Guyana’s Poet Laureate Martin Carter died on December 13, 1997. His poems defined not only his generation but has remained the voice and rallying cry of every generation since as our country continues to fail to deliver on the hopes and aspirations that had their wellspring in the struggle for independence.
Martin Carter wrote some of his finest poems during his youth, at that time of angst and rebellion when he joined the struggle for independence from Britain alongside political leaders like Dr Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham.
In them were the youth and spirit that were to herald the birth of a nation. Sadly, Carter’s poems went on to chronicle instead the despair and hopelessness that overtook the promise and has delivered only division and turmoil.
His enduring legacy was his talent for putting words into exactly what we were all thinking; he, of course, adding the images, the rhythm and the language that would make them everlastingly memorable.
The PPP/C in a statement on his death said that Martin Carter’s poems had “come to symbolise the conscience of a nation.”
No one could have stated it better, and in one line, about the political corruptions and opportunistic partisanship that still stymy our development when he wrote: “But a mouth is always muzzled by the food it eats to live.”
“Death must not find us thinking that we die,” from the poem “Death of a Comrade” is a philosophical statement, oft quoted, that sums up the human will to live, to defy death even at the final moment.
Carter was 70 when he died. He had attended Queen’s College and worked as a civil servant in the colonial government. He was forced to resign because of his commitment to the struggle for independence then worked as an information officer for Bookers. He joined the Burnham government briefly, from 1968 to 1970, as Minister of Information.
He was not, as a poet, ever disengaged from the politics that was shaping the fortunes and misfortunes of our country. As an intellectual he could not help but write about what he saw, felt and experienced, and in his poem about Black Friday 1962, when Georgetown burned, he wrote:
Were some who ran one way.
Were some who ran another way.
Were some who did not run at all.
Were some who will not run again…
And I have seen some creatures rise from holes
and claw a triumph like a citizen,
and reign until the tide!
Martin Carter sought no international fame and fortune from his poems. He never emigrated but stayed close to us, his audience, and was always engaged. He was the quintessential “poems man”. For him, it was enough that his poems were read by the people whose struggle and sentiments he captured so succinctly and vividly.
His volume “Poems of Resistance” was my introduction to Martin Carter. It had been published in 1954 by Lawrence and Wishart in Britain and reprinted locally in 1966 and 1979. It is a collection of 18 poems and my favourite then and now is the one entitled “This is the dark time my love”.
This was a young Martin Carter writing to his wife, Phyllis, while he languished in prison with his political comrades during their struggle for independence. The poem has a simple appeal for being a private and personal moment captured in lines that spoke to the universal condition of our nation.
It is Guyana’s tragedy that this poem, written over 60 years ago, still represents our condition today.
This is the dark time, my love
all round the land brown beetles crawl about.
The shining sun is hidden in the sky
red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow.
This is the dark time my love.
It is the season of oppression, dark metal and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.
Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass?
It is the man of death, my love, the strange invader
watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.
