Perplexities and contradictions that abound in this paradise in purgatory

Jan 29, 2019 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,

This Guyana is always a perplexing place; troubled, too; and riddled with contradictions. These are polite words from me, and indicative of a careful control of the caustic that comes easily. Thinking has to be measured, phrases temperate; after all this is public space and public sharing. Amidst all of this, there are these developments that point to the unfathomable and the enraging. The deformity of continuity.
Take the matter of Lance Corporal Mr. Quacy Baveghems of City Hall. According to the Kaieteur News report dated January 27th, and titled, “City Hall prosecutor who testified before COI banished to guard incinerator.” From many years at the main office, this man is now banished to the career wilderness and humiliation of guarding the incinerator. What was his incompetence? To where can his failure be tracked? How and why did matters come to this demeaning, dismissive state of affairs?
Before going further, and in the interest of full disclosure, I must mention that Mr. Quacy Baveghems is my first cousin; I must have shared a moment or two with him less than a dozen times since my return to this paradise in purgatory. Still, I am duty bound, conscience-driven, to offer a word in his defence; and while doing so, castigate and scorch those who preside over such daily barbarisms (out of sight and soundlessly) in this society.
Mr. Baveghems’ error, unforgivable sin, and hence fatal failure, was to testify before the COI. Testify to truth, and facts and circumstances, as they were, and not as those with power and position desired him to do. To do so as cover and cosmetic for the sake of their own leprous skin and toxic bloodstream and cancerous minds.
This was to cover for not merely conduct unbecoming of a sexually predatory nature, but to speak out against the accumulated evils of an institution and its vested useless, shameless, and inherently characterless people, who first plundered its taxpaying constituents, and then hurled the place and themselves beyond precipices of indecency and immersed all in abysses of irretrievability.
It cannot be left unsaid that there is an army of defaulters out there, who are protected by these venal officials. One man is gone. Sacked. Is that all there is going to be? Was he the only sawdust Caesar responsible for the accumulated atrocities? What about the many left behind and whose first work of art (and revenge) is to send this worker to the incinerator.
It is a masterpiece of bureaucratic rage, of personal vindictiveness and retribution, and of uncaring, unfettered (perhaps unmanageable) arrogance. Institutionalized ignorance, too. Sometime back, I wrote that the whole sick, sorry, sordid bunch ought to be sent packing. The incinerator would have made a lovely retirement home. It works just as well as a sinecure.
Thus, the beat goes on: unchanging, unmoving, uncaring. One man is sent packing; it is far from enough. Another one (Mr. Baveghems) is given marching orders: face the fire. Or be fired. The hard word and harsher lesson are: Keep mouth shut. Do not speak. Give away nothing. Or else… There are many incinerators, dumpsites, and back alleys waiting for the hard of hearing and the uncooperative.
Unsurprisingly, as part of the unending contradictions in this dirty, unearthly, ungodly society, there is the opposite to Mr. Baveghems’ circumstances. A man, a senior servant, is removed following looking and inquiring and probing. He was gone. Well, he is mysteriously back. I know not the man. Nor the context(s) which compelled that decision.
Still, I submit that it had to rise to a sufficiency of satisfaction through a preponderance of the telltale weighty chain, which resulted, at the inception, in a decision of immense proportions and hard finality. Except that it was not so final. It was not so terminal; the penalty of the cat-o-nine is rendered null by cats with more than nine lives. It is from a hot tin roof to the cooling ambience of airconditioned welcome.
Just don’t tell that to the departed Elizabeth Taylor; or the very present Quacy Baveghems consigned, and in effect castrated career-wise, to the comradery of a stilled incinerator. He too has been stilled for speaking. This is the deepfreeze, the lifeless Stygian mortuary reserved for truth and candor in this country. What protection for whistleblower? What price whistleblowing?
Finally, the greatest irony, a continuing one, in this dear land, is that that there are many more getting away with murder (sometimes literally), being rewarded and elevated for doing so; while the unconnected, unrecognized, and undesired peasants languish in the heat of their anguish. They live in and with the combustion of their own personal incinerators daily. It is called truth. It is named conscience. It is of silent suffering patriots.

Sincerely,
G.H.K. Lall

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