Over the years, we have emphasised the role narratives play in our historical accounts: not least to act as filters and projectors for events occurring in the world around us. These narratives are part of a whole welter of formal and informal processes, language and performance – dubbed “discourses” – that serve to fix the acceptable meaning of a given notion and literally “hail” it into being. Identity and social action – including political action – are key features fixed largely by narratives and discourses: “How are we made in our culture?” asked Foucault.
While not denying the importance of structural features, discourses are most crucial because they sanction certain kinds of action and not others. In times of heightened tension and conflict, narratives and discourses link individual and group identity producing a sense of linked fate among groups. Political actions – and reactions – are therefore highly influenced by the dominant discourses circulating at any given time. When violence is in the air, the fears also include concern for physical security and fears of extinction of self, family, and the group and its culture.
The power of discourses lies in their ability to naturalise a particular way of interpreting reality or our perceptions of it – be it an ethnic group or a strategy for political struggle. In the discourse of hate that is once again rising it is useful to examine its production, dissemination and consumption in our society to note its effects.
Discourses are rarely constructed out of thin air but are built on previous narratives and themes that are topical. The “narrative of revolutionary romance” arose as an emancipatory strategy against the seminal discourse on identity framed during slavery and its aftermath – the black-white binary. The discourse of “sin and sinners” played a large part in the larger discourse to justify the genocidal treatment of Africans and other “natives”. They both loom large in our national psyche.
There are two parts to the construction of identity within discourse: firstly the creation of the ‘other’ – with all negative qualities and secondly the comparison of that ‘other’ to the self – the antithesis imbued with all the “good” qualities. The archetypal binary hegemonic discourse owed its success to its divisive framing of the identities in play, as well as to the ‘truthful’ nature it attributed to that framing during colonialism. It remains firmly in place as “coloniality” with its hierarchies of race, culture and power. Since the PNC split off from the PPP in 1955, the binary discourse was taken over by Indian and African Guyanese – with each “side” alternating for respectively 33 and 25 years in government and leaving their ”other” nursing their wounds.
Presently, the PNC and its partisans have defined themselves as fighting for democracy, freedom of speech, justice, workers’ rights and presumably, motherhood (good qualities). In virtually every speech and exposition about the PPP, they are declared to be “ racists committing physical and economic “genocide” against Africans and now creating an “apartheid” state. In this discourse, Guyana is in mortal conflict between good and evil and that evil was real, and must be opposed. Acutely entrenched in our historic binary socio-religious discourses of “us” against “them”, this kind of polemic serves to essentialize the PPP and their supporters as satanic and morally corrupt.
Critically, this framing locates evil in the nature of the PPP – and by extension, their supporters – , thereby stigmatizing a whole category of people. Not to mention putting them at risk in an atmosphere dominated by a discourse of “us” against “them” and a history of political violence. The “complicity” and responsibility of the Indian supporter for the sins of the PPP is manifest in their voting pattern and therefore are unlike Africans, who have presumably not displayed “racial preference”. It is a compelling discourse and an act of demagoguery that vitiates the actions of the PPP and their supporters of any political content by de-contextualizing and de-historicizing them. They are simultaneously de-humanized and de-personalized. What justification, ultimately, can be offered for ‘acts of evil’?
The wages of sin, I am told, is death. In other words, holding that the PPP and their supporters are by nature evil (and racist to boot) rather than ordinary people, it is not difficult to see how attacks against them can become normalized.
