The past as prolegomena

Dec 06, 2009 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

In my critique of the project of historical negationism that some have embarked on in Guyana, I highlighted the dangers of the distortions in their “truth claims” embedded within their narratives of hate. This week I intend to show part of their problem lies with their framing of our conflict – tilting, as they do, on windmills instead of long-gone dragons.
Unfortunately, the windmills are real-life institutions and their destruction can lead to real-life bloodshed. Critiques – narrative or otherwise – are strategic practices that, while tied to one’s time, place and circumstances, are future directed and normative even as they lean on history as prolegomena to that future. Bad history can lead to bad analyses and to bad strategies with fatal consequences for the trusting subjects – not to mention the unwary victims.
As we emphasised earlier, “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.” Very often, to explain events in the present, historians and critics sometimes unwittingly utilise plots from meta-narratives that were conceived earlier and became part of the general worldview.
Part of our dilemma is that most of our politicians and critics are locked into a worldview of politics that has passed its expiration date. I had referred earlier to David Scott’s explication of “the narrative of revolutionary romance” in which our earliest leaders had conceptualised their struggle against the colonial power: Oppression is resisted in a long struggle that teleologically ends in emancipation. It is a narrative of revolution – of overcoming and vindication, of salvation and redemption.
Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”, with its glorification of violence against the oppressor as a cathartic force for the oppressed, is considered by Scott as the paradigmatic statement of the narrative of anti-colonial revolutionary romance. The question should not only be whether Jagan or Burnham was “right or wrong” about their Marxist versions of the narrative of revolution – those must be judged within their contexts.
What we should do is to intensely interrogate their time, place and circumstance – their “problem space” in Dr Scott’s words- along with their chosen narrative to appreciate our “history of the present”. This Foucauldian idea does not mean simply looking at the past with 20/20 hindsight as some naïve version of the present – which some do when they criticise Jagan’s embrace of Marxism in the 60’s, for instance. But rather, “histories of the past ought to be interventions in the present, strategic interrogations of the present’s norms as a way of helping us to glimpse the possibilities for an alternative future.”
Revolutionary fervour against a foreign power (the British) might have served to bring us together (no matter how briefly) but we are not now trying to overthrow a foreign occupier. We have to ask as to what effects the rhetoric, tactics and strategies of revolutionary romance – with its stress on violence – have on the unity and stability that are so necessary for creating a more just state?
In our history, even though the major actors were all influenced by Marxism – which deploys a most teleological and determinist revolutionary narrative – they abjured the use of violence against the colonial power; opting instead for the parliamentary route.
Violence as a tool for seizing political power in Guyana in the modern era was introduced by the colonial power (after some arm twisting by the communist-wary US) through its local proxies in the trade union movement, in 1962. Burnham, I have noted before, had to rush to keep up with his ‘followers”.
Jagan’s attempt to reciprocate in 1964 ended ignominiously and taught him a lesson that he never forget: political violence, no matter how justified theoretically, would lead to interracial warfare of the most vicious kind that would certainly destroy our country beyond redemption.
In the postcolonial era, both Jagan and Burnham would locate their politics within the narrative of revolutionary romance – now against a “world imperialism” determined to impose “neo-colonialist” relations over Guyana. Even though Jagan was derided by many during the long night of the Burnhamite dictatorship, he refused to launch direct violence to remove that dictatorship because of his fears of inter-racial violence. Dr Walter Rodney and the Marxist WPA also debated the utility of violence against the dictatorial state within the narrative of revolutionary violence and evidence (e.g. the “De Willem 15” and Dr Rodney’s assassination) indicates that under their concrete circumstances, they felt that it was justified.
After Dr Rodney’s assassination, CLR James, who had written the seminal work on “the narrative of revolutionary romance” – “Black Jacobins” in 1938 – , analysed his strategy – within that narrative – in Guyana and concluded that Rodney had been politically naïve.
The main factor that Rodney ignored, James claimed, was that even though the population were by and large oppressed, “they were not in any mortal conflict with the government.” to rise up in a mass insurrection. And this was in the time of a dictatorship that denied any change through the ballot box.
So we return to the question as to why the players and critics have doggedly stuck to the old revolutionary script when our history of the present is pregnant with the possibilities of peaceful change, occasioned by the return of (at a minimum) procedural democracy and demographic changes that deny any party an automatic racial/ethnic majority?
The kindest interpretation is that they refuse to think and are doomed to only remember: the violent protests in the streets, the burning down of government buildings, the stockpiling of arms and the “catharsis of revolutionary violence”.
This fixation on the culture of violence leads to what psychologists call a “grievance-hunting” mindset. It is a pathological condition that betrays a state of mind uniquely incapable of seizing the opportunities and responsibilities of the present and so must morbidly escape to the past to discover a sanctuary of grievance for itself. (To be continued)