Dear Editor,
There is a fantastic line from Martin Carter, in an address given in 1974 to graduating students at the Convocation ceremony of the University of Guyana, where he dreams about us living in a world inhabited by “a free community of valid persons.”
He urged students to believe that is was precisely in the most difficult times, or when we faced immense obstacles, that we needed to fight despair with hope, to combat the “paralysis of the spirit” that made those obstacles seem insurmountable, that allowed the pettiness and little things to build up until it seemed we would be engulfed, or swallowed up whole.
I remember when I was a high-school and university student in Guyana, sharing a classroom with Moses Nagamootoo (of the People’s Progressive Party), Raphael Trotman (now of the Alliance for Change) and Mohamed Nazir (of the United Muslim Party), during the days of interminable blackouts, when you opened the newspaper and the first thing you would look for was the power outage schedules. Why must Guyanese be haunted by that again more than two decades later? I remember going to public events and the lights going off, and the audience would sit and wait, and when the lights went on everyone would clap. I remember even then wondering why we were clapping, as if we were grateful, for something that we should have been entitled to?
Are Guyanese not entitled to more, then and now?
How long must Guyanese live with the double albatross of the PNC and PPP hanging over us, like the sword of Damocles? For how much longer will Guyanese be sacrificed on the altar of narrow, petty, recriminatory and vicious politics? Where to speak out is to immediately be placed into one camp or the other? Since when did birthright belong only to these two political parties?
I remember the newspapers a few months ago reporting that President Jagdeo had said that all societies experience migration.
This is true. Migration is the foundation of the modern Caribbean. We are defined by movement. But is the President suggesting that what Guyana is experiencing is normal? One of the least densely populated countries in the world, we have one of the highest out-migration rates.
Everyone is leaving, except for Amerindians, to whom the land originally and rightfully belongs. This has not changed.
According to a report some four years ago by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop-ment, over 80% of those with more than secondary education are leaving for the advanced industrial countries. This was if I recall accurately, the highest or second highest rate among all sending countries. All sending countries in the world. Is this normal?
Is this what Guyanese, and all those who realised that it was not good enough to sit and clap, fought for to end 24 years of rigged elections and then dictatorship under the PNC?
Do we have to wait for 24 years, is this what equivalence is, before the PPP will stop blaming everything on the woes they inherited? Is this what freedom is?
We have independence. We have elections. But what is freedom?
There is a line of dialogue in Season of Adventure, by Barbadian novelist George Lamming, where one of the characters tells the other that “Independence ain’t nothing till it free… Free is free and it don’t have no givin’. Free is how you is from the start, and when it look different you got to move, just move, and when you movin’ say that is a natural freedom make you move.
You can’t move to freedom, ‘cause freedom is what you is, and where you start, and where you always got to stand… free is free and it don’t have givin’ and it don’t have takin’… if ever I give you freedom, then all your future is mine, ‘cause whatever you do in freedom name is what I make happen. Seein’ that way is a blindess from the start.”
Yours faithfully,
Alissa Trotz
