‘Laugh an cry does live in the same house’

How Language contributes to a culture that normalises violence against women and the LGBTQ+ community in the Caribbean

Content warning: This post contains mentions of gender-based violence, multiple forms of abuse and references discriminatory behaviour towards the LGBTQ+ community.

I remember the laughter that invigorated the room and seemed to momentarily suppress the bride and groom’s anxiety. It was my brother's wedding reception and the bride’s uncle decided to give the newlyweds some advice:

‘When yuh reach home, just slap she and say, ‘Yuh see, that was for nothing. So imagine if yuh do something.’

He alleged that this was the secret to marital bliss. Everyone laughed and no one expressed concern. The most tragic part of that night was the fact that all the young people and teenagers laughed, themselves, myself included. Adults were the aspiration so their actions were like every Machel Montano song lyric, to be copied and rehearsed for the next gathering and fete.

This anecdote is one of thousands I can recount where violence against women was ridiculed, trivialised and normalised to the point of being used as an icebreaker or a joke in a toast at a ceremony, where a couple was going to begin their lives. The perverseness is unfathomable but you cannot look away much like an Ari Aster film.

As such, we recognise the very words we do not give a second thought to are a monumental contributor to the high rates of violence against women in the Caribbean. While our language is a glorious product and remnant of centuries of struggle, suppression and multiculturalism, it also bears the wounds of our society. The very language that gives us the sagacious wisdom through granny’s adages, folklore and diverse stories also take away the importance allotted to the safety of women and LGBTQ+ members of society.

Language can influence the impact of culture through perpetuating negative perceptions, reinforcing stereotypes and trivialising harsh realities. This can take the form of seemingly innocuous jokes, witticisms and proverbs. Consequently, the emergence of particular Caribbean slang, though occasionally comical and used to bond and create familiarity with communities, fosters an already misogynistic culture that turns a blind eye to the plight of violence against women and the LGBTQ + community.

A few aphorisms come to mind to articulate this dilemma we find ourselves in. My grandma used to say ‘What sweet in goat mouth sour in he bam bam’ which means that actions that may seem harmless result in bitter consequences. She would also say ‘Laugh and cry does live in the same house’ which means that the source of our troubles may stem from the source of our joys. It seems that our oral traditions that permeate our music, our jokes, our everyday slang, even our Nobel prize-winning literature can not only be a source of unmitigated pride and joy but also our troubles when it comes to our understanding of human rights.

There is an undeniable link between language and its impact on any society’s culture, perceptions and expectations for its people. According to the Theory of Linguistic Relativity, a language moulds our minds and our thoughts inevitably shaping the reality of the people within society. The English language has an inbuilt bias towards the masculine (Stahlberg et al, 2007). The default ‘He’ (Nguyễn Văn Khang, 2000), ‘man’ when referring to the human race, ‘mankind’ all according to Kleinman (2002) maintains the patriarchy by cementing men as the standard and women and those who identify otherwise as anomalies.

According to Caroline Craido Perez in her seminal work, ‘Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’, professions like doctors, lawyers, engineers are still alluded to as being male. Dr Edward Morris affirms that sexist ideas that penetrate our language trivialise and minimise violence, dehumanisation and degradation of women and are brushed off as ‘locker room talk’ or ‘boys being boys’. When these concerns are raised, women are often gaslit into thinking they are just overreacting, a supposed symptom of their sex. Unsurprisingly, there exists a power dynamic in men’s favour with the words crafting not only the past and present but also the future. When women and the LGBTQ+ community undergo physical, mental, emotional abuse, it is easy to then brush aside. Their existence is seemingly an incongruity hence their pain inherits a similar status.

‘Stop being a lil Bitch’, ‘acting like a pussy’, ‘pussyclat’ are fixtures of our everyday talk and we think nothing of it. However, the talk is textured and they poison our relationships with each other. It becomes easier to view women as vessels for sexual pleasure, walking libidos than whole human beings with sentiments and complexity. Women and girls are then reduced to one-dimensional entities which makes it even easier for them to become statistics. Moreover, these terms inhibit men and young boys from practising empathy in their daily interactions with young women, romantic liaisons and amicable relationships. The desensitization is then embedded within the culture and the more incidences of violence that pile up, the more it is ignored. Of course, we see the 10 days of rage and remorse when a young woman or girl goes missing, is reported dead, raped or sexually harassed but then the harsh reality reaffirms its presence. Nothing has changed and the numbness, comfort and complacency return home.

The same is demonstrated with members of the LGBTQ+ community. Attributing feminine traits to anything or anyone automatically denotes inferiority hence effeminate homosexual men and transgender men and women are slandered beyond comparison. We all know the names like “Boula,” “bulla/bulla man” “chi-chi man,” “mal-manman,” “makoume,” “zamiyez,” “rubbers,” “batty bwoy,”“fag,” “faggot,” “dyke,” “homo,” “sodomite,” “she-male,” “he-she,” “it,” “shim,” “tranny” that are thoughtlessly flung around when queer persons are in the room, in relationships, are harmed and sexually harassed. The dogging denigration, therefore, paves the way for violence against these individuals such as corrective rape to be accepted and even encouraged. The jokes and names are used to construct a veil that our society uses to hide behind when we do not want to address prejudice and misinformation. When you strip these individuals of their acknowledged identity and replace it with a publicly agreed upon misnomer intended to break them, you make it easy for their bodies to be viewed as public property. Damage to public property does not outrage us or force us to contemplate and enact change, it is just another Tuesday.

There seems to be a top-down influence where even those we look up to wield the same insults and employ the same jokes that ultimately dehumanise women and the LGBTQ+ community. It reminds me once again of the adults at my brother’s wedding and us looking and listening to learn how to act, how to conduct ourselves in the hopes of deconstructing and mastering adulthood. But this deconstruction of adulthood and governance comes at a price as we realise that some of the adults in the room and our leaders are perhaps just as lost as we are. It does little to ignite and maintain confidence.

When T&T’s Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley made this comparison, ‘A golf course is like a woman, you have to groom her every day otherwise it turns into a pasture,' or when he advised women to ‘Choose your men wisely’ to prevent domestic violence, kidnapping, sexual harassment and rape, it became evident that listening to our leaders during times of desperation can sometimes fail us. In one sentence, the PM reinforced the objectification of women and affirmed with the nation watching that it was fine to refer to women like this.

In another instance, the Bahamian MP Leslie Miller used this analogy during a Parliamentary session, ‘“That’s like beating your wife or your girlfriend every time you go home. You just beating her for looking at her. I love ya. Boom, boom, boom. I had a girlfriend like that. When I didn’t beat her she used to tell me I don’t love her no more cause I don’t hit her.” It was later revealed that Miller beat his partner ‘until his hand hurt’.He normalised violence as a form of love, again endorsing it rather than denunciating it completely.

When you strip these individuals of their acknowledged identity and replace it with a publicly agreed upon misnomer intended to break them, you make it easy for their bodies to be viewed as public property. Damage to public property does not outrage us or force us to contemplate and enact change, it is just another Tuesday.

Even more mortifying is the fact that this analogy was just effortlessly brought up to illustrate whatever point was being made. There was no second-guessing, no hesitation, it was almost like an ingrained part of the conversational encyclopedia to be pulled out when convenient.

We also see that men and boys are not the only dispersers of these notions nor name-callers but women as well.

After being brought up in an environment that consistently denounces women, some young girls and women internalise these patterns of thinking without even knowing it. After swimming in the poison for so long, it is only a matter of time before you ingest some of it. The then Deputy PM of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Girlyn Miguel did not name-call but did a fair amount of victim-blaming, cautioning young women to ‘dress better’. She continues, “I want to ask our young women, in particular, to dress themselves properly. I know that sometimes, their mode of dress is not good at all and it is important that they dress themselves and do not give temptation to our men. […] How many of us know the two big uses of the breasts of a woman. One is to suckle the young and the next one is to comfort her husband.” In one swift motion, she established the place of a woman as a mother and an accommodating wife. She then affirmed that to prevent any kind of sexual harassment, kidnapping, abuse, we must be cautious with our clothing choices. Not only was this victim-blaming but it was a reductive perspective on what it means to be a woman and the agency we have over our bodies and choices.

But how do we tackle this dilemma? Acknowledging the politically correct culture and the ever-looming threat of being ‘cancelled’, the way forward is not a widespread demonisation of oral traditions but converting these incidences into moments of learning. We should start with establishing that human beings are fallible, despite what their Twitter following is. Hold your friends, colleagues, family members, partners, community and national leaders accountable. This predisposition to make errors is accompanied by the fact that we can learn from these mistakes and grow. Yes, cliched but true. Instead of chastising each and every individual, banning them from Twitter when they use these terms and espouse rhetoric that endorses any kind of abuse towards women and the LGBTQ+ community, we can educate. Of course, that involves some tough love but also gives them a chance for redemption. Accountability should not always be a life-long sentence. It potentially does more harm than good if we alienate those who do not understand where they have gone astray. We want allies, not more agitators.

The second tier of the recovery plan is for us to look at ourselves and amend our own vocabulary. Understanding that words truly shape our reality and if we envision a safer, open and empowered reality for those vulnerable in our society, it is incumbent upon us to speak it into existence. The next time we are at the cookout, the beach lime, the bar lime, catching up with the bredrin and sistren, let us re-evaluate how we use particular phrases. Perhaps we must reject its sonic appeal, social pressure to use it and embrace a more critical approach to what comes out of our mouths. Debbie Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch professor of language and communication at Oxford University came up with the ‘Verbal Hygiene’ strategy which is a kind of linguistic cleansing that ensures our language espouses ideals of equality, fairness, integrity, respect, truth and civility. While some may think this is overly simplistic and idealistic, there is a great degree of truth in this tactic. To cleanse our perceptions, we need to cleanse our vocabulary. The name-calling and harsh jokes must be eliminated to see people for who they really are… people who deserve respect.

We must remember that just like the adults at my brother’s reception, we are being watched by those younger, more naive and vulnerable. They are trying to figure out their role in the world and each of us acts as learning vessels for them. Let us not replicate the behaviours of our predecessors who casually besmirched women and their physical, mental and emotional experiences. Let language uplift not destroy. Let language provide a path for the future as it did with our ancestors. Let language give us hope. Let language heal.

About the Author

Manisha Balkissoon is currently working as a Consultant at Turner and Townsend (London, UK) and is a human rights activist, staunch believer in environmental justice and an intersectional feminist. She has written on issues that impact women of all races and cultural backgrounds during her time at the University of Warwick and is an advocate for listening to all parties to continuously improve when it comes to activism.