‘A Mouth is Always Muzzled’ by Natalie Hopkinson
An illumination of the interplay of art, culture, politics, race, and history in Guyana.
This is a singular book, one that is not conventionally academic nor a conventional travel narrative nor a conventional work of arts criticism nor even a conventional piece of journalistic reportage, yet it draws from all of those disciplines as a deeply felt and passionately expressed manifesto. Cultural critic Hopkinson (Communication, Culture, and Media Studies/Howard Univ.; Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City, 2012) was born in Canada and has long lived in the United States, but she clearly feels a strong connection to Guyana, her parents’ homeland. She sets the scene with Guyana’s version of carnival, where there is a tension between unity and multiculturalism and where the government has co-opted so much of what was once indigenous culture in the country that “bills itself as the ‘Land of Six Peoples.’ ” The setting is the eve of the 2015 election, and tensions are running even higher in a country where dissidents have not only risked repression, but death.
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