Guyana Caribbean Politics

Feature Address at the Queen's College Grand Assembly Re-union,
Georgetown, Guyana, October 2009

By Rupert Roopnaraine

It was with much trepidation that I agreed to step into the breach after our esteemed teacher and friend to a generation of stellar historians, Bobby Moore, did not find it possible to come. My trepidation had everything to do with deciding on the tone and topic of today’s address.

Let me begin with the temptations I have chosen to avoid: there was first of all the temptation of nostalgia and reminiscence, an understandably strong temptation now that so many of us are in each other’s presence after so many decades of separation. And perhaps for the last time, as mortality takes its toll. But there will be time enough for old talk and reminiscence over the next few days. Then there was the temptation of lamentation: that the QC of today is not our QC of yesterday. Because of course it isn’t. Any more than the Guyana of today is the Guyana of yesterday. The last temptation, and the one I was most determined to avoid, was to use this forum for a partisan political presentation.

Instead, I have chosen to revisit that school of cherished memory and to see what can be extracted from the traditions that nourished it and that may be of value to the school and the country of today. In speaking of those traditions, I will not dwell on the obvious: the cultivation of academic discipline and the striving after excellence, the athletic prowess at the highest levels, the rich variety of cultural and extra-curricular activities. The point has been sufficiently made, most recently in the Stabroek News Editorial of last Friday, that we of the generation of the 50s and 60s, were the beneficiaries of an educational legacy imbued with a colonial ethos and harking back to the public schools and grammar schools of England. “The bad old days of the anti-colonial creed were arguably, in many respects, the good old days for many QC boys of that era.” I had, on a previous occasion in this very auditorium, paid some attention to this issue. I made the observation that though I, like many of us, might not have recognized it at the time, I did later come to understand how much of our experience in and out of the classroom was being shaped by the ideology of the Victorian Public School.

From early on we were instilled with the sense of responsibility to the traditions to which we were now heirs, traditions of scholarship in the classroom, prowess on the field of sports, and leadership within the group. The programme was clear: as the cream of the crop, we were to be trained to take up our rightful place in the middle and upper echelons of the colonial hierarchy. We were the last of the colonially educated generations, the product of empire for the service of empire. The extent to which we would be able to retain, build on and deepen the best of the learned values while jettisoning what was oppressive and backward-looking was to be the supreme test of my own generation. Sad to say, it was not a test that many who went on to assume positions of leadership in the society managed to pass. On the contrary, too many were seduced by the habits of authoritarianism and hierarchical privilege, blinkered in their lack of concern for the poor and the powerless.

George Lamming put it this way when, in writing of Walter Rodney, he says: “the school became the most accessible means of rescuing their offspring from the enslavement of estate labour. But what began as a necessary strategy of self-emancipation would become, in our time, a major obstacle to national liberation. For the mystique of the educated one has proved to be a mystifying influence onthe Guyanese and West Indian masses throughout the process of decolonization. It has been one of the permanent features of the imperial experiment. Education was a means of escape from the realities of labour, a continuing flight from the foundations of society. To grow up was to grow away. Cultural mperialism is not an empty or evasive phrase. It is the process and effect of a tutelage that has clung to the ex-colonial like his skin. It is the supreme distinction of Walter Rodney that he had initiated in his personal and professional life a decisive break with the tradition he had been trained to serve.” I argued then that what was missing from Lamming’s insightful analysis was that along with the tradition we were being trained to serve, or even within it, we also extracted, those of us who were so inclined, the value and techniques and tools of contestation and critical thinking and, in the best instances, the moral basis of private and public action.

Out of all this, I have chosen today to dwell on values not often enough celebrated and perhaps somewhat more difficult to measure: the values of sharing, solidarity and togetherness, values that survived and persisted in the midst of and in spite of the colonial deformations. It has been argued, quite persuasively I believe, that these values were rooted in our ancestral past. They had survived slavery and indenture and the overlay of Northern and Western value systems we were being taught to revere, with their enthronement of the individual and their devaluation of community.

I believe that when we come together as we have done this week, these are the unacknowledged values that bind us and draw us into communion. The turmoil and convulsions of the 60s when Guyana exploded in an orgy of blood-letting and communal violence were the most deadly assault on these values, achieving in a few short years what not even slavery and indenture and the colonial oppression had succeeded in doing. Instead of the green shoots of sharing, solidarity and togetherness, toxic pools of malignity widening and deepening drop by drop. And over the years the slow drip has continued, poisoning our relations and blighting our development.

The recent unwelcome arrival of organized narcotics related crime spawned rival armed gangs and let loose a torrent of gun violence on all sides. The welcome respite these last few years from the surges of violence that followed the infamous Mashramani jailbreak of 2002 is no cause for complacency. Guyana has been deeply traumatized by the spree of killings. Families have been shattered, communities drawn in on themselves, remembering the worst and fearing the worst. There is little doubt that atrocities like the Lusignan massacre of January 2008 feed into the remembered history of the Indian community, reinforcing and renewing the earlier trauma of the 60s, a collective memory that shaped their identity over the following generations. The extra-judicial and vigilante gunning down of scores of African young men contributed to a sense of a cycle of violence and counter-violence, blood for blood, triggering the other collective memory and its own trauma.

I have chosen to invoke this web of values, frail as it was, because I believe that there is no greater nor more urgent task confronting us today in our troubled, tormented country – and ours is not the only or even the worst of the fatally riven places of the world -- than the overcoming of the accumulated bitterness and fears of the past, the slow and deadly drip that if left unchecked will continue to poison the present and the future. What we require is what John Paul Lederach, in an inspiring book on the building of peace, The Moral Imagination, calls “constructive social change” which he defines as the pursuit of moving relationships from those defined by fear, mutual recrimination, and violence toward those characterized by love, mutual respect, and proactive engagement.

“Constructive social change seeks to change the flow of human interaction in social conflict from cycles of destructive relational violence toward cycles of relational dignity and respectful engagement. The flows of fear destroy. The flows of love edify. That is the challenge: how to move from that which destroys to that which builds.”

It is my belief, and I am not alone in this belief, that if we are to create space for our citizens, within and outside our borders, to come together and work to construct the free and open society built on the fundamental values of liberty, equality and justice and where no citizen shall be enslaved by poverty and ignorance, we must set our face resolutely against the easy reflexes of suspicion, distrust, revenge and recrimination. But we must do more. We must embrace reconciliation and aspire to a higher humanity.

In this regard no-one has been a greater inspiration for our time than the titanic Nelson Mandela, the apostle of reconciliation. It is universally recognized that the central fact of Mandela’s life is his extraordinary humanity. In South Africa they call this ubuntu, a sense that one’s uniqueness on earth is the quality of humanity one extends to others. Mandela was not the first to embrace this life affirming principle. Born on the second day of this month of October 140 years ago, the luminous Mahatma Gandhi, in his teachings and practice, summoned us to the highest ideals of human behaviour. All of Gandhi's campaigns of nonviolence were underpinned by a hunger for reconciliation, for the cultivation of friendship with his opponent. And as we know, he was murdered for not hating enough.

Closer home, we are meeting today in the last week of October, almost 26 years to the day, when our Caribbean suffered its greatest trauma of modern times as the Grenadian revolution self-destructed in a storm of violence and murder that opened the way to the invasion by the United States armed forces. A few weeks ago, the last of those held responsible for the murder of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and his colleagues were released after 26 years in prison. Their release was not uncontroversial.

More than a year before their release, on New Year’s Day 2008, Nadia Bishop, the daughter of Maurice Bishop, issued her remarkable call for reconciliation to the people of Grenada. Nadia Bishop’s words should be etched in stone and committed to memory by the entire political class of the Caribbean and particularly of Guyana.

“…pain does not justify staying in pain. I don't mean to imply that our individual stories are invalid, or that we should diminish our personal experience, but we have focused on our stories of loss for so long that we must let them go if we are truly to embrace reconciliation…..

Let us from this day forward tell a new story about our people. Let us tell a story of forgiveness, of reconciliation, of renewed purpose, of renewed faith, of renewed hope…

We are too small a nation to continue this way.

We have focused for the past 24 years on our differences. Let us focus on the similarities at the core of our humanity. We all say we want world peace. We see so clearly that Israelis and Palestinians must come together in order to achieve peace and stability. We see so clearly what needs to be done in Darfur with warring factions, but do we see the need to speak with a Coardite if we are a Bishop supporter? Do we see the need to speak with a Bishop supporter if we are a former detainee?

I suggest that it is time that we see the need. We must reach out to each other.

Let us be examples of peace in the world. If we can't find common ground with our brothers and sisters here in our own country, why do we expect peace to exist anywhere else in the world? Let each of us individually this year BE the change that we want to see in the world. “

Mervyn Claxton, the former head of UNESCO’s anti-apartheid programme, reflecting on Nadia Bishop’s summons to her Grenadian sisters and brothers to ahigher humanity, has written that whether she knew it or not, Nadia’s call for unconditional forgiveness and reconciliation “appealed to deeply-entrenched values in at least two of our ancestral cultures.” Claxton made the point that traditional societies in Africa and India accorded great importance to such values which they saw as absolutely essential for maintaining social harmony and promoting solidarity in their multicultural societies. He argued that our ancestral values of forgiveness and reconciliation evolved within societies that were constructed on fundamental community values of integration, solidarity, and togetherness.

What I am suggesting, I hope not too fancifully, is that our generation at Queens was growing to adulthood in an environment that had not completely lost touch with those ancestral values that accorded great importance to such inclusive values as sharing, solidarity, and togetherness. If we can learn to revive these values and let them provide a foundation for that constructive social change, if we embrace the idea that the quality of our life is dependent on the quality of life of others, that “the well-being of our grand-children is directly tied to the well-being of our enemy’s grand-children,” then we will have opened a space for renewal and hope.

We can continue to let the worst of the past defeat the best of the present, or we can let the best of the past be marshaled against the worst of the present. Let our re-union be a celebration of the best and the healthiest of the values of the past. If we can transmit this experience that shaped us, I believe we would have fulfilled our generational duty to the present.

A new proposal to give meaning to Article 13 of the Guyana constitution has been put forward by Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, co-leader of the Working People's Alliance, He made the proposal in an address to the Georgetown Rotary Club's Annual World Understanding Day Dinner, held on Friday at Le Meridien Pegasus.

Roopnaraine, an ex-pert on the work of Guyana's national poet, addressed the topic "Understanding Martin Carter: his message for Guyanese." Roopnaraine's proposal is that the concept of shared governance should be put into practice at the level of the Neighbourhood Democratic Councils (NDCs) which could serve as a laboratory to test the concept of shared governance which people keep telling him cannot work.

If it works, Dr Roopnaraine said, "happy days are ahead of us. If it doesn't then we would need to try something else." What I know is this the situation cannot continue as it is. The deteriorations are severe. The outward exodus of Guyanese [has] increased. We are losing our friends and families on a daily basis.

And unless we arrest this degeneration and decline, I fear for the future." Dr Roopnaraine proposed the formal abolition of the 65 NDCs whose members were last elected in 1994 and which all agreed were dysfunctional and too large to be the smallest unit of local government. He said that they should be then be reconstituted as Interim Neighbourhood Democratic Councils (INDCs) to serve until the next local government elections were held. He did not foresee these elections being held within the next twelve months.

Roopnaraine said the INDCs should be co-chaired by persons from governing and opposition parties and the membership of these bodies should be constituted equally from the governing and opposition parties. His formulation is the governing party should nominate half the members and the opposition parties, the other half. He said that he made the proposal because of "all the talk of shared governance in the air and power-sharing and the dogmatic assertions by people that this can never work [and that] executive power-sharing is out because there is not enough trust and all of this."

"My suggestion is that we should try this at the lowest and least threatening level of governance. At the Neighbourhood Democratic Council no one is threatened.

Hopefully the parties will see the wisdom of putting into these bodies, not party activists but leaders of the community in their own right. People who know the villages and can be relied on to deal with housekeeping, which is what local government is all about." Roopnaraine argued that the advantage of his proposed composition of the council "is that the people who have been kept out of this debate while it has been raging in the letter columns of newspapers and in closed rooms... are the people themselves.

"My proposal really will bring the question of shared governance right there to the people among them and the NDCs could be for me a laboratory in which we can test this idea which people tell me cannot work."

He continued, "My own experience working with the political parties in and out of parliament is that when we sit together we can achieve things," and described what he called the obsession with the composition and numbers on the [parliamentary] management committees and select committees as so much humbug. "I think I have worked in every select committee in the House for the last several years and I have never known a single select committee to actually vote. There is no voting. We work by consensus."

Roopnaraine said that his proposal was in the mode of that quintessentially Carterian spirit which permeated Carter's articles in Thunder from March to September 1955, as he chronicled the impact of the split in the national movement in 1955. He cited an editorial of March 5, 1999 entitled "No Separate Salvation" which Carter, whom he described as an early evangelist of national unity and reconciliation, which warned about a sharp polarisation of the masses of the people as they huddle together in their separate racial camps.

He referred to another article where Carter had described British Guiana before 1950-53 and as it was after the split. Vitality, gaiety and charm of manner had characterised the pre-1950 period and the post-split period had been characterised as one in which "every man looks at you from the corner of his eyes.

When he speaks to you, he listens very carefully to what you say because he wants to know where you are coming from." Referring to a speech Carter gave at the Inter- American University of Puerto Rico, Roopnaraine again cited the poet's description of the dilemma the governing and ruling parties face. "The very structure and nature of both of the parties and their leadership, do not allow for a formulation of the problems of the people, on national terms. What they allow is the formulation of the problem in their own limited interests.

As I said, in such a situation objectivity flies away, and everyone interprets every problem in terms of his own self interest." He cited another quotation from the same passage of the same address, which could aptly describe Guyana 2003 as it did British Guiana in 1964. "Someone was saying recently that BG needs a consensus. I contend that there is a consensus, a consensus that there should be no consensus.

And I say that deliberately because the actions of the leaders and the followers provide enough evidence to support this argument." Another reference cited by Roopnaraine also set the search for a solution to the governance issue in perspective.

He cited Carter's conclusion he arrived at after the February 1962 upheavals in which he declared, "None of the groups in Guianese society is prepared to have another group ruling it. Not until each group is confident that no other group will rule will there be a real peace in this country.

Thus although recent and contemporary events manifest themselves in political terms, we should try to understand that they spring from even deeper social and psychological undercurrents." The Georgetown Rotary Club also presented awards to Banks DIH Chairman, Clifford Reis, the Gift Centre's Managing Director, Doris Lewis, and Medicare Pharmacies boss Jaimantie Bacchus for the excellence they had achieved in their vocational lives and the high ethical standards they maintained in their professional lives.

This year we commemorate the 5th anniversary of the death of the poet Martin Carter with a piece by Dr Rupert Roopnaraine who has been engaged in research on Martin Carter's papers with a view to publishing his key writings on language and poetics.

Five years on and he is more with us than ever. Which is a way of saying that his words continue to reverberate among us, and his images to haunt us. I had reason to think on these things only very recently when we gathered, his friends and comrades, and even his foes, at the Antigua Recreation Ground to bid farewell to Tim Hector. In the soft rain of a dull Antigua afternoon, speaker after speaker reached for poems to brighten the air around Tim's mahogany coffin, draped in the flag of the Antigua he loved. Prime Minister Lester Bird, a poet of at least this occasion, read his own. Others reached for Martin. From a solemn podium across from the Richie Richardson Stand, the much loved song of defiant farewell filled the air: Dear Comrade,/If it must be/you speak no more with me/nor smile no more with me/nor march no more with me/then let me take/a patience and a calm/for even now the greener leaf explodes/sun brightens stone/and all the river burns. Sometimes, the words burn with a special brightness, as they did that Antigua afternoon. At these times they seem to have been written yesterday, for just this comrade.

That day they were written for Tim. When words come to life in this way, fresh and bright with last night's dew, we are in the presence of a kind of magic of renewal. This is a good time to reach for Martin. The poems certainly, but not only the poems. Reach for the old Thunder editorials of the fifties, the newspaper articles of the sixties, or the speech he gave at the Inter-American University of Puerto Rico in 1964, at the height of the strife, on the â€œRace Crisis'. He concludes his analysis of the sociological and political dimensions of the crisis on this human note: In the past the people of British Guiana, between 1950, let us say, and 1953 were people with vitality, gaiety and charm of manner. Today, in British Guiana, every man looks at you from the corners of his eyes. When he speaks to you, he listens very carefully to what you say because he wants to know where you are coming from. This sort of thing leads to nightmares, nightmares that do not necessarily occur only in the night, but which haunt you even in the brightest glare of noon.

A nightmare that becomes actual in a pool of blood in a street in the city. This is the sort of life the people live in British Guiana today. Forty years on and the nightmares are more actual than ever, descending with every new pool of blood in the streets of the city and beyond. Five years ago, after he let out his œspontaneous howl'on learning of Martin's death, Tim Hector searched in vain for some mention of an event of such Caribbean importance: 'On Monday, he wrote, I turned on the radio hoping to hear something of Martin Carter. Nothing. Just nothing. Foolishly, and in a frenzy, I went to the TV hoping to find some appreciation of Martin Carter. I forgot that TV was not about us at all! ...But why was there nothing of Martin Carter on Radio and TV, about the most Caribbean of Caribbean poets?

Why? Why? We lay waste our own substance. Not much has fundamentally changed since that day in December 1997 when Martin took leave of us. We are as profligate as ever with what Tim called our substance. Though it is true to say that we in Guyana have always understood the importance of keeping him within arm's reach. A small critical industry is growing up around his work. The groundwork has been laid with 4 landmark publications: the 1997 Red Thread Edition of the Selected Poems, the Kyk-Over-Al memorial tribute of June 2000 (Nos.49/50), the pioneering work of Nigel Westmaas in assembling a collection of the prose writings (Kyk-Over-Al, No. 44), and the critical anthology edited by Stewart Brown, All are Involved: The Art of Martin Carter. There is more to do, more archival excavations to locate and capture the fugitive publications, written in the heat; perhaps more drafts and unpublished poems to be discovered. Hoping to add to this body of work, and with the kind assistance of a six-month Fellow-ship from UNESCO, I have been working my way through some of the papers Mar-tin left behind in Lamaha Street, intending a publication of his key writings on language and poetics. Most of this writing is unknown, though people have long known of his almost monastic devotion to the workings of language and the practice of poetry. It was Kwame Dawes who once wrote: Reading Carter talk about poetry reminds you that his fascination with the poetic process is almost an obsession.

From the evidence of the poetry notebooks, it was a fascination that persisted throughout Martin's creative life, leading him over the years into the most studied considerations of language and all its complex workings in a variety of cultural contexts, his net cast wide enough to catch the Sanskrit poem, Japanese haiku and the tonal structure of Yoruba poetry. In addition to the poetry notebooks that are the focus of my immediate attention, the Carter papers consist of correspondence with friends, colleagues, publishers and editors as well as official documents, including memoranda and other government publications. No attempt to understand our modern political and intellectual history will be complete without a careful study of this material. I have chosen to call them notebooks, though, except for 2 old diaries he entitled Brown Notebook One and Brown Notebook 2, most of the writings on poetry exist in old ledgers, on the inside and outside covers of file folders, on sheets of unused examination stock, the backs of greeting cards, and in all available space in the margins and pages of certain of the books he read, making them unreadable for future readers. Many pages are sequential; others follow each other in a kind of abandon. These latter are diagrammatic notes, a favourite method for organising the pursuit of an argument. Including the Brown Note-books, the material amounts to 1700-odd foolscap pages, some numbered, some not.

All but a dozen are closely handwritten. Mercifully, Martin Carter belonged to a generation of children who were taught to write. His handwriting is always legible, even when thoughts are sprinting ahead; then the pen flies across the page and it becomes looser, as dishevelled as his person, hair in the wind. Unscrambling what is at times a highly personalised code, especially the deciphering of the arguments by diagram, is to follow the tortuous logic of a riddle, a subject that excited his curiosity on several occasions over the years. There are three texts of sustained writing where a minimum of re-construction will be required - Lyric: a Sufficiency, Concerning Verse, and Excerpts and Commentaries on Eliot and Hough.

I began by culling the material down to 967 pages, assembling and organizing the selections into eighteen clusters or divisions. While the ordering of the divisions is at this stage somewhat arbitrary, the writings within each section cohere around particular subjects. A sample of the subjects that engaged him over the years will give some idea of the range and depth of this remarkable mind. Brown Notebook I, one of the eighteen divisions, contains 104 thematic sections. Among them, the following: On Poetics, Pluralistic logics, Tools of communication, Poetic power, Re. Autotelic & heterotelic; the model or the classic, Mental process of poetic power: function & structure & execution, On metaphor, House-slave syndrome, On criticism; what is a poem, Of mentors & models, Why time is the true critic, Caribbean art, The spiritual, Dante's circles of hell, Intersexuality, Interrupted rhythm, Expressive power, What is a great book, Form-structureâ€”feeling-emotion, The original artist, Language & self, Imagery, Craft, Politics of poetry and epistemology, Location, Expression and arousal, Production of voices, Source of the art work, Metaphor & epistemological impasse, and so on. It has been nourishing; this journey deep into Martin's thoughts on the things that mattered so deeply to him. I am thankful that he is so close at hand in this brutish season. It is a good time to reach for Martin.