December 6, 2017 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Kamil Ali
Janice pulled her collar up against the chill that crept into her body in the fading daylight. A rustle in the nearby hedge stopped her in her tracks.
A kitten emerged, mewing for its mother. Janice lobbed it over the hedge with her boot, then hurried away to escape its return.
She reached for her keys at her apartment building's front door and gasped.
She did not have her handbag!
She found the handbag lying on the sidewalk with its shoulder strap snapped. The strewn contents made her swear. A quick examination revealed nothing missing.
Fearing that the perpetrator had set a trap to ambush her, she hurriedly scooped the items back into her handbag and kicked off her shoes. She clutched them in one hand with the handbag in the other and sprinted back to her apartment building. Once inside her apartment, she dropped her shoes and handbag on the floor. She turned the deadbolt and hooked the safety-chain on the door before checking the locks on the windows.
After turning on all the lights, she jumped onto the bed and pulled the covers over her fetal-curled body, still clad in her overcoat.
With her head under a pillow she lay motionless with her eyes closed, straining her ear to listen through the pillow. She cursed her boss for putting a hit on her.
He had terminated her employment when he had turned his extra-marital love interest to a new girl he’d hired.
She had threatened to blackmail him by telling his wife of his indiscretions. He had laughed in her face with scorn. Janice had to give up the high-end apartment and lifestyle that he had provided.
A squeak of the bedroom door’s hinges startled her. She peered from under the pillow through the slightly-open door into the living room.
A shadow darted into the bathroom to the left of her bedroom door!
Janice lifted the pillow off her ear when she heard the rusty shower-faucet turning on. She gasped when the shadowy figure floated toward the apartment door.
After a couple of minutes, she summoned up enough courage to creep behind the bedroom door.
A peek into the bathroom revealed a build up of steam from the hot water tap. Fear paralyzed her to the spot.
After half-an-hour, she crawled into the bathroom with one eye on the apartment door. She switched on the bathroom fan and turned off the hot water tap.
When the mist cleared, she fell backward!
A blob of toothpaste held a page from her diary onto the bathroom mirror. Her handwritten notes told of a death wish for her former boss.
“My diary!” She scurried over to her handbag and unzipped a side pocket. She stared into it with horror! Her diary had vanished!
She jumped at the loud blast of the TV in her bedroom. It had switched itself on!
She heard her boss’ name and rushed into the bedroom in time to catch the breaking news. She slumped onto the bed.
Her boss and his new sweetheart had perished in a fiery car crash when trying to avoid a pedestrian attempting to cross the street.
During the TV interview, the pedestrian, a spitting of Janice, stared at her from the TV screen.
Janice grabbed the remote and shut the TV off. Deafening silence filled the apartment.
She jumped at a loud knock on the apartment door. Shaky legs took her to eyehole on the door. A police officer stood in the hallway!
She opened the apartment door with the safety-chain in place. The cop smiled and gave her the diary without a word, then turned and walked away.
Janice closed the door and leaned on it. She stared at the little red book, afraid to examine it for other missing pages.
She sought the comfort of her bed with white knuckles gripping the book. She laid on her back and closed her eyes.
She gasped at a loud crash in the kitchen!
With her heart in her throat, she tiptoed to the kitchen. The cutlery drawer had fallen to the floor. An eating fork held a page from the diary in its tines.
Goosebumps covered her body when she read her own handwriting!
Her parents had refused to let her come back home after losing her job. They had not communicated with her since they had kicked her out of the house as a teenager.
A wild party with friends had trashed the house when they had gone on a vacation and had left her at home.
As an act of revenge, she had made false allegations of abuse against her father, who had suffered public humiliation before clearing his name.
The statement on the page, ‘I wish they would die’, referred to her father for refusing to let her back into the home and her mother for not supporting her.
The shrill ring of her cell-phone made her dash into her room where she had plugged it in to charge. The screen showed the video of a burning building.
She yelped and dropped the phone when she witnessed her parents screaming in agony, engulfed by the flames.
Janice fell to her knees and stared at the pleading eyes of her parents.
Her stomach churned when her double stared at her from the gathered crowd before vanishing from the scene.
Janice placed her head on her knees howled with pain at the loss of both parents at her hands. She rolled to her side and blacked out.
The soft meows of the kitten and its little tongue licking her face brought Janice back to consciousness.
She reeled back in fright!
The kitten transformed into the cop who had knocked at her door.
When the policeman changed to the image of her, she cried out in horror.
An evil grin crossed the entity's face before it shrunk to the size of a newborn.
“You murdered me mommy?” The baby lay on its back and looked at her sideways with dark gray eyes.
It referred to the full-term baby she had thrown into a river while still alive when she had become pregnant with her boss’s child. It changed to the kitten. “You kicked me away, mommy?” It screamed these words.
The court found Janice ‘not guilty’, by reason of insanity.
Visitors to the asylum failed to see the Shapeshifter life-forms interacting with her.
highest company
By Romeo Kaseram
Martin Wylde Carter was born on June 7, 1927, in Georgetown, what was then British Guiana, to father Victor Emmanuel, a civil servant, and mother Violet Eugene (neé Wylde). One of seven siblings, Carter’s family was of mixed African, Indian, and European ancestry, and belonged to what was then the coloured middle class. Carter attended Queen’s College in Georgetown from 1939 to 1945. He choose to not attend university, and instead joined the civil service in 1945, working for the Post Office, and later as a secretary to the superintendent of prisons.
Carter had an early introduction to books – his father was an avid reader and liked philosophy, while his mother loved to recite poetry. According to Peepal Tree Press, it seems by 1945 Carter had already come into contact with the Marxist ideas circulating in Guyana at that time in the works of the Political Affairs Committee in which Cheddi and Janet Jagan, and H.J.M. Hubbard were involved. It was in this time when Carter developed a friendship with the Jagans, the relationship giving him access to their extensive and radical library. Carter was also writing poetry in these early years.
The year 1948 saw publication of his An Ode to Midnight, which was printed in A.J. Seymour's literary journal Kyk-Over-Al. Two years later, in 1950, Carter became one of the founding members of the People’s Progressive Party, which was led by Cheddi Jagan. Carter’s second poem, "The Indian Woman", was also published in 1950 in the PPP journal, Thunder. He also wrote political articles in Thunder, under the pseudonym M. Black, shielding himself due to his role as a civil servant.
Major writing output continued in 1951, when his first short collection, The Hill of Fire Glows Red, was published in A.J. Seymour’s Miniature Poet Series. This was followed by The Kind Eagle (Poems of Prison) in 1952, and then The Hidden Man (Other Poems of Prison). The year 1954 saw publication of the collection that established an international reputation: Poems of Resistance from British Guiana. This was published in London by the Communist publishers Lawrence and Wishart.
As Wikipedia reports, in 1953 Carter left the civil service for more active politics, running as a candidate for the PPP in the first universal suffrage elections held in British Guiana. While he was not elected, the PPP took a convincing victory. In October 1953, following the British government's declaration of a State of Emergency, Carter was arrested and detained without charge at a US airbase in Timehri. He participated in a one-month hunger strike during this detention, organised with other detainees to protest the injustices of the government and the indefinite incarceration without charge. He remained imprisoned until January, 1954, when he was released with orders not to leave Georgetown, a restriction that continued until 1957.
Out of this experience came the notable Poems of Resistance from British Guiana in 1954, its appearance making Carter one of the first Caribbean poets to be published outside of the region. Six months later, in June 1954, Carter was again arrested, this time for taking part in a PPP procession, and imprisoned this time for six months. He chose to remain with the PPP following a disagreement that led to a split and subsequent founding of the People’s National Congress in 1955. A year later he was expelled from the PPP. Following this, Carter worked briefly as an Information Officer in the British Council's Georgetown Office, and was then employed from 1959 to 1967 at the sugar company Bookers as Information Officer, editing Bookers News between 1965 and 1966. He resigned from this role following declaration of Guyana's Independence in May 1966, joining the PNC as Minister of Information and Culture in 1967. He was Guyana’s representative at the UN from 1966 to 1967. In 1970 he left the PNC, returning to Bookers, again leaving in 1978 to join the University of Guyana as a Lecturer in Creative Writing and Artist in Residence. It was during this time when he wrote Poems of Succession, published in 1977 by New Beacon Books. In 1978, Carter was seriously beaten during a demonstration against the PNC over refusal to hold elections. He was later sympathetic to the Working People's Alliance, Eusi Kwayana, and Walter Rodney, but did not join this political party.
According to Lloyd D. Brown in Fifty Caribbean Writers, Carter’s “earliest poetry was shaped by the turbulent days of anti-colonial radicalism and protest” during the 1950s, adding, his “distinctive voice of protest and rebellion is unmistakeably clear”. Brown notes: “Unlike so many early collections, especially in the Caribbean, The Hill of Fire Glows avoids neo-Romantic idealization of landscape. Instead of the familial pastoral clichés, the young Carter’s landscape vibrates with historical memories, which, in turn, inspire an urgent demand for change. In Listening to the Land the poet hears a ‘tongueless whispering,’ the possible voice of a buried slave who embodies the past. The response to the landscape is activist rather than escapist, and when the poet dreams, his are dreams of social change…”
As Peepal Tree Press points out, critics such as Kamau Brathwaite and Gordon Rohlehr have made it clear Carter should reside in the front ranks of Caribbean poets. However, his reputation did not extend much beyond Guyana. It took the 1987 essay by Rupert Roopnaraine, Web of October: Rereading Martin Carter, to show “how completely the personal and philosophical inter-penetrated the political, and vice-versa, in his poetry”. The body of his work, Peepal Tree Press maintains, is a reminder Carter is a world poet, one to be seen in “the highest company of the great Latin American poets: Neruda, Guillen, and Cesar Vallejo”.
Carter began suffering from failing health in the 1990s, with much of the major recognition for his work coming during this time, or following his death. He suffered a stroke in 1993, and lost the ability to speak and walk. Carter died on December 13, 1997, survived by his wife, Phyllis, and four children. He was buried at the Place of Heroes in the Botanical Gardens in Georgetown, a resting place previously reserved for Heads of State of Guyana.
Sources for this exploration: Peepal Tree Press, Wikipedia, and Fifty Caribbean Writers.
Sources for this exploration: Trinidad Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2015-09-14/swansong-anson-gonzalez; Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English; and Peepal Tree Press.