Revolutionary Comes Home

I am returning to Guyana.

With the support of a few people, I’m making this first step of my thousand-mile journey. I feel that this is the most significant revolutionary action of my life so far. For me, to leave amerika is to leave the plantation, to leave my shackles behind and move on as a free man to the Motherland. I have waited so long for this. I have anticipated this night on many nights before.

In the last six months, I have profoundly contemplated my knowledge, my consciousness, my life, my revolution. While the decision to leave amerika was an easy one, I realised that it was crucial that I honestly understood that I can’t leave amerika because amerika is bad; I have to go to Guyana because Guyana needs me. In other words, I am not _leaving_ amerika; I am _going_ to Guyana. As long as I adjust my mentality to remember this at all times, then I would never feel resentment or discouragement in Guyana when things get difficult. I imagine that at the most desperate of times in Guyana I may question myself, “Why did you give up opportunity in amerika to be here?” which—when posed like that—is a troubling question to answer, and will take me to a state of disillusionment and doubt. But if I leave amerika with the correct mentality, then when things get though I will instead ask myself, “Why did you come to Guyana?” and the answer to that question is easier to find and offers motivation: “Because 700, 000 people need freedom.”

I can think of dozens of reason to _leave amerika_, but it is the one reason to _return to Guyana_ that drives my decision: that I have a mental, social, and cultural allegiance to Guyana and its people, and as a conscious person I cannot rest until we are all free. We must always be willing to fight for freedom, because there will always be people willing to take it away from us.

Besides, I am happy in Guyana. Guyana is the benchmark from which I quantify beauty, not any hazy concrete jungle, not any white suburbia that we see on the television. The street corner, the free-flowing trench, the lone coconut tree, the intoxicating grass, the passion of the people, the uniformed school children, the mighty Essequibo, the afternoon cricket games, the Sunday music—this is beauty to me.

Still, as much as I love Guyana, I _must_ be a world citizen first. I cannot hold primary allegiance to political boundaries drawn up in slave days. Political boundaries ultimately lead to social, cultural and racial boundaries in the mind. To place your country before another is to place your people (white or black) before another. I feel, for example, that the ultra-patriotism of white middle-amerika develops a global short-sightedness and disrespect for other peoples. One country may be bombed with less hesitance because its people are “sand-niggers” in the eyes of middle-amerika. Another country will never face the possibility of a military attack and negotiations will continue because the people are racially and socially familiar. Even tough I’m a world citizen before anything else, I believe the best course of action would be to change Guyana, then change the world.

Now, as I feel myself getting into the philosophy of my revolution, it’s pertinent that I assure you that my thinking exceeds what is presented here at GuyanaTruth. And I say this as humbly as one can. As I have learned more, I’ve devoted less time to GuyanaTruth because I realised the relative ineffectiveness of this medium. While revolutionaries have to educate the people, there is only so much that a Tripod website can do. A defining characteristic of a revolutionary is that he or she walks the walk everyday. Talking the talk is important, as far as the dissemination of knowledge is concerned, but if that’s all you’re doing then you’re under-working yourself. I don’t have the time or patience to lay out my broad, evolving ideology on the internet, assuming that anyone is interested. I’m going to Guyana to put this knowledge into action.

It’s time for action. Mario Savio, an American political activist said in 1964,

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

The ideology of the revolutionary _is_ dynamic, but not contradictory. Changing, evolving ideas are evidence of an active mind. A month from now, my experiences in Guyana could transform by opinions, though I’m certain that a set of core beliefs will remain intact regardless. Some of these are that the race vote in Guyana needs to be killed, that the people need to be more active against systems that take advantage of them, that mental slavery is not just alive across the world—but that it’s being engineered by corporations and governments.

We all have to be interested in politics. Politics is governance. Governance of the state, governance of the self. You _must_ be interested in how you’re being governed. I believe that all governments are corruptible. Power corrupts. Therefore, the type of government or economic situation of a nation is unimportant. What’s important is the power of the people to organise and mobilise themselves and demand something better whenever they are done wrong. To organise and mobilise, the people first need knowledge and that is the responsibility of all knowledgeable people. I am returning to take hold my part of that responsibility.

But while I feel the power of the people precede the political and economic systems of a nation, I do not favour capitalism because of my experiences with it. In a capitalist society, one can only gain wealth as another proportionately loses it. This is common sense, and it is the fundamental reason why capitalism is evil. The success of one person depends on the failure of another. There must be poor for there to be rich. The rich members of a capitalist society depend on the ignorance, gullibility and docility of their fellow citizens to be prominent. Whenever there are have and have-nots, revolution is inevitable. Whenever freedom is denied, revolution is the only resolution.

As musician Ani DiFranco puts it in her song “Serpentine,” “the profit system follows the path of least resistance and the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked, makes it serpentine, capitalism is the devil's wet dream.”

And amerika is a capitalist empire. Despite the government and corporate media propaganda trying to pass amerika off as a defender of the free, home of the brave, I know better. I know that amerika was built on the backs of slaves. Amerika was therefore built on one of the highest forms of immorality and wickedness. And the slave-owners still run things—from the White House, from the high-rise offices. As much as they try to convince me that the red, white and blue is a symbol of freedom, it will always be the mark of imperial exploitation and camouflaged terrorism to me.

Your amerikan dream is our nightmare.

People all over the world need to know this. Especially in Guyana, as part of the first step of revolution—education—we must eradicate the television-taught idealisation of amerika. The truth must be maintained that while amerika waves flags and sings songs of freedom almighty, it is not a democracy. While they enjoy the freedoms that most of the world already does, they frequently confuse wealth with freedom. It _might_ be the freest on earth, but amerika is not a free country. we _can_ follow the few good examples of amerika—which have really been done by the people of amerika who oppose its nation's oppressive policies and who use their liberties to work towards real democracy—but we must be careful to avoid the many bad examples.

amerika is a society of social subjugation. You’re not wanted, and they let you know that. For example, look at the terminology. Even if you were born in amerika, a person of Guyanese heritage will be called Guyanese-amerikan, a person of African heritage will be called African-amerikan, a person of East-Indian heritage will be called Indian-amerikan, and a person of Chinese heritage will be called Chinese-amerikan. However, a white person—even one who wasn’t born in amerika will be called amerikan. Plain amerikan—the pure thing. No, the correct term is European-amerikan. The real Americans are the Native Indians who were displaced by the monarchies of Europe.

A letter I wrote in February gives a glimpse into my life in amerika:

Yesterday I heard from Darrell for the first time since he left and things sound decent in Guyana. I'm very stressed out and mentally fatigued in America. I'm feeling, as I have felt in the past, physical pains across my chest due to all this stress. I don't want to get into a lengthy exposition about my depressed and deplorable life in America; I just want you to know that I hate it here. Every other day in America takes me deeper into the pits of human suffering. At GuyanaTruth, I'm trying to express the social and political reasons for my suffering. Essentially, my politics and my beliefs prevent me from associating or integrating with American or Americanised persons. Consequently, I'm isolated physically, emotionally and financially in a prison where the gatekeepers and my fellow prisoners are all my enemy. Darrell was my single comrade in this prison and he has escaped it. Now he awaits me in a free country. I don't think I could ever impart upon you my experiences in America and the way this country and its people have damaged me. This place truly is my jail. I am in the belly of the beast here. And to worsen my state of mind, I have to deal with the fact that this is what most Guyanese are struggling towards. Life here probably won't be difficult for them though, because they will integrate. They'll accept their prison and put the American dollar before their consciousness. They won't care that they're not really free because they'll have things that make them _feel_ free, that they think make them better: credit cards, cell phones, big cars, expensive clothes, straightened hair, lighter skin, children with American accents, fake American accents themselves, and of course, paper with pictures of dead white men.

Despite all this, I'm trying to be as optimistic as possible. My escape from this prison is inevitable. It is only a matter of time.

It is too easy to find fault in amerika, and doing so does me little good. There are many good people in amerika and, yes, many of these people are white. There is an underground war in amerika and I believe that this country will fall. amerika is an empire and all empires fall. Unless every white man and every white woman change their minds and actions to accept people who look different from them, revolution is inevitable in amerika. Classism is a great issue in amerika, but I feel that this problem arises out of racism because if the rich white felt enough compassion for the coloured poor in amerika to do something to help, then the system of classes wouldn’t exist.

Race shouldn’t matter, but my generation and I live in a world where our societies have been subverted by the white amerikan government. Our goal should be to create a world where our children and their children can exist peacefully, freely. But right now I feel anger towards whites who seem to despise anything that comes in a colour darker than theirs.

I have to be concerned about amerika because this empire poses a threat to our freedom. Amerika has overthrown many democratically-elected leaders and has set up political and economic foreign policies that allow it to have considerable control over a country’s dealings. Also, amerika concerns me because of this thing it produces called a “Guyanese-amerikan.”

Whenever I think of Guyanese-amerikans I get angry. I am so angry that my own family could be this ungrateful and servile. In his song “The Poverty of Philosophy,” Immortal Technique sums in up sufficiently:

They don't realise that America can't exist without separating them from their identity, because if we had some sense of who we really are, there's no way in hell we'd allow this country to push it's genocidal consensus on our homelands.

I can tolerate ignorance, but I cannot understand nor accommodate wilful ignorance. How can a person be wilfully ignorant? To be wilfully ignorant is to be a mental slave, so why would someone make themselves a mental slave? What incentive is there? McDonalds, I guess.

I get even angrier when I think of Guyanese-amerikans who visit Guyana with a condescending attitude, always quick to compare amerika to Guyana and inform us why the whites are better. These people are overworked and underpaid government slaves who bring two suitcases full of fancy things to mislead their own people in Guyana. You see, they are ashamed that they came to amerika and had to find out the hard way that they were lied to about this great land of milk and honey that really is just a plantation for mental slaves, and when they go back to Guyana, rather than admit that they were deceived, they lie. They give the impression that amerika is the place to be, they miseducate their own people. They perpetuate this cycle of ignorance.

If you heard some of these people talk, you’d think they were home-grown amerikans from alabama. Am I supposed to overlook this shameful display of cultural assimilation because so many other people do? Some of these people—brown as the Demerara—talk about whites and coloureds as if they were white themselves. I’ve realised that a lot of non-black Guyanese-amerikans live with the mentality that "if you're not black, you're white" but that isn't true. The reality is that "if you're not white, you're black" but _not_ vice versa.

My comrade suggested something that I overlooked—that the word “coloured” has connotations of slavery and colonialism. Well my connotations of “coloured” are vibrant, rich, powerful, energetic, and full of life.

But I’m going back a revolutionary for the people, and if I ever come across a Guyanese-amerikan showing off their new amerikan accent and telling us why we can’t get ahead—I _will_ call them an uncle tom. Whatever your race, I _will_ call you a house Negro.

I call myself a revolutionary knowing that this status is subjective. By the standards of another, I may _not_ be a revolutionary. I don’t mean to advertise myself as “revolutionary,” I just know that I am.

Knowledge is the most important weapon of the revolutionary. Books are the most economical and practical way to find knowledge, so read. Read your history, politics, economics, and psychology. There’s also a lot of informative and encouraging films and music out there. Some musicians I would highly recommend are dead prez, Immortal Technique, Ani DiFranco, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, and Common. Bob Marley goes without mention.

Though my experiences tell me it will be futile, I have to make a final call to Guyanese in amerika: come home. Come home with the right mentality. Free your mind.

Leave the united slaves of amerika. Let’s build Guyana. Let’s all be first-class citizens in Guyana, rather than dogs in amerika.

I’m happy that, however obvious and redundant it is, my final experience in amerika will be leaving it permanently.

This is no good bye. This is no epilogue. This is the beginning. I have returned to Guyana. The state of mind, the nation.

Educate. Organise. Mobilise.

Gerard Ulric Martins