not hands 
like mine
these Carib altars knew:
nameless and quite forgotten are the gods;
and mute,
mute and alone,
their silent people spend
a ring of vacant days,
not like more human years,
as aged and brown their rivers flow away.
yes, pressing on my hand,
there is an ocean’s flood;
it is a muttering sea,
here, right at my feet
my strangled city lies,
my father’s city and my mother’s heart:
hoarse groaning tongues,
children without love,
mothers without blood,
all cold and dust, nights dim, there is no rest.
ah!
mine was a pattern woven by the slave
dull as a dream and encompassed in a tomb.
now still
are the fields
covered by the floods;
and those rivers roll
over altars gone:
naked, naked loins
throbbing deep with life
rich with birth indeed,
rouse, touring to the sun
and more fierce rain will come again tonight.
new day must clean, have floods not drowned
the fields
killing my rice and stirring up my wrath?
by Martin Carter
Guyana reveled in the celebration of its independence anniversary with the imitation of a carnival borrowed from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago; the people had fun looking elsewhere for significant cultural expressions of a Guyanese nation.
While we hasten to acknowledge that the importation of that festival is in line with the times – the march of the popular culture and cultural change – we recognise two ironies. First, 53 years ago, Guyana celebrated Independence Day in exactly the same way, with a borrowed carnival that continued annually until 1969. The nation then moved on from that, replacing it with Mashramani in 1970. But it has turned 360 degrees, to exactly where it started with an imported independence carnival. Second, we can go back 69 years to the colonial era and find true definitions of Guyana’s real independence in cultural expressions, through its developing literature in the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1949, revered national artist, E R Burrowes, wrote:
“Most of these patrons who claimed to be art lovers are merely sentimentalists at large, who are concerned only with being able to recognise a landscape because of its topographical exactitude, or a portrait because of its recognisable features. This a devotion, not to art, but artifice, not to interpretation but limitation. They would be satisfied to see year after somnolent year the same insane essays in paint; nice little red-roofed or troolie-thatched country cottages with orderly companies of coconut trees all standing at attention on their best Sunday school behaviour.
There have been some attempts made in the past by Guianese artists, to identify their work with the modern trends prevalent in Europe. [. . .] But the working People’s Art Class first exhibition in April of this year, was an outstanding example of the aesthetic progress being made in British Guiana.
“The work at that April exhibition was of an unspoiled freshness, in which modern primitivism and even intellectual abstraction were pleasingly demonstrated, and therein lies the hope of a future development of a typically Guianese art.”
(Kyk-Over-Al, Issue 8, June 1949)
Expressing himself in very strong terms, the painter was denouncing fashionable superficiality and recognising the rise of what can be called Guyanese art. He singled out the growing nationalism that was prominently marked in the best of the poetry of that time, and what was being published in Kyk-Over-Al. This strong sense of nationalism and identity was there, even in those colonial years, in the pre-independence literature and art (fine arts).
At the same time, A J Seymour, editor of Kyk-Over-Al, was persistently advocating the building of national identity; of “the West Indian” and the characteristics of “West Indian Literature”. British Guianese poets were already doing that. Burrowes was pointing to the question, “What is Guyanese art?” a question, by the way, that is still being asked today, although Burrowes, in 1949, was already beginning to attempt to answer it at a time when it was just beginning to grow.
But what is Guyanese poetry? This began to assert itself with a few poets in the 1940s, following a period of imitation that was still not yet over at that time. In that era, the most prominent poets leading that charge were Walter McA Lawrence, Seymour, C E J Ramcharitar Lalla, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew and Helen Taitt. J W Chinapen was learning independence and growing out of imitation, while Martin Carter was to join the charge in the 1950s.
It is significant that at that time with the pronounced dominance of patriarchy, one of the leading talents was a woman – Taitt and dance was her profession.
These poets were somewhat ahead of the time with progressive verse. They were not confined by the conventions of metre and structure but were using confident free verse and demonstrating an independence of theme and subjects. None was settled in that direction more than Harris, who turned landscape poetry into something innovative and profound.
In looking for a Guyanese poem that may exemplify or represent national poetry while demonstrating what was emerging in the pre-independence era, one might not be able to do better than Carter’s 1951 poem “New Day”. Guyanese literature was shaping itself and did not wait for independence in 1966 to become prominent and significant.
Around the same time as this poem, there was Seymour’s “Amalivaca”, printed alongside it in Kyk-Over-Al 12, 1951, which emphasised the developing establishment of Guyanese poetry. This was a poem that asserted nationalism and independence. Seymour’s poem, of epic proportions, is rooted in Amerindian mythology – the story of the demi-god Amalivaca. He was both myth and legend, and as Amerindian belief would have it, even history. He taught the nations many skills and assisted farmers and fishermen by making the Pomeroon River flow both upstream and downstream at the same time. Its subject and preoccupation with Guyanese heroic verse make it a Guyanese poem and a contributor to the national literature.
English critic Michael Niblett commented on the rise of the journal Kyk and placed it against the rise of the poetry itself. He cited Seymour’s “To-morrow Belongs to the People” (1946), calling it an expression of the journal’s “hopelessly Utopian” raison d’être. “And yet such Utopianism was, and remains, fundamental to thinking beyond the apparent impasses and entrenched divisions that mark the present; and to imagining the possibility of a radically different future.”
Yet, it is the sense of a kind of unease in that “present” and the deeply felt need for a real “new day” on which Carter’s poem focuses. There is no euphemistic expression of hope and a bright future. The poem gets to the very roots of the present society in the indigenous beginnings of the Caribs in contrast to the present issues. Despite the ancient “Carib altars … nameless and quite forgotten are the gods”, it is a very Guyanese poem, though not a cheerful one, in contrast to the very nationalistic and patriotic earlier poems of McA Lawrence, for example, and Chinapen among others.
This is the poem that contains the outstanding line “here, right at my feet /my strangled city lies” – highly quoted and used by Gordon Rohlehr as a title for his collection of essays, My Strangled City. The poem’s very title is used ironically. It first suggests a bright prospect – a “new day”, forward-looking, which is reminiscent of the Vic Reid novel of the same name that traces a period of Jamaican history from murderous colonial villainy and martyrdom to the attainment of universal adult suffrage and the dawn of independence.
Contrary to that, Carter says “new day must clean”. This is a clever play on the Guyanese language with a Creole syntax that he sometimes uses. He employs “day clean” meaning early morning – sunrise, but here also referring to a better that must come – a future that the farmer demands in bitterness since floods have “drowned the fields /killing my rice and stirring up my wrath”.
The poem is as Guyanese as you can get, although anti-celebratory. It goes deep into the Guyanese society and its origins in the ancient ethnic civilisation. It visits the same past as does Seymour, not for romantic indigenous heroism but rather for a hard interrogation on the march to independence, of equally deep-rooted disasters from which the nation needs to be liberated.
