My bills it done pay, Inspector, leave me alone
For weeks, I’ve kept waiting for someone to sing Farmer Nappy’s big-tune for all of us. Or at least the Police Commissioner. Kept imagining hopefully the artist himself might weigh in. But few opinion leaders have said much.
Best I did bring some bricks and a load of sand
And build up my house on this land
The Music Farmer’s 2015 anthem celebrated the nation-house that is our birthright, its welcoming culture of enjoyment and inclusion, freedom and forgiveness. The opening lyrics declare: what our bodies do is by no means “by chance”; it is driven on the one hand by nature and instinct, and on the other by a rich cultural heritage. The words go further, asserting any past mortgage of our dignity or freedom “done pay.” So the moral police ought to leave us all alone.
For weeks, “My House” has pounded in my head as loudly as the dangerous decibel levels at every Carnival event. His visionary house “is not a place to stress you out,” Nappy assures.
Yet, over the same weeks, many of us in the national community have been busy stressing and pressurising one young woman. Making sure she will have not only unpaid bills but, left up to her landlord (as the Guardian reported), not even a house to be inside with her two children, one unborn. The deliberateness of all this cruelty has seemed anything but natural, and out of step with our best selves that Nappy celebrated so beautifully. I am struggling hard to figure out why—what with everything else in the country in the state that it is to command our attention instead.
All because she wanted to cock up her foot on a couch.
Almost every line of Nappy’s calypso underscores the irony of our response to this woman, who has found her one foot cocked in the crosshairs of our national shame about ourselves.
Don’t refuse it, it’s like walking footsteps
It’s natural, yeah
Like a baby crying for the first time
Like Anya with her first design
Especially ironic is the song’s reference to another young woman, whose naked pictures found their way into the public domain, who then went on to become the pride of the nation as we cheered her to victory on the US televison competition Project Runway.
But race and class separate this clothed low-wage single mother and the clothing entrepreneuress.
So—as everyone knows by now, not at all by chance pictures of a special reserve policewoman (SRP), reclined, in uniform, on a blue couch, one foot cock-up, recently mobilised the nation to cry shame.
The shaming wasn’t targeted at the editorial decision to make the picture, circulating on social media, a newspaper coverstory.
Neither was it targeted at the person(s) who shared the image in the first place, their motivation, nor those delighting in re-circulating it.
Little shame was targeted to the heartless decision by Police leadership to suspend her without pay for whatever indefinite period it would take a Service, notorious for its inconclusive investigations of Emailgate and plantlike substances, to complete this one. Or towards the landlord not named in these pages.
Instead, we demanded the SRP be publicly named, so the shaming could be personalised.
We seemed to really think this one foot cock-up pic mattered deeply to all of us. I know it’s linked to the fact that the law also cares what I do in my bedroom. But I really, really struggle with what this deep-seated, 21st century need to punish people who are not powerful means for how small and mean we truly are as a people.
The last straw was a Facebook page post, later the same day the coverstory ran, of a beer bottle, reclined on a blue couch, getting “a leg up on the competition.” It drew 2,500 laughs and thumbs up. A journalist I don’t remember, who says he interviewed me once for state television, barrelled onto my Facebook wall to dismiss my distress: “She loss the wuk and I still think it is funny now.” The thing about her homeless children: just “guilt-tripping”. He seemed so proud, I made a meme of his comment.
I read the headshaking letters we published in the press for clues. They repeated the conviction that one leg sticking up from under it brought shame on “the uniform,” and thereby all of us.
Was it a fetish with uniforms? I recall the similar fervour with which we circulated phone video of two young men in a toilet in Fatima College uniforms in 2010. But I remembered 59-year-old Harry Ramlochan, convicted of raping a 17-year-old in his uniform in a police station she had gone to to lodge a report of domestic violence. And I remembered 56-year-old Andy Allan who made the 16-year-old he coached, who went to his home to collect team uniforms, try one on so he could assault her. And I couldn’t recall any national orgy of shaming, or frontpage photos. But I guess they didn’t take any. Instead, the Commissioner recently promoted the idea that police athletic leagues are a solution to crime.
I couldn’t google any public statements about these two uniform-shamers by Police Social & Welfare Association leaders either. I believe they’re supposed to defend police officers’ interests. At first they found it fitting to pronounce that one-foot-cocking by policewomen causes “irreparable damage” to the service and warrants discipline, but now seem to be promoting the SRPs. One citizen stepped forth to offer her a job at comparable pay. And lawyers reportedly are representing her to litigate the photo’s publication and her suspension.
You could cock up your foot on couch if you want
’Cause mi casa is su casa
Perhaps together we can still build Nappy’s nation-house with that couch? It has to be a blue one, though.