The Sovereignty of the Imagination

A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse

Article 1 of 12

Lamming’s one acre of ground, read by lamplight in the middle of an oil boom.

By Nabaclis Piknee · August 20, 2026

I sat on the veranda late into the night, reading by a dim lamp, listening to the heavy trucks hum along the public road. In my hands was a worn copy of a book by the great Barbadian and regional thinker, George Lamming. At seventy-three, looking out at a Guyana dizzy with oil wealth and fractured by a frantic, every-man-for-himself hustle, Lamming’s words no longer feel like old book learning — they feel like a map for our immediate survival. He understood that true freedom is not merely the lowering of a colonial flag or the sudden filling of a national treasury. He called the real goal something far deeper, far more radical: the Sovereignty of the Imagination. And as the old people used to say, empty drum mek mo noise — all this oil money doesn’t mean a thing if the mind behind it is still locked up.

But Lamming did not build this idea alone, and neither should we lean on him alone. Guyana has its own prophets of the imagination, and a sovereign mind has to know them too. Long before oil, Martin Carter was already warning us in verse that “this is the dark time, my love” — that a people bought cheap will sell cheap, generation after generation, unless something in them refuses. Wilson Harris spent a lifetime insisting that our rivers and our forests are not empty backdrop but living text, that the interior itself is thinking, and that a nation which cannot read its own landscape cannot know itself. The sculptor Philip Moore carved that same conviction into wood and stone — that our spiritual life did not arrive with a missionary or a mining company, it was already here, and it is ours to reclaim. These are not decorations on Lamming’s argument. They are the same argument, spoken in a different tongue, from people who never left this soil to say it.

The Mind Still Locked Up

Lamming argued fiercely that a people can achieve political independence and still remain entirely enslaved in their minds. He warned that the greatest danger to a postcolonial society is the unthinking docility of its citizens — a state where we allow our leaders and our foreign corporate masters to define what is possible, what is valuable, and who we are.

Look at our bustling mob today. When our young people abandon the land to chase petty handouts, when they measure their human worth solely by the crumbs that fall from foreign oil tables, they are suffering a collapse of the imagination. They have accepted a reality designed by someone else. They have lost what Lamming called their sovereign “one acre of ground” — that unalterable space of self-possession and dignity that no empire should ever be allowed to buy. As the old people used to warn, when you sell your ground, you sell your voice too. Martin Carter knew this loss before the first oil rig ever touched our water; he called it the poet’s job to keep the strength of the will alive precisely because everything around us conspires to wear it down.

The Politics of Division

This is why our responsibility in choosing our leaders is so heavy, and why we have failed so drastically in the past. We have consistently elected leaders who encourage our self-contempt, feeding us the poisonous politics of ethnicity to keep us divided and weak. When two bulls fight, it’s the grass that suffers — and we have been the grass long enough.

Lamming saw the fictional island of San Cristobal — patterned directly after the racially fractured politics of Guyana and Trinidad — as a tragic warning. He showed how a ruling elite will gladly use the virus of ethnic division as a shield to lock up state power for themselves, completely ignoring the people “from down below.” Rooplall Monar wrote our own version of that warning from inside the sugar estates and logies, showing how easily poverty turns neighbour against neighbour when the real thief is standing offstage, counting money. A sovereign imagination means our youth must look past the tribal theatre of election season. They must realize that a leader who uses fear to win a vote is a leader who intends to auction off their future to the highest bidder.

A leader who uses fear to win a vote is a leader who intends to auction off their future to the highest bidder.

— N.P.

The Environment as a Mirror

Furthermore, Lamming’s concept of sovereignty demands a radical responsibility for our physical environment. You cannot claim to have a sovereign mind while walking through streets choked with filth and watching your natural world get systematically degraded. Aubrey Williams put an entire cosmology into his canvases — the forest, the ancient petroglyph, the shifting Guyanese light — because he understood, the way Harris did, that our landscape is not scenery, it is inheritance.

The neglect of our public spaces, the trash in our drainage canals, and the destruction of our historic wooden architecture are physical manifestations of a colonial mindset — the belief that we are just temporary tenants in our own home, waiting for someone else to clean up after us. But one hand can’t clap — one person alone can’t build a nation, and one government alone can’t clean up what all of us made together. Caring for our environment is the ultimate exercise of local ownership. When a community takes collective charge of its cleanliness, its maintenance, and its spatial beauty, it is actively executing its right to define its own order and priorities.

The University We Must Build

The national university we build must be the institutional home for this philosophy. It cannot simply be a factory to train compliant workers for foreign enterprises. It must be an incubator for the sovereignty of the mind. It must teach our young people to be intellectual soldiers who use record-keeping and radical accountability to audit the state, protect the commons, and actively resist the docility that resource wealth breeds. It must put Carter’s poems and Harris’s novels and Williams’s canvases and Moore’s carvings on the same syllabus as engineering and petroleum economics, so that no graduate ever mistakes technical skill for a whole mind.

Stand On Our Ground

We must listen to George Lamming’s drum, and to the drums our own people have been beating all along. We must step out of the frantic scramble, look across our beautiful, diverse landscape, and remember that our future does not belong to the politicians or the foreign investors. The future belongs to the collective imagination of the people.

As we say back home: wha nah ripe can’t pick. Our nation is still growing, still ripening — and it will only ripen if we tend it ourselves, with our own hands, with our own minds sovereign and free, guided as much by Carter and Harris and Williams and Moore as by Lamming himself. What Lamming named sovereignty, this series will keep testing against a harder standard as it goes — call it the autonomous imagination, a mind that answers to no one’s script, not the empire’s and not any local landlord’s either. It is time to stand on our one acre of ground, reclaim our national dignity, and author our own destiny.

Next Wednesday: Article 2 of 12, “From Imagination to the Curse.”

Beyond the Resource Curse — A GBJ Series

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