On a Kafkaesque night with Shakespearian creatures

Jul 31, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Do you know the Yorkshire Ripper had a stable family life? At nights, he killed women, then went home to his family. One of the things psychiatrists would never know is what lies inside the deep recesses of the mind.

Sigmund Freud wrote that he never really understood women. Can we comprehensively determine why people do the things they do? I am referring here to the great bulk of ordinary people.

I remember one night Dale Andrews was at the wheel, I was in the front passenger seat and Len Gildarie was at the back.

We got a call at Kaieteur News that there was a violent robbery in progress on West Coast Demerara. The time was around 21.00 hours. There were thunder and lightning and the rains were ragingly relentless.

The West Coast Demerara Highway, like most, or almost all of the territory of Guyana, does not have lighted street lamps.

Up the highway and down back, Dale dimmed for about fifteen times. There was not even one solitary response from the oncoming traffic. I witnessed that situation first-hand.

On Tuesday evening, Colin Smith of the Catholic Standard and I took a friend to the airport. It was not a tropical night. The skies were lugubriously coloured and the stars had gone into obscurity.

The East Bank Highway in the night is a pathway of scary darkness. Even feline eyes would be hard-pressed to penetrate the opaqueness of the East Bank darkness.

When you write or if you talk about this Kafkaesque condition of the Guyanese territory, you get two kinds of reprimand from the high priests of the temple of power.

You would be told that Burnham didn’t install street lights so why fight us down to do what Burnham and Hoyte had no interest in.

Secondly, why carp on the negative things? It never occurred to those who echo these words that Guyanese have left the Naipaulian world of the eighties and there are great expectations because the 21st century is here.

Burnham of course had some strong arguments. From 1976, money began to be scarce. Then as the eighties came, the well dried up.

Here in the land of continuous dreams and modern expectations, money is coming in and plenty of it from the capitalist world. Money comes in, too, from charges for tertiary education, water usage and VAT. Finance should be there to illuminate the midnight sky on the East Bank Highway.

I dimmed about forty times, and got eight responses. When on a dark street, a motorist flashes his/her light to an oncoming vehicle, he/she is telling that person that the high beams are blinding. It is an indication that the person cannot see.

What kind of heartless people have we brought up in this country? We wondered at the type of persons we produced in this society that would shoot children sleeping in their beds.

This happened in Lusignan in February 2008. Refusing to respond to a driver’s act of dimming would be a poor analogy if you are going to compare uncivilised behavioural manifestations among Guyanese.

Surely though, it doesn’t say much for the humanity of a person if you are telling them that you cannot see on the road to drive because their lights are blinding you, and they contemptuously ignore your plea.

You wonder what lies inside the mind of the human being. These very heartless creatures go home to their families after driving on the highways where they greet their spouse, hug their children.

But how do they explain to their loved ones that their refusal to be civilized has caused severe injuries to another driver because they blinded them into running off the road or into a moving vehicle? The three persons in Dale Andrews’s vehicle that night have families.

Colin and I have our respective families. Aren’t we entitled to go home to our loved ones? Can we be safe on the roads when on dark streets drivers refuse to take off their high beams?

We love to denigrate the minibus drivers, and most of the times they deserve our condemnation. However, on Tuesday night, out of those thirty-two vehicles that refused to dim, only twelve were minibuses. The rest consisted of persons who had fancy SUVs, expensive family cars and even luxury vehicles.

It tells you that the possession of money doesn’t come with good breeding. It also tells you that persons we associate with wealth and status may not be people with manners, etiquettes and civilized values. On entering the airport, it was enveloped in darkness.

I heard someone crying. Jawaharlal Nehru once wrote, “The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere.”

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On a Kafkaesque night with Shakespearian creatures

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