El Dorado, City of Black Gold

The colonizer Sir Walter Raleigh traveled to Guyana fueled by visions of gold from the myth of El Dorado. With a different kind of ship, and a similar project of extraction, ExxonMobil has established itself in the offshore waters of Guyana.

In “El Dorado, City of Black Gold,” Aliyah Khan writes about this long line of destruction, of ecocide, and indentureship, in cadenced Creolese that is a reclamation amid the theme of devastation. Originally published in PREE, a magazine of Caribbean writing, this trenchant piece of longform reportage treats the history of exploitative labor in Guyana and the colonial relationships that have marked the land.

Guyana has seen ships coming and going for centuries, bringing with them people who try to grab the country’s resources. With knowledge of Guyana’s haunted past, and a keen intuition for writing about a country vulnerable today to being submerged, Khan imagines a better future.

— Alexandra Valahu for Guernica Global Spotlights

I. DESTINY COME: OIL

On August 29, 2019, the prophetically named Liza Destiny ship and its two heraldic maritime vessels arrived off the Atlantic coast of Guyana in triangular formation, looking like nothing more or less than the next incarnation of Columbus’s own Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

The Liza Destiny is a floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel that departed Singapore in late July, 2019, under the auspices of SBM Offshore, contracted by ExxonMobil, the major operator of Guyana’s nascent oil industry, to retrofit what was once a storage tanker into a ship itself capable of autonomous travel, drilling, and processing crude oceanic hydrocarbons. This was the whole colonial extractive process, unlike sugar, timber, and bauxite; potentially independent from Guyana and Guyanese labor from start to almost-finish. It only lef’ fuh Exxon get a rich country fuh buy.

Dem oil corporation people does send FPSO ’round the Third World when there is no pipeline and no infrastructure, but dem really want start drill. This project name Liza Phase 1.

The , she can produce 120,000 barrels of oil a day. Then they say coming in 2022 fuh mek 220,000 barrels a day. Then coming in 2023 fuh mek one next 220,000. Nobody talking ’bout pipeline. Dem white people know the futile prospects fuh dat kind of digging in Guyana mud. This is real oil frontier. Destiny coming fuh we first; den black, Indian, Amerindian, and