In exploring who we are as a nation, where we want to go as a people, and how to get there, we must find a way to delve deep into our creative reservoir, to look inside ourselves.
Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, Dr Frank Anthony, may be trying his best to lead us in this task, but we fall short.
The minister’s commendable leadership to establish a national arts culture, to cement an annual drama festival, and even to launch a national movie enterprise, cannot escape our applause. But these efforts seem like token gestures, lacking real vision, planning and expertise.
So we remain, in many ways, what V S Naipaul called an “unconscious people”.
Naipaul, living and writing in England, the homeland of our own English language, sought to explore his roots in Trinidad, and his ancestry as a descendant of British-bound labourers from India.
Noting the cultural similarity between Guyana and Trinidad in his book A Writer’s People – Ways of Looking and Feeling, Naipaul sought to explore his identity, his place in the world.
He did that for a reason. We must know who we have become, so long removed from our foreparents, who lived in slavery and indentureship.
While Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados and St Lucia made huge strides in defining their new nationhood, we seem to be still groping in the dark to see where we could find a secured place for our own nationhood, for who we are as a Guyanese people.
Yet, we had such a good head start. In A J Seymour, E R Brathwaite, Martin Carter, Edgar Mittelholzer and so many others, our nation was well under way to developing a national literature and a unique culture.
Today, we flounder, having fallen to the wayside, drifting in mediocrity as our people grow more and more “unconscious”.
Over the past two decades our literacy rate plunged from over 90 per cent to less than 30 per cent today; our capital city deteriorated from the Garden City to a garbage-strewn mess harbouring roaming naked, deranged people.
Our youth embrace pop culture but shun literature. Noise pollution, inefficient management of public affairs, loud cussing and the bastardisation of standard English have taken over our public spaces.
Even the national media suffer from poorly trained operators, with radio and TV being particularly annoying. The state media lack any sense of professionalism whatsoever.
In this second decade of the 21st century, as a people, we
have fallen. We stand almost in a stupor, with the average Guyanese unconscious of the state we find ourselves in today.
We lack leadership of any significant value. Our President fails to inspire the nation.
Our ministers and parliamentarians haggle and quarrel in Parliament, failing to generate inspiring, motivating conversations in the land.
And, tragically, we become more and more unconscious. We do not see where we have fallen to. We do not feel our own degradation.
What’s going to wake us up?
We harbour a government that shamelessly bullied its way to handing out radio and TV licences to friends and relatives of powerful officials. We feel helpless, unable to stop our own abuse.
This government once vociferously condemned the 1980 Constitution, but now refuses to reform it; the party in power once railed against public corruption, citing the annual Auditor General’s Report, but now it accepts the same flaws without correcting them; this government refuses to facilitate local government polls.
The litany of our woeful fall is long and twisted and depressing. But few care. We have become numb to the state of our amputated dreams.
Why?
We see in the countries that define themselves as new civilizations, as new nations and a new people, a strong embrace of the arts, of literature and classical music (as in Venezuela), of poetry and drama.
As much as we want to fuel economic progress through science and engineering and technology, we must realise that the foundation of a society lies in its embrace of the humanities.
Despite our Guyana Prize for Literature, we see a vast desert where serious creative, explorative writing is concerned in this country.
In creative writing, in literature, as we see in Naipaul, we find the reservoir where we could explore who we are, and develop a self-identity. This thought seems lost on the powers that be, with Minister Anthony and his government unable to unleash our creative potential.
We saw Ruel Johnson, a young man of promising talent, flower out with his book that won the Guyana Prize, only to be sidelined and pushed to inaction. Government failed to nurture this talent. Despite the impetuous energy of his youth and his naked vulgarity of language at times, his is a talent we should be nurturing, despite his political views.
Yet, we see state funds funnelled to friends of the regime for drama and movie productions of questionable literary merit.
Minister Anthony thus follows the trend of this government, to fuel the passive numbness of our people.
It seems clear that this government lacks a vision for who the Guyanese people are, and sees only its own electoral base as important. This severe blindness and myopic lack of awareness pervades the society.
We copy American TV programmes, in the GT&T Jingle and Song competition, for example, and pat ourselves on the back with pomp and pride that we are making progress as a people.
How do we build a national space where we are able to look deep inside our souls? How do we explore who we have become so long after the British Empire forged us together as a new nation? How do we develop a Guyanese civilization?
The American thinker, Samuel P Huntington, in his thesis ‘Clash of Civilizations’, developed the idea that civilizations are formed and re-formed.
How do we form the Guyanese civilization, build the Guyanese nation, see ourselves as one Guyanese people, feel our connectedness?
We explore who we are through language, by sharing our stories, by looking deep inside ourselves and articulating our deepest being. But we lack the consciousness to make that dream a reality.
How could we become a conscious people?
