Growing up in Barbados I struggled to understand the incestuous and twisted roots of its society, and the facility with which people hide their dirty deeds and continue to walk around in society unopposed.
People here deliberately misunderstand and misrepresent others so they can reaffirm their own prejudices. If you don’t agree, you’re the problem.
Dayo, thoroughly disillusioned by the ‘world of adults’, and I have been having many philosophical discussions about the fear and shame that drives people to their individual and collective narcissism over the last few weeks. Not just in a Barbadian context, but across the board.
We have been discussing the emotional commitment people easily make to their own ignorance. How that makes bigots, zealots and exacerbates the suffering of the world.
He still doesn’t understand and very often all I am left with is, “Dayo Darling it matter far less what people do and far more what you do.”
My grandmother raised me like that.
I think my grandmother was a bad mother, and she did what she could to make up for it with me. As I get older, I begin to understand more and more of the pathology of my family. Both sides of it.
The morals that never took in her own children, for whatever reason stuck with me instead. I also think there is a reason I was her FAVOURITE grandchild, and I got the best parts of her as a grandmother.
But I know I’ve never been really one of them.
I have, since I was old enough to control my passport, tried to put water between me and this twisted little environment that Barbados stews in and the beautiful waters where a mermaid child like me found the only safe haven offshore. I have deliberately chosen to distance myself from most of my relatives here, rather than engage in their particular brand of hypocrisy and class warfare.
I have, consistently been abused, reabused, traumatised, gaslighted, marginalised, and demonised in Barbados by my family and their network of friends. Not in total, but often in insidious and pervasive ways. I used to take it horribly personally when I was younger.
But in my early 30s I read “The Sugar Barons” by Matthew Parker. Allyuh, you will never understand Barbados, Caribbean society or the relentless perfection of chattel slavery that has happened on the 166sq miles of this place, and the way it maintains it’s vice like grip on Barbadian society. You’ll never understand why they’re so proud of their utter sick dysfunction without reading this book. Buy it. Read it. Recoil. Recover. Reassess. Reparations. Revolution!
Never could I understand it growing up here, but this is the one volume that put all that I knew from personal experience and personal study into a historical context, and then I began to forgive some of the abhorrent stupidity. I have not been able to extend forgiveness to the rampant immorality of it all. That I still struggle with.
This is an island built on debauchery, vice and the bending of reality to suit whichever man appears to be powerful in the moment.
Manumission for anyone is a threat to this ecosystem, so shanking anyone without compunction becomes the order of survival.
And I was born free and remain free.
My name N’Delamiko in its shortest contraction means ‘Little Light’.
My initiatory name is Hekait Mafdet Ani Ma’at (She Who Sees Clearly And Brings Justice)
My initiatory name is N’anga Zendaya Banga chaNjuzu (The Healer, Thanks To God for The Sword Of The Water Spirits)
I am a half Venezuelan Trinidadian Combermerian woman with ADHD.
We are clearly not the same!
I have never felt acceptance from ‘society’ in Barbados or my mother’s family. I have found it in Combermerians and others here who are more like me than whatever it is that allows the evil in this world to continue.
I have friends and people I love in Barbados, but this is a small society full of small people, short on imagination and with very, very porous morals and malleable situational ethics.
This is a luxury of iniquity I am not allowed.
I am accountable to Dayo and his children to come, to my spiritual community, my Njuzu, my Neter, my Orisha and my Mami Wata and it is my religious duty to uphold our traditions and these are based on living a good and moral life. I have specific actions and behaviors I am not allowed to engage in, but they are for YOUR protection. Not MINE.
These taboos exist to protect others from what is my justifiable and quantifiable rage. I cannot act from my own hurt and pain. My jumbies observe my behaviour and judge my quarrels.
This is my test. To maintain my control and behave according to the agreement I have with them, life and God.
They KNOW I am in possession of gifts that if not controlled can be deadly. It is an enormous and often unwelcome responsibility to have to think about how your dumb cunt doesn’t know when to stop, so me with ADHD must learn to do it for you.
This is of course a euphemistic ‘you’.
I am consistently required to prioritize the chance that a jackass doing ninny hammer bullshit, may still have good things to do in the world, or are the grist in God’s mill.
Modern society discounts our traditional spirituality, and in a place like Barbados so utterly programmed to its Xtianity and anti-Blackness and specifically to be dismissive of anything they don’t understand, it’s really easy to think you can do what you’ve always done and get by.
But wishing don’t make it so. It means all that I am and can command can only be used to defend the vulnerable and the weak.
But it is the responsibility of being a Sword. Not having a sword allyuh. Being a sword.
You can pick the sense from shit in what I’ve written here.
Pick what you think is the bullshit and see how far you can get. I’ll wait until you’re ready.av
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