Most Guyanese are waiting for the PNC to sort out its leadership contretemps, hoping for a return to more “normal” Guyanese politics. But most are also wondering uneasily whether we would be plunged directly into the Hoytean “slow fyaah; mo’ fyaah” variety, or the uneasy period of the interregnums. Meanwhile, there has been a concerted, coordinated effort by a motley crew of radicals, who are working overtime on social media platforms, to ensure that the new PNC leader would have to choose the violent, confrontational Hoytean strategy.
The radicals are engaging in a “politics of memory and commemoration” designed to not only widen the extant ethnic fault lines of our society, but to ensure that politics is seen as a zero-sum proposition in which the PNC’s African Guyanese constituency has no alternative but to remove the PPP Government.
David Hinds of the WPA, a partner in the APNU coalition, illustrates this politics of memory. As a “memory warrior”, his opening gambit was to label the PPP as an “illegal, imposed cabal” that rigged elections just like Burnham’s PNC. He and his cohorts insist that the PPP has “robbed” them of political office; is subjecting them to “economic genocide”; extra-judicially executing their youths, and is persecuting their leaders.
But while all groups will inevitably recount their histories – which reverberate in the various communities as narratives that often clash on particulars – memory warriors are insistent that only their narrative is the TRUTH, to the exclusion of other narratives. And even though the PPP has offered its specific rebuttals, these are summarily dismissed.
Back in early August, Hinds urged at a protest rally: “…in whatever way you can, undermine this (PPP) Government…I can’t tell you how to do it. But ‘a hint to Beneba mek Kwasie tek notice’. Undermine this Government because it has no good intention towards you all.” Not to “oppose”, but to “undermine”. Professor Hinds always chooses his words carefully: some synonyms of “undermining”, my dictionary informs me, are to “sabotage, cripple or damage”.
Now when such exhortatory calls – dubbed “speech acts” – are made in the wake of the inaugural “African Emancipation Day” and symbolically in the historic village of Victoria, the first village founded by freed formerly enslaved Africans, we have to appreciate how they would be decoded by the listeners. There is the plain meaning of the words spoken – the “locutionary” effect – which David has been emphasising in his response to those like VP Bharat Jagdeo, who claim he is calling for violence. “Not so”, he asserts, “show me where I have called for violence.”
But this is rather disingenuous, since there is the action signalled when he uttered the words as to what he wanted to be done, the “illocutionary” effect. And this we can appreciate from the context in which – and to whom – he was speaking, his tone, his body language, etc. The use of the idiomatic African folk saying, “A hint to Beneba, mek Quashie tek notice”, explicitly means that he doesn’t want to say openly what he wants them to do, but his listeners would understand based on their lived experiences.
Specifically, in the case of Guyana, whenever the PPP is to be confronted, the principle as articulated by Forbes Burnham, Desmond Hoyte and every other PNC leader is that “the only language the PPP understands is force”.
This plays out against a narrative in which African Guyanese argue for their greater legitimacy to the national patrimony – including and especially political power – because of asserted prior arrival, suffering, greater acculturation to European values and practices, especially religion, etc. And this is where the memory war is fought through a “politics of entitlement” by memory warriors, so that the group “winning the war” becomes “entitled” to have all its interests satisfied, especially at the expense of the other groups. I have recommended that we encourage “memory perspectives” – accepting that there are multiple narratives and working towards the crafting of a common narrative that includes all – but to no avail.
And, finally, there is the effect elicited from the audience to David’s call – the “perlocutionary effect”. And we can gauge this from the reaction of his viewers on the many programmes on social media in which he repeated his call for “undermining” the PPP Government.
And it was clear that they understood that it was a call to remove the Government by any means necessary.
