Last week I called Bobby about something but he was distracted, thinking about those Bajan fishermen charged with entering the Tobago waters pursuing the Bajan flying fish dem. He wanted to contact the Trinidad comrades to discuss the free movement of Caribbean fisher folk- an infinity mile mark within the Caribbean Sea. It can be a challenge casually happening upon Bobby, in the gas station, for example, where he would pin you to the wall on your position on, let’s say, the small matter of fixing the education system.
Bobby, who is my father, turns 80 this week. He still works doing, in his words, not law about which he is contemptuous, but rather justice. I think that means that he has given up on reading the books. And, in the other theme in his life, he knows that he is as sexy now as at any other sexy stage in his life.
It is not so straight forward writing about Bobby given the turbulent harshness of his fathering. The question which came up recently at the book club is how to write about a parent in a complete way, in a frame that moves beyond the unblinking child gaze of expectations and disappointments to a nuanced adult consideration of the inherent complexities of human character. That you can be one thing here and something else entirely there and that the multiple personas can be authentic.
Bobby was a reluctant father (not to mention husband). Yet, while he is unable to resist that judgment, he does chafe at it because he himself was terribly fathered. And no, he was not his father whom still he did not forsake or reject, taking care of him right down to the end, honouring his son duties. “So what’s your problem?” he silently impugns me for continuous judgment of him.
And now in my conversations with Caribbean people, I see how many others grow up surviving fathership that is strangely indifferent, disengaged, irresponsible, often emotionally oppressive, even violent. Men who prefer the sexual company of multiples of women and of the men in the rum shop over the interior lives of their developing children.
In some ways, then, there was nothing too exceptional about Bobby’s parenting. But he is an exceptional person, an excessive person, a big and disturbing character. Coming from the volatile Miller clan, he is a contrarian by instinct. It is all masculine bravado and braggadocio. His mother was a strong woman, capable even after diabetic comas and surgeries, to go on a roof in her seventies to patch something.
That sense of kiss-me-ass independence is a dominant streak in his character. Despite his fair skin, ‘nice’ hair and ‘pretty’ eyes, he rejected Caribbean colour privilege, an early actor in the black power movement. Power to the People!
Scathing of the negrocrats and bourgeoisie (isn’t that a delicious word?), his circle of daily man friends were rough and tumble sorts- Naga, Crazy Horse, Critch the Bitch, Son. Way out on the left, banned from entering here, there and everywhere for being a communist, starting with his deportation from Dominica, he adores Fidel, is an ardent regionalist, is reflexively anti-Northern, anti-capitalist, his distrusting rule of thumb being that there is always another truth than the one from Reuters, CNN, BCC etc.
He dreamed for the revo which spectacularly, actually happened for a tragically curtailed moment.
And so, his influence on me is undeniable. From him, I was schooled in skepticism, in distaste for class and race inequality, abuse of authority and power. But yes, observing his certain disregard for the completeness of womanity, the dissonance between his fervently voiced values on social justice in the public sphere and his actions in the private spaces as father and partner, I found my way to feminism, to the injunction that the personal is political.
So well said Roberta. I was reflecting on my own experience of problematic fathering and it’s effects on me and felt a strange solidarity. As a mature adult, I can also see the positives in my father, not necessarily to me but generally to his field as an agriculturalist.
Thanks for sharing.
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[…] and eventful life. He was, in the words of my son Aschille, gregarious. I have written about him here already but in July 2022, Athurine Reece organized a celebration of his life at UWI. This below […]
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Roberta, thanks for this rich and moving reflection. I am looking forward to hearing from more of the men in this reflection.
I must say, that I admire Bobby for his integrity in the political sphere, his rejection of the privilege that he could so easily have claimed on his return. He seemed fundamentally influenced by his experience in the war as a young man. It strikes me that so many of our men were dramatically influenced as adults by their class and racial experiences from the wars including the cold war, the anti-colonial movement and the impact of just living in the US and Britain during these times. Rich or poor brown or black, educated or unskilled, our men experienced racism and oppression similarly. Their class or lighter shade did not protect them from discrimination and humiliation.
The one area of privilege that they continued to enjoy was that of being male. Their ability to identify with the poor and the black, never translated into their ability to identify with women’s second class status and oppression.
I found the contradiction glaring in many of my male colleagues who swore by Marx, but who treated women as their personal serfs.
I am happy to see some of the younger men beginning to question the patriarchal stats quo. However, patriarchy in my view is much more difficult than race and class to address, because few men can actually experience what it is like to be a woman. In addition, so many women have been so thoroughly socialized into patriarchy, that many are equally staunch upholders of the patriarchal status quo.
Much has been accomplished but the road ahead is long.
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Rosina, agreed. If you remember it was Stokely Carmichael who infamously said I believe that the only position for women in the SNCC was ‘prone’. I think he meant it as a ‘joke’. Look how times have changed.
There is a psycho-social book to be written about those men on the left, their commitment yes and their indiscipline at a number of levels.
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This has really moved me, Roberta. Coming to terms with a father who couldn’t “father” was a long work-in-progress for me. Only after his death, when I had to write his eulogy, was I able to shift my perception to realize that he he did the best he could. Yet, as you note of yourself, he has shaped me profoundly.
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I love this. Ive been contemplating the idea of a collection of short essays on those Caribbean men who ‘fathered’ the colorful 🙂 I Thoroughly miss book club.
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I really like this entry. Makes me think a lot about my own father and how much, no matter how and through which lens we journey through life, their impact goes deeper sometimes than we can every fully articulate. There is always more…
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Thanks for sharing this Roberta. Can’t say I don’t have the same thought of writing about my pops… which was part of my original paper for the Cave Hill Summer institute back in 2007. The interview is ongoing, and slowly revealing…but a valuable engage for all. Peace.
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And what would Bobby at 80 say to this I wonder? Is he in anyway reflective? Quite a large character … the kind that you could write a book about and always have material to write another. Yes, human beings can be contradictory and often are; and it seems the bigger the personality the bigger the contradictions.
On another note – interesting question that nature/nurture issue. But that’s for when we meet. 🙂
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