These coconut trees have been destroyed

Dear Editor,

These coconut trees were planted with good intentions by one Brother Shyam Outar with the blessings of the previous Administration to enhance the environment; prevent flooding and erosion, but most of all, to create an ambience of elegance, decency, a picturesque and relaxing scene with a tropical bewilderment of the human imagination.

To show order and elegance; to impress and relax the hearts of Guyanese citizens, visitors and investors, and to show us as a mature people with a brilliant future.

Excellency President David Arthur Granger, Excellency Former President of Guyana, Donald Ramotar, Samuel Hinds, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo and Ministers of the Government, look at these pictures or visit the scene on the seawall between Turkeyen and Ogle and let your heart bleed with tears.

I just cannot fathom the fact that our citizens in the neighbourhood or other areas would desecrate these wondrous coconut trees, blessed creation of the Creator God Almighty. The coconut plant is one of the most versatile foods bearing plants or palms in the entire world.

The fruit is like a complete food. The branches can be used for decoration and religious purposes when used wisely. The fruits can be used for nourishment of man and animal. The coconut water can be used as saline. The jelly as food. The branches can be used for hygiene in the form of the sweeping broom and the flesh of the nut for nourishment and refreshment. The roots hold the Earth together. The wind as it caresses the leaves produces a coolant for the eye and the human body. The trunk can be used for housing.

And it’s just a plain beautiful.

This wanton destruction of the trees show us as a people to be unambitious, indisciplined, lazy and lacking in tribute the Chinese novelist Yiyun Li recalls facing an audience member at a local reading who “said how much my writing hurt her pride. ‘Yes, the Cultural Revolution is in our history, but why not write something that makes us feel great about China?’” Morrison understood the importance of resisting empty flattery and always insisted on holding herself, and her work, to a much higher standard. Morrison once observed that “History has always proved that books are the first plain on which certain battles are fought.”

Morrison leaves behind an enviable multinational legacy. In a pitch-perfect evocation of her signature style, Zadie Smith writes: “Just as there is a Keatsian sentence and a Shakespearean one, so Morrison made a sentence distinctly hers, abundant in compulsive, self-generating metaphor, as full of sub-clauses as a piece of 19th century presidential oratory, and always faithful to the central belief that narrative language — inconclusive, nondefinitive, ambivalent, twisting, metaphorical narrative language, with its roots in oral culture — can offer a form of wisdom distinct from and in opposition to, as she put it, the ‘calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science.’”

Morrison’s pioneering role in opening up mainstream culture to black thought and writing also extended her influence well beyond fiction. She was also a brilliant essayist, endlessly quotable and constantly seeing further than her peers. In a late essay on the meaning of home, for instance, she writes “the destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world. The question of cultural apartheid and/or cultural integration is at the heart of all governments and informs our perceptions of the ways in which governance and culture compel the exoduses of peoples (voluntarily or driven) and raises complex questions of dispossession, recovery and the reinforcement of siege mentalities.” Compare such a balanced and thoughtful sentence against the current political rhetoric on either side of the Atlantic and the scope and complexity of what we have lost becomes vividly and painfully clear. But to practice leadership, you need to accept that you are in the business of generating chaos, confusion, and conflict - Ronald Heifetz

imaginative qualities.

I am asking the Government to instruct the Police Commissioner that they make patrols to try and entrap these thieves and plunderers, bereft of care and maybe even proper upbringing.

I am prepared to use my security service, RK’s Guyana Security Services and ask positive minded Security Agencies such as GEB, PGS and maybe some others to be on the lookout to effect arrests for destruction of properties of the people. Yes, the coconut trees are the properties of the people.

This environment can be for reflections, writings, photography and picnics. We need sponsors for garbage bins and to build up the area to get rid of potholes and plant more flowering trees to create that ambience of peace and beauty.

We as the people must respect our environment, our country, our leaders whether we like them or not and all fellow citizens. We all must contribute positively toward the development of Guyana.

Yours faithfully, Haji Dr. Roshan Khan