I have a confession to make that makes me guilty. I hope today’s Chronicle is not read by one of the most talented theatre personalities in Guyana that I am a fan of – Mrs. Gem Madhoo Nascimento (GMN).
The regrettable truth is that I have seen only one of her plays – The Vagina Monologues. From that one play, I have concluded that GMN is indeed a talented director.

The play is one of the best and most successful plays to have come out of Broadway the three decades. It is a difficult play to direct and GMN succeeded. And along the way there were no stumbles. GMN’s husband I think, though I am not sure, Kit Nascimento, is a communication consultant to the government.
Now that the usual suspects (TUS) have gone completely insane and want the state to render all types of guidance and counseling to a student accused of mass murder, this may be the right time for GMN to put on again this politically astute work, seeing that her husband’s political stance would compel him to be disdainful of TUS.
Here in this column, I will politicize the monologues of what the play is about and desexualize the story-telling by substituting political themes. But the relevance remains intact because the monologues in the play are about people’s experience, derived from the journeys of life.

What the playwright, Eve Ensler has done that has made it easier for me to satirize the monologues and apply them to TUS is that over the years when the play was first staged in 1996, she has changed a number of monologues, substituting newer ones for older ones.
I have been absolutely shattered at what the core group in TUS has become because I have known many of them since I was a scrawny, over-zealous, Marxist youth at UG in the first half of the 1970s.

I will never come to grips psychologically with TUS personalities that I functioned with in interlocking complexities of camaraderie who have now become people who hate East Indians and refuse to accept East Indian citizens ruling Guyana. That is pathological hatred that will always dilute the quality of the human spirit.

I still retained an emotional letter one of the TUS personalities wrote to me after she migrated from Georgetown in 1976 to live in the deeper recesses of the interior. I want to return that letter to her because even looking at it drives uncontrollable chagrin in me.
It is like the book Moses Bhagwan sent me that he authored about his family tree. I will describe in a forthcoming article what I did with the book after Bhagwan became a figure of hate for me.

Briefly, here are a few satirical notes patterned after the play that I have I attributed to TUS. I remind you, the parodies are about politics and othyer subjects because TUS have become such evil people that there is need to bring out the Mephistophelian danger of these haters. TUS’ interpretation of the Mahdia inferno constitutes the vulgarization of an immense tragedy that may have no parallel except in Rwanda and Nazi Germany.

Please note, M is for monologue and each speaker from TUS is relating why he/she does not like the PPP, Indian Muslims and Hindu and want people from the Mulatto Creole class to rule Guyana. And a big reminder- this is just satire. But there are underlying Freudian meanings.

M1- “I have no sympathy for Indian politicians who are not Christians. My great, great, great grandfather was set upon by some Hindu boys who beat him up in the village because on Christmas day he wore a huge Christian cross around his neck that they ripped off. When my great, great, great grandmother tried to intervene, they knocked her spectacles off her face and yelled out, “Putagee devils.” I only respect Indian politicians who are Christian.”

M2- “My great, great, great uncle tried to teach the Indian owner of the shop he supported the correct pronunciation of English words. The owner became annoyed and yelled out; “redman, redman, go away and look for your white father and black mother.” My uncle explained that what he saw as red was in fact far superior to the colour the Indian on his skin, a belief subsequent generation in my family believed in and I am not ashamed of it.”
M3- My great, great, great aunty passed on a belief that up to this day, our family members still accept. Leave business to Indians and never allow them into government because they will never be our equal in the finer spheres of life.”