The heart over the head

A reader asked me in a recent blog (actually, he asked me twice) why I continue to live in Guyana despite the problems. It’s actually a question I hear a lot – more frequently outside – and I give different responses at different times, depending on my mood or the circumstances. In those situations, having made the long migration journey, away and back, via Canada and Cayman, I don’t make any apologies for my choice to the extent that I am sometimes disinclined to explain it. On certain occasions and for certain persons, I will take it on, but generally my response is, “It’s a completely subjective decision, and the issues will vary widely from person to person. It’s something you have to work out for yourself.”

soitgoAt the base of it, though, and I sometimes get into it when time allows, coming back to Guyana is essentially a case of the heart prevailing over the head, or to put it another way, it’s like an ember that never dies. It doesn’t affect everybody, of course, but every time I hear a Guyanese delivering some fervent proclamation of their love for this country, at home or away, I see in their eyes and hear in their voice that they are in the throes of that hold. They may not articulate it that way, but in fact they are. And I come to that recognition, because of my own experience in the process. I have made the same journey they made, although by a very different path, and have come to the same destination. I understand the hold.

There are people on this search, all over this world, many of them with children born in other lands and rightfully allied to foreign flags, but still this connection to the ancestral home remains. For so many of them, it’s an ember that never really goes out. Occasions come like a breeze off the ocean and stir the embers into flames. Occasions like a cricket match, or a band playing music, or a particular song, or an achievement by some Guyanese abroad, and we come out of our various nooks and crannies pulled together, truly, by the bonds to this place.

I was once in a close relationship with a Guyanese dougla in Canada – she had her poetic side – and I vividly recall one very late night when she was attempting to explain her emotions and she blurted out, “I love you, man, I love you, I love you more than Guyana.” I remember thinking at the time, “What an odd statement.” In fact, we both laughed; it sounded comical. But two days later, on a flight somewhere, it suddenly came to me that it wasn’t odd at all; she was in fact using the Guyana comparison to indicate the depth of her feeling for me. There I was, sitting on a plane, staring out the window at Canada below me, having come to an insight about this young woman’s feeling for her homeland. It’s something of course that people in all nations feel; it’s that ember still aglow.

Many years later in Cayman, my friend Henry Muttoo, showed me a draft of a novel he was working on, based in part on his mother who never left Guyana. He explains her, still there in her old age, this way: “Too many of her footprints are on the streets of Albouystown. Her voice is imbedded in every wall of all the houses she lived in and floats silently all over the place.” I keep notes for certain things, and I have one to Henry from then that goes, “Develop that…you are capturing there what a lot of people who can live elsewhere, but live here, feel or sense without putting it into words like that. Many people, most people, can turn to those external enticements and leave and never come back; the old lady in Albouystown is captured by where she is. She’s doesn’t feel ‘disappointment’ because she simply never developed any expectations; she had her anchor. To me, that’s where the novel rests ‒ on the magic, sometimes, of the heart prevailing over the head. In the end, who fares better? Busy career woman outside, or the old Putagee lady with her powerful attachments?”

This is a long answer to the blogger’s query, but it explains the why of many people I know who, like me, live here, and grumble here, and get frustrated here, but still live here. My friend Dennis Diaz is like that, as is my wife Annette, and my Subryanville pal, Colin. They’re like the man who just introduced himself to me in Oasis recently and five minutes later he was belabouring me about why he had come back home. Like the other three, his heart was ruling his head. Of course, it’s a mystery because not every heart behaves that way, and in many cases the ember dies. Indeed, why some die and some don’t is the most mysterious part of it all, so we search for an explanation but are never sure. What we do know is that so it go.