These are no more than sparks snatched from the fire of their lives – encounters with two of the men who were most memorable in my life.
* I was in my early twenties, recently from university and starting work with Bookers in British Guiana, when as part of my induction into the sugar industry I went to meet Dr George Giglioli at the offices of the Sugar Producers Association in Camp Street. He rose white-haired and slightly stooped from behind his desk to greet me and shake my hand, this great old man courteously and kindly putting at ease a nervous stripling. I was right to be nervous. By then George Giglioli was a legendary figure.
Here was true greatness in a man – genius put to practical use for the benefit of his fellow man. He was the first to have the idea and then the imagination and the drive to apply DDT on a large scale to eradicate malaria – thereby saving countless Guyanese and, by the example set, countless millions further afield. It was one of the great medical achievements of the 20th century.
At that first meeting, and subsequently when we got to know each other better, he did not want to talk about that so much. He told me about his daily work in improving the health of sugar workers.
I remember to this day something he said to me at that first meeting, leaning intently toward me across his desk: “If you had the blood count of the average cane-cutter not so long ago, Mr McDonald, you wouldn’t have been able to walk up the stairs to my office! But they worked in the fields for hours cutting cane!” I never met him without marvelling at his modesty, the sweetness of his nature, his complete dedication.
I see him now as I write. I remember how he used to go to his bank of cabinets and take out files to give me examples of the sugar workers whose conditions he was trying to alleviate. In those cabinets, hundreds of files, thousands of lives he comforted and was trying to improve.
* From almost the first day I arrived in Guyana in 1955 I got to know Martin Carter. I had read some of his already famous ‘revolutionary’ poems and the power of their perfectly expressed scorn and anger made them immediately memorable. I began to meet him regularly and knew at once that he was exceptional, his presence filling much more than its share of space, and that his poetry would from then on be a strong influence.
There were times when we were in especially frequent contact – when he was Bookers’ Chief Information Officer between 1959 and 1967 and especially when, as joint editor with George Lamming, he was helping to prepare the New World publication to mark Guyana’s Independence in 1966 and I was assisting David de Caires in getting the publication financed and into print.
When Martin was at Bookers he was not what you would call an ordinary run-of-the-mill administrator, but while there he played a particularly strong part in the process of Guyanisation which helped transform the old, colonial, expatriate- staffed upper structure and made nationalization when it came later a relatively natural and non- disruptive development.
But it was always the ‘poems man’ that I loved like a, sometimes wayward, brother. And it was always his marvellous poetry which as the years went by filled me with what I can only call reverence for a work of man of everlasting value.
After Martin suffered a stroke he never fully recovered and was not able to write poetry. But after a while he was capable again of speaking in his old style and often with intense passion as of old.
At one of his last dinners with a small group of friends we listened with no thought of interrupting as he spoke with wonderful clarity and love of the poetry of W B Yeats.
He said the greatest poem ever written was Yeats’s poem Among School Children and he called for it to be read. Miles Fitzpatrick, I remember, got Yeats’s Collected Poems from his library and Rupert Roopnaraine read the poem beautifully and, again I remember so well, Martin with head in hand listening and by the time the last lines were read tears were glistening in his eyes:
Oh chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bowl?
Oh body swayed to music, Oh brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
At the time Martin died in December, 1997, Georgetown was in an uproar after the general election. Mrs Janet Jagan could not attend Martin’s funeral mass at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Main Street because of fears for her safety. She sent me a note asking me in her absence to read the eulogy she had written for him at his funeral.
When I got up to read it the noise outside the church was so loud I do not think the words could be heard. But I was pleased to shout them as loudly as I could because they named him a great man of the people, a great human being, a great poet and a great Guyanese and those words deserved to be heard.
The English poet William Wordsworth once asked the question, “What is a poet?” In the answer he gave to his own question I recognize fully and precisely my friend Martin:
“The rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love.
In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.
The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge – it is as immortal as the heart of man.”
