What is the Guyanese way of life?

Oct 05, 2022 Letters

---

Dear Editor,

What are the essences of our core as a society?  What are our defining national characteristics?  What is it that inspires us, drives us, as a people, a collective, a nation or what do I conclude to be the emblems of the Guyanese way of life?

I would like to say that it is honesty.  But then, I would be exemplary in dishonesty.  I would have preferred to state that it is honorable political leadership.  But then, I would condemn myself to be among the most dishonorable of men for daring to utter such deviousness.  It would give rare great pleasure to take a stand for clean governance, to assert that this is what prevails, sets the standards, leads the way.  All I would succeed in doing is tarnish myself beyond repair.

So, what is it that we have for national values?  Who is it that we are as Guyanese?  And what are the imperatives that guide our way of life?  Those almost inexplicable and unanswerable questions still remain.  I try hand.  We lack truth, the core of our existence has transformed into an absence of simple truths.  When basic truth desert us, then the greater wisdoms that should be our imperatives, guiding forces, flee.

As a nation, the invitation, the urgency, is to look on each moment as an avenue to explore and expand, to enlighten and be enlightened.  I try to wrap arms around that, and project.  But to do so, we must be frank, even if it means the unsettling must be said.  To speak to the anguish of our poor and left out is to rub the hair of the dog the wrong way.  It is against the now national tendency to let it be the way that prevails.  Bristling, growling, and clawing lunging comes.  A big lie is that there is nothing contrary; the automatic follow-up one is that to be contrarian is to be partisan.  The truth is that the two don’t even belong in the same sentence, much less conversation.  The expanse of our intellect cannot be that today’s wrongdoing is justified by what the PNC did 5 years ago, or 55 such intervals before.  Not I folks.  The keenness of our wisdom should not be limited to the PPP did this yesterday and again today, therefore what the PNC delivered is now sanitized.  Find another party to those discussions, and the reciprocal vitriol that flows reflexively from them.  I prefer to think of the spiraling trajectory that represents what could be, amid our painful divisions, Guyana’s potential.

I am at a loss that we speak of the beauty of ‘One Guyana’ but epitomize a reality that is ugly.  Which one is in, which one out?  There is no one what wishes with a passion to push for ‘One Guyana’ more than I, not even the President, or all of the PPP and PNC.  But, I assert, will even attest, that there cannot be ONE of anything without the fusion of reconciliation.  And before reconciliation, there must have been those limping, timid, steps towards mending, which led to some form of healing.  It is either that we fool ourselves, or we are bent on making fools of each other.  Among the mindless, I cannot be.  In ‘One Guyana’ there is a vision, but it must be buttressed, reinforced, and impassioned by programs with provisions that are of inclusions to the very edges of whatever expansions we are capable of mustering.  Whether I present in the simplest or profoundest language competent at, there must be recognition and appreciation that we retard our national growth, when we the individual Guyanese (PPP, PNC, Black and Brown and all in-between) suppress these troubling stubbles at the roots.  Like hair, the stubbles can be prickly, harsh, and wounding from the touch, but they must be allowed the flow of natural progression that leads to the smooth and soft, what can be cared for and coiffed into something pleasing to all.  Not just owner, or groomer, or presenter.  But every observer.

Editor, our dreadful demons were forever lurking, and now recent discoveries have unleashed them in their fullest, foulest, furies.  We don’t want to face, so we allow them to overtake us, and prosper in rancor and acrimony.  I believe that one truth worthy of exploring and cultivating is that we don’t know half as much as we claim to know, and are not a quarter as shortsighted as we pretend to be.  I place on the table race and corruption and governance and leadership.  And I come right back to the beginning: what is our truth?  Where is mine?  All other Guyanese have to probe for theirs.  That is, if they even care about the fullness of the components I just identified.  On leadership, I absolutely don’t want the President to fail.  Because if and when he fails to deliver – on truth, on integrity, on transparency – then I live with a lie.  I become an agent of endless falsehoods myself.  Have these not been our circumstances for the many long decades, where the first falsehood, that early governance deception, set the stage for all the ones that must compulsorily follow to give credence to the original one?

Leaders lead, and followers follow.  Loyalists on both sides of divide live with lies.  Surely, this can’t be the essence of our existence?  The Guyanese Way must be made of purer stuff, something to which all of us can grab at, embrace as our own.  I don’t mean money.  I go back: a duty to honesty, a call to the honorable.  And if that is too much, then face the children and maker and confess that this is asking of me for what I don’t have in me.  I do it.  I humbly encourage my Guyanese brothers and sisters to try it.  I/we must exemplify what leadership, environment, and governance must be at the crux.  It must not be the other way around.  This must be the Guyanese Way, the national value system, the national ethical expanse and imagination.

Sincerely,

GHK Lall

---

---