Dear Editor,
It is still dawn and dark on Tuesday, June 16, as I take to keyboard and screen to reach my fellow citizens, Guyanese brothers and sisters all. I don’t know how and where we will be tomorrow or on those that follow. But what I do know is that I can hope, and I can voice a prayer for this country. For as I do so, I pray for family, the family of this Guyanese community, and I pray for me.
We have gone through a bruising, piercing, and scarring battle, many such deeply wounding battles. We are hurting, we are troubled. Of the first I am; as to the second I am apprehensive, for I discern the anxieties that drive many agitations of the soul in just about every place in this society, some of which agitations are still dormant. Our wounds overpower the clear heads and clean visions so compulsory for us, if we are to be reenergized to start over somewhere. So, I pray.
I pray for our leaders that they will rise above their misgivings and manifest the calibre of patriotism needed at this time if we are to have a progressive society. I look at and observe how prostrate we have been: feeble, helpless, almost useless to ourselves. I pray that we will regain our strength, at the individual level through our disillusionments, and at the societal level. I think that as we remain inseparable from the volumes and passions of democracy and victory, there may be scarce reception for this kind of thinking, this manner of appealing. But I do, and that is why I stay the rugged course and pray for those, who deny and denounce, even denigrate, then dismiss. This nation is hurting a lot, it is time for a little healing to begin, with hoped for much cascading following. But we do need praying more than anything now, and this is what I do. Publicly. I do so because there is so much anguish in this heavy homeland of ours, so much agony in the fabric of our beings.
For when the heats of elections have stilled, if they ever will, we-me and you-still have to be neighbours. In our car. From the next desk. Across the fence. Along the street, sea lane, and marketplace. This is our hurting (collectively); this must be our willing (nationally) towards the healing that comes, not from the retributory, but from the restorative. I pray, sometimes I don’t know what in the vastness of the significances, the profoundness of which I ask, indeed, that which I beg.
I don’t know what tomorrow brings; or any of the other days that wait ahead with the challenges flowing unrestrained, with either the promises fulfilled or the troubles that gather strength. But, this much I have always known by some mysterious grace: it is that I wanted to come back here. I want to live here and give a little something here. So I give a little and I stay, a little more determined today. I go nowhere. And thus, I pray, for it is all I have.
The wiser and more gifted minds and voices than mine in this town can argue and array themselves in proud procession about concept and theory and practice. I content myself today with reality, the hard and disturbing circumstances of our coexistence. No book, no newspaper, no technology, no group, no grand design-individually or in aggregate-can teach us or empower us (again, me and you) to desire what is wholesome and wise for this country as a whole. We have to want to work for it. I do. We must be willing to sacrifice for it. I did and I do and am willing to give up more, the first of which is available flight. So I stay and pray, with much more demanded of me now. I plan to give from my quiet, little corner, as guided. Not by man, not even by own small mind. But by what is the sum of more than all of us taken together.
I close with one more whisper, the simplest of psalms for my country and all my fellow countrymen (women, too): no greater love hath a man than to lay down…. May God in His mercy be with us and bless us. That includes Mr. Granger, Mr. Jagdeo, Mr. Ali, and those around them, all who identify with them. Now I go to reflect some more and seek some more on how I must be. Pray for me, please.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
