An Interview with Martin Carter
Stabroek News
December 13, 2006
Martin Carter died nine years ago today. Every year Stabroek News commemorates this anniversary
This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted by Gemma Robinson with the late Martin Carter (1927-1997), recorded at his home in Queenstown, Georgetown on 15 December 1995.
GR: Even though there has been a great exodus of Caribbean writers, you have remained in Guyana.
MC: Yes. I have been abroad frequently, but I stayed in Guyana deliberately. I felt that to be a writer, especially a poet I should. Writing covers a broad scope of things, and poetry is very difficult in the sense that one cannot really say when somebody is going to make poetry or not. I have problems and I believe that this is something other people have found too - that it comes and goes.
GR: Are you working on anything now?
MC: No. I can't. I can't write. I couldn't make a fist. I can write my name, but not poems.1
GR: Is that because you found that when you were writing poetry it was a crafting process?
MC: Yes decidedly. You can write a poem and the middle of it may come before or even after you've written it. As I said it is a very difficult process and writing poetry is not something you can do all the time. It is also a question of articulation. For a person who has been speaking all his life it's a difficult task indeed. And that is why I said at the beginning that you know it is very difficult to articulate even. Nonetheless, all I can do is just speak like that, like this, but if I try to do anything more it becomes very difficult.
GR: I would have thought that it is probably your frustration more than a lack in articulation.
MC: I agree absolutely - frustration - because it is a brutal thing to happen when you cannot speak, you know. Therefore, it answers one question very quickly - that not being able to speak is a serious matter. And I don't think that people really understand what it really means because for a person who normally speaks, speaks you know easily, it's a terrible thing when you're wanting to say something, and yet it is not coming out, you know. [. . .]
GR: Do you find that now you can look back and map your career out? Critics have tried to section your life off into certain phases of poetry, and I was wondering how you would respond to that?
MC: That's a good question. It has been said before, but I have an impression that one cannot really say what really happens. It takes a long time, people will take a long time to find out what the poet is really saying. In other words you may write a poem:
Over the shining mud the moon is blood
falling on ocean at the fence of lights.
['Till I Collect']
That is a serious matter because you have to follow every step of what the poet is saying. Another poem may be easy to read superficially, but not necessarily profoundly. And I think that that is the whole tradition in poetry, that is to say, that it could be read superficially or profoundly. Depends on who is reading it.
GR: I was reading 'The Poems Man'. I got the impression that the poetic persona acts as a reluctant spokesperson for the country. I was wondering how you feel about that because you have been given almost the 'poet laureate' position in Guyana. Do you feel a pressure with that, or an honour to have that, or what?
MC: The whole history of the word 'poet laureate' is a serious history: Ben Jonson, you know, how many years ago? When it was invented it was correct, that is in the seventeenth century. It don't work anymore in the twentieth century and it's a misnomer, to make it plain, it's a misnomer.
GR: Do you think that a poet can play the role of spokesperson for a country?
MC: [pause] In a sense only. In the sense that he articulates to some extent the ideas and the feelings that motivate people, but to put it more than that would beg the question. If, for instance, someone said something this week, but next week he may say something totally different or at least contradictory, you know, and therefore you have to look at it over a long period. Look at what he's saying over a long period.
GR: In that sense, I was wondering how do you approach the process of making a collection of poems. Are you looking for something homogenous?
MC: I am of the belief that poems happen, if that's the word for it, it just happens, you can't really tell. Poems happen, that is the whole story of that. You can't really tell - you can't do much more than say that because I think it was Mallarmé who said that poems are written with words not with ideas, and in a sense he's right, he's correct.
GR: So did you feel that there was an arbitrary cut off point in, say, collecting Poems of Resistance or Poems of Succession? Or did you feel that you'd come to the end and now they were ready to be published?
MC: Oh I see. I remember a long time ago I had written a set of five poems, no four poems. When I came to collect them I found a poem I had written much longer in time before I had written the other four. What I had really done was to include a poem which would not look in sequence, but it was in sequence because for some reason or other it was written before the rest, couple of years before. I don't know what the word is but there's a word for it - you do something which is in anticipation of doing something else. I think that that happens all the time, and could be analysed but I don't, I couldn't necessarily analyse it in more words. What is going on, of course, all the time and people try to make up that the word is not a proper word to use, but the word is 'inspiration'. You could say what you like, the fact remains that the word is 'inspiration'. [. . .]
GR: I don't know if you remember Derek Walcott's poem 'Guyana' in The Gulf. At one point he writes about the surveyor 'screwing a continent to his eye'. I was wondering how much geography played a part in your poetry.
MC: The important point is that [pause]. You see the fact is that Guyana is a strip of land on the coast. I mean there's a lot of talk about this and that, but it's really a strip of land on the coast, and the rainforest inside. The forest is to a large extent a myth, people mythologise about what the forest is from not really coming into contact with it. Many people who talk about the forest don't know anything about the forest, they're just reading some book or mythologising something. Like [W. H. Hudson's] Green Mansions. In reality there is no substitute for having lived the life out here. I mean one can try to understand it as much as one can. I think Walt Whitman somewhere said, 'I was the man, I was there, I suffered' something like that, I can't remember. But he said that somewhere, and I agree with that. I think: 'I was the man, I suffered, I was there'.2
GR: Does the difficulty then lie in articulating it?
MC: Precisely. I mean for instance this country has many aspects of it which are very unique in a sense. Even in the normal sense of the word 'the Caribbean' this is a strange Caribbean country, in the sense that the racial problem - which I anticipate that you have already come into contact with - is a serious problem. In the origins it was black/white and then you had the Indians coming out. [. . .]
GR: Do you feel that the problem has been one of cohesion?
MC: Yes, cohesion, that's right, that's what it is. But it is a very old problem, serious problem what we're facing here. In a sense, you know, we talk, but we have the whole 'Western' thing, the whole idea of the 'Western values', and that sort of thing always comes into it you know. And everybody trying to make [pause]. This is not a mixed country. This is not a mixed country. People don't come from India who are here, people come from here. And this is the real point about this country.
GR: I don't suppose that I could talk to you without asking you about politics. There is a debate about which aspect of your poetry should be given primacy. Where would you enter into the debate? Do you see yourself as a political poet?
MC: No, that's nonsense. Usually when people do that they have an axe to grind, some axe to grind, and what you have to do is say no. I mean, I don't pay any attention to it frankly.
GR: I was reading an interview with Jan Carew and he was talking about the 1950s, and his experiences. He spoke of it as a very special, magical time, a time in which he felt that poetry played a very important part, and that the people were almost speaking poetry to each other. Do you share that same sense of the magical?
MC: In a sense, yes. That was a great period in this country's history because something really happened, and it hasn't happened again. Magical in a sense, yes. In the sense that people really believed that something was going to happen here that had not happened anywhere ha'penny. And that makes a point too that about the kind of publication, you know, British, in a sense very much British. Even Americans, comparatively, were not looked upon as exactly the same thing as British. Only nowadays that it is quite different, but in the old days education was British.
GR: So when Kyk-Over-Al came out did you feel that it was filling a very important gap within the country?
MC: Well it was in those days because when Seymour started it - fifty years ago.
When Seymour started it he was forty-odd I think. It was a very rare occasion to have books like that you know. Of course many of the people who read books in those days were English, British educated or better British entrants. And we cannot avoid the impact the British had on this country, I mean it's tremendous.
GR: Your own poems were first published in pamphlet form. Pamphlets can have an immediacy, they can be passed around, and can have a political urgency. I was wondering, did you feel that that was a good way of producing and presenting your poems?
MC: I think necessity - that's all you have in mind, in my mind at the time - necessity. You'd do anything to produce something, and only one thing mattered to us really in those days was necessity. For instance, Seymour had a Miniature Poets Series. Everything was ad hoc so to speak. Nothing was cumulative you know.
GR: You've never been a self-publicist. For a poet of your stature you're not published enough in my opinion.
MC: Oh, that don't matter really to me. I feel, I mean this is my honest belief, that a poet is a poet, and that nothing else matters.
GR: Is that something you've felt in later...
MC: All the time.
1 In 1993 Martin Carter suffered a stroke, making it difficult for him to walk and talk.
2 The quotation is 'I am the man, I suffered, I was there' and is from Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself'; see Complete Poems, ed. by Ellman Crasnow (London: Everyman, 1993).
3 Joseph Warton (1722-1800), An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Alexander Pope, 2 vols (London, 1756 and 1782). His brother, Thomas Warton (1728-90), was poet laureate and author of History of English Poetry (London, 1774-1781).
4 The book could have been Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queene (London: J. M. Dent, 1909-10) from the Everyman's Library, or M. Sturt and E. C. Oakden, The Knights of the Fairie Queene, Tales Retold from Spenser (London: J. M. Dent, 1924, reprinted 1936).
This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted by Gemma Robinson with the late Martin Carter (1927-1997), recorded at his home in Queenstown, Georgetown on 15 December 1995.
GR: Even though there has been a great exodus of Caribbean writers, you have remained in Guyana.
MC: Yes. I have been abroad frequently, but I stayed in Guyana deliberately. I felt that to be a writer, especially a poet I should. Writing covers a broad scope of things, and poetry is very difficult in the sense that one cannot really say when somebody is going to make poetry or not. I have problems and I believe that this is something other people have found too - that it comes and goes.
GR: Are you working on anything now?
MC: No. I can't. I can't write. I couldn't make a fist. I can write my name, but not poems.1
GR: Is that because you found that when you were writing poetry it was a crafting process?
MC: Yes decidedly. You can write a poem and the middle of it may come before or even after you've written it. As I said it is a very difficult process and writing poetry is not something you can do all the time. It is also a question of articulation. For a person who has been speaking all his life it's a difficult task indeed. And that is why I said at the beginning that you know it is very difficult to articulate even. Nonetheless, all I can do is just speak like that, like this, but if I try to do anything more it becomes very difficult.
GR: I would have thought that it is probably your frustration more than a lack in articulation.
MC: I agree absolutely - frustration - because it is a brutal thing to happen when you cannot speak, you know. Therefore, it answers one question very quickly - that not being able to speak is a serious matter. And I don't think that people really understand what it really means because for a person who normally speaks, speaks you know easily, it's a terrible thing when you're wanting to say something, and yet it is not coming out, you know. [. . .]
GR: Do you find that now you can look back and map your career out? Critics have tried to section your life off into certain phases of poetry, and I was wondering how you would respond to that?
MC: That's a good question. It has been said before, but I have an impression that one cannot really say what really happens. It takes a long time, people will take a long time to find out what the poet is really saying. In other words you may write a poem:
Over the shining mud the moon is blood
falling on ocean at the fence of lights.
['Till I Collect']
That is a serious matter because you have to follow every step of what the poet is saying. Another poem may be easy to read superficially, but not necessarily profoundly. And I think that that is the whole tradition in poetry, that is to say, that it could be read superficially or profoundly. Depends on who is reading it.
GR: I was reading 'The Poems Man'. I got the impression that the poetic persona acts as a reluctant spokesperson for the country. I was wondering how you feel about that because you have been given almost the 'poet laureate' position in Guyana. Do you feel a pressure with that, or an honour to have that, or what?
MC: The whole history of the word 'poet laureate' is a serious history: Ben Jonson, you know, how many years ago? When it was invented it was correct, that is in the seventeenth century. It don't work anymore in the twentieth century and it's a misnomer, to make it plain, it's a misnomer.
GR: Do you think that a poet can play the role of spokesperson for a country?
MC: [pause] In a sense only. In the sense that he articulates to some extent the ideas and the feelings that motivate people, but to put it more than that would beg the question. If, for instance, someone said something this week, but next week he may say something totally different or at least contradictory, you know, and therefore you have to look at it over a long period. Look at what he's saying over a long period.
GR: In that sense, I was wondering how do you approach the process of making a collection of poems. Are you looking for something homogenous?
MC: I am of the belief that poems happen, if that's the word for it, it just happens, you can't really tell. Poems happen, that is the whole story of that. You can't really tell - you can't do much more than say that because I think it was Mallarmé who said that poems are written with words not with ideas, and in a sense he's right, he's correct.
GR: So did you feel that there was an arbitrary cut off point in, say, collecting Poems of Resistance or Poems of Succession? Or did you feel that you'd come to the end and now they were ready to be published?
MC: Oh I see. I remember a long time ago I had written a set of five poems, no four poems. When I came to collect them I found a poem I had written much longer in time before I had written the other four. What I had really done was to include a poem which would not look in sequence, but it was in sequence because for some reason or other it was written before the rest, couple of years before. I don't know what the word is but there's a word for it - you do something which is in anticipation of doing something else. I think that that happens all the time, and could be analysed but I don't, I couldn't necessarily analyse it in more words. What is going on, of course, all the time and people try to make up that the word is not a proper word to use, but the word is 'inspiration'. You could say what you like, the fact remains that the word is 'inspiration'. [. . .]
GR: I don't know if you remember Derek Walcott's poem 'Guyana' in The Gulf. At one point he writes about the surveyor 'screwing a continent to his eye'. I was wondering how much geography played a part in your poetry.
MC: The important point is that [pause]. You see the fact is that Guyana is a strip of land on the coast. I mean there's a lot of talk about this and that, but it's really a strip of land on the coast, and the rainforest inside. The forest is to a large extent a myth, people mythologise about what the forest is from not really coming into contact with it. Many people who talk about the forest don't know anything about the forest, they're just reading some book or mythologising something. Like [W. H. Hudson's] Green Mansions. In reality there is no substitute for having lived the life out here. I mean one can try to understand it as much as one can. I think Walt Whitman somewhere said, 'I was the man, I was there, I suffered' something like that, I can't remember. But he said that somewhere, and I agree with that. I think: 'I was the man, I suffered, I was there'.2
GR: Does the difficulty then lie in articulating it?
MC: Precisely. I mean for instance this country has many aspects of it which are very unique in a sense. Even in the normal sense of the word 'the Caribbean' this is a strange Caribbean country, in the sense that the racial problem - which I anticipate that you have already come into contact with - is a serious problem. In the origins it was black/white and then you had the Indians coming out. [. . .]
GR: Do you feel that the problem has been one of cohesion?
MC: Yes, cohesion, that's right, that's what it is. But it is a very old problem, serious problem what we're facing here. In a sense, you know, we talk, but we have the whole 'Western' thing, the whole idea of the 'Western values', and that sort of thing always comes into it you know. And everybody trying to make [pause]. This is not a mixed country. This is not a mixed country. People don't come from India who are here, people come from here. And this is the real point about this country.
GR: I don't suppose that I could talk to you without asking you about politics. There is a debate about which aspect of your poetry should be given primacy. Where would you enter into the debate? Do you see yourself as a political poet?
MC: No, that's nonsense. Usually when people do that they have an axe to grind, some axe to grind, and what you have to do is say no. I mean, I don't pay any attention to it frankly.
GR: I was reading an interview with Jan Carew and he was talking about the 1950s, and his experiences. He spoke of it as a very special, magical time, a time in which he felt that poetry played a very important part, and that the people were almost speaking poetry to each other. Do you share that same sense of the magical?
MC: In a sense, yes. That was a great period in this country's history because something really happened, and it hasn't happened again. Magical in a sense, yes. In the sense that people really believed that something was going to happen here that had not happened anywhere in the Caribbean. In due course it came to naught. The fact is that people had expectations, and they lived the expectations to the hilt, I mean to a great extent. In a sense Carew is right: people did expect great things out of this country.
GR: Do you think that it's been a country of false starts then?
MC: Well really a country of one, of a great start.
GR: Could I ask you your opinion of Cheddi Jagan and Linden Forbes Burnham and the split that came about in the People's Progressive Party?
MC: Well this has been written about very much you know. The whole history of this country that has been written is about them. Everything that happens can be traced back to these two people. These two characters, leaders. Everything you hear in Guyana, in this country is about them. Everything so that it would be not very accurate to isolate these two from the whole country because they are very much taken up in the whole racial problem. As you know Jagan is Indian, Burnham was African, and it has been polarised in that sense. Everything you hear, even today, everything that you hear is tinged with some idea about 'Indian' and 'coloured' people. All the time, everything, and it's up till now - I mean no change. That's very unfortunate because it has prevented people from seeing the country as a whole, you know that is the problem. In the long run people are people, in the long run, not some special people by virtue of having the roles of special people - they're all people, just normal, ordinary people. I think that is all that matters.
[. . .]
GR: Do you consider yourself still politically active?
MC: No
GR: Still political? Do you feel that you have now stepped back from politics, or do you feel that there is that engagement?
MC: Yes, in a sense because if you live in a country you can't live above it. You pay attention to what is going on. But I think that you are some removes from the overt political behaviours.
GR: Could I ask you about your time as Minister of Information and Culture? Did you feel that you were making a surprise move into the government, or did it seem a natural progression?
MC: It was out of character, so to speak. I remained three years in the government, and I resigned after. It was a question of incompatibility. I think that was the whole question: a question of incompatibility. I simply couldn't do it.
GR: What were you expecting when you first took the position?
MC: I expected that it was something that I could handle, you know: a pretty straight-forward business. I had an idea about how people would act. People don't act like that. It's not a straight-forward business at all. Politics is a very important thing that people make a great mistake about, underestimating it, because when the story's told, it is politics that is very important, in the sense that it informs everything that you do.
GR: Did you find that when you held a political position you were forced to make compromises that you wouldn't necessarily have made beforehand?
MC: [pause] I would say that. I was forced into things to the extent of doing things that you don't agree with.
GR: Was there a particular incident that made you resign?
MC: No, I suspect that even before I resigned it was brewing all the time. In this country I was what they call a technocrat - these are not elected for instance.
GR: Some people thought that the poem A Mouth Is Always Muzzled was a statement about that.
MC: It's not a direct thing because that was a general statement - it wasn't occasioned by a given. I had written it before, a long time before.
GR: How did you find your education here in Guyana in terms of the books you studied?
MC: It is an interesting question - I will just give you an example of what happens so that you can tell. I don't know, I was about sixteen - a man came in the house one day, and he had a parcel. He came up to me in the house, came up, and said, 'I know you like books. I don't know the book'. Anyway, I unwrapped the parcel - he had two books without any, it had no title - and he just left them with me. So I looked very carefully and I recognised very quickly that this one book was written in seventeen-something. That's an odd way to come in contact with books because we hadn't many educated people in the country at that time. And then it became very clear to me that somebody had brought these books out here and had left them with somebody, and in due course they came into contact with me because somebody left them as an heirloom. Somebody keeping the books you know, the books. I remember the book very carefully because I went in the public free library and checked all, everything, that I could find and I found out that the books were written by Charles Warton, that's the word. Two brothers, something Warton I cannot recall.3 And the books were essays on The Genius of Alexander Pope. Well imagine that happening to people in this country, I mean that happens. You can find a book like that somebody has somewhere in the house that will be rotting there for years and then somebody will open the book and - 'What the devil, having that book?' That is the sort of country you living in where anything could happen. But this is an example of what can happen you know. I have different, other cases like that.
[. . .] Of course, in my childhood days you read anything, you were omnivorous. You'd read anything at all and I remember vividly an interesting first book I bought with pocket money, you know, was The Fairie Queene by Edmund Spencer. I don't know if you even know it: in those days J. M. Dent was the publishers.4 But it was for three and ha'penny. And that makes a point too that about the kind of publication, you know, British, in a sense very much British. Even Americans, comparatively, were not looked upon as exactly the same thing as British. Only nowadays that it is quite different, but in the old days education was British.
GR: So when Kyk-Over-Al came out did you feel that it was filling a very important gap within the country?
MC: Well it was in those days because when Seymour started it - fifty years ago.
When Seymour started it he was forty-odd I think. It was a very rare occasion to have books like that you know. Of course many of the people who read books in those days were English, British educated or better British entrants. And we cannot avoid the impact the British had on this country, I mean it's tremendous.
GR: Your own poems were first published in pamphlet form. Pamphlets can have an immediacy, they can be passed around, and can have a political urgency. I was wondering, did you feel that that was a good way of producing and presenting your poems?
MC: I think necessity - that's all you have in mind, in my mind at the time - necessity. You'd do anything to produce something, and only one thing mattered to us really in those days was necessity. For instance, Seymour had a Miniature Poets Series. Everything was ad hoc so to speak. Nothing was cumulative you know.
GR: You've never been a self-publicist. For a poet of your stature you're not published enough in my opinion.
MC: Oh, that don't matter really to me. I feel, I mean this is my honest belief, that a poet is a poet, and that nothing else matters.
GR: Is that something you've felt in later...
MC: All the time.
1 In 1993 Martin Carter suffered a stroke, making it difficult for him to walk and talk.
2 The quotation is 'I am the man, I suffered, I was there' and is from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself; see Complete Poems, ed. by Ellman Crasnow (London: Everyman, 1993).
3 Joseph Warton (1722-1800), An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Alexander Pope, 2 vols (London, 1756 and 1782). His brother, Thomas Warton (1728-90), was poet laureate and author of History of English Poetry (London, 1774-1781).
4 The book could have been Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queene (London: J. M. Dent, 1909-10) from the Everyman's Library, or M. Sturt and E. C. Oakden, The Knights of the Fairie Queene, Tales Retold from Spenser (London: J. M. Dent, 1924, reprinted 1936).
Commemoration of
Carter's work tonight
Castellani House is presenting an event commemorating the life and work of Martin Carter this evening at 5.30 pm. Dr David Dabydeen will make introductory remarksand reminiscences on Carter's life will be offered by friends and associates who will also read some of his poems. All are welcome.