In the Stabroek and Kaieteur newspapers this week, columnist/political scientist Freddie Kissoon and historian Nigel Westmaas have raised some welcome and provocative
remarks on our relation to history, and specifically the tragedy of Guyana’s pasts.
Freddie Kissoon suggests that Diana Abraham owes Guyanese an explanation of her understanding of the tragic events that led to the death of her family in 1964 (I do not agree that the burden of explanation should fall on a family that has suffered such an unspeakable loss; it seems that they are the ones who are owed justice). Nigel Westmaas calls for a public discussion that would separate rumour from fact.
Both rumour and fact, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can be distinguished by their relationship to (or distance from) truth. Can they really be so easily differentiated? Rumour is not just about a lack of valid news and/or information, as Nigel Westmaas claims. A big part of the problem that we face in Guyana is that one groups (or more precisely, political party’s) facts are dismissed as rumour by another. What is truth for one is falsehood for another. If we return to 1964, a period about which there has been a deafening silence yet which has continued to overwhelm the country with its ghosts, both the PPP and the PNC have their roll call of martyrs, and the lists are exclusive. Take Linden, for example, a mining community that was bustling in the 1960s and was also multi-racial. The PPP does not commemorate the Sun Chapman bombings, where over forty Afro-Guyanese women, men and children lost their lives on the Demerara river at Hurudaia, while the PNC does not recognize the violence that drove Indo-Guyanese families out of Wismar in 1964. When they do, they have explanations for what happened. When one side raises its martyrs, the other side simply responds by listing theirs. The only thing they share is an investment in victimhood that would place the blame entirely on the other.
What is the way out, then, of this seemingly never-ending divisive cycle of silence and division? The issue, of course, is that we have allowed the politicians to stake claims to the facts. We have given them the power to monopolise truth, and to possess those who suffered during that tragic period. They have been divided up like pieces on a chess board. Your dead. My dead. Note the possessive pronoun. In a country, in a region that has experienced Amerindian exploitation, slavery and indentureship, how is it that we have acquiesced so willingly to this ownership of bodies, even of the dead? Is it possible for us to reach a place where we can properly mourn them all, every one of them, as our dead, as our collective responsibility? In addition to the Abraham family and the names listed in Westmaas letter, there are hundreds of others who lost their lives in 1964, thousands of families who were displaced by the disturbances, forced to leave multi-ethnic communities, homes, neighbours and friends they had grown up with, to seek refuge and rebuild shattered lives in neighbouring villages with others who they often did not know, but were presumed to simply because they looked like them (and we need to recognize how ridiculous this is, especially in light of recent discussions in the media and elsewhere that would suggest that African and Indian Guyanese are different and separate). There are also many narratives, I am sure, of families and individuals and communities that did not succumb to the violence and the suspicion, that refused the deepening rift and politicization of race divides. Why haven’t we heard these stories, or more of them? What are the political stakes of keeping these voices hidden, and who benefits from their continued disappearance?
I fully agree with Nigel Westmaas that what is called for is a frank and public airing of our pasts. I am not convinced that starting out with the objective of getting to the facts of the past is going to get us there. There are different versions of these facts, parallel memories of the same period or place. We need to recognize that searching for one, inalienable and sovereign account of what happened is a futile exercise. What we need to do is to listen to all of these accounts, and to start instead by asking ourselves how and why we have invested so deeply in these conflicting versions of events. Why have we remembered so differently? And where have our dreams possibly collided? That is the first step to seeing each other, and to acknowledging the mutual fear and suspicion that have colonized our lives, our minds and our hearts for too long.
This is why a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) – and there have been discussions of this among list servs in the diaspora as well – might sound good on paper but in practice is so difficult to implement. History is not simply an inert set of events that took place sometime ago, waiting for us to discover them. We always bring our interpretive tools to bear on our reading of the past. And our investments in history cannot be disentangled from the space we inhabit in present-day Guyana, or from our notions of where we want to go in the future. And we need to therefore ask ourselves, in relation to any TRC, for whom? For what?
Towards what kind of outcome? How is the desire for truth inseparable from an insistence on justice, and a commitment to a future in which all are secure and know they have a place and a stake? We need to bear witness, and to recognize that the victim and the oppressor jostle for space inside each and every one of us. Finally, in South Africa, Chile, Argentina, calls for and the formation of TRCs came on the heels of popular movements or struggles. In Guyana, a small country in which we have allowed the facts of the matter to be dictated by the political elite, at some level perhaps we should recognize that it is they who have escaped scrutiny for too long. Do we really want to leave it up to them? As the African tale goes, until the lions have their griot, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
