Guyana Politics 6: Martin Carter: Poems of RESISTANCE

Politics in our time has come to mean the numbing quietude of the polling booth, the deadening platitudes of petition campaigns & political oratory, car-bumper & T-shirt sloganeering, the contradictory rhetoric of manipulative politicians, the spectator sports of public rallies & the larger-than-life posters that assault our senses. All hollow political theater that has replaced genuine politics.

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Salaam All...Let's keep getting to know our political history through the eyes of the poet Martin Carter. These emails warn that we must learn from the past or be prepared to relive the worst of historical experiments and disasters.  In 1950 Carter became one of the founding members of the socialist and anti-colonial People's Progressive Party (PPP), led by Cheddi Jagan. 

Martin Carter with Cheddi Jagan 1994...In 1970 he received the Cacique Crown of Honour and in 1994 the Order of Roraima.

Carter is best known for his poems of protest, resistance, and revolution. 

Like this one THIS IS THE DARK TIME MY LOVE
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 stranger invader
Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.
(Martin Carter in Poems of Resistance, 1954)

He played an active role in Guyanese politics, particularly in the years leading up to Independence in 1966 and those immediately following. He was famously imprisoned by the British government in Guyana (then British Guiana) in October 1953 under allegations of "spreading dissension", and again in June 1954 for taking part in a PPP procession. Shortly after being released from prison the first time, he published his best-known poetry collection, Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (1954).

Like this one I CLENCH MY FIST

You come in warships terrible with death
I know your hands are red with Korean blood
I know your finger trembles on a trigger
and yet I curse you - Stranger khaki clad
British soldier, man in khaki
careful how you walk
My dead ancestor Accabreh
is groaning in his grave
At night he wakes and watches
with fire in his eyes
Because you march upon his breast
and stamp upon his heart.
Although you come in thousands from the sea
Although you walk like locusts in the street
Although you point your gun straight at my heart
I clench my fist above head; I sing my song of freedom
(Martin Carter in Poems of Resistance, 1954)

In 1978 Carter was badly beaten when he took part in a demonstration against the PNC and their refusal to hold elections. Politically, Carter's sympathy lay with the Working People's Alliance of  Eusi Kwayana and Walter Rodney during this time, although he never became a party-member.

His collection Poems of Resistance established his reputation as a powerful moral and political voice. Long seen as primarily a poet who touched on themes of politics, resistance, and protest, his later poems were often highly personal. He is best known, however, for a powerful protest poem of the 1960s, "I come from the nigger yard of yesterday". 

 At the Live from Lincoln Center jazz concert for the victims of  Hurricane Katrina, Danny Glover quoted some lines of Carter's, bringing him to public attention in North America for the first time in the twenty-first century.

On the whole, works like "I Clench My Fist" exemplify Carter's protest poetry at its best. The underlying dialectic is compact, limpid, and consistent. The dialectic statement is tightly controlled through a disciplined, highly economic use of language and sense of form; and as a result, the poetic form itself becomes the imaginative microcosm of that moral wholeness and social unity which the poetry envisions. Given this tightly integrated schema, it becomes clear that "poems of resistance" are not simply poems about political resistance: they are acts of resistance.

When he died Mrs. Jagan said: "I have always had the greatest esteem for his beautiful, wonderful poetry, poetry that this nation had never before heard nor seen...to my mind he is the greatest poet and he has expressed the mood of the people at important periods of our life."

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Shamal...My son is now 18 and he went to two Islamic schools. He was NOT taught Martin's poetry or the history of Guyana's politics. They know more of North American history than our own. PITY!!!