Dear Editor,
As a participant in the Symposium celebrating CARIFESTA’s 50th Birthday, I hesitated to dignify the pellucid race-baiting ploy by Lloyd Sharma which appeared in your Letters column on July 19, 2022 – captioned ‘Indo-Guyanese academics, performers have been excluded from Guyana Folk Festival’s celebration of 50th anniversary of CARIFESTA’ – until I saw the organizers’ response to Sharma on July 19, 2022 – …signed by Vibert Cambridge, A.A., Ph.D. ‘Presenters for this symposium responded to a public call for papers’. Enough said in that response. However – if you will – grant me brief space (too many words could obscure the point) to add my cautionary Postscript to the response from the organizers of the 3-day international symposium to commemorate the 50th anniversary of CARIFESTA ’72 – “Inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA) as Prism: 20th Century Festivals in the Multilingual Caribbean” (August 5th to 7th, 2022). My Postscript for the Historic Record is – Guyanese Be Wary of Mischievous, Rabble Rousing Proliferators of Ideas That Reek of Cultural/Artistic Hegemony.
Sincerely,
Joan Cambridge-Mayfield
