The return of the kakabelly

(Kaieteur News) – There are men and women who return to Guyana not with hope, not with curiosity about how things have changed since they escaped from these shores. They return with contempt so carefully polished that it passes for intellect.

These persons are rare but unforgettable, because they are loud, and because they insist upon their own moral authority. These are not the quiet remigrants who accept life here on its own terms, who understand that trade-offs are part of living in a country still negotiating the legacy of colonial neglect and post-independence mismanagement. These thousands are invisible; they do not make headlines, and they do not need to.

The ones I write about arrive with judgment in their luggage. Everything in Guyana is a disappointment for them. Roads, services, the littering, manners, climate, politics—each is a monument to failure. And yet, they have chosen to return. Silence greets the obvious question: if life is so intolerable here, if it is so backward here, why trade the comfort of suburban America or the predictability of London for heat, bureaucracy, corruption and nastiness? They will not answer. To admit the question would puncture the inflated air of their own importance.

The truth they do not confess is simple. Abroad, they were inconsequential. Small fish in vast ponds, invisible and undistinguished. They could not shine. Their lives were unremarkable, their presence negligible. Now, back in the land of their birth, they attempt to assert significance by denigrating the familiar. Every criticism is a puffed-up monument to their own imagined grandeur. In their world, to condemn Guyana is to rise above it; to sneer at its flaws is to claim moral elevation.

This is the strange psychology of the remigrant critic: they return to a land they claim to despise, yet insist upon measuring it against places they left behind. America and Europe become mirrors, reflecting their own failures, their own quiet irrelevance, and they project that reflection onto Guyana. Every clogged-up drain becomes a proof of backwardness, every bureaucratic delay proof of national inadequacy. And all the while, they hope that in shaming their country, they will loom larger.

There is a comic terror in their self-perception. They speak as though they are outsiders looking in, judges of a populace that has welcomed them with open arms. They complain of petty inconveniences and call it evidence of rot. They note inefficiency and call it proof of national incompetence. And the irony is exquisite: they are themselves the product of frustration, the children of obscurity, the invisible citizens returned to look important.

No one who is secure, truly fulfilled, needs to demean the place that gave them life in order to define themselves. These remigrants substitute contempt for achievement. They are a chorus of grievance, singing of failure, hoping to cloak personal inadequacy in the authority of critique. Guyana tolerates them, partly out of patience, partly out of generosity. It does not need their pomp, their judgment, their inflated sense of self. And yet, they persist, because to return home without a sense of superiority would be to admit what they most fear: that their lives abroad were small, their significance limited, and that they have come home seeking validation in the very land they profess to despise.

In every lecture, every sigh, every glib observation, one detects the tremor of insecurity. Their disdain is a self-portrait, rendered in the language of national failure. The paradox is cruel and almost theatrical: they scorn the land that sustains them, only to stand in it, trying to cast a shadow larger than their own diminished self.

These returned critics—these loud, small-fish-in-big-pond types—deserve no indulgence. Let them parade their superiority and catalogue our shortcomings. We should greet their arrogance with quiet amusement. Let them fume for their words are the echo of their own insignificance. They are to be endured, not admired, and certainly not elevated. Let them become objects of entertainment rather than respect. Guyana does not require the puffery of these self-appointed critics. It thrives in spite of them. And they, small fish returned to a familiar pond, will continue to parade their superiority. The irony is inescapable. They came back not for country, but for themselves and it is a return that will always expose them for what they truly are: little, loud, and ludicrous.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)