Guyana is a nations of six ethnicities, the European (English, Dutch) who owned the plantations, the African slave, the Indian, Chinese and Portuguese indentured servants, and the Indigenous people who lived on the Guyana territory long before the arrival of Europeans. Guyana’s replacement history and heritage is reflected in the shift of political power. The First President was of Chinese descent, the first Prime Minister of African and Christian descent, and followed almost uninterrupted, by a succession of Prime Ministers of Indian Hindu descent. Today, an Indian-descended Muslim man is President, an Indo-Guyanese Hindu is Vice President, an Afro-Christian is Prime Minister, and there is a Cabinet of Ministers that includes men and women of all ethnic and religious groups. With a fat treasury from relatively enormous oil revenues projected into the future, there is hope that some more permanent democratic political solution will eventuate so as to solidify Guyana’s early promise as a paradise nation of six peoples living in peace and harmony, free of poverty and want.
It is against this background that Abdun Noor, first visited Guyana back in September 1970 and then later in May 1983. He has written “RHYTHMS OF RESISTANCE. GUYANA’S INDENTURED LEGACY”. It is a very creative piece of writing, building and enhancing characters with ethnicity and within political contexts, and by so doing, providing perspectives on Guyana that are unique as they are refreshing and realistic. Set in Guyana of the1960s, the family of characters, include the Majeed household of Paromita, the mother, Rehman, the father, Reeta, the daughter, a “Bishops High School girl”, and Mohan Singh, the pilot who hides his past that slowly unravels his marriage to Reeta. Reeta is very troubled by the divisions of her family and dreams of a very different future for herself. Mohan’s secret, Reeta’s desires, and the choices they make, are all rooted in the ethnic and racialist sociology of Guyana. Reeta makes her startling choice and the crisis of the Majeed family parallels the crisis of a country in political turmoil where pre-political independence colonial machinations cause fractures between the mostly Indo-Guyanese People Progressive Party (PPP), the Afro-Guyanese People’s National Congress (PNC), and the Portuguese-led United Front (UF).
In the end, Abdun through this novel, has completed a journey to a small corner of South America to tell a migration story. On the grandest scale, early man migrated to all parts of the globe Out of Africa. In the period of colonialism and imperialism, Europeans migrated to the Americas (North and South) displacing indigenous peoples. The British colonial era saw the movement of millions of people across the Indian sub-continent to create India and Pakistan and ultimately Bangladesh, and an Indian diaspora to its plantation colonies in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Africa.
The awakening of Guyanese people in general, and Abdun Noor’s Indo-Guyanese family in particular, FROM the common “shame” of displacement from origin, chattel slavery, indentured servitude, predatory contract work, or refugee from war and political persecution TO pride in the survival of the “arrival”, the perseverance and resilience through ethnic, religious, and political discrimination and exclusion, and to prosperity and political power, is heralded in “Rhythms of Resistance”. It is a true GUYANA story.
As we rest in our comfortable and warm homes, hoping for ICE-free streets after recent winter storms across large swaths of the USA and in Minneapolis, I hope that we reflect much more on immigration, emigration, our roots, and what exactly makes the USA and the unique “American”, and what “American” would mean without the Indigenous, European, African, South and Central American, Indian, and Chinese peoples? Guyana as a nation would mean little without its six ethnic people.
I recommend this novel .
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I used the cold snap to snuggle in and read the book. I was pleasantly surprised because the book started off tamely but then weaved in the multiethnic context and the early political struggles of Guyana into a story that kept me glued till the end. Really brings out the dark side of plantation management, the struggles of people who had been forcibly imported or tempted with false promises, and the intergenerational cultural tensions as Guyana seeks to evolve into a new nation. And what an ending.