Babel

By Alim Hosein

As part of the Guyana Prize for Literature 2010 awards activities at the beginning of this month, items from a series of prints done by one of the judges, Stewart Brown, were exhibited at Castellani House.  The small prints were taken from a series entitled Babel that Brown had exhibited in 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2010 in various places including Barbados, Jamaica, the United Kingdom and Africa. Given the title of the series, the prints formed an interesting complement to the Guyana Prize week of activities.

The word ‘Babel‘ suggests confusion of sound, a situation in which language, the primary means of human communication, becomes so diverse and multiplex that communication is thwarted rather than enhanced, and dissonance rather than solidarity results. The original concept of Babel comes from the Bible, but the age in which we