In what may be one of the worst cases of police brutality, ranks from the Leonora Police Station have been accused of setting a 14-year-old boy’s genitals alight while questioning him about the murder of former Region Three Vice Chairman, Ramnauth Bisram.

Kaieteur News confirmed the report yesterday after obtaining graphic photographs of the severely burnt lad.
The teen has been in custody since Tuesday and his parents, Doodnauth Jaikarran and Shirley Thomas, allege that ranks had them going from one police station to the next without disclosing his whereabouts….

It is unclear whether the teen is still being considered a suspect or whether he has received any medical treatment for what appeared to be severe burns to his genitals, midriff and upper thighs.

The photograph of the teenager's injuries was reproduced at several blogs and websites, including Propaganda Press [warning: this link leads to a graphic image that some readers may find disturbing].

Many Guyanese citizens, including bloggers, reacted with shock and anger. Attorney Gino Persaud reported in his blog Freedom Under the Law that he was one of two dozen lawyers at a “spontaneous gathering” who issued a public statement “to register their outrage at this latest atrocity”. After quoting relevant sections of the Guyana constitution, the attorneys stated:

We the undersigned wish to condemn in the strongest possible terms the torture of a minor and for a matter of fact any other person while in custody by members of the Guyana Police Force.

We wish to record our unreserved condemnation of the Guyana Police Force of their refusal to permit the minor access to a legal advisor of his choice after his detention by the Guyana Police Force.

Journalist Imran Khan also posted the lawyers' statement on his blog, and proposed that concerned Guyanese use Twitter and Facebook “to keep the torture issue on the front burner”. On 1 November via Twitter (username: mediaimran), he issued this plea:

Please GYnese tweeters, keep #GuyanaPoliceTorture on the agenda. Post once per day with your thoughts.views

Other Guyanese used Twitter to share breaking news about the case, and information about other police brutality cases, introducing the #TortureInGuyana hashtag. On the afternoon of 31 October, Demerara Waves (username: demwaves) reported: “police call beating of man and setting ablaze genitals of 14 yr old ‘excessive use of force'. two investigating ranks arrested for offence.” Imran Khan noted that “This is not the first time a child has been allegedly tortured by police”, linking to a post at the Thoughts of a Minibus Traveller blog which stated:

This is the second report of a child being tortured while in police custody. There was another report in Region 6 of another child who had been brutalised in police custody and his lawyer had made several attempts to seek justice.

The condemnations of police brutality seem not to work when sections of the society believe that it is okay for the police to behave this way.

Following the Kaieteur News report, the teenager was released from police custody and taken to hospital for treatment. An article published in the Stabroek News on 1 November gathered dozens of readers' comments. Sand Hurst First wrote:

The government continues to say they do not condone torture yet still the citizens are crying out constantly of being tortured by either ranks of the Guyana Defense Force or the Police Force and nothing is and will be done to stop it.

YouTube user arinton99 assembled press photographs to create a video montage called Torture of Teenager in Guyana [warning: this link leads to graphic images], which includes a statement condemning Guyanese president Bharrat Jagdeo:

The president of Guyana has always been silent on these issues. He calls it “ruffing up”. As you can see its more than that. Its called inhumane human right abuse. Jagdeo please stop the dictatorship of your rule

On the morning of Monday 2 November, journalist Nazima Raghubir used Twitter (username: nazrag) to report a press conference held by police commissioner Henry Greene. She began: “Greene says that the entire Force is being castigated for what a few ranks did. (torture of boy)”; followed by “Commissioner Greene says police must have ‘good and sufficient reason' to use violence against a prisoner.” Lloyda Garrett (username: craziebutiful) responded: “Ask the commissioner if there have been other cases that can fit into #TortureInGuyana and give him an example…see what he says”. Michael Leonard (username: xcessi) also weighed in: “we need more than scapegoats…we need a reform of the entire police force.” He added: “these seemingly isolated incidents are part of a general breakdown of the structure and integrity of the force.”

Meanwhile, as news of the incident spread internationally, the Barbados Underground blog posted a report which elicited this comment from reader Dictionary:

Horrible, and requiring serious intervention, serious enough that the government of Guyana should be called to publicly answer before the full Caricom heads of Government and/or the Caribbean Court of Justice…

Guyana’s police need to be publicly investigated and reformed from top to bottom, similar to Jamaica’s [and maybe others too]. A full formal regional commission needs to be empanelled to do this — the police systems in the region are similar enough that if there is that big of a hole in the Guyana system, we had better be concerned from Belize to Trinidad as well.

The power of the sword is given to government to defend the public civil peace with justice, not to torture 14 yo boys like this.

A selection of books from and about the Caribbean. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin, originally posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

The anglophone Caribbean's small but energetic literary blogosphere has taken notice of a new arrival to its conversation. Caribbean Book Blog, created by the St. Lucian journalist Tony Williams, aims to “inform writers and readers about the latest developments in the international book trade and how they are likely [to] affect the literary communities in the Caribbean and other small-island states.” Since launching on 11 October, 2009, Caribbean Book Blog has posted a series of thoughtful, statistics-laden essays on the issues facing Caribbean publishers, writers, and readers, at a time when literary publishing around the world is grappling with financial hardship and technological change. Williams's posts have provoked thought and discussion both in the blog's comments fields and elsewhere.

Caribbean Book Blog began with an essay titled “Breaking the Shackles”, analysing the state of Caribbean publishing and the market for Caribbean books.

… if you speak to many booklovers in and outside of the Caribbean, or check out some online message boards where the topic of discussion is Caribbean literature, you’ll find people bewailing how difficult it is to find good books by Caribbean writers, whether it’s in the region itself or in the metropolitan markets.

… there’s need for change — massive change. Otherwise we may well be faced with a situation where our literary griots end up being relegated to a state of obscurity and irrelevance. To avoid this they must find new mediums to draw attention to themselves and their work.

In his second essay, “Now Is the Time”, Williams proposes that “a group of intellectual, editorial and IT visionaries with … pioneering spirit and the entrepreneurial drive” ought to “take up the challenge of creating an online home for our struggling writers and poets to help them stand on their feet so they in turn can help usher in a new dawn of knowledge and enlightenment.”

Several writers based in the Caribbean have joined the discussion by leaving comments. Antiguan novelist Joanne C. Hillhouse writes:

It does take away from the time and energy I have to give to my writing, and I’m still working on finding that balance, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that self-promotion (ugly word) is part of the process and the Internet is in many ways leveling the playing field.

Jamaican poet Tanya Shirley echoes these sentiments:

I think as Caribbean writers we are now living in an age where we have to be more proactive in the process of marketing our work and using all the resources at our disposal to do so.

The Miami-based Jamaican writer Geoffrey Philp — also one of the Caribbean's most prolific literary bloggers — responds on his own blog, with a proposal:

What is needed is a web site that is devoted full-time to Caribbean writing. The site as I envision it would be a clearing house for books published by Caribbean writers. Publishers would submit their catalogues, writers could upload their photos and reading dates, and readers could subscribe via RSS, newsletters, or email.

Philp also lists well over a dozen Caribbean literary and scholarly journals online, some of them traditional printed journals that also maintain a web presence, and some entirely web-based. Together with a few dedicated litbloggers and writers-who-blog, these sites, Philp suggests, could evolve into the nucleus of a future web-based Caribbean publishing community.

In the three and a half years since Global Voices last comprehensively surveyed the Caribbean literary blogosphere, a handful of new journals has emerged, based online and in many cases using blogging software to publish quickly and inexpensively. tongues of the ocean, based in the Bahamas and running on Wordpress, was launched in early 2009 as a poetry journal, but by its third issue it also included short fiction. Editor Nicolette Bethel (who also writes at her personal blog) in an interview with Antilles, the blog of the Caribbean Review of Books, described being inspired by online journals based in other parts of the world:

I was impressed by these journals’ integration of media into their offerings, which made them a substantially different, more alive, animal from the printed page.

What was missing among them? An online Caribbean journal for Caribbean writers with the kind of turn-around and quick publishing record that these other online journals had.

In mid-2009 another blog-based magazine project went live: Zafra Lit, which translates short fiction by contemporary Cuban writers into English. Edited by David Iaconangelo, a student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and running on Blogger, Zafra Lit draws on the efforts of student translators who volunteer their time and skills. An even more recent arrival is Town, launched in October 2009. Based in Trinidad, it publishes short poems and fiction both online and via broadsides — posters — which readers can download as PDFs and print at home.

Other bloggers have responded to the shortage — or absence — of serious literary and cultural coverage in the Caribbean press by turning their blogs into virtual magazines. At Tallawah, Jamaican journalist Tyrone S. Reid posts reviews and articles covering books, music, art, and film, in an effort to “help facilitate constructive discussion.” New Jersey-based literature teacher Charmaine Valere reviews Caribbean and especially Guyanese literature at Signifyin' Guyana — in a recent post she tackled the question “Why review?” And PLEASURE, a new blog by Trinidadian writer Andre Bagoo (who also has a personal blog, Tattoo), covers “art in all its forms”, including a recently launched interview series which began with UK-based Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo.

The most energetic recent arrival in the Caribbean online literary scene may be Repeating Islands, an arts and culture blog run by two literary scholars with roots in Puerto Rico, Ivette Romero-Cesareo and Lisa Paravisini-Gebert. Covering literature, visual arts, music, performance, cultural studies, and more, Repeating Islands posts up to six or seven new items daily: links to articles and interviews, information about new books and exhibitions, and fascinating oddments. Covering all the Caribbean's language areas — English, Spanish, French, Dutch — the blog plays an increasingly important role in spreading information and ideas. An online writing and publishing network like the one Caribbean Book Blog and Geoffrey Philp imagine will need this kind of breadth and enthusiasm.