Our Wounded Civilisations

The gracious pronouncements of party leaders Dr Keith Rowley and Kamla Persad-Bissessar in defeat and in victory respectively Monday night was a welcome, comforting experience at the end of a brief but bruising election campaign.

Even so, the injuries sustained, even by celebrants, will require that we pay much closer attention to the way we engage such contests in the future.

A few years ago, I met a woman during a Caribbean assignment. She was a divorcee with two adult children resulting from a particularly abusive marriage. She told me that several times after being attacked, she awoke in a hospital bed.

There were short-term and lasting physical and emotional injuries – some of them evident in the tone and manner of her narrative and behaviour, and in visible features of her physical appearance.

Throughout the period of abuse there was little to suggest that things had gone badly wrong. Everybody, including the attacker and child witnesses, were putting on a pretty good show.

The conversation I had with that person came to mind last week when a colleague said it appeared that every time we have an election in T&T a period of emotional “recovery” is required, even by the declared winners.

I used the word “convalescence.” Not the paralysing type that brings silence and inaction, but of the variety that generates a facade of normalcy. I thought, for example, of the numbness expected to greet racist remarks, insults, disinformation, defamation, and other forms of normalised verbal violence.

In other Caribbean territories I know well, emotional cover is also required against the threat and experience of actual physical violence. Instances of this are few and far between here, but there is professional guidance that does not make a sharp distinction between the body and the mind.

To reinforce this, my friend recommended I read The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk. It’s not my kind of reading so I reluctantly listened to one portion of the audio version.

The writer’s basic assertion is that “trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.”

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) also appears to have collective, communal characteristics, in the sense that populations undergo processes of denial, guilt, and pain while putting on a splendid show in the face of internal convulsions – much like the wounded lady.

We occupy a Caribbean space in which the injured abound. For instance, psycho-social wounds persist over 40 years after the fall of the People’s Revolutionary Government in Grenada. Who can also deny that Jamaica’s political violence between 1970 and 1980 (more than 800 people were killed in the 1980 elections) has not left scars requiring continued treatment?

Guyana’s decades-long political trauma spanning the late 1950s and into the 1980s remains evident in the tenor of the political discourse and actions of 2025. There are open wounds left unattended after many years. Examine closely, for example, current convulsions in Tuschen and Georgetown. Any “recovery” clearly remains incomplete.

In T&T, we can begin the comparisons years before 1970 and 1990, but much has already been said about the hangovers from those dramatic events that remain today.

We have not had the death and physical traumas of some of our neighbours, but our minds and therefore our bodies, have kept the score. At election time, some politicians and their supporters ensure the scoreboard keeps ticking.

Head of the Council for Responsible Political Behaviour, Dr Bishnu Ragoonath recently reported on  “racially charged and derogatory language, character attacks, excessive negative campaigning, and the removal or defacement of opponents’ campaign materials” when he described breaches of its code during campaign 2025.

This is the limit of the Council’s responsibilities, much like the requirements of the Sixth Schedule to the Representation of the People’s Act which prescribes a Code of Conduct for Political Parties to “regulate the behaviour of members and office holders of political parties, aspiring candidates, candidates and their supporters, promote good governance and eradicate political malpractices.”

It is not within the scope of either the Council, which operates as an institutional check on political behaviour, or the Code to monitor psycho-social impacts. That’s our brief as citizens.

It is however the responsibility of the main political actors who provide the ammunition and triggers that routinely take us to the A&E each time we are required to engage electoral decision-making. This year has been no exception. We must endeavour to put an end to this. Monday night signalled some promise – through both cheers and tears.