A house for a home

Jun 16, 2013 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

About to return to Guyana in the late ‘80s, I ran into Albert Baldeo, who’d been a magistrate in Guyana. Assuming I’d be practicing law in Guyana, he assured me that his home in Bel Air and his office near the courts were just the things I needed to purchase. I told him that even though Tom Wolfe had vouchsafed that “you can’t go home again”, I was going to do just that. Home for me was on the sugar estate of Uitvlugt.
Attending Brooklyn College from1972, when Jewish Flatbush was being overtaken by West Indians, made me realise that whatever else I was, the West Indian component was ineradicable. But life in an apartment never filled my idea of a house much less a home. The “American Dream” of the house in the suburb and the two cars in the driveway beckoned and was achieved by 1979.
Working by then in mid-town Manhattan (40th and Broadway), northern New Jersey was but a stone’s throw away across the George Washington Bridge. The real estate agent suggested two locations, Tenafly and Teaneck. The former was lily white while the latter had been the first town in New Jersey to voluntarily desegregate in the 1960s. I wanted my children to live in a mixed town and attend mixed schools: Teaneck had an interesting mixture of whites, blacks, Orthodox Jews and assorted minorities. What I noticed was that most of the Blacks were professionals who had migrated from Harlem across the Hudson. The kids fitted in; but for me while there was now a house it was never “home”.
Returning annually to Guyana from that year, and making the final move a decade later, I spent a couple of years in Uitvlugt itself, then onto neighbouring Zeeburg and De Willem. The thought was a simple one: critiquing the political and social order, I assumed it would help to be among the people who were facing the greatest pressures then – the sugar workers. In the street where I lived in De Willem, were the homes of several of the men who had been charged for treason and tortured for plotting an alleged WPA attack on the state back in 1980.
I had always found it anomalous that so many of the persons who purport to represent workers were so far removed from the day-to-day realities of the latter’s lives. This is not to say that one cannot empathise with those who experience different circumstances from one’s own – this is, after all, the function of good literature- but that to actually share them brings a great immediacy to one’s sensibilities.
Living in a “bottom house” for the next decade, during which I was catapulted into politics, forced me however to reflect on Thomas Wolfe’s final message: “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
Yes things do change – especially in a Guyana that had just emerged from two decades of dictatorship. Most of my generation had long moved on to foreign shores and those who had remained were altered in ways that I sometimes found disconcerting. For too many, life was literally a “hustle”. There was a cynicism about governments and politicians that went very deep: everyone had to be engaging in a hustle. Which idiot would really be acting altruistically? It can become very tiresome.
By the time I was ready to build and move the family into a “proper” house when I left politics in 2006, I had achieved some of my aims at least. The house was on the spot in Uitvlugt where my father had moved from the logees near the sugar factory back in 1953. The second was to pass on a lesson without words to my two Guyana-born children: that happiness did not only have to depend on having a “big house”, which they now had.
The big house in the “exclusive community” – even gated – was by then the epitome of the “good life” in this new Guyana. I could go along with the “big house” but I drew the line on the “exclusive community” bit. I remembered visiting India to search for the village of my forefather who had emigrated to De Willem back in 1888. Taken to the village of Ishmailpur, I was struck by the segregation of the Brahmin section and the “others” – also sub-segregated. That was not a “full circle” I wanted to draw.
The other cautionary tale was my experience at Teaneck, NJ. The blacks who left Harlem, depleted it of the human capital that could have help lift it out of its morass. Why should we do the same in Guyana?

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A house for a home

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