Dave Martins’s song “Not A Blade of Grass” is playing on steroids right now and while there is a heightened sense of national pride across certain sections of the population due to the border controversy, there is a big part of me that can’t help but to interrogate the phrase, “is we own” that is being plastered everywhere.
While it is understandably used to defend Guyana’s territory against state aggressors and those that wish to pronounce it theirs, when it is chanted and repeated I wonder how it makes those with natural connection and birthright to land, but still waiting on the sidelines for years for its access, feel. Housing access, that is deemed a human right, for many can only be accelerated based whether or not they know somebody or know somebody who knows somebody.
While it may be a distant memory for so many of us or perhaps not even a memory at all, I think of the people of Mocha who watched as their homes got demolished. I think of those who were tossed around and dragged through the mud by the Guyana Police Force while they struggled to salvage both their belongings and dignity. Their livestock that were caught in the chaos and how they managed to move or if they had been reskilled to take up new jobs because their trades were destroyed. I wonder about the public servants who serve us day in and day out and are left at the mercy of salaries that can barely arrest the soaring cost of living. The mental maths gymnastics that they must perform to ensure they save in hopes of one day receiving a call with the news that they can now pay their deposit.
And what about the residents of BV/Triumph whose ancestors laboured on and bought their land only to have it sold without their consent by their NDC. While the matter was eventually withdrawn by the party wishing for the forceful sale, this was a stark reminder that all are at risk and particularly those who don’t have the access to legal services when money hungry capitalists decide to plough through for what is not theirs.
Judge Gino Persaud stated in his perusal, “this case reeks of all kinds of offensive odours from the beginning” while simultaneously claiming that “everyone’s hands are dirty”. To say that this land is ‘we own’ in its entirety and that we are one with our land is a flagrant lie because how else are we to explain the constant and consistent migration of the land’s people? How are we to explain the desperation of mothers to birth their babies elsewhere for some sense of social security and personal advancement? Could it just be that this land has refused us to allow us to own it? Or is it a case of state actors systemically upholding the demands of just the capitalist class and not the demands of all the land’s people?
