Normel

IN YEMEN and Aleppo, the city at the centre of the civil war in Syria, children no longer react to the sound of exploding bombs. A 14-year-old boy is forced to cut off his legs to survive being trapped under fallen rubble. In the words of a BBC journalist, war for these children is “normal”.

There was a time when we in TT would look on with mild interest and perhaps a touch of pity at countries like Syria or those closer to home like Jamaica. Their normal was far removed from us. Rampant crime, abuse, excessive viewing of pornography, kidnapping, trafficking of guns, drugs and humans — these were someone else’s reality.

This week in Port-of-Spain, in the space of minutes I walked past no less than three mentally challenged homeless people, begging, muttering to themselves, engrossed in their own agitated worlds. Passers- by ignored them, tried to avoid them. I was reminded how many years ago, one of these homeless people burned my little sister with a cigarette. She shrieked in pain, I didn’t know what to do, and the rest of the world ignored us, just as they ignored that homeless man. Just as they ignore him now.

In class, as we implemented our cultural interventions, one boy constantly made a sound like a siren.

The piercing sound would disrupt the session and we would have to work twice as hard to return a sense of calm. Eventually, we worked out that the sound of police sirens was a constant feature of this child’s life, and the only way that he could deal with the trauma was to make the very sound that distressed him.

We were able to manage that situation, along with the one involving the brilliant girl who gambled and with the boy who picked fights with his classmates when his mother came in to the country but spent the time with her boyfriend and not him.

However, this week, it struck me that there are a great number of behaviours that we have accepted as normal, when in fact they are not. Realities like putting a chair in the large hole in the road, buses that barely run, police that turn on sirens when there are no emergencies, obese children, citizens who know little about their history and a city filled with business people who still have not worked out that the way to end the chaos is to collectively assume responsibility for its problems.

The process of creating new norms is a slow and painful one.

How to instill in our youth, especially those from vulnerable communities, concepts of discipline, focus, hard work, respect for elders, arriving on time. Success in our world is largely defined by how many things we have and how expensive they are. The global dominance of North American culture and the looming “Trump” era will no doubt further entrench the values of money, ownership, clever deals and thin women.

As the storm approaches, will we use the opportunity to look inwards? Not in a xenophobic way, being prejudiced against people from other cultures, but drawing strength from our folklore, stories and festivals. Artists sent out a call to walk “arm-in-arm” to show solidarity with the victims of crime.

Songstress Mavis John reminded that “T&T is ours and we have to take care of it. We have to make changes.” We need to get to the point where this change is not just normal but “normel”.

D a r a Healy is a perform a n c e artist and founder of the NGO, the Indigenous Creative Arts Network – ICAN