Dear Editor,
There is an old idea about nations that the political scientist Benedict Anderson described as an imagined community. The borders of a state are not only physical lines drawn by surveyors. They are mental frameworks. They shape how a people understand who they are, where they belong and what they can become.
Thongchai Winichakul’s influential book Siam Mapped goes even further by showing how countries can be limited or liberated by the maps they inherit. Geographic imagination becomes political destiny. When a society holds on to a narrow map of itself, its future becomes equally narrow.
Guyana has lived for too long within the mental borders of a coastal, Atlantic-facing plantation society. This old mental map was not drawn by us. It was sketched by those who needed the coast to function as a platform for
sugar production and extraction. The plantations lined the shoreline because sugar had to leave quickly by ship.
The enslaved African people were placed along that littoral not because of cultural logic but because of colonial utility. Meanwhile, the interior was treated as emptiness, as danger, as a space for the indigenous Other. The Atlantic and the plantation shaped what we were allowed to imagine.
Even today this inherited imagination still shapes how we speak of ourselves. It also shapes how others speak to us. When a Canadian envoy recently urged citizens to “speak up” and pressure the government to respond to the EU report, the tone, whether intended or not, carried echoes of an older era in which the Atlantic was seen as the source of guidance and legitimacy. In that framework, Guyana becomes an object to be supervised rather than a sovereign nation whose democratic voice arises from within. That envoy ought to have known better.
A letter writer in Kaieteur News (KN 3/12/25) responded to my earlier argument and suggested that unease with foreign pressure signals political weakness. That interpretation is shortsighted and misunderstands the issue. Sovereignty does not mean silence in the face of critique. It means insisting that the authority to shape our civic behaviour rests inside Guyana. The writer’s comment does not alter this larger national argument and is not significant enough to reshape it or to merit more space here.
The real question is the map we still carry in our minds. When we imagine Guyana as a coastal society facing the Atlantic, we reproduce a colonial geography. Conversely, when we imagine Guyana as a South American state with a vast interior and continental potential, we begin drawing our own map.
A nation is strongest when its people imagine themselves as more than the coordinates of their past. The interior must become part of our civic imagination, not just an administrative territory. Our identity cannot remain anchored only in plantation memory. The past belongs in our history books but it cannot be the only compass for the future we seek.
This re-mapping opens the door to a conversation that is now gaining momentum across Guyana: the Orange Economy. Over the past week, our newspapers have been filled with commentary on this new frontier, from H. Kumar’s reflections to Dr Randy Persaud’s examination of its demographic and economic outlines and my own article in Stabroek News (SN, 3/12/25) on the itinerary of the idea.[1]
This is not accidental. It is the emergence of a national recognition that the creative and cultural sectors are not simply artistic hobbies. They are an economic engine that depends directly on how a country imagines itself.
A coastal imagination tied to plantation economics and narratives produces a narrow Orange Economy. It ties creativity to imported aesthetics, metropolitan validation and Caribbean imitation. But a continental imagination produces a vast Orange Economy, one rooted in Indigenous knowledge, craft traditions, music, literature, film, fashion, sports and stories shaped by the forests, rivers and interior landscapes that define our true geography.
When we think only of the coast we reproduce a plantation-era creativity dominated by mimicry. When we open our imagination to the interior we create the foundation for an original, self-confident, globally competitive creative economy.
This is why the new national conversation on the Orange Economy is so significant. It represents more than cultural policy or economic diversification. It signifies the beginning of a psychological shift in how Guyanese understand value. Creativity cannot flourish if our nation imagines itself through an old colonial map. The Orange Economy becomes possible only when we redraw and reward our mental geography.
The Ali government’s physical development of roads, bridges and interior corridors is part of this re-mapping. These investments are often discussed merely in terms of commerce or transportation. But they also have a deeper symbolic function. They connect Guyanese minds to Guyanese land. They teach us to see our country as a whole and not as a coastal fragment. Infrastructure becomes part of cultural imagination. A nation that builds inward begins to think inward. It becomes harder to dismiss Guyana as an appendage of the Atlantic world when our own people can travel across river systems, forests and savannahs to engage and understand that this is who we are.
My arguments about cultural reconstruction have always pointed to the same idea. Colonialism drew narrow lines around our identity and limited what Guyanese thought they could become. To build a mature Guyana we must redraw both our geographic and our cultural maps. New identification with the land and our Continental neighbours. New cultural confidence. New economic vision. The Orange Economy fits naturally within this larger project because it transforms creativity into a national resource rather than an external dependency.
We must turn South and be prepared to walk the long road. Only then can Guyana develop a post-plantation culture, a deep democracy and a flourishing Orange Economy that are organically ours.