Falsifications of History

Nov 29, 2009 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

---

In my article of last week, “Of Narratives and History”, I proposed that because of how history is composed – as narratives – it inevitably becomes a contestatory site. Revisionism is quite de rigueur. On the interrogation of Dr Jagan’s autobiography, I stressed that Dr Jagan, like every narrator of history, had weaknesses – selectiveness, ideological, factual, etc that should be challenged. But those that seek to correct the record have to take care to ensure that they do not (and certainly not deliberately) commit the same error.
I made a distinction between the books on Guyanese history that involved Dr Jagan by Drs Clem Seecharran and Baytoram Ramharack – well researched and scholarly – and the narratives of Mr Freddie Kissoon, Dr Kean Gibson et al – anecdotal, incendiary and polemically framed to arouse strong passions to bring down the freely elected government of the day. With “motives” in mind, the noted historian E.H. Carr urged: “When we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it.”
The narratives of history purport to take events that occur and embed them within a plot that is supposed to explain the causation and consequences of the events. On historical events that reverberate in our intractable conflictual and violent politics, we cannot play fast and loose either with the facts or the plot. There are the consequences of this distorted narrative, which becomes its own event. Mr. Kissoon commits the precise sins of selectivity and bias of which he had accused Dr. Jagan. He reshapes events to fit his narrative of a PPP regime as far worse that the totalitarian Burnhamite one of yore, and which must be removed by any means necessary.
In his column of two weeks ago, “The blind man and the black cat”, Mr Kissoon ‘emplotted’ ongoing events into his narrative without even a gesture of retrospection, much less research. He sought to highlight “the role of violence in the history of the PPP” in general, and with the present contretemps of “torture” in particular. Mr Kissoon invoked the account of “the respected political activist, Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine, who wrote in a letter to the press that when he and other WPA activists were charged in 1978 with arson of a Ministry building, they were not tortured.”
In an earlier column, “This is a historic letter”, Mr Kissoon had flatly concluded from Dr Roopnaraine’s narrative: “The PNC administration never tortured the people it placed before the courts for political crimes.” Because it suited his purposes, Mr Kissoon not only committed the fallacy of hasty generalisation but wilfully traduced the historical record.
When back in July, I first noticed Dr Roopnaraine’s silencing of the record of the PNC’s history on torture, I wondered if it was a Trouillotian one: “an active and transitive process”. It certainly did not reflect the ethos of Lederach’s “Moral Imagination” that he recently invoked so poignantly at Queen’s College.
What kind of narrative is Dr. Roopnaraine constructing? Back in 1995, he had written very eloquently in SN, (“In the sky’s wild noise”) not only about his PNC-directed arrest for arson but also of the vicious torture of several individuals from Zeeburg/De Willem on accusations of treason: “ It emerged that the five men had been beaten without mercy night and day, burned on their bodies by cigarettes, had their heads forced into full toilet bowls with no plumbing, made to kiss stray dogs brought in from the streets and generally subjected to a level of barbarism normally associated with the artists from the old Chilean and South African security services.”
Dr Roopnaraine’s narrative lacuna was filled in the following month (August) by Elder Eusi Kwayana, (who quoted from Dayclean) and one of the tortured men, Ralph Saywack, who claimed it was actually fifteen of them who had been tortured over six days. I was thus quite taken back when Mr Kissoon repeated Mr Roopnaraine’s original exculpation of the PNC from torture in November. What else could this be but the active silencing by a negative revisionist, bent of twisting history?
In the same article, Mr Kissoon contraposed the PNC’s putatively exemplary restraint to the PPP’s “long association with torture” where, he claims “In the sixties …a PNC political activist (Emmanuel Fairbairn called “Batson”) …was brutally tortured by the police during the reign of Premier Cheddi Jagan.” The slanted word “reign” implied that Jagan had practically “monarchical” authority over, and responsibility for, the then British Guiana (B.G.) Police. A cursory check of the records would have revealed that Fairbairn was tortured on August 9th 1964 to confess to the bombing of the PPP Bookstore (and murder of Michael Forde) on 17th July 1964.
Two months before the torture, on June 1st, Mrs. Janet Jagan had resigned as Minister of Home Affairs, protesting against actions and inactions of the Police during the ongoing racial conflagration in which was completely ignored by the police hierarchy. B.G. was still a colony and Police Commissioner Peter Owen officially reported directly to the British Governor after the resignation as he had unofficially done before. Most of Mr Kissoon’s other “truth claims”, as had Dr Kean Gibson’s before him, can be shown to be lacking rigorous investigation. Does he really want to reopen the Arnold Rampersaud case?
When on one hand we condemn the Police today for its violations of citizens’ human rights but rewrite history to elide the fact that such violations are part of its long institutional practice and thus a structural problem, how can we ever expect thorough-going reform by only blaming individuals in government?
In writing history, we acknowledge that one is engaged in a creative act of research and emplotment to construct a narrative. But there are also rules—rules of evidence, rules of coherence, rules of logic but most importantly, rules of decency – that need to be followed if one is to be credible. We cannot allow cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies to rewrite our history – and shape our future. We have too much at stake. (To be continued)

---

---