Governor General Asks: Who Holds Power
The annual Belize KULCHA Symposium is underway. The virtual gathering brings together academics, researchers, artists and community voices to examine language, heritage, identity and national belonging. At the opening, Governor General Dame Froyla Tzalam asked who holds power in Belize and whether the country has truly embraced the identities of all its people.
Froyla Tzalam
Dame Froyla Tzalam, Governor General of Belize
“My last thing on names has to do with my absolute delight at discovering the early maps of this area that we now know as Belize. There were place names, including rivers, that had Maya names. And I can’t tell you how happy that made me feel, especially when I read that sometime in the 1960s, when the mere idea of a map with Maya names had basically made a lot of people upset and saw it as a sellout to British heritage. An interesting situation we find ourselves today is that culture and identity is closely aligned with languages spoken. And yet, if I were to identify myself as English because I speak English, one can imagine the reaction of many Belizeans. But yet we have no problem describing Spanish speakers in our country as Spanish, even though they may have nothing to do with Spain itself So my question to all, to you all today is, how do we swing the pendulum to embrace a multicultural Belize? I believe this answer depends on who has the power and how this is manifested. We say we have Maya descendants in professional categories, and even point out that the governor general is a Mopan woman. Let me state for the record, simply having representation of a people who acknowledge having Maya DNA does not mean equal representation or integration of Maya values in the national fabric.”
The symposium gives researchers, academics and community members a public forum to discuss Belizean identity, culture and heritage.
Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.
Watch the full newscast here: