Why the fuss now about the pregnant lady at NCN?

Sep 09, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

What Lennox Cornette did was wrong. What he did cannot be justified. And in some countries he would have lost his job. I am a very liberal guy, but I would support some sanction against him. In the world of feminist philosophy, it is unthinkable to use a woman’s pregnancy to determine how she must appear at her workplace. But as outrageous as that appears and outrageous as it is, what Cornette did is normal in Guyana, and Cornette to my mind believed he was doing what was right given the nature of Guyanese society.
This primitive descent at NCN only made the news and we only acted because the lady in question raised hell. Her name is Natasha Smith. But do you know how many Natasha Smiths this country has that have remained silent and accepted the cultural barbarism that has overtaken Guyana? If Ms. Smith was typical of the Guyanese slave mentality, NCN and Guyana would have escaped censure. Ms. Smith would have accepted being taken off, would have got her child, and would have been relegated to a section of the newsroom after she returned.
This is what Guyana has become and I rather suspect Cornette was operating inside the zeitgeist that Guyana has been living with since the death of Forbes Burnham and the rise of neoliberalism in Guyana under Desmond Hoyte. This country is a backward, primitive landscape where outdated anthropological, cultural, aesthetic and philosophical values have resurfaced and become the norm. Poor Cornette thought he was doing the right thing. If only Natasha Smith wasn’t different, Cornette, NCN and Guyana would have accepted moving the pregnant lady and putting her in the kitchen to make coffee and do the dishes.
I am typing this column on Wednesday night and there is a whole page advertisement in one of the newspapers in Wednesday’s edition, and the three persons in it are all Caucasian. President Granger has come out against the outdated dress code, but his sincerity has to be questioned. It is more than a month since he denounced the dress code, but my friends who work at the Office of the President told me that there has been no circular to staff about modernizing the dress code. The same, ancient, conservative misplaced dress code still operates at the Office of the President. They are still turning back women at the Office of the President who do not dress like colonial aristocrats. It is in these circumstances one must understand the psychology of Lennox Cornette.
The 17th century dress code sign is still at the Cultural Centre. The Ministries still enforce the silly dress code. It is still very much alive at all the magistrates’ courts and at the High Court. As much as we find what Cornette did distasteful, Cornette lives in a country where the Rasta hairstyle of a motor-car driver brings about police suspicion, where white-faced, blonde hair dolls were at the table of the President and other dignitaries at the Golden Jubilee dinner; where white skin is preferable in all types of advertisement to dark skin; where women cannot wear sleeveless dresses in any public institution; where cross-dressers are hauled before the courts; where newspapers, contrary to what obtains in the rest of the world, because of squeamish attitudes of readers in Guyana, shape certain words to appear like this – “sh…t,” “bu..sh..” A word like arse which one finds common place in newspapers in the rest of the world, the Guyanese media avoids. We use world like “buttocks,” instead.
Against this kind of cultural reversion to a colonial zeitgeist that we see all over Guyana, Cornette probably thought it was perfectly acceptable not to have a pregnant woman before the cameras at NCN. One must try to put one’s self in Cornette’s mental frame. Here you have a country where women are forbidden to wear sleeveless dresses and tops at any public buildings, so then why should a woman with a loose dress, the kind that pregnant women wear, read the news looking like that.
Those who criticize Cornette are right to do so, but they must take their aesthetic modernness, cultural assertions and ideological convictions to their logical culmination. If it is wrong to remove a pregnant TV anchor from reading the news, then it cannot be right to have a billboard advertising the benefits of insurance and have a Caucasian guy all dressed up in a pinstripe suit opening the door of the insurance company for you to walk in and buy your policy. I saw a company billboard with that image. I doubt Guyanese protested that. Why a Caucasian guy in a pinstripe suit?

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