Words mean things.

A truism, yes. A cliché… maybe… but given how reckless we are with our words, perhaps we’re not using it enough.

There are definitely people who understand the inherent power of words and work hard to use them for their own nefarious purposes (think advertising and hate speech and… the vast majority of the political sphere). However, I suspect those people are so successful in harnessing the power of words to manipulate and cause chaos specifically because the rest of us generally don’t see it happening.

Even as it’s happening to us.

It’s death by a thousand cuts, but what’s withering away in this case is our ability to see through the nonsense we’re being spoonfed by those we trust to tell us what’s going on.

My favourite (or least favourite, depending on how you look at it) example of this is media coverage of “violence against women“.

To begin with, just take a moment to really look at that incredibly commonly-used phrase once again:

Violence against women.

Who, pray tell, is committing this violence against women? Is it a naturally occurring phenomenon to which women fall victim without warning? To hear some (including much of the media) tell it, perhaps. Every time I come across a news story using that phrase or referring to a woman who “was harassed” or “was assaulted” or “was raped” or “was killed”, I wonder why we’re so committed to obscuring or erasing the perpetrator of these types of crimes in particular. I can usually find the answer in the related threads, where there is at least one person willing to outline the ways she brought the all-but-perpetrator-less crime on herself.

The use of the passive voice to describe this particular type of crime isn’t just a personal pet peeve, it’s an issue that has documented, insidious effects in the real world, not the least of which is the way it allows us to shift the blame to the victim rather than the (unmentioned) perpetrator.

When the victim’s at fault, there’s no need to ask why so many men are harming women because the conversation is about what women need to do to avoid “being assaulted”.

This brings me to another sneaky use of the passive voice that has caught my eye relatively recently. As I’ve mentioned before, I parent a primary schooler, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time reading through various textbooks. I find her history textbooks in particular to be quite interesting, as much as for what they don’t say as for what they do.

While they acknowledge the First Peoples and refrain from referring to Columbus as the hero who discovered the West Indies, they sure do have a strange way of discussing (or not discussing) the impacts of his arrival.

Take, for example, the one that ends its introduction to the First Peoples with the following:

When Christopher Columbus arrived in Trinidad in 1498, both tribes of people were enslaved or killed. Some died of various diseases.

Curious use of passive phrasing, no?

I wonder how many seven-year-olds have the wherewithal to ask who enslaved and killed the First Peoples and how many teachers are prepared to discuss it with their students? I wonder because, after discovering this interesting wording, I had to have that conversation with my seven-year-old. I did it because I could see the danger of letting that slick attempt to slide right over the ugliness in our history go unchallenged in my daughter’s mind. Particularly as she’s growing up in a country that enjoys the pretence of “All ah we is one” way more than the practice of it.

The same book later discusses Spiritual Shouter Baptist Day in these terms:

For many years Baptists were forbidden from practicing their religious beliefs and building churches.

The ban was removed and they were allowed to practise their religion.

The next line consists of a very active sentence that specifically identifies the Prime Minister who “granted the Baptists their first Public Holiday.” The shift is sharp enough to seem… deliberate.

Nowhere between those two chapters is there a single reference to colonial influences on T&T. Carnival falls somewhere between them but it’s reduced to a very broad cultural festival of which Jouvay is one briefly mentioned part.

I suppose it’d be difficult to discuss the roots of Carnival without referring to the invisible colonisers, so I guess they really didn’t have much choice but to call it a national festival and keeping it pumping.

Lest I give the impression that this is an issue confined to a single text, let’s look at a different book altogether, which frames colonialism (which it never mentions by name) as part of a kind of parade of different peoples through our nation.

In this one, the Amerindians were the First Peoples, they grew cassava and fished and left us many place names. They were “followed” by the Europeans who brought languages and were “followed” in turn by the Africans who “came as slaves to work on the sugar estates”.

Take a moment to consider the wide expanse of disinformation encompassed in the idea that African people not only “followed” Europeans to T&T, but came as slaves for the purposes of working on the sugar estates. No passive sentences here. Everyone very actively “followed” the people who came before. Willingness is clearly implied.

Naturally, the book continues, indicating that East Indians also came to work on those estates, but “[t]hey were paid workers”. They were “followed” by the Chinese, who also came to work on the sugar estates, but “many of them went elsewhere”. (It never bothers to say where they went.) The Syrians followed the Chinese and they “were known to sell clothing in different neighbourhoods in their early years on our islands.”

A later chapter in the same book glides over the attempted genocide of the First Peoples and the subsequent Transatlantic Slave Trade with the line: “As the years went by, more and more farming took place.”

A masterpiece of passivity. Impressive enough to make one ask precisely what we’re trying to erase here and why we’re trying to erase it.

Listen, I’m not saying The Black Jacobins should be on the primary school curriculum.

I’m simply saying that, as a nation still struggling mightily with the lessons our former colonial masters taught, we should probably be doing better than this when it comes to educating our children about their history. There is a world of approaches between telling children the brutal details of how their ancestors came to be in T&T and pretending that they hopped a cruise ship over in order to volunteer on someone’s plantation.

And there is an age-appropriate way to discuss colonialism with children of this age group. I know because, once again, I did it. She didn’t come out of this conversation traumatised, nor has she run off to join a Maroon community. She was, however, very curious as to why her textbooks would lie to her like that.

Why would someone write a book pretending that colonialism wasn’t really a thing? And then, why would someone allow that to be used in schools? And then, why would someone assign it to her?

All valid questions.

As I watch her in camp, learning things about her cultural roots that she may never hear in school, I think back to a time not so long ago when full-grown adults argued in favour of allowing someone else to trademark and profit off of a particular piece of those roots and I watch the US battle over whether children should be taught about the realities of the world they inhabit, I feel like I can take a guess.

fwiw, I also feel like, as we approach the 59th anniversary of our independence from Those Who Shall Not Be Named in our Textbooks, it’s time to finally take control of our own narratives and tell our own true history.

In an ACTIVE voice.