Guyanese and our Bahamian Connection (Part 2)

May 25, 2014 News

Countryman – Stories about life, in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective

Behind the façades – a shared reality

By Dennis A. Nichols
A façade! Every person, every community and, by extension every country, nurtures one. Without it the inexorable truth about our lives, and how we survive, could be unbearable. That’s my thinking and my conclusion, arrived at through observation, experience and just plain common sense. Because when you plumb the depths of a nation’s soul, from the citizen to the citizenry, you will discover layers of thought and feeling and expression, the outermost often being a posture of self-deprecating modesty, false pride, and in some cases, extreme nationalism. (Here in the Caribbean, we appear to put on a front of cavalier hospitality, which can really be a burden for many.)

Dennis Nichols

Guyana has a façade, The Bahamas has one, and as I mentioned in my last story, living and working in both countries (in The Bahamas, for close to 11 years) has led me to a comparison of the two places in which I have spent most of my life. For the sake of brevity, and for convenience, I am using the word ‘façade’ in the sense of an image presented to persons who normally live outside of a certain community, with a knowledge and understanding of it that may be slightly, or vastly, different from that which is understood and shared within that community, be it village, city or country. It is an image hardly ever in black and white, but tinted and tainted with varied shades of grey.
Tourists coming to visit, or foreigners coming to work in Guyana, must of necessity have a mental image of what our country ‘is all about’. They may even have fact sheets or brochures advertising the country, or the spheres of activity in which they are involved. Thus a certain perception is formed. It is unlikely that they will have a picture that accurately, or even approximately, depicts the crime, corruption, immorality, political mud-slinging and grandstanding that we Guyanese ‘know about’ and bemoan. Instead they will mostly hear about political stability and recent economic growth, our beautiful ‘Garden City’ with its picturesque tree-lined avenues and quaint colonial edifices, our splendid and pristine hinterland, our abundance of natural resources, the grandeur of Kaieteur Falls and our eco-tourism potential.
How shocking and disenchanting it would be if some of them could have a preview – an extensive tour of Georgetown that includes navigating at leisure through Sophia, Albouystown and Tiger Bay, catching a mini-bus at Stabroek Market Square, seeing filthy, clogged gutters, vermin-infested piles of garbage, and derelict pavement-dwellers, then picking up a newspaper and reading about the murder of the day, the latest political bad-mouthing or the most recent financial fiasco. Even a trip to our vaunted hinterland could be fraught with frustration, as they realize that fair-weather roads, impassable rivers and malarial jungle were aspects of eco-tourism not covered in the itinerary.
In The Bahamas, the disconnect between what is advertised and what is realized, may not be as stark as with Guyana, as tourists and foreigners get used to a protocol of deferential courtesy that lessens the impact of the Bahamian reality. And of course much of what is offered in the tourist brochures and fact sheets is more or less true, so that this inconsistency is due more to the act of omission than to deception.
Nevertheless, the reality of Bahamian life can be quite disconcerting, even jarring, for foreigners, maybe more so than in Guyana, since the overall expectation of ‘It’s better in The Bahamas’ has been so well-established and experienced, after the islands became a major tourist attraction, over the last 50 years or so.
The Bahamian façade then, is chiefly a practiced and cultured way of relating to foreigners that hides the uglier aspects of living in the country, particularly in the two most populous islands, New Providence (with the capital, Nassau) and Grand Bahama. There, foreigners, mostly tourists, are usually kept away from the seedy and impoverished areas where criminal activities, including drug-related violence, are rampant. They do not overtly see the poverty, the dysfunctional single-parent households, the jobless and semi-literate youths, the sexually-active preteens, the incestuous relationships, the drug-fueled gunfights, and the white-collar crimes that ordinary Bahamians talk about casually and openly.
However, most Bahamians are shrewd enough to keep up the appearance of equanimity and cultural cohesion for the sake of tourists and the tourism industry which they also ‘know’ is helping to keep their country from economic implosion.

Façade or the real thing? Picture-perfect Nassau!

And the funny thing is that many tourists are not so naïve, or so unread, as not to be aware that the ‘façade’ Bahamas and the ‘real’ Bahamas co-exist as the proverbial two sides of the same coin. But they come in their cruise ships, parade half-naked along Bay Street in Nassau, and in the Port Lucaya Marketplace in Freeport, go on booze cruises, shop for mementos, and generally part with enough U.S currency to help perpetuate the status quo. It is an understanding and necessary relationship.
In the case of Guyana, tourists are like Granny’s teeth – few and far apart. We have not the lure of white sand and blue waters, nor the necessary infrastructure for a Bahamian-type tourist industry. So unlike The Bahamas, there is little in terms of a foil to lessen the burden of our complex social, economic and political problems. Nevertheless, many Guyanese (I included) may want to think of our much-vaunted natural resources, and our undeniably accommodating attitude towards foreigners, as having the potential to mitigate our dilemma. But in any case, our country’s façade lacks the polished veneer of the Bahamian model, which makes the ‘real’ Guyana that much more visible, and that much easier to discredit.
Guyana has long sheltered behind the assumption of being a highly-literate and articulate society. It was, in my opinion, a correct assumption, and one that was validated by the way we spoke and wrote, how we handled our affairs individually and collectively; even how we carried ourselves. That aspect of our façade is crumbling, and it is never more evident to me than when I am abroad. ‘Mud heads’ used to be a jocular nickname for Guyanese, at least several decades ago when I first visited Barbados with my father. That epithet may now be the tamest of the many pejorative terms used to describe our people.
I listen now to the way our leaders and politicians speak and express themselves, as well as our television personalities, young professionals, sports men and women, and schoolchildren, and, with relatively few exceptions, our standards have dropped, in comparison with those of many of our Caricom sister nations. Look at, and listen, to the leaders, broadcasters, sports persons and schoolchildren in The Bahamas, Trinidad, Barbados etc… Compare them to their Guyanese counterparts and tell me what you think.
I now realize that while teaching in The Bahamas, I too adopted a façade to deal with at least two perceived issues that drove many expatriate teachers to frustration, and in my case, to the point of an imminent nervous breakdown. The first was a perception that the schoolchildren there were easily the most inattentive, undisciplined and aggressive pupils I’d ever taught; the second was an idea that the Ministry of Education had a special design to entice, ensnare and infuriate foreign teachers with what we felt was too much bureaucracy and too little efficiency.
Obviously, neither perception was really accurate. There were several very smart, disciplined and personable students at each school I taught, and on more than one occasion, Ministry of Education staff went out of their way to help me. But with nationalistic Guyanese nerve, I inwardly compared these two seemingly exasperating groups of Bahamians to their Guyanese equivalents, and found consolation in the ‘fact’ that notwithstanding the tourism motto of ‘It’s better in The Bahamas’, it is actually better in Guyana. However since my return to my native land five months ago, I’ve done some serious rethinking about this comparison thing, and the truth is I don’t know which, if any, is actually better.
While as nations Guyana and The Bahamas have quite a few dissimilar notions with respect to history, geography and cultural influence, these go more with the façade than with the real. Ordinary Caribbean people – especially those struggling to keep from going under – probably have little time to consider the nuances of what makes them different. And tourists and foreigners are not usually inclined to fight poverty, crime and social disintegration for you. Rather, Guyanese and Bahamians may want to ponder how best they can adjust their lifestyles to accommodate both the façade and the reality of living in such a farcical and changeable landscape. That is what we share.