World literature has never failed to provide insights into politics and the human condition. Following suit, Guyanese fiction, poetry and drama have variously addressed its politics at different stages in its history – whether it is the rising trends of nationalism in the pre-independence era or the rising tides of a shocking and scandalous determination to rig the elections on the independent nation’s fiftieth year as a republic.
Several of the best writers in the country have been reflecting the politics over these past hundred years. In the earlier colonial years, as soon as the fledgling poetry began to find its identity, patriotic sentiments and a more enduring sense of nationalism were striking factors in the treatment of politics. It took much longer and several decades of social realism before the protest literature addressing the politics of the 1970s and eighties emerged in the 1990s.
