According to Marnatha Irène Ternier, it is “our birth that determines the violence against women.
THE HAITI FACTOR, July 13, 2024._Today, in Haiti, one would not be surprised to discover that many men (this is a crucial aspect of the debates on gender), very many men, whatever their rank, status, level, socio-economic position, material and economic wealth or poverty idem (rich or poor), they beat their wife (wives). Or, they exercise on her (them), forms of violence as diverse as veiled and diverted.
Indeed, when the social, political and economic situation is so serious, it is women and children who pay the price.
The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, author of
“Beyond Good and Evil” and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, would he approach the question, in this specific case, from the angle of the “will to power”, given a social context where power relations are simply blind and often do not appeal to any common sense, any common sense, any morality, any fear of God, any wisdom, any instruction, any culture, any humanism, any tolerance, any respect for others, any family education, or even any justice in marital or simply sentimental relationships. It is purely brutal, blind physical force that predominates both in couples and in sentimental relationships in general.
We saw it during the Covid19 period, almost everywhere around the world, we have just seen it again, in Haiti during the last three (3) years of chaos following the assassination of Jovenel MOÏSE where the country was literally left to its own devices, more and more:
Doctors beat their wives
lawyers beat their wives civil servants beat their wives military and police beat their wives teachers beat their wives.
young married people or lovers beat their wives.
lovers beat their lover, (oh) sorry, their mistress…
intellectuals beat their wives. What about priests?
What do some pastors and houngans do with their wives?
In the meantime, we must not forget that journalists also beat their wives in the name of some kind of immunity.
Lower socio-professional categories beat their wives. Peasants beat their wives.
Hold…
There are some who go so far as to bring their wives to their knees to punish them for their marital or other infidelities…
In short, everyone beats his wife like a giant drum.
And, it is painful to say this, there is no one in our society to protect anyone and no institution either to protect children or women.
We are also told (let’s hope this is a good joke by the way) that a married woman, beaten by her husband, a doctor by profession, called in a justice of the peace to decide. When he arrived, the justice of the peace found himself face to face with the still very violent scene.
And the husband declared to the justice of the peace, duly accompanied by a uniformed police officer and his clerk:
“It’s my wife I’m beating, watch out if you put your nose in it….”
Can’t you see it’s my wife I’m beating… »
The violent husband then takes his car and disappears from the scene, while driving it off in a spectacular manner, without regard for the judicial and police authorities dispatched to the scene to avoid the worst that day… His real plan having been, who knows, to kill the woman… He was fed up.
This is the type of husband today, whether he is an intellectual, socio-professional, doctor, and who does not hesitate for a second to attack the mother in the presence of their little girl aged between 4 and 5 years old, nor to call his wife a “bitch”, a “malkadi” with the most crude and filthy insults, always in the presence of their little girl who never stops crying and who sometimes starts to glue back together the pieces of the wedding photos violently torn by the father to illustrate his desire for marital conflict with illustrations of unheard-of violence.
We have seen worse elsewhere: another husband, this time holding a PhD in Sociology from the University of Canada and who lives in the province of Haiti with his wife and their child. During a quarrel that was to subsequently lead to a sort of break-up (separation) within the couple, the husband, a doctor in Sociology, wrote this as a sort of WhatsApp message to his wife and I quote:
» you can kenbel yes (speaking of their child).
But don’t ask for money for it as if it were a child who grew up with me. Look for the work you do so that there is need.
This is the last time I will write this.
If you insist, I will send them again.
You have to understand when you remove yourself from his collar: waste feels…. »
(end of quote)
So, machismo combined with violence (verbal, psychological or physical) goes so far these days, that nothing should actually upset a man in his relationship (a man in the masculine sense). Because, if a man is too stressed at home, if he loses his job for example, if he is too tense, too angry, if he gets angry, he can go so far as to destroy his home, reprimand his relationship, or his love life.
But who protects the weakest in our current society?
A woman beaten by her husband for almost five (5) years of their married life, was systematically dragged, taken for a ride by the public institutions concerned and paid to do their job, during these five (5) years where this victim did not want to tolerate this violence and that she believed it necessary each time, to contact the Ministry for the Status of Women, in particular.
In addition, another woman beaten by her husband on January 2 (in the middle of New Year), bathed in blood stains, she thought it best to go to a police station in the metropolitan area to find help. She learned instead that the complaints service does not operate on January 2, not to mention the ironic comments of the people who were at the reception of the Police Station.
However, the victim was in danger….
But then, who protects who?
The national police?
The DCPJ?
National or international NGOs?
Traditional press or social media?
The Ministry for the Status of Women and Women’s Rights?
The justices of the peace?
Courts ?
Traditional or avant-garde feminist associations?
By the Way, as they say in English, where have the usual feminists gone?
Who protects these women?
Is it their family who protects them in their own home?
What role do the fathers and mothers of these women who are victims of violence play?
What role do the brothers or even sisters of these female victims play?
How can we finally show solidarity with these battered women?
What kind of family education should men have so that they respect women?
And vice versa?
Since we are not together (married, placed, lovers, lovers, or others) to kill each other, nor to debase each other, nor to humiliate each other.
We are together to love each other, to tolerate each other, to understand each other….
If not, who protects women and children in our society where they are constantly abused and humiliated.
And nothing ever works to their advantage?
Who protects them?
What is certain and sure is that, since the assassination of Ginou Mondésir, this cultural journalist from Telemax, channel 5, at the time, beaten, massacred, martyred, killed, by her partner, Valdo Jean, on December 24, 2004, to the present day thus coinciding with the publication of this new work by Marnatha Ternier “the trance of masks”, women in our country have only descended into hell in their life together (2).
And the descent into hell of women in our country is only more and more dizzying. So much so that the very vertigo becomes unacceptable, intolerable and unbearable. According to a very active professional sociologist, also a victim of domestic violence, today there are nearly 60% of homes where women are regularly beaten. I would add, according to my personal research, that the situation is worse than that….
Worse than what we see.
This is what we are trying to understand by reading the new book by Marnatha Irène Ternier who is not afraid to tackle all the taboo, even dangerous, subjects of our current society, such as homosexuality, pedophilia, rape of minors, sexual abuse of children in domestic service, corruption among private or public officials, violence against women, political pollution, the failure of our Western civilization, the failure of traditional religions and colonization in general on different cultural environments.
In the United States of America, for example, there is 911 to protect women and children.
In Haiti, what recourse does a woman and child have who are subjected to any kind of aggression from a violent man who decides to do sport every day (li fè gwo bibit), just to have the physical energy necessary to (guess what…) better destroy and demolish his wife and children?
The author of the book “La trance des masques”, Marnatha Irène Ternier is a wife and mother of three (3) children.
In his collection of short stories, The Trance of Masksshe comes to perceive the categories of births as a living photograph. Each of these categories is a summons to the masked ball of life, carrying with it its joys, its bitterness, its desires, its sufferings and sometimes, a certain determination.
As a collective or cultural trend, sometimes legal, this categorization of children, which is presented in the following news items, is part of “the trance of masks”
as :
- « The bastard«
- “A dull ceremony” – ” Professional » , -« Innocence saves from despair
- the soul of pain
- the Diaspora
- et Finally,
“The Rooster Refuses to Crow”,
While in Jean Jacques Rousseau
“Man is born good but (it is) society (which) corrupts him.”
In this case of ” “La trance des masques” by Marnatha Ternier, man is “born violent” from a set of circumstances, and that very early on, this visceral violence will have an impact on everything that moves around him, in particular, on women, mothers, spouses, lovers, etc.
Marnatha Irène Ternier invites us to see (or to experience) the violence with which we came into the world, with which we were born, on earth, in the midst of so many masks which can only engender, reproduce, prosper and be transmitted to future generations.
In particular, in this injunction where the majority of children are accompanied only by a maternal figure, where in a home considered normal by society, the child, living in the midst of various and varied masks, is regularly a spectator of all possible and unimaginable violence, these can only occur and reproduce themselves…
In this fictional story which runs from page 329 to page 378, entitled:
Violence against women,
The author, Marnatha Ternier, lays out for us, the readers, the description of the decline of a family whose father dies suddenly on a cruise in 1971:
» She found herself telling her mother’s story while she was indeed present at the forum (a workshop for letting off steam for battered women and other types of community suffering) bringing together at least five hundred (500) people, women and men, to talk about herself, her setbacks, in her own home, with her husband who had become, in the meantime, over time, a real torturer for her.
Sardine grew up without a father, without a dad. He drowned on his birthday while he was with a woman completely different from the one everyone knew in the neighborhood, that is to say a second woman, as they say, the woman next door…
“Violence against women” is a tragic and painful story, both for the narrator (I imagine) and for the reader who, in the end, will eventually understand that the central character of this poignant story is a sort of heir to a family that lived as best it could and whose mother is now alone following the death of her first husband, then weakened both by his death and by his children, who will now be difficult for her to educate, manage, take care of…
The stepfather (after having been a man who was completely in love at the beginning of the romance) now ends up equipping himself with his “monster” mask, this time, in order to assault (or rape) both the woman (his new wife) and the little girl (his stepdaughter) who will grow up carrying with her, more than scars, but above all and before all, deep traumatic shocks, so much so that on that day, at the time of a session, one could not be more cathartic, it will already be absolutely difficult for him to express himself or to communicate with the audience…
By the way, in relationships in general, it is not only men who beat their wives, there are also women who beat their spouses. And I am not making this up. On the other hand, in homosexual relationships, there is also the man who beats the other (man) or the woman who beats her partner or lover etc.
Having been a Director of several different companies, both in the public and private sectors, I have already had, for example, to face a situation as funny as it was violent where one of my employees started to “snore” another employee with slaps and punches, from a scene of jealousy, within the company itself. I called them to my office, it was to learn that they shared a certain intimacy and that they actually lived together. That day, they were so excited and irritated, violent, that even I, their boss, could have taken a few good slaps.
I then took my cool in both (2) hands to firmly remind them that this was a strictly intimate or personal matter, to be managed outside the institution….
Brief..
This is a case that “explodes” the debate on violence against women, which has been treated so far in this text, under the aspect of male-female relationships. However, this new real-life example of a violent female-female couple only confirms the approach of the author of La Transe des masques, Marnatha Ternier, who sees the nature of our birth as a Haitian people with a specific culture, as an immediate motive for the various forms of violence that we inflict on our close or distant environment.
Panem et circences (bread and circus games): this was said (among the Latins) in ancient Rome to denounce the public authorities who endlessly distributed entertainment and wheat to the people in order to lull their conscience. Although we would have needed, in the meantime, a little bread and leisure, except that there are social classes who do not even find them. On the other hand, they have ended up destroying our collective conscience and freezing this conscience on various subjects of major concern.
To make us forget the essential, we are burdened with all the debates on sex, sexuality, sex, politics, or even, sometimes, sport…
From time to time we forget the real major societal crises as well as our real socio-economic drama which is slowly destroying all our humanist cells. We end up, I say, forgetting all these violences which rot among others, the lives of the weakest including those of women and children. They are our pillars however….
Excluding here from the outset any ANTAGONIC debate on man and woman, in the narrow sense of the terms, nor on the masculine and the feminine, nor on the stronger sex and the weaker sex, I would say that, like any normal, honest, educated, courteous, elegant, refined, wise, non-sadistic, moral, non-cynical, educated, non-violent, civilized, mature, law-abiding and virtue-respecting man, they are our pillars. Period.
There is no better way to humiliate a people than to begin by humiliating these pillars first, or even to do everything possible to ensure that they are not supported or protected in their dignity.
Precisely, Marnatha Ternier’s work goes against the grain of these Roman-style circus games; it forces us instead to a deeper introspection. It addresses violence in general, violence against women in particular, from the very “nature” of the birth of our being in the grip of multiple distortions.
Is this why, in the trance of masks and for so much violence against women, wearing a mask is often mandatory. All things considered, between us, there are some who do not bother with any scruples and who in reality, do not wear any mask …
Pradel Henriquez
PH.
July 2024
THE HAITI FACTOR (LFH)
