Dear Editor,
Fourteen years ago on June 13, 2002, I attended an event on the Wai Wai culture and wrote some reflections which I forgot about and only found again recently. I did some minor editing and added an updated final paragraph. I proffer it as my contribution to Amerindian Heritage Month.
Wai Wai culture is another way of being human. What does Wai Wai culture have to offer Guyana and modern Westernized culture?
Wai Wai and other Native American cultures are not paper or text-based but are based on oral and other non-text facets. Their culture is as fully legitimate, expressive, contemporary and valid as any other culture and is another way of being human, that is, another valid expression of what it means to be human. To be human, or of humanity, means to be involved in reciprocity – give and take – exchange – sacrifice -interdependence.
Native American cultures are community-based. The people generally believe that they belong to the land and not the land to them as modern societies believe. Modern cultures have a concept of ownership of land and property in which the individual believes that he/she owns things and that those things belong to him/her exclusively.
The Earth is our Mother, we belong to Her, so we must respect and care for her as she nurtures us. Let us question the use of the term ‘modern’. What is modern? What is being modern? It begs the question of what is primitive.
Is Wai Wai culture at a lower stage and so-called modern cultures at a higher stage? Or is it the other way around? Wai Wai culture is no more modern or primitive or inferior or superior than European Western culture. We separate the sacred from the secular, but they do not. The Wai Wai do not have our notion of separation of church and state, the physical from the spiritual. For them all is spiritual; the physical and spiritual intertwine and are inseparable, and this gives them meaning. Even our culture depends on the sacred or divine or something outside of ourselves to give our lives meaning.
In our society, the State is that something outside of ourselves. The State gives us a birth certificate that we belong to it and we give the State its existence. Women give birth to children and the State replicates the birth process in the registration process of birth by giving you a name, place, time of birth, race, region, district, country and sequence number. The State gives you the birth registration process making you a part of itself and in so doing giving itself existence.
In today’s world, everybody must belong to the state and have a passport or travel documents to travel from state to state. The State is frightened of people it cannot control or those whom it has no influence over, although they might be within the State’s territory. But some states ignore native people until elections time to get their votes. In Guyana the State demands a birth certificate but gives Amerindians a hard time to get birth certificates! A contradiction!
A text-based society seeks to reduce our humanity to pieces of paper with text printed or written on them. When we were born the State gave us a piece of paper based on an original birth registration book to certify our birth.
Without a birth certificate, in the eyes of the State we do not exist! We then go to school to learn to make marks on pieces of paper. These marks represent oral sounds, ideas, concepts, beliefs, words, letters and numbers. We soon learn that if we make the right marks we meet our teachers’, parents’ and society’s approval.
Upon writing various texts in examinations we try to make the right marks and if we have made enough of them, we are given more pieces of paper with more markings on them certifying that we are able to make the right marks on paper.
The examination certificates open doors for us to gain employment, careers and acceptance where we live and work. At the end of the day or week or month, we are given pieces of paper with special markings representing the value of our labour. With these pieces of paper we go into shops and stores and exchange them (the value of our sweat) for things we really need – food, clothing, shelter, medicines, water, basic services – and things we want – luxuries. As proof of the exchange we sometimes demand or are given pieces of paper certifying that the exchange took place that we did indeed hand over pieces of paper and got goods and services in return.
When we acquire enough goods and services, society looks up to us; the more we get, the better. Our names might even make it on pieces of paper circulated for the population to read. Eventually when our time comes to die we make markings on a piece of paper giving our assets that other pieces of paper got for us to our relatives and beloved ones. When we die, others desperately rely on that last piece of paper of our humanity to get what we have left for them. When they get it, they have to go to a place called a court to get that final paper accepted. Then the assets become fully theirs, generating in the process more pieces of paper.
Our entire lives are governed, influenced, controlled, recorded and given meaning by pieces of paper. Our lives begin with a piece of paper – the birth
certificate, and ends with a piece of paper – the death certificate without which the will is not accepted by the court. Our entire humanity has been reduced to pieces of paper with markings on them. Without those pieces of paper our lives have no meaning.
But long ago before there was text, language was oral, verbal and aural and our humanity more peaceful, egalitarian, richer and fuller. We are human not because of pieces of paper, but because we can reciprocate and exchange and interdepend like no other creature on Earth can. So we have to learn above all to reciprocate in the best manner so that all will benefit and none will lose.
With the advent of the electronic information technology age and digitized data, our humanity will be reduced even further to electrical and magnetic forms to be recorded on tapes, discs and other means of electronic storage. We will then become an electronic-based society and our humanity will be further reduced to devices with electronic markings in or on them. That is why we panic when we lose a computer, a storage device or a mobile phone with our humanity impressed in electronic markings in it. Every time we reduce our humanity, we lose an essence of our being and become dehumanized.
So what are we really? What is the essence of our being?
Winston Churchill wrote volumes of books on pieces of paper, but he is remembered for his deeds and his spoken word, not so much for his written words. Spoken words existed long before written words and when the written words or electronic markings no longer exist, as will certainly happen one day, our spoken words will be eternal and the thoughts from which they spring will also be eternal. For the words we speak into air and the thoughts we think from our mind (brain) will emanate throughout space and time long after we are gone, carrying the record of our humanity on and outward forever. This is a physical uncontestable fact. So let us ensure we speak the right words, think the right thoughts and do the right actions. This is the essence of our being: our thoughts, words and actions.
Yours faithfully,
Michael Xiu Quan Balgobind Hackett
