Kissoon is off colour

Mar 10, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,
I am sincerely glad that there is someone who has a name like ‘Kissoon’ who highlights the African Guyanese dilemma. It is a step in the right direction in helping to heal racial wounds in this country. Frederick Kissoon’s column in Kaieteur News, “Lady Jags, the colour of Guyana, the colour of tragedy” (06-03-10), however, reveals the columnist’s real colour.
There is an obvious paradigm shift his philosophastering of culture and ethnicity. For a man who has declared that it does not matter one bit whether he is East Indian, and for one who deemed me in 2002 as “too taken up in culture”, it is rather interesting that he now has now ingratiated himself in “historical culture”; his dissection of colour and ethnicity in Guyana is rather pique. Man, what does it matter in the picture? Isn’t all a we is Guyanese, and all a we is not one?
Poor guy – he took the effort to detail the musical staccato of the Portuguese and Africans (Elvis, The Stones, Sam Cooke, The Drifters) but could not stomach mentioning those musicians that have meant a lot to East Indians. I cannot blame the man; he was brought up in Wortmanville, so he never could known about Mohammed R. or Lata M. But I do understand; I was ashamed to expose my Indianness in Georgetown in the 1970’s as a teenager. Being ‘Indian’ (from “the countryside”) was perceived by the people of Georgetown as clumsy, old fashioned and uncultured; I now know differently.
My wife (who was not born in Guyana) and I passed through three sets of government workers since arriving in Guyana a few months ago – those at the airport, at the passport office and at the Ministry of Home Affairs. This first time visitor to Guyana could not help but notice that there was overwhelmingly one “standing” colour of these workers. Mr. Kissoon dares not mention the hue in this context – wonder why? I am convinced the man does not have the integrity nor the guts to do so.
For the sake of brevity, I shall concentrate on Mr. Kissoon’s last paragraph is that column. The proud professor stated (of the commercial landscape in Georgetown), “Almost 99.99 percent is Indian ownership…” In other words, for every thousand businesses or so, about 9,999 are owned by Indians. I have a funny feeling that the professor either needs to have his eyes examined, or he needs a course in statistics.
His last line in that column was the poignant question, “what is the colour of tragedy?” I thought he might have insinuated “yellow”. Though Amerindians are more visible these days, I do believe they are worse off ‘colour’ than the rest of Guyana. Lately, why is he griping about one particular colour? Is he concerned about total colourful mosaic of Guyana? Really, can we take this man seriously in his emotional outbursts and exaggeration?
Devanand Bhagwan

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