Great article.

How a trip to Guyana became a short-listed novel | Latest

How a trip to Guyana became a short-listed novel
Written by Demerara Waves
Monday, 09 April 2012 21:28


Bored with cricket, Rahul Bhattacharya goes to the Caribbean and discovers an India that Indians don't know about

By Samantha Leese for CNNGO

rahul

(CNNGO).-What does it mean to "really travel" in a world where so much is connected and so little seems new?

One answer may be to spend a year in a place that everybody else seems to have forgotten. And, from there, to write a novel so adventurous and beautiful that it reminds us how much of the earth there is left to see.

Former cricket writer Rahul Bhattacharya does just that. The result of his year-long stint in Guyana was "The Sly Company of People Who Care" -- short-listed for this year's Man Asian Literary Prize.

The debut novel follows the picaresque travels of a young Indian journalist who goes to Guyana to escape the "deadness of his life."

Of mixed Bengali and Gujarati descent, Bhattacharya is no stranger to relocations. The 32-year-old author compares his childhood to that of an army cantonment kid.

Bhattacharya's father worked for a cement company, which shunted them around a lot. The family moved from the small town of Secunderabad to Mumbai when Bhattacharya was nine years old.

"With a background like mine, you don't fully possess any of the worlds in which you've lived," says Bhattacharya.

"At times it's frustrating and at others you find it's a useful itch. It can provoke a certain amount of curiosity and action, and maybe that's a good thing as a writer."

Bhattacharya's narrator of "Sly Company" befriends a diamond hunter named Baby who leads him on an expedition to Guyana's interior and across South America.

Guyana is "elemental, water and earth, mud and fruit, race and crime, innocent and full of scoundrels." Its history of colonization centers on the sugar industry and began with the Dutch who came with African slaves and then indentured laborers shipped over from India.

Motley other people, including Chinese and Portuguese, came or were forced to come and help the Europeans run the show. The land passed to the British, who ruled from the capital Georgetown until decolonization in 1966.

Today, Guyana is a co-operative republic on the northern coast of South America, which is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. The population, created almost entirely by the colonial enterprise, comprises mostly East Indians and black Africans.

The author and traveler tells us more about this "elemental" place while he visited Hong Kong for the Man Asian Literary Prize announcement.

CNNGo: What was it like to first visit Guyana as a cricket journalist?

Bhattacharya: I was 22 and it was my first international tour. Landing in a place like Guyana was a mind-enhancing experience because it was so far outside my imagination of the world.

Especially given that almost half of its people are of Indian descent and Indians don't know about this migration and the kind of society that migration has spawned in a world seven seas removed from them.

Because of that and because of the topography -- this very raw South American topography and a really mixed-up Caribbean culture-- Guyana stayed with me.

CNNGo: Has anywhere else you've traveled affected you that way?

Bhattacharya: I think people who like traveling can be transformed in trivial ways as well. If I spent half a day wandering around Hong Kong I'm sure I'd encounter a moment when I felt that stirring of something.

But no, I'd never felt anything as intimately as I did in Guyana. Nothing where I felt that if I didn't go back and live there for awhile I would just regret it.

CNNGo: What was special about the place?

Bhattacharya: When you throw together, under brutal circumstances, all of these civilizations and energies -- of Africans, Indians, Portuguese and Chinese -- it is already completely unique. Their ancestors were transported from all over the world and basically asked to run a factory of sugar cane plantations.

Guyana has a "brukup" quality that I found alluring. I know this sounds like a cliché but there is a great lust for living there -- the sense of generosity, of food and drink and dance. There's a freedom to that. They feel very disconnected from the globe.

Here we are in Hong Kong, and I know I'm in one of the nerve centers of the world and that it's connected to everywhere else. Whereas in Guyana you are free of that absolutely. That is very lovely, to live a life that is not so hectically networked with so many other things in the world.

CNNGo: Why did you choose to write a novel rather than a travelogue?

Bhattacharya: I thought fiction would allow me to make an intimate, detailed and far more intricate world.

There are books where you know the writer has learned something and to my mind those are good books, where you feel the engagement with the subject has been at the closest possible point. And I thought that to make it a travelogue would deny all the layers I wanted to explore.

Fiction allows you everything.

CNNGo: How did you go about research?

Bhattacharya: The thing is that while I was there I was so anxious. There were days when I'd think what the f**k am I doing here? Nobody comes to Guyana. The Rough Guide to South America or something says you can do Georgetown in half a day so you need three days for Guyana. And here I am in my third month

Sometimes I'd wake up in the morning with this mild perspiration on my forehead wondering how on earth to pass the day: What else can I buy from the market? What part of the country can I take the bus to today?

On another level, I thought that to follow your curiosities is good. What happens then is the next step. So I just did that, and eventually I started to feel closer to the place and that I did belong there. And I became less anxious.

There was research when I was there in a very scattershot manner. I would go to the library and read whatever took my fancy. I'd read newspapers, talk to people and travel. I thought, 'You can't take this world for granted. It was so foreign to you, just imagine how unfamiliar it will be to other people. You can't take the setting for what it is.'

So I started to build up these fictional themes and you realize that you have to ground it in something, so people understand what it is -- this place you are talking about, in which all these adventures are set. Nobody else is going to draw those connections.

CNNGo: What are your thoughts on colonialism?

Bhattacharya: It's difficult to make broad statements about colonialism because its echoes are everywhere in modern Indian life. For example, you have generations of Indians who are no longer good at speaking any language because English -- as the language of colonialism and now the language of the globe -- has become the language of aspiration.

So whereas my grandparents might have studied in their regional languages, that tradition is being lost and with it a very intimate bond with our culture. There's a sense among a lot of urban Indians especially -- and I include myself in this -- of not fully understanding the different Indias we could have known.

No matter what you look at, colonialism has had very strong consequences in India. And of course, there's the argument for infrastructure and the fact that the British had this great talent for laying down cities and railways and botanical gardens and hill stations and clubs.

So two hundred years down the line, when you realize your country is ruined and you're unable to do anything, you thank God for small mercies: They ruled us but at least they left us this.

"The Sly Company of People Who Care" is published by Picador.

__________________

"Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor." — Frantz Fanon

'It was 'Maestro' who wrote "Endless Vibration" for 'Shorty'. He used to write all those songs for 'Shorty' and he also wrote for 'Sparrow'. "Sa Sa Ya" and all those songs were written by 'Maestro'. Plenty people wrote for 'Sparrow'." — Winsford 'Joker' Devine

Interesting interview of the author.

Disbursed Meditations: "It's a Consensus of Ethnic Shades"

[B]How did you put together the funds for this trip to Guyana? The air tickets must be crazily expensive from here to a place like that, where hardly anyone goes!
Luckily Guyana’s a cheap place to live in. The air tickets are expensive, but their currency is very weak, and the rupee actually goes a long way. It’s not comparable to the touristy Caribbean, where your money just evaporates away in the sun. In Guyana, money stretches. I also had some financial support from my publishers – they had published me before in India and the UK. But it wasn’t a funded trip, and by and large the investment was mine. Journalism commissions helped. I covered the 2007 World Cup, for instance.

You speak of this warmth there, of how Indian Guyanese would just throw their doors open to a complete stranger, just because he’s from India. What was their attitude to India, especially those who’ve never visited?

They were astonished that anyone would come there and spend a year for no reason! And the fact that I was Indian, that I had come here with a genuine interest and affinity for the place, that, I think, made their response to me all the more warm. Their attitude to India, it’s mostly a kind of distant attachment. Some think of it as a site of pilgrimage, which is many worlds removed, but they might one day make it there. Very few do, because it’s expensive. The “mother ship” was a term I heard more than once. Mother ship, that’s how they see India. India is also the source of their religion – though there’s been a lot of proselytisation, a big percentage of the Indians there are Hindus. When you think about this not only as a place that their ancestors migrated from, but also as the source of their religion, it makes it a very intimate bond. They’ve built their own India there, and it’s very different from the India here. It’s a largely Gangetic-plains peasant culture which has gone to the Caribbean and interacted with a West African culture and colonial rule, and it’s evolved into something very particular. I don’t think they’re aware of how different India is from their India. Because they haven’t been here I don’t think they fully know the kind of place India is, really.
You speak in The Sly Company of People Who Care about how the Indian-Guyanese listen to Lata, and watch Amitabh Bachchan films. Are they stuck in the sixties, then?
Oh, no, they keep up, and because of piracy, they know all the latest Bollywood movies. You only get pirated movies in Guyana, because the market’s too small for distributors to go there. You find pirated Indian movies and CDs in the shops, and on the street, and on TV. The generation that grew up listening to music of the fifties and sixties, they were people whose parents would have spoken the language a little bit; and they themselves would have understood the language more than the generation today. That was also a generation which had lived through Indian Independence – Indian Independence was a big thing in a colony like Guyana, and many colonised countries all over the world, actually, who were fighting for independence themselves. For the Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean, Gandhi’s movement, and the eventual achievement of independence in 1947, was a very significant thing. The cultural and emotional ties, the idea of others also fighting for emancipation against White Rule, and all the things that were flowing from India to here – music, the movies – it strengthened those bonds a lot. Even today, people who don’t understand the language, except for the obvious words, might know all the lyrics to popular old songs. I find that extraordinary. Many people can sing entire Hindi songs without knowing exactly what they mean.

Did anyone ask you to explain what these lyrics meant?

(Laughs) No, not really. They could understand the emotion of the song, and that’s enough.
What I find surprising is that even before film and music piracy started, way back in the fifties and sixties, Indian films were popular there.
Well, see, the cinemas came to Guyana in the 1930s and 1940s, and they would arrange for Indian movies, especially in the countryside, where the majority of the Indian population lives. I came across this lovely story once when I was travelling in the countryside. I met an old woman, who told me that her husband was a “cinemaman”, and he would take her out to the cinema once a week from their hut in the ‘backdam’. She was married to him when she was fifteen, had never met the man before. Once she saw a film where the hero dies, and she cried and cried, and she was all cut up about it because she thought it was all real. The next weekend again they went to a film, and she saw the same ‘starbai’ on the screen, and she wondered what the hell was going on! This was from the early 1950s probably, and at that time there were already plenty of cinema halls. Most of them have now shut down, as they have in many villages and towns of India, because the TV sets have taken over. But they had a significant cinema-watching public, and Indian films would get there.

__________________

"Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor." — Frantz Fanon

'It was 'Maestro' who wrote "Endless Vibration" for 'Shorty'. He used to write all those songs for 'Shorty' and he also wrote for 'Sparrow'. "Sa Sa Ya" and all those songs were written by 'Maestro'. Plenty people wrote for 'Sparrow'." — Winsford 'Joker' Devine

Would you say that the whole of the Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean has a similar mindset, because of this shared heritage, this view of India as a sort of pilgrimage site, or did you feel the Guyanese Indians different from the ones in, say, Trinidad?
Well, I don’t mean to be generalising. For one, not all Indo-Caribbean people see India in those terms, especially not the younger generation. Some do. For another, identity is a political idea as well. Do you see yourself as Indian or African or Caribbean? Or some of all? The consensus culture tends to locate itself somewhere between different ethnic shades. Guyana and Trinidad are the only territories in the Anglophone Caribbean with a significant Indian population, though there are smaller groups everywhere. Trinidad has a far stronger French and Spanish influence than Guyana; Guyana was built primarily by the Dutch. Both of them of course became part of the British West Indies. All those territories have a very particular local culture. And that varies a lot – their patois is different, their cuisine is different, because their racial composition is different. Their experience of being colonised is very different. Trinidad had a relatively minor experience with slavery, which just lasted a few decades, and wasn’t as brutal or prolonged as slavery in Jamaica or Guyana. All these things have an effect. That’s why Jamaican music is much more resistance and violence than Trinidadian music, which is more humour.

Did any of the people you met ask you how they were perceived in India?
Mmm...well, they wouldn’t really ask, but they might occasionally bring it up, and sometimes with a sense of great hurt. I remember being told by somebody that “Indians think we’re like the blackman” and that was quite a telling remark at many levels. Those who have been to India, and those who have interacted with India, feel like they’re looked upon as not really Indian. This hurts them because their Indianness is such as a big part of their Caribbean identity. For them to encounter India, and find India rejecting this Indianness upsets them.
In The Sly Company of People Who Care, there’s a sense of Guyana being perhaps not as well-documented as places like Trinidad or Jamaica, or even St. Lucia, which produced Derek Walcott. Would you say the literary tradition of Guyana is not as rich as these other places?
No, actually Guyana has a very fine literature. If you go back to the fifties, and on to the sixties and seventies, there was a generation of Guyanese writers who made a name for themselves among the Caribbean voices of the time – people like Wilson Harris, and Edgar Mittelholzer, who wrote Corentyne Thunder, one of the earliest novels dealing with East Indian life. Afterwards a novelist like Roy Heath, who has written some wonderful novels about Guyana, which I read with pleasure and also with a sense of instruction, about how he might capture Guyanese psychology, and everyday life. Poets like Martin Carter, later Ian McDonald, who’s written some lovely collections. If you look back at the Caribbean writing boom, I think Guyanese writing was perhaps as much a part of it as Trinidadian and Jamaican writing was.
There’s this very poignant remark in the book, where a character says he doesn’t want to live in Guyana, but he wants to die there. Do you understand that remark in terms of the economic context, or the social context?
I can understand absolutely anybody wanting to return to die from where they came. You leave because of compulsions, and there are many in Guyana, but you want to come back. Leaving, yearning, home, these are some of the themes of the novel.
The overarching theme of the book is the enormous effort that went into salvaging this country from forest and swamp, and building a life for themselves once the plantation owners left. And these people who worked so hard to build a society find it’s not always sustainable, and they leave. Did you sense frustration or weariness among these people?
Yes, but having made the society, they also – and I mean not the individual, but as a community, political parties and so forth – they also conspired to push it into a situation where leaving was the most viable option. It became a society completely polarised by race, to a greater degree greater than any other in the Caribbean because of its particular demographic mix. That is the short answer for why Guyana is where it is – because it hasn’t been able to rise above the politics and the differences of race.

In the book, there’s this lady who bellows, “how them going to stop racial when they cyan stop theyself?” when a bus driver and conductor take a bathroom break and delay the bus journey further. How much is the Caribbean society affected by race relations? How would you describe the dynamic?
The fact of race is not just the fact of racism. It’s about race overwhelming other things. I mean the Caribbean is also an example of a society that has very successfully evolved a hybrid culture, and taken from different races and assimilated them together. You don’t see genocide and civil wars that you see in other parts of the world, in Rwanda, or the Balkans, or in the subcontinent for that matter. They have a sort of dual attitude towards race – on the one hand, it’s something they accept, and it’s a source of humour and laughter, as in the dialogue above. But race is also a defining feature because of how this society evolved. You had a master race in the white people, a colonised race in the indigenous tribes, an enslaved race in the Africans, and an indentured race in the Indians and Chinese. So a society like that grows up with its own sort of class system. It was a plantation society, people came at different times to fulfil different purposes. They came almost blind to a place they don’t know anything about. So race becomes a defining feature. Political parties are aligned along race, and cultural activities are aligned around race, and geographically, different races live in different parts. And so there is this constant tension, and a sort of competition as well. To me race is also a central preoccupation of the book.

The book sort of oscillates between narrative and history, and in the first half of the narrative, it’s a very male story, with this porknocking trip, and the second half brings in a romance. And along with all of this, you had to capture the essence of the society and bring it to a world that was largely unfamiliar with it. Was it hard for you to reconcile all these elements when you were writing the book?
Yes. That precisely was the hard part, which is why I spent a lot of time working on the structure. It’s difficult to be familiar about an obscure place, it’s difficult to dangle these events up in the air and assume people will know the context, because they won’t. Also the narrator wouldn’t, because the narrator himself is a stranger. The movement which I grew into developing was one which takes the narrator from being an outside adventurer, an explorer, to an observer, where he’s watching and understanding. And finally to a participant, where he starts feeling part of the place almost. It’s a fairly compressed experience – but then encounters like these can sometimes more vivid to a person than an entire life lived at home.

__________________

"Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor." — Frantz Fanon

'It was 'Maestro' who wrote "Endless Vibration" for 'Shorty'. He used to write all those songs for 'Shorty' and he also wrote for 'Sparrow'. "Sa Sa Ya" and all those songs were written by 'Maestro'. Plenty people wrote for 'Sparrow'." — Winsford 'Joker' Devine

A year is a rather long time to spend in absorbing a place and then coming back to write about it. So did you keep notes, so you’d remember the things that struck you?
Well, yes, I tried to keep a diary. But I was not very good at maintaining it. I was always about twenty-thirty days behind, you know. (Laughs) I would write stuff in there, and I’m glad I did. Sometimes, it was also about being able to do something, you know – when you’re writing longhand, you feel like you’re doing work. Ideally, I would keep a journal and write in it everyday, no matter where I live. But then ideally I’d also like wake up at 6 am every morning and exercise! Some things are perfect as ideas.

When you came back, I guess there was the sense that you’ve got to know the society quite well, given that you spent a whole year there. But while writing the novel, did you ever feel a sense of panic, that this wasn’t really your story to tell, that perhaps it should be someone who’s been born into that society, born into that shared history and those shared memories, who should be telling it?
Yes, of course. Of course. I imagine that happens to many writers. There was a sense of panic, and I think will be with me through whichever book I write, ever. But the particular sense of panic you’re talking about is having to write a novel about a place you’re not of,in a sense. Here, what you don’t know about a place is as important as what you do know. And you have to figure out how you can use that to your advantage – there are those things you don’t know and you will find out about, and there’s a sense of discovery in that for the writer and also for a reader. But there are also things you will never find out, and there’s a certain appeal in being able to render something as a little unknowable, a little outside your reach. A lot of life is that way, a lot of our daily encounters with the world are that way. I thought that was a valuable thing to try and render.
And does this make the narrator subdued, especially in comparison to the colourful characters he meets?
I didn’t think of it as a book about the narrator. I did think of him in a very proper way in one sense, because the reader was seeing the world through his eyes. It’s also about him in a fundamental way that there is a change in him as he confronts an unfamiliar place, through a series of adventures and encounters. But what I wanted to illuminate was a society like Guyana’s, and how this place was made in the manner that we’ve already talked about, this absurd throwing together of civilisations into a colonial factory, and what are the consequences of that. I wanted to look at that at a human, everyday level.
Your story’s fictional, your characters are fictional, but there must be some real people who stand out as examples of what the society is. Is there anyone, or any encounter, you think of in this way, in relation to your understanding of the culture?
Uhh...no, I can’t think of one or two people. I don’t know whether it’s true of other writers, but I think if you get too close to somebody, you can’t really write about them. They leave nothing to your imagination. I tend to get more out of people who, in a passing encounter, sparked certain thoughts, or a reaction, or an idea. When I think of the people I became friendly with in Guyana, I think of them as friends, not so much as people who gave me specific insights about the society. I think of those who were very generous to me, and there were several people like that, some in small ways and some in very big ways – people who provided me with hospitality and warmth and who let me spend nights in their house when they barely knew me and people who’d give me things to use in my house. Since you ask about encounters, I can tell you about one incident that happened the first time I’d been to Guyana, in 2002. I was coming out of a restaurant, and there was this man on a crutch, a beggar, he wanted a piece of chicken. He had a quarter of vodka in his back pocket. We began chatting, and he said there would be no cricket tomorrow, he could tell from the direction the clouds were in coming in from – and he turned out to be right – and at some point, he said his father was a Test cricketer called John Trim, a fast bowler who played for the West Indies in the 1940s. At first I thought he was lying, and then I thought ‘Why would he?’ He talked with great familiarity about cricket in that time, and he said his brothers had all died, and his father had as well. He was a vagrant. I asked people whether it was possible, and they said of course it’s possible. I tried to research the story while I was there in 2002, and I tried to find out more about John Trim, tried to find his village in Berbice. An encounter like that in the Caribbean is not rare, it’s a very small society, and to run into these stories and these situations can happen. I can’t think of myself running into a vagrant in India who’s the son of a Test cricketer – not that India is without vagrants, but the chances that he’d be the son of a Test cricketer, and that you’d run into him in a crowd of 1300 million people is pretty slim. I think of this now because it was perhaps one of those encounters that made me curious about Guyana.

It’s been a few years since you were in Guyana, right? And a while since you actually wrote the book. But now that it’s doing so well, and you’re being asked about your experience in Guyana all the time, do you ever want to go back, and reacquaint yourself with that society?
Not yet, that’s my instinct. I’d like to go there, maybe after some years. I was there in 2006-2007. I just feel like it’s quite soon, as in when you’ve gone to a place, and then left it and written about it in an intimate way, the departure from it and the writing about it feels like a very profound separation. I don’t know how it would be to casually confront it again so soon. I don’t know how I would deal with it if I went back so soon.

What are you working on now?
I haven’t started anything. There has been something that I’ve been wanting to sit down with and scratch my way into. It’s not happened yet, unfortunately.
Posted by Nandini Krishnan at 9:50 PM [/B]

__________________

"Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor." — Frantz Fanon

'It was 'Maestro' who wrote "Endless Vibration" for 'Shorty'. He used to write all those songs for 'Shorty' and he also wrote for 'Sparrow'. "Sa Sa Ya" and all those songs were written by 'Maestro'. Plenty people wrote for 'Sparrow'." — Winsford 'Joker' Devine

It is interesting how the author said, that India to the native Indians is different from the view of the Indo Caribbean people.

Also, would not agree with his assertion of Jamaican music being militant because of slavery, and attributing the light heartedness of TNT music to our "mild" experience with slavery.

Guyana is a somewhat vague society, its not as defined as it should be.

Guyana, like other mainland Caribbean societies (Belize, Suriname)exists somewhat on the periphery and are giants that have not reached their full potentials.

__________________

"Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor." — Frantz Fanon

'It was 'Maestro' who wrote "Endless Vibration" for 'Shorty'. He used to write all those songs for 'Shorty' and he also wrote for 'Sparrow'. "Sa Sa Ya" and all those songs were written by 'Maestro'. Plenty people wrote for 'Sparrow'." — Winsford 'Joker' Devine

well I disagree, mainly because Jamaican music was mainly humourous and light hearted until the advent of Reggae.

yeah well Guyana is probably not even halfway near its full identity because many of the people have not united to build a unique culture.

seems like the book is interesting.

MG Vassanji writes from the flip perspective - a "displaced" Indian returning to the mothership, India. So its fascinating to see the perspective in reverse to a certain extent.

__________________

"Twats you people be" - Chinks

"Don't try to win over the haters, you're not the jackass whisperer."

Some people get you and some people don’t, and to spend your life trying to make people understand how deep and complex and varied you are — I think that way lies madness - K. Blanchett

"The leopard's stealthy gait is not a result of cowardice; it is simply stalking a prey." (Do not mistake people's gentle nature for spinelessness) - Yoruba Proverb

Thank you for sharing. I enjoyed the article and look forward to reading the book.

@ him hurting their feelings when they realized that indians in India dont rate them.. lmaooo

It's interesting a couple years back someone put up an article with that perspective of an Indian woman living in Trini and her credibility got lambasted up and down... she said much of the same things this guy said .... kinda like the culture of Indians in trini were in a time warp, not truly current.

I think she may have had the added factor of discrimination in India cos she may have been dougla and as such was treated badly in India so many saw her as just bitter all around.

__________________

“A sharp knife never proclaims it’s sharpness to the world…but the first to fall against it becomes it’s advocate.”

You can put any face behind a mask but be careful cos someone else might be pretending. You might not be the only one with a secret -- Cassie/Gretel

that's interesting cause Vassanji who is Ugandan of Indian descent came to this realization when he travelled back to India for the first time. He saw how his parents and prior generations romanticized India to the point that they "fossilized" the country. But they had not been back in generations, so its no wonder that their idea of the "mother country" is going to be out of sorts to an extent.

__________________

"Twats you people be" - Chinks

"Don't try to win over the haters, you're not the jackass whisperer."

Some people get you and some people don’t, and to spend your life trying to make people understand how deep and complex and varied you are — I think that way lies madness - K. Blanchett

"The leopard's stealthy gait is not a result of cowardice; it is simply stalking a prey." (Do not mistake people's gentle nature for spinelessness) - Yoruba Proverb

What mainstream identity do Trinidadians have ,what do they all share in common, are you saying they have one identity because all Trinidadians celebrate Carnival?

All ethnicities are going to keep their customs and traditions of their forefathers no matter what country they are in.

Hinduism and Islam would still be practiced amongst the Indo Guyanese .

Comfa and the Jordanite religion still would be practiced amongst the Afro-Guyanese .

Amerindians would still be Animist and practice indigenous beliefs.

why are you comparing though, we are talking about Guyana..I know many Guyanese share the sentiments that the country is lacking an identity. This is something for major discussion, this is not about belittling anyone.

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GREATNESS IS ALL I KNOW