Aesthetic destruction in 2006
The Freddie Kissoon column
Kaieteur News
January 4, 2007
One of the striking differences between Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean is in the realm of aesthetic values. I came face to face with how different Guyana is from the rest of its CARICOM partners inside a record store in Trinidad years ago.
I was returning home after an eye operation and there was very little time to buy something for my little daughter. I ran into one of the fanciest malls in Port-of-Spain. On my way out, my eyes caught the record bar and I decided I may take home a few CDs. I couldn't find anything in the genre of “easy listening” or “light and easy.”
There was no Julio Iglesias; there was no Johnny Mathis.
I grew up in Georgetown listening to the fantastic selections of Ron Robinson every morning. Even though Guyana is an integral part of Caribbean culture, the music that dominated this country from the fifties until the invention of Jamaican dance hall music, Trinidadian Soca and American rap was the ballad, with crooners like Frank Sinatra and Engelbert Humperdinck being very popular. Of course they played calypso on the airwaves and calypso was popular. Guyana had several top-class steel bands but we were not like the islands.
West Indian societies have to cater for the fun-in-the-sun music that the tourists like. Tourism in the Caribbean islands brought with it certain type of culture that never reached Guyana.
This is not the type of forum to engage in the ideological and cultural implications of West Indian tourism, but it is important to note that radical socialism, as it resided in Jagan and Burnham, could never have taken roots in any other West Indian country.
The appreciation for an aesthetic world in Guyana among its people collapsed after the exodus of the Portuguese mercantile class and the African middle class community. Please, don't accuse me of denying aesthetic values in the Indian community but the majority of East Indians were rurally based and thus were not exposed to the arts, the cultural and social architecture of urban Guyana. East Indians, of course, had their exposure to Eastern traditions.
In another essay, I will argue that the rural leadership of Guyana that took political control of Guyana, particularly after the nineties, did not seem to care for the aesthetic landscape of Georgetown; they would refer to it as western or bourgeois aesthetics. This, I believe, is a terrible mistake in the running of a government.
Money to support the arts was not here and the Theatre Guild was left to rot. The educational system atrophied. The economic disintegration of Guyana gave birth to a hustler mentality best exemplified in the trading groups that filled the void left by the demise of import firms and the government-created External Trade Bureau.
I had a rude awakening at the airport in Trinidad during the era of economic breakdown in the final period of Burnham's rule. There were these traders with massive bags and overweight-suit cases. I had just a little knapsack thrown across my back and had arrived from Barbados with a stop off in Trinidad to proceed home.
Heavy-built women, with booming voices, rushed towards me inquiring if I was traveling light and if yes, if I would check in some commercial luggage for them. My answer was no of course. If I wanted to be burdened with weight why would I have journeyed with only a knapsack?
Plus I had heard what confusion the traders caused at Timehri.
Once you gave a disapproving nod, you were met with a torrent of abuse. Were these the new commercial pioneers of Guyana? Guyana's aesthetic world declined when hard times set in. It has barely recovered. The traders are gone but the minibus deportment and the drug culture have taken over.
Whatever positive role they play in Guyana, a large percentage of minibus drivers are indecent people with no appreciation for the fact that civilisation depends of the recognition of manners and courtesy.
Drug traffickers couldn't be bothered with poetry, the waltz, and the Theatre Guild. Give them and their male children a fancy car, a vivacious young woman, and a gun and together with the millions of Yankee dollars they have, that is life for them.
Over the years, resilient Guyanese entrepreneurs have succeeded in restoring some aspects of the cultural and social architecture to which I have referred. Over the years in this column I have listed many of them. The list includes: Deo Singh of KFC fame; Buddy Shivraj, owner of Buddy's Pool Hall; Lennox John who gave Guyanese a piece of the Mediterranean in the form of Splashmin's, now the City Mall; Sattaur Gafoor and his beautiful Houston Mall; Robert Badal with his Popeye's outfit.
Aesthetic standards are coming back. There is a group dedicated to raising funds for the restoration of the Theatre Guild in Kingston. I will implore that the management of this paper makes a contribution. I hope the government brings back to life the National School of Dance.
Last year, however, saw some severe setbacks. Someone high up in the corridors of power for political reasons wants to kill the Celina Atlantic Resort. Life is funny. Yesterday as I was at my desk in the middle of this composition, someone called out at the gate.
It was the General Manager of Celina Atlantic Resort, Bernard Yuhn. He asked me to come down because the traffic ranks led by the Traffic Chief had descended on his business place and were marking all types of lines in front of the place. He said the police have now drawn out “no-stopping” signs meaning that motorists cannot even stop outside his resort.
Yuhn opined that this may have been as a result of the Home Affairs Ministry holding its Christmas Party at the resort. I felt sorry to disappoint Yuhn but I told him I have done all I could as a media operative to stop the slow death of Celina Atlantic Resort. It is for others to join in his defence.
Yuhn told me that he feels his business cannot survive. What a pity! Celina Atlantic Resort is a place that sits on the Atlantic Ocean as a perfect example of aesthetic manifestation in the heart of the capital city.
2006 was not a good year for the Botanical Gardens. That place is falling apart. The zoo is in an atrocious condition. The lovely cafeteria in the zoo compound has been closed down. The National Parks suffered a similar fate. On Vlissengen Road, right outside the Office of the President, there are no street lights. It has been like this for years.
Someone or some people high up in power do not place much emphasis on the importance of aesthetic values in Guyana in life in general. How sad! An English philosopher once wrote, “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”