Latest update December 19th, 2024 3:22 AM
Apr 20, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
At an uncivilized hour last Sunday, there was a loud noise in the lower flat of my home. It was 3.30 a.m. (Monday morning I suppose). My daughter rushed into our bedroom, asking if we heard it. I did, because it woke me up but my wife was asleep and didn’t hear it. My daughter described it for her. My mother-in-law who is eighty-eight, slept through the entire ordeal. What was the point of waking her?
Then the discussion among us began. My home has two levels but there is no ground level. Because of the flood of 2005, we built way above the yard, making our home the only one in the community that does not have a ground section. My home is the very last unit in the compound.
In the neighbourhood there is only one road in and one way out. I live at a cul-de-sac. So when you drive away from my gate you have to traverse the entire precinct to get out onto the public road; a very daunting prospect for burglars
I made the point that it would be silly for burglars to leave about fifty houses with ground entrance in our compound and seek to enter a house where they will have to use a long ladder to get to any window which are grilled anyway. Why stay upon a ladder working to rip off a grill when you can stand in the yard at another house and carry out the same task with greater ease?
None of us were wildly frightened because a large door separates the first level from our bedrooms at the top. So if the burglars were in the house they would encounter difficulty getting to us. My home is right next to the Railway Embankment so we could go out onto the verandah and shout for help.
All three of us agreed that at 3.30 in the morning it was suicidal to open the door and go down to see. But the timing was advantageous because in ninety minutes’ time, it would be dawn and the vehicular jungle on the Railway Embankment would begin. In the discussion among us, my wife kept saying if movement is taking place in the living room, it is not the work of burglars but people targeting the house. Obviously, she was referring to the political thing.
As we waited with increasing impatience for dawn to come, all three of us agreed that whoever was down there or whatever happened in the living room, it is connected to my politics. I knew in my heart my wife was right. The “thief man” option was just not on the table for debate. Whoever they are and whatever they did, they were not “thief men”.
Dawn arrived, we went down stairs and discovered the source our concern. The hanging chandelier in the ceiling in the living room had come crashing down. The fear in the eyes of all three of us turned to smiles. But we all knew when we heard that noise that fear would take over our minds, not the trepidation of burglars that may not harm you if you give them all that they asked for, but the fear of what brutal power will do to you.
Fear is the shadow that keeps your company as you go through each day exposing and criticizing naked power. As my wife and I walked down the stairs to go out that morning, I asked her, “Did you ever imagine that when you met me at the height of the activist strength of Walter Rodney and the WPA, that thirty-eight years later you would still be afraid that my politics would cause the government to harm me? She is a quiet person. She listened and didn’t reply.
Whenever I read about the children of the power elite talking about their rights and that they are Guyanese too who are entitled to equal opportunity and therefore people must respect that, I always say to myself; why don’t these people have coffee and buns and chat with my wife and daughter.
Talk to my kid and my wife so you could get into their heads to see what fear is like and how close a companion it is as you walk on the street or enter a shopping mall.
Last July, a Minister of the Government and one that is very controversial, said to me that I want to remove the PPP from government. I retorted, “And why not, I almost lost my life twice.” President Burnham and President Hoyte experienced my torrid activism against them but never even essayed an effort to physically harm me. I wonder all the time, had I died, how Papa Cheddi would have felt in his grave.
Is this the kind of power he left with the PPP?
Dec 19, 2024
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