Last Sunday, we celebrated another Independence Day, but are we any closer to becoming a nation than on that fraught night in 1966 when we received all the symbols of “nationhood’ – flag, national motto, pledge of allegiance, etc. after a virtual racial civil war? I say not for several reasons, not least because we have been unwilling to craft a national narrative on which we all agree.
Benedict Anderson said nations are “imagined political communities”, and every nation that has amounted to something has a narrative that captures its essence and holds the people together. The nation “is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship”
Americans, for instance, have their “American Dream” narrative – their firm belief that if they work hard and play by the rules, the sky is the limit as regards their upward mobility. They are a “can do” nation in which their constitution defines and protects their equality. All of which leads to their “exceptionalism” as “God’s country”.
Narratives are the “ideologies” that guide ordinary folks, but ours divide rather than unite.
To say that the nation is “imaginary” is not to suggest that the narrative is a tissue of lies; but, as the historian Ernst Renan noted, it is about what we choose to remember as well as to forget. Fifty-eight years after Independence, each group still holds on firmly to its own narrative, which ever so often clash on particulars. And it is these contending assertions that we in Guyana have to re-examine and arrive at some sort of modus vivendi over what to remember and what to forget if we are to ever end our tragic internecine war and become a nation.
Hegel’s view of tragedy might be particularly apt to our situation. In this narrative, both “sides” are morally right: the conflict is not between good and evil, but between “goods” on which each is making exclusive claim. Have we not all contributed to the building of our nation, but also to pulling it apart? Isn’t this the tragic situation that our mutually exclusive narratives of victimhood with their facile binary oppositions have delivered us into?
Invariably, our nodes of disagreement have to do with one or the other group proffering reasons why they are exceptional, and therefore must be exempted from the universal norm of equality that should be guaranteed to all citizens of the state. Some of our clashing claims are about “who suffered more”, “who arrived first”, or “who did more to build Guyana” etc. Such assertions buttress claims of preferential treatment that create tensions among our several groups in Guyana – but especially the two larger groups: African and Indian Guyanese, who are contesting for power in our democracy.
In noting the importance of narratives in the task of nation building, Benedict Anderson had identified the importance of newspapers – dubbed the “fourth estate” – that are read every morning in constructing those “Imagined Communities”. “The significance of this mass ceremony – Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers – is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” But as this era of the press mediating the news to attract the broadest readership morphed into “the media” with the arrival of radio, television, the internet, and now social media, the formal and informal rules of the game have now been thrown overboard, and the narratives are now customized to fragment rather than consolidate our communities.
In Guyana, our separate narratives have become weaponized on social media to further polarize our already fractured nation. We have literally lost the plot within our narratives that should suggest compromise rather than a battle of one side overcoming. This would be a constructive narrative for our time, place and circumstances. My suggestion is that we – our leaders and our people – have to craft a common narrative which accepts that, for instance, we have all suffered and contributed to the creation and building of Guyana. With new horizons opening up with oil revenues, we can at long last have the opportunity for all to be rewarded equitably based on merit.
