Jackie ‘Jaxx’ Hanover is well known for her music and more recently her Jaxx Apparel clothing line. She has also been outspoken about her mental health, battling with depression and her fractured relationship with her mother.
Sometime ago, she wrote a blog post, ‘Guyanese parents are toxic,’ which was widely read and commented on. She made it clear she did not think all Guyanese parents are bad; her intention was not to paint everyone with the same brush.
“I believe parents do their best to provide their kids with a happy and wholesome childhood,” Hanover said at the beginning of that post. “However, every parent makes mistakes (some more than others), and many unfortunately exhibit behaviours that are mentally and emotionally damaging to their children. These toxic behaviours leave many kids with deep emotional trauma that greatly affects them well into adulthood.”
For her, starting the conversation was a chance to validate the suffering of children from those relationships and hopefully assist in the healing process. She did caution, however, that the Guyanese public at large does not provide an enabling atmosphere for such conversations to take place.
Her candid social media posts about her relationship with her mother saw her receive major backlash and for a time added to her mental health struggles, but for her it was worth talking about. The backlash did not only come from social media, but also popular local radio shows. But Hanover is long past being shamed.
“I have been shamed so much since I was a child. There is no shaming left to shame me. I am immune to it at this point. So it is easier for me to talk about it at this point because I have already taken away that shame from myself. I don’t attach it to myself so there is no shame people can shame me…,” Hanover told the Stabroek Weekend during a long conversation.
Chronicling her childhood, Hanover said she grew up with a mother, who initially was not around as she was out making a living, and so she and younger brother were left with relatives and friends. She was abused on many occasions, leaving her with physical and emotional scars and talking about it is a way of healing and moving on.
She believes that because of her abusive childhood she was also abused in her intimate relationships.
Her mother and father separated and she was the only child who lived with her mother for about four years before her young brother came along. She has two older sisters but they grew up with her mother’s family.
“My mother worked a lot. I saw my mother full time when I was probably 14. My mother is an exceedingly hard worker… she was in the army for 19 years… she worked at the Georgetown Hospital, she is a medic now,” Hanover said.
She admitted that her mother was missing in her early childhood because she had to toil for a living and she travelled a lot. There were nights when they were told to lock the doors and she “would sometimes get away from the army to come home to feed us”. But most of the time they stayed with “people and it wasn’t always family”; some were just residents in the village.
“I think during that period that’s when I experienced a lot of, I don’t even know how to describe it, a lot of abusive situations with random people, with family members who were kind of stressed out about having to keep us. Staying with a family in the village and their kids beating me up… another family who we stayed at, the woman who was keeping us would wring my brother’s ear until it was bleeding and I literally ran away from that house when I was probably 12.”
There was one time, she said, her brother was beaten so badly by a family member that the police were called in.
Mother returned
Hanover said when her mother returned to the home on a more permanent basis, she was already in high school and had already developed a certain mindset. She did excellent in spelling competitions and was debating in high school, but always interested in arts and craft and she wanted to be a singer.
Having an unstable home environment messed with her ability to study and take her education seriously.
“So I had a lot of grievances with her because I was very angry,” she said. “I figured out now that the anger was at the parent who stayed because I couldn’t be angry at the parent who left… So when she came back in our life we had a lot of structure, she was there full time… However, because we didn’t have a relationship prior to that, her now trying to become a mother was very hard.”
She said her mother, who was also abused as a child, was a very abusive person.
“I remember being 12 and I had broken an umbrella that she had given me to go to school and my mother beat me with this umbrella. I was walking to school and my uniform was covered in blood and people were watching me with horrified looks on their faces… I was crying. The teacher had to change me,” she said, laughing sarcastically and adding, “Just talking about these things getting my adrenaline a little high.”
According to the young artiste, she has scars across her body from the abuse she received and there were times she had to have stitches at a hospital.
“She would pelt me with a hammer. She would pelt me with a mug of drink when she was angry,” she detailed, sharing that when she was 12 she wanted to commit suicide because she felt that her mother did not love her.
“I never felt loved,” she added even as she explained that her mother also was not loved as a child.
Her mother, she said, was convinced she was doing better than her parents as she was educating her children, an opportunity she did not have.
An alcoholic grandfather did not contribute positively to Hanover’s childhood, as while she recalled him being mostly jovial, she also remembered him “smelling of alcohol all the time”.
She said her mother began working at a young age to help take care of her family. “When she had us she was so busy at work; she wanted to be the mother that she never had and take care of us and provide for us because they [her mother’s parents] struggled a lot.”
She believes that her mother did better than her own parents in terms of ensuring they were educated as she pointed out that she graduated from St Roses with 11 subjects and all of her siblings went to high school and graduated.
“She did do better than her mother but she also became her mother because she was not taking care of her mental health,” she surmised. And because her mother did not take care of her mental health, Hanover said, she “abused me terribly”. She recalled one instance when she was beaten with a four-inch-thick cord because she refused to attend church with her mother.
“She black and blued me so badly, my mouth was burst, my head was burst and I ran barefoot from East Coast to Georgetown…” she sadly shared. She went to a friend’s house for protection. There was another time when she went to a pastor for shelter and approached her relatives as well but they did not help. “Because it was like, is you mother and you have to listen to you mother and do what you mother say,” she said.
In one instance the welfare system was involved and she was sent to her father, but when she was explaining the issue to him, “he slapped me” and she had “absolutely no choice but to return to my mother.”
Hanover described her mental health during her teenage years as “extremely bad. I tried to commit suicide. I have scars on my hands, at least 16 scars from when I would cut myself at home,” she said. She acted out during those years because of the situation at home and ended up being punished at school.
“It was a very bad cycle and I tried to drop out of school when I was in fourth form,” she said. But said she is grateful that her mother ensured that she returned as she eventually graduated.
However, her mother never believed in her dream of becoming a singer and told her she was wasting time.
When she was 18, Hanover said, her mother threw her out of the house because she went home late one night from swimming classes. She has never returned.
She described her mother as a “control freak,” who “is not normal and I have been trying to tell everybody that she is not normal since I was a child”.
They have had an estranged relationship for years and it has become more fractured in recent times.
“No. I haven’t spoken to my mother in over a year,” she disclosed.
Mental breakdown
Around that time she attempted to wage a public war for better payment of local artistes Hanover took a battering even as no one understood her abusive childhood, her cousin was murdered. She was forced to take a break from social media.
“I did have a mental breakdown,” she confessed, and she is still working on overcoming this because when she speaks of things from her past she is still hurt.
She described that period as being in “isolation” when she was “broken down on social media” as she attempted to understand what was happening with her and it was from listening to people online that she understood what was emotional health and emotional boundaries.
She believes she was the child who cared the most for her mother, but that her mother took advantage of this and acted out her “dysfunction towards me” and used religion as a way to get her to confine to her dictates. “She used hell and God to shame me into coming back in line.”
She was not taught about sex and relationships and she got into an abusive relationship at 19, which lasted until she was 23.
“I had a boyfriend who would beat me for everything. The first time, he kicked me in the stomach because I went out late with my friend,” she shared, adding that his family did protect her from him.
But the mental abuse was more intense as Hanover said she had opened up to him about her childhood and he used that against her to control her. She eventually left when he gave her the ultimatum of choosing between him and becoming a singer.
Her mother was the most discouraging person when she finally started to sing. After she started earning from singing, her mother criticized how she was spending the money, as she was spending it in the studio instead of on material things.
Hanover said she attempted to have conversations with her mother in the past but she gaslighted and used her and she has gotten tired because there is no emotional closeness.
“She never hugged me growing up. I never got a kiss from my mother,” she said, adding that she heard the words ‘I love you’ when she was 26 and assisted her mother financially in a big way.
In 2018, she attempted one last time to have a healing conversation with her mother, telling her how she felt, what she did wrong, how she is still hurting and wanted to be close to her mother. Instead of listening, her mother told her to get over it.
“She said, ‘I have no sorry to give you, get over it’. Nobody could hurt you more in your life than your mother or love you more in your life than your mother.”
Surrogate family
Hanover has now surrounded herself with a surrogate family in the form of her friends and she candidly said, “they are the ones responsible for me not being in a mental institution.
“They poured out so much love and they cried with me when I needed to cry and told me that I did not deserve those things because there was a part of me which thought I did deserve it and I kept getting into abusive relationships.”
She is estranged from most of her relatives who believe she has been shaming the family because she publicly speaks, but for her the family is shaming itself because the family is producing traumatised children.
Members of the public have also told her not to shame her family and pointed out that there were people who experienced worse. Those comments hurt her initially, as she wanted to be understood, but not today.
Since speaking out, countless persons have shared their experiences with her and at times it becomes so overwhelming that she has to stop speaking to them.
“Guyanese have a way of shaming each other, so I wouldn’t tell people to go out and tell Guyanese about what is going on. Seek help, listen to professional persons but do not speak about it publicly unless you are okay with being shamed. Don’t do what I do. I am an extremely brave person, but I wouldn’t tell the average person to go and speak like that,” she advised.
Hanover’s work is a big part of her life. A recording artiste, she has also launched Jaxx’s Apparel and she is a visual artist so she has Jaxx’s Art where she does paintings on commission.
She has been focusing on Jaxx’s Apparel primarily because it was a dependable source of income after live shows were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She hopes to make it global, forming her own website and expanding shipping worldwide.
Hanover emphasised though that she is still a musician and does shows, live and virtual.
She plans to release an album next year but will start releasing singles soon. “In the summer, I would be releasing my first set of singles since 2016; that was the last time I released a song and that was ‘Guyana’… I stopped…[to] focus on my mental health and my emotional health and integrate the lessons that I have learnt from all of those things,” she said.
Her new music will detail her experiences in life, all written and produced by her and her band with assistance from Kross Kolor Records and Gavin Mendonca of Creole Rock. The band is called ‘The Topside band’ with members Jeremy Sobers, Christian Sobers, Rondell Glasgow and Jahiem Jones.
