The uses of history

Jan 03, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Mr Annan Boodram has commented on aspects of the historical revisionism I developed over the last month. He declares, “With all respect to Ravi Dev, the books he referenced by Dr Baytoram Ramharack and Dr Clem Seecharan are not as objective and unbiased as he and others would want us to believe.” He claims that the authors started with a “thesis and then research was scouted to support this thesis” and the opposite could just as easily have been done.
I agree that this is possible. I never asserted that the cited texts or the authors were “objective and unbiased”. In fact what I stressed was that “every narrator of history, had weaknesses – selectiveness, ideological, factual, etc that should be challenged.” The first cut in distinguishing between the two variants of revisionism was to check their “authentication strategies”- for instance their fact claims against verified and generally substantiated records. The distinction lies firmly in the methodology used. I contrasted the “scholarly” approach of the cited two authors that follow rigorous conventions versus what one may call the dishevelled anecdotalism of the latter.
“Objective” social science (or for that matter, natural sciences after Thomas Kuhn) is an oxymoron. There is Hegel’s distinction between “events” and “actions: reality may be created by events and processes but our “experience” of that reality is the “re-memberance” of it and always humanly mediated and constructed.
“Truth” is socially constructed not to mention that we all work within paradigms that massage our conclusions in prefigured ways. For good, bad or indifferent, it is no longer possible on philosophical grounds for us to accept the old “objective” notions of truth, historical or otherwise. As the historian, say, selects even his verified facts about events (and inevitably omits others) he has to connect them in some way to save his account from being a mere list. He accomplishes this with some assumed plot that gives the facts meaning; the significance of narratives, then, is always retrospective. History does not have lessons – historians do.
This perspective begs the question that I implicitly posed in my response to the Peeper: what then are the uses of history? It all has to do with the present in which we are forced to make choices every second of every day. And every choice ultimately is a moral choice. We have daily examples of individuals deploying history to justify the morality of their actions in the present. But we have cautioned that historical memory cannot confine itself to simply criticising individuals from the past for being naïve or, God forbid, stupid. What’s the point of that exercise, apart from sterile polemics?
I suggested that we have to begin from our Foucauldian “history of the present” in which we interrogate intensely the “problem space” – – the threats and opportunities that confront us at a sociohistorical conjuncture – that defined the context of an issue in the past. We engage in a rigorous practice of inquiry that demands us to formulate and present questions, assemble, evaluate, analyze, and interpret evidence, and to articulate and defend an argument based upon the relationship between the questions posed and the evidence gathered. In a word, we problematise the past.
The questions, we have to remind ourselves constantly, is from the interlocutor’s present and framed within his horizon of expectations. The question for us is, what choices are we trying to make (out of the cornucopia of infinite possibilities) in out present problem space and what are we trying to achieve? What traces of the past questions and answers linger in our present? And most importantly, how relevant are they in today’s problem space? It is only in this manner that exemplary history can help us deal with current problems rather than just beating up on our old leaders. We situate the two cited texts in this tradition – even as we may not agree with all or any of the authors’ conclusions.
On the issue of violence as a tool for engendering regime change in Guyana, Mr. Boodram correctly states that early on we believed that Dr Jagan erred in rejecting that option. My very first interaction with Dr Jagan was in the early 80’s at Casas de las Americas in NYC, when I questioned him furiously on his position – as a revolutionary Marxist. He remained steadfast – the “objective conditions” were not right.
As I have written before, Baytoram Ramharack wrote on “The Right to Rebel” in the inaugural issue of Jaguar in February 1988. On our return to Guyana between 1988-1989, however, our structured interviews and surveys showed conclusively that the society was as divided ethnically as ever before and any large scale armed option would certainly precipitate civil war. We changed tack and introduced our “For a New Political Culture”,
But we want to emphasise that the problem space of 1989 was far different from that of 1979 when Dr Rodney evidently opted for an armed option – which was also part of his Marxist ideological repertoire. Dr Rodney cannot be dismissed as some sort of adventurer as Mr Boodram appears to do. He had deliberated long and hard (this is a matter of the published record) on the question of violence. Unlike most other local Marxists, Dr Rodney had a more nuanced position on the “race” question that had bedevilled us since 1838. He and the WPA had done much work to convince many on both sides of the divide that theirs was a viable option.
I returned to Guyana (to Uitvlugt near where the treason 15 had been picked up and tortured) in late 1979 (for the first time since I had left for studies in 1972) and could only concur with Dr Rodney. Indians, especially, felt that Dr Rodney, as an African, could deal with an African-dominated security apparatus better than Dr Jagan’s PPP. CLR James, as a mentor of Dr Rodney who located him firmly within the tradition of the narrative of revolutionary romance, faulted him for not having studied enough “the taking of power”. In the same piece, he also criticised Dr Jagan, within the tradition of that narrative. It is not only the answers of the past that are irrelevant to our problem space – but even the questions since they are grounded in a failed narrative of emancipation.
We repeat the exhortation of John Paul Lederach: Transcending violence is forged by the capacity to generate, mobilize and build the moral imagination. Moral imagination is a matter of creating links between memory and vision and is to a large extent the vocation of communities. Let us create those links with a new narrative.

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