Introduction
Martin Wylde Carter was born on June 7, 1927 in Georgetown, Guyana, then the colonial capital of British Guiana. He is most widely remembered in the Anglophone Caribbean as the poet who, in 1954, published a vociferously anti-colonial work entitled Poems of Resistance from British Guiana. However, Carter’s singular reputation for political engagement belies the broad span of his poetic concerns. As this selection of poems demonstrates, his dense, often lyrical corpus of work successfully transforms historical and personal reference to create a poetry which resonates beyond the time and space of its composition.A glance at Carter’s family background does not point obviously to the route which his life was to follow: he was born into a middle-class family of mixed African, Indian and European ancestry, he attended Queen’s College, the most prestigious school in the colony, and soon after leaving school he became a civil servant. This brief biography of a young man growing up in British Guiana might have served many men in the British Empire, but Carter, who reached his eighteenth birthday as the second World War ended, and who by the late 1940s heard about the liberation movements in India and Malaysia, was among a dissatisfied generation of colonial people who would resist the life that had been mapped out for them by the British Empire. As a civil servant Carter worked as Secretary to the Superintendent of Prisons, yet in his contemporary poetry the symbol of the prison became linked to a critique of the colonial society: in 1952 he published two pamphlets – The King Eagle (Poems of Prisons) and the Hidden Man (Other poems of prison). The poems, ‘Stretch My Hand’ and ‘You Are Involved’, were first published in these collections, and the latter poem’s refrain, ‘all are involved!/all are consumed!, became a rallying cry for the Guyanese population in its appeal for independence.
As a member of the executive committee of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) led by Cheddi Jagan and Linden Forbes Burnham, Carter played a prominent role in Guyanese politics during the early 1950s, campaigning for the PPP throughout the country, attending Communist congresses in Europe, and contributing essays and poems to the PPP organ, Thunder.
When the PPP won a landslide victory in the 1953 elections, Guyanese politics reached a dramatic international pitch. The party’s Socialist principles, its call for independence and for constitutional reform quickly alienated Eisenhower’s American anti-Communist government and the British pro-empire Conservative government led by Winston Churchill. On October 9, 1953, after only 133 days in office and with British troops occupying the streets of Georgetown, the constitution was suspended, the PPP ministers were sacked, and a state of emergency was declared. In response, PPP members began a campaign of civil disobedience, and during the final months of 1953 and throughout 1954 party members were imprisoned for disobeying the emergency laws. For Martin Carter – imprisoned twice between 1953 and 1954, his house searched for ‘subversive literature’, separated from his wife Phyllis and their new family, and cut off from his comrades – this period was ‘the dark time.’ However, these were also poetically fruitful times: on her prison visits Phyllis Carter would smuggle out Carter’s latest poems. Although his work was never officially blacklisted (as was much American and British Communist writing), poems such as ‘This Dark Time My Love’ and ‘I Come From the Nigger Yard’ point clearly to Carter’s revolutionary poetics and its threat to status quo – ‘I come from the nigger yard of yesterday/ leaping from the oppressors’ hate/ and the scorn of myself’. As the Socialist poet, Bertolt Brecht wrote in the 1930s: ‘In the dark times will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing/About the dark times.’
Yet Carter should not be understood simply as a poetic spokesman for the PPP. His work was first published in 1948 in Kyk-Over-Al, the literary ad cultural magazine edited by the Guyanese poet A.J Seymour. Seymour did not support Carter’s radical politics, but his magazine provided a forum in which ideas about the status and nature of Caribbean identity could be discussed. It is to Seymour’s credit that he published Carter’s The Hill of Fire Glows Red (1951). And even more so, that he was the first publisher of the seminal poem: ‘University of Hunger’ during Carter’s imprisonment. Although Carter seceded from the PPP in the late 1950s after charges of ultra-leftism were made against him, his poetry remained concerned to address the historical legacies and social conditions of people living in Guyana and the Caribbean. But if poetry persisted, the focus of Carter’s career changed: after resigning from the civil service he worked as a teacher. In 1959 he moved to the sugar conglomerate, Bookers, as information officer; the irony of working within the colonial establishment was not lost on Carter, but the mood of British colonial politics was shifted, and Carter joined a company restructuring in preparation for Guyana’s independence.
Carter returned to politics in 1962, and to a political system still suffering from Guyana’s turbulent road to independence in 1966. Poems such as: ‘Groaning in this Wilderness’ and “black Friday 1962’ provide an uneasy narrative of the racial conflict and fraught social relations which defined the early 1960s in Guyana:
And I was with them all
When the sun and street exploded
And a city of clerks
Turned a city of men!

So now obsessed I celebrate in words
All origins of creation, whores and virgins
I do it hand upon groin
Swearing this way, since other ways are false!

Riots, the burning of Georgetown, the deaths of over a hundred Guyanese people are prompts for Carter’s poetry, yet there is another concern that can be traced as early as ‘Listening to the Land’ and that preoccupies the poet in ‘They Say I am’: the construction and uses of poetic utterance. Work such as ‘Black Friday 1962’ ironically ‘celebrates’ the freedoms enjoyed in the developing Guyanese nation, and Carter articulates the impossibilities of forcing language to render experience onto the page, as well as the volatile potential for language to reshape that experience. As Minister of Information and Culture from 1967-1970 Carter’s initial enthusiasm for this distinctively linguistic role in Burnham’s PNC (People’s National Congress) government was replaced by his disappointment at increasing government corruption, and the poet who Andrew Salkey hoped could redeem the role of the Guyanese politician – ‘a poet who may yet do a very serious injury to the sterile vocabulary ad syntax of bureaucracy’ – resigned permanently from politics.
Concepts of freedom dominate Carter’s poetry: from the denial of freedom that characterised slavery, to the political call for Guyanese liberation, the social concern for individual liberties, and a philosophical inquiry into the freedoms of expression gained through language. In the 1970s Carter’s wide demands for freedom were shared by the newly formed Working People’s Alliance (WPA). Although never a member, Carter sympathised with the party’s unswerving condemnation of Burnham’s 1980 dictatorial constitution, and supported the WPA’s Walter Rodney in his call for a solution between the Guyanese races. Physical attacks upon critics of the government were common, and in 1978 Carter was among those beaten during a demonstration. Yet it was the murder of Father Bernard Darke in 1979 and Walter Rodney’s assassination in 1980 that marked the criminality condoned in Guyana. And the paradox for Carter: during this second ‘dark time’ came the finest poetry. In 1977 Poems of Succession appeared containing a new collection, ‘The When Time’. A self-critical poean dedicated to the African-American activist, Angela Davis, a provocatively opaque discourse on the Cuyuni River, a painful meditation upon the suicide of the Trinidadian poet, Eric Roach, the startling brevity and beauty of the love poem, ‘Before the Question and he cruel comedy of ‘There is no Riot’ all proved Carter’s range. And this was followed in 1980 by the precise, often ruthlessly crafted Poems of Affinity. Carter’s apparent poetic silence during the mid-1960s to mid-1970swas revealed to have been a period of constant composition. Writing in rum shop on cigarette packets or working privately in his study, Carter produced a corpus of poems which would secure his reputation as Guyana’s foremost poet.
Unlike many writers of his generation, Carter did not emigrate from the Caribbean. Although he travelled widely (as Minister of Information and Culture he represented Guyana at the UN General Assembly in New York, and in 1975 was a writer in residence at Essex University in England) in the poem, ‘Two’ Carter writes ‘a poet cannot truly speak / to himself save in his / own country’. Yet the title of national poet was not welcomed by Carter – the writer who was nicknamed ‘the poems man’ refused to write according to public demands. His exacting poetry does not commemorate a simplistic notion of Guyanese identity; indeed in ‘Bastille Day – Georgetown (On the occasion of the murder of Father Darke)’ Carter writes a furious parody of national celebration:
I have at last started
To understand the origin
Of our vileness, and being
Unable to deny it, I suggest
Its nativity
In the shame of knowledge
Of our vileness, we shall fight.

The precision of Carter’s poetry is typified not only by his search for the mots justes, but also by a wish to confront the traumatic (and possibly recuperative) implications of that search.
Carter’s last work reveals a continued attempt to write crystalline poetry that would illuminate the world in new ways. His densely pared imagery – part of a constantly developing personal, even willfully esoteric, symbolism – provokes connections between disparate aspects of, and responses to the world: city, nigger yard, scorn, love, river, nativity, vileness, courage, pain, mortality all conflict and cohere in Carter’s poetic world. In the poem, ‘Three’, human scale is read onto topographical scale; as in all his poetry, carter engages with the mutuality of humanity and environment, and the need to render that mutuality truthfully in language:
For what is rain
But delta? And delta
What but the immortal river
Of rain? A thing falling
Ever from these mortal
Dripping fingers

Another collection was planned, provisionally titled, Poems of Mortality, but after suffering a stroke in 1992 Carter was left unable to talk and walk. His death on December 13, 1997 followed a successful battle to recover his speech and mobility, but he had not been able to return to writing poetry. Carter’s forty-year poetic career did not bring him the international recognition that work certainly merited. A poet who wrote from the only English-speaking country in South America, and the only continental country in the Anglophone Caribbean it is apt that his work should be translated into Spanish. This is not to argue that Carter is a Latin American poet, nor should it reduce the firm locality of his poetics, yet to read his work in Spanish is to recognise readily what has always been true: that this Guyanese poet speaks with and international voice.
By Gemma Robinson