift their families out of poverty, then the mothers themselves, their children, and the whole society – all of us pay.
Yours faithfully,
Andaiye
Red Thread
