Dear Editor,
Whenever someone of renown, stature, or of exceptional personage passes on, the world pays attention, pays homage, eulogizes and usually laments and grieves. So it was/is with the recent passing of Queen Elizabeth II. The media – newspapers, TV and the internet – are inundated with coverage. And so it should be. They are being complimentary, sympathetic and respectful.
There are others who see the Queen’s passing through different lens. They look at historicity. After all the Queen has been the head of the anachronistic British Empire; which implies colonialism; which speaks of and personifies servility, denigration, exploitation…. As expected, the Queen played her role, having inherited the royal crown in 1953. By her standard, she complied with the formalities, the protocols, her ‘charities’, tea parties, waving, and the people benignly lined the streets, with flags, and smiled. (I recall the times when we had to sing “God save our King” and God save our Queen”, not really knowing what or whom we were adulating; and sang we did, lustily, even the bad notes. Similarly, learning pounds, shillings and pence, and write exams about apple and sycamore tree… things out of our experiential day to day activities, were dissonant.)
Empire might have been good for the Europeans, but certainly evil for the colonials, the exploited, the ‘others’. The monarch should therefore have acknowledged her role when Her Majesty’s troops were sent to British Guiana, when the British Guiana Constitution was suspended, and when leaders of the PPP were imprisoned…. The photograph of Cheddi Jagan and Martin Carter caged in a vehicle still conjures up haunting memories.
It is therefore important that we should not be unduly influenced, fixated and swayed by sentimentality, and be enraptured with the excessive and partisan reportage. It is OK to be a majority of one! We must be rational, be circumspect, and look at the other side also. All was not nice and dandy for the colonials!
Several Guyanese have paid tributes to the Queen, which is appropriate. I take this opportunity to especially commend (and recommend) Ravi Dev and Ralph Ramkarran (SN September 2022) for their excellent discourse which saw the light from all angles.
Yours truly,
Gary Girdhari
