We believed in encouraging independence in the children – Uwe often even more than me. Maternal protectiveness sometimes won. He has had a very strong influence on me – offering intellectual rigour and a challenge. Very often when the children got up in the morning he said to them, ‘Now, what are you going to achieve today?’ At the end of the day he would ask, ‘What have you achieved today?’ This became a great joke in the family. ‘Your mother has already written ten pages before breakfast.’
CHAPTER FOUR
JAMAICA
The comparative sociology of childbirth fascinated me and I wanted to do anthropological field work. The opportunity came in 1964 when Uwe decided to spend his sabbatical from Oxford as visiting Professor at the University of the West Indies. The idea was that I could do research into pregnancy, childbirth and mothering among Jamaican peasant women if I had help with the children. Our youngest daughter was two and the whole family and Sandra, our Scottish mother’s help, went to Jamaica for nine months.
My experiences in Jamaica were utterly absorbing. I was fascinated by the birth practices and women’s beliefs, behaviour and relationships. Far from studying as if at a lab bench, I became an actor in the drama myself.
Yes, a research thesis demands objectivity. Yet in this section of my book I also record vivid personal experiences and emotions that drew me into these women’s lives.
We rented a rambling wooden house on the campus at Mona, and I applied to the Medical Research Council which was doing research there into nutrition and mother and child health, to see if they could offer me a base at their centre. They very generously provided an office, a secretary – the wife of the Chief Justice – all equipment and services, transport into the hills and back-up. I could do whatever I liked, and Professor Ashcroft was lovely to work with.
I worked up in the hills and in the poorest parts of Kingston – in Rastafarian camps and in the public maternity hospital – where patients were often two to a bed, and the only pillows in the delivery room were used to hold over the faces of labouring women to stop them screaming!
At six each morning I climbed into a jeep going up in the hills to Laurence Tavern. The GP who drove me held a clinic there and the home nurses and midwives agreed to take me on their visits so that I could be introduced to peasant women, traditional midwives – nanas – and professional caregivers, school teachers and postmistresses.
In every Jamaican village there was a female triumvirate of the midwife, the teacher and the postmistress. All community news went through them. Every important decision was guided by them. They had to be the key players in any research into women’s lives. There were opportunities to record group interviews – what we would now call informal focus groups – in clinics, churches, at the river where the women did their laundry, and while they cooked meals and tended their children. I talked to mothers, grandmothers and aunties – the last two vital in running family life.
At 3 p.m. I was home again when my older children came out of school in the next hour. So we had a good part of the day together. The three older ones went to school and Polly was cross and bored because she could not go, too. She longed for her Grandfather, my father Alec, with whom she shared a love of the natural world. She decided she wanted to get on a plane and fly back to England to be with him. So that is exactly what she did! We saw a gallant and determined four-year-old with a tag around her neck hurry over the tarmac and climb the steps to the plane with utter confidence. She didn’t look back or wave. She was accompanied by Uwe’s mother. The next thing we heard was that she had enjoyed the flight and was rapturous about being with her beloved Grandfather again. She said later that it served as an illustration of the sort of parent I was. I took that as criticism, but she protested: ‘No, you treated each of us as an individual and listened to us. That was what I wanted, and you made it happen for me.’
Culture Shock
My time in Jamaica was an amazing experience – a culture shock – and opened my eyes to how life was for women who don’t have my privileged existence.
I wrote: ‘Living in squalor, I’m surprised that these people have the same emotions, the tenderness and love, the devotion of a mother to her children, the trust a small child has in its parents, the pride a father in his baby, that we know in our own clean, suburban, polished-knocker society, with its trim hedges and milk on the doorstep, sprung prams, full shopping trolleys and Italian shoes. The sweetness of being human in spite of the dirt, constant hunger, the misery of malnutrition, wasting away not only of body but of mind, that results from serious deficiency diseases.
‘A woman stands, her body swollen with many pregnancies, legs ulcerated with yaws, while her baby grips her tightly, head cradled in her arm in exactly the same way that an English child nestles against her mother, clinging to her for protection in the face of these strangers who have invaded the home. The older brother pokes a straw through holes in a tin can to amuse the toddler, who is too weak to toddle, but leans in the crook of his loving arm.
‘This child has kwashiorkor, abdomen swollen with oedema, hair discoloured. His limbs are flabby and his eyes dull. Two older boys, lumps of ringworm crowning their curly heads, sit in the dust playing and laughing merrily. Animals live a sort of symbiotic existence with them, pigs lying in the baking sun on the threshold, hens darting under our feet, kids gambolling on the mud patch surrounding the hut.
‘I feel ashamed that other human beings should have to live like this while I live in comfort and luxury. The concern I have that my children grow up healthy and strong is the same as this mother’s concern. Only she is forced by the circumstance of birth to accept her fate.
‘What do these babies in the dirt have in common with my clean, shampooed English child? In spite of filth and disease I am linked to them by virtue of our common humanity. Here are my brothers and sisters – my children.’
Discovering Feminist Research
In the 50s feminist research had not yet been invented. Anthropologists undertook research along the lines of the masters of anthropology who either brought powerful philosophical theory to the discipline, as did Lévi-Strauss in France, or, intense observation of a dramatically alien society, like Malinowski working in the Trobriand Islands, or, like anthropologists in Oxford, they sliced up society and systems – economic, political, kinship and so on, demonstrating how the pieces interlocked, like a complicated Lego construction.
This was almost exclusively about men’s lives and men’s power. Nobody was trying to see society through women’s eyes except a handful of cultural anthropologists, like Ruth Benedict, much scorned in British academic circles, and Margaret Mead. They were perceived in Oxford as story-tellers, frivolous as only women could be. Now extracts from their writing are in every anthropological and psychological anthology, but then they were marginal.
I felt very alone. The questions I was asking were about women’s lives, values and relationships. The word ‘bonding’ was not yet current, but they were to do with bonding between women – and how this affected the way society worked. The method was called ‘participant observation’. So I was approaching my research in a way that I think seemed reckless and shallow to most male colleagues and mentors.
There were other differences, too. Instead of concentrating on one informant at a time, I became involved in dynamic interaction in groups, women talking as they did their laundry, prepared food, cared for children or laid out a dead body. I noted agreement and disagreement, harmony and conflict between women facing problems and issues that mattered to them. This preceded focus group research – the kind in which my daughter Jenny became a specialist in the 90s.
My research was also rooted in observation of women’s bodies, how they were used, and the physiological processes that found expression in religious ritual and the life transition of becoming a mother. So I recorded in detail gestures and movements, posture and breathing.
At the time I did not realise that what I was doing was unique. Only lat
er, discussing it with women sociologists, can I understand its significance in feminist research.
Women provided a grapevine of communication through which I could get to know nanas. These traditional midwives often worked surreptitiously, though they were vitally needed, and offered their time and skills either free or in an elaborate system of barter. No woman would ever be left unattended in or after birth. Nanas didn’t just care for mothers and babies. They wove the community together and held its history. Grandmothers, mothers, daughters, granddaughters and families spread out; the women stayed put and the men came and went. The expression used about a man was that he had ‘run’. The most common time to run was following the birth of a baby. The children had aunties, too, some blood-related, others not. That is the way women would sort out child care. They all brought up their children in much the same way, so it usually seemed to be a smooth process, and every woman in the community kept an eye on them.
I didn’t have to seek out anyone to interview. Relationships flowed and developed. There was always someone happy to talk about children and birth.
Girls got pregnant in their teens, though that first relationship was unlikely to last. When I was at the clinic which specialised in reproductive health I met 17 year olds who had not yet become pregnant and were desperately worried that they must be ‘mules’. Though having a period was called ‘seeing your health’, knowing that you could get pregnant was just as surely seeing your health, and if you weren’t certain this was possible, it was almost obligatory to try.
Jamaica Talk
My field work lasted nine months. I remained slightly surprised that I could make contact with most of the women I was interviewing, and that we had a good deal in common, although our backgrounds were so different. In fact, they were eager to talk, explain their problems and gain a sympathetic listening ear. But I needed to understand the subtleties of Jamaican Creole.
‘Jamaica talk’ is more than a dialect of English and less than another language. Socially mobile people tended not to let it be known that they spoke it and often made great attempts to speak ‘polite’ English.
The negative ‘no’ could, for example, be used to emphasise a statement and so draw an expression of surprise from the listener, or to assert something that seemed unlikely – ‘mi waak’ meaning ‘I walked’ and ‘mi no waak’ meaning not ‘I did not walk’ but that ‘I walked contrary to expectation’; ‘no fient me en fient’ meaning ‘I fainted’, the repetition serving to stress the extraordinary nature of the occurrence, and ‘no mango dem gan luk’ – ‘it’s mangoes they have gone to look for’.
I had to learn a new language of gesture, facial expression and even monosyllabic utterance, which at first bypassed me completely.
But apart from difficulties in language, accurate information – especially any which involves dates and ages, was hard to come by, and I had to constantly check and re-check what I was told. Facts might approximate to ideal rather than actual behaviour, the socially praiseworthy rather than correct. This was partly from sheer lack of concern with anything involving figures and measurement of time – ‘plenty-plenty’ fills most needs – and partly from delight in outwitting by talk. I had to be able to sit and listen without looking at a watch (in fact I never carried one). It also involved willingness to give as well as seek information; I found myself talking about my own children for instance.
Anyone doing field work in Jamaica would do well to bear in mind Louise Bennett’s poem about the census:
Ah laugh soh tell ah cry
Me dis dun tell de census man
A whole tun-load a lie …
Him doan fine out one ting bout me,
For fe me y’eye soh dry,
Me stare right eena census face
An tell him bans a lie.
Me tell him sey, dat all me parents
Dem is still alive
But me mada she dead twelve ‘ears
An me fada him dead five.
But it is not necessarily with intention to deceive that someone gives inaccurate information. The questions one psychologist, J C Flugel, suggests that the interviewer should ask – ‘How do you feel your own ideas on how to run a family are like those of people you know / are different from them?’ – is hopelessly involved for Jamaican peasants to answer. I asked very simple, yet far-reaching, questions: ‘What is a good mother? What is a good father? What is a rude child? When you trouble, where you go?’ Even the addition of a single word – ‘like’ – ‘What is your mother like?’ for example, confused the issue, and the reply might well be, ‘Me mada she like paw-paw.’
There were no fashions in child care. As she grew up, a girl coped with babies casually and unreflectively. Unlike the English or American baby in its cot, a Jamaican baby was handled constantly, petted, stroked, kissed and nuzzled by mother, sisters, brothers, grandmothers, aunties, and all the children and young girls in the neighbourhood. They patted his lips and combed his curly hair. They helped bath him in cold water (containing washing blue to keep away the ‘duppies’). He was alternately breastfed and had bush tea (tea made from any bush, leaf or root) or tit-bits from grown-ups’ plates pushed in his mouth. He was jostled and shifted over to make room for others, flung up and down by the menfolk, cuddled and playfully cuffed, held upside down and right way up, head lolling or dangling – then hugged warmly and wrapped up in an old dress of his mother’s and put in the shade while she prepared a meal. He might be placed in a tub on the mud clearing in front of the hut, and other members of the household nonchalantly brushed flies off him when they happened to pass. There were chickens squawking, dogs barking, pigs grunting, and children playing ‘dutty pot’ (making mud pies), a goat or two, lizards darting about, women shrilly arguing, and a transistor radio turned on full. All this was extremely worrying for the nurses and health workers, whom I saw correcting and training mothers in clinic waiting rooms whenever there was an opportunity. The mother complied with the nurse’s wishes while she was watching, and then went on as she did before.
Her main task revolved around provision of food for the family. Children went on a food ‘binge’ in the mango season, and their health improved a lot once mangoes were freely available. Adolescent girls told me that their mothers worried if the children were still hungry at the end of a meal and try to ‘hush’ them, though one said, ‘Me maada say I’m too craveful’ (wants to eat too much). There was a nutritional crisis when breastfeeding was finished, some time between one and two years of age. They stopped growing and might develop kwashiorkor with fatty filtration of the liver, oedema, apathy, and the colour of their skin and hair might fade. Other children were marasmic – wasted, and short – but without oedema or depigmentation.
A good mother gave her child enough food. She ‘see them go tidy, send them to school regular’ (there was an average 60 per cent attendance at primary school on any day, and this dropped further on Fridays when, by tradition, parents had the right to use a child’s labour), had patience and tried to ‘grow them in the right and proper way.’ A mother ‘is like a piece of gold to the sight of her children.’
Woman’s lot was hard, every woman told me. The concept of leisure was non-existent. Cooking and washing filled the whole day. Cooking was never considered a recreation, but washing was, often because women met together and gossiped. If I asked a woman what she did in her ‘spare time’ she often said ‘washing’. With few clothes and high standards of cleanliness for Sunday dress, garments were repeatedly boiled and washed. A woman met her friends at the river after tidying her hut and brewing up bush tea in the morning and spent several hours there. Washing and plaiting straw or ‘hatta’ (weaving straw belts and in some part of the island hats or baskets for profit) were communal activities.
Social interaction depended on the weather. In the rainy season women and children stayed indoors as much as possible, since they believed it was dangerous to get one’s hair wet.
At night an unweaned child lay beside its m
other. Other children might be tucked in at the end of the bed, and some even under it. Mothers aimed at having another bed for the older children, even if it had to be erected specially every night. Far from indulging in nightly orgies – a stereotype about peasants often held by the Jamaican middle class – intercourse was hasty, conducted so as not to wake the children, and, according to many women who talked to me, unsatisfactory.
Whenever there was illness or trouble in the family a woman, if on good terms with her mother, sent her children back to her. In late pregnancy children were often sent to the grandmother’s. If her mother lived near she might have a number sleeping with her who go home for meals during the day. A baby who was weaned at about a year to 18 months was often sent to the maternal grandmother, who if she was no longer lactating herself, took him into her bed and gave him bush tea if he cried.
When I asked women, ‘If you need help, where you go?’ (the only way in which the question can be formulated for quick understanding) they usually named their mother, and an older female relative (frequently the mother’s sister) or a sister. Sisters clung close if they were still living near each other. Women went to their mothers for advice, and often too, to their partner’s or ex-partner’s mother. Sometimes a woman mothered a child of a partnership which had failed, and this built a bond between the two women. They were united in shaking their heads at man’s lack of responsibility and infidelity.
A Passion for Birth Page 12