Xmas and the Guyanese identity
Editorial
Stabroek News
December 22, 2004
It is not easy to escape Xmas. One resolves that this year one will not be part of the rush, the frenzied shopping and jostling crowd, the gift buying for all and sundry, and the over decorating. After all one believes or has been told by those who believe that the occasion commemorates the birth of the Son of God, whose life eschewed worldly things. On the other hand it is maintained that this event must surely be the occasion for the utmost celebration.
The occasion, the birth of the Christ child, has been highly commercialised, the incessant bombardment by advertisements now much enhanced by television, the illuminated shops and fairy lights and the infectious enthusiasms of the crowds. But also there are the special parties for the poor, the aged, the disadvantaged and children. And somehow goodwill and kindness, the Christmas spirit, if you will, breaks through.
Long before the coming of Mashramani and the more recent national or ethnic celebrations, Xmas was the Guyana carnival in which people of different faiths, whether Christian, Hindu or Muslim or of no faith came together in celebration.
All the above is trite, all too familiar, one has heard it so often before. But there is a need to say it again because so much of current thinking and action seems to put the emphasis not on coming together but on separation, the assertion of distinct identities, Indo-Guyanese, Afro-Guyanese, Amerin-dian- Guyanese (the classification omits reference to that rapidly increasing group of mixed persons who can only be described as Guyanese!). The emphasis is on the prefix, `Indo', `Afro' which focuses attention on racial difference. On the other hand the "Guyanese" part of the classification connotes not separateness but the shared ways of living, belonging to a particular place, similar outlooks and so one.
Xmas in Guyana is an important part of that common heritage which has been evolving over time. Xmas had a head start in the long years of colonial rule, it was part of the observances of the rulers and plantation owners and so to be emulated. It is certain that the new holy-days (holidays) which derive from Hinduism and Islam are slowly but steadily filtering into the wider Guyanese consciousness and ways of living and in all probability will in time become part of the national heritage.
Too often one thinks and acts as if the Guyana context can be taken for granted. But it must surely make a difference that the majority of Guyanese live and make a living on comparatively safe, fertile flat lands, beyond the sight of the mountains and without daily awareness of the sea. Is it fanciful to think that the consensual nature of Barbadian politics derives from smallness, the encircling sea and the ever present threat of hurricanes and other natural disasters?
The space which is Guyana has powerfully shaped the common identity no more so than that we speak and write a common variant of the English language. Communication depends not only on the English words but on their referents, the persons and objects all of whom are known to the audience. The political leader has no difficulty getting across to people whenever he speaks whether it be in Georgetown or on the Corentyne. His audience responds to his examples and picks up his sarcasm and most importantly laughs at his jokes because they come out of shared experience. Asserting that to belong to a community is an essential need, Isaiah Berlin, a leading political thinker of the last century, points out that for one "to belong means that people understand what you say without having to embark on explanations that your gestures, words, all that enters into communication, is grasped without mediation by the members of your society.."
It is this distinctive Guyanese language which is the language of Martin Carter and Dabydeen, Seymour and Rajkumarie Singh. It is this common language in which others are producing a Guyanese heritage of creative literature.
To quote Isaiah Berlin again, writing about the eighteenth century Russian author Herder he observes that "a nation is not a state, but a cultural entity of people who speak the same language, .... live on the same soil and possess the same habits, a communal past, common memories...". Berlin notes that Herder says nothing about blood or biological continuity or any genetic factors.
One may not wish to follow Herder in turning wholly away from genetic factors, but his insights nevertheless provide useful criteria as to whether we are becoming one people, one nation, one destiny.
Nowhere is the common heritage clearer or more immediate in its impact at the individual and national levels than in our varied cuisine to which each group has contributed but in which, each meal is adapted and cooked in a distinctive Guyanese way. Think at this Xmas time of pepperpot, Creole soup and metemgee, the range of curries and roti and chow mein and other noodle dishes and garlic pork and sorrel drink and ginger beer and the special delight of black cake with its rum base. Should Guyanese deprive themselves of such diversity in food by invoking separate identities?
There is already the fruitful blending and enrichment in music and in the dance. And the varied physical skills of Clive Lloyd and Rohan Kanhai have together endowed the Guyana and West Indian teams. One recalls C.L.R. James writing unforgettably about the West Indianness of Kanhai.
And there are common memories. The majority of the ancestors of Guyanese shared the plantation experience, most in hard bondage, others a little less so. Indian indentured workers followed the freed slaves into life in the logies.
There are already strong elements of a common identity and it deepens day by day. In the more or less integrated Guyana space, there is inevitably daily intermingling and exchanges, intense in the cities, less so elsewhere, but everywhere increasing despite disagreement and conflicts.
And such interminglings are to be cherished for history shows that the great flowerings of civilisation flowed directly from such situations - the trading port of Athens, the Renaissance cities and Elizabethan England.
At present much attention is focused on constitutional engineering but the evidence is, as the British with their largely unwritten constitution know well, that the law of the constitution however carefully drafted does not itself ensure good government. The recent near agreement in Northern Ireland has just broken down on a question of trust. And in Fiji, where the beneficiaries of shared government are the Indo-Fijians, the constitutional arrangements have now finally broken down because of distrust on both sides, so much so that Chaudhry, the leader of the Indo-Fijian party, has asked to revert to the position of Leader of the Oposition.
Now a moment's reflection leads to the certainty that one does not ordinarily trust strangers or those who are different or separate. One is most likely to trust those who are perceived to be sharing in one's way of life.
So that the emerging common Guyanese identity is a precious and essential thing. It is not just a matter of exciting developments in the arts. It is the only possible foundation for good governance.
Yet today that emerging identity is under threat of erosion or destruction. It can be torn apart by shoddy political theorising. But there is the equally powerful threat from the non-stop bombardment of foreign electronic media. One urgently needs the proposed new broadcasting legislation to ensure that local electronic media purvey a sufficiency of Guyanese coverage of our distinctive way of life including the arts, and in commentary.
Let us conclude, putting all the prefixes aside, by wishing you wherever you are a truly Guyanese Xmas.