Abstract
In the early months of 1980, during revision of a collection that was at that time to be called North and South, Derek Walcott typed a 12 page poem. This poem, I argue, would form the kernel of one that would eventually lend its name — “The Fortunate Traveller” — to the renamed title of the whole collection. Far from the suggestive and sparse, if undeniably political, poem that would be published in that 1981 volume, this early draft reads like a manifesto: both of poetics and of politics. This article takes that unpublished manuscript as a point of departure for thinking through issues of vernacular language and its eschewal, the question of centre and periphery, and Walcott’s avoidance of what would come to be known as “South–South” oriented postcolonial criticism. The article ultimately argues that it is through attention to neoliberalism that Walcott produces a novel approach to these questions of language and space.
A writer on the periphery of that light in those ambiguous cultures that were once colonies may ask himself such Faustian questions. Is this language I use my own? Does it own me, and, if it is mastered have I by mastery, made myself a servant to the very power where it originated? (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
Is using the language of the master a servile practice? One answer to this question and solution to this problem might very well be to write in the vernaculars, the Creoles, the local and mobile minor languages that such “ambiguous cultures that were once colonies” have, in their genius, invented — a decolonial poetics that would take in the vernaculars of the Global South (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986). As Derek Walcott wrote in a touchstone essay of the early 1970s, “what is needed is not new names for old things, or old names for old things, but the faith of using old names anew” (Walcott, 1998a: 9). Yet this relation — between the languages of the South and the canons of the North — is never simple for Walcott. His deep, if ambivalent, concern with canonical tradition, even in modes that subvert and recode it, means that the use of vernaculars is seen by the poet as necessary but insufficient conditions to poetic practice in a world that increasingly finds itself suffused with new relations precipitated by neocolonialist forms of economic imperialism. Mark W. Van Wienen sees in Walcott “two competing, seemingly antithetical poetic vocabularies” emergent in the decade prior to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1992 (1998: 24). As Maria Christina Fumagalli has argued, in Omeros at least, tone is more significant than vocabulary in the uses of patois (2001: 194). While Fumagalli is right that it is Walcott’s tone more than his vocabulary that inflects the poet’s use of patois, Creole, English, and Creole-inflected English, Van Wienen’s taxonomy remains useful. For Van Wienen, one of Walcott’s linguistic styles “seeks epiphany, searching for a superlative poetic language able to rise above the injustices and recriminations of history”, while the other “proposes that all poetry — and indeed all experience — is necessarily determined by history and culture” (1998: 24). Van Wienen is right that a constant emphasis on the relation between history and epiphany remains a crucial concern in Walcott’s writing of the 1980s. However, such an account of the stages in Walcott’s use of language and attitudes to history and culture can be usefully augmented by an attention to his critique of neoliberalism. The critique of neoliberalism is a significant theme in his poetry and intensifies even prior to Omeros. In this essay, I stage this development in relation to globalization and neocolonialism — through an unpublished Walcott manuscript, which, as I show, was the kernel for the title poem to The Fortunate Traveller. While themes of neocolonialism are at play in Walcott’s poetry from as early as “A Far Cry From Africa”, the period of the late 1970s intensifies this concern and refracts it through neoliberalism (Walcott, 1986: 17–18). This moment is prescient also of certain concerns that would arise and intensify in Omeros. What makes “The Fortunate Traveller” such a unique moment in Walcott’s development of a “late style” (as Edward Said calls it) is the embrace by Walcott of a non-binary approach to thinking the politics of postcolonial writing — one that refuses to countenance only simple binaries of centre and periphery in order to account for the distinct mark of neocolonial economic exploitation (Said, 2007: 3–24).
In a public conversation with a largely British audience, Walcott laid out an uncharacteristic attitude to writing in Caribbean Creole: “I do not think in Creole, I think in English. […] If I write a patois Creole poem, then, in a way, I’m faking it” (BBC World Book Club, 2013). This is, perhaps, a central tension in Walcott’s work: the South–South relation that he might share with other writers from (post)colonial islands through the Caribbean and across the Black Atlantic and beyond remains ironically impacted by the centrality of the master language. If writing in Creole is an attempt at a true remove from the exchange with the centre what, then, is Walcott provoking us to inquire when he — the author of such masterful poems in such Creoles as Trinidadian that are evoked in “The Schooner Flight” and “The Spoiler’s Return” — implies that, to write in Creole, he might be “faking it?” For Walcott, the performance of postcolonial authenticity always risks its own reduction to the status of “fake”. If Walcott is ever so slightly “faking it”, when he writes in Creole, this is not to say that he disavows these works — far from it. It would seem instead that faking it might be a productive mode of literary expression. And, importantly, even when these productive Creole “fakes” emerge, they orient themselves relationally in a mode of writing that is a critique of the imperial centre precisely because they represent relation across the oceans and archipelagos of the Global South — most of all in Omeros. Shabine, like Achille or Hector, are mobile figures and their heritage, class, and geographical space of origin differs slightly from Walcott’s own. In this way, Walcott is clearly overstepping his own “authentic” speaking position; they succeed because of tone. Such adventures in Creole relations are productions of new identities that nonetheless subject the author to the self-imposed risk of a sense of being “fake”. This simultaneous openness to exploring comparable but different personae alongside the fear of a rupture in authenticity is also comparable to Walcott’s attitude to other spaces in the Global South.
The limits of South–South identification in Walcott’s writing are foregrounded in the 1980 manuscript with which I began, just as it is explored as early as “A Far Cry from Africa”. South–South correspondences always face interrogation by the “Faustian questions” of the master language as colonial centre. While postcolonial studies for too long emphasized centres and peripheries and while new studies of literature from the Global South are rightly emphasizing more lateral nodes of relation, the necessity of this corrective need not lead to a mutual exclusion between the two concerns. Instead, between the intersecting lines of Southern Creoles and their relation to the languages of the metaphoric North questions of economic redistribution of global space and language foreground the necessity of using the vernaculars of the South in relation to dominant inheritances from canonical centres. What develops in “The Fortunate Traveller” is a call for an account of North and South that would think through the fluid Creoles of the South and the shifting centres of the North — particularly after the shift from colonial (political) domination to neocolonial (economic) forms. The relation of the (post)colonial writer with the centre was, for Walcott at least, never a peripheral one. Walcott’s unpublished early version of the poem, as well as such essays as “The Muse of History”, indicate the way his poetry emerges from a critical relation with the traditions associated with empire that undoes the centre according to a mode that is not peripheral but relational — in Édouard Glissant’s terms (1997).
As Ankhi Mukherjee (2014: 80) notes: “[t]he febrile intertextuality of Walcott’s work […] is liable also to be interpreted as symptomatic of a cultural belatedness that leaves poets overwhelmed by the influence of strong predecessors”. In contrast, for Walcott, South–South solidarity is frequently staged as a thwarted imperative. Take such a mid-career poem as “Negatives”, which I here reproduce in large part: A news clip; the invasion of Biafra: Black corpses wrapped in sunlight Sprawled on the white glare entering what’s-its-name— the central city? Someone who’s white Illuminates the news behind the news, His eyes flash with, perhaps pity: “The Ibos, you see, are like the Jews, very much the situation in Hitler’s Germany, I mean the Hausas’ resentment.” I try to see (Walcott, 1986: 124)
The pre-eminence of the mediation of world affairs, even across the Global South, is accentuated from the outset with the punctuated fixity of “A news clip” — a pause created by the kind of punctuation that abbreviates the newspaper short form. It is as if the news clip, through a semicolon (and metonymically, the mass-mediation of world affairs that it marks), precisely closes itself off to the very event that it reveals: an independence war in a part of the Global South distant from the speaker, pitting former colonial ethnicities one against the other. Similarly, as the white newsreader appears, Walcott emphasizes the way that Southern conflicts are frequently refracted by reference to Northern histories — the Holocaust in this case. The speaker’s vision is, perhaps, thwarted by this chiaroscuro refraction of South and South through the historical pre-eminence of Northern, European conflicts, though his engagement is clear: “I try to see”. The poem’s next line runs, “I never knew you Christopher Okigbo”, highlighting the poetic dimension of this simultaneous impenetrability of another site in the South by reference to the famed Ibo poet killed in the Biafran war. Here the relationship between poets of the Global South is staged as a practice of imagination that cannot but be thwarted. Such a relationship promises hermeneutic access to the mass-mediation of violence even as it calls attention to its own limits. In many ways, “The Fortunate Traveller” stands at the moment in Walcott’s career when he begins to develop a unique account of the intersecting dialectics of North and South that remains a conceptual impasse in such a poem as “Negatives”. He does do precisely by recourse to an invocation of economic neoimperialism. Yet, as I have indicated, the published version of the poem is in fact the culmination of a sustained attempt to voice this political critique anew. Let us now turn to an account of this process.
In the early months of 1980, during revision of a collection that was at that time to be called North and South, Walcott typed a 12 page poem. This poem, I argue, would form the basis of another poem, one that would eventually lend its name — “The Fortunate Traveller” — to the renamed title of the whole collection. Far from the suggestive and sparse — if undeniably political — poem that would be published in that 1981 volume, this early draft reads like a manifesto of poetics and of politics. There are two crucial moments in the manuscript that indicate that it relates to the version of “The Fortunate Traveller” that would later emerge to be published. Towards the end of part three of the final published poem, Walcott evokes an ironized and arguably Eurocentric Nietzsche: Since God is dead, and these are not His stars, But man-lit, sulphurous lamps, it’s in the heart of darkness of this earth that backward tribes keep vigil of His Body in deya, lampion, and this bedside lamp. (Walcott, 1986: 462)
Here, the death of an Abrahamic concept of God at the end of the nineteenth century is shown to have its own potential for cultural imperialism. For Walcott, those with their “deyas, lampions”, and reverence for the celestial, those who, in other words, do not accept the total extinction of the sacred with the secularization of Western modernity, are consistently at risk of being found to be “backward tribes”. The death of God is revealed to be a culturally imperialist concept as it is exported to a cultural world that does not rest its beliefs in Abrahamic monotheism. This reading is accentuated if we compare it with Walcott’s earlier effort, a clear source in the unpublished manuscript for these final lines, and even more explicit in their political assertion:
If God is dead as such cultures want us to believe, and those lights are not stars but infinite, sulphurous, sanctuary lamps we need to fertilize that body with a new pantheon of natural objects wherever there is nature left. and it is in those childish, backward and dark cultures of this earth, such reverence is left, where pride is knowing the names of all the various birds of the earth rising from the stubble is different tribes twittering in dialects (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
These lines establish the relation between the manuscript in question and its eventual published revision — not only through the closeness of the opening lines, but the general sentiment of each set of verses. But more importantly, they also reveal the difference in tone and directness between Walcott’s earlier efforts and what he would later publish. The published lines make the same point — revealing the epiphany that sacral reverence is at once aesthetically beautiful even as it is subject to a cultural imperialism arising from a narrow atheism. However, the earlier manuscript is far more explicit and didactic about this point, a tendency that Walcott’s poetry in this period was attempting to evacuate. Take, for instance, “The Spoiler’s Return”, where explicit political assertions are focalized through the highly located voice of its persona.
The second explicit resonance between the untitled manuscript and the eventually published poem is connected to this earlier instance in both its modulation of didacticism and also in theme: the question of “the heart of darkness” and what will become its famed reversal from the Conradian (1988) imputation of savagery to Africa toward the excesses of secular modernity culminating in the Nazi Holocaust. In each case, vulgar secularization — that sentiment that has forgotten the elemental awe of nature — is implicated in this decline to more or less explicit degrees; as the manuscript will also ironically annotate as a “dictionary of some terms” (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10). There, “Barbarous” is ironically defined by Walcott as “absence of geometry” and “Godlessness” as “the worship of too many gods” (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10).
The second set of lines that are near-retained between the unpublished poem and “The Fortunate Traveller”, are as follows, first in the MS:
The Heart of Darkness is not Africa. The heart of darkness is the white-hot core Of the holocaust, not in the dark hands holding the spear, but in pale rubber surgical glove, the pincered claw selecting scalpels in antiseptic light (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
The published poem slightly edits these lines as:
The heart of darkness is not Africa. The heart of darkness is the core of fire in the white center of the holocaust. The heart of darkness is the rubber claw selecting a scalpel in antiseptic light (Walcott, 1986: 461)
In the published version, the whiteness of the heart of darkness is given distinctive emphasis on its own terms, emphasizing the reversal and avoiding the less subtle contrast in phenotype which marks the “dark hands holding the spear” of the earlier version. Walcott’s revision elegantly reverses Conradian racism, turning it into an indictment of modernity more subtle than his earlier manuscript, while nonetheless retaining its explicit mode of critique.
Where “The Fortunate Traveller” works as such a subtle, if nonetheless explicit political critique, the manuscript is, in form and subject, highly didactic. Not unlike the “If God is dead” lines I have already quoted, many of the lines in the manuscript follow an almost syllogistic form — implying an explicit argument. Take the following lines, which develop the logic of darkness and its reversal:
If darkness is the synonym of evil, And if the darkest evil is ignorance, Then what writhes under the white, surgical light The only to be whispered horror under the knife conducted in the interest of science and for the purification of the tribe must be made tolerable in its intelligence (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
Here we see the syllogistic development of the metaphor of colonial reason as heart of darkness: produced as an “if … then”. It is perhaps the didactic and syllogistic quality of this formalism that would lead Walcott to abandon the lines. If darkness, then horror of modernity: this structure reinscribes the didacticism of syllogism. In doing so it also ironically partakes of the logic of bureaucratized reason that it is highlighting: the banality of evil at the heart of modernity. The published poem had to formally escape this poetic reduction. Walcott must have realized that his formal choice reinscribed his object of critique as its self-same ground. Further, since the finally realized form of “The Fortunate Traveller” operates so clearly in relation to the critique of neoimperial economic policies, the poem is able to critique global imperialism in a nonreductive manner that also annotates the South–South violence proliferated through post-Fordist and nascent neoliberal economics. This multidirectional critique is manifest from the first verse paragraph, containing the oft-cited lines:
In the square coffin manacled to my wrist: small countries pleaded through the mesh of graphs, in treble-spaced, Xeroxed forms to the World Bank on which I had scrawled the one word, MERCY (Walcott, 1986: 456)
Now the centre of imperial force is neither London nor New York, but is manifest through the global financial systems of exploitation of which each are nodes — and not the only nodes at that. “The Fortunate Traveller” reflects the crises of the 1970s associated with the extension of capitalist speculation and the loss of traditional financial semiotic anchor points like the gold standard. As Marit J. MacArthur notes, Walcott writes: “in the 1970s, when rising fuel prices and food shortages highlighted the vulnerability of poor nations” (2012: 276). The poem can arguably only be successful once the dichotomy of North and South is brought in relation to a centrifugal circulation of neoliberal exploitations that is mobile, agile, and lacks a centre. This we find emphasized as the poem moves from Somalia through a recollection of Haiti.
Mukherjee notes that “Walcott admires the great poets of the New World who have looked beyond the trauma of history to articulate instead a vision ‘capable of enormous wonder,’ of ‘the greatest width of elemental praise of winds, seas, and rain’” (2014: 83). She thus highlights the role of this “elemental praise”, but often stops short of attempting to draw out what is meant by it. Although what Walcott means by the “elemental” is difficult to define in light of its viscerality, one can nonetheless parse the vicissitudes of the elemental as it functions in Walcott’s texts and paratexts. Walcott defines the “elemental” in terms of presence rather than pastness. But this hardly makes the problem of understanding him easier: presence, after all, being difficult to define beyond one’s experience of it. Perhaps equally the most explicit didactic logic to run through Walcott’s manuscript, alongside the layered ironization of darkness that runs into the published poem, is the opposition between canonical tradition and this awe emergent from the non-human world. Such opposition moves from a binary to a distributed set of nodes in the neoliberal world system between the earlier unpublished version of the poem and its published culmination. In 1974’s The Muse of History, Walcott had made much of the essence of language’s inspiration by and in the natural world: there he called it the “elemental”. In that essay, Walcott insists that the truly New World poet possesses “a vision of man [as] elemental, a being inhabited by presences, not a creature chained to the past” (1998b: 37). Similarly, in the unpublished manuscript from five or so years later, he aims to develop this theme:
Poetry is not a civilised activity, in spite of Mr T. S. Eliot, which doesn’t mean that it is barbarous, instead its function is a primal one, it really does not need any tradition, its origin is awe, awe of the sun, darkness and death. (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
What Walcott here calls the “primal” and what he earlier named the “elemental” appear to be related. Each is opposed to the cold strictures of the putatively civilized — with its heart of darkness and clawed hand. The primal, like the elemental, is given in the presence of nature. However, where the elemental is pure positive presence, the primal is not only given in “awe of the sun”, but also in “awe” of “darkness and death”. Walcott has found the elemental in that which is present and not merely chained to the past. The primal, on the other hand, which he experiments with in the earlier revision of “The Fortunate Traveller”, appears to be an experiment in seeing the dimensions of originary violence that exist both within and outside civilization. So why has Walcott moved to downplay this primal sense of natural awe in the revision that will bear his published signature? Perhaps this question is best illuminated by Walcott’s shift to emphasize neoliberalism. Like the mass-mediation that conditions South–South solidarity in “Negatives”, the essential relation to nature which runs significantly through the manuscript in question finds itself thwarted (for all its remainder in the lines about the death of God) as Walcott comes to triangulate North and South. He traces this triangulation through the economics of neoliberal exploitation as marked in “The Fortunate Traveller” by the “square coffin” of the “World Bank” that we find “manacled” to the speaker’s wrist from the first verse paragraph (Walcott, 1986: 456).
While Mukherjee (2014: 93) notes that “The Fortunate Traveller” “writes itself through sinuous modifications, substitutions, and reversals” the manuscript does so even more intensely. However, it achieves this according to a logical structure that would have to be abandoned in favour of the diffuse critique that I have been elaborating: an account of mobile modes of dispossession that cannot be located in geographic binaries like centre and periphery. There are two crucial dialectical relations running through the manuscript, both of which I have already touched on as examples of Walcott’s modifications and reversals. The first is the relation between darkness/blackness and light/whiteness. As we have seen in the two versions of the lines, “the heart of darkness is not Africa” — from manuscript to published poem — darkness is shown to inhabit bureaucratic modernity with its forms of killing. Walcott establishes this relation between lightness and darkness in the opening lines of the manuscript, which quote Part II of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine:
Black is the beauty of the brightest day; The golden ball of heaven’s eternal fire, That danc’d with glory on the silver waves, Now wants the fuel that inflam’d his beams (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
Walcott then moves to render a comparison between the “Eastern” hero and conqueror and another of Marlowe’s famed protagonists:
in an age, increasingly more Faustian, though these lines come from Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine” his two protagonists are the one man. (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
Walcott declares both Faust and Tamburlaine respectively a “symbol of near-diving audacity | one of them war, the other intellect” (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10). Walcott’s reference to “Faustian questions” in the lines with which I opened — which follow shortly down the same opening page of the manuscript — clearly render the pact with the devil as a metaphor for the process of writing the language of the colonizer: “Is this language I use my own? | Does it own me”. Yet the image is doubled, as this Tamburlaine/Faust is also to be found in the kind of figures associated with Europe’s butchery — with “the rubber claw | selecting a scalpel in antiseptic light”. Walcott mentions three such figures: Kissinger, the American diplomat so notorious for his role in US imperial wars, Werner Von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist who was later employed by the US military, and B. J. Vorster, the South African apartheid politician. In this way, where Faust is associated with the pact made by European “intellect” with the darkness of militarized racism and imperialism, Walcott sees a risk in the Faustian experience of blackness.
In lines that unsettle any simplistic postcolonial binary, Walcott concludes this verse paragraph that opens the manuscript as follows: what will concern me here is not so much the power of star-piercing intellects, but the idea of beauty and the blackness within that beauty, coming from a race, as Cesaire says, that invented nothing, that is a shadow, and so requires the sun of science to have edge and definition, and if it moves, moves in pure mimicry. (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
The essentialism implicit in these lines is, of course, quite palpable. The “beauty” of “blackness” apparently is to arise in a certain reading of Négritude (given the citation of Cesaire); one that finds virtue in eschewing the evil excesses of modernity associated with Kissinger, Von Braun, and Vorster. This virtue nonetheless ostensibly requires “the sun | of science to have edge and definition” and consequently it consistently risks “mimicry”. Is Walcott ironizing this essentialism? Or, indeed, is this an anxiety of Walcott’s that leads him not to publish the lines, developing instead, the more subtle and poetic critique of neoliberalism that makes up so much of “The Fortunate Traveller”, with its parody of the World Bank and the corrupt system of predatory laws that it represents? The relation between text and paratext that I am excavating here means this indeterminacy around essentialism and mimicry remains in suspension. Turning to the lines that follow and that make up the above epigraph, we find the problem phrased more productively as a question: “Is this language I use my own?”. Walcott’s attempted answer in the manifesto-like manuscript poem that follows remains in his desk drawer precisely because he had yet to work out how the South–South and centre–periphery critiques could be brought together by taking seriously the expansive force of neoliberalism and the neocolonialism it entailed.
The second crucial dialectic is that which we already began to glimpse in the lines about Eliot: the tense relation between the traditions of so-called civilization and the “primal” aspect of poetic “awe” that appears to arise in the poet’s relation to the natural world. This tension between the primal and the traditions of civilization might provide some solution to the Faustian problem we find Walcott identifying in the first verse paragraph. Further on, Walcott asks: “which culture does not have a predecessor?”. Answering:
If the rain have a father, it is heaven. When mind and body wandered over Eden each held the other by the hand, content with the thereness of things, but reason confounded innocence with ignorance […] How atavistic, how provincial to still brood on the origin of evil! (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
Walcott then describes a fresco in Pompeii, dominated by “a dolphin’s eye”, before commanding:
follow the sinuosity of hazard, of a circuitous wisdom and not the rational arrogance of the square (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
Walcott, then, establishes a binary between darkness and light, tradition and the primal, and intellect and innocence (which is not ignorance) in order, in each case, to perform a dialectical sublation.
An instance of this dialectical inversion appears in the representation of rivers in order to perform such a sublation. In this sequence, the Thames is made a tributary of the Congo in a similar vein to the earlier shift of the “heart of darkness” from Africa to Europe. This play with rivers will remain in the published version, diverting the course of the imperialism’s logic:
Perhaps it is not possible for the colonial to avoid the concept of empire as language, a metropolis fed by tributaries regardless of their size so that the Thames at dusk, its glittery silt flows from the tribal dialects of the Congo […] […] But everything is hybrid, And all Empire is ephemeral. And, in the end, language belongs to no one or to all, but since it’s linked with power and power creates the canons of the age the writer on the outskirts of Empire even among the ancient and druidical oaks of Gloucestershire still feels the mimic and lacerates the gift to avoid that condition. (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
Here the risk of mimicry is precisely a condition that must be overcome, lest it “lacerate[…] the gift” of the (post)colonial Caribbean poet. What then is the alternative to the facile mimicry of European tradition? Walcott’s manuscript has given us the answer already: the primal, which is to say, the identification of Europe with a heart of darkness.
The “primal” is the form of the elemental in its darkness — a form that Walcott shows to be more acute in European modernity than in the savagery Europe attributes to Africa. In “The Muse of History”, Walcott was concerned with a possible escape route from a poetics that derives from Europe alone. He opens the essay with such a caution against becoming bound to tradition:
The common experience of the New World, even for its patrician writers whose veneration of the Old is read as the idolatry of the mestizo, is colonialism. They too are victims of tradition, but they remind us of our debt to the great dead, that those who break a tradition first hold it in awe. (Walcott, 1998b: 36)
Here the “idolatry of the mestizo”, even of such patricians as Pablo Neruda who represent Walcott’s privileged examples, must “break a tradition” to which they nonetheless profess veneration and “awe”. Reading between “The Muse of History” and the unpublished poem of five years later — so reminiscent of these nagging concerns — one can identify a certain slippage at the level of the signifier “awe”. In the earlier essay, “awe” marked the reverence for tradition that must be overcome. In the later essay it has become “awe of the sun”, signifying precisely the self-same reverence for an Apollonian occidental knowledge that remains a departure point for “New World” or Southern poetics, though not its culmination. Indeed, the notion of awe had already been further developed in “The Muse of History”, troping a correlate to both the “elemental” that differentiates it from the “primal”. There Walcott writes:
It is this awe of the numinous, this elemental privilege of naming the new world which annihilates history in our great poets, an elation common to all of them, whether they are aligned to Crusoe and Prospero or to Friday and Caliban. They reject ethnic ancestry for faith in elemental man. (Walcott, 1998b: 40)
If the primal was ambiguous and distributed between savage Europe and the violence in humanity per se, elemental man can be faithfully invested in. For Walcott, then, the “elemental” is a rejection of “ethnic ancestry”, of “tradition”, and of “civilization”, which offers instead the “privilege” of relating to the ground of the colony or former colony as a space of invention. The metaphor of the sun and its silhouetted blackness does not, of course, mean the evacuation of all tradition — even that of the Northern imperial centres that generated and benefited from slavery and the Middle Passage. Rather, it marks a relation to it which insists on invention as an active presencing that puts the numinous inventions of the relation to the New World on a par with the pillars of Old World tradition that would set themselves up as a monolithic driver of influence. As Walcott also writes in the 1974 essay:
These writers reject the idea of history as time for its original concept as myth, the partial recall of the race. For them history is fiction, subject to a fitful muse, memory. Their philosophy, based on a contempt for historic time, is revolutionary, for what they repeat to the New World is its simultaneity with the Old. Their vision of man is elemental, a being inhabited by presences, not a creature chained to his past. (Walcott, 1998b: 37)
Walcott, then, evokes the invention born in the Middle Passage as an equally powerful and novel imagination to the oppressive history of the European tradition signified in and by Eliot. But to what degree does this thought of novelty between old and new, North and South nonetheless continue to recapitulate an essentialism of sun and shadow, light and darkness, however reversed these terms may be? Clearly the logic of the unpublished 1980 poem continues that of “The Muse of History”. Could it be that Walcott, realizing the limits of this position in granting only limited agency to the poet of the New World, abandoned the poetic form of this manifesto for other projects? Where Walcott can be scathing of European writers as they represent the non-European other — from Rimbaud to Kipling — he consistently spares Shakespeare and his Caliban. A version of this emerges in the pre “Fortunate Traveller” manuscript I have been considering. There, Walcott traces a long list of writers whose representations he considers little more than “a racist joke”, from Conrad to Kipling. He concludes:
when the native writer sees his culture through others’ eyes as an elaborate joke, to join the club he too will learn the style of the extended joke, so he becomes more critical, more fastidious than his teachers (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
Yet this virtue of overcoming the colonial “teachers” in language and “style” is immediately revealed as the apotheosis of a certain limited form of anticolonial poetics, since this poet, in “learn[ing] the style”,
learns to despise his landscape and his voice […] This is the literature of the Third World. This is the betrayal of his own poetry. (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
The Merchant of Venice is not spared inclusion in this list, but The Tempest indeed is:
“The Tempest” isn’t [a racist joke], neither is “Othello,” Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Caliban a poetry, which, though it uses the language which is taught is clearly elemental as the leaves and berries and the shadowless pools the savage celebrates, and without shame, since Caliban later declares of the same language that its only profit is teaching him to curse (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
Yet, as poignant a symbol as Caliban has been for so many West Indian writers — including also Cesaire and George Lamming, to cite only a very incomplete list — and as correct as Walcott may be about the complexity of Caliban, nonetheless, the author who signs the page — Shakespeare — remains a writer of European tradition. Walcott, I contend, had to seek a further outside. Neither the essay form nor this (abandoned) quite didactic and syllogistic form of poetry furnished in the unpublished manuscript could produce the truly “elemental” outside to tradition which Walcott had been in search of. In breaking off from the manuscript, he declares:
All works of reason are ephemeral unless these works contain a contradiction greater than their own order (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 10)
In these lines that open the final paragraph of the still-born precedent of “The Fortunate Traveller”, Walcott both reaches the culmination of the project that began in essay form with “The Muse of History”, even as his text realizes its limits. For this is precisely what emerges from the didactic form of the unpublished poem, a poetic “work of reason” whose “contradictions [are] | greater than their own order”. Walcott’s own poem is too rational — based, as we have seen, on syllogism and on a didacticism which functions by listing its enemies and defining its virtues.
If Walcott did indeed abandon this dialectic logic of light and shadow, history and the elemental, to where did his imaginary move him in its critique of imperialisms both cultural and material? I would argue that it is in reaction to the turn to neoliberalism that Walcott’s poetic energies move, from “The Fortunate Traveller” to Omeros in the decade following.
“The Fortunate Traveller” not only identifies its speaker (according to one potential reading) as a colonial mimic man not unlike that figure who appears in “The Muse of History” as well as in Walcott’s unpublished manuscript, but the poem further embeds its critique of this speaking position in that of the ongoing neoliberal colonization of the postcolonial world. From the outset, the speaker is identified as a high level functionary of the new internationalism of structural adjustment, carrying as he does a “mesh of graphs […] | Xeroxed forms to the World Bank”. There, in a wintery landscape, surrounded by “steeples” and “spires” evoking the Conradian “whited sepulcre” of Brussels, with “Rotting snow” abounding, “flaked from Europe’s ceiling”, the speaker makes a deal with “Two other gentlemen, black skins gone grey | as their identical belted overcoats” — African businessmen tainted as they are by the whiteness that evokes that same rotten snow of Europe. This image of snow as corruption further indexes the ashen plumes of the Holocaust that will later be directly invoked, as I have shown (Walcott, 1986: 456). Here the indictment of the corrupt mimic men is not merely identified with language, tradition, and the legacy of so-called European “civilization”, but is understood to be continued into the present via the ravages of neoliberal structural adjustment and its precipitation of corruption in the Global South. Further on in the poem’s first section, the speaker
envisaged an Africa flooded with such light as alchemized the first fields of emmer wheat and barley, when we savages dyed our pale dead with ochre, and bordered our temples with the ceremonial vulva of the conch in the grey epoch of the obsidian adze. (Walcott, 1986: 458–9)
That the speaker includes himself in the account of an “envisaged” Africa of the past proffers several possibilities. First, that the speaker, like those grey men he has dealt with, is also of African descent. Second, that the speaker, whatever his ethnicity, in a gesture of bad faith, understands his predatory economic practice as continuous with and an improvement on the most ancient agricultural forms, hence the lines that follow, closing the verse paragraph: “I sowed the Sahara with rippling cereals, | my charity fertilized their aridities” (Walcott, 1986: 459). The elemental space of the Global South is here transformed into a space of harvest and extraction for the Global North — even as the ethnicities of those who render the transaction have been rendered fluid in the neoliberal identitarian field: beyond the logic of the colonizer/colonized binary. In even the latest manuscript versions of the poem, the adjective grey, modifying “epoch”, is further stipulated as “morning grey” (MS 136. Box 6 Folder 11 & 12). Walcott’s excision of this adjectival clause may have been meant to bolster the relation between the epochs of past and present by removing the specificity that the further adjective “morning” could be seen to imply. It is not an ancient “morning”, but an equivalent “epoch” in which such neoliberal exploitation is ironically rendered the equivalent of the precolonial days of the “obsidian adze”. In the next verse paragraph, this neoliberal position of exploitation is identified with literary tradition: “What was my field? Late sixteenth century, | My field was a dank acre” (Walcott, 1986: 459). These lines collapse the literary field into the bad faith association of World Bank development with an almost historically transcendental agricultural practice. In doing so, they recall the sense Walcott had been exploring for the past several years that worried over a certain cultural double consciousness and the imposition of the canon: that working out of the anxiety of the influence of tradition that we have been exploring so far. What is crucial about the development of this critique in this poem is that it refuses the binary between centre and periphery, history/tradition and colonized space, and rethinks these binaries for the neoliberal moment. In the world of “The Fortunate Traveller”, the past of such Orientalist depictions as Webster’s The White Devil and its sixteenth-century play with difference is recalled and inverted. Where Webster’s play figured the stage “Moor” and other outsiders to Europe, here neoliberalism conscripts the colonized subject to exploit fellow subjects from the Global South. Here the colonized are in their figuration turned on one another at the behest of the logic of worldwide finance that ultimately benefits the dominant classes of the Global North most of all.
Stefania Ciocia has argued that the problem of de-emphasizing “Walcott’s debt” to Western literature is accentuated by the fact that “Walcott does pay homage to the blind bard” (2000: 87), meaning Homer, but we might add also Dante and indeed Shakespeare. This tension between the critique of the West and the influence of the Western canon is a well-known problem in Walcott criticism. My examination of the transit of “The Fortunate Traveller” reveals the move away from a refutation of the anxiety of Western influence and its various “racist joke[s]”. Walcott turns instead to a critical opening onto the new neoliberal forms of colonialism that circulate globally, traversing the geographies of South and North beyond a mere binary relation between centre and periphery. As recently as 2013, Walcott maintains and elaborates his relation with the traditions of the centre and the genius of the Global South which, in receiving them, undoes them. When asked about Omeros as an adaptation of Homer, Walcott replied:
I’ve always tried to explain that the book is not a transference of the Iliad or the Odyssey into Caribbean. It’s not a translation. In effect, a lot of the scenes that happen in the poem are incorrect in Homeric terms, they’re not in the original. The poem is a poem about associations, not derivations. […] It’s evocative rather than derivative. I think if you look at the book as a translation of Homer, that’s a cynical attitude, I think, to the book, because it’s saying that we need a culture and you have to borrow. But that’s the truth of transmigration like that, that you’re taken from a place to another place and memory makes associations of the place that you’ve come from.
It would seem, then, that as late as 2013, Walcott’s notion of evocative association continues to hold his sense of “the faith of using the old names anew”. For Walcott, what had been developing from the essays of the early 1970s, through into the more Creole experiments of the early 1980s (presaged as they are by the structural device of Creole that inflects 1976’s “Tales of the Islands”) and evinced by the aborted manuscript I have been exploring, was an attempt to think this faith in such a way that the “old names” of the canon might be referenced without a reduction to a one-directional passage of tradition and influence from centre to periphery (Walcott, 1976: 185–9). One could argue that just as “The Fortunate Traveller” develops a poetics for which the relation between North and South, colonizer and colonized, is redistributed across South–South relations that cannot ignore neoliberalism, Omeros further recodes this relation through a further localization. Omeros is indeed concerned with the effects of neoliberalism and structural adjustment. From the poem’s outset, is the shift of the island’s economy toward a tourist industry, wherein authentic practices such as the cutting of canoes is passed back through the history of the slave trade to the earliest roots of indigenous Carib and Arawak practices. As he cuts down a canoe in demonstration, the wounded “Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try | taking his soul with their cameras” (Walcott, 1990: 3). Across the opening chapter, we are given an image of the elemental, as the history of the island is refracted through the first instance of a repeated image: the reflection in the eyes of an iguana:
The slit pods of its eyes Ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries, That rose with the Aruacs’ smoke till a new race Unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees. (Walcott, 1990: 5)
Here, history is imagined not as that muse of tradition and civilization to be rejected, but rather as something encountered in association with the elemental space of the island itself. The iguana marks the passing of time without a knowing relation to those who come in the temporality of the colonial and postcolonial, whether as colonizer or colonized.
Yet, throughout Omeros, what is further developed is an elemental relation between Western form (terza rima) and content — the reference point that Homer and Dante represent and which must be rewritten. Terza rima, for instance, is established as a form to be fragmented. Lines of terza rima are frequently interrupted by Creole, causing new line breaks which fragment the original prosody in productive ways. Consider the following lines:
They came out of the iron market. Achille gave Helen back the filled basket. Helen said: “Ba moin!” “Give it to me!” Achille said: “Look! I not your slave!” (Walcott, 1990: 38)
Here terza rima is maintained in the rhyming of “gave” and “slave”, but this medieval Italian rhyming structure both nuances and is nuanced by the need to break up lines of Creole in order to emphasize their dialogic and vernacular function. Similarly, the multiplicity of languaging forms is further emphasized by the contrast to the poet–narrator’s standard English provided by not only Helen’s Francophone-inflected Creole, but also Achille’s English Creole. As the poet notes in closing the modern Caribbean epic:
Like Philoctete’s wound, this language carries its cure, its radiant affliction; reluctantly now, like Achille’s, my craft slips the chain of its anchor (Walcott, 1990: 323)
As such, as I have argued, Walcott moves in the 20 odd years from “The Muse of History” to Omeros in an attempt to perform what he had invoked at the outset — this “faith” in making “old names anew”. The relation between North and South that is increasingly impacted by neoliberalism was essential to Walcott’s working out of this process. Here the neoliberal tourist gaze is relegated to its proper place in relation to a deeper elemental history. The manuscript explored in this essay reveals a thwarted attempt at working this relation out, which would be taken much further in Omeros.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.