Dear Editor,
What follows is not opinion. It is piercing harrowing fact. It involves simple people, blanketing pain, grinding poverty, and the vast powerlessness that intensifies indescribably human drama and human agony. It can be, all too frequently, an unspoken, unwritten, unnerving aspect of life here in Guyana.
There is an accident. Recklessness, speeding, the sickening sound of metal maiming flesh through hard jarring conflict. The only movement is that of crumpling flesh. A broken body, two according to the bloodless news coverage of yet another savaging, fateful encounter on the expressways that are Guyana’s roads. There is a fatality; gone, largely forgotten. It is on to the next story, the freshest episode in human affairs that occupy time, space, interest. There are the competing priorities of political maneuverings, racial hostility, settled corruption in the endless repertoire of dreary, weary, sometimes teary sagas part heaving urban civilization, part quaint rural stirrings. The days turn jaggedly forward.
But there is another story; one that is mainly unknown, untold, unfelt. It is the story of the survivor, one related to that same accident. Accident: by any definition the usual rational associations have been turned upside down in too many instances. Do not apply here in many situations. Things can be that criminal, that callous. And obscured at the core of these are the darker, uglier, more dehumanizing elements. More than a lifeless body was buried. More than the tatters of a homeless, foodless, moneyless family were shattered. There is the shattered anatomy of the second casualty, that survivor. Bones mangled, pins and rods and plates inserted and complete a grim devastating reality that chains to a public bed. Except that the horror and reality are incomplete. Here is a young one with nothing ahead but fearful anguish; and by the grace of divine mercy a cloak of blankness and numbness.
There is no future; there is no past, save for that best not remembered for the barrenness of its essence. No housing, no schooling, no working, no funding. Things are that stark; this is not a rarity. A helping hand here, some benevolence there from visiting fleeting strangers moved to reach in the midst of hospital walls, hospital beds, and the overhang of hospital poignancy. The strangers are all there is: no money to make traveling and comforting possible. Not even for a grieving, hurting mother probably residing on the outer edges of spiritual breakdown, life’s beat down, and individual tumbledown. There are more like this empty parent: no answers, no cushion, no net.
In the middle of tall buildings, dreamed of taller towers of oil gushers, fast cars, and faster times, there are these victims and lost, unprepared, ill-equipped bottom feeders in the economic chain. The final cruel irony is that there is nothing at the bottom, besides company and the loneliness of want, suffering, and hopelessness that comes from wanting and not having, hurting and not healing, weeping and not rising, and from yearning and coming up with nothing, nothing, nothing.
This is the chilling story of that youngster prostrate and trapped in a cold bare ward. There are others that share kinship: cancer, street, jail along the concealed avoided corridors of consciousness best suppressed, best left unrecognized. We move away. The days turn and lengthen. There is no way out or up. This should not be. Subsisting at this level and without a scintilla of dignity, without one frail tremulous vine of hope to reach for, to cling to, to lean on. This should not be. But it is there in different places with many different faces. The human detritus, the forgotten Guyanese who languish unnoticed, unwanted, unmentioned. In many instances, this is the lifelong aftermath; what is left of the flesh and spirit after the roar of engine, screech of brakes, and the murderous meeting of metal and man. Man always loses; the poor lowly ones lose the most and limp through what is left of this life. Maybe the next time around, a break will be caught, things will be better. That is, if there is another time around.
To protect the dignity of victim and family, identities, locations, and other specifics have been deliberately omitted.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
