The Tongue and the Trigger

Jul 08, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – It is a fiction of modern politics that violence erupts suddenly. The truth is that violence has a genealogy, and its earliest ancestor is the spoken word.

In Guyana, a small country with its long memory and short temper, one only has to examine the tragic events of the past week to understand the quiet progression from voice to violence. A young man is dead, the victim of road rage. But he did not die in silence. There were words—sharp, petty, and hostile—words exchanged before the fight, before the fall, before the death. Violence, therefore, did not begin with the blow. It began with the mouth, with language.

This small drama on a Georgetown street is but a microcosm of the greater theatre that is unfolding, again, with terrifying familiarity, in Guyana’s election campaign. Already, in this early hour, the signs are there—hooliganism, disruptions, verbal abuse. The political arena has become a bazaar of invective, a carnival of insult. And curiously, the chief actors are not who they once were.

The People’s Progressive Party, once victim of a more brutal era of suppression and state-sponsored menace, now seems eager to trade places with its former tormentors. It is no longer content to rule; it wishes also to ridicule, to repress, and to reduce its challengers—especially those, like Azruddin Mohamed and his WIN party, who dare to plant banners in the PPP- dominated areas.

But again, it is not the physical act—the jeering, the taunting, the tearing down of flags, the disruption of meetings—that should concern us most. It is the language. The press conferences of the PPP have become festivals of contempt. The microphones are not instruments of communication. From the head table, the assaults are launched—not with knives or bricks, but with words, spat and sharpened. Ad hominem becomes doctrine. Character assassination becomes strategy. And it is not just political foes who are the objects. It is also the media and anyone who dare be critical.

The supporters absorb this language. They internalize it, echo it. The crowd takes its cue from the pulpit. The insult becomes the chant. And soon, the chant becomes the shove, and the shove the strike. Violence, like some colonial inheritance, is passed on with ease because its source—this broken language, this permanent anger—goes unexamined and unchecked.

The PPP is not unique in seeking to preserve its strongholds. The PNCR, too, when it feels threatened, becomes defensive, and territorial. But the PPP, perhaps because it has tasted victimhood, now practices vengeance with a peculiar satisfaction.

Historically it has never suffered rivals in its strongholds. Ask Paul Tennassee of the DLM, whose efforts in PPP territories were met with open hostility. Ask C.N. Sharma, once cuffed in a PPP stronghold.  Ask Ravi Dev, whose party’s banner was taken down by a PPP rogue. The message is ancient and unrepentant.

But political soil is not private property. Constituencies are not ancestral lands. Ideas, like religion, must be free to travel. This is what democracy promises: mobility of thought, not the fossilization of power. When one party, any party, claims a monopoly on an area or a people, it has already begun to corrupt democracy’s grammar.

This corruption is made worse by the erosion of language itself. The public square, once imagined as a forum of reason and debate, has become a place of insult. The campaign does not begin with policies, with programs, with purpose. It begins with the casual brutality of language—dismissal, contempt, demonization. Once spoken, these words are not harmless. They linger. They poison. And eventually, they incite.

To stop the violence, then, is not simply to increase the police presence or to plead for peace. It is to reform the language. It is to temper the tongue. At party press conferences, where one leader now uses the occasion to degrade his party’s opponents, there must instead be civility. Not for show, not for pretense, but because democracy depends on it.

A constitution may grant the right of association and expression, but no constitution can save a country whose leaders treat rivals not as adversaries but as enemies, not as participants but as pests. This language—tribal, vengeful, personal—is not the language of governance. It is the language of war.

In a country like Guyana, where memories of political unrest are not distant and where the social fabric is still tender from its many wounds, one would think restraint would be the norm. But power, once obtained, does not learn from history. It rewrites it. And in doing so, it forgets that violence, once unleashed, has no master. It consumes not just its targets but its originators.

If the election is to be more than a ritual, if democracy is to mean more than its slogans, then it must begin where all things begin—with language. Let that language be civil, thoughtful, and generous.

(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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• Elections, Guyana’s election campaign, Peeping Tom, Politics, Trigger

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