How to write or make a film about Guyana..

[Inspired by the Essay How to Write about Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina ]

You do not have to be in Guyana to write about Guyana. In fact, you do not even have to visit Guyana. You can visit the libraries abroad or the CIA archives or the British Archives and compose your stories or histories

If making a film about Guyana, make it one about wildness and adventure. Put something about jaguars in it, or lost land. Do not film anything about the people, the people only exist to make your film making project possible. Ensure that there is a lot of jungle, and mist, and cloud and dust.. and that you are shown in the film slushing through the mud and the water. When you show any of the locals.. it must be in a light which does not show them watching you in amusement.. but rather in a way in which you seem civilised on your wild adventure.. and they seem uncivlised to be living in the place where you come to have adventure.

Or make your film using Bollywood music because the Indian and other people in Guyana want to live Bollywood type lives. Or make films which though beautiful, are about death, dying, loss.. Guyana must be about decay while other parts of the world apparently are about growth and flourishing.

When writing about Guyana, write about decayed and dilapidated buildings. Write about the rubbish and the dirt and the minibuses with loud music and conductors with tattoos and gold rings. Do not write about the minibuses with no music and the conductors with tatoos and gold rings who help old ladies and children to cross the road.

Write about the corrupt police but do not write about the police who might be nice to you.

Write about characters who are scamps or who seem to want to rob people. Or are lazy. Nobody in your writing should be hard working or aspiring to the things which you have achieved. Or their labours must be seen to be in vain. Your characters must not be literate.. or if they are literate, something must be wrong with them to have remained in Guyana.  Sometimes you might use the adjective Guyanan to describe the people who are born here.

Your stories should never really have happy endings. Even those characters who have left Guyana should be pathetic and hopeless where ever they exist.

Nostalgia
If you want , you must write about a Guyana which existed in your childhood or your parents' childhood when they left Guyana. Write about how wonderful it is to have grown up in this place from your photographs and your stories. You do not to visit again to write anything and never mind what you write about is not relevant to anything which exists now or which might be different from other people's memory.

When writing about Guyana's history - make sure you write about the racial riots and Jonestown and those things, do  not write about those who are working to heal the wounds from those memories.


And when you write your book or make your film about Guyana.. there is no need for you to return to share it, to show it , to offer it to the National Library or the National Archives or to open it to criticism. Or if you do return, make sure you do it in such a way that you are immune to any criticism.