The Sly Company of People Who Care

One of the questions you are asked fairly often when you have lived in multiple countries is "Which was your favourite?". Even I am guilty of asking others despite the fact I always feel incapable of truly answering it justly myself. Each place is different and the place that is easiest to live might not always feel like the favourite.

What is my answer? Well so far (there's always room for changes in the future) the answer, after a pause for thought, has always remained the same: Guyana.  I apologise to my Nicaraguan and Nicaragua based friends I have a very special place in my heart for Nicaragua too.

Why Guyana? There is no doubt many more comforts in life or places to visit were available in other locations. The reason is simple, it's emotional, not intellectual, Guyana was the first place where slowly I was allowed to be an insider even though I was an outsider. I started to understand some of the jokes, the satire, the sayings. I was included. Guyana and the Guyanese made me realise I would never again be 100% at home in my homeland. That's unsettling but it's also a blessing.

Like most people with a connection to Guyana it is a land that gives me much joy and delight and much frustration and despair. I am reading a brilliant book from the eyes of a twenty-six year old Indian who went to spend a year in Guyana, the write up describes "The Sly Company of People Who Care" as an "ambitious debut novel, Raul Bhattacharya has created a story that follows the shape and rhythms of life." The words novel and story imply fiction to me but the book includes so much facts and truth that I have no difficulty believing it is all true - all be it perhaps it seems fanciful to those who've not lived in Guyana. It makes me smile to read the Creole and the characters, I makes me melancholy and a little "homesick" to read of  places I know and it makes me sad to read of the racism, violence and sense of despair underlying the day to day amusements.

Like Bhattacharya I am an outsider, right now in a new country and I can relate to his observation,

Everything is linked. Every day you transacted with the world around you, and every day people you met in it knew something you didn't. Looking at smithereens of a bank window on tarmac they knew things I didn't. It could be debilitating, mystifying, desperate; I wanted to scratch my way in.

I know given time, openness and the graciousness of the host country it is possible to scratch one's way in. I've done it before, more than once. But there is no doubt each time can be debilitating and mystifying, another set of unspoken rules, knowledge and assumptions of which my past gives me no experience. However there is a sense of deep satisfaction when you make progress and understand a phrase or a joke that would have meant nothing months before.