OPINION: Singing the blues, reality not poetry

Last Updated on Tuesday, 20 February 2024, 21:47 by Writer

by GHK Lall

This is my song: so much wrong embedded in 6.5%, so much gone wrong in Guyana

Since the PPP Guvment ban de li’l girl and her kaiso, it is time for an adult to tell these so and some more bout deh 6.5%. I plan on submitting this for a national award. That is, if the censors can be overcome.

Six point five is Ali’s jive.
Six point five is wha Jaggy connive
Six point five is what mek Ashni come alive

Six and half percent is de PPP stink and dutty scent
Six and a half percent is Guyanese torment
Six and a half percent is teachers’ lament

Six and a half is Ali’s sly laff
Six and a half is Jaggy’s smaat maan gyaff
Six and a half is Ashni’s fraff

Six and a haaf is how de PPP suck Exxon braff
Six and a haaf is a diseased calf
Six and a haaf is a funeral raft

Sure, it is more than a sonnet of Shakespeare. And, it is more than B.B. King and Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf singing the blues. This is more than poetry or a jarring, pulsating, mind-bending symphony. Six and a half is grueling Guyanese reality. Just ask teachers, and the other locals stranded on the edges of the great Guyana oil bonanza. More oil money, less and less of its honey for those seen as enemies. Elections led to impositions. The punitive is the PPP’s best expression of how vindictive it can be. Revenge for the Burnham excesses and traumas inflicted during the long wilderness years of the 1960s, 70s, 80s. Avenge the recent, still fresh, still boiling mad passions driven by the 19-month hiatus of 2018-August 2020.

In the immaculacy of 20/20 hindsight, the president’s ‘One Guyana’ did mean what it said. Literally and to the tee. Other than for a few stragglers and invited hustlers, just pause and check who is punished and who is protected. Examine who is pushed out and who is pulled in. Take another hard look at ‘One Guyana’. Then just do it one more time, and there it is. It is in a color scheme that shines brightly and undeniably. A power construct that speaks at high volumes. And an economic compact that is mostly brown and occasionally black. In the profaning sum of governance in Guyana, it is about, who can stick around, and those who are discarded to the back. This is the ‘One Guyana’ story, and it is sicker than sin, and longer than a masquerader’s stilt. Just don’t say it in a song. Nor in a written line.

Six and a half percent is the latest and greatest that ‘One Guyana’ can think of, is capable of sparing for those defined as riffraff, for those consigned to be the periphery of Guyanese society, and for those condemned to be nothing but outsiders and bottom feeders. A little girl pours out her soul and sadness in a song that should scorch every last brain cell of every citizen of this soil. For that she is singled out, slapped down, kicked out, and branded with the red-hot mark of ‘Rebel.’ At least, she has a cause, and it is a righteous and inclusive one. And for that, she is made an example to warn likeminded others. This is the ugly beauty of the implacable intolerance that now rages across this corrupted land, and rules over it with an imperious and leprous hand. Take a bow, national leaders. Have a delirious celebration, national profaners. If a song can cause so much of a storm, then what about a real storm, and the turbulences such would spawn.

It is time that those with some principles (if any) in the PPP Government’s cohort of deliberators and decision-makers get some sense, and get a real idea of what lurks behind the screen of daily life. It is the thinnest of screens, and it reveals a few things that are worthy of long, serious consideration. Guyanese are angry, and they are not only from the ranks of scorned teachers, and squeezed public servants. Guyanese are hungry, and they are not from just one segment of the demographic. Guyanese are discontented and disgruntled and disillusioned, and those are a formula for rupture of the outward calm, and leading to spillage, should there be the right confluence of energies and events. My ongoing appeal is for there to be a clearer and finer appreciation from the heights of the PPP Government ranks of what Guyanese are going through, what they are thinking, how they are reacting to what they interpret as unfair and unjust. Feel their pain, discern their anxieties.

The listening that is so urgently needed, demanded, has not been forthcoming. Personally speaking, it seems that the PPP Government and the PPP leadership have a higher regard, a greater concern, for the welfare of Venezuelans resident in this country than they have for Guyanese from specific sections of the national rainbow. The government is more zealous with beating down and locking down Guyanese found objectionable (fighting for their rights, speaking their conscience, and to truth) than it is in dealing with possible weaknesses, and the accompanying dangers, posed by resident hostile neighbors.

When the lyrics of a six-year-old can trigger such agitations and fears, then what Guyanese live with is not a government, but a gang. Not national leadership, but national lunacy. This country is fast approaching that calamitous pass, where all that is engaged in is a dialogue of the deaf. Perhaps, Guyana is already there. When there is no listening, there will only be endless squabbling, backbiting, and backstabbing. When there is no respecting, no moving, then no one and nothing stands still. All are sliding backwards. Listening either comes, or there may not be any liking of what comes in its place.