Stabroek News introduces a weekly column by journalist and former SN reporter, Shaun Michael Samaroo. Mr Samaroo writes full time as a novelist and has a keen interest in the Guyana media landscape. He has over 21 years of experience in the media here and in Canada
Walk with ears wide open listening to the sounds that fill our space. Listen. Listen to the talk, hear the blaring speakers vomiting ugly rhythms passed off as music, much of it interspersed with graphic swearing or incomprehensible language. Walk downtown Georgetown – by Demico. Through the Stabroek Market. Around Bourda Market . By the bus parks. Sounds harsh, hard and heavy pound our eardrums with the rat-a-tat of a brutal social war: a war of words.
Talk deteriorates in the land. What passes for conversation, for talk, in any average social setting across Guyana, reflects a socially devastated society. The concept of society involves in a profound way the use of language. Society matures into sophisticated classiness, into a noble, cultured people, as its language evolves and develops. A society stands on the solid foundation of its linguistic structure.
Listen to the sounds in public places all over this nation. People talk with such harsh, hard, heavy pounding words to each other.
Even the mentally-challenged folks who inhabit the streets of this capital city talk to themselves with such brutal force that listening to a mad monologue on the sidewalk of Parliament Buildings is like experiencing a war zone. Inside Parliament? The talk deteriorates even further most times.
To Parliamentarians, I say: listen. Stop at the gate, hop out of your car, or roll the window down, and listen. Listen to the rants and raves that fill the space of this city with harsh, hard, heavy, nervous screams.
Members of Parliament drive in and out of the tall iron gates of the National Assembly, seemingly oblivious to the noisy chaos on the streets. Don’t they see? Don’t they feel? Don’t they hear? Are they numb to the social devastation that pushes so many people to become crazy, insane with the pressure of existence in Georgetown? Are they deaf to this silent social scream of awful noise that sinks so many into the society’s mental-health quagmire?
This war of words that defines the public social space in Guyana literally falls on deaf ears. V.S. Naipaul wrote elegant thoughts concerning ‘ways of looking and feeling’, in his autobiographical “A People’s Writer: Ways Of Looking And Feeling”. Naipaul wrote of his father’s life in Trinidad, and also his own encounter with India.
The Nobel Prize winning English writer from Trinidad concluded that, faced with a devastated social landscape, people become numb, shutting out the terribleness of their existence. People shut down their sense organs to shut out the noise of the crumbling devastation of the social space around them. People just are not conscious of the social chaos. Like the proverbial frog in the pot, such a society slowly boils over into social chaos.
So not even the Members of Parliament in Georgetown hear the cries on the streets anymore. It all falls on deaf ears. The society, like the frog in his cozy pot of slowly boiling water, becomes gradually numb to the sights of ugly garbage heaps on street corners and mangy stray dogs devouring rotten rats on parapets and filthy water flowing over sidewalks green with sewage; numb to the smell of stink air that fills the atmosphere with nauseous nastiness; deaf to the war of words: unfeeling that the society is crumbling at its social foundation. Walk the streets and listen.
Naipaul’s theme in his book rings with a sad, forlorn resignation, as if this great author has come to the end of a road and found no way to go forward.
This mood is exactly the underlying rhythm that numbs people into a state of unfeelingness, of noisy resignation to their hard, daily existence.
How then should we live?
We must learn to see, to listen, to feel, to smell and act. Listen to the way people talk in public places, and in many – too many – homes, where parents verbally brutalize their children, where school kids in too many schools wage war on each other in a constant social fight.
We must learn to stand still and listen, to hear that silent social scream that penetrates into the soul as a deep cry for help. If we hear the cry, we can learn to reach out. We cannot learn compassion and care as a people unless we learn to listen, to see, to feel: to be conscious of the state of our society, as expressed in the assault on our physical senses.
In the 18 years since free and fair elections were achieved, a new generation grew up, came into being. And this generation, even as it prepares to take over leadership in the society within a decade or two, stands numb, forlorn, resigned and unable to cultivate a sensitive conscience. A sensitive conscience flows from a memory in the society – a memory of justice, of equal economic opportunity, of a just society.
We should live to cultivate in our kids and young people this idea of a sensitive conscience: we should generate a quest in them for social justness, for compassion and care for people, for less material pigheadedness.
A sensitive conscience means we would walk the streets of our communities and reach out with care to shape our public places into social spaces where our talk would be soothing, full of aesthetic wonder – where we would enjoy conversations that cultivate sound ideas, workable solutions to society’s challenges, and great initiatives to become a people of nobleness – cultured, well-mannered and full of grace.
Wake up and be conscious that the society is caught in the trap of a war of words. Listen to the crumbling linguistic structure of the land. For out of the sensitivity that this conscious awareness fosters, a sensitive social conscience would stir the will to act.
And in action against the hard, harsh, heavy words of a socially devastated people, that mood of forlorn resignation would rise to the nobleness of a nice-talking society.
Walk with the senses, the conscience and the feelings and mind open to the possibilities of life in all its miracles and wonders. Do not shut down. Be conscious. Walk with ears wide open to cultivate a sensitive social conscience.
