I
"Remember what I said," murmured the old man in the soiled
off-white linen suit, waggling his crumpled finger wickedly at me.
"I wasn't making joke, you know. Remember what I said"
He seemed to repeat himself endlessly like a tape loop. Behind him
hovered a gaudy kitsch portrait of a diabolically smiling Comrade
President.
After a seemingly infinite number of such repetitions, I awoke,
itching everywhere, opening my eyes to discover that I had unwisely
liberated myself from the mosquito net. Jon was snoring smugly beneath
his net, probably dreaming sweet dreams of passports safely deposited
in the top drawer at home. Going into the bathroom to fetch the
foul-smelling Brazilian ointment the drug dealer at the market had
offered us as repellent and soother, I failed to remember what had
brought me here in the first place. Why hadn't we just popped off
to Tobago or Barbados for a week? My memory evaded me. I took a
swig of bottled water and returned, wide awake, to the misty bed.
This was the real tropics. After years of random travel about the
globe, I had finally arrived. The rotting city at the coast was
a perfect relic of colonialism (someone at UNESCO ought to be alerted).
The erratic supply of even the most basic commodities was as predictable
as the damp and unhealthy weather. The sorry state of the entire
infrastructure was convincing; daily blackouts, water everywhere
except in the taps. Nobody was playing games with us; nobody had
been paid to make us feel that our bid for exotism was successful.
It was real. That was why, among other things, my passport had disappeared
into the dark recesses of the city (or had it -- perhaps that, too,
was only in the dream?), and why things which could never be undone
might happen in this decrepit mining town on the Essequibo.
On the following morning, the landlady, noticing my condition, told
me brightly that there was no cause for worry. "Only mosquitos
dat have yellow stripe dong dey head carry malaria. Odderwise no
problem." After breakfast I returned to the room to inspect
the sheets while Jon tried to persuade her to give us back our passports.
Cautious after first having been held up for half an hour at the
airport because his passport had the ominous word "Journalist"
in it, and then having encountered a greedy hotel director in military
fatigues, burly, balding Jon had reluctantly handed it to her when
we checked in. Giving your passport or VISA card to someone in Guyana
is a dangerous game.
Most of the dead mosquitos had been ground into a dark paste mixed
with my blood, but every one of the dozen or so less mutilated ones
carried an optimistic yellow stripe reminiscent of the henna Hindu
women rub into their partition. Contriving to believe that malaria
had an incumbency period of at least a week, I decided that it would
not break out in these lamentable and medically indefensible surroundings.
The town was sad and lonely, the river was brown and the soil was
a sickly yellow. The chicken chow mein served at the Chinese restaurant
last night had been putrid and the beer had been warm. The mine
workers we met in the rumshop had told us that after the latest
devaluation of the Guyanese dollar, thanks to an IMF structural
adjustment programme, each of them earned about sixty pence a day.
The sense of adventure with which we had set out from Port of Spain,
wearing mock helmets and khakis, became increasingly mixed with
the discomfort of social pornography for every step we took across
the soggy soil of Guyana's bowels.
*
* *
Crossing the
narrow section of the Western Atlantic which separated Trinidad
from the Spanish Main, ostensibly going only from one part of the
English-speaking Caribbean to another, one does something that few
do for pleasure. The general direction of travel is in the opposite
direction. Our BWIA flight had been half full of Guyanese expatriates
temporarily returning to their families as aid workers, carrying
large suitcases filled with toys, American magazines, toilet paper
and all the other kinds of commodities North Europeans were accustomed
to bringing across the Iron Curtain, in addition to treatments for
the vast variety of nasty tropical ailments endemic to that damp
and swampy country.
The consul in Port-of-Spain had offered advice before issuing our
visas. A very old man he seemed, but he was probably no more than
sixty (perhaps there is something to the folk notion that hot tropical
climates speed up ageing among paleskins?), and he treated his young
secretary with a familiarity which could indicate a lot of things,
including that he did not see himself as being beyond the zenith
of his manhood.
"Guyana is not like Trinidad. It is, um, a very strange country."
He spoke the clearly articulated, softly modulated English of the
colonies. "If somebody in Guyana asks you what you think of
their country, don't say anything. Tell them that you have just
arrived and that you realise that this is a strange place. Don't
say what you like or don't like about the country. That could get
you into trouble."
Jon, less accustomed to the ex-colonies than myself, took the character
in thoroughly. A crumpled linen suit which might have been white
years ago, knobbly hands fingering a pipe, a wrinkled skull with
a halo of downlike hair, and an unsettling pair of burning eyes.
"Have you, sir, been working for the Guyanese government for
a long time?" I asked after acknowledging his advice. He shrugged.
"Since my childhood," he answered enigmatically. In his
childhood, there had been no Guyanese government. Leafing through
the only tourist brochure displayed in the makeshift office functioning
as the Guyanese diplomatic representation in Trinidad and Tobago,
Jon remarked that "it says here that Guyana is the first and
only cooperative republic in the world. What does that mean?"
The consul shrugged again. "That is exactly the kind of question
you should not ask people in Guyana. I hope I have made that clear
to you." Suddenly his hands began to move quickly, and carried
out several tasks simultaneously. He lit his pipe, sipped his cold
tea, grabbed a biro and a paper stamp, and prepared our visas.
"Remember Jim Jones?" I said as we walked in the blazing
midday sun towards Independence Square. "The Reverend Jim Jones.
Jonestown. A sort of Christian socialist village in the Guyanese
jungle. Mass suicide, nearly a thousand dead. Late seventies? Book
by Shiva Naipaul. I've got it in the flat, but I don't think we
should take it along. Pass it to you when we get back."
II
The taxi driver turned his head. Paleskins at last. "Change
money? Good rate," he said routinely and turned back. I responded
that it was against the law and that we really ought to change our
US dollars in a bank. "A bank?" the driver replied sourly.
"You know who does run dem banks?" I said no. "Government.
See?" I did not see. The taxi was a semi-retired Buick; large,
slow and ugly. The interior was tattered and unceremonious, quite
unlike the carefully upholstered and pampered taxis typical of Trinidad.
The main road from Timehri International to Georgetown passed a
large new factory, glass and aluminium glittering in the midday
sun. The driver pointed towards it. "Beer and mineral water
factory. Really nice. Dem does supply dey whole country. You know
what?" He paused rhetorically. Of course we didn't know what.
"It is owned by dey former Minister of Finance. He been doing
really well since he quit politics." He paused. He could be
about forty, unshaven, a few teeth missing as is common in the poorer
parts of the Caribbean. He was wearing a straw hat and a sweaty
short-sleeved white shirt. A seasoned traveller, I was about to
ask if he had any family when he spoke again. "You know, you
new in dey country and you don' know it." His words reminded
me of the consul in Port-of-Spain. How right. "And lemme tell
you, please, sir, it's your money and you do wid it as you please.
You can change it into Guyanese dollars wid me, you can give it
to dey poor, you can trow it into dey canal, but please, please
don' give it to dey government." We still did not change our
minds, fearing perhaps that he might be a government agent. We were
later to realise that there was an official black market rate for
hard currency and that nobody seemed to use the banks, whose rate
was lower; just as nobody seemed to buy basic commodities in the
state shops, which did not even try to compete with the open-air
markets for smuggled goods with labels in Spanish and Portuguese.
"Lethargy," Jon said that evening. I doubted it, preferring
the age-honoured hydraulic metaphor used, usually retrospectively,
in accounts of sudden upsurges of irrational violence. "More
likely nobody's lifted the lid," I said, looking cautiously
at the other candle-lit tables in the large bar room. The candles
were not for ambience, but for light, since blackouts were as common
as heavy rains in Georgetown. At the far corner, a table lavishly
adorned with candles, bottles and plates hosted a gold digger spending
the weekend in town with his friends, drinking and chatting noisily.
The men seated at the other tables were silent, most of them spending
hours sipping a single bottle of beer and smoking a couple of domestic
cigarettes. Most were apparently family fathers from their mid-thirties
and up, wearing short-sleeved shirtjacs in neutral colours, sitting
in twos, threes and fours. One of the guests, a man around forty,
was on his own, and so we invited him to our table. Introducing
himself as Knolly, he explained that he was a senior clerk at the
state bank. Had this been in Trinidad, I reflected, he would have
offered a rather more extravagant self-presentation. Perhaps the
general misery and melancholy of Guyana, together with the governmental
immorality, stimulated honesty in interpersonal relations, like
in Russia, where people turned from cold and bureaucratic to warm
and compassionate as they switched between their public and private
personas. "Out on your own?" said Jon, merely translating
to English a sentence he might as well have uttered in a pub at
home. "Argument with my wife," Knolly said, again earnestly;
and again, had this been Trinidad, there would have been a quip.
"We arrived in Georgetown this morning. Care for a beer?"
Finally he smiled with strong yellow teeth, nodded, and asked us
the mandatory first question. "Scandinavia," I replied.
"Northern Europe. Cold place." I wanted to ask him what
was wrong with this country. It contained only a million people
and possessed an enormous wealth in natural resources, and look
at this - virtually everything that more or less functioned seemed
to be derelict colonial legacies. No new roads had been built, most
of the buildings seemed to pre-date Independence, and the state
apparatus was in a lamentable condition. But of course I couldn't
ask questions of that kind. Instead I asked him what he thought
of life in Georgetown. "Lived here all my life," he replied.
"Don't know. It's got to improve." And so he sipped his
beer in silence. Morosely. Unlike many people one meets in hot and
distant countries, he showed little interest in our country. Guyanese
are quite knowledgeable about the external world and know exactly
what it is like, how to get there and why they are at the moment
unable to. "Any relatives abroad?" I finally asked him
as our fresh beers arrived, following my own train of thought. "Lots,"
he said. New pause. "You Ess, Canada, You Kay, Holland."
"Ever thought of migrating yourself?" He looked up. "You
joking? Look around dis place." Knolly had a perfectly respectable
skilled blue-collar job, yet his income was such that a bottle of
beer was an unusual extravaganza. This is not unusual in the Third
World, but the Caribbean, to which Guyana properly belongs notwithstanding
the whims of geography, is different. The Caribbean is supposed
to be don't worry, be happy. Palms swaying in the warm breeze, carnivals,
dusky ladies with glittering smiles, and a lackadaisical way of
life where money trouble is endemic but never serious. A bottle
of beer can always be had somehow. Guyana is different. It is a
country of deep resentment and bitterness, a country with its bright
future in the past, and it carries its bleak present with deep gravity.
Knolly thanked us for the drink, rose and left. He never told us
why he had never emigrated.
III
Climate and ecological circumstances are vastly underestimated as
explanations for mentality and social life. Guyana consists of a
narrow strip of thin soil along the Atlantic Ocean, crisscrossed
with canals and hemmed in by dikes up front and forest at the back.
In Georgetown, you always feel the rainforest staring at you. The
city reeks of growth and regeneration, all of it vegetative and
centred around the omnipresent brown, fetid pools and the drainage
canals separating blocks from each other, which look and smell like
huge gutters and which, clogged by green weeds the size of trees,
have long ago ceased to drain anything. Put a dead man into one
of those canals, and in two hours what you have is no longer a corpse
but a small ecosystem.
We entered a small bookshop off Georgetown's main street. Amid the
meagre stock of second-hand Longmans and dusty Penguins, Chinese
notepads and East German pencils, there was a shelf of local newspapers
and magazines. One newspaper brought the news that a ship full of
petrol had just arrived in town. That would explain the long queues
of old cars we had seen parked on the roads leading to the petrol
pumps. A particularly dismal paper, which did not amount to much
more than eight foolscap pages mass-produced on a roneo machine,
turned out to be the main opposition newspaper, representing Cheddi
Jagan and his PPP (People's Progressive Party), which had for many
years suffered the humiliaton of open repression, cancelled elections,
electoral fraud and arrogance from a thinly disguised one-party
dictatorship receiving covert support by the CIA. A notice of apology
was printed on page four. "Regretfully we are unable to print
photos in this issue, since we have been unable to obtain a licence
necessary to purchase chemicals which are needed to develop photographs.
Hopefully we shall obtain this licence before our next issue."
Low-key resentment, but powerful no less. The history of Guyana
is littered with small Rwandas, small Auschwitzes, small peasant
revolts. No major explosions have been recorded. The dark warm blanket
of humidity and green fertility seems to have a soothing function
here.
The country used to be known as British Guyana, but the Dutch came
first, and it shows in the remains of colonial infrastructure and
in proper names like Stabroek, Vreed en Hoop and New Amsterdam.
The English legacy is also absurdly visible in the bauxite town
of Everton and the nondescript settlement on the lower Demerara
called Hyde Park. Although Guyana is geographically a part of South
America, its history is Caribbean. To the standard story of conquest,
West African slave trade, sugar cane, mutinies, emerging colour
hierarchies and wars between European powers - including the Napoleonic
one which led to a major reshuffling of cards - one may add the
absurdity of Indian indentureship from the 1840s until well after
the turn of the twentieth century. As the slaves were freed, most
of them left the plantations, and new labour was acutely needed.
The most obvious source was the imperial subcontinent teeming with
cheap human life, a few million of whom were coaxed into tempting
deals with glib agents coming upstream from Calcutta and promising
affluence in faraway lands called Fiji, Natal, Mauritius, Trinidad
and Guyana. Illiterates signed contracts and boarded ships where
thousands of them were to perish, only to discover, shortly after
arrival in the new land, that the contract was a fraud. A perceptive
historian has labelled the indentureship system a new form of slavery.
The descendants of the indentured labourers in the New World, collectively
known as East Indians, fight for their human dignity and cultural
identity in hostile, massively Afro-Caribbean environments. The
loss of language has nearly been complete, and the erosion of custom
is only feebly counteracted by Brahminical calls for purity. In
Guyana as compared to Trinidad, Indian concerns are less oriented
towards keeping up an appearance. Numbering roughly half the population
of the country, Indo-Guyanese are mainly rurals, peasants, marginal.
A man in a New Amsterdam bar - an Afro, mind you, Indo-Guyanese
rarely frequent urban bars - told me that through his childhood
memories of Indians he saw them as emaciated wretches, with ugly
teeth and soiled clothes, speaking strange rural dialects interspersed
with snippets of Hindi, and blank staring faces which had appeared
regularly in his nightmares. He had, like so many black Guyanese,
been taught to respect the white man, to despise the Amerindian
and to treat the East Indian with caution. The East Indian, he told
me, is a slimy bastard, never to be trusted, with disgusting manners
and pagan religion.
This is not exactly how Guyana's East Indians see themselves. And
with some reason. A former Cabinet Minister is famously quoted as
having said that "an honest nigger is a dumb nigger",
meaning that it would be stupid to give the East Indians their fair
share of the nation's resources.
IV
Guyana is an obvious metaphor for a Freudian map of the human psyche.
It is a thin layer of culture offering nourishment and shelter,
behind which lurks a damp and fertile darkness, a partly unexplored
interior the size of England and Wales, which contains caymans and
poison snakes as well as an enormous wealth, including gold and
diamonds, but which makes the coastal Guyanese, like everyone else,
shiver.
The terrifying and deeply melancholic beauty of Guyana came to me
slowly, but determinedly. On our third day, I was inexplicably infatuated
with the country, it was seeping into my arteries malgré
moi. Take central Georgetown with its ramshackle Dutch-style Stabroek
Market towering above the crowd of vendors in their makeshift pavement
stalls; it seems stable and credible enough, but a glance on the
pavement suggests that the jungle intends to take this back. Between
the cobblestones and through the concrete, thick green stuff oozes
out slowly but surely, creating cracks and bumps in the smoothness
of civilisation on its way. The sewage canals, which ceased many
years ago to help humans, serve as fertiliser for lush greenery
preparing to replace this thin film of organised culture which clings
so precariously to its crumbling trappings.
Or take New Amsterdam, the hometown of Edgar Mittelholzer, a writer
with occasional glints of genius, who committed suicide in England
in 1966. Like a town visited years after a nuclear war, it is strewn
with dilapidated Victorian houses, a few gardens bravely kempt but
the rest left to nature, which efficiently reclaims them. The most
spectacular building is the hospital, possibly the most grotesquely
beautiful building in all of Guyana. It must have been a fine hospital
when it was opened in the early decades of the century; today, not
a single window pane is unbroken, not a single toilet is working,
and there is a chronic shortage of everything from syringes to sheets.
A boy in the 1930s, Mittelholzer converted to Zen Buddhism and made
a living for a few years as a ticket controller at the municipal
cinema. He fled at his first opportunity, never to return, realising
as best he could his boyhood ambition of writing novels for the
mythical English people to read. His most successful novels were
tales of uncontrolled voluptuousness and uncanny horrors set in
the Guyanese jungle.
The two Amerindians we encountered on the minibus from Linden to
Georgetown had no chance to flee. Restless and shifting on their
seats, they busily packed away their little transparent bags full
of white powder as the first roadblock approached. The tall bespectacled
black man in front of them had been abroad and returned - in his
case, not necessarily for the worse. He was reading the Moscow edition
of Pravda.
The rainfall was heavy, the road was by now little more than a muddy
vehicular track, the wipers were out of order, and I was longing
for a Trinidadian doctor who could diagnose my mosquito bites. Torrential
rains obstructed the view, but we knew that it would, on a sunny
day, have revealed dense greenery, the beginning of a deep forest
full of poisonous snakes, malaria mosquitos, ditches and putrid
ponds, quicksand and an engulfing dark dampness which had led braver
men than ourselves to despair. Emigration and resignation were the
options. "But cheer up, sooner or later Burger King is bound
to buy this and turn it into pastures for cattle," Jon said.
Moving from forest to open land, the minibus drove along a vast
area of bubbling, slimy, nasty river deposits of the kind used in
bad science fiction stories by mad scientists busy developing hitherto
unknown and indescribably hideous life forms in order to facilitate
their destruction of that Western civilization which they hate so
intensely. The hate encountered in Guyana, however, is not directed
at Western civilization. On the contrary, Guyanese love the trappings
of modern luxury in their characteristically resigned, downtrodden
way. Knowing that they cannot have it there, they place their bets
either on relatives in New York and Port-of-Spain, or on their own
emigration application. The destruction of Guyanese civilization
will not require a mad scientist, I reflected as the minibus came
to a stop, instinctively fondling the pouch inside my wet shirt
containing my passport and VISA card. The damp heat of the rain
forest might well do the job. Or was I far off the mark?
*
* *
"WELCOME HOME COMRADE PRESIDENT," the huge sign at Timehri
International Airport read as we walked out to the aircraft. So
this was why the airport staff had been unable to serve us so much
as a cup of water.
A week earlier, Trinidad had been a noisy, dusty, steaming and slightly
irritating country. To a north European, it was disorganised, irritating,
slow, inefficient, violent and corrupt. It has become impossible
to think of Trinidad in such terms again. But even Guyana functions!
Like every other people on the face of the earth, the Guyanese work,
eat, drink, fall in love, sleep, get married, raise their children,
bury their dead and do all the other things that human groups are
expected to do. Life expectancy is about seventy. Perhaps the slow
decay was merely a product of my mind?
This must be what travelling is about; the indeterminate and fluctuating
relationship between the alien and the familiar; the exhilarating
glimpses of that which is truly different and exotic, and the comfort
of recognising the universal embedded in a patchwork of alien colours
and patterns. I once knew a young man from Milwaukee. We met in
the common room of a Lisbon youth hostel and travelled together
on the Iberian peninsula for a week or two. Whenever he found a
clean restaurant where he could order a coke and fried meat with
French fries, he felt he had reached a civilised place, and his
otherwise chronic cautiousness evaporated. Naturally, he was unable
to travel because he lacked the faculty of being able to recognise
difference. No matter where he went, he would never travel.
Guyana is universal, like every other inhabited place. And like
the Claude Lévi-Strauss who authored Tristes Tropiques, reaching
out for the radically different but being unable to grasp it, we
had collected confirmation for all our northern clichés about
the radical difference characteristic of hot countries, and yet
at the end of the day it became impossible to deny that we were
ourselves exactly like the Guyanese and that Guyana was, in every
essential way, exactly the same as our native Norway.
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