Breaking News: Silence Does not Always Mean ‘Go to Hell!”

Their distinctive paw prints are all over social media. Their sense of right and wrong warped beyond repair, they dismiss all dissenting views as “cognitive dissonance.” House slaves singing for their supper; ass kissers and boot lickers and everything demeaning in between. Their psychic exhaust has by this time so poisoned the airwaves and the general atmosphere, even the bravest citizens have run for cover; receded into invisibility. Voices that once had spoken loud and clear on the side of justice and truth and reason are today muffled. Audible only to mongrels. Never before had vice preached so shamelessly to virtue. In this asylum, lunatics rule.   

On a Tuesday morning two or three weeks ago, Castries residents had another rude awakening. Our once upon a time “simply beautiful Saint Lucia,” also known as Helen, courtesy our earliest invaders with their Homeric notions of beauty, overnight had grown yet another grotesque devil’s horn and split hooves. At any rate, so it seemed to souls not yet altogether lost; souls still capable of caring.  In the preceding weeks there had been multiple deaths by unidentified individuals bearing automatic weapons. Mourners at a funeral had been fired upon as they exited a church, among them the town’s parliamentary representative. There had been at least two rape-homicides, no arrests.

On the recalled Tuesday morning, word on the street was that another young female had been brutally assaulted.  Typically, the purveyors of misery were soon speculating on Facebook about how the woman may have found herself at the place she was attacked. She had to have been up to something surreptitious, they hissed. After all, the incident had occurred in a notoriously dangerous part of Castries. An unaccompanied woman would have to be drugged out of her mind to walk there in the daytime, let alone at night.

The referenced no-go zone was once upon a better time known as The Botanical Gardens or George V Park. A more congenial environment would be difficult to imagine. Mothers strolled around the park with their happy broods. Teenaged boys reclined on the several polished benches with their favorite Marvel comic books (especially popular were Batman & Robin, Superman and Wonder Woman), while the more curious, not to say adventurous, explored the exotic greenery, some of which spouted refreshing cold water when stabbed in the right spot with a pointed stick.  

But all of that was countless yesterdays gone. Between the 70s and mid-80s, George V Park had transformed into a hang-out for alcoholic bums and devil-eyed zombies. An open marketplace for homeless dopers and their suppliers.  

By the 1990s George V Park had replaced Vigie Beach as the favorite meeting place for those who made a living turning tricks. And where sex and drugs mix, there too thrive other dodgy activities. The government’s decision to locate the nation’s main bus station in the vicinity had had no salutary impact on the area’s notoriety. Over the years it has been the scene of several shocking incidents, including fatal shootings at breakfast-time, stabbings, robberies and fistfights. Less than a year ago a female transit official was gunned down at the bus station, in full view of early morning commuters.

Small wonder that on the remembered Tuesday morning the most often asked question centered on why anyone in their right mind would choose to walk through George V Park at a time when only centipedes and rats were about. No one offered public words of comfort. Not the victim’s relatives, friends or acquaintances. Neither the garrulous guerrillas for women’s rights. As for the increasingly reticent sworn protectors of Saint Lucian life and property, it seemed they had together taken a vacation on the moon. 

The latest victim of violence against women in Saint Lucia had been three times declared Calypso Monarch. The Kenny Anthony-led Labour government had officially recognized her prowess with a gold Award of Merit. Considered the contender most likely to be crowned this year, she had been at rehearsals mere hours before her attackers pounced.   

Via social media, many of her fans complained that the promoters of the 2022 Calypso Monarch event had been too long silent, despite that it was common knowledge one of their lead contestants had suffered a brutal battering by persons unknown, and was receiving treatment at Victoria Hospital. Moreover, that when finally they chose to speak it was at the behest of a news reporter, and only to say that “due to unforeseen circumstances,” the victimized singer had “withdrawn” from the competition.

It was difficult to tell whether the accommodating spokesperson was being coy or something worse when he said, with a straight face, that members of his organization wished her well “in whatever she’s going through . . . obviously to take a decision like that, it would have to be something serious.” Was he suggesting the calypsonian might possibly have decided otherwise? That she had more than one option? Surely, he must’ve known that in her circumstances his big event was the farthest thing from her mind. That she was fighting for her life!

The calypso organization’s mouthpiece also announced that two other contestants, who had failed to make the final cut but had tied at the end of the semi-finals, would now get another chance to shine.  

Meanwhile, politics had grabbed center stage. Professional and other enquirers about the singer’s condition were seen through filtered eyes as invaders of her privacy, their well-intentioned curiosity as attempts at embarrassing her and her relatives, while underscoring the government’s shortcomings. With the police on mute and seemingly unconcerned about the consequences of their resounding silence, it was widely bruited about that there might be a political motive for the assault on the star calypsonian. Talk of political hitmen had for some time been a regular part of the national conversation!

At least one open critic of Timothy Poleon’s lunch-hour show, Newsspin, complained that the calypsonian’s repertoire had too often been over-critical of the governing party. If true in the past, her latest offerings suggested that since her last stage performance she’d spent much time on the Road to Damascus. One of her two entries in this year’s big event—entitled “We’re Living in the Last Days”—could easily have been lifted from The Book of Revelation. As for her other entry and its alleged political undertones, well, consider this small sample taken from “Shame”:

 Man it’s a shame how we can’t live in unity/How we destroy the family/How we dismantle the country . . .  Also: Let’s build her back before we run out of time. “Her” being our shared island home. Then again this is Saint Lucia, where it seems almost everything comes wrapped in not so fresh red or yellow toilet tissue.

Dear reader, you may have noticed by now my determination not to identify the central figure of this piece. My main reason:   I have always made a point of not naming victims of the most egregious abuse. Even when I’ve covered related court trials. I see no reason now for a change of attitude. In all events, since the kid-glove treatment afforded the topic on Newsspin, not to say the unusually empathetic reactions, there have been many positive demonstrations of public interest in the calypsonian’s immediate and long-term future. There are the ongoing fund-raising campaigns at home and on the Internet. One of them, apparently initiated by an overseas-based close relative, features details of the assault, as well the victim’s name and image. So much for the self-appointed protectors of her privacy.

Finally, there were the touching homages paid her by fans and performers at the 2022 Calypso Monarch finals. It now remains for police to issue their first public word on the incident. Hopefully, it will be that theirs was a strategic silence, and that perpetrators are in their custody. Their victim deserves no less. As do the rest of us—including the faceless Facebook ghouls who appear recently to have acquired souls!

More breaking news, hopefully not of the social media variety: The government has offered to pay the young woman’s medical bills!