It has been said that we “inherited a state, but not a nation”. With the vast majority of Guyanese arbitrarily dumped into Guyana over the last few hundred years, to join the Indigenous peoples already here, we simply do not have the collective wherewithal to imagine a nation “looming out of an immemorial past”, as one writer proposed. We will just have to deal with the bricolage that we are. But in the meantime, what do we do about the demands for a “national culture” implied in such a vision of a nation? President Irfaan Ali has called for a “One Guyana”, and we propose one grounded in “unity in diversity”.
This question about our “nation” has occupied centre-stage in the political arena for quite a while: it has formed the site of a contestation of power in civil society as well as the state. It has therefore precipitated a wider struggle than merely the “political”. Ever since the beginning of European colonisation, the model of the “nation” imposed upon the Guyanese population – notwithstanding some rhetoric to the contrary over the past few years – has been for our peoples to “assimilate”. This stance totally privileges “unity” over “diversity”. It has been the dominant model over the past three hundred years, and still undergirds the policies of most of the states of the world, which now routinely define themselves as “nation-states”. Its premises, which are accepted as common sense, are that the people within a state must all share a common culture and values, so that they would feel a sense of oneness, so as to better work towards achieving the “national” goals. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, of course, is who decides on what constitutes the “national culture” into which everyone is to be assimilated?
There have been several variants of the assimilationist school – ranging from the demand that individuals entering such a society jettison their “old” cultures and live practice the new – to such individuals being told that they should intermarry with others from the “mainstream”, so that they physically disappear. The American “melting pot” remains the most famous example of the assimilationist school, even though that state, especially through its school system and its very explicit “Citizenship” examinations, couched its values to be assimilated in ideological, rather than cultural” terms. This was feasible because the WASP cultural ideal was so deeply imbedded in the state structure that there was no need to emphasise it. In reality, for American citizens to enjoy the full rights of citizenship, they had to conform to the “societal” culture – which was overwhelmingly British.
Sadly, the assimilationist project has only worked at the price of great suffering; and even then, never very successfully. America has had to concede that, instead of a “melting pot”, it has had to accept that it can only be a “salad bowl”. Britain has had to grant autonomy to Scotland and Ireland in cultural as well as political terms. In Guyana, while everyone was told to assimilate into British culture, there were always snickers from whites when “natives” talked about Britain as “home” – as was very common as recently as the sixties. Modern international norms of ‘equality’, ‘self-determinations’ and “cultural citizenship” of peoples militate against cultural hegemony being accepted by even “subordinate” groups. Witness the new militancy of our Indigenous peoples.
It is an ironic fact about the world, however, that multicultural societies are actually the norm in the so-called “nation-states”. Each individual in such states is also a member of a particular cultural group, who will have different experiences from another belonging to a different cultural group. This is because our culture shapes and gives meaning to our life-plans. And the mere participation of each member helps to change the culture itself. Out of this relationship between people and their cultures arises a sense of identity and belonging.
The question as to whether “unity” or “diversity” should be privileged is partially a semantic one, caused by the conflation of “state” and “nation”. But, at the bottom, the dispute has to do with power, as it almost always does. Political unity and cultural diversity do not have to be mutually exclusive.
We can have One Guyana with unity of diverse cultures.
