Dear Editor,
The use of language in my letters can hardly deflect attention from their arguments and facts.
I am therefore disappointed that both Baytoram Ramharack and Ravi Dev have seized upon a light-hearted remark I made about liking words and their use to evade, escape, shun, dodge or sneak away from the point we all know we are arguing. It is the utility and content of the message called for from a personage described, by Dr Ramharack and others, summarily, as “The Indian Intellectual” but whose character and role is not fleshed out by those demanding his incarnation. We have been asking who he is, what his message should be and what his historical role is.
Permit an example in raw language. An activist called Annan Boodram writes letters a couple of years ago blaming persistent suicide patterns in the Indo-Guyanese community on Burnham/PNC, a trope for Black people. There was an exchange with me on the subject. One objects because we cannot allow the venom to be injected into veins every time a self-described Indian intellectual opens his mouth. I think Mr Boodram has seen the error as he has initiated a laudable effort in the suicide awareness field.
Another Indian activist persists in his misappropriation of the years of national suffering under the socialist era food ban and casts the entire episode as a Black racist assault on Indian culture. The toxin is repeatedly administered.
A victimist mythology is being elaborated and churned out in which the Indian is essentialised as “sufferer” in this binary relationship with Blacks portrayed as Ravanic figures. Other examples could be found.
No one tolerates ‘anything goes’ from any commentator or intellectual of any racial or social origin. And if they think the self-defined Indian intellectual is to repeat the foolishness we saw a decade ago about the inferiority of creole culture and the superiority of a millennial Indian culture, all to the applause or silent acquiescence of those now conveniently cavilling about “language”, then they have another think coming.
They are living in an advanced culture where we respond to foolishness. Even from our own. Remember during the Buxton disorders in 2004 a group of black intellectuals wrote letters clearly condemning and distancing themselves from a current of thought in a fringe of the Afro-Guyanese community calling themselves Freedom Fighters, that since Indians were suffering it was something that should give Blacks satisfaction.
The letters were signed by Andaiye, Kwayana, David Hinds and others who added their voices to the condemnation. This writer included.
Mr Dev makes the point that I have said in the past such a figure as the “Indo-Guyanese” who could be rendered an existential reality, subsists in our consciousness; he therefore fails to see how I am talking about multiple identities now with Dr Ramharack. He has missed my starting point. It is that the person exists as a first identity that he ascribes himself, as a second that others perceive him to be and which may be very different from his own self-definition. And that, independent of those two, there is who he is objectively, as a social, cultural and genotypic reality. This was in my first letter in this series, I think. The rest is not mere word-play, but a taste of the complexities that await adventurers in the field of “identity”. But some among us prefer the simplicities of the slogans. It is why, despite several calls, Mr Dev and Dr Ramharack have failed to say what the content of the chant they expect from the Indian intellectual will be. I have asked that they name ten things Indians peculiarly are deprived of and that require remedy in our social and legal system. No response. Mr Dev said he was busy earning $38 000 per month to respond when I first posed the question more than a decade ago. Dr Ramharack, who was not directly interpellated, failed to pick it up.
The problem with a certain kind of mindless and meaningless race-baiting that sometimes passes for ethnic advocacy is that it is empty, inconsistent and intellectually disreputable. Indefensible, better left unsaid in most cases. The detritus of the works of the Indian intellectual was left in magazines like the Caribbean Indian, I think it was called, and various bits over the internet that, frankly would cause embarrassment. I look forward to the manifestation of the avatar being summoned, the “Indian Intellectual.” Believe me, we are equipped and confident.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
