Real life is full of moments which can’t stand up to strict and boring morality

Jul 27, 2013 Letters

Dear Editor,
Freddie Kissoon’s column yesterday raised such resonances that I am impelled to a dangerous act: to express a view different from that of Freddie Kissoon.
First I have to confess that a generation ago I bribed an official of the Ministry of Education to change my son’s primary school placement from a school in our neighbourhood to one at the other end of town.
How I located that officer is another story, but the nature of the bribe is interesting. I gave him a copy of a book I had lately been concerned in publishing: Martin Carter’s Selected Poems. The man was an ex-teacher, of rural origin. He was predictably charmed by the collection, selected by the iconic poet himself as works he wished to be remembered by; with an Introduction by Ian McDonald; printed on the shaky second-hand press that the Stabroek News first used in Robb Street, at great mechanical risk that David de Caires could not but authorise; bound in a cover designed by Stanley Greaves, carrying a portrait taken by Ed Rodway and Pat Pierre, and a two-line blurb written by Rupert Roopnaraine.
How could any educated Guyanese resist an inducement like that, to reinforce the plea I laid on him?
I told him that having gone to Sacred Heart Primary (from a Queenstown address) had had such a profound effect on my identity as a Guyanese that I wanted my boy to have the same influence on his growing up. He said that, though he’d never met either of us before, he was sure the boy would turn out a credit to the school. So the evil deed was done; official discretion was exercised, I don’t now care on what official justification.
A year or two later I emerged into the street from Customs House (after an official encounter that’s another story in itself) and had a kind of epiphany as a Georgetown person, with some of the most vital influences in my life bound up with Main Street Avenue, where my son would be in an hour or two, buying tamarind balls like I had so many years before him.
Well, Sacred Heart gained the boy a place in Queen’s College. He got just enough CXCs (though at Nations, not at Queens, but that’s yet another story) to make it into UG, where he graduated before he was 21. He didn’t become a notable academic, but I know that school did help my son become a person that Guyana can be proud of — though he’s a Canadian now: and isn’t that the story of our homeland.
So how do I feel about that piece of bribery and corruption?
Not guilty, then or now, and I am sure that official should not feel guilty. That’s perhaps the point of all these stories, that real life is full of moments which can’t stand up to strict and boring morality. Not that Freddie will resist attacking the messenger as usual, but ordinary people use whatever advantages they have to make their way through their world. I think it’s called evolution.
Sadly, the advantages became often reduced to crass economics, or unequal access. That’s part of the progress that drove me away from being a Georgetown person. But not to where I cannot see/You walking on the backroads/By the rivers of my memory/Ever smiling, ever gentle on my mind. A (garbled) sentimental quote from John Hartford. For I can’t resist jerking Freddie’s chain one more time: how much of his ranting has to be forgiven, when it comes from genuine sentiment?
Gordon Forte

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