MS. GAIUTRA Bahadur (an American woman of Guyanese parentage) once interviewed me in Guyana on Guyanese politics, and it didn’t appear to me that she knew anything about Guyana.

Ms. Bahadur, author of the book, “Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of indenture,” has just published an essay in the New York Times (NYT) titled, “Is Guyana’s oil a blessing or a curse.” This is an absurd headline that is designed to question the acceptance of oil in a small developing country. The title betrays the Freudian mind of the writer.

In all seriousness, how can an academic ask the question if a trillion-dollar industry for a developing country could be a curse? How could such an immeasurable goldmine be a curse and if it could be a curse, from whose perspective? Would the same writer, who is an American, ask if the stupendous wealth of the US is a blessing or a curse? How Ms. Bahadur would answer that?
How Ms. Bahadur feels about the newspaper that has just published her article – NTY – after what could be considered unprofessional reporting on genocide in Gaza.

Ms. Bahadur teaches journalism and I am sure just as she wrote on oil for the Guyanese people to read, her thoughts would be welcomed in Guyana on western journalism in the context of the reporting on Gaza. Ms. Bahadur lives in the US so she would know more than me that no American or mainstream media house in the European Union has accepted that genocide has occurred in Gaza.

Reading Ms. Badahur’s piece, her Freudian mind is all over her contents. There is the subtle conveyance that Guyana is this low-level country just as in colonial times when Guyana was known as Bookers Guyana as she puts it. She says people now refer to Guyana as Exxon Guyana.

What she did not go on to do is to identity who are the people referring to this country as Exxon Guyana. Of course she could not have done so for one graphic reason. They are very wealthy people whose grouse is not against Exxon but the ruling party which is disliked for reasons of colour and class.

The subtle references throughout the article about Guyana’s low-level status sometimes are not so subtle. She tells us about a restaurant that sells a steak for more than $350 American. What is the point in that? There is none. In Ms, Bahadur’s own country, there are restaurants that you will be refused service based on how you look and dress and the steak will be more costly.

The existence of such a restaurant does not mean that the economy of Guyana does not allow people to buy a nice, juicy steak for 5,000 Guyanese, better that the one for $350 US. Ms. Bahadur has her Freudian reason for so painting Guyana.

An objectionable part of Mr. Bahadur’s odyssey into bad-mouthing Guyana is the photo of the security hut at MovieTowne which is described as Hard Rock Café. Obviously when the Americans readers of NTY look at that picture of Hard Rock Café, they will have a good, contemptuous laugh with the sigh: “Is that what Hard Rock Café looks like?

Ms. Bahadur is an academic that teaches journalism but one seriously must ask how competent her research ability is. For her thoughts on the oil industry, Ms. Bahadur interviews a woman that Ms. Bahadur describes as a jewelry designer.
This lady has no history of civil society activism or is a trained person in any kind of environmental science. The bulk of Ms.

Bahadur’s interviewees are frenetic anti-government critics that 99 per cent of Guyanese never heard about.
Ms. Bahadur tells us that she slipped into a party which had an entry fee of $170 American, and she sipped El Dorado with some of the Exxon bigwigs hoping to get information. She should have slipped into a sugar estate and drink cane juice and eat egg ball and get information about how those folks feel about the oil industry.

If you blank out Ms Bahadur’s by-line, anyone would think that the NTY item was written by a bigoted academic from the developed world who is contemptuous of the Third World. I hope Ms. Bahadur saw the recent biopic of one of the most talented musicians of all time – Bob Marley. I leave with her with a few lines from his masterpiece, “Redemption Song”:
“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
none but ourselves can free our minds.”

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.