Dear Minister Henry, moving on from absent coolies, upset VIPs, bad culture..

Dear Minister Henry

It rough bad. The cussing is plenty.  The cultural commentators and so on are vexed bad that the show of love and unity for the Jubilee was not inspiring and so. It seem like there will be a Commission of Inquiry into the jubilee disaster.


I didn't vote and I boycott the jubilee so I should shut up. I am not interested in saying 'I told you so' and be a self righteous  predictor of yet another Guyanese disaster. 

But the Birth Certificate and the passport imply 'Born in Guyana'.

There is a destructiveness in some of the criticism and this failure to get slap and strip bheri into his seat to watch the flag raising.

There are people muttering how you not hearing the 'experts' and so, and that you not taking advice and that you bulldozing your way through the whole mess and things like that. Those people will decide how they want to document their
contributions .


I do not know any 'expert' in Guyana who has ever put on any show which could depict all the cultural clashes and controversies and miseries. I have no idea which would be the benchmark for the 50th. It would have been nicer for me to focus on repealing laws which discriminate against LGBT citizens and which discriminate against children.



I do my culture thing. I don't wear Bollywood inspired coolie clothes, despite the push for coolies to do so. I can't stand it when 'Indian culture' means bollywood, even though I like Bollywood.  I can't eat with knife and fork, and when I eat with my fingers, I don't do it right apparently because the food comes up above my second knuckles. I dont like winin' down on the road or in minibuses and I dont think chirren should be listening to dutty dancehall music and nothing else.

I don't like that it is 'cultural fuh Guyanese to beat chirren'


Culture is not perfect, and in Guyana is all kinds of people have all kinds of view on what Culture is and so. A Hindu child told me of wondering why her school jubilee event had two christian pastors, but only one pandit and one muslim .

We should be old enough in Guyana to know that there are many different religions in Guyana with all kinds of nuances. Maybe it is time to stop putting prayers on the national events.


I do not blame you for the black-people-mostly event. We live in a place in which culture was inspired by colonialism which had contempt for non-Christian/English origin ways of being.  You will have to decide how you will rise above that.

I can't recall any national 'cultural' event which was able to change that and I have no suggestions as to what would have been the coolie cultural contribution to your Afro centric event which I did not bother to look at. And the tassa drumming/African drumming thing is nice, but getting cliche.

I would have wanted no Alcohol jubilee.. I cannot stand the alcohol culture which is 'we own'.

VIPs
It is always amusing when the class and wealth barriers are inserted.. with the VVIP and VIP distinctions. Some animals are more equal than others and truth be told, I am happy that the VIP seating was messed up .. because it seems the important people had similar experiences to the unimportant people.

I watch on social media that people who went to the fancy 'dinner and ball' complain about plastic.. man, you should have given them calabash and puraine/lotus leaf (of seven curry ) as alternatives.


I aint know if in your view of culture, you will have VVIP and VIP and so still and whether you intended to reinforce the class divisions which Independence was supposed to rid us of.


I am not going to remember you for messing up the VIP seating or the plastic tableware at the gala dinner for the jubilee dinner.
 
I am writing this because I remembered you at the Ministry's November 2015 Diwali event.


I wanted to shout, No no, you don't have to wear dem coolie clothes.. that Indian wear thing is a myth perpetrated by Bollywood lovers who make money out of gold sequined cloth and not worry too much about the spiritual values of the Hindu tradition.


There is the image of you lighting the diya. I do not know if you wrote your own speech or if one of the people who messed up the VIP seating wrote it for you.



I know there are coolie people who dress up in tie and so, and other people who would say Diwali is devil worship (or similar things more politely). My coolie culture is different from the coolie man/woman putting leaflet in my letter box telling me my religion is false.

You have the difficult task of representing all those views.


You said at the Diwali event that "each one of us should seek to have that spiritual light ablaze in our hearts and our minds, serving as a guide to our lives, as we live each day.”

The implications of that philosophy of light are important for culture.

It means that the culture which should be promoted is one which is meant to uplift, rather than to destroy each other. It is a culture which is not like the politics.

It should be  a culture which seeks  equality, rather than hierarchy and inequity. It is a culture which promotes justice .  It is not like the politics or the Constitution.

It is culture  which recognises that no one event can represent all the hundreds of varieties of people and identities, but that we should give space for hundreds of expressions in different locations , all of the time.  
  
That light you talked about might be a helpful logo for the future. I could imagine that thousands would object. 

As I said, I boycott the jubilee and I did not vote, so I should probably keep out.But that birth certificate and passport....