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TAKING EVERYTHING IN; POETIC PERSONA AND POETIC VOICE IN THE POEMS OF DEREK WALCOTT
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of The Ohio State Universit\
By
Anne L. Knee, M.A.
*****
The Ohio State Universitv 1998
Dissertation Committee Approved by Jessica Prinz, Adviser
Jeredith Merrin Adviser Valerie Lee Department of Englis' UMI Number: 9900859
UMI Microform 9900859 Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.
This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ABSTRACT
Derek Walcott's career as a poet and dramatist, from 1948 to the present, spans
the formative years of West Indian history and places him among the founding fathers
of West Indian literature. His work is therefore inevitably judged by Caribbean critics
and theorists as it defines and contributes to a characteristically West Indian literature.
In his early poems, Walcott s commitment to a literary apprenticeship, based on the
imitation of recognized poets, and his appropriation of styles and techniques adapted
initially from the British tradition, lays his work open to the criticism that it is
derivative and Eurocentric. Much of this criticism centers upon the persona presented
in the poems and the poetic voice through which it finds expression.
A study of his poems up to the publication o ï Another Life in 1973, shows
Walcott adopting the post-colonial strategies of mapping and of engaging metropolitan
voices in productive debate in an attempt to produce a West Indian poetry independent of the British tradition, while the style and language of those poems declare their dependence on that tradition, and the persona is a contemporary version of the romantic concept of self derived from that tradition. In Another Life he re-evaluates his poetic practice in the light of his mentor Harrold Simmons, accepting the need for his
work to be rooted in a local materiality and to represent more fully the people of his
region.
Subsequent work from 1976 onwards demonstrates a concern to produce a poetic voice that represents the orality of West Indian culture, through a series of
linguistic experiments, including code shifting and the exploitation of a varietv of vernacular codes into his work. During this period, dramatic monologue becomes a dominant genre in his poetry. The assimilation of West Indian voices into his poetiy' leads finally to the emergence of a multi vocal, inclusive voice, exemplified in Omeros
( 1990). This study traces the development of poetic voice and poetic persona in
Walcott's work through these four stages of development, arguing that Walcott's contribution to a West Indian aesthetic lies in his creation of successive paradigms of the West Indian artist.
Ill Dedicated to mv familv
IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 wish to thank my adviser, Jessica Pnnz. for her unfailing support and encouragement at all stages of this project. I am also grateful to my committee members; to Ruth Lindeborg for her willingness to read and discuss my work at the draft stage and for the acute and penetrating questions that sent me back to think harder: to Jeredith Merrin for her helpful suggestions and patient correction of my errors of style: and to Valerie Lee for being prepared to take me on at a late stage in the project.
1 am very much indebted to Antonia MacDonald-Smythe for stimulating discussion of my dissertation topic, for giving me access to her own unpublished work and to other materials that were hard to find, and for making me really think about the
West Indies. VITA
February 7, 1945 ...... Bom — Shefïleld, U.K.
196 6 ...... B.A./ M.A. English Literature and Language,
St. Anne's College, Oxford, U.K.
196 7 ...... Graduate Certificate in Education, University of
Hull, U.K.
1967-68 ...... Assistant Teacher of English, Sir Leo Schultz
High School, Hull, U.K.
1974-197 5...... Temporary Assistant Teacher of English. Clare
Park High School, East Mailing, Kent, U.K.
1975-198 3...... Assistant Teacher of English, Maidstone
Grammar School for Girls, Maidstone, Kent,
U.K.
VI 1983-1985...... Second in English Department. St. Simon Stock
R.C. High School, Maidstone. Kent. U.K.
1985- 1986 ...... Substitute Teacher, West Kent Area.
1986- 1988...... Second in English Department. Gravesend
Girls' Grammar School. Gravesend, Kent, U.K.
1989 - ...... Graduate Teaching Associate. The Ohio State
University.
Vll TABLE OF CONTENTS
Patze
Abstract...... ii
Dedication ...... iv
Acknowledgments ...... v
Vita...... vi
Chapters;
Introduction ...... 1
1. "Braving New Water in an Antique Hoax: "
The Early Poems of Derek Walcott...... 6
2. "Where Else to Row, But Backward'.^ ”
Walcott’s Re-evaluation of Early Influences ...... 53
3. From Castaway to Fortunate Traveller ...... 103
4. Many Journeys, Diverse Voices:
The Multiple Narratives of Omeros ...... 151
5. "The Poet C arrying Entire C 'uitures on his Back. ” ...... 192
Bibliography...... 233
V lll INTRODUCTION
Derek Walcott's career as a poet and dramatist spans the years of struggle and planning towards independence in the West Indies, the abortive attempt to create a West Indian Federation, and the years of economic and social change which followed the Federation's collapse. It thus places him among the founding fathers of West Indian literature. Whether he were conscious of this role at the outset, and every indication in both his poetry and in published interviews indicates that he was, his work is inevitably judged by Caribbean critics and theorists as it serves the project of defining and contributing to a characteristically West Indian aesthetic. Edward Baugh remarks somewhat tartly in a review of the collection Sea (îrapes that “Walcott’s binding theme is Walcott, the pursuit and delineation of a fictive character based on an actual person named Derek Walcott." Sandra Pouchet Paquet, however, in her essay on West Indian autobiography, examines autobiographical and semi-autobiographical works by C.L.R. James, George Lamming, and V S. Naipaul alongside VJa.\cott's Another Life in order to demonstrate that in these works, which she describes as “the canonical texts of West Indian literature, " each author is engaged in the production of a version of self representative of the region from which he originates, and that each constructs the representative in a different way. My argument in this dissertation is that Walcott’s contribution to the West Indian aesthetic is to create successive paradigms of the West Indian artist, and that as his work develops over time he aims to become that artist whose identity he is in the process of delineating. The process of delineation could be said to cover four phases - apprenticeship, followed by a re-evaluation of early influences, and a penod of experimentation that leads lo the final period, in which his mature style finds its highest expression. In the earliest, apprentice work, which I take as including all work up to the publication of The
(}u(T Walcott constructs a myth of himself as poet, both in the persona he presents in the poems and in the autobiographical prose works written towards the end of this period.
Given the circumstances of his situation, it is perhaps inev itable that this figure is based upon a version of the poet derived from European tradition, and is a contemporary version of the romantic concept of self; but it has laid his work open to the criticism that it is derivative and Euro-centric. Walcott's poetic practice during this formative period, however, contains the seeds of fruitful future development. These include a facility in incorporating other discourses into the poetic voice (at this stage these are most often, but not always, literary discourses), and the presentation of a divided self who observes himself, signalled by a sometimes disconcerting shifting of pronouns (the persona floats between "T," "you," and "he" in many of these poems). During this period three characteristic metaphors for the poet emerge: the Castaway or Crusoe figure, the solitary beachcomber who appropriates to his use the materials saved from a wreck: the
Craftsman, usually a carpenter: and the figure of Adam, deriving from Alejo Carpentier's formulation of the project of the Caribbean artist as "Adam's task of giving things their names."
The death of his mentor Harold Simmons in 1966 prompted Walcott to a re-evaluation of the example of Simmons, which culminated in the long autobiographical poem Another Life. In this poem Walcott’s project is as much to explore the question of what it means to be a West Indian artist as it is to produce an autobiography of his early years. The figures of Simmons. Dunstan St. Omer and his younger self embody some of the possible aesthetic ideals available to an artist working in the West Indies. They also function as models of self-as-artist, and are commented upon by a fourth figure, the constructed persona of the narrator, also an artist. Drawing on Simmons' example.
Walcott constructs a figure who is the product of a local communitv'. thoroughly immersed in local language, folk culture and material reality, but who avoids the dangers of isolation and neglect that dog his fictional artist figures as well as the human models on whom they are based. The narrator renews a commitment to the people of his local community, again using Simmons as example; Simmons is likened to the pot made from local earth that both contains and expresses the consciousness of his community.
It is also significant that the years preceding and immediately following the production Another Life saw the publication of a considerable body of writing theorizing a Caribbean aesthetic, including the work of the Martiniquan poet, Aimée
Cesaire. Franz Fanon, Brathwaite and others. At the same time Walcott's own early work faced a certain amount of adverse criticism, hinging upon the extent to which it contributed to the creation of a Caribbean consciousness, and particularly upon whether it successfully incorporated the African elements of Caribbean culture and subordinated or avoided those identified with Europe. The most important of Walcott’s theoretical prose writings originate in the early seventies and must be seen in part as a response to this criticism. They are also informed by the self-examination which is prompted by the writing o ï Anoihcr I.ifc. Ho\ve\er. while this poem presents a turning point in Walcott's theorization of the position of the West Indian poet, its style differs little from that of the poems published before.
During the next stage of development, in the decade following the publication ot
Another Life. Walcott puts into practice the insights gained during its composition. The persona of self as poet in the poems published during this time mutates from Castaway figure to the figure of the fisherman who casts his net and draws in "living silver." It is at this stage that dramatic monologue, with its adoption of personae clearly not the poet himself as well as its reproduction of other voices, becomes a dominant mode in
Walcott's work. The ability to incorporate other voices in his poetic voice, noted in the earlier poems, is now used to soak up the many codes and vernaculars of spoken West
Indian English. The division of self, which in Another Life manifests itself in an empathie soaking up of the characteristic speech modes of his fellow artists, in the poems of this period is extended to include those of ordinary people and of non-literary discourses — the language of politics, commerce, the streets. In addition to these developments the poems of this period exhibit a new self-reflexiveness, most apparent in
Midsummer. This enables the poet to comment upon his own processes of composition and the problems of representation.
The final stage of development is represented by the long poem Omeros, in which the strategies developed during a working lifetime come together in a multi-layered and multi-vocal work, in which hetero^Iossia, an emphasis up>on the oral, extensive use of code shifting and a sharing of narration among many consciousness, none of which dominates, all play a pan. That the indeterminate self and many of the an i Stic strategies
used by Walcott in this poem seem to mirror those employed by post-modern poets working within the American and European traditions is partly responsible for the wide
recognition which his work has gained. They are. howe\er, arrived at from a different position and in response to other imperatives than those which influence his American and European counterparts. Most importantly, whereas Euro-American Post-Modernism celebrates and exploits the divorce of signifier and signified as a means of destabilizing and fragmenting a monolithic ideology, Walcott's use of fragmentary and indeterminate voices and linguistic codes works towards the realization of a coherent identity for the
West Indies through the attempt to reconnect language to the material world. CHAPTER 1
“BRAVTSG NEW WATER IN AN ANTIQl E HOAX”:
THE EARLY POEMS OF DEREK WALCOTT
Robert Hammer, in a sympathetic evaluation o f In a (Ireen Nif^hr. Derek Walcott's
earliest published collection of poems, observes that the volume as a whole lacks clear
direction. “It is as though, lacking a clear picture of what role he should assume, he sets
out to define the possibilities that are available.”' Like many first collections by young
poets, in a (ireen Nighf is a volume in which the poet begins to formulate a poetic persona
and forge a distinctive poetic voice. For Walcott, however, the problem is compounded by
his perception of himself as a pioneer in the founding of a new literature. In later
interviews, he is to assert repeatedly that at the outset o f his career there were no pioets of stature writing in the West Indies, that he is the first.'
At the time of publication, Walcott’s early work was more enthusiastically received by British and American critics than by those in the Caribbean. A.N. Forde, reviewing In a
' Roben D Hamner Derek Walcott. New York: Twayne, 1993, 29 In an interview with Dennis Scott, Walcott has been speaking of what he learnt from West Indian novelists. When asked about the influence on his work of poets o f the region, he responds: " the bulk of West Indian poetry that we have is very, very bad. Don't you think so? I mean it's pretty poor " Dennis Scott. "Walcott on Walcott," Carihbean Quarterly 14,1-2(1968): 77-82 Ctrecn Xi^ht for the Barbadian journal. Hmi. warns against the temptation to claim this
volume as evidence of the existence of a distinctively West Indian poetrv and places
Walcott's work tlrmly in the English tradition. In the same review, he argues that this is the
only tradition available to a West Indian poet writing in English. Later critics of the region,
drawing on the theoretical work of Franz Fanon and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. locate their dissatisfaction with Walcott's work as the foundation of a distinctive West Indian
literature in the perception that his poetrv foregrounds the individual, rather than the collective sensibility, and in the use o f standard English rather than a West Indian
vernacular as the dominant mode of expression. The “Walcott v. Brathwaite" debate, which reached its height in the early seventies, ten years after the publication of this first volume, focuses on these two issues — the persona of the poet and the use of language — which are interrelated insofar as the self presented in the poems is constructed in language.
This chapter examines the speaking self (or selves) constructed in hi a Green Night, which owes much to European models. While it is clear that in the poems in this volume
Walcott is working towards presenting a West Indian perspective and the formulation of an aesthetic distinct from that of the Western tradition, the poetic persona and voice o f these poems declare their origins in a predominantly British tradition. Nevertheless, a study of these poems shows Walcott experimenting with two classic strategies of post-colonial opposition to the dominant Euro-American culture, notably those of a conscious and detailed mapping of his own region, and of engaging metropolitan voices in productive debate. In the course of this experimentation, he produces a poetic voice which absorbs earlier British literar> models. However, the collection contains other poems that also
reflect the voices around him speaking the many codes and vernaculars of West Indian
English.
Critical Reception of the Early Poems.
Walcott's first published volume of poems. In u (Ireen \'igliL appeared in Britain in
1962. It is subtitled Poems 194^-1960 and consists of Walcott's selection of the poems of
his apprenticeship years. They include polished versions of poems which first appeared in
the privately published pamphlet 25 Poems (1948), and, for the most part, must have been substantially completed before he was eighteen, as well as a range of poems, early versions of which had first appeared in Bim, Curihhean Ouurterly or in the London Muguzine between 1953 and 1961. They span a period of artistic experiment and development covering at least eleven years, during which time Walcott had been a student, a teacher, a journalist and had founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, where he was both a writer and producer o f plays. Two years later Selected Poems, which consists of a selection of poems from In a Green S'lght as well as sixteen new poems, was published in the United States'
’ This overlapping o f poems between British and American editions is a feature o f Walcott's early work. Selected Poems ( 1964)contains sixteen poems later to form the core o f the British edition o f The C 'astaway and Other Poems ( 1965) The .American edition o f The Gulf and Other Poems ( 1970)begins with a selection from the British publication. The Castay^ay, of thirteen poems, not previously included in Selected Poems The rest of the volume consists of the poems published in the British edition o f The G ttlf in the previous year The .American editions of these volumes are, understandably, even less unified in effect than their British counterparts
8 Robert D Hamner quotes the endorsement of Robert Graves, printed on the dust
jacket of the first (and substantially revised) Amencan edition, Sclccicd Poems. "Derek
Walcott handles English with a closer understanding o f its inner magic than most ( if not
any) of his English bom contemporaries."’ For Graves, "magic" is the sine qua mm of
poetr\ : he is giving the highest possible praise. Among the reviewers of the American
edition, Robert Mazzocci criticizes the "preoccupation with Self,...with something vague
and minatory," and describes the panache and delight in language which impresses Graves
as "Walcott’s lush melancholy." Nevertheless, he recognizes in the best o f the poems
"special gifts which...are not much evident in younger poets whether English or American."
Among these he mentions Walcott's "musical textures," "a painter’s eye" and an
adventurous craftsmanship.^ In a more generous review, James Dickey finds the collection
"doubly welcome in a time of timidity and correctness."^
It is a commonplace for critics to note the extent to which Walcott, in these early
poems, refers to, and in some cases imitates, the work o f earlier poets and particularly poets
in the English tradition. Forde is not alone in seeing Walcott as a poet in this tradition rather
than as the founder of a new tradition of West Indian poetry. The allusion to Marvell in the
Robert D Hamner. ibid.2% Even taking a fairly narrow reading of "contemporaries" and "English bom," the group of poets with whom Walcott is being compared is one whose achievements at that time and in subsequent years have been substantial It would include the present laureate, Ted Hughes, whose second volume of poems. Hawk in ihe Ram. had been published in 1957, followed by Liipercal in 1960; Thom Gunn {Fighting Terms 1954, Poems 1954, Ihe Sense o f Movement 1957), Geo&ey Hill (/-br/Ae fZ/ÿü/Ze// 1959) and Charles Tomlinson (ZAe Necklace 1955). Philip Larkin, less unequivocally Walcott’s contemporary since his was bom eight years earlier, had published his second collection o f poems. The Ijtss Deceived, in 1955 ■ AW York Revieu o f Books 3 18, Dec 31,1964
" AVm- York Times Book Review September 13, 1964 title of the original collection of poems as well as echoes w ithin the poems of the work of other English poets invite this viewpoint. Several critics, including Helen Vendler. Louis
James and Stewart Brown, point out Walcott’s indebtedness to Yeats. Eliot, Auden and
Dy lan Thomas in individual poems.
Walcott himself, towards the end of his introduction to Dream on Monkey
Mountain and Other Plays (1970), writes of his boyhood ambition; "1 saw myself legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe, of Milton." But this is a statement about beginnings, rather than destinations: the thrust o f the material that precedes this statement is towards mapping an artistic route out trom the domination of an imposed literary tradition and towards the definition of a West Indian tradition. The makeshift craft in which Walcott describes himself as setting sail in the poem "The Harbour" may be "an antique hoax." patched together from the remnants of English tradition, but it heads for open water and a new beginning.
The concentration on traditional English influences should not blind an attentive reader to the presence of echoes from Baudelaire, Mallarmé (French), and Aimée Cesaire
(Francophone Caribbean), nor, more importantly, to the creative use Walcott makes of pastiche and direct quotation from these sources. The best of Walcott’s early work demonstrates how a voice may be found in oppositional dialogue with canonical poets of
Cameron King and Louis James "In Solitude for Company: the Poetry of Derek Walcott,” in The Islands m Benseen ed. Louis James London: Oxford U P. 1968 Helen Vendler "Poet of Two Worlds" AVm York Renes* o j Books 4 March, 1982 23, 26-27 Stewart Brown. "The Apprentice," in The Art o f Derek Walcott, ed Stewart Brown Bridgend. Mid Glamorgan Poetrv Wales Press. 1991
10 the tradition within which he w orks. Other poems comprise a range of expen ments with language that will eventually, in later work, produce a voice which speaks a Caribbean
English clearly differentiated from Standard English, though equally clearly differentiated from either French- or English-based Creoles.
Walcott's dilemma in these and subsequent poems is that his chances of publication, beyond the narrow circulation of privately published pamphlets and the appearance of individual poems in journals of more or less limited circulation, depends upon his writing in an idiom which recommends itself to British, and, later, to American publishers.'^ Thus, his poems must make an appeal to a wider audience than the immediate one. At the same time, early theorists of West Indian culture, notably C.L.R. James and George Lamming, have already proposed a synthesis of European and the hitherto suppressed African elements in West Indian literature with an emphasis on the latter. Brathwaite. in his formulation of "Nation language” in The History o f the Voice ( 1984), is later to propose uses of language and rhythm to express a characteristically West Indian voice. In the light of these theories. Walcott’s poetic voice should necessarily grow from the sources available to him. reflecting the Creole-speaking oral traditions of the West Indies even as it draws upon the French and English print traditions with which his reading has made him familiar.
* Sandra Pouchet Paquet comments that the surge o f literary activity in the West Indies during the fifties outstripped both the facilities for publication and the audience in the region. Surveying the writers of this decade, during which Walcott began to publish, she remarks: ‘[Their] achievements were all the more remarkable because there were no publishing houses in the West Indies that could support this outburst of creativity Small presses, like the Pioneer Press of Jamaica, were inadequate to the task Moreover there was as yet no significant reading public in the West Indies educated to support a literary movement.” "The Fifties" West Indian Literature ed Bruce King Hamden. CT .\rchon Books, 1979 63-77
II In this first volume of poems Walcott attempts, not entirely successfully, to maintain a difficult balance between the demands of two audiences.
In addition to the problem of addressing two quite different audiences, other factors also prevent him. in this early work, from establishing a distinctively West Indian persona and voice. Foremost among these are his conception of the business of the poet and his perception o f the audience for poetry in the West Indies. One o f the earliest metaphors for the poet employed by Walcott is that of the skilled craftsman:
We shall lay down our work alongside the chisel
Of the stonecutter, with the fisherman's cutlass.
Wanting no more than honesty in labour. ^
This equation o f poetry with the craft of the skilled workman recurs throughout his work.
Here he cites the stone mason and fisherman, in Another Life the painter and the carpenter, in Omeros the embroiderer ("Bit of an artist, toov was old M aud" ).
Intimately linked with the concept of the poet as craftsman is Walcott's conviction that the craft is learned through the imitation of recognized masters. Just as. until the end of the nineteenth century, an aspiring painter would undergo an apprenticeship based on the copying of masterpieces of the past, or would be apprenticed to a master craftsman whose
’ “For all craftsmen ” Rim 19(1953 ). 166
12 st\ie he was required to reproduce, so Walcott descnbes his own self-imposed
apprenticeship:
I used to copy poems in various st> les. modelled, sometimes, down, not to
the rhyme, but to the exact meter of various poems. It would be Hopkins
one morning: next morning it might be Spender, the next morning it might
be Dylan Thomas: the next morning Eliot. .. and so on. .. trying to learn the
craft from exact models of the thing.
The value of this kind of imitative apprenticeship is asserted repeatedly throughout his
career. Stewart Brown cites an article by Walcott from the sixties in which he advocates
that all young poets go through a period of consciously imitating the masters of the past, as
he had. ' ' Thirty years later, a former student of Walcott's at Boston University describes
him beginning an introductory course by demanding that his students write out any poem
that they knew by heart (a task all found impossible), as a prelude to a lecture on the
importance of studying traditional form s.S ince Walcott's early models are drawn from a
European tradition, they employ the forms, rhythms and often the diction of that tradition.
Hence the tendency for critics to classify his early work as belonging to English rather than
West Indian literature.
Interview with Richard E Smith ( 1991 ) Our other I'oices: Nine Poets S[ieuking. ed John Wheatcroft Buckneil U P. 199] 178-95 " "Young Trinidadian Poets " .S’w/itilcn’G//arJ/a/j, Trinidad. 19 June, 1966 5 Cited in The Art o f Derek Walcott ed Stewart Brown. Chester Springs.PA Dufour Editions, Inc. 1991 31 '■ "Homer of the Caribbean " The Observer. 11 October. 1992 21 Perhaps a result of his apprenticeship to an English poetic tradition is his early definition of poetry as "personal " In conversation with Dennis Scott, he uses this term, adding: "To me poetry is an intimate and domestic thing."' ' The implication is that he speaks for and about himself. (Though his position on this issue is made less clear by the ensuing complaint that he is disconcerted when, because he assumes the persona of the
Castaway as a Yeatsian mask, his interviewers seem to expect to meet the persona rather than the poet who created him. ) The focus on poetry as a reflection of the personal, rather than as the expression of communal experience, is used to distinguish his work from
Brathwaite s. It also reinforces the distinction made between them by Brathwaite when he characterizes himself as a "folk"’ poet and Walcott as a "humanist ' poet. At a time when emerging theories of a West Indian aesthetic hinge upon the insistence that the work of a
West Indian writer should in some way express the collective (and, for some theorists, only the collective), this is a damaging distinction. Walcott is slow to evolve a poetic that allows expression of a communal sensibility, and when he does his earlier acceptance of this distinction continues to be used against him.
The second factor that creates a problem is Walcott's conception of the West Indian audience for his poems. A study o f his practice in the early poetry and plays suggests that he conceives of the audience for poetry and the audience for drama as distinctly different.
In the plays he clearly addresses himself to a general and local audience, employing West
Indian vernaculars and incorporating into his work folk tale material and the forms derived
"Walcott on Walcott " Carihbean Quarterly. '4 1-2 (1968) 81
14 from it. However, in the poems he appears to envisage a reader like himself, educated,
middle-class, thoroughly familiar with the print tradition on which he draws and to which
his poems often allude. He addresses only a section of West Indian society , the educated,
middle-class male. All these factors make it easy to overlook Walcott's attempts in his first
volume of poems to offer any effective resistance to the undertow of the English tradition
and the cultural colonialism it represents.
Mapping the Territory / Locating the Self
The first two poems of the volume, "Prelude"( 11 ) and "As John to Patmos." (12)
both reworkings of poems first published in 25 Poems (1948), deal with the poet's choice to
remain in the West Indies, at a time when many artists and writers had chosen to live and
work abroad. The first concerns the search for an individual identity prompted by a sense of
division, and a quest for home in the face of a pervasive consciousness of exile and
displacement. Underlying both, as well as other poems in the collection, is an exploration of the situation of the poet in the West Indies, as divided and displaced, but the situation
could well be taken as representative of the West Indian consciousness in general, or, more widely still, that of twentieth centurv man.
'■* Paul Gilroy in Tfte Black Atlantic lakes up the theme of the "double consciousness" of ihe black subject in a European or North American environment proposed by W E B DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk, and argues the case for seeing this consciousness as a speaai type o f Modernity, in the sense of consciousness of decenterinu of the self and of self-division.
15 In both "Prelude" and "As John to Patmos" the speaking persona is a castaway or
exile, though in the first his situation is seen as cause for bitterness, while in the second it is
willingly accepted. In both, the speaker addresses his audience from the beach or shoreline,
a margin seemingly occupying no physical space and never described. From it his gaze
commands the island and the sea which separates him from the world. The setting is one
which recurs frequently in this and in the three later collections of poems which followed In
A Green Ni^ht over a period of eight years. It is the site of contemplation rather than
action, and figures occasionally as harbor from which the speaker departs, as for example in
"The Harbour." ( 15) or as the site of division and the failure of relationships, as in "A
Careful Passion" (43). More often it is nowhere, deliberately unrealized in contrast to the
vividly concrete evocations of the sea and the life of the island.
In "Prelude," the speaker, in a mood which recalls Fanon, can locate himself only in
the image reflected back at him from "tourist booklets, behind ardent binoculars." and in a
sense of pain and wasted time. ' Stewart Brown notes that the poem is modeled on the
work of Eliot, describing the speaker as a West Indian Pruffock, who "Straighten[s his] tie
and fix[es] important jaws," but this is a Pruffock who has made "one choice." and has a
keener sense of self-mockery. The sense of self-estrangement and frustration is serious and justifiable, and, while the style may be borrowed, it is borrowed intelligently, giving
evidence of a fine sense of the exact, unlikely word, "ardent binoculars," the leopard's
"slow [sloe] eyes," and the need to learn "to suffer in accurate iambics."
' ■ Frantz Fanon Black Skins. H'hite Masks.
16 “As John to Patmos" is also a poem "in the st> le o f - this time o f Hopkins or possibly Hopkins-out-of-Dylan Thomas — in which the situation is duplicated but the attitude of the speaker reversed. A celebration of the beaut\ of the island enables the speaker to embrace exile and undertake the vow to "praise lovelong. the living and the brown dead." The two poems set up an ambivalence between the frustration of the poet and the love of place of the islander. Moreover, the source of the speaker's frustration may be too easily identified on a superficial reading as the fhistration of the cultured man isolated from the life of the metropolis, or as the imitation of a characteristic Modernist angst. learned from a literary model. The autobiographical fragment "Leaving School." written in
1965, records a sense of internal exile, in which Walcott feels himself separated by class, religion and education, not from an imagined metropolitan elsewhere, but from the society of his own island. Mapping, in these poems, serves the personal need for the poet to place himself in West Indian society at least as much as it contributes to the more broadly political project, defined by Brathwaite, of reappropriating a West Indian landscape.
Just as the speakers of the two poems discussed above are of two minds, so there seem to be two identifications of "home." The island, in the first poem is "uncouth"
(in the sense of "unknown" or "obscure" as well as the sense "squalid" or "unattractive") while in the second it is "heaven." One pervasive concern in this collection is to define and capture the island itself. In Another Life, Walcott records of himself and "Gregorias":
Brathwaite ascribes to West Indian writing the “special burden and responsibility which is. basically, an exploration and mapping of the physical, social, moral and emotional territory that is ours ” While he is considering the novel in this essay, it is reasonable to regard this responsibility as applicable to West Indian writing in general, as Brathwaite does in his own poetry “The New West Indian Novelists " Btm. 32 (1961 ) 277-78
17 . drunkenlv. orsecretiv, we swore.
that we would never leave the island
until we had put down in paint, or in words,
as palmists learn the network of a hand,
all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,
every neglected, self-pitying inlet... (8.Ü.I. 3-7)
The project of knowing, naming and taking possession continues throughout Walcott's
mature work, and informs many of these poems. These are not of the genre Walcott was to dismiss later as "postcard" poetry, most going beyond straight-forward description of a
place. Place, however, seems as elusive as a stable speaker. Often, the place which is being recreated is one that has already ceased to exist, as in "Tales of the Islands," (in which
Walcott seems to attempt to recapture the St. Lucia of his boyhood before the Castries fire of 1947, recorded in "A City’s Death By Fire,") or that is characterized as empty, or hollowed of significance, as in "Nearing La Guaira," with its repeated "nothing... nothing. .. nothing" (21-22).
In "Return to D'Ennery, Rain," a closely observed rendering of the place, which remains unchanged — "It could not change its sorrows and be home" - leads to an examination of the enervation and depression the scene induces in the speaking persona.
18 and climaxes in the question, "O God. where is our home'!*" The speaker feels himself
"imprisoned" and the home which has in the past made even povertv seem sweet is now seen as squalid and sunk in apathy, its shacks "contented as a cnpple with defeat." The sense of division of the self is emphasized by the transition from "I" to "we" to "you." as the speaker argues with himself in an attempt to clarify his attitude to place and people ( 33-34).
"Roots" seems to propose that home must be re-imagined as poetry\ that description will produce "merely a naturalist's notebook" until "our Homer with truer perception erect it."
The poet rejects a vision of the island seen through European lenses, just as he has repudiated a vision o f himself reflected in the "ardent binoculars” of tourists;
Not as when the blue mist unraveled Sorcière,
The mountain, our guests whispered, "Switzerland."
When they conquer you, you have to read their books.
Then violently, false folklorique follows. (60-61)
All except poetry, he suggests, is subject to time, and concludes the poem with the vignette of the fort on the headland at Vigie, remaking history as poetry. The introduction in the last lines of the perspective of the old fisherman may be regarded as a tacit admission that the assertion, "From all that sorrow, beauty is our gain," perhaps comes a little too easily.
In other poems Walcott attempts to locate "home" in a relationship, or to domesticate a place through association with a relationship: ".. .islands can only exist/ If we
19 have loved in them" ("Islands" 45). An interesting development of'this move occurs in
poems in which woman is described in terms of landscape, as m "En Mi-Carême." and in
"Pays Natal," in which the speaker declares. "Where your feet rest is my country " In both
poems the woman is absent, evoked with longing in the first, in the second referred to in the
past tense, with a conclusion which suggests that she is lost to the speaker. ' Both poems
are excluded from the later American edition.
"Home." like the women in these two poems, is often elsewhere. The speaker of
"Bleaker Street Summer," is haunted by "the smell of water/ down littered streets that lead
you to no water,, and gathering islands and lemons in the mind" ( 52). In a later poem in
Selected Poems. "Missing the Sea." it is the absence of a familiar sound that conveys a
similar nostalgia for home. Sometimes this nostalgia takes the form of an awareness of the loss of Eden through original sin. "Orient and Immortal Wheat" deals with the loss of
innocence as well as the loss of childhood, while in "Simply Passing Through." the speaker at first views landscapes glimpsed from the window of a train in which he is "homeless" as
"true lands of unlikeliness," whose inhabitants are "ageless." only to conclude;
"Why feel that had we found them earlier some good
Could have come out of a countrv' change? We would
Have spoiled such places too. We would, we would..." (75).
Women in these poems are not seen as sharing in the concerns o f the male speaker and his audience, or. indeed, as having other concerns o f their own They function most often as symbolic figures or as the recipients of the speaker's semi-public musings Although Walcott is not alone among male writers of his generation in relegating female figures to a supporting role, his decision to do so excludes half his possible audience
20 While "Mabie Rawlins" of "A Letter from Brooklyn" may be able to refer to death as being
"called home," it is an identification of home which, it is implied, the persona of the poem
can accept only transitorily and in the context of her letter ( 29-30 ).
By the time that Selected Poems appeared in the United States, the two poems
which open In a Green Ni^ht, along with other early poems written in imitation of the style
of other poets, had been excluded and the volume opens with the much antliologized "A Far
Cry From Africa." This poem raises no question of ventriloquism or pastiche of another’s
style, although the form is characteristically English, regular but varied pentameter lines,
which demonstrate mastery of the technique of counterpointing the rhythms of spoken
English against a traditional meter. Walcott handles sound delicately, half-rhyme and
internal rhyme threading the lines intricately, underlining meaning without drawing attention to themselves.
The subject of the poem is a meditation on the Mau-Mau uprising against British colonial rule in Kenya, in which the speaker, "poisoned with the blood of both," finds it
impossible to make an unequivocal choice between the two sides in the struggle. The theme of a divided sensibility and divided loyalties is made more definitely than in the pair of poems discussed earlier, but the method is to take a personal perspective on a public concern. The poem does not distinguish between \rictims and aggressors. Both "the white child hacked in bed" and "savages, expendable as Jews," suffer, the perpetrator is "upright man" rather than British or Kikuyu; there is no way of identifying whose "brutish necessity"
21 and "dirt> cause" are in question or which is "the gonlla" and which "the superman." This indeterminacy underlines the final impossibilit> of choice to "betray them both, or give back what they gave." There is no way of giving back either a language or a genetic inheritance.
Like the castaway speaker of "Prelude," the persona of this poem inhabits a site between oppositions or contains the opposition within himself, painfully, "divided to the vein." In this situation he is rendered politically and morally impotent, unable to choose between political and moral positions. To be "far from Africa," as this poem suggests, produces a sense of homelessness, div ision and displacement quite distinct from the sense of de-centering and fragmentation that informs the poetry of English Modernists, such as
Eliot or Dylan Thomas. Thus, while for a reader outside the West Indies, the sensibility of the poet presented in this poem seems a familiar one, its roots lie in the West Indian experience of the West African diaspora.
.Absorbing the Voices of Others
Only setting and subject matter mark the poems discussed so far as the work of a
West Indian poet. But these and other poems in the collection show Walcott exploring various strategies which differentiate them from the kind of verse that was being produced by British writers in the Modernist tradition, as well as by other Caribbean poets for whom the same tradition was a fomiative influence. Some of the poems most obviously indebted to British poetr> e\oke the tradition in order to challenge it, and to call into question the conclusions of poets whom Walcott admired and from w hose example he clearly profited.
Among these are "Ruins o f a Great House" and "In a Green Night." both of which evoke
Marvell, the most painterly o f English seventeenth century poets ( 19-20. 73-74).
The first of these covers some of the same ground as "Roots." discussed earlier, in taking as its subject a ruin, this time of the great house of a colonial estate, which provokes the speaker to re-examine West Indian history. Rei Terada, in a persuasive and intelligent reading of this poem, identifies it as belonging to the "( simt ^'' genre, and points out the way in which Walcott charts an infinite regression of non-identical imitations, both of the genre and of the act of colonization on which the poem reflects. The title invites association with the group of "great house" poems produced in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which form a sub-genre of English pastoral. Ben
Jonson's "To Penshurst" and Marvell's "The Hill and Grove at Bilborrow" and "Upon
Appleton House" (which is also the site of his poem "The Garden") provide characteristic examples. The great house is generally presented as a pattem of order and rural tranquillity, in contrast to the corruption and turmoil of court or city life. The peaceful setting of Nun Appleton, in particular, is contrasted with the military calling of its owner, and, by virtue of its transition from convent to private residence, the house is seen as representing the triumph of true religion. The great house is the source of employment to
Rei Terada. Derek Walcott's Poetry: American Mimicry- Boston: Northeastern U P. 1992. pp.60-66
See Ravmond Williams (oM /m o/jJ/Ae (7n'. 26-34
23 the local population, chanty to the poor and hospitality to friends Its agricultural
productivit} is celebrated in a way that links it with classical evocations of the golden age.
when the earth brought forth its fruits spontaneously and in abundance without the need of
human intervention. Estate laborers and the poor are characteristically invisible or are
relegated to a purely decorative function, like Appleton's ornamental mowers and the
"frieze of poor" which adorns its facade. Absent from the description of Appleton, but a
feature of "To Penshurst" as well as other similar productions, is the insistence that the
house and its builders have harmed no-one by their existence. It is a source of satisfaction
that the walls of Penshurst were "reared with no man's ruin, no man's groan." The physical
reality of labor is diminished or denied by such descriptions.
In Walcott’s poem the house has fallen into decay, and the theme of human mortality in general is intertwined with the theme o f the fall of empire. The expectation of
a conventional evocation of the great house is immediately frustrated by the image of dilapidation, "Stones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House," and by its emptiness.
The original inhabitants, "moth-like girls." and "imperious rakes," are replaced by the lizard and the crows. Throughout the first thirty lines of the poem, the juxtaposition of images which invite compassion with images of decay and disease creates a tension between sympathy and revulsion. For a reader with a knowledge of the tradition (and this could just as well be a West Indian reader who shares Walcott’s "sound colonial education” as an
English or American reader), Walcott is able to use conventional expectations to evoke an impression of regret for a way of life which is past, an impression that later in the poem is
24 to be called into question. The lines "Farewell, green fields Farewell, ye happy groves!”
enclosed in quotation marks in the text are a close enough echo of both Blake's "Night"
("Farewell, green fields and happy grove"i and Milton's Paradise l.ost ("Farewell happy
fields Where joy for ever dwells") to conjure up a vague identification with traditional
pastoral. They are sufficiently inexact to send a reader hunting through a whole volume of
pastoral poetry for the precise reference. More importantly, the first brings to mind the
homeless wanderer of Blake's poem ("The birds are silent in their nest. And I must seek for
mine") and the second the outcast condition of its speaker, Satan, cast out of Fieaven. and
by association the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. The speaking subject of
Walcott's poem is also an outsider, who climbs a wall to gain entry.
Overt criticism of the social order which produced both the house and the genre are muted enough for regret to be a possible response to the statement that "Deciduous beauty
prospered and is gone." Nevertheless, the images of "the mouths of those gate cherubs streaked with stain," "the muck Of cattle droppings," the smell of rotting limes and finally
"the leprosy of Empire," unsettle any easy response. That the empire in question is immediately associated with the slave-owning societies of ancient Greece and the southern
United States, as well as with these images, forces a reappraisal of the conventional recognition of human mutability which has been brought to mind.
Later references to the sixteenth century adventurers, Hawkins, Raleigh and Drake,
"ancestral murderers and poets," who were among the first Englishmen to challenge the
Spanish colonial monopoly in the Caribbean and make possible the earliest attempts at
25 colonization, make the need for such a reappraisal more unequivocal. Their memor\ is
"perplexed ..by even, ulcerous cnme." and it is made clear that what was built upon their
gains was slaverv. dependent upon the honors of the Middle Passage, "the charnel galleon's
text." In the penultimate stanza, the speaker’s rage momentarily dominates in the line.
"Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake," only to be opposed by the memory of the most
famous passage from Donne's Dcvonons, which is quoted in fragmentary form;
No man is an Hand, intire o f it selfe; every man is a peece o f the Continent,
a part of the maine: if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the
lesse, as well as if a Promontarie were, as well as if a Mannor o f thy friends
or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am
involved in Mankinde: And therefore never send to know for whom the bell
tolls; it tolls for thee.
Here, the poet enlists a representative of the English tradition in support o f his judgment, and the appeal for recognition of common humanity and common mortality cuts both ways.
That it moves the speaker to "compassion" for the dead empire ("once/ a colony like ours") points up even more clearly the failure of a corresponding compassion in the masters of the
great house. A similar move is made when earlier in the poem he writes;
I heard
What Kipling heard: the death o f a great empire, the abuse
26 Of ignorance by Bible and the sword.
The reference seems to be to "Recessional." a curious poem to have been written
specifically for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 Traditionally, the
Recessional is a hymn or piece of music which accompanies the withdrawal of the priest
and choir at the end of a religious serv ice. At the height of empire and of popular
enthusiasm for empire, Kipling's poem is a prayer for humility, which looks forward to a
future in which:
Lo. all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
As in the reference to Donne, the earlier poet is used as an authority in support of the speaker’s position, producing the same effect as quoting an opponent's words in support of
your own argument in debate. Thus, Walcott's references to earlier English writers have a dual function: they can be called to support the speaker’s position, or they can be conjured
up only to be subverted. In the case of Donne, both moves are made simultaneously.
Besides the overt references to English poets and the quotations and near-quotations
used in “Ruins of a Great House," there is also a use of language that calls particular poets or particular genres to mind. Besides the use of words and phrases which are reminiscent of pastoral poetry, there are a number of lines that evoke the language o f the Elizabethan
27 and Jacobean dramatists closely enough to prompt yet another fruitless search for particular borrowings. Examples of this are "the worm's rent...the padded cavalry of the mouse." and the description of England as "nook-shotten. rook o'er blown. derangedBy foaming channels," either of which might recall the blank verse of Shakespeare or Webster. Neither is direct quotation or near-quotation. They rise rather from a close familiarity with the work of such writers and from the linguistic self-confidence which will later lead Walcott to declare. "It is the language which is the empire, and great poets are not its vassals but its princes.”’*^ In exploiting these fully assimilated influences. Walcott takes possession of one of the inherited traditions which contribute to his development as a poet.
“Ruins of a Great House,” like some of the other poems discussed in this chapter is a poem of division, of being in two minds. Mervyn Morris points out the double-edged nature of the identification of Hawkins, Raleigh and Drake as ancestral "murderers and poets" and asks whether poets might not be counted among the "friends" of the final line."'
It is hard to concur with such a suggestion, even though a British reader might be tempted to seize upon it with gratitude. Walcott’s only revision of the poem between its publication in In a Green Night and its appearance in Selected Puems, the removal of the comma from the line "Ablaze with rage, I thought," intensifies rather than resolves the poem's duality.
Both rage and compassion are experienced as a fire consuming the speaker.
:ü„The Muse of History" 121
■' Mervyn Morris "Walcott and the Audience for Poetrv " Carihhean Quarterfv 14 1-2 (Mar-June 1968): 7-24 ’
2 8 The form and meter of "Ruins of a Great House.” like its diction, are adopted
directly from the British tradition, a blank verse pentameter line that mutates first into half
rhyme and then into perfect rhyme as the poem progresses. For Helen Vendler this and
other early poems present "an unhappy disjunction between his explosive subject... and his
harmonious pentameters, his lyrical allusions, his stately rhymes, his Yeatsian meditations.”
so that the final effect is that of "an essay in pentam eters.Alternatively, it would be
possible to view form in this poem as a device to contain and give coherence to anger, just
as Adrienne Rich writes of her early formalism as "like asbestos gloves [that] allowed me
to handle materials I couldn’t pick up bare-handed.” Even so, the smoothness of the line
might well leave a reader with the impression that, given his situation, this poet is simply
not angry enough.
The title poem of the volume, "In a Green Night," invites even closer comparison with a specific poem from the English tradition. Marvell's "Bermudas." since it takes a
phrase from the original as its title and utilizes tetrameter couplets of the original. As in the poem previously discussed, the project is to question and ultimately subvert the conclusions reached by the earlier poet. Marvell presents his poem as a song in praise of the Bermudas, sung by a party of religious exiles from England (since they mention "an isle. . .far kinder than our own" and their safety from "prelate's rage") as they row in a small boat. Although the singing of the song is no further contextual ized than this except to place the boat "where the remote Bermudas ride," it’s celebratory quality suggests a thanksgiving for safe arrival
“Poet of Two Worlds." 23
29 and provokes the question whether these manners have actually made landfall yet. or are
merely in sight of land. The island they praise so eloquently is presented as an earthly
paradise without overt mention o f a possible future Fall. Us features are "an eternal spnng,"
and abundant food produced without labor;
He makes the figs our mouths to meet.
And throws the melons at our feel.
"Fowls" are sent by a careful Providence, calling to mind similar Biblical instances of divine catering, the quails sent to the children of Israel in the wilderness and the ravens who
fed the prophet Elijah. The whole poem vibrates with color and references to jewels, pearls and ambergris. It is tempting to suspect that the singers are relying for information on the tourist brochure rather than on direct personal experience.''
Walcott's poem draws a tighter focus on the orange tree, whose fruit is mentioned in the original poem in a chiaroscuro effect as "like golden lamps in a green night." In this poem, the speaker is ashore and inhabits a recognizable, mundanely seasonal geography.
The orange tree bears a weight of fruit that bends its boughs from their "summer’s height"
^ While substantially in agreement with Terada's reading o f "In a Green Night," 1 find her reading of "Bermudas" less than convincing. Terada contends that the poem presages an inevitable "fall" on the basis of the "falling oars" of the last line and the linking of "Apples, plants of such a price/ No tree could ever bear them twice" with the apple of the fall of man This last passage would be more naturally read as a reference to pineapples and the mundane botanical fact that the plant bears finit only once and must then be rep ro p ^ te d by rooting the apical bud from the head of the fruit MacDonald's note to the poem in the Muse's Library edition of Marvell's poems would tend to support this interpretation Thus Walcott is seen once again to place himself in an oppositional relationship to Marvell's poem.
30 and the reader is told. "She has her winters and her spnng. Her moult of leaves." The tree
is not changeless, fixed by art and imagination in an image of perfection. The procession of
seasons, which allows growth and the production of fruit, also bnngs the tall of the leaf and
the aging of the tree. The ripening sun's "harsh fires" also "quail those splendours which
they feed." while "dew and dust" tarnish the brighmess o f the fruit.
Close observation of the orange tree disrupts the "comfortable creed" of the poet
who sees them in imagination only and under the glamour of night. In Walcott's poem the
tree presents a "perfected fable" because the full process of growth and decay is laid open,
providing an image both o f Paradise and of an inevitable fall from grace, enabling the mind to "ensphere all circumstance." It also provides a sidelight on the process of "nature
ripening into art," which acknowledges fear and grief as part of the motive force for its production. Ultimately, Walcott’s poem is intended as a correction of the view of the earlier poem on which it is based, rather than as corroboration o f its position.
As in "Ruins of a Great House," the diction of “In a Green Night” echoes that of poetry of an earlier age, this time that of seventeenth-century English poetry. The lines
"Zones truer than the tropical" and "By such strange, cyclic chemistry" are as reminiscent of Marvell, or of other poets of his period, in their word choice as in their regular, iambic tetrameter rhythm. The opening lines of the poem and their variant in the final stanza provide an example of this hybrid diction. In the lines:
The orange tree in various light
31 Proclaims perlected fables now
"Proclaims the fable perfect now," the "various light" recalls Marvell’s description of
the soul as a bird that "Waves in its plumes the various light" ("The Garden"), "Proclaims."
in these lines and in the later line. "Proclaims the fable perfect now. harks back to
"Bermudas." in which the roar of the seas "Proclaims the ambergris on shore." The
"perfected fables" of the second line may echo the passage from Paradise Last in w hich the
trees o f Eden are described:
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme.
Others whose fruit bumisht with Golden Rinde
Hung amiable, Hesperian fables true.
If true, here only
The technique of using allusion, quotation and pastiche of earlier poetry is a
common Modernist and Post-Modernist strategy, employed by Pound. Eliot, Joyce, and
others. Walcott confidently appropriates to his own use. The effect produced is a confluence of voices, but these are British literary voices, and the form and rhythm of both
poems are taken over wholesale from Marvell.
Milton Paradise Losi I \ ’,248.
32 C ode Shifting and the U se of O ther V ernaculars.
In the two poems just discussed, voices are appropriated from the British literary
tradition, but in other poems Walcott widens his scope to include fragmentary direct
quotation; from Mallarmé and Villon. ("Brize Marine" 56). from Baudelaire ( in "A Sea-
Chantey" 64-66) and from multiple French sources in the epigraphs to six of the sonnets in
the sequence "Tales of the Islands." Later, in Selected Poems, he includes the long poem
"Origins" with its epigraph from Césaire. phrases and expressions which echo that poet and
diction which draws from French as well as from English sources, "nuages," "dorade."
"gommier," "adieux," "pommes de Cvthere" and "mon enfance" besides expressions
arguably drawn from the Créole lexicons, "fêtes" and "ba-baye." In the process Walcott
creates a means of expression which is multi-lingual, as well as multi-vocal.
In "'A Sea-Chantey," at least, this strategy may serve merely for decorative and
musical purposes: however, this type of linguistic experiment particularly in the blending of different languages, becomes an essential feature of later work, reaching perfection in
Omeros. where it is instrumental in producing the decenlered self and multiple narration that give a voice to the otherwise silenced inhabitants of the island. Since on Walcott's
home island the official language, English, coexists with both English- and French-lexicon
Creoles, and since Trinidad, where he had been based since 1959, adds Spanish to this spectrum (used in direct quotation in the poem "Nearing La Guaira"), it seems natural that the exploitation of linguistic variety should be brought into play in the project of finding a
33 characteristically regional voice. Received Standard English is a base from which Walcott works, but there are a number of poems m which he departs from the received norms of the
language, working towards the formation of a hybrid poetic language adequate to the expression of West Indian experience. The extensive use o f forms from an English-based
Creole vernacular is found only in two poems. "Pocomania" and "Parang," while French- based or Kweyol forms are absent at this stage.Nevertheless, in a number of poems, there is a sprinkling of French words, or perhaps o f Kweyol words spell as French, the
"voyelles" (vowels) of “A Sea Chantey." for example, and of fragmentary quotations of
French, "Repos donnez a cils..." (Grant them rest) from the same poem (64-66). Similarly, a number of poems contain words and expressions drawn from English-based Creole.
The sonnet sequence, "Tales of the Islands," provides the most varied examples of this polyglot technique (26-30). John Figueroa exhaustively analyzes the use of French, particularly in the first three sonnets of the sequence and goes on to analyze the mixing of different registers of English-lexicon Creole in other poems o f the sequence.*^ ‘Tales of the Islands" contains poems which are arguably the most interesting in In a Green Night from the point of view of language use. It consists of a series of vignettes, later to be re cycled in the long autobiographical poem. Another Life. Since the aim here is to recapture
St. Lucia, and "home," Walcott attempts to integrate as many of the island's linguistic
'' Language use in St. Lucia is complicated by the widespread use of both an English-lexicon Creole and a French-lexicon Creole It seems less cumbersome to refer to the French-based vernacular as "Kweyol" (the term used by St. Lucians to denote this language), and less confusing than to refer to both languages as "Creole."
** "Some Subtleties of the Isle: A Commentary on Certain Aspects of Derek Walcott's Sonnet Sequence Tales o f the Islands'” World Liierature Writtenm English \S.\ 1967 190-228.
34 resources as possible. Since the poem is aimed at a wider audience than the populace of St.
Lucia and because of the necessity of publishing in English, these resources are used to
evoke place in a form accessible to readers who speak other vaneties of English.
In the first sonnet, Walcott establishes a Standard English authorial voice, but
prefaces it with the epigraph "La rivière dorée ..." Standard French in orthography. This
could perhaps stand as a title to the poem, which begins with a reference to the Dorée, but
the name remains uncapital ized, inviting a translation, "the golden river." Figueroa
comments on the effect of the French epigraphs to some of the sonnets, seeing them as a
signal of the foreign and exotic to a reader whose base language is Standard English, and goes on to remark that for a St. Lucian, an English epigraph would signal the exotic. Yet.
the base language o f St. Lucia is not French, but Kweyol. It is conceivable that to a reader whose base language was Kweyol, the epigraph with its reference to a familiar geographical feature would sound in the ear as Kweyol. in spite of its French orthography.
It is also conceivable that this was the sound in the ear of the poet who transcribes it into
French, as Césaire also renders the Creole forms in his poetry. Beyond the geographical names. Dorée and the fragmentary "ici ChoiseuI" (This is ChoiseuI ), there is nothing further to disrupt the pattem of Standard English. The details of landscape and the church interior with its Via Dolorosa and statue o f "Sancta Teresa" strike an alien note for a FYotestant,
English-speaking reader, as the use of English must provide a similar sense of alienation for the native speaker of French- or English-lexicon Creoles.
35 In the sonnets which follow, subject matter exerts a magnetic pull on language
choice. Cosimo de Crétien attracts to himself a vocabulaa sprinkled with French or words
of French denvation. Cosimo's address, his "lineage." and his title, "count." are French: his
"maman" (mother) manages him: his curio shop contains a "perroquet" (parrot), and "old
French barquentine' Anchored in glass." The epigraph. "Qu'un sang impur ." (a fragmentary
quotation from the ''Marseillaise" with the possibility of a double meaning) suggests that
his fatal division is one of race. The "impure blood” evoked in the revolutionaiy anthem is.
of course, the blood of tyrants, yet from a white French colonial perspective Cosimo's
mixed blood might well be regarded as “impure.” He is a black Frenchman on an English
island, and that this leaves him, like all the subjects of these sonnets, in a sense, displaced.
The unnamed exile of Chapter VIII, "who fought/ The falangists en la guerra civil"
( during the civil war) draws scraps of Spanish to him in the same way. An ant "rides" down
his nose, "caballo" (like a horseman). Le Brun, in Chapter DC is given the Creole
appellation "Le loupgarou" (werewolf) and his approach is "Greeted by slowly shutting jalousies" (shutters). Figueroa, in his discussion of the uncertainties of tense in Chapter III,
suggests that these stem from the Creole speech of the mother, who "warned us how that
flesh knew silk.” In the context of the epigraph ( from Villon's "Les regrets de la belle
Heaulmiere") and the final line "Who was so fine once, whose hands were so soft," both of
which place Miss Rossignol s beauty and knowledge of luxury firmly in the past "had
known" would read more unambiguously than "knew" in Standard English.
36 The use of forms from English-based Creole in Chapters IV through VI has already been extensively discussed by a number of critics. These three sonnets, centrally placed in the sequence, present a fluid shitting of codes along a spectrum from Standard English through a range of different registers of Creole from the barest deviations from Standard
("The beer and all looked green," and the use of the present tense in Chapter V) to the clearly Creole ("Poopa, da' vvas a fete!"). What seems more significant than the bare fact of this code shifting is the question of who speaks in these passages.
On a cursory reading. Chapter IV appears to be narrated by a speaker of Standard
English, who includes direct speech in his narrative. However, the "tough" demotic of Doc
("Don't worry, kid, the wages of sin is birth") and the Creole inflected constructions of the
Indian ("Tall too obscene. .. Tall college boys ain't worth/ The trouble") are not the only departures from Standard. The narrator quotes him self speaking colloquially. "He's a damned epileptic Your boy El Greco! Goya, he don't lie." and the disjointed, simple sentences of his narrative signal a different code from the more complex structures used by the narrator of Chapter I. Is this a new narrator, a different character, or is it the same narrator speaking in a different register, assuming the laconic masculinity learnt from film notr dialogue in an attempt to counterfeit hardness and sophistication? It seems more natural to assume that the narrator remains constant with the introspective speaker of the first chapter and the impersonal narrator o f the two vignettes which precede this one. Even so, this is a speaker whose identity threatens to fragment, and whose speech patterns are invaded bv the idioms of other charracters in his storv.
37 Chapters V and VI utilize further shifts of code. In the first of these, the speaker's idiom varies from Standard English only in the use of "fete.” in the first line, in its Kweyol sense of a wild part)', and in the two uses o f British English slang, "a bloody picnic." and
"Great stuff, old boy." The latter of these at the time o f publication could only have sounded either old-fashioned or provincial to the ear o f a speaker of Standard English.
Figueroa identifies it as "another part of the oral tradition of the West Indies, a very English, and slightly comic part, but a very genuine part."' To the speaker of Standard English it might soimd more distinctively West Indian. The use o f the present tense in narration of a past event could be read as a common strategy of narration to heighten the drama of the story, yet for Mervyn Morris the line. "They tie the lamb up, then chop off the head" has
"unassertively b u t... exactly the West Indian cadence."'*^ Here, then, is a speaker at home in Standard English, but English with a West Indian base and a West Indian inflection.
The sharp contrast between the language of the previous poem and the sonnet which immediately follows it again begs the question of who speaks. Chapter VI is the only one of the sequence to make extensive use of distinctive English-based Creole forms, though these, like the French in the sequence, are rendered in Standard English orthography: "it had" rather than the Standard "there were" ( in what sounds like a literal translation of the French tly a \ "some fellars beating' Pan from one of them band in
Trinidad," the words "fête" and "tests." "don't name me," as well as the more prominent use
"Some Subtleties of the Isle" p 122
Merwn Mortis "Walcott and the Audience for Poetrv " Carthhecot Lhiarterlv 14 1-2 1968 7-24
38 of present tense narration in the first eight lines and in an unequivocally non-Standard construction ("They catch his wife with two tests up the beach While he drunk quoting
Shelley"). Just as in the previous poem West Indian inflected speech is suggested unassertively enough to pass all but unnoticed, in this poem the completely standard diction and syntax of lines 11-13 blend into the foregrounded Creole vernacular.
While it is possible to theorize separate speakers in these two poems, the first of whom could possibly be the "Black writer chap" mentioned in VI, it would be equally possible to imagine both being the accounts o f the same event by the same speaker in two different situations. If, as Morris points out, "there are many West Indians who with natural voice interweave dialect and Standard English in their speech," then there is no reason why, in the practice of such a speaker, any one of these codes should not predominate more or less over another in different situations. It is worth while to bear in mind that the speaker o f
Chapter VI is capable of identifying a misquotation-quotation from Shelley, and of recognizing the irony of the form that the misquotation-quotation takes.
The creation of a linguistically divided persona for this series of sonnets, whose subjects are all divided and displaced characters, seems more likely a deliberately adopted strategy than a coincidental effect. In this case, discontinuity of code becomes a factor in the realization of a self which is discontinuous, and which incorporates into its own experience the experience of a diversity of similarly divided selves. They include Cosimo,
French Creole or mulatto, taking his primary identification from the decayed glory of his
French ancestors: the aging aristocrat. Miss Rossignol, fallen on evil times; the exiles.
39 Franklin of Chapter VII and the veteran of the Spanish Civil War in Chapter iX. the frightened adolescent of Chapter IV: the werewolf. Le Brun; and the narratons) of the two accounts of what seems to have been a fabricated black magic ntual, both in different ways at odds with their environment.
The sequence is brought to a close with a return to uniform Standard English in the final sonnet which records the speaker’s departure from the island and the mixed awareness of attachment and consciousness of desertion. As he watches "all I that love, Folded in cloud," he recognizes that as the distance increases between him and his home "all fidelity strained/ Till space would snap it." His fidelity to place "strains" to maintain itself and is strained to breaking point. In conclusion, the line "I though of nothing: nothing, I prayed would change" has a double edge, considering the way in which in other poems ("Nearing
La Guaira," "Return to D'Ennerv , Rain") "nothing" has been one of the salient characteristics of locations which he has called "home." He both desires and does not desire change.
Apart from the central section o f "Tales o f the Islands," "Pocomania" and "Parang" are the only other poems in In A Green Night ox Selected Foems which use an English based Creole spelt as English as their base language. Critics are far from agreement whether either or both of these poems should be regarded as being composed entirely in the vernacular or in a mixed idiom which alternates the vernacular with Standard English.
Morris, in his comment in "Derek Walcott and the Audience for Poetry," refers to their language as "art-speech wrought from dialect," and finds this inferior to what he regards as
40 the more natural and spontaneous language of Chapter V of "Tales of the Islands." Helen
Vendler, writing later of "Parang." criticizes what she sees as unassimdated borrowing from
Yeats and a mismatch between diction and imager} Walcott's blending of West Indian
vernaculars and Standard English is a further feature of this and later poems that she finds
disconcerting. Referring to “The Spoiler's Return. ' a later poem from The I 'ortnnuie
Traveller. Vendler comments;
The experiment is worth trying... but, once again, however it reflects the
truth of Walcott's own divided mind and inheritance, it has not yet found a
conclusive and satisfying aesthetic relation to to his “high " diction.
"Parang" is the lament of an aging "cuatroman” over the cheapening of love bv the
"crop-time fiddlers’" lies of everlasting love and the careless fickleness of voung men.
Allowing for the anglicized spelling, which is inevitable in the absence of a well-
established convention for the spelling of English-lexicon Creole, it would be possible
without strain to hear the whole poem as Creole speech. The lines which could equally
easily be heard as Standard English are the ones which recall Yeats:
..."Is the wax and wane of the moon..." and "Like her one tear afterwards
‘Poet of Two Worlds.” 26
41 The falling o f a fixed star "
and the final line. "The breast of the waning moon " There seems to me no compelling reason to hear these lines as Standard English, beyond the fact that the images they contain recall Yeats. To find an expression reminiscent of Yeats disconcerting when voiced in a
West Indian vernacular seems to me a problem located in the auditor rather than in the verse. Vendler's other criticisms regarding rhythm and diction, however, can justly be applied to this poem.
Walcott seems to be working in two distinct meters in "Parang." The words of this poem will play as easily to the tune of Yeats’ "The Host of the Air" or "The Fiddler of
Dooney," as to the alternating octosyllabic and heptasyllabic rhythms of Trinidadian parang suggested by the title, even though the first is based on an accentual ballad rhythm and the second on the syllabic count. Terada quotes Walcott's statement in an interview with E.D. Hirsch that his intention in those early poems which mix Creole vernacular with
Standard English was "that a West Indian or an Englishman could read a simple poem, each with his own accent, without either one feeling that it was written in dialect." Perhaps it is not unreasonable to see a similar aim at work in the rhythmical duality of tliis poem. The unease Vendler locates in the poem as a disjunction between image and diction, and between content and rhythm finds its parallel in a number o f other critics, who find the voice of the poem unconvincing. Regardless of what Walcott is attempting to do, the rendition of a written version of West Indian vernacular in these poems seems heavy
42 handed compared to the use made of vernaculars in Walcott’s plays of the same penod. //-
Jean and His Brothers { 1957) or Malcochon ( 1959). for example, "Parang ” and its
companion piece, "Pocomania," could well be classified among those poems that
Brathwaite terms "sticky with dialect."
Critical responses to these poems suggest that Walcott's early experiments in the
use o f West Indian vernaculars in his poetry please no one. In later interviews he is to
claim that it would be artificial for him to use "dialect" or "patois" in his verse. '" While he
retains the two poems in Selected Boems ( 1964), neither British nor American editions of
The Castaway ( 1965) and The G ulf (U.K. 1969, U.S. 1970) contain any further experiments of this kind.
Castaway and Crusoe: the figure of the Poet and the Poet’s Voice in The Castaway and
The Gulf
In "Islands," the penultimate poem \nlna(}reen Hiyht, the speaker expresses a longing for an ideal clarity of language;
1 seek.
as climate seeks its style, to write
Speaking to Robert Hainner, 9 August, 1995, Walcott responds to the question of language choice, “I've tried to write poems in patois and feel that later on I may try to do something of that kind On the other hand, it sometimes seems to me an academic thing, and I would not like to do anything consciously academic " World Literature Written in English 16 2 fNov 1977) 409-20 It is far from clear whether here Walcott is referring to poems in Kweyol or poems in an English lexicon Créole
43 Verse cnsp as sand, clear as sunlight.
Cold as the curled wave, ordinal}
As a tumbler o f island water. (77)
Again, at the end of The Gulf{ 1969), in the poem. “Nearing Fortv ." he describes his aim as;
the style past metaphor
that finds its parallel however wretched
in simple, shining lines, in pages stretched
plain as a bleaching bedsheet under a gutter
ing rainspout. (106)
Exactly where Walcott locates his dissatisfaction with his use of language in these lines is
open to discussion. The desire for "the style past metaphor" ( immediately exemplified in
figurative language) calls to mind the search in the work of the early novelists, George
Lamming and Samuel Sclvon, for example, for an authentic West Indian language, and on the demand s of some theorists, among them Brathwaite and Glissant, that the language of
Caribbean writers reflect a local orality. For the moment, however, I should like to focus on the key terms “clear," “ordinary," “simple" and “plain." all of which foreground a movement away from the predominantly literary and heightened style o f In a Green Night and towards the plainer style of The Castaway and The Gulf. The most obvious
44 development of the poetic voice in these two volumes of poems is in the use of a more relaxed, colloquial sty le in. for example, such poems as "A Village Life” ( 5-8 ) and "Blues”
(67-68 ). In both poems Walcott employs the vocabulary of casual speech, rather than the formal pastiche of earlier poets, and looser free verse rhythms, rather than the formal
English meters of his earlier work. In other poems where the basie rhythm is iambie pentameter, as for example in "The Glory Trumpeter," or in "Crusoe's Journal"!alternating pentameter and less regular three stressed lines), the line is opened out by the playing of speech rhythms across the meter. The development brings the poetic voice closer to the diction and rhythms of ordinary speech, and arguably closer to Walcott's personal speech rhythms. The end result is a greater variety of tone and the avoidance of a declamatory or uncomfortably portentous style.
It seems likely that this development can be attributed, at least in part to the influence of Robert Lowell. Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, stopping off in Trinidad on their way to visit Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, visited Walcott in the late summer o f 1961. shortly after Walcott had been awarded the Guinness Poetry Prize and just before the publication of his first collection of poems. Years later, when Walcott evaluates Lowell’s influence on his work, he recalls Lowell advising him to drop the use of the upper case letter at the head of a line and telling him to "put more of yourself into your poems.’" ’ He mentions as equally important the quality he calls Lowell's "brutal honesty,” "his directness, his confrontation with ordinariness.” Walcott’s admiration of Lowell focuses on
Edward Hirsch "The Art of Poetry " Pahs RevieM-2S (Winter. 1986) 197-230
45 the qualities most evident in Lowell's work from Life Sm Jie.s ( 1959) onwards, a turning
toward the "confessional." subject matter overtly drawn from personal experience, a refusal
to romanticize. Lowell's style turns away from the exuberant and sometimes convoluted
linguistic play and density of allusion evident in. for example. "The Quaker Graveyard in
Nantucket." to the plainer, more colloquial style of the later poems. At the same time, he
moves towards more open meters than the strict forms he had employed in the collection
Lord Wean,' ’.v ( 'asile (1946)''. The changes in Walcott's style in The ( asiaway and The
G u lf mirror those in Lowell's between Lord Weary's C 'asile and Life Studies ( 1959 ).
It seems likely that Lowell's influence also reinforces Walcott's own tendency towards the pluralism that seeks to include in his work any influences, including foreign ones. In the same interview Walcott says of Lowell, with reference to the collection
/mitations- (newly published at the time of their first meeting):
I loved his openness to receive influences. He was not a poet who said.
“I'm an American poet. Fm going to be peculiar, and I'm going to have my
own voice which is eoinu to be different from anvbodv's voice." He was a
Lowell's stylistic development at this point was influenced by Elizabeth Bishop, and Walcott s subsequent work contains features reminiscent of both of these poets The poem “Tarpon," for example, is clearly modeled on Bishop's "The Fish,” and the series A Tropical Bestiary" may also reflect the influence of her work. It is also possible that Walcott's naming the sections of The L'oriitnaie Traveller “North" and "South" is a reference to Bishop's collection of poems of the same name The publication of Walcott's "Crusoe" poems, on the other hand, predates Bishop's "Crusoe in England" by some twelve years Walcott certainly met Bishop, and speaks of meeting Joseph Brodsky at her apartment after Lowell's funeral However, while he refers to his friendship with Lowell on many occasions. I can find only one reference to Bishop, and am uncertain how well he knew her personally It is not easy to estimate the extent to which he was directly influenced by her and her work, and the extent to which he was influenced only indirectly through Lowell
4 6 poel who said, "I'm going to take in evemhing." ... he was not embarrassed
to admit that he was influenced even in his middle-age by William Carlos
Williams, or by François Villon, or by Bons Pasternak, all at the same time.
Walcott's poem. "Blues." mentioned above, is singled out by Brathwaite in his History o f the I oice as one poem, at least, from Walcott's oeuvre that comes close to captunng the
West Indian idiom. This for Brathwaite is an essential feature o f poetry which seeks to represent the region. While his demand for "Nation language" has been superficially interpreted as an insistence that West Indian poets use regional vernaculars in their work,
Brathwaite s emphasis is upon reproducing the characteristic rhythms of West Indian speech, rather than upon the exclusion of Standard English. Indeed, he points out in The
History o f the Voice how a productive interplay may be set up between standard English and West Indian vernacular."
Brathwaite's discussion of "Blues ' is interesting in that he implies that he became aware of these rhythms in the poem only on hearing it read aloud by the poet. He objects to the title on the grounds that the form taken by the poem is not the blues form that the title leads him to expect. The feature o f the poem he singles out for praise is its successful reproduction of natural speech rhythms, with the implication that in general Walcott’s work fails to arrive at “Nation language" by virtue of its adherence to traditional (English) metrical patterns. This is to ignore or discount the way in which, in other poems, Walcott
” History o f itte Voice 38-39
47 plays off West Indian speech rhythms against an implicit iambic line. For Brathwaite. as much as for the American Modernists, the discovery of an adequate regional voice in poetry depends upon "breaking the pentameter." utilizing the rhythms of local speech and music
While the poetic voice presented in I'he ( asfaway and The (hilf comes closer to natural speech, in most of the poems there is little that marks it as a West Indian voice, rather than and American or European voice. Similarly the self presented in these poems is still that of the middle-class observer, an extension of the lone beachcomber of In a (Ireen
Night. The poet is still seen as an isolated figure, set apart from the life of the general populace and observing it, offen with a critical eye. The attitude of the speaker of "Mass
Man" to the spectacle of carnival in which he is unable whole-heartedly to play a part contrasts with that of the speaker o f Brathwaite s poem, "Tizzic." For the latter, carnival is a liberating experience under the influence of which Tizzic acquires a "height- ened, borrowed glory." Walcott's Hector Marmix and Boysie never attain to such a glory' and are presented only externally. ‘"Join us,' they shout. ‘Oh God, child, you can't dance?" but the speaker/poet moves to a different rhythm ("a metronome") and identifies with the weeping child “rigged like a bat," who cannot dance. Like the child, he is a distressed observer of the spectacle rather than a participant. His voice is that of the outsider, whereas in Brathwaile's poem two observers speak, one using a West Indian vernacular, empathizing with Tizzic in a language that could be identified with Tizzie s own, the other is closer to that used by
Walcott, the poet-observer commenting. The attitude of Walcott’s speaker is more ambivalenL and the poet is set more distinctly apart from his subject in his account:
48 Upon your penitential morning,
some skull must rub its memory with ashes,
some mind must squat down howling in your dust,
some hand must crawl and recollect your rubbish,
someone must write your poems. (48 )
The dominant metaphor for the poet in the two collections under discussion is a development of the beach-comber of In a Green Might. He is Crusoe, cast away on his island, a poet who improvises using tools and materials saved from shipwreck, to produce:
our first book, our profane Genesis
whose Adam speaks that prose
which, blessing some sea-rock, startles itself
with poetry's surprise,
in a green world, one without metaphors. ("Crusoe's JoumaU 27)
In some respects, Crusoe provides an apt parallel with the West Indian poet from Walcott's point of view, exemplifying the isolation o f the poet and the assimilative practices he has adopted in his work so far. Like Crusoe he makes use of whatever tools and materials come to hand and adapts them to his purpose. In other respects, the figure of Crusoe is
49 problematic, insofar as it also carries the connotations of colonizer and colonialist attitudes
In “Crusoe's Journal," colonizer and colonized merge as onginators and disseminators of language, just as in W alcott's later play, Pamomimc ( 1980), the figures of Hany Crusoe and Jackson /Friday are juxtaposed and change roles in a way that calls into question who civilizes whom, who is slave and who is master. The play, however, explores the tensions inherent in this changing of roles in a way that demonstrates the impossibility of being simultaneously Crusoe and Friday, as the speaker of the poem asks us to believe he is.
The Crusoe of the poem is on one level the European colonist who brings to the island his language and his religion, and “alters us/ into good Fridays....parroting our master's/' style and voice " On another level, he is a version of the historical Walcott, at the beach-house at Rampanalgas. Language is seen as a vessel “whose sprinkling alters us," and the poet as the maker of such a vessel, the possessor of “the hermetic skill, that from earth’s clays,/ shapes something without use. " His activity involves bricolage, the use of found materials both alien and indigenous, earth's clays and Crusoe’s journals, but, in the poem, it produces an original object which goes beyond imitation;
So from this house
that faces nothing but the sea, his journals
assume a household use;
we leam to shape from them, where nothing was
the language of a race. (29)
50 Walcott acknowledges that the Crusoe he evokes in these poems is "not the Crusoe you recognize." and goes on to identify his Crusoe as "Adam. Christopher Columbus. God. a missionary, a beachcomber, and his interpreter. Daniel Defoe.'"'* His analysis of his own
Crusoe figure is complex, but the main charactenstics he requires it to bear are those of originator of language ("Adam"), and craftsman, functions of the poet. Where the figure fails in the poem is that it evokes not Walcott's Crusoe, but Defoe's, and in identifying himself with it, Walcott appears to identify with a colonial world view and complex of values. Such an identification may also too closely resemble the identification of the West
Indian middle-class with the values of colonial Britain. It provokes the accusation that
Walcott as private individual claims for himself the markers of class and status that separate him from the mass of West Indian society.
The portrayal of the poet as Crusoe embodies qualities Walcott sees as essential to a poet, and "Crusoe's Journal" expresses the aim to "shape ... the language of a race." For most West Indian critics, although the developments of style in The C 'asiaway and The Cjulf show Walcott 's growing mastery of language and poetic technique, his poetry up to this point does not sufficiently declare its independence of the established literary traditions of
Britain and America. He can be criticized for the personal nature of his poems, his presentation of a poetic persona that is exclusively male and middle class, his use of
"The Figure of Crusoe " Lecture delivered at U W I., St Augustine, Trinidad, 17 October. 1965 ('rttical Perspectives on Derek Walcott ed Robert D Hamner Washington, D C : Three Continents Press. 1993 35
5 1 standard English and traditional meters. Above all. dunng the penod under discussion, his
work came increasingly to be unfavorably compared with that of Brathwaite. whose tnlogv
The Arrivants was published between 1967 and 1969. Brathwaite s work, informed by his
seven years spent in Ghana, foregrounds the submerged African elements in West Indian
society and culture, and makes extensive use o f West Indian vernaculars. This and his use
of rhythms derived from Afro-Caribbean folk music serve to characterize Brathwaite s
work as distinctively different from the Euro-Amencan traditions of poetrv from which
Walcott's apprentice works derive. At this point however, the most important difference
lies in B rath waiters concentration on collective expenence and his empathy with the
ordinary West Indian, qualities that allow him to speak /or the community , rather than
simply about it.
In an article written for the Trinidad Guardian during the same year In a Green
Night was published, Walcott states the need for a poet's work to grow from personal
feeling "rooted in his own earth. " At the same time he makes high claims for the function of the poet: "The good poet is the proprietor of the expenence of the race,... he is and always has been the vessel, vates. rainmaker, the conscience of the king and the embodiment of society, even when society is unable to contain him In his published work between 1962 and 1967, he becomes increasingly a master craftsman. The years that follow show him working to become the poet he describes, as he re-assesses his concept of the relationship between poet and society, and re-evaluates his own poetic practice.
"Poetiy— Enormously Complicated .Art " Trinidad Guardian. \S June. \962 3
52 CHAPTER 2
“WHERE ELSE TO ROW, BI T BACKWARD?”
WALCOTT’S RE-EVALl ATION OF EARLY INFLUENCES
Walcott's early poetn,-, as discussed in Chapter One, lays itself open to the justified criticism that it remains rooted in a typically Euro-American form of modernism based on the high modernist aesthetic articulated by wTiters like Yeats, Eliot and Joyce, and which Houston Baker has characterized as "exclusively Western, preeminently bourgeois and optically white."' The concept of the poet as divided and set apart from society, the focus on individual rather than collective expenence. and the evident influence of writers from this tradition all lend support to this view. Walcott's long, autobiographical poem. Another Life, published in 1973, represents a turning point, in that, in this poem, Walcott sets out to situate the West Indian poet in society and to formulate the qualities necessary to a poet in that society.
' Houston A Baker. J r . Modenusm and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago L of Chicago P. 1987. p6 53 The poem presents a return to origins, to the St. Lucia of his childhood and adolescence. In the course of a re-evaluation of his youthful relationships with Harrold
Simmons and Dunstan St. Omer. Walcott re-formulates the paradigm of a West Indian poet as product and repository of regional experience and representative of his local community. His realization, informed by the example of his mentor, Simmons, that his project of representing West Indian experience would involve a fusion of the qualities he delineates in Gregorias and himself prompts him to work towards a closer engagement with the non-European elements in West Indian culture and with the lives of the ordinary people of St. Lucia.
This chapter seeks to establish that in Another Life, Walcott presents autobiographical experience as representative, first, of the condition of the artist in the
West Indies and, second, of the wider group that comprises his owm generation in St.
Lucia, and that in doing so he places the work in the established tradition of West
Indian autobiographical writing. Three characteristic strategies contribute to this project. These are the presentation of a divided self, the use of shifting pronouns, and a voice that absorbs the voices of others. An examination of his use of these techniques leads to the consideration of the way in which the tension between references to naming and silence in the poem marks a transitional stage in Walcott’s conception of the poefs function. While up to this point in his work he has been concerned with
“naming" or recording, in the course of writing Another l.ife he moves towards a
54 realization that his task is not simply to describe the inhabitants of his region but to
bring them to articulate speech in his poetr\
Autobiography as Representative Experience
Edward Baugh, in Derek Waleoit: Ktemory us Vision, traces the genesis o ïAnother
Life to Walcott's autobiographical essay "Leaving School." which was commissioned by the London Magazine as one in a series o f pieces on this subject by internationally
recognized writers. Walcott began work in April, 19657 on the prose memoir, a fragment of which was to appear in the edition of the magazine in September of that year. Baugh
records that by November the manuscript filled "76 pages in closely written longhand." In
January o f the following year, prose mutates into verse, and for a time prose and verse alternate. Ultimately, in subsequent drafts, the entire manuscript is recast in verse form to become Another Life.
Like the prose essay, the poem focuses on the period which Walcott calls his annus mirabilis, during which he fell in love with Andreuille Alcée, published his first volume of poems, and witnessed the disastrous fire of 1948. which destroyed the greater part of
Castries. Most importantly, it is during this period that he confirms his dedication to the craft of poetry. For some critics, the clearly autobiographical nature of the poem contributes to the categorization of Walcott as a personal and a confessional poef the more
55 so since it recreates so immediately a physical world apprehended in sensuously concrete detail.
Autobiography invites the reader, and particularly the non-academic reader, to believe that the author deals with his own experience and speaks in his own voice. The strong appeal of fiction which employs a first person narrator is owing, at least in part, to the same innocent belief, or willing compliance in the shared fiction, that a real human being speaks directly to the reader and tells the unmediated truth. The Western tradition of poetT)' from the Romantic period onward invites a similar belief that the voice which seems to speak in a lyric poem is that of the poet, and that he or she speaks of actual events and personally felt emotions. Anyone who has ever attempted to introduce a class of beginning literature students to, for example. Browning's "My Last Duchess" or T.S. Eliot's "Love
Song of J. Alfred Pruffock" will recognize the difficulty o f persuading the innocent reader that Browning is not the Duke or that Eliot is not Prufrock. Walcott's combination in
Another Life of three factors — autobiographical material, a first person narrator, and lyric form - is sufficient to account for the general critical tendency to focus upon the poem as autobiography and to neglect the fact that in it Walcott sets out to explore the situation of the West Indian artist, and to present the artist not merely as idiosyncratic individual but as a representative figure.
As Sandra Pouchet Paquet observes in her study of the autobiographical works of
Lamming, .lames, Walcott and Naipaul (which she nominates "the canonized texts o f West
Indian autobiography"), it would be mistaken to assume that such texts are narrowly
5 6 concerned solely with the project orself-definition." in each of the texts she examines autobiography becomes a stalking horse, not an end but a means to approach collective experience by way of the particular and individual:
Self-revelation becomes a way of laying claim to a landscape that is at once
geographical, historical and cultural. In this fashion, the writer is privileged to write
himself into the symbolic systems w hich make up West Indian literature and
culture. In the process, the autobiographical self as subject is transformed into a
cultural archetype, and autobiography becomes both the lived historical reahw and
the myth created out of that experience. '
Another Life can thus be seen as contributing to an on-going project of West Indian writers to utilize autobiographical material as a means to address general West Indian problems beyond the purely personal.
Sandra Pouchet Paquet "West Indian Autobiography " African Amencan Autohiography: A Collection o f Critical Essays ed William L Andrews Englewood Cliffs. \ J Prentice Hall. 1993 p 196-211
' /W p 198.
57 Elem ents of the representative in "A nother Life"
a) The figure of the artist
Richard Dwyer, commenting on Another i.ije in his rev iew of Walcott's I-'ortunate
Traveller, is representative of the tendencv to treat Another l.tfe primarily as autobiography,
repeating Baugh's identification of the poem as Walcott's Prelude and Portrutt oj the Artt.st
as a Youizg Man.^ Dvvyer characterizes the poem as “a spiritual autobiography narrating the
growth of the poet's mind.”^ The evocation of Wordsworth, with its connotations of the
egotistical sublime, is unfortunate in that it focuses attention upon the more personal
aspects of the poem, as it points to those passages in the poem which chronicle the
development of a poetic sensibility. The comparison with Joyce's novel does justice to the
communal dimension oT Another Life, calling to mind Stephen Dedal us' final words: "I go
.... to forge in the smithy of my own soul the conscience of my race." A more detailed
consideration of the poem suggests that Walcott's project is less to examine the particulars
of the growth of his own sensibility than to explore the development of the artist, and
particularly that of the West Indian artist, in any medium.
^ Baugh, in Memory as I 'ision (9). nominates Walcott’s poem his PreliuJe and Portrait o f the Artist His study of the poem, while providing ample information about the factual basis for its autobiographical details, emphasizes the poem's larger project, that of locating the artist within his society. The primary focus in Dwyefs article, however is on the personal and autobiographical
■ Richard Dwyer "One Walcon and He Would Be Master " Carthhean RevieM \ i A (\9S2) pp 14.36-37
58 The prominence gi\ en in the poem to the figures of Harrold Simmons, to Gregonas.
(Walcott’s fictionalized portrait o f Dunstan St. Omer) and to Anna, who functions as a
"muse" figure as well as Walcott's first love, emphasizes the conditions upon which any art exists, as well as paying homage to those whom the poet acknowledges as formative in his own artistic development. We are presented with three artists, in a West Indian context, whose distinctive aesthetic approaches give the writer an opportunity to explore a range of artistic possibilities. O f the three, only Harrold Simmons is accorded his own name in the poem. The namelessness of the narrator and the name of Gregorias given to St. Omer suggests that these characters are constructs, and leaves room for the two to be seen as representative creative artists as well as historical figures. When the three major characters are named, for the first and only time, at the end of Book Three, it is with a comment which invites us to view them as mythical figures:
Not one is real, they cannot live or die.
they all exist, they never have existed:
Harry, Dunstan, Andreuille. (115)
This transposition of the major human influences of Walcott's youth, and of an earlier self, into representative figures with a resonance beyond the historical characters on whom they are based allows the poet to schematize different versions of a West Indian aesthetic and dramatize the consequences of particular aesthetic attitudes and practices as
59 their relationships are played out in the poem. Harrold Simmons combines the polymathic
interests and academic commitment to artistic technique, which charactenze the younger
Walcott's "Classical" approach to art, with the spontaneous response to a local materiality, which is the major strength of Gregorias' "Romantic " approach. His commitment to and
rootedness in communit) serve as a model for Walcott's ideal of the West Indian artist.
Anna, as muse, also functions as the seductive appeal of a European aesthetic tradition,
which in a West Indian setting leads to artistic sterility unless balanced by a corresponding sensitivit) to local reality, as exemplified by Gregorias. For Walcott, an appropriate aesthetic would demand the successful fusion of both tendencies.
The fact that Gregorias and the narrator are characterized respectively as the artist who remains in his native place and the artist who chooses exile also allows for the exploration of a common situation. From the forties onwards it has been a truism that for a
West Indian artist to succeed he must succeed first in the metropolis. George Lamming and
C.L.R. James are examples of writers who chose exile, and the problem of the exodus from the region of creative artists is addressed repeatedly by critics and commentators on West
Indian art and writing.
The suicide of Harrold Simmons and the descent into alcoholism and near despair of Gregorias, as recounted in the poem, illustrate the possible consequences for the creative artist of remaining in the home region. Public neglect, lack of recognition and intellectual isolation contribute to the fate of both. For the artist who chooses exile, the greater chances of public recognition and financial security are balanced by the concomitant danger of
6 0 losing touch with a local com munit) which is a source oC creative inspiration and artistic
identit)
In Anofhcr f.ijc many of these problems are implied rather than explicitly stated.
However to read books three and four in the light o f the articles written for the Sunc/uy
(iuarJian and the Trimdud (imrdian. in which Walcott had a regular weekK arts column.
"Focus on the Arts" from December, 1963, onwards, makes it clear that these are issues
present in his mind at the time of writing. In these columns, he addresses the problems of the local writer, attacks narrow-minded censorship of the arts, appeals for local funding for theater and the arts, and discusses the reasons why so many talented West Indian artists and writers choose to live abroad. The article "Happ\' New Year in September," prompted b\
Simmons' death, deals with the too common phenomenon of suicide among local artists.'’
As early as 1957, Walcott had identified similar conditions as destructive of regional talent:
They are urged to remain, and these islands kill them. They are killed by acclaim
without cash, praise without purchase, killed by too much drinking which like the
praise of friends bloats and distorts their ego. They are killed by the humiliation of
borrowing from people who always knew they would never mean anything. The%'
are tortured by the insistence with which amateur expatriots and returned dilettantes
tell them of work that is done or has been done in Europe. What is worse they are
* "Happy New Year in September " TrmiJaJ Guardian 14 September, 1966 p 6
61 swamped by amateurs who prefer posture to the serious discipline that must be
acquired.
In the course oÇAnoihcr f.iJc, Walcott is never specific about the personal lives and economic situations of these representative figures. There is no allusion to Simmons' poverty during the last years of his life: we are never told that Dunstan St. Omer is married and has a large family to support. Since he is interested in them above all as particular types of artist in this specific social setting, it is possible that he felt it necessary to omit reference to these personal details, perhaps feeling that such details might undermine his presentation of them as representative figures. Clearly, Walcott intends his characters, and in particular the figure of himself as aspiring artist, to stand as representative of the region as a whole.
The omission of personal and economic factors, however, emphasizes his preoccupation with his own aesthetic.
Similarly, the narrator’s status as exile can only appear inflated if set against the actual circumstances o f Walcott's life. Walcott left St. Lucia, but remained based in the
West Indies for a further thirtv- years of his life after the departure recorded in Another I.i/e.
The departure of the narrator, at the end of Book Three, mirroring Walcott's own first departure from St. Lucia, is for the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, rather than for
London, New York or Montreal. This was during a period when many writers chose either
^ "Society and the .Anist " /’//W/6-(Jamaica) 4 May, 1957 p 7
6 2 temporan or permanent exile in Europe, the United States, Canada, or Africa. Some of the
European exiles include V S. Naipaul, Samuel Sclvon, George Lamming, Wilson Hams,
Andrew Sal key, Edgar Mittelholtzer. Between 1955 and 1962, Edward Kamau Brathwaite
studied at Cambridge and afterwards spent several years in Ghana while Denis Williams,
Jan Carew and Neville Daws took up permanent residence in Africa Again, it is more
reasonable to recognize the narrator as representative of a type and a situation, rather than
reading him too literally as a factually exact characterization of the poet himself.
b) History: personal and public
The choice of the year of the Castries fire as the pivot upon which the poem turns,
while it pinpoints a moment in time crucial to Walcott as an individual, also marks a
moment of symbolic significance for St. Lucia. The fire marks the end of a way of life as decisively as does the dismantling of the fictional Creighton's Village in George Lamming's
novel. In the Castle of\4y Skin. Throughout Another Life, the fading echoes o f the bugles of the Inniskilling regiment serve as a reminder of the end of empire, and the pervading
twilight glow, which acts as metaphor for the transformative function of ait, also carries the same historical charge.
The series of constitutional reforms, which in 1944 brought the end of Crown
Colony Government, introduced a new constitution in Jamaica, under which the House of
Representatives was to be elected by frill adult suffrage. This act marked the beginning of a
63 policy intended to lead towards self-government for the whole o f British West Indies
Negotiations for the formation of a West Indian Federation had alreadv been initiated.
These are ev ents which affected the British West Indies as a whole, and elements o f the
experience of de-colonization in St. Lucia find their parallels in the expenence of other
former British colonies in the Caribbean.
In Walcott's poem the burning and rebuilding of the capital are metaphoric of the
changes thus set in motion, and have a wider resonance. Walcott records of that time.
"They heard the century- breaking in h a lf (83), and he clearly sees the rebuilding o f the citv
as marking the beginning of “another life" for its inhabitants. The initiation of a new social order is afoot, as well as the beginning o f an individual poetic career.
In addition to these public concerns, and indeed as a corollary of them, the issues of regional and personal identitv- coalesce in the poem. The dualisms imposed by history, which Walcott's poetry up to this point has delineated, explored and attempted to reconcile or to transcend, also inform Another Life, and are presented as communally, as well as individually , experienced. Central to this theme is the poet's re-connection with the landscape and society which formed his sensibility. In many respects, it makes as much sense to nominate the poem Walcott's ( 'ahier d'un retour au pay's natal as to invoke The
Prelude or Portrait o f the Artist. It transcribes not a physical but an imaginative return to beginnings, or a reimagining of those beginnings.
Finally, the preoccupation in the poem with history - and with the mismatch between official historiography and the perceived experience of the colonial subject —
6 4 while it is presented as a personal "madness" of the narrator, has wider relevance. John
Heame, in his introduction to the collection of essays ( unjcsta Inruni. whose theme is the
histor\ and historiography of the Caribbean, comments;
History is the angel with which all we Caribbean Jacobs have to wrestle, sooner or
later, i f we hope for a blessing. And after the encounter each o f us drags a foot a
little as he walks.^
Clearly, the itnpasse of history is felt as a problem and a burden by others besides the poet,
and this perception is not specific to Walcott, to St. Lucia or even to the anglophone
Caribbean. For Joyce's Stephen Dedal us, whom Walcott describes, in "Leaving School," as
"my current hero," history was the nightmare from which he struggled to awake.
Another Life dramatizes the young poet’s experience of the specious romance of colonial history This is clearest in the juxtaposition of the child's reaction to the tapestry depicting a battle scene and the more mature awareness of the "history of ennui, defence, disease" that lies behind accounts of military glory . ^ The child's imagination is colonized by official histoiy and artistic representations of historical events. "I bled for all. 1 thought it full of glory," he says of the tapestry. Dreaming over his school texts, "I butchered fellahin, thuggees, Mamelukes, wogs." In the poem a passage in which the child's
* John Heame, "Introduction. ' Canfesta Forum: an Anthoio^' o f 20 Carihhean I owes. ed. John Heame Kingston Institute of Jamaica. 1976. p vii ' Another l.tfe. Book Two. Chapter 11. 68-73. 65 subjectivitN slides into that of the redcoat soldier, and essentially becomes inhabited b\ the soldier's perception, is balanced by a companion passage in which the subjectivité, of the poet slides into that of one of the leapers at Sauteurs. At this point Walcott lays claim to both histoncal traditions as his birth-right, with the description of himself as "the child, like a ribbed mongrel; trailing the fading legions, singing in his grandfather's company" (72).
His strategy in Another Life is to attempt to transcend history , in much the same way as, in the poetry which comes after the publication of In A (Ireen .\7g/// (1962). he proposes to transcend language. When Walcott expresses the desire to "stride from the sphere of legends, from the gigantic myth," his vision of a perception unmediated by the experience of colonialism takes the form of a return to a pre-conquest view o f the island;
Where else to row, but backward?
Beyond origins, to the whales wash,
to the epicanthic Arawak's Hewanora,
back to the impeachable pastoral. (75)
There is the same impulse in his vision of the Indian girl by the roadside waiting to be given a name. The effect of this second image, without the knowledge of Walcott's essay "The
Muse of History," published the year after the poem appeared, misleadingly suggests atavism. However, the essay makes clear that in strategically positioning the West Indies at
66 the beginning ot'histor\ , he is not making an appeal lor a return either to pre-conquest
artistic ideals or to an impossible and more naive earlier consciousness.
The images of the Indian girl and the hunted Arawak have the advantage for
Walcott of representing undeniably West Indian personae, untainted by the sense of
dualism which informs the arguments for the preponderance of Europe or of Africa in the
West Indies. The girl is neither European nor African, but she is an inhabitant of the New
World — or more exactly a metaphor for the inhabitants of a New World that does not owe its identity to any alien subjectivity. The metaphor is problematic: it denies, without having the power to erase, the dualism that Walcott dissects in the course of the poem. The essential and unitary identity such an image proposes will not bear rational examination.
The presentation of an image of West Indian identity which predates conquest and displacement, however, is not based on a facile pretense that history has never happened.
Indeed the consequences of St. Lucian history are worked out with an unsparing and sometimes painful thoroughness in the course of the poem.
Walcott's formulation of a West Indian identity accepts James' view of a dual hentage in order to modify it. There is no attempt to deny the difficulties and contradictions imposed by this doubleness, the effects of which are explored in the interactions o f the three representative artist figures in the poem. In the introduction into the equation of the Arawak figures, however, Walcott proposes a lertium quid^ intended to stand as a representative West Indian figure, partaking of neither of the opposed heritages
6 7 which form so large a part of West Indian culture The "epicanthic Arawak." moreover, presents a third racial category , m an attempt at breaking the dualism.
Another Life mA the Tradition of West Indian Autobiography
In her essay on West Indian autobiography cited above. Paquet includes Walcott's poem as an example of the use of the genre by West Indian writers in order to explore issues wider than those of personal development. She also makes a convincing case for regarding the poem as a contribution to a dialogue between regional writers, "who seek to establish the foundations of their selfhood in a Caribbean reality, " in which the definition of
West Indian identity and West Indian culture is a key issue. Her essay focuses on the different grounds upon which each seeks to present his experience as representative. For the purposes of this chapter it is more germane to consider how these autobiographers and other writers of the region approach the problem of presenting collective experience and to examine the ways in which Walcott's approach is unique.
Among the authors discussed by Paquet, C.L.R. James is separated from ordinary
West Indians bv education, class and career to an even areater dearee than Walcott. There
The epicantkts is the skin fold charaaeristically covering the inner canthus o f the eyelid in Mongolian peoples It seems worthwhile to make this point since in "The Muse o f History" Walcott is at pains to point out the intricacies of race in the West Indies, and to remind the reader that the West Indian population includes representatives of Far Eastern, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean origins, besides those of .Africa and Northern Europe
68 is no sense in which, as a private individual, James could be regarded as a representative
West Indian, or even a representative Trinidadian. In BcyimJ a Hmint/ury. he chooses the
game of cricket through which to present the processes of colonialism and decolonization,
as a metaphor exemplify ing truths which will hold good for a wider community . The self
presented in this book through a unified and somewhat magisterial voice is that of the
educated, fair-minded observer. In his fiction this voice becomes that of an omniscient,
impartial narrator, an outside observer of the lives of the communitv. Thus, while the
collective is represented in James' work in the sense of being “spoken about,” their
representation in the sense of being "brought to speech” is at best a matter for argument.
Lamming, in In the Castle o f My Skin, displaces the first person narrator, G., by
introducing the voices of other characters, who narrate sections of the story and comment
upon events in their conversation. In this way he gives a voice to the collective, but the
separation of G. from the life of the village is emphasized by this strategy. While G's
friend, Trumper, is able to take his identification from a new consciousness of an identity
founded on race, G. remains isolated in his sense of alienation.
Walcott's strategy is to attempt a merging of sensibilities between his narrator and the community by the use of an authorial voice that is penetrated by the voices of others.
In Another Life, this operates most successfully in merging the voices and sensibilities of
Walcott's representative artist figures. The voices of other members of the community emerge only briefly as fragments of the overall narrative voice. The extension of this strategy in later poems, however, produces a multiple voice, giving expression to a
6 9 collective sensibilitv which includes that of the poet. The necessity to produce such a voice is dictated by the conception of the West Indian poet that first emerges during the process of composition Another Life.
Defining the West Indian Artist
‘'The boy"
The epigraph to Book One o ï Another I.ife, taken from Malraux’ P.syvholog\’ o f Art. establishes the major concern of the poem as a whole with the question of art, and in this case not only with the visual arts but with poetry. The passage tells the stoiy of Cimabue being struck with admiration at the sight of the shepherd boy, Giotto, sketching sheep.
Malraux goes on to call into question that the artist is first inspired by the world around him and asserts, “What makes the artist is the circumstance that in his youth he was more deeply moved by the sight o f works of art than by that of the things which they portray.”
Walcott's opening chapter takes up this argument in such a way as to interrogate, rather than simply endorse, this opinion.
The voice which is established in the opening chapter, and speaks through the greater part of Book One is personally reticent, in a way that directs attention away from itself and towards the figures of "the student," "the master," "the girl" and the "cast of thousands" evoked in the coda to this chapter and enumerated in Chapter Three. The "I" who speaks steps forward only twice; once at the beginning of the chapter, "I begin here
70 again." and again at its close, "how shall 1 tell them'^" The distance thus established between the student, "he." and the poet allows a space for Walcott to reflect, not without irony, upon a former self, and to examine and comment critically upon an aesthetic position that corresponds closely to that of "the native wnter" in Fanons H'rciclicJ nj ihc I'.arih. ' ’
In the first phase, the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated
the culture o f the occupying power. His wxitings correspond point by point
with those o f his opposite numbers in the mother countrv'. His inspiration is
European.
Fanon s analysis of the development of national cultures in former colonial societies in his chapter "On National Culture" forms an interesting parallel to the discussion of the development of the West Indian artist in Another Life. Fanon sees a tvpical post-colonial writer as passing through three stages of development. The first of these is the stage of imitation o f metropolitan examples characterized in the quotation above. According to
Fanon's model of development, as he grows increasingly aware of the need for a distinctive national style, the writer reaches back into the past for an authentic national character, drawing on memories of his childhood and folk material in the attempt to make a re connection with his people. In the third and final stage he arrives, through immediate
" Frantz Fanon. Lhe Wretched o f the Earth. Tr Constance Farrington. .New York Grove Weidenfeld, 1986 p 222
71 participation in re\olutionar\- struggle alongside his people, at "a fighting literature, a re\olutionar\ literature, and a national literature. "
In a sense. Another Life could be seen as belonging to that second stage described b\ Fanon, in which a full identification between the wnter and his local communitv has not yet taken place. Unlike the writer described in he IVretchcJ oj the I ’art/i. which draws on the experience of the nationalist struggle in Algeria rather than on Fanon 's native
Martinique, the West Indian writer is not engaged in revolutionary struggle, but rather in the judicial transfer of power from one group to another. He does not have the advantage of an already existent, authentic and uniform indigenous culture, however ignored and devalued, to draw upon for forms of expression, genres and language distinct from those of the former colonial power. Necessarily, then, the course of his development must vary from that of the paradigm set out by Fanon, in spite o f some similarities of situation.
In the course of writing Another l.tfe Walcott carries out a re-evaluation of the material of the past which is necessary to him in order to make the step forward into his mature style. The poem contains the voices of the artist at the first two of Fanon's three stages, the alienation of the first stage, and the desperate attempt to re-connect, to "lose himself in the people," in the second. The exploration of the situation and task of the West
Indian artist that takes place during the composition of .Another l.tfe leaves Walcott in a position from which he will be able to make the step forward into his mature style, the voice of the final stage, in later work.
72 The young artist oï Anoihcr Life, "he" who is not "1." embraces Western European
art as a religion and as the object of passion:
Our Father;
who floated in the vaults of Michaelangelo.
St. Raphael,
of siena and gold leaf:
it was then
he fell in love, having no care
for truth. (44)
His acceptance of a European aesthetic dictates his will to transform the Vigie promontory
into "a cinquecento fragment," and an ideal of female beauty based on "the shepherdesses
of Boucher and Fragonard" (referred to as his Muse) informs his love for "golden and white.
Anna of the peach-furred body."
In a more explicit passage, the golden and white Anna appears as the central figure in two distinct Pre-Raphaelite paintings. She moves:
Through a frontispiece of flowers
eternal, true as Ruth
the wheat sheaves at her ear,
73 or gorgonizing Judith
swinging the dead lantern
ofHolofemes. (61)
The image recalls the illustrations of biblical stories mentioned earlier in the poem as one of the poet s earliest experiences of visual art. The two characters ev oked are curiously contradictory. Each is praiseworthy, Ruth for her fidelity to an alien mother-in-law and
Judith for her assassination of a foreign conqueror, though the latter is equated with the monster of Greek mythology who turns men to stone. The ambiguity these images present is never resolved, though Walcott concludes by contrasting them with "Gregorias... his black nudes gleaming sweat." At a later stage in the poem Anna is more unequivocally identified with the seductive betrayer:
as ruthless as that flax-bright harvester
Judith, with Holofemes lantern in her hand. ( 89)
Neither aspect of Anna cancels out the other. As a Muse, and specifically one connected with European, rather than African ideals o f beauty, she is allowed to function both as faithful nurturer and as a castrating and immobilizing influence. The implication for the poet is that the influence of the European can be both fruitful and dangerous.
74 That the attraction to European aesthetic ideals is the product of a colonial education is clear in Walcott's account of the influences of his childhood. Equally clearly,
the ironical distance which he creates between narrative voice and the figure of a younger self is not intended disingenuously to dissociate the mature poet from these values and
influences. They are acknowledged as integral to his development as an artist, but are no longer accepted uncritically.
Describing his early experiences of European culture both at school and at home, he writes;
I saw as through the glass of some provincial gallery
the hieratic objects which my father loved;
the stuffed dark nightingale of Keats.
bead-eyed snow-headed eagles,
all that romantic taxidermy.
and each one was a fragment of the True Cross.
each one upheld, as if it were The Host. (41)
At this point, narrative voice and created representative persona merge as "I," but the terms in which the objects of youthful reverence are presented make clear the distance between the youth's reverence and the mature artist's re-evaluation. The reduction of Keats’ nightingale and Tennyson's eagle to "romantic taxidermy" - the moth-eaten and
75 unmistakably dead specimens of a provincial museum, which are nevertheless presented
("by black hands") as objects o f religious v eneration - marks that distance;
Remember years must pass before he saw an orchestra,
a train, a theatre, the spark-coloured leaves
o f autumn whirling from a rail line. (41 )
This passage is followed by the comparison of the artifacts o f European culture to stuffed birds in a dusty museum and the ironical perception of these dead things as the relics and sacramental objects o f religion.
In the section that follows, however, the irony which informs his account of his youthful enthusiasms for European art and later his response to a romanticized British history ("I thought it full of glory") is held in abeyance, and the gulf between the young poet, who has thus far been held at arm’s length, and the narrator is abolished as Walcott narrates the episode which marks his dedication to place and people.'' Too long to be quoted in full, this section describes how, "About the August of my fourteenth year. I lost myself somewhere above a valley." The location described is on the property of Grace
Augustin, the D'Aubignan and Patience Estates on the east coast between Micoud and
D'Ennery, which Walcott mentions having visited often as a boy. This passage is the one that Dwyer mentions rather disparagingly in his review, finding its language that of
'* Another Life. Book One, Chapter 7, 42-43 7 6 "someone toiling in what Harroid Bloom would call an extreme anxietx of influence.'"
The passage from The Prelude that he has in mind appears to he Book Four, lines 316-
345.'-
A comparison between the two passages reveals telling differences. In
Wordsworth's account, the narrator withdraws from a scene of human sociability (the
dance) and is walking alone in "all the sweetness of a common dawn." The morning light
touches and illuminates each detail of a harmonious landscape in which human beings are a
single element, presented without comment and taken for granted as an unremarkable
presence, "labourers going forth into the fields." The keynote of the scene is a harmony in
which the poet shares, and which leaves him with a sense that "henceforth I should be .... a
dedicated spirit."
The episode from Walcott's poem, on the other hand, takes place at nightfall and
evokes twilight and a growing darkness illuminated by the lighted windows of the hovels of
the poor. The boy is moved by a felt connection, not with the natural world as a whole, but
with the laboring poor, whose presence is first signaled by the smoke of their chimneys and
later permeates the landscape. In the above-cited passage from The Prelude, the narrator’s mood is characteristically mirrored by the natural world; "melody of birds" replaces the
"din of instruments," the word "bright" is repeated in connection with the sky and the mountains, and the distant sea "laughs." In Walcott's account it is the presence o f those
Book and line references are to the 1805 edition of the text as reproduced in the Oxford Standard Authors edition, edited by Ernest de Selincoun.
77 "labouring poor" which is kept constantly in mind by the transference of the adjecti\ e
"labouring" to details of the natural scene, "labouring smoke." and "labouring breakers of
cloud" as well as "labourers' houses" and the light from their "hovels " The sense of
connection, however, is contradicted by the placing of the boy outside, on the wrong side of
the window, and above.
Of the two passages, Walcott's is the more turbulent and disturbed. This impression
is created in part by the rhythmical movement of the lines, which creates an expectation of
iambic pentameter that it constantly frustrates. It is also produced by the disorienting
confusion of sea in skv in the phrase "labouring breakers of cloud. " and by the dual
connotations of "losing oneself," which suggest losing a sense of self by merging with a
group as well as being geographically lost. The moment of dedication makes explicit an
identification with this group and a commitment to the communalitv, while still leaving the
laborers at a distance. "The poor still move behind their tinted scrim." like mimes in a
theatrical tableau, like the dumbshow of slaves which opens C.L.R. James' play Tomsuini
I. 'Om-erturc. The sense of connection is without the sense of serenit\' which informs
Wordsworth's moment of dedication, "On 1 walked, In blessedness, which even yet
remains." The images used by Walcott to express this link evoke the hardships of the
middle passage:
There is a reversal of position in Walcott's description, in "What the Twilight Says." of himself and his brother as children observing the street life of Castries from their bedroom window, it is still an upstairs window Interestingly. C L R. James opens Beyond a Bntindary with a similar scene of himself as a boy watching the cricket ground from an upper window of his parents’ house
78 the taste of water is still shared everv-where,
but in that ship of night, locked in together,
through which, like chains, a little light might leak,
something still fastens us forever to the poor. (43 )
According to the passage under discussion, what "fastens us forever to the poor" is the pit} with which the child is seized, the awareness of sharing a common geographical situation, and, it is suggested, an awareness of the shared historv of forced migration and slavery. Walcott's identification with the poor at this point is reminiscent of Whitman's identification with an entire American population in "Song of Myself."
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,...
One of the great nation, the nation of many nations - the smallest the same
and the largest the same,
A southerner as soon as a northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable,
A Yankee bound my own way . .. ready for trade... my joints are the
I imberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,
A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhom in my deerskin leggings,
A boatman over the lakes or bays or along coasts ... a Hoosier, a Badger,
a Buckeye,
79 A Louisianian or a Georgian ...
In Whitman's poem the sense of connection is asserted rather than portrayed. Elsewhere, in the same poem. Whitman's fellow Americans are described in a series of brief sketches by an observer, who may be sympathetic but is not involved in their lives. In Walcott's case one is left with an uneasy awareness that the felt connection is given inadequate expression in this poem, where the sensibilities represented are mainly those of the poet, and, through him, those o f his fellow artists, particularly Gregorias.
Gregorias
The figure of Gregorias functions in Another Life as a second representative of the type of West Indian artist placed in contrast with the figure of the younger Walcott. While the two are contrasted, however, there is no sense that their positions are opposed as “right'’ and "wrong" versions of the West Indian artist: rather each position exhibits its own strengths and weaknesses. If Gregorias and the young Walcott are contrasted, it is without any implication that one artistic approach should defeat the other. They are presented as united in a common commitment to record faithfully the life of their shared locality. If
Gregorias represents the Brathwaite approach, the implication is that there is room for the existence of both types within a West Indian aesthetic.
Their unity is dramatized by the powerful sense created in Book Two of entering the consciousness o f Gregorias. This is achieved partly as a result of a variation o f the
80 already noted slippage of pronouns, where the antecedent of 'he" is unattributable or where
"I" merges into “we.” It is also partly the result of the narrator taking on the qualities of
speech attributed to Gregorias. As a result of these two techniques the sensibility of
Gregorias merges with that of the narrator and dominates the discourse of this section of the
poem. This is not to imply that Walcott elides the significant differences between the two
artists, differences of temperament, artistic method and artistic theory, all o f which form a
significant part of his exploration of the situation of the artist and the possibilities open to
him in this setting and at this moment in their shared history. Rather. Walcott
acknow ledges the two artists' points of contact in background, influences and aims, and
invokes an artistic brotherhood that exists in spite of differences.
Difference is established in the first chapter of Book Two. which delineates
Gregorias through a description of his house and describes the friendship and the artistic
project of the two young men. In contrast to the Walcott home, described in Chapter 2, the dominant presence is masculine, rather than feminine, and is established in references to height, in imagery connected with hunting and soldiering, rather than domestic activities, and in the prominence given to the father rather than the mother. The twilight and moonlight of the first book gives way to the searing light of the sun, "drumming, drumming," full daylight:
Days welded by the sun's torch into days!
Gregorias plunging whole-suited in the shallows,
81 painting under water, roaring, spewing spray.
Gregorias gesturing, under the coconuts'
wickerwork shade - tin glare - wickerwork shade,
days woven into days, a stinging haze. (51)
The movement of the lines is vigorous, muscular and emphatic, in contrast to the often dreamy lyricism of Walcott's descriptions of childhood in the earlier chapters, and their energy is associated with Gregorias, "plunging," "roaring," "spewing," "gesturing." The imagery of religion, which makes the windows of Gregorias' house into "vertical sarcophagus"' inhabited by "saints' in their cathedral crypt," echoes Gregorias' habit of mind and the characteristic subject matter of his early art, "lurid Madonnas, pietistic crucifixions/ modeled on common Catholic lithographs." He sings "O Paradiso" as he paints, "his canvas crucified against a tree." Religion is the basis of his art, in contrast to the young Walcott for whom Art is a religion. The saints called up by the young Walcott as he works are "Vincent [van Gogh]/ saint of all sunstroke," and "Paul [Gaugin]," while
Gregorias' artistic "saints," Giotto and Masaccio, are balanced by his association with "Saint
Joseph the Worker." the central figure o f his triptych.
The two artists' differences are foregrounded in the juxtaposition, in Chapters Nine and Ten, of contrasted descriptions of Walcott painting a landscape and Gregorias painting his altarpiece for the church at Gros Ilet, and in Walcott's analysis o f his own failitre as a
82 painter. The difPerence in subject matter between unpeopled local landscape and the religious subjects which are traditional but whose models are local and human ("black nudes," "brown-bottomed tumbling cherubim" ) is significant. Walcott emphasizes the urge to record and transcribe a physical realit\. which ultimately eludes representation;
behind the square of blue you have cut from that sky.
another life, real, indifferent resumes. (58)
In the description of Gregorias at work the religious exaltation of his subjects is conveyed in the language of religious ritual and observance which permeates the language in which his work is described. He seems moved by a more direct and unambiguous vision than the poet who declares:
I sought'
the paradoxical flash of an instant
in which every facet was caught
in a crystal o f ambiguities. ( 58)
Classifying their difference in aesthetic approach as that between the
Classicist and the Romantic, Walcott emphasizes the spontaneity and immediacy of
Gregorias' method. He "would draw/ with the linear elation of an eel," and "1 admired the
83 explosion of impulse." In discussing his early painting, he repeatedly likens his own hand
to a "poor crab." suggesting slowness, clumsiness and oblique movement towards a goal,
and also calling to mind the crab's tenacity, "its circuitous instinct to fasten on what it
seized." (The image of the crab as a metaphor for his poetic method is also a feature of
poems in The C 'asiaway. ) Thus his absorption of classical. European models becomes "this
sidewise crawling, this classic condition of servitude," in which his hand is "crabbed by
that styley this epoch, that school." Gregorias' independence o f the models o f antiquity
causes him to "abandon apprenticeship/ to the errors o f his own soul" and gives his work
the advantage of individuality; "however bad it became/ it was his." In this negative judgment there is the suggestion that the mastery of technique is neglected in favor of the
immediacy of personal vision, and to the detriment of the total effect. Gregorias' work may
be "grotesque," at times, or even "bad." The originality and individuality of Gregorias'
work is emphasized by its association with that of the early Renaissance painters Giotto and
Masaccio, both significant innovators. It is also significant that Giotto is noted for his
rejection of the formality and impersonalitv' of Byzantine style m favor of direct observation
from nature. He is also famous for the solidity and naturalism o f his human figures and the
expressiveness of their features and gestures. Walcott says of his own youthful style, in contrast, that it "shared/ the translucent soul of the fish," taking on the color o f the styles
which influenced him.
The sense o f division experienced by the young Walcott as a result o f his dual heritage, symbolized by the black and white grandfathers, seems to present less of a
84 problem to Gregonas. secure in a religious faith which is that of the majont\ in his community His mural is a direct expression of that faith and at the same time an expression of communal belief. The root of his inspiration in the local and communal gives his art a communal application and relevance which remains inaccessible to the young
Walcott, whose primai} motivation comes from a response to art rather than everyday experience.
There is much in Walcott's chapters that celebrates the singleness of vision. energ\ and directness of Gregonas' work and is overtly cntical of Walcott's own. The frank critical analysis of his early aesthetic theory and its implications for his painting is allowed to carry over into the evaluation o f his early verse. He quotes Gregonas criticism:
"The thing is you love death and 1 love life....
....Your poetry too full of spiders.
bones, worms, ants, things eating up each other.
1 can't read it." (64)
Much that he says of his painting echoes this negative criticism of his poetry, and tacitly admits the justice of those early reviews which found his work derivative of European models. Nevertheless, the poet also presents, if unemphatically, the positive attributes of his approach to art: "1 lived in a different gifG its element metaphor." Unable to say with
Gregorias' certainty, "Yes. God and me, we understand each other," he proffers "a crystal of
85 ambiguities." an oblique, re-cursive, crab-wise circling of the contradictions and pluralities with which his experience presents him.
It would be as mistaken to see his evaluation of this approach to the problems of artistic representation as entirely negative as it would be to ignore the ironic distance between the "I" who speaks and the younger "I." often apostrophized as "you" in these chapters. It would likewise be mistaken to emphasize the differences between the methods of these two exemplary artists at the expense of what they have in common, in those moments when "I" becomes "we." Besides their shared commitment to a geographical, social and historical location, they are both "fatherless now, and often drunk." in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense. The drunkenness is as much a result of the elation with which they pursue their art as their shared drinking exploits, an elation also expressed as the hallucinatory effect o f being "sun-struck." For both, there is an emphasis on the production of art as physical labor and learned craft which associates them with the carpenter and the fisherman. They share a commitment to locality and to the project of the celebration o f that locality:
But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore. ..
...that we would never leave the island
until we had put down, in paint, in words,
as palmists learn the network of a hand,
all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,
8 6 e\ er\- neglected, sel (-pitt ing inlet,
muttenng in brackish dialect... ( 52)
Harroid Simmotts
It is tempting to trace this last feature of similarit\ to the influence of the two artists' mentor, Harroid Simmons. Simmons' own water-colors are informed by his knowledge of European artistic techniques but draw on the life and landscape of St. Lucia for their subject matter. Walcott writes of him that:
he preferred humble subjects, the chronicle of the country life that he knew
well: fishermen at work, peasants, country dances, the firelight or kitchens,
portraits of simple people, and he made us see that these were worthy of our
young and confused gifts.
Simmons' interests were wide-ranging but brought the techniques of scholarship to bear upon on his local community. He edited the island's only newspaper, and was an active botanist and collector of butterflies, as well as an amateur archaeologist, who wrote articles on the population movements of early Amerindian groups in the Caribbean. His interest in
' * Derek Walcott "Tribute to a Master " Swukn Guardian 15 May 1966:9
87 St l.ucian folklore and folk traditions led him to make notes on the Rose and L-a
Marguerite Flower Festiv als and on the classification of folk songs and dances He was also an early advocate for the legitimization of Kweyol and took an interest in the development of an English-based orthography for recording Kweyol speech.''"
Simmons' belief that "There can be no great art unless there is a freedom to weld the international traditions of culture with that of local expression or sty le." can be seen at work in Gregorias' St. Omer’s fusion of traditional religious themes with local landscape and people, as well as in Walcott's obstinate insistence on the inclusion of both European and St. Lucian elements in his poetry. The difference is a matter o f balance and successful fusion rather than of diametrical, ideological opposition. Simmons' insistence that art should be rooted in the community also informs Walcott's desire to establish his commitment to the people of St. Lucia, expressed in the passage from Chapter Seven discussed earlier. ' It is significant thaL in the passage celebrating Simmons' achievement in Chapter 18, the "stars " among which he is placed include the Mexican muralists Orozco and Siquieros as well as Raphael and El Greco.
I am indebted for these details and for subsequent quotations from Simmons’ writings to "The Contribution of Harroid Simmons to St Lucian Literature." an unpublished paper by Antonia MacDonald- Smythe presented at the 12th .Annual Conference on West Indian Literature. .April. 1993.
"No artist can create anything of significance to his people if he is isolated. He cannot hope to thrive if he seeks sanctuary during his life in museums nor can his influence thrive if he or his work is away from the people's way of life, their thoughts, dreams and aspirations." Quoted by MacDonald-Smythe in "The Contribution of Harroid Simmons to St Lucian Literature" fi’om "Selected Writings of Harroid Simmons" eds K Hyppolyte and D Jules (Manuscript in preparation for publication)
88 Walcott's declared ambition "to make out of these foresters and fishermen, heraldic
men" had, at the time of writing, already been put into execution in the plays written for the
St. Lucia Arts Guild and for Tnnidad Theatre Workshop. The Scu ui Dauphini 1954 ). Ti-
Jean and his Bn>thers{\95^). Malc(>ch(m(\959). and Dream on Monkey Kffnmtaini.X'^lQ)
draw upon local folk traditions and represent characters drawn from the "labouring poor" of
St. Lucia, who speak in a theatrical idiom that evokes folk speech with varying degrees of success. In Another Lijiy as in much of the early poetry, such characters are represented, in the sense o f "spoken of," but still seen at a remove "behind their tinted scrim," from without and sometimes from above, their voices marginalized, emerging momentarily in snatches of reported speech. In the account of Myma Auguste's funeral, the voices of the mourners
"flutter shut" and seem to be absorbed into "the shells/ that trumpeted from the graves." In the final book they are recalled almost beyond the threshold o f hearing:
that child who puts the shell's howl to his ear,
hears nothing, or hears everything
that the historian cannot hear, the howls
of all the races that crossed the water,...
...hears the fellahin, the Madrasi, the Mandingo, the Ashanti. (143)
As yet these characters have not crossed the boundary between visual and linguistic representation. They achieve presence only through the sensibility of the observer hearer.
8 9 While the claim for a connection between artist-obscr\ er and com munit) has been made,
these communal voices remain inadequately realized.
Where Simmons is presented as a paradigmatic figure of the artist in the elegiac
section o f Book Four, the connection between artist and communit) described is one of an
empathy which approaches the condition o f possession:
People entered his understanding
like a wayside country church,
they had built him themselves,
it was they who had smoothed the wall
of his clay-coloured forehead,
who made of his rotundity an earthy
useful object
holding the clear water of their simple troubles,
he who returned their tribal names
to the adze, mattock, midden and cooking pot. (134)
The relationship sketched here is one of interdependence. The artist is fashioned by his
communit)', and becomes a "useful object" which contains their consciousness. That this should be expressed as "clear water" suggests an unmediated understanding. The phrase also recalls repeated use by Walcott in earlier poems of the image of clear water as a
90 metaphor for a simple truth beyond language, as in "Islands." where he expresses his desire
for a style "Cold as the curled wave, ordinary. As a tumbler o f island water." or in "Neanng
Forty" the "sty le past metaphor... plain as a bleaching bedsheet under a gutter- ing rainspout."
The idea of the artist as containing the consciousness of the community is repeated in the prayer o f the young poet on leaving the island, "make o f my heart an ark,, let my ribs bear all," and in the image which follows o f "a young man on a pier, his heart a ship within a ship, a bottle." This is presented only in part as an act of memory. It finds an echo in
Walcott's characterization of Perse's hero as "the man who moves through the ruins of great civilizations with all his worldly goods by caravan or pack mule, the poet carrying entire cultures in his head, bitter perhaps, but unencumbered.""^ There is a difference, however, between carrying a "culture" in one's head and carrying the consciousness of a community.
It might be said to be one significant difference between the young Walcott portrayed in the poem, who carries an intellectual awareness of the achievements of the past and Gregorias. who feelingly carries the faith and lives of his fellow St. Lucians.
Both tendencies are united in Simmons, but it is his bearing of communal consciousness, memory in the fullest sense of "bearing in mind," which is emphasized. At the moment at which it operates, Walcott wntes:
"The Muse of History " Is M assa Lkn Dead^ où. Oxdc Coomh% Garden City, .\ Y Doubieday, 1974
91 Their lives slipped into your o w ti
like letters under a door.
The operation of this sliding of one consciousness into another is most complete in
the entry of üregorias into the consciousness and voice of the narrator in sections of the
second book. It operates fragmentanly in the evocation of Simmons' habit of mind in the
opening lines of Book Four. It is most problematical when the invading consciousness is
that o f Anna in Book Three. The same techniques are used to present the narrator s
expenence as representative of the population of St. Lucia as a whole, and to evoke the
consciousness of the community.
“Giving things their names” and “Giv(ing| those feet a voice:” Voicing the Collective
One of the primary functions of the West Indian poet identified by Walcott in
Another Life is the function of correctly naming, or recording, a local materialitv At the end of the poem he records this as "Adam's task of giving things their names,” echoing the epigraph to Book Two, taken from Carpentier's The Lost Steps. Of Simmons, he claims that he "retumed their tribal names to the adze, mattock, midden and cooking pot " By the time Walcott comes to write Omeros. almost twentv' years later, the aspect o f the West
Indian poet's function that he chooses to foreground is that of bringing to voice the otherwise silenced members of his community.
92 In Omcro.s. the poet's father, recalling the procession of women earn ing baskets of coal on their heads to fuel Bntish steam-ships in Castries harbor, tells his son:
They walk, you wnte:
Keep to that narrow causeway without looking dowTi.
climbing in their footsteps, that slow ancestral beat
of those used to climbing roads: your own work owes them
because the couplet of those multiplying feet
made your first rhyines. Look, they climb, and no one knows them;
they take their copper pittances, and your duty
from the time you watched them from your grandmother's house
as a child wounded by their power and beauty
is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice. "
Prompted by Simmons' example. Walcott' concept of his task as a poet has shifted from that of recording material circumstances to giving expression to the felt experience of ordinary people. Running beneath the poet's engagement in Another Life with naming and
Derek Walcott Omeros Book One. chapter XII. iii. p 75-76 93 with the recording of histories, both personal and communal, lies an awareness of the
silence or marginal it} of speech of the greater part of the communit} he describes.
Giving things their names
In Another Life the insistence upon the importance o f naming is driven by the
perception that landscape and people have never been recorded, that "no one had as yet
written of this landscape that it was possible." At times, it is as if natural objects wait to be
named, or wait to be correctly named, before they can become themselves:
trees and men
laboured assiduously, silently to become
whatever their given sounds resembled. (54)
At others, they seem to labor under the weight of fictional and alien attributions. Native
plants are "like bastard children, hiding in their names." When at the abolition of history,
"poet and painter walked the hot road, historyless," the Indian girl at the roadside is "the
new Persephone^ dazed ignoranty' waiting to be named" (77).
The magical power of naming is underlined in the retelling of the story of Auguste
Manoir, and the inclusion of the dramatic scene in which the priest demands that the possessed woman name the demon who binds her, “Name him !... Name! Déparlez!" The
94 naming and the dr\ ing of the bloodstain arc simultaneous, as if naming conferred a power over the thing named, as in many folk traditions it does. This detail is absent from
Walcott's earlier account of the story in "Tales of the Islands." The scene is brought back to mind in the impassioned repudiation of history in Chapter 22, "Pour la dernière fois, nommez, nommez!" when the "demons" are those who perpetuate the endless re-cycling of the history of guilt and recrimination.
A recurrent feature of Another Life is the cataloguing of names, the names of the familiar figures of Castries from A to Z, of the fishing boats in the harbour, the villages passed by the./cHcV, the tanker "remembenng the names o f islands," trees, "^oyavc. corrosol, hois-canot, sapotille." There is the suggestion that naming brings things and people into full existence, reminiscent of the calling into existence of a Christian soul by the sacrament of baptism, ("whole generations died, unchristened") but also of the various folk beliefs which equate the name with the soul, from those described in the ancient
Egyptian Book o f the Dead onwards. In an earlier essay on the poetry of Senghor, Walcott comments that "the mnemonic use of words, of naming things and blessing them by naming, is something which has gone out of English," with the implication that Senghor utilizes the act of naming in this way in his poetry, and characterizing it as "votive, totemic, magical ." '' The poet, then, who undertakes this function of naming, takes upon himself part of the function of the priest for the community, as is suggested by the balancing of:
"The Church upheld the Word, but this new Word,/ was here, attainable/ to my hand" (42).
"Necessity ofNegritude " TriniihJGuardian 28 September, 1964 p 8. 95 Silence
Alternating with these references to naming and catalogues of names in. [nmhcr
Life are repeated references to speechlessness and silence In the second chapter, the
mother sits "folded in silence." the house "gives no outcr\." "the door, mouth clamped,
reveals nothing." On leaving the island, the poet takes "a last look at things that would not
say what they once meant." The silent and the unrecorded hovers at the edge o f language,
or is recorded in unreadable traces of writing in lost languages, "the fine, writing of foam
around the precipices." "scribbles" of the water rat. the egret's "hieroglvph." The last
glimpse of Harr\ Simmons in the poem is of "the astigmatic geologist" intent on
deciphering meaning in material traces.
In a number of places throughout the poem Walcott attempts to evoke the collective
consciousness of the community as a whole by using the same techniques he employs to
give expression to the sensibility of Gregorias. A sliding use of pronouns and the adoption
of other speech patterns allow another to speak through the voice of the narrator. It has
already been noted that the voice of the opening book is particularly reticent, and abandons
pronouncing'T' in order to focus attention on a representation of a younger self, "he." "the
boy," "the student." It is an assumed presence in the undifferentiated groups of schoolboys
twice evoked by the voice of an unidentified schoolmaster who questions them; “Boy!
Who was Ajax?" "Boy! Name the great harbours of the world!" The replies elicited by
these questions represent shared knowledge, the knowledge of education or common experience. At times th e ‘T ' merges with a never defined "we," as in the chapters
96 describing the Fouquarde family and the coasting voyage of Captain Fouquarde's ship The
Jewel from village to coastal village of St. Lucia. "We all knew when the captain had dr\
docked." "it seemed to u s..." "After a while, we lost him " The "I" emerges m isolated
comments that signal the response of an individual sensibilit> to specific experiences. Of
Mme. Fouquarde he records. "I imagined that skin, pomegranate, under silks sheen of
water" After a description of the blind Damley. one of the familiar figures of his
childhood he remembers. "Seeing him. I practised blindness.” The more commonly
impersonal narrative voice, however, makes the assumption that the sights and characters
described, and with them the implied influences of religion and religious rivalries, the awareness of furtive sexual hypocrisies, local superstition and folklore, the incongruous juxtaposition of natural beauty with poverty and social deprivation, are common propert} .
Even the description of the Walcott family home at 17, Chausée Road and the
invoked presence of the mother are made to take on representative dimensions. "Maman" in this chapter remains disembodied as a human being, presiding over the first half of the chapter as an informing presence, a sound and atmosphere associated with routine household tasks, and in the second half taking on the body of the decaying house. This is a
mother of mythological proportions:
You stitched us clothes from the nearest elements.
made shirts o f rain and freshlv ironed clouds...
97 They melt from you, your sons.
Your arms grow full o f rain. (12)
The house is a home, as well as an individual building with personal memories attached.
The “us" of these lines seems as inclusive as the "we" of the Captain Fouquarde passage discussed earlier.
The aim at these points in the poem seems to be to present personal experience as representative of a particular generation in a particular place. Any St. Lucian of Walcott's generation would recognize the school and schoolmaster, the villages passed by
Fouquarde s coasting steamer. The home and mother are 17, Chausée Road and Alix
Walcott respectively, but should also be recognizable as anyone's home and mother. While the shift o f the pronoun from "I" to “we" seeks to include the community as a whole in shared experience, two problems remain. The first is that members o f this community are individualized only in brief vignettes. The second is that they rarely speak, and when they do it is as fragmentary and often unidentified voices.
Qui coté c 'est I 'infer'^
Why, father, on this coast. (37)
or:
“We cure it"
98 said the young research scientist.
"and multiply the population problem (39)
At these points in the narrative, the authonal voice is inhabited brieflv by other voices which contribute to the re-creation o f the milieu of which they are part. At times, these voices repeat snatches of song. Janie's "O promise me." Mme. Fouquarde's "La vie est une voyage,” or the disembodied "A llo u ettetu n e of the lark's legions gone to hack pasta." or of poetry, as with Emanuel Auguste s quotation trom Omar Khayy am as he rows across the harbor, or the bird cries of Philomene and the blackbirds. Elsewhere in the poem, fragments of their speech are evoked, and carry into the standard English of the narrator echoes of other languages and other codes of West Indian English, snatches of French or
Kweyol, including the tiny Kweyol song of the fly (27), isolated phrases of church and schoolboy Latin (34-35), the “Barbadian brogue" of Weekes, the grocer. Like the members of the community whom they serve to evoke, these voices seem incidental to the main concems of the narrator.
There is occasionally an invasion of the authorial voice when the sensibility of the
“I” who speaks merges with that of another character and takes on some features of that character's discourse and with it the habits of mind that discourse implies. This is most noticeable when the distance between the two habits of mind is most marked and an element o f parody is present, as, for example, when in the course of Fouquarde's trip round
St. Lucia the former estates of a colonial ruling élite are described. Here the clipped,
99 telegraphic s\Titaxof their speech is parodied in the lines recalling these once powerful
landowners:
Aubrey Smith characters in khaki helmets.
Victonan tlcurish of oratorical moustaches.
Retired Captain X. w ho kept an open grave behind his house,
would shoot on sight. Shot him self sah!
B. reputedly galloped his charger through the canes,
pointed his whip at nubile coolie girls, "U p to the house.”
droit de seigneur^ keeping employment in the family. (38)
There is a similar invasion o f the voice by a parodied other in the passage describing a
British Council tea-party in Chapter 16. This technique, which successfully gives access to the voice and habit of mind of Gregorias, is never applied to the ordinary inhabitants of St.
Lucia, who remain a chorus in the background of the poem.
The references to silence and namelessness that permeate Another Life demonstrate
Walcott's awareness that as yet the people about whom and for whom he writes have not been adequately represented. Insofar as a West Indian sensibility is represented in the
poem it is that of the middle-class intellectual. Members o f the general population of the
West Indies appear in these earlier Walcott poems only as physical presences, recorded by an observer who gives the reader no clue to their inner lives. If as Walcott has suggested,
100 the business of poetr\ is to record the intimate and the personal, then these ordinary West
Indians must speak in his poems. The next stage in his de\elopment as a poet will be marked by the attempt to a \oice capable ofbreaking their silence. In the context in which
Walcott works, a language adequate to the representation of the v oices of ordinary people presents a problem. Writing as a St. Lucian for a wider West Indian audience, he adopts
Standard English, formally the official language of the West Indies, as a lingiia fruncu. and in doing so abandons the language of his primary subjects and primary audience, the people of St. Lucia, whose mother tongue is Kweyol. Moreover, there is a wide gap between the formal language he adopts and those languages actually spoken by his wider audience in the West Indies, where language use in each island from Jamaica to Trinidad conforms to local patterns. This is a problem which, at the level of praxis, Walcott declines to address in
Another Life.
During the composition of this poem, however, Walcott arrives at a number of insights that inform his subsequent work. Most importantly, the memory of his early commitment to the "labouring poor" of St. Lucia and the example of Harrold Simmons lead him to the realization that his work must in some way contain their experience, as Simmons is said to contain them. ("Their lives slipped into your own like letters under a door.") He portrays both Simmons and Gregorias as rooted in a local reality that finds expression in their a rt even when their practice is informed by non-local influences, and finds his own work, in contrast derivative. During the next decade, Walcott’s work is marked by a closer involvement with West Indian culture and by a return to the linguistic experiments of his
101 first volume o f poems. In a ( irccn Xii^/u. in an attempt to give adequate expression to the people whom he seeks to represent.
102 CHAPTERS
FROM CASTAWAY TO FORTl NATE TR.AVELER
Each of the five volumes of poems produced during the decade following the publication oî Another Life (1976 -1984) further develops the concept of what it means to be a West Indian poet as this concept emerges through Walcott’s representations and self representations and in the development of his poetic style. In each volume Walcott can be seen working progressively to assimilate into his poetic practice the insights gained from his re-evaluation of the example of Harrold Simmons. In Another Life,
Simmons has been presented as a paradigm of the West Indian artist, firmly rooted in locality, both product and producer of local culture, but as an artist who, nevertheless, feels free to utilize foreign influences in his work. Most importantly, however, he is represented as containing the consciousness of his community. He does not so much enter into their concems, as the concems of the community are said to “enter his
[Simmons’] understanding'' like a wayside country church.” If its members are to be fully represented in the work of the poet, they must appear as more than figures in a landscape, however lovingly evoked. In the work which follows the composition of
Another Ltje, Walcott demonstrates a concern that their voices should speak centrally
103 in his poems, not in fragmentan quotations interrupting the voice of a primarv poetic voice, but in a way that allows fuller expression of sensibilities other than his own.
In this chapter. 1 am concerned with discussing four areas of development m
Walcott's work during the years between 1976 and 1984 and their significance for the emerging paradigm of the West Indian poet. Firstly, and apparent in Sea drapes
(1976), there is a more conscious and consistent organization of each volume in a way that grounds the work firmly in a West Indian context. Secondly, the poet returns to a more experimental approach to language use, including code-shifting and the exploitation of a variety of vernacular codes, while the more personal and colloquial poetic voice, attributed to the influence of Lowell in an earlier chapter, at the same time becomes a more prominent feature of his style. As a corollary of this linguistic developm ent, from The Siar-Apple Kingdom (1979) onwards, Walcott uses his experience as a playwright to experiment with a variety of poetic voices and personae, as dramatic monologue becomes a dominant genre in his poetry. Finally, all of these experiments contribute to a revision of the figure of the West Indian poet, presented most fully in Midsummer (1981 ) but implicit in a number of poems in the earlier volumes as well as in the later /IrAumu.s Testament ( 1984).
Organization: “a world, a wholeness/an unbreakable O"
There is a marked difference in organization between the volumes of poetry- belonging to the period under discussion in this chapter and those produced before
104 1970. The criticism of W alcott's first published collection o f poems. In A (irccn
Sight, that, for all its variety, it lacks direction, could well be made of all the collections that precede Another Life. While each contains strong poems, the links which would forge each volume into a whole are often tenuous. This could be ascribed partially to the conditions of their publication. Two years after the British publication o f In a (irccn Ntght, the American edition of Selected I’oems was published by Farrar.
Strauss and Giroux, and included poems from the earlier volume as well as some that were later to be published by Jonathan Cape in the Bntish edition of The ( astaway in
1965. The British publication of The G ulf 'xn 1969 was followed by an Amencan edition, published in the following year and including poems from both editions issued earlier by Jonathan Cape. It is arguable that the American editions of these earlier works were never conceived as coherent wholes, but rather as representative collections of past and present work by the emerging poet. Even so, the British editions of The
( ustaway and The G ulf exhibit a similar apparent lack of overall structure.
Sea Grapes is the first collection of Walcott’s poems to appear unchanged in both British and American editions, and the first which shows positive, conscious shaping of the collection as a coherent whole. Robert Hamner draws attention to the effective patterning which informs this volume, expressing disagreement with the critic
Richard Pevear, who argues that the diversity of subject matter and style produce a characteristically disorganized text. ‘ Hamner points out that the poems fall into two sections, signaled by the opening poem, "Sea Grapes," whose stated theme is "the war
’ Richard Pevear "Caribbean Images S a tm n 12 February 1977, 186 105 between obsession and responsibility " The opening section consists of a series of
poems located in the Caribbean and including a preponderance of poems dealing with
"public" themes, many overtly political ( responsibility i. while the second turns to
material concerned with the personal and the literarv (obsession), and begins with a
geographically wider frame of reference, returning to a West Indian location towards
the end. Centrally placed in the text of Sea drapes and dividing the two sections are
the two key poems of the collection, "Names" and "Sainte Lucie.""
The division of the public and the personal mirrors one key distinction Patricia
Ismond draws between Walcott and Brathwaite in her essay of 1971. Here, she
identifies Brathwaite with the public and collective, both characterized as "African"
qualities, and Walcott with the personal and introspective, seen as characteristically
"European.” ' Ismond's essay provides a temperate and even-handed contribution to
what was at the time an acrimonious and unreasonable debate. The contrast she makes
between the two poets is just, taking into consideration their published work at that
time, particularly since she is at pains to point out the collective concems expressed in
Walcott's work and the personal and introspective elements in Brathwaite's.
Nevertheless, given the legitimate desire among West Indian writers and critics to
foreground the submerged African elements in West Indian culture, her characterization
of particular elements as essentially "African” or "European, " if pursued to its logical
conclusion, potentially places unnecessary restrictions upon West Indian poetry.
Moreover, it seems equally implausible that the "African" should exclude expression of
" Robert Hamner Derek Walcott, pp 102-107 ' Patricia Ismond ‘Walcon versus Brathwaite " C ar/A/)ea/i (jMor/er/v 17. 3-4 (December 1971): 54-71 106 individual sensibilities as that the "European" should preclude expression of the
collective. In giving both equal weight. Walcott claims both as appropriate to the West
Indian poet.
Walcott's method of organizing the poems in Scu (trapes, an extension of the
mapping strategy already noticed in earlier work, involves making poems with a West
Indian setting frame others set in the United States or Britain that deal with experience
in the wider world. Thus the West Indies is presented as the base from which these
observations are made and as the context in which they are to be read. Within this
frame St. Lucia functions as center and pivot from which all other locations radiate.
The strategy places the West Indies at both the margins and the center of the experience
with which the poet deals, rooting him in a specific locality, just as he has portrayed
Simmons as rooted in a native place. It locates the world in the context of the West
Indies and makes St. Lucia its axis. It also formally externalizes the self-division which
has hitherto marked the "Divided Child" o(Another Life and the poetic persona of
much of Walcott’s earlier work.
The division of Sea Grapes which Hamner recognizes, at least on one level of organization, as a geographical one is repeated with variations in the four collections
which follow. The geographical location is sometimes explicitly stated, as it is in both
The Fortunate Traveller and The Arkansas Testament. In the first of these, two brief
sections, labeled “North," frame the longer central section, "South." In The Arkansas
Testament, the location is less explicitly “Here" (the West Indies) and “Elsewhere."
Midsummer, by contrast, is divided simply into parts I and II. Nevertheless, content of
107 the two sections locates them just as distinctively as the geographical subheadings used in The Toriiinule TruvcHcr and The Arkansas Tesiantenl The poems of Section I are
placed in the context of a home base ("Here"), and read like the journal of a summer spent writing and painting in Tnnidad and St. Lucia, while Section II records summer visits to various places in the Caribbean, Europe and North America ("Elsewhere"). In this collection the division is superimposed over the unity of the season ( "I know midsummer is the same everywhere.'!
7'he Star-Apple Kingdom, while without material divisions, like Sea Grapes. also uses the technique of framing the text in context. Both opening and closing poems in this volume have a West Indian setting. The first, “The Schooner Flight," records a sea voyage from Trinidad to various islands in the former British West Indies, and the title poem, which concludes the volume, is set in Jamaica. These two poems also address the two poles of the division Walcott establishes in Sea Grapes, but in both the categories of personal obsession and public responsibility are deliberately merged. It is possible to see "The Schooner Flight" as focusing on the personal and literary in its depiction of the inner life of the poet-seaman Shabine, while "The Star-Apple
Kingdom" presents that of a political figure based partly on Michael Manley and partly on the fictional dictator of Autumn oj the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.'' In neither poem, however, does Walcott maintain a rigid division between the two
■* Ned Thomas ‘interview " vol. 3. no 2 (1981) 42-47 In answer to Thomas'question as to whether in "The Star-Apple Kingdom" Walcott is writing "in the person of Michael Manley," he replies "I am - 1 was - very close to Michael Manley, but it isn't him entirely, and of course the poem is modeled very closely on Marquez s Aiiiumn o f ihe Pairiarch The persona is a leader who is in Jamaica, but his background is not Manley s background" (43-44) 1 0 8 categories. Shabine's personal predicament is influenced by political events in
Trinidad, and the poem is permeated by references to Caribbean history and social
criticism that have resonance beyond the individual situation of its primary speaker. In
the same way, the principal figure in "The Star-Apple Kingdom” is. inevitably ,
influenced by personal as well as public considerations. Just as in life it is often
impossible to retain a rigid demarcation between the personal and the political, so in
these poems the two categories remain inextricably entangled. Walcott s strategy in
these and later poems is to attempt an aesthetic integration of the two.
Similarly, the geographical distinctions described above as informing the
collections of poems under discussion are not a matter of rigid and mechanical
separation of New World and Old, North and South, or Metropolis and Hinterland. In
each case, the opposed categories subtly infiltrate one another. In the group of three
poems set in Frederiksted, in the Virgin Islands, a little of the United States infiltrates a
Caribbean location. In “Schloss Erla," Europe leaks into New York in the form of a
picture on the wall of an apartment. The London crowd in "The Bright Field ' is seen metaphorically as a harv est "of cane or wheat,” “going in by Underground, by cab, by bullock cart," bringing the Caribbean to London and blurring geographical distinctions set up as a means of giving form to the volume. The intentional blurring of boundaries
is apparent in the closing lines of the poem;
These slow bel fry-strokes -
cast in the pool of London, from which swallows
109 rise in wide rings, and from their bright field, rooks -
mark the same beat by which the pelican goes
across Salybia as the tide lowers. (68)^
The geographical division gives shape and anchors the poet's observations in localitv.
but Walcott introduces such details to remind the reader of the permeabilitv of national
boundaries. Cultural influences flow across them in more than one direction,
contradicting the myth of national and cultural purity, and demonstrating the
inescapable connectedness of the world. The sensibilitv displayed in this
interpenetration of influences suggests a vision of a post-colonial global culture similar
to that theorized by At]un Appadurai in “Disjunction and Difference in the Global
Cultural Economy Appadurai argues persuasively against the common assumption
that cultural influence flows unchecked and unaltered from more economically and
politically powerful regions to impose itself upon poorer and less powerful cultures, or from metropolitan to colonial and post-colonial regions. He proposes a thorough study of the processes of cultural transmission that would take into account its complexitv and acknowledge that it is by no means a one way thoroughfare.
Walcott’s organizational strategies in these collections function aesthetically to create more united wholes, but they also serve the further purpose of defining and embodying Walcott's paradigmatic West Indian artist. The poet is situated
Derek Walcott Sea Grapes. London Jonathan Cape, 1979 ^ Aijun Appadurai "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy " hthhc Culture 2.2, Spring, 1990. pp 1-11. 15-24
1 10 geographically and politically in a way which directs the reading of his work From this point onwards it becomes impossible to support the assertion made by some cntics of his earlier work, such as Forde and Brathwaite. that Walcott is a West Indian artist working wholly within a European or North Amencan tradition
“Come back to me my language:" changes in the poetic voice from Sea Grapes to
The Arkansas Testament,
Study of Walcott's early work has revealed a poetic voice peculiarly assimilative of other voices, but primanly of European, literary voices. In In a Green
Sight (\962) Walcott demonstrates facility in imitating contemporary poets, often though not invariably writing in a Western tradition. It also includes poems that show
Walcott absorbing the style of the English metaphysical poets, for example, or producing an English pastiche of the sty le of Aimée Césaire. While the collection contains experiments in the use of West Indian vernaculars and, in "Tales of the
Islands," a low-key but effective use of code shifting, the voice in these poems operates for the most part as an undifferentiated Standard English user's voice, speaking out of the British tradition. The persona presented through this voice is that of the cosmopolitan, middle-class intellectual.
This first collection of poems, as I have noted earlier, ends with the aspiration stated in "Islands” towards an ideal clarity and precision of style:
11 1 seek.
As climate seeks its style, to write
Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight.
Cold as the curled wave, ordinary
As a tumbler of island water. {11)
The terms in which this ambition is couched point towards a certain impersonality of expression, naming as they do “crispness," coldness and the transparency of water as desired characteristics. The same aim is implied in lines written ten years later in
“Nearing Forty," in which Walcott invokes “the style past metaphor" and the image of verses “plain as a bleaching bedsheet under a gutter- ing rainspout" (106). The images involved at the same time suggest a desire for a local language and a dream of the re coupling of language with materiality. The tension between these contradictory desires, for an impersonal purity of an expression and at the same time for an indissoluble bond between language and the material world, informs Walcott's engagement with language throughout his career.
It is this conflicted attitude towards language that most distinctively separates his work from that of contemporary writers in the Euro-Amencan tradition, particularly those identified with a post-modem aesthetic. While Walcott’s interweaving and unweaving of the categories of personal/public and New World Old World, discussed in the previous section, accords with the post-structuralist strategy of deconstruction onginated by Derrida, his desire to establish a truth-value in language which links it
1 1 2 intimately with the familiar features of the material world makes it impossible to identify him with post-modern American poetrv, both at this stage in his career and in his later work up to the present, despite his increasing use of strategies normally identified with post-modernism. The contrast is clearest when his attitude to language is set against those of the L^A^N=G^U=A=G=E poets, who. broadly speaking, emphasize and celebrate the divorce of signifier from signified, language from materiality as a means of escape from the ideological "prison house of language.” For
Walcott, the search for an essential connection between language and the material world becomes a means for asserting a distinctively West Indian experience expressed in terms of West Indian language.
In the collections of poems under discussion in this chapter, the question of w hat language is appropriate to the voice of a West Indian poet remains a recurrent anxiety. Speaking to Sharon Ciccarelli, in an interview which took place early in 1977
(half way between the publication of Grupes and its succeeding volume The Star-
Apple Kingdom), Walcott responds to the question whether black writers should use the languages of their former colonial rulers, a traditional African language, or a vernacular by asserting that "the language of the master" may be fertilized by "the language of dialect" and that a fusion of the two is possible.^ Arguably, the proposed fusion between the two is already a feature of Walcott’s dramatic works (as for example
In an interview with J P White ( Green Mountain Revte^’. Vol 4. no I. Spring-Summer, 1990, 14-37) while Walcott was in the process of writing Omeros, he expresses his search for a language adequate to such a task as a quest for "real Caribbean nouns" (p 37) " Sharon Ciccarelli "Reflections Before and After Carnival an interview with Derek Walcott " Chant o f Saints: A Gathenn}; o f Afro-Amertcan l.tterature. Art. and Scholarship, eds. Michael S. Harper and Robert S Stepto Urbana U o f Illinois Press, 1979 296-309 1 13 Dream on Monkey Mountain), and his practice in the drama informs discussion of
language use in this interv iew and others conducted during the same period. ^ The
metaphor he uses to express this fusion is of the two languages as left hand and right
hand, two limbs of the same body. In the course of this part of the discussion, he is at
pains to emphasize the importance of preserving the sense of orality in the written
language: ‘i don't think that one should attempt to destroy the syntax of one's own
conversation.” However, in conversation with Edward Hirsch later in the same year,
after an enthusiastic appreciation of the metaphorical richness of West Indian
vernaculars, he explains the relative absence of vernacular usage in his poetry compared
to his plays and seems to reject the vernacular as a medium for poetry on the grounds
that it would not accurately represent his own voice:'" "1 couldn't pretend that my
voice was the voice of the St. Lucia peasant or fisherman. So for the poetry to be true,
it had to be accurate, quietly accurate in terms of my own voice.” The issue here is as
much that the use of the vernacular would be inappropriate to the fictional persona of
Derek Walcott, the poet, who appears in the poems as representative West Indian Poet,
as that the historical character, Walcott, does not speak this language. If the voice that
speaks from the poem must correspond to the speaking voice of the poet, and if the only
voice appropriate to the poet is judged to be the formal Standard English of an
' In the play Dream on Monkey Mountain, the facsimile o f realism created by the use of West Indian vernacular speech in dialogue is repeatedly disrupted by soliloquy or longer reflective speeches which utilize a more traditionally lyrical style ".\n Interview with Derek Walcott ' Edward Hirsch. Contemporary Literature. \'o\.20, no i (Summer 1979), 279-92 114 educated, middle-class speaker, then the vernacular finds its place in the representation of the speech of others, either in drama or in the dramatic monologue.
In the interview with Ciccarelli cited earlier, Walcott discusses the problems involved in using authentic vernacular speech in his plays. He feels that in writing for the stage he cannot use what he describes as "pure Creole." In part, he is deterred by the shifting nature of vernaculars and the speed with which the language of the streets mutates and becomes dated. An equally important consideration is the diversity of both English and French Creoles in the West Indies that can make understanding difficult beyond the immediate speech communit>' in which a particular version of
Creole is current:
It is very difficult, in one sense, for a Trinidadian to understand a
Jamaican, or for a Jamaican to understand a Barbadian, but since one
considers the Caribbean — the English-speaking Caribbean — as a whole,
as sharing one language with various contributory sources, one must try
to find, using syntaxes from various dialects if necessary, one form that
would be comprehensible not only to all the people in the region that
speak in that one tone of voice, but to people everywhere. It is like
making an amalgam, a fusion, of all the dialects into something that will
work on stage. ' '
Ciccarelli p 301 115 He cites as an example of this fusion the language used to approximate to Rastafarian speech in O Babylon', a play set in Jamaica, but wntten and first perform ed in Tnnidad by Trinidadian actors. He comments that, although he has not produced a literal transcription of Jamaican speech, ' I believe that the tone itself is accurate. Even if, for instance, it is spoken with a Trinidadian accent” (Ciccarelli, 301 )
Much depends on how Walcott's use of the word “tone" is to be interpreted in this passage and elsewhere, when he speaks of “capturing [the] tone" of certain characters in dramatic dialogue. It is clear that he does not use the term only to denote a local accent, since he says that he is aiming for an idiom which will work regardless of the actor's accent, and he speaks of incorporating features of the syntax of various dialects. Equally clearly, it cannot be assigned to either of the other two definitions of
“tone " given in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry’ and Poetics — the pervading mood of a work, and the pitch of the speaking voice. Walcott's use of the term seems to be closer to the sense in which it is used in speaking of the visual arts. Since
Walcott initially intended to be a painter rather than a poet, and maintains a keen interest in visual art, this seems a reasonable interpretation. Ruskin's definition of the word, cited in the OED, implies an overall aesthetic, as opposed to an emotive, effect:
I understand two things by the word Tone\ first, the exact relief and
relation of objects against and to each other in substance and darkness,
as the nearer or more distant, and the perfect relation of the shades of all
of them to the chief light of the picture...: secondly, the exact relation of
116 the colours of the shadows to the colours of the lights, so that they may
be at once felt to be merely different degrees of the same light.
In a much later interv iew. Walcott speaks of hearing C.L.R. James lecture and
describes his accent as one “whose melody had remained Caribbean."’* He goes on to
comment that "the accuracy of the melody [also referred to later as "the accuracy of the
inner voice"] is the thing" that the writer attempts to capture. In attempting to clarifv
this statement, he uses the example of a sentence by Hemingway, which uses English
words but is, nevertheless, recognizably an American sentence. He insists, "It's not a
matter of the language; it’s a matter of the accent, it's a matter of tone.” Arguably, the qualities he has in mind here would include syntax, phrasing and word order used in
written language to reproduce the characteristic speech rhythms of the speaking voice.
It is tempting to equate Walcott’s tone" with the "riddims" identified by
Brathwaite in The Hisiory’ o f the Voice, and to interpret the word as signifying a characteristic tune or speech rhythm that in its overall effect remains true to the rhythms
of West Indian speech. At the root of this concern is the difficulty of captunng the oral in written form, a project which Walcott shares with other West Indian writers of his generation, novelists as well as poets. Brathwaite, Lamming, and Selvon, among others, each produces his own solution to the problem; each is involved in a kind of translation which produces, not orality itself, but a more or less convincing representation of orality.
II ... An Interview with Derek Walcott." Charles H. Rowell Callalloo. Vol 11, no 1, Winter 1988 pp80- 89 117 Walcott's comments in the interview with Cicareiii cited in this section demonstrate an awareness that all representations of the vernacular are in a sense fictions. The ev idence of the four volumes of poems under discussion would suggest that this insight enables him to employ West Indian vernaculars in his poetrv in a way he has not attempted since his early experiments in In u (}reen (1964). Dramatic monologue, particularly in The Star Apple Kingdom (1979) and The T'ortnnaie
Traveller (1982), provides him with a field for further experiments in the use of vernaculars, but in some poems he employs a fusion of vernacular and standard English which involves the voice of the poet, speaking in both standard English and in Créole, as well as those of his fictional characters, speaking a variety of West Indian vernaculars.
Sea Grapes shows Walcott addressing the problem of language for the West
Indian writer and continuing to experiment with vernaculars and with code shifting in his poetry. The two poems which mark the pole and center of this volume. “Names" and "Sainte Lucie," both take as their subject matter language use and its implications in a West Indian context. The first of these takes the form of a meditation on the impact of European languages on a West Indian sensibility and the consequences of
West Indian appropriation for European languages. The second includes in its central section Walcott's first extended use of Kweyol, and throughout exploits a shifting between Standard English and both French and English based Creoles.
"Names," dedicated to Brathwaite, begins with an exploration of the origins of
"my race" and a definition of race which undoes itself, including as it does "the
118 goldsmith from Benares, the stone-cutter from Canton, the bronzesmith from Benin.” three representatives of some of the non-European components of West Indian populations (32). That each is ascribed a craft signals their derivation from aesthetically and technologically adv anced cultures. This evocation of origins, however, is undercut by the image of the sea as origin, and of a past empty of cultural referents, "with no nouns, and with no horizons." “no memorv," "no future.” "with nothing in our hands// but this stick, to trace our names on sand.” The image evokes the cultural and historical loss of transplanted populations, but, in the context of the group of poems ("Natural History”) which precedes "Names” in the text, it also provides a reminder of the blankness of all human origins, of the earliest life-forms emerging from the sea at the beginning of evolutionary history. There is no division of peoples, "no horizons" to divide either the world or the mind.
Implicit in the first section of the poem is a deconstruction of the concept of
"race” or "nationality,” or, perhaps more accurately, a reconstruction of these concepts which would end by defining them according to criteria other than those conventionally used. The inclusion under the heading "my race" of figures representing three distinct geographical locations and cultural inheritances implies that the basis Walcott proposes for defining a West Indian "race" is one of currently shared space, shared experience, and shared deprivation. Paradoxically, considering the way in which the concept of racial origins has been called into question, Walcott presents the origin of a West Indian
"race" as natural; emergence from the ocean without history, language or any cultural frame of reference. For the purposes of the poem, this group falls into historical time
119 and derives an identity from its immediate material circumstances. The language proposed for them is wordless, consisting only of the osprey's "terrible vowel ... that I '" which is an assertion of identity (33). Language, like history, has yet to be invented, and history (as Walcott makes clear in the later poem " The Sea Is History. " [The Siur-
Apple Kingdom, 1979]) begins with self - determination.
The second section of the poem explores the impact and validity of the process of naming carried out by European colonialists, and the subversive appropriation of those names by their displaced colonial subjects.
Being men, they could not live
except they first presumed
the right of everything to be a noun.
The African acquiesced,
repeated and changed them. (34)
The brief catalogue of Kweyol nouns which follows signals that the process of appropriation is far from a matter of passive repetition. Having already discussed and dismissed the question of motivation in the transfer of European names to Caribbean localities, Walcott goes on to assert the primacy of natural phenomena over the cultural counterparts for which they have been named, whether in nostalgia or ironical derision.
These palms are greater than Versailles,
120 for no man made them.
their fallen columns greater than Castille.
no man unmade them
except the worm, who has no helmet.
but was always the emperor (34).
This seemingly simple image points out the arbitrariness of naming, and at the same time provides a reminder of the transitory nature of political power. The poem, which has so far been enunciated in an impersonal and un-individualized voice, ends with the voice of an unseen and unnamed schoolmaster demanding new names for the stars “Not
Orion, not Betelgeuse," and receiving the answer “Sir, fireflies caught in molasses," an answer which takes the immediate phenomena of the material world as its point of reference.
While "Names" has no precise location, and takes place in a generalized
Caribbean location, “Sainte Lucie" is at the outset precisely located both geographically and linguistically in a St. Lucia which is given its Kweyol name. The poem's first section, written in Standard English, is an evocation of place and the memory of a childhood haunted by the sense of “something always being missing." The poem extends the truncated catalogue of “Names" to include, in its first section, local place- names, “Laborie, Choiseul, Vieuxfort, Dennery," and, in the section that follows, personal names, “Martina, or Eunice/ or Lucilla," besides a hesitantly remembered lexicon of Kweyol words, "pomme cythere,/ pomme granate,/ ...pomme/l have
121 forgottea vvhat word for the Irish potato" (35-36). These catalogues of nouns produce the effect of working back towards a personal origin to which the memor\ of the
language of childhood holds the key. As the poem proceeds, listing gives way to inclusion of snatches of Kweyol embedded in a matrix of Standard English, as the speaker's reverie becomes deeper, and his syntax more fragmentary. The movement of the verse mimics the movement of a mind at rest, sliding from language to the landscape suggested by language, or from landscape to the language suggested by landscape. The phrase hetassiori" (in the country) seems powerfully evocative of locality for the speaker and is repeated, ”en haut betassioa ” "in the country station/ en betassion," “gens betassion/ belle ti fille betassion." Through incantatory repetition it develops resonance even for the reader who is unfamiliar with Kweyol. A reader familiar with Walcott's work might remember his use of the same phrase in the essay
“Leaving School,” where it is used in connection with his boyhood visits to Grace
Augustin's D'Aubignan and Patience estates, the site of his early commitment to the place and people of St. Lucia, described in Another Life. ' ’
Free verbal play introduces the repeated play on the words “important imported.” Water is important ("important?/ imported?") but is "the morning powerful/ important coffee " important or imported? Is only what is imported important? Water is not imported and is important. Coffee is important and may be imported, but maybe only from “the indigo mountains/ of Jamaica.” The implication is that the local is
“Leaving School " rpt Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott 26 Another Life Book One, Chapter 7, 42-13
1 2 2 important, as the speaker goes on to identity as important the names of "small rivers”
and "the important corporal in the country, station In the process of this word-play,
the code shifts to an English-based Creole - arguably, the intruding voice in the empty
schoolyard ( "O so you is Walcott'’.. ."), but possibly also that of the pnmaiy speaker
earlier in the same passage ( "teacher dead today the fruit rotting yellow on the
ground”). The indeterminacy of the speaker at this point, and the uncertainty of
whether the idiom of one invades the speech of the other, creates the effect of a shared
sensibility, that expresses itself in a shared language. The linguistic play of this second
section of the poem culminates in the speaker s self-identification: "moi c'est gens Ste
Lucie./ C'est la moi sorti:/ is there I bom” (39).
The simple assertion which identifies a personal origin prepares the ground for the central section of the poem, “Iona," which is presented both in Kweyol and in a
version of English-based Creole, printed side by side. A note identifies "Iona" as a St.
Lucian folk song, “heard on the back of an open truck travelling to Vieuxfort" (40). In a sense Walcott both takes possession of this communal material, making it his own in translation, and repudiates ownership of it by pointing out its folk origins. In effect, the juxtaposition of the two versions suggests a process of composition shared between poet and community, and the formation of a tradition which grows out of reciprocal exchange. In the closing section of the poem, a reflection on Dunstan St. Omer's altarpiece in the Roseau Valley Church, language use reverts to the Standard English of its opening section. The voice of this final section gives the impression that, here,
Walcott himself speaks in his own person, not as a composite figure of the West Indian
123 poet nor as spokesman for a community. What is presented in this section is a distinctly individual response to St. Omer's triptych that can only be Walcott's reading of the painting. The subject matter of this section, however, re-enforces the impression of reciprocity between artist and community created in the previous sections, as the people and life of the Roseau valley find their reflection in the altarpiece that depicts them.
The code switching of the second section of the poem is a development of the technique used in Another Life, in which the poet's voice is briefly inhabited by the speech codes of other voices. It differs from the voice of the earlier poems in that the poet’s voice now reproduces the vernacular speech of his locality as well as the
Standard English of his education. English-lexicon Creole has previously been employed mainly in set-pieces arguably intended as dramatic monologue, like
"Pocomania" and "Parang," or as fragmentary quotation, or an ambiguous possibility , as it is in Another Life. '■* In "Sainte Lucie," it becomes part of the fabric of the poetic voice, undivided from it by quotation marks or italics, and signifying a closer identification with the people to whom and for whom the poet aspires to speak. The voice and language of this poem are hybrid and constructed no less than those of "Ruins of a Great House" ( and as, perhaps, all poetic languages could be said to be hybrid and constructed), but their components are self-consciously oral and local rather than literary and imported.
Language use in most of the poems in Sea Grapes differs little, if at all, from that of Walcott's earlier collections of poems. Most use Standard English, though in
"But I tired o f your whining. Grandfather " Another Life (209) Is this an unproblematic Standard English past tense, or a Creole present 124 many vernacular expressions blend imperceptibly, as for example "botay” and
“marron" in the final section of"Sainte Lucie," and as they have done in poems as early as “Tales of the Islands" and “Origins." In only one poem in this volume. “Dread
Song," is the language a synthetic version of a West Indian vernacular, and here a comparison with the language o f for example, “Pocomania" shows how much more economically and tactfully this is rendered than in the earlier works. Walcott's reflections on language in Sea (trapes, however, and his use of it especially in "Sainte
Lucie," indicates the direction that development of the poetic voice will take in subsequent collections and in Omeros.
The use of West Indian vernaculars is only one of the ways in which the poetic voice of these poems is diversified. In subsequent volumes, from The Star-Apple
Kingdom onwards, Walcott also begins to employ a greater and subtler variety of codes and jargons of spoken and written English, besides those which mark distinctions of class, education and region. One of the most striking examples of this type of code shifting comes in the title poem of The Star-Apple Kingdom, in which the voice of an impersonal narrator merges with that of his character in a way that is reminiscent of the merging of voices in Another Life. Here the Jargons of the schoolroom, the boardroom, the political meeting, and the newspaper report mingle with the linguistic play and surreal imagery associated with poefic fantasy.
In the passage in which the central character watches night fall from the window of the Great House, the language of colonial nostalgia (“the lilies of parasols on the floating lawns”) gives way to a mingling of the lyrical evocation of dusk in the gardens
125 and an ironical deployment of the cliches ot'casual speech ("the tlowers tightened their fists in the name of thrift., the porcelain lamps of ripe cocoa, the magnolia's jet dimmed on the one circuit with the ginger lilies"). The mundane trope of saving electricity adds a further element of surprise to this passage. The jargon of politics and the cadence of speech are also components in the mixture;
and, had his mandate extended to the ceiling
of star-apple trees, he would have ordered
the sky to sleep, saying. I'm tired,
save the starlight for victories, we can’t afford it,
leave the moon on for one more hour, and that’s it (48).
In this and in similar passages, it is easy to overlook the paif played by subtle shifting of linguistic codes in creating the effect of incongruity that also depends upon the juxtaposition of heterogeneous images. Nevertheless, both techniques are crucial to the final effect. ' ' Without the use of specific, local forms of discourse to place the poem in its West Indian context the play of contrasted images would be reduced to an ingenious and diverting aesthetic effect. Language use situates the poem both geographically and politically, focusing attention upon a specific regional set of conditions and hence directing a reader's response.
' ■ Other passages in which the use o f this technique is strikingly obvious include the section pp 50-51, which mixes the language of theology with that of revolution and in which the use of Spanish place names and personal names plays a part, and that on pp 53-54
1 2 6 In the process of experimenting with the voices of his fictional personae and
with code shifting, Walcott also makes more extensive use of a personal voice in other
poems where the speaker is a representation of himself as poet rather than as a
representative figure, as for example in the closing section of "Sainte Lucie." In a
number of these poems the voice is more relaxed and colloquial than the characteristic
voice of much of his early work: the figure of the p»oet is given access to an informal
voice which can speak intimately as well as declaim. While this is most obvious in the
unmistakably self-reflexive poems in Midsummer (1984), it is also a feature of some of
the poems in the earlier volumes under discussion in this chapter, and occasionally in
earlier work, for example in "A Village Life ' and "'Blues," both of which appear in The
G u lf (1970). Like the voices of his invented personae, this voice employs not a
transcription of the poet's natural speech but a constructed language, that is as much a
written approximation to speech, as the "theatre language" he refers to in discussion of
the constructed Rastafarian speech in O Babylon' It may use elements of West Indian
vernaculars in order to evoke experience shared with the community ("Schoolyard empty, teacher dead today... ) or alternatively to express the deepest and most personal
convictions ("Moi c'est gens Sainte Lucie..."). It may also employ the standard English of an educated, middle class West Indian speaker, as in the concluding section of
"Sainte Lucie." In producing such a voice Walcott lays claim to the right to speak both personally and for the collective, and, in the process, to blur the distinctions between the two.
127 ‘T/iéf peopled head: " Dramatic Monologue The Starin Apple Kingdom and The
Fortunate Traveller
In the later volumes published during this decade, Walcott increasingly mixes different codes and registers of the vernaculars spoken in the West Indies with the more literary codes of his earlier work. This includes, but is not restricted to. both English and French lexicon Creoles and is most obvious in the dramatic monologues which make up almost half the content of The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979). The most striking example is “The Schooner Flight," with its extensive use of an English based Creole.
The Fortunate Traveller (1982) also includes several dramatic monologues, among them the title poem and the long poem “The Spoiler's Return."'^’ Elsewhere, the techniques of dramatic monologue are employed in poems in which the primarv voice is that of an impersonal narrator and the secondary voice that of the character, who intervenes to supplement the narrator's account. Still other poems in these collections proffer an impersonal narrator whose voice slides into that of the character being described to produce the effect of a merging of sensibilities similar to that which has been observed in Another Life and in “Sainte Lucie.” In such poems Walcott adopts the techniques of dramatic monologue to create the voice of the character, who plays a part in the narration of his own story. The effect he produces in these poems is not a
“The Spoiler’s Return" is also an interesting example o f code switching which slides between the idiom of the Trinidadian calypsonian and a pastiche o f eighteenth century English Moreover, it employs an ambiguous rhythm which can be read alternatively as heroic couplets or as following the rhythm of calypso The effect is a deliberate uncomfortable jolting of the reader between the two, so that it is impossible to rest in either version.
1 2 8 collage of voices of the kind presented in Brathwaite's The Arrivant.s. but something more like the blending of two or more voices in a choral work, in which sometimes one and sometimes another dominates. In both "The Star-Apple Kingdom" and "The
Liberator," for example, the initial impression is that an impersonal narrator speaks and that the voice of the character takes over at some undefined point in the course of narration, a technique which has already been noted in "Sainte Lucie." and is later to be used extensively in Omeros.
The fictional persona in dramatic monologue, with its concomitant overt separation of the poet from the voice that speaks out of the poem, has two important consequences for Walcott's poetry at this stage. Firstly, it frees him to experiment with vernaculars as widely as he has previously done in his dramatic works. In creating characters for the stage he has already had considerable experience in producing convincing representations of the many codes and registers of West Indian English, which is now put to good use in the poems. Equally importantly, dramatic monologue explicitly removes his work from the confessional mode, which had dominated
American poetiy during the sixties and early seventies, and continues to exert its influence, to the extent that the non-academic reader tends to assume that the voice of the poem is the voice of the poet speaking the truth about the circumstances of his own life. This distancing effect o f dramatic monologue is useful to Walcott in those poems in which his aim is to bring to voice characters who have previously been silenced or whose voices have been marginalized, both in society and in his earlier poetry.
In Midsummer, he writes of the characters of his imagination;
129 Specters multiply with age. the peopled head
IS crossed by impatient characters, the ears clamped shut:
behind them I hear the actors mutter and shout —
the lit stage is empty, the set prepared.
and I cannot find the key to let them out (23).
This trope which refers to the process of composition for the stage seems also a particularly apt reference to the process of finding voices for the characters who inhabit his poems. In the works up to and including Another Life they have been portrayed from the outside, as figures in a landscape or mimes on stage. In the poems of these middle years his task is to 'unclamp ' the shut ears and hear their voices, and to produce an inhabited voice to match the perception of the "peopled head." Ultimately, this project involves the displacement of the voice of the poet, which has so far acted as a controlling consciousness in the poems. In later works the voices of others are included and come to play an equal, or even a dominant, role. The poetic self is decentered and fragmented in the process. Thus, while in some poems Walcott adopts the dramatic monologue primarily to bring to voice those who have been silent in his earlier work, the form could also be said to provide a safe space in which to explore the idea of the fragmented self embodied in a representative other.
Typically, the dramatic monologue emphasizes the separateness of poet and narrator by positing a fictitious or historical character as speaker, but also through the
130 irony evoked by the speaker's apparently unconscious self-revelation. In a poem of this sort the reader is aware of the poet 's critical consciousness at work and reflecting on the
persona who speaks.'^ This etTect is present, for example, in "Koenig of the River” and
"The Liberator, " both poems of the type in which the voices of both character and
impersonal narrator are represented. In the first of these, the project of colonialism is criticized through the ironical self-revelation of Koenig, the sole survivor of a missionary expedition. We are allowed to share his thoughts, but are also made aware o f the speciousness o f his reasoning:
If he knew he was lost he was not lost.
It was when you pretended that you were a fool.
He banked and leaned tiredly on the pole.
If I'm a character called Koenig, then I
shall dominate my future like a fiction (43).
In the second, the voice of the revolutionary, Sonora, is used to present a characteristic failure of will on the part of the opponents of colonial rule: "We was going so good.
But then, they get tired.” The resulting effect is one of empathy between narrator and
‘ I have in mind the form of dramatic monologue in Victorian poetry, exemplified by Browning in, for example, "My Last Duchess" or "Mr Sludge the Medium " I am aware that dramatic monologue has a history which predates the Victorians ("The Dream of the Rood" is the earliest example I can think of in English) and that in other Victorian e.xamples. as for example in Tennyson's "Tithonus," the persona is a thin disguise for the poet. The ironical mode seems to me to be the development which has been carried forward into modernist dramatic monologue (Eliot 's "Portrait of a Lady" Pound’s "High Selwyn Mauberlev ' provide examples ) 131 character as the voice of one merges into that of the other, but the separation implied by
the use of two voices allows the poet to preserv e an ironical distance that enables him
to comment critically upon the characters he presents.
More frequently in Walcott's use of the genre, however, that sense of the
presence of an ironical and critical observer behind the persona is absent, as is the case
in "The Saddhu of Couva." Here the voice is that of the Saddhu, a clearly fictional
persona whose material circumstances and background are quite different from those of the poet. The poem evokes a particular landscape and explores the theme of change
(the wound of Time, which is to be explored more thoroughly in Omeros) entirely through the inner consciousness of this character. There is a difference in kind between the way in which Walcott assumes this persona and, for example, his use of the
"Castaway" or Crusoe persona in earlier poems. The most obvious difference is that
Crusoe is a ready-made literary character that the poet adapts for his own purposes, whereas the Saddhu is Walcott's fiction, drawn from his immediate experience of
Trinidadian East Indians. He remains un-named and functions as much as a representative figure as a particular individual. This in itself is a significant departure
from the nineteenth century form of dramatic monologue, though it is arguably a feature of Eliot's Prufrock and Pound’s Mauberley that they evoke a collective consciousness. The absence of ironical distance between poet and persona in this poem, however, is a more significant difference, and creates the impression that the poet effaces himself or allows the persona to take over his voice.
The CastoHoy and Other Poems London: Jonathan Cape, 1965 132 In an early interview with Dennis Scott Walcott refers to the Crusoe persona as a mask, quoting Yeats’ dictum "Give a man a mask and he will tell the truth The implication is that in the Crusoe poems the persona acts as a kind of ventriloquist's dummy, manipulated by the poet and speaking the poet's words, dealing with his issues.
In the Crusoe poems, there is a sense that the apparent self effacement of the poet is, as
Walcott tells Scott, a fake." It is difficult to estimate, however, to what extent Walcott sees Crusoe as a mask for himself and to what extent Crusoe functions as a metaphor for the West Indian poet in general. In the same interview, he complains to Scott that he seems to be expected to live up to the mask; this character who is being interviewed and met and so on is not somebody I recognize." In the case of the Saddhu, the persona is more unambiguously a representative figure rather than a semi transparent mask for Walcott as individual.
The problem of the extent to which the fictional personae of these later dramatic monologues are “masks" is raised again in the much later interview with Charles
Rowell, who questions the difference in voice between Another Life and “The Schooner
Flight." Walcott responds that if he read both poems aloud an audience would ask whether in one or the other he was "doing an act." He distances Shabine as a fictional persona, asserting that this is "a dramatic poem:"
The basic language out of which that dialect emerges, comes out of a
dramatization through the medium of masks or faces or characters. It
WaJcort on Walcon ■■ Dennis Scon, ('aribbean (Juarierly 14, 1&2 ( 1968), 77-82. remains that, because our thinking is not pitched at the level of dialect.
I 'm not saying that dialect is incapable of conveying intellectual
subtleties; I'm saying that to be true to the interior tone of reflection you
need to know the exact measures of the sound you are reflecting. If I
become Shabine, then there are passages, I think, in "The Schooner
/'/ighi" that seem to me a little too elevated. ... When that happens the
persona has not remained completely whole.""
There is some contradiction in the way in which Walcott separates himself from his
character and yet at the same time speaks of "becom[ing] Shabine" and of the
‘"wholeness" of the persona, as if his aim were to achieve a fusion of consciousness between himself and his character. His stated aim is to create a "whole" persona, separate from himself, that functions as a representative figure, yet underlying this declared objective is an attempt to integrate the public and personal elements of West
Indian experience, "obsession" and "responsibility," and to integrate expression of his
individual sensibility with that of the collective.
The tension between the desire to "become Shabine" and Walcott s awareness that he "could not pretend that my voice was the voice of the St. Lucian peasant or fisherman" contributes to his uneasy recognition that "the persona has not remained completely whole." The consciousness of the poet, Walcott, is neither submerged in that of his persona, as it is in “The Saddhu of Couva," nor is it a separate observing
Rowell, p 86. 134 presence, as in Another Life, neither does it imperceptibly merge with and separate from the consciousness of the character, as it does in " I he Liberator ' While the poem presents Walcott's most extensive and successful use of an English lexicon Creole in his poetry to date, the poet's response to Rowell's question suggests a certain dissatisfaction with the voice, rather than the language, of the poem that seems to spring from an awareness that sensibility of the poet and that of his persona are inadequately- integrated or in some sense mismatched. I would like to suggest that the root of this problem lies in Walcott's attempt to integrate public and personal utterance in this poem, and to merge his own consciousness with that of his collective persona Shabine.
' either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation:" the fragmented self in “The Schooner
Flight'' and “The Fortunate Traveller.”
Rita Dove, in her review o f Collected Poems I94H-!9S-f. characterizes Shabine as a West Indian Everyman, who “embodies the universal in the particular.""' She points out that Shabine, unlike Walcott, has never left the islands and “suffers no agonizing sense of estrangement from the spirit of his community " (259), accepting his status as representative fiction rather than a poetic “mask. " The poem provides ample support for this view. Shabine's "vain search for one island that heals with its harbor/ and a guiltless horizon" is ambiguously motivated, in a way that makes it anybody's search, though political and historical details identify it more clearly the as search of
Rita Dove Review of Collected Poems 1948-1984 in Parwatvwi. vol 14, no 1 rpi. Panias.'nts: Twewo Years o f Poetry m Revien- ed Herbert Leibowitz. Ann Arbor U Michigan P, 1994 pp 244 -271 135 any West Indian. As the title suggests, it is a flight, but on various levels it is a flight
from failed relationships, from poverty and exploitation by the economically powerful,
from political corruption and the failure to identify with the political movements of his
time. The course of his flight maps the Caribbean and places the poem in a tradition of
West Indian writing that deals with journeys, often repetitive journeys that involve a
mapping of histoncal as well as geographical territory .
The Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris' "The Palace of the Peacock." for
example, deals with the journey of an expeditionary force's trek into the interior in
search of Indian labor for the plantation of its leader. Their Journey is presented as
having taken place many times before and always ending with the deaths of the entire
party. Its members are doomed to go on repeating the same actions until they arrive at some understanding of what they are doing and why. V.S. NaipauTs novel "A Bend in
the River" charts the protagonist Selim’s repetition of the earlier East Indian traders’ expeditions from the East African coast into the interior and back again, and his African
servant Metty’s retracing of the steps of earlier African slaves along the same route.
The collections of essays. Beyond a Boundary’ by C.L.R. James and The Pleasures o f
Exile by George Lamming, are informed by a repetitive re-tracing of the route of the triangular trade from Africa to the Caribbean to North America to Britain and back again, successive essays being located at each of these sites. Brathwaite’s The
Arrivants covers the same ground, mapping the Caribbean diaspora.
If Walcott’s poem is accepted as a further contribution to this established West
Indian form, then Shabine clearly functions within it as a representation of West Indian
1 3 6 man, in the process of self-realization: "either Cm nobody, or Cm a nation" (4),
Shabine's circling of the islands shares a similar motivation, as he seeks, provisionally, to construct a sense of self out of personal relationships, out of political conviction, occupation, history, religion, and. since he is also a poet, out of words: "But that's all them bastards have left us: words " The persona presented in the poem is fragmentary, contradictory, provisional, the quest a process of making and remaking the self. The fragmentation of the self can be seen as instrumental in the presentation of diverse composite experience. Shabine's contradictory vacillations between desire to return to home and family and his urge towards flight, his love of native place and horror at the political and economic corruption he sees there, and his perception of the sea, the
Caribbean, both as material and historical terror and as source of identity and sustenance — all contribute to the perception of his function as representative man.
Nevertheless, Shabine is also a poet, and, although he can be seen on one level as an embodiment of the West Indian Poet, he also shares many details of personal it\ and personal history with his creator. Dove, in the review cited earlier, draws attention to Shabine's poetic manifesto:
... each phrase go be soaked in salt;
I go draw and knot every line as tight
as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
my common language go be the wind,
my page the sails of the schooner Fhg/u. (5)
1 3 7 In doing so. she observ es astutely that Shabine's statement of poetic intent is close to
Walcott's expressed desire for linguistic clarity and immediacy, as well as being
expressed in metaphors of clear water and homely simplicity ("cold as the curled wave,
ordinal} As a tumbler of island water " from "Islands " In a (irecn .V/gA/. 77 ).
Other features also link the two. The character of Shabine, as presented in the
poem, shares many of the characteristics of both the historical W^alcott and his fictional
counterpart in Another Life. Like Walcott in such poems as "Return to D'Ennery.
Shabine exhibits a self-consciousness that leads him to stand back and observe himself
as Other, for example in his account of leaving Maria Conception;
... and 1 look in the rearview and see a man
exactly like me and the man was weeping. (4)
Shabine's claim. "I have Dutch, nigger and English in me, " the reference to his "sound
colonial education. " and his name, "the patois for/ any red nigger, " all call to mind
details of Walcott's own history as presented both in autobiographical prose pieces and
in various interv iews. Shabine’s account of his meeting with his "bastard grandfather"
finds its echo when, in a poem in the later collection S/fidsummer {\9%A), Walcott
identifies England as the birthplace of his "bastard grandsires ' {Midsummer xxxvi, 49).
Shabine's saving memory of his childhood faith is located in "the Methodist chapel/ in
Chisel Street Castries." also the place of worship of Alix Walcott and her children.
138 In the poem, these details are ambiguously deployed to serve the presentation of
Shabine as representative. His claim of mixed ancestry could as well refer to a cultural as a genetic heritage, while the term "red " is used in the Eastern Caribbean to denote a person of light complexion, a pigmentation that occurs naturally among people of purely African descent, as well as those of mixed European and African descent.
Nevertheless, the correspondences are sufficiently marked to make it reasonable to identify Shabine as, at least in part, a representation of Walcott as private individual rather than as a representative of the West Indian poet in general, and to see the poem as an exploration of personal conflicts and contradictions as well as those of a representative figure.
A further example of the presentation in dramatic monologue of a fragmented persona as representative of a group is ' The Fortunate Traveller," in which the reader must piece together a narrative from the fragmentary perceptions of its fictional narrator. On first reading, as in "The Schooner Flight," the narrator appears as clearly a fictional character separate from the poet. His identity is uncertain; though it is clear that he is a member of an educated and often politically cynical West Indian élite, a class to which Walcott also belongs. At times in the poem he sounds like an academic, an African historian or ethnologist, and once identifies himself as "a Sussex don," whose field is Jacobean drama. He appears to act as an envoy or perhaps a diplomat for some Caribbean state and enjoys a position of power. ("One flies first-class, one is so fortunate.." "You are so fortunate, you get to see the world.”) In the course of the poem he is involved in clandestine negotiations with the representatives of an
139 unspecified French-speaking Caribbean state ( Haiti is mentioned at one point). He
double-crosses them for personal profit ("Iscariot's salar\') and at the end of the poem
awaits their revenge, presumably assassination.
The feelings of the narrator shift back and forth during the course of the poem.
His first impulse is one of pity for the v ictims of poverty and famine, but his compassion recedes with distance. His perception of the suffenng of these victims
shrinks down to a vision of statistics, "to an oval nest of antic numerals... then a cloud."
Waiting to be paid, he says, “I cannot bear to watch the nations cry," but later, "I
thought, who cares how many millions starve?" In part, he justifies his betrayal through a cynical sense of universal worthlessness and corruption, in which he includes himself and his kind, seeing them as "roaches/ riddling the state cabinets, entering the dark holes/ of power." His mind moves between a vision of a primeval Africa flooded with
light, the fascinations of history and of Jacobean drama, and a world in which all human beings are envisaged as insects and children fight with rats for rotten meat. In the second section of the poem, the work of Schweitzer ( motivated by a paternalistic racism), the corrupt imperial dream of Conrad's Kurtz, and the holocaust are equated, and appear to him as proofs of a God indifferent to human suffering. In this mood literature becomes, for the speaker, a kind of escapism that reduces the starving to
"compassionate fodder for a travel book.” When confronted by the unmediated spectacle of human suffering, he says, “we turn away to read." As he waits for his assassins, he has an apocalyptic vision of world famine, in which the weevil, the ant and
140 the grasshopper reduce the last empires. Russia and the United States, to desert, a concrete demonstration of global interconnections.
The narrator of this poem clearly is not an individual but a representative of the wielders of hidden political power. His characteristics as an individual and his individual fate become unimportant, since, regardless of his motives and ethical position, the result of his agency is always the same, and he will always be replaced by others of his kind. Whether his impulse is towards the chanty for which the poem pleads or whether he apes the indifference of an indifferent God. starvation will still be the end result. Like Shabine, he seems to be. at least on one level, an attempt to represent a composite human being, containing the features of an entire class in a contradictory and fragmented self. The overtly public and political concerns expressed in the poem support the identification of this narrator as a composite fictional speaker clearly differentiated from the poet. Such an identification is also supported by the fact that “The Fortunate Traveller" is another poem belonging to the charactenstically West
Indian genre of writings involving repetitive journeys, and usually associated with collective West Indian experience. The action moves from an unspecified European city to Bristol, the Bntish port built upon the slave trade, and to the Caribbean, while in imagination the narrator reflects upon Africa and the Eastern European locations associated with the Holocaust.
Despite the obvious political concerns of the poem, however, there are a number of understated details that signal a connection between the consciousness of the composite persona and Walcott, as private individual, and which point unobtrusively to
1 4 1 a more personal secondar\ theme, a questioning of the uses and vaiidit} of literature in
the context of the economic corruption and exploitation evoked through the underlying
plot of the poem. Ultimately. "The Fortunate Traveller" is similar to "The Schooner
F li^ h r insofar as it is a poem in which Walcott again attempts to integrate public and
personal concerns and to merge the representation of a personal self with that of a
collective persona. The references to Jacobean drama, to Rimbaud and to Joseph
Conrad’s Heart o f Darkness point to works whose influence Walcott has acknowledged
elsewhere. The names "Margot" and “Jacob" are close to those of Walcott’s second
wife, Margaret Maillard, and Joseph Brodsky. The repetition throughout the poem of
the phrase "and have not charity" calls to mind the full verse, “Though I speak with the
tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a
tinkling cymbal" (1 Corinthians, 13.i). The concern with the function of language
expressed in this verse links with the comment, discussed earlier, on writing which
exploits the victims of famine and betrayal and functions as a distraction from the
reality of their plight. It also foreshadows Walcott's later and more overtly personal
wrestling with the same problem in the later long poem Omeros.
Thus, in both the poems discussed in this section, Walcott exploits the
presentation of a fragmented self in dramatic monologue to achieve two different ends.
He uses it first as a means of presenting a representative persona as a means to express public and collective experience. As he does so, he is also concerned to integrate
individual perception in this collective utterance and to include the personal in the public, the individual in the collective. Both Shabine and the unnamed narrator of “the
142 Fortunate Traveller ' are required to contain the indiv idual. Walcott, within the
collective. Characteristically, Walcott's strategy is a double one, moving
simultaneously in two directions, using the collective to explore the individual and the
personal to inform the public.
The presentation of a fragmented self as persona in the poems of this period is
only one of the features which might lead a cntic working from within the Euro-
American tradition mistakenly to identify Walcott's work as post- modem. Other
qualities that contribute to such an impression are the linguistic play arising from the
fusion of West Indian vernaculars with standard English in an attempt to find a
synthetic, written equivalent to express the oral rhythms of Caribbean "englishes, " the
cannibalization of both oral and literary genres (the folk song in "Saint Lucie " and
Another Life, the styles of Yeats and Marvell in earlier poems), the (con)fusion of
historical and fictional material in many of the poems, non-linear narration, the
inclusive pluralism that blurs the boundaries between dualistic categories. In addition
to these factors, poems like "The Fortunate Traveller" create an impression of
indeterminacy and openness of interpretation that encourages such an identification.
Walcott's adoption of post-modern strategies, however, arises out of a dramatically
different context from those of his North American and European contemporaries, and
is motivated by other priorities.
As a poet who operates consciously as the founder of a tradition aimed at defining the cultural identity of a diverse and heterogeneous group, Walcott cannot
afford linguistic play that discounts meaning. If his work is to unify and integrate
143 individual experience in the collective, he cannot aftbrd indeterminacy While "The
Fortunate Traveller" contains elements of indeterminacy, as any poem of a similar length and density is bound to do. there is clearly a controlling authorial consciousness behind the narrating voice that directs response to the subject matter, in a way that post modern poetry does not Although the plot of the poem is episodic and fragmented and no closure is offered, in the sense that no solution is arrived at for the problems dissected in the course of the narrative, the ethical position of the poet (as opposed to that of his persona) is never in doubt. Although the narrator oscillates between moral indifference and self-loathing in response to the part he plays in the exacerbation of poverty and starvation, images of infestation and disease predominate in the poem to produce revulsion against his actions. Even as the speaker evokes an indifferent or malevolent God, or calls into question the existence of a deity, the use of biblical references throughout the poem (the narrator's payment, for example, is "Iscariot's salary ") appeal to a Judeo-Christian ethic which would condemn the callous betrayal of the powerless by the wielders of economic power. The equation between the
Holocaust and famine in the Caribbean and Somalia forces the recognition that the speaker's actions are a covert form of genocide. "The heart of darkness " is relocated by the speaker in "the core of the fire.' in the centre of the holocaust " (in racism and the demand for ethnic purity). Both of these formulations, as well as the writer’s ethical position in relation to them, are unambiguous.
The "wholeness " of the persona in those poems, as in "The Star-Apple
Kingdom" and "The Liberator," in which narration is shared between impersonal
1 4 4 narrator and character, ceases to be an issue In both poems named above, the use of an
impersonal outer voice allows for the representation of the thought process of the poet,
as private individual, as well as that of his character. The fluiditv with which one voice merges into another, so that it is often impossible to pinpoint exactly where one ends and the other begins, makes it possible to see narration as a shared process to which language is contributed by both poet and community. This effect has first been noticed and commented upon in "Sainte Lucie,” and is the basis on which Omeros will rely for its multi-voiced effect.
The Figure of the Poet
Walcott s poetic practice during this period gives a clear idea of the way in which his concept of the West Indian poet has developed, as he tries in his own work to become that poet. Like Simmons, he roots himself in local material, in many poems drawing on West Indian landscape and characters for his overt subject matter, and making use of folk material, previously used pnmarily in the plays. Folk material is a feature oi Another Life with its reprise of the story of the loup garou, first used in
"Tales of the Islands." and is also the basis for the song “Iona” in "Sainte Lucie,” and the poems “White Magic" and “The Three Musicians’" in The Arkansas Testament. He also draws many of the personae of his dramatic monologues from local rather than literary sources and, in the process, incorporates vernacular voices into the poetic voice in a way which makes them central to the project of narration. In many of the poems,
145 the presentation of those characters depends upon the foregrounding of sensibilities other than his own, particularly those like the sailor Shabine, the Saddhu. Sonora and the Spoiler, who represent the general populace of his region. The organization of individual volumes situates him unequivocally in a West Indian locality
None of these developments, however, prompts Walcott to exclude material drawn from his wider experience of Europe and the United States. The many poems dedicated to other writers, both West Indian, European and American, and poems like the elegy for Robert Lowell and ‘The Forest of Europe,” addressed to Joseph Brodsky, place the poet in an international company of his male peers. The Spoiler in “The
Spoiler's Return” claims his kinship with Martial, Juvenal, Pope and the Earl of
Rochester, while in Satan's calypso tent at the carnival he allows these and other classic satirists to mingle with the great calypsonians. Maestro and the Duke of Iron. The influence of Lowell, which Walcott acknowledges as formative in his work, and his stated admiration for Neruda, Brodsky, Heaney and others among his contemporanes, show him open to influences beyond his immediate locality and prepared to measure his work against the best of his contemporaries regardless of nationality . In admitting their influence and seeking associations with them he avoids the isolation and neglect which are seen as contributing to Simmons' suicide in Another Life, as well as stunting the development of Gregonas in the same poem. In placing himself firmly as a regional poet, he commits himself to the local, but the “local ”is in itself presented as encompassing non-local elements, both for the West Indies and for the rest of the world.
146 Walcott's interpretation of the local demands attention to a West Indian materialit}. rejecting the idea that such a materiality should be exclusively African, just as he would reject that it should narrowly reflect only the European. This is made explicit in numerous interv iews as well as in the poem "Names." discussed in this chapter. The poem "Hurucan" provides an illustration of this position." The word
"hurricane" derives from the Spanish furncan^ itself a derivation from a Carib word, and the storm god is described in the poem in terms which suggest the figure of a Carib warrior. He is a New World god. neither African nor European:
You'd never reply
to the name of the northern messenger
whose zigzagging trident
pitchforks oaks like straw,
nor to the thunderous tambors
of Shango. you rage
til we get your name right (41).
The choice of the Carib insists on the West Indian as something distinctly other than either the African or the European. Walcott's use of the image throws light upon and clarifies the image of the “Indian girl ' (Is she one of the earliest inhabitants, a Carib, or an East Indian, one of the latest comers to the region?) who, at the end of Another Life,
“ The Fortunate Traveller 40-44 147 stands by the road-side waiting to be named. The Carib god. the East Indian Saddhu. and the "red” seaman Shabine arc all West Indian figures for Walcott.
In spite of his insistence on the importance of the local, there is no attempt to portray the West Indies as hermetically insulated from the outside world. Just as the
Old World — Europe. Africa, and the Indian subcontinent — is shown as permeating
West Indian populations and culture, so the Caribbean exerts its influence in other regions and the New World infiltrates the Old. This is first and foremost a matter of the migration of peoples who take with them fragmentary elements of the culture of their regions of origin. The geographical divisions of Walcott's collections of this period are porous, as has already been observed in the sections of this chapter dealing with his organization of material. Influences from one region continually infiltrate another, so that it is with only a mild surprise that we encounter in New York "a steel tenor pan dazzlingly practic[ing] something from old Vienna.”"'
The same period also sees a development in the presentation of the figure of the
West Indian poet, which proceeds alongside the development of the poetic voice discussed in the previous section. In Sea Grapes many of the poems adopt the
Castaway persona first noticed in In a Green Night, and developed in The Castaway and The Gulf. This representation of the poet still speaks from the marginal space of the sea shore in “Natural History” and “Names,” and, in “Ending Up,” expresses a similar sense of isolation, though poem after poem in the collection bears a dedication
*■' "Pan" is the regional name for the instruments of a steel band, a characteristically West Indian type of folk-music group The "steel tenor pan" is a steel drum, tuned to tske the tenor part in such a group This last quotation, thus, brings together Old World, New World, and the Caribbean 148 to one or another contemporar\ writer, suggesting that Walcott sees himself as part of an international commuait) of writers. The metaphor of poet as craftsman, carpenter, as in Another Life, or. later in Omeros, as gardener and embroidress (the sole example of a female figure in Walcott's images of the poet), persists in some of the poems of this period. In "The Schooner I 'light'' the poet is a seaman, whose homeland is the
Caribbean Sea, rather than any particular island, and he equates his craft as a poet with the craft of seamanship. In two poems towards the end ofSeu CJrapes, however, a new figure is foregrounded as metaphor for the poet. In “At Last," addressed "To the Exiled
Novelists" advising them that it is now safe to return from their self-imposed exiles in
Britain and the United States, the concluding metaphor is one of himself as the fishemian, who casts his net to draw in what is already there for the taking. The metaphor is repeated in K-Iid.snmmer. “What if the lines I cast bulge into a book that has caught nothing?"
The fisherman's catch, coming from the sea, is local but admits of no nationalité and its origins are indeterminate. Oceans flow into one another, have no frontiers and are home to migratory populations, yet particular regions, the Caribbean, the
Mediterranean, the North Sea, have a distinctive local character. Shabine. in search of
“home, " may never find the “island that heals with its harbor,'" but identifies himself with the sea. Still later in Omeros his narrator, in conclusion, says, “I sang our wide country, the Carbbean Sea,” equating identity with region rather than nationality.
Brathwaite, in his seminal essay, "Caribbean Man in Space and Time," in Canfesta
Forum, after a discussion of the differences that separate the cultures of the Caribbean,
149 concludes that "The unit) is submarine.”'^ in choosing the fisherman as representative in these poems. Walcott invokes a similar unity, allowing for the diversity of influences embraced by the region he represents, while at the same time acknowledging its distinctive character In doing so he implies the regional basis of his poetry , while rejecting a narrow, essentialist and ultimately untenable nationalism.
*■' Canfesta Fontm p 199, 208 150 CHAPTER4
MANY JO l RNEVS, DIVERSE VOICES:
THE Ml LTIPLE NARRATIVES OF OMEROS.
The poems discussed in the previous chapter show Walcott increasingly- employing strategies generally associated with Post-Modernism by critics in the Euro-
American tradition. These include the presentation of a fragmented and decentered subject, linguistic and intertextual play, and a resulting indeterminacy of meaning. In
Walcott's case, however these strategies arise from a response to a specifically West
Indian situation, and could be more justly identified as representing a specifically West
Indian modernity. The presentation of a fragmented and decentered subject grows from an attempt to represent the diverse peoples of a wide and culturally plural region, and to present experience other than that of a single class, an educated élite. The language strategies spring from a very different situation from those characterizing the Euro-
American tradition of Post-Modernism and they support a contrary project, the reconnection of language with materiality, rather than the celebration of its arbitrary relationship to the phenomena of the material world.
151 In the long poem ()mcn>\. published in 1990. Walcott returns to the project of
Another l.ifc. the comprehensive recording of the life ofhis native St. Lucia, but
moving forward to reflect a present day St. Lucia rather than the lost world ofhis childhood. In what is essentially a re-vision ofhis earlier portrait of the life of the
island, his project has grown to encompass not only the faithful recording of West
Indian experience but also the placing of the West Indies in the context of the world as a whole. The methods he employs include the established post-colonial strategies of mapping, in the form of tracing the series of parallel, repetitive journeys undertaken by his protagonists, and of calling to account and calling into question the canonical texts of Western civilization, in this case Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The intertextuality implied by the latter strategy, combined with the strategies that present themselves as post-modern, as outlined in the previous paragraph, contributes to the temptation for a reader in the Euro-American tradition to identify Omeros as the product of a Western post-modernism. Nevertheless, while Walcott uses such means with the aim of undermining the Western master narrative, he is also engaged in the presentation of a comprehensive counter- view — an account of the world from a West Indian perspective that, despite the ffagmentaiy nature ofhis narrative, coheres and makes sense.
The present chapter sets out to explore the narrative strategies Walcott employs in the poem, focusing on his presentation of a plot loosely composed of a series of parallel but ultimately dissimilar journeys, each of which holds out the sometimes illusory hope of healing in homecoming. I should like to argue that in making distinctions between the experiences ofhis characters while at the same time allowing
152 for the play of similarity between them. Walcott is at pains to avoid the kind of
universalizing, common to Western humanism, that reduces all experience to an
undifferentiated norm. The position presented in Omeros is that, while West Indian
experience is unique, it shares some features with the experience of other cultures, and
that while no universal pattern exists, there are sufficient points of contact between
diverse groups to allow for productive dialogue between them. A further discussion of
Walcott's presentation of a fragmented narrative voice seeks to establish that in
presenting a multi-vocal narrative his aim is to give equal expression to a representative
range of varied St. Lucian characters and diverse sensibilities, but particularly to those
whose voices have been silenced or marginalized in colonial accounts of the region and
in his earlier works. The consideration of the use made of the Homeric material and the
presentation of the figure of the poet is reserved for a further chapter.
‘‘The right journey:” Themes and Projects in Omeros
In Omeros, Walcott returns to the vow o ï Another I.ife, to capture "in words, in
paint" the island ofhis birth. The poem is a celebration and a representation of the life of St. Lucia, its landscape and its people, lovingly recreated with the aid of a painter's
eye and a dramatist's ear for convincing human speech. In carrying out this project, the conflicts and contradictions between tradition and change, Africa and Europe, Old
World and New, inevitably resurface and demand expression. Thus a major theme, if
153 not the major theme, of the poem is the reconciliation or healing of these conflicts.
Again, Walcott returns to the theme of division, of “the Gulf.” whose manifestations are
both inter-personal and intra-personal, and to the consideration of this gulf as the
product of History , or "the wound of Time.”
Early in the narrative Walcott draws attention to the fact that each ofhis major characters is, in some sense, wounded. After referring to Plunkett's old head wound, a
legacy of the Eighth Army Egyptian campaign of Word War II. the narrator interrupts his narrative to address the reader directly:
This wound I have stitched into Plunkett's character.
He has to be wounded, affliction is one theme
of this work, this fiction. (28)
Affliction takes many forms in the poem. It may be physical or psychic, a personal grief, or the product of a public and historical wrong. First of the afflicted and the first narrator to speak is Philoctete, who has a festering sore on his shin made by a rusty anchor. His wound is physical, but the terms in which he speaks of it give it a symbolic significance:
He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles
ofhis grandfathers. Or else why was there no cure?
That the cross he carried was not only the anchor’s
154 but that ofhis race. (19)
In identif\'ing his wound with the evil of siaverv and forced migration. Walcott offers him as representative of West Indian man, and his healing, consequently, comes to stand for a general healing. Philoctete's story frames the poem: his is the first voice to speak and the account ofhis cure in Book Six forms the pattern for the account of general healing that follows.
Plunkett's war wound is physical and a consequence of historical events, but he is also displaced both socially and geographically, and at one point identifies himself as
"the walking wounded in the class struggle.” He is also childless, and, by the end of the poem, a widower. Other characters similarly experience personal suffering and loss as a wound. Both Achille and Hector equate the fear of betrayal, sexual jealousy and loneliness with Philoctete's suppurating sore. Achille in his misery feels that "he smelt as badly as Philoctete/ from the rotting loneliness that drew every glance. " When
Hector, believing that Helen still loves Achille, drives too fast, his transport "shot with its flaming wound that speed alone could not heal." The writer applies a version of the same metaphor to a socio-historical situation, when he describes the "Negro shacks " of the southern United States running along the roadside "like a running wound, like the rusty anchor that scabbed Philoctete's shin." The repeated image of the wound connects physical injury, personal grief and historical evil in a way that allows each to illuminate the experience of the other without implying that they are the same. In the process, Philoctete's wound becomes an archetype for all others, reminding the reader
155 of the intimate personal consequences of historical ev ents. When Ma Kilman journeys
into the interior, we are told: “She aimed to carrv the cure that precedes every wound."
(239)
The wTiter-narrator. a character called "Walcott,"who is engaged in the
composition of a poem called Omeros, identifies his wound as the imposition of an
alien language, a perception shared by Philoctete, who at his cure feels “The yoke of the
wrong name lifted from his shoulders," remembering the “tribal shame:"
A shame for the loss of words and a language tired
of accepting that loss. (248)
Achille on his dream visit to Africa is aware of the loss of an originary language:
The deaf sea has changed around every name that you gave
us; trees, men, we yearn for a sound that is missing. ( 137)
Ultimately, however, the wound is identified as "the incurable wound of time" — personal and public histories seen as a seemingly endless process of attrition, through which languages, homelands, and cultures are subjected to change, erosion and ultimate loss.
Joseph Farrell identifies one of the consistent motifs of Omeros as the process he calls translatio imperii, “the unending succession whereby formerly enslaved and
156 colonized peoples become oppressors in their own right.”‘ He traces the references in
the poem to a chain of slaver} and oppression extending from Athenian democracy,
through the conquest and appropriation of Greek culture by the Roman empire, its
subsequent appropriation by the Bntish empire, and its extension to the New World
colonies. Set against this Achille s shocked recognition that his African tribe is
conquered and enslaved by other Africans, the reminder of the conquest and
displacement of the Arawaks by the Caribs, and an oblique reference to the part played
by the ‘"Buffalo Soldiers" in the defeat of the Sioux.
For Walcott's purposes in this poem, however, the significant feature of the
processes of empire is that of displacement. The writer-narrator returning to the United
States, “my new empire," comments: " This is the first wisdom of Caesar, to change
the ground under the bare soles of a race (208)." Every major character in the poem has
suffered displacement at the whim or in the service of empire, and each is involved in a journey in search of home and healing. Their journeys, like the repetitive journeys that
characterize much West Indian fiction, trace the slave routes to Africa, Britain and the
New World, but they are paralleled in the poem by the forced migrations of the Sioux,
the flight of refugees from eastern Europe, and the migrations of birds.
This chronicle of migration places the African diaspora in a global context,
without denying its uniqueness. There is no suggestion, for example, that the
experience of the Polish waitress encountered by “Walcott” in a Canadian café is “the
same” as that of Achille s tribe or of the West Indian academic who observes her. In
' "Walcott's Omeros The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World " South Atlantic Quarterly 96 2, Spring, 1997 246-273 p 265 157 Walcott's account she carries with her an evocation of the landscape she has left behind, and the political situation from which she escapes, the "city whose language was seized by its police." Nevertheless, some facets of their situations touch each other; they include loneliness, the loss of language, and removal from a familiar texture of life. Affliction imposed by the forces of history is general: its features are familiar, comparable, and simultaneously unique to each individual. Or perhaps more accurately, affliction is universal, though its manifestations are always particular.
Endless journeying is presented in the poem as one of the afflictions imposed by history, and further journeys undertaken in the search for home are proposed as its cure.
These may be journeys in either space or time. Initially, "Walcott's" homecoming produces a feeling of disorientation. When, following a visit to his mother, he walks out into "the African twilight" of the village he first feels a sense of disconnection, like that of losing one's place in a book and being unable to understand what follows. He has "lost a continent in the narrow streets. " This is followed by recognition of what was once familiar. In his case, however, both dislocation and the moment of recognition are expressed in terms of language:
I stood
in a village whose fires flickered in my head
with tongues of speech I no longer understood,
but where my flesh did not need to be translated;
158 then I heard patois again, as my ears unclogged. (167)
Recognition parallels the "blessed lucidity" which breaks upon his mother at the end of the previous section; "I know, who you are. You are my son." The passage also enacts his reconnection with the suppressed African elements of the region.
Plunkett's return to London, however, leaves him with a deeper feeling of alienation and a longing to return to St. Lucia as "home." His journey in time back to the Battle of the Saints also fails to fulfill his projected aim, to return a revised history to Helen. Achille s hallucinatory journey to Africa is a journey through both space and time, and produces a similar sense of failure to connect with his ancestral homeland.
On the other hand, each brings something back from his journey, even if it is not what he set out to find. Achille returns with a name, Afolabe, to hand on to his unborn son
(who may genetically be the son of Hector); and Plunkett returns with an ancestor, in the form of a young midshipman who shares his name, and whom he thinks of as a son.
The willfully chosen ancestor descendent confirms for him his link with the island.
These two encounters find a parallel in "Walcott's" meeting with a father who died before he was bom, and who, when they meet, is young enough to be the narrator's son. These incidents are typical of the pervasive strategy of the poem to reverse time or to turn history on its head. On the one hand, they invite the perception that all history is simultaneous; the narrator's engagement with Catherine Weldon’s story, for example, brings the Ghost Dance into the present. Similarly, “Walcott”, Plunkett and
159 Achille may each speak with a dead ancestor and find an unborn son in the past. One
effect of these juxtaposed accounts of encounters between fathers and sons, with their
calling into question of who is the father and who the son. is to point to the complexity
of the whole issue of ancestr> and origins, the direction of inheritance, and by
implication the direction of cultural transmission, with the implication that this is no
simple, linear, one-way process.
In each of the cases discussed above, the connection between the father son and
his ancestor/ descendant is voluntary. Achille willingly recognizes Helen s child as his
owTi, knowing that Hector may be its biological father. His identification with an ideal
Africa is equally ofhis own choosing. Plunkett's adoption of a "son" from the past is
similarly a voluntary act. The author-narrator chooses to recognize that: "There was
Plunkett in my father, much as there was/ my mother in Maud." The chiasmus that
operates across the two lines forbids any interpretation that would place either party in a
position of priority over the other. The recognition of literary ancestors is also
voluntaiy and inclusive, the chantwell, the shaman and the griot standing beside Homer,
Shakespeare and Joyce.
Another effect of the reversal of the line of inheritance between fathers and sons
is to draw attention to the fact that the poem as a whole is, in a sense, presented
backwards. The reader's first encounter is with an already healed Philoctete, who displays the scar left by his wound for the tourists, holding out the hope of healing for
all the wounded. Joseph Pareil points out that the invocation that traditionally begins a
1 60 classical epic is placed at the beginning of the final chapter of Omcms. inverting the expected pattern.’ This playing with time subverts the one-way linear narration of history and the recursive circling of the protagonists' journeys in its proposal of a view of time and history that places the past at the disposal of the present.
The presentation of a series of characters who are always in motion invites the reader to view traveling, either voluntary or imposed, as the common lot. At the block party thrown by Statics' United Love Force: "the DJs screamed 'WE MOVIN', MAN!
WE MOVIN'!'/ but towards what?" Early in the narrative, "Walcott's" father proposes
"home” as a destination, exhorting his son: "simplify/ your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbour// and a sail coming in." The image of the sail pervades the poem, and different characters take different directions in their search for home. It is left to Seven
Seas, in the final book, to tell the writer-narrator:
the right journey
is motionless; as the sea moves round an island
that appears to be moving, love moves round the heart —
with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand
knows it returns to the port from which it must start. (291 )
/hid p 259
161 The healing journeys in the poem are not outward, but inward and circular, around and into the heart of the island itself Seven Seas Omeros leads "Walcott" on such a journey, which is also a journey into his own heart, forcing him to question his motives and his art. Ma Kilman's journey to find the healing herb is not to Africa, but into the interior of the island, where the African herb is already grow ing.
Throughout the poem, the forces which produce affliction — time and language -
- are also presented as carrying their own cure. The punning mistranslation ''hlcssc: blest," ascribed to Philoctete, sets the pattern for the other wounds in the poem.
"Muts qui ça qui rivail- 'ous, Philoclde'^ "
"Xiotn hlcssc. "
"But what is wTong vvifyou, Philoctete?"
"I am blest
wif this wound. Ma Kilman. qui pas gucnr piccc.
Which will never heal." ( 18)
The bi-lingual pun on the mistranslation of "hlcssc blest" enables the statement of the theme of the wound which carries its own cure. For "Walcott." who identifies his wound as "language";
Like Philoctete's wound, this language carries its cure,
its radiant affliction. (323)
1 6 2 At the end of the poem Seven Seas prophesies of Plunkett: "He'll heal in time, too.”
To which Ma Kilman. proprietor of the No Pam Café ("is a prophecy.") replies. "We
shall all heal." The implication is that, like Plunkett, we shall heal in time.
The means of healing proposed are multiple and unemphasized, often giving the
impression of throwaway lines, the common currency of conversation, as in the last
cited example. They may be placed in the mouth of a minor figure. "Walcott's " dead
father, for example. 1 hey may be undercut by being given to a character who can
barely be taken seriously, as when Statics, in his election address, pronounces, "(m/y
L'nifeJ Love can give you the answers." A reader is left to disentangle the thematic line
from a concatenation of plots and narrative voices, and in the process must learn to pay
attention to the marginal, the outcast, the uneducated, even, at last, to women.
Narrative Strategies
The structure of Omeros is that of a series of interwoven plot lines, linked
pnmanly by thematic similarity , and by the secondary factor that the protagonists of
each come together in a particular location. Thus the scene at the beach café m the opening book links together Philoctete who overlooks the island from his yam garden,
“Walcott" revisiting his native island, Plunkett at the outset ofhis quest for Helen's
history, and, through the presence of Helen, the story of Hector and Achille. It is
tempting to identify this structure with the play of fractal patterns in those computer programs that allow the operator to focus on smaller and smaller areas of a pattern that
163 appears at times random, at times governed by complex rules of organization, l lamner.
in his study of^^memv charactenzes it as kaleidoscopic, with the implication that its
collection of fragments might be shaken up and reorganize themselves at random in a series of different and fortuitous patterns. ' To do so. how ever, is to ov erlook the
thematic connections that become evident as the poem progresses, and declare the structure to be a patterned whole.
Hamner, among other critics of the poem, has suggested that some of the material introduced, including, for example, the Catherine Weldon episode, is irrelevant to the major concerns of the text.^ While I feel that this perception is a mistaken one, it offers evidence of the extent to which Walcott is concerned to make distinctions between experiences which present features of similarity. The act of identification between writer-narrator and characters always involves an act of imagination that sees common ground across differences. It is far from a facile assertion of universality.
'"Walcott” finds in the historical story of Catherine Weldon an experience of loss which speaks to his own wound and sense of loss. He speaks of it “mak[ingj a fiction/ of my own loss," in a double sense of overshadowing his suffering with a greater grief, and also of providing the stimulus to create a fiction which encompasses both experiences (181). The fictional Catherine witnesses the death of a culture in the massacre of the ghost dancers at Wounded Knee, as a proposed parallel to "Walcott’s" witness of the end of a way of life in St. Lucia by a process of slow attrition. Similarly,
^ Robert Hamner. Omeros. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott s Omeros Colombia and London: U of Missouri P, 1997 p 54 ^ Derek Walcott Twayne International Authors Series Hamner modifies this opinion in the later study. Omeros. Epic o f the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott s Omeros. 164 Achille witnesses his tribe's captivity and transportation to the new world: Plunkett also is watching the end of a way oflife brought about by the Second World War and the end of colonialism. Seven Seas, towards the end of the poem, observes that humankind is an endangered species, and while his comment applies immediately to the life of the fishermen of St. Lucia, the poem has suggested that change, either cataclysmic or gradual, is a recurrent feature of human expenence. The forces that threaten his world are local effects that have their parallels in other regions where environmental pollution, the collapse of local industries, and their replacement by tourism are a consequence of global capitalism and the drive for progress.
Loss is presented as another such common experience and source of affliction.
The historical Catherine Weldon suffered the loss of her only son and the murder of
Sitting Bull, on whose behalf she has sacrificed time, money and reputation, just as
“Walcott” suffers the loss of a loved woman and, later, the deaths of the more distantly known Maud and Hector. Details of Walcott's fictionalization of her story tempt the reader to draw parallels between Catherine's historical loss and the sufferings of the poem's contemporary characters. The son's actual death of lockjaw after stepping on a rusty nail invites a parallel with Philoctete's fictional wound from the rusty anchor, though the similarity seems merely coincidental. Walcott creates a parallelism between the writer-narrator and Catherine by giving Catherine a Bostonian background, which is not mentioned in any of the sources to which I have access, all of which speak of her being a native of Brooklyn, or of New Jersey. He also forges a poetic link when he
165 introduces the motif of the swift, which features throughout the poem as a guide to the narrator and to Achille, in the context of the bov's death;
Once from the barn's rafter
a swift or swallow shot out, taking with it
my son’s brown, whirring soul. ( 179)
“Walcott” comments: “More and more we learn to do without; those we love. With my father it was the same.” While Catherine’s wound is her own. unlike any other, the narrator makes an act of identification with her at this point, and when, at the end of one of the sections which she narrates, he signs off “Catherine Weldon,/ in our final letter to the Indian agent." (My italics)'
Paradoxically, in a poem whose outstanding theme is that of healing and wholeness, the narrative strategies employed give an initial impression of fragmentation. The poem begins with an evocation of the partial view imposed on the physical reality of the island by the tourist's camera before which Philoctete poses. In the final book the figure of Homer/Seven Seas declares that, “The Aegean s chimera/ is
■ Papers relating to Catherine Weldon are published in Stanley Vestal’s jVVm' sources o f Indian History I850-IH91 U o f Oklahoma P Norman 1934 Robert Ben sen in "Catherine Weldon in Omeros and ITte Ghost Dance ’ (I Vrse 1994 Summer, 11:2, 119-25) refers to Walcott s possession of papers relating to Catherine Weldon during the writing of the unpublished play The Ghost Dance in October, 1989 His own references to the letters are taken exclusively from those in Vestal’s collection. She is mentioned briefly and usually dismissively in a number o f biographies o f Sitting Bull, and the part she played in events leading up to Sitting Bull’s murder is treated at greater length in David Humphreys Miller’s Ghost Dance U of Nebraska P Lincoln and London, 1959 The only published biography 1 have been able to trace is a single chapter in Dorothv M Johnson’s Went West Dodd.Mead and Co New York. 1965, 129-36 1 6 6 a camera.” The last view we have of St. Lucia is introduced by a series of snapshots,
fragmentary and perhaps deceptive images of a place that, in the course of the poem, a
reader has learnt to see as a comple.x and contradictory whole. It is clear that the
proliferation of these partial images affects the development of the material realit\ they
purport to represent, as the village becomes “a souvenir of itself."
Its life adjusted to the lenses
of cameras that, perniciously elegiac,
took shots of passing things - Seven Seas and the dog
in the pharmacy's shade, every comic mistake
in spelling, like In God ffe Trousi on a pirogue.
BLUE GENES. ARTLANTIC CITY. NO CABBAGE DUMPED HERE.
The village imitated the hotel brochure
with photogenic poverty, with atmosphere. (311)
Walcott s apparently equally fragmentary portrait of the island and its people differs in
kind from the superficial, visual images produced by the tourist's camera that are criticized here. By the end of the poem the reader has access to an inside knowledge of
the lives and situations behind the images that is beyond the reach of the tourist. During the course of the poem, each character in turn is called upon to cooperate in telling his
1 6 7 or her own stor>-, each one a fragment that contributes towards a more complex portrait of island society.
a) Many Languages
The effect of a fragmented and multi-faceted image is produced in the poem primarily by the use of many voices, by the division of the narrative between “Walcott" as writer-narrator and the voices of multiple characters w hich at times seem to inhabit his voice. The first narrator, Philoctete, begins, in a written approximation to a non specific English-lexicon, West Indian vernacular, to tell the story of the making of a pirogue. Eventually, the voice of an impersonal narrator, later identified as “Walcott," takes over. Every detail of the opening passages of the poem serves to focus attention upon the diversity of languages and upon language itself as a medium. .As Philoctete's narrative closes it is said to be taken up by “a garrulous waterfall," a ground dove,
"talkative brooks " Not only human beings, but features of landscape, plant and animal populations are credited w ith the power of speech and with language. The first chapter buzzes with references to sound, which, taking into account the anthropomorphic vision that allows a generator to whine, gives a lizard elbows and an island horns, give the impression of being constantly on the edge of articulate speech. The trees regard the scene, “without uttering a syllable/ of that language they had uttered as one nation," and curled tongues of leaves in the burning trash of the bonfire speak “the Aruac's patois."
As the fire bums down, “their language was lost."
168 Thus. It is early established that anylhmtz might possesses its o w t i languageand speak. Similar attnbutions of speech to natural phenomena continue to feature intermittently throughout the poem, "these loud-mouthed forests on their illiterate heights., these springs speaking a dialect that cooled his mind." The sea, running water, trees are all at times credited with language, which is always just beyond the range of understanding. Philoctete misinterprets the rattle of the yams' leaves as "warriors rushing to battle” (22).
Once it has been established that many languages, many voices, exist, the reader is presented with details which signal the mutability of language, its variations and the possibilities for misunderstanding. "lounalao," the supposed Aruac name for the island, has over the course of time mutated into "Hewanora." Ma Kilman finds Seven
Seas' "dark language of the blind” difficult to understand: ". . .his words were not clear. They were Greek to her. Or old Aftncan babble " (18). Achille deflects the priest's criticism of the eccentric spelling of his pirogue's name. In (loj IVe Tronst.
"Leave it! Is God' spelling and mine" (8). The schoolboys change Philoctete's name to
"Pheeloh! Pheelosophee! " in their teasing (19). The poet exchanges the familiar name of Homer for its modem Greek equivalent, stripping it of the connotations it has acquired for him in English. Philoctete's mistranslation of "blessé” as "blest " demonstrates the way in which the interface between languages may be a site where meaning proliferates. Clearly, languages are not closed systems. They may change or be changed, either inadvertently or deliberately. They may be misinterpreted. They
169 may also die, like the language of the Aruacs and the language ol the trees, when the
communities which use them die.
Later in the poem, it is suggested that languages are situated in particular
material conditions in place and time. When Achille s people are displaced from
Africa, material change is equated with the erosion of a mother tongue;
Their whole world was moving.
or a large part of the world, and what began dissolving
was the fading sound of their tribal name for rain.
the bright sound for sun, a hissing noun for the nver. (152)
Even elements as ubiquitous as rain, sun and nver are seen here as so intimately connected with a specific geographical location that a change of location necessitates a change of name. Elsewhere, at Glen-da-Lough a brook speaks "the old language of
Ireland." On the beach at Marblehead a dog barks, "Hough! Hough!" while in Dublin it barks "Howth! Howth!" The ubiquitous sea-swift which threads the pages of the narrative through Europe, Africa and the Americas is vanously named, "Cypseloides niger, l 'hirondelle des Antillesi(\\\Q\x name for the sea-swift)."
Achille, in his dreamed return to Africa, understands and is able to converse with Afolabe, but neither his own nor Afolabe's language carries any resonance for him. He cannot explain the meaning of his name, nor can either remember the name he
170 was given in Africa. The meaning of a name is presented as a matter of importance.
To lose It or forget it is likened by Afolabe to losing one's self and becoming nothing.
To lose the sense of connection between sound and matter is for him the same as losing
the material world. In this account a relationship is proposed between the possession of
a mother tongue and the possession of a sense of self as well as a relationship to a community and the natural environment.
if you're content with not knowing what our names mean,
then I am not Afolabe, your father, and you look through
my body as the light looks through a leaf. I am not here
or a shadow. And you, nameless son are only the ghost
of a name. ' (138)
This sense of disconnection extends in Achille s case to the spiritual dimension of his life. When he names the tribal gods on sacred ground, "The trees within hearing/ ignored his incantation."
Walcott's aim here is to dramatize what he sees as the problem of language for
Achille and for those like him. In an interview given at the time when he was nearing the completion of a revised draft of Omeros, he makes the following comment on his view of the relation between language and experience and his aims in the poem, which goes some way towards clarifying his position;
171 the whole of the West Indian experience is not itself- it is translated
There is a film over the name -Caribbean. You can see the object, but
between the object and you there is some experience, some artifice. We
look through a glass in which the noun on the other side has not yet been
named. It's the origin of the real Caribbean noun that I'm after. ’ (36)
The imposition of an alien language and the loss of a mother tongue dramatically break
the illusion of a natural organic connection between signifier and signified in a way that
is reminiscent of twentieth century theories of language. Yet the language situation
described here has long been familiar to colonized peoples, like the inhabitants of the
West Indies, and predates Saussurian linguistics. From a West Indian perspective such
theories can only appear as a belated report. For Achille the result of his situation is a
loss of the materiality of the world, leaving him with a sense only of the mismatching of
language and object in both his ancestral and his adopted languages. For Philoctete it
leaves the sense of having been wrongly named. For “Walcott " it is a wound, gulf or
division between the self and the world. In Walcott’s account it interposes a barrier
between object and perception.
The search for "real Caribbean nouns" is problematic. However we choose to
define the term "Caribbean," or even the geographically more discrete "West Indies,"
the region in question is host to a multiplicity of languages, English, French, Spanish, and of regional vernaculars and local variants of these languages, each with its own
J.P White "An Interview with Derek Walcott." Green Mountain Review, Vol. 4. No 1 (Spring - Summer. 1990) 14-37 172 codes reflecting social stratification, occasion, gradations of class, gender, occupation,
origins. And in a situation where authenticity is a dream the "real" can only be based
upon what is already in place, in the belief that it will necessarily reflect its origins, as
well as its difference from those origins. If "real Caribbean nouns" are to be found in
St. Lucia, then the work which sets out to find them must reflect the diversity of
languages and codes which are in use there. Consequently, the poem interweaves many
voices, many different kinds of discourse, and many registers on a scale that runs from
St. Lucian Kweyol to Plunkett s fake upper-middle class army jargon. God, however,
speaks a non-specific English lexicon Créole, when he tells Achille:
Look, I giving you permission
to come home. Is I send the sea-swift as a pilot,
the swift whose wings is the sign of my crucifixion. (134)
b) Many Voices
The infiltration of other voices into the poetic voice discussed in the previous chapter as a feature of Walcott's work from Sea Grapes (1976) onwards, is extended in
Omeros, to allow a multiplicity of characters to share in the narration. These characters often take the foreground of the scene in a way that the supporting cast of Another Life does not. Whereas in the earlier poem all but the four central figures of artist and muse
173 — "H am . Dunstan, Andreuille," and the narrator — are presented as figures m a
landscape, coming to voice only in snatches and fragments, those of ()mcms speak,
taking over the narrative from the voice of "Walcott" as primary narrator The
multiplicity of voices gives access to the sensibilities of a number of characters, as well
as permitting the reader to observe them from a variety of perspectives. In this respect the poem is dialogic both in the Bakhtinian sense of opposing diverse viewpoints, and
dialectic in the sense posited by Gwendoline Mae Henderson, which brings those opposed voices into harmony to the extent that, at times, it is far from obvious who
speaks, when experience fortuitously intersects with the experiences of others at so many points.
An example of the Bakhtinian dialogic can be found in the opposed responses made by Achille and Hector to social and economic change, Achille clinging obstinately to the traditional way oflife of the fisherman and making a primary identification with his African origins, while Hector embraces change by leaving the sea and the village to become a cab-driver in Castries. Statics and "Walcott" respond differently; the first attempts to take political action, and later, like the second, migrates to the United States. The poem is dialectic in the second sense proposed by Henderson in that it creates the connections of shared expenence, not only between these St.
Lucians across the barriers of gender, class, religion, and political situation, but
Gwendoline Mae Henderson “Speaking in Tongues Dialogics, Dialectics and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." Colonial Discourse aiui Post-Coloiual Theory. ed. Patrick William's and Laura Chrisman Columbia U P New York, 1994 257-67 While I accept Henderson's reformulation of a "dialectic of identity" according to Gadamer 's model which “proposes as its goal a language of consensus, communality and even identification" (260), I am less than convinced that this is exclusively a feature of Black women's writing 174 between them and other inhabitants of the New World. The impulse of the poem is ultimately towards inclusion, though it works to avoid the facile assertion of universality of experience and emotion, and the flattening and avoidance of issues of class and economics which are a feature o ï Am nher Life.
This strategy allows characters whose voices would otherwise go unheard ( like
Statics, whose impassioned rhetoric is continually silenced or wasted on the bananas because he has forgotten to activate the on switch of his P.A. system) to come to articulate speech. In the process, those whose voices have usually been marginalized, the poor, the uneducated, women, in turn take center stage in the narrative. The strategy is not so much one of "giving those feet a voice," as proposed by the father, as of shared discourse, in which the discourse of the poet and those of his characters alternately join and separate in narrating a story over which no single voice is given ultimate authority. Since in the process both writer and community contribute language to the poem, each narrator speaking in his or her characteristic idiom, Walcott creates a democracy of voices, decentering "Walcott" as narrator.
The play between dialogue and dramatic monologue in Omeros
Sidney Burris commenting upon the relationship between Walcott’s dramatic works and Omeros, remarks upon the predominance of dialogue in the text;
175 Monologues are unimportant to Walcott, unless we consider the
narrator's voice monologic, because the essence of his technique
involves the steady revelation of character through dialogue w ith other
characters ... a technique found fundamental, of course, to dramaturgv.^
(563)
This may depend upon a looser definition of dialogue than would be generally accepted, though Burris does make a distinction between dialogue and dramatic monologue, which suggests that he has overlooked the extent to which voices other than those of the
"Walcott" infiltrate the text and at times take over the narrative.
Dialogue certainly has a major part to play in Omeros. The quarrel between
Achille and Hector, and that between Achille and Helen, Maljo's election campaign, and Achille s return to Castries after his dream of Africa are only the most obvious examples of scenes heightened by the dramatic use of dialogue. In the first book alone no fewer than fifteen characters speak either in extended dialogue, as narrators of a section of the poem, or as a momentary intrusion into the narrative. Besides the self revelation which is involved in scenes of extended dialogue, Walcott uses the intrusion of another voice into the narrative to create a variety of effects.
At the simplest level, an individualized voice may emerge momentarily in a passage of impersonal narration. ("Sometimes, a resinous/ woodsman would startle them, his bag full of snake-heads/ to flog to Der Guva'ment" (61).) The technique is
* Sidney Burris “.\n Empire of Poetry " The Southern Revien' Summer, 1991 558-74 176 similar to that used in Another Life, and produces the effect of a vivid glimpse of the
elusive woodsman in a fragment of his speech. More problematically, "Walcott s '
voice may intrude to translate the Kweyol speech of one of the St. Lucian characters,
though an attempt is made to create the impression that characters retain authority .
Typically, as in the fragment of conversation between Ma Kilman and Philoctete quoted
on page 11, Philoctete translates his own words into an English lexicon Créole. Where
"the hymn that Achille could not utter” is translated, Kweyol is given priority, and
English appears as a marginal gloss.
Where another voice takes over narration for an extended period, a sensibility
other than that of "Walcott" dominates the narrative, and another character reports
events from his or her own perspective. In addition to the way that this technique
illuminates the character and experience of the speaker, it may also allow other
characters to be seen from more than one perspective. Thus far, Walcott could be said
to be using traditional narrative techniques to produce widely recognized effects. His
extension of these techniques, however, serves to remove his fictional self from the
center of the narrative, in effect to undermine the authority of the author, while at the
same time demonstrating the connections between the experience of the author and the
experience of his characters.
In the early stages of the poem, it is usually made clear who speaks and, to begin with, the transition from one voice to another is marked by the use of inverted commas
and such obvious verbal signals as "he said." As the poem progresses, however, and the reader has learnt to expect changes of narrator, these signals are dropped and one voice
177 is allowed to merge imperceptibly into another. Thus at a number of points in the narration it is impossible immediately to determine who speaks. The result is to produce a recognition of the sharing of experience between "Walcott " and one of the other characters. This identification between "Walcott" and speaking character is also extended to draw the reader into the experience and to produce a similar identification with the characters of the poem. The effect should not be confused with that of traditional indirect first person narration of that kind that operates, for example in
Chapter One, section ii, where "Walcott" describes events from Achille s point of view, without the voice taking on the characteristics of Achille s speech. The technique
Walcott uses has more in common with dramatic monologue of the type used in The
Star-Apple Kingdom and The Fortunate Traveller.
Use of Alternative Narrators a) Presentation o f Character
The introduction of Helen in the first book of the poem provides a useful example of the way in which multiple narrative voices and the multiple perspectives they provide are used to produce a complex and multifacted presentation of character.
It will also serve to illustrate the mechanisms Walcott uses to introduce other voices than that of "Walcott" into the poem. Walcott begins conventionally enough, using a cinematic technique of presenting isolated glimpses and snatches of overheard conversation to create interest in the character. Helen is described first as she appears
178 to the author, a tlgure glimpsed casually and noticed because of her beauty, "a woman in a madras head-tie, but the head proud, although it was looking for work " His obser\ ation is immediately followed by the overheard snatch of dialogue from the ne.xt table: "Who the hell is that?" a tourist near my table asked a waitress. The waitress said. "She? She too proud!”
In the next chapter, she appears again, briefly seen by the Plunketts. Since
Helen's first appearance in the text, narration has shifted from the author-narrator, first, to Plunkett and then to Maud. There is no clear break between one narrating voice and another, and in the case of the passage of narration in Plunkett's voice (25-29), it is impossible to pinpoint the moment when the second voice takes over. The code changes, style and tone shifting gradually, first with the inclusion of expressions that sound characteristic of his voice: "This was their watering hole, " "lowering the yardarm. " That the choice of pronoun in "WV helped ourselves- to these green islands " could easily go unnoticed is evidence of the extent to w hich a new narrative voice has taken over without drawing attention to itself. Narration continues in Plunkett's idiom as he ruminates on his resignation from the club, "that haunt of middle-clarse farts ... with more pompous arses than any tlea could find," though the pronoun of choice remains "he. " It mutates to T ' two pages later, when Plunkett's meditations shift from the general (the island, the club, his position in island society as an expatriot
Englishman) to the particular and individual (his war experiences), " ... and 1 leant on the tank turret... 1 wept with pride" (27). Maud interrupts him on seeing Helen,
179 "There’s our trouble,” and her brief comments on Helen, that she "lies so much, and she stole.’ seem to color Plunkett’s reference to her as "the arrogant servant who rules their house.” Her appearance prompts his awareness of something owed to Helen ("But the bill had never been paid”), and he begins to formulate his project of giving her a historv.
The same technique that allows Plunkett to take over narration operates again in the passage that follows his narrative to allow Helen relate how she lost her job as a waitress (33-34). The passage begins impersonally, but at some point between "Time halts the arc of the javelin," and "both said the tables was full" (33) a new voice takes over. The shift in code is obvious enough to bring even a casual reader up short and for a moment it is not clear who speaks — perhaps the women with whom Helen is gossiping; "what the white manager mean/ to say was she was too rude." Gradually, it emerges that the speaker is Helen, "‘[she] take off her costume, and walk straight out the hotel/ naked as God make me, when 1 pass by the pool, people nearly drown. ” The pronoun shift from "she ” to "I" clarifies who tells this story, and creates the impression of gossip overheard. At the beginning of the next section, the shift back to the wnter- narrator is also unsignaled. The reader becomes aware that at some point between sections i) and ii) Helen's voice has faded from the narrative.
The shifting of narration in this passage, a technique used throughout the poem, allows for a number of effects. First, it creates the impression that each of the characters involved tells his or her own story in his or her own words, giving the reader insight into individual thought processes. At the point of transition between narrators
1 8 0 when Helen begins the account ol'her dismissal, the uncertainly about who speaks.
Helen or her gossips, has the effect of making her experience and her response appear
as shared experience. Any of the women might have sufTered the same indignity,
though some of their responses ("She loo proud," "she too rude") suggest that only
Helen would have responded as she did. Shifting narration also allows her to be seen
by the reader as each of the narrators sees her.
At the point when Helen goes to her former employer to borrow money ( 122-
125), we have already "seen" Helen through the eyes of "Walcott," Achille and
Plunkett. Maud's perception of her provides a new perspective. Again, part of the way-
through this section the narrative passes imperceptibly from "Walcott" to Maud. The
passage begins smoothly enough and with a lyricism and metaphorical turn of
expression that suggest the same narrator who takes over from Philoctete in Chapter
One. As Helen approaches, casually stripping the blossoms from Maud's garden plants,
another voice comes into play. "My bloody allamandas! Maud swore." Vocabulary
and syntax from here to the end of the section are Maud’s, and provide a running
commentary on the conversation that takes place, which is revealing of both women.
"She had timed it well. A little intimacy; between us girls , but not this time Miss
Helen, non mera."
The narrative voice in such passages seems to be porous, soaking up a style that
suggests the voice of each character in turn. The effect created is reminiscent of
possession, as if Walcott became a medium inhabited by a series of sensibilities not his own. This effect of “possession" provides a parallel to the Haitian Ceremony of Souls
181 described by Lamming in his introduction to The ricasurcs oj T'.xik\ in which the dead
are summoned by an intermediary and are obliged to offer "a full and honest report on
their past relations with the liv ing' The ceremony involves public confession and
atonement, an honest confrontation with the past in order to go forward into the future.
It would be possible to read Omeros as Walcott 's Ceremony of Souls, in which he
summons colonizer (Plunkett), colonized (Achille) and a version of himself as writer,
and demands of each an examination of his conduct and attitudes. The writer, himself,
functions in this account as the medium through which others speak, but is also
represented as a character in the poem.
b) Shared Sarration and Shared Experience
The most important of the effects created by the sharing of narration, and particularly by the uncertainty it creates about who speaks at any point in the narrative,
is that of compelling the reader to recognize connections between disparate characters.
At the points at which narration shifts, we are forced to attend to the points where different experiences intersect and to acknowledge how much is shared between character and “Walcott”, between character and writer, and between these characters and ourselves.
The account of the quarrel between Achille and Helen (37 - 42) demonstrates how this sense of connection may be created. Initially, the scene is set by “Walcott”
' George Lamming Ihe Pleasures o f Exile. Ann Arbor : U of Michigan P, 1992 182 operating as an impersonal narrator, whose style is allusive, highly metaphorical, and characterized by long, complex sentences. While the visual detail he uses creates a vivid picture of the market, it is also presented metaphorically in terms of the processes of empire and serves as a reminder of the iranslaiio imperil theme, the successive transition of power and its concommitant vices from conquerors to conquered.
"Walcott” dwells upon:
.... the curled heads of cabbages
crammed down on a tray to please implacable caesars,
slaves head down on a hook, the gutted carcasses
of crucified rebels, from orange tiled villas,
from laurels of watercresses... (37)
As the actors enter upon this prepared scene, the style changes abruptly. Sentences are short and declarative in a way suitable to dealing with action and to creating a mood of tension. Almost immediately, dialogue takes over: "Helen said: ’ Ba m om ' The change in tone and stvie of narration seems appropriate to the shift from scene setting to dramatic action. It does not jar the reader as a change of voice, nor is it immediately noticeable that the shorter sentences continue beyond the scene of the quarrel. It is only in the flashback to the earlier occasion when Achille had seen Helen and Hector together when he was fishing that it becomes apparent that another voice has taken over:
183 .... Lobsters was ofT-season.
or diving for coral: shells was not to be sold
to tourists, but he had done this before without
getting catch himself he knew that his luck would hold. (39)
It is at this point that it becomes apparent that we have been seeing through Achille s
eyes for some time. A glance back over the previous page reveals a change in the
quality and t\'pe of imageiy. Simile takes over from metaphor (‘‘And he, feeling like a
dog that is left to nose the scraps of her footsteps,..."), and there are turns of phrase
which could easily be Achille s (“Her stubbornness; made him crazy." “For a long time
he had sensed this thing with Hector ").
When at the beginning of the last section the pronoun shifts from “he" to “1" it
is easy to take this as confirmation that Achille speaks and has been speaking for the
greater part of this chapter. “In this boat we were shipmates," could easily be Achille s
reflection on his relationship with Hector. It seems natural to read the ensuing
reminiscence as Achille s perception of the relationships between himself Helen and
Hector. The account of a time of love when "never in my life had 1 been happier," and
the hind-sight which recognizes that, even then, love was threatened could easily be details of his storv . As the passage progresses, however, an awareness grows that there
184 is a sensibility here that is not Achille s, and a speaker who employs expressions that he
would never use:
... and the little crab-cries
of her parting shell, her forehead glazed with the sweat
of the bride-sleep that soothed Adam in paradise,
before it gaped into a wound... (42)
The first part of this quotation could have its source in Achille, the second
seems unlikely to be a part of his thought patterns as they have been exemplified in his
direct speech earlier in the narrative. Tone and sentence patterns have changed,
reverting to a style closer to that of "Walcott" whose voice began the chapter.
Ultimately, it is impossible to determine who speaks in this passage. A closer reading
of its central section, particularly at the points of transition between one voice and
another, suggests a mingling of two voices. For example, the image of Helen as panther when she claws Achille s knuckles and is led into Hector's transport, echoes the same
image used at the end of the previous chapter, where the voice is clearly that of
Walcott. "I saw her once after that moment on the beach," introduces the image: "I
saw the rage/ of her measuring eyes, and felt again the chill/ of a panther hidden in the dark of its cage” (36). The impression created by this mingling of voices is that there is common experience between Achille and "Walcott," that they share the narration of the
185 incident, and that the concluding reflective passage is a duel for male voices. At its
conclusion, the pronoun shifts again, "and you leave her there.” “You" moves outward
to embrace not only Achille, but also a male reader, in its invocation of the shared
experience of loss. The matter of the early part of Book Four, dealing with "Walcott's”
reflections on the break-down of his relationship with an unnamed woman, makes it clear to what extent he and Achille are metaphorically "in the same boat,” as is
Plunkett after the death of Maud.
This is not an isolated effect. It is a pervasive feature of the entire poem that there are occasions when it is impossible logically to determine who speaks, and voices
shift in such a way as to entrap the reader into recognition of the points of contact between characters and between the characters and "Walcott.” This is noticeable in that section of the poem when narration passes from Walcott s voice to that of
Catherine Weldon. Catherine's account of the massacre of the Sioux after the Ghost
Dance and her return to Boston in winter is followed by an elegiac passage reflecting upon winter in terms that keep in mind the destruction of the earlier passage. Again, it seems natural to assume that Catherine's voice continues. The description of the obliteration of a landscape by snow echoes the snow at Wounded Knee. In addition, the snow masking the streets is seen as the obliteration of a language, linking the experience of the Sioux with that of Achille s people. As snow blankets the street,
"every noun/ became its muffled echo.'’
Turn the page. Blank winter. The obliteration
1 8 6 of nouns fading into echoes, the alphabet
of scribbled branches. (218)
However, as the passage proceeds, details are introduced that place the scene in the
twentieth centun, present rather than in Cathenne's late nineteenth century Boston.
The traffic light, trolley station and a crowd wearing "black coats and parkas” indicate
that the narrative has passed from Catherine to"Walcott/' a transition that is confirmed
when he describes passing the house of the Greek girl, now lost, who had first given
him the name Omeros.
The references to the attrition of language thus take on a third application, to the
situation of the exile in the United States, who feels his personal and cultural identity
threatened by an alien landscape and an alien language. He says; "I could, since the
only civilizations/ were those with snow, whiten to anonymity." The slide between
narrators that leaves the reader initially attributing speech to one character, being
unable to tell who speaks, and finally recognizing the voice of another, invites empathy
across divisions of gender, nationality, race and class. It does not assert the equivalence of disparate experience, but leads towards an imaginative recognition of the relatedness
of those experiences.
187 The Author and Authority
Given the extent to which the narrative voice in O m eros is plural, composed of
the voices of many narrators, it is difficult to acquiesce in Burris's identification of the
poem as monologic. Even "Walcott's " voice fragments, and could equally well be
regarded as the three separate voices of three distinct personae, or as three aspects of
the same voice. It functions at some points in the poem as the impersonal voice of the
omniscient narrator of traditional fiction, as in the opening chapter of the poem, where
it interrupts Philoctete's voice to place his narrative in context;
For some extra silver, under a sea-almond.
he shows them a scar made by a rusted anchor,
rolling one trouser-leg up with the rising moan
of a conch. It has puckered like the corolla
of a sea-urchin. He does not explain its cure.
"It have some things" — he smiles — "worth more than a dollar. " (4)
Elsewhere, a more distinctly individualized voice emerges, that of the traveling poet
and scholar who is both a participant and observer in the action of the poem and shares aspects of Walcott's personal history. He functions as a fictionalized version of
Walcott himself, a character called "Walcott." It is his voice that recalls the encounter
188 with the Greek girl (14-15) and describes the scene at the beach cafe, where he is
present watching the interaction of the characters;
I sat on the white terrace waiting for the cheque.
Our waiter, in a black bow-tie. plunging through the sand
between the full deck-chairs, bouncing to the discotheque
music from the speakers. (23)
This narrator, like the other characters in Omeros, has his own journey to make, one in
the series of journeys that comprise the plot.
Throughout the poem, but most notably in the last two books, his voice merges
with that of a metanarrator, the detached, voice of an author who stands outside his
fiction and comments upon the processes of its creation. This voice is present when he
interrupts Plunkett s narrative to observe, “This wound 1 have stitched into Plunkett's
character" (28) and steps aside from the account of Maud's funeral to point out;
1 was both there and not there. I was attending
the funeral of a character I'd created. (266)
As this last voice observes, at an early stage in the narrative, “every "V is a fiction
finally, " and any "I" may become a series of disparate fictions. The voice identified as
189 that ot "Walcott" in this chapter could, thus, be said to fulfil three roles in the poem as
writer, fictional character, and commentator. The device allows Walcott to comment
critically on "Walcott," (or possibly for "Walcott" to comment on Walcott) while
leaving some doubt as to which of these voices, if any, is that of the "real" Walcott.
The use of the third self-reflexive voice constantly signals the artifice of the text, while
simultaneously evoking a material reality that stands beyond it, and calling into
question the authority of author-as-character and by implication of the author who produces the text.
The fragmentation of the writer-narrator and the sharing of narration among characters ultimately reduces the author's voice to one voice (or three voices) among
many. The consciousness that pervades the poem is not that of a single observer, nor does it represent the viewpoint of a single class. The narrative includes the voices and sensibilities of women. Helen, Maud and Ma Kilman all take center stage at different points in the poem; and while Helen and Maud both serve the function of emblems of nation, the use of Helen as symbol is overtly condemned, and both also appear as rounded characters, endowed with individual agency.
Consequently, the portrait of St. Lucian society that emerges during the course of the poem is composite and inclusive. It is not equivalent to the series of snapshots taken by the tourist, one man's incomplete and superficial record, but a communal record in which no voice is given ultimate authority. No other poem in Walcott's oevre comes closer to the ideals of voicing the collective and of presenting a West Indian materiality through the many linguistic codes used by its multiple narrators.
190 The poem works in a way diametrically opposed to Bakhtin s formula identify ing the classical epic as the most monologic of poetic genres. Nevertheless, critics continue to debate the genre of the poem, its relationship to the classical epic, and the use made of the matter of Homer in its composition. Just as the narrative and linguistic strategies discussed in this chapter have lead some critics to identify the work with a Western post-modernism, so the pervasive and teasing references to the Western epic and the story of Troy have been seen mistakenly as aligning Omcras within the tradition of Western European poetry. The next chapter examines the way in which
Walcott, in the course of the poem, attempts to place the West Indian poet and West
Indian poetry in the context of World literature.
191 CHAPTERS
r f/£POET CARRYI^G ESTIRE CLLTL RES OS HIS BACK"
In his essay "An Empire of Poetry," Sidney Burris envisages an army of scholars setting out to trace and expound upon the references to the epics of Homer that link the poem to the tradition of Western epic, or to demonstrate how Walcott modifies the traditional genre in his "re-writing" of Homer's masterpiece! s)‘. Predictably, his vision has been fulfilled during the years following the poem s publication. In a recent special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly devoted to Walcott s poetics, four out of six articles, three of them on Omeros, concern themselves with such topics. Robert
Ham ner's Omeros, Epic o f the Dispossessed devotes considerable space to the tracing of parallels between Walcott's poem and the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. In the background, Walcott keeps up a steady stream of disclaimers that his work is epic, repudiations of "the kind of thing that many reviewers and critics saw in Omero.s-. a reinvention of the Odys.sey, but this time in the Caribbean," even repeated, and
' Sidney Burris "An Empire of Poetry " The Southern Review- Summer. 1991 560 192 transparently disingenuous, denials oF having ever read Homer, "not all the way
through.”"
The deployment of the Homeric material in Omero.s serves two purposes
Firstly, just as the parallel journeys in search of home and healing place the West Indian
experience in a global context, so a series of representative poets from both oral and
print traditions are used to negotiate the relationship of the West Indian poet to world
literary traditions. Omeros, in this context, is presented not as a universal archetype of the poet, but as one type of poet in a group whose similarities and differences are
explored. The process involves a revision of the formulation of the function of the poet and his relationship to history as laid out in the essay, “The Muse of Histoty” (1974).
Secondly, the use made of Homer by two of Walcott’s poet characters, Plunkett and the narrator, dramatizes the dangers of each of their modes of appropriation. In contrast,
Walcott’s appropriation of the Homeric material makes the classical text secondary to a
St. Lucian materiality, presenting not a revision or re-writing of either Iliad ox Odyssey but a work that replaces them, and, at least for the duration ofOmero.s, deletes their stories.
Singers and Writers: the Company of Poets in Omeros
In Omeros, just as he has done in Another Life, Walcott deploys a series of representations of writers, poets and historians, including a narrator who shares
" "Reflections on A talk given by Walcott at Duke University, 19 April. 1995 Printed in ,Sot//A Atlantic Ouarierly 92.2 Spring. 1997 p.232. Omeros, 283 1 9 3 features of his own personal histor\ and is shown in the process of composing Omeros.
Nevertheless, more obviously than in the earlier poem, this is a project that involves more than autobiography, in spite of the fact that it depends, in part, upon a representation, or, more accurately, several representations, of sel f-as-poet. As observed in the previous chapter, the "Walcott” figure appears as traditional narrator, as a character observing and involved in the action, and as metapoet, commenting upon the process of composition. And, of course, since "every T is a fiction finally,” beyond them stands the poet Walcott, controlling the representation of all three. As in Another
Life, the separation of self from self involved in presenting a fictional version of the author as a character in the poem enables Walcott to stand back and criticize his poetic method.
This fictional representation of the poet is placed beside that of Plunkett, the amateur historian, engaged in his self-imposed task of returning to Helen a history which will substitute for an official history that misrepresented, represents her people, and a lost past, which is both inescapable in its effects and irrecoverable in its authentic detail. Besides poet and historian, Walcott also introduces the figure of the writer's father, as memory or ghost. He appears twice in the narrative, on each occasion directing his son's life and works.
Alongside these contemporary writers, Walcott places a series of poets from the oral traditions of various cultures. The first of these, Homer, is evoked in the poem's title, in the efforts o f' Walcott ' and Plunkett to match his work in some way, and as a character in the narrative. In this last aspect, he is repeatedly and deliberately confused
194 with Seven Seas, "the blind singer." who in turn features as a protean figure, mutating
into the African gnot in Achi lie's dream of Africa and the Sioux shaman of the
Wounded Knee episode, whom Catherine Weldon identities as "Omeros" Finally,
although making only a brief appearance. leading the singing of "By Bendemeer's
stream" in a Dublin pub, there is Joyce, "our age's Omeros. undimmed master "
On one level, each of the poets represented appears in some sense as an ancestor
of "Walcott" as poet, but the relationship is never uncomplicated. The phantom father
is the writer's biological father, and is based on Walcott's father, who died young
leaving the notebook of verses and the watercolor sketches that determined the young
Walcott's vocation. He is also, by the time they come face to face in Omeros, young
enough to be the "Walcott’s" son, and functions as a younger version of himself, who,
when the father asks of their two voices "Which is the boy's,, which is the father's'!’" is
told, "Sir,. ..they are one voice" When he sends "Walcott” to see the great cities of the world, his description of his own simultaneous attraction to and fear of the cities of
Europe is an echo of Walcott's account to E. D. Hirsch of one of the reasons why he chose to remain in the Caribbean, when so many of his contemporaries chose exile in
Britain, Canada or the United States. ' The imagined father's account of himself as dominating a small circle of admiring friends ("I felt like the "I" that looks down on an island,/ the way a crested palm looks down from its ridge. " ) is reminiscent of the figure
^ Edward Hirsch "An interview with Derek Walcott " Contemporary Literature, 20 3 (Summer. 1979). 279-92 "In terms of my poetry, I felt it would be a very, very long time before I could feel secure enough as a West Indian to see or to experience the culture that England and Europe represented I still have a subliminal fear of Europe; I think I would feel dislocated, alienated, or uprooted if 1 had some of the traditional great experiences like seeing the Coliseum or Chartres" 1 9 5 ofthc poet, in so many of Walcott's early writings, a soiitar\ figure observing the life of
the island from a distance and from above.
Plunkett, whose discovery of a nineteen-year-old ancestor, dead at the Battle of
the Saints, parallels "Walcott's "relationship with his Father soa self, has been the
narrator's drill sergeant in O.T.C. at St. Mary's College, and in some respects appiears
as a surrogate father. On the other hand, "Walcott" and Plunkett are also presented as
brother writers, and brothers who make parallel mistakes in their adaptation of the
matter of Homer to their literary purposes. Each is seduced by the coincidences of
naming, which endow contemporary figures with the names of characters from the
Iliad. Each makes a bid to own Helen metaphorically, one by constructing her as a
metaphor for the island, “Helen of the West Indies," and by forcing History into the
shape of myth, the other by trying to represent the material Helen in terms of the Helen
of classical myth.
The literary ancestors from different oral traditions — Homer, Seven Seas, the
griot, and the shaman — form a single set, and, at times, appear interchangeable, as
Omeros and Seven Seas dizzyingly keep changing places in the final book. The attitude of "Walcott " to these figures swings between respect and an ambivalent fear. More
than the ghost of his dead father they haunt the poem, present in one or other of their various aspects in almost every scene. Their identities are deliberately confused, nor is
it possible conclusively to identify one of them as the matrix for the others.
Through the representation of these juxtaposed versions of the Poet, Walcott once again questions what a poet is, what his function should be, and also reviews his
196 owTi poetic practice in the light of'their example. His aims are. firstly, to formulate a
model of the Poet, and also, in the composition of Omen is, to become the poet whose
identity he has formulated.
Homer and the Oral Tradition
To evoke Homer, the first founding father of the Western literary tradition, at the outset of the poem is an egregious piece of coat-trailing on Walcott's part,
considering the frequent criticism of his work as Eurocentric. As John Figueroa admonishes Walcott in a spirited apostrophe:
Wha de hell yu read Homer —
A so him name — fa!
Yu his from the horal tradition
And must deal wid calypso and reggae na!^
To mention Homer, let alone to construct a work which makes constant reference to the matter of the IliuJ and Odyssey, could be regarded as perpetuating the pattern of domination set up by colonialism and the colonial education system, and as re enforcing the mind-set which sees West Indian literature as subordinate to the English
^ "Problems of a writer who does not Quite ." Quoted Edward Kamau Brathwaite,///5/o/r of I 'cHce, London and Port o f Spain New Beacon Books. 1984, p 39 197 tradition. As one Caribbean academic, who prefers not to be named, told me. "I would
have no interest in reading a poem called ()meros. the title tells me all 1 need to know
about it." Nevertheless, it seems that for Walcott, as for his primarv narrator. Homer
cannot be quite so easily dismissed. Since he returns unbidden, since the verv act of
dismissing him involves the re-mscription of his name, Walcott employs three opposed
strategies. The first is to appropriate the figure of Omeros, reclaiming him for the West
Indian tradition by emphasizing his relationship to an oral tradition operating in a
largely pre-literate society. The second is to allow “Walcott" and Plunkett to propose a
series of parallels between the Homeric poems and the lives of his St. Lucian
characters, which constantly contradict and undo themselves. In addition to these
strategies and in contradiction to the first of them, Walcott sets up a framework in
which he, as outer, controlling poet, seems repeatedly to promise his reader a reprise of
the Troy story that he never delivers. The material of Troy is dangled teasingly before
the reader's nose, while its substance is infinitely deferred, contradicted or ignored. In
place of the matter of Troy he presents us instead with a series o f interconnected stories about present-day inhabitants of St. Lucia, each of whom contributes to the narration in
his or her own idiom.
Walcott places himself alongside his fictional self and Plunkett as a poet who also feels the attraction of what he has called “the fearful magnet of older civilizations," and offers in the text a series of contrasted responses to that attraction. His defense against it is a simultaneous acceptance and rejection of its influence that incorporates
features of the verwincJung theorized by Vattimo as the only possible defense in such a
198 situation, an alert, ironical awareness of the extent and the means by which the
influence he seeks to exorcise invades his thought/ However, this is not his only
defense, since in the poem the substance of Homeric epic is only promised but never
delivered. It is instead replaced by the representation of present day St. Lucia, the
immediacy of which overlays and cancels the shadow of the earlier story, very much as
in Hans Anderson's story , “The Shadow," the shadow steals the substance of its owner
and in the end becomes the man, who is hired as the former shadow's shadow. It is an
outstandingly daring and successful piece of appropriation.
The introduction of Omeros in the account of "Walcott's" encounter with the
bust in the Greek girl's apartment, involves a stripping of the name Homer of its
accumulated associations by substituting its modem Greek equivalent, and by proposing
a different set of associations: “Homer and Virg are New England farmers,, and the
winged horse guards their gas station " (14). These associations in themselves are
reductive, diminishing and distancing the original. The new name is further
neutralized, first by reducing it to the pure sound provided by the immediate landscape,
sea and the sound of the conch, and then by retranslating it in the terms of three of
Walcott's primary languages. Standard English, the Kweyol of the streets and the Latin of his education:
Gianni Vattimo [he Etvi of Modernity: Nihi/ism and Hermeneutics m Post-Modern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore; Johns Hopkins UP, 1991 Vattimo argues that post-modern thinkers find themselves heirs to a tradition of thought which they perpetuate even as they attempt to resist it and proposes that their only defense against it is to hold contradictory elements in an ironical balance. Brathwaite at the end of his essay "Caribbean Man in Space and Time," after discussing the problems of creollzation, that perhaps the best that can be achieved in the West Indies is "a permanent, coexistent plurality " Paul Gilroy in There .Aint No Black in the Union Jack, theorizes plurality rather than hybridity or créolization as a model for black British identity Both leave space for and predate the type of formulation proposed bv Vattimo 199 1 said "Omeros,"
and () was the conch-shell's invocation, mcr was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
OS a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes
and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.” ( 14)
The act of renaming is in itself an act of appropriation, which associates the name with a West Indian materiality, but the substitution of one name for another also works to throw a reader back upon a concept of the original Homeric poet or poets and the conditions under which the great Homeric epics were composed.
While little is known of the historical Homer, and it remains uncertain whether the same poet, or group of poets, is responsible for the composition of the existing transcribed versions of both Ihad and Odyssey, one influential theory would place both poems in a tradition of oral, improvisatory poetry in a pre-1 iterate society, which involved the re-working of traditional material according to agreed formulae.^' The
The Parry-Lord oral-formuiaic theory, derived from a study of classical Greek and twentieth century South Slavic (Yugoslavian) folk epic, posits the construction of oral and oral-derived epic texts from a series o f structural and formulaic units and argues for the validity o f applying the theory to similar texts in a wide range of different language traditions. The validity o f the theory has been contested on a number of counts In particular, G.S. Kirk in The Songs o f Homer (1962), AC Watts in The Lyre and the Harp (1969) and Walter Ong in (Jrality and Literacy (1967) call into question whether a broad (or even universal) application o f the theory can be made It is no part of this dissertation to discuss whether or not the Parry-Lord theory can justly be applied to the oral literatures o f West Africa, the Plains Indians or the West Indies The point to be made is simply that the theory exists and its existence is put to poetic use in Omeros 200 placing of these poems as orally-based and drawing upon the traditional formulae of oral composition provides an interesting parallel to Walcott’s view of the relationship between the individual artist and tradition as expressed in Another f.ijc. and in numerous interv iews in which he stresses the importance of knowledge and imitation of an established tradition for the apprentice poet. It also, and more importantly, places
Seven Seas and the other representatives of oral traditions on a similar and equal footing.
Walcott's presentation of the Omeros figure and the connections he makes in the poem between him and representatives of other oral traditions — the African griot, the Sioux shaman, and especially the West Indian chanterelle or chantvvell — places emphasis on Homer as the culmination of a now defunct orally based European tradition and as fulfilling some of the same functions as the types of poet evoked by these figures. Each acts as historian, providing a story of the origins of his society; each memorializes and conserves the traditions of a culture that has disappeared or is in the act of mutating: each points towards the future either prophetically or to perpetuate historically approved values in a new stage of history. Homer also stands at the beginning of the long written tradition of the European epic and provides one example of a single oral tradition carried forward to create and inform a written tradition that assumes some of its functions.
Walcott is also concerned, when he deploys these characters, to examine the appropriateness of such a tradition to present day West Indian society and its viability at the end of the twentieth century. The relative stability and uniformity of the societies in
201 which these figures traditionally operate provides a marked contrast with the diversity
and flux of twentieth century West Indian society. Seven Seas operates locally as a
repository of regional history and tradition suppressed or distorted in printed (colonial)
sources. Unlike the griot, the shaman and the epic praise singer he does not occupy a
recognized professional position in his society. Both griot and shaman arrive at their
position after a rigorous apprenticeship, whereas the chantwell is an amateur. WTiile
the griot and shaman are honored and valued by their society. Seven Seas seems largely
misunderstood and unregarded. Ma Kilman cannot understand his "old African
babble." Implicit in his association with Homer is the possibility that his influence may also inform a written tradition that assumes some of the functions of his work.
From the outset Seven Seas and Omeros are consistently associated with one another. The introduction of Seven Seas into the narrative in the second chapter, an
account of his rising to begin the day, as he sits at his kitchen table, "fingers recounting the past/ of another sea," is interrupted by "Walcott's" invocation to
Omeros:
O open this day with the conch's moan, Omeros,
as you did in my boyhood, when I was a noun
gently exhaled from the palate of sunrise. (12)
Details of the invocation that follows, including the assertion that only in Omeros' lines can the writer recapture scenes from his St. Lucian boyhood, suggest that at this point
202 Seven Seas is Omeros. In the subsequent section of the poem, when "Walcott" is shown the bust of Homer and given the alternative name, the appearance of the bust calls to mind Seven Seas "sitting near the reek, of drving fishnets, listening to the shallows'noise." They are physically alike; both are blind. Ma Kilman thinks of
Seven Seas as "the blind singer," and gives his name as "Old St. Omere," a familiar St.
Lucian surname, but one reminiscent of Homer or Omeros. It is also a name he shares with Gregorias of Anoiher Life, a further detail that aligns Seven Seas with living St.
Lucian artists.
Achille’s tribe in Africa has its own blind singer, "a white-eyed story-teller," whom, at the climactic moment when he witnesses the aftermath of the slaving raid,
Achille identifies with Seven Seas:
"Achille saw Seven Seas foaming with grief. He must
be deaf as well as blind, Achille thought. The head
never turned" (145).
Catherine Weldon's account of the scene after the massacre at Wounded Knee includes the shaman, with the words reminiscent of these earlier lines: “1 saw white-eyed
Omeros, motionless. He must/ be deaf, too, I thought, as well as blind, since his head/ never turned" (216). Each of these scenes emphasizes the connection between the griot, the shaman and Seven Seas with the use of identical details. In both, the observer comes upon the blind singer in the aftermath of destruction and sees a deserted \nllage,
203 a child who sits in the dust, holding a clay pot. and a dog The posture and actions of the singer are identical in both scenes. The dog reminds us of Seven Seas' constant companion.
The passivitv o f these figures, the images o f the container and of the child all suggest problems or limitations of poets operating in an oral tradition. Oral performance is by its very nature ephemeral, hence the child as auditor is a necessar\ adjunct to the singer. Only an auditor can carry the singer's words forward into the future. The pot, that calls to mind a series of similar images used in connection with
Harry Simmons in Another Life, contains but is static. It and its contents can be used, but the oral singer has no control over the uses to which it may be put by a later poet.
The passivity suggested by both the figure of the poet and by the pot places the singer and his song at the service of his community and of the future users of his material.
In the final book o f the poem, in which "W alcott" encounters Omeros in a dream-like passage, Omeros and Seven Seas seem at first to be interchangeable. What first appears to be a coconut floating in the surf at the sea's edge takes on the appearance of a marble head of Omeros, though, "It changed shapes in light according to each clouding thought." The next moment it has mutated into the figure of Seven
Seas, "and the shallows at that second;' changed to another dialect as Seven Seas stood, in the white foam manacling his heels.” Throughout the journey on which this figure conducts him, "Walcott” has the impression of sometimes being in company with
Seven Seas, sometimes with Omeros, and the figure addresses him in the person of each of these in turn. A.t the end of the passage, when both unite to attack his poetic
204 practices, the two feature as double-headed Janus, as in nightmare the narrator fancies
himself sinking into the mud of Soufrière:
Both heads were turned like the god of the yawning year
on whose ridge 1 stood looking back where 1 came from. (294)
In effect, each attacks the writer from the standpoint of a different poetic tradition, and
both condemn him.
Neither Omeros nor Seven Seas is presented as primary or as the archetype of
the oral poet. In some respects. Seven Seas could more justly be identified as the
matrix of all the several versions of oral poet who appear in the poem and as unifying their functions. In conversation with Achille:
He said he was once
a Ghost Dancer like that smoke. He described the snow
to Achille. He named the impossible mountains
that he had seen when he lived among the Indians. (164)
Despite their similarities, however, these representatives of separate oral traditions are not collapsed into a universal figure of the archetypal poet. It is not easy to say whether a reader would have the impression of recognizing Seven Seas in all the oral poets who
205 appear in the course of the poem, or of recouniziny Omeros. Catherine Weldon sees
Omeros in the shaman; Achille identifies the griot as Seven Seas: “Walcott" names
sometimes one, sometimes the other. Each constitutes the figure they see according to
the template of poet provided for them by their own cultural norms. In the case of
"Walcott," Omeros looks ver\ much like the old chantwell; Seven Seas looks like the
founder of the Western epic tradition. Thus, Walcott establishes grounds for believing
that cultural conditioning determines which analogy will hold good for each character.
The correspondences between the functions of these representatives oral traditions
licenses the dialogue and questioning of these traditions in which the writers engage.
While their functions overlap to a certain extent, traditionally in the case of
shaman and griot a different function is foregrounded and may be shared by Omeros or by Seven Seas or by both. The griot acts as record-keeper, genealogist, and historian
for his society , a repository' of local information. He is described as "the crooked tree who carried the genealogical leaves/ of the tribe." His songs record "who perished in
battle, who was swift with the arrow,, who mated with a crocodile." D T. Niane, in an introduction to the transcription oï SimJtata, defines the griot s function as a conservator and teacher of historical tradition and asserts the historical reliability of his accounts.^ The griot, Mamadou Kouyate, who narrates the story identifies the griot as
"the memory of mankind," and claims; "My word is pure and free of all untruth ... royal griots do not know what lying is.” His comprehensive knowledge of precedent and tradition makes him the adviser of rulers, ensuring that tradition is perpetuated.
D T Niane Siindiaia. an Epic o f Old Mali trans G D Pickett Harlow Longman, 1986 p vii 206 Homer was also considered, during the Classical period, to be an historian, the
Troy stor>- being part of his people's history , and according to H. D. F Kitto was
regarded as encompassing an encyclopaedic knowledge of all subjects.^ Se\en Seas
fulfills a similar function w hen he explains to Achille the denvation of the name
pomme artic\ and tells him the story of the Aruacs. earlier inhabitants of the island,
whose historical trace Achille finds in the petroglyph he picks up in the yard. Both
provide a sense of continuity, preserving knowledge that would otherwise be lost and
situating their hearers in relation to the past.
Each of the oral poets, in common with the writers in the poem, "Walcott" and
Plunkett, shares an awareness that they witness, or in the case of Homer that he has
already witnessed, the end of a way of life. The Iliad and Odyssey record the way of
life of Mycenaen Greece, already beyond living memory at the probable time of
transcription of the two epics. In addition, Homer has himself become a part of the
past, barely read, at least in his onginal language (even by the narrator of this poem).
He explains his treatment in London by telling"Walcott,” ambiguously, "They don't
know my age." In Omeros, the griot and the shaman both wimess the violent and
cataclysmic destruction of their own societies. Plunkett has witnessed the slow
dismantling of the British Empire after the Second World War and the gradual change
that, in the years that followed, make the London he revisits seem like an unfamiliar.
** ** H D F Kitto ITie Greeks Penguin Books Ltd. : Harmonds'worth. 1951 "Tht Iliad andlhs Odyssey have been called the Bible of the Greeks For centuries these two poems were the basis of Greek education, both of formal school education and the cultural life of the ordinary citizen. Homer could be quoted in diplomatic exchanges, like a Domesday Book, to support a territorial claim A kind of Fundamentalism grew up Homer enshrined all wisdom and all knowledge” (44) 207 foreign cit>'. Seven Seas and "Walcott " in the course of the poem are witness to social and economic change in St. Lucia Though change in each case lakes on a different aspect and has its roots in different causes, for each of them, change is the visible effect of the wound of time. In each case, their f unction is to witness and to bear witness.
The shaman may also record, but is primarily identified as priest, prophet and healer. Ironically, his prophecy leads to the Ghost Dance and the decimation of his tribe. The griot is also credited with the power of prophecy when he sings his lament after the enslavement of the tribe and when he records Achille's own story before it has come to pass. Again this is a power which Seven Seas, unlike Omeros, seems to share.
He is able to tell Philoctete that Achille has gone to Africa to look for his name and his soul, and will return soon. He also warns Achille that their way of life is changing, threatened by over-fishing, the encroachments of tourism and destruction of the eco system, "that once men were satisfied with destroying men they would move on to nature" (300). In their aspects of priest and prophet, their function is to direct action and prescribe conduct for the societies they serve, pointing forward to the future as well as conserving the connection with the past.
The separation of the poet s functions as historian, custodian of the past, and as prophet and healer, oriented towards the future, emphasizes the tension that exists between these functions. It also raises the question of why histories are written, a question raised by R. Radhakrishnan, who comments that "it is never clear if the purpose of historicizing is to instrumentalize the past in the service of the present or to conserve the past through continuity in the present." The two writers in Omeros,
208 "Walcott" and Plunkett, invite comparison with this complex of characters representing difTerent oral traditions insofar as they attempt to fulfill some of the functions ascribed to them.
The poets of Omeros and their relationship to the past
“Walcott", Plunkett and, ultimately, Walcott himself are all engaged in the project of recording histories, and in the course of their work, each engages the traditions of the past, particularly the tradition of Homenc epic, in a different way.
Each, in his own way, seeks "to instrumental ize the past in the service of the present,” proposing to heal the wound inflicted by history. The efforts of both Plunkett and
"Walcott” are subjected to criticism in the course of the poem, while Walcott's text is offered as a third model of response and relationship to the material of the past.
Plunkett's proposed historx is motivated by desire for Helen, and justified as a the laudable wish to set the historical record straight. "My thoughts are pure.' he tells himself. "They're meant to help her people. " The serpent bracelet he has just watched
Helen trying on replies: "But these, smiled the bracelet, are the vows of empire " (97).
Inspired by the desire to possess and control, he seizes on the coincidences of naming and tries to force history to fit the shape of myth. Helen for him is “not a fantasy, but a webbed connection."’ He is naively delighted to find that the name of the French flagship in the Battle of the Saints was the Ville de Pans: “Ts this chance, or an echo?
Paris gives the golden apple, a war is/ fought for an island called Helen?’ - clapping
209 conclusive hands ” The rational reply is that this is chance From Plunkett's point of
view, however, each coincidence serves to reinforce his conviction that the struggle
over St. Lucia replicates the events of the Trojan War. In Plunkett's revision of colonial
historv. classical mythology dignifies and glorifies a sordid struggle over a strategically
advantageous piece of ground, opportunistically acquired and cynically exploited. It becomes a chivalric exploit motivated by love, rather than a matter of militarv and
economic expediency. It is not for nothing that the juvenile Plunkett has been awarded the essay prize by a neo-fascist history master during his schooldays.
"Walcott” makes more subtle use of the Troy story, though, like Plunkett, he is motivated partly by the desire to possess and partly by guilt. His strategy is a mirror
image of Plunkett's in that, rather than replacing historical fact with mythology, as
Plunkett does, he romanticizes a present reality by decorating it with classical allusion.
His illusion is that he can dignify Helen by comparing her to Helen of Troy, while it is clear that the material Helen requires no borrowed dignity . The character "Walcott", in his commentary on their proceedings, describes the two as driven by the same impulse but using "two opposing stratagems "
Plunkett, in his innocence,
had tried to change History to a metaphor,
in the name of a housemaid; I, in self-defence,
altered her opposite. Yet it was all for her. (270)
210 The crucial difFerence seems to be that Plunkett has substituted a myth for the physical and material Helen, while "Walcott” has attempted to elevate the material woman by associating her with the mylh. but inevitably perpetuated mvth rather than materiality.
Both interpose an external fiction between themselves and the Helen they attempt to grasp. Both deny her the nght to be herself. They attempt to transform her into a metaphor for the island or an embodiment of a mythical figure, and in each mode of representation she is appropriated to their use without reference to her own subjectivity or sense of self. She can only be a fiction. "A girl smells better than a book," Omeros tells the narrator. "A girl smells better than the world's libraries.”
Both Plunkett and "W alcott" are powerless to fulfill the prophetic and healing roles ascribed to griot and shaman. Plunkett’s researches send him back along the linear course of history, while "Walcott’s" journey into the underworld gives him access only to the events of the past. In this he is no different from poets of the Western epic tradition. The prophecies granted to Achilles and to Odysseus in Homer's Ihaü and
Odyssey, those revealed to Aeneas in the Aeneid. and Raphael’s revelations to Adam in
Paradise I.osi rely upon the hindsight of the writer.
In the poem the role of healer is transferred to Ma Kilman, the obeah woman.
The text itself, however, enacts the process of healing in its disruption of time, which allows different characters access to histories that they can make use of in the present.
Plunkett's historical researches sponsor his commitment to an adopted homeland. Ma
Kilman's memory of oral tradition, handed down to her by her mother and represented figuratively in the procession of ants that leads her to the cure, informs her search for
211 the herb that provides the final necessaiA ingredient in Philoctete s healing bath. For
Achille, the journey back to Africa enables him to make the act of recognition of
African elements in his present West Indian milieu. The recognition gives a new seriousness to the Jonconnu masquerade at Christmas time. Putting on his costume,
Helen's yellow dress, he puts on not only the African but also the female, becoming.
someone else
today, a warrior-woman, fierce and benign.
Today he was African, his own epitaph.
His own resurrection. (273-76)
and in the process he assumes voluntarily the function of symbol of the island, the role
Helen has been required to assume throughout the poem. The transformation links him with the gods who ignored his invocation in his dream of Africa:
He was resinous and frightening. He smelt like trees
on a ndge at sunnse, like uns waving cedars. (276)
The seriousness with which he assumes his role infects Helen with an answering seriousness, and the ceremony that memorializes and transcends past suffering moves
Philoctete to tears.
212 The claims of the text to record faithfully, to contain the memories of an entire group, and to place history at the disposal of the present in a form that can be used to direct future action, bids to place its author in relation to the oral traditions of the past as it shows him assuming their functions. The move decisively separates Walcott from the operations of his nanrator-as-character, whose efforts in the poem are associated with those of Plunkett, and who during the last two books of the poem is subjected to the criticism of the composite figure(s) of Omeros. Seven Seas. As in Another Life,
Walcott separates himself from the fictional representation of himself in order to review and revise his earlier methods and assumptions about the role of the poet in the West
Indies.
Sot the Matter of Troy
In considering the second of the strategies outlined in the introductory section of this chapter — the presentation of a series of untenable parallels between local events and the Troy story — it is important to make the distinction between the way in which
Walcott deploys Homeric allusion in the poem and the quite different ways in which he shows his characters. Plunkett and”Walcott," making use of the Troy story. The introduction of Philoctete at the beginning of the poem leaves room for doubt as to which classical text is being evoked. Philoctetes’ story is alluded to in both Iliad and
Odyssey, among other texts, but the fullest account of it is in Sophocles' play,
Philoctetes. The casual reader, particularly the reader unfamiliar with Homer’s work,
213 may well read Omeros with the impression of having read a West Indian re-work mg of
Homer's account of the Trojan War. Given an acquaintance with the I had and the
Odyssey, a reader could be forgiven for some confusion as to which of the two poems formed the basis for the later poem. Thematically, Omeros is closer to the O dyssey, in its presentation of the journeys that end m home coming and its accounts of reunion between fathers and sons. In its references to the Trojan War and its account of a quarrel between two characters named Hector and Achille it invites identification with the Ihad. In both cases the link between the modem and the classical text is tenuous.
The supposed correspondences between them form an elaborate literary practical joke, in that, ultimately, the text presents a vividly realized present-day West Indian landscape and characters that overshadow and replace the world and characters of classical myth.
Initially, Walcott quietly seduces the reader into an identification of St. Lucia with Mycenean Greece, and St. Lucian characters with the protagonists of the Homeric epics. From the outset this is a matter of the simple coincidences of naming. ( "The name Helen gripped my wrist in its vise, to plunge it into the foaming page,” says
"Walcott,” towards the end of the poem.) Presented with a character called Philoctete, who has a festenng leg wound, a beautiful woman named Helen, and a pair of rivals who go by the names of Hector and Achille, the average, semi-educated Western reader
(who needs only a casual nodding acquaintance with the story of Troy or with
Caribbean cultures) will go galloping off in the direction of classical Greece, without needing any further encouragement. In doing so she falls headlong into the same trap
214 into which Plunkett and the narrator stumble in the course ofthe narrative, namely,
overlooking the local and perfectly obvious trees in favor of a distant prospect of'
Classical woods. The less the reader knows about the Ihad-ànd about the Caribbean,
the more elegantly the trap is sprung, and the better the joke. In this respect Walcott is
performing an elitist manoevre. The details of the poem which evoke the work of
Homer are raised only to be dismissed as irrelevant, while the use made of them by
“Walcott" and Plunkett is presented in a light which calls into question the legitimacy
and effectiveness of their uses.
Philoctete's story is the only section of the poem that comes close to a parallel
with the story of Philoctetes alluded to in Homer's narratives, and is also the section of
the poem that lends itself most readily to a clear, point-by-point allegorical reading.
Both characters have a wound that is healed in the course of time. Moreover, there is a
teasing similanty between the names of their healers, the Greek Machaon being
replaced by the ironically named West Indian Ma Kilman. ' It is possible, though not
strictly necessary, to read Philoctete's story in the light of the classical story of
Philoctetes, who must be persuaded by the wiles of Odysseus to forgive his comrades their abandonment of him on a remote island, because his magical bow and arrows (the source of his incurable wound, in one version of the story) are vital to the success of the war against Troy. An attempt to read the parallels too closely, however, results only in confusion. Philoctetes' wound is accidentally self-inflicted with his own arrows;
.via Kiiman has already featured in the folk song section o f “Sainte Lucie,” and seems to be a figure from Eastern Caribbean folklore Adam Price-Mars has a folk tale in Ainsi dit l 'oncle which includes a witch who goes by the name of Madame Kéiéman. 215 Philoctete's is indicted by the external agencies of history . Philoctetes' healing is an
advance payment for services to be rendered to Agamemnon's expeditionary force:
Philoctete's is a gratuitous restitution for past suffering, and carried out by a sharer in
that suffering. The changes made in the Greek legend of Philoctetes adapt the original
to serve as a metaphor for the situation of West Indian man. it is not suggested that
Philoctete repeats or echoes the same experience. The classical myth illustrates the
West Indian situation, rather than the West Indian situation imitating the classical myth.
Beyond this, the apparent allusions to Homeric material are illusory, or depend
on a loose association of imprecise ideas about the Homeric characters. Walcott's
narrator confesses that he has never read Homer's work; Walcott's use of detail in the
poem demonstrates a working familiarity with the texts that suggests that we should
consider the poet as separate from his fictional self. "Walcott" calls up a series of
parallels with the Homeric material, which Walcott later calls into question. By these
means Walcott enacts the dissociation of local material from the matter of Troy.
Homeric myth may predate local reality, but is denied the power either to shape or to
take precedence over it.
The differences between the story of Troy and the story of Omeros are striking.
In the Iliad, Hector and Achilles are enemies on opposing sides in the war, whose
pretext is Helen. The contest between them is one of military prowess. Neither is a
Walcott wrote and produced a stage version of the Odyssey for the National Shakespeare Company, which was performed in Stratford in 1992. It is possible, though unlikely, that this was researched and carried out after the completion of Omeros In a recent interview in The American Poetry Review 26 3 (May/June 1997) pp. 41-46, Walcott again asserts that he has never read the works of Homer or has only read “fragments." His education and writings would lead one to suspect a more thorough knowledge of the work of Homer, even if onlv in translation than either he or his narrator is prepared to confess to 216 rival for Helen's affections, they simply happen to be on opposing sides. Achilles' bitterness against this particular enemy is aroused because Hector has killed his bosom companion, Patroclus. Achilles kills Hector and pursues his revenge against him beyond death, dishonoring his corpse and for a long time refusing to return it to the
Trojans for burial. In Homer's account Hector has a wife and son, who feature in a scene of domestic peace and harmony which stands in strong contrast to the accounts of battle and carnage which precede and follow it. Achilles' wrath is ignited at the start of the poem by Agamemnon's demand that he hand over the woman, Chryse, a spoil of war. Helen does not figure in the calculations of either Achilles or Hector, except as the pretext for the war they are engaged in .
The relationship Walcott portrays between Achille and Hector is more complex. They are friends and comrades, temporarily divided by sexual jealousy.
Except for their quarrel over Helen, they have a great deal in common with one other.
They are described as united by their calling to the sea, a bond that survives Hector's desertion, presented as a matter of necessity after the loss of his pirogue in the hurricane. When Philoctete tries to make peace between them, he reminds them of their common bond, the sea: "He said, whatever a woman does/ is her business, but men are bound by their work" (47). They are divided in their response to ' progress, "
Achille struggling to continue in the traditional occupation of fisherman. Hector embracing change in his new life as driver of a transport between Castries and the airport at Hevvannorra. Achille s funeral oration over Hector expresses the bond
217 between them beyond their rivalry and contrasts markedly with the pronouncements of
Homer's character in a similar situation.
Homer's Helen is a puppet whose abduction from her husband Menelaus by
Hector's brother, Paris, occasions the ten year battle between Greeks and Trojans. In
this respect, she is the basis for the historical cliché which metaphorically labels St.
Lucia "the Helen of the West Indies," with reference to the prolonged struggle for
possession of the island between French and British fleets during the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. The epithet is repeated in the standard school history text
which was in use during Walcott's boyhood, and is enthusiastically seized on by
Plunkett at the start of his historical enterpnse. ' ' Walcott draws a telling parallel
between Plunkett's lust for the beautiful housemaid and both the colonial greed that
brought St. Lucia under British rule, and the desire to control, however benignly
intended, which informs Plunkett’s revision of history. Nevertheless it is only a
metaphor, and one whose implications fragment if the identification between island and
fictional beauty are pursued literally and in detail, as Plunkett attempts to do.
Walcott's Helen is similar to Homer's only in her universal attractiveness and
the rivalry she excites among her suitors. The Helen of the Iliud is a piece of property, without agency on her own behalf. Homer portrays her as unwillingly held in Troy and,
in a telling scene, when she purposes to return to Menelaus and end the war. Aphrodite takes her firmly by the arm and makes her sit, helpless to exercise any autonomy. The
' ‘ "St Lucia is the Helen o f the West Indies, and has been the cause o f more blood-shedding than was ever provoked by Helen of Troy . Whenever war broke out between England and France, the call that at one rang out in the west was ever the same To St Lucia! To St Lucia!”’ Sir Frederick Treves. The Cradle o f the Deep. 1910. p 109
2 1 8 Helen of Omeros makes her own choices, turning from Achille to Hector and back of her own volition, and according to a motivation which is never revealed. She rejects ownership: "I not your slave." she tells Achille, and in the next moment. 'You not my slave." The Plunketts may employ her but are foiled by her independence, which prompts Maud's dark mutterings that, "they start to behave as if they own you." She refuses Maud's patronage, flouncing away from the loan that comes accompanied by a lecture. Plunkett may try obsessively to transform her into a Homeric Helen, and regard her as a representative of her island, but she is untouched, and apparently unaware of his efforts, which in the poem are consistently presented as absurd. In Plunkett's mind
Helen is the island; Achille, in contrast, only says that she is like the island.
Helen is a Wonder whom the two writers in the poem. Plunkett and "Walcott, " stubbornly insist on taking for a Sign, but in Walcott's portrayal she is too complex to be encompassed either as a metaphor or as a myth. She remains a mystery. We are only once given access to her thoughts, and this is in a moment of auto-eroticism, the only sexual scene in the poem, in which she misses Achille and delights herself. She is pregnant and nobody, including Helen, knows who the child's father is. We are left with an image of her at the end of the poem as an embodiment of possibility. She contains the future, but there is no telling what the future will be.
"Why not see Helen/ as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow? " asks the metanarrator. The question is never answered, and possibly cannot be answered. The
Helen of Omeros, however, exceeds the literary fictions of the two authors who attempt to reduce her to a metaphor or a myth. For the reader who has been fooled by Walcott's
219 ploy, and has only a haz\ idea of the Homeric story , she replaces the classical Helen.
For the reader acquainted at first hand with the Homeric epics. Carol Dougherty s study
ot ()meros demonstrates how Walcott's reversal of the hypermasculme ethos of traditional Western epic colors and challenges response in any further reading of the
Oc/yssty:
Walcott's poem supplements and reshapes [the tradition of classical
epic]... helping us to I earn "to read Homer” again. His fusion of
Homeric, Caribbean, and African traditions (among others) opens up the
ancient and authoritative Homeric texts and gently chides us for our
previous lack of imagination about them.
Doughty's essay is cogent and persuasive, but while she presents the (JJyssey as requiring the supplement of Walcott's poem as a corrective to our reading, Omeros requires no such supplement. Despite the coincidences of naming that Walcott exploits, its effect does not depend upon the knowledge of a prior text.
Carol Dougherty “Homer After Reading a H/Omeric Text " South Atlantic Quarterly 96 2 Spring, 1997 p 356 220 T he Idea of the Poet
It is instaictive to compare the writer figures portrayed in Omeros with the several versions of the idea of poet formulated by Walcott in earlier writings, in particular those generated between 1970 and 1974, during and immediately after the composition of Another Life. The portrait of Harrold Simmons in Another Life and the discussion of the New World poet in the essay "The Muse of History" provide models of the poet that share some features with the Omeros/ griot group of poets in Omeros.
Each of these earlier formulations contribute to the final concept of the poet in Omeros, which represents a revision of Walcott's thinking concerning the function and attributes of the West Indian poet.
Harrold Simmons shares with the griot, the shaman and the epic praise-singer the function of remembering and recording a particular locality. First and foremost, however, his function is to contain, as suggested by the images that transform him into an earthenware pot, made of local materials, containing an entire culture. He is "a man the colour of her earth," with "a dimpled pot of a belly from the red clay of Pialle," and, at the last, "a cracked claypot full of idle brushes." In Omeros, at the point at which communities are broken and dispersed, the clay pot is not broken; in the African village and the Sioux encampment, it lies whole in the hands of a child. These repeated images in both poems, as discussed in a preceding section of this chapter, leave open the question of the fate of culture and people. The last word of shaman and griot is "one
221 eleg\ from Aruac to Sioux." The laments put into their mouths speak ofthe deaths of both societies, their people scattered and the unit} of the tnbe broken.
Nevertheless, in both settings of the lament ofthe poet, the solitarv child (a familiar figure in Walcott's poems from “Return to D'Ennerv" through "Mass Man" to the boy, fishing, who ignores Achille toward the end o\'Omeros) remains as a guarantee of some form of continuity, and holds the clay pot unbroken. Something goes forward, a collection of genetic material, an artifact detached from its context and function; there is no guarantee of what the pot will contain, what the child will remember, or the use the container will be put to in a future in which many, but not all, of the material links to the past have been severed. The account of Simmons last days and death by suicide in Another Life gives a particularly clear -sighted estimate of the price exacted from the
West Indian artist who cleaves to tradition and native place, but holds out some hope for continuity of the tradition in the example passed on to a later generation of artists.
In the case of Simmons, although the clay pot is "cracked," and the narrator observes that "the alphabet I learned as a child will not keep its order," there remains an assertion of the continued influence of his example. “I see him bent under the weight of the morning....the master of Gregorias and myself,, I see him standing over the bleached roofs" (280).
In the essay, "The Muse of History," the passage in which Walcott discusses the figure of the hero in St. John Perse's poetry slides between reference to the hero and reference to the poet who creates his story.
I l l What Perse glorifies is not veneration but the perennial freedom: his
hero remains the wanderer, the man who moves through the ruins of
great civilizations with all his worldly goods by caravan or pack mule,
the poet carrv'ing entire cultures in his head, bitter perhaps, but
unencumbered. His are poems of massive or solitarv migrations through
the elements.’ ’ (3)
The pronouns "‘he" and "his" allow for a merging of hero into poet, perhaps even an
identification of the poet as hero. The description given here of poet and wanderer
could be applied equally to the figure of Omeros, to the poet narrator o ï Omeros, to
Seven Seas in his aspect of gnot and time-traveler, or to Walcott their creator. Each of
these travels one way or another, the narrator in particular is constantly on the move
between St. Lucia, and the cities of North America and Europe, where he encounters
Omeros in different guises and different locations. The figure of Omeros appears in
London and the West Indies as well as in the Mediterranean. The nautical references
used to describe him in the London episode form a link between him and his character
Odysseus, who also makes an appearance later in the poem, captaining a crew whose
members speak an English-based Creole and offer to sing a calypso. They also link him just as firmly to Seven Seas and the fishermen of St. Lucia. Each, in one sense or
another, moves through the ruins of great civilizations and carries entire cultures in his
Derek Walcon "The Muse of History ” Is Massa Day Dead'^ ed Orde Coombs 1974. 1-27 223 head, fulfilling the funclion.s of witness, record keeper, and repositorv of culture which are ascribed to Simmons in Another Life.
This version of the poet as traveler, however, is contradicted by the static image of the clay pot associated with the griot and shaman. Both have, in the past, been located in a specific geographical location and have held an established place in rooted stable societies. Both are, at least in part, accorded a conservative function, the carrying forward of traditional knowledge and modes of thought. When the societies they serve are broken and their populations dispersed, their mode of expression is elegy, their function to memorialize and lament. Seven Seas, rooted in the shade outside the
No Pam Café, remembers a life of voyaging through space and time, but his travels have come to an end. Simmons, too, is associated with the image of the pot, and is portrayed as similarly rooted. While the qualities ascribed to Simmons and to Seven
Seas are given their full importance, neither provides the model of the nature and function of the West Indian poet that Walcott works towards in the poem. Walcott is able to bring to his work the knowledge of a wider world appropriate to the diverse and cosmopolitan community he serves, as well as to represent his own society in the world he visits.
In the same essay, Walcott also prescribes what he sees as the required response of the New World poet to history and to classical civilizations. Here Borges and Perse serve as examples of a process which denies the power of history in the new world and resists "the fearful magnet of older civilizations." Walcott sees this process as one of mythologizing the material present of their own localities; "So the death of a gaucho
224 does not merely repeat, but is. the death ot'Caesar " This transformation of "(act into m\lh" sounds suggestively similar to the practices of the two fictional writers of
Omeros. Plunkett and”Walcott." Both have recourse to the matter of Troy in their narratives, each using it in his own way. and for each this appropriation involves an attempt to give mythic resonance to the local and the mundane. The e.vtent to which their attempts are ironized in Walcott's account of them demonstrates a refinement of this version of the function of the poet. The criticism and self criticism of his fictional self suggests that he would now wish to revise his earlier formulation of the poet as one who presents the death of the gaucho as the death of Caesar. Both he and Plunkett evoke a mythical Helen to glorify a material Helen, who in Walcott's poem exceeds the outworn myth. Walcott's strategy is to present the material Helen as a greater wonder than the myth, and present-day St. Lucia as a more immediate presence than that of
Classical Greece.
“The Light Beyond Metaphor”
The conceit behind history , the conceit behind art, is its presumption to
be able to elevate the ordinary, the common, and therefore the
phenomenon.... It is the ordinariness, not the astonishment, that is the
225 miracle, that is worth recalling. It is not the war over Helen of Troy; it is
Helen of Troy It is not the invention; its the person '
Thus Derek Walcott comments upon the operations of his writer-narrator and Plunkett
in Omeros. In his portrayal of Helen and of the island, he offers an ordinary and local
materiality as the phenomenon that challenges and cancels their conceit. A chastened
“Walcott" who has gained self-knowledge asks:
When would my head shake off its echoes like a horse
shaking off a wreath of flies? When would it stop,
the echo in the throat, insisting, “Omeros";
when would 1 enter that light beyond metaphor? (271 )
Walcott first expressed a longing for an ideal clarity, a “style beyond metaphor," in his first published collection of poems. In a Green Xighi, (1963). The same phrase or an echo of it recurs throughout his subsequent work. Its interpretation is always problematic, and metaphor always reinstates itself immediately after it has been dismissed. Metaphor interposes itself between thought and expression, just as language
“Reflections on ■■ talk given by Derek Walcott at Duke University, 19 .\pril, 1995 Printed m South Atlantic Ouanerty. 96 2. Spring, 1997 p 233
2 2 6 interposes itself between materiality and perception and produces the sensation Walcott
has described as "a film over the name ~ Caribbean."
At this point in Omeros. "the light beyond metaphor" is associated with the
ability to perceive one's surroundings immediately, without their being refracted
through the myths of another culture. The aim is to present a West Indian materiality
on its own terms, to see through West Indian eyes. The myth presented by Homer seizes
Walcott’s imagination just as it does those of his characters, and Walcott can no more give it back than he can give back the genetic heritage of England, Africa and the
Netherlands that he claims or the language and education he received as a child. Like metaphor, myth will not go away. Asked why he employs allusions to classical myth
(with reference to Another Life) Walcott replies. "Many assume we live in a world of myths which constantly are replaced with new myths." When the interviewer probes further, asking which myths he would want to do away with, Walcott answers: "1 believe myths are unkillable."''
Walcott's practice in Omeros suggests that even if myth is unkillable it may be appropriated, subverted, and its various applications criticized. It may also be replaced by a new myth. "Walcott" and Plunkett both provide a practical demonstration of the ways in which the Homeric material, and with it Western European culture, infiltrates their treatment of West Indian subject matter. Each of their practices is subjected to criticism, indirectly through irony, humor and the transparent absurdity of some of the correspondences they recognize, and directly in "Walcott's" evaluation of his own
'■ LeifSjoberg ".\n Interview with Derek Walcon "/Irres (Sweden), 1 (1983), 23-27 rpt in Conversations With Derek Wakott ed William Baer p 85 227 proceedings. The last and penultimate books show the narrator groping towards a different mode of apprehending the life that surrounds him. expressed in the poem as a new way of seeing. The source of this new vision is presented as a total immersion in a local materiality, and the account of "Walcott's ' experience is paralleled by the account of Philoctete’s immersion in a healing bath.
Philoctete's healing involves the bringing together of past and present in Ma
Kilman's concoction of a cure made from ingredients which are already in place, at hand waiting to be used. It encompasses history, using the herb brought from Africa, sea water, and sulfur from Malebolge compounded in a cauldron from the old sugar mill. They are all elements which conjure up images of the historical past, just as they are all features of his immediate material surroundings. "Walcott" identifies himself with Philoctete (“There was no difference/ between me and Philoctete"), and Ma
Kiiman with "my mother, my grandmother, my great-/ great-grandmother" (245). The two share the moment of healing, and as Philoctete feels the poison drain from his wound, "Walcott" feels the voice of the Greek girl "draining from mine."
The effects of the cure are expressed as "the wrong love leaving me." The
Greek girl becomes a metaphor for Western European culture, "a bracleted Circe," whose spell has been broken. The narrator acknowledges that her influence has distorted his vision;
In her white pillared house
I looked down from the wrong height. (250)
2 2 8 When the influence is dispelled he is able to see clearly: "My eyes were so clear...” In
this state of heightened clarity of his v ision he is able to see his "true love." as the
island itself and all its people.
My love was as common as dirt; brown sheep bayed at it.
as it sang an old hymn and scraped a yard with a broom ...
.... smoke made it cry
for a begging breadfruit, an old head-scarfed woman
in the bible of an open window, a boy
steered it like a bicycle rim; like an onion
it wept openly. In a shop, with its felt hat,
it smelt of old age. It was carrying Hector's child ... (250)
While the account of Philoctete's cure marks the beginning of a senes of denouements
for the characters of Omeros, including Maud's funeral, presented as an exorcism of
empire, Walcott has not finished with his fictional self.
In fact, while "Walcott's" response to the healing is touching, and his
recognition of the relationship between his own and Plunkett's misrepresentation of the island demonstrates a growth of self knowledge, he must repeat the process for himself.
229 The nightmare passage in which he is confronted by Omeros Seven Seas underlines
Walcott s insistence on the importance of locality in the context of writing. He must
first encircle the island. When urged by Omeros to praise the island, in the most
startling example of the merging of voices. "Walcott" is struck dumb. Omeros' voice
silences his own. The italicized passage in which Omeros’ voice leads and supports
that of the narrator is unlike any other in the poem. It 's formality of rhythm and diction
provides a sample of the voice dominated and drowned by that of the older poet:
“In the midst o f the sea there is a horned island
with deep green harbours where the Greek ships anchor... ”
and the waves were swaying to the stroke of his hand,
as I heard my own thin voice riding on his praise
the way a swift follows a crest, leaving its shore. (286)
The voice is not the one of the many voices that narrate this poem: its rhythmical
movement is significantly different from those that shape the narrative. Significantly,
this voice is allowed to intrude only briefly and at the end of the poem.
When the group penetrates into the heart of the island, the sulfur springs of
Malebolge, the self-accusations of the narrator take a different turn. Here he recognizes himself in a Hell that includes the speculators, traitors, and corrupt politicians, those
"who had sold out their race ” He is among poets described as "selfish phantoms with
230 eyes who wrote with them only, saw only surfaces, in nature and men. and smiled at their similes" (293). The faults he acknowledges are "pride in my craft." and "elevating myself." When he is finally pulled out ofthe pit by his phantom guides they merge into a single figure, an “ice-matted head." who urges him: "Ask yourself this question, whether a love of poverty helped you to use other eyes, like those of this sightless stone?"
The question is never answered. Ultimately, we are left with paired examples of the fruitless attempts of "Walcott" and Plunkett to appropriate the Homeric material to
West Indian use. Clearly they are wrong, but Walcott makes no assertion that his own use is right. The text is left to demonstrate how the actuality of present day St. Lucia may by presented as an antidote to "the fearful magnet of older civilizations." As in each volume of Walcott’s poems from Sea Grapes onwards, the organization of the poem makes the St. Lucian scene a frame and context for the rest of the world. It shows cultural categories to be porous, so that the narrator visits Lisbon but sees Port of Spain, looks at Winslow Homer's painting "The Gulf Stream" in the Boston Museum of Art and recognizes Achille. West Indian experience illuminates the rest of the world. The
West Indies, however, is portrayed as being as various as the world beyond and as a distinctive part of the larger whole. It is Maud Plunkett's quilt, where:
The African swallow, the finch from India
now spoke the language of a tea-sipping tem,
with the Chinese nightingales on a shantung screen ...
231 while the Persian falcon ...
... understudying the ma-'o-war.
talking the marine dialect of the Caribbean
with nightjars, finches, and swallows, each origin
enriching the islands to which their cries were sewn. (313-14)
The poem presents the sensibilities of a broad range of St. Lucian characters who share in the narration of their own stories in a written equivalent to a range of West
Indian vernaculars. It takes and refashions the classical hexameter line and the lerza rimu stanza to fit them for the representation of these voices. The text both rejects the power of Homeric epic to distort local reality and appropriates it to serve the representation of the West Indies. It reclaims useable histories for its characters, and holds out the hope of healing. Walcott is not ready to claim that he has entered "the light beyond metaphor," just as Shabine never reaches his healing island, but like his narrator, who begs for "another chance ... at language," continues to pursue it.
232 BIBLIOGRAPHY
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