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Apr 24, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I wasn’t surprised when I read about the death of Ras Michael Jeune. He was ailing for a while now. If I have to go through the songbook of my life, Ras Michael will receive conspicuous mention, because we had an enigmatic friendship that I never understood. But we were good friends and shared a mountain of information on Guyana and its people.
I met him in the seventies when I was a student at UG and he was far from being Rastafarian. I went away to study, came back, and we renewed our friendship which lasted until his death last week. We had almost nothing in common. And I always wondered why he liked and trusted me. One day I finally began to understand. I remember the time he summoned me to his flat on East Street. He said he wanted to talk urgently. I vividly recall we stood on a shaky verandah that if both of us were bulky people the verandah would have caved in.
He asked me my opinion of Miles Fitzpatrick. I enquired why and he told me was to become a weekly columnist with the Stabroek News and he had just had an informal yet formal chat with Fitzpatrick on the requirements of being a Stabroek News columnist. At that time I was a Stabroek News columnist. My response was automatic; an elitist middle-class man who would naturally talk down to someone like Ras, who is from the lower economic stratum. In his own inimitable way with his histrionic style, he lent his neck slightly downward, and said, “Freddie, yuh good yuh know; yuh dead right.”
One day I got a telephone call from him. He said management ordered him out of the famous Coalpot Restaurant because he refused to take his hat off. I suggested he tell his version in his column. The next day he did just that with a piece titled, “Out of the coalpot into the fire.” Another time he got in touch with me about a bank manager who sexually harassed young male employees. I wasn’t going there, and I accused him of asking me to do what he didn’t want to do, and I reminded him of what he once told me; he was just as brave as I was.
As I said, I never saw Ras Michael as an intimate buddy and I always wondered why he saw me as a friend. It became more pellucid to me one day when he asked, with a really funny smile on his face, why I wasn’t as Black as my brother, Harold “Lightweight” Kissoon. Ras Michael could break you up with his funny looks and funny jokes. He was par excellence in that department. Ras Michael could be bad-mouthing someone with large streaks of vexations on his visage, but the look on his face would have you in stitches. I didn’t comprehend the question. I thought he was talking about skin colour. Then I got to know the true Michael Jeune.
He indicated that my brother Lightweight was the real thing and I wasn’t. He pointed to Lightweight’s life among Black people. He married a Black woman, lived in Lodge among Black neighbours, and started a football club with Black youths. I didn’t know if this was ignorance or naivety. I threw my academic learning at him. By that time I had read every book by Karl Marx and had internalized Marx’s famous reflection, “Social being determines social consciousness”.
I quoted that Marxist phrase for him in my defence, telling him, that we are shaped by the environment we live in and that I was an educated man, going to university where I shared a friendship with black, brown, white, yellow, purple people whom I appreciated and who appreciated me. I explained that my life took a different pathway from my siblings, four of whom married Black people, but I married someone I loved without thinking of race and colour. I did say to him my first girlfriend was a Black woman.
Ours was an uneasy relationship, because for me, he was essentially anti-Indian, anti-Guyana and anti-world. Ras Michael was an unhappy person, because he felt the world and Guyana did not recognize his talent. We rapped many nights at the “People’s Parliament” in 2012, and it was the same haunting refrain – racist Indian people, Guyana and its backwardness, and the world and its limitations. But he had also become anti-Black; being cynical about Black opposition to PPP rule.
Ras was anti-everything. Ras was powerfully talented and maybe was one of the world’s most gifted dub poets. Goodbye, Ras!
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