Home is where the heart is, but don’t lose your head!

Oct 26, 2014 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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

By Dennis A. Nichols
The Bahamas is beautiful, but it’s not home! America is the home of the brave, (and the land of the free) but, going

colloquial, it ain’t home for me! Industrialized Germany with its tough nationalism, and enigmatic England, our increasingly cosmopolitan motherland, are models of European stability. I’ve been there and seen that, but home for me is, and will always be, where the heart is.
It’s where heart beats to rhythm of land and water, where memories of the past and hopes for the future collide with everyday survival, where my channa, puri, metemgee, cook-up rice and mauby; even the glass of lemonade ‘swank’, taste like nothing else on this earth. So I propose a toast to the health and heartiness of my homeland.
I returned home several months ago, after a prolonged stretch of teaching in The Bahamas. And just as happened 22 years ago when I returned from the U.S after living there for two years, friends and relatives wanted to know if I’d lost, or am losing, some of my most basic mental faculties. I was accused of being an unrealistic dreamer, seeing my Eldorado through rose-tinted specs, and worse, being a damn fool. Truth is, I may be guilty to some extent of all of the above, but I am also a realist; it’s just that my reality may be a bit different to the reality of others, especially when it comes to Guyana.
My Eldorado is far from what I would have liked it to be. Compared to The Bahamas, the United States, Germany or England, and several other ‘nice’ places, it may be seen as an impoverished third-worlder, a labyrinth of crime and corruption, or a failed state. That’s eminently arguable, but I’m not a politician or an economist.
Yet I consider myself sensible enough to know that in many ways, Guyana and Guyanese are not that different from some other countries and their citizens; for example there are some people, among them scientists and philosophers, who think that mighty America is fast approaching a doomsday of sorts, who also imply that it is becoming a failed federation. Maybe. Maybe not. Like I said, I’m neither a politician nor an economist, but I am a Guyanese.

A LIFETIME OF SIX HOURS
My story, my life experiences have been vast and varied, and some, immeasurably memorable. Many of them could only have happened here in Guyana, and one such experience lasted a lifetime of six hours, on a sugar estate of all places – Diamond sugar estate to be exact, out of which was born the short-lived legend of Balgobin

I had quit teaching the year before, and my interest about that most Guyanese of all jobs, cane-cutting, was inexplicably aroused when I learnt of a strike at Diamond Sugar Estate on the East Bank of Demerara, and the urgent need for scabs to supplement the non-striking workers. Why not, I mused. I’d already worked as a rice stacker at the Guyana Rice Board, a road gang labourer at GS&WC (Waterworks) and a teacher at St. Dominic’s School on the Aruka River, a few hundred kilometres from Georgetown. No roads, no electricity, no telephone, no potable water!
Those were tough jobs. Why should cane-cutting be any tougher? My cerebral cortex dismissed the very thought of it; never mind that my cutlass-wielding experience had been limited to yard-weeding in late afternoons, and chopping grass in my school compound on the Aruka. Wasn’t cane a kind of grass?
And so it was on an explosively bright Monday morning (I think) that I left my sister’s home in Plaisance and caught the sugar workers’ truck headed for Diamond Sugar Estate.
I duly presented myself to the relevant authority there who, after peering at me intently, wrote my name down in a book, gave me a brand new machete (not the kind of long, narrow cutlass I expected, but a shorter, thicker, heavier version, which I found out hours later I was supposed to sharpen first… how would I know that?) and sent me out, not with the scabs, but with a group of seasoned veterans. I wanted the experience, didn’t I; in fact I had asked to be sent with the regular workers!
Some of what I endured over the next six hours has been clouded over by time, but this much I remember. There was I, a skinny Red man with an unsharpened machete staring at a field of blackened sugar cane, with the sun already beginning to scorch my hide, sheepish and self-conscious, amidst a gang of tough-looking, weather-hardened, sinewy East Indian men.

A couple of troubling questions were starting to alarm that part of my brain to which I have already alluded. But I could not turn back; my pride wouldn’t allow me; in any case it dazedly came to me that I had a wife and three children to provide for, and I was a man. End of the matter.
I was given a partner to work with, one of the aforementioned weather-bronzed stalwarts, who proceeded to give me a short but intensive lesson in commonsense and cutting cane. He had little time to waste. He showed me how and where to cut each stalk, gather them together in a bundle, place it on my head, and walk the hundred yards or so to the punt he and I were supposed to fill.
But he was guilty of the sin of omission. He didn’t tell me where/how to sharpen my tool, or that I should have something on my head (I think he later called it by a Hindi name) to cushion the weight of the canes on my bare head. Neither did he tell me that the sun that shone down on cane cutters had a special kind of enervating heat straight from hell, that the ground was uneven, that my head, stomach, back and knees would betray my manliness, that skin colour can change from red to black in a matter of hours under the hell-sun, or that I needed to have on my person a little something named WATER. Until it was too late!

A CULTURE OF ITS OWN
I had walked briskly into the blackened field, the ashy heat already stinging my eyes. I think I was actually humming inaudibly the old national service song, ‘I want to build this land that belongs to me…’ I slapped the machete against my leg in manly fashion. My punt-partner wasn’t impressed.
A Guyanese sugar-cane field has a culture of its own. Those who work it generally know how much cane it holds, how and why it was burnt, how many punts it can fill, how much it costs their bodies, and how much money it can put in their pockets. They also know its bittersweet history, and theirs; many of the mostly East Indian labourers tracing back their lineage and livelihood from India, across Kala Pani, to the truly ‘New’ World. Guyana became their home and sugarcane, their identity. I later reflected on these things, but for me then, the idea of cane-cutting was as much a romantic notion as an economic one.
I started out boldly enough, secretly reveling in what I always felt was my wiriness and deceptive strength. I think it was about 7 ‘o’ clock and as I said earlier, the sun was already ‘standing up.’ I swung at my first cane stalk, swung again, and it fell. So far, so good. I bent my back to the task.
After about ten minutes, it suddenly dawned upon me that the other cane cutters were all ahead of me, and that I hadn’t tied a bundle yet. I hailed my partner. He came over and showed me how to do it. My first bundle had maybe a dozen canes, and as I tried to balance it on my head, the canes began shifting and sliding, and seconds later they were on the ground again. I tied them tighter; they continued to slip and slide but I managed to make it to the punt. It felt good, and I went back with renewed will.
My second trip to the punt however didn’t fare as well as the first. In addition to the bundle of canes shifting and sliding, my head was beginning to hurt, my one-inch ‘afro’ providing little cushion from the hard, knotty stalks. As I struggled to keep them from falling again I realized with a growing sense of amazement, that I was literally in over my head. (Cool pun) Twice the bundle slipped and fell to the ground; twice I managed to pick it up and go on, and twice I noted just how far I was lagging behind the others.
By the time I got to my third bundle, my partner, feeling sorry for me I guess, came and asked if I didn’t have some sort of a pad for my head. I answered sheepishly in the negative. Grim-faced, he tied the bundle for me, helped me hoist it to my head and before going back to his part of the field, reminded me, somewhat ungraciously, that we had a punt to fill by such and such a time. By his tone I had the uneasy feeling that he wanted to use stronger language (maybe a few expletives) but he held his tongue, and I held my nerve. The bundle fell only once this time, and I felt a little better.

“I AM TOUGH… I WILL BE A CANE CUTTER!”
Time went by, the sun notched up its heat a few more degrees, and by ten ‘o’ clock I was seriously reconsidering my latest ‘profession’ My skin had turned two shades darker, my head was throbbing erratically, and I was building up a mighty thirst. But as far as I could see, no one had stopped working, and I didn’t want to be the first. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I felt I could do this thing. “I am a Guyanese. I am tough. I will be a cane cutter!”
As the morning progressed I actually felt I was doing a fairly good job. Wasn’t it my first cane-cutting venture? Wasn’t I working with an unsharpened machete? Didn’t I not have a head pad? I had made more than a dozen trips to the punt by then and I thought it was beginning to fill up quite nicely, even though acknowledging that the ratio of my partner’s canes to mine was probably close to 2 to 1.
Then without warning, the sun decided to pull out all the stops. It blazed! It burned! It singed! The sky got bluer, the canefield grew darker, my skin got blacker, and the only clear thought that filtered into my mind amidst a cacophony of voices, was one word. Water! It’s the thing they say you never miss ‘till the well runs dry, or in my case, my throat. I could feel my eyeballs sinking a few millimetres into their sockets. My back and head ached. I convinced myself that I could feel my skin shrivelling and my body shrinking. And it was then that I knew, suddenly, and with the certainty of an epiphany, that I couldn’t go on. Forget manliness. Forget pride. Long live common sense!

“GO BACK TO TEACHIN’!”
Finally, it was over; well not quite. It was about one ‘o’ clock if I remember rightly when we took a break, at least a group that included my work pal. Supremely thankful, I sank to the ground under a tree that afforded a little shade, and the one word that had bullied my thoughts for the last hour, came out in a sort of gasp, ‘Water!’ It was then my partner asked me with a look of utter incredulity on his face, if I didn’t walk with any. I shook my head in the negative. He shook his in disbelief. Then, oh Blessed Father, he handed me something that looked like a sturdy canvas bag (I guess it was a canteen) and told me I could have some of his.
I drank, and drank, then drank some more. It was as if there was a reservoir inside me that wasn’t filling up. I think I must have drunk three-quarters of the container. My partner either didn’t notice or didn’t care, or felt very, very sorry for me. I looked at him, and I thought, what were the odds of this scenario happening, where the paths of a relatively young Afro-Guyanese teacher and an obviously seasoned Indo-Guyanese cane cutter would cross so unpredictably, in such a setting? Then he turned to me, and the following brief conversation ensued.
“Tell mi sumting, is whe’ you use to wuk befo’ you come wuk hay pun dis estate?”
“I’m a teacher. I used to teach in the Northwest, near Mabaruma.”
“Go back to teachin’!”
I smiled and told him I was going, and to take whatever I was going to be paid, for himself. I never found out if he did. Then I went back to the estate compound to wait on the truck that would take me to back to Plaisance where I was then living with my sister and nephew.
There was a mild hullaballoo as I turned into the yard on Ben Profitt Drive. I must have looked like a fiend from hell. Dishevelled and dehydrated, skin burnt and blackened, eyes red and sunken, and smelling of smoke and cane ash, I must have been barely recognizable. My nephew, Rasta Gary, seemed awestruck by the transformation, but not for long. As I went to the stand pipe in the yard to wash up, I looked up and saw him staring at me from the house window. Then a wicked smile crossed his face as he yelled down at me, “Wha’ happenin’ Balgobin?”
I didn’t have the strength or wasn’t in the state of mind for a witty retort, but I did manage a broad smile in acknowledgement of the humour and the absurdity of the moment. Yes, Balgobin the cane cutter, a one-day wonder, and a living testimony of the back-breaking effort and fortitude of the Guyana cane cutter. Oh, by the way, Big Respect to all the ‘Balgobins’ out there.

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