IntroductionI who am poisoned with the blood of both
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the British tongue I love?
from "A Far Cry from Africa"
When the Swedish Academy awarded poet and playwright Derek Walcott the
Nobel Prize in 1992, it recognized what many commentators on Caribbean
literature had long celebrated, a brilliant artist response to the "complexity
of his own situation." Walcott’s life and work inhabit a teeming
intersection of cultural forces, a space that his friend and fellow-poet
James Dickey described with a remarkable litany: "Here he is, a twentieth-century
man, living in the West Indies and in Boston, poised between the blue sea
and its real fish … and the rockets and warheads, between a lapsed colonial
culture and the industrial North, between Africa and the West, between
slavery and intellectualism, between the native Caribbean tongue and the
English learned from books, between the black and white of his own body,
between the sound of the home ocean and the lure of European culture (8)."
Despite Walcott’s international fame and his acceptance as a great poet
of the English language, these relationships have remained a major subject
of his work. For his imagination has never lost contact with his
native West Indies, which animates his writing with its intense physical
beauty, the troubled relationship between this gift and a colonial heritage,
and the problems of a fragmented postcolonial identity.
Early Life and Poetry
Walcott was born in 1930 on the island of St. Lucia, the posthumous child of a civil servant and a schoolteacher, and the descendent of two white grandfathers and two black grandmothers. Though his first language was a French-English patois, he received an English education, an apprenticeship in language that his mother supported by reciting English poetry at home and by exposing her children to the European classics at an early age. In "What the Twilight Says," an autobiographical essay published in 1970, Walcott writes of the two worlds that informed his childhood: "Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles; that being poor, we already had the theater of our lives. In that simple schizophrenic boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, and the outward life of action and dialect (4)."
Walcott’s art arises from this schizophrenic situation, from a struggle
between two cultural heritages, which he has harnessed to create a unique
"creolized" style. His early poetry booklets, published in the late
1940s with money borrowed from his mother, reveal a self-conscious apprentice
determined to make what Walcott called a verse "legitimately prolonging
the mighty line of Marlow and Milton (31)." While English and American
critics often have been ambivalent about his use of the Western literary
tradition, Walcott has drawn criticism from Caribbean commentators, who
accuse him of neglecting native forms in favor of techniques derived his
colonial oppressors. To be sure, his early works seem overpowered
by the voices of English poetry, and his entire oeuvre respects the traditional
concerns of poetic form. But if his poetry sometimes betrays a significant
relation to tradition, it also manifests an elegant blending of sources—European
and American, Caribbean and Latino, classical and contemporary. Later
apprentice works, including In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, reveal a
poet who has learned his craft from the European tradition, but who remains
mindful of West Indian landscapes and experiences. The task of the
young poet, one he undertook with an enthusiasm for both imitation and
experimentation, was to develop an idiom adequate to his subject matter.
Early Dramatic Writings
Though his poetry displays a passion to record Caribbean life, this
tendency is more apparent in Walcott’s drama, which draws consistently
not only on his native patois, but also on regional folk traditions.
In the 1950s, after taking a degree from the University College of the
West Indies, Walcott wrote a series of verse plays, including Henri Christophe,
which recounts an episode in Carribean history using the diction and plotting
of Jacobean tragedy. His subsequent forays into dramatic writing,
The Sea at Dauphin and Ione, mingle the influences of J. M. Synge and Greek
Drama with a new emphasis on West Indian language and customs. During
this period, Walcott also taught and wrote as a journalist in Grenada,
before moving to Trinidad, where he gathered a group of actors and founded
the Little Carib Theatre Workshop (later renamed the Trinidad Theatre Workshop).
While in Trinidad, Walcott developed a mature dramatic idiom in plays,
such as Ti-Jean and his Brothers and Dream on Monkey Mountain, which put
an elevated dialect in mouths of common West Indian folk. In "What
the Twilight Says" Walcott describes his desire to fill these plays with
"a language that went beyond mimicry, … one which finally settled on its
own mode of inflection, and which begins to create an oral culture, of
chants, jokes, folk-songs, and fables (17)." Chronicling a
peasant fantasy of rejecting the white world and reclaiming an African
heritage, Dream on Monkey Mountain not only makes effective use of native
dialect, but also satirizes the bureaucratic idiom of colonialism.
Language becomes a route to racial identity and a necessary resource for
the survival of West Indian communities.
Mature Writings
While Walcott dedicated much of the 1960s to developing the Little Carib Theatre and to rewriting earlier dramas, his primary focus was on poetry. Between 1964 and 1973 he published four volumes, which continued his exploration and expansion of traditional forms, and which increasingly concerned themselves with position of the poet in the postcolonial world. In contrast to the plays of this period, which arise from a sense of shared colonial history and local mythology, The Castaway and Other Poems (1964) draws on the figure of Robinson Crusoe to suggest the isolation of the artist. "As a West Indian," Katie Jones suggest, "the poet can be seen as a castaway from both his ancestral cultures, African and European, stemming from both, belonging to neither. To salve this split, Walcott creates a castaway who is also a new Adam … whose task is to name his world. Walcott’s castaway is a poet who creates and gives meaning to nothingness (Brown 38)." Coping with internal division remains a concern in The Gulf, which calls on the body of water separating St. Lucia from the United State as a metaphor for the breach between the poet and all he loves, between his adult consciousness and childhood memories, between his international interests and the feeling of community in his homeland. Walcott explored these themes again in Another Life, a book-length autobiographical poem that examines the important roles of poetry, memory, and historical consciousness in bridging the distances within the postcolonial psyche.
This investigation transferred to his dramatic writings in the 1970s,
which address the problems of Caribbean identity against the backdrop of
political and racial strife, and which increasingly find solutions to these
troubles in the individual. These works also display an expansion
of his artistic concerns into different genres. After a comical turn
in Jourmard, Walcott wrote two musicals in collaboration with Galt MacDermont:
The Joker of Seville (1974), a patois adaptation of Molina’s El bulador
de Sevella, and O Babylon! (1976), a portrayal of Rastafarians in Jamaica
at the time of Haile Selassie’s 1966 visit, which uses reggae music as
a means of exploring West Indian identity. O Babylon! also marked
the end of Walcott’s association with the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and
the beginning of new period of dramatic writing, highlighted by plays such
as Remembrance (1977) and Pantomime (1978). The protagonist of Remembrance,
Albert Perez Jordan, is a schoolmaster who lost his elder son in the 1970
Black Power uprising and who remains distressed by a political commitment
he cannot understand. Unable to connect with his family or with his
own past, Jordan finds himself divided between an older generation committed
to tradition and a younger one playing at revolution. Characters
in the comedic Pantomine confront similar divisions, but here the issue
of race comes to the fore. Reviving the Crusoe story once again,
Walcott creates a play-within-a-play and recasts the roles so that Jackson,
a black hotel servant, plays Crusoe and his white employer plays Friday.
This reversal highlights the fraught relationship that binds black to white,
master to slave, colonizer to colonized. Far from being an irreparable
situation, however, Jackson’s ability to synthesize his calypso talents
with a poetic use of the English language suggests a respect for differences
and a possibility for healing old wounds.
Life and Work in the United States
If his drama has examined the role of music and language in mending divisions, Walcott’s poetry has sought to do the same through a continuing examination of the relation of life to art. After his break with the Trinidad Theatre workshop in 1976, Walcott directed his attention increasingly to the United States, where he has held a number of teaching positions, including a long-standing appointment a Boston University. It is not surprising, then, that much of the poetry written during this period reflects the tensions between his role as an educator at a mainland institution and as a poet from a small island nation. But even before Walcott began spending most of the year away from the West Indies, his experience as transient international poet, called to read and lecture around the world, had supplied his poetry with images of painful departures and the guilty homecomings. In the title poem of Sea Grapes, for instance, Odysseus is portrayed as a divided man, who finds himself both a husband going home and an adulterer unable to forget his trespasses.
Rather than avoid such painful dilemmas, Walcott’s works from the 1980s explore the "bitter sweet pleasures of exile" experienced when one has become estranged from his beloved homeland, when one has become divided between "North" and "South" (the subdivisions of The Fortunate Traveller) and between "Hear and Elsewhere" (The Arkansas Testament). While these works deal with general themes such as injustice, racism, hatred, oppression, and isolation, they continually return to inner-divisions of an exile and increasingly to the role of art in mending these tares. Midsummer is important in this regard, for its lyrics record a year in the life of the poet, as he returns to the Caribbean from the United States in search of childhood memories and travels throughout region, recording its sense of community from the perspective of an outsider. Despite his feelings of loss and his increasing awareness of cruelty in the world, the poet finds not only the strength to endure but also some reassurance in artistic vision, in the English and patois languages he loves, and in masterpieces of modern art.
Nobel Prize and Omeros
While Walcott has been praised for his lasting contributions to Caribbean theater, receiving credit for establishing a truly native dramatic form, the Nobel committee singled out a work of poetry when it selected him as laureate in 1992. Omeros (modern Greek for Homer) is Walcott’s most ambitious work to date, a book-length poem that places his beloved West Indies in the role of the ancient bard’s Cyclades. This retelling of the Odyssey is not inhabited by gods and heroic warriors, but by simple Caribbean fishermen, whose Greek names register their hybrid identities. And though it is composed in terza rima and organized by rhyme and meter, Omeros is not an epic in any traditional sense. Rather than describing a single quest, the shape-shifting narrator, who appears in Homeric guise at several points in the poem, recounts a number journeys into the hidden corners of colonial history. The success of Omeros validates the substance of Walcott’s entire oeuvre, for here are the themes that have consistently preoccupied the poet: the beauty of his island home, the burden of a colonial legacy, the fragmentation of Caribbean identity, and the role of the poet in addressing these concerns.
Since winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott has continued to write prolifically, producing a new epic poem, The Bounty, in 1992 and, more recently, a collection of poems entitled Tiepolo’s Hounds, which examines the life and art of impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. In these works, he continues to explore the complex legacy of colonialism with a poetic vision that recognizes the range of traditions comprising his beloved West Indies, and with a poetic voice that harmonizes the discord between the English canon and his native dialect.
Walcott in His Own Words
on his poetic language:
It was no problem for me to feel that since I was writing in English, I was in tune with the growth of the language. I was a contemporary of anyone writing in English anywhere in the world. What is more important, however—and I’m still working on this—was to find a voice that was not inflected by influences. One didn’t develop an English accent in speech; one kept as close as possible to an inflection that was West Indian. The aim was that a West Indian or an Englishman could read a single poem, each with this own accent, without either one feeling that is was written in dialect.
on his status as a Caribbean writer:
I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer. The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property to 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.
on his reception as a Caribbean writer:
So if you ask me about how I feel if I’m reviewed, I think I’ve had a parallel equivalent, politically I have been through, in my life, an identical series of phases which would be that of being a colonial, being someone given adult suffrage, being someone given self-government, and being someone who becomes very public so that the decades of my life may be the equivalent of the political decades of the Caribbean. Now, on the other had, those decades or those definitions have sometimes been bestowed by the empire; in other words, the empire has said, okay, you are no longer a colonial, you can now have adult suffrage; you no longer have adult suffrage, you an now be independent; you are no independent, you can now be a republic.
on America, colonialism, and identity:
The whole idea of America, and the whole idea of every thing on this side of the world, barring the Native American Indian, is imported; we’re all imported, black, Spanish. When one says one is American, that’s the experience of being American—that transference of whatever color, or name, or place. The difficult part is the realization that one is part of the whole idea of colonization. Because the easiest thing to about colonialism is to refer to history in terms of guilt or punishment or revenge, or whatever. Whereas the rare thing is the resolution of being where one is and doing something positive about that reality.
Works by Derek Walcott
Poetry:
25 Poems, 1948
Epitaph for the Young, 1949
Poems, 1951
In a Green Night: Poems, 1948-1960, 1962
Selected Poems, 1964
The Castaway, and Other Poems, 1965
The Gulf, and Other Poems, 1969
Another Life, 1973
Sea Grapes, 1976
Selected Verse, 1976
The Star-Apple Kingdom, 1979
The Fortunate Traveller, 1981
Selected Poetry, 1981
Midsummer, 1984
Collected Poems, 1948-1984, 1986
The Arkansas Testament, 1987
Omeros, 1990
The Bounty, 1997
Tiepolo’s Hound, 2000
Drama:
Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes, 1950
Harry Dernier: A Play for Radio Production, 1952
The Charlatan, 1954
The Sea Dauphin: A Play in One Act, 1954
Ione: A Play with Music,
Ti-Jean and His Brothers, 1957
Drums and Colors: An Epic Drama, 1958
Malcauchon; or, Six in the Rain, 1959
Dream on Monkey Mountain, 1967
Dream on Monkey Mountain, and Other Plays, 1970
In a Fine Life, 1970
The Joker of Seville, 1973
O Babylon!, 1976
Remembrance, 1977
The Joker of Seville & O Babylon!, 1978
Pantomime, 1978
Remembrance and Pantomime, 1980
A Branch of the Blue Nile, 1986
Three Plays, 1986
Viva Detroit, 1990
Steel, 1991
Odyssey: A Stage Version, 1993
Works Consulted
Atlas, James. "Constructing Modern Idiom on a Base of Tradition." The New York Times. (9 Oct. 1992): 30.
Brodsky, Joseph. "On Derek Walcott." The New York Review of Books. (10 Nov. 1983): 39-41.
Brown, Stewart, ed. The Art of Derek Walcott. Chester Springs: Dufour, 1991.
Dickey, James. "Worlds of a Cosmic Castaway." The New York Review of Books. (2 Feb. 1986): 2.
Gale Research. "Derek Walcott." Contemporary Literary Criticism Select [computer file]. Online. Internet. 1998.
Lyndersay, Mark. Photography of Derek Walcott. n. pag. Online. Lyndersay Photographs Page. Internet. 10 April 2000. Available: http://www.wow.net/macmark/html/Walcot17.html
McWatt, Mark A., "Derek Walcott: An Island Poet and his Sea." Third World Quarterly 10.4 (Oct. 1988): 1607-1615.
Terada, Rei. Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992.
Walcott, Derek. "What the Twilight Says: An Overture." Dream on Monkey Mountain. New York: Farrar, 1970. 3-40.
Walcott, Derek. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Ed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996.
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Author: Patrick Bixby, Spring 2000
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