Latest update April 26th, 2024 12:59 AM
Aug 24, 2014 News
COUNTRYMAN – Stories about life, in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective
By Dennis A. Nichols
Guyana in crisis, again! So what else is new? Not ridicule or embarrassment. We’ve been through that and worse, from ourselves, our government, our legal system, our Caricom kin… you get the picture!
I for one am drained. So, with my senses concussed but my patriotism relatively intact, I mask bewilderment with humour and satire. I imagine, for example, when our country has been all logged out and we sicken with despair, I will cry the maudlin anthem, “Bare land of Guyana, of shivers and pains; made poor by exploiters, and crushed by their gains …” then laugh at my anti-nationalist wit.
Well, maybe not. We Guyanese are more resilient than may be apparent. I know I am, and ‘The Father’ has blessed me with the ability to laugh at myself and my embarrassments. Several years ago, I travelled to Trinidad with my three year-old son who had been diagnosed as hearing-impaired, to do a series of tests at the Port-of-Spain General Hospital. Arrangements were made between our Ministry of Health and its Trinidad counterpart, the necessary documentation was put in place, and everything was set. Or so I thought.
Imagine my dismay and anger when, on my arrival, a Trinidadian immigration officer said to me, “We en have yeuh name on de list. (What list?) All you Guyanese jus’ coming to take people weurk. Is Beaunham send you.” I explained to him that my visit had nothing to do with Burnham or work, and showed the acceptance letter from their general hospital. He was adamant. My Trini cousin, who had come to receive me, asked him to hold on; he would scoot down to the hospital and have the matter sorted out. The officer seemed to agree, but ten minutes after he had left, my son and I were back the same plane we had arrived on less than half an hour before.
I eventually entered the country a month later after the intervention of the Trinidadian Consul in Guyana, who offered profuse apologies and had our tickets advanced. By then I had dismissed the incident as an aberration. (maybe the guy had been dumped by his Guyanese girlfriend, who knows?) My Trini cousins joked about him being suspicious of my accent. (I was told that I don’t sound like a typical Guyanese) I countered by telling them that the thing which opens into a room is not a doah, it’s a door(r). My teenaged cousin, Peter, laughed uproariously at that one. Humour defeated pettiness.
But more to the point, laughter is indeed good tonic for the Guyanese, or any other, soul. Ask the ghost of Habeeb Khan to tell you the joke about why his wife sought to divorce him. But you can’t, so let me tell. He said his mother-in-law had drowned in the Berbice River, and he and his wife were there to witness the retrieval of her body from the water. Upon seeing the body covered with shrimps, Habeeb remarked, with supposedly shrewd acumen, “Y’all just tek off de shrimps and t’row back de bait.” Now I call that only-in-Guyana humour.
What about out-of-Guyana? Most visitors to London, England, do not miss the chance to go to Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, where lifelike heroes and villains co-exist in eerie proximity. My sister, Grace, took me there. Moving around, I saluted Benny Hill, posed with Viv Richards and shook Desmond Tutu’s hand. So real they looked! Among the commoners was a statue of a young man to whom I was drawn for some inexplicable reason. I ventured really close and reached out to tentatively touch his arm, when suddenly the figure made a gasping sound and lunged at me. I jumped, maybe a foot high, while the ‘statue’ burst out laughing, joined by his two teenaged friends nearby. After the initial shock, I joined them. What else could I do?
Back home, I was going to work at the NIS on Brickdam one morning, shirt-jacked and with briefcase in hand, when I saw two young schoolboys desperately trying to pull the foot of a third one out from a piece of metal grillwork in which it was stuck. The li’l chap seemed to be in serious pain, and I broke into a run to try and help. But as I got near, the ‘victim’ and his two young cronies took off running, pointing at me with shrieks of laughter. Again, what could I do? I’d been pranked! And far from being upset, I stood and laughed at my naiveté almost as heartily as they did.
Those were jokes. But this one was pure embarrassment, only discerned in hindsight. Ruel Johnson had invited me to address the ‘Janus’ Young Writers Group at its launching in 2001. In my address, I modestly admitted my ignorance as to who ‘Janus Young’ was, but opined that he must have been an inspiring figure who blah blah blah… words to that effect. Imagine my chagrin and horror when I realized my faux pas in creating this fictional personage. And to see that Ruel and I had actually discussed this a few weeks earlier – Janus being the two-faced Roman God of doorways and beginnings, so aptly symbolic of the group’s aspirations. I still cringe at the memory, just before a wry chuckle.
In this beautiful paradox of a country, there’s enough to be ashamed of; maybe less to laugh about, as we plough our way through ongoing post-colonial and post-independence trauma. A guy named Douglas Engelbart said, “The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate” and recently there’s been much talk locally centred around this word ‘mature.’ (Think IFMAS, Bai Shan Lin, and wood) Now as a nation is a collection of persons, this quote may at least help us to acknowledge our embarrassment stockpile, and set a tolerance limit to it. Maturity will follow later, but in the meantime, laughter may suffice.
Govt. on its knees over a year now for US$646M to ease Blackouts, and one Canadian Company…
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