The boundless mainland of Guyana, which is considered part of the Caribbean for historical, linguistic, and cultural reasons, saw the emergence of a great literary and political figure in the ’50s and ’60s: Martin Carter. He embodied the poet who always looked for the freedom of his land, who called for a unity of the people and who tried to raise a common cultural conscience among the Guyanese. The first time Carter was imprisoned by the British Army in colonial Guyana, he was accused of suspected political agitation, while the second time he was jailed after having published his Poems of Resistance from British Guiana in 1966, just twelve years before the turnover towards independence—though in the more liberal London.
The paper analyses what really meant for Carter to make a plea for freedom in his historical time, trying to strike down the prejudices of race and identity which history had riddled. Politics was clearly one major lever on which to be based, but I am convinced that it would not have been enough without the power of his words and of his farsighted poetry. I will go through his major poetic collections to clarify the nature of slavery, revolution, prison in relation to his concept of freedom. Can the four walls of a prison really limit the freedom of a man or impede him to express his revolutionary thoughts, or do they, instead, reinforce the potential range of his message?