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Fiction or fact?
Dear Editor,
Kaieteur News – The Guyana Prize Literary Festival initiated by the PNC in 1987, was a step in the right direction, the likes of Al Creighton and others, deserve this nation’s commendation and congratulations.
However, throughout history, we have witnessed flaws, failings and foibles among us, even with the best of intentions. It is bewildering if not unbelievable that in Guyana, we somehow fail to recognize our greatest fiction writers of all times. I refer to the ‘Alibarat’ authorship who from the sanctuary in Robb Street and elsewhere deliver gems of glorious fiction on a regular basis. They tell us that fifty thousand US dollars from Government funds are paid to a group who delivered recently fiction clothed with a flimsy garment of fact.
We boast of building schools, at inflated price tags, yet failing to pay teachers a livable wage and at the same time failing to put in place advance training to cope with the rapidly advancing world of science and technology, in similar fashion, building hospitals and health centres while being unable to stop the haemorrhage of medical staff from specialist to nurses.
While seeming quite comfortable to bringing staff, alien to our social and cultural environment and boasting from their citadel in Robb Street and ivy towers that they are doing a wonderful job. Fiction not fact. Instead of taking measures to ease the burden of an increased cost-of-living, they have no problem with platitudes, palliatives and piffle.
We shout from the roof top of freedom of expression as required by our Constitution, but we go after the independent media and those whose only offence is to relay the truth to the people of Guyana. I anxiously await the announcement of the Fiction writer of the year to our learned and illustrious ‘Alibarat’.
Hamilton Green
Elder
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