By Ravi Dev
Mr Eric Phillips responded to my article that asked the question, “Can the Indian Guyanese speak for Justice?” and claimed, “This shows the malicious degree of deception used by Indian leadership in Guyana”. He then went on to name a number of media entities owned by Indian Guyanese and several individuals of Indian descent who write and comment in Guyana to “prove” his point.
First of all, apart from Ms Ryhaan Shah, I doubt the others who were named would take kindly to the notion that they speak “as Indian Guyanese”, as I have done over the last three decades. But secondly, and more germanely, it is clear Mr Phillips chose to ignore the allusion of the title of my column to Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which makes the point writ large.
That point being the non-white world is locked in a discourse in which the West has universalised its particulars as “Knowledge”. When the subjugated former “speaks”, she is merely uttering words that are unintelligible to the latter, unless the consciousness, premises and values of the West are accepted and incorporated.
As I wrote in 1993 in the SN, “Hegemony and Hinduism in the West Indies”, when the Indian was brought to the West Indies, he was inserted into the dominant Creole culture that derided and devalued all that he was and stood for. Unless he adopted what anthropologist RT Smith called the “white bias” Creole culture he could not speak, because he was not listened to, since by definition he was speaking “nonsense”.
The African, who had been brought as slaves the previous centuries, had already been brutally subjected to this “epistemic violence”, as Spivak called it. They were now the practitioners of Creole culture, which denied them humanity and agency. In its pecking order, the apex, white, represented knowledge and culture; he snickered at the pretentions of the Coloured below him, who obsequiously imitated him even as he constantly changed the goalposts. The Coloured derided the Africans beneath him; and the African, after the abolition of slavery, now had someone lower than him on the totem pole – the heathen “coolie” and his clannish ways.
I had returned to Guyana when Dereck Walcott, in 1992, dedicated his entire Nobel prize speech to his discovery of the Hindu Ram Lila performance in a village in Trinidad. It had not penetrated the consciousness of “Trinidadians” that such an art form could have existed for almost 150 years without being “heard”. It was “just a coolie thing”. And the same in Guyana, of course.
With Independence, there was a brief period of questioning of the premises of Creole culture by Africans in the Caribbean, with the tools that came out of the Black Power Movement. Rodney made a gesture to include the Indian in that counter discourse, oblivious to the irony of him not recognising he was not allowing the Indian to speak in his own voice. The Rastafarians of Jamaica made a bold assault on the debilitating premises of Creole culture to people of African origin, but when I called it an “abomination”, I was silenced with the “racist” label.
Those individuals mentioned by Mr Phillips, save Ms Shah, do not generally speak outside the dominant paradigm from an Indian perspective, so I will speak my own truth on being silenced. In my paper, “For a New Political Culture”, in 1990, I introduced the notion of an Indian and an African Security Dilemma, which must be addressed if Guyana was to know any peace. Yet no one heard our warning the PPP in 1993 about the African Security Dilemma, for to speak as an Indian, say, for the Police Force, Army and Bureaucracy to be more “balanced” was to be inevitably “racist”. I could call for an inquiry into the use of Phantom Squads at the Square of the Revolution and be cheered, but become “racist” when I call for one into the violence emanating from its epicentre at Buxton. There are thousands of other instances down the years; the latest with speaking about Indigenous Peoples’ lands.
An entire sub-discipline has developed, especially by African Americans, to expose their “silencing” by White Americans by epistemic violence. But if the Indian makes the analogous point in Guyana, he is silenced as “racist”.
