The Shadow of the Whip: A PDF on Caribbean Male-Female Relations

INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES: Read the article and summarise it in no more than 250 words in the space provided. “The Shadow of the Whip: A Comment on Male-Female Relations in the Caribbean” By Merle Hodge 1 The man-woman relationship is nowhere a straightforward, uncomplicated one....

INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES: Read the article and summarise it in no more than 250 words in the space provided. “The Shadow of the Whip: A Comment on Male-Female Relations in the Caribbean” By Merle Hodge 1 The man-woman relationship is nowhere a straightforward, uncomplicated one. And in the Caribbean this relationship has been adversely affected by certain factors of our historical development, notably, I think, by the legacy of violence and disruption with which our society has never adequately come to terms. 2 Caribbean society was born out of brutality, destructiveness, rape; the destruction of the Amerindian peoples, the assault on Africa, the forced uprooting and enslavement of the African; the gun, the whip, the authority of force. Yet the Caribbean area today is not particularly noted for any large-scale, organized violence. Caribbean governments sit securely and complacently, with or without popular support. 3 But the violence of our history has not evaporated. It is still there in the relations between adult and child, between black and white, between man and woman. It has been internalized; it has seeped down into our personal lives. 4 The fact that a physical fight between a man and a woman, or more accurately, a woman-beating, may erupt into the open air and rage for hours without any serious alarm on the part of onlookers for the safety of the woman, without attracting the intervention of the law, is a strong comment on our attitudes. 5 "Never never put yu mouth / In husband-and-wife business," runs the refrain of one calypso, a word of warning to the sentimental, to those who may be naive enough to think that a woman minds being beaten by her man. Another song recounts with mock disapproval a public "licking." The thinly veiled sexual imagery is a stock device of calypso, but here it illustrates effectively the idea of violence being part and parcel of the normal relations between man and woman: a policeman who would intervene is rebuffed by none other than the ''victim" of the licking: Constable have a care This is my man licking me here And if he feel to lick me He could lick me, Dammit, don't interfere. Of course, calypsonians are mainly men, and men are largely responsible for perpetuating the myth of women thriving on violence from their men:  Every now and then cuff them down They'll love you long and they'll love you strong. Black-up their eye Bruise-up their knee And they will love you eternally. 6 But of course, violence in its narrowest definition, namely, physical violence, is only a visible manifestation of a wider disruption, a basic breakdown of respect. For violence to women includes the whole range of mental cruelty which is part and parcel of women's experience in the Caribbean. 7 Every now and then our attention is drawn to this existing situation when a woman, known to her neighbors as a devoted, hard-working, self-sacrificing mother, of no particular wickedness, appears trembling and speechless before a judge for having killed her man. 8 And the familiar, almost humdrum details roll out again a history of intolerable ill-treatment by the man both upon her and upon her children: neglect, desertion, humiliation, tyranny, unreasonableness, lack of consideration... the last straw falls and the woman runs at him with a kitchen knife. 9 There is the folk song about Betsy Thomas, who killed her husband stone cold dead in the market and had no doubt that she would be absolved of crime: "I ain't kill nobody but me husband." In fact, our society implicitly acknowledges the permanent situation out of which husband killings arise, in the leniency the court generally affords to a woman who has been driven to this act. 10 Killing your man is an extreme measure, but it is a crisis which is only the visible tip of the iceberg. The black man in the role of dispenser of violence is very likely a descendant of the white slave-overseer asserting an almost bottomless authority over the whipped. But there is one fundamental difference, for whereas the overseer beat and tortured his victim because he had power over him, the black man ill-treating his woman is expressing his desire for power, is betraying a dire insecurity vis-à-vis the female. 11 In the Caribbean the "war of the sexes" takes on a very special character. It is not a straight fight between handicapped woman on the one hand and omnipotent man on the other. From the very beginning of West Indian history, the black woman has had a de facto "equality" thrust upon her. We became "equal" from the moment African men and women were bundled together onto galleys, men and women clamped to the floor alongside each other for the horrifying middle passage. 12 From the very beginning of our history on this side of the Atlantic, woman has been mobilized in the society's work force. But there was, of course, some division of labor or functions, and this is where the male-female trouble began. 13 The humiliation of slavery meant an utter devaluation of the traditional role of protector of the tribe, he was unable to defend either himself or his family from capture and transportation, from daily mishandling. His manhood was reduced to his brawn for the labor he could do for his master and to his reproductive function. 14 And the function of fatherhood was limited to fertilizing the female. Gone was the status of head of the family, for there was no family, no living in a unit with wife and children. A man might not even know who his children were, and at any rate they did not belong to him in any sense; he was unable to provide for them. Their owner performed the function of provider. 15 The black man had no authority over his children, but the woman did. The children's mothers, or female child-rearers, were responsible for the upbringing of the race. Women became mother and father to the race. And it is this concentration of moral authority in the person of the woman that has influenced relations between men and women of African descent in the Caribbean. 16 For today the average Afro-West Indian is still reared more or less singlehandedly by a mother, or aunt, or big sister, or godmother. The men have still not returned to the functions of fatherhood. Fathers are either physically absent. The prevalent pattern of concubinage and male mobility results in a man not necessarily staying put in one household until the children he has deposited there have grown up or, even when the father is present in the home, his part in the bringing up of the children is a limited one. 17 His role is not clearly defined and not binding. One of the roles he may play is that of punisher, administering beatings at the request of the mother; but the strongest influence in the home is usually female. The society may be called a matriarchal one. 18 Most Afro-West Indians have grown up "fatherless" in one way or another; most have been reared under almost exclusive female influence. So, in the society moral authority is female, an authority that may sometimes be harsh and driven to extremes by the situation of stress in which a Caribbean mother often finds herself often ill-feeling against a deserting man is vented upon the children he has left in her lap. 19 Caribbean women have developed a strong moral fiber to compensate for the weakening of the male. Hence the desire of the man to do her down, to put her in her place, to safeguard his manhood threatened by the authority of the female upstart. 20 The black man in the Caribbean is capable of deep respect for his mother and for older women in general. The worst insult in our language is to curse a man's mother. An "obscenity" flung in the heat of quarrel is, quite simply, "Yu mother!" Authority is female; a man will have instinctive qualms about disrespecting his mother or, by extension, her contemporaries, but he will take his revenge on the black female by seeking to degrade women within reach of his disrespect. 21 Young men at a loose end (usually unemployed: the devaluation of black manhood is perpetuated in economic frustration) will position themselves on a culvert, at a street corner, on a pavement, and vie with each other in the ingenuity of their comments to embarrass women going by. The embarrassment of woman is part of the national ethos, stemming, I am convinced, from a deep-seated resentment against the strength of women. 22 An important element of the history of male-female relations in the Caribbean has been the imposition of European standards of physical beauty the tendency of the man to measure the desirability of women by these standards, and the corresponding struggle of black women to alter their appearance as far as possible in the direction of European requirements for beauty but of course still falling short of these requirements. A large part of male disrespect for the black woman was an expression of his dissatisfaction with her, "inferior" as she was to the accepted white ideal of womanhood. 23 This bred a great deal of destructive dishonesty, a canker eating away at the roots of our self-respect. For these attitudes were especially destructive as they were to a large extent disavowed or even entirely subconscious. A man would vehemently deny that he could be the victim of this mesmerism. His cousin, yes, damn fool who went to England to study and could find nothing else to get married to but a white woman but he would never be found putting milk in his coffee, unthinkable, he had a healthy attitude toward these white people. 24 It was indeed a difficult burden to bear his very deep-seated resentment of whitedom and this hopeless involvement with them. Today's ideology has begun to liberate us from this particular dishonesty. It has forced into the open, and at a popular level, the discussion of our polarization toward whiteness, and it has effectively set about revising our concepts of physical beauty. The progressive abolition of hair-straightening in the Caribbean is a momentous revolution. It is part of the revaluation of the black woman. And the revaluation of black womanhood inevitably also implies a restoration of black manhood, when the black man no longer forcibly evaluates his women by the standards of a man who once held the whip hand over him. 25 It is one stage of his liberation from the whip hand. And it is only when our lives cease to be governed by the shadow of the whip that we can begin to heal the grave disruption of relations between men and women that we have suffered in the Caribbean. Extracted from “The Shadow of the Whip: A Comment on Male-Female Relations in the Caribbean” by Merle Hodge