The fiction of the incapacity of young people persists

Dear Editor,

When I was a child growing up in the late 1980s in the tiny Georgetown community of Tucville Terrace, there was the eldest son of a man we called Palla Walla, a young boy, mid-teens, known for his insanity, for his wild ideas and stupendously false facts. He put forward, for example, the absurd theory that professional wrestling was fake and that turtles could live to be a hundred years old. He was mocked and ostracised for such lunacy.

Eventually, I went away to high school, President’s College, where I spent much of my time in the library, learning things that were not necessarily in the tedious high school curriculum. One day, I picked up a magazine with a feature story on professional wrestling and learned that the wrestlers would have small razors hidden away that they would use to cut their foreheads so as to simulate serious injury and that the matches were pre-scripted. Somewhere along the line I learned also that turtles could in fact live to be a hundred years old. These things were astonishing to me because I had held fast to the ‘knowledge’ that nothing so brutal as what I saw on television could be staged and that a little thing like a turtle could not live that long.

As a society, we are conditioned to hold fast to our separate founding fictions, to defend them at all costs, even in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The most ingrained of these is the selfperpetuating mythos surrounding race and ethnicity and its relation to our concept of citizenship and nationhood.

The primary narrative is thus. I am born into this camp that identifies me as Yellow. All my life I am taught, the lessons constantly reinforced, that there exists this other camp of others, the Blues. This isn’t the fiction of course. There is truth and dignity in Yellowness, and the existence of the Blues is indisputable. The fiction that is however woven into that truth is that there is less dignity, less worth in Blueness. We are led to believe in the dogma of the Yellow super-citizen and the Blue sub-citizen. It does not matter that objective and excessive proof exists of exemplary Blues and bad Yellows, the fiction of otherness defined in terms of superiority and inferiority persists.

Another fiction that persists in this society is that young people must wait, hold strain, prove themselves via some arbitrary and amorphous sense of loyalty to the separate camps of Yellows and Blues, before they can aspire to a seat at the table of leadership, of self-determination. I have told my friends who are in political camps that they endure the longest adolescence I’ve ever seen. Those who join a particular party in their early teens are chronologically in their forties before they are considered as politically

mature enough to be even considered for leadership. Meanwhile, a 41-year-old, Emanuel Macron, is the President of one of the oldest republics in the world, France, and New Zealand’s recently elected Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is at 38, just two months older than I am. This contrast is, in my mind, a cruel irony in a country that was less than sixty years ago founded by a group of men and women in their twenties, thirties and forties. The fiction of the incapacity of young people, of ‘newbies’ nevertheless persists.

After I left high school, armed with the ‘new’ knowledge about pro wrestling and turtles, I asked about the young man, Palla Walla’s son, only to learn that he had in fact, over the years, actually gone insane. Years later, as I observed the madhouse that is Guyanese politics, about the ‘truths’ that people are conditioned to accept and the viciousness with which they attack anything contrary to those truths, I couldn’t help but think about him and what a community of his peers, steeped in ignorance, did to him, how there was no place at the table for his new ideas, for his repudiation of our accepted fictions.

Yours faithfully,

Ruel Johnson