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And yet…
Kaieteur News – his has been a cruel year, a brutal year. It has been a year that has already earned the label of epoch-defining, demonstrating how fragile a thing humanity is. Heralded it seems by the death of American basketball star, Kobe Bryant, his daughter and their friends, the novel coronavirus with its curious name slowly began to spread its tentacles throughout the world from its origin in the Chinese city of Wuhan, a metropolis few outside of China had ever heard of before.
Here in Guyana, a fairly tepid election campaign season ended up metastasizing into what would eventually be the globally condemned attempt by incumbent David Granger to steal an election he had clearly lost. For five months Guyanese endured, against the backdrop of heightening political tensions and a global pandemic, a theatre of the baleful and the banal, machinations to subvert the already flawed Constitution executed to the rhythm of the inane and Orwellian mantra, “I have always abided by the Constitution.”
In August, we exited – after great struggle and Coalition attacks on the characters of everyone from Caribbean leaders to the judiciary – to an upsurge in coronavirus deaths. Shortly after, while we were supposed to be at least attempting to heal from the divisions of the failed post-election coup, the unthinkable happened, with the brutal murders of the teenaged cousins, Josiah and Isaiah Henry, a horrific crime that sent the villages of West Coast Berbice in uproar. Before things could calm down, another teen boy, Haresh Singh would be brutally killed in the backdam.
Also, from earlier this year, we began to have some significant insight into precisely how much we were screwed over, when it comes to the oil deals by first one government and then another. Money that was supposed to enter this society in a flood that would raise all boats equally, was found to be irrigated into shady reservoirs controlled by major oil companies and unknown local and foreign ‘investors’ while a trickle flows to the people of Guyana.
In this year, despite a lockdown, our road fatalities have rivaled the previous year’s, and while there has been some slowdown from before, this year continues previous trends of far too many women being murdered in clear acts of gender-based violence.
As Shakespeare had the character Claudius wax poetically in ‘Hamlet,’ “When sorrows come, they come not single spies. But in battalions!” This year has seen a siege of sorrows of Biblical proportion.
Still, if we have been tested in 2020, we have proven resilient. For the most part, Guyanese have endured and come out at least surviving, despite the best efforts of circumstance and our own, often senseless action to the contrary.
Over 200 years ago, a Japanese poet and priest summed up the human condition most beautifully and more simply and accurately than anyone before or anyone since. Wrote Kobayashi Issa two and a half centuries ago:
This world of dew
Is a world of dew
And yet, and yet…
The year is coming to a close and life, all things considered, seems to have no intention of being any less unrelenting for the average Guyanese. And yet…
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