Sporus biography of martin carter

Stewart Brown on the art and legacy of Martin Carter

A poet cannot write for those who ask
Hardly himself even, except he lies:
Poems are written either for the dying
Or the unborn, no matter what we say.

(“They Say I Am”)

Across the Caribbean, Martin Carter is regarded as one of the great poets of the region, one of those revered voices who have chronicled the journey from colonialism to independence, alongside such figures as Nicolás Guillén, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite.

That his work is hardly known outside the Caribbean is largely because of his early reputation as a “political poet”: he was interned by the British colonial authorities in the early s for his involvement in the supposedly subversive actions of the first democratically elected, non-racial, and idealistically socialist government in the Caribbean.

His poems of that period were published as Poems of Resistancefrom British Guiana in by the London socialist pres