In the Diaspora
By George Mentore
George Mentore teaches anthropology at the University of Virginia
Imagine this country, really as our own, to do with as we pleased. Imagine no burden of obligation, to either past or present masters. Imagine the freedom to rebuild (this, our own country) and to remake (these, our own people), and to do so without the heavy weight of a commitment to repay. How would we do so?
To those who still claim, deep down (and sometimes not so deep down), that they remain our masters, we continue to repay – even as we think we do not. We repay them our obedience – even when we think we do not. We repay them an implicit and undeserving homage – even when we think we do not. And we repay them in such a way that, at the end of the day, at the end of that long dark day, we still remain in their debt.
Under our current regime of thought, we will never be able to cancel out what we owe. This is because, historically, everything we once produced with our own torn hands and broken backs, everything we sold (mistakenly thinking it was ours to sell), and everything we pocketed from the sale (mistakenly thinking it was ours to spend), actually belonged already to the master and not to the slave. In the once crazy rationality of an economic system (which we still live with today), the master not only owned the body of his slave, he also logically possessed as his own private property all that his slave produced, sold, and bought.
Any monies the slave might have earned and used in personal transactions, even to buy her freedom, could not have been hers with which to transact. Everything the slave acquired or produced — from the children of her womb to the ground provisions grown by her own hands and sold with her own ingenuity — all legally and logically belonged to the master. Thus all her purchases, made with the monies ultimately belonging to the master, could not have been hers to own — not even that of her freedom.
In this insane scenario of an economy in human flesh, where the honor given to the fiction of autonomy allowed the master and not the slave to be the one capable of owning private property, the slave actually became that which only the master could enslave or liberate. Built-in to the institution of chattel slavery, this principle of status hierarchy mitigated against the possibility of any reversal or shift in social positions.
Within its deep structural logic, no actual purchase of liberty or constitutional reform could become the starting point for a universal disavowing of slavery or, indeed, a falsifying of its constantly fabricated truth. The perennially made-up truth, that is, that by the sale of an object and by the law of private property, the ownership over the sold object (be it human or non-human) transferred rights in the object from the seller to the buyer.
In this so-called reasoned reality of the very system in which she lived, therefore, no American slave ever redeemed her freedom. Indeed, we all still live in debt to our modern masters. From the manumitted, the indentured worker, and the peasant to the colonized citizen and the independent Guyanese, we all have slithered from the ugly belly of the social history of slavery. And we remain, to this day, entangled in its slimy tentacles of indebtedness.
Many would argue that at least in the Antilles, there is one exception. Haiti has had the unmatched courage to have wrenched its liberty away from the sticky grip of its enslaver. Rather than have its freedom given to it by some European potentate or North American President claiming for himself and his nation a “humane” or “progressive” magnanimity, Haiti rose up against the great lie of commerce in human flesh. But look at the tremendous toll extracted from this nation for its historic and heroic severance of chains, for its attempt to build a polity in its own image, and to do so without an obligation to follow the lead of any colonial master. It has been made to suffer the humiliation and scorn of being classed the poorest of the poor and the most primitive of all in the Americas.
We Guyanese have never had the audacity to refuse the so-called civilizing culture of the master or to say “no” to western European models of thought. We continue “to pay tribute to Caesar” and to do so by honoring his ways of being in the world. Influenced by logics from Africa, India, China, Portugal, Scotland, and indigenous Amerindian thought, our Guyanese ways of being human in the world have, in contrast, struggled to maintain any kind of respect or modicum of legitimacy.
You have heard this kind of argument before and it remains familiar because of the continued resistance against the postcolonial regimes and because it continues within the same language and logic of the master. This familiarity of argument on its own would be troubling enough, but most disconcerting of all has been the question of why we continue (even in the very act of resistance) to repay the master by mimicking his worst attributes. Why do Guyanese display the obvious evidence of envying and copying the harsh and uncaring representations of power once practiced on our very own selves by our masters? And why do we continue to do so with such seeming relish and in such hyper aggressive forms?
The simple answer would be that this kind of behavior is in fact the result of our colonial past. But is this a sufficient answer or an excuse? Could it not also be a case of our refusal or inability to view the cause of history as having little if nothing at all to do with the inevitability of “nature” or its “natural rendering” of humanity? What if all the time we had the cultural capacity (if not the will) to throw off the coercive effects of the master’s power and that it was a question of not knowing how to do so? What if the Fox, in all her crafty wisdom, already knew this, and was by now practicing, not the power of the master to humiliate and to cause pain, but the power to care and to love?
When in the body of woman she lifted heavier weights than the ordinary man, she foxed us into believing this was something extraordinary. When she acquired her doctorate, she foxed us into believing this was an extraordinary feat for an indigenous woman — the first Guyanese Amerindian to have done so. When she took office in the upper echelons of our state apparatus, she foxed us into believing that this had something to do with her being special, and perhaps even superior. But at no time throughout her meteoritic rise did the Fox ever succumb to the illusion that the qualities said to have been hers actually made her extraordinary or somehow different in ways that separated her from other Guyanese. She knew intuitively and experientially that the elitist accolades attributed to her only further armed the colonial and postcolonial mentality of power and assisted its aims to divide and rule. She worked almost at every step in her life to disavow this difference that seemed to do nothing more than help maintain the master in his unassailable position of authoritative ownership over power.
She did not just imagine this country as her own, she made it hers by reshaping the way she treated other people with kindness, humility, and a sense of belonging. She did not repay the obligation to mimic the master, because every time she stepped into his image to repeat his actions, she transformed the projected appearance, the act, and the very meaning of the original image. In this way she blazed the trail to true liberty: to the freedom to rebuild our country and to remake our people in ways filled with grace and honor. The question that her life’s example has left is this: How do we find the strength of will and courage to continue the journey along the path of materializing an enlightened utopia in the form of Guyanese?
