A Turn in the Road

Sharing lessons in how to live. Ralph Ellison in Harlem in 1966. Photograph Copyright © by David Attie/Getty.

A gun in hand knows no friend.

John King, "How Many More?"

IT FEELS LIKE we’ve reached a bend in the river, a turn in the road.

For 2024, Barbados recorded a total of 50 homicides, the majority of them gun-related. The number was the highest on record and alarming for a population of roughly 283,000 unaccustomed to the audacious violence that often accompanied the crimes. With the death March 25th of 13-year-old Shawnathon Chase, a spectator shot at a netball game in his community when reportedly two gunmen opened fire on the crowd, the numbers for 2025 are so far 12 murders in 13 weeks. There's been no discernible reason for the attack. Chase was by all accounts a well-behaved boy who enjoyed sports and got along with others. The incident seemed as random as it was senseless.

Except most of the killings have been of young people, or people far younger than I am, so our problems have been youth-related. With this and other violence apparently unabating in our society, I’ve been asking myself what I can do as father, citizen and artist to help defuse this powder keg. I've been calling on age, experience and the ancestors for guidance.

The Montreal diasporas of my youth, during the 70s and 80s, were no less violent in their own way. There was less tolerance and more ignorance about diverse people and their reality then, the same type of tempers and temperaments as now. Certainly, there were guns available, circulating even in our presumably safe, sleepy corner of North America. Some we saw, most we didn’t. My friends and I, Black and White and other, were nonetheless faced with the choice all young people, throughout all the ages, are faced with in hardening circumstances.

The answer was, or seemed, obvious to us: torture or be tortured. Lash out first or be destroyed by someone else's pain. Fight with all the pain you felt on the inside until you drew blood.... Unless you were presented with another way, a way out. That turn in the road.

That turn would be some time in coming. After the Rodney King Riots of the spring of 1992, a six-day conflagration sparked by racism and violence and a sense of hopelessness, of powerlessness in people, King’s “Can we all get along?" plea became an existential question for all kinds of communities suffering the same despair. A despair that was fuelled by a lack of understanding of the world, of our place in it, and how that world could be made different, meaning better through our own agency—through what I would call empathetic imagination.

That despair, clearly, is still with us. It's not hard to see why. We live in an age when the president of the United States would seek to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) among other similar federal agencies that provide hundreds of millions of dollars "in grants to libraries, museums and related institutions across the country and its territories." These funds are for everything from "internship and fellowship" programs to "new curricula for groups of visiting schoolchildren." Trump signed the executive order to defund the IMLS on March 14th.

But our problems are the world's problems, and vice versa. Vigilance. Lest we forget. At home, we're still grappling with education reform and declining public library use in what is essentially a one-party state with only one national newspaper—and an identifiable link between "declining literacy among boys [and] school unrest.”

The defunding of our libraries is a real concern. Books helped to raise me. I didn't know they were doing that at the time, but books helped me to grow up and live in and understand the world around me, cruel as it was. They helped me to find expression for my own dreams and hopes and frustrations, and with it not just the possibility but the ability to make my reality better.

I say "books," but I’m talking all kinds of reading: Marvel and DC comics; paperback short fiction; non-fiction in the form of newspaper magazines and the ones my older brothers bought, like GQ and Esquire; and poetry in the shape of the music albums they listened to, Muddy Waters and Elton John, The Who and Stevie Wonder. Why did those days ever have to go, eh?

I think of Ralph Ellison, author of the iconic Invisible Man, and his observations on Hemingway in an interview published in The Paris Review (Spring 1955) and republished in his measured non-fiction collection Shadow and Act:

“…I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a story. I guess many young writers were doing this, but I also used his description of hunting when I went into the fields the next day. I had been hunting since I was eleven, but no one had broken down the process of wing-shooting for me and it was from reading Hemingway that I learned to lead a bird. When he describes something in print, believe him; believe him even when he describes the process of art in terms of baseball or boxing; he’s been there.”

It’s that last comment that gets me: he’s been there. It implies trust; the respect due is all over his words. I know the feeling. Ellison was saying you could learn things, real, practical things about life and also living, about building and getting along—for a better way of life and living—from reading a novel, a poem, or seeing a play or painting.

That’s a powerful discovery. More powerful than any gun.

“IS A POEM ENOUGH to heal a bleeding world?” asked Winston Farrell in a Sunday check-in call to me yesterday evening. We hadn’t spoken in a while, Ras and I, which was maybe a few weeks for us. Our talk was usually a mix of the local with the global, poetry and performance, on my plant-potted verandah. "Writerly" stuff.

My answer to his off-the-cuff question was “It also takes us.”

He thought about that. I could hear him nodding as he chuckled. He fed me a line from another of his pieces: “On and off the page, the poet stands at the crossroads....” So where are we, then, the readers?

Books, not bullets, seized me from the moment I was a young boy able to listen to stories (often read to me by a father who loved literature, same as with Ellison). Their grip doubled in strength when I learned to read for myself. It grew exponentially when I began to write.

There’s value in writing books, and there’s value in writing an especially good book, or poem. But increasing age and experience have shown me that act has to be balanced with other forms of activism.

Because something quite other than books has taken hold of our young men. And of the young women, too, despite out best efforts at educating them both, at offering them good books. And this happened a long time ago, not just the other day, but as the result of an ongoing apathy and neglect.

Over the years, decades now, I’ve looked to the stories of Alice Munro for insight on how people in love behave; to the graphic novels of Chris Claremont for reassurance that once there is life, there is hope; to the poetry of Kamau Brathwaite for my Nation Language; to the essays of James Baldwin for how to express my indignation and rage against all prejudices; and the list—of contemporary and classic writers, Barbadian and foreign—goes on and on.

There is work our young can trust and respect that is worthy to follow the day after it is read, books and stories that can build them up for taking care of themselves and this world. We’re talking powerful life lessons and social examples that will help young men and women to do more than survive—if they are even being offered these books and stories by any parent, teacher, friend, or public servant. Who is leading them there?

It often seems to me our politicians are more fearful of the lessons our children can learn from reading, say, Animal Farm or Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack than those they might pick up from idle liming on the block. At the other end of the discussion, parents are still more likely to put a device in their children’s hands instead of a book, to "pacify" them. Even now, when all the studies indicate such practices can lead their young users to an aggressive anxiety about the world they are supposed to be a part of, not siloed from. And then we wonder why our children are emotionally AWOL, intellectually disengaged, unaware of their own history. We set them adrift.

The maintenance of literacy programs; the institution of Bajan literature classes; increasing public library funding and visits; and the inclusion of the arts in our public life as a matter of policy, not decorative afterthought—I’m talking about choices to help build that better, safer society, and where we will find them. I'm talking about finally offering, or offering again, another way of seeing the world and embracing it; one that doesn’t leave it or us crushed or in pieces. One where a certain kind of literacy is nurtured to quell future misunderstandings and violence through the active choice of mediation and conscientious objection.

The works of countless writers and dancers and actors and artists have made me feel, reminded me, really, every day, that I have choices. I am a writer, and maybe that’s why their books and stories have led me, encouraged me, entreated me far enough away from the gun. It could also be they showed me my life is worth more, deserves more care and consideration, than any bullet in a barrel can offer.

It may be too late for those who are involved in the killing in our society. All may not be saved. All won't be for turning. But we are losing too many by not getting them in the early with whatever tools we have, all the good books and art that show them how to hope instead of despair.

Robert Edison Sandiford is the cofounding editor with the poet Linda M. Deane of ArtsEtc Inc. He is the author of several award-winning books and well-received graphic novels. Read more by Robert at dcbooks.ca, nbmpub.com and writersunion.ca/member/robertedison-sandiford.

Last Modified: April 1, 2025

Barbados