Dear Editor,
I refer to your editorial ‘The Budget and cultural policy’, dated January 22, 2023. The key thrust, as I understand from the editorial, is the size of funds allocated to the cultural sector in this year’s budget. The editorial questions the usefulness of the allocated funding measured against the scope of works desperately needed within that sector. One example discussed is what the editorial defines as, ‘the plantation museum’ and it goes on to reference this concept as evidenced in other societies. There is one major gap in this part of the editorial, and needless to say, I have not heard discussed in other media, which is, the situating of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICT) within Budget 2023.
Editor, the colonial sugar plantation was a cultural intersection between slave master and slaves, where each exchanged musically and perhaps in other forms, each ICTs. Modern Caribbean musical traditions, inclusive of other art forms, are indebted to these historical points of contact, and I am sure, so does Guyana’s musical heritages such as our folk and national songs. But ICT is even more critical to knowledge production of our Indigenous Peoples for the simple reason that they, the Indigenous Peoples, did not build monuments and other symbols nor troves of written records to evidence their past nor their presence in this space. Rather, these were encoded within their song-forms, dances and story-telling, and these are haemorrhaging and disappearing.
It surely cannot be for the want of money, after all, we are now an oil producing nation, says your editorial. This declarative does not leave any room for disagreement.
It is my hope, therefore, that the absence of ICT in your editorial was purely an oversight and not a plausible reality of Budget 2023.
Sincerely,
Rohan Sagar
