Dear Editor,
There is something a little surreal about a letter from Samuel H Johnson in your edition of Dec 31 (‘Citizens should be allowed to keep their caps on in air-conditioned offices’). Mr Johnson, visiting the Deeds Registry and before that, GPL, is requested to take off his hat in accordance with the rules of the establishment.
Mr Johnson objects, resists, refuses, and eventually is permitted, as an exception, to keep hat on head. Mr Johnson says he is in his seventies and bald and concerned about the exposure in a micro-climate of air-conditioned offices. It is the reason he gives for his insistence. Apparently Mr Johnson is not overly concerned about the irritation or inconvenience this ‘doff the hat‘ order could cause other head-covering wearers in the generality, and so presents his problem as specific to balding senior citizens. But there are serious questions raised by this kind of absurdity.
Upon reading this I heard in my mind the chant of the victors as they regard their subjects in the colonial relationship. It is “Victoire, Victoire,” as in Aimé Cesaire’s Notebook on the return to my native land, and the cry is followed by the evocation of its cause “the vanquished are content!”
There is something about the symbolism of taking their cap off that is utterly anachronistic in a 21st century post-independence Guyana, as it is in multi-cultural England from which the rule would have been exported with all its class significations.
A country such as ours, with bonneted Rastas, toped Muslims, hijabbed women, ought to ensure that the old Anglo-Creole cultural template and its prejudices is thrown out, out of respect for the variety of the peoples and sub-cultures that we piously boast of hosting. Similarly, the United Kingdom would have had to accommodate itself to Sikh turbans, saris with bare midriff, Saudi and other Arab headgear, African headwear, dhotis, kurtas, abayas – this is visible in England on the streets.
There needs to be a continuation of the de-colonisation process that takes us beyond what was psychically bearable and thus permitted by the generation from the thirties and forties that led us until the end of the last century. Colonial era laws and mores most often than not remained intact, with the exception of what it was politically advantageous to repeal, the gesture of the shirt-jac, and so on. And while the nationalists made enormous changes in terms of access to education for all, access to jobs for meritorious natives, independence of foreign policy and political action, the definitions of what was acceptable as deportment and ‘cloth‘ remained dominated by customs created in European civilisations. The same for the interlocking legal and social systems and their assumptions.
Former President Jagdeo and his ‘divorce‘ is a case in point. The old laws allowed only the extreme and the absurd as permissible grounds. Our lawyers and politicians are not strenuously exercised by these anomalies. Former PNC efforts at law reform were apparently discontinued. Marxists of one stripe or another settled into the vanities of office without giving these matters further thought. Mr Johnson‘s exposure in the Deeds Registry is a consequence.
Occasionally we have read, from female writers in Guyana, objections to rules concerning access to this or that office in sleeveless frocks, etc. Clearly at work here is confusion.
It is the confusion celebrated in the cry “Victory, Victory, the vanquished are content.” Their contentment is evident in the fact of their total absorption and perpetuation of the value systems of the conquerors; in their entire conviction that their subjection was not only merited, but more, a measure of their historical election in their hard work at the mission of becoming the “civilising force” to all the inferiors around them. Hence, for the scribal and ruling classes of the Creoles in the Caribbean, hat must be doffed as one enters polite society, arms covered – and we must all enter the public space accoutred as a certain version of dead Englishmen.
The point to be made is that with all its often quite revolutionary zeal, its genuine efforts at self-validation, its determination at affirming the equality of all the varieties of the species, the Caribbean Creole group is so varied in its composition, historical and racial origins, that behaviour has ranged from the most conformist to the most ethnocentric and the most intolerable. Our administration, like many administrations in the region, often opts for a definition of the decent that is only congruent with old norms applied by the former masters.
Evidently, any society, in order to cohere, has to admit a consensus on what is tolerable, polite, and civil in dress, speech, gesture, and so on. In the case of nations dominated by Muslim elements, care has usually been taken to exercise tolerance with regard other religious practices; but, as everywhere else, there has been a tendency to uniformisation.
India is the best example I know of a tolerant society in matters of dress and religion. All cultural expressions are known to co-exist. And religious expression is varied. Dress codes vary from the nakedness of “sky-clad” Jains to the body and face coverings of some Muslim groups. It is as if we gave equal honour to Amerindian traditional dress customs then through the whole range of sartorial practice to the burqa. Rastas in Guyana have, in the past, paid the price for their deviation from the Creole middle class norm.
Perhaps in Guyana we need to evolve to this level of tolerance in the use of the public space. The days when this or that people was ridiculed for dressing in a certain manner, must be recognised for what they were – the anxiety of the conquered to become the white man of their age and space.
The old, or existing, or modified sense of entitlement to hegemonical status that the Creole conferred upon himself ought to yield to something more intelligent than the unthinking imposition of a certain version of ‘good manners.‘ In sum, the struggle needs to continue.
It is not clear that Mr Johnson intended any or all of this in his letter. But any or all of this springs to mind as we, his advocates inquire of his oppressors the objective reason they can offer for his exclusion.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
