Dear Editor,
I recently read in the press that the Second Inter-Guianas is imminent. A year ago, I had cause to write the following in a letter to the editor.
“I saw last week, via the Guyana Chronicle, that the Government of Guyana took a forty-member delegation to the first Inter-Guiana Cultural Festival, a delegation which included a literary component. While I understand that it is the policy of the government not to respond to interrogations of its integrity and fairness, I nevertheless would like to – for the record – make a query. Who were the members of the literary delegation, what were their qualifications, what were the criteria used for selection, and was the good Minister of Culture satisfied that the literary contingent offered the best Guyana had to offer?”
That letter was met by silence, as were previous letters throughout the years asking the essentially the same question of Guyana’s CARIFESTA contingents.
This time around, a full year after Guyana would have had time to constitute consultative committees, months after those committees would have been formed without so much as a phone call from the Ministry of Culture, a few weeks before the festival, and days after I signalled my intention publicly to again expose the Ministry of Culture’s discriminatory practices, I received a poorly constructed e-mail on behalf of the “committee” from one of its members asking me to conduct a workshop on the “mechanics of poetry.”
My response signalled my participation premised upon nothing more than a formal/official invitation from the presumably literary committee; I included my unequivocal condemnation of those intellectuals who facilitate the continued idiocy carried out by the ministry under Dr Frank Anthony, now buttressed by an entire Director of Culture, Dr James Rose.
I received, for my efforts, a response from UG’s Alim Hosein, the “head of the committee on whose behalf” I was originally contacted. The body of that correspondence reads in its entirety:
“To put the matter succinctly, let me say that we do not know what you are talking about. If we did, we would not have contacted you. We contacted you in good spirit to participate in the workshop as someone who could make a useful contribution. This is the entire gist of the matter, to which a simple refusal would have sufficed for our purposes.
The rest of your e-mail really is not applicable in the circumstances, so there will be no need for us to contact you further, officially or otherwise.”
First of all, it is the depth of disingenuousness for Mr Hosein to surmise a refusal – simple or otherwise – from any part of my letter, considering that my original response expressly ended with the line, “In closing, properly contacted, I will work with the festival but you can relate to your superiors that my public criticism will continue and they are free to respond accordingly.” If he missed that, the learned gentleman either needs to change the prescription of his lenses or catch up on his basic comprehension skills.
Secondly, permit me to familiarize Mr Hosein publicly, as I have had to do privately, with facts that anyone with a fleeting interest in the local cultural policy should have some tangential knowledge of, considering the seriousness of the charges that I have levelled against the ministry, year after year, without so much as a response from the Minister of Culture. I have not, starting from CARIFESTA 2003 to the present, been so much as invited to officially represent Guyana in my capacity as an established writer – this despite being far more qualified than most members of Guyana’s literary contingents at various cultural events, locally and overseas, from that time to now.
I find it the height of absurdity that Mr Hosein would state that if his nebulous committee were aware of the ministry’s shameless discrimination, they would not have contacted me. In short, the head of a department at the University of Guyana is saying that his magnanimity was premised on his ignorance of the ministry’s discrimination, and had he foreknowledge of that discrimination he would have perpetuated it.
Finally, for Mr Hosein to have instructed someone to contact me to conduct a literary workshop at this late date presupposes a couple of things, the most obvious of which would be my lack of qualification relative to those others who are on the committee that he heads, and/or some difficulty in contacting me.
The committee member that contacted me has had my contact information for years which renders the latter possibility null; as to the former, if the committee is comprised of persons better qualified than myself to meaningfully contribute, I challenge Mr Hosein – as I have challenged Dr Anthony – to release the names and relative qualifications of those luminaries, and I will humbly offer mine for comparison.
This government and those ‘intellectuals’ who facilitate its discriminatory policies will have to learn that is not the place of the artist to mewl and kowtow before partisan political interests.
This is not Soviet era Russia and the Minister is going to have shed his Stalinist tendencies, or face unrelenting public shaming from me and I have the time, the talent and the arsenal to do so with very little effort.
Drs Frank Anthony, James Rose, and whatever coterie of minions that supplicate before them have conspired to ensure that Guyana does not have its best literary representation at the current Inter-Guianas Festival, as has happened at previous festivals; anyone purporting to have any literary qualification and is on the official contingent should be embarrassed to be part of this fiasco – and Alim Hosein should bear the brunt of that ignominy, if only for his profession of academic legitimacy, something upon which he premises his collection of his monthly pay cheque as well as his questionable stewardship of literary committees.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
