Content warning: this post contains descriptions of violence.
A community group in south Trinidad invited me to their men’s forum to help define a “man’s identity today.” Traditionally, men’s forums are gatherings for men to vent and speak in a language rooted in masculine scripts, complain how they are left behind or how much they want no part of this changing world.
Men’s forums sometimes reward the cheap complaints and excuses by men forced to account for their participation or complicit role in male dominance. I do not carry get-out-of-jail-free cards. I prepared for the engagement refusing to accept the terms given to me by my host. For what is a “man’s identity” I must explain, or worse, prescribe? I failed to deliver either providence or science to explain the meaning of what a man is and most were taken aback when I asserted a real man did not exist.
Yet, I understood the anxieties of men and women who bear witness to the sociological drama of masculinities that plays out in public. More than five hundred murders were recorded last year, most of this violence was committed by men, many of the dead were the young, bodies that piled like mountains in the distance. Fear and the limited capacity of community groups to address violence fuel our search for an answer, an ordinance, and a standard of manhood to be taken as fact.
At the forum, men trickled in, slowly. Women organized a social of card games and dominoes for us to gather. It is not surprising to see women in the ‘background’, setting tables, serving food, cleaning, coordinating personnel, printing final edits on the evening’s program. Then, staying silent, over time learning that this space has not been accepting of their interventions. I have grown tired of hearing the three sentences of thanks by men to women at the end of these events, the expression of verbal gratitude that moved lips but never had the power to move chairs and make the place tidy.
I observed that most of the attendees were twice my age. Some of the old men limped as they entered; others senior enough to not have concern with the aesthetic and luxury of front teeth. Most were bald old men in polo shirts, thick gold chains and stood with their hands in pocket, talking about sports and the unpredictability of rain. All the men present lived in the community, most of them agricultural and construction workers. They were keen to remind me that I was the outsider with their cutting glances as I sat on the single chair to the back, reading notes. I had play dominoes and play cards to earn their respect.
I played two rounds of dominoes and then made my way to the All Fours table. All Fours is an old game of cards fit for a gamble or passing time. Four players divided into pairs are served six cards and play in service of the trump card. In both games, I shouted over the participants, slammed the table and kept the winning score in matchsticks. In return, they laughed or quarreled or tried to slow the game by lecturing me about the rules or times when they were luckier. Every game I won was a way of sharpening the tip of my knife for them to see. There was intense noise, it was a profound way of not talking.
My All Fours partner, after winning the second round of the card game, offered me a drink, rose above the table, grabbed my shoulder, “That is my boy, he knows how to play.” I have played this game, many times among men, on wooden and folded plastic tables, at the workplace and on the streets. I had to play it here again. I felt that the first part of my talk began with the dominoes and deck of cards in my hand.
When the games ended, the boards, cards and dominoes pieces were put away along with the plastic cups with bones of wild meat and corn. Only pieces of conversation remained in their hands, I learned that most of them continued to struggle to meet the demands of their trade and being present in the family. I knew that job opportunities were narrow in the community and boys apprenticed from a young age under their fathers, following their lead, mastering the knowledge of tools, even measuring their chests and arm muscles to their fathers’ to one day work alongside him. But this happens in such silence, boys develop the ability to read the language of approval or disappointment in their father’s eyes. Few words are ever shared.
I was plucked from the games area and put to sit in the middle of the room. I opened talking about the arbitrariness of gendered constructions and the concrete consequences that come about because of these ideas. I told the men in the room that I could not explain an ideal of manhood to live up to, all I knew was the possibility that comes to us when we are alone on a mattress in with the curtains blowing against our flesh. There was a space for men that had less to do with certainties and more to do with reflection, feeling, and care for others.
One of the four young men present got up, “What could I do to get my father to stop shouting? Every day on the job, he shouts at me, he embarrasses me.”
“When I talk to my father, I feel sand in my throat. He never spoke to me. He gave instructions, shout and hit,” another one added.
Some of the older men laughed. Some sat silent. “That sounds like my father,” one said.
I told the men in the room that I could not explain an ideal of manhood to live up to, all I knew was the possibility that comes to us when we are alone on a mattress in with the curtains blowing against our flesh. There was a space for men that had less to do with certainties and more to do with reflection, feeling, and care for others.
Men’s forums should not just be a ‘space for men’ because they need exclusivity. They should be spaces that provide a safe environment to make connections between their experiences and the power imbalances of the world.
The conversations in the room grew and became more animated when persons kept speaking up, letting their guard down, and trying to make their own connections. The room for once did not continue to be an ordinary setting, a “men’s forum” of men to “hear” issues or retell their hard upbringing in labor for which some felt they “turned out fine.” It was not just a room made up of plastic tables and card games for the workers and their strong hands.
As I was about to close, one of the older men, let us call him ‘Mr. B’, removed his cap, crumpled it in his hands and screamed crying. He said, “Every day I worked in the fields. I had joy. I ploughed the land, cleaned the home, went to the lagoon to plant rice and called that a life. I had joy. But God, when I had to load the truck with six bags and I came up short with four and a half, my father beat me. My father beat me till I bled. Beat my black until I turned blue. Beat me by the river and I never felt the water on my skin. My father war me and war me to this day. This is what my father doing to me.”
Then, Mr. B and the young men in the room remind me how much people have been deprived of conversation, how much silence and emotional reserve are markers of men who have been robbed of much needed words of support, care and affirmation.
Violence is a mechanism of control used by parents to punish children. Especially as it relates to boys, studies show that they are raised to be “tough and emotionally stoic” and parents may abuse them on the basis that they will learn to take it “as a man.” In addition, poverty and structural inequalities influence the ability of parents and families to care for their children in nonviolent and non-stressed. Raising ‘real men’ fuels violence.
Some days I become complacent and tell myself that meetings and talking sessions do not bring about the material changes needed to improve lives, or to shift attitudes and behaviors around cold stoicism. Then, Mr. B and the young men in the room remind me how much people have been deprived of conversation, how much silence and emotional reserve are markers of men who have been robbed of much needed words of support, care and affirmation. They remind me how violence took up space in the absence of words.
I thought about how I rolled up my sleeves when I entered that forum and had to play games as a competitor to introduce myself when words did not. Conversation can untangle one complicated part of our very complicated lives. Conversations we need to continue to have are ones that peel away from what we were taught made us men in order to piece together our human form. The trauma of violence does not always fade, but our truths and need for community do not have to as well.
This piece was authored by an Equimundo Writing Fellow, a member of a cohort of forward-thinking individuals with a global perspective on masculinity and male partnership for gender equality. The content of this piece represents the views of the author alone.