Como este, Senor Carter?
The second anniversary of the death of Martin Carter
An appreciation

By Moses Nagamootoo
Guyana Chronicle
December 13, 1999

IAN McDonald has put many of us to shame by his reminder in yesterday's `Stabroek' that two years would pass today since the death of Martin Carter, our greatest poet.

His overwhelming, sincere emotions have as well ruined my Sunday as I read his tribute. I was listening to an enchanting pan version of `Kuch kuch hota hai' playing softly in the background. Again, as at the time of his death, "something happened". Martin Carter's image was traversing my mind, spinning like his words, weaving new meaning, asking new questions.

I remember his admonition about our supposed political mortality: "Life is the question that asks what is the way to die."

For us who knew him, we could be selfish. We could trap Martin within our memories. We could remember him in any convenient way that suits our particular mood. But two stories that he shared with me captured his humility and formed an oxymoron of his vision of life and death.

After he heard about the death by drowning of a Jamaican painter, whose name he gave as Parbhu, Martin had sauntered off alone to the seawalls. He sat there in the rain, perhaps acquiring the wisdom that for many of us, the horizon at the edge of the sea is the end of the world. He was to write a poem which I never read. Bill Carr was to interpret that poem, much to the amusement of Martin, that Prabhu didn't drown; he simply fell over the edge of the world in sweet ecstasy.

Ian reminded us that, far from it, Martin was not without humour. Martin recounted how he was once sought after while he was Minister of Information by a group of "middle-class women" during a Carifesta celebration. He, George Lamming and others were having a drink, and the girls wanted to meet the "famous Caribbean intellectuals".

Martin was practical; he had wanted to save the waiters extra work so, glass in one hand, he grabbed the bottle of rum in the other. The "intellectuals" were in the midst of a gaff when a female voice exclaimed, "Here they are," and she added, "meet our Minister."

Martin stretched out his hand for the customary polite handshake. It was the hand that grasped the rum bottle. The bottle slid innocently to the floor, and then sent the golden brew like a broken fountain all about the room.

"Nice to meet you ma'am," Martin said calmly.

I have always remembered that story, and it reinforced Martin's down-to-earthness; the content of a proletarian character in a petty-bourgeois intellectual, who was unspoilt by office or fame. He was always himself, and let his circumstances and perhaps despair as well fall to his feet like so many broken bottles.

When Martin died the street disturbances prevented many of us from attending his funeral. That pained me, even to this day, and I wonder whether I would ever come to forgive those who had organised the desecration of his memorial.

A funeral of a loved one always gives a sense of closure. Last year when I spoke at an event to celebrate the life of Martin, I had not found closure and I could not find words to bid him farewell. We should never be able to find words to express our loss at the death of a poet.

At about the time of Martin's birth in 1927, A.G. Gornfield wrote a booklet, "The Torment of Words" in which he said: "There was no torment in the world more exquisite than the torment of words."

This should be our comfort - the torment of trying to make words, like parents sweat in love to make a new life, that remember Martin Carter.

As a poet, he was a master of form; but he also shared "the torment of words" - the content of ideas, purpose and action. But when words that objectively mirrored these were distorted or suppressed, it constituted for him "anesthesia of the intellect."

Way back in 1955 he had lamented the threat to the intellectual soul when he said: "Life in a country as materialistic and Philistine as British Guiana soon blunts the edge of the mind."

Ten years later, in 1965, he returned to this concern, when he was quoted as saying: "The most fanatical pre-occupation with hollow issues, the gossip mongering which passes for conversation, and the inevitable political hysteria, leave little time for the serious examination of ideas."

Once during the mid-1970s, while we were talking current political issues, he became pensive and contemplative; then dead serious. He stared blankly beyond the thick lenses of his spectacles (which I thought were more to suppress his noble nose than to facilitate his eyes), and pronounced definitively about public debate. The issue was unity, and he thought it was going nowhere, and what he had seen in the media on the subject resembled "mutterings from mud-holes beneath the trench."

Martin was interested in serious talking. As a poet who had clenched his fist and sung his song of freedom, he had long defined the content of unity as togetherness. In 1955, he wrote: "There is no separate salvation for Indians in Guyana; no separate salvations for Africans.."

At the heart of his quest for discussion of ideas was the need for society to see the broader picture of life, a vision of themselves beyond themselves.

It might be the reason why in the 1950's he wrote: "The people of the city are like creature in a cage...pressed down into the mud under the weight of a hopeless sky, the people live like ants in an ants nest, biting at each other because there is nothing else for them to bite at."

I may be wrong but I feel that Carter's disappointment with public figures was what he had perceived to be lack of introspection, the absence of vision, and commitment that comes from the depths of honesty. His poems of resistance were as political as they were a negation of mediocrity and intellectual inertia.

I read an excerpt of an interview in which Martin was asked, "When did you become a poet?"

His answer was, "One does not become a poet; one finds oneself a poet..." What he could have been saying was that the best is within us. We need to search and find it!

I had asked him a similar question in a Quamina Street shop. It was dumb question, but I wanted to ask it anyhow: "How did you become a poet?"

He said after a long pause, as if he was deciding whether it was an answerable question.

"When you are in jail you can't go forward. You soon recognise the futility of it. So you walk back," he said without answering, then paused again. The lengthy pause, and several gulps.

He thought I had understood but I didn't. He then indulged me in his characteristic generosity of spirit, the charity of his attention that he had always given to me. He had felt that I wanted to know, or that I needed to know. He explained.

"While I was in prison, as I stepped back, I stepped into myself. And in stepping into myself I discovered a poet."

Maxim Gorky was writing someone named Camille Flammarion, but I wish to borrow and adapt his words:

"Somewhere in the infinity of the Milky Way a sun has become extinct and the planets about it are plunged into eternal night; that, however, is something that will not move me at all, but the death of Martin Carter, a man of superb imagination, gave me deep sorrow."

Gorky also advised: "The history of human labour and creativity is far more interesting and significant than the history of man; a man dies before reaching the age of one hundred, whilst his works live through the centuries."

I suppose the works and ways of Martin will be described in volumes, the first of which was planned for this month.

I understand that it will now be launched next month, and these essays and appreciation of Martin Carter will take him beyond his time, into the 21st century.

Already, Martin has been transposed beyond his native language. I have had a glimpse of his poems in Spanish, and on the occasion of the second year of his departure, I salute you dear Senor Carter.

"Como este usted? Todos bien?"

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