Dear Editor,
I refer to GHK Lall’s response (SN, April 18) to my Kaieteur News column of April 17 on him. I’m glad he took the route he did in his reaction. It will prove to every reader of the Stabroek News in and outside of Guyana what kind of person he is. I am sure Stabroek’s editorial management cannot fail to detect the libellous contents.
His missive is a reflection of his mind. Being a school teacher in the US, Lall seems to have been infected with Dickensian, Naipaulian fantasy to write prose. The effect is that he came back to Guyana to impress. The results are letters in the Stabroek News that are a morbid journey into the use of language that would bring derision in any country. Such prose is for poets and writers, particularly travel writers. But even such people make sense when they pen their prose. A newspaper letters section should not be filled with such esoteric nonsense.
I could offer you dozens of paragraphs from letters by GHK Lall and no one can describe who or what he is referring to. It is simply bewildering that the editor never pointed out the irrelevance of that style to a newspaper. His abuse of me I just read, and that is gone from my mind, never to return. Why that is so is because it comes with the territory. Once I remain a social activist and a critical commentator, more letters like the one from GHK Lall will follow. You treat that as a hazard of the job and you don’t think about it even for a fraction of a second. I know this country and its people in ways Mr Lall never will, and he is fooling himself if he thinks he has not been laughed at by substantial numbers who have read his letter. Armed with a sense of national importance, he assumes he will be liked for calling Freddie Kissoon all types of names in his letter. But it takes just one little situation for many of the foolish persons in this country to expose themselves. It would be a journey of tantalizing curiosity to find out how his staff feel about his mind after they have read his letter.
I will end with an amusing quote from Mr Lall that is a reflection of what this man is. Of himself he wrote; “There must be something that I bring to the table, this stranger, this outsider, this foreign presence, this enigma…” Really, Lall doesn’t know what he brings to Guyana after fifty years living outside? He brings amusement to those who read his letters where big, long words are used to describe things that exist only in the warped mind of the writer. Freud must have been at work when in his reply to me he wrote: “Man, that boy does have a lot of poison inside.” Right now there is poison infecting hundreds of employees in the operation of the Gold Board. Look who is Chairman of the Gold Board.
Your faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon
