Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine has brought the ex-Soviet republics to the public’s attention, since Crimea, Belarus and Chechnya have also been dragged into the conflict. But one of the causes and effects of the Soviet Union’s 1991 breakup and Russia’s subsequent incursions into the Ukraine in 2014, when they annexed Crimea and the western provinces, had been over the problematic of “national identity”. The “sovietization”, it was felt by large swathes in the ex-republics, had been dominated more by “Russification”, and set off counter-reactions.
Two scholars, Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik, proposed a theoretical framework that provided the methodology for examining the nationalist thrust in seventeen ex-Soviets. It was issued in 2014 as “Twenty Years after Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration”. I found their framework quite useful for examining more granularly the processes of “group comparison” and “group legitimacy” that had helped create our “politics of entitlement” in Guyana.
What Bernard and Kubik and the case investigators discerned was that while there were structural and cultural constraints, and cultural strategies that undergirded the conflict between the various “national” groups and Russia, quite critically, they were all embodied in narratives about the past that the leaders conveyed to the “peoples” as motivation for acting in the present. They made a distinction between “history” and “collective memory” in that while the authors of the former may be selective in their recordings and silencing, the latter is even more distorted, being what is “memorised” and “memorialised” by groups and their leaders. Extending the old adage about victors writing history, they identified four categories of narrative-creators by competing groups in plural societies. He called them “mnemonic actors”, but I went for the simpler “memory actors” when I used their framework, starting in 2020.
“Memory warriors” are insistent that only their narrative is the TRUTH, incontestable and non-negotiable, to the exclusion of all others. “Memory pluralists”, on the other hand, accept that there may be different takes on the past, and respect them as such in a “live and let live” manner. Then there are “memory abnegations” who dismiss the entire projects of memory politics to insist that “all-a-we-a-waan” and the focus on the past is misguided. Lastly, there are the “memory prospectives”. These accept that there are multiple narratives, but work towards the crafting of a common narrative that includes all. As one author suggests, “it might be useful to think in terms of different ‘memory communities’ within a given society. It is important to ask the question, ‘Who wants whom to remember what’, and why?’”
Our political system is driven by our two ethnically-based “Security Dilemmas”. These were ironically triggered by the introduction of democracy and the universal franchise in Guyana preceding independence, which was going to decide who was “going to rule” with the departure of the British. Elections still precipitate fears of domination. The Ethnic Dilemmas, however, are structural factors that have to be actuated by an ideology that impels individuals to act as they do. And this is where the memory warriors come in, to augment the lived experiences of the people.
Unfortunately, what predominates in Guyana are the one-sided narratives of “memory warriors”. The leaders of African Guyanese argue for a greater legitimacy to the national patrimony – including, or especially, political power – because of prior arrival, 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.
We have dubbed the politics of memory as a “war”, because even though it does not always lead to physical war, it is always accompanied by a psychic onslaught on the “other”, which destabilises the society. Our demographics have produced a nation of minorities in which any party has to obtain cross- ethnic support to form a Government. We once again call for a national conversation on race/ethnicity in the hope that the memory warriors can become memory prospectives, to integrate a common narrative and build a One Guyana that delivers justice, equity, dignity and respect to all groups in Guyana.
