I’m not going anywhere, but my soul is pained

Mar 19, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

During the anti-parking meter protest on March 9, (Dr. David Hinds missed being clamped by seconds last Friday, as we left a television interview with Malika Ramsey), a middle-aged woman with a mixed accent (Guyanese and foreign) came up to me and said, “Are you leaving Guyana?” She said, she read in my column that I was leaving.
It had to do with how I framed my words in the final paragraph of my Sunday, March 5, 2017 column, titled, “The Heart Has Its Reason, Mr. Persaud”. These were the ending lines; “I am riding out into the sunset to spend my remaining years with my family and two pets.” The nice lady with her picket in hand probably misinterpreted those words to mean, I am finished with activism and leaving Guyana. When I told her I wasn’t leaving, she said a few instructive words which I will not repeat here. At the last picket on March 16, she was there again.
I’m not leaving Guyana and no Hobbesian condition or Hobbesian Leviathan will force me out of Guyana. And Guyana’s continuing journey into the moral abyss will not cause me to leave. I am going to spend out my years in the land that I have a love/hate relation with. But the capacity of the heart, soul and mind is not limitless. There comes a time in the search for truth, justice and civilization, that one feels that there is only so much more one can contribute.
I came from an era where hope was alive, and hope brought liberation. This is not the time in Guyana to hope and dream and wait for liberation. It isn’t coming. One still has to complete the journey, but reason left this country a long time ago.
I see so many things happening to this country that it puts too much of strain on my soul. I read a letter signed by more than a dozen organizations and individuals, voicing concern over the arrest and charge of a woman who exposed wrongdoing and violations in Jamaica. But why go till to Jamaica? There are Guyanese citizens who have been wronged and are being wronged everyday in this Faustian, Mephistophelean, Kafkaesque wasteland, and there are no letters in the newspapers signed by dozens of people.
Where were those signatures when a Berbice magistrate sentenced an 18-year-old girl to six months for merely crossing over to Suriname with a speedboat without an immigration stamp – an act that started before my generation was born and goes on every single day between Guyana and Suriname. We don’t see letters with dozens of signatures when poor women guards write about ruthless exploitation by security firms.
One of the things about our Guyanese activists that irk me is their open hypocrisy. They simply barefacedly choose which victim to support. It as if these people have convenient moral values. Carol Ann Munroe, a treason accused who was freed, wrote a letter to this newspaper that was almost a full page, describing how she and her two small children, one of whom was sick at the time, were treated when the police came to arrest her. It was a moving story. The people who signed their names to that missive about the Jamaican woman were in Timbuktu at the time of the publication of the Munroe letter, so they couldn’t write to the newspaper. Now they are back, they could do so.
There are things that go on in this country that really pierce the soul of a human. There are plans to make closing hours at midnight from the 2a.m. stipulation. Is that more of a pressing matter than our rundown public schools, our rundown university?
No, I am not leaving Guyana, but my soul has had enough of this incredible nihilism of a fading horizon. I leave you with some lines of a 1974 Johnny Mathis song I dedicated to my wife when we were courting. It is the story of my life.

You and me against the world,
Sometimes it seems like you and me against the world,
When all the others turn their backs and walked away,
You can count on me to stay.

You and me against the world,
Sometimes it seems like you and me against the world
And for all the times we’ve cried I always felt that
God was on our side.

And when one of us is gone,
And one of us is left to carry on,
Then remembering will have to do,
Our memories alone will get us through
Think about the days of me and you,
Of you and me against the world.