Anger and Violence

Jul 08, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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A childhood friend of mine is visiting from Toronto. He’s a psychologist and family therapist by training and specialises in “anger management’. I showed him the letter by Lincoln Lewis, “Don’t expect silence or compliance on my part, Mr. Dev. Not now, not ever!” He assured me that this was a very angry man. Now I don’t have a problem with Mr Lewis being angry. Anger is a natural human emotion that arises out of frustrated or thwarted desires/goals. The problem is when we allow it to become excessive and allow it to subvert or reason. Mr Lewis after all is head of the TUC: his anger issues can have wide repercussions.
All I’ve suggested is perhaps Mr Lewis’ approach to addressing the African Guyanese condition in Guyana is not perhaps self defeating. Responding to my column “For a future peace”, he divined that “(Dev’s) interest is in keeping the races divided to pursue the agenda of racial dominance by demonising and labelling the African race.” I was shocked: had I been transported to some sort of parallel universe, where everything is the opposite? I went back to my column, which actually was a modification of one that had addressed a similar polemic several years before.
I’d written that Lewis’ call for a confrontational approach by African Guyanese to address their problems came out of a violent ‘revolutionary’ approach, honed to deal with colonial oppression. I suggested: “Our “problem space” – the threats and opportunities that confront us in our (present) sociohistorical conjuncture – is radically different. At a minimum, our “us” and “them” within the old narrative is not a unified “us” versus the “them –British”, whom we hoped to kick out – the “us” and “them” are now “all-ah-we” that have to co-exist in our common homeland.” To say that our races/ethnic groups are now “all-ah-we” and we must “co-exist in our common homeland” is to ‘divide the races’ and ‘demonise’ Africans?
I then proposed that when we make critiques of our present, we always do so with an eye towards a future we want to create: the present is unsatisfactory and we want to rectify that. I called this our ‘horizon of expectations”. I said that while we may differ in specifics, all peoples want “a more harmonious society”. I wrote, “I am suggesting that with the privilege of hindsight, we should connect the past with the present in a broader narrative that is healing rather than destructive? We cannot change the past but we can certainly change the future.” Is this divisive and ‘labelling’ to Africans?
I also pointed out: “Another way our problem space is different even from our immediate post-independence period is that the demographics now deny any built-in ethnic majority and so opens up the possibilities of a working democracy. A constructive narrative cannot then picture our opposing groups locked in mortal combat.” Is this divisive and racist?
Asserting that the details of the narrative we use is crucial to provoking either violence or peace, I vouchsafed that: “Hegel’s famous interpretation of Antigone as the paradigmatic Greek tragedy might be particularly apt to our situation. In this narrative both “sides” are morally right: the conflict is not between good and evil but between “goods” on which each is making exclusive claim.” To say that Africans and Indians et al all are ‘morally right” is divisive? I ended “For a future peace” by pleading to Lewis: “Let us use our newspapers for nation building rather than tearing it apart by narratives that are fighting long-gone terrors.” “Racist and divisive”?
Lewis warns: “(Dev) is advised while it is his right to agitate on behalf of any group; it cannot and will not come at the cost of disrespecting another and engaging in act/actions to deny them their rights.” I really do believe that this is the crux of Lewis’ (and for that matter, several other Afro-centric activists): While it is okay for them (and even myself) to agitate for African rights in Guyana –   but I am certifiably racist if I defend Indian interests or speak from an Indian perspective – contrary to the protestation of Lewis.
Back in 2009, Mr Lewis had also accused me of ‘racism” against African Guyanese. Inter alia, I answered: “Racism, of course, is the articulation of practices designed to place or keep a group in subjugation solely on account of their race. The fact that over the last two decades I identified the imperative for African voting behaviour as the consequence of an Ethnic Security Dilemma rather than being just “evil persons”; called for affirmative action in entrepreneurial activities for Africans to compensate for historical discriminations, an Ethnic Impact Statement on all government policies and program and for Equal Employment Opportunity legislation; supported a temporary shared executive arrangement as a precursor to more permanent mutually agreed to constitutional arrangements; etc. does not cut any ice.”
As I concluded then: “But this is the way of the binary: for one side to be all light, the other must be all darkness.”

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