Earlier this week, I ran into a true blue Jaganite old acquaintance from the seventies, who bemoaned that our political discourse is again dominated by “race talk”. It would appear that announcement of the demise of such an orientation in our political mobilisation with the emergence of new generations of voters has been rather premature.
Sadly, the questioning of the right of Indian-Guyanese — through their preferred party, the PPP — to seek national power has reappeared. There was that early instance, at Ghana’s first independence celebrations, when Jagan was excluded from a meeting including Nkrumah, Burnham and a host of WI leaders, who feared Jagan establishing an “Indian state” in BG. Barbadian writer George Lamming later observed: “This perception of the Indian as alien and a problem to be contained after the departure of the Imperial power has been a major part of the thought and feeling of Black West Indians, and a very stubborn conviction among the Black middle layers in Trinidad and Guyana. Indian power, in politics or business, has been regarded as an example of an Indian strategy for conquest.”
The irony is that, after 181 years in Guyana, notwithstanding their protestations, Indian-Guyanese has become “Guyanised” to such an extent by the plantation system and the post-colonial experience that they are as distinct from the present-day “Indian Indians” as African-Guyanese are from “African-Africans”. While the first part of our hyphenated designation may signify our “motherlands”, are we not all bound by the common second part: being Guyanese? There is, of course, the problematic of “the narcissism of small differences”.
The Jamaican poet Olive Senior, of mixed heritage, used the activity of “gardening” as an extended trope in her book, “Gardening in the Tropics”, to analyse the brutal colonisation of us all in the Caribbean by the Europeans in the formation of our identities. Gardening does involve “rooting out”, discarding” “cultivating”, “nurturing”, “grafting”, “hybridity”, and so many activities that are also at work in cultures and relationships in the construction of identities. All of us have been, and continue to be, “cultivated”, whether we like it or not, and have, to a lesser or greater extent, been “hybridized”.
Even when we were uprooted from homelands in Asia, Africa and Europe, we were all already “hybrids” that had been variously constituted. For instance, the North Indians of the Bhojpuri belt were the product of continuous invasions for thousands of years, of which the Moghul invasion and its Islamic world view was only the most extensive. Ditto for the West Africans from different tribes with Islam.
In the Caribbean, the Indians, Portuguese and Chinese indentureds would encounter the Africans, who had been subjected to hundreds of years of European-imposed culture and religion – forcibly then hegemonistically. Africans were expected to inculcate “English culture”, even though their humanity was denied, and they definitionally could never be “English”. While, against all odds, they retained elements of their West African cultures, it was their “creolised” culture into which the new indentured servants would be thrown to imbibe through “seasoning”.
However, during the 20th century in Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean, people of African origin sought to counter the European hegemonic cultural imposition with the ideologies of “Black Power”, “Negritude” and “Pan Africanism”, all of which privileged African culture as the “root” of the tree of “national culture” here. There was never a comparable, say, Pan-Indian movement, but with independence we were instructed that we were “One People; One Nation; One Destiny”. Last month, with no sense of irony for what it implied for the Indigenous Peoples and descendants of indentured labourers, a high-level UWI conclave in Jamaica bestowed on Caricom the African Union’s designation of its diaspora as its “6th Region”.
Reviewing the broad sweep of Caribbean history, Senior had sought to make the point that there are no “pure” origins, and no “one root” from which to construct our Caribbean identity. She borrowed the metaphor of the “rhizome” – with its multiplicity of roots that privilege no one root for Caribbean identity from the Martiniquean Edouard Glissant. He was consciously reacting against the construct of “negritude” and of “hybridity” that had been proposed to describe French Antillean identity. The first excluded all others, such as people of Indian origin and the French, and the latter still privileged the “African root”.
We are all equally Guyanese, and should have equal opportunity to all that our country offers – culturally, politically and economically, etc.
