This is an adapted piece from a few years ago, being featured to reinforce a point I have been stressing recently: we need to consciously construct a “national narrative” that would give each group in our country their just desserts.
Narratives are stories, and it seems that their structure happens to be wired into our brains. An event occurs, and we are driven to explain how or why it did. What happened first…what followed? Who were the persons involved? What did each person do? And what were their choices? What were the background circumstances – social or physical – that might have brought the event about? We want to know about causation.
And we create narratives. Since very few of us are in a position, or have the inclination, to conduct rigorous enquiries from ground zero, we reflexively also resort to narratives that others might have constructed around similar events. In a word, we fall back on “history” – whether at the micro or macro level. Narratives, then, are not only constructed; they are constitutive as far as they “explain” our experiences.
In assuming there must be some material historical truth “out there”, we should appreciate we have to be careful to filter out, as best as we can, the inherent subjectivities of all narratives — especially when they concern history “writ large”. Reality may be created by events and processes, but our “experience” of that reality is the “remembrance” of it – that is “his-story”. History is the human narration of that reality as seen by historians; it is therefore inevitably subject to the limitations of our human mind.
Yesterday, I was on a panel with former PM Sam Hinds and former Chairman of the PNC, Vincent Alexander, to discuss Dr Cheddi Jagan’s role in the history of Guyana. The host wanted to interrogate the question as to whether Dr Jagan was the “father of the nation”. Next week, the same panel will look at Mr Forbes Burnham. I was afraid the panel would descend into a clichéd descriptive frenzy as to whether it was Dr Jagan or Mr Burnham who led us out of bondage of British colonialism; but thankfully, that was avoided.
The Jamaican Anthropologist Dr. David Scott dubbed this type of telling as “the narrative of revolutionary romance”, and offers its contours: “It typically begins with a dark age of oppression and domination. This is followed by the emergence of the great struggle against that oppression and domination, and the gradual building of that struggle as it goes through ups and downs, temporary breakthroughs and set-backs, but moving steadily and assuredly toward the final overcoming, the final emancipation.”
Today, we and all those who would examine our history have the advantage of hindsight and access to a wider array of accounts (for eg. the US declassified files) than those who lived through the events. In attacking the possible “illusions of retrospective determinism”, we should connect the past with the present in a broader narrative, one that is healing rather than destructive. We cannot change the past, but we can certainly change the future.
A few years back, Dr Rupert Roopnaraine poignantly evoked John Paul Lederach’s definition of “constructive social change”: the pursuit of moving relationships from those defined by fear, mutual recrimination, and violence toward those characterized by love, mutual respect, and proactive engagement. As suggested by Dr. Roopnaraine, we should invoke the narrative of our traditional ancestral values of “sharing, solidarity and togetherness”, and reintegrate them back into our national psyche.
Lederach has advised that, “Transcending violence is forged by the capacity to generate, mobilize and build the moral imagination.” We must recognize the complexity of relationships, and not fall prey to an “us vs. them” mentality. There can be no “dualistic polarity”, as advocated by our revisionists. Moral imagination is a matter of creating links between memory and vision, and is to a large extent the vocation of communities.
By shifting the meaning of the past through a differential emphasis on particular events, we can transform how we act in the present. The past may literally not exist — not any more than the future does — but it lives on in its consequences, which are a vital part of it. Our past was not all hate or division.
