– a remarkable invention

I FIRST heard of the label backtrack in the mid-1970s from a high school friend. His family was from Crabwood Creek in Region Six, along the banks of the Corentyne River, who was involved in the smuggling of people and goods between Guyana and Suriname. This young man told me attractive stories of smuggling along the Corentyne River so much so that I wonder now if he was trying to recruit me to ply that lucrative trade. The label, boring the border, came to my attention a few years later when I realized that certain people in the villages would simply disappear and no one cared to look for them or even to file a report at the police station. The word got out quickly that the disappeared chose to bore the border via the backtrack route to North America since the legal immigration gates were closed to them. The concern of the villagers was not the safety of the disappeared but rather how these individuals were able to use their acerbic wits to make that “golden” contact to get them out of Guyana. Many villagers simply wanted to follow suit.

By the late 1970s, at least one household member in the Corentyne region, if not the entire Guyana, had left using the backtrack route to enter some foreign country, preferably Canada or the United States. The word had gotten out that going to America was no longer a distant dream. The belief that the one percenter of Guyanese could only enter the United States, the land of plenty and promise, had become a figment of the imagination. A fresh terrain of hope for disillusioned Guyanese had developed into a culture of illegal out-migration pregnant with a well-organised groundswell of networks in which Guyanese paid thousands of US dollars to get them out of Guyana. The ambition of Guyanese took volte-face from centering on saving and investing for their family to have a good life in Guyana to paying their way to some foreign country.

We knew that a culture of out-migration had begun, but we were not sure of the magnitude of this Guyanese post-independence out-migration. Various studies have placed the out-migration figure to be around 600,000 since independence. An estimated 200,000 out-migrated to the Caribbean region while 400,000 went to Europe and North America. Of this total, it is safe to say that an estimated 100,000 Guyanese might have entered North America via the backtrack route, paying around US$3000-$6000 per person. The decision of these 100,000 Guyanese to out-migrate was myriad, ranging from personal ambitions to political turbulence to economic deprivation. Despite the varying reasons, they all shared a foundational similarity in that they left not on their own free will. They were uprooted, if not un-homed.

I opine that the method – the pooling of family resources and risking of lives – Guyanese used to get out of their homeland was one creative invention of the post-independence Guyanese experience. It matched the PNC dictatorship and represented a remarkable desire to have a better life anywhere outside of Guyana amid adversity. Yet, we are not sure how the historic backtracking and boring the border coda has panned out for the thousands who were forced on that route. Some academic studies exist, but they are largely buried somewhere, inaccessible to the layperson. Conversations and testimonies in public and private spaces have expanded our understanding of Guyana’s overseas branch communities. These perspectives have revealed, on the one hand, the success stories of academic and material achievements, as well as despair and despondence on the other hand. This experience is, of course, the imminent and immanent enigma of the immigrant experience.

I postulate that this backtracking and border boring generation is now on an average over fifty years old. Some have stayed on in their new-found homeland and raised families, leading to the procreation of children and grandchildren, and perhaps forgotten Guyana. They appear unspoiled by the pains of out-migration. Others have migrated back to Guyana either occasionally or permanently. Whatever has been their journey, these individuals arrived in a new place with no roots. Some died in a land they struggled to assimilate that did not understand their human existence. Some have been stuck and torn between nostalgia and realism. Some have replaced missing family bonds and kinship with steady work. I suppose that at some point they might have asked, is it worth spending the most tender part of life in a land where the anchorage of homeland sentiments appears so elusive? Is it worth replacing a community of openness with a community of four walls?

I conclude that the post-independence exodus of backtracking and boring the border may never happen again as in the past. Some movements will occur, and we will be informed of triumph and tragic stories. Guyana, however, will depart from those backtracking days because it is on a verge of experiencing enormous growth and development generated from oil revenues. The country will be an importer rather than an exporter of people to meet the aforesaid demands. The backtracking and boring the border movement will be transformed into “front tracking” namely, that thousands of immigrants will pour into Guyana’s porous borders. It has already begun (lomarsh.roopnarine@jsums.edu).