Martin Carter died ten years ago today. Over the years Stabroek News commemorates the anniversary.
Martin Carter, who died ten years ago today, did not shy away from the subject of death in his poetry. His now famous line ‘Death must not find us thinking that we die’ (‘Death of a Comrade’ (1952)) rings with the energy of life even in the face of mortality. A quick glance at his work shows a poet who, throughout his career, explored the possibilities of enduring life, who understood how the long reach of memory worked against the finality of death, even when this kind of finality might be welcomed. In ‘The Leaves of the Canna Lily’ (1977) he reveals, ‘For it came to me once in a sudden enlightenment / that all of us, having once been born / can never die, can never choose the kind of sleep / we dream of, or recognise awake’. This enlightenment is double-edged for Carter, but for those of us wanting to mark this tenth anniversary of his death, his enlightenment has a renewed force.
It is worth remembering – and particularly on this day – that Carter’s work finds new homes all the time. From Linton Kwesi Johnson’s musical translations of ‘Poems of Shape and Motion’ on his album More Time to 3Canal’s recent rendering of Carter’s essay ‘The Time of Crisis’ for their 2007 Bacchanal show, ‘None Shall Escape’. To hear rapso artist, Wendell Manwarren, say in 2007 that Carter’s words from 1955 resonate for his contemporary Trinidad aims to provoke the same quake of recognition that Rupert Roopnaraine’s film, The Terror and the Time, aimed at when juxtaposing 1950s Guyana with the 1970s. In Thunder (5 January 1955) Carter wrote:
The year that lies before us will be a year of heart searchings, a year of doubt and perplexity, a year in which each one of us will question himself in secret, studying whether the path of life we now tread is the right one or whether a wrong one. In the midst of all the turmoil and confusion, there will be some whose convictions will crumble, some who will repudiate past activities, some who will say in an hour of fear that the road they have been walking is the wrong one because at the given moment all is dark and dreary and apparently hopeless.
In such times it become necessary for us to understand ourselves, the world we live in, the people we live among and the problems we must solve. At such times, ideas and emotion become inflammable. And it is at such times that our fundamental outlook on life, the means we employ of measuring and assessing events and occurrences, either assist us or betray us.
Writing of imperialism in the 1950s and calling for the independence movement to stay united, Carter nevertheless realised the doubts, perplexities and confusions involved in walking ‘the path of life’. When, earlier this year, Wendell Manwarren recited these words at an event in celebration of Carter’s work, the packed audience at Port of Spain’s The Bookshop needed no explanation of what it meant to them to live in ‘an hour of fear’, how ‘ideas and emotion become inflammable’ and why we must still attach hope to ‘a year of heart searchings’.
For Carter’s poetry, his year of heart searchings led to Three Poems of Shape and Motion – A Sequence. Carter’s work until this date had wavered between the geographically locatable and the abstractly drawn: in To A Dead Slave (1951) he carefully situates himself in the Guyanese landscape. In The Kind Eagle: Poems of Prison (1952) Carter’s prison metaphor is partially explained by his own career in the Prison Service, but the poems themselves refuse any fixed location. In The Hidden Man: More Poems of Prison (1952) the poet determinedly walks the streets. In Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (1954) he writes self-consciously as a prisoner, locating his struggle within global anti-colonialism, and experimenting with a politicised surrealism in ‘University of Hunger’ and ‘I Come from the Nigger Yard’.
‘Poem one’ from Shape and Motion continues this exploration of concrete and abstract representation. He writes: ‘I was wondering if the strange combustion of my days / the tension of the world inside of me / and the strength of my heart were enough’. The quality of the nouns in this poem is telling: passion, fire, combustion, days, tension, world, strength, heart, tide, sea, sky, earth, door, morning, sun, wound, wind, face, work, life, growth, pain, sleep, strife, agony, seed, hour, roots, swamp, flower, population, stars, challenge, space, soul, shape. They are a combination of the elemental, the emotional and the concrete, framed by the latent spirituality of the poet’s ‘passion’ and ‘soul’. What interests Carter is recasting his experience in order to achieve a clarity of expression (to ‘shape this passion’, he writes, ‘in solid fire’) and an indication of his own potential. For what practical purpose he refuses to disclose.
Published in Kyk-Over-Al at the end of the year in 1955, the doubting that Carter articulates in this sequence is interrogating not despairing. The penultimate sentence of the poem reads: ‘I was wondering if I could find myself / all that I am in all I could be’. But it is difficult not to consider how this doubting might have affected his poetry. For the next six years it appeared as if Carter was not writing, and that the ‘all he could be’ might not include being a poet. Two poems were published in 1957 (‘Voices’ and ‘Words’) and when Conversations was published in Kyk-Over-Al in 1961 these fears were clearly premature. But what about these almost lost years? Did Carter’s ‘year of doubt and perplexity’ extend over these six years, despite the stunning articulations of fear, potential and hope in the Poems of Shape and Motion, ‘Voices’ and ‘Words’? In this final poem, poetry emerges bloodied but unbowed: ‘These poet words, nuggets out of corruption / or jewels dug from dung or speech from flesh / still bloody red, still half afraid to plunge / in the ceaseless waters foaming over death’. ‘Words’ registers the difficulties of poetic expression, but nevertheless Carter continues to wrestle poetry out of what he and Bertolt Brecht (at different times and for different reasons) christened ‘the dark times’.
For critics and readers these poems partially answer our questions about the possible lost years of writing and the pauses in composition that punctuated Carter’s career. For example, in 1969 fears of Carter’s silence emerged again, prompting C. L. R. James to write to him privately with the words, ‘I hope you have not entirely abandoned the writing of poetry’. He hadn’t, and it is the work now of Carter’s readers to search for any remaining works. Unfortunately, with Carter there is no compelling evidence to suggest a soon-to-be-discovered manuscript of lost poems. More’s the pity, but we can celebrate the work that has appeared in recent times. The archives of the BBC in London UK have revealed a previously unpublished poem, ‘Wind of Life’. Broadcast on the radio programme, Caribbean Voices, it is one of the few poems by Carter that appeared on this landmark forum for West Indian writers. George Lamming broadcast ‘University of Hunger’ in 1958, five years after it had first been published, but it was V. S. Naipaul in 1956 who first identified Carter for the programme, broadcasting a selection from Poems of Shape and Motion and this new poem. How Naipaul came by ‘The Wind of Life’ is unclear, for Carter never expressed any wish to his family to be published on the radio programme. These are questions still to be answered. Most important, though, on this anniversary of Carter’s passing, is that we have another poem to add to his archive and another poem that may help us understand his and our time of ‘heart searchings’.
Wind of Life
Birds of endurance
weary of flying
drop to the ground.
Feathers of hope
torn from the bone
lie in the dust.
Altar of earth
heavy with sacrifice
spins round forever.
Wind of life
is willing to bear
wings born again.
To be
born
is to fly
from a nest
in the light
and go near
to the egg
in the dark.
(This poem was first broadcast on Caribbean Voices on 1 July 1956. It was published for the first time in Martin Carter, University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, edited by Gemma Robinson (Tarsett: Bloodaxe Books, 2006).)
Dr Gemma Robinson authored the definitive work on Martin Carter’s poetry published by Bloodaxe Books (see details below) This can be ordered from
