Because of their confusion with the letters O and A war (pronounced wor) in the English speaking world is pronounced waarrr.. by Guyanese and so instead of there being a bat and ball contest for Guyanese, this is war for them today at Providence.
In my book, “Among the Best: The Vampires of El Dorado” I explained in details why Guyanese have an ongoing war with Trinidad (and this is essentially a war Guyanese Indians have with the Indo-Trinis). When I wrote that Indo-Trinis wanted to bite off my head and in fact arranged a meeting with me to explain what they considered blasphemy on my part; that if your ancestry belonged to India and you were part of the diaspora, it was the conclusion that ‘all ah we is one’.
Naively, I once thought so, but having sojourned in Guyana for a bit as, firstly, adviser to one of their political leaders and afterwards as asst. GM of Guyana Broadcasting where staff members were to consult with me on pronunciations that they had waaarrr with, I being recognised as quite knowledgeable in that field, was to be their howjsay Oxford dictionary.
Anyway, you see how the Guyanese spectators booed Pollard, that was not a first or an isolated incident of that kind of hostile insularism on their part. On page 19 of my book written three decades ago, here is a preview of Guyanese hostility and what happened to Pollard: I argue and tell them that it was Trinis who picked up Guyanese Chanderpaul and carried him on their shoulders when he scored a hundred in Trinidad but Simmons you booed and heckled who was just a guest in Guyana. I argued against the boast of their bogus hospitality which so many years later continues to be a myth in their mythological world of being the best in everything and being the most hospitable. I quoted VS Naipaul to prove to them that they were living a lie: Naipaul said, “Guyanese hospitality is a myth: Inhospitable, reactionary, and lethargic except when predatory…”
So now they leave their homes abroad in America and Europe to be at the CPL – not just to see cricket and see Guyana triumph over the other countries of the Caribbean but in their pathological egocentric chauvinism, it is less about cricket they are here for and more about the Guyanese delusions of grandeur, that, as my book refers to with tongue-in-cheek sarcasm; “Among the Best”.
