Dear Editor,
The Minister of Culture only recently waxed poetic about the role of the arts and music, having apparently had the recent epiphany that the arts are not just about “recreation,” even as the ban on the social commentary musical form of calypso as practised by the participants in the state-run competition continues on the national airwaves.
It is interesting to note that Dave Martins, after expressing hope in the Minister’s empty rhetoric about opportunity coming out of the ban, was reduced to glibly referencing the government’s “semantics” in continuing this mindless repression, after a meeting with NCN in which the ban was referred to as a mere “prohibition.”
The silence and the facetious pandering to ‘opportunity’ notwithstanding, the public was perhaps inadvertently treated to some insight behind the continued ban via a column (and I use the label loosely) published last Sunday under the extremely ironic title, ‘Pseudo-Intellectual,’ in the Guyana Times newspaper (also loosely).
The writer asks:
“Can anyone listen to the winning entry from ‘De Professor’, ‘God na sleep’ and distinguish it from any opposition campaign speech? Where’s the subtlety? Where’s the picong? Where’s the calypso? And to make matters worse, none of them [critics of the ban] even took note of the blatant recourse to opposition’s blatant racist standing libel that Luncheon is doing the bidding of a ‘coolie’ government. How else do you explain in De Professor’s line that Luncheon is ‘stuffing fowl curry down’ the throats of those who didn’t vote for the PPP? Ok, Mr. ‘Intellectual’ [Ruel] Johnson, since you know so much about Borges, what is being signified by the term ‘fowl curry’?”
First we can start by reduction of the allegedly coded metaphor to what the writer believes to be its racist connotations.
We can reasonably presume that the person means anti-Indian racism, and for the racial invective to be most piercing, it should ideally be acutely representative of the race maligned. ‘Fowl curry’ is as ubiquitous to the Guyanese experience as is cookup or chowmein or pepperpot, arguably more so, and only the most myopic, tribal and idiotic mind would see it as exclusively emblematic of East Indians.
I can humbly offer that perhaps ‘fowl curry’, in the tradition of calypso and chutney, offers a homophonic pun to an expletive, a derivate of the well-known f-word constructed by the addition of the suffix “ery”. “Fowl-curry,” therefore, is slang for “bull,” a criticism that has been levelled at Dr Luncheon in usually more euphemistic terms in numerous instances, particularly for his tendency towards the circuitous, ludicrous and obfuscatory in his addresses to the nation. This has obviously escaped the cerebral capacity of the no doubt courageous bona fide intellectual who wrote that Wikipedia-quoting article anonymously in the newspaper owned and operated by an ‘entrepreneur’ living under the largesse of the People’s Progressive Party.
The next time that the writer chooses to engage me in defence of the government’s attack on freedom of speech, it may serve his (and their) credibility better if he were to do so openly, not behind the skirt-tail of anonymity.
The ban continues, and the silence from the supposed intellectual class continues, content with the fowl-curry being crammed down their throat by everyone from Dr Luncheon to Dr Anthony to the management at NCN – trahison des clercs, indeed.
Meanwhile, I for one sometimes wish for a better quality of repression – this could not truly be the best that the PPP has to offer in terms of debate.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
