Dave Martins embodies the unique Guyanese culture. Our body politic, after nearly 50 years of political independence, has developed a culture that identifies us as a distinct nation in today’s global village. There is a particular Guyanese culture that defines our body politic.
Martins composed and performed his famous songs while living in Canada and the Caribbean. Even this migrant theme, in his shaping of our culture, reflects the fact that the Guyanese nation has become a global one, encompassing the worldwide diaspora, and the homeland.
In England, Wilson Harris and David Dabydeen live as global literary icons, with much of their work reflecting their Guyanese upbringing.
Eddy Grant performed his famous ‘Johanna’ song at Nelson Mandela’s birthday a few years ago in South Africa, appearing on international TV with that distinct Guyanese accent.
These cultural gurus of the Guyanese nation speak not to one ethnic group, but to the nation as a whole. Their cultural accomplishments shape how we understand what being Guyanese is all about. Their art transcends ethnicity, race, religion, colour and creed. They embody the essence of the Guyanese Dream, enshrined in our motto of “one people, one nation, one destiny”.
In the United States, the popular playwright Harold Bascom is shaping brilliant art and paintings.
In this 21st century, we see the Guyanese culture not just as a homeland mashup of who we are as a people, but as a global gathering together of talents and intelligence to shape a Guyanese cultural identity.
In this, the nation matures and grows into a distinct people on the world stage, shaping its own culture, its own history, and its own diaspora space in the global village.
Many factors shape and define a nation’s culture. Music, art, drama, literature, social norms, economic development, history, and so on, all play crucial roles in shaping, designing and forming our culture.
As the Guyanese culture evolves, each Guyanese who contributes within the public square makes a difference, whether a business person, a media operator, a teacher, nurse or garbage collector at City Hall. We each shape our culture, but the culture also shapes each of us. The relationship is dynamic.
Would we ever see the kind of brilliance that Dave Martins exhibits, from the younger generation? Would we see a Martin Carter or a Wilson Harris or a David Dabydeen rise from the new generation? Would we even see another Cheddi Jagan or a Forbes Burnham or a Desmond Hoyte rise in the future?
We could look back at our nation and stand tall. We accomplished much as a people.
Yet, the future looks glum. Why?
One of the foundation pillars that shapes a culture stems from the linguistic structure of the society at any given time. Linguistic structure, or the way we talk to each other, the way we engage in national conversations, determines the kind of future the nation embraces.
What kind of future are we constructing today? We could see the proverbial writing on the wall simply with a sketch analysis of the way we talk as a people.
Our linguistic structure embodies more than just talk, though. It includes how we write, how we engage in literature, how we create masterpieces out of original insight, intelligent probing and critical thinking.
This generation saw the rise of Ruel Johnson as a brilliant fiction writer, able to look at our society and grasp essential truths. Yet, as a young man, he becomes embroiled in social causes and political activism, much like Martin Carter, because the society fails to nurture his talent and cultivate his gifts.
The land is like a hard non-fertile desert that sucks the life out of creative souls.
Much of the culturally defining work was done while the talent lived overseas, as with Bascom today.
Why?
Our local linguistic structure falls apart.
Ian McDonald has written a column in the Stabroek News for over two decades, Sunday after Sunday. He urges our nation to take poetry and literature seriously. As someone who grew up in the days of Caribbean British rule, and who got his tertiary education in Britain, McDonald knows the value of a sound linguistic structure.
Yet, over the past two decades of his column, the nation suffered a shocking decline in its linguistic structure. It might not be coincidence that this period saw the replacement of British literature in high schools in the country, with Caribbean, home-grown literature that was imposed under the auspices of the Caribbean Examinations Council.
Why do we suffer today from a breakdown and falling apart of the way we use language?
A walk about in any public space in this country would reveal the low depths to which we as a nation have sunk. Lewd cussing, harsh plosive, loud rasping voices drown
the ears out in a tumultuous noise of confused, chaotic babbling.
Our young people no longer read time-proven literature to learn about human nature. Dickens, Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and A J Seymour have all fallen into disuse.
Their masterpieces have become alien strangers in this new Guyana, a place of literary drought.
How could we have descended to such lows in our linguistic structure? This threatens the development of our culture, and hence the overall development of our nation.
It starts with the Government imposing on the population a draconian leadership in how to build the nation’s linguistic structure.
The government took hold of the national newspaper, the national radio and the national TV station, and strangled this voice of the nation into an impoverished, imprisoned, starving, sickened, simpering national institution. The government “dumbed down” the body politic.
For two generations, Guyanese saw their leaders define the linguistic structure of their nation. They saw the government squeeze the life out of the leading linguistic vehicles of their land. And they became voiceless, silent, unconscious of their falling standards.
V. S. Naipaul wrote about the unconscious state of a people. The Guyanese nation suffers from this unconsciousness of its condition because it lacks a national voice. It is the worst cultural crime that any government could commit against its own people.
Could Dave Martins, living in this cultural wasteland, produce another “Boyhood Days” masterpiece?
Email: beingshaun@gmail.com
Website: thequalpedlife.com
