After Brazil but before the Aquarium
I’ve skipped over the English school factories whose buildings I entered and exited like a ghost as a valued “native speaker” while studying abroad. I’ve skipped over the hotel. Every room in it had at least a 180 degree view of an unreasonably azure ocean, except its windowless basement Accounts Department, where I spent a year after returning to Barbados.
That I was psychologically a human boomerang, must be the only explanation why I never considered making a life for myself in Brazil. Instead, I brought back to Barbados the signed piece of paper (made important through the use of a watermark and foil stamp) telling me what I already knew – that I’d graduated in Business Administration from a university. Its calligraphic script didn’t advice, however, how to be content doing what I had started out instinctively disliking, had grown to hate, and was now qualified to for (what my name on the paper meant, at least).
The First Premeditated Rebellion
I skip over all of this to land in one of my proudest accomplishments – my first premeditated rebellion against wage-slave masters. It occurs at the job following the one at the hotel where I am then employed at an aquarium.
Thinking I should try to spend as much time doing what I like with my life will be my downfall. I had a monthly student loan payment of almost $500 US at that time. A pay cut meant explaining the job change to the student loan officers who had their goals and targets and weren’t particularly interested in my contentment with the only life I have to make mine. I wasn’t asking their permission though. I was letting them know I’d be paying less. So they sent letters to my sureties and I lived in anxiety.
When things were good
Me & the resident Nurse (shark)
Siphoning fish shit from glass tanks and chopping smelly squid guts for food preparation was my destiny. Yes, there was a time to arrive and a time to leave but, between the two, I could organise my tasks and didn’t mind so much that I was still a slave because I got to walk around outside, barefoot. It helped that I’ve been drawn to animals ever since every book I was given as a child had their pictures.
Southern stingrays would nip my toes while I spoke about them to an audience, I got my scuba certification and swam with the nurse sharks and a shoal of very shy piranhas (more tank cleaning), and I had contact with other creatures I wouldn’t have ever seen outside of the National Geographic channel: octopuses, sea horses, white tipped sharks and horseshoe crabs, for example.
When things Soured
Everything was dreamy as are beginnings before impressions fade to reveal tiresome truths that are permanent. The truth was that the aquarium was a business, businesses are profit-driven and this can lead to deceitful tactics. Theirs presented itself primarily as them regularly stealing from the Caribbean Sea and not following their own quarantine regulations so they could have animals quickly advertised as being on display.
I opened my mouth wide to tell them what I thought of this and they didn’t like that. They changed my tasks to reflect how much (more tank cleaning). They warned me in letters not to speak to them about their wrong doings, they made a blue-eyed man Supervisor so he could tell us what to do, put his blue eyes on what we did and talk about us to them when and where we would not hear. Believing rhetoric which takes for granted stereotypes about the slave population being lazy and, more relevantly, ignorant, they left me to work alone on weekends. My face reflected their smiles as if I didn’t see what they were planning and wasn’t busy photocopying documents.
On the day I was called in, after a full day’s work (as is customary), I smiled when I was told that “it didn’t seem like I was a good fit”. I’d already taken their key off the keyring and had only to hand it in, but held back my rage – let it simmer without boiling over, even after I’d gotten the reference letter I requested.
In an email to a local underground newspaper
I said this:
Photocopies I’ve taken of daily report sheets prove high mortality rates at the aquarium. Since working at this marine park and seeing behind the scenes, I’ve become strongly opposed to keeping marine life in captivity. Under pretence of commitment to protecting the environment, it is being systematically destroyed in an attempt to make a profit. Fish are netted in our waters because it’s easier (and cheaper) to replace dead fish than to address the causes of their deaths. The high mortality rates at the aquarium generally result from poor capture and transport methods (fish bruised from netting often die in quarantine); uncovered tanks (fish jump out); being confined to small aquariums (which leads to aggression and fighting); human error (forgetting to switch back on the water flow to the aquarium or a sea cucumber releasing a neurotoxin that kills all the fish in the tank when it gets injured during repairs to the tank); starvation (slower fish kept in the same tank with faster, more voracious fish like horse-eye cavallies) and disease (white spot, gill flukes and others).
Marine life that has died at this particular aquarium: four-eye butterfly fish, goat fish, blue chromis, jaw fish, parrot fish, sea urchins, lobsters, helmet conchs, gobies, wrasses, flounders, French angel fish, high hats, surgeon fish, hamlets, bicoloured damsels, Oriental sweet lips, file fish, squirrel fish and the list also includes, on the 1st of June, 6th of May and on the 8th of July, 2007, a spotted eagle ray. On the 22nd of April, 2007, there were 42 mortalities, notably, a sharpnose puffer, a band tail puffer and 17 blue chromis, but on the day before there were 78 deaths, the number of blue chromis was 44 – all probably due to handling stress.
I’ve included as an attachment the article I’ve written and will send copies of mortality reports and photos. The Advocate and Nation newspapers are cunts. It seems as though they’re on the aquarium’s payroll with all the money the aquarium spends on advertising with them. Please let me know if you’re willing to publish my article.
The Aquarium – A Place Where Fish are Taken to Die?
Not knowing how I had gotten access to the files, the fools started firing workmates closest to me, thinking they were leaking me information. Then this thing called KARMA happened.
The aquarium closed its doors in 2009 citing financial difficulties resulting from an inability to convert from the high cost saltwater displays ($150, 000 US a month in bills!) to freshwater or terrestrial exhibits. I still fantasise that I helped sink them, though, with the bad publicity they got from the article (which is too long to post here).
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