Dear Editor,
Independence found me a mere child. This infant nation and I started out together, except I left her, abandoned her, for some three decades and counting. The parting was hard, but the flame of love and attachment never flickered or waned. What has 50 years of Independence meant for me, to me?
There I was in 1966, not yet in high school. The trauma of what was euphemistically labelled ‘disturbances’ was still sharp and heavy all around. Until recently, citizens knew of a Ministry of Housing; back then there was a Ministry of Reconstruction. That should say it all: reconstruction. In many respects the reconstruction continues: of the narrative, of the time, of the contributors, and of the tragedy of incalculable loss. But I digress. Remember: independence and me.
Here was the reality: High School, poor boy, job needed. None of the latter was around. None was around for an unaffiliated unheralded Indian like me. Then came a black Guyanese and my world righted and took form through a job. There it was: outreach and inclusion and embrace before, way before its time. I remember. I appreciate deeply all these years later.
Back then Independence gave me a sense of the limitless power of ruling political figures and public institutions. LFS Burnham and the Guyana Police Force come to mind; and so, too, the Public Service Commission. Nationaliz-ation was good for those with an inside track; I was on the outside, and soon going to be way out there, over there in the land of milk and honey, except that it didn’t begin that way.
There was another stop along the journey of years, compliments of another black Guyanese. It was called the Guyana Airways Corporation. I never had a party card, was never asked to get one, and to this day do not know what one looks like. It was never mentioned. There must have been something about me…
There I am, this callow juvenile at Atkinson Field (now Cheddi Jagan Airport) in the first decade of an independent Guyana absorbing close-up the drama and anxieties and pain of our own bloodless aviation partition. In planeload after endless planeload, day after day, week long, and year round, those iconic names from flight lore came and left with droves of the cowed and conquered. Air Canada, Air France, BOAC, BWIA, KLM, Lufthansa, and Pan Am departed with nary the nook of a spare seat. This was the teeming exodus of raw upheaval and numb desperate flight.
As I child, I had looked northward to the city and the night sky glowing with pre-Independence wrath; as a stripling lad, I stood in my crisp uniform and beheld the emptiness of a nation gutted, disjointed, and dispirited. It was a precursor of worse to come closer to the 21st century. Here was political derangement then that adhered to no restraints, displayed no sanity, and practised not even rudimentary civility. This is not for me, can possibly kill me. Leave! Go! Go now! And then there was no place left for me, and the time came for me to go.
I had hoped to travel alongside my country; I had to go off on my own. There is some emotionally wrenching tissue embedded, especially about the lost possibilities. I thought that we would grow together and come of age together, beyond the rush of youth, into the broad wisdom of nurturing grounding years. The heart bleeds for this absence, too.
Thirty plus years later I returned and I certainly did not feel like Macarthur. For just yesterday, there was the same hubristic madness of vainglorious men bent on bending a society ‒ an independent and free society ‒ to their warped will and deformed ways. It was the same dastardly political story of the craven, self-loving and self-enriching; only this go around, it was to an unbelievably greater and sickening degree. Same story, different time, new players, new masters all wrapped in one.
Masters who extended little, took much, and affixed to themselves everything else. Then they came after the objectionable.
There were the physical restrictions, the mental oppression, and individual subversion. To exist, nay to survive, meant bartering honour, truth, spirituality, and self-respect. Too many succumbed before, and then much later. There should be no amazement, no disgust, as to why we are where we are, and how we are an individual and collective plane. Despair edges out, if not overwhelms, the disgust.
In my own instance, it has been immensely helpful to be a fierce individualist, rather than an abjectly waiting, grasping follower. The desire to carve a separate and distinct path was always strong, still is. It is not for the sake of being contrarian, but for a calling pounding irresistible siren of the independent spirit. It has stood me well over the years.
My one regret is that the freeing of this country from the foreign yoke did not come to represent a full soaring freedom for all its peoples, which led many to find the same elsewhere. These include one-time loyalists and diehards, who flourished here and fled there.
Now I am here again: a stranger, an outsider, sometimes a mystery and a controversy, yet always a simple story. I hardly know this new place once called home (still so called) and its peoples. They whisper the same of me. Such are the fruits of a forlorn freedom –all fifty years of it. I look around and they are mostly gone: family, friends, neighbours; the old hunting grounds are either unrecognized or unrecognizable.
At the core, that is what 50 years of Independence has signified for me – old masters and new masters. As I look back, what has 50 years of Independence meant, really meant for me in this land that is my land? It was the freedom to start somewhere.
Elsewhere. It was the freedom to construct a personal vision. Elsewhere. It was the freedom to follow that vision and pursue one’s destiny. Elsewhere. And last, it was and is the freedom to wonder, what if….
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall