Freedom – a state of mind

Aug 01, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – From me to the president and his team, to those other Guyanese in the same stream of activity, and to all citizens: a reflective, productive Emancipation Day.  Unlike any other Emancipation Day, this one of 2025, the matter of a mere 31 more revolutions to another fateful day, must resonate deeply within each of us, push towards grasping the vastness of the possibilities.  Even at the edges will do.  Of nationhood.  Of what it means to be a man, a woman, a child and citizen of Guyana.

Emancipation is a state of mind.  More than that, it is a state of being.  Few are the men who have a scrap of self-respect in them, who take easily to the harness of being coerced in any fashion, cornered by any foe, after having his guts spilled before the world.  Not even from a friend is that found satisfactory.  What proud, dignified, woman is there who willingly bares her breasts before the lecherous eyes, the recoiling touch, of the enslaver, the predator dressed in the cloak of a partner, a comrade?  I am looking for Guyanese who does not fit that bill, and I hang my head in shame on this Emancipation Day.  There is the sickening, frightening bleakness, of too many of them who surrender with joyful abandon.  I shouldn’t need to identify them.  For they rise high and they sit low.  Whether at the heights, or the ordinary, there’s that oozing of slavery’s pus, that almost drenching, nauseating, overpowering stench.

What Emancipation Day, when minds are made that way?  I have been handed the greatest treasure imaginable, one that makes me the envy of the world.  Yet, the best that I am capable of is relinquishing that inheritance to those who come to seize it, even when that means that they squeeze me into the existence of a kicked, cowering dog.  A man that has some elemental substance in him, though in chains and wracked with pains, still thinks of, still yearns, for the bright light, the wide open spaces, of those who know what Emancipation means.  Emancipation is not a day.  Emancipation is more than a special sense of self and celebration.  Emancipation is what must be for man, for if there is one thing that he knows, it is that he was not born to be a slave, or any other man’s booty.  Not even when in captivity.  Not even when subjected to the worst barbarities of those utterly deprived of humanity.  Not even when confronted by those devoid of that human essence called conscience.  Not even when faced with what is condemnable because it is criminal, and no matter however well glossed over, however sweetly rationalized, however closely guarded.

The spirit of self-emancipation still glows, and all that that entails, all that should be and could be.  It goes some distance in explaining why men breakout from maximum security prisons, and the grim stockades of entities ago.  It why men and women cross borders, brave the crossing of oceans in canoes.  It is that unquenchable, irrepressible, inexhaustible spirit that draws to freedom, and the simple beliefs in what such offer.  It is why men and women have rebelled against saddle and bridle, spear and sword, and regret that all that had to give was one life.  For a cause.  And what is a nobler calling that freedom?  Where no man of no color, of no standing and backing, can tell how to breathe, and what can’t be done.  For then that’s not manly in the least.  It is slavery enjoying the fruits of a lavish feast.  Now, if all this makes me a marked man, one to watch, then that’s the richest gift that I can give to my fellow Guyanese.

For all the above assertions and convictions, it is why I say that Emancipation is not just about a holiday, that first day of liberty.  Emancipation is of all the days that follow, and the quality of them. Even when they have to be fought for, when they have to be died for, because freedom matters that much.  When strangers arrive and convert a country into one filled largely with half formed humans, a place seen as peopled by animals trapped in the semi-completed state of part beast and part bird.

What Guyanese are reliving on this Emancipation Day are the ghastly horrors of the Middle Passage, the ceaseless grinds of the fields.  From the drains of the sugarcane fields and rice fields of decades ago, to the dregs of the oilfields and goldfields of now and for many decades to come.  Emancipation is not a commodity.  Emancipation is more than the priceless currency of humanity.  Emancipation is the way that Guyanese were made to walk this land.  It is how he and she must be.

(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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• Emancipation Day, Freedom, GHK Lall, State of mind

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