Stabroek News as cultural heritage and daily companion

Dear Editor,

In the tetralogy, ‘Jahrestage’, published in German in four volumes between 1970 and 1983 and translated into English as ‘Anniversaries’^[1], the New York Times was, strange as it may sound, a main character. The book is about the day-to-day life of Gesine Cresspahl during a year between 1967 and 1968. A fictional thirty-four-year-old German living and working in New York, she depended on the New York Times for much more than just news. The New York Times, Gesine thought, was like an aunt.^[2] She spoke about it (her?) like this:

She describes hearsay as hearsay. She lets even those she despises have their say. She talks to sportsmen in the language of sportsmen. Changes in the weather, too, she points out. She helps the poor with charitable donations, and investigates poverty using the latest scientific methods. She decries disproportionate sentencing. At least she has pity. She is impartial toward all forms of religion. She safeguards purity of language—even correcting it in her clients’ advertisements. She offers the reader at most two pages of ads without a news story (except on Sunday). She never swears or takes the Lord’s name in vain. She occasionally admits to errors. She can restrain herself and call a murderer a controversial figure, from brigadier general up. She drank in propriety with her mother’s milk. Why shouldn’t we trust her?

Gesine cannot bear to miss even a day’s companionship of the New York Times. The author writes:

If spending a day at the beach has made her miss getting the paper, then that evening she keeps her eye on the subway floor and every garbage can she passes, in search of a thrown-out, torn-up, stained New York Times from that day, as though it alone were proof of the day having existed. The New York Times accompanies her and stays home with her like a person, and when she studies the large gray bundle she gets the feeling of someone’s presence, of a conversation with someone, whom she listens to and politely answers, with the concealed skepticism, the repressed grimace, the forgiving smile, and all the other gestures she would nowadays make to an aunt, not a relative but a universal, imagined Auntie: her idea of an aunt.

Like the New York Times in ‘Anniversaries’, Stabroek News has been a main character in my life.^[3] Through the course of my life, I’ve thought of Stabroek News, whose end I cannot begin to imagine, like Gesine thinks about the New York Times. In November 1986 when it started^[4], I was seven years old and in primary school. Then, and for another eight years, as my father collected me every day at midday from school, the first thing I did when I got into the car was to snatch the newspapers from the centre console and look through the pages and pictures, later reading the stories as well.

From seven to forty-seven, Stabroek News has been a part of my life almost every day. It is an immutable part of my life. Every Sunday morning, the first thing I do with my phone in one hand, hugging my sleeping family with what is left of my arms while holding the phone, is to read three columns in the Stabroek News: Ian McDonald, my father’s column immediately below (which I do not read elsewhere nor know its subject beforehand) and Cynthia Nelson’s column. My three-year-old son is sleeping on my arm as I type this on my phone, having just finished reading the Sunday Stabroek.

These columns and the other contents of the Sunday Stabroek are so valuable and significant that I think they are a material and indispensable source of cultural heritage in Guyana. They make us as we make them. After the three columns, I scan the editorial and the letter columns, checking the names at the bottom of the letters first to not waste time, and then reading what I find interesting. The editorials, sometimes righteous like an aging and conservative aunt, often point us unflinchingly to the serious issues of the day. The letter columns, daily and on Sunday, are the voice and democratic forum of the thinking Guyanese person, continuing in the tradition of long disappeared Guyanese newspapers. Whether Stabroek News agrees or disagrees with your views, it publishes your letter.

For a hundred years and more to come, researchers will learn about our society from the petrified letter columns of the Stabroek News, as many now learn about past Guyanese society from The Guiana Chronicle and Demerara Gazette in 1824, The Creole in 1905, The New Daily Chronicle in 1926 and other newspapers, all of which are now long gone but live on in archives on the internet and elsewhere.

Femi Harris wrote the best analyses of court proceedings and decisions I’ve seen anywhere in the Caribbean.^[5] I often told her, but I don’t think she ever believed, that what she did in providing a fair, accurate and complete report of legal proceedings, with technical issues fully explained, was more valuable a public service to the country than the practice of law from day to day could provide. Rather than mourn its loss, I am happy that I have been part of the community Stabroek News created. Whenever I felt that I must say something, I often reached out to its letter columns which always gave me the space to say what I needed to say. May we all recognise what we are losing.

References

1. Anniversaries. From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl — en.wikipedia.org ↩
2. 'Jahrestage' ('Anniversaries') by Uwe Johnson (Review) - Tony's Reading List — tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com ↩
3. Stabroek News was instrumental in ways that extended far beyond traditional journalism - Stabroek News — www.stabroeknews.com ↩
4. A demanding profession - Stabroek News — www.stabroeknews.com ↩
5. Femi Harris-Smith, Author at Stabroek News — stabroeknews.com ↩