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Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Bacchanal, catfight!

by

Ira Mathur
2075 days ago
20191102

Last week I asked a fel­low Trinida­di­an (a bril­liant writer—Kevin Jared Ho­sein) a sim­ple ques­tion: why he writes. As his re­sponse, he re­layed an im­age he said he can’t un­see. He re­ceived it on his phone. A man is dead on the street, his body crushed and di­vid­ed un­der two tyres of a car. A pass­er-by takes a video of it, laugh­ing, say­ing the man looked like ‘scram­bled eggs.’ More laughs from the street.

He said, "I don’t know why vi­o­lence is so fun­ny here. It doesn’t seem to con­cern most peo­ple. I write to un­der­stand this."

Kevin re­mind­ed me what the late Raoul Pan­tin, al­so a bril­liant jour­nal­ist and po­et al­ways said. That it is a writer's du­ty to hold up a mir­ror that shows us all, who we are.

As these things go, over the next few days, friends showed me sce­nar­ios from the street.

In one, a young woman stopped by a dou­bles ven­dor. Find­ing that he was out of dou­bles, she asked for the num­ber of his es­tab­lish­ment so she would be able to call in fu­ture to make sure she didn’t waste a jour­ney. He scrib­bled his name and num­ber on the back of a brown bag. She said, “Can you write down the name of your es­tab­lish­ment next to your name?” He replied, “What hap­pen, you 'fraid your hus­band will beat you if he sees a man’s name or what?” The ven­dor laughed up­roar­i­ous­ly at his own joke. Then he said, look­ing at her spec­u­la­tive­ly, “Or you will beat your hus­band?” More laughs.

What is shock­ing is that in a coun­try where the sta­tis­tics show that one in three women are vic­tims of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence; that last year alone there were half a mil­lion dis­tress calls on the do­mes­tic vi­o­lence hot­line; that at least 50 women are mur­dered each year in do­mes­tic vi­o­lence dis­putes, that some­one on the street thinks it’s a joke. That its healthy for men and women to be com­bat­ive. To beat and be beat­en. To laugh at and be laughed at.

That evening I got an­oth­er anec­dote from the street in a restau­rant.

A busi­ness­man, a woman friend and I were in con­ver­sa­tion.

The busi­ness­man told us that last week in Port-of-Spain he was dri­ving home in traf­fic when he saw a woman run­ning out of a build­ing. Just be­hind her, al­so run­ning, was an­oth­er woman who was stark naked. He said his first re­ac­tion was “Bac­cha­nal, cat­fight!” He pulled out his phone. His sec­ond was to reach for a tow­el he kept in his car to cov­er the naked woman who he lat­er dis­cov­ered nar­row­ly es­caped be­ing raped. A pass­er-by got to the naked dis­tressed woman be­fore he did and cov­ered her with his jack­et.

The woman’s re­ac­tion was “You would have record­ed it if it was a cat­fight?”

The busi­ness­man said, “Yes, I would pay mon­ey in Flori­da for that kind of thing, es­pe­cial­ly if jel­lo was in­volved.”

The woman said, “You do know even if a cat­fight for a woman was to be naked in the street it would be from a place of pain, right?”

He is a kind, fun­ny and de­cent man but wasn’t con­vinced.

We have shut off the valves of our hearts to cope with the per­sis­tent vi­o­lence about us.

You see it in the cin­e­ma. Peo­ple here laugh at ten­der scenes: hu­mil­i­at­ing mo­ments in­volv­ing vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple, a gay man, a sad drunk woman, an el­der­ly cou­ple. All elic­it guf­faws from the au­di­ence.

Are we in so much dis­tress that we’ve for­got­ten how to have nor­mal em­pa­thet­ic re­ac­tions to pain?

At uni­ver­si­ty, I read If This Is a Man (1947) by Pri­mo Levi, Ital­ian-Jew­ish writer and chemist—a de­tached ac­count of sur­viv­ing life in Nazi camps. The Pe­ri­od­ic Ta­ble (1975) al­so by him was said to be the best sci­ence book ever. In April 1987 Levi killed him­self. In his obit­u­ary Diego Gam­bet­ta, an Ital­ian so­cial sci­en­tist wrote of Levi: ‘On that trag­ic Sat­ur­day on­ly his body was smashed.’ Clear­ly, the bru­tal­i­ty he suf­fered in the camps had dead­ened him a long time back

This tells me that un­ac­knowl­edged pain leads to the even­tu­al de­struc­tion of our very souls. In hu­man­is­ing oth­ers, we hu­man­ise our­selves.


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