Baytoram Ramharack’s release of his book, “The Wismar Massacre: A Case of Ethnic Cleansing of Indians in Guyana”, coinciding with our 60th Independence Anniversary commemoration, has unleashed a new wave of narratives and histories of the 60s when that independence was birthed. I would like to emphasise, however, as I have done over the past few decades, that histories are not only written within a particular “space of experience” – the ways that the past is remembered in the present – but also with a “horizon of expectation” – the anticipation of the not-yet-known future beyond the horizon. The pertinent question for the interlocutors is what kind of future they are trying to create with their narratives.
A history of our present, in the words of Caribbean anthropologist David Scott, demands that “histories of the past ought to be interventions in the present, strategic interrogations of the present’s norms as a way of helping us to glimpse the possibilities for an alternative future.”
Somehow our narratives now circulating about the events in Wismar during May 1964 just keep looking backward at what was “then”. But our “problem space” – the threats and opportunities that confront us in our present sociohistorical conjuncture – is radically different. At a minimum, the “us” and “them” of the narratives during the ethnic violence of the 1960s, as the PPP and PNC struggled to inherit governance of our country, has radically changed. The new demographics demand rationally that political parties mobilise across the old ethnic divides for a “One Guyana” to gain political power.
What then should be our “horizon of expectation”? Our interlocutors should note that criticism is always strategic. What is it they want for our society as a consequence of their criticisms, narratives, actions, and exhortations? What, in a word, is their “good”? While there will never be an identical horizon of ends for all of us because of our inherent diversity, I am hoping that among the various possibly competing ends, that of a more harmonious society would be common to all formulations. I am suggesting that with the privilege of hindsight, we should reject the assumption of retrospective determinism and connect the past with the present in a broader narrative that is healing rather than destructive. We cannot change the past, but we do not have to repeat it and can then change the future.
Our horizon of expectation must generate strategies that speak to our normative end of living together in a truly independent Guyana rather than further dividing us as some seem determined to do. A constructive narrative cannot then picture our opposing groups locked forever in mortal combat. John Paul Lederach’s definition of “constructive social change” should recommend itself to us: “the pursuit of moving relationships from those defined by fear, mutual recrimination, and violence toward those characterized by love, mutual respect, and proactive engagement.”
Lederach has advised that “transcending violence is forged by the capacity to generate, mobilise, and build the moral imagination.” We must recognise the complexity of relationships and not fall prey to an “us vs them” mentality. During the violence of the 1960s, there were always accounts of those who risked their lives to help the “other”: there can be no “dualistic polarity” as advocated by our revisionists. Moral imagination is a matter of creating links between memory and vision and is, to a large extent, the vocation of communities.
As I have often mentioned, the plots of the Indian Mahabharata War between the Pandava and Kaurava cousins and Hegel’s famous interpretation of Antigone as the paradigmatic Greek tragedy might be particularly apt to our situation.
In this narrative, both “sides” are morally right: the conflict is not between good and evil but between “goods” on which each is making an exclusive claim. Isn’t this the situation that our mutually exclusive narratives of victimhood, with their facile binary oppositions in a zero-sum struggle, have delivered us into – which, ironically, neither political nor economic competition now demands? The plot of our narrative should suggest compromise rather than a battle of one side overcoming. That would be a constructive narrative for our time, place, and circumstances after Independence 60.
By shifting the meaning of the past through a differential emphasis on particular events, we can transform how we act in the present. The past may not literally exist – any more than the future does – but it can live in its consequences based on our narratives. Our past was not all hate or division.
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