IN our vision to construct a Guyanese social space that hums with aesthetic soundness, we look to the Ministry of Sports, Youth and Culture, and the Ministry of Education to provide the kind of national platform for artists, writers, sports talents, talented performers, dramatists, for these creative souls to cultivate their passion.In our ongoing national recovery process, from the days of debilitating socio-economic and cultural collapse, when citizens could not access books, when the dictatorship discouraged free thought and harassed and tormented thought leaders like Martin Carter, for example, in this ongoing recovery, we’ve come a far way. Today, we no longer worry about primary concerns like basic survival.
We’ve moved on to secondary concerns, like acquiring our homes and owning a car and building a respectable career.
In fact, we’ve moved even higher. We’re essaying into the admirable space where Guyanese live for tertiary concerns, looking to travel on vacation to the Caribbean and North America, instead of what we did for decades, escaping there for basic survival. Within just the last year, Guyanese transformed our goals in life, and in the process, stifled such illegal trades as the back-track organized criminal network, although pockets of the enterprise may still exist to smuggle non-Guyanese through Guyana. Our goals now incorporate international vacation, even for the average citizen. That’s an astounding transformation, which happened as recent as within the last year.
The Unites States Embassy in Georgetown issued 51,000 US visitor’s visa to Guyanese last year, and 49,000 travelled to and from America for vacation.
So we face a new landscape today. Our people aspire for things of the soul, for a propelling forward of the humanities, for a cohesive, organized expression of our creativity and our passion as a people.
We live in a transformed world today, in this 21st century Knowledge Age. The theory of the noble English economist, Adam Smith, propagated in his book, The Wealth of Nations over 250 years ago, set the thought pattern for the 200-year old Industrial Age. That age saw socio-economic realities like Specialisation transform the living standards of global humanity, fuelling, for example, the global auto and oil industries.
Smith based his theory on the concept that the human being lives to satisfy his or her needs and wants, needs being basic survival stuff, and wants the higher pursuit of life.
However, as Mankind’s thinking advanced, we saw the 20th century management guru, Peter Drucker, introduce the idea that we don’t only live for need and wants, but that we actually live for aspirations, aspiring for the higher, nobler, greater things of the soul. In fact, in the Pursuit of Happiness goal of the American Constitution, or the inalienable rights of Man as enshrined in global human rights through the French Revolution, we see this idea of Mankind’s higher aspirations at work. This forms the foundation idea of the Knowledge Age we’re now constructing in the global village.
Now, as we approach our 50th year as a politically independent nation, Guyanese stand at that place where those higher aspirations matter more to us than anything else.
The responsibility lies with Education Minister Priya Manickchand and Minister of Youth, Sport and Culture, Dr Frank Anthony, to take leadership in constructing this national space for our creative souls to flourish and bear soul-feeding fruit.
Dr Anthony has done an admirable job at the Ministry, and his leadership and determination to make the Caribbean Press the national success story it is today should generate our applause and praise. Minister Anthony transformed our athletic, swimming and cricket landscape. He’s working hard to build a youth culture that escapes the divides of our historical political playfield.
And Minister Manickchand is open, authentic and visionary in leading the Education sector, fuelling a thriving private education sector, and developing universal primary and secondary education for Guyanese children.
As we move from here, we must generate an exciting, inspiring national arena where classical music, literature, ballet and musicals, theatre become the choice of entertainment of our people, even in rural Berbice or Essequibo: we want to construct a national appreciation for the fine arts, for the cultivation of original ideas, for the expression of creative passions, for our people to love cultivating their comprehension and composition of noble ideas and thoughts.
To counter the misguided belief in some national writers that pop-culture and Creolese, which appeal to our base instincts, constitute the Guyanese culture, where cussing and crass Creolese could be incorporated into Guyanese literature for it to be uniquely ours, we must set out with a determined vision to construct a Guyanese social space rooted in developing higher ideals, greater truisms and soundly ethical creative pursuits.
Truth is not at all what we reflect, but what we create, and creativity in the heart and soul of our musical talents, our sports stars, our literature buffs, our dancers and writers and poets, we must cultivate and hone and shape into a workable, inspiring, motivating national social landscape.
This calls for training our nation in language and words, which happens to be English.
Ms Manickchand and Dr Anthony would want to design a collaborative working relationship to enhance our literary systems, whereby the University of Guyana becomes an institution holding evening classes in school buildings across the country’s local communities, for adults and young people. These two visionary, open-minded leaders, as head of the Education and Culture Ministries, would want to enhance the training of individual Guyanese in the crucial life-skill of comprehension and composition.
It is in fact in our ability to understand our context, and to express ourselves with powerful personal performance in how we live out our lives as Guyanese, that we each one of us, each individual Guyanese, would contribute to the evolution of a knowledge-based Guyanese 21st century society.
The task to foster such a national platform rests on the fine shoulders of Dr Anthony and Minister Manickchand, or whoever holds these ministerial portfolios after the May 11 elections.
Our most pressing aspiration today is to construct our national social space so that we understand who we are as a Guyanese people, and know the blessedness of our pastoral landscape, and to be able to express our heart and soul with aesthetic appeal and impact. In that, the Guyanese nation’s latent creative potential would become a showcase on the world stage.
We’ve arrived at the place today to design and construct the story and image of the Guyanese nation where we really showcase to the world our innate beauty, our creative passion, our latent potential to contribute original ideas and thoughts and concepts to the creative knowledge vat of humanity.

by Shaun Michael Samaroo