Is a harsh life a blessing?

Dear Editor,

Some Guyanese living abroad get nostalgic at times and they compensate by romanticising the life they lived or imagined they lived in old time Guyana.

Stabroek News columnist, Mr Shaun Samaroo, says the poverty-stricken life of a colonial cane-cutter is a blessing! (‘The blessed lifestyle,‘ SN, May 10). Mr Samaroo wrote about the life of Ivan, a man who lived his entire life in hard labour, as a cane-cutter on a Berbice sugar estate.  Samaroo sees the “harshness” of Ivan’s early years as being blessed.

I wonder if given a chance, would Ivan choose to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning to start his backbreaking work of wielding a cutlass repeatedly until “late in the night”? Did Ivan get his medically recommended hours of sleep? Wouldn’t he have preferred to rest just a little longer? Weren’t the circumstances of his life and the debased social system of colonial Guiana forcing him to endure this gruelling routine day after day, year after year? There is dignity in work, but were conditions on a colonial plantation a blessing?

According to Mr Samaroo, if you spend your young days “hauling massive bundles of raw cane on [your] bare shoulders to punts in blazing hot midday sun” for a British plantation owner, that’s living a blessed life!

I’m sure Ivan loved gardening, but after hours sweating under the glaring sun in the canefields did he really want to come home (“late in the night”) and tend to yet another field? Or was he forced into gardening at home to supplement his family meals? Not working for a living wage is a blessing?

Ivan, Mr Samaroo writes, is now a “solitary stooped figure” and he would still go fishing. An old frail 90 year old man alone on a roaring river, exposed to the elements and wildlife (snakes!) throwing out a net to catch a meal. Blessings!

Perhaps Ivan just likes fishing, I’m sure if he had the chance he would absolutely love fly-fishing as a hobby. Did his blessings-filled life include a chance to even have a hobby?

And, Samaroo says, the woman of the house “worked just as hard: hand washing clothes and ironing them smooth and crisp with starch using a heavy flat iron heated in red hot coals; waking up at 4 am to start her cooking and sweeping the wooden floors of the house and daubing the mud yard to smooth perfection; working to milk the cows…  walking the village with her five-gallon milk canister on her head hawking milk to neighbours…”   Really, I would not wish such a bronze-age existence on anyone. I would certainly not be living it up in Canada while telling these people their life in a place where “When it rains…  suffers some flooding,”  is a blessing.

Don’t get me wrong, Ivan and Baba are honourable people doing what it took to get by in a hard life.   Mr Samaroo says they now “laugh away the harshness of their days.”  These are good people who acknowledge their suffering. Please don’t insult them by telling us that such harshness is a “blessing.”

Indeed, if harshness is a blessing, then what is gentleness, a curse?

And if you come to believe that a hard life is a blessing, would you ever work to improve your lot and so escape Mr Samaroo’s idea of blessedness?

Yours faithfully,
 Justin de Freitas