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| Masked & Enslaved in Brazil. |
Covid 19 is an assassin, a sniper, picking us off, robbing us of good people. It comes masked and has unmasked the underbelly of capitalism. It operates as if independent of the state: our governors and their politics. It is not. No country, or group within, will escape this virus. But some countries, 'races' and ethnicities will lose more because of the same historical evil that has turned us, its victims, into each-other's socio-econo-political enemies. Covid 19 is stalking the monied class and their money too; by picking off those historically exposed, at the gates of the palaces, and on whose backs the money is made.
A select few made even more riches on account of the pandemic. Political nobility, charged with enforcing the rules, seem distracted with image and power. The deaths of our comrades by or from Covid-19 have dragged us kicking and screaming to what should be a revolutionary moment; to confront or betray.
Party politics as a mask.
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| The Writer in masked repose |
Some masks may protect you, but muffle your speech as well: a quid pro quo. A red or green shirt or blue dress is more muffle than protection. We all should be able to explore space and ideas as we wish. But the color of your mask does not permit exploration. Not everyone can ride party colors to success. It is a pyramid with the majority stuck at the bottom.
Sadly, all I am about to say is already well known. The mask is well known, familiar. There is no need to think. You need only grab your mask before leaving home. The familiar colored shirt explains why you are right and the others wrong. We need a new approach. That possibility, of a new way of thinking, offers a slim hope.
At its core, the struggle is about power and not race or ethnicity. The diversity that should be our strength is turned against us. Race and ethnicity do matter, as both symptom and fake cure. It is a drug the rich share freely while holding themselves as above such things and drug free. It is a seduction, like crack-cocaine, hiding deeper feelings of inadequacy, while offering a false sense of security. People with potential, made vulnerable by ambition, succumb to short-term feelings of contentment. They steal things to sustain their habits sometimes from their own families: a vote here, a vote there. Their dealers, in turn, steal lives as a sacrifice on the path to power and money. Those dealers' dealers steal whole countries and pawn its resources to their dealers. Recovery and rehabilitation is no easy matter. It requires a revolution and we are reluctantly in one.
A month after President Ali's swearing-in, two African-descended young men were lynched and their mutilated bodies found in the West Berbice Backlands. Protests erupted: and a few days later two East Indian young men were lynched in separate incidents also in Berbice County. No one escapes. We are locked seemingly in a never ending and deadly tit for tat. Each needing the other for justification in a kind of dance. We wear the scars whether addicted, recovered, or have never touched the stuff. Some wear them proudly: a ring through the nose or lips as proof of our loyalty and status. Others hide their loyalties. Some are no good at it. Others take their chances navigating their own independence straddling the fences between political parties and no woman’s land. Others seek therapy. It is easier to dance.
To not play Mas is to be exposed as weak, or worse, a traitor, a pretender. Sometimes the Mas erupts and people die for real. Some have a peculiar ability to shape shift and play the band of the day. In Mas, enemies can be friends and friends enemies. A shrill blast reminds the afflicted of their duty, the location of their dealers and temporary relief.
The morning after, we'll be at our desks and dam-beds as if nothing had happened. Those occasions when the Mas turns deadly are only as an outlet for violence so as to deflect it from those in high office. The Mas wears their name as sponsor. How else could we explaIn the masked costume party that stormed the Capitol Building in Washington DC.
Masks may hide your true identity, but that's not all
Mas (querade) and elections are a postponement of violence until such time when violence is the only tool left. It has gotten harder to tell the difference between the two. Violence is the tool that drew the border you now claim like a chalk line around death. And it will draw you too.
Claims of sovereignty reflect the years of our miseducation. The global elite hears that word and cracks a smile in its all-white-toothed boardroom: with one other smile for diversity. "Sovereignty?”, they ask with tilted heads and widened smiles. “We did well”, they report and add, "We stole land, stole people, drew a border, gave it a name, gave them a name, an education, and made the victims believe it is theirs. We took what we wanted. They even argue among themselves about who came first.". The board votes in its interest, to support all the parties, so whichever wins will still continue the project to drill to the center of the planet.
It is this tit-for-tat politics, sponsored by foreign-based resource hunters, that compromises our selected governors and lead to the oppressive agreements like the Exxon/Mobil (Esso) oil production deal signed by Guyana's governors. Governor is different from leader.
The difficulty in this analysis is it requires you tell members of a self-identified multiracial, multiethnic, society why they must be concerned with saving everybody and not just the race or the party, or whatever they claim membership in. If nothing else I say is clear, I make this clear - If you encamp one one side of this divide, absent clear thought and action to the contrary, you are involved in the preservation of White Supremacy. It is these forces that promoted and worked towards the permanence of the divide. It has become something families hand down like generational wealth or instead of generational wealth: an inheritance of conflict you did not create.
To support the strictures, created by White supremacy, is to support White supremacy.
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| The Dawn of Masks by Gary Thomas Multimedia |
White nationalism and America's continuing history of lynching should have forced us to look at ourselves and confront our own biases. "Watchmen', the TV series, references the Tulsa Massacre: one of numerous examples of the excesses of white supremacist violence where several hundred African descendants were killed or injured and their businesses destroyed. No one is safe, even at home. Unity built the so-called 'Black Wall Street' (a misnomer of tragic proportions). Unity might protect us from the misguided. But unity should not hide truth. White Supremacy is proof. Instead, we hunker down in or own misguided ethnic unity voting for a less dangerous version of White Supremacy. Watchmen does point to the alliances needed to defeat the sponsors and their surrogates.
"Ah 'unity’?”, the boardroom cracks another smile, "we have a solution".
‘Change the constitution’ is a frequent cry in Guyana. Changes to the US Constitution is debated as well, and it must be changed. But a new constitution would not change the hearts and minds of the men and women steeped in the gang culture of racialized and other divisions. The few that made such diabolical constitutions possible have considerable influence still. Much more will be required to cure our addiction. A new constitution in old hands will become another mask. Its upholders will cite it as they take you away, yet again. Because, 'it is the law'.
Elections won't save us.
Elections as presently conducted, even 'free' and 'fair' ones, represent and present a false credibility and security and have managed to remain central as an advanced form of power distribution. It allows us to move about in polite society with a stamp of approval. It is another mask. In reality, elections leave much to be desired and often resemble a carnival more so than any serious attempt to empower people. This is true in the US as in Guyana. President Trump did not invent the mass rally. President Trump did little to nothing for his supporters and it is the same in Guyana
In the US we have an electoral college based on the dehumanization of Africans. It is rooted in apartheid and intended to dilute potential political power by a compromise to protect slaveholders and the institutions of enslavement. It is White supremacy. It is a constitutional construct. In Guyana, we have the Guyana Elections Commission. It too is a constitutional construct. It is not an exact fit but the intent was the same: to keep political power in the hands of a few. It is a little more complex than I have time and space here. But it matters little what the people say. GECOM has the final say and works best with strategically placed officials. It has been weakened over time but the purpose is the same. It did not work so well this last time.
Joseph Stalin has been credited, many believe in error, with the quote, 'those who vote decide nothing, those who count the vote decide everything'. Political ticks have tried in all history to control the count as a back-up to controlling the political outcomes. In March 2020, Guyana Elections Commission attempted a post-election purge of the voter roll with its discard of 'invalid' votes. A US example is the Florida count of the 2000 presidential election: Bush v. Gore. More recently, Stacey Abrams is believed to have lost the Georgia governor's race because of Republican opponents' success with purging voters of African descent. The purge dates back to the birth of elections. Boardrooms do it all the time. GECOM was an attempt to institutionalize power in the counters.
Another difficult lesson is that our governors have never been elected. They have been selected. Forces elsewhere decide who holds the title and for how long. To choose one of those sides, and not be aware of their formation and funding, or acknowledge that history, is to engage in furthering the aims of White supremacy: unknowingly. To know the history and still engage with ethnic choices, is to further the aims of White supremacy, knowingly. This is what our ‘leadership’ is engaged with in politics and in government. The consequences are deadly.
To survive we wear a mask
Okoye, a General in the King's honor guard in the mythical Wakanda, questioned Nakia, the Lupita Nyong'o character, on the object of her loyalties. Nakia answered, 'to country'. Okoye responded with a sneer that she in contrast was loyal to 'that throne'. The answer ought to be ‘to the people'. Maybe that is what Nakia meant. But without the people there is no throne and no country. Okoye meant whomever was on the throne. But had no problem supporting, and then turning against, Killmonger who had become King: even if he had questionable ethics. We make mistakes all the time. We must learn to correct them.
Thankfully, Shuri, the character of Guyanese actress Letitia Wright, Wakanda's techie and sister to the deposed King T'Challa, had smuggled the necklace with the power of the masked Black Panther into exile after King T'Challa's defeat by Killmonger. With the purple herb and his vibranium necklace, full suit and mask reprogrammed, a resurgent King T'Challa returned to reclaim his throne.
Back in Guyana, two important post election events signaled a progressive change away from our masked existence: A Black Lives Matter rally at the Square of the Revolution and an uprising of un-housed and under-housed people ‘squatting’ at a village named Success. The importance of the BLM protest rally is twofold. One is the recognition of an international struggle for a reckoning with the ongoing oppression of African people. The second is that its black-shirt dress code signalled something new: A mask that projects a more progressive inclusive direction. They could have worn green, or red, and demonstrated their loyalty to the masquerade of the party of 'African' interests or the other. Instead, the mostly youthful participants chose to send a direct message to that political history; that it was inadequate or worse. The message from the Success village protesters is that it is multiethnic and, by extension, outside the control of partisan interests and the working class. So dangerous was the protest that the state, now red shirted, unleashed teargas and rubber bullets. And all this is happening in the middle of a pandemic. They had stepped from behind their allowed masks and revealed what had been hidden for years, but always known. The masses can and do unite in their own interest and across divisions. The struggle is for the space, the actual land too, to do just that.
There is a direct connection with the Success Village protest and the 1823 Demerara Revolt of enslaved Africans against Britain’s aristocracy. I have said many times before that 'Squatter' movement has been the most radical movement in Guyana.
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| Insurgency as mas (c)Globalnews |
It is a revolution when a retiree breaks a bone and gets a prescription for cannabis, while elsewhere hungry youth sit in jail for a seed. In Guyana they are burning cannabis fields.
It must be a revolutionary moment if oil is cheap. It is not really cheap. It flows at too high a cost for our planet. In Guyana, they are drilling new oil wells: and in Brooklyn laying new pipelines for fracked gas.
It must be a revolution. Our once crowded cities are unrecognizable. Cubans are not flooding Georgetown stores. And European visitors are not impeding New York City sidewalks. Over 70 million tourists visited New York in 2019. We can smell the trees through our masks. Streets are quieter except the sirens in Brooklyn and Queens. They had slowed in the summer, but it is almost spring again and the urgency seems to be returning. Other road users seem in less of a hurry. Road carnage has slowed, except in Guyana. In 2019, we lost almost 39 thousand in the US alone: and globally, one every 25 seconds.
Public transportation systems have slowed too. Airlines need life support. The drop in oil prices have not reduced consumer prices. The opposite has happened because of distribution problems. Centralization, mergers and acquisitions, has left us too far from the farms and food too expensive. Staying home is recommended. The white militia disagrees. The peoples’ militia is about to drop. Stars are visible in Brooklyn’s skies. Mortgage rates are down.
Food will grow more scarce. The prices will increase. Those unable to afford it will become more creative and 'revolutionary'. Oil is like sugar before it. The foreigners own it.
Somebody calling himself ‘the Governor’ became must-watch daytime EMMY reality tv. He ordered New York City trains to be cleaned every day, to slow the spread of Covid but mostly to discourage the city's homeless population from making the trains their home. A problem all our governors seem unable to fix. Evictions are on-hold in New York for now. “The Governor” says so. Street crime is down with no help from the police. They seem in a lull: like before a storm. Prisoners are being released early. “The Governor” says no. The White collars go first. Others are attempting to escape. Animals have noticed and are reclaiming spaces. Hunters have not stopped. Black men are still preferred. We are wrestling each other at the supermarket. Amazon workers are on strike, nurses too. We are cooking again. Bald Heads are not going to the barbershop. It must be a revolutionary moment.
The bodies of people we love are disappearing. The governors have no answer. They do not see their historical complicity in privatized and then closed hospitals. We do not have a healthcare system in the US. Our lost dead could be found rotting in the backs of trucks in Brooklyn, on the floors of frozen tents and or, just like that, on the streets of places like Guayaquil in Ecuador and Sao Paulo in Brazil. It is a massacre
Sadly, more will die before anything changes. Confronting these forces means we must honor our past. Honoring our past requires us to retire the leaders and leadership class that continue to foster conditions for separateness and inequality. It would be different if the many commentators would speak the truth. There was little difference between the daily tattle on the Guyana election recount and that of the Donald Trump show. It is the same. Stop reading this, if you think what is happening in the US is different and separate from what is happening in Guyana.
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| The Mask by Gary Thomas Samaan wood |
We are victims of an ongoing massacre unleashed on vulnerable communities, more than 500 years ago maybe longer. We cannot find the bones of the ones we loved. They are pieces of a puzzle scattered across the planet. They are not colored coded.
A masked solution
Europe’s disparate impact on Black and Brown communities overseas came home to roost. Despite limitations on their access the formerly enslaved established communities in those industrialized centers. Some have arrived more recently after surviving the Meditaranean Sea. The recent arrivals, whatever they may have escaped, have not escaped capitalism and White supremacy. It follows them everywhere. Its limitations persisted in every aspect of our lives, health, education, housing, governorships, and capital. It is in Guyana too.
The beneficiaries of enslavement, indenture, low pay, and violence have built hospitals, modern transport systems, university systems and huge armies and alliances to protect their largesse from being snatched. China once a victim of European occupation and exclusion began to challenge Europe on all levels. It has been identified as the birthplace of Covid-19. China’s capitalism has shown the usual proclivities for Black and Brown lives too.
Covid-19 has been described as the rich-people’s disease. Meaning only those who can afford to travel to China, Europe and America contracted it. But the current evidence is that it's a poor people’s disease. Poor is relative. The rich may have made it or the conditions for it, but it's a price paid by those historically without material power. Black and Brown in the USA remain its epicenter, for now. Ominous signs exist in Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and elsewhere and with the usual proclivities. Could Guyana be far behind?
On April 23rd, 2020, NBC, News 4, announced Brooklyn, New York, also known as Kings County was the deadliest in the country, overtaking Queens County. What an irony; not only in their names. The mecca of global finance and media had not been able to stem the rising tide of Covid 19. California and Tennessee would challenge for the title of deadliest. We must know that what happens in Kings and Queens County has everything to do with what happens in Georgetown:King George’s town.
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| The Promise of Africa by Gary Thomas Mahogany Wood |
For some time now I have reassured myself, and the few who seemed in need of it, that the revolution is only 4 to 5 hours away from our most recent meal. That is about the time most humans begin to feel hungry again. I am talking about revolution and not the naive reforms of the government or the constitution. I am talking about a rise to abolish poverty and its symptoms.
Most of us have an idea about where to find that next meal. The rich and powerful have accumulated enough to avoid the anxiety of hunger. Like the wild canine families, the ancestors of our pets, the wealthy bury carcasses in various denominations and locations to relieve their anxiety and ensure they eat again and again. Most of the rest of us, the masses, contemplate the source and value of that next meal. But there is a fast-growing group for whom the next meal's whereabouts are uncertain and in need of a solution. If only they can find someone else's buried bones. And if not forthcoming; a kind of revolution has to be an option.
The local stick-up gang might see, through their face covering, the latest haul as a kind of revolution. Some without had taken from some with. But there had been no change in the circumstances that needed a gang in the first place. That 'taking' came with no, and perhaps needed no, historical and ideological grounding. There was no consideration of the economic and global political circumstances. If at all, it would be reported as a crime statistic in the next day's news and solely within the context of methods for arrest and punishment. But if several hundred, maybe thousands, acted on that instinct and in consort, then maybe the result is revolution.
Guyana’s rice-terriers, the local mutt breed, descended from ancient canines. Domestication stripped their DNA of those old instincts. Instead of burying carcasses as did their Siberian wolf ancestors, the Rice-terrier buries bare dried bones in the yard. The more pampered house dogs have never seen meat and instead hide plastic imitations under the living room rug. Shreds of the burying instinct still remain despite a forgotten purpose, buried deep in DNA, even if it is without context. We too need to recapture an instinct long domesticated and masked.
The warming warnings of revolt had been long evident with not so picturesque valleys but beautiful rising ridges of resistance. The Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the Yellow Vests of France are examples. Locally, the Georgetown prison uprising in 2016 should have been a sign. It was not the first or the last but most notable because 17 prisoners were massacred by fire; incinerated. There were escapes and almost continuous protests over conditions by inmates on the roof of the prison. Inmates on the roof should have been a sign of insecurity. In 2002 an escape that left one warder dead and another totally disabled began a 6 year period of gang violence involving a gang led by the escapees and a 'phantom' gang tied to the then ruling People's Progressive Party (PPP). Ostensibly the police needed the help of this squad to find and annihilate the threat.
That war claimed hundreds more including the escapees. Some claimed it was genocide against African ascended people. Today, prisons all over are in uprising mode. It is not possible to practice the WHO Covid -19 recommendations of social distancing and hygiene in prisons. Inmates who were already riled-up about being locked-up without trials are unwilling to die locked-up. In April 2020, four escaped from Lusignan Prison in Guyana. In Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Iran, Afghanistan and the US prisoners have either escaped or on some kind of strike. ICE detention centers for those facing deportation from the US have seen a rise in protest including hunger strikes as reported by LA Times April 2020
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| Contemporary Kali Mask |
We could not afford ventilators. We did not have enough. They couldn't afford PPE's. They Couldn't afford tests. And now, vaccines too. Ninety five percent of the vaccines distributed has been to European countries and European settler countries. And within those countries, access to the vaccine wears the same bias. The other gangs, the corporations have grown wealthier exploiting the poor and their weak representatives with pre-conditions to a batch of vaccines.
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| by Desmond Alli ( wood Purple Heart) |
Cries for national unity will not help us. Unity is not as desirable as it may sound and definitely not on every occasion. Importantly, our cries have little value when dressed in our gang colors. It is not one people, one nation, and one destiny. It has never been and never will be. But enough have joined the gangs to form a 'nation'. That 'One nation', gets in the way of the people and their destiny. But this is not about Guyana; not really. I wish it was important in and of itself. It’s that self importance, that comes wrapped in countries and borders that causes the problems. It sucks your intelligence. Turns otherwise intelligent people into automata without free will; and forces us to wear the mask.
Who gave you your name? Who baptized you? Who gave Guyana its name? Who drew the borders, who?
No government of national unity will work. The people are tired of these pretentions with no chance of success. Please don’t tell me about Singapore and Scandinavia. Any deep analysis of those societies will reveal the importance of cheap labor to their existence. That Scandinavia is able to operate on a more equitable footing, does not negate the horror their industry has caused historically and continues to cause even when disguised as some carbon credit paid to keep local operatives quiet about what is really happening in the Amazon and the real cost. They too have benefited from that history.
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| Totem (lying unfinished for lack of promised government funding) by Winslow Craig (mixed media) |
We are experiencing a new Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander boldly proclaims. This is why laws intended to relieve the damage to anti black and poor often lead to worse outcomes. It is because we all refuse to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. It is not that what I am saying is a secret or unknown. But the rhetoric of differences is stronger than that of equity. There is a certain inevitably that flows from people not fully grasping the idea of race and class and therefore it is internalized and perpetuated. We wish to enter the palace. Not to overthrow it, but to join in the hope we might eat better. The gravity of the situation is that we are all in prison. Gravity keeps most of us on the ground and from flying freely through the air. Gravity ages us, bends our shoulders, droops or eyelids and cheeks, and keeps us fenced in the prison yard that is earth. It is gravity pushing our lungs closed.
I use prison as an analogy in the hope it would grab greater attention. Some may see it is not an analogy at all. It is difficult to come up with more scenarios that better describe our collective living conditions. These scenarios are useful in understanding what a breakout would require and look like. The ‘system’ is too generic and imperialism implies some are free. No one is ‘free’. Hopefully I can help generate new ways of understanding our situation and new relationships that reflect the freedom we seek. We must understand; the prisoners in Guyana's prisons are part of the same incarceration system as those in US prisons
When you are sent to prison, you know you are in a prison. When you are born into prison you may not know you in it or could be in denial about the origins of your birth.
Some of us continue-on asymptomatic: or with mild symptoms. What is there to complain about and to who? You have to be alive to complain. Like I should be grateful that I am alive. So why a revolution?
It is also true for Guyana and elsewhere, that ethnic wars and violence do follow major global wars. The British invasion of British Guiana in 1953, to the extent one can invade one's own territory, came in the aftermath of the 2nd World War. It took 8 years, but was part of a global crusade for independence following the war. The Vietnam War had been raging for almost 2 decades by 1962 when (Guyana) British Guiana's Civil War solidified the ethnic divisions we see today. Similarly, The US Civil War, set the US political divide: Confederate ideology against a more worldly version of it. It was the former that stormed inside the capitol building on January 6th, 2021 looking for glory. So yes, wear a mask, I do too, but know it is not who you are and it won't help you heal.
Clairmont Chung
A writer, blogger, Filmmaker and co-founder of the Pan African Workshop
Reach him at:chungmont@gmail.com
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