Dear Editor,
Having lived all my formative years on the Essequibo Coast with the opportunity to access the small public library that was located at the Anna Regina town square, I am aggrieved that 20 years later there has been no replacement of this pivotal institution.
With the exception of the small unit of the Guyana Book Foundation in Cotton Field, and the attempt by a private citizen to establish his own library, possibly out of civic interest, there is no established library on the Essequibo Coast. Worse yet, there is no public library in that region.
Defenders of such cultural and academic negligence can surely pinpoint increased access to the internet as reason for the irrelevance of a public library, but of course such an argument will render all five branches of the National Library of Guyana equally superfluous. If Wikipedia is correct, then Demerara itself with public libraries in the capital, Bagotville, Ruimveldt and Linden, is obscenely under serviced. What about citizens on the East and West Coasts? Is it that private libraries exist there? More households have internet access? Or perhaps these citizens have private transportation or wealth to travel miles to access a public library?
The pitfalls of centralization are increasingly less at fault, especially when one considers that our policy-makers and casino capitalists are excitedly hewing out more residential communities, erecting banks, gas stations, restaurants and hotels (schools and hospitals are also erected but hardly achieve their central aims beyond design and carpentry). In other words, every building besides a public library gets constructed. This is hardly surprising because our policy-makers cannot fathom progress in cultural terms, at least not on behalf of the citizens they serve. Even education is commodified as is exemplified by prominent figures in government choosing private schools for the education of their children (I remember vividly a former minister of education picking up their child from a private school, even as that minister gloated about public education on television). These “practitioners of progress” are not oblivious to the value of literacy and quality education, because they are willing to pay prohibitive fees for the private tutoring of their own children. Add to this the fact that many of these “leaders” dispatch their children to post-secondary institutions in the developed world − with the best libraries and professors − and we recognize that aggregate development is for the sake of any but the common, struggling Guyanese and their children.
So many years have elapsed and no politician, not one, has recognized that the mobile library that serviced Peter’s Hall and Providence no longer exists, yet they were febrile for hotels and the cricket stadium. Not one of them seems awake to the loathsome reality that in a country of over
700,000 there are only five branches of the National Library of Guyana, yet so many are zealously promoting the establishment of housing schemes and the sale of house lots.
20 years have passed and not one politician, including all of those who snuggle up in the State House at Anna Regina, has been perceptive enough to see that no public library exists anywhere along the 37 miles of that region. Yet they come in their droves to sermonize to us about development, progress and their concern for us.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address provided)
