The Guyana Prize Literary Festival is an annual event that took place from February 29th to March 3rd. Hosted by the University of Guyana, this event awards exceptional creative work done by Guyanese People in the previous year. Dr. Nesha Z. Haniff placed tied for third with her book The Pedagogy of Action: Small Axe Fall Big Tree.
The Guyana Prize Jury for Non-Fiction commended Dr. Haniff for this powerful account of an academic and activist life conducted with revolutionary passion and loving care for her students and for all whom she tried to reach with her radically egalitarian module for teaching HIV prevention in a very simple, accessible, but effective way to a wide array of communities with the goal of empowering learners to become teachers and leaders in their own right. The Caribbean expression that serves as the subtitle of Haniff’s book - “Small Axe Fall Big Tree” - is appropriate in that what she describes is the power of individuals to affect transformative change in the world. The book is a particularly inspiring Caribbean tale in part because it is a decolonial intellectual biography in which Haniff expresses her groundings in revolutionary ideas gleaned from the Caribbean (her youth in a colonized Guyana and the figure of Che Guevara) and the global south more broadly (her encountering ideas of Paolo Freire, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Barbara Christian, Ella Bhatt, and others).
The Jury saw the ways in which Haniff carried these influences into her pedagogy and her engagement with landscapes of inequity in the Caribbean, the US, and South Africa. Influenced in particular by the work of Brazil’s Paolo Freire and India’s Ella Bhatt, as well as by Mao Tse-Tung’s “barefoot doctors” model of health education in China, where ordinary people were empowered to teach and practice both traditional and Western medicine without years of training, the HIV education module that Haniff describes developing and implementing over decades in multiple sites is one dedicated to breaking down hierarchies of class, language, education, race and gender. The book is a valuable archival record of decades of activist work in which a Guyanese woman shaped by the region’s revolutionary thinking and by decolonial traditions of the global south went out and waged her own transformative change. It thus corrects for a lacuna found all too often in documenting and preserving records of Caribbean feminist activism and offers an example of a praxis of inclusion in storytelling that reflects Caribbean values of community empowerment and challenges to elitist hierarchies.
