AN instructor directed a group of Guyanese, of which I was a part of that, “If you don’t speak about the pretentions in your society, the more dismal depths of those pretentions and beliefs will grow out of control and will explode.” I sat in that audience and congratulated him but pondered on where the courage would come from to address those deficiencies, from among most of my countrymen and women, because pretence is a safe zone, the confrontation of truth is a stressful and combative effort. With the advent and now wide access to social media, on the other hand, we find that technology has birthed the Wiz of OZ, and the obvious is evident. With the saturation of cowards who need a shroud to hide behind, to become the undead and then expound false courage to say the vilest things along racist and public slander, they even adopt other people’s identities so they can spite venom, that they would be too timid and terrified to express publicly,   and when caught, they claim that they were hacked. That’s the most plausible modern escape, not denying that it doesn’t happen. The other fact is, that if we define ourselves as a Democracy, and lack laws that arrest the vocabulary of incitement in its ‘theme form’ rather than its expanded epistle, this will continue to occur.

Recently a former official made some harsh stereotypical declarations. One such is that ‘Afro-Guyanese are lazy’ amidst a barrage of other racist vomit. How this could be said about a people who were brought against their will into slavery; still laboured and saved money against all odds to buy former plantations; shaped them into villages; built over 10,000houses across the colony of British Guiana- their labour built every township; defied every scheme and plot to reverse their emancipation; enter the ‘Gold Bush’ as labour; wrestled with the rapids; paid the price in ancestral lives lost and triumphed as proprietors. How could such a thing be said of young Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow whose father died when he was 13. He became a man then, was integral at 21 in the largest protest for social change between 1838 to 1950- that of the 1905 riots, which launched the modern political era with the entrance of Critchlow and the British Guiana Labour Union (BGLU) in 1917. What folly of racist laziness is he talking about? Neither can it be said that all ‘East Indians’ are racists, because I experienced racism in my creative life when the same Jaguar character that was rejected as a Black superhero. When the book was published before it entered the Newspapers, I benefitted from meaningful support from Indo Guyanese business persons. Politics manipulate religion and culture that employ doctrines of sacred discrimination where it conveniently exists to generate fears and hysteria of economic space hate, real and unreal, and a false and irrational surge of entitlement, which generate mindless votes forged by bigotry for the political puppeteer.

Culture is a dividing force, not all cultural beliefs are rooted in positive tenets. In some parts of Asia, young girls are married off as children, while in parts of Africa the low almost bald hair cuts on young girls symbolise not ready for marriage, with extremely harsh penalties for violators. Matriarchal and Patriarchal cultures differ and have shaped a virtual chasm with parameters not consciously understood in the Guyanese context. But culture is not stagnant, but every though and dark effort is made to protect and to retain that which is proven as “the easily controllable and beneficial to the hierarchy” so arguments of logic, obvious and scientific fact are isolated. It’s like defining a village because a certain crude and connected official drinks his rum then dances on a tabletop expressing the most vulgar drunk man talk. The reality with “Drunk man talk” that is expressed with “rum courage” which without that spirit, consequences would have prohibited him uttering, yet it’s his true self, that creole ting: “He ent know is wuh he seying” is another barren comfort zone to be aware of and ignore, but he may be a loud and forced imposition on his audience but does not define “the all”.

As an artist, I understand the discussions provided by insinuations, body language, the specific dishonest edits of social and historical events to make loud false pronunciations, serious calculated humour and appealing statements by soft tone, that need not pass without interception, are all necessary life skills to be understood in this world of great deceptions, at times to the detriment of all that you hold secularly sacred.  Through art and literature, we experience that two prototypes of men exist, one who is confrontational and will engage you in battle, and should you in defeat seek mercy, may spare your life; then there is the other who will woo you with bribes and make promises that only your delusional ego can justify, then poison you in many ways with a smile.

Adolf Hitler did not invent the world he presided over; he merely adopted and reshaped the macabre. But since he is the historical poster boy of hyper racism, mass murder and inhuman practices, I will explore a long-personal confusing aspect of his reality.  I saw an article some years ago, with Eva Braun Hitler’s poster wife privately modelled as an Afro American Jazz musician, her face darkened and in the photograph as if singing a song. I never read her published diaries so I will for now go with the theory that she was modelling as the Jazz singer in the 1927 movie of the same name, which ironically was based on a white Jewish boy who wanted to become a Jazz singer, a scenario that is based on an inner transference into the despised but secretly admired soul order. Did Hitler like Jazz which he called inferior music, was he in his imagination transferred into a Berlin Jazz club which his thralls had closed down, with the Black-faced Eva as his muse? Then in the same project, I later discovered something else, an extract from his May Day speech in 1933-“ Germans, you are not second-rate, even if the world wishes to have it so a thousand times. You are not second-class and inferior. Awake to the realisation of your own importance.”  And in was invited the occultists with their master race Aryanism, to stimulate the imagination and rejuvenate the post-1918 defeat loss of self-esteem, race and religion spiralled Hitler to power… the rest you know enough off.

In the same way, young Afro and Indo Guyanese working with GECOM in the house to house registration were subject to abuses and racial insults, to whip up the old Gorgon of fossilised racist thinking, inspired by blunt statements carrying subliminal messages by political leaders. We have precedents of how dangerous incitement vocabulary can be. I can remember a steel pan genius in the burial ground and the young girl holding her tummy with streaks of blood running down her leg, and the sensational woman coming through the ground screaming rape. The man was beaten, placed on the front page of the papers, his life destroyed. Afterwards, silently and in shame, everyone kept the secret, that the child was actually having her first menstrual period- there was no rape.

We have got to follow the evidence on this national problem, described according to a much balanced Freddie Kissoon on January 22, 2015: “ The PPP has never won an election using ideas”- an interesting article; interesting details. There are no illusions about where in the political houses of Guyana that the cauldron of racial strife boils hottest, from 1961 to date. The point is, this has to be a national ideal, with all Guyana involved towards a surge of cleansing, of intense self-questioning, and it has to begin now, especially with foreign dabbling no longer a speculation.