Dear Editor,
I learn of scores of buildings in the city alone earmarked for demolition, to be erased from landscape and memory. I wonder. I wonder what has happened to the Guyanese Way. Where is the Guyanese Dream? And I wonder was there any of either the way or the dream that was unique and the prided monopoly of this society.
The way today is overwhelmingly negative, with fading fragile droplets of hope interwoven in a dull, dreary tapestry of disappointment. On the surface, there is the gloss of energy, hustle, and complacency among those who believe that they won, while resignation reigns in the midst of the minds of those who feel only loss. Just below lives the real story of what is truly the Guyanese Way: haphazard tension, mutual suspicion, irreversible distrust, hidden hostility, and cemented separateness. There is the recognized crying need to coalesce and leverage and build; but footsteps entangle, mentalities clash, visions blur, and the old way continues along the same deformed and degraded paths always trodden.
The abandoned derelict buildings are about to go down into a void. In some existential way, they represent the unformed, unfulfilled, unhappy state of this state. It is that even as things stand up, go up, and look up, they point downward with the same abandoned emptiness, the tawdry dereliction of responsibility, of pride of place, and of priorities. It is that the Guyanese way has come to encapsulate and encircle the corrupt and corruptible, and the deplorable and dishonourable in broad sweeping, entrapping waves.
A foundation of growing and vision, of honour and ethics and commitment of the soul is called for; the response is an open palm, followed by a concealed deposit slip, many such slips. Such is the character of success, the passage of a foot over the threshold, a rubbing of shoulders with the players and powers, the guarantee of acceptance and movement. It was not always this way.
There were villages and enclaves; people cared. They were careless, yet careful about colour. They cared enough to reach, to touch, to instil, to discipline, to reconfigure, and to channel along the straight and narrow. The progress of one was the sweet palpable success of all; and celebrated, too. Oh, they voted for Burnham and they voted for Jagan. Yet there was a certain fluidity of mentality, and not the hard cold rigidity of now, that inflexible bitter steel of modern democracy, Guyanese style.
Thus the physical apparitions and wooden monstrosities abandoned as the wake of fleeing refugee detritus come down today, and point some more to the fissures and chasms deep in the bowels. Whither hope? Whence trust? Where are belief and outlook and faith?
There is fate though; and it is inextricably bound up with that irrepressible internal stirring, that call: Go west, young man! That would be Duke Street first; and then north to the unfamiliar intimidating jungle of civilization, promise, and possible potential realized. This is the Guyanese Dream at the core (a byproduct of the Guyanese way), a stake in the heart of a nation that beats for a distant imagined love. All prefer the agony of being jilted, of losing out, if only to shake the dust from a place and way long disparaged, long denied for its motherhood and coddling embrace.
To be an alien is better, richer, sweeter. There is the willingness to make any sacrifice, to dedicate to overcome limitations and circumstances elsewhere, always elsewhere. In large part, this is the Guyanese Dream, whether graduates of learning or of the gutter, for most of the long dark night, and all of the desultory days. It is an ongoing dream; ebbing then, now regaining the impetus of tensed corded sinew. It is time to go. It is time to devote to carving something out of nothing. Except that it is over there, not here. Hence there are the abandoned buildings, the empty houses, the deserted habitats all over the city and then beyond.
Right now Guyana is holding territory; it might as well be the 51st state of the Union. A hundred years post 1899, the Monroe Doctrine takes on new significance. Remember the oil, and all will be well. The Guyanese Way and the Guyanese Dream conspire to denude of the essence, the intangibles, and the will to stand proudly upright, to reach deep within to develop, to decorate, and to display the best that yearns to be discovered.
And so there is the untold poignancy of the mental abandonment and spiritual distancing. Just like those buildings about to taste the dust. All of this testifies to trust, now tattered, always tortured, rarely tried, once more tumbled into the yawning abyss.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
