Hardly a week goes by without some reference in the media to the depressing statistics of the number of Guyanese who continue to migrate. We can see the reaction to the degrading conditions at home – crime; unemployment; governing traumas; our inability to even keep our capital from looking decrepit – as the outbound flood continues, and our people endure the long visa lines at the US Embassy hoping for good fortune.
Most of them, of course, are simply seeking “a better life” for themselves or their children – one of safety and opportunity and better health care and more of the material goodies, and like their brethren in Jamaica and Haiti and other Caribbean nations many of them will leave these shores, taking their skills with them, never to return.
The loss to our nation has to be staggering. When you speak with many of these people outside, along with the success stories, you hear in their voices, and sometimes see in their eyes, their regret for the path that life took them away from the country they still love. In Orlando, last year, the morning after a Tradewinds dance, a woman from Mahaica held onto me
55 and cried tears over it. It is a cruel wrenching story, and it goes on virtually every day.
In the midst of it, however, there is a significantly smaller number of Guyanese, living in the same conditions, who chose to stay home. Several of them, while publicly complaining about the problems, have gone as far as to declare in the media, “I don’t want to live anywhere else.” I can think of five examples of prominent citizens saying more or less the same words making the same point openly in recent months, and I have heard the comment in several social settings repeatedly. Out of my own curiosity, in recent weeks I have put the “why do we stay” question to many in this group in casual, and sometimes not so casual, conversations. As one would expect, the answers are myriad and complex.
Admittedly, for many, the question of being in reasonably good financial shape is the predominant factor. Many of these individuals are holding good jobs in government or private sector, or have professional careers in various areas – law; medicine; construction; service companies; etc. They are therefore not suffering the indignities of those people whose only mission in life is to migrate.
But there are factors other than money. There are, for instance, many people in the group who stay for whom the very Guyana landscape – the spread of it; its unspoiled nature and majestic rivers and forests – is the magnet. One of them, a Georgetown resident with a small business, who is an avid outdoorsman, told me, “I’ve been to those other places. I can’t do over there what I do in Guyana on a weekend, with my friends, fishing – I don’t want to move away from that.”
For some, it is the mystical pull of the interior. One of them, with a big smile, as the thought came to him, said, “When ah stan up in front of Kaieteur or reach the North Savannah, ah does feel like if God livin dey.” For some, it is simply the comfort of familiarity, like the woman sweeping the bottom house in Soesdyke, who offered me a seat and said, “I poor, yes, but this is the world I know. Alyou could travel; I deh good.” My four aunts at Hague, now all deceased, were in that category. I tried to get them to visit Canada. Only one, my Aunt Julie, came on a 10-day trip and wanted to go home after five days. Months later, sitting in the house at Hague Front, she hugged me and laughed said, “Boy, thanks for the offer, but we born and live here; this is what we know; where we going?”
For some, it is the verve and splash of this multi-cultural mix that we have in Guyana – the food, the various musics, the dialects. Those things, meaningless to some, are powerful magnets to others. George, a musician friend of mine, who had spent some time away, put it well. “I know now that after 35 years of citizenship, I’m not an American. I feel a certain way about the Essequibo, and the room up the East Coast where I’m writing this. These things provide a comfort and wholeness that I wasn’t able to construct in the USA, even though the physical environment could not have been more comfortable. And curry Gilbacker… I just can’t find a good way of pinning it down, but I recognise it as a big part of me.” Many of that choosing-to-stay group were like George – not knowing exactly how to phrase it but knowing there was something here they felt nowhere else.
Another piece of the magnet is our sense of humour. The late David Brenner, a US comedian said, “Laughter is like a salve you put on a wound until you can get to a doctor. It doesn’t take away what’s bad but it helps to deal with it, or get through it.” Most of the people who stay on in Guyana “strugglin’ we struggle” (as I said in a song) have learned that; you can see it, almost daily. In one dilemma or another, one trauma or another, Guyanese are coping by seeing some humour in the circumstances. Indeed, often they will actually state the philosophy, as one hears elsewhere in the Caribbean, “Boy, wha yuh gun do? Yuh have to laugh.”
Why we go and why we stay is a book, or several books, and definitely a musical – the subject is very complex; I’m just raising a flag here – but one thing that came out strongly for me in these conversations with the ones who persist with Guyana, time after time without fail, was the condition of hope. It was touched on by Gordon Forte in a recent letter to Stabroek News. In it, Gordon was regretting the failure of the Guyana success story but still making this point: “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.” He doesn’t say so directly, but he’s really referring to hope, for what could have been and therefore could still be, and that sentiment, sometimes using the very word “hope” itself, is clearly present in those people I spoke with. I kept a note of a striking comment from Jairo Rodrigues who wrote recently in the press, “We are becoming hollow beings, and when that happens we lose hope.
Never let us walk down that road. I pray for the youths, I pray for myself and those of my ilk that we never give up hope; that we do not just watch life pass by, but cling to the remainder of Guyana and help build a country that those before us dreamed of, but failed to accomplish because of lack of cooperation and misguided visions.” Beautiful, Jairo.
For the ones who leave, hope has essentially been ground down in them; that’s why they leave. If the opportunities or windows were here they would stay. This is where the grandparents and great-grandparents are from; this is where their lives were formed, where their roots are, but once hope for better goes there is no motivation to stay. Indeed, for the ones who stay, like Gordon and Jairo, it is because hope, faint though it may be, still lives in them; the day that hope dies they, too, will leave.
