Martin Carter

Martin Wylde Carter was born on the seventh of June 1927 at Georgetown, British Guiana, the son of Victor Emmanuel Carter — a Georgetown Black-and-mixed-race civil servant — and Violet Eugenie Wylde Carter. He was raised in the Georgetown Black middle-class community of the late-colonial British Guianese period.

He completed his secondary education at Queen's College at Georgetown in 1944 — and was hired in 1945 as a junior clerk at the British Guiana Civil Service.

He joined the principal People's Progressive Party of British Guiana under Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham at the principal Party founding in January 1950 — and was named principal information secretary of the People's Progressive Party from 1950 to 1953.

He was detained without trial by the British Guiana colonial authorities at the principal British Operation Windsor of October 1953 — at the principal post-1953 Guianese constitutional suspension and the principal British military occupation of British Guiana. He was held at the principal Atkinson Field prison camp from October 1953 to March 1954.

He published the principal poetic volume Poems of Resistance from British Guiana at the Lawrence and Wishart Press at London in 1954 — at the principal post-detention Atkinson Field period. Poems of Resistance includes the principal poems 'I Come from the Nigger Yard' and 'University of Hunger', the principal foundational poetic statements of the principal Guyanese anti-colonial movement.

He served as principal Minister of Information and Culture in the principal post-independence People's National Congress government of Forbes Burnham from 1967 to 1970 — at the principal post-independence Guyanese state-building period.

He broke with the principal Burnham government in 1970 at the principal post-1970 People's National Congress authoritarian-state transition — and lived across the 1970s and 1980s in the principal Guyanese political opposition.

He published five further poetic volumes across the 1960s through 1980s — including Jail Me Quickly of 1963 and Selected Poems of 1989, edited by the principal Carter scholar Ian McDonald.

He was named Hughes-Wooding Lecturer in Caribbean Studies at the University of Essex in 1975 and Guggenheim Fellow in 1988.

He died at Georgetown, Guyana on the thirteenth of December 1997 of complications of a long illness, at seventy.

He is honored here as the author of Poems of Resistance from British Guiana.