The local TV news had ended and as I walked past the TV set I glimpsed a young protege. He was in what might be a new, local, studio-based game show in the typical foreign style of presentation.
The question posed by the quizmaster was something like, what wakes you up at night? Unsurprisingly, most contestants immediately thought about gunshots, before the idea of nightmares or a full bladder surfaced. Even I did, and I have never actually been awakened by gunshots.
Such is the profound expectation of violence. It is unhealthy just knowing how damaged our psyches are.
The Prime Minister recently announced a new approach to the prevailing violence in TT, having classified it as a public health issue. It always has been that, in fact, except that the disease is worse because of gun trafficking and we know more about it now because of the very active new-media environment.
But violence is endemic in our society. Conquest and colonialism were violent and our responses have been violent in return, both official and personal. The history of police savagery is older than Dr Rowley. A strong-arm, criminal police commissioner like Randolph Burroughs and his officers reducing incorrigible offenders and innocent unfortunates to less than gibbering wrecks. Batons beating bones like cutlasses felling cane stalks satisfied the desires of many ordinary self-respecting citizens, and in the rowdy rum shops, the ubiquitous cutlasses removing drunken drinking partners' arms and slashing disobeying women to death were everyday affairs.
These acts of violence have been with us since the 1800s as ways of keeping society and chattels in order and of settling scores. The bull-pistle might have been feared but was respected by the public as an instrument of punishment used by shopkeepers and others, since no one thought such a whip was an illegal weapon. One lash from the skinned bull's penis, stretched and cured to taut, rubbery strength, having slashed through clothing and skin, could proverbially make a slow man miraculously achieve the speed of lightning to avoid the second blow that would wreak havoc on the human body.
The violence was there among perfectly middle-class schoolchildren decades ago. My elder, high-achieving sister, who was the object of much teenage jealousy, was once boxed by a schoolmate as we walked out of the school gate. It was funny,
'Just because you think you are Barbara Salandy, you feel you could do anything,' to which my sister replied, 'But I am Barbara Salandy.'
When I was aged about ten, I experienced a similar boxing, but I never found out why. The girl, a quiet classmate, stepped out silently from a store entrance on Henry Street, hit me and ran off. The acute shame and shock were greater than the blow.
Another playful, pretty classmate would turn up with bloody wals on her legs from the whip her mother used. It was most probably not reported to the police and the child was not counselled.
The marauding red and black Carnival devils, jab jabs, and the characters of our folklo
