| Sports |
From passion to compassion
Teary-eyed Siuke
disproves a popular cliché, writes JACK METTA
“GROWN men don’t cry” is a rather
ambiguous cliché that seems to glorify the chauvinistic spirit
of the arrogant and proud male, but it has been disproved often
enough – most times in quiet solitude.
In the contemporary PNG society, the latter is highly
recommended lest you are called ‘girlie girlie’ by the
neighbours.
This is not to be confused with the tears and the noise brought
on by the amber fluid, which is a common sight in most of the
public places around town.
Mary noticed the tell-tale signs when Siuke emerged from the
confines of his hovel – the bloated red eyeballs, the sniffles,
the sudden swipe at a tear but making it look like a banal
everyday affair of clearing one’s vision.
It would have been disrespectful to ask Siuke the reason for his
tears and his sombre mood, but eight-year-old Mary felt no such
emotion at her age.
Mary came straight to the point. “Have you been crying, bubu?”
Siuke grimaced as if someone had poured icy cold water on him.
His face shrunk with the wrinkles you could almost predict his
next words: “Who, me? Nahhh, I just got a little dust in my eye
…”
Siuke mumbled something and you tell that was trying his utmost
to conjure up the words to distract Mary, who watched him
intently. He felt himself becoming entangled by the spreading
ripples of embarrassment.
He wanted to deny the charge but the more he thought about the
reasons he should give for his situation, the more he came up
with balmy excuses that no sane person would believe, let along
an eight-year-old girl.
By and by, he thought it better to spilt out the truth. He had
to. His whole being was now crying out for him to tell her, just
to ease the tension if anything else.
“Yes, Mary. I was crying ...” They looked at each
other – an aged man and a young girl, each standing on the
opposite side of a steep cliff separated by the generation gap.
Time stood still and for that moment, there was understanding
and nothing mattered at all.
Siuke was humbled. “There. It’s wasn’t so bad, was it? And you
thought, you’d die of embarrassment, just for telling the
truth,” he thought to himself.
“But why, bubu?” came the inevitable question, typical of ones
as young as Mary.
“I have this pain in my heart that cannot go away,” Siuke
started and paused immediately as an afterthought struck him.
“It’s not the pain that kills people but if you keep it inside
you long enough, it may eventually kill you.”
“But why?”
Siuke weighed the question. Young children are often asking why
and even if your answer is satisfactory, they would continue to
persist with the why.
“Some pains are bearable. Time heals them eventually. Others
kill you because you want to make them go away, but they just
don’t go. The only way they go away is when you die, because the
pain would then not have a living soul to live off.”
He started into the innocent eyes of Mary, who was obviously
trying to condense the meaning of what was being said.
“There is this pain,” he dabs his forefinger at his chest, “that
just refuses to go way. And it looks like it won’t go away. So
the only way to ease the pain is to let it pass out through your
tears. It is only a temporary reprieve but it gives you the
breathing space to carry on with life’s other struggles.”
Mary nodded her understanding, but Siuke detected something
amiss in her expression.
He nodded his understanding. “I know it’s not considered manly
for men to cry. It’s alright for girls to cry but men are
conditioned not to cry. We are taught that from childhood but
that does not mean we don’t feel. It’s just that we are trained
not to cry. We have our own fears, our own insecurities and our
own demons and we deal with them differently. We may not show it
but I guess men are scared a lot …”
Mary did not let him finish. She nodded her approval, though
Siuke doubted she could remember all that was told. Humming a
tune, she turned and skipped away.
Siuke watched her for a while. He felt relaxed at having
satisfied a young girl’s curiosity about grown men crying but on
second thoughts, he felt he would not be able to explain to
young people why people cried and especially, when it’s about
grown men succumbing to this emotion behind closed doors.
Tears shed in certain circumstances like deaths and departures
are a different story and it could be related without qualms.
As he lingered on the subject, he realised that he hadn’t been
himself lately. Events around have propelled him into a mixture
of emotions and moved him to shed a tear or two in the silent
privacy of his hovel, was completely out of his character.
He had reminded himself on these occasions to “get a grip of
himself” but it seemed as if he was just opening up to the
attack of emotions, something he hadn’t done before.
Perhaps age was catching up with him.
Perhaps it had something to do with his upbringing. He admits he
was a cry-baby once. He could cry anytime, anywhere. His mother
told him that he did not cry at his birth but fulfilled that
quota in the coming years. He didn’t know why he cried so much
in his childhood.
He was, he admits, a very disgruntled child, mostly angry and
edgy.
“I guess I was more under confident and uncomfortable with
myself. Those who know me say that I haven’t changed much. But
then I was the silent crying type. I would not cry for toys or
anything materialistic. It was general anger directed at my
parents but mostly no one in particular. Looking back I don’t
know why I cried. I would cry when I received a trashing, I
would cry when things did not fall in place. My teenage years
brought more anger but the tears decreased. The tears became
more silent. It was not until I went to school that the tears
almost disappeared, well, almost. I was a rebel without a cause
in the true sense. I was angry but I don’t know for what. I
guess it has to do with the whole process of growing up in the
squalor of the settlement and peer pressures. Perhaps, I was not
comfortable with myself and hated being compared with others. I
was trying to become what I was not and that was frustrating.”
Siuke’s tears, it turned out had been those of helplessness –
helplessness to satisfy a hunger; helplessness to induce people
to live a healthy, happy life; helplessness to help his friends
and relatives in their times of need; and, helplessness to chart
his own destiny in order to make it end like a fairy tale.
His tears were doing the talking for him. They were, after all,
his very own personal expressions – the outpouring of the
bitterness related to injustices, inequalities and prejudices
and all the other challenges that he had been subjected in this
country’s (soon to be) 32 years of independence.
A tune hits him like a jackhammer jolting his memories and
sending Tim McGraw’s Grown men don’t cry lyrics soaring over the
troubled recesses of his mind:
I’m sitting here with my kids and my wife;
And everything that I hold dear in my life;
We say grace and thank the Lord;
Got so much to be thankful for;
Then it’s up the stairs and off to bed and my little girl says,
I haven’t had my story yet.
And everything weighin’ on my mind disappears just like that;
When she lifts her head off her pillow and says,
I love you dad
I don’t know why they say grown men don’t cry;
I don’t know why they say grown men don’t cry ...
Perhaps, a part of the answer could be deduced from the Wise
Counsellor’s words: “To grow old is to pass from passion to
compassion …”
 
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