By Nicholas Peters
Colonialism had already imposed colonial mindsets on the psyche of African people, which meant that they continued to reproduce coloniality as their future even after direct juridical colonialism has been dismantled – Sabelo J.Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Living in Guyana can make us very jaded when we think of our place in the rest of the world. For a long time, it felt like there was no hope for what the future would bring. Our history is filled with genocide, enslavement, abuse, and a general trauma that we don’t know how to deal with to this day. What compounds these realities even more is that our present situation is muddled with in-fighting, the spectre of big oil, and a vulnerable nation-state with a tenuous constitution. Unfortunately, these factors do not tackle the problems that continue to affect the daily lives of Guyanese. Crime appears to be on the rise again, infrastructure projects are on a perpetual pause, a high unemployment rate perpetuates the growing economic inequality, and our age-old ethnic tensions seem to never end. These harsh realities can make it difficult to envision a future that is free from the social animosity and suppression that many people feel. But! Our futures are not lost and something as simple as our imagination can give us the foresight to change our current conditions.
Imagination is defined as the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses. Imagination tends to be spoken of in terms of an artistic and literary nature, as an invaluable asset to have when creating fictionalised worlds. We tend to talk about imagination as a quality that is relegated to fantasy and science fiction, which helps us to escape the harsh realities we face. That is completely true, but it is not the only value that our imagination has. I believe that imagination is one of the greatest tools anyone has when it comes to envisioning the collective future of the land we share.
Imagination is escapism but it is also the invaluable asset we all possess when creating our real world.
Most people have some great work of literature that has led them to imagine worlds they never thought possible. For me, that novel was George Orwell’s 1984. The novel is about a world where a nation is united under one party that controls propaganda, suppresses opposition and high-tech surveillance to monitor the lives of its citizens. 1984’s political themes resonated deeply with me since at the time, I thought it was reflective of Guyana. However, it was its technological imaginations that continue to ruminate in my mind in more haunting ways. Orwell wrote about television-like screens that people spent most of their time watching while a camera watches them back and feeds information to the authorities. This haunted me more because it reminded me of the screens with cameras that contain countless personal information that corporations and governments have access to that we have in our pockets. It becomes even more disturbing when you think about how those screens are being used to influence things like what we buy, to how we vote, to even what we think is truth. Orwell’s novel was written decades before the invention of the internet and mobile phones, and yet it appears to have indirectly predicted a reality that we’re living.
Orwell’s imaginary future was morbid and works as a cautionary tale but his is not the only future people can look to. With today’s vast media landscape we have a plethora of imaginary futures to draw on for thinking of what a Guyana future can be like. Works like Star Trek and Black Panther have been highly influential in their own way. The former has even inspired technology that we take for granted today and have pushed agencies like NASA to investigate the viability of others. Meanwhile, Black Panther has reinvigorated the conversation about Afrofuturism – the theory of reimagining futures where art, technology, science and society are manifested through a black (non-white) lens. These and many other creative properties demonstrate the influential scope of imagining worlds beyond the present senses.
Sadly, I have not engaged in many literary or other creative media that explores imaginary futures about Guyana. And while it may seem like a disadvantage, I choose to see is as a rich opportunity. Many of the literary works I’ve read have focused on Guyana and the Caribbean’s historical past, in fascinating and ground-breaking ways. We need only look to the likes of Pauline Melville or Wilson Harris for canonical examples of Guyanese writers who have pioneered new imaginative frontiers of our past and present. But where are the imaginary pioneers of our future as Guyanese?
It is important, to me, that we imagine a Guyanese future that is outside the colonial and modern boxes we live in today. Yes, parties and governments have plans for what Guyana will be, but these are generally skewed towards political interests and biases that can be disingenuous in confronting the conditions that are around us. Furthermore, there are times when I wonder just how much things have changed since we gained independence. It is for this reason that I find imagination to be such an important tool at this critical time in our history.
By utilising our imaginative faculties, each of us is capable of charting a future that is cognizant of our past and challenges the present. Imagination is a source of innovation that can spur new industries in the arts and sciences, where the skills of dispossessed sugar workers are utilised, instead of turning them towards crime. Imagine, for a moment, a railway system, as an affordable form of public infrastructure, which connects the Rupununi Savannah to the Demerara Coast. Imagine an economic system that does not sacrifice the needs of the poor in favour of the desires of the wealthy. Imagine, a reformed constitution that enshrines true community and ethnic representation in Parliament, regardless of the party that is in power. For too long, we have been trapped by the same mechanisms that have been designed to keep our peoples’ potential inside a historical box. These ideas may seem fanciful, but I believe that we have to push the boundaries of what we can imagine in order to create a future that is unlike our present day.
Writers are very familiar with the power of imagination. For many, it has been credited as the source of their professional success. However, imagination is not only for the creative professionals. Everyone is familiar with imagination, whether as a child playing with your cousins, or as an adolescent thinking of the future with your secondary school crush, or as an adult dreaming of what the weekend will bring when it’s only Wednesday. But we can all extend our imaginations to envisioning the future of the country we share and finding solutions to the conditions we are in now. We will never live in a utopia free of all the problems we face today, but we are capable of solving those problems. In each of us, we have the capacity to imagine, and imagine for the better.
