Martin Carter

Site Update - "Live Chat" Now Available !!

2006-11-23T16:06:00.000-08:00

Hey Everyone,This is just a brief note to inform everyone that we have now created a new chat room (a special thanks to Gav !!) which we hope you will all use ... For those of you who are unfamilar with chat rooms, it is a great way to meet people from around the world by having a "real time" conversation with them... You can talk about all sorts of various subjects or simpy view the online discussion... I would like to invite all of you to use this feature which I believe is a great way to connect with people from around the world...Thanks again to Gav as this would not have been possible without his hard work and dedication...Sincerely,JonoThe Mittelholzer Foundationhttp://www.mittelholzer.org

Mittelholzer Foundation

2006-06-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

Hey Everyone,

Under the spirit of encouraging national unity and preserving our culture we have launched a website called the Mittelholzer Foundation. Since we feel that all forums are only as good as their visitors, we would like to encourage everyone to join and participate.

Features of our site will eventually include:

Archives of rare pictures, historical journals and essays.

Free Online Classified

Free Community Cooperative

Gallery of hundreds of old and new pictures of Guyana

Free Event Listing

A Chat room

An assortment of arcade style games (including a cool cricket game !!)

Private Messaging

And much, much more ...

And hopefully an area where people can download and upload music

One of the most complete links pages featuring Guyanese and Caribbean sites

Once again, we cannot work on promoting national unity and preserving our history without your participation and as such, I must make a very public and personal plea for people to join and spread the work of our existence...

Main Page - http://mittelholzer.org/

Forum - http://mittelholzer.org/forum/index.php

Thanks,

Jonathan Bratt

jonathanbratt@rogers.com

A Political Plea...

2006-05-05T14:07:00.000-07:00

Hey Everyone,

Sorry to bother you as I am sure you are all busy however I came across this important news item in the Kaieteur News and wanted to forward this message to as many people as possible and I hope that you will also feel the need to so do. Although I am not an authority on Guyanese politics there is little doubt that the country has suffered enough because of the racial politics that are continually being practiced by the PPP and PNC. It is for this reason, that the people of Guyana have been and continue to be subjected to the constant threat of violence and criminal activity as the political officials have done little to improve the quality of life for the average Guyanese citizen. It is time for all Guyanese people to take back their country from the corrupt politicians and inept government that seeks only to maintain the status quo which is essentially to keep the people as uniformed as possible so that they can maintain the status quo and retain their political power. If the people of Guyana were better informed about the current political practices and policies in place, they would no doubt expect and demand better from their elected officials who, in my honest opinion, have done little to help improve the country. It is for this reason, that I make this public plea to everyone to at least think changing their vote from one that is based solely on race and ethnicity, to one that is based upon the idea of change. There is no doubt that all Guyanese people deserve and I firmly believe that the AFC represents a legitimate opportunity for Guyana to have a prosperous future. If there is any confusion or hesitation to vote for change, then consider voting for the AFC as a means of protest which will send a message to the powers that be that you are tired of the existing racial politics that so divides and hinders the economic and social development of the country. It is time for every Guyanese citizen to take back their country and to assert their power by casting a vote for the AFC.

People do have the power to change the world in which they live in... I encourage you all to please forward this message to all of your Guyanese friends and family and to do all you can to help the AFC win this election either through a donation or by talking with friends and family about the idea that it is time for change, it is time for the AFC lead Guyana toward the bright future our ancestors had envisioned and struggled to achieve.

Thank-you for your time and I although I do not have any affiliation with the AFC, there is no doubt in my mind that they represent the best hope for Guyana.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Bratt

jonathanbratt@rogers.com

Guyana On My Mind

2006-04-28T10:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to James for this wonderful article !!

By Felicia Persaud

Hardbeatnews, NEW YORK, N.Y., Fri. Apr. 28, 2006: “I grieve … Your land is vast, full of plenty and your people hope. What tragic fate has betook you and left you barren. Of love, of the beauty and the freedom of existence.”

Those words from renown Guyanese poet James C. Richmond came back to me on Saturday April 22 as I woke like many to the horrific news that four more nationals – including a government minister – were senselessly slaughtered in the South American nation. The news came on the heels of the many other killings in recent weeks, that has put the spotlight on this country of less than a million people.

Murders like the Ronald Waddell execution, the Gazz Shermohamed killing and the bloodbath of February that took eight lives in one night in a tiny village on the outskirts of Georgetown, the country’s capital, have all stunned the nation.

But the Satyadeow Sawh, Rajpat Rai, Phulmattie Persaud and Curtis Robinson murders left many especially bewildered, since for the ruling Peoples Progressive Party/Civic, it hit so close to home.

I never knew Sawh, Waddell or Shermohamed, or the many more whose lives have all been taken coldly and callously by bullets. But for me, the reports of the horrific killings took my mind back to a dark period in my life in Guyana, prior to the Desmond Hoyte rule, where many lived in fear of ‘kick-down the door’ bandits, that robbed, raped and killed often.

I especially remember the infamous leader of the bandits, ‘Eyelash,’ who brought terror to the East Coast of Demerara and of the many vigilante groups that were formed in many communities by residents to help protect their families. I can still see the many steel doors that popped up all around houses to prevent such attacks and I can still hear my father detailing to me in military-like precision, the plan of assault and my role should our home be attacked by the terror squad.

Luckily we never were, but I know countless others who were; many of whom left Guyana almost immediately after, vowing never to return.

So contrary to the many comments and emails I’ve seen flashing around this past week, terror in Guyana is nothing new. What is new, however, is the sophisticated weaponry and tactics of the criminals, boosted no doubt by the lucrative drug trade that’s spilling over from neighboring South American countries.

And the economic plight of many in the country is providing the fuel for to rapidly make its way across the country. With many in the civil service and tactical services units so vastly underpaid, fast, easy money is no doubt tempting and it’s causing many to dismiss a human life as coldly as they would a chicken that they rear for a meal.

So what should be done? First off, the government and the opposition must desist from using these killings as a political ploy. There is no time for selfish politicking. This is a national crisis of enormous proportions that can only be solved by bringing in international help, especially to neighboring Brazil and Venezuela, while working together to devise a national strategy.

And targeting one specific area of the country while the government and the police throw around wild theories of a political terror plot is not a solution. The rising crime rate in Guyana is a social scourge of enormous proportion not some air brain scheme to steal the government. If that were the case, the entire cabinet would have been taken out already.

When Hoyte took over the government in 1985, he reinstated the death penalty and took a significant bite out of crime. Similar radical steps must be taken to send a strong message to those who take innocent lives without care but it must be substantially boosted by international firepower and aid.

Once these criminals are found, the death penalty that’s on the books in Guyana must be implemented to send a clear message that such cold-blooded assassinations will not be tolerated. Let’s get real please, identify the problem and not continue to be blinded by race and politics.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The writer is publisher of The Caribbean World News Network (caribworldnews.com), the only daily Caribbean Diaspora newswire.

WELCOME TO THE GUYANA FOLK FESTIVAL '06 SEASON

2006-04-24T23:09:00.000-07:00

WELCOME TO THE GUYANA FOLK FESTIVAL '06 SEASON

http://www.guyfolkfest.org/

WELCOME TO THE GUYANA FOLK FESTIVAL '06 SEASON

2006-04-24T22:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Colleagues:

Greetings and best wishes in this the 40th year of Guyana's independence.

This e-mail is to share with you the plans that are emerging for Guyana Folk Festival 2006.

For the past five years, the Guyana Cultural Association, a New York-based, non-profit organization, has organized the Guyana Folk Festival which is becoming an important end-of-summer holiday destination for the Guyanese and Caribbean diaspora.

Each year, the festival is organized around a theme. In past years the themes have been "Celebrating Guyanese music," "Celebrating the Guyanese word," "Celebrating Guyanese dance." In 2006, the theme is "Carifesta 72 Revisited: Celebrating Our Caribbean Culture"

Background

Just six years after independence, Guyana hosted the most important cultural event in contemporary Caribbean history--Carifesta 72. For three weeks (August 25 to September 15), the Caribbean expressive culture bloomed in Guyana. The festival celebrated the region's intergenerational and multiracial heritage, transcended the narrow geographies of history and revealed the important role of creative expression in the region's future development. Carifesta 72 was one of Guyana's important gifts to the region during its 40 years of independence.

The goal of Guyana Folk Festival 2006 is to celebrate the several threads that make up the Caribbean cultural tapestry and the ties that bind the peoples of the Caribbean, at home and in diaspora.

The 2006 Program

The emerging program shows that this year's festival will start in June 2006 and will end with the popular Folk Festival Family Fun Day on Sunday, September 3, 2006. What follows are some of the emerging highlights:

Festival of Guyanese Film: This program scheduled for Friday, June 30; Saturday, July 1; and Sunday, July 2 will showcase films made by Guyanese or about Guyana. The venue will be the Meyer Levin School Auditorium, Ralph Avenue, Brooklyn, New York.

Festival of Performing Arts: This program scheduled for Saturday, July 29; Sunday, July30; Saturday, August 5; and Sunday, August 6 will celebrate Caribbean performing arts. The venue will be the Meyer Levin School Auditorium, Ralph Avenue, Brooklyn, New York.

The Guyana Cultural Association's Awards Ceremony. This event for members and special invitees is scheduled for Wednesday, August 30, 2006. The venue is to be announced.

Come to My Kwe Kwe. This event is scheduled for Friday, September 1, 2006. The venue is to be announced.

The Symposium. The 2006 Folk Festival symposium will examine Guyana's place in Caribbean creativity. This event will take place at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York on Saturday, September 2, 2006. Prior to the New York symposium, a series of seminars on the same theme will be organized in Guyana, Atlanta, Florida, and the Cayman Islands.

Folk Festival Family Fun Day. This event is scheduled for Sunday, September 3, 2005 at the Meyer Levin School Ground, Ralph Avenue (between Tilden & Beverly), Brooklyn, New York.

The Guyana Cultural Association, organizers of the Guyana Folk Festival, seek your usual support and participation. I will keep you updated as further information becomes available.

For further details on the Guyana Cultural Association and previous Guyana Folk Festivals, please visit: http://www.guyfolkfest.org/

(Special Thanks to James C. Richmond and all the organizers of these most important event in the history of Guyana ...)

The West Indian canon?

2006-04-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

Over the long Easter weekend I started reading my newly-arrived review copy of University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose by Martin Carter, edited by my friend Gemma Robinson and published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books. (By happy coincidence, another new edition of Carter's poems edited by Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown will be published by Macmillan later this year.) University of Hunger--which takes its title from one of Carter's best-known poems--includes every poem he published in his lifetime, and is scrupulously annotated--the full treatment. It is, in fact, one of the best edited volumes of Caribbean literature I've yet seen, befitting the work of one of our major--dare I say canonical?--authors.

And it got me thinking, as I sometimes do, how wonderful it would be to have a Caribbean equivalent of the French Bibliotheque de la Pleiade or the Library of America--a uniform series of definitive editions of our major literary works, edited by experts and produced to the highest physical standards, and kept in print indefinitely at relatively inexpensive cost to the buyer. Perhaps one day a sufficiently enlightened (and sufficiently wealthy) benefactor will come along and make this possible. Should that day come, which writers or works would we include? What are the true Caribbean classics, worthy of preservation in this way for future generations?

Carter would certainly make the cut--the other obvious writers would include Jean Rhys, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Wilson Harris, Kamau Brathwaite, Louise Bennett, C.L.R. James--and who else, Beat blog readers? Who are the canonical West Indian authors? Which not-so-well-remembered writers do you think deserve to be resurrected? I'd make a strong argument for A.J. Seymour myself. Other suggestions? Use the comments below, please.

Caribbean Beat Weblog

2006-04-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

THE VENN COMMISSION

The strike in the sugar industry and the shooting of sugar workers at Enmore forced the Colonial Office in England to agree that the sugar industry in Guyana was facing a crisis, and that urgent action was needed to improve the social conditions of the sugar workers. As a result, the Secretary of State for the Colonies in October 1948 appointed a three-member commission to examine and report on the problems affecting the industry. The commission was headed by Dr. J. A. Venn, a professor of Cambridge University, while the other members were R. Sudell, an agricultural journalist, and B. G. Smallman of the Colonial Office as secretary.

The commission arrived in Guyana in late December and during the next six weeks visited the main sugar plantations. The team also took evidence from 192 persons at meetings held in Georgetown and New Amsterdam.

The commission's final report, submitted in July 1949, paid special attention to problems affecting women in the sugar industry. It noted that in 1948, 28 percent of the sugar workers were women, and spoke of the strenuous labour they had to perform in weeding, moulding cane and jumping over canals.

The women were forced into this situation to supplement the poor wages earned by their husbands. Many of them, the report stated, had to be up by 3.00 a.m. in order to prepare meals and to leave for work, and they would not return home until the evening. As a result, their children's care was neglected since there was no parent at home to care for them. The commission was concerned, too, that female workers were supervised by male drivers.

Among the recommendations of the Venn Commission were the following:

1. Each estate must provide creches to care for young children, while tasks should be arranged to allow women workers to return home to prepare meals and look after their children.

2. Women must not work in water (canals and flooded fields), and gangs of women workers should be supervised by women overseers.

3. All workers must be supplied with fresh drinking water, and sheltered areas must be erected for protection against rain and to provide places for workers to have their meals.

4. Roads must be constructed so that workers could travel in comfort to the fields.

5. For factory workers, social amenities such as proper toilet facilities, bath rooms and canteens must be provided.

6. There must be proper inspection and care of machinery on the estates.

7. The Workmen's Compensation Ordinance must be amended to give recognition to the claims made common-law wives and their children. This was necessary since most marriages among sugar workers were not official.

8. Measures should be taken to halt the use of child labour in the sugar industry.

9. The title of "drivers" should be changed to "headmen".

10. The Medical Department should institute regular inspection of housing, water supply and sanitation on the sugar estates.

11. Plots of lands must be provided to regular workers to cultivate rice, root crops and vegetables.

12. The British Government should provide a subsidy of one pound Sterling for each ton of sugar produced in Guyana for at least the next 15 years.

13. All the "ranges" in which sugar workers lived must be torn down and replaced with proper weatherproof housing by 1953.

14. The "cut and load" system which influenced the 1948 strike should remain in force, but the "cut and drop" system should operate when there was not an adequate supply of punts.

15. A Wages Board, to fix wages, should be established for the entire sugar industry. It should be made up of an equal number of representatives from the employer and the unions, and two neutral members appointed by the Government.

The Venn Commission also stated that a contributory pension scheme should be established. It recommended that male adult workers should contribute 2.5 percent and the employers 5 percent of the weekly earning of the workers. But this scheme was not implemented mainly because the SPA was not supportive of it, and also because the MPCA, the recognized union, was not willing to struggle for it.

The Commission examined the demands for recognition by the GIWU as the bargaining union for sugar workers instead of the MPCA. It disagreed with the immediate claim made by GIWU saying that if workers maintained their membership of the union for about three years, the union would then have grounds to make its demand for recognition.

http://www.guyana.org

2006-04-15T22:05:00.000-07:00

THE ENMORE MARTYRS

By 1948, most sugar workers in Guyana were giving support to the Guyana Industrial Workers Union (GIWU). On 22 April 1948, cane cutters, backed by the union, went on strike demanding the abolishment of the existing "cut and load" system in the fields. This reaping system which forced cane cutters had to load the sugar punts with the cane they cut, was not popular among cane cutters. It was introduced in 1945, and from time to time workers had gone on strike to demand that it should be changed. As part of the demands of the 1948 strike, the cane cutters called for the replacement of "cut and load" with a "cut and drop" system by which the cane cutters should cut the cane, but other workers would load the cut cane into the punts for shipment to the factory.

In addition to this particular issue, the workers demanded higher wages and improved living conditions on the sugar estates. However, the real aim of the strike was to demand recognition of the GIWU as the bargaining union for the field and factory workers on all the sugar estates in the country.

The strike obtained political support from the Political Affairs Committee (PAC), and the workers were addressed at numerous public meetings by Dr. Cheddi Jagan, Janet Jagan and leaders of the GIWU. The PAC bulletins were widely distributed at these meetings. Dr. Jagan himself was personally involved in the organization of the strike, and helped to raise funds across the country to it. Janet Jagan was also in the forefront in operating soup kitchens for the striking workers and their families on the sugar estates.

As the strike continued, the recognized union, the MPCA, urged the workers to return to work saying that they demand for higher pay would be taken up with the Sugar Producers Association (SPA). But the workers, who had no confidence in the MPCA, refused to heed this call and stated that in any discussions with the SPA they wanted only the GIWU to represent them. However, the SPA was adamant that negotiations would be conducted only with the MPCA, the recognized union.

With sugar production seriously affected by the ongoing strike, the sugar estates hired scab labour and enticed some workers to return to work. In retaliation, strikers went to the fields and chased them away, and in some cases physically attacked them.

On 14 June the SPA and the MPCA met to discuss the issues, but no satisfactory agreement was reached. In any case, the workers were not prepared to accept any agreement that the MPCA was negotiating, since they felt very strongly that the union was betraying their interests. On the following day, some strikers attacked overseers and some strike-breakers at Nonpariel, and in the evening there were reports of vandalism, including the cutting of telephone lines between Georgetown and Enmore.

Early on the morning of June 16 a crowd of about 400 workers gathered outside the factory at Enmore for a protest and picketing exercise. The management of Enmore Estate was expecting this protest action, and the evening before had requested assistance from the Police. Lance Corporal James and six policemen, each armed with a rifle and six rounds of ammunition, were earlier sent from Georgetown early on the morning of June 16 and they reported to the management of Enmore estate at 4.00 a.m. Two hours later, they and took up positions in the factory compound which was protected by a fence 15 feet high with rows of barbed wire running along the outward struts at the top.

By 10.00 a.m. the crowd had grown to between 500 and 600 persons and was led by one of the workers carrying a red flag. They attempted to enter the factory compound through the gates and through two trench gaps at the rear by which punts entered the factory. But they were prevented from doing so because the locked gates and the punt gaps were protected by policemen. A section of the crowd then hurled bricks and sticks at the policemen, and several persons managed to enter the compound on the rear of the factory. The policemen tried to push back the crowd, but after this effort failed, they opened fire and five workers were killed and fourteen others were injured.

Lallabagee Kissoon, 30 years old, was shot in the back; 19-year-old Pooran was shot in the leg and pelvis; Rambarran died from bullet wounds in his leg; Dookhie died in hospital later that day; and Harry died the following day from severe spinal injuries. These men, through the years, became known as the Enmore Martyrs.

On June 17, the funeral of the slain men saw a massive crowd of people marching behind their coffins from Enmore to La Repentir Cemetery in Georgetown, a distance of more than 16 miles. This procession of thousands was led by Dr. Cheddi Jagan and PAC and GIWU leaders. The tragedy and the ultimate sacrifice of these sugar workers greatly influenced Dr. Jagan political philosophy and outlook. On the grave side of the Enmore Martyrs surrounded by thousands of mourners, he made a silent pledge that he would dedicate his entire life to the cause of the struggle of the Guyanese people against bondage and exploitation.

To investigate the shooting, the Governor, Sir Charles Wooley, appointed a commission of enquiry headed by Frederick Boland, a Supreme Court judge. The two other members of the commission were S. L. Van Batenburg Stafford and R. S. Persaud. Evidence was collected from 64 persons and a report was presented in August 1948. Dr. Jagan, Janet Jagan and Dr. Lachmansingh refused to testify before the commission because they felt it was a waste of time owing to the fact that the commission chairman and members were openly showing a bias towards the Police and the management of Enmore Estate.

In their testimony to the Commission, policemen involved in the shooting claimed that they were forced to shoot to protect the factory from destruction or damage and to protect the lives of workers who were on the premises.

The report, as widely expected, justified the shooting. But it criticised the Police for not applying measures, such as the use to tear gas, to keep the crowd away from the factory compound. The members of the commission also felt that the shooting period went beyond what was reasonable when they stated: "We are, therefore, of the opinion that the evidence has established that after the first few shots, there was firing which went beyond the requirements of the situation, with the result that Pooran notably and some others received shots when in actual flight."

http://www.guyana.org/

2006-04-07T13:44:00.000-07:00

THE CANADA-GUYANA FORUM

INVITES YOU TO A PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION:

Guyana in Crisis: Crime, Security and the Elections of 2006"

WHEN: Saturday 22nd April

WHERE: WEST END: From 12:30 pm to 2:30 pm at Connections - 5835

Dixie Rd & Shawson. Directions: 1 Block North of HWY 401 Beside the

Best Western

AND

EAST END: From 3:30 PM to 5:30 pm at Scarborough Village RC,

3600 Kingston Rd. For directions contact: 416- 396 - 4048

If you are planning to attend the lunch meeting, please e-mail Derek

Kowlessar (derek@humanitylink.org) or Alissa Trotz (da.trotz@utoronto.ca)

For information contact: Sr. Hazel Campayne (416-920-0132); Jai Parasram

(416-289-1346); Alissa Trotz (416-978-8286)

PLEASE COME OUT AND JOIN US AT ONE OF THESE GATHERINGS FOR A LONG OVERDUE

DISCUSSION!!

I pray that someday there will be peace on Earth.
OUR FIGHT IS WITH IGNORANCE, NOT WITH EACH OTHER! - Jai Parsram

2006-04-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

Slavery in the British and French Caribbean

Slavery in the British and French Caribbean was the Slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by France or the British Empire. The Lesser Antilles islands of Barbados, Antigua, Martinique and Guadeloupe were the first important slave societies of the Caribbean, switching to slavery by the end of the 16th century as their economies converted from tobacco to sugar production. By the middle of the 17th century, British Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue had become the largest and most brutal slave societies of the region, rivaling Brazil as a destination for enslaved Africans.

The death rates for black slaves in these islands were higher than birth rates. Three out of four babies born into slavery died before the age of five. The main reason why the birth rates were lower than the death rate was because many slaves were over worked. Slaves had to use axes to cut down trees and burn brush to clear land for sugar plantations. They also had to crush sugar canes and remove liquid from them. After that they had to boil and clarify the liquid until it crystallised into sugar. Slaves also had poor living conditions and consequently they contracted many diseases.

Caribbean slavery gave the masters a complete freedom over the control of his slave. The low birth rates and high death rates caused the Caribbean island population to decrease. Slaves worked from sun up until sun down, with little medical care. Caribbean slaves often worked on cane estates suffering hardship in harsh conditions and supervised under demanding masters. The sugar industry caused the need for complete control the master needed over the slaves in order to meet demands and control the harvest. The Caribbean islands used a factory-like system to mass produce sugar production.

The factors mentioned above were perhaps the main cause of low birth rates among Caribbean slaves, as life was extremely hard in every aspect of their survival. But there is another possible reason for the low birth rate among slaves in the Caribbean. It is possible that females simply didn't want to bring new life into their existing world. Author Jan Rogozinski briefly mentions this in his book, "A Brief History of the Caribbean." He states that "Perhaps slave mothers simply did not see much point in raising children solely to provide labourers for their masters" (p. 142). This had been another form of slave rebellion against their masters. Slaves sang songs insulting their white masters and, in some cases, they would simply pretend to be ignorant or stupid (thus conforming to their master's preconceptions) to avoid punishment and further work. These factors may suggest that an unwillingness to bear children was a further act of resistance.

With the abolition of the Slave trade in 1807, the new British colony of Trinidad was left with a severe shortage of labour. This was exacerbated by the abolition of slavery in 1833. To deal with this problem Trinidad imported indentured servants from the 1830s until 1917. Initially Chinese, free West Africans, and Portuguese from the island of Madeira were imported, but they were soon supplanted by Indians. In addition, large numbers of ex-slaves migrated from the Lesser Antilles to Trinidad.

The first announcement from Whitehall in England that slaves would be totally freed by 1840 was made in 1833. In the meantime, slaves on plantations were expected to remain were they were and work as "apprentices" for the next six years.

Trinidad was to demonstrate the successful use of non-violent protest and passive resistance almost a hundred years before Mahatma Gandhi's campaign in India. On 1st of August 1834, a unarmed group of mainly elderly negroes being addressed by the Governor at Government House about the new laws, began chanting: "Pas de six ans. Point de six ans" ("Not six years. No six years"), drowning out the voice of the Governor. Peaceful protests continued until a resolution to abolish apprentiship was passed and de facto freedom was achieved. Full emancipation for all was finally legally granted ahead of schedule on 1st August, 1838, making Trinidad the first British colony with slaves to completely abolish slavery.

(Wikipedia)

2006-04-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

Slavery and the Caribbean

Europeans came into contact with the Caribbean after Columbus's momentous journeys in 1492, 1496 and 1498. The desire for expansion and trade led to the settlement of the colonies. The indigenous peoples, according to our sources mostly peaceful Tainos and warlike Caribs, proved to be unsuitable for slave labour in the newly formed plantations, and they were quickly and brutally decimated. The descendants of this once thriving community can now only be found in Guiana and Trinidad.

The slave trade which had already begun on the West Coast of Africa provided the needed labour, and a period from 1496 (Columbus's second voyage) to 1838 saw Africans flogged and tortured in an effort to assimilate them into the plantation economy. Slave labour supplied the most coveted and important items in Atlantic and European commerce: the sugar, coffee, cotton and cacao of the Caribbean; the tobacco, rice and indigo of North America; the gold and sugar of Portuguese and Spanish South America. These commodities comprised about a third of the value of European commerce, a figure inflated by regulations that obliged colonial products to be brought to the metropolis prior to their re-export to other destinations. Atlantic navigation and European settlement of the New World made the Americas Europe's most convenient and practical source of tropical and sub-tropical produce. The rate of growth of Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century had outstripped all other branches of European commerce and created fabulous fortunes.

An estimate of the slave population in the British Caribbean in Robin Blackburn's study, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776-1848, puts the slave numbers at 428,000 out of a population of 500,000, so the number of slaves vastly exceeded the number of white owners and overseers. Absentee plantation owners added to the unrest. Rebellion was common, with the forms including self mutilation, suicide and infanticide as well as escape and maroonage (whereby the slaves escaped into the hills and wooded interiors of the islands and set up potentially threatening communities of their own. See references in Wide Sargasso Sea). Jamaica holds the record for slave revolts, with serious uprisings in 1655, 1673, 1760 and continued disquiet after that. The documentation of revolts in Trinidad is less complete, but we know of at least one serious plot in 1805. Guiana was actually governed by a slave named Cuffy for a year after the revolt in 1763, and Barbados also had numerous plots, including six between 1649 and 1701.

Even after Emancipation in 1838, the unequal system continued. The first indication of this came with the awarding of some twenty million pounds to the planters by way of compensation, with nothing being awarded to the former slaves. The system tried to force them to continue the arduous work on the plantations by introducing high taxes on small holdings, high rates for licences or small traders, and contracts to shackle the labourers to the large plantations. The problems associated with the uneasy post-Emancipation time form the backdrop for Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

The shortage of available labour led to the introduction of indentured labour from another of Britain's colonies, India, in 1844. These labourers worsened conditions for the former slaves by undermining attempts to achieve improved conditions through strikes. By 1917, when immigration came to a halt some 145,000 Indians had come to Trinidad, and 238,000 to Guiana. The importation of Indians affected Jamaica, but not Barbados, as well, with 39,000 immigrants. Writers such as V.S. Naipaul, the highly reputed Trinidadian novelist, have their roots in the importation of Indian indentured labourers to replace the slaves.

Slavery is a recurring theme in the literature of the Caribbean. Many writers feel the need to attempt a vocalisation of all that was denied under the brutal system. Writers such as Derek Walcott in Omeros, and George Lamming in In the Castle of my Skin talk about the difficulty of moving forward from the feelings of injustice inspired by the slave system and the lack of improvement of life after slavery. The Caribbean moved from a place of glory in the British Empire, with Barbados nicknamed "Little England," to its present position of instability and reliance on tourism for the survival of the economy. Some writers, including Jamaica Kincaid, see tourism as an extension of the system of slavery, with the "natives" there for the tourist's amusement and comfort. Any study of the literature of this region must bear in mind the violent heritage of the place, and the fact that the indigenous population were almost totally destroyed and the present population were brought there entirely against their will.

http://www.qub.ac.uk/en/imperial/carib/slavery.htm

2006-04-01T22:53:00.000-08:00

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Felicia A. Pride, Founder/Editor/Publisher
"A vision without a plan is a dream. A plan without vision is a nightmare." –Unknown

Felicia Pride was raised in both Northern New Jersey and Baltimore , Maryland giving her a unique sense of possibility. A self-proclaimed nerd, Felicia has always been a lover of the nontraditional. After receiving a B.S. degree in business, she moved closer to New York City to bask in its immense opportunities. Immediately, she held positions in marketing, gaining a firm foundation and promoting various products and services.

She made the initial transition into publishing through writing. Penning cultural and entertainment pieces not only allowed her to interview an intriguing list of personalities, but also earned her writing credits in the Baltimore City Paper, Vibe.com , Popmatters.com , Africana.com and Fly Magazine . She also expanded into other types of writing and possesses a vast and diverse portfolio. It was a subsequent position as an assistant editor at a magazine that prompted her to return to school and study publishing.

Felicia has a graduate degree in writing and publishing from Emerson College ( Boston , Massachusetts ) with a specialization in books. Already, she has held positions at respected publishing houses and continues to work in the industry. Yet, she hasn't abandoned her marketing roots. She freelances as an editorial and promotional consultant to writers and publishers. To learn more about her writing and promotional services, visit www.thebacklist.net/main/services.html .

But most importantly, she has been able to realize her dream to edit her own publication, BackList, which combines her love of books and publishing. As her entrepreneurial nature leads the way, Felicia continues to involve herself in positive, challenging projects. The one concern that remains is whether she will be able to do everything in one lifetime.

stacia l. brown, contributing writer
stacia l. brown is a twentysomething lansing, michigan native, raised in baltimore , md. a graduate of trinity college of washington , dc, she enjoys writing in all forms (though she's currently on a poetry hiatus). stacia has watched an inordinate amount of television and is trying to match her hours logged staring at the black box with hours spent reading substantial literature. after having adopted that mission about three years ago, she's decided it'll probably be another five years before she accomplishes it.

2006-03-31T20:30:00.000-08:00

US$15,000 urgently needed to save infant's life

Stabroek News

Desean Noel

Little Desean Noel is in desperate need of an operation for a brain tumour which has almost rendered him immobile and is affecting his eyesight.

The child, who is just shy of his third birthday, urgently needs US$15,000 to have the surgery done at the Community Hospital, Cocorite, Trinidad. Because of the urgency, Dr Richard Spam who saw the child at the Davis Memorial Hospital and agreed to do it, has set April 6 for the operation. He said the sum of money is all-inclusive and the child and his mother would just have to get tickets and accommodation for the mother.

However, because the child's parents, Althiea Sampson and Richard Noel, who reside at 139 First Field Caneville, Grove, East Bank Demerara, have no way of raising that sum of money they are appealing to the public for assistance.

Desean is now a patient at the Georgetown Public Hospital. He was admitted last Thursday as his condition has deteriorated and he is in constant pain.

His mother said the boy is her only child and he was "normal" until early last month when he began to suffer from headaches and was vomiting everything he ate. He also had a high fever and was rushed to the hospital where he remained for 19 days.

During that time an MRI scan of the brain was ordered and this was done at St Joseph Mercy Hospital on March 3, revealing a large left frontal tumour that extended into the third ventricle resulting in obstructive hydrocephalus.

"He requires urgent treatment which will involve a section of the tumour. It is likely that once the tumour is cleared he will not require ventriculo-peritoneal shunt. I have advised the parents of the proposed treatment and the urgency," Dr Spam wrote in a letter he gave to the parents.

The mother said that late last year the child had developed an abscess at the back of his head but this was treated by the hospital and they never suspected there was a much larger problem.

Desean is now lying in the hospital bed and according to his mother he is unable to focus on anyone or anything because of the constant pain he is in. The parents have approached the Ministry of Health and First Lady Varshnie Jagdeo's Kids First Fund organisation and now await word on what help would be made available. But time is running out and even though they have set up a bank account they have only managed to raise a little over $200,000 which is a far cry from the US$15,000 they require to save the child's life.

The account is at the New Building Society (NBS) and its number is: D15453. Relatives of the child could be contacted on 643-2654 and 646-0262.

2006-03-31T20:14:00.000-08:00

Stabroek News

Twenty-year-old mother of two abandoned, struggling to make ends meet

By Oluatoyin Allyne

Wednesday, March 29th 2006

Janel Chase

At 20, Janel Chase should have been looking forward to how her life would unfold. Instead, she is a depressed mother of two whose reputed husband recently walked out on her leaving her with no means of supporting herself and children.

Some days it is a struggle to find a few spoons of sugar to make tea for her two- and one-year-old children.

She lives with her 81-year-old grandmother and according to her they help to take care of each other and the children. Their home is located in Cemetery Road, Mocha, East Bank Demerara, and although it is in "good condition" it does not have any electricity or running water.

And apart from the difficulty of surviving and providing for her two toddlers, the young mother is also epileptic. She was forced to leave school early because of the condition.

She said she sometimes knows when to expect an attack but at other times it happens suddenly, like one she experienced a little less than two years ago.

She said she was returning from the shop after making a purchase for her grandmother when suddenly she blacked out. She later learnt she fell flat on her face on the road and had to be taken home by public-spirited citizens. When she came to, Chase was in her bed and two of her front teeth were missing, knocked out when she fell on the road.

Even though her boyfriend, who was living with her at the time, stuck around after this incident and she bore him another child, Chase feels that her missing front teeth caused him to leave.

"I think is because me ent get no front teeth and he must be see some other girl more flashy than me and gone with she," the young woman said.

She told Stabroek News that he walked out earlier this year. She said he made a living by weeding for people during the day, while at night he operated a karaoke machine at a popular business spot in Mocha. But many days he gave her just $300. One day, she said, she told him that the money could do nothing for the children. "He just turn and say, Janel me ent able with this. This relationship between me and you over. He ask me for his clothes and I give he it and he gone," she said.

"I don't know, honestly I don't know where that boy is."

Chase said she attempted several times to make contact with her daughter's father's relatives to get assistance for little Marian and Mario but they were not willing to help and on a few occasions she has had the phone hung up on her.

Chase is very conscious about her missing teeth, which are only noticeable when she speaks. She is small in stature and underweight, but the young woman said she really cannot take care of herself. She said many days when there is not enough food for the entire family she leaves herself without to ensure that her children and grandmother eat because of their ages. And this is not healthy, because, according to the young woman, whenever she is not eating properly she is more likely to have an epileptic fit.

Chase grew up with her grandmother. Her father lives overseas but she does not know him, while her mother is married and living in the same village. Chase said since she grew up with her grandmother she is not close to her mother. According to Chase, she left school in form four on the advice of the headmistress because of her condition.

At her grandmother's age there is not much she can do, but Chase said the woman still has a small kitchen garden which she maintains.

"She would go and sit down and weed and plant and when dem things get ripe deh does come in handy fo we. I don't really know how really we surviving," the young mother said.

Chase's story is not unique as there are many women her age who are in the same position or even worse but her existence is indeed sad. She survives through the benevolence of those living around her. She does not mind that her reputed husband has left, but wishes he would contribute to the children's upkeep. "Is better he go if he want another woman, I don't want he to be with me and other woman because with all dem things out there, I don't want to dead and leave me children," she said.

Chase would not openly beg for assistance, but would welcome anything offered to her. Because of her condition and lack of education it is difficult for her to find any employment and even if she does she has the added problem of finding someone to take care of the children since they are sometimes too much.

She sees the road ahead as long and difficult.

Editor's note

We have received numerous letters from persons willing to help Miss Chase.

Miss Chase lives in Cemetery Road, Mocha, East Bank Demerara but does not have a telephone. Persons willing to help Miss Chase can do so through Troopers of Charity a non governmental organisation formed in America 36 years ago which established an office in Guyana seven years ago, dedicated to improving the livelihood of homeless children, school dropouts, teenage mothers and other disadvantaged persons. They are located at 122 Nelson Street, Mocha, EBD. The director is Mr. Kenneth Johnson and the mediator is Miss Zipporah Peters who can be reached at 263-6037.

2006-03-31T09:17:00.000-08:00

Society

THE COMPOSITION OF GUYANESE SOCIETY is a reflection of the country's colonial past. The colony was created by Dutch and British planters who grew sugarcane using the labor of slaves and indentured workers. Ignoring the country's vast interior, the planters constructed dikes and dams that transformed the coast into an arable plain. With the exception of the indigenous Amerindians and a few Europeans, the entire population consisted of imported plantation workers or their descendants.

Guyanese culture developed with the adaptation of the forced and voluntary immigrants to the customs of the dominant British. Brought to Guyana as slaves, Africans of diverse backgrounds had been thrown together under conditions that severely constrained their ability to preserve their respective cultural traditions. In adopting Christianity and the values of British colonists, the descendants of the African slaves laid the foundations of today's Afro-Guyanese culture. Arriving later and under somewhat more favorable circumstances, East Indian immigrants were subjected to fewer pressures to assimilate than the Africans had been. As a result, more of their traditional culture was preserved.

Although the culture of independent Guyana has become more truly national, the Guyanese people remain divided by ethnic mistrust. The Guyanese elite that has emerged to replace the colonial administration faces the enormous challenge of satisfying the aspirations of the people concerning economic development and educational opportunity.

Guyana Table of Contents

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

2006-03-30T10:59:00.001-08:00

Please visit...

Kyk-Over-Al

http://kykoveral.blogspot.com

Online/Caribbean Arts Journal. Features poetry, essays, drawings, sketches, paintings of various Caribbean/Guyanese artists. Also includes historical information and biographies of notable people from the region. All are welcome and we are always accepting submissions for content...

2006-03-29T07:36:00.000-08:00

What’s in a Name.

Many years ago I was sat in my bank manager’s office with my partner, bob. We lived in a small town in North Wales called Bethesda, where my mother was born. We had a little shop there called ‘Quarry View Stores.’ From the back window of our shop we could see the huge slate mountain, which had been the home of the Penrhyn Quarries, once famous for its slate throughout the world. We didn’t call our shop Quarry View Stores because we could see the quarry. It had been the name of mam’s family’s shop, a grocery owned by her parents, and we wanted to continue the tradition.

It was the summer and we had been summoned to the bank to discuss our finances. For me it was a good time to switch off, to not be responsible and I left it to the men folks to deal with such matters. I settled myself down in the warmth of the room and watched the sunlight illuminate the motes of dust by the window. It was beautiful and I lost myself in reverie.

The bank manager’s name was Williams, the same as my father’s- Denis Williams, but unlike my Guyanese father he was a Welsh man. I could hear the bank manager being rude and patronising, as people with a very little power sometimes are. I suddenly had a thought that perhaps his forebears had owned and named my father’s ancestors in Guyana. After all Williams was one of the oldest of Welsh names.

Later, I went to the library. In the archives department I held the original documents from the Pennants plantation in Jamaica, the family that had developed the quarry that dominated the town. I was aware of being a black woman, probably the first black person to see these papers, reading through a long list of names with no surnames. The archivist was very sensitive and helpful but he seemed embarrassed. These were the names of slaves – Pennants, real people with real lives that were documented as commodities, chattels. They had no identity save their owner-given names. Their belonging was only to the slave master. Nobody would ever know their real names. I was in awe. I was shivering. I felt myself to be trespassing in another world, as if I had no right to be there, to be witnessing this history.

I was able to find no other acknowledgement in Wales of involvement with slavery, even the Pennants, whose name meant something in the Welsh language, are generally regarded as English. The negative connotations of Empire are always attributed to the English, but my family name, a slave name, was a Welsh name. It was then that I decided to change my name.

I came from a family that had come to Wales in 1959. There were very few black people in this area back then but over the years the family has grown into dynastic proportions and being a ‘Williams’ meant something. But what did it mean? My paternal grandmother was called Isabel Adonis: I had been named Isabel after her and decided to adopt her surname as well.

I discovered that Adonis had a mythical and spiritual significance and it added to its specialness, originating as it did from Adonai meaning ‘lord.’ Adonis in Greek mythology was a beautiful man, loved equally by Persephone and Aphrodite, the goddesses of darkness and light, and because neither would give him up, he divided his time equally between his two lovers. The name was also connected to rebirth so it couldn’t have been more perfect and more meaningful to me. It was still a family name and it seemed to give me access to the feminine side of my father. I was the only daughter amongst my sisters named after a black woman and it gave me a strong sense of intimacy with this dark mother.

Mam had been a Hughes. Of one thing she was quite sure: when it came to a disagreement she would always revert back to her Welshness.

“Don’t forget I’m Welsh,” she said, and there was something rigid and autocratic about this statement. Once I asked her if she thought I was Welsh; if she was, why wasn’t I? She answered:

“It would take a long time for you to be Welsh.”

“But mam, how long would it take?”

But having established her bottom line she couldn’t go further and see the whole problem of identity, that it was about power and who belonged to who and nothing else. She would not explore her feelings, which were well defended. When my father left mam she continued to use his name and couldn’t let her wedding ring go and get a new partner. She continued to own him through his name Williams. Despite having a Welsh name, he wasn’t Welsh and neither was I, his daughter. No amount of time would change that.

My father had never spoken about his background as though he was entirely self made. To mention that I’m Denis Williams’ daughter in a Guyanese context has significance, whereas in Wales it has a false meaning. My father could never live here and in the context of Wales it sounds like somebody Welsh, somebody white. Moreover my father’s name of Williams, was a black name that spoke of oppression, cruelty and endurance, but in Wales that association and is denied.

The American Indians changed their names throughout their life to acknowledge psychological and spiritual transformations. They might have three or four name changes in a lifetime. We limit our identities to a small space of the body, but extend ourselves through a long lifetime, but not everyone is the same throughout their lives. People can change; changing your name doesn’t make you different but it symbolises change. The tradition of patrilineal surnames extends this identity through the generations in a particular form, which in the case of slavery has been broken. From the fragments of this fractured history, one has to seek an undivided individuality, and a name that symbolises connectedness. In Guyana it might be different, but in Wales the name of Williams symbolises the fracture, while my grandmother’s name, Adonis, asserts with it’s uniqueness here, something of my Caribbean and African heritage.

Isabel Adonis.

March 2006.

(thanks Isabel !!)

2006-03-27T12:15:00.000-08:00

Playing Militia

Even in that place of final exile
among tombs, and mechanical inscriptions,
each leaf is a different green,
flower of a different kind
of red and yellow; also each ripe fruit
tumult of a really different seed
there, in that place.

Outside in the traffic
between the city's indifferent wheels and feet,
amid a hatred of trees,
the phalloid needles of sewing machines
have sown a new drill. The sleeves
of uniforms droop
like the wet feathers of a crow's wing
over a secret carrion. Girls unbreasted,
wear guns like earrings. Boys ungamed,
grip them like tickets. The spree
is a wake. Admission is free.

Martin Carter in Poems of Affinity, 1980

2006-03-27T10:49:00.000-08:00

César Vallejo

César Abraham Vallejo was born on March 16, 1892, in Santiago de Chuco, an isolated town in north central Perú. Vallejo's grandmothers were Chimu Indians and both of his grandfathers, by a strange coincidence, were Spanish Catholic priests. He was the youngest of eleven children and grew up in a home saturated with religious devotion. Vallejo entered the School of Philosophy and Letters at Trujillo University in 1910, but had to drop out for lack of money. Between 1908 and 1913, he started and stopped his college education several times, working in the meantime as a tutor and in the accounts department on a large sugar estate. At the sugar estate, Vallejo saw thousands of workers arrive in the courtyard at dawn to work in the fields until nightfall for a few cents a day and a fistful of rice. Seeing this devastated Vallejo and later inspired both his poetry and his politics.

In 1913 Vallejo enrolled again at Trujillo University and studied literature and law, and read voraciously about determinism, mythology, and evolution. After receiving a Master's Degree in Spanish literature in 1915, Vallejo continued to study law until 1917. However, his life in Trujillo had become complicated by a tortured love affair and he moved to Lima. Vallejo found work as the principal of a prestigious school. At night he visited opium dens in Chinatown and hung out in the Bohemian cafe where he met the important literary figures of the time, including Manual Gonzalez Prada, one of Peru's leading leftists. When Vallejo's Los heraldos negros was published, in 1919, it was received enthusiastically. Vallejo then began to push his talent in a new direction.

Vallejo lost his teaching post for refusing to marry a woman with whom he was having an affair. In 1920, after his mother's death and the loss of a second teaching job, Vallejo visited his home. During a feud that broke out before his arrival in Santiago de Chuco, an aide to the subprefect was shot and the general store burned to the ground. Vallejo, who was actually writing up the legal information about the shooting for the subprefect, was blamed as an "intellectual instigator." In spite of protest telegrams from intellectuals and newspaper editors, he was imprisoned for 105 days. When released on parole, he left for Lima, embittered by the affair.

In 1922, Vallejo published Trilce, a book written while in hiding before his arrest. Trilce, which placed Latin American poetry in the center of Western cultural tradition, appeared to come out of nowhere. Vallejo continued to teach while in Lima, but in the spring of 1923 his position was eliminated. Fearing that he could still be forced to go back to jail, he accepted the invitation of his friend Julio Gálvez to go to Paris. Vallejo left Peru for good in June 1923.

Vallejo and Gálvez nearly starved in Paris. It wasn't until 1925 that Vallejo found his first stable job in a newly opened press agency and began to receive a monthly grant from the Spanish government to continue his law studies at the University of Madrid. Since he was not required to stay on campus Vallejo remained in Paris, where he continued to receive the money for two years. The grant, plus the income from articles, enabled Vallejo to move into the Hotel Richelieu in 1926 and frequent exhibitions, concerts, and cafe He met Antonin Artaud, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau. The somber, straightforward works he wrote during this period form a bridge between Trilce and the densely compassionate and bitter poetry he would write in the thirties.

In 1927, he received news from home that the tribunal in charge of his old case had given orders to arrest him, which confirmed his intuition to leave Peru. He left his post at the press agency and refused further grant payments. His economic situation worsened. By 1928, he had begun to read Marxist literature and appeared to be an actively committed Communist. In September of 1928 Vallejo made the first of three trips to Russia; he returned to form the Peruvian Socialist party with other expatriates.

In January 1929, Vallejo and Georgette Philipart, whom he met soon after his arrival in Paris, moved in together. Vallejo's Marxist studies continued, and he decided no longer to publish poetry, devoting himself instead to writing a book of Marxist theory. In 1930, Vallejo wrote his first drama. He continued to write scripts in the years to come, leaving nearly 600 pages of unpublished material at his death. Vallejo was arrested by the police in a Paris railroad station in December and ordered to leave France within three days. He returned to Madrid where, in 1931, he wrote his only novel, El tungsteno. When the Monarchy fell and the Republic was proclaimed, Vallejo officially joined the Spanish Communist party and, once Rusia en 1931 was published, was even temporarily famous. Despite his success, however, he could not find a publisher for his new material.

In January 1932, Georgette Philipart returned to Paris to find their apartment sacked by the police. Meanwhile, Vallejo was desperately trying to establish publishing connections in Madrid. Finally obtaining a resident permit in February 1933, Vallejo left for Paris with nothing but the clothes on his back. The conditions of the permit forbade him to engage in any political activity whatsoever; the years between 1933 and 1936 were the least documented in Vallejo's adult life and may well have been his darkest.

Vallejo and Philipart married in 1934, and their financial situation took a turn for the worse. Finally, in 1936, Vallejo found a teaching position, and the Fascist uprising in Spain in July of that year inspired him to a spectacular display of sustained creativity. Absorbed by the Loyalist anti-Fascist cause, Vallejo began to build a "popular poetry," incorporating war reportage, while at the same time becoming more hermetic than ever before. In July 1937 he left again for Spain, which was deep in civil war, and took part in the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture. Among the 200 writers attending, Vallejo was elected the Peruvian representative. While in Spain, Vallejo visited the front briefly and saw the horror with his own eyes. Back in Paris he wrote a fifteen-scene tragedy, La piedra cansada, and then in one sustained push, from early September to early December, fifty-two of the fifty-four poems that make up Sermón de la barbarie, along with the fifteen poems of España, aparte de mí este cálize.

In early March 1938, the years of strain and deprivation, compounded by heartbreak over Spain, as well as exhaustion from the pace of the previous year, finally took their toll. Vallejo contracted a lingering fever, and by late March he could not get out of bed. Despite medical attention, his condition worsened. No one knew how to heal him; at one point, his wife even enlisted the help of astrologers and wizards. On the morning of April 15, the Fascists finally reached the Mediterranean, cutting the Loyalist territory in two. At more or less the same moment, Vallejo cried out in delirium, "I am going to Spain! I want to go to Spain!" and he died. It was Good Friday. The clinic records state that he died of an "acute intestinal infection." His body was buried at Montrouge, the "Communist" cemetery in southern Paris. In the 1960s, Georgette, who was living in Lima, had his remains moved to Montparnasse, where they now reside.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Selected Poems of Cesar Vallejo Selected Poems of Cesar Vallejo (1981)
Antologia (1948)
Antologia (1966)
Antologia de Cesar Vallejo (1942)
Antologia poetica (1962)
Asi es la vida, tal como es la vida (1982)
Canciones de hogar: Songs of Home (1981)
Cesar Vallejo (1967)
Cesar Vallejo, a Selection of His Poetry (1988)
Cesar Vallejo: An Anthology of His Poetry (1970)
Cesar Vallejo: Sus mejores obras (1962)
Cesar Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry (1978)
España, aparte de mí este cálize (Spain, Take This Cup from Me) (1939)
La vida, y quince poemas: antologia poetica (1958)
Los heraldos negros (The Black Heralds) (1918)
Los heraldos negros y Trilce (1962)
Los mejores versos de Cesar Vallejo (1956)
Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (1993)
Nómina de huesos (Payroll of Bones) (1936)
Obra poetica completa (1968)
Obra poetica completa: Cesar Vallejo (1982)
Obras completas (1974)
Palms and Guitar (1982)
Perfil de Cesar Vallejo: Vida y obra antologia poetica (1978)
Poemas (1958)
Poemas en prosa; Poemas humanos, Espana, aparta de mi este caliz (1988)
Poemas escogidos (1958)
Poemas humanos (1923-1938) [and] Espana, aparta de mi este caliz (1937-1938) (1961)
Poemas humanos (Human Poems) (1939)
Poemas humanos; Espana, aparta de mi este caliz (1985)
Poesia completa (1981)
Poesia completa (1988)
Poesias completas (1961)
Poesias completas (1965)
Poesias completas (1918-1938) (1949)
Poesias completas de Cesar Vallejo, J. Pablos (1971)
Selected Poems (1976)
Selected Poetry (1987)
Sermón de la barbarie (Sermon on Barbarism) (1939)
Seven Poems (1967)
Ten Versions from Trilce (1970)
Trilce (1922)
Trilce (1992)
Trilce (1992)
Trilce (1973)
Twenty Poems (1962)
Un hombre pasa (1970)
Works also collected in Poesia completa (1978)

Prose

Articulos olvidados (1960)
Autopsy on Surrealism (1982)
Battles in Spain (1978)
Cartas a Pablo Abril (1971)
Cronicas (1984)
Desde Europa (1987)
El romanticismo en la poesia castellana (1954)
Epistolario general (1982)
La cultura Peruana: Cronicas (1987)
Literatura y arte (1966)
Paco Yunque (1981)
Rusia ante el segundo plan quinquenal (1965)
Rusia en 1931 (1932)
Rusia en 1931: Reflexiones al pie del Kremlin (1959)
The Mayakovsky Case (1982)

Drama

La piedra cansada (1927)
Teatro completo (1979)

Letters

El tungsteno (1931)
Escalas melografiadas, Talleres Tipografia de la Penitenciaria (1923)
Fabla salvaje (1923)
Novelas y cuentos completos (1970)
Novelas: Tungsteno, Fabla salvaje, Escalas melografiadas, Hora del Hombre (1948)
Tungsten: A Novel (1988)
Tungsteno (1958)
Tungsteno y Paco Yunque (1957)

2006-03-26T23:37:00.000-08:00

Letter of Reality

Leaping through the open door

Right fist raised in defiance and pronouncement of death

Go curse the world

Enunciating right and wrong

Announcing the beginning of the scene, the scream will come

This salutation is meant to right the wrongs

And the perplexities of some

Across the world and under the eyes of the sun, where the obliteration prolongs

In a frenzy – in midair the search consumes

The sentence is meant to contradict

Will Nations and man with much to spare, rescue their hearts entomb

Remember the Negroid who were tricked

Shackled, abused, culturally lynched, enslaved, a people to expire!

The indigenous who were robbed of their rightful place

Carrying their dead to a higher ground, while dancing with painted faces by the fire

To call upon their God of courage and muster strength to save face

Like a lingering wind

Soon to draw upon typhoon wings

Strides that man made must never be rescind

Nor fall upon ages dark, for all were meant to walk like kings

Nor collude or conspire a Barabbas over Jesus of the Crucifixion

A Nation under judgment will never get a song to sing

And blood that was shed must be repaid to redeem a Nation

Wars and rumors of wars, pestilence and suffering

Brutal Taliban, Al Quad – Bin Laden and suicidal attacks against democratic Nations

Write again and then in words again, write again

Birth a song to right the wrongs

Like the slewing of Goliath, stop the shame

David the conquering lion of old standing strong

Now frustrated man, comfort thyself, the Omnipotent did predict a rescue of the Nation

Though perilous times must come, will come, must come, take heart and see His salvation

The oceans shall give of their dead

And mangled bones who fled

Must come bone upon bone, the bones shall live again, live again

Stand still to see the latter – rain

Poem by: James C. Richmond

2006-03-26T18:51:00.000-08:00

Cover of racist book dealing with Indians and Chinese immigrants.

2006-03-26T18:37:00.000-08:00

An indentureship-related transcript, dated 1844.

2006-03-26T18:23:00.000-08:00

19th Century Indentured servants.

2006-03-26T18:16:00.000-08:00

19th Century Indentured servants working in a field.

2006-03-26T18:07:00.000-08:00

19th Century Indentured servants cutting sugar cane.

2006-03-26T17:44:00.000-08:00

19th Century Indentured servants at depot.

2006-03-26T17:31:00.000-08:00

19th Century Indentured servants eating at depot.

2006-03-26T17:27:00.000-08:00

December 19, 1997 I believe we can fly - goodbye to Martin Carter

On Sunday last, I had one of those rare experiences, which I suppose, all flesh is heir to. From about 9.00 a.m. friends had dropped in and we had talked matters literary, matters political, matters Caribbean, matters of life-styles, in an unstructured way which created its own structure of thought and feeling. It had gone on until 10.00 p.m. For more than 12 hours. It was what I call a Soul Food Sunday. I suppose it has become a feature of my life these past 30 years. So much so, that in playing a part in the design of our house, Jennifer had it so designed that she could be in the kitchen and take part fully in what she calls "the conversations." The flow of food and the flow of talk are vital to these unscheduled Soul food days.

Then at 11.30 p.m. my youngest son by Arah, Amilcar, returned from University. Going to the airport to meet any of my children I always remember that past time when I had to go to meet them after their mother was murdered. They were all abroad at the time. Try as I might that dreadful occasion always returns to churn up the mind. I was abroad at the time too. Returning on the long trek from England I had to keep fighting myself to get some lines from Bishop King out of my head.

But hark, my pulse like a soft drum

Beats my approach, tells Thee I come;

And slow however my marches be,

I shall at last sit down by thee.

It was written I know on the death of King's young wife, and the analogy was obvious, but its metaphysical character was the frame of mind I did not want to be in. Later when the boys came in I wondered what fixation must have bothered them on the long flight from California and from Cuba. All three sons and myself were away when Arah was set upon and done in. I had failed her and them. The thought overwhelmed. And every time I go now to the airport to meet anyone of them that sense returns. Last Sunday it was the same, but it was a moment of triumph. Amilcar had finished and he announced, with characteristic aplomb and nonchalance, that he was going back to grad school. I felt ten feet tall. It was of his own choosing. I had a sense of a debt outstanding paid to Arah. I had seen the last one through, as she would have wanted.

But as high as I had mounted in my delight in my dejection did I sink as low. On coming home, I opened the papers to find that Martin Carter, the great Caribbean poet was dead. I let out a spontaneous howl.

On Monday I turned on the radio hoping to hear something of Martin Carter. Nothing. Just nothing. Foolishly, and in a frenzy, I went to the TV hoping to find some appreciation of Martin Carter. I forgot completely that TV was not about us at all! I usually boast that I am incapable of depression. Grief yes, but depression, No. My own optimistic cast of mind does not allow of such. I wanted to call my brother friend Lukie. but he and I have commiserated about so many deaths that I did not wish to impose on him. In fact, he called about a student I had taught, who died suddenly that very Monday. Pain is sometimes heaped upon pain. One steels oneself and reaches for greater humanity.

But why was there nothing of Martin Carter on Radio and TV, about the most Caribbean of Caribbean poets? Why? Why? We lay-waste our own substance.

And, of all things, V.S. Naipaul's caustic comment came to mind. I have not looked it up in his The Middle Passage, I never learnt it. But it came to mind with great force: "History is built around achievement and creation and nothing was created in the West Indies." What a categorical judgement!

I found it difficult now, as I had in the past, to categorise this and dismiss it as purely the Eurocentric Naipaul. I juxtaposed this against his other comment that we in the West Indies, reserve our admiration "for scholarship winners gone mad and failed cricketers". It was largely true I said, still defensive. Then I reconciled myself with: It is still true.

But then I counter-attacked. Martin Carter, as poet, was indeed a West Indian achievement in his own creations as poet. And perhaps moreso as a man - a man of the rarest integrity. The integrity shone through in his person, in his love of good talk, good company and the good times which these two add up to make. And above all in the love of his wife. It was a rare pleasure to be at their house, and you knew in the profoundest way, that he and his wife had created a home and a habitation, with little or no models to go by. It was their own creation. In its own right, a West Indian creation. There was no affected stylisation about the relation between Martin and his wife. Each day it was spontaneous, natural, entirely free of imitation, with its own intimations of a love deep and abiding. And, he did not pretend to be Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights or she Elizabeth of Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice. They were themselves.

It was not a case of

By all of Him thou hast in thee;

Leave nothing of myself in me

Let one so read thy life, that I

Unto all life of mine may die

Each was her or his person in union, each helping the other to realise their personality in their spheres of existence - in union. Martin Carter's marriage was to me, in itself, a work of art, with all the disingenuous ingenuity so essential to great art.

Every time I hear modern people, in their wisdom, tell me that marriage cannot work, I think of the Carter marriage, the Black, Indian and White races they represent, and say, here the impossible union is made manifest and dwells - more correctly - dwelt among us.

After being in Martin Carter's house his immortal lines - This is the dark time, my love. - took on new meaning. I knew that the terror of the time was contrasted with "my love" and the "my love" was not a salutation as the casual reader may guess, but the illumination that would follow the dark time, as embodied in his love.

I am incapable at the moment at looking at Martin Carter's poetry. I would weep, and weeping I could not write. But I can look at his poetics, that is, the theory of art that informed his imagination and his particular structure of feeling. To do this I am going to have to quote at length from an interview he did with Bill Carr, a Professor of English at the University of Guyana, and a personal friend of Martin's. Here is an excerpt from most remarkable interview.

Bill: Any poem presumably is an adventure, something which is totally unknown and in terms of your craftsmanship how do your readers respond to what you say? Do you think of them? Do you bother with the readers when you write a poem?

Martin: No one knows - you write. You imagine an audience - an imaginary audience, and the imaginary audience is God, who is everybody.

Bill: Well yes, God has the supreme copyright, but I am sure that you do not think of God all the time when you are writing a poem.

Martin: I don't think of God, he thinks of me.

Bill: That's an aspiration or a conviction?

Martin: Arrogance.

Bill: No it is not arrogance at all - an aspiration or conviction?

Martin: Faith, F-A-I-T-H.

Bill: How would you describe faith?

Martin: Faith is a belief that - the sun rises in the morning. Hemingway wrote a book. The Sun Also rises. I also rise.

Bill: What you said a moment ago, when you are writing poetry your firm conviction is in the existence of, is it God? I mean it could well be God or a God, it could be a Hindu God, or a Muslim God, a Christian God, they all seem to boil down to the same thing.

Martin: It boils down to love.

Bill: This conditions not your sensibility which is your own personal thing but your feeling when you are writing a poem.

Martin: Nobody writes a poem upon feeling. Feeling invents a man.

I warrant you, there are some profound nuggets in this exchange about God - as everybody; about faith, as more than the evidence of things unseen, and art as the province of everybody in his imaginary audience.

It reminds of Belinsky's unmatched comment redefining art, in which Belinsky stated:

"To take away from art the right to serve the public interest is not to elevate it but to debase it because it means to deprive it of its most vital force - of thought - to transform it into the object of some kind of sybaritic movement, the plaything of lazy idlers. It even means to kill it, as the sorry condition of painting in our time bears witness. This art, as if it did not notice the life that is seething around it, has closed its eyes to everything that is alive, contemporary, actual, and looks for inspiration only to the lifeless past, seeks ready-made ideals from it, ideals to which people long ago became indifferent, which interest no one any longer, which do not warm, do not inspire living sympathy in any one.

Art must serve to illuminate social questions. It was, in my view, Martin Carter's credo. That is just as social arrangements impose certain conditions upon the writer, so the writer must use imagination to change those impositions and make the readers, or the audience, see the need not to sleep to dream, but to dream to change the world. The work is its creator. Be it the fruit of conscious organisation or dark instinct, it is the expression of an individual nature. What alone matters is what the work expresses. So that Shakespeare, Milton Puskin, Goethe, Raphael, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Walcott, Lamming, Wilson Harris, Minshall, are to him their works; their private lives do not directly concern him, only the vision of life that they carry, their depth, their validity, their relation to the central problems that have agonised women and men of their time, as imaginary audience. Maybe, Martin Carter projected beyond Schiller's point of the artist as the avenger of insulted nature, the restorer of the integral human being whom convention, and in Martin's case, imperial domination, has distorted or destroyed. And this work of restoring or leading out his imaginary audience - everybody - to strive to become the integral human being, to whom nothing truly human is alien, he calls simply and profoundly an act of love.

But this aesthetic of Martin Carter, is all the more important. He is probably the only West Indian writer who did not live abroad, except for a brief stay at the University of England as a writer in residence. In other words, Martin's theory of art is in and of itself West Indian. Mark you he was a voracious reader, an autodidact of high quality. But it is Martin Carter as artist, up against his own reality, natural and social, mediated by the great writers and critics he had read, who through the patient labour of the negative worked out his own theory of art, and practised it. In him there is a unity of theory and practice that is indivisible. And unlike Naipaul the theory is rooted in the Caribbean. Those who saw him as some sort of ideological poet missed the point by a mile. He was no social realist a la Soviet Union. Not even like Pablo Neruda whom he greatly admired. He was a poet. A poet whose feeling invented the man, and who hoped, by faith, that truly human history would begin "Ah yes, tomorrow", but who looked for the regenerative protons and neutrons, in the current "carnival of misery".

And as Martin himself said "If life is the coin itself the one side of the coin is love, and the other side is death. So poets talk about these things - life, love and death." But the distinguishing feature of Martin Carter, as man, as husband, above all as poet, was the belief, the f-a-i-t-h, that we can fly - soar above the impositions of history.

Martin Carter was confident in his own aesthetics that he refuted the commonly accepted notion that the artist is a rebel. "This idea" wrote Martin Carter in 1958 "about the artist being a rebel seems a romantic notion to me, a notion the philistines love". Later he continued with words which Naipaul and another need ponder. Wrote Carter to Kyk-Over-Al in May 1958 "You say" part of the repressive atmosphere of the Colonial scheme is its intellectual poverty". May I extend this condition of poverty to everything? And may I say that the job of the artist and intellectual in the West Indies is no different from the job of the artist and intellectual in every part of the world. We are concerned always with the human condition and the establishment of value. Everything is to be taken in hand and given meaning."

There is perhaps no shorter and few better definitions of the artist in society than this one. It is the job of the artist in the context of the particular human condition to establish value, by taking everything in hand, and giving it meaning for his imaginary audience. Not an audience of the elite, but an imaginary audience of everybody. The artist establishes value for everybody.

I have gone a long way to prove that Martin Carter is in himself, as man, as poet, as husband, a West Indian achievement. But it remains true, that he is an achievement that is not yet part of our reservoir, from whose well-spring our being West Indian springs. Martin Carter awaits a Caribbean homecoming, when we acknowledge our own achievements and creations, be they the work of the architect, poet, the sculptor, the farmer, the fisherman, the scientist.

And how best to end this, but with a poem of Martin Carter's, the only one I can completely remember at this time.

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.

Check the remarkable phrase, "the carnival of misery." It sums up our post-independence, structurally-adjusted condition under globalisation. And we are reminded that "the stranger invader" does not only come in the explicit and literal "festival of guns" but in WTO rulings as he watches "you sleep and aiming at your dream." If however you awake in time, my love, "Red flowers" will unbend their heads", in affirmation that however struck down, however marginalised, however defrauded by wretched corruption - the sun also rises. Martin rises. Rises because he believed we could fly - fly on the wings of our achievements and creations - in the fullness of time. That time when "all are involved" in creating and renewing as we "awake and full of good life." "Ah yes, tomorrow," was Martin's undying vision.

2006-03-26T17:15:00.000-08:00

Church Street, Georgetown c.1910

2006-03-26T17:07:00.000-08:00

Main Street, Georgetown, circa 1960-70

2006-03-26T16:46:00.000-08:00

Plantation Enmore, East Coast Demerara, British Guiana (circa 1900)

2006-03-25T10:40:00.000-08:00

The Alliance For Change-New York Chapter
Presents a Fund-Raising Dinner & Dance
with the AFC Leaders from Guyana

on Saturday, March 25th, 2006
from 7:30pm to 1:00am

at the Elegant Mangoville Banquet Hall
187-30 Jamaica Avenue, Jamaica, NY 11432

718-468-4170
Cocktails from 8:00pm to 9:00pm
Donation $60 per Ticket
Ticket Info: 718-848-9000
Email: allianceforchangeny@yahoo.com

2006-03-25T03:35:00.000-08:00

For Angela Davis

Rain blazes in that hemisphere

of my mind

where little else happens

neither sunshine nor cloudburst

and certainly not the blossoming of the

power of love you cherish

which so much overwhelms my tongue

give to speech

in the necessary workplaces

where freedom is obscene.

And from a drab window falls the

happy consequence of clouds

which the roots of passionate trees

receive with splendid gratitude

and which may return to us all in

their time

and in their special ways,

linking hand to fruit

and fruit to the promise of our

prayerful hope and love

and the triumph of the effort of

the always beating pulse

in the wrist and temple of the architect

who wars.

I am thinking about you.

Angela Davis

I am thinking about you and

what I want to do

is to command the drying pools

of rain

to wet your tired feet and

lift your face

to the gift of the roof of

clouds we owe you

(1971)

(Martin Carter in Poems of Succession, 1977)

2006-03-23T14:41:00.000-08:00

From goldengrovenabaclis@yahoogroups.com:

Today March 23 in celebration of the birthday of Our Leader, Hero Walter Rodney

A Good man is seldom rarely and over never honored in his own country – and so it is with Walter Anthony Rodney (PBUH) and the land upon which he and a number of his ancestors were birthed. His killers reigned misery upon the people and the state of Guyana. They pointed us to a low-level member of the GDF trying to deceive about a million Guyanese and the world over. Well! People were fooled one bit they world know the PNC killed Walter while the PPP did not lift a finger to stop the act nor did they bring his killers to justice. PPP is just as guilty as the PNC in the sordid act of political violence, which has marred and handcuffed the political boundary beginning with the USA and UK support to rid British Guiana of their communists’ political minds, Cheddi Jagan, and his protégée Eusi Kwayana, Martin Carter, Huntley, Rory Westmaas, Keith Carter, and others.

This gave rise – opened the door for a most ridiculous relationship - strange bedfellows; Burnham, USA and UK. Burnham their puppet would become their enemy – just as it is with most of America’s enemies – they were all once her friends – her puppets.

It is very sad to realize that Walter Rodney is not enshrined as a national hero in Guyana. Rodney is clearly the Guyanese intellectual who dared to dream of lifting Guyana out of the chaos it was driven there by Burnham and the gross negligence of the PPP and the people of Guyana who stood idly by allowing the comrade leader, the Kabaka and the other foolishness Burnham labeled himself to do as he so pleased himself. Rodney is the champion of the post independence struggle.

The people must enshrine him as their national hero. That in my mind is the first logical step to building national unity. Clearly, the PPP is not about national unity. They are the folks who did not ensure Indians were returned to their property in the predominantly Afro-Guianese communities, after the madness of the 1962-64 had subsided. I stand today; as I always did that, such was and remains the most terrifying blow against national unity. It was worst than Jagan saying Indians are 100% against West Indian Federation.

It is high time the two major groups in Guyana decide whether they intent to continue in this indifference mode of existence, or may the necessary choices for one of the following; national unity, partition, federation, or two separate nations. Most of all, I support the concept of an Indian nation in South America for all the descendants of indentured labourers – the British and Americans established Israel in Palestine for the Jews – therefore why not an Indian nation in the Americas. It is the least the Europeans could do for the return of the cheap labour they obtain from May 1838 - and the prevention of hostilities between Blacks and Indians wherever they are yoked together.

Your print media does not mention Rodney at all, today. I am sure such is the truth.
Long Live Walter Rodney long live people’s power. Vote AFC

Remember Walter Rodney Today!

Go buy: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney today!
Today March 23 in celebration of the birthday of Our Leader, Hero Walter Rodney .....

Walter Rodney [1942-1980]
Taken From: http://www.thegren adarevolutiononline.com/rodney.html
Walter Rodney was born in Guyana on 23 March 1942. He died under questionable circumstances on 13 June 1980 near his birthplace and childhood neighborhood on Bent Street in Georgetown, Guyana.

Dr. Rodney was a teacher, writer and political activist. His first studies were at Queens College. He fulfilled his undergraduate studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus in Jamaica, where he received his Honors Degree in History in 1963. He had traveled to the Soviet Union and Cuba during this time.

Rodney went on to receive his Ph.D. in History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University, on 7 July 1966 at the age of 24. During his time in London, Rodney was involved with a study group which met with C.L.R. James and his wife Selma. After his graduation from SOAS, Dr. Rodney taught [1966-1968] in Tanzania, at the University College of Dar-es-Salaam.

In February, 1968 he returned to Jamaica where he lectured on African History at (UWI), Mona, Jamaica. At this time Rodney met with Rastafarians, facilitating the talks which resulted in his book “The Groundings with my Brothers,” published in 1969. Rodney taught in the depressed communities of Jamaica.

According to Sanford in “New Jewel:”

“In October 1968 . . . tensions boiled to the surface when the government of Jamaica [the Hugh Shearer Jamaican Labour Party, JLP] declared Walter Rodney, a left-wing Guyanese lecturer on African history at the University of the West Indies campus there, a prohibited immigrant. Shock waves of anger reverberated throughout the West Indies, particularly on the other campuses, and helped to touch off black power riots and a soldier's mutiny that rocked the government of Trinidad.”

Rodney influenced his followers, according to Tafari:

“In his powerful ‘Black Power’ synthesis, Rodney brought together the Rastafarian and Marxist theses in a new ideological trinity of race, class and culture; i.e., a rejection of white imperialism (race); the assumption of power by the black masses (class); and the redefinition of the society in the image of the blacks (culture).”

What Rodney did was attend a black writers conference in Montreal, Canada. All the while he was being followed by government security in Kingston and outside so that when he went to return on 15 October 1968, his entry to Jamaica was denied.

Reaction to Rodney's banning was explosive and started with the students who used a variety of disruptive tactics. These actions spread to the streets off campus with a series of riots in Kingston city. The University was closed for a couple of weeks and debates raged on in Parliament.

In the 1970's, former Grenada Prime Minister Eric Gairy took note of the concept of 'Black Power' - by way of demonstrations led by Walter Rodney. On 10 May 1970, Maurice Bishop led a Black Power demonstration in Grenada. Waves of Rodney's influence spread over the islands. Michael Manley's PNP government replaced Hugh Shearer's JLP in the 1972 elections.
Rodney went back to Tanzania to lecture from 1968-1974 after his his entry to Jamaica was barred. He returned to Guyana in 1974 to take a position as Professor of History at the University. After the Burnham government countermanded his appointment, he taught for a semester in the United States at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University [January-May 1975].

Guyana was Rodney's base of operations from 1974 until his death. He lectured and organized. In 1974, when Rodney joined, the Working People's Alliance (WPA) of Guyana was an emerging force that became an independent Marxist political party in 1979.

A brief example below, reflects Rodney's eloquence. In 1976 at a public street meeting in Guyana, Rodney spoke about race:

“You see, we have had too much of this foolishness of race. I'm not going to attempt to allocate the blame one way or another. I think more than one political party has been responsible for the crisis of race relations in this country. I think our leadership has failed us on that score. I think external intervention was important in bringing the races against each other from the fifties and particularly in the early sixties. But I'm concerned with the present. If we made that mistake once, we cannot afford to be misled on that score today. No ordinary Afro-Guyanese, no ordinary Indo-Guyanese can today afford to be misled by the myth of race. Time and time again it has been our undoing.”

“Does it have anything to do with race that the cost of living far outstrips the increase in wages? Does it have anything to do with race that there are no goods in the shops? Does it have anything to do with race when the original lack of democracy as exemplified in the national elections is reproduced at the level of local government elections? Does it have anything to do with race when the bauxite workers cannot elect their own union leadership? Does it have anything to do with race when, day after day, whether one is Indian or African, without the appropriate party credentials, one either gets no employment, loses one's employment, or is subject to lack of promotion?”

“It is clear that we must get beyond that red herring and recognise that it is intended to divide, that it is not intended in the interest of the common African and Indian people in this country. Those who manipulated in the 1960s, on both sides, were not the sufferers. There were not the losers. The losers were those who participated, who shared blows and who got blows. And they are the losers today.”

“It is time that we understand that those in power are still attempting to maintain us in that mentality - maintain us captive in that mentality where we are afraid to act or we act injudiciously because we believe that our racial interests are at stake. Surely we have to transcend the racial problems? Surely we have to find ways and means of ensuring that there is racial justice in this society? But it certainly will not be done by a handful of so-called Black men monopolising the power, squeezing the life out of all sections of the working class, and turning around and expecting that they will manipulate an issue such as the Arnold Rampersaud affair and get the support of ordinary black people because we will say, ‘After all; is only an Indian. We could hang him. No sweat.’”

“Because, as I said before, you start with one thing, you end with another. The system doesn't stop at racial discrimination. Because it is a system of class oppression, it only camouflages its class nature under a racial cover. And in the end, it will move against anyone irrespective of colour. In the end, they will move even against their own. Because, don't believe if you are a member of that party today, that you will be protected tomorrow from the injustices. Because when a monster grows, it grows out of control. It eats up even those who created the monster. And it's time that our people understood that.”

Walter Rodney visited Grenada 12 June 1979. He gave a talk at the Anglican School about the liberation process in Southern Africa. People were turned away because the event was so crowded. His Grenadian visit continued until 16 June. Again, early in 1980, Rodney was in Grenada.

After two government offices burned, Walter Rodney was arrested in Guyana with seven others on 11 July 1979 and charged with arson.

Rodney was killed in a car explosion on 13 June 1980 when a remote control bomb was detonated in his [Rodney's] lap in a back street of Georgetown, Guyana.

According to Rickey Singh in the 'Guyana Chronicle' of 21 March 1999 " . . . the primary suspect in his killing, a soldier of the Guyana Defence Force, continues to live in exile in French Guiana . . ." The man, Sergeant Gregory Smith, of the Guyana Defense Force, died in exile.
Walter Rodney was mourned by people around the world; specifically, his family - his wife Patricia; his son Shaka; a daughter Kanini and another daughter Asha, plus his mother. In late June of 1980, the People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) expressed their unhappiness with the Burnham PNC government of Guyana. The PRG accused Burnham of entanglement, even assassination, concerning the turn of events causing the death of Walter Rodney.

©2001-2006 by Ann Elizabeth Wilder. All Rights Reserved.
Please email comments and questions to annew@buncombe.main.nc.us

2006-03-19T12:45:00.000-08:00

Blogger Status

Saturday, March 18, 2006

A clarification about the filer we restored yesterday: This machine is indeed up and functioning again, so the affected blogs are no longer entirely inaccessible. However, it is still not in great shape and we are in the process of moving all the data off of it and on to better machines. So over the next few days there may still be lingering and intermittent problems for some blogs. This includes the "forbidden" errors we're all getting tired of, as well as occasional publishing errors, or incompletely published pages. If you get an error viewing a blog, refreshing the page once or twice should clear it. For publishing problems, simply wait a few minutes and republish, and that should take care of it. Thanks for your patience while we work on clearing all this up.

2006-03-18T17:39:00.000-08:00

Please help...

On behalf of a UWI graduate student who is studying the poetic works of Martin Carter we are attempting to obtain either an actual copy or photocopy of Kyk-Over-Al (June 2000) edition which is a 411-page tribute to the Guyanese poet. Any information or suggestions would be greatly appreciated as we are under time constraints and need any help or advice as soon as possible. Thank-you for your time and I eagerly await your replies ...

Sincerely,

Jonathan Bratt
jonathanbratt@rogers.com

2006-03-15T16:27:00.000-08:00

The Legend Of Kaieteur

Prelude:

The nation of Guyana seems to have pause, (as could be deciphered from A. J. Seymour’s poem) in its progress consigning itself to space (as could be deciphered from A. J. Seymour’s poem) and has committed suicide. So sprung this series of poems are called, “The Awakening” inspired by Arthur Seymour’s, “The Legend of Kaieteur.” To inspire unity, progress and democracy in the strictest sense of the word so as to unleash the untapped potential of Guyana and Guyana’s children.

The Legend Of Kaieteur (Continuing the dialogue)

The Awakening

After hundredths of thousands of years Kaie had spent

Where the raging black waters of the Potaro vent -

Came that day when Makanaima relent

From the pedestal of the sacred rock sent

One drop of water to let flew, to awaken stone aged Kaie

And has he gazed above the gorge where glory-fly

In iridescent tapestry from the sky

The foundation of the earth shock and the stars flew

Birds of the air trumpeted songs in the morning dew

And winged their way across the regal sky’s view

Like stars and moons and suns they grew

With bended wings as not to obstruct Omnipotence

In a singular sentence of reverence

The awakened souls mellow to the tropical sight

And marveled that omnipotence condescend to visit earth that night

And mingling substance of marvelous light

Arising from the mountain’s crest

Imbuing night and day the same and the tropical nest

Like the waking of a new dawn

Like alleluia and soul revival morn

The folding tide of Kaieteur’s immaculate gate

That strutted over the rolling savannahs, and the coastal plate

Signal green of forested nature, a crown upon the agricultural State

Kaie humbly bow upon his “wood skin” canoe and cried

As he relived the memories of his tribe

And look for his companion in the tide.

2. The Awakening

Under the glorified rainbow sacred sky

Where glory called the worlds from on high

And covenanted to you and I

There with magnificence, God formed the earth-man to live and not to die (before sin entered)

Far across the rolling plains and mountains high

Where the flowering-roam

Perched Mount Roraima’s dome

The flowing Valley of Crystal spread

Liberally overflowing love into lakes, waterfalls and the canyon’s river bed

To bring from within the peace that mankind most felt

And bow to worship wherein Omniscient foot stool dwelt

Below the beast of the field graze where the memories of the Patamona tribe slept

Where Kaie hoped and wept

Where the Caribishi came and dealt

The death blow and themselves-melted into history

This is the essence of my story

In this condition we languished, our vanquished spirits tarry

Soaked in blood and pain and brotherhood

Man against man, brother against brother - misunderstood.

Out of struggles known and unknown

Wickedness and scorn condoned

Ripping at the water ways of our soul - now gaze upon the beckoning white light even alone

A saviour must be born to deliver

When the wings of change comes from constant prayer

Poem by: James C. Richmond

To order James' CD entitled, 'Emerging Sound' which contains 49 poems and costs only $10.00 please contact him at jrich40439@aol.com and help support one of the most talented artists and creative voices that Guyana has to offer...

Kyk-over-Al
http://kykoveral.blogspot.com

2006-03-10T18:17:00.000-08:00

Ideas, Images and Inspiration

Needing Inspiration or Encouragement ?? Why not check out Ideas, Images and Inspiration at http://idimin.blogspot.com

2006-03-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

Caribbean Woman by Bajan Italia

she is the deffusion of Bahia

with the strength of a boriqua

resembling a bajan queen

with the riddim of St. Lucia

hips that sway towards the Grenadines

her blood runs in the Banks of Calcutta

through the diamond mines of mozambique

her soul sleeps in Barcelona

as she resides in the "land of waters"

shall you memorize her Morugan melodies

mimic her patois

tantilize over her sun-kissed skin

label her as beauty

from the land of rice and beans

though she prefers dhal purrie and peas

dosen't mean she'll be pregenant at the age of sixteen

never let them cross your borders

dillute you with western dreams

dont exchange gold for residency

oil for cocola companies

intoxicate them with ur sweet aroma

of mur and palm

never forget your sisters that live across foreign seas

For more Guyanese/Caribbean Poetry please check out

Kyk-Over-Al - http://kykoveral.blogspot.com/

2006-03-06T08:24:00.000-08:00

LLOYD W. BROWN

Martin Wylde Carter

Martin Carter's earliest poetry was shaped by the turbulent days of anti-colonial radicalism and protest in Guyana (British Guiana) during the 1950s. During the thirty years since then, especially since the publication of his hallmark Poems of Resistance ( 1954), his has been the voice of radicalism in Anglophone Caribbean poetry. This preeminence as the poet of revolution has generally tended to be emphasized by the fact that revolutionary rhetoric in general, and revolutionary literature in particular, has been a rarity in the English-language Caribbean (with all due respect to the ethnic intensities that have become de rigueur in the literature during the last twenty years). Indeed, this very uniqueness probably accounts for the fact that Martin Carter's preeminence as the poet of revolution has not been seriously eroded by the muting of his revolutionary voice over the twenty years since Guyanese independence.

This silence, or near silence, may be linked to the profound disillusionment which has engulfed so much of the Third World intelligentsia, including that of the Caribbean, since the achievement of (nominal) independence. In Guyana that disillusionment has been especially intense in the wake of racial violence between Blacks and East Indians, political stagnation and repression, and the economic as well as social malaise which has undermined the experiment in cooperative republicanism. In this period the Guyanese government has been accused of seizing and maintaining its power by means of a fraudulent electoral system gerrymandered in cooperation with the British and the Americans; and more recently, the government has been accused of complicity in the violent death of one of its most vocal and popular critics, historian/activist Walter Rodney

( 1980). Against such a background Carter's relative silence as revolutionary poet may be interpreted either as prudence or complete disillusionment--or both. But that silence is relative: Carter's days of overt revolutionism and rebellion may be past, as have been the days of active political involvement and direct participation in government; but he has continued to write and publish his poetry-poetry which sometimes manages to convey a special intensity of feeling and purpose by the very manner in which it studiously avoids a certain directness of statement. The voice itself may have been muted, but the fiery sense of engagement which has made that voice all but unique in Anglophone Caribbean poetry still burns.

BIOGRAPHY

Carter was born in 1927 and received his secondary school education at Queen's College. During his early twenties he joined the turbulent political movement for national independence, quickly becoming a leading spokesman for the more radical forces of the movement. This prominence inevitably led to his arrest and imprisonment by the British colonial administration in 1953. At the time of his detention Carter had already launched his career as a poet, having contributed works to A. J. Seymour literary magazine, Kyk-over-al, and to Seymour "Miniature Poet" series of poetry pamphlets ( Hill of Fire Glows Red). But it was during his imprisonment that he composed his most important collection, Poems of Resistance, which was eventually published in London, in 1954.

After his release from prison Carter remained active in the independence movement and in 1965 was a member of the colony's delegation to the Guyana Constitutional Conference in London, the final hurdle before the formal achievement of nationhood. Thereafter he served for two years ( 1966-67) as a member of Guyana's delegation to the United Nations. He has also served in the Guyanese government at home, most notably as minister of information and culture, finally leaving the government in 1971. Throughout this entire period he has maintained the dual roles of poet and activist, an appropriate choice in one whose most important writings have passionately advocated involvement and commitment. Consequently the years of political activity and government service also saw the appearance of the first half of his published output, followed by works ranging from the last of his outspoken collections, Poems of Shape and Motion ( 1955), to the cryptic reticence of Poems of Affinity: 1978-1980 ( 1980).

MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES

From as early as his first significant publications Martin Carter's distinctive voice of protest and rebellion is unmistakably clear. Unlike so many early collections, especially in the Caribbean, The Hill of Fire Glows Red avoids the neoRomantic idealization of landscape. Instead of the familiar pastoral clichés, the

young Carter's landscape vibrates with historical memories, which, in turn, inspire an urgent demand for change. In "Listening to the Land" the poet hears a "tongueless whispering," the possible voice of a buried slave who embodies the past. The response to the landscape is activist rather than escapist, and when the young poet dreams, his are dreams of social change ( "Looking at Your Hands"). In earlier works like these it is fairly easy to grasp the dominant features of Carter's poetic personality. It is a personality in which the imagination of activist and artist is indivisible, and in some respects these poems are about the imagination and its transforming powers--it transforms the land itself into an insistent voice of history and, simultaneously, responds to the voices of history by envisioning change, including revolutionary change, as the desirable and inevitable consequences of that history. And, finally, the poet's own persona as the embodiment of the transforming imagination incarnates the vision of change. Accordingly, the revolutionary idealist envisions change as a creative process which produces vital forms (social and political structures) out of the chaos of colonial inequities, in much the same way that the poetic imagination creates living forms in art ( "The Kind Eagle").

In a sense the poems of The Kind Eagle ( 1952) suggest an interesting paradox: chaos and repression are reprehensible on the one hand; but on the other hand, they emerge as indispensable factors. In political terms the liabilities of history have inspired the kind of intellectual and political ferment which fuel an (apparently) inevitable process of fundamental change. Prison, both as literal experience and as colonial symbol, therefore inspires a fierce ecstacy in the title poem of the collection: "I Dance on the Wall of Prison!" ( Poems of Succession, 1977, p. 19; hereafter cited as POS). And by a similar token, the poetic imagination thrives on political adversity and on the reminders of historical injustices: it carves monuments out of the poet's "time," from the "jagged block of convict years" ( POS, p. 19). Moreover, the consistent integration of imagination and historical memory imparts a powerfully suggestive sense of inevitability to Carter's ethics of change. The envisioned changes, even if unrealized, are as much a part of a distinctive historical pattern, as is the past which made the present itself inevitable. And this pervasive sense of inevitability inspires recurrent images and themes of movement to the poems of The Kind Eagle--movement as history, history as change, change as the collective, irresistible pilgrimage undertaken by a special breed of visionaries: the universe of history moves, "revolves / like a circling star," and "Only men of fire will survive" ( "The Discovery of Companion," POS, p. 24).

Altogether, these early collections reflect a tightly knit dialectic, with its closely integrated poetic forms, which are to define a good part of Carter's poetry for much of the next fifteen years. The ethos of change is both political ideal and the creative principle of imagination. The patterns of history are mirrored in the imaginative patterns of the poet's art, and since both patterns have been shaped by the same social forces, then the poetic imagination must, perforce,

be politically involved. Or in the words of the poet himself, "Like a web / is spun the pattern / all are involved" ( Poems of Resistance, p. 18).

That assertion is the climactic statement of "You Are Involved," a work which is one of the most typical, in tone and feeling, of the celebrated collection, Poems of Resistance. This is the collection in which the twenty-seven-year-old Carter fuses the characteristic themes and forms of the preceding works into the compact designs of his best, and most famous works--"Till I Collect,""Cartman of Dayclean,""I Come from the Nigger Yard," and "University of Hunger." It is characteristic of Carter's writings at this stage of his development that these successful poems owe much to the turbulent times and frankly repressive circumstances in which they were written. They were composed, for the most part, while he was in political detention--in "the dark time," in "the season of oppression," the "carnival of misery" ( This Is the Dark Time My Love, POS, p. 42). While it is less celebrated than its companion pieces, few poems in the collection surpass "I Clench My Fist" in this regard. The very intensity of feeling and statement owes its very essence to the forces of repression and exploitation against which the poet rebels. British colonialism represents social chaos in the immediate, Guyanese context, and in the broader, global context, the fragmentation of humanity between the oppressor and the powerless, the haves and the have-nots. The confrontation between colonizer and colonial rebel is therefore an allegory of a divided universe, the microcosm of historical patterns of chaos and conflict. Conversely, the poet's reaction, as artist-activist,to this chaos amounts to a harmonizing, creative power, the transforming power of the imagination. The defiant act of clenching the fist in the face of British weapons and political power suggests a compact wholeness as well as creative energy which contrasts with the prevailing chaos, and it is synonymous with the harmonizing patterns of poetic art itself ( "I sing my song of FREEDOM!" [ "I Clench My Fist," Poems of Resistance, p. 41]). Finally, the thematic progression within the poem itself, from images of fragmentation and conflict to the vision of a powerful, harmonizing energy, is in itself a structural or formal emphasis on that sense of movement--historical progression or inevitability--which is always so integral to Carter's revolutionist vision.

On the whole, works like "I Clench My Fist" exemplify Carter's protest poetry at its best. The underlying dialectic is compact, limpid, and consistent. The dialectic statement is tightly controlled through a disciplined, highly economic use of language and sense of form; and as a result, the poetic form itself becomes the imaginative microcosm of that moral wholeness and social unity which the poetry envisions. Given this tightly integrated schema, it becomes clear that "poems of resistance" are not simply poems about political resistance: they are acts of resistance. This implies an aesthetic that has been rather rare in the generally conservative context of Anglophone Caribbean literature. It was not to be aired in any significant sense, in any Caribbean language area, until the successful Cuban revolution began to define its own revolutionary aesthetics

during the 1960s: the only valid revolutionary art is that which is committed to, and a part of, the revolution; writing about the revolution is not enough, the writer must be an active participant in the revolution. Or to phrase this ideal in Carter's poetic language, the poet must not simply write about resistance, he himself and his poetry must be directly involved in resistance.

However, notwithstanding this kind of analogy, and notwithstanding the power of Carter's own rhetoric of change, it is important to recognize the substantial limitations of his revolutionism. These limitations are both external and internal. Externally, Carter has lived and written in a political and social context in which the idea of change has always been sharply delineated in nonrevolutionist terms. The rhetoric of rebellion or "revolution" in the English-language Caribbean of the 1950s and 1960s seldom encompassed fundamental (i.e., genuinely revolutionary) changes in the social fabric. "Resistance" as such was conceived and fashioned in relation to the British colonial order and its associated bureaucracy. In other words, resistance was the movement of a bourgeois nationalism, which would replace the colonial overlord with nationalist leaders and political structures, which would leave the social and economic order relatively unchanged. Neither has radical revolutionism demonstrated significant grass-roots appeal in the English Caribbean--a fact which needs to be borne in mind when one is tempted to blame the failures of the Guyanese promise on the demonstrable and alleged sins of the Forbes Burnham regime. The electoral rejection of "democratic socialism" in Jamaica during the early 1980s is another example of this limitation, especially when one remembers the definite, built-in limitations of Michael Manley's democratic socialism as a revolutionist principle. And in retrospect, the recent collapse of the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, even before the inevitable U.S. intervention, suggests that beyond the personal popularity of Maurice Bishop the New Jewel Movement, as revolutionary ideology, was less deeply rooted than its most ardent supporters seemed to have imagined.

It is necessary to emphasize this historical and social context because these are the broader circumstances which go beyond Guyana's immediate boundaries and which explain, in part, the long-term sense of futility that now envelops Carter's revolutionist poetry, especially in retrospect. The limited impact and relevance of his revolutionary themes reflect the limited capacities of his society for the idea of fundamental change. This, in turn, leads to the internal limits of Carter's revolutionism itself. Poems like "University of Hunger," "Cartman of Dayclean," and "I Come from the Nigger Yard" reverberate with the passions, even violent potential, of the dispossessed. But there is really no substantial evidence, even in these works, of a revolutionary vision that goes beyond the immediate anti-colonial nationalism of "I Clench My Fist." The ferocity with which the poet assaults an entrenched (colonial) status quo undoubtedly continues to exert a powerful appeal to present readers who dream of "resistance" to the neocolonial establishment which succeeded the British colonizers. But this ought not to obscure the clearly limited implications of Carter's original vision.

While the scope of the revolutionary vision is circumscribed, so is the poet's

realism. The poet's passionate commitment to change of sorts is not really counterbalanced by a realistic awareness of the substantial barriers to significant change. In these earlier poems of "resistance," from the first collection to Poems of Shape and Motion ( 1955), technical polish and thematic coherence go hand in hand with what, on the whole, is a relatively limited emotional range or appeal--limited, that is, by an absence of complex self-awareness vis-a-vis the limits of his own vision and of his society's capacity for change. It is not surprising that, when those social limitations were made painfully manifest in subsequent years, Carter's poetry seems to have retreated into a state of shock from which it has never really recovered.

On the whole, the assessment of Carter's overtly "revolutionary" or "committed" poems leads to a historically significant, albeit unintended, irony: his real achievement as a poet of resistance is, in the final analysis, an exclusively aesthetic one, rather than the effective political-aesthetic synthesis that is envisaged and structurally symbolized by his poetry. That is, we can always admire the consistent coherence of thematic statement, the telling integration of formal structure and theme, the striking tension between intense feeling and the spare, tightly disciplined language; and throughout all of this we can admire the skill with which the poet weaves his complex patterns of imagistic and structural variations on the fundamental theme of change-as-creation. But that theme is often less profound or far-reaching than it may sometimes sound.

The poems since Guyana's independence are, collectively, an implicit admission of the earlier limitations. A somber silence broods over the post-independence poems first published in Poems of Succession. Silence as speechlessness and paralysis is the dominant motif here, in contrast to the defiant energies and perpetual movement in the earlier works. Here silence and inactivity suggest that history moves, not toward inevitable change and creation, but in repetitive, predictable cycles. Indeed, this kind of silence is the main topic of poems like "A Mouth Is Always Muzzled," "Even As the Ants Are," "In the When Time," and "Fragment of Memory." These works also demonstrate that despite the changes in mood and historical circumstances, the older Carter still commands the talents for striking, arresting poetry. The brooding silence of these poems is not the silence of a lost idealism, or of a crippled imagination. Far from it, he manages to develop his themes of silence and futility through "confessional" modes of private experience, or even through abstract statements, communicating a powerful sense of repression and stasis in his society while avoiding explicit political protest. Both the explicit theme of silence and the suggestive absence of overt protest in themselves become rhetorical symptoms of his real, but implied, subject. As in his earlier works, the better poems in this later collection demonstrate his characteristic ability to develop form as statement.

This highly suggestive silence continues in his most recent collection, Poems of Affinity: 1978-1980. The disillusionment with "history" is more pronounced, and we are left with only a quiet despair in the face of history's relentless repetitiveness. It is the image of death, not creation, that dominates "PlayingMilitia"

Militia" where the uniform sleeves droop "like the wet feathers of a crow's wing / over secret carrion" [ Poems of Affinity, p. 17]). And in "For Cesar Vallejo ii" the decay is everywhere. Clearly, he still remains the poet of passionate commitment. Where that commitment will lead his future poetry depends as much upon Carter's world as it does on himself.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Edward Brathwaite "Resistance Poems: The Voice of Martin Carter" ( 1977) is one of the more comprehensive studies of Martin Carter's poetry thus far. The critic examines all the major publications up to the mid-1970s, with special emphasis on Carter as the voice of revolutionary change. Briefer, more general comments also appear in Brown, West Indian Poetry ( 1977), and Herdeck, Caribbean Writers ( 1979).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Martin Carter

Hill of Fire Glows Red. Miniature Poet Series. Georgetown: Mater Printer, 1951.

To a Dead Slave. Georgetown: Author, 1951.

The Hidden Man. Georgetown: Author, 1952.

The Kind Eagle. Georgetown: Author, 1952.

Returning. Georgetown: Author, 1953.

Poems of Resistance. London: Lawrence, Wishart, 1954; Georgetown: Guyana Release, 1979.

Poems of Shape and Motion. Georgetown: Author, 1955.

Conversations. Georgetown: Author, 1961.

Jail Me Quickly. Georgetown: Author, 1963.

Poems of Succession. London: New Beacon Books, 1977.

Poems of Affinity: 1978-1980. Georgetown: Release, 1980.

Studies of Martin Carter

Brathwaite Edward. "Resistance Poems: The Voice of Martin Carter." Caribbean Quarterly 23 (June-September 1977), 7-23.

See also General Bibliography: Allis, Brown, Herdeck, Hughes, and McDowell.

2006-02-28T04:01:00.000-08:00

Bare Night Without Comfort

In a bare night without comfort
stood like an infant hearing a drum:
Shadows and green grass spinning
but clutched at a world without nearing

Like dark ball rising from nothing
hurling curse at me and full of scorn:
Bare night without comfort
stood like an infant hearing a drum.

Martin Carter in The Kind Eagle (1952)

2006-02-22T16:24:00.000-08:00

Privately funded National Archives building progressing slowly

Wednesday, February 22nd 2006
Stabroek News

The construction of a two-storey building, funded by a private investor to house the National Archives on Homestretch Avenue has been progressing slowly.

In exchange for the building, the private investor has purchased the land on which the National Archives is currently housed on Main Street, downtown Georgetown. KP Thomas and Sons Contracting Inc is constructing the building on Homestretch Avenue for an undisclosed sum.

When Stabroek News visited the site, adjacent to the National Cultural Centre during the week, there was a lull in work and the project manager referred this newspaper to the contractor for information or details on the building.

Contacted, Ken Thomas of KP Thomas told Stabroek News he was not at liberty to reveal the cost of the building or when it would be completed except that completion would depend on the features the contracting party wanted.

Thomas referred Stabroek News to Head of the Privatisation Unit, Winston Brassington but he could not be reached during the week. Stabroek News was referred to another officer within the unit but she was unable to assist.

Stabroek News was also unsuccessful in contacting Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, Anthony Xavier or Permanent Secretary in the same ministry, Keith Booker.

Late last year after the staff of the National Archives had been told they had to relocate temporarily to the National Cultural Centre. Stabroek News reported on this and the temporary relocation was then shelved.

The Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport subsequently issued a press release in response stating that an investor had offered the Guyana government to build a new building to house the archives on land adjacent to the National Cultural Centre.

On completion of the building the investor would acquire the site where the National Archives is now located on Main Street. No mention was made of the name of the investor or the purpose to which the Main Street site would be put.

The movement of the archival materials were halted after this newspaper reported the plans to move them and concerns had been raised over the handling and storage of centuries-old documents.

The ministry's release had said that the finalization of the designs were under discussion but from all appearances, which included the contractor already being on site and laying the foundation of the building, the deal had already been struck.

The release had said that the search for a permanent home for the National Archives had been on the cards for decades and the ministry and the National Archives Advisory Commit-tee have been aggressively pursuing this for the last five years and as such its removal to a new home should be applauded as a dream finally coming through after 30 years.

Stabroek News had learnt of the planned removal of the archival materials after a noted historian visited the National Archives but could not access research material because of the preparations for removal.

Concerns had been expressed that the cultural centre would have been inappropriate for the temporary storage of archival material and many pieces would have been damaged in the process.

The ministry's release had said the provisional first move to a part of the National Cultural Centre was to protect the artefacts as construction was taking place next door at a privately-owned building which posed some risk to the archives collection.

The move was to take place under the supervision of the National Archives Advisory Board, whose Chairman is Dr James Rose, historian and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Guyana.

However, the National Archives has since remained open to the public and there is no evidence of construction taking place in the immediate vicinity, though the area has been fenced off.

Some of the materials in the archives were previously housed in the dome of the Parliament Buildings for years after which they were moved to a small building near the Central Fire Station on Water Street, close to the Stabroek Market. They were later moved to the Main Street location, which formerly housed the Barclays Bank. Some were accommodated in quarters at the National Museum building.

Lots of materials in the National Museum building are reportedly threatened. Public records are also housed in such institutions as the Parliament, Lands and Surveys, Deeds Registry, Central Housing & Planning Authority and City Council. Some materials are also reported to be in individuals' private collections. (Miranda La Rose)

2006-02-20T20:18:00.000-08:00

Watch My Language: From Cheddi Jagan to Martin Carter

By Sasenarine Persaud

"All of a man is heart is hope"...................................................................Martin Carter

At a certain time when I was growing up, it seemed that there were always references to a person who wrote and recited his poetry publicly. I say seemed because at a certain age one is never certain of some things but has snatches of impressions. One knew that it was an important and momentous time - that there were upheavals, tension and great sweet victories. And then things some things got clearer. Out of that stabilizing centre of home, family and relatives, pujas and kathas and the recitals from the great poetic epics of India in mandirs came a calm and an euphoria. And then those disturbances one never forgets, no matter how long one lives: the roving gangs of black men on bicycles, and the men, the Indian men in our little cul-de-sac streetof all Indians, on the edge of Kitty bordering Campbellville where we lived with my great-grandmother, keeping an armed, around the clock vigil. If these roving packs of black men, who pounced on and beat up solitary Indian men in the city trying to go about their daily chores, should decide that our enclave of Indians was easy picking, then let them come.

Things were never quite the same again though all of that ended and things seemed to revert to normal. And it was left to "the Babulall", as Rohan Kanhai was known to Indians, and his batting genius, to take up where Jagan left off, let us down. Every ball Kanhai lashed, every run, every boundary was a salvaging of lost Indian pride - of defiance. We moved - a thing I sort of dealt with in my first novel, Dear Death - my mother died, another thing I sort of dealt with in that novel too, and I changed schools. I remember a huge celebration, and waving of flags, the learning of songs, an anthem and an exhortation in school that we must be happy, should be happy. Something like independence. We, the people of this young country were free at last - but at school, but only at school - not at home.

Through all of this I knew that this person who once wrote great poetry, and read them was fashionable again; that that devious black man, the enemy of Indians, who now ruled quoted this man who wrote these quotable verses. And this quotable man had sold out to this quoting man - he too was no good. I didn't know then that Carter was Minister of Information in Burnham's government. And much later, I would ask that same vexing question; how could Carter have been taken in by that man? And much later still be as frustrated and unsatisfied as I first was with the answer. Race and human emotions are complex things.

So too that Osmosis of opinions and hang-ups one sucks in while growing up. Those things, like the great race divide, which seeps into ones consciousness without one fully comprehending them. I grew into a greater consciousness hearing teachers at school fawn over Carter, and those black leaders, the enemy, at every turn spouting, "I come from the nigger yard of yesterday/leaping from the oppressors' hate/and scorn of myself...".

I was no "nigger". And I hated the word, as I hated being lumped together with people of African descent as "we black people" - involved in the struggle of black peoples the world over. I felt, like my relatives, that I was being made invisible. In my boy's mind I rebelled and resented that I should celebrate a blackness which wasn't mine. But if my relatives resented this celebration of blackness which made then invisible, they also resented and blamed Jagan for his sitting back, for his non-violence stance and our predicament as second class citizens. Why did he hold us back? If the blacks wanted a fight let us fight, carve up the country, set up our own state - they would only respect us in strength!

Race is a thing which nobody in our time and space could escape - well not even in this time and one only has to look at the Naipaul saga, or many of the critics' responses to my own work: that I am too Indocentric, Hinducentric - when what they really mean is that they find it difficult to deal with Hinducentred, outspoken - and often fearless Indians. And labelling is often the most convenient tool in the strategy of dismissal. The EuroAmerican pushed aura of Gandhi's PASSIVE-resistance was the stereotype expected of Indians and the Jagan non-violence approach strengthened the stereotype.

But I was learning from Martin Carter. If Carter could affirm and celebrate and find strength and acceptance in his "niggerness" in his poetry and do the same for black people, why couldn't I do the same thing in poetry with my Hinduness for myself and my community? I still get critics, including Indian ones, who are leery of my outspoken Indiangroundedness - a positioning from Carter's - but who can sing and celebrate his, "I Come From the Nigger Yard". But I am racing ahead.

I came late to Carter - and to Jagan. Or rather I should reverse that in the correct sequence, I came late to Jagan and then to Carter. Their lives intertwined in our history of a certain time and place: Carter served the kabaka, and Jagan kept us down, did not let us carve out a state for ourselves when we had the guns and the arms and the anger and the will. The "wisdom" of elders which follows kids into adolescence, and often much later into life could be a stifling thing!

Later, directly exposed to the machinations of Burnham and the PNC, and the attendant racism, I would rebel and resist Carter - and Jagan - much more consciously and independently of my parents and relatives. I throw in Jagan because in many ways my revision of my appraisal of Carter was dependent on my reappraisal of Cheddi Jagan - and visa versa.

In the sixth form at Queen's College, I was lucky in having the late N.A. Robinson as my literature teacher: write write all that poetry if you must Sase - but also read all the fine poetry around too - Carter, Walcott...well after exams, he would urge. That too dealt with somewhere else in my writing. But reasoning-thinking-analyzing is a slower process than the reflexive emotional.

We were in the late seventies and switching from the London G.C.E. to the CXC examinations and Carter's poetry was in one of the books on the soon-to-be-introduced syllabus...

But I have jumped ahead again. I was teaching at the Central High School and the CXC History syllabus was being phased in first and Jagan's classic West on Trial was on the syllabus. George Moore, the acting deputy principal who was teaching history, in an extraordinary act of courage for those tenuous times did not hide his copy of West on Trial, with which he walked to classes and back openly - like a badge of honour. George Moore, a man of African ancestry, was one of the nicest, most agreeable persons on our staff, a respected but approachable elder, and we had never seen him angry until that day we good naturedly teased him, as we had done so many times before: what was this "Jagan history" he was teaching the kids in class? He slammed down West On Trial on a table in the staff room and glared at us, a young largely Indian staff: What do you really know of Cheddi Jagan? What do you really know of Dr. Cheddi Bharat Jagan that is not propaganda? Have you read his classic? Why don't you read this book of this extraordinary Guyanese first before passing half-scalded judgement? Or words close to those boomed across the room like a cannon. There was a long silence. It was one of those extraordinary and rare moments in one's life. George Moore put his book in his locker and quietly left the room.

I hunted down that copy of West on Trial I had bought at the GNTC Bookstore - subsequently destroyed by fire - a book which I had breezed through before and read it again, carefully, slowly - if one can read such a fascinating book slowly. That, now battered, copy has the date scrawled across the title page: 86.09.29. It turned out to be a most extraordinary book - a book, which alone, I knew would guarantee Jagan a place in the history of Guyana, as one of its most outstanding writers and historians.

This was a watershed moment in my life. How could my relatives be so wrong about this man? And what of Carter? Many of the things I had imbibed from my society I was finally ready to reexamine, and throw out if need be. And so it was that I could finally go to Carter, read his work - put aside that certain conditioning as with Jagan - and let the work and one's subjective reason speak. Yes, subjective reasoning. Objectivity is a myth. Carter again, "Watch my Language".

This was at a time when I was awash in poetry. I wrote, read, slept, dreamt, poetry. A throwback to high school and especially my time at Queen's College and the prescribed poetry - Chaucer, Shakespeare, T.S. Elliot, Graves, Yeats, Auden, Owen, a host of others and the so called Metaphysical Poets - who were influenced by the European poets, in turn influenced by Indian mysticism and epic poetry, then novel in Europe.

I had found Tagore at Queens too. An odd a place? Not really. Remember Marvell's, "...Thou by the Indian Ganges side/Should'st Rubies find..." And there was the Hindu Society and the deliberate immersion in the Indian world; The Hindu Society and the voluntary immersion in celebrating things Indian were, in many ways, our tools in defying the Burnham regime and the racism of that time.

So there I was, teaching and politicking and poetrying. I lived for poetry, writing a poem a day for almost a year before slacking off into a poem every four days or so for another few years, and reading as much as I could from both sides of the Atlantic and further afield. From the Public Free Library as it was then - Burnham's National Library! came later - there were the contemporary British, and occasional European poets in the Encounter, London Magazine, Poetry Review and other journals while from the John F. Kennedy Library, a greater slew of contemporary magazines; Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Literary Review, The New Yorker, Paris Review, others... and a rich poetry book section: Pound, Dickenson, Merrill, Wallace Stevens, Hollander, McLeish, Mark Strand, Langston Huges... the collected/selected of Auden, Frost, Eliot...and too many others from elsewhere, including that of Lawrence and Hardy. I must have made an unconscious effort not to have a favourite poet because while there were many great poems in the lot, I could never remember names of poets.

Into all of this now came Carter. I was immediately spellbound by Carter's poetry, and I felt then that he was unquestionably the greatest poet in the English Language this half of the twentieth century. Here was a poet whose lyricism effortlessly bridged that gap between the written and spoken, academic and non-academic in a way done more consistently in this century only by Rabindranauth Tagore. Afterwards I would go on to read Walcott and Brathwaite and other West Indian poets. But their work only served to confirm and strengthen my original assessment of Carter. Only at their best they came close to what Carter had accomplished in all his poetry, well all his poetry which I had read at the time.

Of course, there was that gap where Carter left them all behind - those poems of resistance and defiance and mourning and sadness, poems like; "Weroon Weroon", "University of Hunger", "Death of a Comrade", "Letter 1", "Letter 2", "This is the Dark Time My Love" - which aptly described the time again before our eyes. Only this time the foreign invaders were the Guyana Defence Force soldiers marching through all those Indian villages, intending to cower the Indians; particularly that village I knew on the West Demerara - and which I sort of dealt with in my recently published "Jagan" long poem and an unpublished novel The Kinder Lake - in the aftermath of the baldfaced, brutally rigged 1973 elections. And then there were the People's Militia and The Guyana National Service putting on all those military parades on every least excuse of a 'National' occasion around Georgetown.

Perhaps Walter Rodney and the WPA, and Carter's somewhat redeeming association with them, his turning against the regime - the "roughing-up" he received from the regime's thugs helped. It was not a time for lollipop poetry. And I think the students knew that. I would read a Carter poem once, and then analyze it, go over the history and the politics - show how the poem was relevant to the time it was born of and to our own time and the students would want to hear the poem read again and again. There would be a hush and full silence, and then questions and comments. And when the bell went for the end of a period everyone would want to stay longer and do more poetry. That was what Carter's poetry did in a time when students tended to shy away from poetry.

But nothing stands by itself, not even poetry, and one only has to look at Walcott and Brathwaite and their university connections which supported their poetry and reputations. It is one of those quirks, that brahminism of literature, where once a writer is a lecturer or professor, has a Ph.D. (never mind if it is a Ph.D. in physics) or graduated from a particular university, or from university period, that his work is automatically held to be more complex, more wrought, more crafted by all those editors and publishers and critics who themselves have a claim to the caste of the university and academia. If Sam Selvon suffered for not really belonging to this brahminism, to be sure so too did Martin Carter. I only saw this clearly when I came to Canada. But I am again jumping ahead.

Close encounters with Carter were few. Once or twice I visited his house on Lamaha Street to drop off copies of poetry collections by friends - P.D. Sharma's The New Caribbean Man, for instance, which Sharma had just published in Los Angeles and wanted me to take to Carter. Very brief meetings. I would pass Carter on my bicycle or on my motorcycle on Vlissengen Road as we both headed for the seawall - his long, brisk striding walk unmistakeable - for the calm and rage of the Atlantic, and the sea breeze, that seemingly endless expanse of water.

Another day it was at Bill Carr's house, a roaring discussion and drinking party in session, I was dropping off another copy of Sharma's book and, as Carr had suggested, one of my first poetry manuscripts for a Carr demolition. I had earlier had the privilege of listening to Carr present a brilliant paper at the University of Guyana titled, "Stewards of their Excellence" on the work of Carter, Walcott and Brathwaite, and that presentation had impressed me.

I had heard and seen Carter on other occasions. But the indirect encounter which stuck with me was that time we drank rum in the same rum shop. He with his few friends and I with mine. It was a rumshop in Alberttown, at the corner of fifth and Light Streets. There was cricket on and we were off work early, headed for Bourda. I can't remember if there might have been rain, or the match being over earlier than expected, or simply that good old Guyana excuse - the existence of a convenient rum shop - but we were stopped off there for a drink. It was the first time in my life that I got really plastered, and it was my last. The next day, listening to accounts of my exploits and language, I decided I didn't like being drunk and the best way of avoiding drunkenness was by avoiding drink - a resolve I have not broken since.

What I also recalled thinking before I ceased recalling anything else on that afternoon was this: here was a great poet who walked about his city, lived in it, drank in it without putting on any great airs - and he was neglected for it and for his truth seeking which did not always coincide with other people's. I also recalled feeling sorry for him, wondering if in his disillusionment with the rampant corruption of the Burnham regime and the near total breakdown of morality in our society, he wasn't simply drinking himself out and wasting this great gift of his - conscious of the gap in the publication of his poetry. I felt that if I continued on this way that could happen to me too, and I didn't want that to happen to me. Perhaps this may have had something to do with my own resolve the next day to give up drinking.

There are gaps. I left Guyana in 1988. To be sure Carter came to Canada - at least in his work. In a paper "The Indian Presence as a Caribbean Reality" presented at York University during the conference celebrating 150 years since the arrival of Indians to the West Indies, George Lamming would read from another of Carter's masterpieces, "Looking at Your Hands" and posit that the political dynamism and racial unity of the Indians and Africans of Guyana of the early 1950's - for which Cheddi Jagan more than any other person was responsible - was the fertile soil for the early genius of Carter [and for Jan Carew and Wilson Harris] - and that Carter was never to write like that again. This was an intriguing opinion with which a few writers present agreed.

But what struck me was that here was another of those twists and intertwining of journeys; Jagan's and Carter's. It was Jagan in a way who led me to Carter and Jagan was leading me back again. Jagan was himself at that conference at York University and I remembered after his presentation he stayed around to hear me read my poetry - having, earlier in the year in Guyana, agreed in principle that I could write his biography.

And then that next year (1989) Ian McDonald and Demerara Publishers would bring out Carter's Selected Poems. Nothing of its calibre had been published from within the region before - or after - and it was a pleasure to receive a copy from Ian McDonald. There are not many books I inscribe dates in on receiving. Carter's Selected Poems is one of those few: August 15/89. I walked around Toronto with my copy in my bag, reading in my lunch breaks at work, on the earlymorning subway, in the quiet of night.

Then it dawned on me why I admired Carter's poems so much - particularly his early poems up to 1966 - it was the seeming simplicity and directness of language, which I had found and loved in Tagore. And going back to Tagore and reading them side by side, the parallels were uncanny. I am browsing though my copy of Selected Poems now and seeing all those poems of Carter, alongside which I had written in Devnagri script - Tagore: "Shines The Beauty of My Darling" (The Hills of Fire Glows Red, 1951), "I Stretch my Hand" (The Hidden Man, 1952), "Let Freedom Awake Him" (Poems of Resistance, 1954) - and even in such later poems as "Rain Falls Upwards" (1966), "Before the Question" (1973), "In a Certain Time", "With That Loan" (from Poems of Affinity, 1980) and "One" (1984).

I couldn't help asking myself if there was a Tagore/Upanishadic/Indian influence; recalling mention of the British Guiana Dramatic Society's performances of Tagore's plays and work in the thirties and forties in Georgetown. Tagore was, has always been, a presence in Guyana - even in the naming of the Tagore Memorial High school on the Corentyne Coast. Was Carter aware of all this - some kind of osmosis. Tagore's famous verse 35 from the Gitanjali was/is a prayer used in the Guyana parliament. Who was responsible for that? And could Carter the politician and parliamentarian be unaware of it and its power and lyricism, of the personification of the poet as supplicant and prophet - and that personification of god much noted in Hinduism and a distinctive mark in Tagore's work, and in his own? In 1967 while Minister of Information he had met visiting Indian Swami Chinmayananda who had caused an uproar in the media by pronouncing on the stupid Guyana Pandits Council supported law, passed by the Burnham government, that only Brahmins could be pandits. There were calls for Chinmayananda to be expelled from the country for meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign county. The matter was eventually sorted out and Chinmayananda had even promised to send Carter some Indian literature after he returned to India.

Carter read widely, including of the Latin American poets, who themselves had greater contact with Indian thought and poetry through Tagore. On his well publicised South American tour Tagore had spent a few months in Argentina, reading and lecturing, and after falling sick, recuperating - guest of the well known Argentine writer, Victoria Ocampo. And Tagore came and brought all that was expected of the spirit of India.

What is again intriguing about the lives of Jagan and Carter was that there seemed to be some affinities with recent Indian history. Swami Chinmayananda, on that same trip to Guyana, after meeting Jagan had called him the, "Nehru of Guyana...". The reality is that a more accurate comparison of Jagan would be to Gandhi. Perhaps, in some ways, this is a comparison which has merit. And yet if Jagan was the, "Nehru of Guyana" in the fight for independence from Britain then Carter was The poet, The literary presence in that struggle for independence, not unlike Tagore who was The literary presence during the fight for Indian independence - at least in the eyes of the west. Was Carter conscious of this?

And did all this matter? Influences are extraordinarily quirky things. I had stopped making those "Tagore" notations alongside Carter's poems. In any event, which intellectual living his life in Guyana, or Trinidad, could not be aware of Indians and Indian culture and literature? Not event Walcott whose association with Trinidad, and its smaller percentage of Indians, was relatively short - and this comes out in his Nobel address.

Martin Carter not only deserved the Guyana Prize he won but the Nobel Prize for literature. I was amazed, but not really surprised, that other writers from Guyana in North America felt this and that, "Walcott could not even kiss the dust of Carter's feet". And interestingly almost all of those who feel this way are Indians - a throwback to ancestral aesthetics, to Tagore to the Upanishads? What is objective and not clouded by race? Not the Nobel Prize, not anything. Certainly not Brathwaite's African leaning "nation language" or even my yogic realism - but then I have never claimed that my yogic realism is the aesthetic of ALL West Indians.

Guyana is different, distinct from the rest of the West Indies and that difference has not only to do with the landscape but with the Indian population and its culture, and speech patterns and literature.

It was good to see Carter note the distinctiveness of Guyana from the Caribbean in his interview with Frank Birbalsingh in Kyk-over-al, and also the positive quirkiness which sets the writings apart. This interview, published in 1995, shows vintage Carter. Birbalsingh couldn't trip him up while he was making that distinction and pointing out the greater affinity of Guyana to Latin America than is normally assumed.

History is everything and yet it is nothing. It is instructive that all during those tough Burnham years, it was finally the smuggling (the most widespread and profitable industry at the time) of foodstuff and all manner of other things, through Guyana's South American neighbours; Surinam, Brazil and Venezuela which made life bearable. And even those of us who were Customs Officers knew this. Guyana is after all on the South American continent.

And Birbalsingh couldn't trip him up as he clinically took on Brathwaithe's "nation language". The proponents of "creole" - including Birbalsingh himself, who always in reviewing some of our works lament the lack of usage of "creole" and judge our works and our "originality" by the amount of creole used - must have cringed. Martin Carter had lost none of his sharpness and clarity and eloquence - not even in an interview. Carter continues to be as important a voice, for a certain community, as he was in the 1950's and early 1960's. And he is right. Language is indeed a personal thing and those of us who write largely in a standard English do so because it is the form of expression we are most comfortable in. And we are original and universal in it. We are direct in it. We achieve clarity in it. We communicate effectively in it, and as evidenced by Carter's own poetry, produce works of genius in it.

Martin Carter is unquestionably Guyana's first world class poet, and if one includes Guyana in the English Speaking West Indies, he is also the first and foremost world class poet from that region - nobody had achieved the sustainable poetic excellence and genius he achieved in the early 1950's - not even Walcott. And, perhaps, he is the only genuine poet - no playwright-poet, or historian-poet or novelist-poet or even academic-lecturer-poet - we have. No confusion of form. Yes, there has been dabbling here and there - and who doesn't dabble here and there? But finally this is what I need to say:

forgive me, if ever I came
to stand before you
in your own worn boots
thinking I brought myself.
Today I come unshoed
and lotus my legs
and wait to watch your language.

(Sasenarine Persaud is an author, poet and literary theorist)

2006-02-17T19:31:00.000-08:00

The Great Dark

Orbiting, the sun itself has a sun
as the moon an earth, a man a mind.
And life is not a matter of a mother only.
It is also a question of the probability of the spirit,
strength of the web of the ever weaving weaver
I know not how to speak of, caught as I am
in the great dark of the bright connection of words.

And the linked power of love holds the restless wind
even though the sky shudders, and life orbits
around time, around death, it holds the restless wind
as each might hold each other, as each might hold
each other.

Martin Carter

2006-02-17T19:28:00.000-08:00

Bastille Day - Georgetown

Not wanting to deny, I
believed it. Not wanting
to believe it, I denied
our Bastille day. This
is nothing to storm. This
fourteenth of July. With
my own eyes, I saw the fierce
criminal passing for citizen
with a weapon, a piece of wood
and five for one. We laugh
Bastille laughter. These are
not men of death. A pot
of rice is their foul reward.

I have at last started
to understand the origin
of our vileness, and being
unable to deny it, I suggest
its nativity.
In the shame of knowledge
of our vileness, we shall fight

by Martin Carter

2006-02-16T19:08:00.000-08:00

Please Visit...

Geoffrey Philip's Blog Spot

Jamaican author Geoffrey Philp has written five collections of poetry, a novel, Benjamin, My Son and a book of short stories, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien. His short stories and poems have been published in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories. He lives in Miami, Florida.

http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/

2006-02-13T18:04:00.000-08:00

Please visit the brand new site dedicated to Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelholzer at:

http://edgarmittelholzer.blogspot.com/

2006-02-10T21:53:00.000-08:00

Special Thanks to M'lilwana Osanku ...

References

Carter, Martin, Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954).
Poems of Succession (Port of Spain and London: New Beacon, 1977).
Poems of Affinity (Georgetown: Release, 1980).
Asein, Samuel O., ‘The “Protest” Tradition in West Indian Poetry: from George Campbell to Martin Carter’, Jamaica Journal, 6.2 (June 1972), 40-45.
Brown, Stewart, ed., All Are Involved: The Art of Martin Carter (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2000).
Robinson, Gemma, The formation of Martin Carter’s poetry in the Guyanese cultural context. PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2003.

2006-02-10T21:13:00.000-08:00

Biography of Martin Carter
Funded by the British Academy

Dr. Gemma Robinson

Research Context and Objectives
My scheme of research seeks to expand and revise the limited biographical work that has been completed on one of the Caribbean’s leading twentieth-century writers – a writer who I contend played a defining role in the development of Caribbean literature, politics and Socialist poetics. The few biographical summaries in print are useful but brief and often contradict each other. No-one has to date compiled a definitive chronology of Carter’s life (1927-1997), nor has anyone written an extensive biographical essay on Carter.

In my completed research on Carter I prioritised bibliographical issues, arguing that Carter’s reputation as the Guyanese anti-colonial writer who fell into political despair belies the broad concerns of his published poetry (Robinson 2003). I now wish to focus on specific biographical questions relating to Carter in order to produce a definitive biographical essay, incorporating a chronology of his life and a critical assessment of his political and literary career. Carter’s contributions to Caribbean anti-colonialism and his affiliations with international Socialism have long been acknowledged (Asein 1972), but they remain under-researched. Furthermore, there has been no research carried out on Carter’s work for the British Council in the 1950s, the Bookers Group in the 1960s, the University of Essex in the 1970s and the University of Guyana in the 1980s. Therefore, the main objectives of the proposed research are (1) to identify and describe key and/or under-researched periods in Carter’s life, (2) to clarify our understanding of Carter’s literary, political and social concerns through an assessment of his literary and political career, and thereby (3) to prove the significance of Carter as a twentieth-century writer and political activist. This project is essential for continued research on Carter. As well as constituting a project complete in itself, the biographical research enabled by this grant is also integral to my longer-term project of producing a critical edition of Carter’s poetry and prose.

Research Methodology
I adopt a historicist approach to the study of Martin Carter’s life and work. The parameters of this biographical project have in part been established in relation to my completed bibliographical research on Carter’s poetry. Several of the key periods in which I am interested coincide chronologically with the dates of Carter’s major poetic publications (Carter 1954, 1977, 1980). During my previous research I had almost exclusive access to Carter’s private notebooks and I interviewed many of Carter’s friends, family and work colleagues concerning his poetry. My methods of research reflect my belief that Carter’s biography can only be constructed within an interdisciplinary context. I use both oral and written, and academic and non-academic sources, in order to establish the fullest account of Carter’s literary and political career.

References
Carter, Martin, Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954).
Poems of Succession (Port of Spain and London: New Beacon, 1977).
Poems of Affinity (Georgetown: Release, 1980).
Asein, Samuel O., ‘The “Protest” Tradition in West Indian Poetry: from George Campbell to Martin Carter’, Jamaica Journal, 6.2 (June 1972), 40-45.
Brown, Stewart, ed., All Are Involved: The Art of Martin Carter (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2000).
Robinson, Gemma, The formation of Martin Carter’s poetry in the Guyanese cultural context. PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2003.

2006-02-09T23:12:00.000-08:00

OUTSTANDING YOUNG CARIBBEAN-AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP

(OYCAS)

JCI Caribbean New York Junior Chamber is a worldwide leadership development organization with focus on the development and recognition of members from the Caribbean Community who resides in New York City.

One of our major projects is the Outstanding Young Caribbean-American Scholarship (OYCAS) will be an annual project of the JCI Caribbean New York Junior Chamber, Community Development Area. Eligible applicants will be selected from senior high school students across the five boroughs. Nomination packet should be submitted by the due date of March 3, 2006.

Scholarship prizes will be awarded to the OYCAS 1st, 2nd and 3rd Place winners during the JCI Caribbean New York Junior Chamber competition on March 18^th, 2006. The 1^st Place winner will represent the chapter at the New York State Jaycees Outstanding Young New Yorker (OYNY) Convention on April 21-23, 2006.

For more information, contact:

Christine DAndrade

741 East 42^nd Street

Brooklyn, NY 11203

718-856-2025

Email: jcicaribbeanny@yahoo.com

2006-02-08T12:56:00.000-08:00

Guyana Supplement

To mark Guyana's Republic Anniversary, The February issue of The Caribbean Voice is publishing a supplement on Guyana, focusing on the current political and economic situation, development prospects, businesses and the achievements of Guyanese worldwide. Businesses and other advertisers can take advantage of this opportunity to send greetings as well as to reach out to the Caribbean communities in North America. And for a small additional cost, ads can also run in the Guyana issue of The Caribbean Voice, to be launched in February to coincide with the Republic anniversary.

Note that in addition to being distributed in New York, Georgia, Texas and Florida, The Caribbean Voice is distributed via email to over 200,000 readers around the world.

Call 718-542-4454, 917-714-2012, 678-425-0278 or email caribvoice@aol.com or caribvoiceatl@aolcom. Deadline for all materials is February 20th.

2006-02-05T17:32:00.000-08:00

GUYANA DAY 2006 will be held on Saturday, May 13, 2006, at the Performing Arts Center, York College, Queens, New York, 3:00 - 8:00pm. Admission free.

Last year was great, with over 700 people in attendance. This year promises to be much greater, with top performers, including Slingshot. last year Slingshot was restricted to a very small time slot. This year he will be given enough time to shake, rattle and roll on the stage.

For more info contact me at harbis01@aol.com

Harry B

2006-02-05T01:39:00.000-08:00

This is the dark time, my love

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

2006-02-02T14:45:00.000-08:00

The Mob at the Door:
A 'Biography' of Martin Carter

Among the many things the poets W.B.Yeats and Martin Carter have in common is the role they played in the shaping of nationhood in their respective countries. Each holds a very high place in the hierarchy of the literary genius produced by his country, but in both cases, their role goes beyond the production of the great corpus of national literature. It includes the formation of a literary consciousness and involvement in the corresponding current of revolutionary politics. Yeats' Ireland and Carter's British Guiana fifty years later, waged wars of independence against the same colonizing power. The similarities between them come to life in this comment on the life of Yeats by critic and editor, George MacBeth.

"His greatest successes seem to me to have been achieved in writing about his friends and the causes for which they spoke, fought and died. Irish history and Irish politics came alive to Yeats through the doings of people he knew and loved. His best work is a commentary on the history of a whole country at the establishment of its freedom, a period of agonizing crisis seen through the eyes of a particularly sensitive and involved member of it. Ireland was still small enough in the early twentieth century for one man to feel its problems personally and mould great poetry out of them."

Substitute Guyana for Ireland and that could well be a comment on Carter. Yeats became an Irish Senator after a period of tangential involvement in the political rebellion. His poem Easter 1916 is about the Easter Rising for which some of his friends were executed. Like others of his friends and associates in the PPP, Carter was imprisoned in a detention camp at Atkinson Field in 1953. Like Yeats, he became a minister of government, a 'technocrat,' under the PNC after independence. Yet he was to take to the streets again in protest against that same government a decade or so later. Yeats claimed he properly learned to be a poet during those years close to the revolution in Dublin when he came to appreciate poetry as a public art. Similarly. Carter grew up as a poet against a political background that no doubt helped to bring him to maturity as a writer, but he emerged as "a particularly sensitive" universal humanist who could feel his country's problems "and mould great poetry out of them."

The June, 2000 issue of Kyk-Over-Al (Number 49/50) is a testament of this aspect of the life and work of Martin Wylde Carter (1927-1997), to date, Guyana's greatest poet. The journal documents his career in 411 pages. The editors, Ian McDonald and Vanda Radzik silently celebrated Kyk's 50th volume, launched on December 19, 2000 on the virtual anniversary of Carter's burial (on December 18, 1997). The memorable celebration of the poet was more loudly proclaimed, and for this they drew on a large number of contributors who knew him personally, are fellow writers, or mere critics and students of his work. The result is a virtual biography of the poet.

One of the vital factors that emerges from the volume is the contribution Carter made in a very informal way to literary consciousness in pre-independence Guyana. Eusi Kwayana, Jan Carew, David de Caires, Roy Heath and Wilson Harris among others, recall the almost ritual sessions of literary readings and discussions in which Carter was central. They continued even up to the seventies, contributing to Guyanese nationhood no less than the political activism recorded by other contributors such as Janet Jagan and Rupert Roopnaraine.

Kyk 49/50 is thus sub-titled 'The Martin Carter Tribute,' following Number 48, which is a Language Issue dedicated to linguist and lexicographer, Richard Allsopp. But it is more than the biography of one described by Kwayana as "a friendly, dreamful, dangerous man." It includes critical essays by leading scholars, reviews, poems dedicated to Carter as well as a selection of his own prose and poetry.

There are two significant observations about the poetry. Carter's celebrated piece, Proem is reprinted as a kind of preface to the volume. It is a fitting statement about the poet, his poem and its audience, which is an overture to the book Poems of Succession and Selected Poems (1989). But it was removed from that strategic position in the Red Thread reprint of Selected Poems (1997) and is now restored in this document. Secondly, and of greater importance, is the recent discovery, after his death, of previously unknown, unpublished Carter poems, which now appear in Kyk 49/50. Of these, the most noteworthy is an untitled love poem, which seems far more complete and polished than the other four. "Wanting to write another poem for you," the poet "searched the world for something beautiful." What he finds is crafted with the usual neatness of Carter's metaphysical verse.

Outside my window, law unto itself
This tall green crown confirms an oath I swore
With mighty roots invisible in earth
And amongst seeds that war with God and die.

Of importance too, is the publication of two original handwritten manuscripts. The first is the poem now known as Death of a Comrade, which was first scribbled on a page and sent to Janet Jagan under its original title For a Dead Comrade. It was written as a tribute to late Barbadian trade unionist, Ivan Edwards. The second, Poem of Prison, was also handwritten and sent to A J Seymour for possible publication. The prose selections are mixed, (some early pieces which are not earth-shaking and others of greater import), and are of historical importance, following Nigel Westmaas' much more substantial collection in The Martin Carter Prose sampler in Kyk 44.

Collections of poetic tribute to a great personality are normally valued more for the tribute than for the poetry. Such is the case with the volume dedicated to the memory of Cheddi Jagan and edited by David Dabydeen, which mixes genuine poetry with contributions of no poetic pretensions, published in good faith to record the writers' valuable sentiments. It is of note, therefore, that Kyk 49/50 prints poetic tributes to Carter including two which are particularly serious verses of merit. The Last Walk by Stanley Greaves is no surprise from a long established poet whose first collection is expected soon out of Peepal Tree. But Freedom, a well crafted poem, startles, coming from Ameena Gafoor, previously known as a critic.

Also of interest is that this edition of Kyk-Over-Al may be seen as a companion volume to Stewart Brown's All are Involved: The art of Martin Carter, released by Peepal Tree at the 'West Indian Literature Conference, Textualities/ Sexualities,' hosted by the University of Guyana in March, 2000. Brown edits the most important collection of Carter criticism, drawing on a wider field of writers, but for the most part, sharing the same list of contributors with Kyk. Brown himself, as well as Clem Seecharran in the UK, has a critical essay in the journal, whose tributes are not mere sentiment, but include sound, scholarly papers. Nevertheless, the journal, even while honouring the poet, does not abandon some of its routine features. It still keeps abreast of the latest books through reviews of Pauline Melville by Denise de Caires, and of the newly emerged Onya Kampadoo by Joyce Jonas, while the paintings of another Guyanese great, Aubrey Williams, is noticed by Elfrieda Bissember.

It is Wilson Harris who mentions Carter's admiration for Yeats. He recalls Carter quoting a line from the Irish poet, "What if the mob at the door is the state." It is no wonder such a line appealed to Carter, who expressed many similar sharp observations that shock and disturb. If the editors of Kyk-Over-Al 49/50 had asked Yeats to submit a poetic tribute to Carter, his most likely selection might have been A Coat, written in 1914, to express his moving from "old mythologies" to poems wrought out of the problems of his newly emerging nation. For Carter whose shirt became a banner for the revolution, whose lips and fingers became the ragged edges of a cloud and the trembling leaves of the canna lily, and who recognized "the man who walked sideways," Yeats is a kindred spirit. It is this, above all, that is documented in Kyk-Over-Al.

Al Craighton

2006-01-31T14:59:00.000-08:00

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. When 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 !

Martin Carter, Poems Of Succession, 1974

2006-01-28T12:25:00.000-08:00

University of Hunger: Collected Poems & Selected Prose

By Martin Carter

The Guyanese poet Martin Carter (1927-97) was one of the foremost Caribbean writers of the 20th century. Twice imprisoned by the colonial government of British Guiana during the Emergency in the 1950s, he became a minister in Guyana’s first independent government during the 60s, representing his country at the United Nations, but resigned in disillusionment after three years to live ‘simply as a poet, remaining with the people’. He was one of the first Caribbean poets to write about slavery, Amerindian history and Indian Indentureship in relation to contemporary concerns. Wise, angry and hopeful, Carter’s poetry voices a life lived in times of public and private crisis.

Gemma Robinson’s helpfully annotated edition is the first Collected Poems of Martin Carter. The selected prose includes key essays on race, colonialism, political action and the role of the poet in a postcolonial society.

‘A major contribution to Guyanese scholarship. This sets the standard for editions of Caribbean poetry’ – David Dabydeen

‘Carter has a stature in the collective consciousness of Guyana that is quite unique among writers in the English-speaking Caribbean…he will remain one of the greatest writers of that period…Carter will stand in the very first ranks of the writers of the Americas’ – George Lamming

‘Martin Carter spans an enormous arc of experience from exuberant public statement to betrayed introspection’ – E.A. Markham

‘His impulse was always lyrical, he was a great reciter, he had a great voice, he had a great joy in the sound of the poem…the example of his work was phenomenal…West Indian literature even in English is totally underestimated, totally. The literature is astonishing, the quality is astonishingly high. And Martin’s position in all this is special’ – Derek Walcott

£12.00 Paperback
1 85224 710 X. 320pp. 2006.
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/

2006-01-19T15:20:00.000-08:00

2006 Commonwealth essay competition

THE annual Commonwealth Essay Competition organised by the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) will close for entries on March 1, 2006.

The RCS expects to receive thousands of entries from around the Commonwealth, as in previous years. In 2005, some 5,000 essays from more than 1,100 schools were received.

Winners of the 2005 competition included students from Australia, Canada, Dominica, India, Malta, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, United Republic of Tanzania, and Cayman Islands.

The competition is open to students in the Commonwealth aged between eight and 18. They are eligible to enter based on four different age groups.

Mr Stuart Mole, Director-General of the RCS, said: "This extraordinary international writing contest has been going on for around 100 years. The quality of writing it inspires around the world is remarkable."

Topics for this year include: 'Is the indigenous culture of your country worth preserving?'; 'What are the advantages and disadvantages of English being the language of the Commonwealth?'; and 'Write an adventure involving yourself and the characters of a favourite book.'

More information on the 2006 Commonwealth Essay Competition is available at www.rcsint.org/essay. (COMMONWEALTH NEWS AND INFORMATION SERVICE)

2006-01-09T02:05:00.000-08:00

Visit GYSPHERE at http://www.gysphere.com/fashion.html and help promote Guyanese artists...

http://www.gysphere.com/fashion.html

2006-01-07T22:29:00.000-08:00

The Early Versifiers in Guyanese Literature

Preserving our literary heritage

by Petamber Persaud

THE minute efforts of pioneers in whatever field of endeavour are frequently overshadowed by the achievements of their successors and too often those groundbreakers go unacknowledged. This is poignantly true in the field of Guyanese literature.

“Every little achieved is a landmark established,” wrote N. E. Cameron in 1931, describing the contributions of those pioneers in the field of poetry. It is distressing that so little is known about the early versifiers who initiated a written Guyanese poetic tradition, a practice that laid the foundation for others to build on, producing internationally recognised poets, winners of such awards as the T. S. Elliot Poetry Prize, the Casa de las Americas Prize for poetry and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

When you think Guyanese poetry, the name Martin Carter readily comes to mind. But our written poetry did not start with Carter, in fact, that tradition started more than one hundred years before Carter wrote his first verse.

The ‘COLONIST’
The first recorded verses of this country surfaced in 1832. That was the year someone calling himself the ‘Colonist’ published his ‘MIDNIGHT MUSINGS IN DEMERARA’. Significantly, this first effort was printed locally in the Courier Office in Georgetown not long after the counties of Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo were merged to form British Guiana. However, that was the only local feature about the book; all of the verses therein were coloured by inspiration from England.

SIMON CHRISTIAN OLIVER
Following the musings of the ‘Colonist’ were the ruminations of Simon Christian Oliver, a Black schoolmaster stationed at St. Augustine’s in Buxton. Oliver was born in Grenada, successfully settling in British Guiana where he died in 1848, grieving to return to his birthplace. Oliver is reported to have written some poems in 1838 and his verse, ‘1st August, 1838’ may be the only surviving piece to mark the occasion of freeing of slaves in this country. Despite the subject of that poem, it is abounding in archaic English phrases and in praise of the monarchy, ‘oh! Ye first of August freed men who liberty enjoy,/salute the day and shout hurrah to Queen Victoria’. Poetry then and for a long while after was written in similar vain.

DR. HENRY G. DALTON
It took a doctor to inject local flavour to Guyanese poetry; the names of two of his poems, ‘Essequibo and its Tributaries’ and ‘The Carib’s Complaint’, bear out this fact. That honour went to Dr. Henry G. Dalton who was ‘born in a British colony, but educated in England’. In 1858, Dalton published his poems in London.

WILLIAM E. ROBERTS & FRED A. BELGRAVE
As if to follow Dalton’s lead, William Eaton Roberts and Fred A. Belgrave produced in 1867 a book of eight poems entitled ‘LOCAL POETRY’. Although the regular religious theme runs through the poems, others subjects as kindness, retirement and matrimony were explored.

THOMAS DON
But no sooner, it was back to the religious theme which was a reflection of the times. After emancipation, the Bible was the main text in the teaching/learning process. This next contribution to local literature came from Thomas Don who in 1873 published a book of 43 pieces entitled, ‘PIOUS EFFUSIONS’. Incidentally this was another locally produced book, this time printed at the Royal Gazette Office, New Amsterdam, Berbice!

The subject matter of the early poets cannot be argued away but there was much to be desired in their craft. Of course, there were exceptional pieces like the long poems, ‘Agnes de Clifford’ by the ‘Colonist’ and ‘Essequibo and its Tributaries’ by Dalton, but for the most part, the early verses were bad.

EGBERT MARTIN ‘LEO’
So it was, lo and behold, that almost to the end of the period under examination came along the best, Egbert Martin better known by his nom de plume, ‘Leo’. He approached his craft in words of one of his poems, ‘The poet is a magician./The philosopher’s stone is his;/It turns all baser metals/To priceless rarities’. Egbert Martin (1862-1890), described as a ‘fair mulatto’, was invalid when very young and died at the age of 28. His first book of poems, ‘POETICAL WORKS’ was published in 1883, running into 224 pages. That was quite an achievement! ‘LOCAL LYRICS’ came out in 1886.

After ‘Leo’, there was a lull, nay a wide gap, in poetic expression until a revival in 20th century that led to what is termed modern Guyanese Poetry.

Sources:
* Cameron, N. E. editor, GUIANESE POETRY, Georgetown 1931

* McDonald, Ian. ‘Guyanese Poetry before Independence’, THE GUYANA CHRISTMAS ANNUAL 1999.

Responses to this author telephone (592) 226-0065 or email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com

Literature Update: More than half of The Guyana Annual 2005-2006 is devoted to emerging writers, writers whose efforts like those of the early versifiers will be important landmarks in time to come.

SUPPORT THESE WRITERS by getting copies of this magazine from Austin Book Services, Universal Bookstore, Michael Ford Bookshop, Castellani House, Guyenterprise Ltd., and the editor, (592) 226-0065.

(Guyana Chronicle)

2006-01-06T23:07:00.000-08:00

Recently was informed about a new Linden Chat Forum at http://www.lindenpeople.com/index.php

I think it is very well done and I hope it gets busier since we can never have enough sites that promote Guyana ...

Once again, props to D for sending me the info...

2005-12-29T19:47:00.000-08:00

Hey Everyone,

Please check out the following new site that has recently been brought to my attention... I think it is wonderful to so many interesting and informative sites that are helping to promote Guyana and our wonderful culture... We can certainly never have enough of them so please keep all the wonderful work going !!

http://www.guyanagazette.com/

2005-12-17T11:58:00.000-08:00

Two lost poems by Martin Carter have recently been discovered in a UK archive. The poems, along with other previously unseen work, will be published for the first time in University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, edited by Gemma Robinson (Bloodaxe publishers, February 2006). Stabroek News has been given exclusive access to this new edition and publishes the two poems with a note from Dr Robinson.

[Let my greatnesses transcend my indecencies]

Let my greatnesses transcend my indecencies

and let the sun that nature fashioned to make trees green

be as nothing to the light I fashion to make myself

nothingness.

Because I have discovered the secret of death

which has nothing to do with the end of a life

or a soul or a heart or an ignorant brutal mouth,

can be revealed in a moment of supreme love

and pain, the origin and birth of a face.

I have seen the rain fall in so many places

that I have ceased caring where the drops come from

whether from clouds or tree tops or the eyes of monkeys

who would like to cry but have to howl instead.

And so I look through the savage window of the world

sitting perilously on the sills of the shoulders of the clock

While a sweet child smiling with innocence

still wonders why a frown is not so ugly.

[Having, as I do, a profound hatred for

humans and alcohol]

Having, as I do, a profound hatred for humans and alcohol

I welcome both as dear friends to my bosom.

For while the former enrages the instincts of love buried in my skin

the latter makes release of what I should not want.

On the pavement of the street near to my house

I saw a man kill nearly for a love

which like a beetle he knew would soon escape

and vanish in the yellow pool of moonlight.

Human moonlight, alcohol of beetle and murder of love is one

As everything is in my futile benab

where the tribesman's poison arrow is the rain

that makes the greenest leaf turn yellow brown.

And yet I want you seriously to know

that the poison on the arrow's bark is food

as a curse is, or a moan is, when a man and woman soar,

as all of us have soared beneath the ocean's drowning.

On August 2, 1971, Martin Carter dated his handwritten copy of the poem that begins 'Let my greatnesses transcend my indecencies.' A poet who always celebrated and mourned what it meant to be human, Carter writes, 'I look through the savage window of the world.' This frank admission of human disgrace has not lost its poignancy. I came across the manuscript of this forgotten poem in the New Beacon papers held at the George Padmore Institute in London, UK, while researching Carter's work for the first edition of his collected poems and selected prose.

The 1970s can now be seen as a period of great poetic activity for Carter, but this was not obvious at the time. At the end of 1969 the Trinidadian historian, C. L. R. James, wrote to him saying, 'I hope you have not entirely abandoned the writing of poetry.' Carter had not given up on poetry. In that same year, while Minister of Information and Culture, Carter invited John La Rose (the Trinidadian writer, activist, and founder of New Beacon publishers) to publish a retrospective selection of his poetry. Between 1970 and 1975 the collection expanded, and the new poems, titled 'The When Time', eventually took up a third of the collection we know as Poems of Succession. The manuscript is now held in the New Beacon papers at the George Padmore Institute, and among the papers, proofs and correspondence, the two new poems, undiscovered for over thirty years, were found.

Both pieces display Carter's characteristic talent to voice compassion and fury in a single poem. The second poem begins, 'Having, as I do, a profound hatred for humans and alcohol/I welcome both as dear friends to my bosom.' But this is not a misanthropic or nihilistic poem. It ends with a bittersweet line, encouraging us to think about the heights and depths of human experience: 'all of us have soared beneath the ocean's drowning.'

The new Bloodaxe edition of Carter's work is intended to complement the important 1989 and 1997 Selected Poems, which included Carter's choice of his work. The new edition, titled University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, is the most comprehensive collection of Carter's work, including the first republication of 'To A Dead Slave' (1951), poems from the PPP journal, Thunder, all his uncollected poems, and key prose pieces. We may never know why these poems were not included in Poems of Succession, Poems of Affinity or Selected Poems, but I am glad to be able to introduce them to readers of Carter. In his work we find (in the words of Derek Walcott) a phenomenal 'tenderness.'

Carter could make poetry out of a flower, a leaf, the rain, a bird or a fish as easily as he could address fury, fire and futility. Writing in Georgetown, in the country where he spent his whole life, Carter's world was both local and global. Composing poetry on whatever was in front of him - cigarette cartons, envelopes, scrap paper - the urgency of his writing matched his need to understand himself and the world. Today, on the anniversary of Carter's death, it is important to remember him, his example and his work.

(Stabroek News - Tuesday, December 13th 2005)

2005-10-06T00:22:00.000-07:00

GUYANESE LITERATURE

Jeremy Poynting, 15 September 2005

LANDSCAPE
In the beginning is landscape. As part of a continent, no Caribbean country except the other Guianas (Suriname and Cayenne) can speak of such a fundamental opposition between coastland and hinterland (between the cultivated and the natural); can feel human settlement to be dwarfed by an almost unpeopled wilderness (must, indeed, acknowledge areas of the heartland where mapping is still provisional); can boast such a rich diversity of tropical flora and fauna in the still surviving rainforest. No other Caribbean country is as profoundly shaped by its rivers, as Guyana is by the mighty Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice. No other Caribbean country (except Montserrat and Soufriere) has a natural phenomenon quite as iconic as the Kaiteur Falls. Guyanese writing has been hugely marked by its attempt to come to terms with the country’s physical space. In the Anglophone Caribbean, only Jamaica can in any way match Guyana’s sense of distance. Journeys – from country to town – on the steamers and ferries across the rivers – from the coastal settlements up the rivers into the interior – are an important part of Guyanese writing. Even as short a distance as the young June Lehall cycles from her village to school in New Amsterdam in The Last English Plantation encompasses a huge social and cultural gulf. In journeys something is always sought, and Guyana is the home of one of the most potent myths of seeking: the search for Eldorado, the gilded one.

From the earliest writing of the naming of place by poetic pioneers such as Leo (Egbert Martin) and Walter Mac Lawrence, to the nation-defining poetry of A.J. Seymour in his early collections such as Over Guiana, Clouds (Demerara Standard, 1944), Suns in My Blood (Demerara Standard, 1945), to the open, rain-sodden vistas of Edgar Mittelholzer’s Corentyne Thunder (1944), Guyanese writers have recorded their country’s spaciousness (and sometimes threatening emptiness). The contrast between the regularities of the industrialised landscapes of the sugar plantations and rice farms on the coast and the indeterminacy of the interior is, of course, at the core of Wilson Harris’s early Guyanese-set novels, Palace of the Peacock (Faber, 1960), The Far Journey of Oudin (Faber, 1961) or Heartland (Faber, 1964), and of Jan Carew’s The Wild Coast (Secker and Warburg, 1958), and Black Midas (Secker and Warburg, 1958), his novel about the democratisation of the El Doradean dream in the world of the diamond-seeking porkknockers. Indeed, until the 1970s novels of Roy Heath (A Man Come Home (Longman, 1974), From the Heat of the Day (Allison & Busby, 1979) and One Generation (Allison & Busby, 1981)) urban Georgetown, where over a third of all Guyanese live, scarcely features in Guyanese fiction.

The fiction and poetry published by Peepal Tree since 1985 has added immensely to the Guyanese sense of place. There are, of course, more distinctions in reality, (there is as yet little writing that deals with the growing suburbia around Georgetown) but in Guyanese literature one can see five distinct spaces: absolute ‘unpeopled’ wilderness, the inhabited interior, coastal and riverine villages, the sugar estate communities and the city.

Heartland
As an interesting parallel to the fiction of Wilson Harris, (who also worked as a land surveyor), are the memoirs of Vincent Roth Vincent Roth, A Life in Guyana, Volume 1: A Young Man's Journey, 1889-1923 and Vincent Roth, A Life in Guyana, Volume 2: The Later Years 1924-1935) and Matthew French Young (Guyana the Lost El Dorado: My fifty years in the Guyanese Wilds) which give rewarding insights into the worlds of the Amerindians, porkknockers, balata bleeders and the fauna and flora of the forested interior and the savannahs, and the heroic efforts involved in mapping Guyana’s wild places. Several of the stories in Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences play on the meaning of wilderness as a place where, in the absence of the familiar human landmarks, characters discover things, sometimes unpalatable, about themselves. The sense of Guyanese interior space as a place to find yourself is also a key element in Ian McDonald’s poetry in his Essequibo (Peterloo Press, 1992) and in his two Peepal Tree publications, Jaffo the Calypsonian (1994) and Between Silence and Silence (2003).

Even for those on the coastland there is an encroaching sense of mystery in the forest that lies just beyond cultivated space. It is there in Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s Timepiece where the Canje river and its surrounding forest was, historically, the place of escape for runaway slaves and still stands as a space of freedom for the mind, in contrast to the more dangerous human jungle of the city where the young Sandra Yansen goes to make a career as a journalist. It is there in Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl where the Indian Guyanese villagers in a remote part of the Canje live in an underlying state of existential terror from the forests and creeks that surround them, a consequence of the fact that they have not yet fully claimed the place as their own. This terror is symbolised in the mythical figure of the massacouraman on which they project their fears. (Dark Swirl is also highly rewarding as a fictional play with the conventions of the European explorer narrative, where a Gerald Durrell-like figure comes to share the life of the village.)

However, if in some Guyanese writing the interior can be seen as innocent, virgin territory, such a perception could not survive the horrors of Jonestown, the mass slaughter of the followers of the charismatic American preacher Jim Jones in 1978. Matthew French Young was practically involved in dealing with the aftermath of Jonestown, and he reports his experiences in Guyana the Lost El Dorado. Several Guyanese authors have been drawn to contemplate that heart of darkness, including Wilson Harris (Jonestown, Faber, 1998) and Fred D’Aguiar in his long narrative poem, Bill of Rights (Chatto, 1998). It is also the subject of Cyril Dabydeen’s poem ‘Jim Jones Revisited’ in Imaginary Origins, and an important element in Lakshmi Persaud’s For the Love of My Name.

Plantation
Whilst the sugar estate appears in the fiction of the British/Canadian novelist Edward Jenkins (Lutchmee and Dilloo, 1875) and in ARF Webber’s Those That Be in Bondage (1917), it is not until Peter Kempadoo’s Guiana Boy (published under the name of Lauchmonen in 1960, and reissued by Peepal Tree in 2002 as Guyana Boy), Sheik Sadeek’s Song of the Sugarcanes (Sadeek, 1975) and (most definitively) in the fiction and poetry of Rooplall Monar (Backdam People (1985), (Janjhat (1989) and (High House and Radio (1994) that the manufactured and highly defining landscapes of the sugar estate become part of the fictive landscape as seen from the perspective of its actual inhabitants. Monar focuses primarily on the human relations of the estate and the workers’ stratagems to evade managerial control. The physical landscape of the estate is described most vividly in Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s The Last English Plantation (based on the Rose Hall estate) where the demarcations of place (the fenced-off grand manager’s house and the junior managers’ quarters, the solid cottages of the overseers and the temporary logies of the workers are described in highly visualised terms. If in general the descriptions of the estate focus on its utilitarian meanings, in Rooplall Monar’s poems in (Koker there is also a perception of the beauty to be found in the kokers, watch-houses and bridges that are features of estate architecture.

Village
But it is in the village that the sense of place most in tune with human wishes is to be found. Here the work of Beryl Gilroy, from her fictionalised memoir of 1930s Skeldon in Berbice, Sunlight and Sweet Water or her novel In Praise of Love and Children gives the sense of place built on a very human scale (marked, of course, by the usual human virtues and vices), and a place where a rugged individuality is able to flourish alongside the capacity for human solidarity. But Gilroy’s village is not a homogenous place; there are always outsiders as well as insiders. But as a much later novel, Ryhaan Shah’s A Silent Life (2004), shows, the village is also the place where Guyana’s ethnic groups have established the most quotidien human contact.

City
As late as the mid 1970s, it was still just possible to see in Georgetown elements of what had been a truly elegant colonial city, with its wide, Dutch grid of streets and canals and beautiful white wooden houses. That city of the 1940s is remembered in Michael Gilkes’s elegiac, Guyana Prize-winning Joanstown, where the ‘cross-stitching of avenues, bridges and canals’ is made golden by being the place of first love. That city has already gone in Denise Harris’s Web of Secrets, set in one of the older established middle-class areas of Georgetown in a house, which like its family, is crumbling both within and without under the pressures of political turbulence and the racial disturbances of the 1960s. What characterises Harris’s city are the feelings of the old brown middle class that the city is no longer theirs as news of the riots and burnings, brought as soot in the wind, reach their enclave.
The city, indeed, is always a place in Caribbean writing where there are those who are established and those who arrive from the country (see VS Naipaul’s Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas) and in Jan Shinebourne’s Timepiece, the perspective is that of the village child, alarmed by the city’s rush and what she sees as the hard-faced pseudo-sophistication of city people. The same discomfort and alienation, the same progress from innocence to experience, is experienced by Devan, the country preacher from the Corentyne when he arrives to bring true Hinduism to the unreceptive and confusingly multi-ethnic people of Georgetown in Cyril Dabydeen’s The Wizard Swami.

Perhaps of all recent Guyanese novels it is Churaumanie Bissundyal’s Whom the Kiskadees Call that makes greatest use of Guyana’s diversity of place. Four different areas of the country are used as very specific and contrary backgrounds to the attempts of the main characters to find some peace in their lives. In each place there is some doubleness of experience: in the village world of Leguan there is beauty and innocent pleasure, but also the threatening power of the big landlords; in the fetid slums of Georgetown there is a kind of freedom but also a threatening disorder; in the well laid-out sugar estate of Blairmont there is order but the restrictions of a regimented life; in Good Shepherd Square up the Barima river in the interior there is peace, but also the absence of possibility. In the end, peace has to be found within.

Drought, Fire and Flood
If the surrounding sea and the regular threat of sea-borne hurricane is the shared environment of the Caribbean islands, the dominant environmental images of Guyana are the cycles of drought and flood, and in Georgetown (city of wooden buildings – including the largest wooden cathedral in the world) the regular outbreaks of fire, whether through accident or riot. In Guyanese writing there are the semi-aquatic cows of Wilson Harris’s The Far Journey of Oudin (Faber, 1961); the fires that feature in Denise Harris’s The Web of Secrets and Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s ‘Memories of British Guiana’ in Godmother and Other Stories; and the images of drought in the poetry of Rooplall Monar (Koker) as an index of spiritual desiccation. All three phenomena provide unifying motifs for Michael Gilkes’s Joanstown and Other Poems as images of destruction and renewal. No doubt the catastrophic floods of 2004 will find their way into future Guyanese writing.

HISTORY
In colonial origins, Guyana’s Dutchness remains highly visible in the constructed landscape: in the poldering (the complex system of dams), the system of drainage (the kokers), the sea-wall defences and the rectangular precision of both agricultural lots and the street layout of Georgetown; in the survival of the visible ruins of the slave past: the fort of Kyk-over-Al and the chimney at Chateau Margot (both the subject of many poems – see Monar’s Koker). And whilst much of the rest of the Caribbean has made its various postcolonial accommodations with former overlords – English, French and Spanish (the French creoleness of Trinidad is prized by most Trinidadians as part of their country’s distinctiveness) Guyana’s connection to the original makers of its landscape is fragmentary, orphaned, negative. Except perhaps for Jamaica, no English-speaking Caribbean country has quite such a deeply ingrained and scarred awareness of the centuries of slavery, and the belief that the Dutch variant was uniquely harsh. Of all the wandering spirits that terrify in the night, none is more fearful than the Dutchman jumbie.

Dutchman Jumbie and Bakoo
Nowhere else in the Caribbean is the national writing so obsessed with what it feels is the society’s wilful amnesia about past traumas or so strongly imbued with a sense of history. These voices crying out from the past are heard in Cyril Dabydeen’s poems (Imaginary Origins: Selected Poems) and in several of the stories in Berbice Crossing. This observation may be challenged, but with the exception of Jamaica’s rolling calf and Trinidad’s lagahoo, no Caribbean writing is characterised by such a presence of malign folkloric spirits as Guyana’s. There is moongaza who features in several of the stories in Monar’s Backdam People, massacouraman in Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl, Ol Higue (also Backdam People) and perhaps the most specifically Guyanese of creatures, the bakoo who features in Denise Harris’s Web of Secrets and in ‘Alma Fordyce and the Bakoo’ in Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences. In both, the homunculus trapped in the bottle, ready to create violent mayhem if allowed to escape, becomes a potent image of the violent energies created by Guyana’s harsh history and liable to explode from time to time. The corollary of the presence of malign spirits is their exploitation and the existence of those skilled in the working of counter measures. There is the rascally Hendree in Moses Nagamootoo’s Hendree’s Cure, and there is the immeasurable more complex and powerful figure of the obeah woman Irene Gittings in Denise Harris’s In Remembrance of Her who makes use of her ‘dark’ arts in the attempt to right the wrongs of untrammelled power.

Voices from the Past
This sense of the past is reinforced by the comparatively recent demise of the dominance of the classic sugar estate in Guyanese economic life. Until the 1950s, a majority of the Indian population either lived on sugar estates or in the satellite villages around them. Whilst only a minority of African Guyanese in the twentieth century lived/worked on the plantations, no Guyanese except the most stay-in-the-city Georgetown dwellers could avoid the sight of sugar factories and labourers toiling in the cane, since estates stretched from one end of the coastal strip to the other, from Hampton Court in the Essequibo to Skeldon in East Berbice (whereas in Trinidad and Jamaica the sugar growing areas are concentrated in one area – Caroni and Westmoreland respectively).

However, apart from the pioneering historical fiction of Edgar Mittelholzer in Children of Kaywana (Neville, 1952), The Harrowing of Hubertus (Secker and Warburg, 1954, also published as Kaywana Stock) and Kaywana Blood (Secker, 1958), it was not until the 1990s that there was another surge of Guyanese historical fiction. There was Beryl Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico (mostly set in Barbados, but with a general pertinence to the commodification of human relations under slavery), Fred D’Aguiar’s historical novel of slavery The Longest Day (Vintage, 1995) and his narrative poem Bloodlines (Vintage, 2003), both set in the USA and David Dabydeen’s The Counting House (1996, republished by Peepal Tree in 2005). In David Dabydeen’s novel, set in the early nineteenth century at the beginning of the indentured period, we are shown both the continuities from the period of slavery and the early confrontation between African Guyanese trying to find a new way forward and the newly arrived Indians who have come to occupy their partially vacated space. (This historical rooting of the early and vexed meeting of Africans and Indians is also given insightful treatment in Judaman Seecoomar’s Contributions Towards the Resolution of Conflict in Guyana in his survey of the historical frameworks for each group’s conflicting insecurities.) Andrew O. Lindsay’s forthcoming novel, Illustrious Exile: Journal of My Sojourn in the West Indies by Robert Burns Esq. imagines what might have happened if the Scottish poet Robert Burns had actually gone through with his decision to take the position of overseer on a sugar estate in Jamaica in 1786. In Lindsay’s novel, Burns then moves to Guyana and his journal gives an incisive picture of slavery in Guyana as seen by man of Burns’s humanity.

LAND OF SIX PEOPLES
In population, Guyana, once famed as the land of six peoples (by the 1970s, most of the Portuguese and Chinese had left), is marked in the Caribbean by its Indian majority and by its growing and increasingly politically significant Amerindian minority. Like the rest of the Caribbean its dominant culture has been Euro-creole with a submerged, contesting African dimension. Like Trinidad, the nature of that Creoleness has been increasingly contested as Indian Guyanese have become more economically and culturally assertive. Whilst, as in Trinidad, the residential patterns of Africans and Indians are marked in the first place by urban/rural inverses, the location of African and Indian villages in neighbouring proximity (unlike the concentration of Indians in the rural South of Trinidad) means that there is little scope for avoidance. Again, whilst the scale of political violence in Jamaica in the 1980s resulted in four or five times the level of fatalities of the Guyanese racial civil war of the early 1960s, nowhere in the Caribbean have the fissures of politics and ethnicity had such toxic consequences. The political culture of Guyana is discussed below, but suffice to note that here that Guyana’s ethnic divisions have become so embedded that real development remains an impossibility as long as half the population feels excluded by the results of a winner-takes-all electoral system. Whilst much Guyanese writing is as ethnocentrically focused as elsewhere in Caribbean, the presence of the ethnic other looms large, though sometimes as a glaring absence. Two books that offer analysis, a theoretical framework and practical solutions to the issues of ethnic conflict are Judaman Seecoomar’s Contributions Towards the Resolution of Conflict in Guyana and his forthcoming Democratic Advance and Conflict Resolution in Post-Colonial Guyana.

By far the most outstanding fictional treatment of this impasse at the heart of Guyana’s social relations is Harischandra Khemraj’s Guyana Prize-winning Cosmic Dance. In this novel he deals not only with the tyranny and political corruption that poisoned Guyana in the 1980s, but with the toxicity within. No Indo-Caribbean novel deals more honestly with the nature and sources of Indian racist feelings towards the African Guyanese, and no novel deals more rigorously with the basis on which real friendships and openness between the races can and must exist. Of all the Guyanese fiction we have published, Cosmic Dance is the novel we would wish our enterprise to be judged by. Khemraj’s self-reflection is rare. Trinidadian Lakshmi Persaud’s unquestionably important novel For the Love of My Name deals powerfully and accurately with the ethnic rage and insecurity that made Indian Guyanese victims of African Guyanese violence at Wismar and in Georgetown in the 1960s and excluded them from political involvement in the 1970s and 1980s, but its one deficiency is that it fails to look inwards and acknowledge that Indian Guyanese were not just victims but also perpetrators of violence. This fact is recognised in a couple of the stories in Rooplall Monar’s High House and Radio which deal with the conflict between the inhabitants of Annandale and Buxton at the height of the 1962-64 conflict.

Peepal Tree’s fiction is indispensable for getting behind the stereotypes concerning the Guyanese Indian community and revealing its actual heterogeneity and its essential Guyaneseness. How Indian indentured immigrants became Guyanese is part of the subject matter of Dale Bisnauth’s The Settlement of Indians in Guyana 1890-1930. One feature of Bisnauth’s book is its emphasis on the role of the lower castes in the making of the unique Indo-Guyanese culture, contrary to the tendency of some sectors of the community to deny such origins. The kind of adjustments made by the emerging middle class to assert their mastery of European culture, their distance from the ‘coolie’ culture of the estates and their connection to a noble vision of India is the subject of Clem Seecharan’s insightful India and the Shaping of the Indo-Guyanese Imagination. Very useful brief overviews of the connections between history, evolving ideas and literature is offered in They Came in Ships: An Anthology of Indo-Guyanese Writing, and is dealt with much more fully in Jeremy Poynting’s much delayed and hopefully eventually forthcoming The Second Shipwreck.

The range of Indo-Guyaneseness can be seen in the contrast between the worlds of Rooplall Monar and that of Sasenarine Persaud, between the Muslim background of Ryhaan Shah’s characters in A Silent Life and the Madrassi world of Moses Nagamootoo’s Hendree’s Cure and Peter Kempadoo’s Guyana Boy. Culturally, the range encompasses the ‘Indo-Saxon’ orientation manifest in the work of earlier writers such as the Ruhomons, Ramcharitar-Lalla and Jacob Chinapen anthologised in They Came in Ships; the ‘bung coolie’ orientation of Backdam People and High House and Radio where there has been a dialogue with the African Guyanese village world; the Corentyne village Hindu world of Cyril Dabydeen’s The Wizard Swami, and the ‘brahmin’ concerns with cultural purity explored in Sasenarine Persaud’s Dear Death and The Ghost of Bellow’s Man.

One of Peepal Tree’s future objectives is to publish fiction that gives a similar sense of the range and diversity of contemporary African Guyanese life, to bring up to date the village world fictionalised in Beryl Gilroy’s Sunlight and Sweet Water and In Praise of Love and Children, and add to the 1970s village world that Denise Harris’s Blanche Steadman runs away from to Georgetown in In Remembrance of Her.

Though many of Guyana’s Chinese population may have emigrated in the 1970s and 1980s, there are vivid fictional representations of their world in a couple of the stories in Meiling Jin’s Song of the Boatwoman and in Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s ‘The Berbice Marriage Match in The Godmother and Other Stories, which explores the tensions between the creolised Chinese whose foreparents had come as indentured labourers and those who regarded themselves as ‘pure’ Chinese who had come to Guyana as merchants and traders.

In comparison to the despair sometimes aroused by the African-Indian impasse, the Amerindian presence has been altogether more leavening feature in Guyanese writing. Although, until recently, a socially and politically marginalized minority, the most impoverished and oppressed section of the population, the Amerindians have become both a politically significant broker group, and culturally iconic. Although Amerindian culture has made transforming adaptions to both colonial and missionary pressures, and to the attractions of ‘modernisation’, the Amerindian presence offers all Guyanese, symbolically at least, a sense of indigenous geographic connection and cultural continuities that predate colonialism. These connections are to be found most expressly in Guyanese imaginative writing. The work of Wilson Harris is clearly most influential in this respect, in The Sleepers of Roraima: A Carib Trilogy (Faber, 1970), Age of the Rainmakers (Faber, 1971) Companions of the Day and Night (Faber, 1975), and there are also Jan Carew’s short stories (see ‘The Coming of Amilivaca’) and Pauline Melville’s more representational fiction, The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997). (So far the only published imaginative literature written by an Amerindian that I know of is David Campbell’s Through Arawak Eyes.) In Andrew Jefferson-Miles Harrisian The Timehrian, two Amerindian mythical figures play a key role in the narrative: the God Amalivacar who rescues the narrator from the trauma of being stricken dumb, and the vision of the timehr, the painted child of Amerindian legend, who prompts the narrator to the need to tell his story and recover the world of those by-passed by history. In Denise Harris’s In Remembrance of Her, Amerindian images play a similarly iconic role.

THE POLITICS OF DESOLATION
The overarching element of the human culture of Guyana has been its political culture. At one point Guyana could boast the most sophisticated and advanced anti-colonial movement in the Caribbean, with a radical intellectual elite that spawned a creative intensity unmatched in the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean. Over the past fifty years Guyana has been blighted by the terrible failure of the country’s political elite to find solutions to its ethnic plurality. No other English-speaking Caribbean country has gone so far down the road to political dictatorship. None has come so near to social disintegration and economic collapse. None has suffered such a dramatic flight of its middle class. The dramatic failure of the hopes of independence connects to the central narrative of Guyanese life: the myth of Eldorado, the narrative that informs so much Guyanese writing.

No writer has more finely transmuted into lasting art the trajectory from rising hope to fallen reality as Martin Carter. Peepal Tree’s dual language (Spanish/English) selection of his poems (Poesias Escogidas) has many of the poems most central to Carter’s opus (for the whole body the Red Thread Selected Poems is the essential purchase), but no admirer of Carter should be without All Are Involved: The Art of Martin Carter, edited by Stewart Brown, a very substantial collection of critical essays, memoirs by contemporaries and contextualising essays that provides both a fitting memorial to Carter and a constant reminder of how vital and enduring a body of work he created.

To encounter the ‘fallen’ Guyana of Carter’s later poetry, several Peepal Tree novels are essential. Jan Shinebourne’s Timepiece catches Guyana in the late 1960s when the beginnings of government interference in the freedom of the press is part of Sandra Yansen’s experience as a young journalist in Georgetown. Narmala Shewcharan’s Tomorrow is Another Day is moving and insightful vision of a society at the point of disintegration and it offers a unique insider’s view (she was a journalist on a government-run newspaper) into the corruption of political ideals. Harischandra Khemraj’s Cosmic Dance gives a dramatic picture of the terrors encountered by Guyanese citizens when they fell on the wrong side of untrammelled state power and Sasenarine Persaud’s Ghost of Bellow’s Man explores the corrupting consequences for Hinduism when it leaders attempt a political compromise with the state. And there is Lakshmi Persaud’s For the Love of My Name, an imaginative attempt to get inside the mind of a Burnham-like figure, to explore the moral equivocations and psychological premises that became the justification for political dictatorship and party paramountcy.

In the work of Guyana’s poets, besides Carter, there are reflections of Guyana’s agony that take us inside the pulse of individual feeling. There is the feeling of estrangement recorded in Sasenarine Persaud’s Demerary Telepathy, the bemused outrage over Guyana’s decline expressed in Monar’s Koker, the lament for lost civilities in Ian McDonald’s Between Silence and Silence, and the identification with courage of opposition symbolised by Walter Rodney in Mahadai Das’s later work, collected in A Leaf in His Ear. It is there obliquely in Rupert Roopnaraine’s Web of October: rereading Martin Carter and in his Suite for Supriya, where the very act of writing about love and the integrity of art is a powerful act of persistence in the face of a state which has been corrupting human values.

And, indeed, something of that original ferment of ideas that found a place in AJ Seymour’s Kyk-over-Al (and in the writing of Carter, Harris, Carew, Milton Williams, Ivan Van Sertima and others who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s) has persisted. It is there in the work of the novelists and poets who kept on writing throughout the 1980s and 1990s and into the new millennium. For example, many of the then young writers around the 1960s magazine Expression have continued to write into the present: Jan Shinebourne (Janice Lowe), Brian Chan, ND Williams, Mark McWatt and others. It is there in art of Stanley Greaves, which is finely documented in Rupert Roopnaraine’s The Primacy of the Eye. It is there in the efforts of Ian McDonald and Vanda Radzik to first revive, then keep Kyk-over-Al going. It is there in the commitment of young writers such as Ruel Johnson to develop a writing which is rooted in a concern for craft.

OVERSEAS
But no survey of Peepal Tree’s publication of Guyanese writing can duck the issue of emigration. It is far briefer to record who stayed than who left: Dale Bisnauth, Martin Carter, Mahadai Das, Ian McDonald, Rooplall Monar, Moses Nagamootoo, Rupert Roopnaraine and Ryhaan Shah. All the other authors listed in this catalogue now live in other parts of the Caribbean, the UK, Canada or the USA. The extent to which exile has changed the nature of writing about Guyana itself is beyond this brief survey. What it has created is a literature of Guyanese life outside Guyana. The work of Cyril Dabydeen has been pioneering in this respect, in his poetry collections Islands Lovelier Than a Vision, Discussing Columbus and Imaginary Origins and in his short stories in Berbice Crossing. In all of these Cyril Dabydeen fully acknowledges his location in Canada, and allows the Canadian landscape to work on his imagination, whilst his work is always shaped by Guyanese memory. The same kind of duality of landscapes is present in Sasenarine Persaud’s second Canadian collection The Wintering Kundalini and both London and Guyana are present in Marc Matthews A Season of Sometimes.

The pressures towards emigration are powerfully explored in Narmala Shewcharan’s Tomorrow Is Another Daywhere Asha thinks that all Guyanese are ‘beggars at the gate’ in the vast queues for visas outside the American Embassy, and in Monar’s story ‘Cookman’ in High House and Radio looks at the consequences for village life as some of its most enterprising inhabitants begin to leave. Throughout the stories and fiction of ND Williams, whether set in Guyana or elsewhere in the Caribbean (The Crying of Rainbirds, The Silence of Islands and Julie Mango) characters are always on the point of leaving, always suffocated by their feeling of the narrowness of Caribbean life, though often full of regret after they have left.

The transforming experience of migration is there in Beryl Gilroy’s In Praise of Love and Children (the UK in the 1950s) and in David Dabydeen’s The Intended (the UK in the 1970s), in several stories in Meiling Jin’s Song of the Boatwoman and in Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s The Godmother and Other Stories. Here several stories explore the tensions between Guyanese friends who stayed and who left and the gradual transformation of sensibility between being a Guyanese in exile and being someone who is both rooted in the UK and in Guyanese memory. The later mass emigration to North America is explored in ND Williams’s novella, ‘What Happening There, Prash’ (in Prash and Ras) where the struggle to remake the personality in the American mould is achieved far more easily by Prash’s wife than by Prash himself.

There are also the novels of established settlement, often with the motif of return, whether in the mind or actuality. This is the theme of Beryl Gilroy’s Gather the Faces where Marvella Payne, having grown up in London, meets a Guyanese visiting London, and returns to Guyana as his wife. It is there in David Dabydeen’s Disappearance which explores the attempt, from a Guyanese perspective, to come to terms with Englishness and the aftermath of empire, and it is there in ‘London and New York’ in Jan Shinebourne’s Godmother and Other Stories, where the story enacts the arrival at a point of peace, where the writer feels able to celebrate the coming together of previously divided Guyanese and British selves.

The Guyanese diaspora is a reality. The fact that it has taken so many important writers away from reflecting and recording Guyana’s present realities is to be regretted, but new writers are emerging, and those who have left and continue to write offer Guyanese at home an important sense of an essential Guyaneseness that persists across time and place. There is, as this brief overview indicates, a growing and substantial body of Guyanese imaginative writing, with a tradition of concerns, themes and iconic motifs that the writing emerging in the twenty-first century can build on, reject, subvert. One of the elements of Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences is precisely this: an affectionate and sometimes ironic play with these traditions, from the Harrisian poetic of the interior to the Guyanese bakoo tale. It indicates that we should see the relationship between ‘home’ and diaspora not as a division, but as the location for dialogue.

(Courtesy of http://www.peepaltreepress.com)

2005-10-04T18:09:00.000-07:00

So That We Build

In a great silence I hear the approaching rain:
There is a sound of conflict in the sky.
The frightened lizard darts behind a stone.
First is the wind, now is the wild assault.

I wish this world would sink and drown again,
So that we build another Noah's ark
And send another little dove to find
what we have lost in floods of misery.

(Martin Carter in Conversations, 1961)

2005-10-04T18:04:00.000-07:00

University of Hunger

is the university of hunger the wide waste.
is the pilgrimage of man the wide march.
The print of hunger wanders in the land.
The green tree bends above the long forgotten.
The plains of life rise up and fall in spasms.
The huts of men are fused in misery.

They come treading in the hoofmarks of the mule
passing the ancient bridge
the grave of pride
the sudden flight
the terror and the time.

They come from the distant village of the flood
passing from middle air to middle earth
in the common hours of nakedness.

Twin bars of hunger mark their metal brows
twin seasons mock them
parching drought and flood.

is the dark ones
the half sunken in the land.
is they who had no voice in the emptiness
in the unbelievable
in the shadowless.

They come treading on the mud floor of the year
mingling with dark heavy waters
and the sea sound of the eyeless flitting bat.
O long is the march of men and long is the life
and wide is the span.

is the air dust and the long distance of memory
is the hour of rain when sleepless toads are silent
is broken chimneys smokeless in the wind
is brown trash huts and jagged mounds of iron

The come in long lines toward the broad city
is the golden moon like a big coin in the sky
is the floor of bone beneath the floor of flesh
is the beak of sickness breaking on the stone
O long is the march of men, and long is the life
and wide is the span
O cold is the cruel wind blowing.
O cold is the hoe in the ground.

They come like sea birds
flapping in the wake of a boat
is the torture of sunset in purple bandages
is the powder of the fire spread like dust in the twilight
is the water melodies of white foam on wrinkled sand.

The long streets of night move up and down
baring the thighs of a woman.
and the cavern of generation.
The beating drum returns and dies away.
The bearded men fall down and go to sleep.
The cocks of dawn stand up and crow like bugles.

is they who rose early in the morning
watching the moon die in the dawn.
is they who heard the shell blow and the iron clang.
is they who had no voice in the emptiness
in the unbelievable
in the shadowless.
O long is the march of men and long is the life
and wide is the span.

(Martin Carter in Poems of Resistance,1954)

2005-10-04T18:00:00.000-07:00

They say I am...

They say I am a poet write for them:
Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I solemnly nod.
I do not want to look them in the eye
Let they should squeal and scamper far away.

A poet cannot write for those who ask
hardly himself even, except he lies;
Poems are written either for the dying
or the unborn, no matter what we say.

That does not mean his audience lies remote
inside a womb or some cold bed of agony.
It only means that we who want true poems
must be born again, and die to do so.

(Martin Carter in Conversations, 1961)

2005-10-04T16:54:00.000-07:00

For Mereya:

Listening to the Land

That night I left you on the bridge
I bent down
kneeling on my knee
and pressed my ear to listen to the land

I bent down
listening to the land
but all I heard was tongueless whispering

On my right hand was the sea behind the wall
The sea that had no business in the forest
and I bent down
listening to the land
and all I heard was tongueless whispering
as if some buried slave wanted to speak again

(Martin Carter in The Hill of Fire Glows Red, 1951)

2005-10-04T16:12:00.000-07:00

I Come From the Nigger Yard

I come from the nigger yard of yesterday
leaping from the oppressors' hate
and the scorn of myself;
from the agony of the dark hut in the shadow
and the hurt of things;
from the long days of cruelty and the long nights of pain
down to the wide streets of to-morrow, of the next day
leaping I come, who cannot see will hear.

In the nigger yard I was naked like the new born
naked like a stone or a star.
It was a cradle of blind days rocking in time
torn like the skin from the back of a slave.
It was an aching floor on which I crept
on my hands and my knees
searching the dust for the trace of a root
or the mark of a leaf or the shape of a flower.

It was me always walking with bare feet
meeting strange faces like those in dreams or fever
when the whole world turns upside down
and no one knows which is the sky or the land
which heart is among the torn or the wounded
which face is his among the strange and the terrible
walking about, groaning between the wind.

And there was always sad music somewhere in the land
like a bugle and a drum between the houses
voices of women singing far away
pauses of silence, then a flood fo sound.
But these were things like ghosts or spirits of wind.
It was only a big world spinning outside
and men, born in agony, torn in torture, twisted and broken like a leaf,
and the uncomfortable morning, the beds of hunger stained and sordid
like the world, big and cruel, spinning outside.

Sitting sometimes in the twillight near the forest
where all the light is gone and every bird
I notice a tiny star neighbouring a leaf
a little drop of light a piece of glass
straining over heaven tiny bright
like a spark seed in the destiny of gloom.
O it was the heart like this tiny star near to the sorrows
straining against the whole world and the long twilight
spark of man's dream conquering the night
moving in darkness and fierce
till leaves of sunset change from green to blue
and shadows grow like giants everywhere.

So I was born again stubborn and fierce
screaming in a slum.
It was a city and a coffin space for home
a river running, prisons and hospitals
men drunk and dying, judges full of scorn
priets and parsons fooling gods with words
and me, like dog tangled in rags
spotted with sores powdered with dust
screaming with hunger, angry with life and men.

It was a child born from a mother full of her blood
weaving her features bleeding her life in clots.
It was pain lasting from hours to months and to years
weaving a pattern telling a tale leaving a mark
on the face and the brow
Until there came the iron days cast in a foundry
Where men make hammers things that cannot break
and anvils heavy hard and cold like ice.

And so again I become one of the ten thousands
one of the uncountable miseries owning the land.
When the moon rose up only the whores could dance
the brazen jazz of music throbbed and groaned
filling the night air full of rhythmic questions.
It was the husk and the seed challenging fire
birth and the grave challenging life.

Until to-day in the middle of the tumult
when the land changes and the world's all convulsed
when different voices join to say the same
and different hearts beat out in unison
where the aching floor of where I live
the shifting earth is twisting into shape
I take again my nigger life, my scorn
and fling it in the face of those who hate me.
It is me the nigger boy turning to manhood
linking my fingers, welding my flesh to freedom.

I come from the nigger yard of yesterday
leaping from the oppessors' hate
and the scorn of myself
I come to the world with scars upon my soul
wounds on my body, fury in my hands
I turn to the histories of men and the lives of peoples.
I examine the shower of sparks the wealth of the dreams.
I am pleased with the glories and sad with the sorrows
rich with the riches, poor with the loss.
From the nigger yard of yesterday I come with my burden.
To the world of to-morrow I turn with my strength.

(Martin Carter, Poem of Resistance 1954)

2005-10-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

Carter, Martin Wylde (1927-1997)

Poet, Activist, Essayist.
Active 1947-1997 in Guyana, Caribbean, South America

Martin Wylde Carter has long been regarded in the Caribbean as an important political poet and activist whose works painstakingly trace the volatile transition from colonialism to independence in Guyana. Imprisoned during the early 1950s by the British colonial authorities for his involvement in allegedly subversive activity by Guyana’s first democratically elected government, Carter wrote many poems that were inspired by his role in the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and the nationalist anti-colonial movement. Although three volumes of Carter’s verse - The Hill of Fire Glows Red (1951), The Hidden Man (1952), and The Kind Eagle (1952) - were all published locally, he is best known for Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (1954), which was published by a socialist press in London. “University of Hunger”, “This is the Dark Time My Love”, “I Come from the Nigger Yard”, and “On the Fourth Night of a Hunger Strike” are considered to be central works in the canon of socialist and Caribbean literature. In contrast with the directness and optimistic stance of his earlier, more overtly political lyrics, Carter’s later work is more stylistically complex, cryptic, and inaccessible to readers. Poems of Succession (1977) and Poems of Affinity (1980) express world-weariness and disillusionment at the nation’s growing racial tensions and rampant political corruption. With the publication of Selected Poems (1989, with a revised edition in 1997), a growing number of readers outside of the Caribbean will come to recognize Carter’s achievement, and critics will come to see that his artistry and range as a poet have been underestimated. Carter’s work is not limited to political themes. He also delves deeply into the exigencies of life in Guyana during a formative period in that nation’s history. Despite, or perhaps because of the intensity of his social commitments, Carter’s poetry is memorable for its artful treatment of family life, love, spirituality, consciousness, and the shaping forces of nature.

Carter was born on June 7th, 1927, in Georgetown, British Guiana. His parents were both of mixed race (or “coloured”, as they are called in the region), and therefore had a comparatively high status within the colonial polity. Carter’s father, Victor Emmanuel, was a civil servant, and both he and Carter’s mother, Violet Eugene Wylde, loved books and made sure that their son had ready access to literature, the Bible, and the local library. Carter was educated at Queen’s College, a prestigious boy’s school, graduating in 1944, after which he also secured a job in the civil service - first at the Post office, then as secretary to the Superintendent of Prisons. Dissatisfied by the limited opportunities of government bureaucracy, Carter soon turned his attention to poetry and politics. Growing up as part of the mixed race middle-class in a British Caribbean colony, Carter would not have been expected to identify so strongly with the struggles of working class people. But the poems he wrote during the early 1950s are marked by a sense of outrage against the injustices of colonial rule. In his 1951 volume, The Hill of Fire Glows Red, Carter closely observes ethnic and class divisions, and calls for liberation through unity and revolutionary action; and in The Hidden Man, published the following year, he cultivates a poetics of social realism, meticulously documenting the concrete details of oppression.

Despite the fact that many of Carter’s early poems express strong political views, it is important to note how he consistently works within a subtle but essential dialectic, forging a voice that simultaneously private and public. There are quietly meditative lyrics, such as “Listening to the Land” from The Hill of Fire Glows Red, which summons up an unspoken history of slavery - “tongueless whispering / as if some buried slave wanted to speak again” - inscribed in the vast continental landscape. In The Kind Eagle, another volume published during this period, Carter’s protest idiom also moves dialectically, mediating between elements that are universal or transnational and those that are particular to his own locality. Like Whitman, Carter seeks to inspire and exhort the people to action by using figures of speech such as apostrophe, anaphora, and other syntactical patterns of repetition. But in “The Kind Eagle”, the title poem of the collection, Carter effectively mediates between a public mode of Whitmanian declamation and a far more privately local Creole cadence and syntax, drawing on images (such as the river collapsing to an estuary) that are distinctly Guyanese.

I dance on the wall of prison!
It is not easy to be free and bold!
It is not easy to be poised and bound!
It is not easy to endure the spike!
So river flood, drown not my pillar feet!
So river flood, collapse to estuary!
Only the heart’s life, the kind eagle, soars
and wheels in flight.

Too often, critics have emphasized Carter’s reference to political contexts, as well as the simplicity and accessibility of his style. As a result, his skills as a craftsman have been relatively neglected. In the brief lyric “Till I Collect”, from Poems of Resistance from British Guiana, we find polished blank verse stanzas that cohere through internal, perfect and imperfect rhyme. Carter’s speaker self-reflexively figures his lyric as a craft - with a “mast of love” and a “rudder tempered out of anguish” - sailing over an ocean illuminated by blood-red moonlight. The dwindling length of each successive stanza dramatizes the poet-speaker’s self-diminishing hesitancy and doubt, and the elliptical, open form of the concluding stanza suggests that the poet writes for a better, future society whose ideals have yet to be realized.

Over the shining mud the moon is blood
falling on ocean at the fence of lights.
My mast of love will sail and come to port
leaving a trail beneath the world, a track
cut by my rudder tempered out of anguish.

The fisherman will set his tray of hooks
And ease them one by one into the flood.
His net of twine will strain the liquid billow
And take the silver fishes from the deep.

But my own hand I dare not plunge too far
lest only sand and shells I bring to air
lest only bones I resurrect to light.

Over the shining mud the moon is blood
falling on ocean at the fence of lights -
My course I set, I give my sail the wind
to navigate the islands of the stars
till I collect my scattered skeleton
till I collect…

As a prominent figure in the PPP, and member of the editorial board for their publication, Thunder, Carter’s hopeful sense of his party’s prospects did not seriously wane until a drastic “split” occurred in February 1955, when L.F.S. Burnham, an Afro-Guyanese leader and chairman in the party, and several others, left the party which was then under the leadership of an Indian, Cheddi Jagan. Burnham’s departure portended the growing racial tensions between people of African and Indian descent, and sectional conflicts within the polity as a whole. Eventually, Carter fell out of favor with Jagan, and subsequently endured a long period of political disillusionment. Unlike many other Guyanese intellectuals of his era, Carter did not migrate to the metropole; he chose instead to remain active in local politics, serving briefly as Minister of Information for the PNC government under Burnham in the late 1960s. But he suddenly resigned his post in 1969, when he saw that the racial and ethnic strife in the region was worsening. Despite his continued commitment to national unity and the ideal of racial reconciliation in Guyana, he for the most part withdrew from formal politics. After leaving public life, he continued to write and speak publicly on the dangers posed to society, and especially to young people, by violence and corruption.

Carter’s shift away from poetics of political commitment meant that this phase of his career has been neglected. Taken together, the lyrics in Poems of Succession offer a sustained, skeptical inquiry into the limits of language. This same skepticism informs Carter’s style, as his taut paradoxes and difficult syntax question the efficacy of public speech, moving the mind ever forward, never allowing the reader to rest on easy rhetorical formulae. In one of his best known lyrics written during this period, Carter’s disappointment with public life are distilled into three-stress, memorably aphoristic lines:

In the premises of the tongue
dwells the anarchy of the ear;
In the chaos of the vision
resolution of the purpose.

And would should it out differently
if it could be sounded plain;
But a mouth is always muzzled
by the food it eats to live.
(“A Mouth is Always Muzzled”)

Like Poems of Succession, Poems of Affinity also exhibits paradoxical, and often densely chiastic verbal structures that delineate the depth and difficulty of Carter’s response to political events. Consider, for example, his evocation of horror at the murder of a Roman Catholic priest in ‘Bastille Day - Georgetown”: “Not wanting to deny, I/believed it. Not wanting/to believe it, I denied/our Bastille day.” But most poems in this volume chart the endless flux of an inner life encountering despair, and seeking significance in the smallest details of nature and local culture. Here, as in his earlier work, Carter demonstrates that for the poet, “being” entails craft - that is, the hard earned technique of arranging the often chaotic and bewildering reciprocal entailments of private and public; meditation and declamation; mind and world:

Being, always to arrange
myself in the world, and the world
in myself, I try to do both. How
both are done is difficult.

Carter died in December 1997, and was buried at the Place of Heroes, which had previously been reserved for Heads of State. For his artistry, wisdom, and commitment to the future of Guyana and the region as a whole, we have good reason to be thankful.

Anita Patterson, Boston University
First published 21 October 2004

(Courtesy of http://www.litencyc.com/)

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Saturday, March 18, 2006

Ideas, Images and Inspiration

Biography of Martin Carter Funded by the British Academy

2006 Commonwealth essay competition

The Early Versifiers in Guyanese Literature

Carter, Martin Wylde (1927-1997)

Biography of Martin Carter
Funded by the British Academy