This famous poem entitled `The Soldier’ was written by Rupert Brooke, an Englishman who died in 1915, during the first world war, though not of injuries sustained in combat. Though it has been described as sentimental by more astringent tastes for romanticising the awful brutality and suffering of war there can be no doubt of the genuine, patriotic feelings so beautifully expressed.

But our purpose today is not literary criticism, the question we wish to ask is could a Guyanese today write a poem expressing similar sentiments? Are there those among us who have that kind of belief in their country, a deep, national pride? Brooke reflects in his poem a belief in the myths of England’s greatness and grandeur. There have been historic achievements, of course, but they have been mythologised and they create a number of positive images and legends to which idealistic young Englishmen can relate. The imagined community that people call a nation, as distinct from the constitutional state with its legal boundaries, is based on an amalgam of positive myths. Do we have such myths in Guyana, can we create them, is it desirable or necessary that we should?

In the first place, our primal myths are negative. We see our origins here as labourers in the oppressive world of the plantation. Because of that, most Guyanese relate negatively to this country at the deepest level, they hanker, or at least they delude themselves that they do, for other places, other countries, in some cases the one they came from a century or more ago.

Can we create positive myths based on the struggle against oppression and for survival? To some extent that has already been done, heroes have been identified. Is it enough? How can it productively be developed? Do the Amerindians, our native ancestors, provide a solution or at least the valid beginning that is needed? Can we learn from the writings of Wilson Harris, and draw some positive message of the meaning of our past, and the complex meetings that took place here between various civilisations and the linkages that have gone to make us up? Can a new multi-ethnic `nation’ emerge from this vision, in an imaginative architecture?

Can we truly possess this land, washed by its many rivers, its “sights and sounds”, dreams “happy as [its] day” despite all that has gone before, the original exile, the suffering, the despair and more recently the emigration? Nation building is a tool, to create the possibility for development, for feeling better about ourselves, for peace of mind. It is not itself a final human end but a means of achieving the redemption of our humanity, as a prelude to other things. Indeed there can be a narrow line between a progressive nationalism and a zenophobic chauvinism or militarism of which Nazi Germany is perhaps the most infamous example. It is also true that what has been described as the natural cosmopolitanism of the Guyanese has sometimes been praised. But the truth is that we have become creatures of this country, whatever that may mean, in all our shapes and forms, and whether we think so or not. What we do not yet have is an understanding of who we are, or any comfort with that vision. The pain of our past has not been put to rest, we have not yet been able to accept ourselves.