Hybridity and Hypocrisy

Mar 25, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

Last week we emphasised the distinction between ‘multicultural’ and ‘multiculturalism’. The former being our lived societal reality with diverse cultural streams and the latter our national policy to deal with former. We’ve been ‘winging’ it up to now, but periodic eruptions of dissatisfaction invariably peter out because they are dealt with in isolation rather than honing in on the systematic contradictions in our ‘multiculturalism”.
Under the rubric of ‘National Culture’, our constitution Article 35 states: “The state honours and respects the diverse cultural strains which enrich the society and will constantly seek to promote national promotion of them at all levels and to develop out of them, a socialist national culture for Guyana.” So while our ‘multiculturalism’ accepts that we are a ‘multicultural’ society and promises to ‘promote the diverse cultural strains” it explicitly seeks to “develop a socialist national culture”.
While the ‘socialist’ qualification might have been discretely dropped in the last few decades, the fundamental goal of creating some sort of unitary ‘national culture’ is still the overarching goal of our state. The National Motto – One People; One Nation; One Destiny – emphasises the assimilationist imperative of the old British imperialist model. We were all expected to jettison our respective distinctive cultural identities/practices and hark to a putatively ‘higher’ ideal.
The constitutional stipulation proposes a sort of ‘all awe ah one’ cultural melange from the aforementioned ‘strains’ a la the ‘melting pot’ model. But the American experience that gave us the latter term is instructive. While the ‘melting pot’ suggests an interpenetration of all cultures into each other, in the US, British culture became the de facto standard to which all were supposed to cleave. The question, as we pointed out last week, always boiled down to the cultural premises of those that possessed power: definitional power in the hands of any one group is never neutral.
And we can begin to discern the problems Indians had with Mashramani from the moment it was introduced in 1970 in Linden. It was then adopted by the government of the day as the ‘national’ celebration of Republic Day. While the “Republic” promised equal participation as citizens, Mashramani demanded they fit into a ‘cultural’ festival defined by the carnival ethos of T&T. Earl Lovelace, among others, has delineated how that ethos was transmuted from the African cultures the ex-slaves had brought from their homeland.
Thus while the official rhetoric of the Guyanese state after independence suggested it was interested in ‘cultural hybridity’, the form it took, as in the US, was that some cultures were more equal than others. And the less equal ones should go along with the ‘standard’ to get along.
Calls for Indians to participate in Mash – as when the SN recently called for the organisers of Diwali to come aboard – arrogantly take for granted that the premises of the former are in consonance with the latter. And this is why the PPP will always be blamed for Indian non-participation in Mash: that the latter may have substantive problems with the content of Mash, does not even enter the equation.
The irony, of course, is that after an initial period of honest appraisal, the PPP has vigorously promoted Mash, but with no discernable improvement in Indian participation – either by numbers or by content. The point, of course, is that the PPP, which now has control of the state to create norms and by definition a reordering of social hierarchies, also has not seen it fit to initiate a national discourse on the contour of our multiculturalism. The official ‘Guyanese’ culture is still to a large extent disdainful of the Indian component of the ‘multicultural’ reality.
Mash, as we noted last week, therefore becomes simply a trope for disputing the mono-cultural foundations of our ‘multiculturalism’. In a multicultural polity, groups will always challenge their silencing on the national stage – or its token representation – in the name of some universal standard or value. Because such a silencing is always a consequence of a lack of power, such challenges are ultimately political in that it calls for a more equitable distribution of power.
But such open contestation should not be seen as threatening once it is accepted as necessary and it is dealt with through national dialogue and discussion. It is also positive because it not only addresses dissatisfactions with the status quo, but reduces the potential for demagogic manipulations that have become standard in Guyana. And this occurs not only at Mash.
One point that we have emphasised in arguing for an equitable national policy on multiculturalism over the last two decades is that it will make available such a wider array of knowledge and practical wisdom to our nation. And God knows we are in dire need of such wisdom.