28 Derek Walcott: Poetry

Ms. Aparna Prem

Introduction

Derek Alton Walcott, poet from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, has been internationally recognized for his poetry, plays, prose and paintings. He expresses himself through different mediums to resolve his own divided identity as well as to locate a transnational Caribbean identity. This module focuses on his poetry with a brief analysis of some of his important poems.

“Poetry”, says Derek Walcott in his Nobel lecture “conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present. . . There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and self discovery” (28). The binaries of past and present, the dichotomies of the original and mimicry inform his view of the exchange between the native and the other. This is the core of the Caribbean consciousness which moulds the imposed English language to forge a plurality out of the divided existence that Walcott’s life and poems epitomise.

Background and Short BiographyWalcott was born on 23rd January, 1930 in Castries, St. Lucia, the child of a civil servant and a schoolteacher. Both of his grandfathers were white and both his grandmothers were slaves. Both France and England colonized St. Lucia and Walcott’s poems show the influences of both the languages. However, he was exposed to English literature and classics through his British education. Moreover, his mother was a schoolteacher who recited English poetry at home. His father, who painted and wrote poetry, died before he was born. The divided consciousness that caused a feeling of rootlessness began in childhood itself when he had to face two languages and cultures inside and outside the education system. Through art and poetry, Walcott tried to address and bridge the gap between the two identities: “In that simple schizophrenic boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, and the outward life of action and dialect”.

When he was fourteen years old he published his first poem and by nineteen he self- published two of his poetry collections 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he formed a group of actors and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959. Mimicry and other African and Caribbean performance traditions, folk songs and a blend of languages are amalgamated in most of his plays and poems. His collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962) received international recognition. Later he travelled to Boston and at Boston University, he founded Boston Playwright’s Theatre in 1981. He taught literature and writing at the University, till he retired in 2007. His book-length poem Omeros (1990) won Nobel Prize in 1992. His later collections include The Bounty (1997), Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), The Prodigal (2004) and White Egrets (2010). Walcott is a man of many cultures, standing at the confluence of African, colonialist and Caribbean traditions, a self-described “mulatto of styles”. In his review on Collected Poems 1948-1984, James Dickey describes Walcott as a 20th century man, living in the West Indies and in Boston, poised between the blue sea and its real fish, its coral reefs and gigantic turtles . . . between a lapsed colonial culture and the industrial North, between Africa and the West, between slavery and intellectualism, between the native Caribbean tongue and English learned from books, between the black and white in his own body, between the sound of the home ocean and the lure of European culture . . .

Themes and MotifsHis first published collection of poems 25 Poems (1949) had influences of Western literary tradition. Though he has followed Western literary techniques and forms, the West Indian landscapes, seascapes and other natural motifs engage in his poetry the task of developing a tradition far from the western. Regional and folk traditions blended with the European, spoken in a mixture of native patois and British English. These are the thematic and linguistic techniques that define Walcott’s poetry. The poet’s image as an exile, yearning to find ‘home’ is continuously repeated in most of his poems. Especially in The Castaway and Other Poems (1964), Walcott narrates the experiences of the island from the point of view of an outsider and explorer, Robinson Crusoe. The existence of an artist, who is isolated from the idea of home, is even more complicated when he is divided between the past and the present. That particular experience of nothingness is the space for creativity for the Caribbean Adam in Walcott’s thought. He turns the nothingness into ‘twilight’ where both identities blend.

In The Gulf and Other Poems (1969), Walcott uses the metaphor of the gulf that separates his island St. Lucia and the Caribbean as a whole from the United States, to denote the division between his colonial past and the postcolonial present. His book-length autobiographical poem Another Life (1973) revisits these themes, especially by focusing on the importance of memory and history, which can be created and recreated through poetry. He takes up the responsibility of creating history from sea, sand, water and surf. In the absence of the real, the monuments, myths, epic, history and tribal memory, Walcott keeps the sea and the landscape as the witnesses to the history of the land.

A Far Cry from Africa

Walcott’s art arises from a ‘schizophrenic’ situation, created from a struggle between two cultural heritages, which he has harnessed to create a unique “creolized” style. Walcott describes his ‘schizophrenic’ existence in “What the Twilight Says” an autobiographical essay published in 1970. His poetry manifests a graceful blending of sources—European and American, Caribbean and Latino, classical and contemporary. Walcott uses images of genetic hybridity and cultural diversity to express the extremity of his identity crisis in “A Far Cry from Africa”:

I 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 English tongue I love?

Betray them both, or give back what they give?

How can I face such slaughter and be cool?

How can I turn from Africa and live?

The identity, the ‘reality’ and the root comes from interaction between the heterogeneous experiences of life. Walcott is “poisoned with the blood of both”, divided between cultures and languages of the colonizer and the colonized. Growing up in a blend of culture and educated in a hybrid system, the poet, who is divided and confused about ‘where to turn’, expresses the burden of a half-European and half-African identity. The struggle of a postcolonial self for whom it is impossible to choose one identity and ignore the other, is emphasized in this poem.

The education and upbringing of Walcott in an English background seem to have disguised the violent reality of the history of slavery. Hence in the particular situation described in the poem, Walcott sees everything as an image, and the internal quest is to find an authentic identity beyond the shadow of images. The taught or imposed identity and the realized one are obviously different from each other. “Divided to the vein”, Walcott struggles to find himself and expresses that struggle in a specific local context thereby accepting the multiplicity of human experience. He describes a different way of living in, perceiving and understanding a ‘changed’ world, from a Caribbean perspective.

In “A Far Cry from Africa”, Walcott poses the intense question: “how choose between this Africa and the English tongue I love?”. This haunts him while he tries to understand himself, his country, the world at large, and the colonial suppression that ‘divided’ his self, his vocation as a poet and the complex experience of life owing to the dual consciousness. The wavering conscience, unsure whether to “betray them both, or give back what they give?” arises from the realization that the self includes and contains both. He curses the British officer who separated the poet from his roots and heritage through the violence of slavery, but at the same time, he is not able to part from the English language, which has already become an inevitable part of his selfhood.

The Sea is History

“Monuments, battles and martyrs” describe the history of a country. However, after decolonization, the Caribbean islands face the accusation of historylessness. Contemporary writers like V.S. Naipaul ascribe this lack of history to the state of the islands as in-between, where no one belongs. The white colonisers leave, the Asian indentured labourers had the option of returning home and, in Naipaul’s view, the permanent residents of the islands, the slaves who are forced to live there, have no history because they are Africans who come from scriptless cultures.

Naipaul discounts this history of pain and violence but Walcott in the “The Sea is History”, says that the monuments, battles, martyrs, the tribal memory and the whole of history is locked in sea. Down the centuries, the ocean turns its “blank pages” in search of history and finally it discovers a new history “in the salt chuckle of rocks / with their sea pools, there was the sound / like a rumour without any echo / of History, really beginning” (75-78). The sea is no more a barrier or border that recalls the lament of the lost, original, single history, but becomes a link between plural identities to show that at any point in time, ‘history’ can be made and remade. In “The Muse of History”, Walcott announces a revelation to mankind in the New World “inhabited by presences, not a creature chained to the past” (2). He picks up the physical features of the land in striking images “shark’s shadow”, “sunlight on the seafloor”, “white cowries” but still realizes that “the ocean kept turning blank pages looking for History”. There are references to Christianity throughout the poem to show the relation between religion and Caribbean identity. “The Book of Genesis” (meaning ‘birth’ in Greek and ‘in the beginning’ in Hebrew, this is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament), “Exodus” (meaning ‘departure’ in Greek) and “Sh’moth” (‘names’ in Hebrew and is the second book of the Hebrew Bible, and the second of five books of the Torah/Pentateuch) are some of those religious symbols. Going through “Genesis”, “Exodus”, “the Ark of Covenant”, “Song of Solomon”, “Jonah”, and “Gomorrah” he finally become aware that these signs were all false representations: “that was not History/ that was only faith”. The imposing of a Hebraic/Biblical historical model onto Caribbean and African suffering and identity can be considered as an ironic way of forging history, highlighting the fragmentation and loss of faith in the postcolonial situation.

When he proclaims that “each rock broke into its own nation”, the multiple identities that exist in the Caribbean islands and their relation to the natural world are highlighted. Here ‘sea’ is a metaphor for the plural histories hidden under the homogenous official history, which was a false re-presentation. Walcott gives the diverse landscape, rocks, and sea the authority to create and maintain the History of a land and its inhabitants, whose ancestral memories are erased by a “deep amnesiac blow”.

Laventille

The phrase “deep amnesiac blow” is a very relevant and significant idea considering the plurality of viewpoints and diversities of history and civilization in the Caribbean where the slave trade and the trauma of exploitation and subjugation made the ‘real’ memories fade into nothingness. This phrase is taken from the poem titled “Laventille”, dedicated to V. S. Naipaul.

Something inside is laid wide like a wound,

some open passage that has cleft the brain,

some deep, amnesiac blow. We left

somewhere a life we never found,

customs and gods that are not born again,

some crib, some grill of the light

clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld

us from that world below us and beyond,

and in its swaddling cerements we’re still bound.

Identity begins from this ‘wound’, the ‘cleft in the brain’ that led to the ‘loss of the real’. All the ancestors of the Caribbeans, except the Amerindians, were brought from elsewhere as slaves and the resulting cultural subjugation and repression are expressed in the phrase “swaddling cerements”, denoting the helplessness, restriction as well as death, to which they are “still bound”. The dark emptiness of the eroded memories, the “deep amnesiac blow”, describes the forced forgetting imposed by the violence of slavery. The Caribbean people are now living in a life that they “never found”—loss of ancestral memories of the uprooted Africans.

Walcott is not nostalgic or pessimistic about that ‘loss’ but in his poems he voices a quest for finding the ‘real’ that is hidden under the perceived signs of history. This quest leads to recognition of the complexities that cannot be moulded into a single form of history . The “new” postmodern world where the inhabitants like Walcott feel both the wound of an “amnesiac blow” and the realization of present pluralities, assert and celebrate this very hybridity and diversity as their individuality and uniqueness.

The Schooner Flight

Shabine, the mulatto seafarer, in his travel through the sea that erased his history, tries to find a renewed identity through the nature itself. Shabine who “had no nation now but the imagination” (8) realizes that “this earth is one / island in archipelago of stars” (20). “My first friend was the sea. Now it is my last”, says Shabine in “The Schooner Flight” (20). Carenage, a beaching community in northwest Trinidad, is Shabine’s point of departure. With the naming of the place, Walcott contextualizes the Caribbean mulatto Shabine whose way of living is intertwined with the nature around him: “in simple speech / my common language go be the wind / my pages the sails of the schooner Flight.

Though the poem is primarily about the identity crisis with a comment that Shabine is any ‘red nigger’ and at the same time ‘nobody’, it is important to know that he is a sailor who journeys toward past and future through the waves. In the Caribbean Sea, “so choke with dead”, Walcott could only find “brain, fire, sea fans, / dead-men’s fingers, and then, the dead men” (7). Shabine, who is separated from his wife Maria Concepcion and their children, tries to console himself by weeping under water, “salt seeking salt” (7). The vision of the “cleft rock” in the “rapturous deep”, makes him think that he can hide his soul. As in most of the poems of Walcott, “The Schooner Flight” is also a journey to find a peaceful land: “Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor?” (8). The single stanza of section 4 of the poem shows how cleverly Walcott employs nature in describing a land to refigure his nation.

Dusk. The Flight passing Blanchisseuse

Gulls wheel like from a gun again,

and foam gone amber that was white,

lighthouse and star start making friends,

down every beach the long day ends,

and there,on that last stretch of sand,

on a beach bear of all but light,

dark hands start pulling in the siene

of the dark sea, deep, deep inland. (10)

Like Walcott, Shabine’s only possessions and weapons against the loss of an identity, are imagination, creativity and the seascape: “I who have no weapon but poetry and / the lances of palms and the sea’s shining shield!” (16). Walcott finds the geography and nature replacing the lack of history and identity: “the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam, / is clothes enough for my nakedness” (19). The sea in “The Schooner Flight” is a healing element. While lamenting on the lost “green islands”, lost in the advent of jet planes and ‘progress’, Shabine says, “In such fierce salt, let my wound be healed, / me, in my freshness as a seafarer”.

In a search for “one island that heals with its harbor / and a guiltless horizon, where the almond’s shadow / doesn’t injure the sand”, Shabine discovers that “There are so many islands!” (19). This discovery corresponds with Walcott’s discovery of otherness as he crossed the physical boundaries across the sea. Comparing the islands to the falling meteors, Walcott says that the ‘fall’ is necessary for ‘oneness’: “But things must fall, so it always was, [. . .] / fall, and are one, just as this earth is one / island in archipelagoes of stars” (20). The acknowledgement and acceptance of the ‘other’, as mentioned elsewhere, and here through the metaphor of sea, is the cure for the plural society that yearns for an identity.

The journey of the ‘fortunate traveller’ between old and the new world, between African roots and the Caribbean present, ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’, by crossing different borders, leaves him in a world reconciled by the self. The affirmation of selfhood and identity lies not beyond the journey, but is an experience of crossing the border itself, acknowledging the darkness and the twilight. The Sea becomes, in Walcott, that history which includes past as well as present, history as well as individual creation—the sea bridges boundaries, geographically, socially as well as psychologically. The sea, which symbolizes the Middle Passage, stands for the slave trade, colonization and simultaneously connects the Old and New Worlds, thus redefining received notions of identity. He announces through the voice of Shabine, hero of his poem “The Schooner Flight”: “I am just a red nigger who love the sea, /  I had a sound colonial education, / I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / And either I am nobody, or I’m a nation”.

Another Life

Walcott finds the authentic existence of the artist in himself within a contrasting duality: “I am a kind of split writer: I have one tradition inside me going in one way, and another tradition going another. The mimetic, the Narrative, and dance element is strong on one side, and the literary, the classical tradition is strong on the other” (“Meanings” 48). The vocation of painting inherited from his father and learnt from Harold Simmons and Dunstan St Omer (who are called Harry and Gregorias respectively in Another Life) informs Walcott’s literary career. In an interview with Carrol B. Fleming, Walcott remembers how, when he was young, he was taught to believe that the light of the Italian sky was superior to that of Caribbean sky. However, as he says “I think I got rid of that feeling of inferiority extremely early as a painter practicing the actual skill of painting light, which is what painting really is about, at least representational painting”. The initial lines of the first chapter of Another Life embrace both poetry and painting:

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 (1-7).

Through knowledge life begins with a ‘twilight of confusion’, the process of identifying the meaning of existence is suffused with the power of nature and the absent master. The clarion call to merge dualities of heritage and cultures exists in ‘incompleteness’, a mist of uncertainty, from which artistic beauty arises. The ‘half-ness’ and the in- betweenness is not the reduction and diminution of dualities, rather it creates ‘another life’ where the confounding confusions merge into an enlightenment of identity, the self, nation as well as of the world at large. The practice of comparison to find out similarities and dissimilarities between contrasting dualities do not force Walcott to be partial to one, but rather to create a balance of pluralities. The linguistic, cultural, temporal and social ‘inbetweenness’ provides a surplus meaning, a blend and reconciliation of dichotomies, without compromising reality of himself as an individual and creator of multiple consciousnesses.

The castaway is a figure experiencing a blend of being Caribbean and yet discovering the world through the English language. The schizophrenic sensibilities of the mulatto are conveyed in Another Life as a “crystal of ambiguities” revealed in a “paradoxical flash of instant” (58). The image ‘crystal of ambiguities’ shows the paradox of his self, endowed with a crystal’s clarity and not drowned in mystification, – yet what the crystal reflects are multiple, varied and hence not limited to any single identity. Walcott aspires that “both disciplines”—the ‘both’ can be the physical binary of Africa and Europe, artistic binary of poetry and painting or the binary of past and present—would “by painful accretion cohere / and finally ignite” (58). The poet, who is “poisoned with the blood of both”, is cursed to be alienated from society as well as the self. The extraordinary world of creativity arising from the chaos of tangled pluralities showed him ‘another life’ where he has to live “in a different gift, its element metaphor” (59), pointing out that artists are castaways in a state of exile.

Omeros

Walcott received the Nobel Prize in 1992 for his long narrative poem Omeros. With a title that stands for the Greek name of Homer, this long poem retells the story of the Odyssey, re- contextualizing it in the island scenario. Gods, heroes and warriors are the fishermen and women who live on Walcott’s island. While there is a continuous and complex search for the way to heal the colonial wounds and find the ‘roots’, the redefinitions of the Greek contexts and the demystification of Greek heroes itself provide the answer for the questions regarding postcolonial Caribbean identity. In the quest for the self in the postcolonial context, is Walcott going back to the already made canons of literature, influenced by the classical epics, or is he remodelling the present by transcending the past towards a forged identity? With the references to classical texts and contexts, and the rewriting of history intertwined with it, Omeros endeavours to re-create past in the present, which becomes both the pain and the cure.

Conclusion

The dichotomies of inheritance from white European grandfathers and grandmothers with slave histories trapped Walcott “the mulatto of style”, in the ‘gulf’, that widens every day. In “Codicil”, Walcott explains the dualities experienced by the poet in exile: “Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles, / one a hack’s hired prose, I earn / my exile”. The word ‘prose’ here can mean the French patois or the common language of the colonized, in contrast to the poetic language or the ‘civilized’ language of the colonizer. The poet is separated from the self and banished from society, twisted ‘in between’ two sides of the borders, which appears at various levels of human knowledge and experience. For Norval Edwards, the relevant features of Walcott’s “double-headed poetics” are his “insistence on the plural genealogies of Caribbean culture, and his refusal to entertain the pieties of purity and the nostalgia of origins” (30), which defines identity from the in-betweenness. The creole language itself is a symbol of in-betweenness—the blend of French patois and Standard English, both of which are inevitable to Walcott, the mulatto. Colonization, slavery and migration that brought the New World into being are the basis of the process of creolization in the Caribbean region.

The search of ancestral roots does not confine him to a grand narrative or a universal framework, rather he gives attention and dignity to everything that he encounters and even the landscape in his poems has a perspective and identity. The view of life as a flux, a world of multiple contradictions and rootlessness are the major themes engaged by Walcott in his poems, but this is not a postmodern flux. Rather it is a celebration of plural reality, that the history of slavery has brought to the Caribbean, and which now stands at the basis of a Caribbean aesthetic.