Dear Editor,
A letter appeared in yesterday’s newspaper penned by Eric Phillips, accusing this writer of “disinformation, deceit and plain lies” and diagnosing my condition as being that of a “subtle bearer of self-hate” (‘Bakr has chosen to blame the victims despite the evidence’ SN, March 21). One gets the impression that my remarks about African complicity in the slave trade were treasonable in the eyes of Mr Phillips and that he hovers at that psychological level as he seeks to lead his people to higher levels of existence.
Mr Phillips’ is reacting to an essay published in the form of a letter in which I made certain comments on the concept and thrust of a bid for reparations for slavery, benefiting from the attention of a part of the Caribbean political establishment and steered by a committee of which Barbados’ Hilary Beckles and Mr Phillips himself form active part.
His distress is comprehensible because the piece to which he objects makes the point that the account of our slave past that we consent to learn, generally fixes the commencement of the narrative more or less with the act of purchase or rapture of the captive by European traders. The hand on the African side receiving the cheque is obscured by a mist and the lights focus on the countenance of the European trader contorted by greed and malice and regarding the bound and supine ancestor with a satisfaction that says a great deal about the future rapport between them. In the backdrop is the ship. Our attention then segues to their transportation to the New World. The entire text ignores or minimises the native traffic and the culture that made the deal possible, and the role of our African ancestors in it.
It serves, the scenario, to efface or obscure some troubling aspects of our past and culture. Laid bare they evoke reactions such as we note in Mr Phillips’ letter.
Naturally, to preserve the integrity of the self-satisfying narrative carapace we have developed, a thick layer of self-deception is necessary. Mr Phillips thus still insists, unable to deny that slavery existed in Africa, that I was wrong and that it was really a milder form of servility. Thundering “chattel slavery” was never practised in Africa, he hangs all his hang-ups and bewilderment on this factoid and proceeds to flog to death an Abu Bakr guilty of the offence of ripping off the armour of self-deceipt which protects the bandages of rationalisation and myth with which we have bound our collective wounds.
Difficult to understand the nuances of a condition in which you are captured and sold into “chattel slavery,” but the captors are considered free of the stain of practising “chattel slavery” itself. Confused and convoluted. Mr Phillips also asserts in defence of Africans that they built no ships to expedite us to the New World. Hence, a plea in mitigation is offered.
Thundering again that it was mean of me to fail to refer to Hilary Beckles by the feudal title/honorific ‘Sir’ bestowed on him by his national government or perhaps by the Queen, Mr Phillips claims that I am “purposely hiding the fact” that several Caribbean governments are associated with the reparations drive and will sue Britain and some other European countries.
Far from it. In fact it is up to the reparations commissions to do the public information and education needed to promote the idea and events associated with it. The usual ‘Caricom’ ineptitude in this area means that not enough is known about the events planned and the wrongs to be repaired. It was thoughtful of him to take the opportunity to inform us further of the work of the reparations committees or commisisons.
What we are seeking, he writes, is an “Apology,” which he then qualifies. But it is supposed to restore our dignity, one gathers, and assume a hugely symbolic existence in the “reconstitution of the racial self” that Afro-descended individuals and communities have been struggling with for centuries.
Many are still at the point where the white man is to be blamed, entirely and solely, and made to apologise, but by a strange legal logic, the relatives at the starting end of the chain of indignity are exempt – a pro-black discourse that grants racist favours to our own by dispensing them of all culpability in a crime that Mr Phillips describes as the equivalent of a “nuclear bomb.”
All of the above remains of little importance but key to the reflection on the larger question, which is: What is the utility of the ethnic narratives in the modern multi-ethnic world and how detach our peoples from the illusions and perhaps psychic protection they provide, despite the pain and disorientation such a process will cause?
In reality, today, our families have origins in many peoples and continents. It is absurd, in my own circumstances to favour exempting Africans from blame while mortifying another ethnic strain by exaggerating and isolating its implications in the crime. It is also absurd to view oneself in a “primary definition” as African, when we are taught that all identification is secondary to the essential… “muslim.”
It is also absurd, in the multi-racial situation of Guyana, to elevate any race, through the narratives, privileges we accord it, above any other in a victimology that establishes a hierarchy of transgression which serves, essentially, to save the skin of the tribe or race with which one identifies. It is to promote a racial favouritism that reminds one of past problems more than it promises future solutions.
On the other side of the divide, the Indo-Guyanese also have their founding myths and suffer as disorienting any corrective discourse that they see as a racist attack. But in one version of the founding story, the labour recruiter “arkati”, an Indian, is the trickster figure that lures the thousands to their exile and deportation. This version does not baulk at the image of the wicked native ancestor.
Mr Phillips seems to think that my Muslim belief somehow renders me insensitive to black suffering of the type that he serves as porter. But to speak of my Muslim belief and identification is to take this type of interchange beyond the categories of race that Mr Phillips and all the descendants of Africans have inherited, to their grief, in the most eurocentric of forms. The eurocentric history of their slavery, as of the New World, begins with the European purchase and discovery. Before it is terra incognita. There are no actors and no guilty. It is this delusional state that Mr Phillips wishes to preserve. He is entitled to sing his own songs. Those not sharing the tune could simply be products of different mental processes, a different world view, different psychic needs, a different consciousness.
Concerning the Arab role in the history – I am neither disturbed nor comforted by it. Nor am I by the role of Africans in the slave trade. Those unable to face the fact have their own self-esteem to protect I suppose.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
