Dear Editor,
Ian Mc Donald, in his Sunday, Stabroek News Column (11th June), wrote an extraordinarily perceptive, thoughtful and revealing assessment of self, captioned “The colour of one’s skin”. He wrote: “an amazing fact quickly begun to dawn on me. Thoroughly though I searched my memory all the way from childhood and youth in Trinidad and Antigua throughout my life in Guyana and much traveling in all the West Indies I could think of absolutely no occasion when I had experienced discrimination or even ill will because of the colour of my skin”. Ian was responding to a young black girl from the West Indies, born and living in England, who, as a minority, not surprisingly, had experienced just the opposite in a majority white community. Ian’s article struck me forcibly as he could almost have been speaking for me.
As a young Portuguese (white) boy, I was born in Guyana, left for Trinidad & Tobago with my parents at the age of 5 and went to school there until the age of 14 when I was packed off to an English boarding school, not to return home to Trinidad & Tobago until I was 20. Never once, in all those early years at school in Trinidad, in sport and as a Sea Scout, did I ever think of myself or did I ever have cause to think of myself nor was I treated by my friends as anyone ethnically or racially different.
The colour of my skin never became a matter of consideration. It was not until I arrived in England at school, though white, but with a foreign name and a strange English accent, that I was made to know that I was not exactly one of them, and proud to be known as a boy from the West Indies.
When I returned to Trinidad & Tobago and, eventually, Guyana, I was never once questioned as to the colour of my skin, not at work, not when I represented Guyana at rugby and at motor-racing, not until I became involved in politics. It was then when, suddenly, distinctions were made of the fact that I was not Indian nor African, but Portuguese.
But, even then, and now, I have never thought of myself as anything but Guyanese, not Portuguese Guyanese, just a Guyanese. Ian writes that he was made to “realize what a blessing all this is” that he came “to take for granted”, as I myself have done. It is a sad reflection, however, of the continuing state of our country that it has only been in the realm of politics that the question of where my ascendants came from originally and what I look like, has occasionally sought to define who and what I am.
This is, of course, precisely what continues to haunt our country to this day and was reflected, once again, in the results of the recently conducted Local Government Elections. It was, however, to their credit that the PPP/C had reached out, and, as a result, received support from voters who were not from their traditional Indian power base.
Let us hope that, finally, as a people we are coming to the realization that it is not the colour of our skin that matters when exercising our votes but the colour of our politics.
Sincerely,
Kit Nascimento
