were some who ran one way
were some who ran another way
were some who did not run at all
were some who will not run again.
And I was with them all
In those lines you will find some elements of the way one poet responded to a tragic event. While it was a tragedy in the wanton waste of innocent, non-combatant lives, the poet focused the larger, more perplexing tragedy of human atrocity; of the complex mix of crime, politics and race in Guyana, all adding up to an even greater tragedy. The poet was responding to the violent events of ‘Black Friday’ 1962, but when flashes of the deadly destruction of that time recurred like a persistent decimal in the criminal slaughter of innocent non-combatants in Lusignan on January 26, 2008, were some who ran to politics, were some who ran to history, were some who could not run at all. Among other things, like Martin Carter in 1962, I fled to poetry.
I repeat now, as I will have cause to repeat again, that there is no human event or experience that has not been treated in some way by literature, if not by poetry. Since learning of the reprehensible murders in Lusignan, along with a deep sense of regret, unqualified condemnation of the crimes, an intense anger, and an evil judgement against the criminals, as well as against those who harbour, protect and glorify them, poetry came to my mind.
I repeat now, as I hope I will have no cause to repeat again, that there is nothing that can justify or explain away what was unambiguously a criminal terrorist act. Surely there are many socio-political and historical factors that have contributed to a number of causative factors relating to crime and certain depraved behaviour in Guyana. There are issues arising from this country’s particularly obnoxious brand of race politics. However, let it be unequivocally stated that the massacre of carefully chosen people in Lusignan was a case of criminals exploiting a smouldering political and racial situation to commit a deliberate act of terrorism.
It was, as another poet Derek Walcott describes it, another case in which “brutish necessity wipes its hands upon the napkin of a dirty cause.” Fellow poet Michael Gilkes also echoes Walcott in his reference to “the spectacular failure of Upright man.” Gilkes could well have been describing the after-effects of Lusignan in his poem about the Jonestown massacre in 1978. He then paints an unrecognizable picture of Buxton-Friendship as those now besieged and occupied villages were in 1961. All that was wholesome and typically Guyanese has been destroyed and the poem ends with a subtle explanation of why he left at a volatile period in 1961. The poem Mudhead, Painter from his book Joanstown (Peepal Tree, 2002) was first published in the Sunday Stabroek Arts.
Jonestown
(for Ian McDonald)
It stained the rivers red. Stir any creek, the red stain shows.
The vowels are howler monkeys roaring, shocked again
by carnage in Paradise, their mouths widening to oval O’s.
Believers felled like lumber for some dumb, millennial plan:
again, spectacular failure of Upright Man.
The site’s been cleared. Deceivers and deceived are gone.
Of all that sin-converted host only their sins remain
washed in the unconverted forest’s cleansing rain.
Michael Gilkes
Mudhead, Painter
Begin with a dark grey wash on this sky’s canvas.
Before it dries touch the belly of that cloud
with a wet brush tipped with black, then paint the deluge.
Let the paint flow in rivers like Orinocco
or Amazon discolouring an ocean to make beaches
of mud, not sand. Add a dewlapped lizard
drinking from the green Teflon bowl of a lilly’s
dinnerplate leaves, rain forming quicksilver necklaces
which break letting the bright pearls fall to make the lotuses
nod approval as the trench fills up with paint
the colour of mud. Paint a farmer, Indian
or African, shirtless, up to his calves in mud
labouring towards a bawling, mud-coloured cow
tied to a stake. Fur with green mold the wooden
stilts of his crude house. Paint a hammock,
rice-bag or sugar-bag, under the house between
two stilts. Let the house stand marooned in water,
galvanize roof pouring. Pictorial, not picturesque.
(after the rain it will contemplate its own
limpid reflection). Paint small black and brown
boys naked in the rain, tins scooping
water up to throw in a muddy Phagwa
game, innocent and raceless as the genip-seed
buds of their childish penises. Name the painting
“Buxton/Friendship.” Sign it “Mudhead, Guyana”.
Date it nineteen sixty-one, the year you left.
Michael Gilkes
Poets are notorious for being bad readers of their own work. Of course there are exceptions; Edward Baugh, especially, and Mervyn Morris are excellent. Ian McDonald tells the story of Dylan Thomas scheduled to read at Cambridge and turning up late, staggering drunk. Yet the moment he stood behind the podium and started to read, all was transported in a powerful, dramatic performance.
I had thought for a long time that Carter was one of those who read indifferently, in a flat monotone. But that was until I heard him in a wing of the Georgetown Public Library transfix the audience with several selections including the Poems of Shape and Motion and the sequence called Jail Me Quickly which includes Black Friday 1962, After One Year and Now There Was One. They are timeless expressions of a poet’s shock and disapproval of such atrocities as Lusignan, January 26, 2008.
Jail Me Quickly
(Black Friday 1962)
I would never have believed it.
I would have made a telling repudiation.
But I saw it myself
and hair was a mass of fire!
So now obsessed I celebrate in words
all origins of creation, whores and virgins:
I do it with a hand upon a groin,
swearing this way, since other ways are false!
For is only one way, one path, one road.
And nothing downward bends, but upward goes,
like leaves to sunlight, trees to the sun itself.
All, all who are human fail,
like bullets aimed at life,
or the dead who shoot and think themselves alive!
Behind a wall of stone beside this city,
mud is blue-grey when ocean waves are gone,
in the midday sun!
And I have seen some creatures rise from holes
and claw a triumph like a citizen,
and reign until the tide!
Atop the iron roof tops of this city
I see the vultures practicing to wait.
And everytime and anytime,
in sleep or sudden wake, nightmare, dream,
always for me the same vision of cemeteries,
slow funerals
broken tombs, and death designing all.
True, was with them all,
and told them more than once:
in despair there is hope, but there is none in death.
Now I repeat it here, feeling a waste of life,
in a market-place of doom, watching the
human face!
Martin Carter
After One Year
After today, how shall I speak with you?
Those miseries I know you cultivate
are mine as well as yours, or do you think
the impartial bullock cares whose land is ploughed?
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.
So jail me quickly, clang the illiterate door
if freedom writes no happier alphabet.
Old hanging ground is still green playing field.
Smooth cemetery proud garden of tall flowers.
But in your secret gables real bats fly
mocking great dreams that give the soul no peace,
and everywhere wrong deeds are being done.
Rude citizens! think you I do not know
that love is stammered, hate
is shouted out
in every human city in this world?
Men murder men, as men must murder men,
to build their shining governments of the damned.
Martin Carter
Now There Was One
Now there was one whom I knew long ago
And then another to whom I paid respect:
The first I would salute, the second praise
But all is gone, all gone, the murder cried.
Along what road they went he cannot say
So many roads there are, so many bends.
There is no short cut to integrity
All, all is gone, all gone, the murderer cried.
They did not mean to kill only to burn
But then one act can transform everything
A brother into charcoal, love to crime
Yes, all gone, all gone, the murder cried.
Martin Carter
