Open Letter to PM Gonsalves, CELAC, CARICOM, MERCOSUR, OAS, UN, EU, UK & other parties & partners in our war for peace
Dear Comrade Gonsalves, CELAC, CARICOM, OAS, UN, EU, UK and other interested parties and partners in our war for peace et al,
Seasons Greetings to you and yours during what must seem like a Dickensian period in our contemporary affairs – the best of times – in celebrations of the St Vincent and the Grenadines’ Nine Mornings Festival and inscriptions of Junkanoo, Bolero, and Bandas de Parrandas onto the UNESCO Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity – and the worst of times with the decibels of potential war drums escalating in intensity and terseness from our feuding neighbours on the continent, Venezuela and Guyana.
Comrade Gonsalves et al, it must indeed put a damper on your enjoyments of this festive season with the troubling task weighing so heavily on your goodly neck in being anointed by your illustrious peers of CELAC, CARICOM, the UN, UK, Commonwealth and the like, to broker bilateral talks between the duelling nations. I, Comrades, could think of no more sufficient shoulders on which this task could rest than yours!
I recall that you, Comrade Gonsalves, and many of you in the decision-making chairs, have in the past extended the full hospitality of your realms and territories to me as I try to help carve sustainable development pathways, which of course includes sustainable peace and security, whether in our engagements in culture and heritage, education, media, new technologies or agriculture as has been the case of my cavaliering past.
And I much appreciate your openminded and appreciative chuckles at my journalistic monologues of yore, but I do prefer action, as I try to unravel the twisted knots of mis-knowledge, miseducation, misrepresentations and misinterpretations that imperial, colonial and the inheritors – the neocolonial massas – of our hemispheric earth have at times tried to impose on us.
Inclusive conversations with Troika and Fourth Estate
It is in such spirit of extended amicability and mutual friendship, camaraderie, peace and goodwill to men, that I have delved into my GloCal Knowledge Pot (GLOCAL – Global Latin American and Caribbean), found and gazed in séance into my Krystal-fish-bowl-without-fish to summon “the proverbial wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job and the foresight of all the ancient prophets,” as you counselled.
Spicy Picong and Mamar Gallo
What follows surfaced with the vivacious humour and picong of our Caribbean islands and the Mamar Gallo of the continental spirits with a wish to extend good neighbourliness for continuance of ours as a Zone of Peace, Justice, Security, Prosperity and Goodwill to all in this and beyond the yuletide season!
And so I extend my Dove-washed hands in service and the olive branches of my learnings from sitting at the feet and gorging on the wisdom of the gurus of your esteemed generation in negotiating consensus for our diverse and variegated Caribbean peoples.
Comrade Gonsalves, I admit it somewhat deviates from your proposed resurrection of the Bolshevic Troika, for accommodation of myself as a representative of the Fourth Estate, but I am sure as a patron of egalitarianism and as a matter of balancing the democratic playing, you will permit me to be the cat who addresses the king as the voice of those of all of our realms and shires not so far included in these talks.
For want of an agenda…
Comrades, I recognise that your talks might now find itself in want of an agenda, given that President of Guyana Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali has made it crystalline and categorically clear – backed by the distinguished Caribbean lawyer and Diplomat, Sir Shridath Ramphal and supported by a host of international and regional outpourings of support – Belize, Jamaica, Organisation of American States, Commonwealth, British Parliament, UK Government, France, CARICOM and a host of others too numerous to mention – that the border feud between himself and the beleaguered President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro is OFF the negotiating table!
Surely the immediate reaction of his tempestuous and vengeful rival must be ‘off with his head’ given his emphatic intent – “Venezuela Will Prevail!” – a clear path to making your proposed talks a strategic photo-op to aide his beleaguered election campaign. Given that Venezuelans are not flocking into, but fleeing from his country – it must be now a tremendous headache for you to ensure that the bilateral talks take place.
In the interest of creatively redirecting such soundings of war, towards de-escalating the conflict that threatens our long-referred Zone of Peace, as you so eloquently appealed,
– and so that you would not be left seated across your well-prepped diplomatic table, sans a point of dialogue, staring vacuously at each other as at times obtain at these events – I should know – I have been to three decades of them!
– and, indeed, as the so-rebranded by peers of the Fourth Estate to your Troika as the Caribbean Queen of Culture so to speak,
I here lay out for your esteemed consideration a revised, refreshed, renewed and resolute agenda befitting the post-pandemic world in which we can fortunately count ourselves as survivors!
A novel revised agenda to rival all agendas
In preparing this new agenda, I too have taken time away from a busy matters of grave, urgent immediate import. Not the least of these preoccupations have been trying to convince our local banks and financial sector that their blinkered stipulations on credit card limits on foreign purchases directly contradict Government’s and indeed the region’s – CELAC/OAS/UN/UNCTAD/CARICOM and others’ – stated priorities for liberalising E-Commerce and supporting the digital and creative education sectors that I champion and stymie the efforts of independent creators and innovators like myself who are trying to put the region on the map (not take countries off it!) with such as the world’s newest creative genre in the MultiMedia MicroEpic.
Psst! Its exploration of our MotherContinent, stretching across territorial jurisdictions, may lend some novel insights and perspectives to your role in brokering the many Border Wars that plague our hemisphere and beyond! I will be happy to give you a sneak peak at your leisure, Comrade, et al.
Focus on the Post Pandemic Priorities
Suffice it to say that in the measures I outline below, we will see this and other creative endeavours blossom and flourish in the region, so our leaders have better focus on the post-pandemic priorities, in which such archaic germs, dug-up to be renewed like festering sores, as the one just taken-off the negotiating table, surely have no place. Then, we can happily allow it to be washed down with the covetousness of the alluring and beguiling Essequibo riverine system into the vast blue pacific Caribbean Sea, or if it prefers, the more tempestuous Atlantic and assign such a path to all other festering hemispheric conflict!
As you advised Comrade, having delved into such of my heritage archives with “the proverbial wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, the foresight of all the ancient prophets” from which surfaced the deep spiritual surge of Caribbean picong – or in Venezuelan, Mamar Gallo , In Guyanese Parlance Gaff– I wish to extend good neighbourliness and wishes for peace, justice, security, prosperity and goodwill of people before profit in this yuletide season towards the adversarial bank and financial fraternity in particular.
Revised Agenda Item 1: Enabling Environment for Digitisation and Creatives
So shall we put at the top of the new CELAC-CARICOM brokered agenda-without-an-agenda that our leaders make good on your promises of an amicable enabling environment, liberalised to facilitate the free flow of software and hardware and the means to access the same so those of trying to fill the regional knowledge void through creative education and digitisations be adequately tooled and equipped?
I am sure your will concur, Comrade Ralph, that “so much is at stake for our Caribbean and Latin American civilization” in this, and if given focus and attention it deserves, will certainly sweep from the table any necessity of talks over a trumped-up ancient grievance whose sores had already scabbed, until it was recently resurrected to serve the election bid of a misanthropic aging troupial.
My rationale, comrade, is that if we keep the heads of these new instantaneous, fast food, instant tea and coffee generations – who cant be bothered with the obsolete politricking over the waters of the Essequibo – so focussed on the surreal business of CEIBA-EDUtainment, they would have less time for rabble rousing, or to indulge the liberal more accessible and easy availability of the herbal distractions and other dry vices – ie ganja/marijuana/cannabis/kan/canamo, as you may call it in your respective jurisdictions.
Nevertheless, you must concur, Comrade, that not just myself but all of the regional creative and technical fraternity would welcome your brokering of the sorry state of our regional environment and the veritable hostility with which we are confronted in just trying to carve a space for our region within this quagmire of global technological trends by those who are charged with the responsibility as enablers, as bankers, financing, technocrats at the registry who do not have aclue about how technologies make for simplifying processes, not compleacting them etc, etc etc – my list of gaps and deficiencies is as long as the Essequibo! So let’s place that on top of the agenda without an agenda for the regional talks!
Revised Agenda Item 2. Retrieving lost and invisible interconnections
I am sure Comrade Gonsalves et al, that this item surprises you, but I am well are that many of you are avid supporters of the arts and culture and my activities to enhance the visibility of our Global Caribbean Heritage
So Comrade Gonsalves, in my selfless ‘plus-one’ service to you as a facilitator and interlocutor, who without prejudice, want to propel the talks along pacific pathways, I continue with recommendations for additional agenda items that will hold the populace of both feuding nations in awe of their wise, patient and foresightful leaders.
Simply, this agenda item takes out from your cue on the successorship as pro Tempore of CELAC will be Honduras, with which, as you observed you have “we have a historical link with the Garifuna.”
This gives the incoming Pro Tempore, Honduras, the opportunity to resurrect – and indeed it will be the season of Easter when he takes the Chair – the pitch made by this great nation of Honduras when it hosted the First international Summit of Garifunas as he ratified the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention. His predecessor then stated his intent to join Nicaragua’s Corn Island of Managua in the Caribbean Sea, with other Garifuna enclaves in the Caribbean to build a trade network of Caribbean Garifuna communities from Cancun on the Yucatan Peninsula to Nicaragua and deepen its relationship with the CARICOM. But of course that has remained in the rhetoric of 2003, two decades ago, as so much of our tireless heritage retrieval endeavours, while we continue to fist-fight over territories and borderlines!
Reeducation – From Pre School to Policymaking
I am sure you will concur as I near the end this tirade that none of this debate will exist were not our education systems adequately poised to retrieve and represent our cultural histories as they should be.
Do you think you our leaders will be limboing on the Essequibo borderline, if you/they knew that such traditions of Bandas of Parrandas, inscribed last week on the UNESCO Register as mentioned earlier, that the Venezuelan President was waving like the flag of his raggedly power-bid, is a thread lost in language, translation, representation and geopolitricking of the colonial powers that has its roots in the Junkanoo also inscribed as a cultural element of the Bahamas, which is, also shared by Jamaica and took a northerly route into the United States. Pity their lack of knowledge inhibited the inscription as a joint transboundary element than the piecemeal, cut up fragments as they now appear on the UNESCO international Registry of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity! Whither our humanity, pray tell!
Were you not so preoccupied with national budgets and war and were our education set on sounder footing – with an adequate research and education agenda as with a few of my colleagues are now engaged to retrieve our cultural histories – you may know, Dear Comrades, that we can now define its roots and its pathways, since erased and realigned, through to the selfsame Nine Mornings Festival of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Believe it or not, we can also trace how it threaded its way with the Garifunas who were shipped off by the British to the Bay of Honduras to create strands of festivals known as Junkanoo in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and – unbeknownst even to Venezuela – as the Bandas de Parrandas of the Holy Innocents of Caucagua, enshrined separately from the Junkanoo element on the UNESCO Register of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity!
Multicultural Cross Border Identities
This lack of knowledge of this important element of our Caribbean multicultural cross border identities is replicated in the somewhat vacuous descriptions of the elements now represented on UNESCO Heritage Lists that misrepresent the lost and invisible but tenuous strands that bind us all, Caribbean peoples and peoples of the Americas with DNA strands across both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. That, and the on-going virtual invisibility of the English-speaking Caribbean (four elements from 31 countries, as opposed to 99 elements from Latin America which is itself a matter of imbalance in representation of our diversity, constantly being threatened with erasure by various forces can certainly make for considerable fist shaking at your well-prepped table for dialogue!
Shouldn’t our Caribbean, so conscious of its origins and identities, be more preoccupied with not just the physical Essequibo, but also the cultural and metaphysical Essequibo – those line of demarcation and points of intersection of our splintered cultural pathways? Shouldn’t our people be educated in the origins, practice and heritage of festivals like Nine Mornings of your world, Junkanoo of the English-speaking world and Bandas de Parrandas of Spanish Americas?
Out of the InterCultural Vacuum
Wouldn’t our peoples be less in a cultural vacuum if they can collectively, through common agreement of the many regional blocs – Mercosur, CELAC, OAS, Commonwealth, CARICOM – (did I miss any?) to actively pursue research and education so we can reclaim the illustrious rooted interconnections to such as the noble warrior African King who so fired the imagination of those who were enslaved that they kept the memory of his strategic tactic of attacking the regime while their massas revelled in Christmas jollity – a cultural element that so strongly bonded them, invisibly, through all the ravages of colonisation and in the very many communities into which slavery deposited them, to buoy their courage and endurance to stand-up to their oppressors, as he stood up to the slave traders?
Shouldn’t we be tracing how what has passed on in our knowledge of the traditions to become the distorted processes of splitting and splintering and fragmentation and fracturing that have been refabricated much like the dates and veracities of territorial treaties to be torn-up and gnashed-at over the colonial interlude? –
Massively Spread the Now Splintered Guianas
Yes! Split, divided, gnashed-at and torn-up, indeed, Comrade Gonsalves et al, as has been the once massive spread of the Guianas itself that encompassed the bulging belly of South America, which has also been erased from our history, and that to feed the greed of colonial exploiters and their inheritors!
How great will be an agenda that reflects and incorporates consideration of the true nature and character of common survival and survivalism of our Caribbean people.
How rich will be our understanding of each other, our modes of engagement, our bilateral, trilateral and multilateral engagements if we can try to focus on what matters to the people of our region, while we allow the system and institutions as the International Court of Justice to do its work!
So Dear Comrade Gonsalves, whether or not you remain as the troika as you have proposed, or I as the voice of the Fourth Estate as I have proposed, and if you do indeed care to adopt this proposed new and revised agenda to make this a season merry and bright with goodwill towards all, I wish you every success in your interventions as an alternative to the rhetoric, fist-shaking, selfie and photo-op as the current one promises to be. And if you do, well make a request via the GloCal Knowledge Pot fishbowl-without-fish afloat and adrift on the Essequibo!
Comrades, as the talks threaten to break down before they have even started, I hope you appreciate such pre-emptory foresight of the ancient mystics through such séance with the likes of Solomon and Job, I delved into my heritage melting pot without fish and fished out these creative agenda items to align with and restore the joy a joyous yuletide. I trust that it fits with your intended purpose as pacifier, that at once allow the tottering Venezuelan President a bag of Christmas goodies to take home to his uneagerly awaiting electorate, while the fortified President of Guyana undeviatingly pursue his chosen unwavering path to the United Nations International Court of Justice, as he insists!
Then you may all declare a win-win in this season of limbo, bolero, Paranda and Parang, Junkanoo and diplo-gibberish Jabberwocky – the illustrious British tradition on which some of us have been nurtured:
Yours in Service of Heritage Education and CEIBA-EDUtainment,
The Caribbean Queen of Culture, Heritage aka Demokrissy
A Unique Perspective – AI Assessment of this Post
The content of the post is an open letter addressing various parties involved in brokering talks between Venezuela and Guyana. The author discusses the need for an agenda and suggests two revised agenda items: an enabling environment for digitization and creatives, and retrieving lost and invisible interconnections in the Caribbean. The author also emphasizes the importance of reeducation and understanding of cultural heritage. Overall, the post provides a unique perspective on the ongoing conflict and proposes actionable steps to foster peace and understanding.
About Dr Kris Rampersad
Dr Kris Rampersad is former – President of UNESCO Education Commission, Vice President of the Programme and External Relations Commission, Vice President of the UNESCO Consultative InterGovernmental Body on Intangible Cultural Heritage and a UNESCO and National Geographic Educator, Woman Techmakers’ Ambassador, Google Digital Skills Ambassador and Small Island Innovator’s Ambassador. Subscribe and follow here and on social media for more and make contact to support, sponsor or collaborate.