There is a time for mourning- it is now

May 24, 2023 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News- We must go on, though our hearts are breaking with pain that is so unbelievable as to be intolerable and unmanageable.  Onward we must go, despite our eyes overflowing with scalding tears.  It is the only thing not chilled, cold to the bone, frozen stiff, in Guyana at this time, for even the sun seems faded and lacking its usual warm embrace, as though in recognition of this greyest of grey Guyanese hour.  How we go on I do not know, but go on we must.Strength will come, wisdom will be found, and that indefinable something called faith will lift up and carry us through this endless day. It will carry us on foot and upon back through all the other days that will remind us of Mahdia, and of 19 young strangers, almost all daughters and sisters, with one little son and brother, consumed in a scorching, searing inferno that swept them all out of our embrace, away from this earthly pale.

Mahdia, the mother of all fires, with its raging, vengeful, destructive pathos, has left us terribly wounded, with limping on our sore, swollen, heels, and dragging with wretched spirits too numb to respond to the commands of a guiding mind impaled by the horror, transfixed by the shadow of death from an irresistible wall of flame and fiery fury. As a community, the indigenous people that are our own, must grieve first, then rise up; and we from near and far must give them a shoulder to lean on and straighten up, an ear to listen to, if only to keep them going.  This is a time of mourning and grieving, and such is the state that I cannot tell the difference between one or the other, or if there is any at all.  It is at times like these that these instinctive human concerns should give way, must not matter.  What matters is that we mourn as a people, we cry as a national community, and we offer solace to each other as citizens of this scorched, sometimes so wretched earth.

Yes! this is a time for mourning.  There will be time enough for all those other things, those many other thoughts that must be stilled today, and the abundance of ideas, that I hope will help us knit and heal.  In times of great human tragedy like these, we must learn; for if cannot bring ourselves to do that, then we might be as good as dead ourselves, only we don’t know it.  We must learn how to grow; and grow we must beyond our current inflamed state, our present imprisoning limitations.  Our children (yes, they are ours) have been burnt to death in the worst of conflagrations with no way out, no room for one struggling breath of saving oxygen.  Let us-me and you-give life to their memory, to their short youthful steps on the lushsoil of this richest of emerald swards.  Let us honor our fallen young, let us manifest the strength and authenticity to respect our dead now departed forever, by how we pay tribute to them, how we treat each other.

As this nation mourns, let us in our private grief, remember that there are these simple, salt of the earth people set in those distant villages around Mahdia that are nestled at the feet of mountains.  They are the parents who have lost children, and we must identify with their piercing, bludgeoning, crippling pain.  We succeed in doing so in the best possible manner, with the highest regard for their sorrow, when we hold off on the anger at what went wrong, at who is at fault and should be blamed, and of what consequences there must be.  There will come the time for that long moment of hard, honest national self-examination, for an accounting of what should have been, but wasn’t.

Of those lengthy national post-mortems, I am sure there will be, but I appeal that they be in the proper time, and always with a mind focused on the victims and their hurting, punishing survivors of the same flesh and the same blood.  The horrible is compounded by the harrowing: more than one dead in a family; more than one or two or three gone by leaping, reaching, incinerating tongues of fire in a small village that is just a name to a stranger, an untutored one, like me.

This is a time of weeping and wailing, and I say let it be.  Let it be in the catharsis of release, in any flood of tears, any expression of the pain that twitches and tortures, and torments in torrents almost too much for humans to bear.  But bear we must, and it is our duty, it my responsibility, to help those who lost to know, to believe, to accept that they will live again.  I don’t know how, only that the flood of grief must be replaced with the grace and goodness that comes out of nowhere, and step by inexorable step teaches us how to start over and to be some semblance of ourselves again.

(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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• 19 children killed in Guyana school dormitory fire, GHK Lall, Mahdia

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