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The dialectic of looking up and down at the same time
A visitor, Rahul Bhattacharya, came here and wrote a book titled “The Sly Company of People Who Care,” about what he observed in Guyana. Missing from Bhattacharya’s panorama (he is not an investigating scholar but a travel writer) is the paradox of resplendence sitting alongside squalor. It would have been interesting to read his description of this peculiar Guyanese dialectic.
Travel around this country and what you see will strain your neck. You have to keep looking towards the skies if you want to see the sudden emergence of resplendent construction.
All over Guyana, expensive seven-storey buildings are going up. The manifestation is greater in Georgetown. The reality covers both private sector and private investment. The total cost is probably unimaginable. This volume of money will need a super computer to calculate. One businessman bought a church and its land in downtown Georgetown for half a billion dollars and demolished the church.
If someone gives you a guided tour of these structures, you probably will conclude that Guyana is a developed country. Of course private money that finances opulent buildings is not as lamentable as public money that goes into ostentatious projects. We have an Olympic-size swimming pool (will tell you about the mashed-up donkey outside the pool last week and minutes after it was removed; I live a five-minute walk from this facility).
We will be having a Marriott Hotel. There is going to be a spanking addition to the Timehri Airport. In Leonora (why here of all places), there is going to be a modern athletic track and the list goes on.
Your neck strain immediately vanishes to be replaced by angst when you look down. What you see is nihilism. This is a land of bestial, inhuman contrasts. If someone should come from another planet and visit Guyana, and you show them all these expensive “skyscrapers” going up, you tell them about Marriott, show them the new Ogle airport, go swimming with them in a certain ministerial pool in the Montrose area, take them shopping at the Regent/Camp Streets junction, then they are bound to see Guyana as the Paris of the CARICOM family.
It is when you let them open their eyes on the ground, then Guyana becomes a best-selling horror novel. This contrast has no parallel in modern history. How can a country have the types of commercial banks we see in Georgetown, an Olympic-size swimming pool, ultra-modern shopping malls, but children are being educated in squalor at most public schools?
Very few public schools throughout the territory of Guyana have functioning toilet facilities.
I travelled to Berbice and Essequibo last week and I thought it was only Georgetown that was stink. Georgetown is indeed the dirtiest capital city in the world, but the mess dots the landscape of the other two counties. I saw filthy areas, districts and surroundings in both Berbice and Essequibo. I didn’t see any clean cemetery in those two counties.
The rut, miasma, the stench of rotting civilization is not confined to Georgetown. It pervades the entire land of Guyana. Rats eat a corpse and the Stabroek News did a cartoon on it.
I thought it was indeed an effective caricature of disappearing civilization in this country. But the cartoonist could have done a more devastating job if he had shown the art of looking up and down at the same time. While he painted the oversized rat eating the corpse, he could have shown some youths having fun in the elevator at Guyana’s latest shopping complex at Regent and Camp Streets.
Children have no way of answering a call of nature at public schools; the country’s only university has been hit by Sandy long before Sandy touched down in New York last week; half of the row of lights on the East Coast Highway from Clive Lloyd Drive to the Russian Embassy went out of existence two years ago; most of the traffic signals died a year ago and plantains are going at $160 a pound.
Against this misery of civilization in this territory, singer Chris Brown will collect over sixty million dollars of public money for performing for one hour.
Do you know Colonel Gaddafi’s son did the same thing? One year he paid Lionel Richie a million American dollars for three songs. The next year, he gave Beyonce two million American for five songs. Do you know where this fool is at the moment? He is in jail, overthrown by the Arab Spring. It is doubtful he will see Richie or Beyonce in person again.
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