The Glass Menagerie in 2015

Jan 03, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I believe once a student does philosophy if you ask him/her who is likely to be their favourite playwright, Tennessee Williams will challenge William Shakespeare.
It depends on who you are. I find Williams is more focused on the determinism of illusions in people’s lives and he does not search for solutions to the relentless confinement of the mind that reality imposes on humans.
Williams is not interested in happy endings, because he feels that those too are illusions. He replaces hope with escapism. Shakespeare on the other hand accepts that human nature is redemptive and the denouement will inevitable be rewarding
Williams has long been my preferred playwright, maybe because in the evolution of my life I could more identify with his themes. “The Glass Menagerie” is my number one selection among his work. It is the story of three persons who refuse to accept reality and will go on spending their lives in illusions, replacing reality with escapism.
Looking back in 2015, if any country fits the theme of The Glass Menagerie, it is Guyana. This is a country where people are happy to live in the self-imposed deception that the country moves forward in the direction of a free horizon
Did Guyana move in 2015? How and where did it move? “Oh yes,” would be the immediate response. The reaction would be that we changed an “unchanging” government. That graphic fact is pregnant with hope, but hope is another form of illusion, in the Guyanese context, that is. We have been hoping since the election of local politicians to power at the beginning of the fifties, that would be about sixty-five years ago. Hope gave us the cancellation of such a government in 1953. Hope gave us Forbes Burnham in 1966. Hope gave us the PPP in 1992. What will hope give us after May 2015? I would not hold my breath.
This is where the theme of The Glass Menagerie comes in. Illusions replace hope and reality is substituted for the endless drift into escapism. What giant stride did we take in 2015? No modern laws were enacted in the entire 2015 that took us away from the long, dead past that controlled and control our lives.
We inherited some nasty libel laws from the English that the English themselves have long done away with.
People sue for libel in this country that would make even Trinidadian and Jamaican judges laugh at us. But then again they laugh at us anyway.
In the sixties, about half a century ago, the PPP lost a libel when its newspaper, “The Mirror” frontpaged a story about a cow electrocuted on the fence at the home of Prime Minister Burnham. The PPP paid substantial damages. Incidentally, that article was written by a young journalist named Moses Nagamootoo. About fifty years after that article, Nagamootoo is now the Prime Minister. Will he move to change the libel laws?
Prime Minister Burnham sued again. This time the defendant was the Mayor of Georgetown, Archie Codrington. Sympathetic people had to raise money to stop the levy on Codrington’s home. Vice-President Desmond Hoyte sued the Catholic Standard on specious grounds and won substantial libel.
Today, our libel laws are have not changed even in one sentence as when they were first written more than a hundred years ago and handed down to us when we became a British colony. Nothing changes in this country, but like the three characters in The Glass Menagerie, we pretend the reality is different from what it is
Perhaps the most dangerous form of self-deception is the Cuban-trained Guyanese doctors. They are simply not competently trained. UG’s medical programme has been decertified, yet UG-trained doctors are millions of miles ahead of what Cuba gives us.
This is the stark reality we refuse to face. These students are mass-produced as a political favour to Guyana by Cuba. It is more politics than science. Brazil and Jamaica have rejected the scholarships, but we turn them out by the hundreds each year and their incompetence kills people, but it is to our mental satisfaction to fool ourselves to say we have a well-staffed medical system.
But sometimes things do change in Guyana. But shockingly for the worse. A major high school rejected the CXC syllabus and its students have to do the British GCE.
Miss Israel, Miss Japan, Miss France were all non-white contestants on the world stage. Here in unchanging Guyana, even the most inconsequential advertisement features the White faces of Caucasian models. How does one explain this contradiction in a country that loves Bob Marley’s philosophical songs? Marley must be turning in his grave.

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The Glass Menagerie in 2015

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