Voices in the wind

May 10, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News-  The multitudes exist in quiet obscurity. In such a situation, a crisis presents an opportunity for self- promotion.

Those without fame, fortune or the facts feel displaced yet rooted. They spend their lives watching, speculating, whispering and longing.  They crave the recognition that the lack of personal achievement has denied them.  A crisis—any crisis—gives them breath. A scandal, a murder, a disputed election, a riot. The facts scarcely matter. What matters is the opportunity. The opportunity to step forward, not with evidence, but with narrative. And narrative, in such situations becomes a form of power.

A man who had spent his life in quiet anonymity suddenly appears on social media claiming he was in the room when the betrayal was planned. A woman who, until yesterday, sold imitation handbags on the pavements, insists she knew the victim— “a quiet one, but troubled,” she says, squinting for effect. Another says he overheard something—something dark, something dangerous—but cannot say more “for his own safety.” All of them speak as if the truth itself resides in their throat, waiting for the moment to spill out.

In these cases, the emptiness and lack of recognition creates a void that must be filled. And so, the people invent. They invent stories. They tell tall tales.  They create roles for themselves in dramas that did not need them. And nowhere is this more apparent than in times of upheavals. The crisis creates a massive audience and the opportunity to play to the gallery.

Gossip takes the place of journalism. Whispers become headlines. The man at the rum shop becomes the analyst. The woman on the minibus becomes the witness. They have no facts—only feelings, suspicions, half-baked theories. But that is enough. Performance is truth. Conviction matters more than content.

These are people for whom the boundary between reality and performance has long since dissolved. They are not pathological liars; they are dramatists of the everyday. They speak with the assurance of those who believe they must be heard to exist. For them, attention is not luxury—it is survival. In such a setting, visibility becomes currency.

One sees it in the language. They do not say, “I think” or “I heard.” They say, “I know.” They say, “I was there.” There is no room for doubt. Doubt weakens the story. Doubt is for people who can afford to be ignored. And so, they speak without doubt, without pause, without verification. A man will tell you he saw the minister entering a house at midnight. Another will tell you the minister never left. No one questions the contradictions. To question is to threaten the performance. And everyone, in their own way, is performing.

There is also a cruelty to it. They speak of people as if they are characters in a play—expendable, interchangeable. A woman loses her child in a fire, and before the ashes cool, someone says she did it for insurance. A man is murdered, and within hours, a neighbour claims he knew too much. These are not judgments; they are plots. And those who create them are not evil—they are hungry. Hungry for relevance. Hungry to be seen.

This hunger has deep roots. Colonized people were made to feel invisible, voiceless. They were taught that to matter, one had to be noticed by others—especially by those who held power. And even though the colonizers have gone, the need to be seen remains. Now they perform for each other. They seek affirmation in the eyes of their own. Social media provides a platform.

And so, they fabricate and invent roles for themselves with an almost instinctive ease, and they do so with such frequency and confidence because the soil in which these fictions grow is always fertile. In every village, every town, there exists a ready audience—gullible, credulous, eager for drama. The performance requires only a whisper and a willing ear. People do not ask for proof; they ask only for performance. The more outrageous the claim, the more it circulates. The storyteller is rewarded, not punished. And thus, falsehood becomes reputation, and fiction acquires a kind of social permanence.

But these performances are not harmless. They obscure the truth. They cheapen the suffering of others. They make justice impossible. A man wrongly accused must defend himself not against the law, but against stories. A woman grieving must contend not with her loss, but with strangers who say she orchestrated it. In this theatre of crisis, truth becomes irrelevant.

And yet, there is often no malice. Only longing. The longing to be part of something larger. The longing to matter. They are not liars in the criminal sense. They are fabricators of meaning in a society that offers little. In a world that denies them status, they create it. In a culture that denies them history, they narrate it.

That is the paradox. The crisis does not reveal the truth; it reveals the people. Not as they are, but as they wish to be seen.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)    

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• handbags, massive audience, Peeping Tom, personal achievement, Survival

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