The Gwo Pwel

I recently gave a presentation at a postgraduate conference at the Newcastle University Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. The preseentation was on the phenomenon known in the Francophone Antilles as the Gwo Pwel, or the 'Love Sickness' (known in Trinidad as 'the Tabanka') - the ubiquitous and deeply painful emotional affliction that often befalls somebody left by their lover. 

Men claim to suffer from it far worse than women since its cure - finding a replacement lover - is more readily available to females than men. The GP is also bound-up in a gendered micropolitics of conjugal distrust and ideals of masculinity constituted through emotional autonomy. The Gp therefore provides a fascinating social vehicle for understanding Dominican ideas about love, gender, kinship and the ideal of the mature, emotionally robust and independent individual self. I'm currently writing up this chapter on the GP but since the sickness seems to provoke humour at every turn I thought it might be fun to share the presentation here.

I was up until 2:30 am the night before the presentation producing this Prezi on the GP. Enjoy!

Illustrating Intimacy: A Fathermen Special Edition from Stella Phipps

In this special edition, Fathermen proudly presents the work of burgeoning Glasgow-based artist Stella Phipps. 

The illustrations that feature here, are part of a collaborative project between Stella and Adom that seeks to illuminate new interpretive angles on the themes of paternal visibilities and the mundane - yet under-recognised - caring kin-practices of Caribbean men.

(Some text will follow - first from artist, then ethnographer - to offer a contextual backdrop to subjects and project).

© Stella Phipps

© Stella Phipps

© Stella Phipps

Of her images Stella writes:

"These portraits depict the unique bond between father and child, suggesting shared memories and experiences. Here, the fathers are caring for and nurturing their children, a vital part of each-others lives; based on my own childhood experiences and close relationship to my dad.

For me, Fathermen celebrates the diverse responsibilities that come with fatherhood in Dominica and beyond. It opens up engaging conversations about more equal forms of parenting and challenges stereotypes of 'absent' or uncommitted fathers in society"

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Adom:

The figure of the father has a troubled place in the Caribbean imagination. Notions of paternal absence abound in popular discourses that repeat throughout the Antilles. Yet it seems that the image of the feckless father is so deeply embedded a notion in the Caribbean that quotidian acts of kining -so mundane and so unremarkably everyday that they seem beyond comment - are rendered invisible. Walking children to daycare, 'looking at' (minding) a toddler with a watchful eye whilst fixing a bicycle, bathing a sick child in the curative Caribbean sea or simply posé (resting), sitting and watching TV at home 'wid de kids' - are all examples of the unexamined ground of fathering and male kin-care in Dominica (and elsewhere). Many Caribbean men are in complex ways perceived by children and 'child-mothers' to be absented from their offspring's lives. Yet, this well recognized reality conceals another subtly vivid reality that deserves acknowledgement. Stella's illustrations are an ode to these subtle everyday intimacies between men and their young kin. We witness bodies in close contact - maybe brothers, fathers, uncles or simply neighbors - holding, embracing, feeding or stood with kin. The images convey moments that might be occasioned or routine , a snapshot of a summer with a returning father who resides 'overs' (overseas), perhaps, or being fed by a cohabiting father during his day off work. 

As illustrative interpretations of photographs, these images are the interwoven with the artist's fatherly memories and as such communicate a very fundamental and immediate human quality that traverses bounds of difference.This enables tthe bodies/subjects featured to stand apart from the caucophony of voices that malign and over-determine fathering in the Antilles. For a moment here Stella's drawings bring about a semblance of serenity, an incubated co-being, a silent kinship beyond parental frictions and disjunctures. Images of laboring bodies or protective, providing and disciplining hands might offer a more familiar picture of the embodied practice of Caribbean fathering, consistent with normative ideas about paternal duty and care in the region. Yet these less common images of bodily closeness offer a possibility of seeing men's affective relations with children as something ordinary and habitual. 

The drawings presented here are part of an emerging visual ethnographic project set to be exhibited in Scotland in early 2015 on the themes outlined above. It will present a composition of photography, quotations (from Dominican men/fathers), audiovisual installations featuring everyday kinship activities and, of course, more of Stella's illustrations.

We are currently locating the right space for such an exhibition; one that might offer a diverse public access to the project. If you have an exhibition space in mind or are interested in promoting / supporting this project, please leave your contact email in the comments box at the foot of this post.

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On the artist:

Stella Phipps is an artist and illustrator based in Glasgow. She recently graduated from Edinburgh College of Art and is currently involved in community arts projects with Impact Arts.

Stella's art emerges from personal experience, people and places, the surrealities of dreams, wild landscapes, folktales and the sea.  

For more of her work, please visit her website at stellaphipps.com or stellaphipps.tumblr.com.  

Family and Colour in Jamaica - an ethnographic re-reading

In recent months I have returned to some of the classical early kinship studies in Caribbean anthropology with the goal of mining for interesting themes and patterns that might spark dialogue with the ethnographic info I have collected during fieldwork in Dominica. 

This morning Jamaican anthropologist Fernando Henriques' Family and Colour in Jamaica (1953) fell through my door (a heavy eyed late night Amazon purchase I'd forgotten making some weeks ago). 

I read somewhere that a good ethnography is one that contains sufficient sociological richness and detail to be read as the author directs you, and then re-read, revealing its potential for alternative reinterpretation and reanalysis. This is one such ethnography. 

Here's a brief meditation on and rereading of the place of the father in Henriques' account with reference to a short autobiographical portrait of a 'lower class' schoolgirl that Henriques has annexed in his appendix.

For the most part the book is the kind of empirical overview of 'social organization' that was typical of the day - attempting to offer a cogent and comprehensive ordering of kinship across the class-colour strata of Jamaican society. 

Yet it  also seems the author felt a commitment to the first person narratives of two female interlocutors collected during his fieldwork (the diary of a Jamaican schoolgirl constitutes the similarly rich appendix II) and as such wanted them to go into print, despite convention forcing him to append them at the back of the book. His choice is a wise one though, it leaves them analytically open since appendixed items didn't demand authorial elucidation and as such they are allowed to speak for themselves. 

In the main body of the text in a chapter on 'lower class families' Henriques outlines the role of father in relation to his procreative kin (children, child-mother) and household:

[see red lined section in scan below (as you'll  observe I enjoy owning books as you can write in them with pen!)]

However, despite the 'minor' role of the 'absent' or unconcerned father and the occasional proud father when viewed structurally, 'Appendix III: Fragment of A Lower Class Autobiography' reveals a subject-oriented account that positions father/step father at the centre of a young girl's kinship world. Here we glimpse the kind of richness, depth of field and audibility of voice that would only become visible decades later in anthropology.

Approaching Caribbean family life from this angle urges us to interrogate the matrifocal thesis which would be later later introduced by RT Smith, and to which Henriques  formal observations above fore-run . In this account the father-daughter is the most centrally 'focal' relation through the optics of the narrator/protagonist, rather than the objectifying position of observer who might label the arrangement as matrifocal if they were simply observing from without. I offer this interpretation as a complementary counterpoint to matrifocal interpretations, suggesting the simultaneity of multiple perspectives on kinship from each subject-position in  ego-centered radial networks of kin - with dyadic bonds of varying intensity - could yield new conclusions about who's symbolically, practically, emotionally 'focal' in kin relations at a given moment. 

This sketch (below) could represent the girl's kin network in the autobiographical account below. It might be methodologically productive to call this a polyfocal reading of kinship arrangements if we were able to gather the subject centered accounts of each kin member mentioned and bring them at in analytic level into conversation.

[the size of dot connotes intensity/significance of relationship]

In the account that follows, a 34 year old woman recalls moments in her childhood through her own words. Interesting to reflect on is the significance of her father in structuring her kinship world:his protective  patriarchal (almost Oedipal) 'ownership' of her chastity, body and sexuality; his encouraging her to be hardy and learn to fight; hers and his tears upon her discovering he was her 'step father' not biological father; and the everyday taken-for-granted intimacies of his routinized food-sharing with her, her sleeping patterns with him and the mother, their playful observation of his provisioning banana trees through the window, and the episode of being separated during a hurricane as he walked her to school. 

These richly evidenced forms of everyday paternal practice seem far from anomalous to the narrator, yet the book up to that point conceals such realities behind concerns with familial form. 

It might be fascinating to see the complexity that such a close re: reading of other canonic Caribbean kinship studies might excavate. 

Below is a scanned copy of the appendix (I hope this is legal)

'Fragment of A Lower Class Autobiography'

For readers whom this book is of interest, a book about the Henriques family and their experience of pioneering prewar migration to the UK may be of interest too. It is titled The Jippa Jappa Hat Merchant and His Family 

'Straight Talk' with Scratchie D - 'my life is a journey'

Last night on DBS radio's 'Straight Talk' program Delia Cuffy-Weeks and Kimara Hurtault hosted Scratchie Dan( aka Densley Stephens aka Montgomery Richards aka Old School) and myself (Adom Philogene Heron) to talk about Scratchie's life story on their program.


With his usual candid and rugged eloquence Scratchie shared the memories of his early life as a 'notorious criminal' between 'Gwada' and Dominica, and then reflected on his more recent moral and spiritual  refashioning into the figure of working 'family man' and 'big man in society'.

Scratchy also comments on some of the issues facing youth in today's global internet moment, looks back at his time in prison, his relationships to his mother, aunties and elder sisters who stood by him throughout his notorious criminal life, and also spoke of his excitement at recently becoming a grandfather.

I will not share anymore since I hope you will download and listen to the full show by clicking the Green box below:




A big thanks once again to our hosts Delia and Kimara for having us on the show
... and if you would like to contact Densley directly to find out more about his life or for him to come and share his story with a youth group, school or at any other event please contact him via Facebook here or you can email me (aph7@st-andrews.ac.uk)

Be(com)ing papa: kinship senescence and the ambivalent inward journeys of ageing men in the Antilles

Here is the podcast of a working paper I recently delivered (2-12-14) on grandfatherhood, masculine being and ageing in Dominica, at Oxford university.



I presented at a multidisciplinary 'Generational Change in Reproductive Cultures' seminar funded by the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Galton Institute @ Oxford, and convened byDr Kaveri Qureshi (Research Fellow, ISCA, University of Oxford) and Dr Sian Pooley (Lecturer, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge)

....thank you to both of them for the invitation and I commend them on a fascinatingly diverse and well organised series.

An article I recently wrote about Fathermen for Starbroek News of Guyana

Fathermen: An Open Anthropological Platform

Adom Philogene Heron is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology and associate of the Centre for Caribbean, Latin American and Amerindian Studies (CAS) at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He is editor and author of a blog called ‘Fathermen’, the outgoing sibling of a PhD project he is currently undertaking on fatherhood and men’s experiences of family life in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean. The blog seeks to render accessible the themes of his research to a broad audience and open up a public conversation on fatherhood, masculinities and family amongst Caribbean peoples.

The work of socio-cultural anthropology is to document, elucidate and communicate understandings of human social and cultural experience. Given this almost infinitesimally broad remit – to study any and all things human – anthropologists tend to focus on the particular. Thus, the minutiae and details of particular social phenomena, cultural contexts, geographic locales, and individual lives constitute the bread and butter of the discipline.

Yet with this penchant for the particular comes a preoccupation with the peculiar, the bizarre and the esoteric. Whilst not inherently problematic – anthropologists have produced a great number of fascinating and important studies drawing attention to marginalised forms of social experience – this preoccupation too often results in our conversations becoming somewhat insular. Aside from fieldwork our discussions are usually confined to seminar rooms, lecture theatres and museums, and occur amongst other academics (area specialists, fellow anthropologists or social scientists). By and large those with the biggest stake in our work are excluded from the conversations we engage in. Our ‘informants’, the people whose voices and life-ways we profess to represent are often forgotten, as if they couldn’t possibly understand our ‘heighty-tighty’ (to use a Dominican term for uppity) analyses of their lives.

However, in recent years there has been a concerted effort to ‘open up’ anthropology, by incorporating subjects’ voices into ethnographic accounts and displacing the traditional anthropological gaze through ‘native anthropology’/’anthropology at home’. At the level of publishing we have witnessed a move towards internet based discussion networks, open source journals and blogging.

The Fathermen blog falls firmly within this unfolding vision of an open anthropology. Launched in January 2012, Fathermen is the extroverted twin of an ethnographic research project I am currently undertaking on fatherhood and men in Dominican family life. Although my work focuses specifically on Dominica, I believe that the themes, social patterns and experiences I encounter in my fieldwork ‘speak to’ Caribbean realities throughout the region and beyond. As such the blog’s scope is broad: I post commentaries, videos, personal memoirs, essays, radio shows, short stories, photographs and poetry on all things associated with men and family life. Examples include a recent post entitled ‘The Plight of the ‘Paro’’, a short commentary on homelessness in Roseau; some images from a Fathers Day photography exhibition that I organized entitled ‘Look a Fada!’; and a critical analysis of UNWomen’s ‘Yes We Care’ TV advertisements in Trinidad and Tobago.

At present Fathermen functions not so much to inform others of research conclusions as to share emerging fieldwork meditations, half formed ideas I am in the process of trying to make sense of. Currently I am in the middle of research, dwelling in Dominica for approximately 18 months and as such I am yet to draw any firm analytic conclusions (even if provisional patterns are starting to gradually present themselves). Therefore, (for now) the fundamental goal of Fathermen is to open-up debate and contribute to an already growing public conversation on Caribbean men’s roles, practices and experiences vis families in the 21st century Caribbean world. The posts I have contributed thus far represent a series of fieldwork reflections in response to encounters I have had, newspaper articles read, events attended, incidents observed, videos I have seen, and discussions shared. I cross-post Fathermen entries on Facebook, through Diasporic social networking sites such as Dominicadiaspora.com (DD) and on occasion I submit them to Dominica News Online (DNO), an internet based newspaper. Dominica has a deeply engaged internet public, both domestic and overseas, who candidly comment on anything posted on either DD or DNO; therefore these sites provide good virtual spaces of critique, commendation and exchange of ideas.

My hope is that all Caribbean peoples can claim a stake in this little blog, hence as wide an audience as possible should be able to contribute to its polyvocal making. After all, every one of us has a father in some shape or form. If not an accessible physical father, then an idea, an ideal image of what a father is or should be; a mother who metaphorically fathers; a ‘sperm donor’; a psychic figurative space where we would want a father to be or he once was; a grandfather, a godfather, a step-father; an all mighty Father! From plantation to present the figure of the father has been itinerant and amorphous. Whilst many Caribbean peoples speak of fatherhood’s generic profile in various modes of absentia, most will readily admit that no singular typology of Caribbean fatherhood exists. In a sense then, the very idea of the father in the Antilles, reflects the existential landscape of Caribbeanness –  ‘an open frontier’ of evolving plurality, hybridity and differentiation, as recently deceased Haitian scholar Michel- Rolph Trouillot has astutely pointed out.  The point I am making (in a round-about way) is that the subject matter of the blog matters in an everyday sense to the region. Hence I invite any and all to participate in it – as contributors, commentators (in comments boxes) and critical readers.

American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins notes that,

“Kinsmen are people who live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths. To the extent that they lead common lives, they partake in each other’s sufferings and joys, sharing one another’s experiences as they take responsibility for and feel each other’s acts.”

The story of Fathermen, or better the research project preceding and underpinning it, begins in the vast and dispersed world of kinship I inhabit. That is, it begins in diasporic imaginings cast across a vast transatlantic field of familial intimacy and separation. These imaginings connect Bristol, the English port city of my birth, a slave-trading capital built on the profits of British sugar, tobacco and cocoa, where my arrivant maternal grandparents set up new lives, raised 5 children and found work at Wills Tobacco and Fry’s Cadbury Chocolate factories respectively; with Dominica, the rugged verdant island home from whence they departed in 1956, leaving behind the familiar rhythms of daily life, friends and family (including several ‘outside children’). My grandfather Peter Mendes Philogene retired and returned to the small fishing village of his birth in Dominica, some 29 years after leaving. My grandmother, Alaskar Philogene – despite speaking daily of somewhere else called ‘home’ – was never to return to Dominica in all her 41 years of life in Bristol.

On the 19th of December 2010, several months after I had moved home to Bristol following my undergraduate studies, I received a message from my cousin (also grandson of Mendes and Alaskar) telling me of the arrival of his son into the world and asking me if I would be consider becoming the godfather. I said yes without hesitation. Since my graduation three months earlier I had been contemplating the idea of further study. This news of my new role in the new life of my cousin’s progeny, and more importantly what I observed of my cousin’s attentive and committed fatherhood, prompted me to begin meditating on what it means to be and become a father. And with such meditations this enquiry came into being.

On the 24th of March 2012, 6 months after beginning to transform these thoughts into a PhD project, I received another message, this time from a cousin in Dominica. The message read that our grandfather, Mendes, now a returnee in Dominica from Bristol, was unwell. I messaged her back immediately telling her I had notified the family in the UK and that my mother would call her. She replied the following day after visiting our Grandfather,

“…. I did tell him that I communicated with your mom and he seemed extremely pleased – he was giving so many kisses – I think I got the kisses for all of you. This must mean something. I would attempt to call your mom from the hospital, but he won’t be able to respond so I am not sure whether this makes any sense.”

Peter Mendes Philogene – great-grandfather of my godson, grandfather of my cousins and me, and father of my mother, uncle and aunts – passed away at 1:15am on the 25th March 2012. Sadly my studies prohibited me from attending the funeral. I would arrive in Dominica to begin my fieldwork some months later on the 2nd October 2012 – this being only my second visit to the island, my first visit and only meeting with my grandfather coming as a small child in 1987. Upon first returning to my grandfather’s village in the second week of October last year, an aunt introduced me to my Grandfather’s best friend. Tears welled up in the eyes of the tall broad framed old man as he studied my face and gently gripped my hand in an extended handshake. “I feel like I’ve arrived too late”, I told him. Gathering himself he looked back at me with a warm smile, then with a sudden tone of assurance he reminded me “nothing happens before its time”.

Locating its moment of departure between a birth and death, this personally motivated project is marked by the beginning and end of the life-course of the father. The birth of a first child signifies the coming of fatherhood and the death of a grand-, or indeed great-grandfather signifies its closure.

Both Fathermen and the ethnographic enquiry from which it derives are dedicated to the memory of my Grandfather Mendes and the life of Milan.

A Call to Contribute:

I am of the belief that all of us possess anthropological faculties. In other words, we all have the capacity to reflect upon, enquire about and ask questions of the social worlds that surround us. Therefore, I invite readers to make a submission Fathermen. My modest hope is that many of the readers of this column will share it widely and take up this invite. A submission can take the form of a descriptive personal narrative/memoir/history of a father, uncle, godfather, big brother, grandfather …etc during your childhood, his old age, or his passing; a poem; a short story; a commentary;  old photographs with captions etc… or any other suggestions.

For more information on Fathermen submissions or any of themes discussed please email Adom at: aph7@st-andrews.ac.uk

To visit the blog, see: http://fathermen.blogspot.co.uk/

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).