Horses , Essequibo, Haiti and looking into old men's eyes - Blogging Guyana

 

Horses
There is a herd of horses which roams around Subryanville. It is nice to see them. I am cautious around them as they might jump and run.  I have a feeling they would run from me more than running towards me. The only annoying thing is when they leave their droppings in the middle of the bridge.
That is about as much I could write about horses in Guyana. Not many people would write about horses in Guyana.

Nikita Blair though, wrote (and photographed) about observing the empathy of horses near where she lived. The story of a dead horse and the surviving foal might not have been published anywhere else except on a blog.


Moray House Trust hosted an event "The Fifth Estate : a sample of blogs in Guyana".   A kind of offline event about writing online. Four bloggers shared some of the things they wrote. Nikita shared her piece on horses, with an additional treat of a slideshow of beautiful photographs.  Sara Bharrat read about an old man's tired eyes and hugging him . Phebe Wallerson read her piece about the Essequibo and 'she' blaming. Derwayne Wills read his piece about the July 2018 protests in Haiti .

I moderated the event. I did not think I was going to blog about the blogging event and my fickle memory does not recall the titles of the other pieces which were read by the bloggers.


Guyana blogs
 There were some popular "cuss out people" blogs a few years ago. Some people started, stopped, resumed or closed off their blogs. Neena Maiya (pseudonymn), Guyana Gyal , has been blogging since 2005. She uses creolese . Randall Butisingh started blogging at 95. Visitors to Guyana have blogged about Guyana. I remember one peace corps volunteer got into trouble for some of the things he wrote about his host family. Sherlina Nageer posts pictures and her own other poems, including her own. Michael C Lam posted some of his pictures and other thoughts of photography.  Some people like Kevin Bonnet posts about 'develop.meant' . Krysta Bisnauth's blog is called 'Seeking El Dorado'.  Verian Mentis-Barker blogs about politics in Guyana. Mark Jacobs blogs about farming and politics . I have seen seen posts from others.

The frequency of posts vary. Some people use Facebook to post some long notes about Guyana. Some academics and writers have used the blogging platform to share their work. Some of the writers in the mainstream media put their content on blogging platforms.  Guyana Chronicle in 2016 recommended some other blogs.


Self-censorship
 Carinya Sharples wrote a post about the things 'which were not said' and she asked the bloggers about the things which they had not written.  The bloggers talked about things which were works in progress, and which were taking a long time to finish. They talked about posts which they had 'taken down' or 'restricted' I thought of the word 'self-censorship' in the blogging context, 'holding your mouth' as one blogger said and there was discussion that because of the working environment or other threats, that there were things which were left unsaid. Derwayne talked about how to integrate the personal. A man had told me my blog was very personal. A woman had told me that even though I appear to be open on the blog, I am very much covering a lot.

That night after the event. I stood up listening with relief to an old man peeing into the toilet. I thought of writing a blog about that relief  , relief that he could stand up after having had an episode earlier in the day where it seems he could not stand. I didn't write the blog though because it wasn't my story alone, and the story has continued and it might be a long time before the old man stands up to pee again. 

A man in the audience said 'if blogging was around when Walter Rodney was alive, some of us  would have been dead'.   We talked about freedom of expression, and the opportunity which exists now, in the legacy of Rodney and Courtney Crum-Ewing and others, of speaking truth to power.
One man wanted to know if there was a way he could write about things without being seen as political - and we had to say that really and truly people will see your writing for what it is.. being 'political' is not the same as being 'untruthful'

There are some other subjects though, like mental health, which are difficult to write about. And we talked about the opportunity which blogging presents to help break some silences. Even when "navel gazing." I know that writing can be therapeutic, writing on the blog in a kind of way to be visible without worrying too much about an editor thinking that any one would want to pay to read the stuff.


Guyana narrative 
We talked about blogging and the Guyana narrative. I guess, how does the headline of 'The Empathy of  Horses [Guyanese] or "Remembering Cha-Chee : Love from across the street" be as visible as the mix of "murder guyana oil doom and gloom".  People talked about a community of bloggers, to help with editing and so.
In 2014, Tonya Haynes organised an interesting Dear Caribbean   e-mas collection.  It might be an interesting thing to do in Guyana from time to time.. blog about some general topics and curate a couple of random pieces which are not oil and gas .


Pineapple curry and the power of change
A man asked if he could come and be obnoxious and ask questions like " how you create positive social change?" and "do you think you're really free?"  He fell asleep before he could come to the event but I thought of what I would have said .  My most recent 'popular' post with the most hits for me, 7 times as much as some as the ones about deep and meaningful topics is one about pineapple curry.

Derwayne reminded the audience too that social media and the internet have their own ways of pushing content and there are social media algorithms which will hide some things. I noticed since the GDPR implementation, that the stats have shown a decline in hits. There could be reasons including that this blogging platform does not record the hits the same way.


Writing just because...
I confessed to Phebe that I did not understand some of her posts even though I felt some power reading them. Phebe laughed and reminded me,  that not everything is written for everyone, that different people will like different things. And that's the thing with blogging, that there is no 'cost' if only one or two people like it. I remember feeling anxious when writing the Coil about the number of likes and shares and so on. (I was being paid. ).

Success now is just hitting 'Publish' on a post and then sharing it around.