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Martin Carter's Poems of Succession

Posted January 26th. 2003

By Wyck Williams

MARTIN CARTER: KIND EAGLE

Poems of Succession: Martin Carter

New Beacon Books 1977

Poems of Succession is the only copy I own of Martin Carter's poems. I don't plan to buy more recent publications, though they might contain excellent poems missing from this collection. Succession was printed as "the first almost complete collection of the poetry of Martin Carter" and contained poems he wrote between 1951 and 1975. It's fairly representative of his work, and when he died in 1997 I pulled it out (distressed by the erosion on the book's spine) and read the poems as a private tribute.

I've been reading them more earnestly since, dipping into the pages whenever there are headlines of "dark times" in the city; or reports of the "awful sorrow" in coastal villages with names like Friendship, Better Hope; the shuttered houses, the flight of Indians in fear for their lives, the gunning down of police ranks - those painful, malignant things that poison our wellbeing, creating in so many "a bafflement of speech".

Martin Carter was for me the mapmaker of Demerara's cities, the way Wilson Harris cartographed the rivers of our soul's hinterland. Growing up in Georgetown in those globally turbulent 60s, knowing there was a poet who lived in Lamaha Street, across from the train line, who wrote poems about "the leaves of the canna lily near the pavement"; then discovering his Black Friday 1962, that dark time in our history "when the sun and streets exploded", and some ran "this way", while I ran "that way" and Carter was with us all; all this made me feel captured in history, as on film for a time capsule. My life became meaningful. The poet, my hero.

Reading him closely, thereafter, I was haunted by his images of the city; then found myself resisting much of their appeal. I didn't question his heart's authority. He'd written:

I know this city much as well as you do,
The ways leading to brothels and those dooms
Dwelling in them, as in our lives they dwell. (from After One Year )

Those dooms dwelling in our lives? Somehow that line struck a dissonant note. It was time, I felt then, to discover my city, my Georgetown.

This meant relinquishing the branch one shared with him, his poet's high perch from which one viewed through his anguished lens the making of so much history in Georgetown. For although Carter was the kind eagle, "the heart's life", soaring in that vast blue Georgetown sky, you felt the perch was, perhaps, too lofty. It made for generalizations that sounded facile and high-flown.

In every human city in this world
Men murder men, as men must murder men,
To build their shining governments of the damned. (from After One Year)

Those lines had the sweep of some powerful universal truth back then; they left you somehow a little uneasy with the poet's spectatorial perch, as if Carter was missing grainier insights into our blighted villages, our city streets. (I still hold on to these lines, written in 1972, but with a ring of authenticity for any Lagos or Kuala Lumpur of today:

In a small city at dusk
It is difficult to distinguish
Bird from bat. Both fly fast:
One away from the dark And one toward the dark. (from In A Small City At Dusk)

What is alarming (it pains me to admit) is that his poems are losing their significance for me with each passing day. Beneath the much praised craftsmanship, little that resonates remains. The anti-colonial Freedom poems, for instance, I bypass; likewise the Death of a Comrade poems that so enamored academics back in the seventies. The University of Hunger invites me up to that transcending perch, that view of the eternal verities of the world. It's terrible to admit, but I've been there! And in any event the world is a more jumbled place these days, some new nations locked-up in narcotic activity, or collapsed in gun-infested swamps. ("The unwanted unwanting the world", Carter once wrote.)

Does this mean that for me Martin Carter has become irrelevant? Am I a romantic longing for the pre-Independence days when the railway embankments trembled only from the passing of trains, and hope was "a blade of fury". Is it fair ask his poems to pierce the new darkness, help us understand the post-colonial time: the city's uncaring smut, its "festival of guns"? Why hasn't his quietly built achievement inspired some new talent, some less soaring but equally kind eagle, refracting our capital city where one-eyed sophistry, brazen banditry, the gaping wounds of racial harm would make us strangers again, harden our heavy hearts again?

And If Martin Carter were alive today - but I refuse to go there!

Truth to tell, back in my youthful longings of the 60s he was always twinned in my psyche with Wilson Harris, the one examining the fissures in our city, the other pouring over prints of our interiors, appeasing our hunger for larger identities to transcend our origins. You felt at the birth of our Independence that with these two national treasures, their powerful imaginations enriching nascent souls in classrooms, our humanity would triumph in Guyana. Making their profound kinship with the landscape ours, our nation couldn't lose its way in the world.

Perhaps it is a measure of my current despair. There are lines from Cartman of Dayclean which, like an old stain, refuse to go away:

hidden cartman fumbling for a star
brooding city like a mound of coal
till journey done, till prostrate coughing hour
with sudden welcome take him to his dream
with sudden farewell send him to his grave.

Haunting, eagle-eyed lines, sharp and portentous. Is that how he really saw human existence in Guyana?

Carter didn't find much to celebrate in his later poems, unless there's a volume I haven't read (and, sad to admit, will not acquire). Those short, ruminative pieces written in the 70s (in Succession, selections from The When Time) with titles like "Before the Question" "If It Were Given" "As When I Was" I find not particularly compelling. Carter seems at this stage to be fiddling elliptically with his talent, the way a man past his prime scratches his balls now and then. (I'm sure there are researching scholars out there who will respectfully disagree.)

What remains, then, on the pages of Poems of Successionm are mere intimations of what Guyana could become as a nation. That instan- taneous generosity shown to strangers, a people's readiness to be each other's friends. You have to listen hard to find it in the clamorous march of Carter's Comrade poems. It stayed intact, surfacing through the cracks and divides of the Burnham/Jagan years; it almost disappeared during the armed-forced socialist union of the Comrade years. I mean, those layers of forbearance, overriding fear and distrust, that got us this far as a nation, that get us through the coastal travails each day.

I heard it in the music that woke the nation to fresh mornings of labour and hope back in the days of radio; you hear it in that amazing old Guyanese composition "Happy Holidays" which defines our spirit at Christmas. A readiness for friendship that wards off periodic cries for partition; a kindness of heart that sutures communal wounds, offering hope again - that's what I mean!

With luck it will see us through the current slime of lawlessness in Demerara's towns and villages. It was always the fertile ground for a new synthesis. Still is, once we've found ways to ease debilitating poverty, drain our little gun-infested swamp.