Abstract
Throughout his career, the Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott has celebrated the Caribbean Sea. From his early writings that pay homage to the importance of the sea in the Caribbean literary voice, Walcott has developed a complex notion of the sea as a place that can be known phenomenologically, and that defies or complicates hegemonic definitions of place and country.
De tous les héritages, la mer est celui sur lequel tous les souverains prétendent le plus de part, et cependant c’est celui sur lequel les droits d’un chacun sont les moins éclairs. (Of all inheritances, the sea is that on which all sovereigns have laid the most claim, however, it is also the one on which their individual rights are least clear.)
[T]he sea for [Aimé] Césaire is closed, looking out onto a corridor of despair, leading nowhere, confining itself to washing up the mental corpses of the inaugural crime that was the Middle Passage. In this way, it throws the Caribbean subject back upon itself, as in a Hall of Horrors.
This paper examines Walcott’s portrayals of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. In it, I read Walcott’s poetic works chronologically, investigating the ways in which Walcott invests the sea with a sense of place, and the meanings that Walcott attaches to both the sea and the ocean. I take my understanding of the term “sense of place” from Seamus Heaney, who defines “a sense of place” as an equable marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind, whether the country of the mind takes its tone unconsciously from a shared oral inherited culture, or from a consciously savoured literary culture, or from both, it is this marriage that constitutes the sense of place in its richest possible manifestation. (1980: 132)
The first part of the paper explores the relationship between the sea and sensual knowledge. The second part considers the relationship between the sea and history. The concluding part of this paper examines Walcott’s views on the relationship between place, ways of knowing, and the idea that space is subjective, culture-bound, and anthropocentric. This paper argues that for Walcott, the sea is place, or a set of places; viewing the sea in such a way goes against assumptions made by a number of scholars of Caribbean literature and Walcott. I use the word “sea” to mean both the Caribbean Sea, and the immediate Atlantic waters to the east of many of the region’s islands and the word “ocean” to refer to the Atlantic in its entirety. Unsurprisingly, the sea features in many of Walcott’s poems so, in the interests of concision, this paper deals with those poems that include the sea as the poem’s subject, rather than as a “background” feature.
The terms space and place are themselves problematic as various scholars use the terms with both overt and nuanced differences of meaning. In this paper, I work with the following definition suggested by John Agnew, with the qualification that if space is “top down”, and place is “bottom-up”, we should be hesitant to describe place as “inscribed in space”, but rather see space as inscribed over place: Space signifies a field of practice or area in which a group or organization (such as a state) operates, held together in popular consciousness by a map-image and a narrative or story that represents it as a meaningful whole. Place represents the encounter of people with other people and things in space. It refers to how everyday life is inscribed in space and takes on meaning for specified groups of people and organizations. Space can be considered as “top-down”, defined by powerful actors imposing their control and stories on others. Place can be considered as “bottom-up”, representing the outlooks and actions of more typical folk.
Continuing with this definition, Agnew identifies a tendency to imagine America as a vast space, and Europe as “place-laden”. Although Agnew does not specify exactly who has imagined Europe and America in these ways, it is clear that this notion of America as lacking place(s) is formed from a Eurocentric perspective. Place, in these terms, is associated with culture, and especially with cities. More importantly, place is defined by both physical embodiment and human settlement; neither of these criteria are usually applied to the sea.
Beyond Walcott’s own works, this paper is indebted, in very different ways, to three separate writers: Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (2007); Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (1999); and the works of Edward Kamau Brathwaite. DeLoughrey’s text studies the importance of the sea in the literatures of both Caribbean and Pacific islanders and argues that predominant ideas concerning the sea were the invention of a European hegemony which constructed “the trope of the isolated island” (2007: 2). For DeLoughrey, viewing the sea as place was part of a European colonial project: “British maritime expansion sought to render the vastness of ocean space into temporalized place through a system of cognitive and literal maps that ranged from nautical literature to the charting of longitude” (2007: 41; emphasis in original). Although DeLoughrey assumes that maps convert space to place, her own findings may suggest otherwise. For example, she argues that her adoption of the “tidalectic approach”
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“marks a significant break from colonial maps that depict land and sea as unmarked, atemporal, and feminized voids, terra nullius and aqua nullius, unless traversed and/or occupied by (male) European agents of history” (2007: 22). In other words, the assumption that the sea is space until mapped by European travellers is, of course, entirely Eurocentric. These kinds of assumptions about the sea have been applied specifically to Walcott’s work: This means that a New World cultural unity can be imagined locally. The seemingly limitless physical environment evident in the sky and sea surrounding the islands provides the context within which Caribbean cultural diversity is projected, making for a rather pronounced geographical and biocentric notion of cultural possibility. […]Walcott comes to […] conclusions regarding the sea as the radically expansive, regenerative natural space within which to imagine our human place. (Handley, 2007: 356)
In this paper, especially in its conclusion, I argue that Walcott does not “imagine” place onto space, but rather asserts that space has been written onto place. In the above quotation, Handley asserts that Walcott refutes “biocentric notion[s]” of the sea in favour of “imagine[d …] human place”. As I show, this is not entirely true, and Walcott’s writings on the sea show a marked concern with the presence and importance of non-human life forms, for example coral reefs in both Midsummer and Omeros and dolphins in The Prodigal. This emphasis on non-human life, or “biocentricity” does not, as Handley may suggest, disavow “human place”, but rather it simply asserts that human presence is not the sole criterion for defining place.
Walcott is not alone in understanding the sea as place, and in fact, as Raban shows, his understanding has commonalities with many coastal peoples or islanders across the world. Raban traces the view of the sea as a “tabula rasa” or a “pure inviting space” back to Rennaissance “exploration and imperial conquest” (1999: 34), and he associates it with the kind of imaginative cartography that was prevalent in that period. This notion of sea as spatial body allowed the inscription of “new routes of trade, exploration, and imperial conquest” (1999: 34). For Raban, the spatial sea is a construct of European Early Modernity. Investigating the beliefs of some Salishan tribes, Raban narrates a myth about a local coastal area. In the story, a young woman, Kokwalalwoot, falls in love with a whirlpool and metamorphoses into a grotesque semi-human semi-aquatic creature. By mythologizing parts of the water, the Salishan used the story of Kokwalalwoot as a navigational aid and mnemonic to help canoeists locate whirlpools and slipstreams, and thereby manoeuvre the dangerous waters (1999: 188). The local people, therefore, deemed certain areas of the sea important enough to mythologize them and imbue them with a “sense of place”. Raban also details how Polynesian seamen would navigate their local sea by sensing the behaviour of the water in the vibrations of their testes. Raban argues that, for these people, the “open sea could be as intimately known and as [available] to human habitation as a familiar stretch of land to those seamen who lived on its surface, as gulls do, wave by wave” (1999: 94). Whilst DeLoughrey asserts that “[u]nlike terrestrial space, the perpetual circulation of ocean currents means that as a space, the sea necessarily dissolves local phenomenology” (2007: 55), Raban’s firsthand experience of the sea as a traveller of various seas and oceans, and his understanding of Polynesian and coastal Native American cultures shows that the sea is knowable through immediate, primary, and embodied sensual experience. As Raban attests, “for the Polynesian navigators […] the ocean is a place, not a space; its mobile surface full of portents, clues and meanings. It is as substantial and particular, as crowded with topographical features, as, say, Oxfordshire” (1999: 95). It is this emphasis on phenomenological experience that separates spatial ownership of the sea as practised through European cartography from the embodied experiences of tribal peoples. While it is fully possible that the Salishan and Polynesian seafarers sought to territorialize the waters and claim them as tribal space, the initial understanding of the sea was forged through sense-knowledge.
This paper is also informed by Kamau Brathwaite’s famous assertion that “the unity is submarine” (1974: 64). By this, Brathwaite means that the sea has concealed inter-island unity. Elsewhere, Brathwaite discusses this notion of a submerged unity on both a real and metaphorical level: “The sea is a divider. It is not a life-giver,/ Time’s river. The islands are the humped/ backs of mountains, green turtles” (1969: 1–3). The islands in the Caribbean archipelagoes are actually the tips of a mountain range. Beneath the waters of the Caribbean there lies a unified landscape. Because the sea covers this immense landscape, for Brathwaite it is a “divider”; if the “unity is submarine”, the sea itself appears to be an unwelcome body. In contrast to Brathwaite’s view of the Caribbean Sea, at the close of Omeros, Walcott refers to “our wide country, the Caribbean Sea” (1990: 320). Importantly, both Walcott and Brathwaite agree that there is an inter-island unity, and that this unity is something that should be praised. That is, both poets locate and promote a pan-Caribbean identity in their work; the objective remains the same, but the strategy differs. The notion of the sea as a “wide country” is both complex and magnificent: it rebels against nationalist ideologies, and compels the reader to reconsider normative conceptions of space and place.
Walcott’s first major poem (a self-published work composed when he was 18 years old) Epitaph for the Young (1949), displays a concern for the importance of the sea, and its role in fashioning the young poet’s craft. The autobiographical poem details Walcott’s attempts to forge his own poetic voice and to “give voice” to his native island. As Paul Breslin has argued, “the aim of Walcott’s voyage remains tentatively defined […:] [t]o bring thought to the thoughtless islands” (2001: 63), and to disprove the charge that “There is not a West Indian Literature”. Walcott intertwines his “voyage” of self-discovery with journeys made by himself and Dunstan St Omer within and around Saint Lucia. In order to counter the charge that “there is not a West Indian Literature”, Walcott uses nautical language to describe the beginnings of his own poetic journey: So I began to write, to take up arms, Fitting out vaguely for a pitiless sea, Willing to drown under impersonal stars… On a strange sea… towards… (Walcott, 2002: 35)
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Fitting out is the penultimate stage of shipbuilding. The process involves releasing the ship from its dry dock onto seawater, where the ship’s construction is finalized. Following on from this, the ship undergoes its “sea trials”, and is then certified as complete. Likening the process of forging a poetic voice to that of building a ship, especially the stage at which the ship is tested on the sea, indicates a deep, or even fundamental, bond between Walcott’s poetry and the sea. The adverb “vaguely”, through the intersection of the various languages that Walcott was proficient in or familiar with, also suggests nautical themes. Whilst the English “vague” suggests uncertainty, its Latinate root “vagus” means “to wander”; the French “vague” means a wave, and the Creole “vag” conflates both the English and French meanings. In essence, this “vaguely” does not just mean uncertainly, it also suggests a journey that takes its movement, rhythms, and qualities from the sea. In other words, Walcott’s poetry is not only created in the sea, it is also created of the sea. The poet later reaffirms this idea when he describes himself as a “sea voice” (41). Walcott describes the action of writing poetry as “taking up arms”, associating the idea of verse forged from the sea with martial activities; the “sea voice” is one that battles, counteracts, or contests other voices. Arguably, Walcott’s “sea voice” is apparent within his entire oeuvre; explicitly, Walcott has returned to the idea of the “sea voice” in “The Schooner, Flight” (1979) and Omeros (1990). In “The Schooner, Flight”, Walcott writes from the perspective of his alter ego Shabine. 3 Shabine begins his story at a specific time of the year characterized by what he calls the “softness” of the sea: “In idle August, while the sea soft”. 4 Throughout the poem, the speaker uses nautical metaphors and similes and the semantic field of marine language creates the sense that the sea dominates Shabine’s life. Since Shabine describes his eyes as “sea-green” (4), and tells the reader of his inability to “shake the sea noise out of [his] head”, one could argue that the sea has become an integral part of his body. Moreover, Shabine’s ability to express himself, that is his agency, “takes from” the sea — “each phrase” of his poem, he insists, is “soaked in salt” (5) — and when Shabine describes himself as “just a red nigger who love the sea” (4), he defines himself through his topophilia for the waters. In Omeros, similarly, Walcott describes his own “craft” as “requir[ing] the same/ crouching care, the same crabbed, natural devotion/ of the hand that […] planed an elegant canoe”. 5
As he discusses in his Nobel speech, for Walcott, the formation of West Indian literature does not solely involve West Indians writing, but West Indians writing about their native land. In order to write from and about the Caribbean, in Epitaph for the Young the poet adopts cartographical language: “The new sojourner took the wheel, solitude charted/ The early seas, mapping explored actions” (20). Walcott describes his journeys onto the waters as “chart[ing]” them. This act of “mapping” deals with “actions” and the experience of “explor[ation]” and rejects the cartography of “space” for a new way of mapping that relies on sensual experience. As Walcott and company continue “mapping” the “early seas” they find: “Rocks and blue water, deceptions, wicked children/ Playing on sand in reach of the wicked waves.” Applying the adjective “wicked” to both waves and playing children serves to problematize the epithet in both cases. Waves are of course outside of morality, and the children do not appear to be doing anything “wicked”. Instead, the term seems to be reported speech. The idea of “wicked children” and “wicked waves” suggests that someone other than Walcott has already “written on”, or of, both the water and the West Indian people. The repetition of “wicked” to describe both the Caribbean Sea and Caribbean children unifies, or at the very least associates, the children with the sea. From the moment Walcott begins “to write, to take up arms”, he shows a profound link between his islanders and the sea; they become what the Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo would later call “the peoples of the sea” (1996). The narrator and his travelling companion join the children, and “by acquaintance learn” some of the culture of the island. Walcott suggests that the children could offer one of the many “alternat[ive]”, subversive “sea-voice[s]” from the “twilight”. In addition to “writing back”, Walcott also suggests “re-charting” as a subversive tool. The encounter with the “wicked children” is a part of the project of “chart[ing] the early seas” that begins the canto.
From developing the notion of “a sea voice”, in one of his most accomplished earlier poems, “A Sea Chantey” from In A Green Night (1962), Walcott achieves his first Caribbean-centric map of the waters. Walcott constructs a kind of literary map of the waters, which deals with the Sea as it is known phenomenologically, and reconfigures the waters from the perspective of place. “A Sea-Chantey” explicitly references two French poets. Typically of Walcott, whose oeuvre consistently creolizes European voices, these are both European poets who were “outsiders” and uncomfortable in their own societies. The poem begins with an epigraph from Baudelaire’s 1857 poem “L’Invitation au Voyage”. In the fourth line of the poem, Walcott also references Rimbaud’s 1883 sonnet “Voyelles” (“Vowels”) (Rimbaud, 1998). The epigraph: “Là tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,/ Luxe, calme, et volupté” (“there, everything is order and beauty, luxury, peace, and pleasure”) describes an unnamed, probably fictional place. In the poem, Baudelaire’s speaker extends an invitation to a woman (possibly a lover) to join him in this carefree world. To a Caribbean reader, a European desire to find a beautiful, tranquil place of relaxation carries a very unique set of issues. That is, from its discovery, the Caribbean has been imagined as an available space for European projects; these have included touristic practices of spatial consumption, control, and exclusion. 6 In the poem, by exchanging Baudelaire’s fantasy “there” for an embodied “here”, Walcott rewrites the “luxury” and “peace” of the Caribbean Sea from the perspective of a Caribbean person. Although Walcott references it less explicitly, a brief reading of Rimbaud’s poem is necessary for full comprehension of “A Sea-Chantey”. In “Vowels”, the poet begins by attributing a different colour to each of the five vowels. Building upon this, Rimbaud then explores the associations of each colour/vowel. The poem is a meditation upon, and celebration of, the poet’s synesthesia. For Rimbaud, language is composed of colour, music, scenes, and scents; every utterance takes from a palette with an endless possibility of mixtures. Drawing upon Rimbaud’s experience of language, Walcott creates his own “Voyelles, of the liquid Antilles” (4). 7 For Walcott, every utterance takes from, and refers back to the Caribbean Sea. In “A Sea Chantey”, Walcott describes a scene at an island harbour: he hones in on “a young sailor”, who plays “His grandfather’s chantey/ On a trembling mouth-organ” (ll. 57–9), and then refocuses on the chantey itself, which “uncurls with/ The soft vowels of inlets,/The christening of vessels/ The titles of portages” (63–6). Beyond the harbour, the music also contains “The pastures of ports” (71), 8 “The rosary of archipelagoes,/ Anguilla, Antigua,/ […]Guadeloupe, [… and] Grenada” (73–6). The chantey shifts from the local to the regional; as it does so, it charts the archipelago. By focusing on the player, and on music itself, 9 Walcott emphasizes the embodied nature of this Caribbean map: it is drawn from, and “inscribed” from within the site it represents. In other words, the map does not present an aerial or spatial view of the Caribbean, but instead encompasses an expansive range of phenomenological experiences. This map is the sense-map of the “young sailor”, his grandfather, and a myriad of other “sea voices”.
At the beginning of the poem, Walcott suggests why it is important that a chantey should “contain” the sea as place, or remap marine space. Taking “the sea’s liquid letters” (26) as his language, Walcott revises Baudelaire’s “luxury” and tranquility from a Caribbean perspective. The idea suggested by Baudelaire’s lines is inherent in a constructed image of the Caribbean: a desire to travel somewhere that is seemingly untouched by the “modern” world. In other words, Baudelaire’s vision of a place that is ordered and peaceful is not unlike literary tropes that construct the countryside as “untouched”, or unaffected by modernity. Walcott does not go against the notion of the waters as peaceful, or the idea of the islands as sensual but he places Caribbean people at the very centre of this landscape: Yachts tranquil as lilies, In ports of calm coral, The lithe, ebony hulls of strait-stitching schooners, The needles of their masts That thread archipelagoes Refracted embroidery In feverish waters Of the sea-farer’s islands (7–15)
For Walcott tranquillity is not stillness: the waters are “feverish”, and, as the poem progresses, references to “blazing cargoes” (28) and “Holds foul with great turtles” (42) suggest movement. This movement is that of industry; to Walcott, “order” and “beauty” do not exclude working bustle.
The poet then describes the “ship-boys” as “A sea-faring, Christian,/ And intrepid people” (45–6). The poet’s seas are dominated by these “intrepid” sea-farers, and it is from their perspective that the map is redrawn. The “strait-stitching schooners”, which “thread archipelagoes”, make lines on the water and create an “embroidery” as the waters are constantly being charted and re-charted by Caribbean travellers. The fusion of this mapping and the music that both contains and depicts the Caribbean Sea creates a sense of the sea (in Heaney’s sense of the term). The chantey is produced from an experience of the sea, and this experience reflects upon how the sea is known. The poem itself echoes this conceit: in its eighty lines, Walcott uses only five full stops. In combination with an emphasis on lateral (liquid) consonants such as “l” and sibilant sounds, the poet evokes the sound of the surf and ends echoing the sound of waves rolling onto the beach with the line “the Amen of calm waters” repeated three times. These elements are more than just stylistic: they create the sense of a literature beholden to the sea, a literature that seems to contain the Caribbean Sea within itself, and to originate from that Sea. The sea itself threads the different islands, with their different languages, and becomes a place of shared experience within the Caribbean.
In his work on regions as a spatial production, Annsi Paasi argues: A region is mediated in our everyday life in the form of various symbols, which are the same for all individuals in the one region, though the meaning associated with them will always be construed personally on the basis of the individual's life system and biography […] though the regions of society obtain their ultimate personal meanings in the practices of everyday life, these meanings cannot be totally reduced to experiences that constitute everyday life, since a region bears with it institutionally mediated practices and relations, the most significant being the history of the region as part of the spatial structure of the society in question. (Paasi, 1986: 114)
Paasi goes on to argue that place is defined by the individual, whilst a region is defined by the collective imagination. However, unlike Walcott’s view of a collective region, Paasi’s definition of the collective imagination includes “institutional” agency. On the one hand, he gestures to a region as a mutual or democratic place; on the other, Paasi defines a region as a controlled space. Continuing his search for a classification of “region”, Paasi also notes that, of the media through which a region is constructed, language is the most important. Walcott’s region certainly utilizes language; however, it also operates outside of it. This Caribbean region comprises speakers of many different languages. Perhaps more important is Walcott’s use of the “language” of music, which here operates to express place through non-linguistic means. The chantey, both expresses place (comes from it) and ties places together into a region. Importantly, this region is not a space in the sense of a controlled or dominated area. It may be a space in the sense of an area to be traversed, and through which different agents move and interact; however, as Edward Casey has argued, in his work on phenomenology and place, these types of movements and meetings can just as easily occur within place (1996: 24). For Walcott, therefore, regionalism is a useful term that enables him to move away from “nation” as a collective and bonding force. This kind of notion of regionalism, is, of course, indebted to the poem’s placement within the Caribbean archipelago. My point is that the Caribbean seems to deflect Paasi’s “model” of “regional identity”, which, when applied elsewhere is astute. This is in itself a testament to the need to question spatial models and to privilege particularity.
In “Nearing La Guaira”, also from In A Green Night, Walcott describes a voyage to the Venezuelan port city on a fishing boat. The speaker repeatedly directs his attention towards the sea, describing the motion of the waves (4), the look of the moonlight upon the water (6–7), and the effects of the wind upon the water (13). Talking to one fisherman in Spanish, the poem’s speaker asks him the meaning of the name La Guaira. The fisherman “grins/, [and] says it means nothing” (19–20). The next day, when the sun has risen, Walcott describes “nothing [a]s green water” and as: […] a cornet in the plaza, nothing the Morro Where the garbage drifts,[…] Nothing the soldiers drilling in the square, […] Nothing is bitter and is very deep. (21–34)
The list describes both natural landmarks (“the Morro”, “rust hills”) and constructed sites (“the plaza”, “cathedral”). The final line, “nothing is bitter and is very deep”, echoes the final line of the poem “Air” (from the same collection): “there is too much nothing here”. Both Edward Baugh and Paul Breslin (2001) have argued that Walcott celebrates Caribbean “nothingness” by using it to create a “blank page on which there is everything to be written” (Baugh, 2006: 8). Whilst both scholars are extremely sensitive to Walcott’s work, and the idea of rewriting colonial space is important within the poet’s oeuvre, I take the phrase “blank page” to be somewhat of a misnomer. Although Walcott erases colonial definitions, and challenges the notions of colonial space, he does not replace colonial space with “blankness”. Instead, Walcott uses the opportunity created by the idea of “nothingness” to reassert the importance of place itself. In “Air”, the phrase “too much nothing” suggested the presence of an ineffable “something” (Jefferson, 2012). In “Nearing La Guiara”, the notion of nothing being “very deep”, again suggests a “something” that is just outside the bounds of normal, or “standardized”, perception. This “something”, which Walcott continually encourages his reader to engage with, is a deeply rooted sense of place. The meaning of the word “Guaira”, which Walcott places so much emphasis on in the poem, sheds light on the strategy that Walcott employs within the poem. A guairo is in fact a type of sloop, and a guaira is the name for the boat’s sail. The etymological origin of these words comes from the Amerindian language of the coastal region. The name “La Guaira”, quite literally, means the port of the guairos: the place where the guairos are sailed. To the fisherman, La Guaira may mean “nothing”; ironically, although the fisherman does not understand, or claims not to understand, the meaning of the noun, its meaning is still pertinent to this fisherman: La Guaira is, in the world of the poem, literally the place of the fishermen. The Amerindian etymology of the word further suggests a sense of place/ relationship to the sea that has pre-Columbian origins.
In Another Life (1973), Walcott’s book-length autobiography and history of Saint Lucia, the poet returns to the relationship between the sea and Amerindian peoples. The poem begins as Walcott looks out to sea from the land: Verandahs, where the pages of the sea are a book left open by an absent master in the middle of another life– I begin here again, begin until this ocean’s a shut book, and like a bulb the white moon’s filaments wane.
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Walcott begins by “reading” “the sea” and vows to continue “until the ocean’s/ a shut book”. Although colloquially one may use “ocean” and “sea” as synonyms (which Walcott certainly does elsewhere in his poetry), the words have different connotations. From a Caribbean perspective, the majority of the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles curve around the basin of the Caribbean Sea; the coastal points on their east are the beginnings of the Atlantic Ocean. The sea therefore links the islands to each other, and looks towards the Central American continent. The Atlantic Ocean looks outward to both Africa and Europe, and has overriding associations with its “Middle Passage”. By beginning with “sea” and ending with “ocean”, Walcott expands his survey of the Caribbean across place and time. The notion of the sea as a “book” suggests that, if one studies it, one can gain knowledge; this knowledge, however, is based on emplaced experience rather than abstract savoir. The idea of an “absent master” contains multiple meanings. The “absent master” could be any of the historical plantation owners, who were often “absent” by virtue of the fact they lived in Europe. The “absent master” could be the British “owners” of Saint Lucia. In these scenarios, through the absence of the colonial master, the sea becomes the inheritance of the Caribbean people. Walcott does not state whether the book is empty or full of information. In the first instance, where the book is full, Another Life is the project of reading and interpreting the sea; in the second, as Yvette Christianse has explored, the book is blank and available to inscription, Another Life is a project in which Walcott writes onto the emptiness of the sea (2001: 202). Whilst initially the second idea seems the most likely, further investigation of the poem reveals a combination of both strategies. As we will see, in further chapters of Another Life, Walcott delves into the depths of the sea and, in order to uncover Caribbean history, he “reads” the depths of the sea and ocean and then “writes” them onto its surface.
In the second part of Another Life, Walcott returns to the artistic potential provided by the Caribbean Sea. The poet also begins to forge his famous concept of the sea as historicized place. In this part of the poem, Walcott describes his artistic development with his friend Dunstan St Omer, who is renamed Gregorias in the text. As they stay in Gregorias’s house, the artist affectionately chides his friend: “Your poetry too full of spiders, bones, worms, ants, things eating up each other, I can’t read it. Look!” He frames a seascape in a chair, […] “Listen!” As if the thunderous Atlantic were a record he had just put on. (206–7)
Reproaching Walcott for composing poetry with too much “duende”, Gregorias suggests the sea as a place of possibility and restoration for the Caribbean artist. Gregorias’s two instructions, “look” and “listen” suggest that Walcott had to be taught to understand and interpret the everyday scenes of his youth. In the poem, the more fruitful or beneficial process is the act of listening to the ocean, which then begins to reveal itself to Walcott in the form of “an undersea museum” (208): Crouched there, like a whelk-picker, I searched the sea-wrack for a sea-coin: my white grandfather’s face, I heard […] my black grandfather’s voice […] (208)
Expecting the ocean to reveal the history of his European ancestors, Walcott is surprised to uncover the history of his black ancestors. The history contained within the “oceanic past” complicates the poet’s European lineage and emphasizes his Afro-Caribbean roots. It is perhaps important to note that both of Walcott’s grandfathers were white. By rewriting this ancestry, Walcott formulates a direct comparison between his white and black ancestry. Following this act of excavation, Walcott attempts to exorcise his European grandfather’s ghostly presence: “I tired of your whining, Grandfather,/ […] I tired of your groans, Grandfather,/ […] I hoped for your sea-voices/ to hiss from my hand” (209). Despite his desire to rebury the voice, once Walcott has learned to listen to the Atlantic, he is unable to undo the process.
As Walcott continues to muse on the relationship between the sea and history, he continues the process of excavation. In contrast to his school textbooks’ view of history as “Nostalgia! Hymns of battles not our own” (212), Walcott imagines the history of the Caribbean as contained within the depths of the sea: The leaping Caribs whiten, in one flash, the instant the race leapt at Sauteurs, a cataract! One scream of bounding lace. (213)
As the poet stands on a cliff in Saint Lucia he thinks about an incident in Grenadian history. In 1651, rather than surrender to the French invaders, the surviving Caribs of Grenada jumped to their deaths from a hill. Now named for the Caribs (the French “Sauteurs” translates to “jumpers”), both the place and the action are a vital reference point in Caribbean history and culture. The idea of whiteness suggests blankness and erasure. In addition to the gruesome and powerful image of the leapers as a waterfall, the word “cataract” also suggests visual impairment. Whilst the Caribs have disappeared from view, and have been swallowed by the sea, Walcott can still hear the “scream”. Importantly, for Walcott, the cliff in Saint Lucia is an appropriate place to discuss the leaping Caribs of Grenada. Because of the shared nature of the sea, Sauteurs becomes part of a unified and unifying history in the region. Although the tale of the leaping Caribs may at first seem to haunt the Caribbean as a story of oppression, it has also been told and fashioned as a story of resistance. 11 Although submergence under the waves removes the Caribs from sight, their “scream” becomes a part of the sea’s “bounding lace” as it meets the rocky land. By removing the signifiers of history from the realm of sight, Walcott excludes the sense element most associated with colonialism and power 12 and demands the use of other senses that are associated with emersion within place, and therefore deeper phenomenological knowledge of place.
Later in the poem, Walcott returns to the idea of listening as a means of understanding the sea: that child who puts the shell’s howl to his ear, hears nothing, hears everything that the historian cannot hear, the howls of the races that crossed the water, the howls of grandfathers drowned in that intricately swivelled Babel, […] and the crossing of water has erased their memories. And the sea, which is always the same, accepts them. (285)
Within these “races” the poet includes various African tribes, Canton in China, “Indian provinces”, and with the word “kaddish” gestures to the “Middle East.” Although the “crossing” is the ocean, which “erase[s…] memories”, it is the “sea” that “accepts them”; whilst the ocean is the place of dislocation and disassociation, the sea becomes the place of unity and belonging. Walcott suggests that this understanding is attainable through a different form of perception: whilst “the historian” does not understand or “hear” the Caribbean experience, the innocent “child” (here, Walcott’s son Peter) comes to it through the wordless sound of the sea.
In “The Sea is History”, from The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), Walcott identifies the sea as the place where he can begin to understand Caribbean history. The poem starts with a question directed to the Caribbean: “Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?/ Where is your tribal memory?”
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The poem’s speaker precedes his answer by addressing the question’s speakers as “sirs” (2). By using the pluralized honorific “sirs”, Walcott indicates the question has arisen from a group of people who have, or claim to have, a dominant relationship over the Caribbean. The speaker then locates the “tribal memory” “in that grey vault. The sea. The sea/has locked them up. The sea is History” (ll. 3–4). Clarifying his meaning, the speaker describes the crossing of the Middle Passage as experienced by African slaves. Walcott depicts the Middle Passage in a series of fragments, which suggest both the inhumane conditions aboard the ships, and, describing “bone” as “coral”, the process of throwing dead or dying bodies into the ocean. By affixing the skeletal corpses of Africans who did not make it across the Middle Passage onto the ocean floor, Walcott turns the whole Atlantic into a kind of necropolis. Necropolises, literally meaning “cities of the dead” act as a place of memory: for Walcott’s ocean these are memories of those who made it halfway between Africa and the Caribbean, and memories of those bodies whose names will never be known, and whose numbers can never be counted. Following from his exploration of the Middle Passage, Walcott turns from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea. When asked, “where is your Renaissance?” (33), Walcott’s speaker responds: it is locked in them sea-sands out there past the reef’s moiling shelf, where the men-o’-war floated down; strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself. It’s all subtle and submarine (ll. 34–8)
Here, the offer to “guide” the reader/interrogator goes against the idea of the sea as aqua incognita. Whilst the questioner may not know his or her way around the sea, the speaker claims enough familiarity with the “subtle” “submarine” world to act as a guide. This subtlety and emphasis on sensual immersion again reflects Walcott’s view on place: one cannot simply be told or learn about it, one must enter it.
Continuing this project of submarine exploration, In Midsummer (1984) Walcott describes similar, intricate submarine worlds where “coral [is] busy with its own/ culture”, 14 and “where the jellyfish trails its purple, imperial fringe” (35). The poet describes these undersea reefs in the language of place. In his own words, “Ocean,/ whose pride is that no man makes his mark on her,/ still offers such places for the selfish pen” (67). The word “here”, from the first quotation designates a specific point. Walcott’s play upon the word “culture” also evokes “place”. A culture is usually associated with nations, ethnic groups, cities, or other inhabited locations; culture is rarely, if ever, discussed in terms of space. Colloquially, the word “culture” is often used as a referent to the hegemonic culture. Describing a person as “cultured”, suggests that they are familiar with aspects of privileged metropolitan cultures, while the slur of being without “culture” has often been levied at colonized people. Walcott continues to mock the types of speakers found in “The Sea is History” when he provocatively describes the Caribbean reef as “busy with its own/ culture”.
In “The Sea is History”, Walcott used the bottom of the Atlantic to discuss the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. In Midsummer, he finds another connection, which suggests the sea or ocean’s “own culture” as one that is truly heterogeneous: I heard their old talk carried through cables laid across the Atlantic bed, their gossip rustles like an apple orchard’s in my own head, and I can drop their names like familiars – those bastard grandsires (49)
In much Caribbean and African American literature, the Atlantic figures simultaneously as a void and bridge between West Africa and the Americas. 15 Walcott configures the Atlantic as the bridge between Europe and the Americas. The transatlantic telecommunication cables that Walcott discusses here carried telegraph and later telephone messaging across the Atlantic. Because the cables were laid in the 1800s, and were used to “efficiently” communicate between metropole and colony, the poet imagines their presence as a means of communicating with his European grandfathers. Importantly, for Walcott, the sea does not contain just Afro-Caribbean history; it also contains buried elements of European/ Euro-Caribbean history.
In Omeros, Walcott capitalizes on the experience of his character Major Plunkett — a former English soldier who has moved permanently to St Lucia — in order to once again investigate and reject the idea of oceans and seas as spatial bodies. In his effort to write the history of the island, Plunkett relies only on the “factual fiction” of textbooks from the library which skirting emotion as a ship avoids a reef, […] followed one chart dryly with pen and compass, flattening an ocean to paper diagrams (95)
As Walcott has consistently demonstrated through his work, seas and oceans are not “flat”; the act of charting them without intimate knowledge and, most importantly, without emotion, makes them flat. Later in Omeros, again through the musings of Major Plunkett, Walcott suggests another way of “flattening” aquatic bodies: “the gold sea / flat as a credit card, extending its line / to a beach that now looked just like everywhere else, / Greece or Hawaii” (229). The touristic commodification of the landscape turns the sea into an unspecific “space” which could be anywhere and whose only purpose is to appeal to tourists. The “gold” sea is an intriguing concept: in a map, aquatic bodies are always depicted as a uniform shade of blue; for Walcott, this goes against the actual experience of “the peoples of the sea”. In Epitaph the water is “sparkling in the wind, green water near brown reefs” (31) and again in “Nearing La Guaira” “nothing is green water”. In Another Life, Walcott describes the water near his St Lucian home as “oil green” (233) and in The Prodigal (2004), Walcott asks his reader to reflect on “the subtleties of the noon sea: lime, emerald, lilac, cobalt, ultramarine”. 16 The “gold sea” of course links to the commodification of the sea as an inviting and available space, possessed by the tourist industry and “leased” to those people privileged enough to own “a credit card”. To reconfigure the sea as “gold” against the imperial cartography of blue, yet again suggests the tourist industry as the inheritors of imperialism and, like the colonial imagination, the major creators of the Caribbean as space. In direct contrast, and resistance to this “flat” spatial sea, Achille’s sea (his “garden”) is “grooved”: the notion of a “garden” suggests a place that is both cared for, and that, in turn, nourishes its carer. As the phenomenologist Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka suggests, the garden “expresses […] an elaborate interplay between the organic/vital needs of the human being for the sake of his life-sustenance and the resourcefulness of the elementary forces of life” and also “a complex interplay between the ways in which these forces may be virtually processed” (1985: 9). Importantly, Tymieniecka has also celebrated the garden as “our existential ground into which we stretch our vital roots” (1985: 13).
In Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), Walcott again looks out across the Atlantic, but this time he does so from a European vantage point: That middle passage, that bridge the bank provides, is one the submerged memory must negotiate between the worlds it finds on both its sides, […] but on the other side of the wind […] the still pond and the egrets beating home through the swamp trees, the mangrove’s anchors, and no more bitterness at the Atlantic foam hurtling the breakwater; the salt that cures.
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Walcott again shows the Atlantic as the bridge between Europe and the Americas. Significantly, he describes this channel as a “middle passage”. The Middle Passage between West Africa and the Caribbean is normally rendered as a proper noun; by not capitalizing this “middle passage”, Walcott suggests a myriad of possible and personal journeys across the Atlantic. In this sense, for each Caribbean person (in the poem, the painter, Camille Pissarro), the Atlantic offers different routes and meanings. In a Caribbean context, the notion of “the salt that cures” conjures the African-American myth of the flying man. 18 The flying man myth is common to African disaporas across the Americas. In the Caribbean in particular, the myth states that all black people had the ability to fly, until white people tricked them into eating salt from the sea. As Gayl Jones explains, the myth “may be drawn on by the African American with the same assurance [of readerly recognition] that the European American artists draw on their various Daedalus mythologies” (1991: 172). Pertinent to Walcott’s allusion to the myth is the suggestion that flying over the ocean is the route to freedom: crossing in or on the ocean suggests enslavement and oppression. For Walcott, however, instead of being an affliction, the “salt” of the ocean has healing properties. Whilst the Atlantic may have been the site of terrible histories, it also offers the Caribbean subject the “cure” for this “submerged memory”.
Throughout his career Walcott’s interest in the Caribbean Sea, quite literally, widens and deepens. His early writings show a concern for re-charting the Caribbean waters from a local perspective. Additionally, Walcott begins to imbue the waters with, or accepts the waters’ sense of place; by giving the sea and ocean, a “sense of place”, he disrupts hegemonic concepts of the sea as space. By drawing lines between the islands, he ensures that the sea is a unifying, rather than divisive, body; this body becomes a place of solidarity and common experience between the Caribbean peoples. In turn, this wide Caribbean is a source of strength for a region that has often been belittled and marginalized. From his new “maps” of the waters, Walcott proceeds to expand into the Atlantic and under the sea. Here, Walcott finds the sea to be a place of troubled memories and histories. Despite their underwater location, Walcott offers to “guide” his reader around the submarine world. By claiming the depths of the sea and ocean as the Caribbean’s “museum”, Walcott finds and reveals a place of living and shifting memories; unlike metropolitan museums that house “dead” memory, the “undersea museum” is inherently expansive and limitlessly inclusive. Finally, Walcott suggests that, as the places of history, aquatic bodies may also be the site of healing.
In The Prodigal ((2004), a confessional and autobiographical work, Walcott returns to many of these ideas of the sea. Following his twin brother’s death, Walcott embarks on a personal journey of healing. This journey leads him onto a boat, which travels between the islands of the Caribbean. As Walcott begins the journey, he describes himself entering “the open sea”, which consists of “immeasurable and unplummetable fathoms” (102). From this, “the farther” Walcott voyages into the sea’s openness, “the wider [his] fear” becomes. Describing these waters in the terms of space, the poet expresses an anxiety about the unknown. Walcott locates these “open” waters “between Martinique and Saint Vincent” (102), which are away from the islands that he has lived on in the Caribbean. As soon as the poet creates this sense of the sea as unknown space, and links it to a personal “fear”, he retracts these ideas. After Walcott’s “fear” of the “open sea” “widen[s] into mania”, it settles when the steersman assures Walcott that he knows the waters and his route: “Dolphins,” the steersman said. “You will see them playing,” but […] there were only the crests that looked to their leaping, no fins, no arching backs, no sudden frieze, no school today, but the young captain kept on smiling, I had never seen such belief in legend, and then, a fin-hint! […] […] the legend broke water and was reborn, her screams of joy and my heart drumming harder, and the pale blue islands were no longer phantom outlines […] and everything came back as it was[….] (102–3)
Arguably, these lines attest to Walcott’s life-long ideas concerning space and place. Typically in Walcott’s writings, he describes places with which he is familiar, and through his local knowledge, challenges ideas that view these places as either unknown or owned spaces. Here, the poet reverses this paradigm: Walcott himself enters an unknown place, and immediately finds himself frightened by it. However, the Caribbean “steersman”, who acts as his guide, displays intimate, familiar knowledge of the waters. The poet himself does not trust in the steersman’s navigational abilities, until, by the appearance of dolphins, the steersman is proved right. By assuming the role of the stranger who is educated by someone with local experience, Walcott asserts that this space is simply a place that is unknown. Importantly, others are acquainted with the place: the steersman finds his way through the waters without a map, in the same manner as the dolphins navigate the sea. The inclusion of animal life suggests something that Walcott has threaded throughout his entire oeuvre: human habitation, settlement, or dominion is not the only criterion for defining place; the natural world comes first, and it is into this world that humans enter. By emphasizing the relationship between non-human life and place, Walcott constructs or reveals place as something that exists before imagined space.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.