Sigmund Freud: Returning to class and colour one year after

Jan 27, 2023 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – Let me be incandescent in my words to follow. I was trained in history when I first entered university. I cherish the opportunity to write on history and to compose notes that leave questions that must be answered about history.

I have preserved the willingness inside of me since I became a UG freshman in 1974 to probe the past, to examine people, places and events that need to be revisited because there may be dimensions that form gaps in history that must be filled.

Revisionism is important to history if subsequent generations are spared the deceptions of the past. I have tried in my life as an academic and media operative to be both revisionist and iconoclastic.

I believe there are hidden aspects of important personalities that when the revisionist and iconoclastic pen probes, history is made richer. Two gaps arouse my interest – Martin Carter and Walter Rodney.

My iconoclastic notes on Martin Carter reveal sides to his politics that continue to be deeply buried. It is an incredible mystery that a man in the anti-colonial struggle in the 1950s could declare himself a Stalinist, picketed the Queen’s relative on an official visit to British Guiana and was expelled from the anti-colonial movement for being a communist extremist could find a high-level job in the British colonial office and in the Bookers plantocracy.

No! Something is not right here. Carter’s political life needs extensive researching. I believe Carter was a Jekyll and Hyde in Guyanese politics and remains the only such person in Guyana contemporary politics.

In relation to Walter Rodney, I am not convinced that he was that quintessential working class revolutionary class champion that his biographers make him out to be. Two recent books on Rodney describe an incident at the University of Tanzania in 1971 that revealed a Freudian, Afro-centric instinct in Rodney that bordered on racist feelings. For more on this see pages 170-171 of Leo Zeilig, “The Water Rodney Story: A Legacy of Our Time,”

In Guyana, Rodney’s praxis was centered in an ambience that was filled with middle class elitism devoid of in-depth and consistent groundings with the masses and an avoidance of political socialization with the Indian rural peasantry. The expected 1979 mass uprising against Burnham that failed was determined by that kind of class limitations.

I return to race and class one year after I visited that theme because race and class will be the key issues as oil revenues lead to consolidation of the PPP’s electoral prospects in the coming years.

Last year at this exact time, these were my articles;

1-January 26- “The Walter Rodney family and Kit Nascimento: Notes on Class and Colour.”

2- January 27, “Burnham and Kwayana: Iconoclastic notes on racism.”

3-January 28, “Kisssoon, Gaskin and Roopnaraine: More Notes on Race and Class.”

4-January 30, “My music choice disqualifies me from being an unbiased human.”

The March 2020 election fiasco demonstrated in volcanic ways that Sigmund Freud exists in all of us. Humans carry Freudian repressions and Freudian sublimations in them throughout their lives. Then a situation unfolds and Freudian rivulets run into the river.

As 2023 began, I saw Freudian underpinnings and I knew I was right about the power of race and class in the history this country. I have admired the sociological scholarship of Percy Hintz whom I first met as a UG freshman. I thought his exposure of the entitlement demands of the Mulatto/Creole class was incisive scholarship.

Recently in 2023, the professor wrote these words: “When people ask me what I am, I reply that I am a Guyanese creole. This is how my identity was forged, and where my interactions have been, and continue to be, most intense.”

What happens to class belongings when people ask you about your past? I am East Indian. I was born into a working-class environment in the south Georgetown ward of Wortmanville. All I knew from age 5 until I was liberated in my early 20s was poverty.  I am compelled by the force of my psyche to answer the question as to who I am the way Hintzen answered it. The difference between Hintzen’s response and mine is form and not content. Here are the words copied from Hintzen with one word missing that I have substituted. Do you think you can spot that word: “When people ask me what I am, I reply that I am a Guyanese proletarian. This is how my identity was forged, and where my interactions have been, and continue to be, most intense.”

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• Freddie Kissoon, Freud, Martin Carter, Sigmund, Walter Rodney

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