Dear Editor,
A minister of government walks into a radio station and objects to the calypso which won the national competition being played on state radio – his rationale is that he sees the lyrics as abusive and slanderous and inappropriate, and the “accusations” levelled in the song cannot be proven in court. Not only is that calypso taken off air by order of the state radio station management, but all other calypsos in the competition are too, and the public is given no explanation as to the principle or policy involved.
Two weeks later, the calypso ban still in place, the President of Guyana goes on stage and labels a former colleague and a sitting member of Parliament an “intellectually corrupt jack-ass,” and that information is presented on the front page of the state-owned paper. He is also reported in the Guyana Times as labelling [an] independent media owner[s] as “smugglers” and “backtrackers, also on the front page, and without any supporting evidence of his claims.
Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer and politician, said that it is through the experience of the deeply absurd that we first begin to seek true meaning in our lives – here in Guyana we exist in a living
theatre of the absurd and the idiotic, of what Borges referred to as “Bellboys babbling orders, portraits of caudillos, prearranged cheers or insults, walls covered with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking.”
What we are absent here is an intellectual class brave enough to collectively stem the tide.
Too many of our otherwise brightest, even the minuscule few that still haunt like ghosts the musty corridors of Freedom House, have awoken to find their minds in pawn to this machinery of illogic and repression of basic sense. There is a necrotic silence spreading over this place, a mud that seeks to stifle and murder the least word of defiance, of change.
To those few of us in the struggle, and it is a struggle, still willing to openly confront this absurdity, this parody of a parody that the People’s Progressive Party is so indecently proud of parading itself as, I urge you in the words of Havel, to press on.
“Every concession gives rise to further concessions – we cannot back down, because behind us there is only an abyss.”
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
