– In truth, you rage against that which has a secret altar in your soul

As a child living on the coast, in my former years, Roy Mangra lent me a novel to my memory was titled “The Butcher’s of Berlin”. I was about nine years old, he was older than I was, and probably was able to understand it better. I left the Coast that weekend to spend the time at my grandmother in West Ruimveldt and walked with it. My uncle Victor, my father’s youngest brother, had not left for the US of A as yet. He was usually jovial, and he became serious when he held it in his hand. Lil Braff who gave you this book to read? I replied that it had a lot of words in it that were not in my school Dictionary, (many were German). He promised to explain it to me but I got distracted, though from movies I recognised the WWII Nazi uniforms and the term ‘Jews’ that applied to some of the pictures in the novel.

I left without my uncle explaining the book to me, he studied French and had a book with paintings in it that fascinated me. I tried to draw one particular painting, it was some Greek soldiers with swords raised, which he had told me its name, but I had to recall it, as a young adult as ‘Oath of the Horatii’ by a French Artist named Jacques-Louis David. Uncle Victor later went to the US of A but was never the same when he returned. Some weeks later, long after I had returned the Novel to Roy I was exploring my imaginary games with my toy soldiers, when my Godfather, Abel Burke walked up quietly behind me and was observing the game I was playing. There was a chewing gum back then called MX. After chewing some of us washed it and used it as plasticine for modelling monsters etc.

(children played back then). He asked me to explain what I was doing. I excitedly told him that the MX-Plasticine creatures were the invaders from space called ‘The Jews’ and my toy soldiers were the Germans who defeated them. That was my interpretation of the unexplained emaciated pictures of Concentration Camp dead from Roy’s book. Abel quietly explained that Jews were people and he later introduced me to a Jewish friend he had named Mr. Costello, but never burdened me with the facts of the ‘Race Hate’ report that the book constituted. They told me under the watchful eyes of my Godmother, that my toy soldiers were the United Nations Army, and my plasticine Aliens were from the Demon Galaxy, that worked, for there were always movies and Flash Gordon comic books in our world.

The East Coast was not without constant verbal racist attacks, that at times became physical. I was called many names, some from Hindi. In the ‘West on Trial’ by Cheddi Jagan, he pointed on page 114 to “Crude religious and racist appeals were made by the Hindu Pandits and Debadin’s United Farmers” and Worker’s Party respectively. They originated the term ‘Apan Jhaat’ (literally own race) planting the racist De-vide, with intense Anti-Afro-Guyanese hate mythology” (my précis and text deviation). However, there are other interpretations and interjections to the beginnings and to why we are partially still there.

Today, some articulated that the PPP adopted that very racist format and perfected it, which came and was adopted here from India actually, and there is evidence to substantiate this, as a formula to invent a continuous voter ‘crop’, but things do change. Growing up between Georgetown and the provincial East Coast was a tremendous anthropological firsthand experience and advantage for me, from which I learnt that the race hate intensity cannot be blamed entirely on that era in the ’60s that was still alive for me as a child. But resides in the ‘The Cultural reality’ of either ‘Isolation’ or ‘Involvement’ what I witnessed on the coast was the demographics of two villages sharing the physical being that enveloped both, one side an old plantation was now occupied by Indo Guyanese, the other that housed a Fort and military hospital is occupied by Afro and Indo Guyanese. The latter can be termed Creole, meaning that they read and share books, newspapers and not only play cricket, are mainly Christian, argue about fashion, on mainly western made movies, listen to music from Classical, concert American and Caribbean, know their national and Caribbean history, knowing where Dominica is as against the Dominican Republic, court women differently, discuss social and political ideas, joke about their public officials etc. The other is rooted (especially in the rural areas) in a cultural interpretation of self outside of Guyana, any preferences outside of that regardless of how practical was repressed, with name-calling and social castigations.

Political ideas and interpretations come from a didactic political and religious conduit of Ideas. The enemy is defined by his race (human variation) unless he or she is a servant of the leader, and to prove it, he or she must hold his own phenotypic origin in public contempt, and be immune to that contempt coming from his/her adopted cast. Then that person will be described as ‘one ah we.’ Musical taste, movies, conversations are rooted in events from that external universe, little is known of Guyanese history, cultural, industrial and academic achievements, geographical backgrounds and places, folk songs, national foundations etc. And with the casual offer by a leader shaped from that culture to a foreign state of a part of our geographical heritage to console a border issue, now, doesn’t this pose a significant and alarming problem?

Both my Father and God Father instilled in me that it is normal to resent certain habits, preferences and practices, thus avoid its practitioners, but never hate, because in most cases, those who hate- hate what they cannot be, and hate poisons you.

Former American President Obama was hated by racists in and out of the closet because he shattered their stereotypical comfort zone and walked into the ‘White House’ with, as we say in conversation, an ‘African Princess’. If he had done this with a non-African woman, the myth would have circulated that he was a product of her enthusiasm. The problem that faces Guyana requires a hands-on approach, where meritocracy transcends slogan bearing –victimhood, as a school child. I was told by a political misguided audience that I will be a public servant and work for slave earnings till I die, now that very grown-up misguided audience is forging their qualifications to be high-end public servants, and crying out for ethnic balance everywhere, and had only yesterday made nurses out of Grade 4 Social Studies passes. In the decisions of the past lies the present, commonly applied trends of injustice hiding behind a screen of convoluted hate cannot correct it, the German nation learnt that after WWII.