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 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
Beyond Walcott’s own works, this paper is indebted, in very different ways, to three separate writers: Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s 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
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
Walcott’s first major poem (a self-published work composed when he was 18 years old) 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
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
From developing the notion of “a sea voice”, in one of his most accomplished earlier poems, “A Sea Chantey” from
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 […] 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
In 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
In the second part of “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
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
In “The Sea is History”, from 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
Continuing this project of submarine exploration, In
In “The Sea is History”, Walcott used the bottom of the Atlantic to discuss the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. In 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.
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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
In 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,
In 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.
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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
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 “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
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.