Snowy Illusions and Guyanese Destitution
By Romain Khan
Published on January 21, 2026. Originally published on Stabroek News on December 29, 2025.
My attention was drawn to an album of photographs appearing on a Facebook page (December 12, 2025) about Guyana. The album appears to chronicle a Christmas-oriented event that encourages the belief in “the magic of Christmas.” Among the pictures of that album is one that depicts children gleefully reveling in what appears to be a granular, frost-like substance suggestive of snow. Any thoughts of this being a naturally occurring anomaly were brought into question by the image of a snow-cone machine and other paraphernalia.
It appeared that this was a faux snow flurry, but one which nonetheless captivated and gladdened these children. In a country where public spaces have yielded to the modern-capitalist imperative of expanding highways and widened streets that promote the tyranny of the automobile and corporate profiteering, this is ostensibly a refuge. A reprieve from the unendurable malaise of asphalt, concrete and the environmental and social cleaving of communities. Taking into consideration the state’s recent rallying cry against the “pernicious” influences of gambling and social media on Guyanese children, and which seemingly necessitates the antidote of “civic education,” any occasion for cultivating youthful mirth must be seen as praiseworthy.
One may say the exultation is befitting the European folktale “The Snow Child,” in which a childless couple are gifted a newborn, the consequence of the wife miraculously conceiving after an accidental fall in a snowbank. Unlike the Biblical counterpart, however, the celebratory mood of this glacial virgin birth quickly evaporates as the child expires with the coming of summer. Those who have experienced the climactic if not social “novelties” of the industrialized North know all too well the stubborn reality of the dark, sodden earth that emerges with the melting of the snow. Could it therefore be that the glorified “magic” of unblemished snow is nothing more than Western racial nostalgia prepackaged for Third World consumption? That behind the ashen lustre of snowy seductions lies the murkiness of Guyanese and Caribbean destitution?
More than forty years ago, Barbadian sound poet-extraordinaire, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, highlighted the perils of thinking with and in snow. Snowfall, he writes, is “the imported alien experience” of metropolitan cultures. European imperialism had done more than loot us; it had coerced, then indoctrinated us to think and act in European models, since purportedly ours were subhuman. To glorify an extraterrestrial experience while rebuffing our local cultural inheritances—the sodden, submerged experiences and values of our folk culture—was considered enlightenment. In the assessment of Martinican psychiatrist-philosopher, Frantz Fanon, this disfigured us, rendering us cultural schizophrenics.
The aftermath, as Brathwaite observes, has been tragi-comedic. Caribbean children, indoctrinated by the alien experience of English snowfall, begin to write about “the snow falling on the canefields.” Eerily, one of the pictures of the Facebook album of Guyanese Christmas photographs captures the contrast of ersatz snow against the backdrop of an organically flourishing bougainvillea. Cultural dissonance.
Brathwaite’s conclusion is melancholy: “in terms of what we write, our perceptual models, we are more conscious of the falling of snow…than of the force of the hurricane which takes place every year.” This is more than self-delusion; it is also self-alienation. And if Barbadians shun the paradigm of the hurricane, then Guyanese — certainly the elite bourgeois caste and their adherents — snub the flood and mud, absconding into frosty unreality away from the waterlogged existence that besieges the majority “Wretched” of this swampy, ensnaring earth.
Such flights of fancy, as political scientist Fernando Coronil details about his native Venezuela in The Magical State, are definitive of petrostates. For with the transition from agrarian to oil nations comes the “deification” of the oil state and its senior apparatchiks. The latter, semi-skilled “magicians,” flourish the wand of oil wealth to produce “fabulous fictions.” According to Coronil, whether unleashed as grandiose infrastructure projects or political speeches, the intended effect is always to charm, to entrance, to mesmerize. After all, what good is a performer/performance without a captive audience?
But it is not just the people, but the very state itself that is spellbound. We may have been informed of the restructuring of the socialist foundations of party constitutions, but never was there an explicit utterance of what had filled the ideological void. By neoimperial decree, the state has inculcated the spirit of neoliberalism — a carnivorous form of capitalism that has been stealthily sanctified as a global secular religion.
A “church” in which many are called but few are chosen as Fanon reminds us.
Masquerading in deceptive shibboleths such as “progress” and “freedom,” neoliberal ideology facilitates the enrichment of financial elites (local and foreign) through what another Martinican philosopher, Édouard Glissant, sees as the “exchange of public credit for private benefit.” Socialized welfare for the affluent, administered by a technocratic/managerial political elite class. And as neoliberal dogma commodifies all forms of social, cultural and ecological life, education is devalued to technical careerism; citizenship/human identity is reduced to being marketable/entrepreneurial subjects; and organic ecosystems are debased as “carbon credits” etc. Worst, within the magical neoliberal petrostate, conformity is institutionalized, and as political thinker Wendy Brown observes, the “democratic energies” of the society are starved. With the obliteration of democratic norms, the “political” understood as the pursuit of justice and order, perishes. Personalized rule that borders on hyper-presidentialism; orchestrated straitjacketing of representative institutions and constitutional functions; censorship and discrediting of media and civil society organizations unaligned with the state; and heightened allegations of political corruption and financial irregularities that foster socioeconomic exclusion and social instability are some of the manifestations of democratic erosion in the Caribbean’s newest petrostate. Pronouncements of electoral integrity as if it is the sole index of democratic vigour, overlook the exercise of participatory rights (civil and political), public right of access to information and public accountability as equally constitutive of such self-congratulatory claims.
So, we in this “Plantation America” to recall Édouard Glissant, appear fated to imperial models that are constantly being reinvented and imposed, with enthusiastic local elite consent. Caribbean/Guyanese subjects and history continue to be the victims of “imperial debris” and are evicted into the white-out of unrelenting blizzards. Not with the innocence of childish elation, but the violence that accompanies the miscarriage of the promises of political independence. Our “original sin,” the Plantation scar, continues to fester.
Neoliberal magicians belong to what philosopher Craig Chalquist qualifies as “the cult of quantification.” Carefully curated numbers, economic models and statistics form their vernacular. Ironically, the Guyanese state’s reflex of rebutting the validity of international findings on account of supposed faulty analysis or weak empiricism is undone by a delinquent 2022 Census and glaring truancy in several international data repositories. Not to mention that the very notion of “empiricism” rests in the Greek root “empeiria” which means “experience.” The severity of lived experience that Guyanese often relate in local newspaper columns such as the “How the Cost of Living is Affecting People” should remind us of Frantz Fanon’s sobering rejoinder that “individual experience is national, since it is a link in the national chain.”
Briefly indulging the neoliberal quantitative fetish, we can sweep away a few snowy mystifications to unveil the muddy realities that saturate Guyanese everyday life. Schematically, and in some cases, verbatim, we may reflect on the following:
- According to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Country Strategy with the Cooperative Republic of Guyana (2023-2026), Guyana recorded an average "Extreme Poverty" rate of 29% between 2017-2021, periods of accelerating oil production. This was in addition to an average "Poverty" rate of 17% over the same period. No less dire were 37% of the population living under conditions of "Vulnerability." The "Middle Class" was no higher than 15%, leaving a "High Income" minority of less than 1%. It is therefore not surprising that the same financial institution observes that in Guyana "The richest 20% of the population capture 42% of national income, underscoring a highly uneven distribution" ("Ten Findings about Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean," 2024).
- Since 2000, Guyana’s life expectancy at birth has improved by 1.43 years, but as laudable as that may appear, the nation registers an average life span of 66 years (across sexes), staggering at least eight years behind the Americas which records an average of 75 years (across sexes) (World Health Organization).
- UNICEF Guyana’s Annual Report 2024 notes that public assistance programmes are not adequate to lift families—especially those in remote or underserved areas—out of poverty, leaving many vulnerable children, including those with disabilities, without needed support. Although the national budget for social protection has increased, these investments have not yet resulted in meaningful improvements for the most marginalized groups.The International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Guyana Decent Work Country Programme 2025-2030, has found that “while non-contributory social assistance schemes provide extensive coverage to vulnerable populations in principle, coverage in practice is limited.” Moreover, “cash transfers to poor household cover just a quarter of the population living in extreme poverty.”
- The same ILO report notes that labour market conditions are weak, with a low participation rate of 49.6% and unemployment at 14.5%, including a high share of long term unemployment (38%), signalling persistent barriers to finding stable work. Over half of all workers (53%) are in informal or non standard employment—such as temporary contract work—contributing to widespread decent work deficits. Women face persistently poorer labour market outcomes than men, with much lower labour force participation (37.8% vs. 62.1%) and higher unemployment and underemployment rates. Gender inequalities are reinforced by women’s disproportionate unpaid care responsibilities and the prevalence of workplace discrimination, including sexual harassment.
- A report by the Inter-American Development Bank Education Division, The State of Education in Latin America and the Caribbean 2023, indicates that “the countries with the highest school dropout rates are Mexico, Guyana, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Honduras.” The ILO Report states that while primary education is nearly universal, Guyana’s low secondary enrolment rate (68%) continues to limit employability and contributes to decent work challenges, especially in interior regions.
- The IDB Group Country Strategy with the Co-operative Republic of Guyana (2023-2026) finds that “Indigenous people remain the most economically disadvantaged and vulnerable ethnic group in Guyana.” Meanwhile, the UNICEF Guyana Annual Report 2024 points out that social protection services in Guyana are concentrated in urban areas, leaving rural, Indigenous, and migrant communities with limited access to assistance. Clean water access is lowest in rural and interior regions—especially among poorer households and Amerindian communities—with high contamination levels (up to 83.4% in Region 1, an Indigenous-dominant community), worsening health risks and deepening social inequalities.
It is the remarkably perceptive Jamaican cultural critic, Sylvia Wynter, who reminds us that as casualties of imperialism, we Caribbean peoples are “imprisoned” by the “bewitched reality” of capitalism/neoliberalism. With oil bearing Olympian powers and the petrostate a magician, we can expect to be enshrouded in layered hallucinations. However, with both Wynter’s and Brathwaite’s invitation, we can pierce the frost of misdirection by attuning to the rhythms and political protests of our “muddy” folk culture—the counterculture of critical social consciousness and liberation from colonial domination. And who best to guide us than the venerable Jamaican folklorist, Louise Bennett-Coverly, fondly known as Miss Lou, whose “Dutty Tuff” poem reminds us of our paradoxical social realities:
Sun a-shine but tings no bright,
(The sun is shining, but things are not bright)
Doah pot a-bwile, bickle (food) noh nuff,
(The pot is boiling but food is scarce)
River flood but water scarce yaw,
(The river has flooded but there is a drought)
Rain a-fall but dutty tuff
(The rain is falling but the earth is hardened/tough)
The following video contains Miss Lou’s performance of the poem.
About the Author
Romain Khan is a Doctoral student who identifies proudly with his Caribbean roots. His research critically engages the confluence of decoloniality, racial subjection and the geopolitics of knowledge in relation to the ongoing modernist project in the Caribbean's newest petrostate, Guyana.