Getting away from it all
By Donald Sinclair
CURRENT political and industrial difficulties in Guyana are having very profound and far-reaching effects upon many aspects of life for Guyanese. While some of these effects are easily measurable and even more easily discernible, others are less easy to measure empirically and more difficult to perceive. For example the economic impact of the GPSU strike can be determined on the basis of analysis of a number of economic indices. The result of such analysis is unlikely to be of comfort to anyone. But there is another kind of impact that is of concern to me, and will be the subject and focus of this Viewpoint - that is, the impact upon the national psyche. I would be the first to acknowledge that any attempt at measuring a collective psychological impact is fraught with dangers, and the analyst is open to a charge of impressionism and subjectivity. The task in fact, is likely to incur the scorn of social scientists, who would prefer to swear by more sophisticated sampling techniques. But I believe that the evidence of a troubled psyche is all around us and too difficult to ignore. I suspect also that, that psychological condition, though it may have intensified in the course of the recent strike with some of its grisly sequences, may well have its genesis in a period long before the strike began. The word that perhaps most aptly describes our psychological condition is the German word angst - referring to a mental and spiritual state of anxiety, dread and fear of the future, even disbelief in the future. In the film Zardoz, the main character makes an apocalyptic statement. he says, "I have seen the future, and it does not work." In Guyana today, visions of apocalypse come thick and fast; doom-sayers are having a field-day; Jeremiah seems to have come home to Guyana. So much conversation turns upon prospects for migration, while in the media gloomy economic predictions compete for space and attention with the Federalist propositions of Mr Ravi Dev. This scenario is further complicated by the travel advisories that describe Guyana as `unvisitable' and the hand-wringing of our well-intentioned Guyanese relatives abroad. A grenade that explodes in Georgetown is heard in New York and Toronto not once, but a hundred times, leaving Guyanese abroad to paint wildly exaggerated accounts of events at home. This condition of angst is creating in the minds of many a kind of escape - psychosis as a means of dulling the pain and soothing the anxieties associated with the current national crisis. Escape rituals take many forms short of physical migration. What is achieved is a migration of the spirit as people lose themselves in the anaesthetics of soap operas, international sporting events, or an addiction to foreign television programmes; drinking binges and sexual experimentation. The aim is to create a mental environment that one has control over, that induces pleasant consequences and distracts one from the pain of reality. The just concluded World Cup cricket tournament, always a source of interest for Guyanese, seems to have been embraced with an added fervour and passion. It was something to dull the pain. While escape rituals are understandable psychological responses to external stress, a protracted condition of spiritual distance creates its own problems. Ultimately it leads us to inhabit two worlds - one in which we discharge our professional and civic responsibilities, look after our homes and our families, and the other in which we retreat from external reality into worlds of our own creation. The spiritual crisis at the moment is that for many Guyanese, those two worlds are completely divorced, thus creating conditions for schizophrenia on a national scale.
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