On the Queen and Moving Forward

An old woman far away has died and, in the manner of Donne, perhaps we can spare a moment of silence in acknowledgement of the Clod that has washed away, and that truly would be more than decent, more than enough.   However, in the wake of her passing, far too many of us have been conditioned to revere, and hence to mourn, a constructed and curated Promontorie, a façade which belief we have invested in to the detriment of the construction of our own Manor.  

Even, or especially, in the midst of outpouring of grief at her death at 96 years old, it bears reminding that for the past seven decades, Elizabeth II has played the colonial good cop, to the British imperial machinery’s bad cop – while it was Her Majesty’s troops that were sent to undermine and reshape Guyana’s pre-independence political direction for over a decade, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, it was Her Majesty herself who alighted to ‘grant’ independence in 1966. 

In her lifetime alone, the British Empire’s brutal oppression in Guyana was stark in itself, although nowhere close in degree to what took place elsewhere at the time. In 1948, for example, five sugar workers were slaughtered for protesting against labour exploitation at Enmore Estate.  No episode of Netflix’s polished biographical drama ‘The Crown’, chronicling her youth and her ascendancy to the throne, has ever even referred to the incident or them, much less stated their names – Rambarran, Pooran, Lallabagie Kissoon, Surujballi and Harry.

In 1954, two years after she ascended to the throne, a young poet and independence activist was imprisoned for six months, along with a young political leader, for the crime of seeking self-determination for the country from the shackles of Her Majesty’s exploitative imperial power.  That young political leader was Dr. Cheddi Jagan, and that poet, himself just a year younger than the then 27-year-old monarch, was Martin Carter.  During that time, Her Royal Majesty would send what was effectively an occupying military force, British troops that would remain in the colony for most of the decade leading up to Independence.  That era would inspire the famous poem of Carter’s, the one we have our children recite but do not educate them about the full historical context from which it came:

“This is the dark time, my love,

All round the land brown beetles crawl about.

The shining sun is hidden in the sky

Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow.

This is the dark time, my love,

It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.

It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.

Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.

Who comes walking in the dark night time?

Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass?

It is the man of death, my love, the strange invader

Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.”

Of course, even after independence British companies whose foundations were steeped in slavery and colonial exploitation – Bookers, and Sandbach Parker – would continue to control not just our national sugar industry, but corollary businesses like auto sales and appliances, for at least the next ten years until Guysuco was nationalized, at significant cost to the newly post-independence state, in 1976. 

While it was Her Majesty’s government’s machinations that would help to keep the post-Independence dictatorship in power for 28 years, in keeping with the ‘exigencies’ of Cold War geopolitics, it was Her Majesty herself who would once again alight here in 1994, two years after our first free and fair post-Independence elections and three after the Cold War had effectively ended, to address our Parliament to offer her “blessing at the highest level for return to full representative government” and “the fullest support from the United Kingdom for the consolidation and deepening of the democratic process”.

The nobility of the British Royalty is a myth, one that has survived for the past seventy years as the PR brand for a faded empire seeking to clothe its history of atrocity with a modern fable, with Elizabeth II as the ostensible moral center.  From the inane Royal Watch media to the absurd publicly-shared pseudo-protocol of “London Bridge has Fallen” to the sympathetic, functionally apologist high artistry that is the Emmys-sweeping ‘The Crown’ or the Oscar-winning ‘The Queen’, what we have been subject to, as Britain lost its imperial military influence, is the skillful transition from the sword to the pen, the theatre of grand war and invasion giving away to the grand theatre of public perception and social engineering.

Elizabeth II was no more the moral center providing corrective action when British troops were invading Guyana in 1954 and locking up Jagan and Martin Carter, than she was the moral center, providing corrective action when the British government, beginning just ten years ago, started deporting and otherwise treating as second class citizens the Windrush migrants, Caribbean people who had swarmed to Britain in the post-war years and who were conveniently welcomed with open arms to fill Her Majesty’s labour shortages, but who found out only recently that they were not in fact the full British citizens that they believed themselves to be after decades of living in and building the country.  She was no more some moral compass when the British were brutally suppressing the Mau Mau rebellion in then British colonial ‘possession’ Kenya at the beginning of her reign in the 1950s, than she was when, decades later, the Tony Blair government gave critical support to the lie of Weapons of Mass Destruction that the American government under George Bush, Jr., provided as the fig leaf to invade Iraq , resulting in a conflict that would cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens their lives, both directly in the conflict as well as its aftermath.

Borges wrote that, “Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.”  The person most are mourning in Elizabeth is a fraudulent intimate portrait, a construct deliberately implanted into the public sphere, protected by the Official Secrets Act, non-disclosure agreements and a complicit media.  Who among those professing grief can really remember from her a single heroic intervention, some inspirational statement, some specific deed that was not an artifice of the imperial machinery?  The realest things to have emerged from her monarchy are the familial scandals that have spilled out of and tainted it, and which over time have been deftly airbrushed (or Photoshopped, to keep the metaphor modern) away from her official portraiture.  And that portraiture was the mask she willingly provided to conceal the grotesque face of British foreign policy, particularly at the end of colonial era and beyond.

As Harvard Professor, Maya Jasanoff, wrote in her detailed and excoriating guest essay in the New York Times of September 8, titled ‘Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire’: 

“By design as much as by the accident of her long life, her presence as head of state and head of the Commonwealth, an association of Britain and its former colonies, put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval. As such, the queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.”

In brief, she was the Ivanka Trump of post-war British Imperialism, a supposedly ‘fair’ (feminine, pale, beautiful, principled) representative of indecent power with the quasi-official duty of pretending to temper that power’s ‘necessary’ excesses, a political palliative in which people invested their hopes of normalcy and decency because the sheer bitterness of what that power represented was so vicious and surreal.

To be clear, I am not recommending that we approach Elizabeth’s death with some reinvigorated sense of animus against the historical crimes of the empire she embodied.  I am saying that we as a people need to perceive her, and the machinery she represented, minus the veil of compromised history and deliberate miseducation that has been consistently pulled over our eyes, one that has whitewashed those crimes of empire and given us the image of an increasingly maternal old woman whose place in history is linked merely to embarrassing family squabbles and a wringing of gloved hands before putting on that proverbial stiff upper lip in times of supposed crisis in the “Realm”.  We have been fed a carefully curated image of cups of tea and crumpets and curtsies and corgis when what exists was in fact built upon blood and injustice.

We need to acknowledge that, and within the ecosystem of colonial history and its contemporary consequences, we have to adjust our vision inward – the old lady that died was not the epitome of humility, of achievement, of courage, of grace, or even power, she who was just conveniently born into the upper echelons of a racial, imperial, economic hegemony with automatic life tenure.  That embodiment, for us, exists in the old Indo-Guyanese canecutter who lived through the backbreaking labour and brutal administration of her empire’s colonial exploitation but who has endured and provided his children and grandchildren with the ability to strive for something greater across generations, education and upliftment, and who can without resentment look at the royal family whose wealth was wrung from his sweat and that of his ancestors, and still maintain his sense of calm.  That embodiment exists in the old colonial era public service worker, who as a young African-Guyanese woman, just two generations away from enslavement under the British Empire, was subject to years and years of casual, soul-crushing racism and deliberate professional under-development and exploitation, who saw for herself the “brown beetles” (British army vehicles) sent here to spread terror simply because people wanted self-determination, but who still committed heart and soul to building both a family and newly independent nation through economic crisis and critical shortages so that her grandson and that canecutter’s granddaughter could meet, fall in love and start a business and family and life together. 

It is that ability to survive and to emerge from crushing circumstances – from exploitation and racism and terror and human slaughter – with a fundamental dignity and a drive towards achievement, that is true nobility, not a hereditary throne of wealth and privilege built on perpetuating and profiting from those very injustices.  If we are to offer any truly redemptive prism with which we can view Elizabeth II, it is that as her life and ‘reign’ drudged on over the decades, she as a person became more Cumaean Sybil than British Monarch, suspended high in her shrunken, ampullar role, at once both protected from and exposed to the elements, increasingly exhausted (“respondebat illa: apothanein thelo”) of a lived experience to which no one else in the world could truly relate.  To that old woman, whatever her sins, we can offer, though not too deeply lest it be taken for a bow or curtsy, a final nod in empathy, because that is the power that we have inherited, of radical compassion, of forgiveness, as we turn now to those noble ancestors and fellow citizens who bequeathed that power upon us, with a new eye and the celebration that they are warranted.