I hope that the submitted works for the Guyana Prize will be available to the public

Feb 28, 2015 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
Having written to the press on the Guyana Prize and receiving replies to statements he made, Ruel Johnson begs off from continuing the discussion (Letters, February 27, 2015) saying it is “ad hoc cross talking” in which he is too busy to engage and finds tedious. He now says the discussion is too important for the media and has to be done by bringing serious, knowledgeable people together, and around a table of some sort, I suppose?
I, like so many others, will never be invited to any discussion around any table at any time, which leaves me wholly dependent on the media for any discussion, a situation I much prefer anyhow.
Since a free press is a fundamental of democracy and good governance, providing a free and open forum where ideas can be exchanged and debated, one must wonder what Johnson hopes for in a post-elections Guyana. Tables around which a privileged, hand-picked few will meet to make decisions for all of us? This will constitute a free expression of ideas rather than the cross talking that a free press supports?
Johnson writes hopefully of a new dispensation where writers and artists would be free of fear from victimization intimating, perhaps, that he has been so victimized. I am no proponent of the current government, but could he say when and how this occurred, especially given the fact that he won his two Guyana Prizes under the PPP administration.
Johnson is proud that he succeeded in getting the Guyana Prize deadline extended and continues to exhort writers to network and workshop to get their work ready for the competition and the goal of a prize, because he is well aware that the million-dollar prize can go to the best of a bad lot. It can be won by work that is poor, badly edited and shows only some promise, making it incomplete.
I would advise new writers to have personal integrity, an extremely rare commodity in Guyana, and to stand above it all and take your time to think, write, review and reflect then rewrite and when your work is good and ready, and is the best you can do, then you submit it. Have your own standard of excellence, since Guyana has none.
I hope that the submitted works will be available to the public so that we can all have an opinion on who should win. The secret society, back-door-deal procedure that usually obtains in selecting the winners is not acceptable. Hopefully, we will not see the same old faces, those multiple-time winners who are proud of their multiple wins and never stop to ask themselves why they have won one, two, three times.
Do they win over and over because there are not enough good writers around or is it because they are favoured to win each time they submit their work, any work?
Either way, this is more than enough reason to scrap the prize and mount an investigation. Since Johnson has written to the media on so many occasions to hold government accountable, I am sure he too will insist on this investigation by whoever forms the next government.
Ryhaan Shah

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