Reflection on the Martin Carter years – pre-independence to post-Republic

Jan 31, 2016 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols
His persona isn’t as easy to pin down as those of my first two featured prominent ‘pre-independence’

Guyanese, and he is arguably the most eloquent and controversial of the three. His restless, searching spirit in poetry and in politics made him stand out from his contemporaries. His highly-figurative, often brutal, but alternately sensitive lines reflect a preoccupation with symbols of resistance. And images of oppression are interwoven with emblems of love, tenderness and passion – just right for the seasons and times of our country in the vacillating nineteen-fifties, sixties and seventies.
His name is Martin Carter, and both his words and his actions questioned the conscience of a people as we ploughed into the transition from British colony through independence, and to republic status. Anger and resolution, hope and disillusion burst from his pen, and one wonders, were he alive in 21st century Guyana, if stark despair would have been added to those moods. Though Carter exhibited a curious unpredictable streak, I speculate that the answer would have to be ‘yes’.
I never knew the man personally; his son Keith and I were classmates at Q.C. in the sixties, but I knew Martin was his father only after I left that institution. So what I am writing has been gleaned mostly from online sources and from reading his work. Furthermore I am not qualified to professionally evaluate his politics or his poetry. Others have done that; I simply comment, along with the appreciation of a smattering of his work. But as I reflect on his impact as a man of the times, even from a layman’s viewpoint I cannot escape the feeling of passionate hope, and of anger, balanced by a heroic and unassuming nature – and finally despair, that the fire of his words could not foil the evil of abused authority.
Born in Georgetown on June 7th 1927 to Victor and Violet Carter, Martin Wylde Carter attended Queen’s College, but eschewed a university education and went straight into the public service. His earliest poems and first collection, ‘The Hill of Fire glows Red’ were published, under the pseudonym, M. Black, in the literary magazine Kyk-Over-Al, and in Thunder, the journal of the People’s Progressive Party, which he had joined in 1950. His last known published work was an anthology, ‘Selected Poems’ published by Demerara in 1989. Martin and his wife Phyllis were married in 1953 – a union that lasted 44 years and produced four children.
Carter entered the world of politics as one of the earliest members of the People’s Progressive Party and appeared to share its leftist ideology. During the early nineteen-fifties, anti-colonial and nationalistic sentiments were spreading across then British Guiana, and party leaders, including the Jagans, Forbes Burnham and Carter, were perceived as communist leaning. This led to repeated confrontations with colonial authorities and two imprisonments for Carter, the first with other PPP members including Cheddi Jagan and Sidney King (Eusi Kwayana). During that incarceration at the Atkinson Field U.S. airbase in 1953, the ‘prisoners’ staged a one-month hunger strike against being detained without charge.
Far from dampening Carter’s political/poetic spirit, that detention was the catalyst for a more rebellious and passionate voice in 1954, despite another stint in prison later that year for taking part in a PPP-led demonstration. He was also restricted from leaving Georgetown for three years; in his most-acclaimed collection ‘Poems of Resistance’ he wrote, “This is what they do with me/ put me in prison, hide me away/ cut off the world, cut out the sun/ darken the land, blacken the flower/ stifle my breath and hope that I die”
When the PPP split in 1955 and Burnham started the People’s National Congress, Carter stayed loyal to Jagan, but after being perceived as too leftist even for that party, he was forced to quit. He taught for several years, and then went to work as an information officer for the Booker Group of Companies, among the very colonials he was agitating against. In an interview with journalist Bruce Paddington on this incongruity, Carter remarked, “The human aspect of their (colonial authorities) lives was the most important thing to me.”
During his Booker years, Carter experienced the politically-fueled violence of the early sixties. The images of riots, racial assaults, murders, strikes, fires, and ‘antagonistic’ British troops formed a tapestry of terror that stirred him to write then, and later, some of the most passionate and poignant verses ever penned by a Guyanese, including ‘Jail Me Quickly’ a collection of five poems written in 1963.
With independence beckoning, one might wonder in hindsight if those turbulent years contributed to what some critics saw as a later disenchantment with self-rule.
(On a more personal note, Carter’s ‘Black Friday 1962’ is, for me, more than one of his best-known, angst-filled poems, partly because it is such an emblematic  commentary on a single day –  the day on which I ‘celebrated’ my ninth birthday with a baptism of fire and fear. Though a child, I was there with him as “the sun and the streets exploded … a day that had to come, ever since the whole of a morning sky, glowed red like glory, over the tops of houses.” )
Carter’s maverick streak asserted itself again following Guyana’s 1966 independence, after the PNC’s controversial win at the 1964 general elections. He left Bookers and promptly aligned himself with the ruling group, thereafter being appointed Minister of Information and Culture in 1967. He was also Guyana’s U.N. Representative for one year.  But once again, his restless spirit and growing disillusion with the PNC caused him to quit his government job and move on with the business of being the voice of a generation of troubled Guyanese.
Surprisingly to many, however, he returned to the Booker Group in 1970 and worked there for another eight years before accepting the position of Lecturer in Creative Writing and Artist in Residence at the University of Guyana. By then he had published another poetry collection, ‘Poems of Succession’ in 1977, which was generally thought of as less rebellious than the pre-independence ones. World-weariness and disillusion were taking their toll.
In 1978, Carter was allegedly badly beaten by a group of young men during an anti-PNC demonstration, shortly after he had aligned himself with the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) led by the revolutionary academic/historian Dr. Walter Rodney.
Although this theme of intermittent violence could hardly be expunged from his writings or his life, it became less evident in both, even as within the next two years he witnessed two more politically-connected killings – the stabbing to death of Jesuit priest, Fr. Bernard Darke, and the June 1980 bomb explosion that ended Walter Rodney’s life.
That same year Carter published his ‘Poems of Affinity’ which, according to some critics, showed his growing resignation to local politics, evidenced by a more distinct lightening of tone and message. One critic described this as ‘the muting of his revolutionary voice … since Guyanese independence’ although the power and eloquence remained up to his last collection ‘Selected Poems’ published in 1989.
The last decade-and-a-half of his life is not well-documented, and has been described by some as ‘a period of silence’ which writer Ian McDonald saw as ‘internal exile… the long silence which descended too soon on Martin Carter’. He was awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature in 1989, and died in 1997 following a debilitating stroke.
For three decades Martin Wylde Carter spoke to us as only he could, but we were as ‘hard-ears’ as only Guyanese can be. Maybe if he’d chosen simpler prose to express how he felt, and how he expected us to react to his words, we (especially our youth) would have cared more. But there’s still time.
Remember, as we celebrate our independence golden jubilee, that words don’t die as easily as dreams. For as our own poet laureate observed, ‘These poet words have secrets locked in them/ like nuggets laden with the younger sun’.

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