Natalie Hopkinson’s “Republic Lecture”
Transcript of Speech Delivered in Georgetown on February 22, 2018
Natalie Hopkinson | Share by the IF (Interactivity Foundation)
IF Fellow Dr. Natalie Hopkinson was invited to deliver the Republic Lecture by the government of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana on Feb. 22, 2018 on the role of the creative arts in citizenship. She was also invited to launch her new book, “A Mouth is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents and the Art of Resistance” on the The New Press, which has won favorable reviews from NPR, Kirkus magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, Forward magazine and is mostly set in the author’s family’s native Guyana.
Both the book and the speech was an outgrowth of the Interactivity Foundation’s Future of the Arts & Society project.
Greetings from Washington, D.C. Thank you to President Granger, Prime Minister Nagamootoo and the Honorable Ministers Joseph Harmon, Dr. George Norton and Nicolette Henry for your leadership, and hosting me here to deliver this Republic Lecture on the occasion of celebrating Guyana’s establishment as a Co-operative Republic.
It is the honor of my life to be here and speak to you. I come from very humble beginnings. My late father, Terrence Hopkinson, grew up here in Georgetown in the neighborhood of Lodge, the son of a seamstress and a police officer. My dad attended Queen’s College, where IBM recruited him in the 1960s. My mother was born Serena Baird, and hails from the Pomeroon River off the Essequibo Coast. Her family raised mangos, rice, provisions, eddoes, coconuts. They sold them at Stabroek Market where the matriarch of the family, Mother Benn had a stall.
Each morning, my mother and her eight siblings paddled by boat to Marlborough R.C. school. My mother and two of them are here today: My Auntie Lynette George and Uncle Calvin Benn. There was no electricity, but at the time, they did not notice. They learned math, English, geography. My mother loved to read books. In her mind, she traveled to new dimensions on earth and beyond.
My mother never once considered herself “poor”. She also did not know of a word like “art” or imagine that one day it would bring her here today with me for this great honor. Art was not something they talked about in school. Art was never connected with her aspirations. Dreams were for banking, medicine, law — computer engineering. What is art anyway?
This is the question I have been asked to address today. What is art? What are the roles of art in society? What does art have to do with exercising citizenship in a cooperative republic? I will add another question: How can art help us imagine a radical future?
Read the rest of Hopkinson’s speech via the Interactivity Foundation.
