Dear Editor,
The letter from GHK Lall that you published September 7 (‘Please stay, don’t go’) is thought-provoking indeed. To what minority, one wonders? And to what echoes in my own experience, in my evolving views of what has happened to my home country?
I have been tied for over forty years to a feeling that there is something special about being Guyanese. In 1970 I was lured back early from a planned life in the diaspora by the possibility of taking part in the making of Guyana into a country where humans could best grow in humanity. By 1980 I could feel that the magic we called Guyaneseness, best expressed through the creative arts though daily felt in a sense of communal relatedness and mutual understanding, could still inspire and sustain us to work together and build a decent nation.
By 1990 my pursuit of the roots of Guyaneseness, tracing their contributions to societal evolution, was distracted by hard material times brought about by power-crazed politicians. Up to 2000 I was trying to learn what it was we had come to define as hard times, and why we found them hard.
The next decade was a time of wonderment to observe a system of society, reflecting a style of governance, very different from anything I had ever regarded as acceptable, normal or dignified. In the last four years I am being taught how special we Guyanese must be indeed, to cope with, or to live from, the circumstances forced on our daily life by organised criminality top to bottom.
My despair, and Mr Lall’s, must be a generation thing. Old-fashioned habits of observation, analysis, evaluation and articulation are decried as useless wastes of time, producing only unwelcome unease that there might be such a thing as standards. Shut up and drown your nostalgias in the pursuit of popularity, through consumption of material goods acquired by whatever means.
In the far-off days of my youth, when Guyanese were literate to a fault, there was a joke in my family, upon the utterance of a stickler aunt, “This is a situation up with which I will not put.” Today, look around you, and find that Guyanese must be tolerant to a fault. What’s left of Guyaneseness is that we can still joke about what we put up with.
And maybe that’s enough, Mr Lall, to relieve the bitterness of having one’s proffered solutions, matured by observant, relevant experience, rejected as threatening to new-established short-cut ways. If you can find your place in one of the many small communities outside the social mainstream, there is still plenty of the old Guyanese goodwill to relieve, day to day in a quiet life, our sadness over the loss of what might have been, for us and for our homeland.
Yours faithfully,
Gordon Forte
