Dream to Change the World

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The Sunday Essay · Poetry & Public Life

Dream to Change the World

Martin Carter and the Guyana We Have Not Yet Built

Nearly seventy-five years after Carter first refused to still his voice, the line has become a national slogan. What would it mean to treat it instead as a standard, and to let a nation that celebrates the poet be answerable to the poem?

By Dr. Terrence Richard Blackman · Brooklyn, New York · September 2026

 

“I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world.”

— Martin Carter, “Looking at Your Hands,” University of Hunger: Collected Poems & Selected Prose, ed. Gemma Robinson (Bloodaxe, 2006), p. 70.

The refusal came first. Detention came after.

We tend to tell the story the other way round. Martin Carter, we say, wrote Poems of Resistance from British Guiana while interned at Atkinson Field, after the British suspended the constitution in October 1953 and removed the People’s Progressive Party government. The familiar image of the detained poet is so satisfying that it has quietly rewritten the chronology.

Gemma Robinson, who edited Carter’s collected poems, has set the record straight. “Looking at Your Hands” appeared in October 1951 in the small collection The Hill of Fire Glows Red, two years before the Emergency. Carter was twenty-four. The poem was republished during the Emergency as “I Will Not Still My Voice,” taken from its opening line, and included in the early versions of Poems of Resistance from British Guiana, published in London in 1954.^[1]

The chronology matters. Carter did not discover his refusal in detention. He had already declared it publicly and in print. Its price changed. The poet paid it and did not retract.

The precise political sequence matters, too. The PPP’s first term ran from the opening of Parliament on 30 May 1953 to the suspension of the constitution on 9 October: 133 days. That describes the government’s term, not Carter’s detention.^[2] A poem is not a policy. Its force in public life comes precisely from its being a made thing—exact and beautiful—that survived its author and his circumstances. But a poem can state a demand. This one does. A demand, unlike a mood, is something one can fail.

So the question isn’t what Carter meant. Readers have argued about that for nearly seventy-five years and should go on arguing. The question is narrower. Speaking has a price in 2026 too, quieter than a detention camp and, as we will see, no less real. The question is whether we have let that price decide what we are willing to claim.

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I. Before Detention

The poem’s solidarity has a material setting: hands, hunger, an unlit room, ranks. The speaker turns to a listener he calls friend and speaks of people living and hungering without light, people whom even death could not afford, people who did not sleep merely to dream. Then he turns the learning outward. He looks at hands. He listens to speech. He joins ranks. The ending is conditional: if you see me doing these things, then you must know what I am for. The speaker does not ask to be trusted. He asks to be judged by his conduct, and tells the listener what conduct to look for.^[1]

That is a stronger foundation for accountability than a slogan. It is a standing invitation to check.

A demand, unlike a mood, is something one can fail.

— T.R.B.

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II. The Hands

Consider the passengers of the M/V Barima. The Transport and Harbors Department ferry capsized on 18 July 2026 while traveling from Georgetown to Port Kaituma. Its original manifest recorded 116 passengers and 17 crew members, for a total of 133 people. A later review of boarding-area CCTV found 179 people aboard, including 18 crew. The difference between the two totals is 46, but the two counts are not interchangeable: one is a manifest, and the other is a CCTV reconstruction.^[3]

The Government acknowledged that people had boarded without tickets and announced stricter compliance with existing ticketing and passenger-management procedures so that manifests would accurately record everyone aboard.^[4] What has not yet been publicly explained is how people went unrecorded, who they were, and whether a complete accounting now exists. That is an unresolved question about whether anyone was counting before the vessel left the wharf, not whether footage could be read afterward.

Andrew Donald, a former captain of the vessel, has offered his own account of what counting and loading looked like from the bridge. In a public Facebook statement reported by Kiskadee Watch, he alleged management pressure over loading and sailing, chronic overloading, safety deficiencies, and retaliatory personnel action after his objections. He declined an interview with the publication. These are allegations, not findings, and should remain so described.^[5]

The Commission of Inquiry, established to investigate the disaster, reported on 2 September that it had conducted a site survey, arranged a public-hearing venue, established a secretariat, gathered records, begun document analysis, and prepared potential-witness schedules. It said that public hearings had not yet begun and that it was working to commence them later in September.^[6] If the inquiry finds that a safety objection drew sanction rather than remedy, it will have described a system that saw the objection and not what it was about.

Who counted them? Who listened to them? And when the answers were unsatisfactory, who said so, and what happened to the people who did?

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III. Stilling the Voice

Carter belongs in the history of the Guyanese press more directly than quotation suggests. The final editorial of Stabroek News records that he was among the friends with whom David de Caires discussed how the paper might be realized. That is not the same as calling Carter its founder. It is nevertheless a meaningful connection: the poet of the unstilled voice took part in conversations that helped imagine a place where other voices could be heard.^[7]

On 15 March, Stabroek News printed its final edition after nearly four decades. Its editorial said the paper had not been earning enough to survive. The company’s announcement of voluntary liquidation earlier attributed mounting losses to structural pressures facing print journalism, including global digital platforms, falling circulation, and dwindling revenues. Those explanations are attributed accounts, not a measurement of why every reader left.^{[7] [8]}

The paper also raised a separate question about the Department of Public Information’s advertising debt. Stabroek News reported that DPI owed GY$87,056,431 for advertisements published as of 28 February. It also reported that DPI notified the paper on 26 February that all advertisements intended for March had been canceled with immediate effect, without explanation. The closure had already been announced on 13 February; the cancellation therefore cannot explain the decision to close. The longer history of unpaid bills is another matter. A newspaper struggling to survive is especially vulnerable to a public debtor’s delay, and a state that carries such a debt need never say a censorious word.^{[9] [10]}

A smaller dispute shows another mechanism. In February, the Speaker of the National Assembly said that two private-media camera-operator positions had been converted to reporter seats, allowing seven private-media representatives inside the chamber. He said that Parliament-contracted cameras recorded proceedings and provided an official feed.^[11] The Guyana Press Association disputed that account. It said the agreement invoked was a COVID-era arrangement, that private cameras had been excluded, and that no usable, continuous direct feed was available.^[12] The disagreement is not merely procedural. A legislature whose visual record is made only by cameras it contracts has narrowed what journalists may independently show, even if the parties disagree about the scope of the limitation.

Carter’s years in government also belong in this account. He served as Minister of Information and Culture in Forbes Burnham’s government and resigned in November 1970. Accessible sources render his portfolio title differently, but his later public-information role and resignation are not in doubt. The author of the refusal once exercised public power. That does not weaken the story. It places his own exercise of power under the same scrutiny the poem invites.^[13]

Kiskadee Watch, an independent, digital-first publication launched on 14 June and led by former Stabroek News editor-in-chief Anand Persaud, carried Donald’s account. That is the refusal in its 2026 form: smaller, online, and still speaking.^[14]

A newspaper struggling to survive is especially vulnerable to a public debtor’s delay.

— T.R.B.

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IV. Not to Dream, but to Change

Here is the poem’s turn. Carter’s ending distinguishes between two kinds of dreaming: the dream that escapes the world and the dream that is a reason to act in it. It ties the second to conduct that others can see. The institutional argument that follows is ours, but it begins there.

We have said before that institutions matter more than elections. The claim needs care. Elections give citizens the means to remove a government. Institutions must protect that choice and make public power answerable between elections. Nor is an institution good because it exists. Guyana’s commissions, banks, and regulators show plainly enough that a body with a charter and a budget can entrench the failures it was created to correct.

The mathematician’s temptation is to call a dream a conjecture and an institution its proof. But a charter proves nothing. The evidence lies in what follows: whether a recommendation makes a crossing safer, whether a regulator applies its rules fairly, whether public lending serves its stated purpose and accounts for its losses. Existence is not performance, and performance is not activity. It means fulfilling the stated purpose in practice.

By that standard the Barima record is, so far, incomplete rather than damning. The distinction matters. On 24 July the Government said it was strengthening compliance with ticketing and passenger-management procedures. That is the right kind of response. The poem’s question is the one it asks of its speaker: can we see it? What evidence shows that a departing ferry now leaves with a manifest that matches the people aboard?^[4]

The Commission had published no report and had not heard public evidence by its 2 September update. That is not failure at this stage. It is a reason to ask for a timetable and to judge the process against it.^[6] The M/V Ma Lisha had not begun service to Port Kaituma because the wharf intended to accommodate it had developed structural problems after significant movement of surrounding soil; the Government said sections required rebuilding.^[15]

The Transparency Institute of Guyana urged the Government to seek an independent, international investigation led by the International Maritime Organization. That was an advocacy position, not an investigation that had been ordered.^[16] A separate, independent archive said it cataloged 338 published documents on the disaster, last revised on 14 August. Its value is as a citation guide and a record of conflicting accounts, not as an official finding.^[17]

Those are real responses, demands, and records. They are not remedies. Remedies belong to the state, and the state’s are still promises.

That is not a counsel of despair. It is a discipline we can bring to our reading of the poem and to our public life. Carter’s speaker does not say he dreams of a changed world. He says he dreams to change it, and tells us how to check.

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V. Exactness

“Looking at Your Hands” lasts because it is exact. Its images are grounded in particular conditions, and its abstractions are earned from them. That is why the ending can be lifted onto a placard at all. But lifting it is not the same as keeping it. Quotation preserves words while quietly loosening their demands.

Last Sunday we wrote about a school on Thomas Lands and argued that beauty in public building happens when the brief has an objective, not merely constraints. The same holds for public language. Too much official prose in the oil era—the press release and the ministerial statement—has one constraint, admitting nothing, and no objective beyond the news cycle. Carter is the standing rebuke to that prose.

But exactness alone is not the ethic. A statement can be meticulously precise about a chosen fact and misleading in the whole. The ethic is exactness with its context, uncertainties, and inconvenient evidence attached. That is why this essay records what the Government has announced as well as what it has not yet shown.

The ethic is exactness with its context, uncertainties, and inconvenient evidence attached.

— T.R.B.

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VI. Too Much to Claim

Carter died on 13 December 1997, more than two decades before Guyana began oil production in December 2019.^{[13] [18]} The Barima has made older questions about oversight and accountability newly urgent, and oil wealth makes them harder to evade: what now prevents us from doing what we already know is necessary?

So let us not end by asking Guyanese to remember Martin Carter. We remember him well enough; his lines are on our walls. Let us ask something harder. Let us ask to be answerable to the words we have chosen to claim. Let that audit begin with those of us who write, this journal first among them, since a publication that invokes the poet’s refusal has no standing to exempt its own claims from his exactness.

Every institution that holds public power, whether built in this decade or inherited, should be able to answer, in the terms of its own function, the questions the poem implies. A commission: did you hear the people who were there and test what they said fairly? A regulator: did you apply your rules to the strong as to the weak? A bank: did the lending serve the purpose you announced, and did you account for what it cost? A university: did you teach the people you were built for? And to all of them, the poem’s own test: when you say what you are for, can we see it in what you do?

We have too much to claim.

When we say what we are for, can we see it in what we do?

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Sources and Method

This essay was fact-checked against the linked materials below. Official statements are used for Government and Commission actions; reporting and advocacy claims are identified as such. The M/V Barima inquiry had not heard public evidence as of the Commission’s 2 September 2026 update. The independent disaster archive is cited as a guide to published documents, not as an official record.

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