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Hope in a New Year

Jan 01, 2011 Editorial

It’s a wonderful tradition, this commemoration of a “new year”. Apart from acknowledging the passage of time, it makes us believe that whatever may have gone wrong in the past year, whatever may have been our unfulfilled aspirations, we have the opportunity to start all over again to make things right. It is a commemoration of hope, which we are assured, beats eternal in the breast of all mankind. This is not an inconsequential happenstance for those of us that live in Guyana today.
If one were to look around, after all, there would be precious little to give us “objective” hope of betterment in the near future. Farmers toil and hope to eke out a living from the honest sweat of their brow: but their lot is as wretched as their forbears’.
The promises of new markets and new crops that would catapult them into prosperity have become bitter harvests that have to be ploughed into the ground. The less that is said about cane workers, the better. The small gold prospector has been pushed out of existence and bauxite workers cling precariously to life.
The growing “service sector” continues to earn less than subsistence wages. But hope remains.
Women continue to die in childbirth at extraordinary rates and the authorities seem not to have the foggiest notion of what to do. Taxi drivers are still found randomly executed at various points in the country.
Drugs continue to spread its deadly tentacles into the sinews of our society even as its spoils trickle into the economy to create the illusion of “progress”. The tiny elite with incomes thousands of times larger than the average citizen’s enjoy their debauched lifestyles in burgeoning, luxurious, gated communities.
But hope survives. And it must, for all the wretched of the earth, including those in Guyana.
In the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, the protagonist is doomed by the Gods to push a heavy stone up a hill only to have it roll downwards as it is about to reach the crest and he returns to his onerous task eternally.
For the longest while the myth was interpreted as exemplifying the futility immanent in the human condition. And it certainly seems to describe ours. In our never-ending struggle to keep out the “bush” – to switch to Naipaul’s local analogy – the bush seems to be winning, hands down.
The Algerian-born, French philosopher Camus, however, gave an interesting twist to the myth of Sisyphus.
Camus observes Sisyphus as he pauses at the summit of the mountain realising the rock has rolled past his feet and turns to make his way down the mountain again.
For Camus, this is the defining moment in the tale and the only tragic one, because it is only then that Sisyphus becomes conscious of the futility of his existence.
This realisation could lead him to surrender, to refuse further part in this charade and let the Gods do what they will with him.
But dignity does not permit him to kneel, to admit to the wretchedness of his condition and we see him wiping his brow, face set in grim resolve as he trudges down the mountain of his despair.
In each of those moments, Sisyphus has conquered his fate – “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn,” declares Camus.
With this understanding at the foot of the mountain, Sisyphus turns, braces himself against the stone, the clarity of his purpose permitting him a fleeting smile, and begins to push. Sisyphus’ purpose is to defy the odds at all costs, to keep pushing his stone up the mountain until even the Gods are humbled before him.
There is grandeur in Sisyphus’ existence and majesty in the tenacity of his purpose. In that moment, we may imagine Sisyphus to be happy.
And it is this grandeur that we must not allow to be stripped from us by uncaring leaders. This year, we have the option of choice. We cannot ever lose hope.

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