(Extract of an interview with Ms Vanda Radzik and Dr Gemma Robinson, Georgetown, Guyana, 2004.
Radzik is an educator and women’s rights activist. She was co-editor of Kyk-over-Al, a judge for The Guyana Prize for Literature and The Guyana Annual magazine, and largely responsible for the reprinting of ‘Martin Carter: Selected Poems’, 1997.

Robinson did her Ph.D on Martin Carter, and is considered the foremost authority on Carter. In 2006, she published an extensive work on Carter, ‘University of Hunger, Collected Poems and Selected Prose of Martin Carter’.)

PP: THERE is already quite a body of scholarship on Martin Carter, but  it would be useful to start this discourse by placing Carter in our [Guyana] history, because he is credited with the shaping of the nationhood of Guyana.
Martin Wylde Carter was born on June 7, 1927, in Georgetown, British Guiana, educated at Queen’s College, putting out his first collection of poems, ‘The Hill of Fire Glows Red’ in 1951. The longest period he had ever been away from Guyana was in 1975, when he spent an academic year at the University of Essex as Poet in Residence. In 1989, his ‘Selected Poems’ won the Guyana Prize for Literature in the category of Best Book of Poetry.
Twice he was honoured by the government of the day: In 1970 when he was conferred the Cacique Crown of Honour, and in 1994 when he was awarded the Order of Roraima.  Carter died at his home on Lamaha Street, Queenstown  on December 13, 1997, amidst political turmoil.
Also, before we get deeper into the discourse, let me acknowledge the work you gentle ladies have done, and are doing, to keep the name and work of Martin Carter alive.
Dr Robinson, what’s your impression of Carter?

GR: To me, what’s so striking about Carter — and it’s something you have mentioned in your introduction — was his commitment to staying in Guyana and writing in Guyana. I think while he never spoke of it in an interview when I first met him in 1995, he said for him to be a writer, and especially a poet, he had to stay in Guyana. And I realised that as a young interviewer then, I naively just let him make that statement and move on.
But I kept coming back to that sentence again and again, asking myself, ‘What are the reasons for writing in a particular society?’ It seems to me, from the earliest poems right up to his most recent ones, Carter was interested in creating new vocabularies, new grammars about the realities of the Caribbean; realities of Guyana, and thinking how one could write freely about that place, and how one could find an appropriate role for himself as a poet. And what his poetry does is to constantly explore how he should be a poet in Guyana.

PP: Vanda, how do you see the man?

VR: I think Martin Carter was multidimensional; certainly the legacy he has left to the world in what is a relatively small corpus of poetry, but brilliant. I just want to say what I meant by small: He was not as prolific as other poets and writers, but the thing about Martin Carter was that all of his poems were so honed. It’s often been said that his poems are jewelled in the precision making of them.
And there are many he had chosen not to leave or give to the world, because he used to throw stuff away a lot; and he would even tell you this. And there were some, when he has really finished with them, they were ready. I also remember him saying there are some poems that came to him full-blown. One such is a favourite of mine, ‘The Great Dark’.  He said sometimes there are poems that come to you in a near as perfect form as possible.
I just want to say, Petamber, that I had the privilege of knowing Martin Carter personally for decades; for years as a young girl, and through my years teaching at University [of Guyana], and as a friend. And I discovered he was an ardent fisherman; he loved to fish.
You know, Martin would frequently go into the ‘Interior’, up the Lama Canal and so on. And his great friend was this character called ‘Farro’; ‘For Farro’ was one of his poems, as you know. I can say now, Martin loved fishing; he was an ardent fan of the ‘fish’. This came up while looking at his papers with his sons and Phyllis in his study after he died.  That was another dimension of him.
I think Guyana’s history, pre-independence and since, is integrally woven with the work of Martin.

PP: That’s how I introduced him; placing him in our history.

VR: And he was a public figure; he held political office… He represented us at the United Nations; he was a man of public letters. A famous line of his, sort of condemning of the political culture, was that people barked rather than spoke.  He was all of this, as well as a private man, writing, writing for the public to read and enjoy.
If I can finish now,  I’d like to quote something I wrote in the home- grown publication, the second edition of ‘Selected Works’;   and I should say for the record, the first [edition] was published by Demerara Publishers.
I began by saying, “It has always been a matter of pride and a source of wonder that the poetry of Martin Carter has been so integral a part of Guyana’s history for what is nearly half a century. Many of the poems collected here speak to moments in time: Variously they have celebrated, condemned, mourned, questioned; and almost always they have reflected the condition of our being.”

PP: Dr Robinson, one of your research interests is politics and literature. What is your attraction to the work of Carter?

GR: For me, one of the major attractions is that Carter wanted to write good political poetry. I think it is quite easy to write poetry that has a political edge; poetry that professes political beliefs; poetry that kind of wears its politics on its sleeves. One of the things Carter was trying to do in parallel was to write the best poetry he could, as well as staying true to political beliefs he shared with many over the years in Guyana. And I think when we think of poets as political poets, we often forget they are craftsmen; we often forget that they are actually writing, and you [turning to Vanda] talked about his poetry being honed. That idea about Carter being the man declaiming his poetry is one side of him; but there is also the man, the poet who is in his study, who is writing his work, who is rewriting his work, and re-re-writing his work, and constantly trying to think about what political statement you could make within poetry, but what kinds of poetic innovations you could make while speaking politically.
To be continued…
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