Dear Editor,
I am deeply saddened by the passing of my friend, David de Caires. Every summer, over the last few years, I have met with him, in London, to enjoy a few glasses of red wine and good West Indian food prepared by Doreen.
We talked late into the night, setting the world right: America, India, Africa − Guyana in all its bewildering complexity. We talked about VS Naipaul, George Lamming, Martin Carter, Ian McDonald, Lloyd Searwar and many more. He never tired of anecdotes about New World Fortnightly and the celebrated Guyana Independence issue of New World. He told me of his and Miles Fitzpatrick’s hunger to help in shaping an intellectual tradition in Guyana at the end of empire. At the bottom of it all is the sacredness of liberal democracy. He had a profound hatred for dictatorships and those who seek to stifle the right to think. There was purity to his perception of the intellectual vocation: ideas mattered. For David, to write is to learn. Knowledge is indispensable to the sustaining of the democratic impulse. His was a life of the mind consciously engaged in the unending fight to be free.
I frequently left exhausted after my encounters with David. But I was always energised to rethink, reassess and rewrite. His intellectual integrity could never be compromised. His work in founding and sustaining Stabroek News is imperishable. David’s imagination and fearlessness were a major force in bringing the last dictatorship to its knees. For him the pursuit of freedom is necessarily uncompromising and interminable. That vigilance, informed by his intellectual integrity, will not die as long as Stabroek News lives.
David’s achievements belong to the intellectual history of the Caribbean. And as time goes by, more and more people in the region will begin to appreciate the quality and the size of his contribution to the fight to stay free and to expand our conception of freedom.
My thoughts are with Doreen, Isabelle and Brendan as well as Mike and Lisa. I am sure they will find the strength to climb this mountain of unimaginable pain and loss of this indomitable man.
Yours faithfully,
Clem Seecharan
