Dear Editor,
I have learnt, from the People’s Progressive Party that you, at the Stabroek News, have been fomenting racial strife.
If true this is bad. And it would be the due of every patriotic Guyanese to join in the party’s call that you “cease from inflaming racial sentiments in our society.” I was made aware of the details and the cause for this latest rebuke by an article carried in the Kaieteur News in which the PPP’s Indian Arrival Committee (IAC) reacted to a cartoon drawn by Harris and published by yourselves. I then searched the cartoon with a more critical eye.
The cartoon depicts an Indian lady from what must be, by now and in many places, another era, making it clear that a “black” like Obama could be president somewhere else. But not here. In America. All of the inferences that could be drawn were drawn and presented us by the IAC. The cartoon didn’t say much that is good about Indian readiness for a black president in Guyana. But, one responds reflexively, they have by all accounts suffered greatly among us, and the voting patterns, the sense of ethnic and existential security, have been warped, deformed perhaps for all time. “Black President” as idea brings on only the flight or fright reaction.
I then considered this cartoon more carefully in light of the IAC’s deconstruction of the image. Every aspect, from the “undecorated rumal” to the rendering of the “foot ring” and the scientific nomenclature of the vegetables contained in basket and bag, were treated to an IAC interpretation. The conclusion is that the representation offers us a false image of a race… feminised, prejudiced, unpatriotic, suited only to agricultural or manual labour, backward… it is also anti-Hindu. There must be a reason the PPP/IAC feels this way.
Harris had drawn neither the common figure of the government dignitary, the Indian lawyer, businessman, pirate or drug investor. Nor had he chosen to depict any from the legions of tight-jeaned and well-coiffed and resolutely modern young ladies representing the new Indian identity that doubtless the IAC and its parent-party find familiar and reassuring. What Harris has drawn, or sought to draw is the ‘ur-Indian.’ What he must have considered the essence of Indian-ness. A character and condition essentially funny. After reading the IAC the lady in the cartoon is now posed, in the mind’s eye, against a backdrop of logies before which a dry and beaten-looking dog stares balefully at the clutch of thin pickney, bare-footed and vacant-eyed, huddling in its shade. An unkempt male brandishing a bottle of Russian Bear Rum nurses a broken arm in the background. We know who beat him. And robbed him of that week’s wages.
The woman in the cartoon, deconstructed by the IAC, is therefore a symbolic, if not sexist, representation of an ethnic and collective martyrdom which Harris and his like at Stabroek News are happy to portray. If not celebrate. The cartoon ‘speaks to’ Indian suffering and the deleterious effects of that suffering on the Indian collective psyche. Salt is being rubbed in the wound.
And the point here is that we have got to be very careful with racial sensitivities, with the portrayal of ‘the Other’ in the public space. The ‘Black Pudding lady,’ ‘Portuguese shop keeper,’ ‘Buck man’ and all the other prototypes, neutral or demeaning, of race and class that nestle in the consciousness can, given our insecurities, be collectively repressed (in psychological terms) or paraded at your peril. Like imitations of the Chinese immigrant accent in Dave Martins “Wong Ping,” a case can always be made that stereotypes, the basis for humour everywhere, can cause discomfort to the sensitive or raise the voices of those with an investment in racial sensitivities. And it is in these latter terms that the PPP’s intervention could be seen.
The PPP’s orientation in terms of race is clear. It has an ‘Indian’ Arrival commemoration operation which has seized our Ethnic Relations arm in relation to this affair. The party (for the moment but doubtless this will not be long in coming,) has no African Arrival or European Commemorative extension. The PPP is therefore exercised by issues that touch the image of Indians, that affect the welfare of that group and impede its steady progress.
The party, a long-standing beneficiary of the electoral dividends of racial strife, is known to prudently maintain a silence on matters affecting Afro-Guyanese. The party is known to dismiss or minimise Afro-Guyanese concerns, however exaggerated and manipulated, about “marginalisation,” but has actively encouraged Indian anxieties and myths arising out of the PNC’s “twenty eight years” in power and office.
That the assaults on Indians, even in symbolic forms such as the cartoon, are allowed to continue is bad enough. That Stabroek News, which, unlike Mark Benschop, seems not to have learnt its lesson, is weak to the temptation of perpetuating violence to the image and self-esteem of most PPP supporters is bad news. Here was the President hammering it home to Burke in New York that we have no racial problem. While cunningly and treacherously the bad-minded at home strive to inflame racial feelings. In our circumstances this is a grave error.
It is the kind of error for which, sooner or later, the party will make you pay.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
