Dear Editor,
Today there are some very dangerous narratives being peddled in Guyana. Over the years, I have emphasised the role of narratives as part of our differential cultural repertoires that foster the divisions in our political and social lives. I noted that each group in Guyana has its own narrative of why we are in this mess, and each points its fingers to the other in blame. This simply means that our narratives are in conflict. Sadly, these narratives have become more fractured since the change of government in 2020 and the flow of oil revenues.
I have suggested we need to consciously construct a “national narrative” that would legitimize each group in our country to their just desserts. Narratives are stories and evidently we are hard-wired to create them. An event occurs – say the elections contretemps at Ashmins in 2020 – and we are driven to explain how or why it happened. What occurred first…what followed? Who were the persons involved? What did each person do and what were their choices? What were the background circumstances – social or physical – that might have brought the event about? In a word, we want to know about causation.
And we create narratives. Since very few of us are in a position, or have the inclination, to conduct rigorous enquiries from ground zero, we reflexively also resort to narratives that others might have constructed around similar events. We fall back on “history” – whether at the micro level of our lived experience or at the macro level from what we are taught. Narratives, then, are not only constructed; they are constitutive as far as they “explain” our experiences.
In assuming there must be some material historical truth “out there”, we should appreciate we have to be careful to filter out, as best as we can, the inherent subjectivities of all narratives – especially when they concern history “writ large”. Reality may be created by events and processes but our “experience” of that reality is the “re-membrance” of it. History and remembrance are not the same. History is the human narration of that reality as seen by historians but it is our “remembrance” of the events that structure our responses.
Why is it, we should ask, do the supporters of the PNC/APNU/AFC coalition insist there was nothing untoward in the actions of Mingo in the tabulation of the Reg 4 SOP’s, when the international observers and the ambassadors insist he was pulling a flagrant sleight of hand? Much of it has to do with the narrative we bring to “explain” our experience. African Guyanese have a historical fear, their “Ethnic Security Dilemma”, of being ‘swamped and subordinated” by Indian-Guyanese, if the latter get into office via the PPP. To assert, as I have done, that Indian- Guyanese are now a minority in a nation of minorities in which neither of the two major blocks have a chance of securing office through attracting votes outside of their base constituency, has not cut much ice. Even though the “Mixed” constituency cleaves to the African and together now amount to a majority.
Today, we have the advantage of hindsight and access to a wider array of accounts than those who lived through the events. In refuting possible “illusions of retrospective determinism” – that things HAD to be so – we should connect the past with the present in a broader, more unified narrative that is healing rather than destructive. We cannot change the past but we can certainly change the future.
John Paul Lederach, the “International peacebuilder”, defines constructive social change as “the pursuit of moving relationships from those defined by fear, mutual recrimination, and violence toward those characterized by love, mutual respect, and proactive engagement.” We can do worse than start with positive “proactive engagement” while recognizing the complexity of relationships and not fall prey to the “us vs. them” mentality of the memory warriors, who insist that only their narrative is valid. Moral imagination is a matter of creating links between memory and vision and is, to a large extent, the vocation of viable communities.
By shifting the meaning of the past through a differential emphasis on particular events, we can transform how we act in the present. The past may not literally exist – any more than the future does – but it lives on in its consequences, which are a vital part of it. Our past was not all hate or division.
Sincerely,
Ravi Dev
