Small Axe #15: Guyana
By David Scott | Small Axe
Guyana is all of us. It has held our best hopes and suffered our worst despairs. And however much the rest of the region may, in the enormous arrogance and mindless conceit to which it is so often given, ignore the implosive destructiveness carrying Guyana toward catastrophe, it remains a duty of criticism to seek to challenge (as Goveia would have had us do) the shibboleths, old and new, that govern our understandings of where we are and why. This is what this issue of Small Axe is a partial contribution toward. The pieces assembled in it, nonfiction and fiction alike, text as well as image, are various in their preoccupations, disparate in their angles of interpretation, and several in the locations from which they seek to be heard and seen. But they hold something in common. And what that something is, I think, is an ongoing argument with an embattled idea of Guyana, and a shared sense of the urgency with which they come at their concern to reimagine a future out of the remains of the uncertain past and the contingent present it has bequeathed. In this they are constant. I have no wish to try to summarize what they have to say or show, to overstage their interventions, or to foreshadow the directions in which they aim to guide our attention. Th ey stand together in their distinctiveness. My hope, though, is that they may serve as an inventory — at once lucid and provocative — of what seems to me the still quick pulse of the intellectual and aesthetic imaginations of our Guyana.
This text is excerpted from the Preface of Small Axe 15. Discover more about this Special Issue at Small Axe.
