Discourse of hate

Dec 13, 2009 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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We have emphasised the role narratives play in our historical accounts: not least to act as filters for events as they occur in the world around us. These narratives are part of a whole welter of formal and informal processes, language and performance – dubbed “discourses” – that serve to fix the acceptable meaning of a given notion and literally “hail” it into being. Identity and social action – including political action – are key features fixed largely by narratives and discourses: “How are we made in our culture?” asked Foucault.
While not denying the importance of structural features, discourses are most crucial because they sanction certain kinds of action and not others. In times of heightened tension and conflict, narratives and discourses link individual and group identity producing a sense of intertwined fate among groups. When violence is in the air, the fears also include concern for physical security and fears of extinction of self, family, and the group and its culture. Political actions – and reactions – are therefore highly influenced by the dominant discourses circulating at any given time.
The power of discourse lies in their ability to naturalise a particular way of interpreting something – be it an ethnic group or a strategy for political struggle. In the discourse of hate that we have been critiquing, it is useful to examine its production, dissemination and consumption in our society to note its effects.
Discourses are rarely constructed out of thin air but are built on previous narratives and themes that are topical. The “narrative of revolutionary romance” that we spoke about arose as an emancipatory strategy against the seminal discourse on identity framed during slavery and its aftermath – the black-white binary. The discourse of “sin and sinners” played a large part in the larger discourse to justify the genocidal treatment of Africans and other “natives”. They both loom large in our national psyche.
There are two parts to the construction of identity within discourse: firstly the creation of the ‘other’ – with all negative qualities and secondly the comparison of that ‘other’ to the self – the antithesis imbued with all the “good” qualities. The archetypal binary hegemonic discourse owed its success to its divisive framing of the identities in play, as well as to the ‘truthful’ nature it attributed to that framing.
After a brief moment of “us” (all Guyanese) against “them” (the British) the struggle for independence introduced complications into the narrative. Between 1958-1964, it was a “coolie-rice” PPP government locking Africans out of development (African narrative constructed by the PNC) or a “communist” government determined to deliver B.G. into Moscow’s arms (the narrative of the West).
During the PNC regime of 1964-1992 – ushered in after a virtual civil war between Indians and Africans – Indian narration was of marginalisation through “racial” policies of a government dominated by their African political opponents. Since 1992, with the table turned, the “us” against “them” discourse between Indians and Africans remained in place.
Between 1993-1997, the discourse was sharpened by PNC claims of “ethnic cleansing” and other excesses of the PPP and precipitated anti-Indian riots after assertions that the 1997 elections were rigged. African ideologues revived the “narrative of revolutionary romance” dominated by the imagery of Fanonian violence and matters degenerated into a full scale assault against the state and perceived supporters of the PPP by violent terroristic gunmen. The latter were dubbed “Resistance Fighters”.
Ronald Waddell, Mark Benschop and Dr Kean Gibson were three of the main manipulators of the old discourse that dehumanized and demonized the PPP as the enemy ‘other’. The fundamental process in the construction and reproduction of terroristic violence is the deliberate creation by critics and political entrepreneurs of a totalizing and hegemonic social and political discourse that builds on the previous discourse of hatred, fear, and the justified use of extreme violence.
Today there are calls for an inquiry into alleged linkages between the government and a drug dealer that worked with elements of the armed forced to neutralise the terrorist threat. The new discourse has no questions as to why, if true, a government with viable armed forces needed to go down that route. The debilitating “us” against “them” narrative explains all.
After 2006, the discourse was taken over and given a new twist by Mr Freddie Kissoon and some new entrants such as Mr Lincoln Lewis. The PPP – the “them/other” – was now defined as an “elected dictatorship” – the repository of all evil – and the Indians that mainly voted for them were given full responsibility for their actions. The new party, the AFC, which Mr Kissoon declared he now supported, was now the angelic “us”.
Mr. Kissoon, the AFC, Lewis and the PNC defined themselves as fighting for democracy, freedom of speech, justice, workers’ rights and presumably, motherhood (good qualities). In contrast, in virtually every speech and article about the PPP, they declared the PPP was “fascist” – Hitler, killer of 6 million Jews is invoked; was committing economic “genocide” against Africans – invoking millions genocidally murdered in Rwanda and the Congo; perverted; corrupt, violent etc.
In this discourse, Guyana was in mortal conflict between good and evil and that evil was real, and must be opposed. Acutely entrenched in our historic binary socio-religious discourses of “us” and “them”, this kind of polemic serves to essentialize the PPP and their supporters as satanic and morally corrupt.
Critically, this framing locates evil in the nature of the PPP – and by extension, their supporters – , thereby stigmatizing a whole category of people. Not to mention putting them at risk in an atmosphere dominated by a discourse of “us” against “them” and a history of political violence.
The “complicity” of the Indian supporter for the sins of the PPP is made explicitly by Mr Kissoon. He capriciously conferred the ultimate accolade in the discourse of Guyanese politics – being “truly” multi-racial – on the AFC; determined that Indians had not voted for them in 2006 and therefore unlike Africans, had displayed “racial preference”. To reinforce the Indians’ culpability, Mr Kissoon gloats that whenever an Indian mentions some problem with officialdom, he demands: “Well, who did you vote for?”
It is a compelling discourse and an act of demagoguery that vitiates the actions of the PPP and their supporters of any political content by de-contextualizing and de-historicizing them. They are simultaneously de-humanized and de-personalized. What justification, ultimately, can be offered for ‘acts of evil’?
The wages of sin, I am told, is death. In other words, holding that the PPP and their supporters are by nature evil (and racist to boot) rather than ordinary people, it is not difficult to see how attacks against them can become normalized.

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