‘A Mouth Is Always Muzzled’ Is A Sprawling Look At Art And Resistance
By Ericka Taylor | NPR
When I first started reading Natalie Hopkinson’s A Mouth Is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents, and the Art of Resistance, I found myself ricocheting between bewilderment and frustration. I consider myself a pretty well-informed person with more than a passing knowledge of the histories of oppressed people, but I couldn’t make it more than a few paragraphs without wondering, “How could I not know this?”
Although it spans five continents, A Mouth Is Always Muzzled uses Hopkinson’s ancestral land of Guyana as its jumping off point and narrative center. Surprising facts about the country abound: Who knew that when Guyana gained independence from Britain in 1966, the British government paid 20 million pounds (16.5 billion pounds in today’s currency) in reparations to former slaveholders? Not me. Who knew that the United States cut aid to the country from $18 million in 1968 to $200,000 in 1974 in retaliation for Guyana’s decision to become a “cooperative republic”? I certainly didn’t. Sure, I’d known that the Haitian Revolution began with a slave rebellion and ended with the establishment of the first free Black republic in the world. I’d had no idea that in Guyana a full 40 years prior, an enslaved Akan man named Cuffy led 5,000 people in the hemisphere’s most successful slave revolt up to that point. He ruled the area for almost a year before the Dutch reclaimed power.
