III The burning echoes in Guyana
Arts On Sunday
The discussion of the profound impact of literature has great relevance to the current climate of racial and political tension in Guyana. What can only be described as criminal action is being encouraged under the cover of political protest and serious conflict between the two major races is being courted. Despite the predominance of weak plays, local theatre still has the power to wield some influence. The Theatre Company's Link Show is emphatically popular and commands the ability to speak to an audience. First of all, it can provide catharsis through laughter in extremely tense situations thus reducing Freudian neuroses. Secondly, it can go further through satire to lead the population into an avoidance of bitterness, narrowness and poisonous thought. It is a very influential production but it will only properly use this power if it is itself free of any bias.
With Al Creighton
Stabroek News
July 8, 2001
However, a very good Guyanese play that needs to be performed at this time is Harold Bascom's Two Wrongs, winner of the Guyana Prize for Drama in 1994. Its title, though somewhat clichT, is an appropriate, uncomplicated way of carrying its straightforward message. Written in 1994, the play contains echoes of the past while being prophetic about what is happening now in 2001 and can alert the nation to the dangers of repeating that murderous past. Two Wrongs is the tragic tale of and the bond between the Black hero and his Indian friend endures to the end. But the curtains come down at the moment when they both walk defiantly into an angry mob whose members wield cutlasses and fire bombs, crying vengeance at the high point of inter-racial war. Although the play ends at that precise point, it is assumed they are about to be slaughtered. The drama is cold, hard and realistic, showing how the heroism failed to avert the bloody consequences of the African-Indian conflict.
The son of the black hero goes to the USA for a university degree but, influenced by a white American friend, ends up a trained recruit of the CIA. They come to Guyana with a covert plan to orchestrate political instability and bring down the government. However, the black Guyanese recruit falters in his mission when faced with the positive force of his father's friendship with the Indian family and his own sense of failure because he has betrayed his parents' dream of academic success. His CIA friends recognize his hesitation and brutally murder him, placing his body where it would appear the Indians savagely slaughtered him. Having aroused the indignation of the black villagers, the American team then executes an Indian in the backdam, leaving clues to suggest he is the victim of angry black retaliation. This instigates a full?scale war between the villages with protests, burnings and revenge killings.
Bascom's plot is faithful to events that took place in the early sixties and, interestingly, it also bears sinister resemblance to some actual events in Guyana in April?May, 2001. The suggestion that there was CIA subversion in the sixties is supported by historical evidence. The proceedings of the race riots of the 1960s are well known, but what is to be found in the existing documentation is even more revealing. Several files from the early 1960s concerning relations among the governments of British Guiana, Britain and the United States became available for scrutiny. These documents, added to the 'confessions' of former US Secretary of State A. Schlesinger, reveal the great interest taken by the two world powers in the affairs of British Guiana as well as their manipulation of the colony's political future. Interesting details of meetings, including verbatim records, correspondence, plots and espionage are faithfully written down. They reveal unblushingly that the USA was convinced that BG should not be given independence under Cheddi Jagan for fear of another strategically placed communist state to add to the headache caused by Cuba in Latin America.
Although Britain wanted independence for the colony, it worked with the Americans and carried out their plans through the agency of Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys. Guyanese historian Clem Seecharran deals with some of these intriguing issues in a forthcoming book about Sir Jock Campbell, a former Bookers administrator in Guyana. It is a publication worth looking forward to.
There is enough evidence to confirm that there was covert activity and espionage. According to Seecharran, Schlesinger made at least one secret visit to BG, unknown to the Guianese authorities. There was an intention to destabilize; to show that not only was the country Communist under the PPP, but that it was ungovernable. In Bascom's play, murders are committed in the backdam, bodies are placed in strategic positions to make them look like the vicious work of the Indians in some instances and of the Blacks in others. Racial enmity is incited to trigger off political instability.
The rehearsal of this past history in the literature serves to alert Guyanese to the danger of repeating it. It may generate a consciousness that could cause the population to be wary of divisive forces working in the same way to exploit a tense political situation and old racial grievances. The revelations in literature make readers suspicious of the close resemblance between the divide and rule tactics of the past and the orchestration of strife and destruction in the present which keeps people apart and sets Blacks and Indians at each other's throats.
Guyanese literature instructs that the nation has been there already. Apart from Bascom, other works have already exposed it. But no other writer explores these subjects in a more innovative and profound way than Wilson Harris. Regarded by the world's critics as one of the most original contemporary writers, he is unique in his uses of inter-culturality as both theme and form in some of his novels. He emphasizes the difference between being merely multi?cultural and being truly inter-cultural, reiterating that the latter requires real cultural integration. Harris manages to work this into a style of fictional narrative in which he presents mankind as one race wearing different theatrical masks at different points in time at different places and warring against itself. He represents history as a sequence of theatre and the world as a stage on which these different masked personalities confront each other in wars, acts of genocide, destruction of civilizations, strife and disasters. The human race continues to repeat the history of destruction and tragedy. In Harris' theory of the one-ness of man, the world is self-destructive; every war against another race or culture is an attack against one's self.
There are debates today about the social and moral issues arising out of new discoveries and medical technology. The world is confronting the alarming uncontrollable possibilities of the use of computer technology; how much we are at the mercy of the most proficient hacks. The great fear that was whipped up around the expected Y2K computer collapse was worthy of a high tension Hollywood movie or a best-selling novel. Most people suddenly realized just how much almost everything in this brave new world depends upon properly functioning computers and Britain lives in constant fear of a computer error or breakdown causing another disastrous train crash. But it was many decades ago that Graham Green wrote the story titled The Machine Stops! The international community will wish it had read Harris carefully each time it remembers Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia. It will wish it had always been taking literature seriously when it realizes how it could have avoided so many of the disasters that make up this grave new world.