Sweeping Guyana into the Global Frame

In February 2024, the president of Guyana, Irfan Ali, sat down for an interview with the journalist Stephen Sackur, the host of BBC’s HARDtalk, about the future of oil and gas production in the country. The conversation occurred during the sidelines of the Guyana Energy Conference and Supply Chain Expo held at the Marriot Hotel in Georgetown. Shortly after BBC released the full interview, a two-minute clip went viral. It was the presidential clapback heard around the world and certainly throughout the global South. When Sackur attempted to inquire about how Guyana is morally contending with the reality that the latest oil discovery will release approximately 2 billion tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, President Ali refused to entertain the question. In fact, he cut Sackur off and scolded him: “Does that give you the right to lecture us on climate change? I will lecture you on climate change!”¹ The president of Guyana then went on to list all the ways that Guyana and its rainforest have functioned as a carbon sink for many years for the rest of the world without recognition or compensation. Frequently in his response to Sackur, President Ali expressed, “We have kept this forest alive” or “The people of Guyana has kept alive [this forest]” or “We have kept our biodiversity,” emphasizing how it is the nation’s citizens who have functioned as its loyal stewards.² 

But nowhere in his powerful rebuke did President Ali address the gendered nature of that care for the planet. For instance, not once did he call attention to the attorney Melinda Janki, who has been at the forefront fighting deep-water petroleum production in offshore Guyana. Nor did he recognize the members of Red Thread—a Guyanese multiracial grassroots women’s organization formed in 1986 as an autonomous organization located outside of party politics—who have been staging demonstrations outside the Environmental Protection Agency’s head office in Georgetown. Still more, there was no mention of the artist Roshini Kempadoo, whose ongoing project Like Gold Dust (2019–) reckons with the twinned afterlives of slavery and indentureship particularly as they manifest through processes associated with commodification and extraction in Guyana. None of these women and many more not named here were acknowledged for how their labor has been directed toward protecting Guyana’s ecosystem.

Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond by the anthropologist Oneka LaBennett carefully exposes the relationship between Guyanese women’s gendered labor and global racial capitalism in a country that is rapidly becoming a leader in oil production worldwide. Unlike President Ali, whose passionate defense of Guyana disregards the important role women have played in protecting the environment, LaBennett carefully and convincingly tells an intricate story about Guyana’s unique economies, ecologies, and histories of extraction through generations of Guyanese women. Despite Guyana’s invocation seemingly everywhere, from international newspapers to popular television, the country is hardly ever grappled with in meaningfully complex ways. In order to tell a different story about her native land, LaBennett employs what she calls a pointer, or “pointa,” broom approach. The pointer broom is a handleless Guyanese yard tool made from the dried spines of coconut leaves that are held together by a thin piece of twine or cloth. As LaBennett explains, this broom is traditionally wielded by Guyanese girls or women to remove debris in one’s home or yard, and the more frequently it is used, the shorter it becomes, requiring the sweeper to get closer to the ground (xi). According to LaBennett, a pointer broom analytic “insists that a close-to-the-ground inquiry from Guyana’s vantage point—one that utilizes varied techniques, collected together like the spines of a broom—will uncover dismissed and erased knowledge” (xiv). To that end, she brings together a set of interdisciplinary methods including Black feminist autoethnography, archival research, and oral history to unsettle rigid tropes associated with the country and illustrate Guyana’s vast global connections. 

Very aptly, LaBennett begins her book with an epigraph from the Bajan/Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s depiction of the “Traditional early morning old / woman of Caribbean history” seen sweeping sand away from sand on a beach in Jamaica (vii). According to Brathwaite, the more he looks at this woman, the more he realizes that she appears to be walking on water: 

                         and she was tra
velling across that middlepass
age, constantly coming from wh
ere she had come from—in her
case Africa—to this spot in
North Coast Jamaica where she
now lives . . . (x)³ 

Brathwaite once proffered this particular image in response to the poet and scholar Nathaniel Mackey in 1999 when he was addressing the question “What is Caribbean / the Caribbean?” Brathwaite’s response that features an old woman functions as the embodiment of his well-known theory of tidalectics. What is not so well-known, LaBennett points out as she turns to this image from Brathwaite as a springboard for her own project, is how Guyana and Guyanese women featured in the poet’s life. For instance, his first wife, Doris Monica Brathwaite, was Guyanese. Moreover, the unique Sycorax Video Style that appears across Brathwaite’s work was inspired by Guyanese Amerindian petroglyphs. Still more, the Jamaican beach he describes while talking to Mackey likely had sand imported from Guyana, a topic that LaBennett explores at length in the third chapter of Global Guyana. By starting with Brathwaite and his sweeping old woman, LaBennett demonstrates how to engage a country not always typically seen as belonging to the Caribbean and sweeps Guyanese undercurrents into the frame to better understand how social worlds reveal important clues about the past that might guide the future. Additionally, by pairing Brathwaite’s oft-cited old woman alongside another epigraph depicting a younger woman, Lula, who similarly uses a pointer broom to “sweep, sweep, sweep, stamp” in Oonya Kempadoo’s novel Buxton Spice (vii), LaBennett emphasizes the ubiquity of the broom to the Caribbean and the necessity to employ it as an analytic method to reframe Guyana’s cultural, social, and economic importance (4).⁴ 

The first half of the book presents an intimate look at family—LaBennett’s own and the global superstar Rihanna’s—as the author investigates what contributes to the erasure of Blackness in each case. In chapter 1, “From Full Negro to Dougla Girl,” LaBennett sweeps an old, worn photograph of a Guyanese couple—her great-great-grandparents—into the frame to tell a far more complicated story than the covering up of Blackness in her own family and provide a new look at the history of the Indian village Sarah Johanna. By examining transnational race and gender formations across five generations of female relatives, LaBennett pushes back against common notions that suggest that Afro- and Indo-Guyanese heritages are ultimately incompatible. Further, she demonstrates how autoethnographic research can trouble colonial archival records that contain wrong information and unleash powerful new counternarratives. In chapter 2, “Rihanna’s Guyanese Pattacake and the Homewrecking State in Barbados,” the author explores the conditions that make it so that Guyanese women are regarded as seductresses who dismantle marriages in Bajan culture. By analyzing a popular Bajan calypso, “GT Advice,” sung by the Indo-Guyanese Nalini Sukhram and written by a Black Bajan man, Eric Lewis, alongside Rihanna, whose Afro-Guyanese matrilineal ancestry goes unacknowledged despite her public embrace of it, LaBennett complicates the picture of the Guyanese women in Barbados. Importantly, this chapter uncovers and contextualizes the long history of Bajan Guyanese migration and intermarriage that have contributed to anti-Guyanese women stereotypes and Bajan laws that treat Guyanese immigrants as threatening foreigners. 

Shifting from the familial and domestic to the environmental, the second half of the book considers the long history of exploitation and extractivism in Guyana from the sixteenth century to the contemporary moment. Chapter 3, “Transplanted Beaches and Silica Cities,” considers one of Guyana’s most exported resources that is hardly spoken of: silica-quartz sand. LaBennett addresses the environmental and social impacts of sand mining, since this resource is rapidly exported from Guyana to replenish high-profile tourist beaches across the Caribbean. As the author uncovers the hidden story of sand, she advances an ecofeminist analytical approach that shows how the promotion of extractive industries has rendered racialized sexualized violence against the most marginal women in Guyana, especially the country’s Amerindian population. After chapter 3 reveals Guyana’s secret history of sand, chapter 4 takes up the resource that everyone is talking about most: oil. In “Recasting El Dorado,” LaBennett investigates how Guyana enters global economic discourses since the discovery of massive oil reserves. In a close reading of international news coverage alongside local on-the-ground reporting, she argues that much of mainstream reporting fails to acknowledge how the legacies of colonialism have left Guyana in a precarious position and thereby pigeonholes the country and its people as wholly incapable of handling the wealth that will accompany this resource extraction. The result of shifting the gaze from the international to the local is a highly nuanced chapter that takes seriously how Guyanese people—not onlookers—register the effects of oil, politics, ethnic conflict, environmental degradation, and violence in their country. As with previous chapters, LaBennett exposes the violence against women and children that has accompanied ExxonMobil’s large-scale quest for oil. 

I first saw a pointer broom in 1994 when my grandmother, Sundri Panaram, used it to clean up our apartment in the Bronx, New York. I recall what looked like the effortless, repetitive strokes across the ground (which if I only tried to replicate would cause the entire broom to dismantle). I recall her hunched over, close to the ground, maneuvering with such skill as to get dust from all corners of the room. I recall something else, too: how every so often she would sit down to reposition the strands and re-tie them with a thin piece of cloth. There was a deliberate care and thoughtfulness to the work that she did. That is true of my grandmother, and that is true of Oneka LaBennett. At stake in LaBennett’s brilliant contribution to Caribbean studies with Global Guyana is how we might read, listen to, and look for Guyana differently in a world where the country is simultaneously routinely invoked in global discourses about oil and literally left off of the map in some pictorial depictions of South America. LaBennett makes a compelling case for putting Guyana front and center in discussions about the Caribbean and the world at large, especially if we are to understand the history and present dangers of extractivism. Global Guyana joins an exciting set of academic texts that are critically engaging the nation and its people, including Natalie Hopkinson’s 2018 A Mouth Is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents, and the Art of Resistance; Grace Aneiza Ali’s 2020 Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora; Arif Bulkan and D. Alissa Trotz’s 2019 Unmasking the State: Politics, Society, and Economy in Guyana, 1992–2015; Aliyah Khan’s 2020 Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean; and the 2020 collected writings of the Guyanese activist Andaiye in The Point Is to Change the World, edited by Trotz. With Global Guyana, LaBennett reminds readers that we cannot tell the history of Guyana without careful attention to its women and girls. Using the pointer broom analytic, she sweeps stories, some hidden and some in plain sight, into view together to sketch the relationship between Guyanese women’s gendered labor and racial capitalism. Hers is an urgent, necessary new text in Caribbean scholarship and a powerful reclamation of a country she knows well and wants us readers to know better. 

Figure 1. Two pointer brooms from the Panaram family in the Bronx, New York, 2024.
Image used by permission of the author.

Sasha Ann Panaram is an assistant professor of English at Fordham University, where she specializes in African American and Caribbean literature, with a particular interest in slavery studies and women’s and gender studies. From 2023 to 2025, she held the Cheryl A. Wall Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American and African Diasporic Literary Studies, and the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rutgers University. Her research has been published in The Black Scholar, Small Axe, Southern Cultures, and the Journal of West Indian Literature. Other public-facing scholarship and interviews have appeared in Public Books, Black Perspectives, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Left of Black.

---

[1] See “President Dr. Irfaan Ali Talks Oil and Gas and How It Is Transforming Guyana’s Economy on BBC’s HardTALK,” YouTube, uploaded 28 March 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyOo7J18aXA (accessed 1 April 2024). For the viral clip, see “Guyana President Blasts Journalist When Discussing Country’s Oil Reserves,” YouTube, uploaded 29 March 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDv42L8-soA (accessed 1 April 2024).

[2] “President Dr. Irfaan Ali” (italics mine). 

[3] See Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey (Avon: We Press and Xcp, 1999), 30.   

[4] See Oonya Kempadoo, Buxton Spice (Boston: Beacon, 1998).