Dear Editor,
I thoroughly enjoyed Dave Martin’s excellent column, ‘The Black Watch time’ (SN, May 12), particularly the anecdotal history present therein, although I find myself in a qualified disagreement with his conclusion, “I don’t think we’re in that time now.”
In rereading much of Carter – whose words and personal interactions with whom are recalled with anecdotal fondness by several in the middle class – I continue to find an ironic and terrible parallel to our situation today.
For example, published in Kaie, in 1979 – the year of the murders of Ohene Koama and Father Bernard Darke, and a year before the assassination of Walter Rodney – Carter published the poem, ‘Show Me a Little Freedom,’ the most prescient literary commentary on the state of affairs in Guyana at the time, the looming violence and the calculated and cowardly reticence of those who were most equipped to speak out, the middle class. I offer the excerpted lines:
Show me a little freedom, different
from this. Time’s tick tock
is our doom’s astronomy. Caring
too little our voice betrays the hours
we tread upon. Only last night
I dreamed a stray dog eagerly
as we would, devour a kitten. Similarly,
in the firmament’s disgrace Orion
the great sky hunter fled in front
of us. Yet I keep watch. Not
only their bad hands but worse
eyes I see. Everything blindfolds. Rain
and meteors want now in this season
to surrender their arts of falling.
The middle class in contemporary Guyana has blindfolded itself to the increasing indecency in this place, its voice silent against the din of baleful idiocy that emanates every hour from Freedom House, all responsibility abdicated, surrendered to the moral and intellectual peasantry of those in power.
A newspaper recently carried a story about a married couple who were charged for as serious a crime as treason and then released without any clear recourse toward restitution or compensation. Mark Benschop, zealous but as decent a man as I’ve ever met, was imprisoned for five years on the same charge, then ‘pardoned’ without similar recourse. The murder of EPA employee, Alicia Foster, the disappearance of GRA Levoy Taljit, and the orgy of violence that grips this coast constitute proof that the implementation of a far from ideal dispensation of ‘justice’ prevails, now as then.
The man with the gun still exists, still aiming at your dream, only he has traded in jack boots for designer sneakers, standard issue for an unlicensed AK-47 – his power, his lethality, his impunity nonetheless still derive from a supranational infrastructure of imperial and colonial authority, facilitated by the complicit undermining of native judicial, legislative and executive legitimacy. We need no further evidence than the fact that drug baron and self-proclaimed extra-judicial enforcer, Roger Khan could drive around Guyana with a virtual armoury, as well as surveillance equipment only licensed to governments. The brown beetles, the British army vehicles, of the dark time have today been replaced by bulletproof BMWs. The teenage aspiring singer of today knows that certain names cannot be called in uncertain company, that he and his friends should go silent when a certain type of darkly tinted luxury vehicle drives by.
That said, perhaps the most effective agent of the authorities is not the man with the gun but the man with the clipboard. At present, in the United States, a scandal is brewing because the IRS appears to have placed anomalously intense scrutiny on Tea Party groups, known for their rabid criticism of the Obama administration – yet this is something that happens here on a daily basis, the government regulatory clerk’s ad hominem targeting of those who do not find favour with the regime, and it has been the PPP’s most clandestine yet ubiquitously wielded weapon used for the suppression of dissent.
The colonial governor’s great white house has become the minister’s mansion at Pradoville Two and other such places, atolls of surreal estate, incredulous luxury in what is largely a relative ocean of poverty and displacement. The middle class watch on and the decision is made that better a chance at such splendour enjoyed in an increasingly guiltless silence than risk that which they have either feared all their lives or scrambled their way tooth and nail out of, poverty.
And the man of the cloth is no different – on Brickdam, even the once-crusading Catholic has lowered his battling Standard. There is many a man here who in his quiet moments once vowed to never sell his soul, but once the twin wolves of hunger and debt came a-baying found that it was perhaps possible to rent it just a little, and then a little bit longer, and longer after that.
What we need to examine is not what happens on an absolute basis, but what happens in relative terms – the question is not whether we are exactly as we were at the Black Watch time, but why we are near that place at all today, and why we are silent at such alarming proximity. Was a time worse than this, yes, but was a time worse that roused an anger where little nor enough yet growls in the bowel and belly, like gnawing hunger of niggeryard waif.
At the time Carter wrote, we were a subject colonial possession and subsequently a post-colonial dictatorship, living in an evolutionarily less refined era with little or no human development indices or others to refer to as benchmarks. Today we are ostensibly a modern constitutional democracy, yet here – as things continue to fall apart – I can speak with the same exasperation at the cowardice of the middle class that Carter expressed in the final lines of ‘Show Me a Little Freedom.’
In this foul age of a new
and recurring despair, I
keep working for a storm, some
kind of fury to write new dates
in our vile calendar and book.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
