Last week, in a column entitled ‘Knowing the Fine Fine,’ I made the point that to know any society, including this one, you had to remain imbedded in it for a long time, and that therefore when resident Guyanese tell expatriate Guyanese that they “don’t understand Guyana,” the comment is accurate. To truly know a society, to gather in all the nuances, and all the background information, to know all the forces and counter-forces, including the changes, you have to be there in that place continuously.
The column stirred some wonderful public responses, and some equally wonderful private ones, and while I don’t often respond to comments, there was much percolation in those letters, and I found myself drawn to respond to some of them.
In that process, however, it struck me very quickly that many of the persons responding to the column had widened the discussion. My point had been that you needed to live here steady, as Guyanese say, to really understand things, but many of the letter writers went past that to accuse us of an inability to prioritize, of a lack of initiative, of flaws in our approaches, of a disposition to accept sloth and disorder, etc. All interesting topics, perhaps, but how did they get into the conversation?
Today, reflecting on all the back and forth with the commentators (Chan, Satish, Griffith, Roman, Cummins, Asif, etc) a couple things are worth noting: One is that while people are sometimes persuaded by something you say or raise, they will generally go where they want to go. In this case, of all the several comments I received from the ‘Knowing the Fine Fine’ column, only one was about what I had written: the impediment to understanding in the diaspora. Every other comment, local or overseas, went straight to the question of solutions to our problems. I thought I was leading them into one discussion; they turned their attention to a wider one.
That’s fine. I love it when a column stirs gaff or even irritation; when people use their brains and challenge; that’s when we’re learning, including me. Not enough of that is going on in GT; too much palin’ in the way. I say keep the gaff going, front or back. I love it. My point was only that to truly understand the problems here you have to live here; just as you cannot possibly understand New York enough to posit solutions to its problems without living there for some time. That’s it; nothing more. My point was not about the conditions in Guyana and why and how and so on. (Somebody said I should write a song about it. I said, “That’s not a song; that’s an opera.”)
Secondly, there is a wider engagement revealed by these wider comments. There was this assertion (it is frequently presented in letters to the editor) that people in Guyana are indifferent to the problems, don’t know how to prioritize, that we look for reasons not to get things done, and so on. Such writers are seriously misinterpreting a behaviour, and their positions confirm the point of my column last week: the persons contending that we are unconcerned, lazy, rudderless, etc, clearly don’t understand their own people very well.
Most of the people I know here are, in fact, very concerned – they want to see things get better; they hate the irregularities and the travails; they fume at the inefficiencies and inconsistencies – but to continue living with the continuing problems they have adopted the classic human escapes (denial, distraction, humour, opiates) that help us to cope. In effect, what appears to be withdrawal is a necessary coping mechanism.
The frequency and sometimes the ferocity (I use that word deliberately) of the problems are such that daily confrontation would wear you down. Sometimes you resort to tuning them out. As I write this, in Demerara, the homes of our West Bank and West Coast brethren are under several feet of water – not the result of a flood as in Pakistan; nor from a dam bursting as in China; not due to choked rivers as in Indonesia, but simply the result of a rising tide from the ocean, and exceptional hinterland rains, overtopping the river’s banks. What do we do about that?
What do we do about our women being beaten and murdered; about the dishonesty in public servants and to irregularities in public contracts? What do we do about the litter, and the cocaine smugglers? What do we do about the bewildering political machinations? The charge that we have abdicated is not legitimate. It is rather that many people have become inured to, even numbed by these things. The scale and the push of the problems are such that we feel, to a large degree, that protestations don’t seem to make a difference; the newspapers are full of the daily trauma. In simple words, we don’t know what to do about it. It’s a phrase that comes to my ears in this country as often as the sound of the six o’clock bee.
In case you’re about to tell me what we should do, let me remind you that this is not a Guyanese anomaly; it is a worldwide condition. In almost every place I visit, or the ones I read about, I hear the same litany of crime, pollution, corruption, violence, etc, and I hear in those people, as well, the frustration in their inability to extirpate these things.
Why in the very USA where a writer accuses Guyanese of malaise for not solving our problems, can they not solve the cocaine demand that is driving the drug trade, or the dilemma of the illegal immigrant, or the ghettos in American cities? Look at the Israel/Arab conflict; with the best brains and the most money in the world going at that problem for 62 years, it remains a dilemma. Consider the Pakistan/Indian killings; radical Muslim extremism; Christian myopia; Haitian poverty; the gun culture of so many countries; drug cultures across Europe – the list would cover pages.
On television last week, I saw a woman in the Middle East, after the recent killings, looking at the camera, tears on her cheeks, spreading her hands in despair. You could almost hear the words she didn’t speak, “I don’t know what to do.” In scene after scene here, you can hear the same bewilderment expressed.
It’s a daunting scenario, but also worth noting from the comments published is that ray of hope we can lean on. It came in an email from someone named Roman who said, “In GT we have to take stock to change. Each Guyanese has to make that improvement within themselves; we all have to start that self-development process.”
I will give you that it is a slim hope, perhaps the only hope, but hope it is – the individual effort to try and hold the line in the space where one has influence; each of us can at least do that.
Finally – and this is where this discourse started out – in both the public and private arenas, we have to keep these discussions going. Even when the voices are acidic, even when fools are on the platform, even when nonsense is being paraded, at least we are talking to or with one another. When we stop talking, then doomsday is about to dawn.
Jesse Jackson says, “Keep hope alive.” I say, “Keep the gaff going.” Different words, same idea.
