Some of my best friends are coolies...

A couple of years ago, one of my two closest friends and I are travelling in his car when he casually mentions to me that he heard I was racist. How do your respond to such a charge coming from a respected friend? More importantly, how do you respond to such a charge coming from a respected friend who happens to be, and I hate this fucking term, "of another race."?

My ancestry consists of Portuguese, Amerindian, African and Indian. I may look mostly like one thing, "African", but my siblings (same parents) are all "high yella and got that good hair, chile." Call me greedy but I feel I have a right to claim every fucking strand of genetic heritage I have in me...and I do.

The problem this poses with my writing, particularly in racially explosive Guyana, is that because I look more like one thing than the other, my work is automatically categorised as representative of one thing, as unspoken as this may be.

Six years ago, I ran into this phenomenon head-on. After working my ass off on editing the Guyana Christmas Annual 2001, I was called into Guyenterprise (which published the Annual) to respond to a letter charging that a story I published, "Coolie Tom Puss" written by Haslyn Parris, was racist in nature. Now the thing I have noticed with racists is that they are very much like those nasty people who fart in the company of others and then start up a furore by accusing someone else of letting one rip.

Now I had included Parris' story for the specific reason that it highlighted the absurdity of racial prejudice, something I thought was more or less fucking necessary in the aftermath of the 2001 Elections. Every Indian supremacist reactionary nutjob crawled out of the fucking woodwork, offended by the word "coolie" was used in the Annual. Or rather, they sent in a barrage of letters to the Editor under names that rival those published on Chronicle's letter pages in terms of fictitiousness. I had a field day...

"Mr. Thompson finds as "most objectionable" the title of the story. Assuming that it is the word "coolie" which has raised the ire of Mr. Thompson, then I suggest he would be equally offended at seeing David Dabydeen's Coolie Odyssey (Hansib, 1988) or Clem Seecharan's Bechu: Bound Coolie Radical in British Guiana (UWI, 1999). "

By the time the issue ended, it had spawned an editorial in Stabroek News and after a complete dissection of their idiocy by yours truly, the ghost writers went on to attack my age (I was 21 at the time) and my literary qualifications. My age I couldn't defend, but my response to my alleged lack of literary qualifications was having two manuscripts shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature that same year.

I admit now that experiencing racism in Guyana was a culture shock for me in the years after leaving high school. I spent the bulk of my formative years in President's College. In PC back then, race was more for descriptive purposes than anything else, largely cut off as we were from the prejudices - that inheritance of divisive neurosis - that was one legacy of our parents.

For the most part, PC people (the men in particular) treat the fact that we come from the same alma mater as if we belong in some Skull and Bones society or some lodge. And not in the pompous, punkish way those QC faggots do it either - it's a more solid, more real broderbund that came out of living in the same dorms, eating at the same tables, peeping through the windows at the same girls, pissing in the same "brewery". Saying you are a PC banna is good for anything from a job, free drinks, access to information, ...it's like saying that you been in jail in certain gangsta cultures.

While my friends in SASOD are fighting up about the dangers of prejudice against people because of their sexual orientation, racism is the leading fucking ill that is plaguing or society - most other shit are just what can be called the opportunistic illnesses.

And what we are faced in Guyana is not only racial division but racial stratification as well. In a small society such as ours, with limited access to resources, a political system that is based on racial division is going to naturally shape a racially defined socio-economic system, the definition of politics after all being who gets what, when and how. Where we had the insidious black power ethos during the seventies and eighties, we have the insidious hinduvta ethos today.

The role of the writer in a society like this is to cut through all the bullshit and let the chips fall where they may. The friend who mentioned to me that he heard I was racist is still my friend today and that's what's important.

I do not go for political correctness because political correctness gives bigots the room to squirm and manoeuvre before spitting their acid. I'd expected the shit to fly when it came to Ariadne & Other Stories but the psychos chose to stay in the woodwork, possibly because of the ass-whupping they received in the wake of The Annual. And possibly because of reviews like this.

With Fictions however, I hope whatever I have to illustrate about race and race relations is attacked because I have been itching for a public brawl for the past six years - I come from Tucville Terrace and the ghetto does show up in me every now and again, even in intellectual matters. Heck, I might even get a lil brawl from the title of this post.