Moving Forward

Nov 14, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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“On a cold winter’s day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order, through their mutual warmth, to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effects of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between the two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from where they could best tolerate one another.” Arthur Schopenhaur

It would appear that unlike the porcupines, we humans in Guyana – especially the “Indian” and “African” Guyanese – have still not worked out the “proper distance” from which we may best tolerate each other. Rather, not long after founding moment in 1953 when we huddled together to counter the bitter chill of colonialism, we began arguing as to which group drew the first quill.
For those involved at the time, the question may have been very crucial – especially to one such as Mr Eusi Kwayana. In 1999, when he re-issued his argument from 1962, “Next Witness”, he accepted he had “once called for retaliation, never, never for aggression”. Retaliation, after all, can only be justified if the other drew the first quill. But in the present, the question and its teleological retaliatory answer are irrelevant – even as the temperature has dropped even further in these neo-liberal times. And Mr Kwayana persists in “proving” that “one side” started it in 1961.
My position – especially for those that insist that the “historical” record must be “straightened” – is that the US, for its own reasons, provoked the riots of Black Friday – February 16 1962. This was the first, extensive deployment of political violence in our modern political history. This narrative spares either group of the burden of being the “guilty” side that started “it”. But the perspective is haughtily dismissed as “shallow”.
For the record, let me restate my contention that both sides had “quills” – sensitivities, prejudices and stereotypes about one another, prior to 1962. In the rules of the game, for their coming out of the colonial cold – majoritarian political competition – mobilization would have inevitably followed – and then reinforced – ethnic cleavages. But I believe that without the CIA’s involvement in 1962, political violence would not have become endemic as is now the case. Once the genie (of extreme, directed violence) was out of the bottle, there was no turning back for ambitious leaders. And yes, Mr Kwayana, as I have written on many occasions, the PPP started the 1964 round.
It would appear that Mr Kwayana is oblivious to the connection between resurrecting the questions from another era, even though the answer to it (which he favours) gives credence to the arguments of those that justified the violence emanating out of Buxton, post-2001. And which ironically forced him out of that village. His heroic condemnation of the violence was judged to be ill-advised at best, and opportunistic, at worst. It is for this reason that I have counselled that we not only interrogate the answers that have come down to us from the past – the narrative of revolutionary romance with its vindicationist ethos, for instance – but the questions that prompted them.
I am suggesting that those questions have lost their salience in our present and we ought not to be surprised that their answers have ensured – fifty years on – we still haven’t discovered our “tolerable” living space. But it is easier to signal this than to change the premises of the answers in the present, which, after all are defined by the experience of our past and the expectations for our future.
From 1999, Africans have been bombarded with allegations that Indians committed the “first” political murder of Guyana in 1961 and inevitably this becomes incorporated, reworked, preserved and remembered in the present to justify the strategies of the radical elements for achieving their expectations for a different future.
The overwhelming majority of the citizenry make their decisions about public involvement through simplified heuristic models – in our case, our ethnic security dilemmas. These influence both our reading of our past and our expectations for our future. Our present problem space has become further complicated by a neo-liberal order with its dominant “dog eat dog” ethos. While everyone rails at the growing gap between the tiny elite and the masses of the poor, no one notices that it is a mirror image of conditions in the countries that pioneered the model. It is just that our miserable starting point – and the ostentatiousness of our elite – makes our bottom, so much more unbearable.
We also need a political system that will address the dangers of a tyranny of the majority: governments must be regularly voted in and out. But how do we effectuate change democratically when the divided opposition, fuelled by arguments as to who started “it” within narratives of vindication, alienates the major bloc of voters? Our questions and answers in the present must confront these realities if we are ever able to achieve what seems within the ken of even porcupines.

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