On the anniversary of Martin Carter’s death, and the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Kind Eagle (Poems of Prison) and The Hidden Man (Other Poems of Prison), Gemma Robinson re-minds us of the landmark cultural developments of 1952.
The Emergency of 1953 looms so large in our reading of Martin Carter’s work that it is easy to forget the activities of the year before. 1952 was a turning-point for a generation of writers: a year of publications that showcased the talents of Guyanese poets such as Carter, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew, and opened up the possibilities of Caribbean poetry.
In 1952 A. J. Seymour edited The Kyk-Over-Al Anthology of West Indian Poetry. Published in Georgetown, it included the work of George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, E. M. Roach and Carter, and was the first anthology to bring together many of those writers who define anglophone Caribbean literature.
It is a landmark collection and can now be read free online through the Digital Library of the Caribbean. In the Preface, Seymour notes that the Barbadian literary journal, Bim, made the first step in 1946 with a modest collection titled the Little Anthology. What distinguishes The Kyk-Over-Al Anthology is not just Seymour’s ability to predict the major names in Caribbean literature, but simply his success at publishing an anthology with a wide West Indian scope.
Letters in the A. J. Seymour Collection at the University of Guyana show the growing concern for demonstrating in print the existence of West Indian writing. In a 1951 letter to Seymour concerning the Anthology, a young Derek Walcott wrote, ‘In as much as my poetry is not published but privately printed, as far as I am concerned any qualified anthologist can make use of my material if he desires, if it is mainly for dissemination of West Indian literature’. To be privately printed (as were Walcott’s first collections) was the usual means of publication for a West Indian writer in the 1940s and 1950s.
Una Marson, a writer and editor of the Jamaican Pioneer Publishers, also wrote to Seymour: ‘We are anxious to publish a West Indian book, but the trouble is that a purely literary effort will not have a large circulation’. She continued, ‘production costs are so high now that our Advisory Board will not give the nod to anything that appeals only to a small group’. Marson wanted to publish an enlarged edition of Seymour’s anthology to link literary activity across the West Indian region, but it never materialised. Instead, the response in each territory to overcome the problems of circulation and production costs was the encouragement of local writers and local readers.
However, imperial connections remained influential. Seymour was described by the Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey in his Georgetown Journal as ‘a creature of British Council endeavours in the Caribbean’. Seymour himself acknowledged his debt to the British Council in the pages of Kyk-Over-Al, describing himself and his contemporaries as the British Council’s ‘sons in the tradition of culture and kindliness’.
Seymour and Carter are good examples of the differing ways that writers in the Caribbean positioned themselves according to ideas of political and literary self-determination. In politics, Seymour rejected revolutionary routes toward independence, but his editorial interests reveal a belief in the eventual cultural and political independence of the West Indies. Claims to nationhood within the colonial world have been reliant not just on the construction of a political agenda, but also on the construction of cultural integrity. What Martin Carter would come to question during the early years of the 1950s was the determining significance of British culture in Guyana, and he would reject the claim that British political and cultural institutions could determine the future Guyanese nation.
1951 was a crucial year for this position. To A Dead Slave and The Hill of Fire Glows Red announced Carter’s wish to reimagine Guyana’s colonial past from the perspectives of its dispossessed, enslaved and indentured populations, and to mobilise these energies for his anticolonial present. Quamina from the Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 is pictured as a forgotten father-figure. Colonial dreams of El Dorado evaporate in Carter’s work to reveal a ‘province of mud’ (‘Not I With This Torn Shirt’). Yet if the sweeping away of old colonial stereotypes mark Carter’s 1951 publications, 1952 provides another kind of milestone.
Carter’s The Kind Eagle (Poems of Prison) was printed by the Magnet Printery in June 1952. Like Wilson Harris’s Eternity To Season, published a month earlier, and Jan Carew’s Streets of Eternity, published two months later, The Kind Eagle was a pamphlet of less than ten pages. By August of the same year Harris brought out another pamphlet of poetry titled, The Well and the Land (studies in time), and Carter published The Hidden Man (Other Poems of Prison). Seymour’s own Water and Blood came out in the same year. This was fast-moving literary history.
Seymour recalled that these pamphlets were produced in Tiger Bay by a printer ‘who had a modest trade in handbills or cinema bills or wedding bills and birthday cards’. Publishing in small print runs of forty or a hundred, the printer warned the poets, ‘You all will have to proof it carefully yourselves’. Seymour described the effect of seeing their work in print: ‘it opened up for us writers a source of gratification and personal pride, while putting a few shillings in his hands’.
Of the extant copies of Carter’s, Harris’s and Carew’s pamphlets housed in the A. J. Seymour collection at the Public Library, Georgetown, The Kind Eagle and Eternity to Season are marked neatly in pen with the corrections of their authors. Published alongside cinema bills and birthday cards, these pamphlets share the functional appearance of cheaply produced advertisements. Eternity to Season is decorated on the front cover with a small Celtic knot, Streets of Eternity with a small star, and The Kind Eagle is left plain.
In answer to a question about the attraction of the immediate, and often politically urgent, form of the pamphlet, Carter confessed that practicalities were all that he considered as a young poet: ‘You’d do anything to produce something, and only one thing mattered to us really in those days, was necessity’. This emphasis on making the work and getting it out to readers has an urgency that is missing in Seymour’s own account of the necessities of publishing. The poet of To A Dead Slave had already demonstrated that his hopes for poetry were not a matter of personal pride or making money. Phyllis Carter remembers her soon-to-be-husband distributing the pamphlet for free.
Working as a civil servant (he was the Secretary to the Superintendent of Prisons in Georgetown’s Camp Street prison) by day, not yet married and spending his time with the PPP and its supporters, Carter in his ‘poems of prison’ explores what it means to live an imprisoned existence, and how it conditions an apparently un-imprisoned consciousness. His hopes were those of a poet who also sought to affect the world in which his poetry was read.
The slim collections, The Kind Eagle and The Hidden Man, examine human presence in an inhospitable world. Here we find Carter balancing his hope for a new community against the nightmare of colonialism, but his terms of reference are expansive, as in the opening lines of ‘I Stretch My Hand’:
I stretch my hand to a night of barking dogs
feeling for rain or any dropping water:
But the wind is dark and has no shower for me
and the street is strange and has no pathway for me
and the sky is old and keeps no comet for me.
The stretching hand is a potent metaphor for Carter’s attempt and failure to create communion, and its emphasis upon ‘hand’ also recalls the writing hand of the poet. This world is one markedly absent of humans, a grim miscellany of elements, objects and animals who imprison the ‘Hidden Man’.
The cultural activities of 1952 all suggest a society unwilling to be restrained by past identities and looking towards the future. Carter’s poems register a desire to find signs of recovery and renewal: the wish to find a familiar path or see an auspicious comet. In the face of being ‘hidden men’, he searches for symbols to describe wholeness: ‘O strike kind eagle, strike! / All of a man is heart is hope’ (‘All of a Man’). In ‘Cartman of Dayclean’, the dawn gives rise to mixed hope and realism:
Now to begin the road:
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.
This search for wholeness and new beginnings turns up in contrasting quarters of Guyanese society in 1952. The cultural possibility was exhilarating. We find it in Seymour’s Kyk-Over-Al and a group of Caribbean writers agreeing to be published in a West Indian anthology. We hear it in Wilson Harris’s poems of the Americas that remind us of the linked geography of the hemisphere: of prehistoric travellers crossing the Bering Straits and the transnational Amazon basin: ‘The living jungle is too full of voices / not to be aware of collectivity’ (‘Amazon’). We hear it in Jan Carew’s surreal renderings of place in ‘Streets of Eternity’. We read it in the translations of Martinican and Senegalese poetry in Kyk-Over-Al that suggest a connected postcolonial literary culture beyond the West Indies and the Caribbean. We hear it in the first British Guiana Music Festival. We see it in Denis Williams’s watercolour studies, The Inner Plantation, completed in the UK. We see it in responses to the British Empire, in the conflicting celebrations and demonstrations against the visit of Princess Alice, in the opposition to the Undesirable Publications Bill, and in the PPP’s preparations for constitutional change and universal suffrage the following year.
It is a truism to say that 1953 was the year in which the world changed in British Guiana. But we should remember that in 1952 cultural and political history was on the move, and Martin Carter and his contemporaries were working and publishing their way towards a collective future that we can now only imagine. They were facing dayclean and beginning their roads.
Gemma Robinson is the editor of Martin Carter’s University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose (Bloodaxe). You can read the 1952 issues of Kyk-Over-Al, and more, free and online at the Digital Library of the Caribbean http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00080046.
