By Percy C. Hintzen
Percy C. Hintzen is a native of Guyana. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley and, until recently was Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University.
Our “ways of being” as Guyanese are products of the uniqueness of our history over which we had little control. Before our quest for “convergence” with the Euro-American North we tried, in every way and as much as we could, to separate and protect ourselves from colonial governance. We looked upon our colonizers and their agents with disdain, derision, distrust, hilarity, and envy—the latter because we understood that the material foundations of their lives derived from our labor and the exploitation and extraction of our natural resources. As colonized subjects, we fought and struggled to live our own lives, forged in the crucible of our histories, and to chart our own paths, even within the constraints of colonial commandment. Our self-understandings, self-consciousness, and “ways of being” had little relation to what our colonizers told us about ourselves. Most of us had no desire to live the myth of whiteness.
People are products of networks of relations that are most intensely and meaningfully engaged with in local communities. These extend in rhizomic patterns through other meaningful networks to neighboring communities, subnational regions, national territories, and globally. The particularities and uniqueness of the changing historical conjunctures of these networks are at the root of identity formation in all its diversity. Not race (which I will argue in a future column is an illusion) or religion, as we seem to believe in Guyana, but in the way these local communities are constituted and the manner in which, over time, they are differentially affected by the processes and practices of those who exercise power and authority at every level— local, national, and global. People employ these networks of relations in their perpetual struggles against this exercise, as they try to “make their way” as best they can, and to create the capacities and capabilities that allow them to live lives constituted by their true selves.
When the integrity of the local community is destroyed, people exist in what sociologists call a state of anomie. This produces mental breakdown and suicide. In Guyana, it is the source of a collective state of national psychosis —- the country has the highest rate of suicide per capita in the world and among the highest rates of psychological depression. Our anomie is integrally related to our desire for “convergence” with an illusion of Europe and North America. We accept, without reflection, the exercise of a governing authority, headed by an executive president with near dictatorial powers in what is one of the most centralized and unrepresentative systems of governance in the world. Those who “represent” us are chosen from a list prepared by national parties. In the process, we have disempowered the network of relations in which we are embedded and which we employed so successfully in our history of struggle against colonial commandment. Now we have accommodated ourselves to a neocolonial order that is even more pernicious and dangerous, because we have been deluded into a belief that it is what we have willed.
Our system of government is a shadow of the modern Western democracy that we are trying to emulate. In the United States, for example, most decisions that directly affect the lives of people are made through forms of local governance Revenues at the national level are transferred downward to cities, towns, villages, counties, and “states” (not to be confused with the national federal government). These have absolute authority to raise taxes, to allocate revenue transfers, and to make their own laws and statutes, except when they violate highly restricted and circumscribed constitutionally specified federal authority. Some version of this is true for every North Atlantic government. Governance in Guyana has moved in the opposite direction. Local governments of the past, notwithstanding their limitations, have become a. moribund illusion. The exceptions are Indigenous communities that continue to challenge and reject, as much as they can, centralized authority, whether colonial or postcolonial.
I anticipate, in response, the predictable ruse that “he doesn’t know what he is talking about” while pointing, with the derisive intent of silencing, to the ten regional Democratic Councils and the village and city councils. Don’t be fooled. Their incorporation into the centralized party-political system renders them powerless and useless. What I am advocating is for a form of participatory democracy where power is exercised in and through the network of relations whose rhizomic core rests in our multiple diverse communities. This was where our historical struggles against colonization were forged, fashioned, and conducted. We have destroyed their horizons of possibilities by ceding authorial power to national governance and the global agents that it represents.
I would like to engage in what scholars describe as a “history of the present” using memories of my youth that, I believe, contain possibilities for a more desirable future. I was born in Georgetown in 1947 and lived throughout the fifties in the four-bloc multi-racial, multi-class and multi-cultural community of Bishop Street, bordered by Princes and D’Urban streets, in the district of Werk-en-Rust. My Identity as Guyanese was forged in the networks of relations of this community and in the rhizomes of relations that extended outside of its porous and indeterminate boundaries. Most of the critical services upon which the community depended were provided by the Mayor and Town Council. These included an efficient, cheap, and punctual public bus system. Train was the principal mode of transportation from Georgetown to Rosignol and from Vreed-en-Hoop to Parika. We crossed our rivers by government-owned ferries or boat. Only three of the families owned cars. Everyone else rode bicycles. We depended on animal drawn “dray carts” to transport goods and materials when bicycles could not suffice. We purchased most of our products at Bourda Market and at a Chinese dry-goods and grocery store located on our street. Most families raised chickens, had fruit trees in their yards, and cultivated vegetable gardens. We drank “bush tea” (now called “herbal tea”) or “cocoa tea” made from locally produced cocoa, for the most part. During the August “holidays” when schools were out, we went on “excursions” by train, bus, and boat to various parts of the country. We patronized the “channa man.” We ate at Chinese cookshops. Consumed “puri and ball,” pickled fruit, fruit preserved with sugar, mithai, roasted peanuts, coconut water, cane juice, fruit drinks, “pudding and souse”, shave ice, custard blocs, inter alia, all made and sold by small and individual vendors. Every day, the “milk man” on a carrier bike peddled fresh milk ladled out in quantities according to our needs and pocketbook. We purchased cloth and personal items from an itinerant salesman who came around once a week. Tailors and dressmaker sewed the clothes we wore, to our specification. Our shoes were repaired and sometimes made by shoemakers. “Cabinet makers” produced our furniture. We consumed locally produced and bottled “ice drinks.” Coconut was the primary ingredient in the domestically produced soap and cooking oil that we used. I could go on and on, but you get the picture.
Current concerns in the Global North centered around “climate change” and “supply chains” are producing policies, proposals and practices that have resonant resemblances to memories of my childhood. They are fashioned in the wake of the growing existential threat to human sustenance, environmental sustainability, and political and economic order that is affecting everyone everywhere, and of the uncertainty, unpredictability and exorbitant and unsustainable transportation costs associated with disarticulated “global factories”. There is a discernable and palpable shift to local production for local consumption. Severe restrictions are being imposed on the use of private cars. Gasoline is heavily taxed and parking rates are deliberately restrictive. The use of bicycles is encouraged. Dedicated pathways are being built to accommodate cyclists in places like Seattle, Washington, home to some of the major software companies charting the future course for the world. Bicycles are the major mode of transportation in Holland, our colonizing power before Great Britain. There are shifts everywhere to public transport. New York has maintained and expanded its subway and bus systems, as have most large cities in the Euro-America. Locally produced products are sold at growing number of “flea markets”. Small locally owned businesses, which employ half of the labor force in the United States, are pervasive, encouraged and supported. Street vendors using trucks and food carts are becoming somewhat of the norm in many places.
In Guyana we are moving in the opposite direction. The Georgetown of my youth was a “garden city,” free from the dilapidated ugliness, blackouts, deficiencies in delivery of potable water, poor sanitation, clogged and polluted trenches and gutters, traffic congestion, homelessness, crime —- all maladies that are replicated everywhere in the country. The desire of everyone is to own a car, the bigger the better. We look with disdain on public transportation. Publicly owned buses are non-existent, replaced by less efficient, gas guzzling minibuses that clog our streets and spew pollution. Most Guyanese have never seen a train. Consumption of anything foreign, including foreign television, is a mark of sophistication. Malls are in. Local markets are out, except for the poor and the dispossessed. We spend our money on foreign goods in foreign-owned enterprises. Government revenues are dedicated to road and bridge building, primarily to facilitate our export economy. The foreign exchange that we earn goes into debt servicing and to pay for imported goods and services that we do not need. The major contributor to our current account imbalances and to our high “debt-to-GDP ratio” is fossil fuel imported by a country that refuses to tap into its abundant resources of alternative energy. Our intent is to repeat the pattern of exporting our raw crude so that we can import useable fuel produced and marketed by a foreign conglomerate. And we think this is our path to our illusory “good life”.
As a colleague of mine, who learned to speak English in St. Lucia, would say “Wat a ting!”
