In a multicultural space such as ours, the world is at our doorsteps and in our backyards. A bit of Africa, granted we have lost specificity to the cultural retentions; a bit of India and China, and aspects of the indigenous cultures of what we lazily call the Americas survive. Of course, Europe is present.

We are who we are because they were here.

We have inherited diversity, of thought and meaning given to the world, and in reinterpreting and presenting the world. Ultimately, we have diverse ways of feeding and nurturing the truly fundamental aspect of our beings, our souls. The arts of our diverse collective offer a beautiful array to excite the senses. However, it is truly unfortunate when as individuals and individual artists we are not allowed to pick and choose from our individual and our collective inheritances as we wish, modify and change as it satisfies us, and so live, create, and thrive. Instead, we are forced into the singularity of our dominant physical selves. Sometimes the result is laboured, efforts bogged down in ethno-racial specificity when our lived reality is a mosaic of sounds, smells, and tastes – curry and roti for lunch and cook-up for dinner; chutney and reggae wafting through the air on a festive Saturday night.

What is wrong with embracing the mosaic of our beings? We hold on to the individual strands of our ancestral past, stifling the evolution into our future. But, hey, I am an artist, so what do I know? What do we ever know?

Nonetheless, I write these things because as a creative in Guyana, I feel we are being pigeonholed into expressing ourselves on the basis of ethno-racial identities that are assumed singular. This is despite the fact that our individual genealogy may not be evident to others and the history of this country speaks to miscegenation – plenty mix up, mix up.

The beauty of the Caribbean is its hybridity. The beauty of Guyana could also be hybridity.

I listened in on a conversation among Caribbean and Caribbean-descended artists living and working mostly in the world centres of art. Many lamented being pigeonholed into blackness; they are as relevant as their art intersects with blackness.

I did not realise, as I listened to their frustration, that pigeonholing extended beyond those wonderful metropoles.

These visual artists are as visible and worthy of consideration as their work intersects with blackness. Meanwhile, visual artists in Guyana are as relevant and supported as we are engaging with the national motto, colours and significance of the flag, one or all of our six ‘races,’ the flora and fauna, and the awesome landscape

from the rice fields to the majestic Kaieteur. Visual artists are as relevant in Guyana as they address the project of nationhood.

I heard of discussions in late January about a certain heroine not being Guyanese, despite her repeated admissions, her birth certificate, and the embrace of her by multitudes of Guyanese as one of us. Of the discussions, I say: Disappointing. Routine. Simply and frankly myopic. But not surprisingly because it is a pervasive criticism and a quick mode of dismissal for those among us who do not speak a certain way or create in keeping with the national songs and motto etc. But alas, there was a time when this was desperately needed of creatives. Times are not as desperate.

Ask any Guyanese, and I bet they know who they are as a Guyanese. They may not offer up an encyclopaedic knowledge of our history but they know and they own this country enough to love it one moment and curse it in another, swearing in favour of greener pastures. And should they reach those greener pastures, they long for tennis rolls and salara, and chowmein and fried rice done the Guyanese way; they long to come home because “Guyana nice bad” and the fullest, truest realisation of their identity is only truly possible on this soil.

The creatives of the past did their jobs well. They helped to etch in the minds and hearts of many what it meant and still means to be Guyanese. Now, we are in a time when some Guyanese artists, artistes, and other creatives are attempting global dialogue and engagement.

Sadly, this is to the dismay of some. These are voices of discontent corralling us. Her work is not Guyanese. She doesn’t speak for us. He doesn’t even speak like us. Never mind we live in a global village, we must keep to our huts, in our own family compounds. We are not allowed to venture to explore the offerings beyond to be influenced by them and better yet, influence them.

I think of Donald Locke (1930–2010), an internationally celebrated artist of Guyana’s soil whose work in different ways references back to Guyana while engaging with global discourses and global audiences. Locke’s work is grounded in Guyana without being so bogged down in Guyanese-ness that it cannot transcend and have meaning for others not of the same soil. Locke’s Plantation K-140 (1974) in the Tate Collection recalls, not only through the name but

also its form, the ordering of the coast land and the sun-burnt blackened black and brown bodies that characterised the landscape of colonial British Guiana, land of Locke’s birth and maturation.

A Guyanese viewer immediately recognises the grid of the plantations along the country’s coast and how bodies were corralled by these spaces within the grid and defined by it. A Guyanese audience immediately recognises the anonymity of the sun-burnt blacked bodies regimented by the grid.

A Guyanese audience recognises the timelessness of the grid defining our lives, palpable in contemporary times during election seasons. For a none Guyanese audience, the first part of the work’s title evokes history – the brutality of sugar, tobacco, and cotton plantations.

Perhaps it also recalls the plantations of the present – low wage work and exploitation; and nameless, indistinguishable faces. It speaks to workers and the peculiar human intellectual construction – race.

Left to their own devices, therefore, visual artists speak with far greater power and force than government and institutional mandates may allow.