Janice Rogers is a graduate of the Creative Writing programme at Humber College. She is a mother and grandmother who has celebrated five Guyanese Christmases in Toronto.
By Janice Rogers
When you coming home? You should really come home for Christmas. Nothing like a Christmas in GT! These are words I’ve heard often during my five years living in what I’ve come to realize as a self imposed exile from my country. It is true, there’s nothing like Christmas in Guyana. We Guyanese know how to be merry, how to deliberately toss aside our troubles and differences, stretching meagre budgets as everyone joins in celebrating this season. Offices close early, staff parties are easily ‘poped’, everybody “got a lime,” people who haven’t seen the inside of a church all year attend midnight mass on Christmas Eve before heading out to celebrate the holiday. The energy and excitement begin to build in the air starting from around mid-November, with the sounds of Christmas carols playing on the radio and the proliferation of Christmas paraphernalia crammed into small stores and stacked high on the downtown pavements. In a nation of diverse religions, Merry Christmas, Happy Diwali and Happy Eid, are greetings easily exchanged between people from all backgrounds, different from Canada where cumbersome rules of political correctness dictate that there be no reference to any religious holiday.
I would smile in agreement, nothing like a GT Christmas, deftly avoiding the question of when, repressing the feelings of anxiety that flicker in my belly, a visceral reaction at the thought of returning to the land that was my home for thirty-eight years. I have a connection to my country not unlike that of a child yearning for the love and acknowledgment of a dysfunctional parent. I start each day by reading the Stabroek News online immediately after reading the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, moved to tears sometimes by the stories of profound injustices and the brutal violence that women and girls continue to face daily in Guyana, unsupported and unprotected by the law simply because we are female.
This is not to say that women and girls do not suffer injustices outside of Guyana, but the reality is that in other countries we are protected by laws that are actually enforced in order to minimize the volume and viciousness of these incidents of abuse.
Many women in Guyana remain in violent and abusive marriages because to leave requires that they abandon their homes and possessions, sometimes their children, until they can prove in a court of law that they are entitled to that which they have worked for and contributed to. This is a process that could take many years, as court cases are entangled in knots of bureaucratic tape and women are forced into the humiliating position of having to stand up in court to not only defend their reputations and character, but to prove that they actually did contribute and to detail the extent of their contributions. How many men in Guyana have had to leave their homes and wait years for the courts to rule on a division of assets, or spousal support in those cases where they do not have an income independent of their partners? Many women choose to walk away in exhaustion and defeat at the futility of going to court time after time after time only to be rewarded with a new date for a hearing. It seems only fair that the dissolution of any partnership would result in an equitable distribution of assets created during that partnership. Fair however, is not a word that applies to the treatment of women who wish to end their marriages and the only options left are to “cut and run” or “stay and bun.” Without the tools and resources to sustain themselves, many of my sisters have no choice but to “stay and bun.”
This enrages me and I realize that I must reconcile these emotions if I am to ever return to Guyana, a country where my own daughter, a brilliant and accomplished young woman, would have been forced to discontinue her studies because she was pregnant at seventeen, simply because she is female. I think of the thoughtfulness and sensitivity with which my daughter’s pregnancy was accommodated in Ontario by her high school principal and teachers to ensure that she completed her high school education, allowing her to gain acceptance into university. There was never a question that she should discontinue her education. This is not to say that individuals may not have had their personal prejudices against teenage, pregnant, immigrant, racialized women in Canada, but the law dictates the right to an education and that is the right of every person – male, female, pregnant, disabled, Christian, homosexual, refugee, scion, or other. Personal judgments must be kept in check as institutions are bound to administer their services fairly. I think of my daughter, strong mother of an almost four-year-old whose daycare costs are completely subsidised by the city of Toronto as long as she remains a student. She’s now on the cusp of graduating from university with double honours degrees in Political Science and Latin American and Caribbean Studies and getting ready to begin post graduate studies in September 2010 and I am filled with gratitude that she was a pregnant teenager in Canada and not in Guyana, her home to which she remains firmly attached. Ironically, because of her scholarly interests and attachment to the country of her birth where her pregnancy would have marked her with a scarlet F for Failure, she will more than likely use her skills and education to serve Guyana.
I read the Stabroek News and weep for my young sisters who are forced to return from Cuba in shame and disgrace if they get pregnant during their studies abroad, their scholarships and future hopes vindictively snatched back from them as punishment for their infractions by a system that dooms them to a life of financial dependence on others, crippling their ability to contribute to the development of themselves and their country. In December, Kaieteur News reported that Minister of Public Service Jennifer Westford confirmed that pregnant students will no longer be allowed to continue the scholarship programme. Moreover, the double standard entailed by such narrowness is clear. Young women do not become pregnant on their own, but they are the ones who are singled out and penalized. What about Guyanese male students who go to Cuba? Since they do not bear the physical signs of sexual activity, their education continues uninterrupted.
When you coming home? Come for Christmas man. There’s nothing like a GT Christmas. I struggle with my yearning for home as I think of the women in Guyana who survive assault only to be beaten down by a system that demands that they explain why, because for a woman to be assaulted she surely must have done something to invite or trigger it. I remember being attacked in Guyana by masked gunmen and having to go repeatedly to the police station in an attempt to give a statement – “come back 3 o’clock, the officer gone to lunch” – and I think of the young woman who successfully fought off an attacker at a bus stop in downtown Toronto and who when she phoned the police, saw them arrive at her home within minutes to take her statement and begin their investigation of the crime, all the while reassuring her that there was nothing she had done to provoke the incident.
It is unlikely that a man will ever stand at a bus stop anywhere in the world and have a woman attack and attempt to force herself on him sexually, so this is clearly a crime based on gender. In Guyana however, this issue is further compounded by the fact that the woman would be forced to defend herself even to the police when reporting the incident, as they seek to assign some degree of blame to the victim.
Girl, why you don’t come home for Christmas? Nothing like a Christmas in Guyana!
I hear the words and I hope. Sadly, reading the newspapers daily, I no longer hope that the situation will change. Instead, I hope that I will someday find the courage to return.
2010 maybe?
