The ruins of a great dream

By Brendan de Caires

Originally published in Stabroek News, Sunday 24 September, 2006

University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, by Martin Carter, ed. Gemma Robinson (Bloodaxe Books, 2006, 320 pp)

In a small city at dusk, the Ministry of National Development burned brightly in the evening air. A hill of fire warming my cheeks a hundred yards away. I remember watching the flames through the Demerara windows in my father’s study, aged nine, delighted that Skylab had chosen our street for its long-awaited crash landing. Finally, Georgetown was going to be famous for something. My enthusiasm was not shared by the Founder Leader; he looked for a source of fire much closer to home.

Lunchtime at our dinner table, soon afterwards. A messenger from my father’s office arrives with news that “they beat up a priest at Brickdam.” Presbytery, police station, cathedral, or somewhere else on that busy street? It wasn’t clear. A few weeks later I unexpectedly saw photographs of this priest, Fr Darke, being “beaten” to death (he was actually stabbed). I knew they were connected to what I’d heard before, but it would take me decades to understand the wider resonances of the memory.

A year later, returning from movie night at a sugar estate on the East Coast, I run upstairs to my father’s study to tell him about the film. At the top of the stairs I turn to see him lying back in his Berbice chair with only one of his reading lights turned on, left hand on his brow, “propping sorrow” as we used to say. He was listening to a radio. There was a terrible sadness in his eyes. “Walter is dead,” he said, “They killed him tonight. Walter is dead.” Walter was a short man with bright eyes. I’d met him downstairs once, when some people had come over for drinks at our house. He shook my hand firmly and looked me straight in the eye, adults didn’t often do that. They killed him down the road from our house, close to the jail. (I grew up on Camp Street, two hundred and twenty-seven postal numbers away from Lot 12. How many cities have such a cosy nickname for a prison?)

In the National Park many years later, ambling along at our usual geriatric pace, my father and I see a giant ball of flame glowing red above the city centre. From where we are it looks like the newspaper is on fire, so we drive home, walk down Camp Street and watch the Kissoon furniture store burn until there is only ashes. The crowds lining the street are thrilled. “Serves those Indians right, we should burn down all their stores like this,” I heard several of them say, in somewhat less parliamentary language.

I offer these memories without further comment, as a side road into the work of Martin Carter, a man who wanted us to “liberate ourselves from our inherited economic, social, and psychological bondage,” who warned that “the public and the private are distinguishable not separable.” These moments are fragments from my childhood in a failing country, a child’s confused images of the political pathologies which Carter turned into poetry.

The middle class of my generation, the group usually suspected of having enough time and education to wrestle with poetry, has yet to come to terms with the “terror and the time” — a task made no easier by our wholesale emigration. For me, at least, there was no bliss to be alive in the dawn of an independent Guyana, and to be young was purgatory. But Martin Carter’s poems restore the missed meanings of those experiences and offer a way back to the deepest questions of what it means to be Guyanese.

Bloodaxe has just published a scholarly edition of Carter’s Collected Poems painstakingly arranged, edited, and annotated by Gemma Robinson, who has supplied variant readings, details of manuscripts and typescripts, dates of composition, even glosses on dialect usage, local knowledge and literary and political allusions. She has spared no effort to help the reader, sifting through Carter’s notebooks, letters, and conversation to find clues to the difficult lines, parsing ambiguous phrases (such as the Creole/Standard English usages which are important in several poems), and pointing out when the poetry shares concerns with the prose in the second half of the book. She even prints two drafts of a poem (“Bastille Day — Georgetown”). These give a fascinating glimpse of the poet at work. Add to all this a clear, well-written introduction to Carter’s life and politics and you can easily see why this will be the definitive edition for the foreseeable future. No West Indian writer has been published more respectfully. Let us hope this sets a trend.

Robinson’s supplementary information is extraordinarily useful and often quite charming for non-literary reasons. Georgetown’s nocturnal frogsong earns a mention in a gloss for “is the hour of rain when sleepless toads are silent”; different notes tell us that toads are usually called “crapaud” and are “associated with obeah practices”; frangipani in the poet’s garden enters a note to a poem for Eric Roach, and the image “plantation earth” in “Confound Deliberate Chaos” is sharpened by Carter’s opinion elsewhere that Guyana was “not a country, but a refined plantation.”

Anyone who knows those details already will appreciate more literary information such as the fact that Carter was reading Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism when he started his riddle poems, or that he may have written “Two in One” — a strange poem about the hsien (“Immortal beings depicted in Chinese mythology as bird-like people or wise old men who could fly great distances and change their shape”) — at the University of Essex in 1975, while he was a Writer in Residence there.

Martin Carter’s Georgetown was a “city with a prison for a heart.” Prison is where “they . . . cut off the world, cut out the sun / darken the land and blacken the flower.” That this was more than the usual hyperbole of political activism is shown by an entry for “Guyanese Poetry” in his 1979 notebook: “Guyana’s analogies on a global scale are the prisons, madhouses, hospitals, slums, street pavements which all countries, developed or underdeveloped have. This is what makes it possible for Guyanese poetry to have universality, because it is the poetry of naked men and naked minds locked in cells.”

Is there anything quite like a good dose of prison for a poet in a crisis? When Oscar Wilde was no longer the darling of the London stage, he plunged into the depths of Reading Gaol and took stock of a few naked minds in their cells. “Most people,” he decided, “are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Many years later, in his own dark time, Martin Wylde Carter would come to much the same conclusion. But this was where he started, determined to write his way out of this blankness, to work out the meaning of the historical accidents which had formed this country, without repeating earlier formulations.

Carter’s work is often split in three: an early radical phase, Poems of Resistance, and then the later work. This is a useful grouping, but there are so many internal resonances in his work that any division seems more of a critical convenience than a natural fact. One of the joys of having a heavily annotated edition like this is that it helps a reader to tease out many of the details that make the mature work so re-readable. It shows that even in his weak poems Carter often worried away at the same problems that fed his best work.

Throughout, the poetry is full of deceptive simplicity. Take, for example, the opening lines of “The University of Hunger”:

is the university of hunger the wide waste
is the pilgrimage of man the long march

Read as Standard English, these are questions (Robinson notices the possibility but stresses that Carter rejected this reading). Read as creole, they are statements. The shift in those meanings is very suggestive. An outsider reads doubts where the local reads declarative sentences. There is an abundance of these reconfigurable meanings in Carter’s poems, much of it so subtle it can pass unnoticed through several re-readings. Consider the poem “All are Involved”:

This I have learnt:
today a speck
tomorrow a hero
hero or monster
you are consumed!

Like a jig
shakes the loom
Like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved
all are consumed.

In a fine piece of close reading, Rupert Roopnaraine has shown how much slippage takes place in these eleven lines: the cunning indeterminacy of “you” (singular or plural? personal or general?), the ambiguity of “shakes” (does the loom “shake” itself in a dance, or is it being “shaken” by a jig, like those which guide tools or even the ones which jerk hooks into fish?); should we read “is spun” tacitly onto the end of the eighth line? and so on. The poem’s confusion of active and passive, its playful doubt, is a hallmark of the mature Carter. Having awoken from his early radical dreams into the crude political realities of the mid-1950s and 60s, he tends towards a refusal to be neatly pinned down. His public voice grows quiet and is replaced by a more personal tone. No more the poet of “I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world,” he begins to produce lines like:

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

(“After One Year”)

These lines quietly play with their images and sounds. A hanging ground becomes a playing field by remaining where it is, just as “green playing field” is recycled into the sounds of cemetery flowers in the “proud garden.” Still, smooth, cemetery, secret, and soul run parallel to ground, garden, gables, and great dreams. The end of the poem gestures towards Shakespeare and possibly even Milton, but a reader needs to look no further than burial ground or forgotten scaffold to take its meaning. There is nothing so simple as a straightforward political message any more, except perhaps that world-changing dreams have become an embarrassment.

This understated vision of shifting meanings extends beyond wordplay and into some of the symbols. I believe this tendency reaches back to some of Carter’s earliest work. Clem Seecharan has written of the fire images in The Hill of Fire Glows Red:

The “hill of fire,” a transcendent feature of the plantation at harvest time, as the tall sugar-cane is set alight and the avalanche of fire consumes the cane-leaves, undergrowth, insects, snakes etc., is the infernal motif for the pain, the hurt of slavery and indenture, and fountainhead of colonial being. But it also becomes the symbol of hope: it clears up, cleans, and allows for new shoots of cane, the ratoon, to sprout — the red hill speaks of a new day.

One kind of fire is beautiful and cleansing, the other an expression of self-destroying rage. It is the kind of paradox beneath Yeats’s “terrible beauty,” an all-too-familiar case of ambivalent hopes that someone will slice open the Gordian knot of race hatred in this country, even if a little blood must flow.

Keats famously described the Negative Capability of great literary minds as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.” Keats believed that Shakespeare worked at the limit of this gift and was able to live inside characters with complete imaginative freedom, creating Imogen one moment and Iago the next. This emphasis on inner life was a general characteristic of the Romantic movement. From Germany to England the new poetry placed the highest value on the artist’s direct access to “feeling,” to knowledge of the heart and its irrational tendencies — all the forces which lay beyond the grasp of the Encyclopaedists. These forces, of course, animated the politics of the French Revolution and all subsequent nationalist passions, and taken together they constitute the most telling corrective to the Enlightenment’s assumptions that mankind is fundamentally reasonable and governable on the basis of common interests.

I believe that Carter deliberately kept switching perspectives between Enlightenment hopes for a common future and a Romantic apprehension of our irreconcilable pasts. This allowed him to get very close to the “heart of darkness” of the Jagan-Burnham era. He understood the demons of racial politics very early and knew that he couldn’t simply re-invent a better reality, but he could claim a modest triumph if he refused to quote other people’s passions and to go along with the shabby accommodations of political shamans and their tribes.

Because he kept alternating between these approaches, there is an ambivalence about experience throughout his work. An awareness that to see the world rationally is to see it with one eye. There is a strong sense of other perspectives, of other readings. Sometimes these are suggested by an absence of punctuation or capitalization, sometimes by a trick of syntax. Carter knew that — Amerindians excepted — this country is entirely derived from elsewhere. And he went to some pains to stress that fixed points of view could never work.

Despite his early Communism, or perhaps because of his discomfort with it, the poetry offers a lot of evidence that Carter was never content with a merely ideological view of the world. Whatever the attractions of “dialectical materialism” (a phrase he used ironically in later years) and other big picture explanations, he always tried to understand human problems from within. Disappointed by the continual political failures of independence, his poetry began to brood in surreal and sometimes inscrutable images. But there is plenty of evidence throughout that he kept returning to the same questions, wondering why our nationalist dream had unravelled so painfully.

If psychoanalysis is “a conversation that enables people to understand what stops them from having the kinds of conversations they want,” Carter can partly be understood as an unacknowledged therapist of our national psyche. He kept trying to reshape the quarrels of the 1960s into conversations that could move forward. When this failed to happen and he turned his attention elsewhere, he grew no less curious about the inner life of ordinary people. Even after the rhetoric of the early poetry was toned down, he was always willing to sound an almost religious note when looking into the human heart. For example, the late poem “On a Child Killed by a Motor Car”:

Child, a moment of love ago
you danced in the eye of the woman
who made you. Within another moment
like the innocent wheat that made the loaf
of bread she sent you for
in this field of the heart’s ploughed land
you were threshed.

This is perilously close to sentimentality, but who can read it without enjoying the biblical evocation of the child, or that strange penultimate line? Perhaps there is an echo here of the lines in “After One Year”: “. . . do you think / the impartial bullock cares whose land is ploughed.” The ploughed land in the earlier poem is a field of cultivated miseries, here it is soil on which an innocent life is harvested. A passive voice strengthens the last line, and the motor car of the title is tactfully omitted.

For most of his work, Carter refused to accept that we could not alter our cultural insecurities by the force of our imagination: “Instead of going down to the cause of fear the racists accept fear and make it a cause for action,” he wrote in a 1955 editorial for Thunder. To save the issuing flower he went down to the roots of the swamp and tried to illuminate the waste and the nigger yard, “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle,” as Wittgenstein said of his attempts to take philosophy in a new direction.

In the very first poem in this edition (“To a Dead Slave”) Carter attempts, not altogether successfully, to imagine the nightmare of slavery and to understand how it might have shaped us: “the Caribbean cut by European keels / which sailed the Afric and the Indian seas; / and though my hand is brown as mother earth / yet moves my tongue in English syllables / beside a Hindu in her white ramal.” In another early poem he describes the life of a poor Indian woman, “With hands as rough as the rusty edge / Of some old spade left in the rain.” As his style matured these forays into other lives came much more naturally and he was able to bring much greater intellectual pressure to bear upon the big questions which these imaginings were meant to answer, namely why had freedom brought such unhappiness? Why had it degenerated into such atavistic hatreds?

Derek Walcott has faced some of these contradictions in his own work. Shabine, the “red nigger” in “The Schooner Flight”, has Dutch and English blood mixed into his African veins: he jokes that “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” Carter never abandoned the dream that a nation of multifaceted nobodies could grow out of independence, but the political failures of four decades seem to have driven him to the conclusion that there was no easy way back from our political unconscious. The first poem of Shape and Motion is his most eloquent treatment of this theme:

I was wondering if the agony of years
could be traced to the seed of an hour.
If the roots that spread out in the swamp
ran too deep for the issuing flower.

(Perhaps it is worth noticing that even here there is ambiguity: “spread out” can be read in two slightly different ways depending on where the caesura falls.) These failures left their scars and Carter suffered a long silence in the middle of his career and often succumbed to an implosive cynicism in later life. But the poetry he left behind suggests that this may have been a price worth paying for such a grasp of the “penetralium” of our mystery.

Maybe there aren’t good answers when we ask the questions this way. If nations are “imagined communities” then they must be imagined by everyone who wants to belong. The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. Faced with a new world at independence, we collectively chose Hobbes over Locke and learned the hard way that “love is stammered, hate is shouted out  /in every human city in the world.” As it had so often before, mob politics carried all before it and “the oppressor’s hate and scorn of myself” produced a brutish society that consumed its own until there was nothing left but bad memories.

On the few occasions I was able to watch Martin Carter among close friends, I saw the dying embers of his hopes for Guyana. He had an unnerving ability to anticipate arguments, to enter your thoughts, jump several steps ahead and tell you where you were going. When something roused him — usually an idle remark that “something better” might come out of more “dialogue,” or “power sharing” might be the answer after all these years — his eyes would flash as he put you inside the mind of “these people,” the ones who would have to believe in your idea if it was to stand any chance at all. In a few vivid phrases he could conjure up a land of Conradian darkness that swallowed anyone stupid enough to confront it. He spoke with such moral force that you could not help agreeing that the minds of “these people” were irrefutable proof of the absolute hopelessness of the situation in Guyana. When really angry he might warn you that “this country isn’t a country, these people aren’t people . . .” His rants often silenced a dinner party of six people for half a minute.

A brilliant and original man, Martin Carter expected more from us than we have learned to expect from ourselves. At the heart of his disappointed love for this country there is a prophetic quality which we would all do well to remember a little more often. In his obituary for Nadezhda Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky wrote: “[b]eing told that you are a slave is less disheartening news than being told that morally you are a zero. After all, a fallen dog shouldn’t be kicked. However, a prophet kicks the fallen dog not to finish it off but to get it back on its feet.”

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Added to The Caribbean Review of Books online library in June 2010, with permission from the author