Unspoken, untouched truths

Jun 19, 2019 Editorial

Guyana can find neither footing nor vocals. Its citizens have voice at high volume for everything: name it, and that’s it. One screeching, soothing, overpowering, counterattacking, desecrating, energising crescendo after another of consensus (intragroup), conflict (intergroup), and nothing but distrust, antagonisms, and irreconcilable differences in between. The sounds will now restart at fever pitch following the oracular pronouncements of the CCJ.
Select a topic: corruption or governance or tenders or policing or who did steal then versus who is stealing now; and loudest of all in the days to come, who won by the hand of the CCJ. It is a soaring space flight into the bowels of bickering, lots of muck, lots of sleaze to hurl at each other. There is much over which to bicker, renew animosities, walk away smug and resolute in self-satisfaction, while leaving matters just as unaddressed, untapped, and unsolved.
In this world inhabited by usually loud, traditionally raucous Guyanese peoples, there is an eerie silence on one particular issue. A silence that pierces in its enormity, haunts with its shadows and specters, and shackles hands and feet and minds. Mouths, usually the first responders, join the ranks of the first prisoners. Thus, silence is the first conspirator.
Nobody wants to talk about it, has anything to say about it, desires to go anywhere near it. It is the conspiracy of silence, by a population stumbling along to get along; by leaders first nurturing and then spearheading the senselessness that relates to race in this country. One more time to drive home the point: RACE. For Guyanese politics fosters racial exclusivity and racial exclusion. Aside from deceptive platitudes, inclusion is neither internalised nor prioritised.
Race relations. Race fairness. Race equity. Race justice. Race presence and race representation. Silence has stood the tests of time. Silence has outlived founding fathers and will outlast lost children. Silence surpasses all. Unsurprisingly, the Pandora’s box and Dante’s Circle that is the race maze and race hell of Guyana flourishes, and fails decade after decade, devouring each succeeding generation.
There are no answers because there are no questions. There are no solutions due to there being no concerns. There is no progress since there is neither drive nor urgency nor inspired ideal towards a less bitter Guyana, and a more trusting one; towards a less contradictory Guyana, and a more understanding one; towards a less angry, hating Guyana, and a more tolerating, appreciating one.
Indians and Africans are not contemplating returning via ships back to their ancestral lands. Both ponder and proceed on planes to the kingdom of plenty. But, when all the leaves that have drifted in the far winds are added up, there are still the many aborning and multiplying left behind. They perpetuate the old myths; relive the legends and ghost stories spoken in hushed, gravelly voices choked with memory and emotion around the tribal campfires of home and heart, and which stoke the divisions that condemn to the purgatories lived.
The race conundrum that bedevils Guyana will not mysteriously, magically fix itself. Healing and reconciling and growing as a society, as a nation undivided, will not come about through individual, political, and racial distancing and disowning. This national shame will not power its way on its own to the tribunals of hard conversation, harder bargaining, and the hardest degrees of deciding that are the imperatives of any authentic narratives. Narratives that must pierce the hitherto impenetrable veils of silence that shroud this country in fear, in ugliness, in hostility, and in the damnation of first indifference, then ineptitude, and last the multitude of insecurities.
The CCJ substituted as Guyana’s voice and conscience. On their own, Guyanese must find their voice and break their self-endangering silence on race.

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