From boy to man

October 26, 2004

Sometime ago in this very space, the point was made that there suddenly came a time in T&T when no male person responded positively anymore to the much over-used term of endearment and acknowledgement: "boy."

In fact, any reference to a male person as "boy" brought a most abrupt rebuke: "Not, boy, MAN!" Language was actually being changed to express a new, deep desire and need.

It seemed as if citizens of T&T had chosen to embrace more potent images of self, and in so doing the politics of the streets symbolically had come to define "boy" as a sociological and psychological degenerate form of "man." And at the same time this posture and mental transformation was being reinforced by the Rastafarian concept of "I and I."

But if, according to that new language, "boy" had become a bad word, symbolic of negative and corrupted growth, much like "Knee-grow" (Negro) in the USA in the 1960s, how then was one to address a 12-year-old male? Simple: "small-man" or "youth-man," which in fact became popular terminology throughout the country.

That column underlined both the positive and the negatives of this posture, this new stance, so to speak, and warned that "what we shall make of this society eventually depends a lot on what we succeed in doing with the minds of these "small-men" or "youth-men."

Well, we did very little with them and the results are there to be seen.

School, church and parenthood, all the moulding agencies of society, have failed; have lost legitimacy, validity and authority, and this is at best reflected in their inability to do anything with male teenagers in particular, ie the "youth-men."

New approaches have to be worked out that will take into consideration their feelings and their demands. And it is not that teenagers haven’t always been problematic.

Universally, the transition from teenage to adulthood has always been emotionally traumatic but one knew and expected that eventually the value-system and the mores and the culture promoted by official society would "kick-in" and smoothen out even the most troubled teenagers into upright and quite remarkable well-adjusted adults. But much depends on society being malleable.

Teenagers are never conservative; they question the way things are, they challenge the status-quo, then expose hypocrisy and at times can be quite ultra-idealistic.

Teenagers will always therefore tend to be attracted to the counter-cultures, the sub-cultures, and the adventure and the danger involved in embracing these subterranean ways, and that is why and how the youth find themselves inventing and discovering the new horizons.

What we are saying is that it appears to be natural that the youth will be divergent in their thoughts and be attracted to that which is counter to the established ways of behaving.

In this regard, the youths of today are no different to those of yesteryear.

Back in the late 1950s, all the male youths at Tunapuna EC Elementary School learned to walk like "Dalgo," one of the more colourful badjohns of the day, whose pronounced way of walking was indeed a speciality.

And when in 1958 there was this famous clash between the boys of Tunapuna and those of Arima, one of the boys from Tunapuna called Fred Buck or Jabbla, who only last week they buried at age 65, delivered a speech that was learnt by heart by every male pupil at that school, even by those who could neither recite Queen Mab nor the Burial of Sir John Moore.

A small part of his speech was as follows:

"...Is me they call Sir Hangaganga, the boss of all n-----. . . and all my friends and partners does complain to me when anything goes wrong... I come to Arima to find out who de hell is this Jap? Trinidad never had a Chinee badjohn, and will never have a Chinee badjohn when I done today... So make allyuh play..."

The speech-giver was wounded in one of his knees in the course of the action that day and even that wound was viewed honourably by the pupils of Tunapuna EC.

Today such impressionable youths are being seized upon by the drug networks and the community gangs battling for control of quite lucrative turfs, pushing the crime rate sky high just as the social agencies have lost their legitimacy and validity and their power and authority.

This is why we concluded as follows in the last column:

"...This country needs to listen and listen well. The only solution to our present predicament is conscription to a national service. We have to militarise that element from which the drug lords and gangs recruit. We have to dry up that source.

"Every single youth of a particular age, say, 18 plus, not involved in an educational/training programme should be conscripted by the State.

"Put them in some quasi-military organisation, train them in areas of their choice and, most of all, take them to the shooting ranges and demystify ‘the gun’ once and for all. Wake them up at 4 am and put them to bed at night when they are dog tired.

"After three years you will have produced a disciplined young person with a skill and a different set of values. Trust me!

"Prayer will not do it. Prayer only helps the already converted..."

Of course, to make a national service work, the Government has to be creative in its approach. But that we all know is easier said than done.

Enough said.