Dear Editor,
One cannot help but reflecting on the missed opportunities we have had to collect and construct a database of Guyana’s cultural heritage and now with the looming threats from Venezuela one would hope that this national duty will be fulfilled without delay.
The Essequibo is the home of all nine Indigenous Nations, descendants of slaves and indentured labourers, as well as colonial and post-colonial multicultural and multi-ethnic (and in a few specific cases trans-national) conversations; it is the place of the storied porknocker, the perhaps only space where the St. Lucian Lawoz Festival was celebrated in a non-Francophone space. It is the birthplace of Guyana’s and perhaps the region’s only hybrid religion, the Alleluia, localized to the Upper Mazaruni and North Rupununi. Essequibo formed the epicentre of iconic imageries that formed the musical repertoire that became known collectively as The National Songs of Guyana.
While history is replete with conquests and disappearances of civilizations, history has also chronicled, and with evidence, that nations, peoples and nationalistic ideas that refused to be conquered were those that protected their heritage by reliving these whether under occupation or in exile; and which when combined constituted the twin pillars of nationalism and patriotism. Let us hope our cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, will be preserved, protected and repurposed going forward.
Sincerely,
Rohan Sagar
