Occupy Guyana

Rise In Power, my fellow Guyanese!

“After Georgie seh officer, officer I get shot, de officer didn’t tek he on. So Georgie now go fah raise up holding he ribs and I hear another shot. When I look at Georgie, I see a bullet to Georgie forehead, which in, he head had a big hole and blood running down.”

 Black skin against a yellow satin background. The marks of violence were still evident on his young face. Left eye bruised and bullet hole still clearly visible on his forehead, even though the undertaker had tried. Murdered by the police, a day before his 18th birthday. Shaquille Grant. Two months ago, it was Ron Somerset, also a teenager, Shemroy Bouyea, and Allan Lewis- all black men, all unarmed, all murdered by police.

 There is a regular police roadblock in my neighborhood. Almost every night, right at the corner where I get off the bus, they are there, stopping vehicles and frisking people. Tonight was no exception. As I passed, I saw three men hunched in a circle on the ground, with several plastic bags of stuff in the center. Police- or men in dark blue uniforms with AK-47s- towered over them, menacing. Two of the men were hauled up and taken to the back of another vehicle while the last was ordered to drop his pants. He protested. They shouted, guns at the ready. Grudgingly, he complied, bare buttocks flashing in the streetlight. Jump, they ordered, and jump he did. They pawed through the bags on the ground but finding nothing, moved on to the interior of the car.

 At the most, all those men had on them was a lil bit of ganja. And the only ones with the weapons were the boys in blue. In all the time that the police have been carrying out their nightly roadblocks on that street corner, there has been no news of the apprehension of any major criminal mastermind or any astounding drug bust. No, they’re just terrorizing the population, as normal. Wait, clarification- they’re terrorizing ‘ordinary’ Guyanese, of a specific racial group mostly.

 I spent last evening visiting my relatives in Lusignan, gaffing into the night. It was dark when I left. The road was clear; there was no roadblock. No menacing men with guns to stop the music-blasting Hummer from speeding down the road. No naked young Indo-Guyanese men jumping on command in public.

 Lusignan has plenty drug and gun men though. I was astounded the first time I heard that. Lusignan? The lovely, peaceful village of my childhood? Say it aint so! But that is the truth now, sadly.“Dem boys tell me how to make lots of money quick,” my NY-based uncle reports, two days into his visit. But he is a bad enough Muslim already, he says, and doesn’t need that on his conscience.

There are two car dealerships in a village with two main cross streets. The ports where container ships dock to offload their cargo of Lamborginis and Hummers are the same ones where drugs are sent out, even though a million dollar container scanner was commissioned just last year (Skeldon sugar factory anyone?), and a new ‘container control programme’ MOU signed just last month. Packages at the Post Office are cut open and every item inside fingered before it can be uplifted, but millions of dollars worth of cocaine regularly leave Georgetown (in one notorious case last year, the MV Vega Azurit was busted ferrying cocaine from Guyana three times in as many months.)

 They’re murdering black youth!” 

The anguish is real. And the pictures of the faces in the newspaper don’t lie. But that is not the whole story. 

Most of the members of the Guyana Police Farce are black men. 

We must talk about race, yes, but we must also talk about class and $$.

 They said the boys were planning a robbery and shot first (nevermind that eyewitnesses contradict that). And so they shot to kill. The protesters in Linden were blocking the road, preventing vehicles from reaching the gold mining camps and markets. And so they shot to kill. Lives taken to protect property. Money over justice. The 14yr old tortured by police several years ago, his genitals set ablaze, is nowhere to be found in Guyana anymore. There are rumors that he and his relatives are overseas, ‘compensation’ in pocket.

 Overseas, to enjoy the land of milk and honey? Or overseas to work like a dawg, struggling to make ends meet when the money runs out, just like here, but without home comforts. Dreaming of home always, working to build up the vacation days, not wanting to leave when the two weeks are up. But not willing to stay here, to stand up, to speak out, to look out for each other. Paralyzed by fear- of being victimized, penalized, fired. Made callous by easy money. Pacified by religious dogma. Stupefied by nonsensical beats and rhymes. Beat down (or enraptured) by the rapacious capitalist system. Poisoned both mentally and physically. This is what Guyana has become. A dog-eat-dog society where each man scrabbles to accumulate as much ‘stuff’ (wealth) as he possibly can, whether by legal or illegal means, just hoping, praying, and bribing his way out of any ‘sticky’ situation. Where every meal may be the young black man’s last, no matter how hard mothers work. Where conscious, striving brethren and sistren are overrun by zombies, sheep, and ostriches, blind, deaf, and dumb.

 This is not my Guyana though. It may be the reality now, but it doesn’t have to remain that way. 

 It’s helpful to try to understand how it became like that though. History book aside, listening to the body, part of the answer is heard. I’ve been having foot troubles for a lil while now. Stumped my right big toe last year and it’s been bum ever since. And now recently, the left one has started tingling, a slight numbness. No pain and I can still walk fine, so I’ve been mostly ignoring it. Musing about what’s going on and what it might mean, wondering what I can do about it, but mostly just leaving it alone, hoping that it will get better soon, without any major intervention on my part. Walking wounded. The psychology of oppression and survival. 

 This may be how it is now, how we all are, but it doesn’t have to remain that way. We have the power to change everything. 

 My nose is pointy and my hair is straight. Her nose was flat and her hair was curly. She looked curiously at me and I gazed back, grinning at her two-teeth mouth. She smiled wider, all gums.

 “We also need the fires of love to thaw the frozen streams within. We need to look at one another afresh, with new eyes. We need to keep doing that. Every day. We need to tear down the barriers wisely, or else we won’t be able to get out and nothing will be able to come in.” (Ben Okri) 

 They’ve begun to put in the fence. They want to have more ‘control’ of the space, they say. There are too many ‘junkies’ passing by. They’re afraid that their nice nice park is going to get messed up.

 Oh, the irony!

 The PEOPLE’S Parliament. High St and Brickdam. Fence or not, we’ll be there. 24/7. Join us. Straight hairs and curly hairs all together as one. What is your vision for the future of Guyana? What are you doing to bring it to fruition?  

 “WOW, girl i cant tell u the transformation i have had through those continuous dialogues. The thing is though, if more people never come join us then it would be sad but i aint doing this for them. I doing it for me.” 

 Occupy Guyana.

Guest article by Guyanese activist Sherlina Nageer.