Dear Editor,
I refer to the letter “Remembering the ‘Son Chapman”, written by Sharma Solomon and published in the state newspaper of July 7th. Mr Sharma noted, “TODAY (6th of July), 53 years have passed since that fateful day when more than 40 of Linden’s own were massacred on the Demerara River as they travelled home on the Son Chapman launch at 16:00 hours on Monday, July 6, 1964…. We must take the lessons taught by tragedies such as these to guide our actions in the here and now.”
But the “lessons” will be incomplete if parts of the story of Linden are silenced. The PNC, since 2004, have been annually commemorating the Sun Chapman tragedy, but not once have they mentioned its precursor – the pogrom at Wismar on May 25-26. Yet, on those two days, 220 Indian homes were razed, three Indians were murdered, several women and girls raped, almost the entire Indian population of 3000 was forced to flee. The July killing of five more Indians who had returned or stayed behind at Wismar after the destruction of the Sun Chapman was almost an anti-climactic. This is also Linden’s history.
In 2013, the PNC moved the commemoration from Hurudaia upriver to the centre of Linden. Dr Alissa Trotz and Red Thread have interrogated the purpose of this commemoration and queried the silencing of the preceding tragedy of the violence and ethnic cleansing of Wismar. They interviewed many of the refugees from Wismar but living on the East Coast of Demerara. Like the survivors of the Sun Chapman, their loss is also palpable.
As I have written, when we “look back at history” we can only do so from our present, in which questions are posed for answers sought. For me, one question has been ‘how and why the history of the Indians of Wismar, with its denouement of May 26, 1964, has been so completely “silenced” in the sense of the word used by Rolph Trouillot:
“…the presences and absences embodied in sources (artifacts and bodies that turn an event into fact) or archives (facts collected, thematized, and processed as documents and monuments) are neither neutral nor natural. They are created. As such, they are not mere presences and absences, but mentions or silences of various kinds and degrees. By silence I mean an active and transitive process: one “silences” a fact, or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active dialectical counterparts of which history is the synthesis.”
But we simultaneously, from our present, have our eye on our future — a future we hope to create with the knowledge gleaned from the past. For me, it is a future in which all Guyanese can live in peace, to create their progress and not be manipulated to a return of that past. We cannot create such a future based on selective silencings.
I have recommended at least the erection of a monument to all the 176 victims that perished during the “disturbances” of 1964. I do so once again today.
Sincerely,
Ravi Dev
