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RE: Industrializing the Creative Arts is Key to Preserving Our Cultural Heritage
Dear Editor,
Al Creighton is right to be concerned. The disappearance of Guyana’s folklore and rituals, masquerade, Balgobin tales, and Amerindian myths deserves our immediate attention. But while his diagnosis is accurate, I believe his interpretation of the role of modern technology is incomplete. The question we should be asking isn’t whether technology threatens our culture, but how we can wield it to preserve, reimagine, and expand our cultural identity.
Technology, especially visual media, is not the enemy of intangible cultural heritage. It is, in fact, one of the most powerful tools we have to save it. Film, animation, and video games are new forms of storytelling, not replacements, but continuations. These forms allow us to encode the movements of a masquerade dancer, the cautionary tone of an old-time tale, and the dreamscapes of Amerindian cosmology in ways that are both immersive and transmissible.
They are the modern griots, the keepers and spreaders of memory.
In failing to appreciate this, we risk surrendering these stories to those with the means to digitize and globalize them before we do. In a world where intellectual property is currency, the question of who gets to tell our stories and profit from them is one of sovereignty. If we delay, others will own what we should have claimed, because they’ll have packaged and sold our myths better than we did. To industrialize our culture is not to commodify it, but to protect and propagate it through structure, scale, and ownership.
We must therefore stop seeing the creative industries as hobbies or distractions and start seeing them for what they are: core infrastructure for national identity and economic growth. Building local capacity in film, animation, and game development isn’t just an artistic ambition; it is an industrial imperative. These sectors can carry our folklore into the future while creating high-value jobs, exportable products, and a generation of young Guyanese who see their own culture as something worth mastering and monetizing.
To do this, we need more than cultural lamentation, we need policy, capital, and curriculum. The CXC Theatre Arts syllabus, as Creighton rightly notes, is underappreciated. But perhaps that’s because we have not yet built the industries that give it value in the real world.
Let us create those industries. Let us build the studios, fund the ideas, support the youth who are ready to translate oral tradition into digital experience.
Editor, the survival of our intangible cultural heritage does not require retreat from the future. It requires mastery of it. Let us move forward not with nostalgia alone, but with vision and investment.
Sincerely,
Emille Giddings
Georgetown Film Festival
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