My Poetry Corner November 2025 features the poem “The Day of Revolution” from the poetry collection My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982) by Guyanese poet and teacher Mahadai Das; included in the posthumous publication of her work (1976-1994) A Leaf in His Ears: Collected Poems by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2010). All excerpts of her poems are taken from the Peepal 2010 publication.

Born in 1954 in Eccles on the East Bank Demerara, Guyana, Mahadai’s father was a rice farmer. She attended the prestigious Bishops High School for girls in the capital, Georgetown, where she began writing poetry. Then in 1971, her mother died while giving birth to her tenth child, leaving Mahadai, then seventeen, with responsibility for her siblings. Later that year (November), she was crowned as the “Miss Diwali” beauty-queen. What a boost that must’ve been for the adolescent Mahadai!

In the early 1970s, while taking care of her siblings, Das earned her BA at the University of Guyana and became a volunteer member of the Guyana National Service.

Disillusioned with the corruption and authoritarianism of Burnham’s regime (1974-1985), she became involved with the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), co-founded by Walter Rodney (1942-1980), an African historian and political activist. In the poem “Militant” from her debut poetry collection I Want to be a Poetess of My People (1977), Das declares her commitment to joining the fight for change in Guyana (pp. 39-40):

Militant I am / Militantly I strive. / I want to march in my revolution, / I want to march with my brothers and sisters. / Revolution firing my song of freedom. / I want my blood to churn / Change! Change! Change!… // Child of the revolution! I want to grow… grow… grow! / I want to grow for my revolution. / I want to march for my country!

In her quest to grow professionally to better serve her country, Das left Guyana to obtain her MA at Columbia University, New York. After earning her MA, she began a doctoral program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, Illinois. While there, she became critically ill and never completed the program.

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