Guyana’s Golden Age – the one that never was

Aug 31, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – No, it is not oil, though it should have been.  No, it is not about quiet times, the ones that never were; those soft, satisfying ones that touched, stirred, endured, for those never were, too.  It’s not about all those people who left here, but should have stayed, for then who knows what a place, what an age, that could have been…  No, Guyana’s Golden Age was what should have been, the great promise of which so much has been spoken, written, envisioned, hoped-for, imagined, but as ever proved to be that grail that always eluded.

Guyana’s Golden Age was always about all those expectations that were born with liberation, then elections, and the convictions that this time, things will be better for the first time.  Because the quality of the people who could make that possible were ready to give of their best, and be the best, when the inner trumpets sounded.  It is a tragedy that whether high times or low times, something wasn’t grasped.  Whether good or bad, it is the only time that would ever be.  That through the tears and pain, there would still be the strength to laugh.  Laugh at our tears, and mock our fears.  We are that junction, that crossroads, that abiding national mystery, yet again.  How many countries and their peoples could say that they had so many second chances to get it right, do things well?  And then kneel and say grace for the favour, for the essence of an authentic existence, however fleeting.

Elections have always been about the potential.  Awesome.  Vast.  Profound.  Yet never realized, always proving to be a stranger evading the grasp.  We can be the best of proud citizens, but to what avail, for what purpose, when we can’t even try the first steps towards friendship.  Circumstances have fostered an environment, a condition of the mind, where to be spiteful and vicious is to be majestic.  The thought was of living, when there was little wisdom of where to start, what was being missed.  It isn’t of paradise lost, but of paradise unmoored, unraveled, unpeopled.  Ah, the quality, the courage to dare to try, and then to accept whatever comes, because of that gallantry that ennobled the simple act of heartfelt effort.  Armed and armored in the knowledge that right is on our side, then to possess the essence to stand and not yield has to qualify as something sacred.

We have been spurned and burned, yet find great joy to turn against brother, sister.  The irony is that that is the greatest testimony of the Guyana history lived.  Says something, but how much, when so many gifts have been ours?  In hindsight, even in victory, elections have proved to be pyrrhic.  For, as the Roman General Scipio did to the vanquished Carthaginians, Guyana’s soil sowed with salt.  Barrenness and devastation follow.  Still, that stirring, that prophesy, of a Great Golden Age for Guyana will not die, will not vanish into the ether of night.  In thinking of promise, potential, and prophets, I recall Senator Daniel P. Moynihan and his gentle correction, poignant insight, following John F. Kennedy’s grim, brutal scything from this life: “we will laugh again, but we will never be young again.”  The hopes, dreams, myths that nurture the imagination are too often crushed by our own hands.  Still, there must be searching for that gilt-edged state with the richness that could motivate a minor handful of intrepid individuals to rise and carry a community, then a country.  It is that even when hearts are breaking, there is still room for the breaking of bread.  I exhort all to be open to that peace, now needed more than at any other time in the history of this society.  So punished, yet so promising.

When I should have laughed in the teeth of difficulty, confronted any sadness, only human wilting was found as companion.  The terrible beauty of this country is that while the mind is on tomorrow and beyond, the heart is forever locked in yesterday and all that could have been, and never was.  When failures defeat, then it could just be that we are not worthy of that ascendancy yearned for, that Camelot, those Arcadian fields imagined, but which don’t really belong.

It’s now customary to look back, lament.  Guyana dismissed as a place of regret, yet bewilderingly comforted in how it is.  Perhaps, it’s the beginning of that phase which T.S. Eliot wrote so profoundly: “In order to be healed, our illness must grow worse.”  Personally, I can only say that I am going somewhere, if I came from somewhere, possess something.  The Golden Age of Guyana, the fictions of dreams, the truths of myths, which will it be?  For there’s the contradiction, the reality, the story, of Guyana.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• GHK Lall, Golden Age, Guyana, oil

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