YOUNG AND RESTLESS

THERE IS a fear consuming the nation, a force that grips every hot blooded Trinbagonian by the throat, filling them with terror, pounding them with paranoia, molesting their mental stability. This fear is greater than the fear of hurricanes, floods, cancer, crime, two-tonne cranes crashing into your house, credit card bills, pitbulls, or even losing your ticket to the next One-Day Test Match. This fear is none other than the deep dark fear of being horned. The fear of being horned plays upon our deepest insecurities, our darkest jealousies, our most hidden vulnerabilities, and it has led many a man or woman to the very brink of society, betrayed by the person in whom they have placed their trust, the person who has humiliated their soul. Getting horned is considered the worst thing that could happen in your relationship, and once it happens to you one finds it hard to shake off the feeling that it will happen again, to the point where one can become permanently suspicious, pessimistic and cynical.

Some will return a horn with a horn in revenge, as if to even the score. In fact, some hornermen or hornerwomen become repeat offenders — serial horners, unable to remain faithful. It’s like the call of the wild — horn or be horned. The average Trini’s obsession with horning is aptly reflected in our calypsos and soca, showcasing and highlighting our problems with fidelity and our fear of being horned. Ah horn is ah horn. If yuh want to horn meh, yuh could go ahead and do dat. Yuh looking fuh horn, plenty plenty horn boy. Raise yuh hand if yuh hornin. De hornerman crying. Leh go meh man. Somebody will horn you, yuh better believe it. And so on, and so on, every year producing more and more songs about our deepest fear. Why the obsession with horning? Indeed human infidelity is present in every human civilisation — it is cross cultural, cross regional and as old as horniness itself.

Even in Olde England, Shakespeare often wrote about our fascination and fear of being a “cuckold” — a Latin term used to describe a man who has an unfaithful wife. The phrase was coined after the cuckoo bird who lays its eggs in another bird’s nest, leaving the eggs to be cared for by the resident nesters. Time old legend has it that in many European villages, if it was discovered a man was in fact not the father of his child, the hapless husband was forced to wear an animal’s horns or antlers on his head as a symbol of his wife’s infidelity, which is perhaps where we get the term “horning” Centuries later the term “cuckold” has died out, but one only needs to turn on Jerry Springer to see men and women quarrelling violently about who is the “baby’s daddy.” Trinis, I believe, may be obsessed with horning because we are “bacchanalics” — addicted to bacchanal, gossip, juicy stories, action, ruction, and just downright mischief. Maybe it comes from too many years of watching The Young and the Restless when all that we had was TTT.

We seem to think that real life is just like a soap opera, full of passion, deception, dark secrets, and delicious drama to make your heart pound. Or maybe we are just trying to make our painfully normal and boring lives a little more exciting by pulling in a few extra actors onto the stage of our love lives. Either way, our addiction to bacchanal, particularly when it comes to the opposite sex, is certainly no fun and games. Firstly, it creates a complete lack of trust in the opposite sex. Women start to believe that all men are, by nature, hormone crazy dogs that will hump any and every female, given the opportunity. Men start to believe that all women are, by nature, untrustworthy, vindictive, conniving and ultimately trying to trap you with an “unplanned” pregnancy. In a highly sexual and sensual culture like ours — where good looking Trinis love to lime, flirt, wine and move with inviting body language, where sex is used to sell everything from alcohol to corn curls, where competition is fierce and revenge for stealing someone’s lover is fiercer — horning can be a downright dangerous activity.

Every day in the papers you read about insecure men chopping their wives and the children they suspect are fathered by an outside man. You get forlorn lovers hanging themselves from the rafters because of love gone sour. You get people sinking into depression from being horned, contemplating using that weed killer for something other than weeds. Even darker, and more serious, is that we have a country full of promiscuous people who think having multiple partners is cool, who also reject notions of “safer sex” and who won’t get tested for sexually transmitted diseases, spreading life threatening infections to their unsuspecting spouses. We might joke about it, sing about it casually in songs, gossip about it on the radio talk shows, but horning is no laughing matter! Time to grow up boys and girls — real life is not young and restless or bold and beautiful! Horning your partner is no joke, it is playing with people’s emotions and with their health and well being. You think a horn is a horn only when you take it on? Think again!