Speech Acts

Oct 31, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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When one writes or makes a statement, there are the words. These can be analysed for their sense and reference (the locutionary aspect) that one can verify whether it is true or false by comparing to that which was referenced.
Thus, for instance, when Mr Kwayana wrote, “On the surface, the village (Buxton) took the killing (of the Sealeys) quietly until the day of the funeral.
That night free-wheelers became active. Fires broke out (sic) at “eight or nine” Indian homes…” one can point to the words of Mr Randall Butisingh, another elder of Buxton, about the “afternoon” before the fires: “As I was coming home to Buxton by train, I saw a large gathering of Africans waiting for the train.
As soon as the train stopped and some teacher and I disembarked, they boarded the train and began beating up the Indians,” to claim that Mr Kwayana’s statement is false.
But there’s also simultaneously the “point”, or one may say, the “move” that was intended by Mr Kwayana.
This is the illocutionary aspect of the statement – called “speech acts” by J.L. Austin: these cannot be judged to be true or false but simply “felicitous” or “infelicitous”.
Mr Kwayana’s point was to assert that Buxtonians were not initiators of ethnic violence. In this sense, his statement is thus “felicitous” and it would be cavilling to argue about his intent.
So when Mr Kwayana recently remarked that I dubbed the title of his riposte (“No Guilty Race”) to my “Aetiology of an Ethnic Riot” “felicitous”, I meant it in the latter sense.
Mr Kwayana’s move, as he explicitly stated, was to wage “jihad against the doctrine, not the person, of anyone who claims there is a guilty race in Guyana.” Even in a locutionary sense I believe the phrase is true: I myself would join him in such a jihad. The problem is that as I have pointed out several times over the last decade, in developing his argument, Mr Kwayana waged his war against a straw man.
I have never ever claimed (locutionary) much less tried to prove (illocutionary) that Africans are a “guilty race”.
But speech acts have a third, “perlocutionary”, dimension – “what we bring about or achieve by saying something”. And in the case of “Aetiology” Mr Kwayana misunderstood the point I was making.
I have no wish to rehearse my argument in this article, save to say that I’ve asserted that my analyses of social phenomena are always strategic.
They interrogate a genealogy of our present and identify obstacles that have to be overcome to realise a desired future.
When I wrote “Aetiology” my intention was to suggest ways of dealing with the fact of the ethnic riot of January 12th 1998, which I feared, would escalate. I believe that Mr Kwayana’s felicitous phrase has unfortunately short-circuited the discussion I hoped to provoke.
Few Africans, if any, take the trouble to follow my argument or consider my proposals – after all why bother with a text that tries to prove that there’s a guilty race? This, I believe, is unfortunate because events since 1998 have repeatedly validated the thesis of “Aetiology”.
Mr Kwayana also asks if “Mr Dev (is) serious in hinting that my attitude caused, or embraced, ethnic cleansing (in Buxton)?” I sincerely believe that words such as “caused” or “embraced” displays an intentionality that was absent in his speech acts of the sixties.
But I do believe also that those speech acts helped create an atmosphere that led to the violence against Indians and their property in Buxton and elsewhere. Mr Kwayana noted that between 1961 and 1971 he “was inclined to blame Indians in general” and between 1961-64, his position was that “Indians attacked. Africans retaliated”.
There are the illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of speech acts. Hence my caution to Dr Hinds earlier this year and my observations on my own speech acts after 1998.
As an example, I repeat an observation I made last year about one such speech act from his booklet “Silent Witness” of 1962.
Here, Mr Kwayana states his case about “guilt” explicitly: to expose, “(‘the coward’) Jagan’s racial insolence and his cold-blooded organisation of the East Indians for the conquest that has always been their dream.”
He concludes: “The (PPP) Government, the guilty party in the matter of racial conflict, wished to hide the truth (about 1961) because it wants immediate independence under a constitution, which will leave it free to strangle the breath of the African people and the minorities, to create here an East Indian State, to plant the East Indies in the West Indies.”
And I concluded: “From Elder Kwayana’s problem-space in the sixties, I can understand (if not agree with) his answers to the questions then posed.
What has troubled me since was his resurrection and deployment of those Q&A’s, based on questionable “facts”, in the present.
At a minimum, I thought, the later revealed and confirmed facts of foreign fomentation in Feb 16, 1962 offered us the opportunity to “revise the narratives of guilt and innocence and construct one consistent with its objective of a national reconciliation based on ethnic equality and mutual security.”

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