Dear Editor,
I refer to your Editorial, `Just words?’ (SN 2-27-22) wherein you critiqued President Ali’s speech at the Republic Day Flag raising ceremony by claiming, “There was too the mystifying question of character, and what makes us uniquely Guyanese. We should be known, the President said, as a people who espouse freedom, democracy and rule of law, equity and fairness. It might be remarked that while these values are eminently desirable, they would not make us ‘uniquely Guyanese’”.
I read this as a restatement of David de Caires’ claim from 2001 that I deconstructed then, and repeated in my letter, “We have to shift our focus of organising our societies away from wiping out differences towards celebrating differences” (SN 2-21-22). David had posited in a speech on “Problems in nation building” that “nation building” was a process (or an end) which would address the ethnic problems he identified. He asserted unequivocally that while Guyana is a “state”, “we are not yet a nation”. His “yet”, I said, joined him with those who conflate or would conflate the concepts of “nation” and “State” as I believe this editorial writer is also doing. I repeat my caution: “this is an extremely dangerous notion since it is this conflation which has been one of the causes of ethnic conflict.” The “solution” was part of the problem.
The ideal of a “nation-state” is a modern construct and evolved in a Western Europe that had been swept by a Christianity that insisted that there is only one set of beliefs. In the secularizing wave after the 17th century, the ideal posited was the citizens of a state should now share the same culture. It reached its apogee in 19th century Western Europe as a means of defusing class tensions during the rise of capitalism. But the “one people” national ideal was hollow not only because the inequalities became greater. Cultural diversity, it was seen, can only be eradicated either by physical force or hegemonic forces that damaged the ones “othered” as “natives” in the colonial and “post colonial” era. Sadly, the economic inequalities were now made coincident with racial, epistemological and cultural hierarchies and inequalities.
I proposed that we had to address the tensions arising out of inequalities and differences by other mechanisms than the state seeking to blend everyone into some melange of what will always be a particular group’s conception of “culture”. It was suggested that we “shift our focus of organising our societies away from wiping out differences towards celebrating differences. The question, therefore, is not one of “nation building”, but of organising on the principles of autonomy and differences. We suggested the construction of a national outlook within what we labelled “Project Democracy” – the creation of conditions wherein we are all treated as one, equally, by the state.”
We seemed to have anticipated the editorial writer’s objections when we said, “Equality of opportunity; human rights, encouragement, of diversities, due process; justice and fair play and rule of law may seem dry compared to the warmth of the blood ties of some “one nation”, but they can engender the unity of public purpose and the recognition of individual worth wherein we can be proud of our common citizenship. Citizenship of Guyana has to become something that has concrete meaning to all of us.
“For Guyana, then, our ethnicities would be defined outside our “Guyaneseness” and to be African-Guyanese, Amerindian-Guyanese or Indian-Guyanese etc would not be contradictory in any sense. The first part of our identity would be specific, while the latter universalistic. The “nation” would now be a heterogenous space that ethnically imagined communities can live in and even voluntarily share as we increasingly do with foods. To be Guyanese would be to share moral precepts – norms, values and attitudes – rather than state-imposed shared cultural experience and practice”.
It is the unequal treatment by the state of its citizens that precipitates mobilization along ethnic lines when there are what have been called “horizontal inequalities”. Let us accept this formulation, which should remove the bases of the politicization of ethnic identity.
Sincerely,
Ravi Dev
