Song of my heart’s composing; I hear it still, I always will.

Oct 01, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Whenever I discourse politics with someone from my defining years of politics (the seventies shortly after I entered UG as a freshman), there are sad moments of reflection; reflections of my dreams then and where those dreams are now and where are those people who define those years with their definitive courage.
Women rights’ campaigner, Andaiye, is one of those people. I met her when I was a teenager in the organisation named Movement Against Oppression (MAO) formed in the cook shop named German’s in Tiger Bay. Shortly after my activism with MAO, I went into UG and got to know Andaiye better because I became a friend with her husband, the inimitable left-wing maverick, literature professor, Bill Carr.
From MAO through to the WPA through my post WPA praxis and my journalistic career, I remained on good terms with Andaiye. She is for me, one of the founders of the WPA that has remained loyal to the dreams that were born in those times. Many of her comrades, today, have gone so far away from the dreams of the seventies that you can hardly recognize their thoughts when they speak and write.
I am currently engaged in an analytical discourse with Andaiye through email exchanges. When I open her mails, there are so many memories that tumble out about my praxis and the shape it is in today. I was pretty young when I met Andaiye, Clive Thomas, Dr. Josh Ramsammy and others but the song in my heart that was born then still lives in me. In today’s Guyana the song has become unplayable. No one wants to hear it.
It is the song about justice, liberties, equalities, class struggle, anti-racism, the brotherhood and sisterhood among Guyanese, human dignity, human rights, appreciation for the colour of your skin and the texture of your hair, appreciation for the humanist stuff that inheres in homo sapiens.
The seventies are gone, the presidency of Forbes Burnham is gone, the WPA is gone, my student’s days are gone but the song lives on. In my exchange with Andaiye, I hear it still. I always will.
Can I reconcile in my own mind the dreams I nurtured in the seventies and the cruelties I see around me in a Guyana that I fought for as a UG freshman and a Guyana I see today that bears absolutely no resemblance to the revolutionary, romantic age of the seventies? Reconciliation is impossible. And here is why. I belonged to an age where it was virtually impossible for a business firm to advertise a locally produced item with the face of a Caucasian person. Today that is the norm in this country.
In that era, it would have been impossible to find a silent society when over a hundred Stabroek Market vendors were forcefully evicted to accommodate an Independence rally from the Stabroek Square to D’Urban Park. Silence is everywhere in Guyana. It is not just its ubiquity that is depressing but its morbidity.
Reconciliation is impossible because we fought against a president in the seventies that compared with today’s sadistic neoliberal state behavior appears like a saviour out of a movie about a revolutionary hero.
I belonged to the epoch of the revolutionary seventies where if a Tiger Bay teenager was jailed for shop-lifting, all hell would have broken lose in Georgetown. The marches and demonstration would have engulfed the entirety of Georgetown. Today first offenders jailed for stealing occurs with such frequency that one simply loses count.
The seventies are long gone and I am in my mid-sixties with a grown up child, an NIS pension, 39 years of marriage with the same woman, and an increasing pessimism about the human condition. But that song that was born when I met people like Andaiye, when I was active in the MAO, when I joined the WPA in 1976, when I was a radical UG student with an anarchist bible and when I believed in Marx’s classless society is still there. If at any time in my life I am proud of the song, it is in today’s Guyana where life has no meaning
I don’t recognise my country any longer. I recognise Andaiye when I open her email. You can call that a yearning for the past. But the past has passed. I love quoting Gramsci about the optimism of the will overcoming the pessimism of the intellect. But in today’s Guyana I’m not too sure about that. I am not too sure Guyana can sustain an enduring optimism.
Writer’s note; the title of this column is a line from the theme song from the 60s movie, “Charade.”

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