Poet in opposition

Abstract

For several years tensions in the former British colony of Guyana have been running high. Since the late 1960s Prime Minister Forbes Burnham and his party, the Peoples National Congress, have been accused of keeping power through a combination of fraudulent elections, the sponsoring and equipping of private armies of thugs (often linked to religious cults such as that of the notorious Rev Jim Jones and, currently, the ‘House of Israel’ led by the self-dubbed' Rabbi Washington'), the manipulation of the ugly racial divisions between those of African and Indian origin, and the harassment of the opposition. This last has included restrictions on the press, by interrupting newsprint supplies and intimidating printers, and outright murder. A number of recent events have brought the situation to a head. On 14 February 1980 the PNC-dominated National Assembly approved a new constitution which gives Burnham the position of Executive President and virtually unlimited powers. At the beginning of June the trial finally began, after two postponements, of three leading members of the left-wing opposition Working Peoples Alliance - academics Drs Walter Rodney, Rupert Roopnaraine and Omawale - accused of burning down the PNC headquarters in Georgetown in July 1979. Such were the doubts about the fairness of the trial, which the authorities had decided should be held summarily before a judge rather than by jury, that several international human rights agencies, including Amnesty International, the UK Parliamentary Human Rights Group and the United States National Council of Churches, sent observers. In the event, lack of evidence and radical inconsistencies in that which was presented, resulted in a further adjournment until August. The trial was accompanied by widespread arrests in various parts of the country, the erection of roadblocks, house searches and heavy-handed police operations to prevent demonstrations. Finally, on the evening of 13 June, days after the trial was adjourned, Walter Rodney was killed when a bomb exploded in his brother's car in Georgetown. Despite official denials all the indications were of assassination by a government-sponsored death squad. There was world-wide outrage, including statements by Commonwealth leaders Michael Manley and Robert Mugabe. Rodney's death deprives Guyana of one of the world's foremost specialists in African and Caribbean history, as well as of an able political leader, whose young and growing party has made considerable strides in overcoming racial antagonism. In the article which follows, Stewart Brown, an English specialist in Caribbean literature and himself a poet, looks at the writing of Guyana's leading poet, Martin Carter, and, through his work, at the general situation of the writer in the post-independence Caribbean.