Dear Editor,
I regard with some unease a letter appearing in the September 1 edition of SN, written by David Hinds. It deals with media response to the Cuffy 250 activities (‘Ignored by media or presented as a threat’) .
I have been accused of ignorance and of ignoring the efforts of this organisation to motivate black people to do better and to champion their causes. I therefore find myself duty bound to offer a comment on Dr Hinds’s contentions and to signal my support for the intentions of the work.
I have read with startled approval a report or extract of a speech given by Nigel Hughes in which he utters a frank diagnosis of some problems facing Afro-Guyanese. The report of the Buxton Forum also presents Mr Hughes continuing along the analytic line with the power of one side of the truth. I hasten to say that the need for sound and frank talk is evident. But there has got to be care taken with tone and content and message. We have, also, from a psychological and spiritual point of view, to be careful to emit ideas that are empowering, liberatory, encouraging and enriching, and to set in motion positive waves even as we point to the tears in our social fabric that need repair. So I wish to note on the discourse (as gleaned from reports in the press,) we produce and its role in the society.
Dr Hinds has been a principal exponent of the thesis that marginalisation by the PPP has extended a history of racist victimhood that began when we were dragged from the Old Continent. This type of discourse, grounded in the politics of grievance of the latter end of the colonial period has been useful in its time. In doing so Dr Hinds continues the type of exposé of the African reality that served, at a certain point in the history of the African American, to draw attention to their plight. He is Associate Professor of Black Studies, I think. The victimology discourse is expected. It is the professional stock in trade.
But, as chant, it has its psychological and spiritual resonance and in a Guyanese context, gladdens the hearts of the band over at the newspaper watching, to hear that we are marginalised, catching hell, worse than the rest, lost and condemned to a perpetuity of the same condition. Because we are Black.
It is the malediction we heard from the pen of V S Naipaul when, a dozen years ago, we wrote our first letter in this paper introducing a powerful counter-discourse that is uplifting and positive.
We are not fated, either by our own debilities or by a destiny linked to our race, to labour under a curse and to satisfy other’s insecurities by serving as their whipping boy; as the being upon which is projected all the traits that are negative in their own conception of the universe.
It needs to be repeated what was written in the case of my critique of Naipaul. We are a people of achievers whose contribution to world civilisation, despite our location on the periphery and small numbers, has been phenomenal in terms of creativity and mental, psychological and spiritual power.
The Black American misfortunes and successes are a tributary stream of diasporic history and not our own, though the waters mix up and down stream. Their stories and miseries are not to be adopted and grafted onto our own realities. The dismay of street violence in urban USA or the vulgarities of Jamaican song are not our own, and as Guyanese the racial identification has to be so confined that it spreads out of our normal religious or class-based abhorrence of the gun culture and the public winding and it becomes a sub-cultural norm.
We also have got to transmit the high morality of our predecessors by moving beyond the cliché of ‘seek ye first the political kingdom’ with its self-serving silence on questions of public morality or follow-fashion of the latest from the West in terms of sexuality and the family. Given that the Cuffy 250 has touched some of these themes we need to have, on a web site, the full texts for reading. The man micking you from the newspaper on the other side has raised the question. Are institutions being created to solve some of the problems? Are the people being mobilised apart from a role as passive listeners or a vote bank for a political aspirant?
We need a renewal of our morality. For we came to the New World and released and re-created an innate religiosity despite the indignities of plantation life, fragilised families and mockeries of the masters.We, growing up in the sixties, were taught that E R Brathwaite was a Guyanese and first Black perhaps to have a novel made into a major successful film (To Sir with Love). Or that Eddy Grant, a Guyanese, was the first Black Briton perhaps to achieve international stardom in music, or that Wilson Harris… or that Edgar Mittleholzer … or that Worrell or Walcott… or closer to home, Burnham or Fred Wills. That this or that figure of importance was a West Indian such as we were.
I have reviewed for the UWI scholarly publication Caribbean Quarterly, a Brazilian work entitled The African Heritage in Brazil and the Caribbean. The review appears in the June edition of Caribbean Quarterly and I refer to it because it makes the point: “Most of the existing work on cultural survival has concentrated on the religious sphere…” And this is because that, from new religions such as Jordanite, sycretisms like the Spiritual Baptists or Rasta, retentions like Vodou or Candomblé, this community has been remarkable for its insistence on infusing its existence with the spiritual, the hopeful, and the positive and all that it suggests.
The emphasis on ‘respectability’ and family life and stable marriages common to the emerging and established middle class in every location of the region is noted by sociologists.
The power of our creative minds in literature, music, mathematics and politics has excited wonder in the highest places of the world.
This is what we are essentially. Despite the efforts of the old colonialists to dismiss us as the cursed children of Ham, or others to despise us as ‘Ravan pickney.’ That is to say then that we need to stop hollering at every street corner “Poor marginalized, we are, come hear about it” and we ought to set in force a counter-chant of positive and liberating vibrations.
That said, we need also to speak positively of the other members of our multi-racial community. We ought not to fall into the cultural trap, inherited by some unfortunates, of generating antagonisms within groups and segments of groups. It is their unholy lot and they will die in it or achieve their own liberation. We avoid the trap of the racial/racist provocateur who, once he has finished with us will turn to the Muslim neighbour, the Madras minority or whichever group he decides. It is a case of not having sufficiently ingested and integrated the culture of egalitarianism and human dignity in the present environment; of an incomplete deculturation. Stresses are created which manifest themselves in the dissonant discourse and the disdainful regard of which Dr Hinds complains.
But the transport of the native religions and their transformation, was not limited to Africans. Indians also came here and, in a few years built mosques and mandirs. A spiritual people, the high moral values, after the initial confusion, was able to protect and preserve the community and to generate a new discourse as a reference point when moral arguments were made against the colonialists.
But, as with the Afro community at certain times and in certain locations, the community has had periods of social problems and intra-group crime as shocking as anything Bro Hughes can recount.
The community has a tendency to speak less and less of this period as it creates its own narratives of arrival and implantation, and emphasises its successes. Please note the discourse coming out of the group and of the newspaper Dr Hinds complains of.
Prof Bridget Brereton also reviewed a book in the Caribbean Quarterly. It is a compendium of articles entitled ‘Readings in Caribbean History and Culture: Breaking Ground.’ It contains, by the formidable Dr Raymond Ramcharitar, a piece of revisionist history that one recognises from his regular columns in the Trinidad Guardian. He is going counter to the general tendency to sanctify the arriving Indian immigrants and ignore the lies in the narrative of arrival and settlement as the Indian group forges a pedestal for itself in our communities.
Prof Brereton writes of Dr Ramcharitar’s piece: “This essay is genuinely revisionist: it proposes a new way of looking at the history of Trinidad (and by extension the region) which challenges the accepted narrative of heroic struggles against slavery, indenture and colonialism. Instead it insists that the heroic, the sordid …and the range of antisocial and destructive behaviours among the Indian population (domestic violence and ‘wife murders’ alcoholism, vicious family disputes, illicit sex, secret hindu sects…) are at least as important in understanding the behaviour of people in the past and in the present. Ramcharitar wants historians to incorporate this ‘underground history’ in their narratives.”
In sum, no one wishes to obscure and efface the problems we have in our communities. But the message has to be what Hughes I imagine set out to make… that the essence of us is a good and progressive people, and that the transient crime and social breakdown do not define us. There are wonderful stories of our success in Guyana (that go beyond the shovel-man tales of moving earth) that need to be told.
We need to go beyond facile descriptions and analyses to look at the historical development of settlement by each and all race groups in Guyana. But, finally, when we consider the dominance of this Afro-Guyanese group over the last century we remember Naipaul’s note on entering Guyana in his book the Middle Passage. He says he found Afro Guyanese in a mood of self-questioning. It is perhaps, our way. But I found on the internet a list of the obituary reports in the local newspapers for the last fifty years or so. The list of local notables is dominated by Creoles of mostly African stock. A prominent community must also, I suppose, generate its problems.
The point being made is that the discourse against which Dr Hinds complains is not dismissed by a public whimper, a complaint, but by the deployment of the instruments at our command, brains and knowledge.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
