By Nigel Westmaas
(GHK Lall Sitting on a Racial Volcano (Guyana Uncensored), 2013)
There is no Guianese people. Only an accumulation of persons − end products of a various history. Images in mud of the distant alien. Here patterns kill us, and the spiritual bullying of foreigners forever consent to the act. Incoherence, apishness, sentimentality, uncreativeness. And always the blighting frustration of a land which has got us down. Think for instance on our emotional life − caught up within a mesh of influences. There is some pattern here. -Denis Williams, Kyk-Over-al December 1949
Guyana has been beset with the trauma of race conflict from the onset of the political economy of slavery and racism in early colonialism, through the arrival of indentured labourers in the nineteenth century, and certainly since the notional birth of the modern political movement from the 1950s. Two regimes have ruled the country since independence, and political and other forces, civil society and individual Guyanese in general have proposed, defended, avoided, and moralized on the race issue. And yet it remains a factor which inspires pessimism in national life. Enter a revelatory, persuasive and passionate book, Sitting on a Racial Volcano (Guyana Uncensored). With moral urgency and language to back it up, GHK Lall, a re-migrant and a skilled man of letters, penetrates the fray to launch his own rage and introspection on the “race problem.” Given that he was here, went abroad and returned, Lall comes with the facility of ‘three’ lens – and this is seen in his wide- ranging references and quotes in the book from sources abroad and especially from North America where he lived.
Lall has obviously been a keen observer of his home for a long time, inside and outside Guyana, with eyes and ears close to the ground in examining the contradictions, evasions, and political cynicism around the race issue. His mantra is akin to Martin Carter’s descriptive feeler “when a man lies to himself the world will lie to him.”
Lall’s enthusiastic mission is to provide an ‘uncensored’ outlook on the state of play between the two major Guyanese antagonists, Indians and Africans, and the organizations and narratives that presume to represent each group. The book of 166 pages is organized in three parts and thirteen short chapters. Lall warns in the preface that it is not his desire to
