Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jan 01, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I once observed in these columns that no other profession in the world is more conscious of the passage of time than a newspaper columnist. As you keep writing, you are face to face with how time moves on. My finger typed in today, “January 1, 2019.” I am fully aware that I would not put 2018 on any other column of mine.
Tennessee Williams once wrote in “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” that every step you take becomes the past right away. In the movie version, with the disastrous title, “Boom” which turned out to be a disastrous flop, Elizabeth Taylor in a deep, philosophical refection uttered those words to her lover, Richard Burton. How right Williams was. Time flies without your conscious knowledge and every step just recedes into the past.
As the columnist’s finger moves on the keyboard, he/she is so preoccupied with the moment in front of him/her that each does not really see time ebbing. Then as your finger continues to strike the alphabet keys, you realize that all that you wrote has faded into the past.
Where did 2018 go? I really don’t know. I wrote, sermonized, reflected, advised, internalized, criticized, lamented, wondered and despaired in my articles of 2018, but where did 2018 go?
So here I am today, writing another article as I did the past thirty years, but in a brand new year. As your finger punched the number 2019, the inescapable thought is what it will bring. What is in store for Guyana and the world? We live in the world alright but we each live in a part of the world we call our country.
English poet John Donne once wrote; “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” We are part of the world but Guyana is our home and though through the interconnection of humanity we give the world and the world gives to Guyana, what happened in Guyana does not necessarily impact on the world. What happens in Guyana impacts on us, the souls who live here.
Guyana has not had a viable physiology. It has been interrupted too many times by the vagaries, vicissitudes, visceralness, visinertia, viciousness, and viscosity of life. The viability and, visibility of a visionary horizon has tantalized this nation to the point where Guyana becomes a permanently bounded Prometheus. Heracles came onto the scene and freed Prometheus. No Heracles is anywhere near to Guyana.
Can Heracles come in 2019? Are there signs of him somewhere on the horizon? If you look far enough you will not see Heracles but Tantalus and Sisyphus. The gods punished both Tantalus and Sisyphus. The cruel treatment had no ending. Is Guyana the reincarnation of these two mythological figures in ancient Greek folklore?
The situation is uncannily identical. We are forever doomed to have the fruits of life recede from us as we reach out to pick them. We are forever doomed to push a stone uphill.
Will it be like this in 2019 or will Nietzsche’s Übermensch come to Guyana. Since the fifties we have been waiting for Heracles and the Übermensch. First it was the superb anti-colonial song of the two superstars – Cheddi Jagan and Fobes Burnham. Then, it was Forbes Burnham on his own in 1966. Then it was the revolutionary magic of Walter Rodney. Then, it was Cheddi Jagan on his own in 1992. Then it was the baby face boy, Jagdeo that had no baggage in 1999. Then it was the romance of the multi-racial god, the Alliance for change in 2015.
But Prometheus is still in chains; Tantalus is still drowning in the water; Sisyphus is still pushing his stone uphill. Nowhere in sight is Heracles. Nowhere in sight is the Übermensch.
There is one thing I hate about the uncertainty of life in Guyana – the uncertainty of the fate of young, beautiful, talented, humane Guyanese. In the commercial banks, at the immigration department, in the police force, at the NIS, at the airport, at the supermarket counter, you meet young men and women who have the goodness of the heart in them.
As you walk away after they have served you, you reflect on what will become of them in a country where the journey of Faust never ends and the fire of tears replaces the taste of music.
I honestly don’t know what I will write on in 2019. The year has not started well. We are swimming in choppy waters the sharks are circling. As the French said in 1968, “God is dead, Marx is dead, and I’m not feeling too well myself.”
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
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