Kristen Gyles | What mental shackles look like

“We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”

I bet Marcus Garvey didn’t know this snippet of his 1937 speech would be repeated by so many, for so long. Having first been popularised through Bob Marley’s Redemption Song, Jamaicans have become all too familiar with these words and with the broader concept of mental slavery. But what does mental slavery look like? The entire suite of ideologies that have been directly and subliminally ingrained in our minds to keep us subjugated as a people, is what keeps us mentally enslaved.

Self-hatred is one of them.

As a people, it is uncertain whether we really like ourselves. From observation, Jamaicans love the concept of Jamaica but do not necessarily like the people in it – the vast majority of whom are black people. Just look at how colourism and classism work in Jamaica. Skin bleaching, despite the physical and aesthetic damage it does, is still embraced in many communities because the lighter the complexion, the more importance and relevance in society some feel.

Negroid hair is still outrightly detested in some homes. Quite likely, some young girl is spending the emancipation holiday at home sitting between her mother’s legs getting her hair combed, while listening to a long berating rant about how she doesn’t have ‘good hair’ like some cousin or friend. On a more societal scale, the contempt towards black hair is more subtle, but it still stings. Young black girls have to spend inordinate amounts of time dealing with their hair because of how heavily policed it is. Afros are bad, puffs are bad, braids are not allowed and so are certain cultural hairstyles like ‘chiney bumps’, so black girls learn to see their hair as being the proble.

LOOK ON WITH CONTEMPT

Still, we argue endlessly about whether the use of Patois is appropriate in certain dignified spaces and we look on with contempt whenever certain cultural expressions are used – outside of on a stage, of course – where it can be monetised. Meanwhile, people who have never set foot on Jamaican soil are overseas trying to mimic the way we look and speak.

I guess one man’s meat really is another man’s poison.

Another one of the mental shackles still stunting our progress as a people, is disunity.

It is widely recognised that Africans were stolen from their homes and relocated to various parts of the world. But now that some are living in the United States, and others are living in the Caribbean and others are living in Latin America, we are too different to get along. We have become so individualistic and uncaring towards the issues that affect the wider community of emancipated people. Some Jamaicans will explicitly declare that we have our own problems and can’t afford to dilute our concentration with foreign issues. This mindset became most apparent during the Black Lives Matter movement where many Jamaicans boldly declared that “Cockroach nuh bizniz inna fowl fight”.

While black people compete with each other in the ‘Struggle Olympics’ to see whose suffering has been the worst, others are forging ahead with their lives. If you see yourself as an African-Jamaican as ‘cockroach’ and your African-American brother as ‘fowl’, you are a big part of the problem facing the black community. I hope we can at some point realise that racist white people don’t care one bit whether you call yourself cockroach or fowl. What is certain beyond all doubt is that you are African. So, good luck dodging the dart when your skin colour is in and of itself the bullseye.

FATHERLESSNESS

Another painful ideology that we are yet to leave behind is the one that results in fatherlessness.

The widespread absence of fathers in the black community can be traced back to the transatlantic slave trade, where deliberate efforts were made to tear the enslaved families apart by separating fathers from their children. This strategy was designed to weaken West African societies at their core by dismantling the family. It worked. And to this day, we have not fully recovered.

Across the society, fathers are treated as being secondary to mothers. For starters, we expect little of them and for the little that many do, fathers as a collective get little recognition. The wider the disparity between our celebration of mothers and our celebration of fathers, is the more fathers say they feel discouraged and continue to function as backseat passengers in their children’s lives. So, we end up with a matriarchal society running on patriarchal Christian values. But that is a discussion for another time.

It suffices to say that it is boys who grow up under this regime that become Jamaican fathers. If anything is to change, the change will therefore have to start with them. Are our boys being taught what parenthood looks like? Are they being told that most importantly, they will need to be *present* as fathers? Are they being taught that they will one day have to show up for PTA meetings at school? Or that they will have to help with homework at some point? Are they being taught that they will eventually have to get up in the middle of the night to hush the baby who won’t stop crying? Or are they learning through observation that fathers only matter when money is low?

Fatherlessness is a cycle the entire society plays into. It can and should be broken.

Mental shackles can only be broken if we first realise that they exist, and then actually identify them. We can choose to distance ourselves from our past, or we can face it head-on and address the hard parts while celebrating the good parts.

Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Send feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com