Dear Editor,
In my letter, “We continue to live in a multiplicity of colonialities”, (SN 1-31-22) I cited your report on the new Atlantic Readers, which claimed they were intended to address our “cultural complexities… (and) demographic uniqueness”. I concluded that this “represent(ed) an ongoing attempt to eradicate debilitating traces of our colonial experience that were imposed during slavery, indentureship and its aftermath.” It seems not only was I wrong on the “decolonialisation” front but even on their own goal to address our “cultural complexities and demographic uniqueness.”
On decoloniality, I assumed incorrectly, that the new “Atlantic Readers” were in the tradition of efforts going back to the 1930s with the West Indian Readers. These were supposed to make our primary school students more au fait with our local realities than the “Royal Readers” used since the late 19th century. The latter’s Imperial mission to convince we natives of the necessity of the European “civilizing mission” was not even masked. We cried about the poor “Little Match Girl”, even as our children died like flies of malnutrition, malaria and overwork.
But the West Indian Readers were written by an English educator J.O. Cutteridge, who merely daubed on a patina of local colour that fooled no one. In 1963, a year after Trinidad’s Independence, Sparrow spoofed them better than any PhD dissertation with “Dan is the man”. By then, we had the “Caribbean Readers” that yours truly was weaned on. I learnt about the farmer Mr. Joe building a house with his spotless white shirt and his menagerie of animals. He was nothing like my Nana, however, who farmed at De Willem in grimy clothes and where I had to labour.
While we may criticize the PNC (and this writer has done so profusely) after independence, they at least self-consciously articulated a decolonial agenda in the school system that was inherited from the 1957-1964 PPP government. In the 1970’s, the “Rampat Family”, “A Happy Family” and Timehri Readers “Market Day” went further; not only in terms of cultural inclusivity but decoloniality in valorizing local Guyanese forms of knowledge. Colonization was nothing, if not epistemological, in imposing its hegemony. My children consumed these Readers in addition to the “Nelson’s New WI Readers” into the new millennium.
It was therefore quite shocking to read the critiques of the Atlantic Readers and then browse them on the MoE’s website. The illustrations are resplendent – as the Imperial Royal Readers were – with foreign fruits and vegetables along with blonde and red-haired ruddy-cheeked children. But our Indigenous Peoples are literally an afterthought through the artifice of a “visit to Lethem”. Why marginalize the practices, beliefs, cultures and unique identities of those whose stolen land we live on? At least the writer had learnt the poem “There was an Indian…” in pre-independence 1960, which he had deconstructed during the Passage of the Amerindian Act during the 8th Parliament.
In my previous letter, I quoted Anibal Quijano: “Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony.” I suggested it “should be especially relevant to academics in our local university” and asked, “How do we break out? The Atlantic Reader rather than the Royal Reader suffices?”
Clearly they don’t for our next generation now in Primary School. Back to the drawing board.
Sincerely,
Ravi Dev
