RADDY VIEWS BY Harold A. Bascom Back in Burnham’s Guyana, the Ministry of Education saw the need for reading-books with story-content and illustrations that reflected the reality of the Guyanese people, and our landscape: books with local stories about little Guyanese children with illustrations showing little Indo-Guyanese and little Afro-Guyanese in their natural settings. And so, with the above objective in mind, the Materials Production Unit of the Ministry of Education (M.P.U) was formed around 1973, and operated out of the compound of Queen’s College. Out of that unit came local supplementary readers like, ‘Our First Village’, that told the co-operative-pooling-together story of the residents of Victoria village after slavery; ‘Balram’s New Home’, that told the story of an Indian family that first lived in a ‘logie’ and how through a co-operative effort moved into a new house in a scheme; ‘The Moco-Moco Tree’; the ‘WE ARE ONE’ series; and many other titles that reflect our Guyanese-ness. In EACH of the above titles were pictures that reflected the make-up of our national races. Gone were those readers published out of England that showed white children in white situations. With the advent of the Materials Production Unit, OUR children—our Guyanese children were able to see drawings/photographs in books that looked LIKE them, and THAT was priceless for the self-esteem—never mind from what angle it was viewed. (To honour the M.P.U. I will explain its basic structure: There was a group of writers that included Alan Fenty, Sybil Corte, and others; and there was a group of illustrators, trained in the art of designing and illustrating books by Tom Feelings. This group of illustrators included me along with Victor Davson, Roy Best Jr. and others.) But why am I bringing this up? Is it to remind ourselves that there was a time when we, as Guyanese, progressed along more very positive paths? That too—but mainly I’m bringing this up because, of late, it seems that the images now being offered to Guyanese children (and public at large) have reverted back to an old imagery: that of the light-skinned, and the close-to-white. (I recently helped a teacher from Guyana with a presentation; and it was saddening to see that all of the images in her slide-show were pictures of little white boys and little white girls instead of images of little Indo-Guyanese and little Afro-Guyanese.) So I now ask: Where are we going? Backwards? Are we soon to see even the advertisements in our newspapers reverting back fully to the images of white men and white women as it had been back in British Guiana? I saw a poster for a Cultural Center play on Facebook, and the images were Caucasian. I asked the producer why—why are you using a poster for a local play that shows non-local images for your poster? He said that he wasn’t even thinking about that—that it never crossed his mind. … And in my mind Max Romeo sings: ‘One step forward, two steps backward—down in a Babylon...’ What the hell went wrong after Burnham passed with our collective pride as a people proud of the way we look? It’s time to ask ourselves, as Guyanese: ‘Have kaka-roach eaten out our collective consciousness? youtube/watch?v=Ei5_k8fo5vY
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 15:31:45 +0000
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