“The Sky’s Wild Noise” drowned me with pessimism

May 01, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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There are two persons in the history of this country who will remain enigmas, mysteries, inexplicabilities and agonizing curiosities for me – Cheddi Jagan and Rupert Roopnaraine. I can never understand how Jagan was able to maintain a phenomenally successful life in politics despite character faults that were immense and shocking.
A fanatical communist that relied on race and Indian capitalist support, he lived out a contradiction that few in the history of modern world politics could have navigated.
Equally amazing is Rupert Roopnaraine. No one in the Third World has the ability to do what he has done. He has lived out more than thirty-five years in radical politics, yet for me, Roopnaraine is one of the most elitist, upper middle class politicians the Caribbean has produced.
From the time the WPA magic died, Roopnaraine has remained the darling of Guyana’s middle class and its upper strata. He moves with mesmerizing ease in the company of the Georgetown elites and they view him as their favourite politician. Yet paradoxically, he moves with equal ease among the radical wings of working class politics in this land.
It has always fascinated me how Rupert Roopnaraine and Tacuma Ogunseye can coexist in the same working class organization. But then again, this is Guyana, a country different from other nations in the entire world.
When I heard that Roopnaraine had published a book on his political senses, I knew that though I think of him as a most enduring elite, Guyanese from age eighteen to eighty would get an elegant, Fanonian, Jamesian (after CLR) treatment that they will forever cherish on Guyana’s contemporary political evolution. It was not to be. There can be no human being in this land from eighteen to eighty that did not jump up with glee when they heard Roopnarine was writing a book and his political thoughts would be contained therein.
We all waited with an exigent heartbeat to see how he would cover the landscape of the WPA period from Rodney’s arrival to his death in 1980; the personality of the complex human being named Forbes Burnham; the character of Cheddi Jagan, the turbulence and confusion in Buxton from 2002 to 2005; the regime of perhaps the most jejune, arid, unimpressive, and anti-working class leader in the history of the English-speaking West Indies, Bharrat Jagdeo.
But most irritatingly, Roopnaraine stayed billions of miles away from these sensitivities. And who can blame him. At seventy years of age, maybe he feels that world has long gone for him.
The book is divided into four sections – politics, art, literature and tributes. This is rather misleading because there is no politics section as we expect. Roopnaraine cannot be that dishonest as not to know that when it was announced that the book had a section on politics.
Guyanese, in and out of the territory, would anticipate that they would have his conceptualizations on exactly what constituted the WPA phenomenon. Was the WPA morally and politically right to do what it did back then? Did Roopnaraine have regrets or would he do it all over again?
The part that was interesting for me was page 21 of the introduction in which the author subtly stayed away from an adumbration of his own position on what took place in Buxton between 2002 and 2004 but chose to quote from “ The Morning After,” the book by Eusi Kwayana on the subject. But I guess in quoting from Guyana, one presumes that he accepts Kwayana’s analysis.
The only thing that bothered me was that I wasn’t reading “The Morning After” but the Sky’s Wild Noise.” I wasn’t reading Kwayana but Roopnaraine.
After enduring twelve years of Jagdeo’s reign, it would have been comforting to the historian to hear from Roopnaraine how the Burnham autocracy stacked up against the Jagdeo oligarchy. As someone who lived under the oppressive wind of both men, I honestly feel that Burnham was a more redemptive ruler.
At seventy, there are lots more years left in Roopnaraine, so we may yet have the penetrating thoughts of this long-serving activist on the most momentous periods of modern Guyana, in which he played no small part.
Honestly speaking, I find the politics section of this book disappointing. I paid $5000 for it. It was money I borrowed from my media colleague, Dale Andrews. I don’t know if Dr. Roopnaraine would like to reimburse me.
I read “The Sky’s Wild Noise” on my landing that overlooks my garden. I am beginning to resent my garden, because the birds have literally taken over, denying my wife her share of the fruits. But after I was finished reading, I did made a noise to get the birds to fly. And they did. The noise was pleasant but as they flew and I looked toward the sky, I saw a country I gave so much of my life to, but perhaps will never understand.

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