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Close encounters of the nasty kind in 2009
I courted the woman who was to be my wife during the tempest of WPA politics in 1978. If she married me, she knew what she would be getting into. When I couldn’t be found, she went in search of me at the Wortmanville home of Brian Rodney, one of the finest political activists to come out of this land. She walked into marriage the next year fully knowing that human rights politics was the chemistry that flowed in me. One night in 1989, I didn’t come home, so off to Brian’s house she went. Brian told her that I was arrested for picketing outside Parliament during the budget debate and was in the Brickdam lock-ups.
As my daughter reached primary school age, she would come home and tell me that people were taking about me – some nice stuff, some not so cool things. I sat her down and lectured her on expecting these things from people about her father. It was early training for her. Decades after, my wife and my daughter know what to expect and what they see and hear, doesn’t bother them at all, I repeat, at all. Sometimes they come in for some attacks but they know how to handle it; they never bother. It was a year of personal attacks on me and my family, with the Chronicle leading the way, but my dead mother came in for some tongue-lashing too.
My mom, who died in 1985, was a semi-literate woman whom 99.99 percent of the Guyanese people never heard about. She never uttered a public statement in her life and never talked about politics except to take sides like all Guyanese families in the war between Jagan and Burnham. Out of the blue, last year, I got this e-mail from the Stabroek News editor, Anand Persaud, asking me to defend myself in a letter to be published, written by an extremely weird PPP fanatic who accused me of stealing 88 books from the National Library 40 years ago.
I didn’t have a problem responding to Mr. Persaud’s request though I couldn’t fathom what was the point of the missive. What I couldn’t understand is how my mother got into that correspondence and why Mr. Persaud didn’t edit out that sickening section before sending it to me. I threatened Mr. Persaud with an extra-journalistic reaction should he publish that entire letter because of the nasty things said about my mom. I guess of all the surprises of 2009 in reaction to my politics, this was the one.
I started out in politics at age sixteen, and no one ever wrote a single line about my mother until November last year. There were two other dimensions to that surprise, which do not augur well for journalism in 2010. One was that this came from unlikely quarters, the Stabroek News. I still cannot comprehend why that paper would want to drag my innocent mother’s name into the mud. Secondly, that e-mail to me from Mr. Persaud typifies the decline of that paper since the death of David de Caires; 2009 proved that de Caires was indispensable to the survival of the Stabroek News.
The year 2009 put me in the record books. Never before in this country has any citizen without political office, or not an opposition politician, had more written about him than what appeared on me in the Chronicle. In 2009, every week there was a minimum of five letters on me. In one day, all the letters, five in all, were on me. On another day out of seven letters, four were on me. Please multiply 4 by 52 and you get a record in the history of newspapers in this country. Yes, you cannot and will not believe it, but do the research and you will see that for 2009, there were over 200 letters in the Chronicle attacking me.
One can say that in 2009, Chronicle had an obsession with me. All I repeat, all the letters were scurrilous and a majority analysed my mental health, declaring me insane. I never knew Guyana had so many psychiatrists.
It is possible that in 2009 the Office of the President, Freedom House and GINA ran courses in psychiatry? Pity they didn’t take the time to conduct some courses in democratic governance. I was called all kind of names in the English language in those letters, including ugly by that same PPP fanatic mentioned above who would hardly pass a beauty test but that is life; you meet all kinds in the world and in life. Let me end with an announcement. I will continue to do what I did in 2009 – fight against elected dictatorship in my country.
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