Each has contributed to a whole

Mar 04, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

It is pellucid that Vishnu Bisram and I will never see eye to eye on the matter of our culture, nor, it seems, on the matter of nationhood. Mr. Bisram has chosen to live outside of Guyana, so much for his patriotism, but persists in pontificating on who we should be culturally as a people.
As is often the case, in responding to my letter, he prefers to attack the messenger rather than the message then proceeds to write what amounts to a thesis on promoting what can only be described as “Indianism”, as a cultural imperative for our country. How terribly wrong he is.
My ancestors were brought to Guyana as immigrant labour from Madeira (not Portugal), as were Bisram’s from India, though in fact, before his, but, unlike Bisram, while I, of course, recognise and respect this heritage, I am first and always will be Guyanese. For me, and if we are truly one Guyana, what is most important to the future of this country which has given us birth, is, as I have said, to acknowledge who we are today.
We have just celebrated our 52nd Anniversary as an independent republic and we have been an independent people for 56 years and yet, Bisram questions, what is our national culture, what is our national identity then asserts “we don’t have one people or one culture”. How then are we one nation, how then are we “One Guyana”?
Last Wednesday (23rd February), on stage on the grounds of our National Assembly, we celebrated our culture with song, dance, music and recitation, reflecting all of our six heritages, but in fusion, representing who we have become and who we are and not by singular performances promoting our separate ancestral cultures. In doing so, there was no attempt here to reject our ancestral culture, whether Asian, African, European, or Indigenous, nor committing “cultural genocide” as Bisram persists. We were simply recognising that each has contributed to a whole.
In defining the challenge we face in Guyana, when addressing the Family Summit hosted by the TARIC Islamic Centre of Ontario recently, on the subject of “Countering Islamophobia”, President Ali put it best when he said that “as multicultural societies, both Guyana and Canada recognise the need to engender respect for internal diversity and face the challenges associated with multiculturalism, including ethnic prejudice and discrimination”.
As for my time served as a Minister, not information as is popularly mistaken, in the Burnham government, a total irrelevance to the subject at hand, sufficient to say that politics is more often than not, pursuing the practice of the possible, and the possible at that time was the choice between Guyana becoming a communist satellite of the Soviet Union or remaining an independent country in its own right, albeit an imperfect and unfortunate victim of the cold war between the West and Soviet Russia, but that is for another discussion at another time.

Yours sincerely,
Kit Nascimento

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