As I contemplated this week’s column, the sunshine had long receded and the feeling of being slowly rotisseried over the past weeks had vanished. Instead, the skies were gray and the floodgates of tears from above were open. With the opening, there was a deluge of heavenly waters filling the dried and parched earth in the yard, swelling the perimeter drains, and releasing all manner of odours into the country air. I wondered whether these were the tears of ancestors who have felt mostly forgotten and only periodically remembered. Quamina. Jack Gladstone. Others unnamed. I wondered whether the heavenly waters were those of regret for what could have been; victory for 9,000 to 12,000 enslaved men and women who rose up in a bid to gain what they always knew should be theirs and a birthright. Freedom! Freedom from shackles. Freedom from the whips and the stocks and perpetual exploitation. Freedom to self-actualise and self-realise. Freedom that was fought for in myriad ways. Malingering. Sabotage. I reflected on how little is known of Susanna and Amba and the other women of the rebellion. I wondered whether my womenfolk from those times had joined in the rebellion.
1823 seems far away but the names of our villages echo that past. Some of our names do too. I want a place to go to pay homage to the African and Africa-descended victims and survivors of this past. A past that was centuries long. But there is none. There are some monuments to momentous happenings but no place for me to go to leave a flower for someone long forgotten who endured what I know I could not, so I might be here. Where can I sit with my thoughts and my sadness for what that past meant. Where can I go to celebrate perseverance and persistence. I am here because she endured. I am here because he endured. We are here because they survived. Where can we go? I contemplate an Emancipation Park.
I read the names of some of the participants of the rebellion; the names are familiar. I have questions that will never be answered. Some of us do not want answers, I know. Others do. Some of us do not want to be reminded. Others welcome the reminder with a sense of obligation and responsibility to hardships endured, denials received, and selfhood circumscribed.
I have been thinking about monuments for some time. Global events of 2020 caused me to think of them – who they commemorate and who they do not. In Guyana, we are not so unfortunate to have to endure monuments to men who upheld an unjust system. Instead, we have monuments to heroic figures who opposed that system: Kofi, Quamina, and Damon. I am thankful for this but where are the memorials to the women who resisted? The women who took lashes as a consequence of rebellious action. In search of the women of the 1823 Revolt, I read Emilia Viotti da Costa’s Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: the Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823. I found Susanna. I wanted to persuade someone to commission a grand work that positioned women as integral in opposing enslavement. At the time, the bicentenary was due in three years and I wanted our womenfolk remembered alongside our menfolk. It was not a commission meant for me but a commission that needed and still needs to be. I know our 1823 Monument has a female figure on the southern side of the plinth but I’m not satisfied.
I worry about the man on the plinth of our 1823 Monument with a cutlass in one hand and a chain interwoven with the Christian cross in another. Its unveiling was met with protests. I didn’t understand it at the time. The protests related to its location and its suitability. I didn’t understand; I didn’t know the history. Today, despite its presence at a prominent location, it and the events it is representative of are disconnected from our national consciousness. I think of ‘Le Marron Inconnu’ (The Unknown Slave) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. With a conch shell held to his mouth, the unnamed heroic male figure resists falling to the ground in a pose that is both elegant and defiant. His body is supported by his right arm which extends to the ground, hands formed in a fist, holding an implement which could have been used to break his chains. This is undoubtedly my favourite monument in the Caribbean to commemorate Emancipation – a nameless man, who like so many, fought against shackles and the associated forms of bondage. Our unknown man in Haiti is in the throes of his own upliftment or conversely, he resists death as he tries to attain freedom. He is representative of a collective.
Even before I knew a fuller history of our 1823 Rebellion, I worried about the cutlasses in our monument, and the persistent imaging of black masculinity entangled with violence. Western culture is replete with such imagery. Considering the vilification of black bodies nearly every election season in Guyana, I have always felt uncomfortable with our monument. Historians say two maybe three whites died during the course of the rebellion but approximately 200 enslaved people were summarily executed by the colonial militia. Many of the rebellion’s leaders were brought before the courts and sentenced to execution, flogging, or deportation. Our monument tells a very incomplete story. So, I wondered whether the deluge that suddenly came upon us on August 19th was the tears of those who feel their story is not well told. After weeks of blistering heat and as the Department of History of the University of Guyana held a public symposium to commemorate the bicentenary of the rebellion which started on Monday, August 18, 1823, and ended on Wednesday, August 20, 1823, rain fell torrentially. Unusually, rain fell westward. Saturday it rained again. And after rainfall in the wee hours of Sunday morning, the sun reappeared and has remained drying out the perimeter drains, once again suggesting that sunny days are here to stay. I wonder, are the ancestors consoled in our remembrance of the lives they lived and the freedom they sought to secure for themselves and their progeny?
