As I shared in my May 23rd post on getting my creative mojo back, I have resumed work on my writing project about women of agency. Revision of the completed draft of Part One, set in Guyana, is steadily moving forward. I struggled with Chapter Two: The Violence of Men.

When I first presented this chapter to my writers’ critique group in August 2019, I discovered that it was an uncomfortable subject for the male members of our group. I could see the rage in the eyes of my writing friend seated directly across from me on the other side of the table.

“I’m not a violent man,” he told me, struggling to restrain his anger. “I defended my mother against our psychotic father… I protected her.”

Taken aback, I said: “I’m speaking in general terms.”

Another male member of our group was more measured with his response: “Rough content, but so is life.”

Guyana’s First National Survey on Gender-Based Violence, launched in November 2019, revealed that more than half (55%) of all women experienced at least one form of violence. More than one in ten had experienced physical and/or sexual violence from a male partner in the previous 12 months. One in every two women in Guyana has or will experience Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in their lifetime. Moreover, one in five (20%) women has experienced non-partner sexual abuse in their lifetime; thirteen percent (13%) experienced this abuse before the age of 18.

We live in a world still dominated by the heterosexual male. All men are not violent. All women are not nurturers. I’m considering changing the Chapter heading to “Violence as Humanity’s Default System.” What do you think?

Chapter Two: The Violence of Men

Violence in all its manifestations has been a part of our lives worldwide. No country is immune. In former European colonial societies built by slave and indentured labor, like British Guiana, violence was an essential means of control. Such violence against the human body and spirit did not simply vanish into the ether at the end of slavery and colonialism. It reverberates within the society where the strong continue to batter the weak and more vulnerable: women, children, the aged, and the marginalized.

From an early age, I experienced and witnessed the violence of men while growing up in one of many working-class tenement yards across the capital. Father ruled with verbal and physical abuse. Playing in the drawing room and touching his treasured record and book collections featured high on his litany of offenses. He beat us for being disobedient. He beat us for being too noisy or fighting among ourselves. He beat us for stealing sugar or sweetened condensed milk. The local wild cane—made from the tall, tough-stemmed, arrow-grass reed plant—was his weapon of choice. A blow from the wild cane stung our tender flesh, leaving a red mark that later faded. Hiding the wild cane made matters worse, as Father would grab his leather belt which wielded a more severe blow. I developed an abscess on my right arm after such a blow. Once, I tried escaping licks, as we called it, by hiding under the bunk bed. Bad idea. I got double the number of lashes.

When Father came home drunk, things could get ugly for everybody, including Mother. Father did not strike her. Similar in body weight, she never cowered. She stood firm, ready to fight back. Instead, he lambasted her with the most vulgar Creole language.

“Scunt, rasshole,” he said, hurling the demeaning words at her.

Mother responded in similar coarse language.

“One-a-these days, I going bash in your mouth.”

“Try it,” she told him.

One of my earliest memories of Father’s drunken rage was the time he threw the pot of cooked food out the kitchen window. For some reason, it was not done to his liking. I must have been between three and four years old. I huddled in a corner out of sight. Did Father hate us? Were we a burden to him? These were questions I asked myself as I grew older.

He and Mother fought constantly about money. In those days, Father worked as a clerk for a small, family-owned, importer and wholesale firm. The money he gave her each month was never enough to feed our growing family.

“But you always got money to drink with your friends.”

“Is what you saying?” Father would snap back. “A hardworking man can’t even take a drink with he friends?”

To help with expenses, Mother took a Singer’s sewing course. Grandfather paid for the course and bought her a table model of the Singer sewing machine with a hand crank. (I didn’t know it then, but Grandfather was our Guardian Angel.) Added to her chores of caring for us kids, cooking, washing clothes, and house cleaning, she began working from home as a seamstress. From as early as six years old, I became her helper in caring for my younger siblings and going on errands to get everyday foodstuff—like margarine, peanut butter, salt, and sugar sold by the ounce in greaseproof paper packages or paper bags—at the Chinese cake-shop at the corner of our block. Fearful of getting licks, I never told her about the time the shopkeeper’s young black assistant put me to sit on the countertop and put his hand in my panty.

At eight years old, I learned the truth about my birth. In the tenement yard with ten family units—two two-story wooden houses with four flats each and two small cottages—we children were privy to the boisterous exchanges between the adults. Mother got into an argument with a female tenant after my seven-year-old brother broke her windowpane while playing cricket.

“Your husband only marry you ‘cause you did pregnant,” the neighbor told Mother, straight up in her face.

I dared not ask Mother if it were true. We did not put our mouth in big people business, as we say in the local dialect. Later, Mother’s youngest sister, Auntie Baby, confirmed the accusation. Oh, the guilt I carried from thence forward, believing that I was the cause of Mother’s unhappy marriage!

In her elder years, Mother became more open about her early life. She and Father were thrown together by circumstances not of their doing. Her younger sister stole her boyfriend, the guy she had wanted to marry. The girl Father loved was my mother’s cousin—Grandfather’s only daughter. At the time, Father worked at Grandfather’s bakery. Determined to end her daughter’s undesirable relationship with a penniless orphan, Grandmother used her niece, living under her care, as the scapegoat to separate the lovebirds.

“He seduced me,” Mother told me, in anger. “I didn’t even like him. He was too full of himself.”

Mother was seventeen when she got married under a judge’s order. Father was eight years older. Did Father resent being forced to marry a girl he did not love because of an unexpected pregnancy? Was that the source of his rage? As an adult, after their separation and divorce, I never discussed those early days living under his roof. I did not share such a close personal relationship with him. During her first return-visit to Guyana, after migrating to the United States, my younger sister asked him why he used to beat us so much.

“I didn’t want you-all to grow up bad,” he told her.

My only sister, the third-born child, was born a week after the British governor suspended the Guianese constitution and clandestinely landed British troops at dawn on October 9, 1953. From that day until our country’s independence in 1966, the presence of British soldiers on our streets and on parade became part of our daily lives.

“They were a bad influence on young girls,” Mother told me. She could tell lots of stories, she added, about the comings and goings of British Army officers at a house owned by a respectable woman in society. “You won’t believe the pretty young girls she had working for her.”

Young women vied for the attention of the single, young, white males from every new regiment of British soldiers that came to our shores on one-year tours of duty. They dreamed of marrying a white man and moving to the United Kingdom. Dozens of our local beauties succeeded, flying out with their army husbands at the end of their military posting.

Some men did not take kindly to the ‘limeys’ stealing their women. On the street where Father’s brother and his family lived, a soldier died during a street fight with a local black man over a woman. My uncle’s eldest son, then a teenager, was among the crowd that gathered to witness the fight. When the local police arrived, he was arrested and jailed along with other onlookers identified as inciting the squabble.

“When you see people fighting on the street, you go the other way,” Mother warned me and my siblings.

Though the adults often used a coded language for serious stuff we kids should not know about, it became clear to me that lots of violent men existed in the world. Men much worse than Father. Men who beat their wives to death. Men who slashed their wives and children with the cutlass or machete, like cane stalks on the sugar plantation (see captioned photo).

A local man killed a white female foreigner in the Promenade Gardens, an area we walked by on our way to and from elementary school. More warnings. The police found a missing girl’s body in an outdoor latrine pit. What had she done to deserve to die, to have her body dumped in a pit of human feces?

In my adolescent years, as for all young women, I became the target of idle young men liming on the sidewalks—with nothing better to do with their time than to hang around making remarks about female passers-by. Nothing escaped their scrutiny: your hair, face, breasts, hips, buttocks, legs, dresswear, the way you walked. Vulgarity was their preferred language. Depending on the location, I also faced the danger of being sexually assaulted.

The racial disturbances, during the 1960s struggle for independence, brought increased violence in our city streets and in villages along the coast and riverbanks. While protestors burned the commercial district on Black Friday, February 16, 1962, Mother and I huddled in the blackout around a transistor radio, listening to the news. We heard the British governor call for order in the streets. Father had left home earlier that day and had not yet returned. What a relief when he appeared around nine o’clock that evening! Exhausted and covered with soot, he gave us the terrible news. The building where his workplace was located had also burned to the ground. Father was now out of work. Six months went by before he found another job.

The vileness of men intensified as the two major political parties battled to lead the colony to independence, pitting the majority blacks and East Indians against each other. Caught in the crossfire were the minority populations of Amerindians, Chinese, Portuguese, and people of mixed race, like our family. Political discussions between Father and his drinking buddies often grew heated. The newly formed Portuguese political party, led by a successful businessman, only divided them more. Taking sides came with risks to one’s safety. A group of young East Indian men once threatened to beat up Father for trying to protect his black friend.

As villages burned along the coast and families were attacked and killed, people were forced to flee their ancestral villages for refuge among people of their own kind. Two East Indian sisters joined our class at the Catholic high school for girls. With only the clothes on their backs, their family had fled the fire-bombing of their home in a coastal village. I saw only fear in their eyes. They never talked about what they had seen and experienced. Newspaper reports recounted all the killings, burnings, and defilement of women and girls. An eye for an eye. As a devout Catholic, I saw all this violence as the demons of Satan let loose among us. The demons possessing men showed no mercy for children.

I was thirteen when the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Works and Hydraulics and seven of his nine children, ranging from six to nineteen years old, were burnt to death in their home. The Permanent Secretary was an upstanding Catholic in the Portuguese community. That fatal night, as the family slept on the top floor, the arsonists saturated the interior stairway with gasoline, and then set it ablaze. The mother, badly burned, and her twenty-year-old daughter survived by jumping through a window on the top floor. On her return home from a show, their eldest daughter, twenty-four years old, could not contain her terror and grief as she looked on helplessly as her father and younger siblings perished in the flames. The perpetrators were never brought to justice.

Violent men have no regard for the children of our world.

I determined, then, never to get married and bring children into such a heartless and cruel world. That same year, I also began menstruating. “You’re a young lady now,” Mother told me. “Don’t let any boy touch you down there. He going give you a big belly.” She did not go into details. The threat of pregnancy was enough. No boy was going to get me pregnant and condemn me to a life of suffering, like my mother.

In biology class in high school, I learned all about the male and female genitalia and reproductive system. From more informed girls in class, I gained enlightenment not only about sexual intercourse, but also about sexual abuse within some families. Other girls my age faced much greater abuse than I did.

The hushed coded language among adults on my mother’s side of the family became clear to me. My own relatives were not immune. One of my older female cousins, raised by Grandfather, was a child of incest. On discovering her father’s identity as a young woman, I kept my distance from him. Another female cousin, also under Grandfather’s protection, was a bastard child—a curse in those days for an upright, Christian family. She was left behind in British Guiana when her teenage mother migrated to the United States.

By fifteen years old, I made up my mind to enter the convent, to devote my life to Jesus with whom I had developed a deep, spiritual connection. He filled me with courage to face my fears and insecurity to survive each new day. What better way to repay Him for all His blessings?

The day I left home for the convent, January 14, 1971, Father was next door at our landlord’s residence. Only my mother and sister attended the entrance ceremony held in the chapel of the Mother House of the religious order. Years later, the landlord told me that on that day, as he drowned his sorrow in alcohol, Father had blamed himself for my decision to become a nun.

“I was too hard on her,” Father had lamented. “I drive her away.”

During those years of a semi-cloistered life of self-denial, prayer, and reflection, I learned to forgive my father. I made my peace with him and with the abuse I had suffered under his care. As a nun in a patriarchal church, I saw more clearly the place of women in a world dominated by powerful men who use violence as a means of control. Not all men are violent or prone to violence. Not all women are nurturers.

My repressed rage erupted when I was a twenty-six-year-old nun struggling with sexual harassment in the workplace. The explosion of a firecracker, placed under my chair by a thirteen-year-old male student during a school party, brought the darkness deep within me into the light. My rage terrified me.

Regarded as inferior human beings—for we came from the rib of Adam, the Holy Bible claims—women have found myriad ways to survive and even thrive in a world where men have for millennia enjoyed privileges over the female body. In the following chapters, I share the stories of such women. Their names have been changed to protect their identity. These are stories from my viewpoint as a participant-observer, a term used by field researchers in anthropology and sociology.