Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Nov 30, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Someone like me could never have understood the attraction, power and magic of ethnic belonging because the way my world evolved, I was never loyal to anything. I don’t think I was ever loyal to myself, in the sense that I felt that life was hardly a ride to be joyful about, so why bother with the meaning of your own existence.
My family was very liberal. I grew up wild and carefree. I was never into religion and culture. In south Georgetown, there were hardly any East Indians in Wortmanvillle, at the school I attended on Durban Street and on Durban Street itself. Four of my siblings married African Guyanese. My first girl friend was African Guyanese. I am married the past 36 years to an East Indian, Muslim woman. I carried out my mother’s wishes of giving my child, a Hindu name, Kavita.
I never followed my friends in their cultural pursuits. I loved Bob Marley’s music, grew up with soul and reggae, but also loved the phenomenal philosophical songs of the Beatles (Eleanor Rigby, Nowhere Man, The Fool on the Hill, Imagine). Some of my friends would accuse me of liking “white people” music, but I would always reply that music was beyond race and culture.
Today I still remain crazy about the music of Barry White (his composition, “Love’s Theme” is one of my all-time favourite songs), love soul, rhythm and blues, reggae but equally the Beatles, Burt Bacharach, ABBA and Italian songs.
My heroes include Mahatma Gandhi (but I am an intense admirer of his denouncer, Arundhati Roy), Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Malala, Mother Teresa, Liu Xiaobo, Lisa Lovatt-Smith and the Pope. The philosophical book that influenced me more than any other written material was authored by a German philosopher who supported Adolf Hitler – Martin Heidegger, “Being and Time.” My favourite painting is from a Frenchman, Monet’s “Waterloo Bridge.”
My favourite playwright is an American homosexual, Tennessee Williams. My best read is “Things Fall Apart” by Nigerian, Chinua Achebe. My number one actor is an Italian-American, Al Pacino. My number one director is an Italian, Bernardo Bertolucci. My choice for a poet is a Lebanese Arab, Kahlil Gibran. The living scholar I admire most is an East Indian, Amartya Sen. The living politician I admire most is Barack Obama.
My all-time favourite sports personality is a Jamaican, Courtney Walsh. Some of my favourite Guyanese are Catholic priest, Andrew Morrison (deceased); Jehovah Witness leader, Fred Philips (deceased – former manager of the Georgetown Club in the sixties); Brian Rodway ( deceased -founding member of the WPA); Catholic nun, Mary Noel Menezes; Yesu Persaud; Eusi Kwayana; Tacuma Ogunseye; Dr. David Hinds; Nigel Hughes; Khemraj Ramjattan. Desmond Hoyte is my preferred Guyanese Head of State.
I would vote for gay marriage, the legalization of marijuana, the abolition of the death penalty, but only for sociological crimes. I have an unusual exception with my death penalty abolition belief and I am comfortable with it and would not depart from it. I believe authoritarian rulers who used state power to kill opposition activists, critics and journalists should be put to death after a fair trial.
I am an inflexible supporter of women’s rights and would classify myself as a feminist. I love my country but I am not a nationalist in the mainstream sense of the term. My favourite countries are Guyana, Canada, Barbados and Grenada.
This is my evolution and it didn’t allow me to think about loyalty to race and culture. I honestly believe that it is the power of race inside the mind of Guyanese that allowed Africans to stick with the authoritarian excesses of Forbes Burnham. Today Indians who screamed and cried victimization from the first day of PNC rule to its last moment in power, are barefacedly silent on the very things the PPP is doing that they criticized the PNC for.
The race madness has taken over the soul of Guyanese East Indians. I know hundreds of Guyanese Indians who admit to me that the PPP is absolutely no good but they want Indian political control of Guyana. This blind faithfulness to ethnicity has taken on self-destructive dimensions.
Only a fool cannot see that unless the government finances the emptying of this country’s clogged drains, alleys, trenches, gutters and other waterways, this nation is going to continue to be devastated by a mere ten hours of continuous downpour. It has nothing to do with unusual rainfall. That is a nasty lie.
We watched with open eyes the tragedy that visited us on November 20. But Guyanese could have stopped it. We could have stopped the building of the Marriott and demanded the money be used to prevent what took place on November 20, 2014. Was ethnic loyalty the reason?
Every national election, African people vote for an African party that does not deserve their vote. Every national election, Indians vote for an Indian party with evil people who have no love for Guyana.
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
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