Guyana has never had more ways to transmit and fewer places to encounter one another. With Stabroek News gone and oil decisions compounding, the national question is not only who gets to speak. It is who is required to listen.
Nearly seventy-five years after Martin Carter first refused to still his voice, the closing line of “Looking at Your Hands” has become a national slogan. This Sunday Essay asks what it would mean to treat it instead as a standard, and to hold the M/V Barima inquiry, the closure of Stabroek News, and the institutions of the oil era answerable to the poem.