The recent discussions by Freddie Kissoon, Nigel Westmaas, and Alissa Trotz in the Guyana press on political murders in Guyana’s troubled history since the 1960s bring to mind Martin Carter’s powerfully evocative poem, After One Year, published in 1964:
After today, how shall I speak with you?
Those miseries I know you cultivate
are mine as well as yours, or do you think
the impartial bullock cares whose land is ploughed.
Carter’s pregnant question – After today, how shall I speak with you? – is a question that every Guyanese alive during the bloody years of 1962-1964 has had to confront in attempting to make sense of the chaos that was unleashed during those dreadful years. Our political leaders have had no difficulty since in speaking to each other across the boundaries of the political/racial divide that became seared into the Guyanese psyche as a result of the descent into communal violence and targeted murders. The common people have understood and internalized the shared miseries even as the political leadership has used the rhetoric of ethnic mobilization as the chloroform to still the torments of memory and to sanitize their individual and partisan histories.
It is within this context that Guyana needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission – a way of giving people a chance to speak outside of the agencies of the state and the political parties that have for too long shaped Guyanese political discourse. Guyana needs to create an alternative space for people to make sense of the lives they lead or have led. It is striking that both the PNC and the PPP have assumed a vested interest in crippling the University of Guyana as one alternative space for public discussion that is beyond the control of the political directorate. The work of the Guyanese intellectual diaspora in opening Guyana’s history to wider discussion is part of the long-term process of creating an alternative space for Guyanese life beyond the limits of ethnic polarization. Debates within the diaspora are providing breathing room since we are not immediately invested in shaping politics and policy within Guyana.
However, for people inside of Guyana, there is an urgency to the issue of creating alternative intellectual space outside of the state and the political parties. After 50 years of governance, starting in 1957, by either the PPP or the PNC, what does Guyana have to show as a result of the search for freedom from British colonial rule? Can we suggest an alternative to Carter’s pithy observation:
So jail me quickly, clang the illiterate door
if freedom writes no happier alphabet.
The Guyanese search for freedom was derailed after 1957 by a bitter election campaign that pitted the two factions of the PPP against each other and which paved the way for the bloody events of 1962-1964. There are people who are still alive who were witnesses to, and participants in the events of that critical period and they should be encouraged to talk about that period by way of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As minor or key actors, they can help the society to hear the voices of age, and hopefully, regret, for the missed opportunities to create a past with which the society can reconcile itself in seeking a viable future. It is not a sanitized past that is being suggested, but one in which people who were not the principal players can help us to understand the ego and ambition of those who drove the society to the brink of self-immolation. It is also important for many who suffered the personal tragedies of that period to have some sense of closure where possible in order to suture the open wounds of betrayal and loss.
In the years since 1964, the tradition of targeted political murder has been kept alive and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission can help the society to navigate the tortuous path that has led Guyana into that cul-de-sac. Carter’s poem again provides us with a way to think about the current Guyanese predicament:
Men murder men, as men must murder men,
to build their shining governments of the damned.
For contemporary Guyana to rise above the legacies of the past fifty years, the society must have a space to mourn its losses, to give voice to its grief, and to make a plea for reconciliation. More important, it will be important for the voices of civil society within Guyana to shape that space beyond the political process and it may be useful for the various religious communities to jointly consider sponsoring a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The search for national redemption and national reconciliation has eluded the political class, and it is perhaps time to recognize that we have moved beyond Caesar’s realm.
