This day sixty years ago Martin Carter, Eusi Kwayana (then Sydney King), Rory Westmaas, Bally Latchmansingh and Adjoda Singh were detainees at Atkinson Field, now the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Timehri. Arrested first on October 24 at Plantation Blairmont by the police for spreading dissention, they were moved quickly to the US airfield, where they remained until their release in January 1954.
When Lawrence and Wishart advertised Poems of Resistance from British Guiana in their 1954 catalogue, it told what is a now familiar story in Caribbean poetry and politics: “Martin Carter, the foremost poet of the Caribbean people, is a true people’s leader. A Minister in the democratically elected government of British Guiana, he was arrested when the Constitution was suppressed. Several of these poems were written in prison.”
Even when the London-based publisher was getting it wrong (Carter was never a minister in a People’s Progressive Party government), its errors proved how easy, even fitting, it was to slip from talk of a ‘poet’ to talk of a ‘people’s leader’. In Poems of Resistance from British Guiana readers could find a political document in verse form, a poetic narrative of the urgent work of the PPP, Carter’s imprisonment and the crisis of 1953.
Carter’s poetry certainly deals with the political activities and energies of the Emergency. ‘Letter 1’, ‘Letter 2’, ‘Letter 3’ and ‘On the Fourth Night of Hunger Strike’ assert their status as autobiographical prison poems: ‘This is what they do with me / Put me in prison, hide me away’ (‘Letter 1’). Yet Carter’s lyric voice was always pushing to explore personal experience in relation to broader social affinities.
After twenty days and twenty nights in prison
you wake up and you search for birds and sun light
You wait for rain and thunder
and you think of home with pain inside your heart
and your laugh has scorn more bitter than a curse.
(‘Letter 2’)
In this poem he deflects attention away from himself, incorporating his readers into an inclusive, even collective ‘you’. Carter’s unique lyric response to the politics of his day will remain a necessary document for the reading of his times and the poetics of his times. But until now there has been little that allows us to consider Carter’s immediate response to his imprisonment, not as a poet, but as a political activist.
Materials kept at the UK’s National Archives can now provide an insight into the beliefs and activities of the 26-year old Carter during this famous period of his life. A letter addressed to the Advisory Committee for Detained Persons at Atkinson Field, signed by Carter and dated 28 November 1953 can be read alongside those written by fellow PPP members, King, Singh and Westmaas. All five detainees were invited to appear before the Committee to put their objections to detainment. All refused and either sent legal representation or written statements.
Our own understanding of twentieth-century Cold War politics will inevitably colour how we read Carter’s letter now, but his complaints also have a contemporary ring, from his denunciation of disaster/war capitalism to his care for the everyday victims of ‘economic crisis’. And for those looking to find the continuities between his politics and his poetry, his determination to “challenge the authority that keeps me detained in a hut with a garden of rusting barbed wire” points to a meeting point of his political and poetic vocabularies. In ‘Letter 2’ in Poems of Resistance he writes, “Where a garden should be green in the light / They have planted sharp vines of barbed wire.”
Dismissed by an anonymous political reporter to the British government as “the usual Communist jargon,” Carter’s letter shows him to be a political activist pushing to understand the world system that had impoverished life on “the dreary mudflats of Guiana.” Arrested at a rum shop on estate payday while talking to sugar workers, Carter and his comrades were moving informally, trying to sidestep the Emergency’s ban on political meetings and to keep agitating for a Guyana beyond British rule.
In the 1960s – after the political promise of a multi-ethnic PPP and anti-capitalist future seemed to have been lost – David de Caires remembered Carter’s barbed but sympathetic humour towards young left-wing thinkers. “Have you thawed out yet?” he would ask. De Caires summarised what he saw as Carter’s attitude in the face of an increasingly complex political future: “he just became against failure.” In 1953, detained and facing indefinite imprisonment, Carter squarely faced the failures of his present and promised a different future. On the anniversary of his death we hear him in his own words arguing for his rights, and the right of a people to “learn how to free itself.” We print here extracts from his four-page prison letter.
“DETENTION CAMP,
Atkinson Field,
28.11.53
“Sir,
“I have to acknowledge receipt of your letter and the statement of the Grounds of Detention on which my detention was ordered. I have appended comments on the grounds –
“In the first place the charge that I was present at and took part in the holding of an illegal meeting of more than five persons on the 24th of October, 1953, at Blairmont estate is a common or garden falsehood. I neither took part in the holding of, nor was present at any meeting on October 24th at Blairmont Estate. The fact that this untruth is the charge first mentioned in the grounds of detention more or less indicates the tone and character of the charges that follow.
“I am proud to agree that I identified myself with the People’s Progressive Party since its inception. This Party has been, from its inception the target of a barrage of lies, slanders, libels and misrepresentations. On the one hand it strove to march in the vanguard of a people, a colonial people fighting against the inherited ossified cruelties of colonialism and imperialist repression. Drawing strength from the descendants of black slaves and indentured “coolies” this Party raised a banner of hope over the dreary mudflats of Guiana. Against it however were ranged all the institutions of British Imperialism – press, pulpit and radio, each of which outdid itself in the vicious campaign of vilification that attended all the moves and efforts of the militant Party of the people.
“I note in addition that it is stated that I have always been a close associate of Dr. C. Jagan, Mrs. J. Jagan and Mr Sydney King. To a point of correction I am not merely an associate of these patriots – these people are my comrades.
“It is with some surprise that I observe that a previous conviction has been entered among the grounds of the detention. Perhaps this is included to ‘prove’ that I am a ‘criminal’ with a record.
“It is stated that in 1951 I became ‘Chairman of the Peace Committee. This Committee is known to be affiliated to the Communist controlled Peace Movement’ and that in July 1953 I went to ‘Bucharest to attend there the Fourth World Festival of Youth which was sponsored by the Communist controlled World Federation of Democratic Youth’. As there are so many misconceptions in these two little paragraphs it is necessary to explain to some degree the nature of the Peace Movement. To obtain a clear view of the events that made the emergence of a World Peace Movement a burning necessity it is necessary to begin from the epoch of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was the epoch in which the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class) was established in power. Passing from commercial capitalism the capitalist class entered industrial capitalism seeking in various areas of the earth’s surface good markets for the sale of their commodities. As technology developed however and the productive power of machinery increased the capitalist class found itself in different countries faced with the glaring contradictions. On one side there developed the fight between various capitalist powers for colonies in which to dump their commodities (this ended up the first time in the first World War of 1914-1918). But even before the war there was also occurring in highly developed countries (like America for instance) a peculiar phenomenon called over-production. Over-production only means of course that the people who work for wages and produce goods and commodities etc. are so terribly robbed and exploited of their labour power by the owners of the means of production (the capitalist class) that they – the workers that is – are unable to purchase the goods they themselves produce after a while consequent upon this peculiar situation a thing called crisis occurs. Here factories close down, men are thrown out of employment and misery creeps over the land like a bloated toad. This situation moves like a nightmare in the subconscious mind of every capitalist driving him to various wild schemes of self-preservation and other things which I shall speak of as I go on.
“In 1917 during the first Great War a wonderful event occurred. The glorious Soviet Union, the first Socialist State in human history was born. The first cry to issue from the heart of this young state was the cry of Peace and Security among the People. This was so because the people of the Soviet Union realised that only Peace could help them live better, that Peace was a condition essential for the development of human culture. In reply Great Britain, U.S.A., Holland and other capitalist countries organised an expeditionary force and sent it through the backdoor of Russia to strangle the life out of this young peace loving state. This vile attempt failed ignominiously.
“Ever since then however the capitalist states have been seeking to let loose the dogs of War at the gateways of this Socialist stronghold. America by then had become pealed into the forefront of industrial capitalism. In 1929 the phenomenon called over-production burst like an abscess spilling puss over the streets of New York, proving the instability and insecurity of the capitalist system. In 1939 the fiend Hitler broke loose and soon the whole of Europe was groaning beneath the heel of the Nazi jackboot… In 1946 men of good will who desired lasting peace met in Europe and founded the World Peace Movement. From the outset the ideologies of capitalism launched an attack on this movement for peace and friendship. From the capitalist class of America came the loudest and most vicious attacks. On the other from the Soviet Union came warm and generous support.
“Why did America and English ruling circles attack the Peace Movement? Clearly they did not want the peace of the world secured. In America particularly the nightmare of overproduction had been sated by the gluttonous jaws of war… As Lenin the architect of the Soviet Union once said ‘The capitalists like war not because it is terrible, but because it is terribly profitable’.
“Stretching long tentacles over the world American imperialism today threatens the world with the threat of war. War to the rulers of America is the only solution to the contradictions inherent in the system they foster.
And as American imperialism has taken the whole of the capitalist world as its private domain it is to be expected that wherever American imperialism is the word “Peace” becomes subversive and forbidden. [. . .]
“The world peace movement therefore is an organisation fighting for the preservation of peace. Professor Frederic Joliot Curie the world famous physicist is President and many persons like Paul Robeson, Professor J. D. Bernal renowned in different fields of human effort unite to weld it into a powerful force for maintaining World Peace…
“With regard to my visit to Bucharest I wish to state that the World Federation of Democratic Youth is a world wide organisation with a membership of over 80,000 persons in 90 countries. This organisation fights for the rights of youths and fosters Peace and Friendship.
In British Guiana youths do not have the right to employment, to education, to develop fully. It was therefore a great privilege to attend the festival in Bucharest and to show solidarity with an organisation that fights to lift from the sump of degradation the youth not only of Guiana but also of all the countries where youth pines away under miserable conditions of life.
“I note that I ‘became an assistant Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party and assisted in the sale and distribution of Communist propaganda material’. I became an Assistant Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party in 1953 but I have been selling and distributing Communist propaganda before 1953, and I shall continue to do so as long as I possibly can.
I feel convinced that it is only by the adoption of the principles laid down by Marx and Engels furthered and developed by Lenin and Stalin that a people colonial or otherwise as the case may be can learn how to free itself from the tight bonds of imperialism and capitalist serfdom and go forward to the creation of a form of society in which the free development of all will be assured.
“In the light of all this I am compelled to challenge the authority that keeps me detained in a hut with a garden of rusting barbed wire.
The rules and regulations of the Committee to which this is now submitted leave no room for doubt as to their purpose and intention. I feel that the appointment of the Advisory Committee by the Governor is nothing more than a sop to Cerberus. It strikes me as an attempt to create the illusion that justice is being done, while in fact there was always the intention within this context of suppressing that freedom of movement, association and belief, which is the inalienable birthright of every human being.”
(Sgd.) Martin Carter.
28.11.53.
