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 (1947-1997)
At times like this, when words fail us, many of us turn to Martin Carter.
On one level, this poem, published in “Poems of Resistance” in 1954, may be read as a metaphor for colonial oppression and the violence being inflicted on dreams of individual and national freedom.
On another level, these verses are an uncanny foretelling of the wicked and sinister brutality that has been unleashed on our native land.
Herein lies the frightening beauty of some of Martin Carter’s best poems. Their ability to reach across the ages and their images to touch us all in their universality.
But even our national poet could not have foreseen the horrific barbarity of these times and the phenomenon of home grown terror that is now blighting Guyana.
As we have moved from darkness to ever increasing and despairing darkness, we have become almost inured to the daily evidence of incompetence in high places and the literal and figurative darkness we have been forced to endure for far too long.
The past thirty years in particular have seen us, first, sleepwalking slowly along the slippery slope of mismanagement, corruption, brutal intimidation and authoritarianism, and more recently, rushing blindly towards the terminal decline of intellectual bankruptcy, more corruption, organized crime and failed governance.
It is as if some feel that violence is the only answer, but we do not deserve, no one deserves this backlash of murderous savagery.
We Guyanese are traditionally a “make-do” people. We have over the years put up with indignity on top of indignity and hardship and more hardship and we have sought to make do for the sake of a little peace and quiet, and whatever happiness we can inject into our lives. We have struggled as a people, buoyed against all logic by hope, looking for the light at the end of the dark tunnel that has encapsulated our experience as an independent nation.
But have we been too weak, too undemanding of our leaders? Have we been negligent or complicit in each successive step towards the abyss? Or are we, simply put, quite mad?
And we do not here refer to the psychopathic madness of cold-blooded killers.
We have all been mentally brutalized for so long that one wonders how much more we can take. How much more can we, will we put up with? Are we so blind, are our senses so numbed that we cannot see that we just cannot continue like this?
When men come at night to shoot our little ones as they dream, making them targets just because they lie there, innocent and unprotected, then they murder our dreams of fulfilment as individuals, families and as a nation.
The US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) describes Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as “an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. Traumatic events that may trigger PTSD include violent personal assaults, natural or human-caused disasters, accidents, or military combat.”
Most of us will be familiar with PTSD as treated by Hollywood or as discussed on foreign television shows. There can be no doubt however that more and more Guyanese, including an unacceptably high number of children, are being subjected to the types of trauma described above. But do we have in Guyana, doctors, mental health practitioners and counsellors to treat victims of PTSD?
How will the survivors of the Lusignan atrocity cope? The NIMH website says: “People with PTSD have persistent frightening thoughts and memories of their ordeal and feel emotionally numb, especially with people they were once close to.”
Beyond the gut-wrenching anguish of the bereaved, how will they live with the pain, fear and anxiety of the nightmare unleashed on the unsuspecting village last Saturday?
Even as the authorities are harangued about the need to come up with a well-thought out and robust response to the latest and worst mass murder since the 2002 jailbreak unleashed this reign, this grotesque carnival of terror, one hopes that some thought will be spared for what can be done to help those most traumatized by the mindless carnage of last Saturday.
And the rest of us, at home and in the Diaspora? Maybe we are all suffering from some form of PTSD. Certainly, we have been left, at best, uncomfortably numb by the tragedy and the horror of this dark time.
