This week we present an edited version of the lecture presented by Dr Gemma Robinson of the University of Newcastle at the Hotel Tower, on Tuesday December 7, 2004, in the Martin Carter Memorial Lecture series co-ordinated and introduced by David de Caires, Editor-in-Chief of Stabroek News. Dr Robinson is researching extensively on the life and work of Guyanese poet Martin Carter.
Carter was present at the demonstration when Fr Darke was murdered, and two of his three draft manuscripts of Bastille Day - Georgetown are dated, showing that he began to write the poem on the day of the murder:
OUR DAY OBSCENE ANTS
I denied it. Not wanting
to believe it. On this
Bastille day, this day
of the fourteenth of July
I woke up wanting to deny
it. But I saw; with my own
eyes, the faces of the fierce
killers. Men, if I may call them
so, with long sticks, sharp
knives, and impulses worse
than the greed of hungry
infants, which I have seen.
Not human infants I mean.
I mean the progeny rather
of ants who steal the eggs
in the obscenity of theft, of
other obscene ants.
Martin Carter
July 14, 1979
OUR BASTILLE DAY
For Walter, Rupert,
Not wanting to deny, I
Believed it. Not wanting
To believe it. I denied. On
On Bastille day, this day
Of July, I saw with my own
Eyes, the fierce barbarians killers, those:
Of criminal want. I saw
a creature, something, once,
I saw, the man a man of death,
The sticks of a hungry lepers
who wants to make hunger
the leprosy of their his own want.
On Bastille today day is today.
We do not want your gates.
You will perish. I say so.
Martin Carter 14.7.79
'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.
The third draft differs from the published poem in Poems of Affinity only in the absence of the stanzaic break after "of rice is their foul reward." Denial and belief are present at the opening of all the drafts, as is the emphasis on the date, but by the third draft Carter has worked out the knotted relationship between believing and denying the collectively owned "Bastille day."
In the first draft Carter attempts to create some distance between himself and the event. His statement, "I woke up wanting to deny it," shows him either projecting into the future as he writes, or indicating that he woke from his night's sleep as if from a nightmare in order to write denial. Carter's shock and disgust is palpable in the first draft; it is also the most documentary of the three: "But I saw; with my own/eyes, the faces of the fierce killers." The poem is testimony and Carter is a witness, writing out his memory so as not to forget the details of the crime.
In the second draft Carter is thinking about the implications of the poem and about the conclusions he might draw. Although he thinks better of a dedication to Walter Rodney and Rupert Roopnaraine, the focus of the poem is still unresolved. Carter shifts between providing a witness statement - "I saw/a creature, something, once" - and analysing the repercussions of what he saw that day. However, the analysis was obviously proving difficult: in the first draft he experiments with the image of "obscene ants," but the repetition of "I mean" suggests that Carter was struggling and failing to express himself. The second draft contains a central section on death and leprosy, and for the first time Carter experiments with discussing the gang violence of 14 July in terms of a singular "man of death." He also returns to the ramifications of the date: "On Bastille today day is today./We do not want your gates./You will perish. I say so." This is the most interesting departure from the published poem, for Carter, in his anger, writes in the fateful voice of justice and fury. Carter is at his most desperately performative, almost asserting that the poem will be the act of justice, rather than any storming of the Bastille.
Yet the third draft is the most successful; Carter retains the perspective of poet as witness, both magnifying and lessening the actions of the murderers. The "fierce/criminal" becomes almost archetypal, anonymous and singular (going against the information that Carter would have had about the murder), but Carter also asserts "These are/not men of death." There is nothing apocalyptic about Fr Darke's murder, nor revolutionary; if it represents anything it is the arbitrary "vileness" of criminals for whom "rice is their foul reward." The blank space after "nativity" proposes a gloss: there may be no ultimate origin of "our vileness." While the emphasis on perishing in the second draft supports a retributive reading of the poem, the fact that such a definitive statement ("You will perish") is missing from the published poem (and what seems to be the final draft of the poem) should instead encourage us to accept the irresolvability, even the inexhaustibility, of Carter's 'Bastille Day.' And this inexhaustibility, encourages us back to Carter's early work. In You Involved, the poem that concludes Poems of Resistance, Carter writes:
This I have learnt:
to-day a speck
to-morrow a hero
hero or monster
you are consumed!
Like a jig
shakes the loom.
Like a web is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!
Riddling informed Carter's early and later work. You Are Involved and Bastille Day - Georgetown share an insistence on understanding, an acceptance of involvement, and both question the parameters of human nature (hero or monster; citizen or criminal). Most strikingly, each poem concludes with an inexhaustible riddle, asking us to consider the implications of the phrases "we shall fight" and "all are consumed." Are these statements positive or negative? Are we consumed like heros or monsters? "we shall fight" can be a determined call-to-arms - the monosyllables beating out the collective obligation to engage with and overcome their shame. An alternative reading, however, draws on the inconclusiveness of the collective action that follows "our Bastille day." "We shall fight" may share the ironic obligation Carter describes in After One Year - "Men murder men, as men must murder men" - and thus "fight" may not refer to collective opposition to the vileness of "Bastille day," but to a portentous prediction of perpetual internecine conflict.
But we cannot end here. The last point I would like to make shows us how Carter viewed the value of poetry. In 1992 Carter was invited on a book tour to England with Wilson Harris, Grace Nichols and Fred D'Aguiar. On the radio they discussed their writing. After Nichols read Blackout a poem written on a return visit to Guyana in 1990, D'Aguiar commented: "If it wasn't for the articulacy of the writing, it would be a picture that is utterly depressing." Carter incisively added:
"Of course. It [poem] has to liberate her from precisely what she's saying, so that she knows it better for having written it and therefore she has acquired some psychological distance from the raw, empirical fact. In doing so, of course, there are two gains, I think. One is for Grace as a person, and also for people who will read it and who would come to realise that it is possible to know it and not be defeated by it. So there is a possibility of triumph through a work of art; that art should not only be communication - the word that everybody talks about - but also be a triumph of the spirit."
Always in his poetry, Carter invites us to join him in this liberation and to share in this triumph of the spirit.