Abstract
“This time Shabine, like you really gone!” Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight” (Walcott, 1979: n.p.)
It is hard to overstate the importance of Derek Walcott. His was a vast scope of feeling. With a single strophe Walcott could evoke a nation or the intricate and intimate gestures of its people. His 1965 poem, “The Castaway”, begins with two masterful lines which together embody the central tenets of his oeuvre: The starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel Of a sail (Walcott, 1989: 57, ll. 1–2)
I have taught this couplet for several years, introducing it at the beginning of each poetry module, as an illustration and examination of all that poetry can achieve. In these lines, the reader observes a master’s attention to poetic sound in the sibilance, lineation, and imagery. And then there is the Caribbean and its particular light, the ocean, the heroic desolation of the loner within the land- or seascape, a timbre which is both muscular and elegant; echoing back the sound of the surf rolling under islands, and a poetic vision, which, like the eponymous castaway’s, extends beyond the limits of the island.
Walcott’s writing seldom aimed for the indigenous opacity of an art that could only be understood by those within the culture it sprang from. He was concerned instead with the liminal; with the affinities and resonances between the classical and the colloquial, not with that which is derivative or created in a dispossessed isolation, but the interstices; the spaces in which both old and new world soundings bore an equitable validity.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 1992, Walcott spoke of witnessing a reenactment of the Ramleela, a segment of the Hindu epic The Ramayana, performed by descendants of indentured East Indians at Felicity Village in central Trinidad. In his speech, later published as The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (1993), Walcott echoes Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s suggestion that the problem in defining the Caribbean lay not in any inherent disunity or dispossession, but in the tendency of “postindustrial society” to apply methodologies and theorizations to the Caribbean which were more suited to their own circumstances (Benítez-Rojo, 2006: 1–2). As Walcott explained through a metaphor also utilized by Wilson Harris, the region was perceived by Western theorists as “a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed […] illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized” (1992: n.p.).
According to Nicole N. Aljoe, Walcott’s reading of the Ramleela performance signals his particular theorization of creolization, in which “the experiences of the new world create new forms from the global fragments” (2012: 18). Accordingly, Aljoe sets Walcott’s thought within the context of a creolizing continuum which “emphasises the interactions of all cultural influences” (2012: 17; emphasis in original). In The Antilles Walcott argues further, suggesting that like the process of making poetry, in which the poet is preoccupied with “renaming, of finding new metaphors […] assembling nouns from necessity”, the “basis of the Antillean experience” is not simply the experience of fragmentation, but of reassembly, of reconstituting what he refers to as a “shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs” into a whole; into “the sum of history”. For Walcott, the very act of creating poetry, “which combines the natural and the marmoreal” and which, “conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present”, is akin to the historical process by which the “captured and indentured tribes” of the Caribbean, “deprived of their original language”, had been forced to “create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an old, an epic vocabulary, from Asia and from Africa” (Walcott, 1993: 10–11).
Works such as “The Schooner Flight” and the epic Omeros (1990) expand on historical motif. They capture not just a local, colonial history of the Caribbean but also a mythic marine history which connects the Caribbean to Homer and Virgil’s Mediterranean. In Omeros especially, one senses that a glance between fisherman huts may reveal either Caribbean or Aegean oceans, each flashing violently, blue with history. In a 2008 interview with the BBC’s “World Book Club”, Walcott explained that Omeros was not a derivation or translation of The Odyssey to the Caribbean, but a work of “associations”. It would be, as Walcott explained, cynical, to look upon the poem as a translation of Homer. It would be like saying, “we need a culture, and we have to borrow” (Walcott, 2008: n.p.).
It is on grounds of these very ideas of appropriation and “borrowing” that Walcott has been criticized throughout his career, for what some have perceived as mimicry, Eurocentrism, or a commitment to Western humanism. In a 1968 essay, Sylvia Wynter argued that Walcott was “trapped” by the “myth” of Europe, and that that myth would “alienate him [Walcott] from himself”. “The creative reality”, Wynter wrote, “will give him a complex, if painful, mirror in which to reassemble all the divided fragments of his still indeterminate identity” (1968/1996: 312). In a 1986 interview with Edward Hirsch, Walcott addresses such concerns, eloquently distilling his relationship to the English language:
The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets. Now that has led to a lot of provincial criticism: the Caribbean critic may say, “You’re trying to be English”, and the English critic may say, “Welcome to the club”. These are two provincial statements at either end of the spectrum. (Hirsch, 1986: 106)
What Walcott seems to be articulating here is a liminal position in which he occupies both spaces in the “spectrum”. And it is this positioning — simultaneously peripheral and imperial — which makes him, in his own words, either nobody or a nation (Walcott, 1989: 346, ll. 40–44).
In the BBC World Book Club interview, Walcott responds to a suggestion that in Omeros, “the motif of affliction” emerges as “the common thread which pulls together the disparate worlds, cultures, eras and peoples of the poem” by reminding us that, “the wound is history”, that what is left as historical ruins in the Caribbean are “monuments to a memorial of suffering”. Citing the image of a derelict sugar cane refinery set in an idyllic valley as one such monument, he argues that the immense beauty of the valley, while not “erasing history”, is “stronger” than the presence of the ruined refinery, and reclaims the space, both intellectual and physical, with its beauty (Walcott, 2008: n.p.). There is within this too a response, perhaps, to those for whom the irascibility or perceived arrogance of Walcott the man, has somehow obscured the incredible power of his art.
I met him twice. First, in 2008 at a hotel off Marylebone High Street in London, where a meeting became an unexpected audition for a central role in The Burial at Thebes, an opera based on Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone. Walcott arrived on time; he filled the room with his insouciant gravitas. He took his seat and asked what I thought of the West Indies cricket team, and whether I had watched the last test series. I hadn’t. He then chose a passage from the libretto for me to recite. I did. “Read it again, louder again”, he said. I did, but perhaps unsurprisingly — I was a poet rather than an actor — I was not cast. Years later, in 2014, attending my first Bocas Literary Festival in Trinidad, we met again. He was frail, greeting us with a quiet smile from his wheelchair. And there was, in the softness of his gaze, a sigh not unlike a breathing out, not unlike the tide receding from the beach.
At this year’s Bocas Festival, his absence was as tangible as the heat was fierce in Port of Spain. Attending the screening of Walcott as Poet and Seer, a 2014 documentary which examines his literary legacy, I was reminded of why my close readings of Walcott during my first, homesick year in London made me long for Trinidad even more, and why I decided then to dedicate my own life to poetry. In an interview segment of the film Walcott spoke as a poet aware of his own transcendence. “The tone of every poem”, he says, “is a tone of lament for loss. Every poem is an elegy, because everything has a beginning and an ending” (Antoine-Dunne, 2014: n.p.).