An Inspirational and Introspective Gathering of Men in Dominica (Oct 30th – Nov 1st 2012)

Last week, in the days approaching Dominica’s 34^th year of formal independence, invited guests of UN Women and members of the Caribbean Male Action Network (CariMAN http://cariman-org.tumblr.com/) – a diverse and dispersed web of Caribbean men connected by common concerns with issues of gender - arrived on the ‘Nature Isle’ to participate in a 3 day conference. The conference, supported and coordinated by UN Women, was entitled ‘Men as Partners for Gender Equality and the Elimination of Violence Against Women’.

As Dr Peter Weller the regional director of CariMAN (and psychologist by trade and training) laid out in his opening notes, the 3 day meeting intended to provide a forum for self inquiry and the questioning of gendered concepts, assumptions and experiences. The attendees were a diverse group of lawyers, researchers, students, teachers, social workers, religious leaders, sexual health activists, police men and NGO workers hailing from all across the Antilles and its diaspora. Thomas Holmes (Ministry of Education, Dominica) the head of CariMAN Dominica chapter also offered a warm welcome to all present; as did Gabrielle Henderson (UN Women), the event coordinator.

Day 1:

After the formalities and protocols of the introductory session, the group opened out into a round with chairs placed along the perimeter of the room to offer an open space for exchange and conversation. ‘Arts in Action’ (http://www.artsinaction.org/meet-the-team/), an applied performance arts collective based at UWI St Augustine, then entered the space calling us to our feet. They immediately stimulated the room and all within it: inviting us to move through the space and interact with one-another to the irresistible rhythm of the djembe drum. Call and response exercises and short thought provoking skits (e.g. ‘I Tarzan, she Jane’ – on gender roles and sexualities) followed, offering an invigorating beginning to the process of gendered self reflection we had been called to undertake. And with their uninhibited and fun approach, it felt as though a ‘safe space’ of respect for confusion, questions and difference had been implicitly inaugurated.

And confusion, questions and differences would most certainly emerge as the group began making sense of the many presentations that followed. Dr Hazel Da Breo (Psychotherapist / Family Therapist) and Alex P Vega (PhD Candidate/ UN Women Consultant), both offered thought provoking presentations questioning gender essentialisms and patriarchal forms of oppression (Da Breo); and interrogating common understandings of gendered identities and sexualities (Vega).

The goal of both presentations was to destabilize dominant gender concepts – and more importantly challenge the audience to cognitively unpack their own taken-for-granted gender concepts - which are understood by the presenters to reinforce/re-inscribe a patriarchal order of things in Caribbean societies (and worldwide). New terms and, idioms were offered as a means of talking about sexualities, gender, women and relationships in non-sexist ways .

Yet the presentation of concepts deriving from North American and European queer/feminist academic theory to an audience of Caribbean men was always likely to demand a process of dialogue to reconcile diverse gendered understandings that emerge from quite different contexts. Much work and negotiation took place on the part of the men present as they sought to square the open-ended notions of gender and sexuality they were being told about, with the gendered meanings operating in the contexts in which they live.

Fundamental questions concerning what makes a man or woman; who can ‘mother’ or ‘father’; and what range of sexualities exist in the world were discussed. During these discussions much laughter reverberated through the room. For the most part baffling and transgressive ideas were processed in the spirit of humour, rather than dismissed or ignored. Disagreements did arise, but these were understood to be integral to the gender work the men were engaged in. Indeed, one delegate remarked: “a quarrel is required” to work through the themes discussed, and render them appropriate oneself and others around us. Many questions remained, and came to be accompanied by new ones throughout the day. However, in the interest of the conference aims – the process of inquiry had begun.

Day 2:

Presentations by a number of researchers and NGO workers followed on the second day:

Corin Bailey (Sociologist/ Social Geographer, UWI, Cave Hill) presented research on violence and masculinities among Caribbean young men. He concluded that despite some alternative ‘positive trends’, valorised dominant masculine attributes reinforce and naturalise violence among young men; and between young men and their female partners.  

Nicholas Gilbert (Researcher IGDS/ Life Skills Coordinator, Ministry of National Security, Trinidad and Tobago) presented on masculinism and criminality. He concluded that masculinist ideals concerning individual strength, independence, the imperative to provide for family and a rejection of feminine forms are all generative of criminality within the Trinidadian prison in which he did his study.  

In response to these two presentations the discussions shifted towards the relationship between ‘fatherhood absence’ and Criminality. A pastor from Guyana highlighted the paradox whereby patriarchy has been deemed a central problem and cause of violence/criminality (with masculinism and hegemonic masculinities constitutive aspects of patriarchy), and yet mother-centered households who are lacking that patriarchal figure are also seen as the cause of violence/criminality. This latter question concerning of the pathologisation of female centered households lies at the centre of my inquiry on fatherhood and male kinship in Dominica... and as such the discussion shifted us organically towards the proposal for inquiry that I would present.

Adom Philogene Heron (PhD Candidate, Social Anthropology, St Andrews) – ‘Exploring Everyday Experiences, Practices and Ideas Concerning Dominican Men in Family Life’. (Download PDF Here).

Alice Taylor (Promundo) highlighted the international work done by Promundo in their Multi-Country Gender Based Violence Prevention Project. (http://www.promundo.org.br/en/)

And here’s an interesting report of Promundo’s on men as caregivers (http://www.chsj.org/uploads/1/0/2/1/10215849/men_who_care.pdf)

Keshan Latchman (Global UNiTE Campaign, Trinidad) Presented on ‘The importance of Involving Youth in Prevention Strategies for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls’. He discussed his use of outside informal settings for engagement with young people (rather than confined classrooms); the use of popular cultural forms to stimulate discussions on gender based violence; and the utility of social media to create spaces for discussion and intervention on gender based violence.

Petit Frere (Lyme Lavi, Haiti) then discussed the rethinking power project in Haiti. He cited interesting reflections on experiences of community support among religious leaders in challenging domestic violence; and also distributed bright and bold posters/ promotional materials that his Lyme Lavi use in their work to end gender based violence.

Sheldon Mycoo (Cariman Trinidad and Tobago) then offered detailed mapping study of the organisations and projects that might fall under the remit of CariMAN in Trinidad and Tobago. This assessment set out to identify needs/ demands for projects across the country; and hence locate where and to whom CariMAN can offer assistance.

Finally, Abbas Mancy (Cariman Guyana) offered a series of lessons learned from a football tournament project amongst men and boys focused on ending gender based violence in Guyana.  

Day 3:

A day of action oriented planning.

The group divided into our various territorial chapters and we each offered a series of reflections on the workshop thus far as well as laying out concrete strategic and practical plans for future CariMAN projects in our respective contexts.  A clear agenda was laid out by each group, and we finally offered our parting comments, thanks and meditations on the rich experience of the three days.

Together the group then boarded the bus that had brought us to the conference each day and we ventured out up Dominica’s steep and rugged mountainous terrain for a visit to the island’s Fresh Water Lake. The cloud cloaked mountains that cradle the cold lake siting beneath them provided a tranquil yet invigorating setting for final reflections, conversations, and for some, a cold swim before a warming alcoholic tonic to cap a stimulating week.  

Nom Figwe: A brief portrait of a Kalinago tree fern carver in Dominica

A short film about a day in the life of a Kalinago tree fern carver in Dominica. The film provides a breif yet richly captured snapshot of an artisan mask maker, father and husband going about his daily life.

Made by Paul Crask and Pierre Deschamps (for more info: http://www.paulcrask.com/)

Guest Contribution: Delroy "Nesta" Williams

For this post I have invited poet, activist and former president of The Dominican National Youth Council, Delroy “Nesta” Williams to share two of his poems with Fathermen.

Delroy’s work is infused with feeling, it offers his reader a young Dominican man’s perspective on ‘various issues including poverty, failure, [and] personal struggle’ (Dominica News Online 9/9/12). Although often dealing with difficult themes, his poems posses redemptive qualities.  They provide not only ‘faith and hope… but the greatest of these is love’ (Dominica News Online 9/9/2011).

Delroy is also the author of One Room Shack (Free Expressions Poetry Company, 2011), a meditative collection of poems that candidly express a Dominican youth’s search for meaning, self, love, recognition and belonging from the confined solace of his humble single roomed house.

Here, his contributions reflect on the place of the father in the lives of Dominican youth. The significance of a father’s presence/absence in the life of a young man...... a father’s shortcomings as a figure of manhood for his progeny..... and a man’s role as moral guardian and spiritual inspiration for his children.... are all explored.

Father, Teach Me To Pray

By Delroy “Nesta” Williams

I want to revisit my youth,

Go back in time.

Just to talk to my father,

There is this question that I need him to answer.

Daddy, why you never taught me to pray?

As I reflect,

I’ve heard you curse,

I even saw you smoke,

But I can’t remember a word of prayer

That you spoke!

But Father I ask that you hold my hands,

Force my knees to the floor,

Recite to me the Lord’s Prayer

Or just scream out Proverbs and Psalms.

All I have to go by right now

Are the teachings of my mother,

Her words were comfort to my ear

And the lessons still linger.

But I would still like to know

The thoughts of my father.

Father Failed Me

by Delroy "Nesta" Williams

They should have noticed
the silence before the storm
and now the silence has returned
no answers to the questioned posed
where to start? where to look?
to the "wine"; to the rope
Killing all hope
dream-dazed, dreams choked
reality all up in a blaze
no water to quench the fire's thirst
for father has failed
and now son is worst

Prison record passed
from father to son
not hard work, commitment or patience
lifelines of generations past
but rash, harsh words
scarring the soul
As the world turns

Sons slipping beyond rescue
everyday the situation compounded
society dumbfounded
no answers to the questioned posed
where to start? where to look?
to the "wine"; to the rope
as his last, best hope

too late, too late
society has sealed his fate
and now mother cries
because mother tried
while father hides

For more more of Nesta's work visit his blog: And Then There Was Jetzzz

'We Care'

Some interesting new adverts have recently emerged as part of a UNIFEM campaign in Trinidad and Tobago called 'Share the Care'. The initiative seeks to get more fathers to take on caring roles in their children's lives.


For more see: http://www.guardian.co.tt/womanwise/2010/12/05/unifem-launches-share-care-ww

However, although undoubtedly father involvement is an important issue, somehow UNIFEM have managed to reduce the complexity of fathering and parental relationships,and made them so simple. It would seem all it takes is one visit from the social worker and all of the apparent 'problems' of family life - attributed to single motherhood (see T&T Guardian article above) - are cured when daddy appears.

Furthermore, the T&T Guardian newspaper quotes the makers of the ads, saying,

'The campaign producers tried to represent the mix of cultures and classes here in T&T so that the messages would reach everyone'. 

But, interestingly, we only seem to see men and women cohabiting in nuclear family arrangements, enjoying a visibly high material standard of living. It's a nice picture of a middle class family ideal that the ads paint. But I do wonder how many real fathers - who care on a day-to-day level for their children in often complicated circumstances - really experience such a neat and tidy picture. I also wonder what such dads might make of the adverts.

I guess I'm playing devil's advocate a bit here, and maybe The UN's intentions are more benevolent than I'm giving them credit for. After all the people in the ads look pretty happy, and it's got to be better than another car advert filling peoples TV screens.

  

Food for thought, for anyone who cares (excuse the pun).

I recently came across this video on the CariMAN facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/CariMAN/202917276451762#!/groups/CariMAN/). The video's caption on youtube reads....

"Who is a Man? Who is a Father?" is a short film by Marlon Thompson which attempts to dispel some of the local myths about fatherhood in Jamaica and the Caribbean especially among young fathers. Three men from the Hannah Town community in Kingston talk freely and frankly about what it means to be a "real man" and a father, especially in today's Jamaica and give advice to potential fathers.

A diversity of fathering practices are cited; so too are transformations in the constitutive nature of 'fatherwork'; so too are ideas of fathers as those who reason with, protect and provide for children alongside and in 'balance' with mothers; with such care expected to endure where relationships to mothers have changed or broken down.

Thank you to Svenn Grant of The Caribbean HIV AIDS Alliance for sharing this.

Masculinities in Motion: Imagining Fatherhood

I recently encountered a photo essay entitled ‘Masculinities in Motion’ by Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, a lecturer in gender studies at The University of West Indies. Her photographs depict men in San Fernando, Trinidad going about their everyday lives in a marketplace, a Carnival “mas” camp and a fishing wharf.  She includes brief captions beneath each picture that draw on conversations between the author and the subjects of each photograph.

http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/april2007/journals/Masculinities_in_Motion207_pm.pdf 

The title 'Masculinities in motion’ conjures images of men on the move. It connotes limitless male possibility and a plurality of manliness that is being continually fashioned. Yet photographs themselves do not move. They can’t. Thus, her title communicates the ephemerality of the photograph, as a momentary framing, a temporary pinning-down that admits to its own transience. Her images cannot keep up with the men her camera captures. And it appears that the author does not need them to. We are not presented with "The West Indian Male" (whoever that quintessential actor might be). We are presented with short fragments of narratives (in the form of captions and the images themselves) that move the reader/viewer beyond caricatures. What are encountered are snapshots of day-to-day life. Such snapshots gesture towards realities characterised by creativity, pride, hardship, tenderness, violence, love and fun (amongst other things).

“Imagining Fatherhood”

This image, its title and the short caption beneath it, speak directly to themes I am currently confronting in my own work. The photographer/ethnographer writes,

Some men ‘create’ fatherhood, which then becomes a compelling motive to work. A father tries to secure temporary employment so that he can support his common-law partner and son. Yet, the boy is a neighbour's child. His mother couldn’t look after him as well as the young couple nearby. So, without any formal “paper”, the couple has informally adopted him. The three live together in one room they built from gathered and donated materials. This union is a long Caribbean tradition of making family that defy “fictive” and “blood” categories, and rules regarding legitimacy (Hosein 2007: 3-4).

This idea of family as an open-ended concept, as something made through shared contact and experience, as well as 'blood', is nothing new to Caribbean people. However, what is somewhat more recent is the realisation amongst anthropologists (and social scientists more generally) that Caribbean men are often intimately intertwined in these creative practices of making kin. All too readily regarded as marginal actors positioned on the periphery of female-oriented networks, men have been considered an appendage to family life in much anthropological writing.  However, following the lead of scholars such as Christine Barrow (1996; 1998) and Barry Chevannes (2001), Hosein's image and words encourage a more complex and nuanced understanding of the existent positionalities of men, and fathers more specifically, within the family.

Fatherhood in this instance is imagined, but it is not imaginary. It derives from the immediate material realities of Trinidadian life. Concrete social and economic contingencies make childhood relocation a necessity in many such instances. A mother who is unable to care for her son gives him to neighbours who might better meet his needs. But they themselves have limited resources with which to raise a child, and must seek work to fulfill their new parental roles. At the risk of sounding functionalist (functionalism has after all misunderstood Caribbean families in some important ways as Barrow 1988 highlights), child shifting provides something of a morally sustained mechanism of ensuring child welfare within extended family and community networks. As Wardle notes, fields of relations spanning rural, urban and overseas sites often provide effective/affective responses to family 'crises' (Gordon 1987) that Caribbean states snipped by structural adjustment policies are unable to remedy (Wardle 2004).  In such networks, love expressed materially through provision - to sustain life and health - can become an important means for the making and maintenance of bonds between father and child (Seller 2005). Therefore, as Hosein states, neither “blood”, legal adoption “paper[s]”, nor “fictive” notions of relatedness necessarily produce father-son bonds. Instead, sacrifice, contact, labour and giving offer some indication as to how men can 'create' fatherhood.

The images command the reader – scholar, policy maker, or anyone else - to 'imagine fatherhood' beyond preconfigured understandings. The title contains the latent imperative to conceive of paternal relatedness in direct response to practice and encounter. However, a flexibility and openness to recognise diverse, variegated and yet unencountered patterns of fathering/male care must also be assumed by the ethnographer/social scientist. The emergence of organisations such as Fathers Inc. in Jamaica and The Roving Caregiver programme in Dominica and elsewhere attest to transformations of fatherhood taking place across the region. People's engagement with, and responses to these projects/organisations are yet to be rigorously studied by social scientists. But what is clear is the fact that fatherhood - as a salient aspect of Caribbean men's masculine selves - is a constant process of becoming. It is our role as social scientists to offer a detailed momentary framing of such motion.

References

•  Gabrielle Jamela Hosein (2007) ‘Masculinities in Motion’, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. Vol.1(1) http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/april2007/journals/Masculinities_in_Motion207_pm.pdf 

              Gabrielle Jamela Hosein – UWI Profile: http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/april2007/gabriellehosein.asp

---------------------------------------------------------------

• Barrow 1988 "Anthropology, The Family and Women in the Caribbean." In Patricia Mohammed and Catherine Shepherd, eds. Gender in Caribbean Development. Jamaica: UWI. Pp, 156-169.
• _______ 1996 Family in the Caribbean: Themes and perspectives. London: Ian Randle
•  _______ 1998 “Caribbean Masculinity and Family: Revisiting 'Marginality'and 'Reputation'”. In Christine Barrow (ed.), Caribbean Portraits: Essays on Gender Ideologies and Identities. Kingston: Ian Randle.
• Chevannes (2001) Learning to Be a Man: Culture, Socialization, and Gender Identity in Five Caribbean Communities. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press
• Gordon 1987 “I go to 'Tanties': The economic significance of child-shifting in Antigua, West Indies”. Journal of Comparative Family Studies
• Seller 2005 “Out of State But Still in Mind: Family Love and the Cultural Context of Migration in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean ”, Les Cahiers du Gres 5(1). Pp, 43-59.
• Wardle 2004 “Choosing Parents: Adoption into a Global Network”. In F. Bowie. London  (ed.) Cross-cultural Approaches to Adoption: Routledge.

An Introduction

This blog is the extroverted twin of a PhD project on fatherhood and masculinities in (The Commonwealth of) Dominica. It aims to engage anthropologists & non-anthropologists, fathers & non-fathers, Dominicans and non-Dominicans with all things related to being a man and dad in the West Indies (and beyond).

Fathermen has been set up to inform those who may be interested about some of the diverse themes and issues that intersect the project. Videos, articles, short essays, poetry, photos and links to events (amongst other things) are likely to feature. However, Fathermen seeks not only to provide information, but to open up debate. The author of this blog is of the belief that all humans possess anthropological faculties. In other words, all of us have the capacity to reflect upon, enquire about and ask questions of the cultural worlds that surround us.... so I hope the entries of Fathermen will be critiqued, commended and interrogated by readers in the comments boxes of each post. Such emergent conversations will hopefully result in a healthier and more publicly grounded project.

Fathermen is a blog by Adom Philogene Heron, a doctoral research student in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews (PhD Profile).