A friend of mine, who knows I love Martin Carter, alerted me to a recent letter in the press by Ruel Johnson that contained a poem by Martin apparently written in the dark days of our suspended constitution. It was a riveting piece entitled ‘Not I With This Torn Shirt’ and one verse went, “In the white dust and grey mud, I tell you and I tell no secret – now is the long past time for worship, long past time for kneeling.” I had not seen the poem before, and I read it several times. It is constructed on short powerful phrases with Martin’s distinctive rhythm – one of those that stops you in your tracks – and as we chatted about it my friend remarked that one could be excused for thinking the poem was written about Guyana now.
His comment struck me as another example of mankind’s tendency, caught up in the very troubling woes of today, to lose touch with those wretched earlier torments. As the years go by us, it is generally true that time heals the painful wounds of an earlier time; our memory of it goes behind some sort of therapeutic veil that softens both the incidents themselves and our recollection of them. The poem is startling.
Martin had this facility of the great writer to take a few simple words and create these stunning, magical phrases of depiction that captured the time and the mood so strikingly. At the same time, however, I think it’s a stretch to say that the poem, written in those Black Watch days, is a reflection of Guyana today, as well.
In that piece and in much of his work, Martin was writing about a time in this country when people were put in jail for just being; when the colour of your skin automatically precluded you from circumstances of all stripes; when you felt like hostages in your own country; when the colonial overlords ruled in the chilling truth of that term. I was just 18 years old or so when the British sent the Black Watch soldiers here, and I can’t speak for the other Guyanese living here then, but I remember as a young man the shock of seeing those Black Watch men, armed to the teeth, poised in this country like sentinels. Some of them were garrisoned at Atkinson Field where I worked at the time, and I remember like yesterday the coldness I had in my chest seeing and hearing them, and the confusion in my mind as to why these strange-looking military people in kilts were here and, my particular concern, for some reason, as to when were they going to leave. I recall going to town on work break (4-5 days) and coming back to Atkinson on the bus only to see them still imbedded there walking the roads as if they owned the place. Would you believe some of the officers would even come and swim in the pool at Atkinson? They weren’t noisy, they didn’t show aggression, but their presence would shout volumes at you. Every time I went to town, on that dreary, dusty red-road ride, I would come back hoping they would be gone just as silently as they came.
Admittedly, I was just two years out of school and almost totally distracted by tracking woman and not really focusing on much else, but we, or at least I, could never figure out the why of this soldier presence. We were not a violent people. We weren’t holding hostages or burning down buildings. I didn’t apply the word “revolutionary” to us, or even “radical.” So the question that hung in my mind for months: Whom or what were these soldiers protecting? What uprising were they here to prevent? Which army were they here to suppress? I suppose one could say that they were here to preclude the eventuality of such things, but the entire notion was foreign to me in the Guyana that I knew.
The other striking thing was that we didn’t talk about it. I’d be chatting with a friend, a Black Watch solider would pass, and the two of us would simply look at each other and not say a word. I suppose we were partly in shock at what had landed on us. It was as if by not talking about it, or by pretending not to see it, that it would go away. I was just out of short pants then, and not aware of the psychological ramifications at play, but in retrospect that was probably our way of dealing with this invasion. Only years later, living in Canada, did it strike me that for the adults of that time, at both Atkinson and along the West Coast where I lived, the Black Watch presence was not a topic of conversation. Even in the taxis then common in Guyana, where every subject known to man was covered, that one stayed untouched. I remember only one reference, in a taxi one day, heading for Hague, when the car’s radio carried a short news item about the Scottish soldiers. As it ended, a bountiful woman sitting next to me, raised her arms, plunked them on the bag in her lap, and pronounced scornfully, “Black Watch….hmmm!” Other than that, ironically, among the Guyanese I knew, what we mostly did with the Black Watch was watch – and wait.
Martin Carter’s words in the poem of “a bruising and battering for self preservation” reflect that time pungently; those were very “dark times” indeed. I migrated two years or so later, and while I wasn’t leaving in any panic, I can relate to the notion of “kneeling” that Martin referred to; it definitely reflects that time. I don’t think we’re in that state now.
