My non-Indianness and my fictional self-hate

Jun 02, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News- One of the most graphic expressions in class and race driven society anywhere in the world relates to how Guyanese Indians have treated two high-profile Indian activists – me and Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine.
If you want to see how colonial society has messed up not only the mind but the soul and psyche of the colonial subject you don’t have to read Edward Said; just examine the juxtaposition of me and Dr. Roopnaraine, a juxtaposition invented by Indians in Guyana.
Let’s start with four Indians who have referred to me as a self-hater – a person who doesn’t like being Indian. I will go to my grave and not understand what I did with my life to earn that derogation. There were many Indians that have insultingly thrown that tag on me but these four persons are the more prominent among Guyanese – Ravi Dev, Vishnu Bisram, Ryhaan Shah and Dr. Baytoram Ramharack.
I chose not to sue them for libel. Mr. Bisram has penned more than a hundred letters on me saying the most scurrilous fictions about me in the Chronicle and Guyana Times between 2002 and 2014. I never sued Bisram and the two newspapers. I just don’t have it in my DNA to sue anyone. The exception was Dr. Walter Ramsahoye. He abused me on CNS channel 6 then had the temerity to sue me for something I wrote in one of my columns.
I counter-sued him. The two trials were heard the same time. Justice Dawn Gregory Barnes ruled in favour of Ramsahoye and awarded $2 million. Justice Yonette Cummings-Edwards chose not to give a decision in my case. It has been six years since she has done so. See my column of Sunday, May 8, 2022, “Chancellor of the Judiciary and the syndrome: Maybe, maybe not.”
Yesterday, Bisram and Shah replied to my confession that I don’t know what or where is my Indianness. But they chose not to explain why they described me as a self-hater. The explanation is simple and Dr. Ramharack’s self-hate portrait of me remains the most graphic to date.
Here it is. I could not have confronted and campaigned against an Indian government over a long period of time if I wasn’t someone who did not like Indian Guyanese and who did not feel comfortable being Indian. But the juxtaposition between me and Dr. Roopnaraine shows how sad is the mentality of Indians in Guyana.
I have been closer to Indian people, Indian Muslims and Hindus and Indian parties and Indian politicians all my life, a record Dr. Roopnaraine cannot match. I grew up with a devoted Hindu mother. I worked with the Indian PPP government as a media consultant in 1999 to Minister of Information, Moses Nagamootoo. In contrast, Dr. Roopnaraine hardly had any contacts with the PPP throughout his political career.
I risked my life exposing anti-Indian mayhem in Buxton. The WPA’s line on the Buxton mayhem was the opposite to mine. Dr. Roopnaraine merged his party with the PNC and became a minister under the PNC-led government after 2015. I never had an informal or formal relation with the PNC up to this day.
No Indian has ever attacked Dr. Roopnaraine in this country while I was called a self-hater over a long period of time. What is the analysis? The reverence for Dr. Roopnaraine among Indians I will never receive. Why? Class analysis explains it. Class analysis explains why Dr. Roopnaraine and I confronted the Indian PPP government over a long period of time but an ocean of self-hate appellations have been pinned on me but not on Roopnaraine.
I guess most Guyanese would know why this is so even though they may not be able to do an astute class analysis of the juxtaposition. I am dark-skinned, born in dirt poverty in the Black Georgetown ward of Wortmanville and never went to Queen’s College and Cambridge University. I never wrote books about Western literature as Roopnaraine did. I do not socialise with the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie.
In the eyes of Guyanese, Kissoon and Roopnaraine are from different worlds, one of which admiration and respect are due, the other is just another world where people like Kissoon come and go. I want to close this article by advising every human wherever he/she is, do not bother even for a fleeting moment about what people say about you.
I don’t give a rabbit’s ass what others in this world think of me. For the past 44 years, I have been coming home to Janet Kissoon and once she is there, my world is complete and I shut out the world of philosophically flawed people. Dr. Roopnaraine studied literature at Cambridge University. I studied philosophy at the University of Toronto. Who wants to make the comparison that is none of my business. I am a happy man!
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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