Is rape the bailiwick of one ethnic group in Guyana?

Jun 13, 2011 Letters

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Dear Editor,
In a previous letter Mr. Vishnu Bisram described witnessing Chanderpaul cloistered in his hotel room as he added depth to his cricketing knowledge while the rest of the WI team — descendants of the first beneficiaries of the 1834 Proclamation — bellied up to the first-floor bar to freely explore the glories of distilled spirits.  Did I say explore?  One explores assiduously only what one is unfamiliar with.  No, in Mr. Bisram’s telling resides the suggestion that these habitual, legendary, and perhaps hereditary slackers were far removed from the business of exploring; they were already intimates of alcohol.
Each letter Mr. Bisram puts his signature to draws one more nail from the closet in which his racism is confined, thus bringing it closer to collapse, and drives that same nail into the coffin containing his credibility to speak or to write without favor on these matters.
Now comes his latest epistle, laced with various chastisements of Mr. Malcolm Harripaul and a piece of advice for the same gentleman: to wit, that he might want to rejoin the PPP fold after speaking with certain of the country’s older doctors, who could inform him of the prevalence of rape at national service and the unvarying ethnicity of its victims.
If there were hundreds of Indian girls doing national service, then it is reasonable to assume that there were also hundreds of Indian boys likewise engaged, at the same time.
If rapists are considered strictly as those in possession of two separate chromosomes, then the presence of these boys had the potential to widen the pool of those involved in this reprehensible behavior.
Unless, of course, Mr. Bisram is leaving it to his audience to infer that when it comes to identifying the ethnicity of those loins that are inflamed at the sight of silky hair, the world knows and history endorses that they belong to none but the satanic black male.  (I should say silky hair on a female head, lest in the near future Mr. Bisram discovers that the predatory habits of the black male stick to no guidelines and in a forthcoming letter seeks to enlarge his claims of rape.)
To my mind, it would be disingenuous of him to claim any meaning other than the one inherent in the same presumption that for decades saw young black men in America tortured and lynched, to great public approbation, at the drop of a hat.
And what of the hundreds of black girls enrolled in national service at the very time?  Not a single case of rape?  Not a single case of fleshly coercion?  Not a single case of subsequent shame requiring drastic measures of concealment?  Is the lust of the male world whipped to frenzied levels by the females of every race save the black?
What a rare and enviable gift doth she possess, our dusky citizen, to be able to walk bare-breasted through the valley of the shadow of male lust and yet to fear no evil.  Or is it Mr. Bisram’s view that rape, shame, concealment become wholly unnecessary when dealing with alley-cat morals and the ease of ingress to certain twilight portals?  Something is responsible for his caged tongue where the welfare of these young women — no more or no less vulnerable than their Indian sisters — is concerned.
He goes on to mention a young Indian girl raped in an office by a goon during the PNC era, conveniently overlooking that with the exception of the party’s initials, in this his blessed, post-1992 belle époque such an act found an echo so loud that for brutality it might have been confused, or conflated, with his description of the original.
Or so Canadian authorities seemed to indicate when they recently lent a sympathetic ear to the lamentations of a shattered young girl applying for refugee status in their country.
The leader of a now defunct political party used this same sinister rhetoric of seemingly guileless omission while addressing a meeting in Liberty Avenue, Richmond Hill in 1998, when he thundered the following question at his audience:  For how long shall we allow our women to be raped?  If the audience there totaled 200 people, 199 were of the same ethnicity.
I was the exception, if we are to go by appearances.  I had thought initially that the man was a Guyanese addressing a Guyanese audience, and given his question I concluded that some foreign power had invaded our country and was using rape as a weapon of war.
It soon became clear that his meaning did not cast a net so wide as to embrace all Guyanese women, and that instead of being a Guyanese, for that moment at least he was simply an Indian man living in Guyana.
Ashamed of its naïveté, I was forced to abandon my original theory of foreign invasion.  Heavy with the new knowledge, I waited for him to say by whom these rapes were being committed.  He never did.  I suppose he was confident that despite the one obtuse fool that had wandered into their midst, the rest of his audience could easily and accurately infer the ethnicity of the rapists.
There are pages, books, volumes yet to be written about this pestilence.  But at some point a crippling disgust steps in.  It is tiresome and crushing in the extreme to find this kind of arrant nonsense and barely concealed innuendo still being let room to breathe in Guyana.
Nigel Rogers

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