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Guyana’s Ethnic Security Dilemma: Positing an 
Alternative Reading   

Duane Edwards 

 
Duane Edwards has recently completed reading for a bachelor degree in 

sociology at the University of Guyana. Though trained in the social sciences, he 
enjoys engaging in philosophical reflections. His main project in philosophy is to 
bring to bear the radical philosophical ideas of Caribbean thinkers to the problems 
faced by persons and institutions in the Caribbean.  

 
Introduction 

 The ethno-political problem currently affecting Guyana has 

occupied the attention of many Guyanese. The pre-occupation with 

this problem results from the fact that after forty six years of 

independence, Guyana is, by and large, stuck at the same place in 

terms of its political and racial engagement. The reality of race-based 

politics has become so ingrained in our collective psyche that every 

aspect of our social interaction is becoming increasingly defined and 

colored by our political/racial polemic. My occupation with the 

problem, however, goes a little further. I am interested in how our 

political/racial polemic serves to buttress regimes that are guilty of 

numerous totalitarian excesses; how the cleavage in our ethnic 

interaction produces negative externalities that affect the country as 

a whole; and how the purported fear of each other, base on fictitious 

premises, is creating a real monster right before our eyes. To assist 

me in exploring this tragi-comic situation, I will draw upon the 

resources of two of our Guyanese thinkers, viz., Wilson Harris and 

Ravi Dev, along with Slovenian Philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. 

 

Ethnic Security Dilemma – Ravi Dev 

 Ravi Dev, among other Guyanese thinkers, has posited an 

Ethnic Security Dilemma (ESD) as a means of explaining the 

political behavior of Guyanese political actors. According to this 

postulate, Guyanese of the two major race groups, namely Africans 

and Indians, vote for the parties which they think would, or is more 



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inclined to, confront and resolve their respective (ESD). The African 

Security Dilemma (ASD) has to do with the numerical dominance of 

Indians. In a political structure that prioritizes majoritarian 

democracy, Africans can be locked out of political power in 

perpetuity (Dev 2008: 113). On the other hand, the Indian Security 

Dilemma (ISD) has to do with the dominance of Africans in the 

Armed Forces. In the event of ethnic strife, Africans have the upper 

hand based on their control of the arms and ammunition in the 

country. Grounded on these 'real' situations, and unfortunate 

historical experiences, Africans and Indians vote to this day in a way 

that is perceived as prioritizing 'race', but which Dev, et al, argue is 

determined by their respective security dilemmas. 

A Different Reading of Reality –Wilson Harris 

 Wilson Harris, the Guyanese writer and literary critic, of 

course, pursued a radically different reading of reality. He was not 

interested in the simple explanation and justification of the status 

quo; he was interested in how the reality (African dominated armed 

forces and bureaucracy, Indian numerical (political) and economic 

dominance) could result in the minting of the many bizarre 

currencies of the imagination that are experienced in Guyanese 

history; he was interested in why out of the infinite number of 

possible ways to deal with, confront or neutralize these (real) 

imbalances, Guyanese choose the one possibility that result in a 

crudely political and racially divided society. And, it is in exploring 

this question that Wilson Harris, the Guyanese writer and literary 

critic, converges with the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, 

Slavoj Zizek while at the same time exposing us to creatively new 

approaches to the reading of reality. 

ESD results in a Stalled Dialectic 

 Harris introduces the concept of the 'backward-flowing 

stream of consciousness'. Existing in this state of consciousness, 

Guyanese, by and large, allow the past or past experiences to gain a 

type of militant occupancy over their current liveliness, a militancy 

which should otherwise be reserved for the future or present. 



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  The future and present which are usually pregnant with 

limitless possibilities have been, in Guyana's case, static. This reveals 

a comic inversion of reality and progress in the Guyanese political 

and ethnic engagement. Our future takes the place of our past while 

our past assumes the role of our future. What is being witnessed in 

Guyana is not even a negative dialectic in Adorno's or Harris' sense 

whereby there is a progressive negation of the totalizing structures 

which come with the Marxian and Hegelian dialectics. On the 

contrary, it is a stalled dialectics in which the synthesis is already 

made impossible by the thesis and antithesis. This stalled dialectics 

has been referred to by someone (Walter Benjamin I think) as 

'dialectics at a standstill' - dialectic, in that, what is being witnessed 

are persons of the same racial group but of various classes and 

religions overcoming their religious and class differences in order to 

achieve a unity and identity which Harris refers to as 'pigmented 

identity' (an identity based on skin color and hair texture); stalled 

because the dialectical positing of unity in diversity fails to move 

beyond skin color and hair texture. Guyanese are stuck in history as 

prisoners of history whereby history forecloses any possibility of 

freedom. So instead of achieving 'the future in the present' in C.L.R. 

James' sense, Guyanese are stuck with the past in the present. This 

backward-flowing stream of consciousness and prisoner-of-history 

psyche reveal a lot about the psychic states of Guyanese. It is only a 

pathological psychic condition which would allow the subjection of a 

living being to a hardened social practice that goes against his/her 

own well-being. 

 This psychic condition is what Harris referred to as a 'lust 
for symmetry'. This lust is highlighted rather clearly by the Christian 
existentialist Kierkegaard in his 'The Sickness unto Death'. 
According to Kierkegaard, the self is made up of the synthesis of 
finitude and infinitude. The development of the self therefore 'must 
accordingly consist in infinitely coming away from oneself [that is 
one's finite self]...and in infinitely coming back to oneself in the 
finitization' (1989: 69). Despair occurs whenever there is a short-
circuit in this process, that is to say, whenever there is a failure to 
check the infinitizing tendency of the self or to break out of the 
confining and constraining tendency. Zizek, in his 'The Ticklish 
Subject' gives a clear explanation of the Kierkegaardian despair 



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(Harrisian lust for symmetry). According to Zizek, '...Kierkegaard 
inverted the standard despair of the individual who is split between 
the certainty that death is the end...and the unquenchable desire to 
believe that death is not the last thing...Kierkegaard's sickness unto 
death involves the opposite paradox of the subject who knows that 
death is not the end....but cannot face the exorbitant demands of this 
fact' (1999: 292-293). Whereas for Kierkegaard, it is not death but 
life which becomes the ultimate horror for modern man for Harris it 
is not confinement but freedom which becomes the ultimate horror 
for the post-independence West Indian man. The Guyanese 
personality exemplifies this fear of freedom in its ideal. This fear of 
freedom is what buttresses totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. 
 

The Art of Memory and the Re-membering of History 

This prioritizing of history and historical experience lies at 
the heart of the conflict between Caribbean poeticism and 
historicism. For Harris, a 'historical stasis...afflicts the West Indian 
sensibility'. (Harris: 156). This historical stasis results from the 
prioritizing of history which according to Harris is equated with 
prioritizing of the dead (past acts that have lost their spontaneity) 
above the living (current acts of the spontaneous and creative 
imagination): the pitting of historical fact and experience against the 
currency of the radical and creative imagination. It is not even the 
prioritizing of history as such but only of one view or perspective of 
history, which in other words amount to giving permanent and 
totalitarian status to an historical account which could only be 
temporary and tentative. Against this tendency, Harris urges us to 
engage in the profound art of memory, to engage in various creative 
readings of reality and history. This art of memory entails not merely 
remembering but re-membering history, which entails first 
dismembering then reconstructing the disjecta membra of history. If 
one moves from Harris' metaphysics of history to history proper, one 
finds noteworthy attempts at applying Harris' Art of Memory to 
history. Two such attempts are Walter Rodney's 'A History of the 
Guyanese Working People, 1881 -1905' and C.L.R. James' 'Black 
Jacobins'. Commenting in a foreword to Rodney's book, George 
Lamming stated that for Rodney '...history was a way of ordering 
[emphasis mine] knowledge which could become as active part of the 
consciousness of an uncertified mass of ordinary people and which 
could be used by all as an instrument of social change.' The phrase 
'ordering knowledge' speaks both to the intentionality of the thinking 



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subject and the selective nature of history. It is this intentionality 
and agency of the thinking subject that Harris emphasizes in all his 
work. The following excerpt by Sharrad commenting on the task of 
the artist of memory is very instructive. 

"He shuffles his notes in order to awaken memory and in the 
process reorders [emphasis mine] perceptions of the past, creating 
new possibilities for understanding the complex interrelationship of 
innocence and guilt via the breakdown of tyrannical biases of 
stratified social attitudes and linear documentary history" (Sharrad: 
103). 

With this ordering and reordering of perceptions of the past, 
Walter Rodney becomes the quintessential artist of memory. The 
main purpose of his book was to review history in order to bring to 
life those periods in our history in which both Africans and Indians 
were engaged in unified struggles against the system of oppression. 
'Working people of African and Indian ancestry in Guyana have had 
a history of active struggle which it has been our habit to omit or 
underestimate in political discourse about the past' (qtd. In Rodney: 
xix). Walter Rodney, in a different reading of reality searched for 
those moments in the past in which the various races break down the 
racial barriers and engaged in acts of collective liberation. For him 
what we need more than the bland recollection of the unfortunate 
occurrences of the past is a profound confession of the selective 
effacing of the eruption of consciousness which is a necessary 
condition for a radical counter-history. 

Ideological Substructure of Political Actions – Slavoj Zizek 

 Ravi Dev's ESD, while a sociologically valid construct, made 

the error of totally ignoring the ideological underpinnings of the 

political behavior of the two major races in Guyana by attempting to 

suggest that their political behavior is purely situational. For him 

there is no ideological undercurrents fueling the actions of Africans 

and Indians in Guyana – they merely react to pressing and 

threatening politico-economic realities. Dev's thinking is a classic 

manifestation of post-modern thinking which attempts to suggest 

that we are in post-ideological times. By doing so, Dev effectively 

separates political belief from political action and behavior. Political 

action, according to his theory, is not guided by inherited ideologies 

but by current political situation. To what extent is Dev's 



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conceptualization of the political culture of Guyanese accurate? This 

is where Slavoj Zizek might be of some value. 

 According to Zizek, political action is always driven by 

political belief. But, while in the past it was very easy to identify 

those beliefs because persons avowedly held on to those beliefs, in 

what is called the post-ideological age there is a great deal of denial 

and distancing from beliefs and ideologies. In the past, persons had 

no qualms about saying that they believe Africans are inferior or that 

Indians are coolies, or about subscribing to Marxism, or even 

Nazism. Paradoxically, what has happened in the age of tolerance 

and multiculturalism is not what would be logically expected, that is, 

'I hold this view but I am still tolerant of those who do not share it'. 

What has happened in fact is that the prevailing attitude under 

multiculturalism is 'I cannot profess to hold this view because it 

would appear as being intolerant of another's view'. Because of the 

rule of this arch-ideology of tolerance, there is a reluctance to 

admittedly hold on to any belief which could be interpreted as 

promoting intolerance. This does not mean, however, that we do not, 

in spite of this dominant ideology of tolerance and multiculturalism, 

hold on to, albeit disavowedly, parochial, exclusive, ethnocentric, 

sexist and religious fundamentalist ideologies. We still do, but we do 

so quietly. This is what led Sarah Ahmed to remark that 

"multiculturalism is a fantasy which conceals forms of racism, 

violence and inequality'' (qtd. In Zizek 2009). It deals with racist, 

sexist, and other such separatist ideologies in very superficial ways. 

For example, we are expected to be politically correct when 

addressing others. We can no longer refer to Africans as 'black dogs' 

or Indians as 'coolie crab dogs' because that would inspire the 

utmost disapprobation from 'civil' society. We can, however, be 

totally oblivious to the killing, suffering and oppression of the other. 

Not only can we be oblivious to it but we can also literally contribute 

to it, if we do so in a 'politically correct' manner. 

 

 



CARIBBEAN QUILT | 2013 

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Outsourcing of Ideology – The Big Other 

 Another way, according to Zizek, ideology plays out in our 

political behavior is by means of the Big Other. The Big Other is a 

technical term borrowed by Zizek from Lacanian psychoanalysis. 

According to the thesis of the Big Other, subjects need not directly 

subscribe to a particular political ideology; they can do so by means 

of their political representatives. In this way, their political ideology 

is proxied by another. This reduces the burden of knowing or being 

aware of the master signifiers current in the ideology while at the 

same time also reducing any kind of responsibility. Both the 

symbolic meaning and responsibility are outsourced to what is called 

the 'Big Other'. In our own Guyanese case, the Big Other' can be 

manifested in the personages of our politicians, priests, political 

parties or ancestors. Let's take the exhortation by former President 

Bharrat Jagdeo in the election campaign of 2011 as a means of 

clarifying the above. Jagdeo exhorted a cross-section of the Guyanese 

community to 'know your history'. The call by Jagdeo was not 

necessarily to study Guyanese history which would entail (re-

)reading history from various viewpoints. On the contrary, it was a 

call to know what your ancestors or politicians say about history. In 

that case, your politicians or ancestors become your big other to 

whom you have outsourced the burden and responsibility of knowing 

history (the former Leader of the Opposition, Robert Corbin, was 

quick to urge his audience, after he gave them his version of history 

at campaign meetings, not to get overwhelmed by amnesia). The 

security of conscience offered by this outsourcing of ideology is made 

evident by the court case between Fredrick Kissoon and Bharrat 

Jagdeo in 2012. The case has so far revealed that the major 

bureaucratic and Government positions were disproportionately 

held by Indians, no Africans held Ambassadorial positions and that 

only 0.5 % of all the state resources that were privatized went to 

Africans. Because of the Big Other thesis, Indians who supported the 

PPP/C regime with their votes can rest with a free conscience 

because while they vote the party in, they were not directly 

responsible for the selection process that determines who become 

Ministers and Ambassadors. In a farcical manner of course, this is a 

wonderful manifestation of Kantian morality. Kant is the 



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philosopher who posited the categorical imperative. What he means 

is that moral laws are so absolutely imperative that if a killer breaks 

into your home with the intent to kill your wife (husband) and 

children and insist that you tell him where they are hiding you are 

obligated to tell him the truth. When you tell him the 'truth' you have 

discharged the entirety of your moral obligation. If the killer finds 

your family and kills them, he is the one, not you, who have to bear 

the entirety of the moral burden for his act: you have totally 

exculpated yourself from any moral responsibility by being truthful. 

While the Kantian morality prioritizes the moral law, existential 

morality prioritizes freedom and responsibility. For the existentialist, 

both concepts, freedom and responsibility, exist in a kind of Kantian 

synthesis – freedom is already presupposed by responsibility and 

vice versa. And because one is always absolutely free in an 

existentialist sense, one is also absolutely responsible. So there is no 

way that Indians in Guyana, from which the PPP/C obtains its votes, 

can be totally exculpated from the responsibility for the ideological 

racism of the PPP/C. Existentialist morality would also place no less 

a responsibility on Africans, Amerindians and other ethnic groups, 

because although they may not have voted for the PPP/C, they, by 

and large, legitimize the PPP/C's racism by choosing to fight only by 

means of ballot which is another way of conscience cleansing - ' I did 

my part by voting against the PPP/C, therefore I have fulfilled the 

entirety of my moral responsibility'. 

 This reading of reality, some might argue, places too much 

burden on the masses without understanding the structural 

constraints that influence their action. As a way of pandering to the 

masses, a structural reading of reality is preferable. This structural 

reading of reality is precisely the reading of reality that strips 

individuals of their humanity, subjectivity and agency and reduces 

them to objects rather than subjects of history. It is also a reading of 

reality that seems to be engendering 'collective psychopathy' among 

the masses. Psychopathy is a condition in which victims become 

oblivious to the personal responsibility of their acts and who try to 

place the blame on every other thing or person except themselves. 

 



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Ideology as a Result without its Sustaining Cause 

 Another characteristic of ideology outlined by Zizek has to 

do with its truth content or lack thereof. Ideology carries out a social 

function quite unrelated to the truth it professes to represent. And, 

in carrying out this function, its professed truth need not reflect the 

political or other reality. For example, Dev's ESD by his own 

admission has become baseless on both sides of the ethnic divide. He 

openly admits that Africans need not fear Indian numerical 

supremacy because Indians as an absolute numerical majority is a 

thing of the past. On the other hand, he inadvertently I suppose, 

admitted that approximately 30 years after the Indian community 

voted for the PPP/C to address its ESD, Indians are still faced with 

an African-dominated Armed Forces to the extent that when Indians 

protest the Police Force, by command, are prepared to shoot to kill 

(according to Ravi Dev). This occurs in a political environment in 

which it is not only PPP/C and PNC/R competing politically which 

would have clearly explained the political behavior of both groups; 

but in which the WPA, AFC, JFAP and even ROAR whose programs 

were intended to radically address the ESD, were available 

alternatives. With these competing facts, one can clearly see that it is 

not the fact to which the ESD purports that influences the political 

behavior of Guyanese because those facts simply do not exist. 

Guyanese, by and large, are motivated by politico-racial ideologies 

the truth content of which has long since been invalidated. These 

ideologies have become what Wilson Harris refers to as 'Apparition 

of the dead among the living'; they do not only direct the life of the 

living but also weigh heavily and overbearingly upon our present and 

future. This mindless attachment to these substance-less insecurities 

reveal something more fundamental in the human psyche, for which 

a purely structural argument or analysis might be totally inefficient. 

This is why Wilson Harris' exploration of the West Indian psyche 

might be of significantly more value than Dev's ESD. 

 To add further clarification to this disconnect between the 

social reality and social ideology of both Africans and Indians, a brief 

exploration of Sylvia Wynter's sociology of knowledge or social 



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epistemology might be useful. This reading of  Wynter is adopted 

and adapted from Paget Henry. 

 In response to the epistemological question "what are the 
processes through which signs and symbols represent and shape our 
perception of reality?" Wynter's response is that this process involves 
indirect representation by which the signs and symbols and their 
relation to reality always take place in a particular discursive 
framework which is shaped by the concepts, symbols and rules of 
statement formation which constitute it. These elements which 
constitute the discursive framework are in turn shaped by prevailing 
social and natural imperatives. It is usual, however, for the discursive 
framework to take on a life of its own by outliving its social 
imperative. The time between which the social imperative becomes 
null and the new social imperative give rise to a new discursive 
framework, I hereby refer to as an epistemic gap. It is my position 
that we are currently within this epistemic gap. The discursive 
framework provided by the ESD becomes then a result without its 
sustaining cause. The Wynterian response to this self-perpetuating 
framework would be to expose the baseless nature of the founding 
categories of this transcendentalised discursive framework. Dev 
stopped half way of this revolutionary project of decentering the 
founding categories of the ESD framework by seeming to be willing 
only to expose the emptiness of the ASD while maintaining the 
validity of the ISD. Dev needs to take the next step forward. 
 

Redemption via Abjection 

 Furthermore, while the behavior determined by the ESD 

fails to bring about its intended result, that is, the security of the 

race, it has resulted, nevertheless, not in the security of one race but 

the subordination of all races under a lumpenbourgeoisie. In spite of 

about 30 years of PPP rule (counting also the period in the 50's and 

60's) Africans still dominate the Armed Forces and the public sector. 

On the other hand, in spite of, in fact as a result of, 28 years of PNC 

rule, the numerical dominance of Indians have been given more 

'teeth' as a result of an executive presidency and the inability of 

parties to form coalitions after an election: two constitutional 

changes brought about by the PNC. In an interesting paradox, it is 

the PNC that gave more weight to the numerical dominance of the 



CARIBBEAN QUILT | 2013 

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Indians quite in contrast to the fear of its own constituency. This 

same paradox is seen on the side of the PPP/C which against the 

wishes its own constituency refuses for decades to reform and 

professionalize the Guyana Police Force. 

 This being the reality -Africans and Indians continue to vote 

for parties which worsen their respective ESD - what if the familiar 

way of reading the political situation in Guyana is erroneous; what if 

it is not Africans and Indians who are victims of the political 

machination of the PNC/R and the PPP/C respectively but quite the 

opposite. What if both the PNC/R and PPP/C correspond to 

primordially dark sentiments in both races which desire the 

oppression and marginalization of the other. What if with the 

political machination of the two parties, Africans and Indians 

become victims of exactly what they secretly wish for the other. The 

PNC/R and PPP/C are only able to swindle us because within our 

own unconscious (Jungian instincts) there is a desire to swindle the 

other. Ervin Goffman highlighted this paradox in his 'Frame 

Analysis' and Slavoj Zizek in his 'The Ticklish Subject'. In Goffman's 

anecdote, in certain dark streets in America, hustlers with stolen 

items to sell were wont to run out of dark spots anxiously 

confronting innocent passersby. The hustler would give the passerby 

the impression that he is selling her/him a watch (or some other 

item) at half the market price. Thinking that s/he is getting a good 

deal on the stolen item, the passerby falls for the bait only to realize 

later that the price s/he paid was the actual market price. Another 

example drawn from local experience with what we call 'junkies' 

would further add clarity. The junkie goes into a neighbourhood yard 

cuts out a flower plant by the stem and pushes it in a milk tin with 

mud. Knowing that the plant will soon wither, the junkie endeavours 

to sell it immediately. He, therefore, approaches someone in the 

neighbourhood offering the plant at a ridiculously low price. 

Thinking that it is a good deal, someone in the neighbourhood buys 

the plant only to see it wither in less than a day. In both cases the 

swindler only succeeded because he appealed to something abject 

within the victims. That abjectness is the need to benefit at the loss 

of another. It is through this need that we ourselves become 

swindled by our political parties and leaders. Is it not that what 



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happens, if Ravi Dev is right, when we vote according to our own 

ESD? Do we not desire our dilemma to be resolved at the expense of 

the other group's dilemma? 

 Strange as it may sound, it is by means of such abject desires 

that redemption (individual, group, national) is possible. This 

redemption by means of abjection was expounded upon by Ethel A. 

Powell who in her Master's thesis explored the theme of redemption 

through abjection in the works of Wilson Harris, Julia Kristeva, et al. 

Powell concluded that for both Harris and Kristeva, redemption 

involves coming to grips with one's own abjectness. Kristeva defines 

abjectness as '...the raw crudity about humans such as...murderous 

impulses, horrifying thoughts and deeds...in short the abject is what 

we as humans are often about but we are loathe to admit...' (qtd. In 

Powell 2005). It is only by recognizing in ourselves what we fear in 

the other that we realize that the monstrous, abject Other is not 

necessarily outside but inside ourselves. The Other is not,'the 

intruder responsible for all the ills of the polis. Neither the 

apocalypse on the move nor the instant adversary to be eliminated 

for the sake of appeasing the group. Strangely, the foreigner lives 

within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks 

our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By 

recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in 

himself' (qtd. In Powell: 8). 

 It is by means of such profound self-confession that we are 

able first of all to redeem ourselves (group, race); secondly, to 

destroy the swindler (PNC/R, PPP/C) by destroying his opportunity 

to swindle us; thirdly, to realize that the other group or race is not a 

monster that needs to be marginalized or exterminated but fellow 

human beings the understanding of whom has been interrupted by 

the projection of our own fears on them, a process which has been 

exploited by the  swindlers. 

 

 



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Citations  

 

Dev, Ravi. (2008). "For a New Political Culture in Guyana". In Transition 

no. 38-39, 2008, edited by Rishee Thakur. Turkeyen: IDS. 

 

Harris, Wilson. (1999). Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished 

Genesis of the Imagination. London: Routledge. 

 

Henry, Paget. (2000). Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro Caribbean 

Philosophy. New York: Routledge. 

 

Kierkegaard, Soren. (1989). The Sickness Unto Death. London: Penguin 

Books 

 

Powell, Ethel Anne. (2005). Ghosts of Chance for redemption via 

Abjection in Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock and Others. A 

Master's Thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina 

University. 

 

Rodney, Walter. (1981). A History of the Guyanese Working People, 

1881 -1905. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 

 

Sharrad, Paul. (1995). The Arts of Memory and the Liberation of History: 

Wilson Harris Witnessing of Time. London: The Johns Hopkins University 

Press. 

 

Zizek, Slavoj. (1999). The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political 

Ontology. New York: Verso. 

 

-- (2009). Multiculturalism: the Reality of an Illusion. Www.lacan.com 

 

 


