Guyanese and visitors arriving at and departing from the Cheddi Jagan International Airport at Timehri are once again confronted with a spectacle that is as bewildering as it is revealing. Snowflakes cling to Christmas trees, artificial snow is scattered on the ground, and wintry motifs dominate the airport’s festive display, an imitation of a European winter transplanted without reflection into the heart of a hot and humid tropical nation.
This is not a harmless decorative choice. It is a statement about identity, self perception and cultural priorities. It raises an unavoidable question. Is this cultural imperialism by habit or cultural stupidity and laziness by design. And what does it say about a people who allow their most visible national gateway to mock their lived reality.
Guyana is not Europe or North America. It is not a land of snow, sleighs or frozen ground. Guyana’s people are African, East Indian, Indigenous and of mixed heritage. Europeans and Chinese together account for less than two percent of the population. Yet the imagery greeting the world at our international airport is unmistakably European. Snowflakes dusting Christmas trees, snow scattered across the floor, reindeer, nutcrackers, sleighs and snowmen. Objects that belong to cold northern climates and nowhere else.
Even a child understands the absurdity. In Guyana’s December heat a snowman would melt within minutes. There is no snow on our ground, no frozen rooftops, no white Christmas mornings. Yet year after year the same fictitious enactment is staged, and those responsible for planning and approving these displays either do not see or do not care about the insult embedded in this performance.
The offence is compounded by the fact that this is not a private display. This is a state-owned space and business. Government institutions are meant to set the cultural tone and reflect the nation back to itself and to the world with confidence and clarity. Instead the message projected is one of confusion and cultural insecurity, a willingness to discard authenticity in favour of imported fantasy.
Christmas in Guyana has never needed snow to be meaningful. Our traditions are rooted in rhythm, movement and community. The masquerade band, Mother Sally, the Long Lady, drumming, folk songs and locally composed Christmas music speak directly to our history and environment. These are not quaint alternatives. They are the core of a Guyanese Christmas.
Ironically it is visitors from the North escaping snow and freezing temperatures who come to Guyana yearning for precisely this cultural richness. They do not come to see artificial snowflakes glued to trees or fake snow scattered on the ground. Those leaving Guyana for the holidays also deserve a visual reminder of home, a cultural send off that quietly says ‘there is no place like home for the holidays.‘
This cultural drift extends well beyond airport décor. Across state institutions there is a striking absence of deliberate and structured thought about what defines us as Guyanese. Turn on state owned media and you are often greeted by announcers with Jamaican accents. Jamaican Creole slips easily into broadcast language even as Guyanese Creolese, our own linguistic inheritance, is diluted and sidelined. We promote another country’s cultural expression while neglecting our own.
Guyanese have become mimic men and women, echoing borrowed identities rather than standing firmly in our own. One suspects that even the renowned Trinidadian born journalist and writer V S Naipaul would struggle to capture the full irony of a nation mimicking others while standing on such a rich cultural foundation.
Milan Kundera warned in his 1978 novel ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting‘ that the destruction of a nation begins with cultural erasure.
“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.”
The cruel irony is that no external power is doing this to Guyana. There is no occupying force, no imposed cultural mandate. We are doing it to ourselves. And the government, whether through negligence or indifference, is not merely a bystander—it is in the driver’s seat, or at the very least riding comfortably alongside those steering the slow erasure of Guyanese culture.
