This section discusses the data concerning how the fishers relate to their children in the fishing community. The main objective is to shed light on how the fishers violently (physically, emotionally, mentally, and discursively) relate to their own children as they
work with them onshore and/or offshore. This is also to bring to light how this contributes to children being put to work against their own wishes or will. I draw on Frantz Fanon’s concept of violence to make sense of the fishers’ responses. The fishers made the following comments;
Me:
Please tell me about how you relate with your own children in this community.
Atta Brukusu (May 21, 2014):
…..I love my children so much. My parents loved me just like the way I am also loving and caring for my children. My parents beat me very well anytime I did wrong. They did so because they loved me. Children of this era are different. So as a parent you need to be aggressive with them so that they know you are serious. Children in this community understand only one language.. {Me: Which language?} Beatings….
Araba Alanta
…None of my children can say I don’t relate with him or her well. They think I am violent with them. But I think that is exactly the only way I can get them to behave well. These children need tight control by way of some few lashes and stravation… I don’t spare the rod to spoil the child…..
Sapiensa Musah
Me and my children are nice and good friends. They know I am Mr no nonsense. As we are speaking I have asked one of them not to come home.
{Me: Oh Why?} Yes because he refused to mend my net for me. He knows very well that I hate that. He thinks he is stubborn, I am more than that.
How can my own 11 years old boy use tricks on me? I will beat him mercilessly….
The comments here suggest how the fishers consciously justify the beating of their children to save themselves from embarrassment or to get me ‘off their back’. They might have felt embarrassed that I have observed them exploiting or beating their children, so they there was the need for them to save their faces. The comments suggest that children are regarded as what MacLure, Holmes, Jones, and MacRae, (2012) refer to as a “problem to be solved” in a violent manner. Like Fanon (2004), I view violence as a result of the inherent opposition between the fishers and their children. Broadly, this suggests that fishers as parents in the community have put in place control measures
characterised by violence to deal with their children (Fanon, 2004). For me, this suggests colonisation of the children by their own parents (Bhabha, 1994). As Bhabha (1994, p.
70) indicates;
…. Colonial discourse to construe the colonised as a population of degenerate types …, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction.
This represents the fishers’ discipline and control measures over the children just as their parents did to them. As Araba Alanta puts it, these children need tight control by way of some few lashes and starvation. This suggests a perpetuation of culture of exploitation and violence against children (Fanon, 1986). Embedded in the fishers comments is that relating well with their children is all about being violent towards children to get them to do what is required of them (Adzahlie-Mensah, 2013). Therefore when children refuse to do what is required of them, the fishers as parents consider that as a justification to unleash violence on these children (Fanon, 1968). Cartwright (2002) argues that perpetrators of crime, violence, and/or victimising an “other” as a symbolic process, overladen with meaning that is embedded in their pasts. This for me explains the fishers’
indication in their comments how their parents used to beat them up anytime they went wrong or refused to work. Added evidence can be derived from the following interactions between me and some other fishers;
Me:
Please tell me more about the nature of parents’ violence to their own children in this community.
Mathew Eshun:
Please it is not like we parents just get up and decide to be violent against our own children. It is more to do with the frustration with the system. The educated people normally use the police to deal with us as parents disrespectfully in this community. So parents redirect this frustration unto their own children…
Araba Alanta
Educated people who are more violent and corrupt than us in this country have labelled those of us who ask our children to work with us as violent.
So we are living according to our label. They steal from the poor and hardworking fishers like us. They use it to take care of their children. They also grow and do same after they have completed school. Our children
can’t get such treatments. This attitude of the educated people makes us feel bad about ourselves. Some of the fishers get jealous about that sometimes. Therefore, we need to force our children to work hard with us to show the educated people we better than them…..
Esi Tawiah
….the way fishers as parents are treated in this community is the same way the fishers also treat their children. We all believe that the only language which is easily understood by all is violence. Look when we ask children to do any work and we don’t threaten them, they won’t do it. The government does the same to us. The government threaten and arrest people in this community for petty squabbles and misunderstandings. The police will just come and scatter all of us and take our money as bribes…there are strong people here who sometimes meet them with same violence..
These comments suggest the fishers’ perception of violence as a “cleansing force”
(Fanon, 1963, p. 94). For instance, Araba Alanta’s comments that ‘…we need to force our children to work hard with us to show the educated people we better than them…..’
gives substance to that.
The comments further suggest that the widely used language in the community is violence. For instance, the fisher woman, Esi Tawiah, puts it this way we all believe that the only language which is easily understood by all is violence. This bespeaks of Frantz Fanon’s (2004) argument that violence is the only language that a colonialist understands.
Like Fanon, the fishers’ comment suggests, “…it is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence" (Fanon, 2004, p. 23). Fanon further argues that the “government’s agents use a language of pure violence” in dealing with the colonised people (Fanon, 2004, 4). Consequently, violence becomes not only a sensible recourse, but also the only possible recourse in most situations. Because they inhabit such vastly different sectors, the only communication possible among the fishers, their children, and educated people as leaders is violence. In this situation, the authorities speak to the fishers through violence, and should they wish to reply rather than just passively accept, the fishers have to reply through violence of their own. In the fishers’ response to this violence, they extend their frustration on their own children, thereby being self-destructive. As Fanon (1963, p. 18) emphasises,
….you will learn how, in the period of their helplessness, their mad
impulse to murder is the expression of the natives' collective unconscious.
If this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves. In order to free themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy…
Other fishers who were part of the focus group discussion added more perspectives. Two fishers said the following;
Abiba Langu
Massa sometimes most of us are just jealous of the status of the educated people. We call them thieves, corrupt, and criminals without any evidence.
We just want to be like them, we wish our children were like them….You see we feel frustrated by all of that.. But you see our fishing business is very lucrative but we don’t manage things well….
Ali Baba
…. see, a hungry man is an angry man. The educated people are in charge of all of our resources. Those of us who did not go to school will continue to complain because we feel we are not being given some of the resources.
We are always angry with ourselves and our children…our anger leads us into despair even though I believe we need to blame ourselves for all that.
This is because our work is profitable. We misuse our monies and then turn our frustration on our children and women in the community…
These comments indicate that the fishers have this perception that the educated elites are in charge and control over all the resources in the country. Therefore, they use the resources as and when they deem it fit to enrich themselves at the peril of the larger population. This suggests that it is a source of worry and frustration on the part of the fishers. This on the face of it fits into Fanon’s (2004) argument that colonised people are never permitted to lead fully human lives. As the fisher Ali Baba commented, “Those of us who did not go to school will continue to complain because we feel we are not being given some of the resources”. Frantz Fanon describes the envy and fear that this system creates. According to Fanon this ‘creates fear within the colonisers realising that the natives only want to replace them and envy within the colonised whom indeed aspire to replace their colonisers with themselves’ (Fanon, 1963, p. 334).
Moreover, these comments by the fishers illustrate what I choose to term as ‘neurosis of poorness’ drawing on Franz Fanon’s (1986) work cited in Hook, (2004a, p. 117)
‘neurosis of blackness’3 from his famous work; Black skin, White mask. By neurosis of poorness, I mean the fantasised desire of the fishers to be like the educated elites or leaders that he or she is against. Like Fanon, I consider this as a fantasy. As such, I view the fishers desire to be as rich as the educated elites or politicians that they have labelled as thieves, corrupt, and criminals, as a neurotic condition (Fanon, 1986). This also suggests a ‘nervous condition’ (Fanon, 1990, p. 17). By this I mean, the desire of the fishers to be like the rich educated elites or politicians alienates them from themselves and leads to a splitting of the ego. Since the identification with richness can never be total in the face of the way the fishers manage their financial resources, the fishers like the Negros Fanon refers to enter into a condition or situation in which they turn to destroy their own presence (Fanon, 1967). This is so because they become so dissatisfied with what they have or who they are, so would try anything, including the exploitation of their own children, violence against children to become like the rich. By so doing they engage in self-destructive activities as already explained.
The next section discusses the theme; redirection of violence.