THE man sat on the pavement adjoining the Bourda colonial cemetery, muttering responses that none of his interrogators heard. Most of the small gathering had known him for many years, so they unveiled his truths angrily and accusingly.
One person said, “He got good family; only recently they took him home and clean he up. If yuh see how he was looking. Now he gone back in the dutty ‘Drug Yard’. Another in the small group exclaimed, “Look at he foot! Like something bite he up!” The man’s foot was swollen with sores. Another critic gave his view and left, “These banna weak; people try wid he and he let them down.”
In my experience, drug addiction is a chemical force from the fabled netherworld that is entirely unpredictable, though indeed possesses the human mind and wields its own commands onward to self-destruction. I knew him casually before; mostly “hi and right”, with an exchange here and there. It was pure curiosity that made me wait to ask him some questions, and not very intelligent questions. My first question was, “Yuh know yuh gon end up dead, or with a life of permanent suffering if yuh don’t blank drugs and move on?” He looked at me for a moment dropped his gaze, and spoke softly, “How ah gon move on?” I anxiously replied with a typical unrealistic suggestion, “Come off the drugs and get a job.”
He glanced up at me and immediately dropped his glance and looked straight ahead. Then he said, “Ah tried to get a job, but ah can’t read and write. Even with watchman wuk, yuh got fuh know fuh read.” Checkmate. I was unsure how to proceed, so he continued, “Meh big brother didn’t stay around, suh I had to help out. Li’l boy wid money does feel nice; force-ripe man, but when yuh get older, it get different.” He chuckled, mocking his own words. I understood, because I had written about that before, and my early life was no bed of roses, either. I had witnessed the darker side of that thing.
Now, this old-time thing of the surrogate parent has not passed, I thought. Therefore, it may well be necessary for the return of the authority figure from that period: The ‘School Inspector’ into the 2020s. Back in the day, they visited homes of students who did not meet a justified number of schoolday attendances during the school year, and did not meet average standards in schoolwork towards later survival levels. The School Inspector was always a strong and experienced person, possibly an old teacher. They would filter through gossipy neighbours with all-knowing views and address situations like this man’s early life events to prevent the “Not-So-Good-Old-Days” from reoccurring, with the necessary authority of salvaging before the inevitable unfolds.
The environment of the young has always been vulnerable to the whims and presumptions of society’s pretensions that have inflicted false responsibilities onto children. At times, these responsibilities begin in the home, and oftentimes result in illiterate young and mature adults. That there are young children with addiction problems is not an exaggeration. Truancy of school periods can be an indicator of many issues, among them, more dangerous issues of our time like early subculture inducements, like marijuana as a cure and a positive alternative, rather than realising the uprooting mental activity it incurs.
The labour avenues for survival for people like the man who inspired this article were common 30 or 40 years ago; they no longer exist, and nothing of similar legal earning capacity has replaced them. Thus, for someone like him, the needs of the now are a basket-case reality. It can only be addressed by first acknowledging that it exists.
Some social failures are driven towards correction by committed concerns and not by the designated task of employment positions alone. The social deviation discussed here, of the guardian or parental imbalance, requires meticulous assessment of alternatives to understand the social conditions that led to such grim decisions, as well as the unrealistic projected expectations then and now.
Again, what is worse in our current age is the grim frequency of addictive drugs, not to ignore the prevalence of alcohol back then, whose addiction wiped out undocumented numbers of our population and led to even fatal domestic uproars. Then there are always the luring temptations of adultery, whether based on a new start or the promise of economic and emotional deliverance, that in many cases went wrong, adding “Old house pon Old house”, as the saying goes.
None of us can predict the future, but what exists around us is what we must pay attention to because we can’t build walls high enough to block the fallout from affecting us. We’re facing the shadows eye to eye; the only remedy to address this entangled legacy is an innovative, unravelling, supportive light.
