Martin Carter
1927 — 1997 · Guyana's poet of resistance; detained by the British in 1953, a minister resigned in 1970; buried at the Place of Heroes
Martin Wylde Carter was born on the seventh of June 1927 at Georgetown, British Guiana, son of Victor Emmanuel Carter, a civil servant, and Violet, née Wylde. Queen's College schooled him; the colonial civil service employed him; and the founding era of the People's Progressive Party claimed him — an executive-committee man who wrote for the party's Thunder under the name M. Black, and who left the service in 1953 to stand, unsuccessfully, for New Amsterdam.
One hundred and thirty-three days into the elected PPP government, Britain suspended the constitution and landed troops. In October 1953 Carter was detained without charge at Atkinson Field, joined the detainees' hunger strike that November, and was released in January 1954 — then jailed again for months that year for defying the emergency ban on processions. Out of that crucible came Poems of Resistance from British Guiana, published at London in 1954: "University of Hunger," "This Is the Dark Time, My Love," "I Come from the Nigger Yard" — the poems by which a country still knows itself.
His politics kept its own counsel. The PPP expelled him in 1956 as an "ultra-leftist"; he worked for the British Council and then as Booker's information officer; represented Guyana at the United Nations in 1966 and 1967; served Forbes Burnham's government as Minister of Information and Culture from 1967 — and resigned in November 1970, to live simply as a poet, remaining with the people. Essex had him as poet-in-residence in 1975; the University of Guyana kept him from 1977.
Poems of Succession came in 1977, Poems of Affinity in 1980, and his Selected Poems of 1989 took the Guyana Prize for Literature. He is widely held the greatest of Guyana's poets and among the Caribbean's most important. He died at Georgetown on the thirteenth of December 1997, at seventy, and was buried at the Place of Heroes at Seven Ponds, in the Botanical Gardens — ground once kept for heads of state. Honored be Martin Carter, who answered the dark time with poems a nation keeps by heart.
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