22 April 1999, 850 words
The word "amok", which means "run about in frenzied thirst for blood", has come into English from the Malay language where amok literally means "rushing in frenzy". In Malaysia, the term refers to a phenomenon which happens often enough to get an adverb: a Malay man, usually a peasant, would discover, or believe he has discovered, that his wife is being unfaithful and kill her and then kill himself. Frequently, the man would go on a rampage, killing several others before taking his own life.
That alone tells you why this rather unusual word is in common usage in Trinidad even - or especially - among illiterate people. In fact, recent events are beginning to convince me that Trinidadian men on the whole are sexually immature. Lance Corporal Anthony Caesar was just an extreme example of a typical Trini man. The fact that his acquaintances have all described him as "a cool fella" is an even more damning indictment of our social mores, since "cool" invariably means being what other people expect you to be. Caesar was aberrant only in what he did; his attitude, however, reflected exactly how the average Trinidadian man thinks and feels.
As always in situations like this, the question on everyone's lips is "Why?" The majority of commentators will as usual blame TV, music, Carnival, lack of morals and Caesar not being beaten sufficiently as a child. But the question is really an unanswerable one. All one can look at are the more general social factors that produce so many men like Caesar in our society.
Let us start with a basic fact common to all cultures: men are always in sexual competition for women. The most recent figures from the Central Statistical Office show that there are now more men than women in Trinidad and Tobago. This is odd, because in all normal populations - those not skewed by war or disease or famine - the male/female ratio is usually equal. So there needs to be an investigation into what has caused this skewing. Is it that more boy babies are surviving, or that women are dying faster than men, or that women are emigrating in greater numbers, or that many women have been having their first child for men five or more years older than them (a factor which increases the likelihood of having a boy)?
This trend may have begun to impact on sexual relations in our society, resulting in both increasing paedophilia and more murders of women. Of the most recent set of murder-suicides, I have noticed that several of the women killed were 20 years younger than their husbands. Extrapolating from the age of their oldest child, all these women first got pregnant when they were between 13 and 14 years of age and their husbands already in their 30s. It seems, therefore, that paedophilia is a tacitly accepted practice in our culture, which is not surprising when the Maha Sabha wants 14-year-old girls to be legally married and Muslims think it's OK for nine-year-old girls to be married once they start menstruating and the Thusians like watching eleven-year-old girls bathe.
Now the fact that men outnumber women would, in a rational society, lead to greater empowerment for women. When women can pick and choose, polyandry is often the result. The number of domestic murders where men have killed women for infidelity suggests that polyandry, serial and otherwise, has in fact been happening at the informal level. And, were it not for religious and social strictures, prostitution would be an acceptable way for women to take economic advantage of this situation. (Legalized and socially approved prostitution might even help reduce rape by making sexual partners readily available.)
But Trinidad is a hypocritical society where the average man still sees a deputy as essential and women as inherently inferior. So what happens is that high-status men tend to have more than one woman of child-bearing age, thus increasing sexual competition among males at lower levels. And, at the lowest levels, this competition for the resources to attract women leads almost inevitably to violent crime, especially rape. (The phenomenon of gang rape, paradoxically, seems to embody both this factor of sexual competitiveness and male homosexuality. The latter is not too surprising, when one considers that captive animals when deprived of mates indulge in homosexual acts.)
But why should all this lead to men killing women? For the answer to that, I will quote a North American scientist and a Trinidadian novelist. Steven Pinker: "The intellect is designed to relinquish control to the passions so they may serve as guarantors of its offers, promises and threats...because only if the passions are in control can they be credible guarantors." And V.S. Naipaul: "[The] idea of honour is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law."
Lance Corporal Caesar viewed the authority of a superior officer and the independence of a woman as mortal insults to his shallow honour. That is the root, not only of his tragedy, but of ours as well.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh