The Tribune

By DR IAN BETHELL-BENNETT

IN THE Bahamas today you can buy anything you want, from an Uzi to a baby.

You can ride down the road on an off-road motor bike, shoot someone in the head and ride off. Yet no one sees anything; no one seems to say exactly what kind of violence that is.

We talk vociferously about disaffected youth but say very little about the level of gang violence in town.

In a 1960s novel, “God the Stone Breaker” by Jamaican writer Alvin Bennett, the young male character, Panty, is brought up by his grandmother, GB, a hard-hearted, harsh-tongued, unloving trickster.

He is the illegitimate son of her illegitimate daughter, and she has no love for him, except when it is convenient for her. She constantly tries to benefit from others’ misfortunes. She is manipulative and callous, yet a fantastic actress and always ready to buck the system.

Under her expert tutelage, Panty becomes a male version of her nasty ways. She often says that he will be the death of her. He, as he has learned from her, uses her for all he can.

Meanwhile, under her callous-hardened heart she somewhere adores this boy, because he is a boy and so has privilege without responsibility.

From the missionaries in the novel to the politicians, all are unsavoury, hate mongers and disingenuous ‘lucifites’ ready to rape and pillage and use all they can for their own benefit; the community be damned! Yet, GB loves them thus. She promotes male domination and control. When these unpleasant things happen, however, as they do regularly, we blame something other than bitter seeds of hatred we spawn.

GB, Bennett’s character, had nothing good to say about anyone except when she would benefit from her kind words. Life was nothing but a show. Her heart was filled with bilious contempt for all around her, except for her secret admiration of whiteness. Yet she would do all she could to steal them blind as well. Her moral compass was absent.

When preachers preach hatred based on difference, what are they really saying?

How can they then turn around and claim that God has inspired them to preach love and fellowship?

The entire concept of breaking bread together is about love and togetherness. Yet these persons who wield power in our gambling-happy, rum-swilling, hypocritically-pristine community see nothing wrong with killing people with words but condemning the murders and other sundry sinners.

In most instances, they stand and sing or recite simply:

I hate you because you are high yellow;

I hate you because you are FE-MALE;

I hate you because you are black;

I hate you because you are poor;

I hate you because you are low class;

I hate you because you don’t look like me;

I hate you because you look too much like me;

I hate you because I hate me;

I hate because I ain’t never seen love;

I hate because I ain’t never felt love;

I hate because it is all I know;

All I hear,

All I see,

All I feel,

I hate because I am taught to hate.

When I am not taught to hate, I am taught to kill.

It is ironic that, like GB, so many in our society are happy to teach hate and spew vehement violence—like they throw lye—because they are in power; they then run and hide their hands or stand their and say, it wasn’t me, I preach love.

They are quick to condemn those youth who gather their message and drive down dark roads or day-lighted avenues and shoot and kill. The cloth that cloaks gives a responsibility—beyond teaching hatred, not only privilege.

When ministers, politicians and members of ‘high’ society can freely shout hatred, while at the same time abusing the people they claim to love, much like paedophilic parents do to their children, we create a community blinded by anger and hatred. So when the young man shoots the other young man who is walking a street, shoots him straight in the head, he is only doing what he has learned from those who claim to be his betters, yet he is being more honest with his violence. His violence is not hidden under the cloth and the grammatical nightmare of a show of flower-filled love.

The last few weeks have seen some of the worst two-faced, violence-building and hate and fear mongering that a country can see. Every tool has been used to destroy a people, yet the people are led willing into their destruction. The leaders use every word and every minute to undermine and steal away from the community their very breath. They throw up smoke and countless dispersions that allow them to sow hatred, discontent, anger, fear, distrust, inequality, violence while selling the colonial saviour myth, destroying the very fibre of the community, smiling and praying, and blaming the poor, black youth man out on the street who has done nothing more or less than follow the example of his ‘betters’.

The forked tongue of love has a dagger hidden in its folds that inflicts far more damage than the gun held openly in the hands of the criminals.

When will we wake up and see where violence really buries its cancerous growth?

Not all flowers are sweet in the same way, sometimes the simplest flower with no perfume is the least poisonous.

Bennett showed how completely destructive GB was in the life of her grandson, and the devastation of colonial encounters, yet half a century on, we seem to think that there is still a great white hope that will come and lead us out of Babylon without exacting any responsibility or accountability from the black hope that lives among us. There are many kinds of gang violence.