Everybody peepin’: Making society through gossip

Everybody want to see they neighbour

Everybody peepin’

Everybody peepin’.

At night when you think they sleepin’

They hidin behind window curtain and peepin’

Everybody peepin’…

The pastor on the pulpit preachin’

He buss ah hole in de bible

An’ he jus’ dey peepin’…” (SuperP)

Corner house, maco, ol’ talk.We are familiar with these expressions.‘Grenada’ can easily be replaced with ‘Trinidad’. Or if you look at the Youtube video of this song (youtube comments also give us a good idea of trending conversations), the lyrics echo across the Caribbean. Humourous and entertaining because of the very fact that it resonates with us – this fast growing urban village, if ever there was an oxymoron, remains grounded in gossip.

The writer, V.S. Naipaul once noted (this is hearsay) that if you wanted to hear the latest happenings around town or the country, you just had to sit in a bar and listen.

This point also destroys the gender bias that says gossip is more associated with women, for these are predominantly male spaces, particularly at the time that Naipaul would have been sitting in them. Everybody peepin’ – mother, father, brother, sister. There is no gender constraint.

We are often told in moral lessons that we should not indulge in gossip. And around the world, gossip has had a very bad rap for ages.

Recent research however now puts a different spin on it by raising the question of its social uses.

In a Stanford report, dated January 27, 2014 “…researchers found that when people learn – through gossip – about the behaviour of others, they use this information to align with those deemed cooperative.

Those who have behaved selfishly can then be excluded from group activities, based on the prevailing gossip. This serves the group’s greater good…” As it is, gossip it seems, is a part of human nature. “While much of this behaviour may be undesirable and malicious, a lot of it is critical to deterring selfishness and maintaining social order in groups.” For those interested in further reading, an interesting article by Jeet Heer on ‘The Globe and Mail’ can be found on https://www.theglobeandmail.

com/news/world/loose-lips-maysink- political-ships-but-they-also- launch-literary-flights/article1826716/ We are a society that can understand how gossip works for much of our calypso has its base in gossip.

Gossiping is a process that, through history, not only in Trinidad, but around the world, has functioned on one level as a way of equalising, of levelling off class differences particularly for those who feel that they are in a position of oppression, and on the other, as a way of purging hidden hurt. Both are done through picong but there is almost always a more serious side to gossip under the humour. As listeners, we can read beyond the humour even if we do so at a subconscious level.

As Professor Gordon Rohlehr, the pioneering scholar in calypso research noted in a recent chat, ‘gossip…certainly comes up in calypso where the calypsonian very often presented himself as the person with the inside information.

And it partly comes out of that barrack yard situation where people lived so close to each other that you could hear what was going on in another’s home. You had the walls that didn’t go up to the ceiling so that you could hear what was going on in the next room, the walls with little cracks in them so people could peep at each other...Gossip is performance and one always performs before a group.’ Cultural oppression of the African slave more than likely too had their grounding in gossip spread about him. The tales of obeah that made the white man afraid, a stereotype that persists today when the larger society hears the words Baptists or Shango in particular; those that spoke of talking drums that made the banning of drums necessary for the coloniser to maintain his power; the carnival characters born of stories about the women’s sexual perversity. One cannot help but notice how much of the stereotypes about each other that we have today come from the gossip that spread about things that people of a different culture didn’t understand.

So, it was one group against another.

Gossip rooted in class and ethnicity created group identities and divisions – us versus them - that have survived until now. So, while recognising the importance of emancipation as a triumphant event that provided freedom of speech and movement, pride in self and power to the African community, the term should also serve as a metaphor for everyone to begin revising some gossip in an effort to adjust the narrative in our movement towards a society where ‘Tole r a n c e’ s h o u l d n o w be exchanged for ‘Acc e p - t a n c e ’.

sharda.

patasar@ g m a i l .

com