Edward Said and 51 years of failure in Guyana

May 25, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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I read Edward Said’s breathing book, “Orientalism” when I was doing my doctorate at the University of Toronto. It was high on the reading list for the class on post-colonial politics. I doubt there is a non-white Third World student that entered a university and has not read “Orientalism. “
Said’s scholarship is profound. Because he was a literary specialist, I find there is more psychological depth in his examination of colonialism’s psychic destruction than our own Walter Rodney, CLR James and Franz Fanon – all three were West Indians.
My problem with the Third World is that after all we have learnt from these fantastic Third World scholars’ exposure of the deadly effect of cultural colonialism, why haven’t Third World leaders learned from the brilliance of people like Said? Can you read “Orientalism” and not learn from it? If you can’t, then you are hopeless.
The argument of Said needs no complex explanation. It goes simply like this. The Westerner came to the Orient and left an interpretation of the totality of Oriental existence – culture, literature, arts, psychology etc – that is derived from the binary of West versus East. West is superior, East is inferior and from thereon, the Orient has been seen as such. This has found deep roots in the psyche of the colonized and the colonizer.
Deep roots can be dissolved through centuries of counter-learning. I use the word counter-learning because that is what Walter Rodney, Edward Said, Hamza Alavi and others have left for post-colonial generations. I include Alavi here because though he was not as penetrating as scholars like Said, I think his seminal work on the Overdeveloped State in the post-colonial world is an indisputably brilliant guide to understanding politics in the developing world after the colonials left. The Overdeveloped State explains the politics of every president in this country starting with Burnham right up to David Granger.
Has the Third World learned from counter-learning? Burnham is one that stands out. Sadly, his application of Said to Guyana was short-lived because Burnham destroyed his precious counter-learning contribution to post-colonial rejection of western colonial penetration by his resort to an expanding authoritarian hegemony. Indian is a mixed result.
While there are large measures of counter-learning in India, Said’s portrayal of the permanent caricature the West has painted of the East is still graphically manifest in India, especially in the area of the entertainment business etc.
When one examines the marijuana sentence debate in Guyana, the failure of counter-learning in Guyana is dangerously perturbing. The attitude of the ruling establishment on the marijuana sentence structure constitutes an assault on counter-learning. One must make a neat distinction between legalization of marijuana and the sentence structure for marijuana possession.
While there is discernible movement towards legalization of marijuana among top countries in the world, in many other states, the possession issue is virtually ignored. Possession of marijuana is illegal in Brazil, and many EU countries but the police just don’t bother with people who are seen smoking it.
In Guyana, the marijuana sentence structure is an issue that the power establishment (with the noticeable exception of Khemraj Ramjattan who has spoken out against the current sentencing scheme) has frowned upon. What is the argument? Possession of ganja is illegal and carries a jail sentence if found guilty with special circumstances allowing for non-custodial sentence once the amount is less than 13 grams. From 13 grams up, a guilty verdict is an automatic sentence of three years. Possession from 13 grams up is, according to the law, trafficking in narcotics.
The Bill in the name of AFC parliamentarian, Michael Carrington, does not even go near to legalization. It does not touch legalization. All the Bill does is to ask for two things – bail for the possession charge and non-custodial sentence in the circumstance of a guilty verdict. What is important to note is that the current law does not differentiate in the jail term between amounts of ganja and cocaine. For one hundred pounds of cocaine the guilty verdict carries five years maximum. For a guilty verdict in the possession case of 13 grams of marijuana, the sentence is the same because the charge is trafficking. The legal limit in Jamaica for ganja is 40 grams.
This columnist has been reliably informed that an influential voice in the APNU+AFC Government does not want the Carrington Bill to come before Parliament even though it was slated to be on the order paper last year. So we come back to Edward Said. What have post-colonial leaders learned from counter-learning? In Guyana, we can say in 2017 absolutely nothing.

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