Dear Editor,
The recent exchanges between, on the one hand, Speaker of the House Ralph Ramkarran, and Dr David Hinds plus Tacuma Ogunseye on the other hand, draw us into a reflection on the uses of ‘history’ and the way facts fit in with or fail to modify a grander meta-narrative of racism and suffering that in its several versions define how we see our past.
The discussion among the gentlemen turns on the question of the PPP’s role in the perpetuation and nourishing of the racial/racist situation.
We conclude that, in this case, “fact” is mostly irrelevant. Most people understand and re-transmit not only the truth but also much that is only the mythical and the meta-narrative. From the Afro-Guyanese perspective, some Indians are animated by a triumphalist racist mythos feeding on a false sense of victimhood..
In the Indian story many blacks are basically unjust and overbearing and possessed as well of a consistently false sense of their own victimhood.
Ideas of who suffered more will, as suggested by Dr Randy Persaud in a recent letter, emerge or suggest themselves from discussion of slavery and indentureship and become attached to readings of our recent history under the two major parties in the post-independence period. It is therefore unlikely that agreement as to the existence and interpretation of ‘objective fact’ will be easy.
Hence what the psychologist remarks about the human tendency to filter away inconvenient information and to retain only that which accords with pre-existing dispositions, the cultural theorist offers as operating at a collective level with an equally great force.
And it is precisely this distinction between the historical narrative with its multitude of details that fix blame then establish cause and effect, and the overarching meta-narrative that comes in different versions according to the race and ethnicity of the narrator, that is at the root of the conflicting versions of PPP and Guyanese history. The historians’ narrative seeks to decide with exactitude who did and does what to whom, who are the heroes and who the victims of the co-habitation between black and Indian. The historian offers us for example – who was first killed in the sixties, who first extended the hand of peace, who first invited whom to share the pie… But we conclude that this narrative is forcibly subordinated to a grander conceptual scheme, a mythical meta-narrative which serves, in the end, to help each party decide who suffered more at the hands of whom. And to whom reparations or revenge is due. The meta-narrative is hardly concerned with fact, but principally with image and idea.
If we accept the above then, in this sense Ralph Ramkarran is right when he
says the exact sequence of events in the following case is of little weight.
It doesn’t matter if Cheddi had refused to include the PNC or WPA in the proposed national reconciliation government at point A or at point B of the historical narrative. The Indian meta-narrative insists on portraying Dr Jagan’s hand eternally extended in a gesture of reconciliation and invitation.
Whatever happened, Mr Burnham is eternally portrayed in some minds as plotting with his people to punish some by banning flour or peas. Not true, but it has entered the racial/racist narrative and there it will stay. The black marginalisation, facts and fears, despite the statistics being fondled and paraded by Prem Misir, have also embedded themselves in a meta-narrative that has now taken a life of its own and, when and if the PPP is put to sleep, black narration of their version of the PPP years will use these facts and fears to colour their historical narrative and to lend meaning and motive to the story of the East Indian government. The process has begun in the work of Kean Gibson.
What Mr Ramkarran will doubtless agree with is that the PPP is seen and sees itself as an Indian party. We may observe that it has consistently and exclusively championed Indian issues and has campaigned against anti-Indian discrimination. It is stubbornly silent or dismissive of complaints against the Indian racists in its midst. Its final years as an opposition party witnessed its own distortions of history as it contributed to the meta-narrative, and ceaselessly, to the fiction that East Indians here were living in a condition comparable to apartheid.
It has given birth to an Indian Arrival Committee, a good work in itself, but one that essentially answers all questions about its racial identity and preoccupations.
So, in the end it does not matter what Hinds or Tacuma say, Dr Jagan has long been carved in stone, his hand held out in a gesture of peace and reconciliation, his smile benevolent. Mr Burnham (and it doesn’t matter what he did) has his own role in that version of the story.
Finally it matters little what the historians say about who did what to whom if we continue to hold on to what Eusi Kwayana sought to dispel – the myth of a single guilty race.
We make victims of each other. And we know only our own version of the story.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
