For those who took the time to read the article by Freddie Kissoon, here is one by Ulele Burnham. Freddie tried to make amends for the sins of the past but here we see something else. We learn once again that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. We have had enough of sugar coating. There are things happening in Guyana all to similar to what had happened 27 years prior to the now elected Government. It just goes to show you that the more we try to change sometimes we just remain the same. However, when we choose to think back to certain things, nostalgia plays tricks on us by making us think and believe that things were better than they really were. People on the whole have had enough of suffering. People all over are fed up. If you remember how things were, think of how things are today. Are they reverting back there? Is the vicious cycle still happeneing? I sincerely hope not, because if it is, it would mean that an entire nation has learnt nothing.
The truth is a bitter cup sometimes that we all must drink from. I honestly think that Ulele Burnham has had more than a few sips from that cup. I also happen to think that it was good of her to do that. So the next time you choose to think about things in a nostalgic sense and forget about reality. Here is something to bring you back.
This article was most wonderfully done and I know you will appreciate what was written.
Samuel Singh
Ulele Burnham is a barrister specializing in mental health and discrimination law and practises from chambers in London, where she has been based for the past nineteen years. "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." Ludwig Wittgenstein My sister Melanie emailed me a copy of Freddie Kissoon's 6th August 2007 Kaieteur News column written on the 22nd anniversary of my father's death, accompanied only by the brief epithet 'who would have thunk?' After I had recovered from her unorthodox American conjugation of the verb 'to think' (something which would have caused our father as much consternation in his final resting place at the Seven Ponds as would Freddie Kissoon paying homage to him), I read the piece and thought. Those who know me will know that with me, thought can often take an extraordinarily long time and lead to debilitating prevarication. But on this rare occasion I thought a lot and thought rapidly. My first train of thought led me back to a 'Noddy' guide to Philosophy called 'The Consolations of Philosophy' by Alain de Botton which I picked up on one of my trips to a local bookstore, desperate to widen and deepen my knowledge of life and thinking, and desperate to feel that my brain was not merely reducible to a string of ill-remembered and badly organised legal principles and cases. As I read Freddie Kissoon's piece I was struck by an obvious paradox: that his imagined visitation from my father, in the course of which he found himself almost constrained to apologise to a man he had once vilified, had led him to dissuade his daughter from the rigours of philosophy or philosophical thought. How was it possible that a man whose assessment of another appears to have been altered by the passage of time, painful experience, and, most importantly, reflection, could conclude that a discipline aimed at elevating thought, reason and reflection over impulse and instinct was a futile pursuit? My second response to the piece was to think that if Freddie Kissoon could make some sort of peace with my father, publicly, it was time that I made public a small indication of my private battles and my peace also. The road I have travelled, my journey of philosophical reflection, has, I assume, been markedly different from Freddie's. Many may say, and I do too, that fortune has bestowed upon me a remarkable privilege in the circumstances. The fact that that road has been sometimes muddy - and often rough - has led me neither to an unconditional defence of my father as a political figure nor to underestimate the consequences for Guyana of his frailties as a leader and a human being. For many in Guyana today, there are, still, no roads. And such roads as there are appear to be going nowhere, fast. Much as I would love it to be the case, neither I nor History (to use Fidel Castro's coinage), nor Freddie Kissoon can completely absolve my father of his share of responsibility for this tragic state of affairs. And so I write this short comment with more than a little humility. My friends better versed in psychoanalysis than I tell me that pre-pubescent and pubescent rage against a father figure is fairly standard in children between the ages of 9 and say 13. They say that the disempowerment which accompanies the fact of childhood tends to manifest itself, at that age, in anger directed at 'the law' in the home. That law has, historically, tended to be enforced by the father. I, of course, enjoyed the dubious privilege of having a father who was "the law" writ large. When I was in the early part of the period in which adolescent rebellion is said by my friends to be commonplace, the anger at my father seemed, at least to me, to originate from quite a different source. By way of example, I remember a time when students at St. Roses High School took to the streets in revolt against the transfer of Sister Hazel Campayne to Eteringbang. For what seemed like the first time, I began to feel a real sense of confusion rather than rage. The man who presided over Sister Hazel's transfer was the man who, with my mother, had taught me about integrity, about the value of national self-determination, the abject immorality of colonialism, the havoc it wreaked on the psyche of the colonised and the disenfranchisement of the colonial subject denied a voice. Yet he appeared impervious to the voices of those who spoke, angrily, against him. I was, at first, angry at those who protested for failing to understand what he had so carefully sought to explain to me about the Western powers' commitment to destabilising left-wing regimes in the South. But later I could no longer feel secure that he was right, that what he did or oversaw was right. The voices of dissent were too loud and too close. My idol did have feet of clay. Much time has passed since the 1970s and 80s and I have been forced to think and to reflect. There is little detail about the period of my father's leadership to which I was privy - I was 15 when he died - but there is a great deal that I have read since, both damning and eulogising. I have wrestled with the myriad accounts of his deeds as issues of conscience for much of my adult life. There are questions that he may have been able to answer had I been old enough to formulate them while he was still alive. It may be a little known fact that he was rarely dismissive of his children when we asked him to explain things to us. He may, for all I know, have been able to silence his detractors with his own words. But I cannot, and will not, speak on his behalf. I know enough about what he was to be proud to have been his child and will continue to be grateful for many of the things he instilled in me. On the other hand, even taking account of the fact that I know much of what is written about him to be untrue, I have heard enough to have, also, a sobering sense of shame. It was not without years of thought and discussion with friends and family that I eventually arrived at something of an equable place in relation to this tension. Nonetheless, something niggled me about Freddie Kissoon's elliptical piece. I recognised instantly that it wasn't his criticism of my father because I am, regrettably for me, all too familiar with that. Nor was it his belated damascene conversion. I eventually came to the realisation that it was something less directly related to how anyone viewed my father; it was Kissoon's cynicism about philosophy that troubled me. It was his jocular rejection of what I see as an inherently valuable tool in politics as much as in psychology; something that was indispensable for me in my maturation process. What was it other than a philosophical approach which had led both Freddie Kissoon and me, perhaps without knowing it, to be sanguine in our reflections on a complicated man and a complicated period in Guyana's history? And as my Noddy guide to philosophy had informed me, the greek etymology of the word philosophy is philo (love); Sophia (wisdom). How can one even begin to understand (and change) the world - the stated aim of any political movement - if one does not strive for wisdom through considered thinking? I share Freddie Kissoon's view that the parlous situation in Guyana is one of which we should all, including administrations past and present, be deeply ashamed. It seems to me, however, that he, and others who care about Guyana, should embrace rather than jettison a philosophical approach. Philosophy is not concerned only with human malady. Much philosophical writing focuses, for example, on the pursuit of long-term happiness by the process of learning to defer gratification. So philosophical education, as my cousin Gary Lam reminded me recently, might do wonders for young Guyanese who see the answer to life's travails in the quick and easy money that might, at great risk to them, be obtained by acting as drug mules. An ability to reason would perhaps lead to mature reflection upon the consequences of such apparently impulsive decisions. It is true that a call to reasoned contemplation may, at first blush, seem empty in a society where few can avail themselves either the time or opportunity for thought. But a closer analysis may lead to the conclusion that only reason and wisdom can make our shame about our predicament productive. I am eternally indebted to my father (and mother, and not necessarily in that order) for teaching me how to think, even if that process has led me, at times, to be critical of him. It is time that we demand that our present leaders do the same, and better, for all the daughters and sons of Guyana's soil.
By llanusTuesday, August 21, 2007
