Guyana’s most famous poet Martin Carter wrote the immortal lines “but a mouth is always muzzled, by the food it eats to live” in 1969, and soon after, disillusioned and disgusted by his own short stint in the country’s authoritarian Government he finally resigned, remarking in a Sunday Graphic piece that he wished to live “simply as a poet, remaining with the people.”
His single, succinct composition reportedly handed to veteran newsman then the private newspaper’s Chief Political Reporter, Rickey Singh and first published in the November 1970 anonymous article titled “Exit Carter with a poem,” movingly captures the predicament of free speech and paralysis in a time of censorship and what one critic calls a brooding and “somber silence.” Yet “A mouth is always muzzled” resonates across the decades and world’s borders, attaining renewed relevance in a modern technological age that has seen the immediate release of
