Of Narratives and History

Nov 22, 2009 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Narratives are stories and it seems that their structure seems to be wired into our brains. An event occurs and we are driven to explain how or why it did. What happened 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? 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. In a word, we fall back on “history” – whether at the micro or macro level. 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 can appreciate that 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-memberance” of it – that is, “his-story”. History is the human narration of that reality as seen by historians, inevitably subject, therefore to the limitations of our human mind.
Of recent, there has been much disparagement of Dr Cheddi Jagan’s account of Guyana’s history of the sixties – “The West on Trial” by Mr Freddie Kissoon. In and of itself, this is as it should be if for no other reason that the weaknesses of all narratives – the selectivity of the writer (re significance of the various events), the ideological orientation of the writer (which determines the weight given to the agency of the actors versus the structural constraints), the issue of factual claims etc. – makes their record contestable. Mr. Kissoon declares that because of the constitutive aspect of such historical accounts, PPP supporters have been led astray – by Dr Jagan’s “misstated” truth claims. He claims that his “revisionist methodology” will deliver the “true history of our country” as apposed to the “fictions” of Dr. Jagan.
He is scathing on the form of Dr Jagan’s narrative: “The way history was presented to us by Dr. Jagan was that Guyana’s messiah, the PPP, was set upon by evil forces – the colonial government, the United Force of Peter D’Aguiar and the PNC of Forbes Burnham – to undo the historic mission of saving Guyana.” But, with the appropriate substitution of names, isn’t this the narrative of all the post-war, anti-colonial movements?
The Jamaican anthropologist Dr. David Scott dubbed this type of telling as, “the narrative of revolution romance” and offers its contours: “It typically begins with a dark age of oppression and domination. This is followed by the emergence of the great struggle against that oppression and domination, and the gradual building of that struggle as it goes through ups and downs, temporary breakthroughs and set-backs, but moving steadily and assuredly toward the final overcoming, the final emancipation.” Was Bustamante’s, or Williams’ or for that matter, Mr Burnham’s narrative any different in form?
The optimistic teleological premises of the narrative and its general inapplicability for today’s reality are interrogated by Dr Scott in his book, “Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment,” but we leave that for another occasion.
There are both positive and negative revisionisms. The former, exemplified by Drs Clem Seecharran’s and Baytoram Ramharack’s books, are well researched and non-polemical. What I am concerned about is the new narrative of the past – fused with the present – that is being created and disseminated so extensively by the negative revisionists such as Dr Kean Gibson and Mr Kissoon et al.
Ironic for individuals seeking to correct “historical errors”, their own epistemic offences are legion. Their new “history” is a narrative of hate, a narrative of “us against them”, a narrative of retribution and a narrative that is guaranteed to further leave us divided. It even justified “Resistance Fighters” and various marauding gangs murdering police, and ordinary men, women and children with impunity. How does this new narrative deliver a “horizon of ends” toward which all Guyanese can hark?
We – and this includes the revisionists – have the advantage of hindsight and the access to a wider array of accounts (say the US declassified files) than Jagan who lived through the events. In attacking the possible “illusions of retrospective determinism” deployed by Dr. Jagan, do not the revisionists have a duty to avoid his alleged mistakes? Had not a similar narrative of hate predisposed the 60’s generation of trade unionists and politicians to accept the CIA invoked bogeyman of “communism” to destabilise the then government of the day and dividing our country to this day? How can repeating our history not lead to greater divisions? Wouldn’t that be the “farce” against which we are warned? I am suggesting that with the privilege of hindsight, we should connect the past with the present in a broader narrative that is healing rather than destructive? We cannot change the past but we can certainly change the future.
A few weeks back Dr Rupert Roopnarine poignantly evoked John Paul Lederach’s definition of “constructive social change”: “the pursuit of moving relationships from those defined by fear, mutual recrimination, and violence toward those characterized by love, mutual respect, and proactive engagement.” Would it not be better if, for instance as suggested by Dr. Roopnarine, we invoke the narrative of our traditional ancestral values of “sharing, solidarity and togetherness” and reintegrate them back into our national psyche?
Lederach has advised that, “Transcending violence is forged by the capacity to generate, mobilize and build the moral imagination.” We must recognize the complexity of relationships and not fall prey to an “us vs. them” mentality. There can be no “dualistic polarity” as advocated by our revisionists. Moral imagination is a matter of creating links between memory and vision and is to a large extent the vocation of 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.
(To be continued.)

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