Given that I’m always scribbling notes regarding topics for upcoming columns, I occasionally end up with a number of short bits that don’t add up to a single cell but are still worthwhile fodder. Case in point, today I have an example going back a couple weeks after I was confronted again on Facebook by a poster by some politician or person touting the slogan “One People, One Nation, one Destiny,” which I believe was coined in the time when Forbes Burnham was our President. The note to myself was to remember to say, as I’m saying now: ‘Excuse me, what nonsense?’ We are not one people, not one nation, and therefore not one destiny. Indeed, if by some restructuring from outer space we did become so transformed, my reaction would be, “What a loss!”
From a youth growing up in Guyana on West Demerara, Pomeroon, and Atkinson Field, etc., I was frequently noticing the various surges, as I refer to them, that came from the variety of the population around me, and as an adult in Canada, spending some time in university, the concept of nation only reinforced my view of Guyana as a particularly blessed place in that regard. The very trenchant presence in our lives of these various people who had moved here – some from slavery, some from indentured work, some from migration – makes for an exciting mix of dress, cuisine, arts and even manners that was a delight for me starting from my early teenage years, and to this day, that combination of mixes, remains a constant delight in my interactions with Caribbean people, whether I meet them in the US Virgin Islands in the north, or tiny Bequia in the south. It is our strength, that diversity, which makes us a combination of things we would not otherwise know. I don’t have anyone in my family waiting at the roadside for a minibus wearing a sari, but there is clearly a delight in me to find an Indo-Guyanese lady standing there so dressed, as I also get a lift from the Afro-Guyanese man by Stabroek Market in a striking dashiki, the colours calling at you from a distance. And the benefits are not just from our dress. The Caribbean, including Guyana, is a place where cultures combine and sustain and delight one another. If, by some unforeseen alchemy, we do indeed one day become one people, I would want to move away from here to find that variety somewhere else; and it’s not just how we look. The variety is there in our cuisines – how would we get along without our roti shops, or our metemgee lunches, or our Madeira pancakes, or our French croissants? I would miss Phagwah and the Festival of Lights and Shrove Tuesday if they disappeared. I daresay, we all would.
In addition to all that, we also have the striking Amerindian presence, the original people here, with that powerful culture, and resplendent dress, unique cuisine and artefacts, the distinctive benab, and traditions going back centuries, probably the most dynamic piece of the long promoted ‘six peoples’ of our country.
Even when one turns to the arena of our ambitions, even there we see the diversity in our populations so that we don’t have to send to England or Australia for our legal experts – we have grown our own, and we have our own people as doctors and mechanics and farmers and technicians in various fields. We are not one nation in any of those aspirations, just as we have diverse positions on what we choose as our destiny, and, happily, it is generally among our own people where we find the matches to those choices, with the inevitable result that even in our destiny we aim for different things in different ways. Personality traits or abilities are affected the same way. I was struck by a recent online comment from Isabelle deCaires, one of those people of immigrant stock, who wrote following regarding our current political turmoil in Guyana. She pronounced: “There is one commodity that has always been in scarce supply on these shores: trust. Trust in government, trust in public institutions, trust in public office holders, trust in each other. Trust is the thread that binds our social fabric. It has been depleted, almost to vanishing point, by the events of the last six weeks (some would say 18 months). Oil is a fickle companion on the road to nation-building. Trust is an indispensable one. Guyana can build a future without oil if necessary. We cannot build a future without trust. This is what is at stake. This is what is being squandered.”
She makes a good point, but to look carefully is to notice that we have always been lacking trust. The model the British imposed, with its divide and rule approach to the immigrant groups they imported, left us in that divided state affecting us all but particularly the two largest groups: the Indo- and Afro-Guyanese, with the former feeling the latter was “lazy” and the latter feeling they were neither appreciated nor rewarded for their suffering in slavery.
I have to restrain myself from going on at length on this subject – I feel so strongly about it – but I am unable to resist adding this: I have in my possession a gift I received from our country’s Mangrove Action Committee after I wrote a song about Guyana’s need to protect our mangroves shielding us from the sea. The pen was made by David Persram and while it contains a standard ballpoint refill, the body of the pen is uniquely crafted from figured heartwood as is the case holding it. It is a beautiful piece of David Persram’s handcraft and is a constant delight. I’m familiar with such things in many countries, but this gift has a special aura for me; it is distinctly Guyanese. Mr. Persram does not come out of one people, his destiny takes many forms. He is typically Guyanese, reflective of the mixed bag of his surroundings. Long may that remain.
