The paradigm has been established in Guyana for what is acceptable as viable discourse, and what is not

May 23, 2009 Letters

Dear Editor,
Before putting this discussion on group suffering to rest, I wish to respond to two points raised by two authors subsequent to my initial letter. One is presented by Vishnu Bisram, and the other by Kowlasar Misir.
Bisram states that nothing in his letter implied that Slavery and Indentureship were identical, and it was not his intention to suggest thus.
Mr. Misir scolds that it is equally prejudicial to dismiss the parallels that existed between the two historical events.

Certainly this indignant statement suggest that Misir was so incensed by my “rant”, that he did not take the time to read my letter in its entirety.
And speaking about “rants”, well, his inference that the responses to Bisram amounts to denials that there were similarities between slavery and indentureship, is equally descriptive of a “rant”.
Perhaps it might be prudent for Mr. Misir to observe the biblical caution of removing the beam.
Mr Bisram is telling us that, as an academic writing about two historical events and drawing comparisons of similarities between them, he did not consider it important or necessary to touch on what made them different, what rendered them dissimilar.

That although his intentions were not to present them as identical, this conscious recognition did not produce a single line indicative of that thought process. Bisram please!
Some of the responses to Bisram’s letter claim that this is not his first venture into this kind of misrepresentation. And some of those who have made that point are not exactly alumni of the raging “Guyanese Africanist University” who come in for censure whenever they do exactly what those seeking to censure them indulge in on a 24/7/365 basis.

I would suggest to the reading audience that Mr. Bisram needs to do some serious introspection of his capacity to walk in the moccasins of his African brethren in order to accord them the same freedom and right to be offended that he hugs zealously to his breast.
And that goes for everyone whose hubris become stimulated whenever Africans assert the right to define their experiences to the same degree that these critics continuously assert for themselves in these very pages.

I have read nothing in the responses to Bisram’s letter that denied that there were some similarities between Indian Indentureship and Slavery. And I stress Indian Indentureship, because Indian Indentureship negatively varied in great degrees from the indentureship of Europeans, for example.
But here are similarities between corporal discipline of a child and slavery. Both victims are beaten for not doing what they were commanded to do. There are similarities between imprisonment over an act of disobedience of the law and slavery. The freedom of both captives to go where they wish is taken away.
There are similarities between the circumstances of employees in Guyana today being forced to take low paying back breaking jobs in order to feed their kids, and indentureship.

The ethical obligations of parents force them into these livelihood circumstances.
It is not what is similar between these experiences that is crucially important to understanding and defining them. It is what is what is drastically different between the experiences of the underpaid worker performing back breaking task for measly wages today, and the experiences of those performing indentured servitude back in the day, that is crucially important to the understanding and the definition of them.

Similarly, it is what is different between Indian Indentureship and the enslavement of Africans, that is crucially important to the understanding and defining of each. This is not a matter of ranting.
I present here an excerpt from my letter that renders Mr Misir’s scolding about being equally prejudicial in ignoring similarities between slavery and indentureship entirely superfluous.
I wrote, “Before going further, let me hasten to assure your readers that nothing in my letter is intended to diminish or deny the horrible conditions of indentureship, the experiences of our Indian ancestors who suffered through that period, or the fact that both our Indian and African ancestors shared many similar experiences.

But that is a far cry from making an argument that indentureship and slavery were identical human conditions, which is in effect, what Bisram set out to do. Now if this was an uneducated person advancing this take on history one could chalk it off as expressions of innocent ignorance, rather than something more nefarious. But this is someone who claims to be a scholar.
That means he knows he is playing hop scotch with history and the truth. In that context, one has to image this letter as Bisram patting the heads of black people while he attempts to convince them that the enslavement experience of their ancestors was no big thing, and common to the experiences of everyone else”.

And like I said, I would have had no need or compulsion to “rant” if the author of the misrepresentation was not a self described academic.
In closing, let me state that what is quite apparent in some of these responses that obliquely critiques Bisram’s misrepresentation while taking pot shots at those of us who responded to him, is the automated rejection of a balanced playing field when it comes to Guyanese of African descent taking umbrage over what they perceive as being offensive.
One can open these papers every day and read lengthy missives either extolling group virtue or lamenting adverse group experiences, and pointing fingers at the culprits perceived to be responsible for those experiences.

Recently it was asserted that Indian Unity was a priority when it came to efforts to unify Guyana, and there was not a single letter published that challenged this assertion, or required elaboration on it. And quite rightly so, I might add.
But contrast that with the eruptions that followed Eric Phillips’s call for an African renaissance as a prelude to national reconciliation, and you get the picture of the paradigm that has been established in Guyana for what is acceptable as viable discourse, and what is frowned upon.
The effort to present a prejudice equivalent to Vishnu Bisram’s view in this discussion thread is just another example of the maintenance of that paradigm.
Robin Williams