For a future peace

Dec 20, 2009 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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In a very nuanced review of some narratives that have been deployed in our colonial and postcolonial periods, the Peeper raised the question of subjectivity immanent in the “constructive/negative” dichotomy I identified in the revisionist historical project presently underway in Guyana. The Peeper suggests, “The central hurdle to an assessment of these counter narratives is therefore the task of emerging with a framework of analyzing the validity of each narrative.”
I can see where the Peeper is coming from and would say that the dichotomy serves as a “first cut”, so to speak, to eliminate those revisionisms where there can be shown to be deliberate distortions of the historical record to present certain events in a more or less favourable light. It is a question of intentionally traduced methodology.
Negative revisionism or negationism engages in such tactics as blatant “silencing” of facts – such as for example, asserting that “there was no torture during the Burnhamite regime” in the light of available incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
Other questionable authentication tactics to buttress fact-claims would be dropping names of people who are dead (e.g. “O’Lall told me”) or unnamed persons of high status (“a famous doctor told me”) or blatantly lying (“Ravi Dev has a US passport”). Then there is the repeated misstating of the positions of respected writers even after being corrected (eg, Peeper and Bisram pointed out that Zakaria’s text “Illiberal Democracy” had contrary implications to the ones being touted). Particularly troubling also is the blending of factual issues with value concerns e.g., the exploitation of the unfortunate suicide of Miss Bulkan to blame the government. We could go on but I hope the point is made.
But on those narratives that make the cut (and since we are talking about a human-mediated project, maybe there will never be any cuts satisfactory to all) I propose not some “framework” which sounds mechanical, but an evaluation of the narratives. While inescapably subjective it might work if we can agree on our Foucauldian “history of the present” that I spoke of earlier and our “horizon of ends”. The latter terminology is from the historical theorist Reinhart Koselleck. Histories, he suggests, are always written within a particular “space of experience” – the ways that the past is remembered in the present and a “horizon of expectation” – the anticipation of the not-yet-known future beyond the horizon.
A history of our present, in the words of David Scott demands that “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.”
Without even addressing whether the narrative of revolutionary romance has ever fulfilled its promise of deliverance and redemption, we can at least agree, as I have pointed out, that our present is not the same when the narrative was crafted. Our “problem space” – the threats and opportunities that confront us in our socio-historical conjuncture – is radically different: at a minimum, our “us” and “them” within the old narrative is not a unified “us” versus the “them –British”, whom we hoped to kick out – the “us” and “them” are now “all ah we” that have to co-exist in our common homeland.
What then should be our “horizon of expectation”? Criticism is always strategic. What is it we want as a consequence of our criticisms, narratives, actions and exhortations? What is the Good? While there will never be – for the simple reason that it just cannot be – a single horizon of ends for all of us, I am pretty sure that among the various possibly competing ends, that of a more harmonious society would be there in common in all formulations. As I wrote earlier, “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.”
Our horizon of expectation must generate strategies that speak to those normative ends rather than further dividing us. So in the evaluation of narratives, I would first of all ask whether the particular narrative (of revolution) or any narrative that seeks to connect our past to the present and envision a more positive future that I have been critiquing fits the bill. Another way our problem space is different even from our immediate post-independence period is that the demographics now deny any built-in ethnic majority and so opens up the possibilities of a working democracy. A constructive narrative cannot then picture our opposing groups locked in mortal combat.
Crucial to the formulation of a constructive narrative would be what Hayden White labelled the “content of the form” of the narrative – particularly its plot to link past, present and future. While the narrative of revolutionary romance sets “”us” against “them” into a frenzy of nihilistic Fanonian violence – not to mention teleologically promising a future that can never be delivered – Hegel’s famous interpretation of Antigone as the paradigmatic Greek tragedy might be particularly apt to our situation.
In this narrative both “sides” are morally right: the conflict is not between good and evil but between “goods” on which each is making exclusive claim. Isn’t this the situation that our mutually exclusive narratives of victimhood with its facile binary oppositions have delivered us into? Such an emplotment within a narrative, I am suggesting, should suggest compromise rather the than a battle of one side overcoming. That would be a constructive narrative for our time, place and circumstances ` In noting the importance of narratives in the task of nation building Benedict Anderson has identified the importance of newspapers that are read every morning in constructing what he has tellingly labelled “Imagined Communities”. “The significance of this mass ceremony – Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers – is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.”
. Let us use our newspapers for nation building rather than tearing it apart by narratives that are fighting long-gone terrors.

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