Guyana revolves around two women

Aug 14, 2019 Editorial

A nation now waits for God. Truth be told, it is on two women elevated, by the accident of time, to the stature of goddesses. Maybe it is no accident, after all; since men have proven themselves lesser than the tasks at hand. Theirs will be voices from heaven; it will be hell for somebody.
Citizens, and none more so than diehard, irretrievably lost, loyalists, watch calendar and clock, as they count days and hours. Their existence is a bed of barbs, the hard state of not knowing the unknowing. Knowing will come on Wednesday, August 14; and quickly followed by the Ides of August on what will be a fateful 15th.
Two women have reduced the loud to the sudden discovery of the polite, the guarded, even the bland. Those sparring are made to sit and wait, to ponder what patters forward in the studied, dulcet tones of serious tribunes of the people, for the people. Some people are going to be bitter by the broadness of what comes.
It is an exciting time, even a profound one, with a special kind of history in the making. But those sentiments–cool and coherent–only come to the dispassionate, the unattached, those untouched by the racial poisons that madden mind and drain of any constructive sense.
So it is those two times: 14th and 15th. From then to where? They are called upon, argued before, and pressed, for the wisdom of the judicially oracular through favourable constitutional interpretation. It must be understood that these women of the silk, neither live nor function in the barrenness of vacuums.
What the men in this country are too timid to undertake, they now lean on the ladies of law and land to lead into pathways of righteousness for deliverance.
It will not be the pathway expected, insistently signaled and demanded in the press: my way or no way. One judge is sure to take a different highway; it may not be one to heaven, but it will have to suffice. It is because one after the other, the contexts of the social milieu will feature. Somehow.
In some thing or the other and all together to defuse the situation, and allow it some respite, through a lease of time, to gather sense and spirit to see the wisdom in embracing as many Guyanese as possible.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “All life is an experiment.” The two lady jurists will not experiment; that is too farfetched and too dangerously adventurous in these parts. But they would-or could-leave just enough room for political considerations and reconsiderations; perhaps enough even for the vast sum of 749,000 souls. The specificity and finality of a date in the hands of the unelected might simply be asking too much of these two.
Justice Holmes also shared this pearl, which could come into play right here: “The provisions of the constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form, they are organic, living institutions transplanted… Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and their line of growth.”
Rising and growing: Man is supposed to be this thinking animal; the women are going to have to compel to that mental state, and away from the all too traditional, too familiar physical and visceral; the automatic and the comforting vocals found so vexatious.
There is no legacy in any of that; merely the regularity of the routines. They are routines that stand inflexibly attached to the priorities of this set of people or that; while at the same time, thoroughly aloof and disconnected from any and all aspirations to something resembling nationhood.
Come August 14th and August 15th, two women without any following, lacking in any of the usual trumpeting, will speak loudest in this land. Hearing and growing it must be.

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