Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English And

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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

Literatures in English

Mgr. Asma Hussein, B.A

Alternative Semantics of Water: Watery Images in Derek Walcott’s Poetry

Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

2017

I declare that I have worked on this dissertation independently, using only the sources listed in the works cited section.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor prof. Milada Franková for her willingness to supervise my work first and for patiently answering my many questions all through the research journey later. Not the least, too, for her steering the research at the points when it went off the rails; for fine-tuning some arguments; for literally toning down the strong argument against Lennard’s approach in the “Introduction.” Not to mention her ever coming up with solutions to overcome the distance obstacle when I moved to Germany in the last year. Special thanks go to my friend and colleague Alexandra Stachurová for her help with the Czech translation. Last but not least, I thank my little family. Biggest thank goes to my love and husband Adel Safi for his unwavering and unremitting support and encouragement that made my idea a study, especially at the many times I felt as disparate as to drop out; for his unending love and for shouldering some of the tasks I was juggling during my study. Thanks, too, to my littles Ammar and Natali for being in my life. I do also thank my bigger family: father (Mohammad), mother (Wasfieh) and brothers Nidal, Ali, Feras and Odai and deeply appreciate their excusing the many special moments I missed and failed to share with them due to a book I had to read or a chapter I needed to finalize.

Table of Contents 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 6 1.1 Derek Walcott ...... 7 1.2 Elemental Landscape ...... 9 1.3 Image and Metaphor (Terminology) ...... 14 1.4 The Post-Colonial ‘Thing’ ...... 20 2. THE WATER ...... 27 2.1 Spellbound by Water ...... 28 2.2 Fresh Metaphors ...... 41 2.3 Writing on Water...... 49 2.3.1 History: “This is the music of memory, water.” ...... 53 2.3.2 Identity ...... 55 2.3.3 Poetic Voice ...... 60 3. THE SEA ...... 68 3.1 Walcott and Time ...... 73 3.2 Walcott and History ...... 80 3.3 Sea Is History ...... 89 3.3.1 “The Sea Is History” ...... 94 3.3.2 Another Life ...... 100 3.3.3 “The Schooner Flight” ...... 106 3.3.4 Omeros ...... 111 4. THE RIVER ...... 120 4.1 Time ...... 122 4.2 Crossing the River ...... 131 4.3 “I was a knot of paradoxes” ...... 136 4.4 “the river’s startled flowing” ...... 147 5. OTHER BODIES ...... 161 5.1 The Ocean ...... 161 5.2 The Rain and The Dew ...... 174 5.2.1 The Rain: “The Muse of Amnesia” ...... 174 5.2.2 The Dew ...... 200 5.3 The Waves and The Tides ...... 202 5.4 The Snow and The Ice ...... 210 5.4.1 The Snow ...... 211 5.4.2 The Ice...... 217

5.5 The Waterfall and The Fountain ...... 219 5.5.1 The Waterfall ...... 219 5.5.2 The Fountain ...... 223 6. CONCLUSION ...... 225 6.1 Results ...... 225 6.2 Future Work ...... 230 7. SUMMARY ...... 231 8. SHRNUTÍ ...... 232 9. WORKS USED AND CITED...... 233 9.1 Primary Resources ...... 233 9.2 Secondary Resources ...... 233

1. INTRODUCTION

In terms of scope, this literary research monographs the images of water across Derek

Walcott’s poetry volumes, as implied in the study’s subtitle. The title “Alternative Semantics of Water,” on the other hand, articulates the study’s purpose that could yet be coded in a hypothetical question form: To what extent does Walcott reproduce, appropriate or subvert the respective watery images’ conventional symbolism(s)? Conspicuously, however, the title bespeaks of the study’s hypothetical statement whereby, the images were actively reworked

(appropriated or subverted) rather than passively reproduced. But then this opens yet on more questions: Are the images subverted from the onset on? Or, did subversion occur later marking a moment of breaking with reproduction? And yet how to account for the reproduction instances that appear side by side with the subverted images? Or, long after the subversion break-moment? Is contextualization Walcott’s answer to conventionalized symbolism? Does it explain the reproduction-subversion concurrence?

The water image per se is the focus of the first chapter; the sea and the river images are the focal points of chapters two and three; respectively. These single-subject chapters are followed by a multiple-subject chapter entitled “Other Bodies.” The “Other Bodies” chapter examines yet more aquatic images in Walcott’s poetry: the ocean, the rain, the dew, the waves, the tides, the snow, the ice, the waterfall and the fountain. These bodies label the respective subheadings in the “Other Bodies” chapter. These bodies have been grouped in one chapter for they figure sparingly in Walcott’s poetry. Hence, the space needed to examine each does not qualify as an independent chapter.

The research is mainly library-based relying on printed critical material: books and articles. The main organizing principle of the study is chronology, i.e., tracing the respective

image across the successive volumes and spotting the changes or the developments (if any) in treating the corresponding symbolism of the image under scrutiny. However, the above hypothesis is at work, too, in these chapters, i.e., whether or not Walcott reproduces the conventional symbolism associated with one or another watery body. Alternatively, does he adapt his Caribbean peculiarities to the conventionality of the symbol or vice versa?

1.1 Derek Walcott

Sir Derek Alton Walcott is a Caribbean poet, playwright and essayist. Walcott was born on 23rd January, 1930; in Castries, St. Lucia. He was raised fatherless as his father died from mastoiditis (aged 31) shortly after his wife, Alex Walcott, gave birth to her twins: Derek and Roderick. The latter, too, is an acclaimed St. Lucian playwright. Besides Derek and

Roderick, Alex Walcott raised a daughter, Pamela (Walcott’s elder sister).

Although Derek’s and Roderick’s literary achievements brought St. Lucia to an international visibility1, making it as an artist in the Caribbean (let alone small Caribbean islands) is a formidable task. Laurence A. Breiner pictures the existing state of affairs thus:

“the smaller islands can support writers to a limited extent, but they cannot be expected to sustain a literature” (85)2. Nevertheless, art was not an elsewhere for the Walcotts; so untypical of West Indian middle-class families. So untypical, too, was the very circle of friends surrounding the Walcotts, paternal and maternal friends alike. Walcott’s father was a civil servant with modest means. Yet he found a space to produce and support art. He was an amateur watercolorist and satirical poet. In addition, Walcott’s father befriended and supported Harry Simmons (the future accomplished St. Lucian painter). Simmons rewarded the father’s support by fathering Walcott the son’s talents. Simmons was indeed one amongst

1 See Breiner, p. 86.

2 See also Breiner, p. 9, 20.

a group of budding artists whom Walcott’s father encouraged. Warwick Walcott gave these aspiring artists an occasion to discuss art, play music and perform theatricals. A ritual that was maintained and perpetuated by his wife after his death; so untypical of a West Indian single mother. Alex Walcott was a teacher by profession (a seamstress besides) yet she developed a passion for the arts; especially poetry. Where a single-mother would stock assets for rainy days, Alex did not hesitate to fund her son’s (Derek’s) first literary ventures: two poetry pamphlets.

Whereas Walcott’s father’s delicate paintings and satires were Walcott’s first exposition to the world of arts, school curriculum at St. Mary’s College and Walcott’s voracious reading habits combined introduced him to serious art: Western classics. Walcott’s higher education and later educational pursuits point at a sense of Walcott seeing himself as an artist. Winning a scholarship, Walcott completed his undergraduate studies at the

University of the West Indies in Jamaica by 1953. Afterwards, Walcott completed a short teaching stint at St. Mary’s College (St. Lucia) before moving to New York in 1958 to study theater. An orientation towards the stage can be spotted long before his Rockefeller fellowship in the States, however. Back in 1950, Derek and Roderick Walcott co-founded a theatrical troupe: the St. Lucia Arts Guild. The Guild offered Derek Walcott a venue to produce his plays. Disheartened by the racist exclusion of black artists (actors and playwrights alike) from theater in the States, Walcott left the States and duplicated the St Lucia Arts Guild venture single-handedly in Trinidad in 1959. Not only is the year 1959 marked by Walcott’s founding the Trinidad Theater Workshop, but it also inaugurates Walcott’s regular literary publication phase.

Walcott’s first published work was a religious poem with Miltonic underpinnings, appeared in local The Voice of St Lucia. Walcott was then only 14. Funded by his mother,

Walcott self-published and distributed his first volume 25 Poems at 19. The following year 8

(1949) Walcott duplicates the venture in a second volume Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos.

Despite limited circulation, Walcott’s first publications draw serious critical attention. His religious poem, for example, was tagged ‘blasphemous’ in a published angry response by an

English Catholic priest. On the other hand, his subsequent juvenilia received a professional critical praise. Frank Collymore (nicknamed “Barbadian Man of the Arts”), who was then an influential and recognized artist, highlighted and praised the literary merits of Walcott’s earliest volumes. However, Walcott’s In a Green Night is his internationally recognized debut. Not only did the volume win Walcott an international recognition but it also accelerates the rising popularity of West Indian literature at the time3. Afterwards, publications flowed: poetry, plays and a single collection of articles. Publication and recognition went hand in hand ever afterwards. Walcott received many awards for his volumes and plays. The highest of these literary awards was the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in

2011. The most recent and the highest of honors Walcott received was the Knight

Commander of the Order of Saint Lucia in 2016.

1.2 Elemental Landscape

Although Walcott’s main topic in his writings is Walcott himself, the particulars of his personal and cultural makeup make his personal concerns national (i.e. Caribbean) and, to some extent, universally human. Walcott’s birth, growing up and coming of age correspond to

St. Lucia’s transition from a colonized island into an independent state. His career route, too, concurs with West Indian literature acquiring an international literary visibility. These parallels make of Walcott’s works historical and literary chronicles. Furthermore, descending from black grandmothers and white grandfathers make his identity concerns representative of the Caribbean national identity concerns.

3 See Hamner’s “Introduction” p. 1 and Breiner p. 98.

Historically, the Caribbean witnessed dramatic twists and turns prefaced by an accidental discovery and an ensuing radical demographic change and incessant colonization waves. Indeed, these fluctuations and vagaries seriously challenge any historical project that employs the conventional systematic paradigms in chronicling a region. For example, in the

“Preface” to A Concise History of the Caribbean, Higman recounts of the “special difficulties” that faced him in writing a history of the ‘region’ (xi). The difficulties had seriously threatened the whole project that Higman consciously resolved to redefine the

‘region’ concept excluding a significant portion of the Caribbean Basin (including: the peri-

Caribbean enclaves (the rimland or hinterland) of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, and the outliers (like Belize)) that, in its turn, pose a threat of inconsistency (xi). For this is a serious violation of the concept (Caribbean). As defined in Postcolonial Studies: The Key

Concepts, the concept ‘Caribbean’ comprises, by default, “the island nations of the Caribbean

Sea and territories on/the surrounding South and Central American mainland (such as Guyana and Belize) … the term ‘Caribbean’ refers to all island nations in the area (and mainland

Guyana and Belize)” (Ashcroft et al. 38/39, emphasis added). Higman is as conscious of the fact that manipulating the term questions the project’s integrity. But then, he rationalizes:

“Confining the narrative to the islands sets limits but at the same time provides an ecological coherence that enables an attempt to write a systematic comparative history” (xi). In other words, Higman jeopardizes the integrity of his work in the interest of upholding its structural unity as if they are incompatible. Are they really? Not at all, holds another historian of the region in the opening pages to her history book.

In the “Introduction” to Empire’s Crossroads, Carrie Gibson acknowledges the region’s vicissitudes and individual histories’ dissonances. In fact, rather than dissonance,

Gibson alternately terms this feature in the more favorable word “diversity” (xviii, xxv) and the objective, realistic phrases of “multiple yet conflicting strands” (xix) and “connections and 10

crossings” (xxi) amongst others. Unlike Higman the ardent believer and faithful observer of

“ecological coherence,” Gibson reckons that “the past cannot so neatly be packed into boxes, and the story that unfolds in this book is often one of extremes” (xx). If a box, it is rather “a box of puzzle pieces” (xxiv). On the contrary from Higman’s design that trims a large portion of the Basin and chronicles a deformed Caribbean made up restrictedly of the Islands, Gibson broadens and dilates on (and complicates) the region’s historical reaches registering that

“each of the islands has its own rich, dense history that extends across the globe, far beyond the Caribbean” (xxi). Contrary to Higman’s “systematic comparative history,” Gibson is of the mind that “The Caribbean lends itself to the mosaic approach to history” (xxvi).

‘Mosaic,’ also, best renders the resultant cultural makeup of the Caribbean communities. These communities are characterized by pluralism that translates into a psychosis of dividedness and culminates in a crisis of identity split. Higman opts for the term

“creole society” to describe this pluralism (137) and, on an occasion (the Trinidadian context), he allows for adjectival “multicultural” (186). But, he also used “fractured global identities”

(275). The synthetic underpinning in ‘creole’ and ‘multiculturalism’ is carefully used by

Higman to characterize the Caribbean identity forged by a creative adaptation to the imperatives of the colonization and slavery past. The implicit antithesis in “fractured,” on the other hand, denote the skillful trans-meridian identity continuum assumed by Caribbean migrants with the aim of “keeping a foot in more than one camp” (275).

Gibson points out the uncertainty that characterizes identification and Caribbean identity definition that marks the post-World War II era: “Whatever it meant to be Jamaican, or Barbadian, or Dominican was being figured out on both sides of the Atlantic” (265). The reference in “both sides” alludes to West Indians who moved to the war-exhausted Europe and to those who stayed in the islands. When it comes to terming Caribbean identity, Gibson identify with Higman’s stand. Indeed, Gibson references Higman’s weighing two terms: slave 11

society (modelled on Roman society) and creole society and eventually favoring the latter as it best captures the Caribbean reality. Gibson settled likewise and says: “the idea of a creole society is unique to the Caribbean” (351). It is unique for it originates from the unique historical ‘route’ and the forced amalgamation of the region’s cultures. In Gibson’s words,

“this enforced mixing was the precondition for new identities and traditions to emerge from the ones brought across the Middle Passage, and to grow under the shadow of slavery” (105).

This singularity is seconded in Ashcroft et al.’s terminological account: “From the seventeenth century to the nineteenth … the most widespread use of the term [i.e. ‘creole society’] in English was to mean ‘born in the West Indies’ … (OED)” (Key Concepts 68). In effect, Ashcroft et al. triangulate Higman and Gibson in using “creole society” to designate the Caribbean societal peculiarity (Key Concepts 69).

Gathering from all that, identity as a finished wholeness is a foreign concept in the

Archipelago due to the unique character of its colonization past and its characteristic postcolonial contemporaneous reality. Rather, artists and artistic works are identified and characterized by their incompleteness. Walcott is no exception to this characterization peculiarity. Walcott judges his father’s watercolors as incomplete in a “Leaving School” essay: “I felt that my father’s work, however minor, was unfinished” (28), implying his literary venture would fill in the missed notches in his father’s. However, after decades of writing, Bedient judges Walcott in identical terms of incompleteness: “Still he’s unsure of who he is, an unfinished man” (315).

Walcott projects the different manifestations of the Caribbean experience of incompleteness on Caribbean landscape par excellence. He has pared Caribbean landscape to its elements. The prominence of (elemental) landscape in Walcott’s works has been

repeatedly emphasized by different scholars4. However, the present study differs from previous studies on Walcott for it pares down Walcott’s elemental landscape to its watery components. Previous studies have explored some watery images but these were not a focal point of examination, on the one hand. On the other, many of these studies focused on the sea, the river, or, sometimes the ocean images but seldom went beyond these major bodies. Hence, it is the business of this study to demonstrate that Walcott and ‘water’ share something beyond initials.

In “The Collected Poems and Three Plays of Derek Walcott,” Bruce King praises

Walcott’s “use of such commonplace images as sky, water, earth, south, and north [that] constitutes an elaborate system of private symbols” (368). This study brings into full view the privatization of ‘water,’ and its many manifestations: the sea, the river, the ocean, the dew, the rain, the tides, the waves, the snow, the ice, the fountain and the waterfall.

Closely pertinent to this privatization is Walcott’s privatized concept of “nothing.”

European early accounts5 had always reported of the pervasive nothingness in the Caribbean,

Walcott reworked the different watery bodies’ images and highlighted their lack of the images’ symbolic tradition. Eventually, he turns the symbol-charged image into an image of lack: of nothingness. Which, in turn, corresponds to the Caribbean experience. Breiner notes:

crucial to Walcott’s ‘nothing’ is his own presence in it. The presence of a

sail is important in ‘The Castaway’ because it could confirm the presence of

the poet who looks for it. … The objective in reducing experience to the

elemental, after all, was to find a resonance, a meaning, for the Caribbean

‘nothing’ and the Caribbean man barely accommodated in it (208, italic in

4 See Breiner p. 205, 208, 209; King p. 368; Ismond p. 14, 194; Thieme p. 36.

5 Most notably are accounts by Anthony Trollope (and his infamous “non-people” phrase) and James A. Froude’s “no people.”

the original).

Not only does Walcott glimpse a meaning. Rather, Walcott presents a Caribbean landscape that resonates with meanings. Thieme observes:

The capacity to link topographical contemplation, social commentary and

personal reflection does much to broaden the significance of the poetry,

especially since poems such as ‘Choc Bay’ and ‘The Banyan Tree, Old

Year’s Night’, which initially seem to be as meditations on landscape, turn

out to be pervaded by social and cultural history (36).

Indeed, Breiner’s argument of West Indian nature poetry as the “genre [where] the first signs of strain are apparent even before they are explicit – the first suggestions that the

English language and its poetic tradition are not absolutely compatible with Caribbean actuality” (10) captures the tension between the actuality of Caribbean-derived watery images and their conventional counterparts in Western poetic tradition. A tension that is subsumed in all Walcott’s poetry. However, unlike his fellow West Indian poets who resort to nature poetry as a protest statement (Breiner 134), Walcott realizes that the genre “need[s] to be motivated, to speak to or to illuminate human concerns” (Breiner 135). Beiner uses the term bricolage to describe Walcott’s achievement in this regard. As defined by Breiner, bricolage recalls King’s ‘privatization’ argument above: “bricolage – the inspired tinkering that ingeniously works with what is at hand” (Breiner 200). Faithful to the doctrines’ of T. S.

Eliot, Walcott, the bricoleur enriched (precisely, altered) tradition and its images by adding to them.

1.3 Image and Metaphor (Terminology)

It is important at this point to illuminate two terms: image and metaphor. In The

Poetry Handbook, John Lennard shares: “One word I might be expected to have used in a

technical sense I have deliberately avoided. … ‘image’” (xxiv). The term’s inconsistency is

Lennard’s rationale. ‘Image’ covers, Lennard explains: “everything from the meaning of a single word to a meaning arising from a whole poem” (xxv). Lennard goes as far as saying

‘image’ proved dispensable in his handbook on poetry altogether (xxv). But then, Lennard retracts: “It remains true, though, that almost all the techniques I discuss (metrical, formal, syntactical, whatever) will probably first be apprehended by a reader as components or substructures of an ‘image’ (of one or another kind) that the poem (or poet) has communicated to them” (xxv). This sort of image-or-no-image indeterminate tone rationalize this section. That ‘image’ bewilders such a prominent poetry scholar tells a lot.

As the first question that confuses Lennard above is one of identity (what is an

‘image’?), I will start with definition. The term ‘image,’ in this study’s title and all through is used as defined by Ezra Pound, the pioneer imagist. Pound perceives of image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (qtd. in Hughes 28 and in Wellek and Warren 187). This definition is concise and precise. Yet, it could be more so when compared to and contrasted from related terms. The first of these is the derivationally related term: ‘Imagery’.

In Abrams’ Glossary, ‘Imagery’ opens: “This term is one of the most common in criticism, and one of the most variable in meaning” (128). The striking echo of this opening in

Lennard’s introductory statement above (xxiv) does not promise answers. Nor does Wellek and Warren’s statement “The semantic difficulties of our topic are troublesome” that appears in Chapter Fifteen whose topic and title is “Image, Metaphor, Symbol, Myth” (186). But reading through Abrams’ definition, it becomes clear that this indeterminacy of meaning is the very meaning. For after all, ‘imagery,’ is a subjective experience for the largest part.

Abrams finds the variable meanings to range “from the ‘mental pictures’ which, it is sometimes claimed, are experienced by the reader of a poem, to the totality of the components 15

which make up a poem” (128). The confusion, at this point, seems to arise from the context of application. Applied to the physical printed words on the page, it could easily be spotted via underlying words and highlighting phrases that “signify all the objects and qualities of sense

[in a] work of literature” (129). Applied to the reader’s individual experience of the work, it is hard to pin point, i.e. confusing to define. For there are as “variable” experiences as there are readers. Either way, the aim of both domains of ‘imagery’ activity is to concretize the poem,

Abrams contends (129, 130). The abstract feeling and meaning that the poet communicates materialize in “the objects and qualities of sense” s/he orchestrates in the work. The reader, too, establishes relational bonds between “the objects and qualities of sense” and rearranges them in “mental pictures” that embody the feeling and meaning s/he detects in the poem.

Indeterminacy of definition is not the only bond between ‘image’ and ‘imagery.’

Rather a relational one is at work, too. It is a-part-to-a-whole relation whereby ‘image’ is the elemental constituent of ‘imagery.’ Whereas every single object or sense quality in a poem is an image, the sum total of these objects and sensory qualities is the poem’s imagery. Despite other indeterminacies, this aspect entertains consensus. Besides Abrams (129), this part-to- whole distinction is reiterated by Wellek and Warren. In discussions of ‘imagery,’ Wellek and

Warren use the descriptive phrase “all-inclusive” (26). They are also clear that “Imagery … should not be confused with actual, sensuous, visual image-making” (29). Besides, they allude to the sense of ‘imagery’ as a mental activity exercised by readers and use for this activity the verb “visualize” (27).

The talk of the visual compels distinguishing both ‘imagery’ and ‘image’ from a third related term: imagism. Whereas an ‘image’ can be visual, auditory, haptic, etc. and ‘imagery’ is all images in a poem, an imagist poem is narrowly defined by its marked juxtaposition of visual images (Abrams 130; Wellek and Warren 187). But all these definitions and distinctions amount to a synonymous functionality that refers back to Pound’s: an image 16

“presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

Moreover, what is particularly important and pertinent to this study is Pound’s talk of the liberating effect of the ‘image’: “freedom from time limits and space limits” (qtd. in

Hughes 29). Walcott’s patient carving of the sea image, for example, to communicate his nonlinear paradigm of time by way of liberating himself/his people from the imperatives of the linear paradigm literally testifies to Pound’s statement. But then, Walcott’s term for the undertaking is ‘metaphor.’ And this is not a Walcottian peculiarity, rather a modern one. The ternary discriminable use of ‘imagery’ in Abrams’ tripartite list is outlined: “Commonly in recent usage [i.e. after the 1930s], imagery signifies figurative language, especially the vehicles of metaphors and similes” (129, italics in the original). Indeed, ‘metaphor’ and

‘image’ are used interchangeably in Wellek and Warren’s discussion of ‘imagery’ (26-27).

Furthermore, in their eight-item outline of literary analysis methodology, “image and metaphor” is the ternary item in the list (157). This designed grouping and ranking suggests

‘image’ and ‘metaphor’ are, at least, interrelated if not synonymous. Later in the book, Wellek and Warren draw a line of distinction between the two terms expounding: “The image may exist as ‘description’ or … as ‘metaphor.’” (188). In other words, ‘metaphor’ is one of the binary possible manifestations of an ‘image’ in a poem. Despite the subcategorizing discrimination, ‘image’ and ‘metaphor’ are shown to belong together. Indeed, Wellek and

Warren refer to Middleton Murry’s view that ‘metaphor’ and ‘simile’ are both subsumed in the term ‘image’ (188) which recalls Abrams stand (129) above.

Nevertheless, Walcott’s imprint is discernible in opting for ‘metaphor.’ Not only has

Walcott’s ‘metaphor’ a conceptual and functional (liberating) affinity with Pound’s ‘image’

(or, the image complex), but it has also a semantic affinity with metamorphosis as expressed in Another Life, Patricia Ismond notes (3). Ismond elaborates; it is “to argue against an older, classical metaphysics that projected metaphor as an ideal of higher transformation” (3). In 17

Walcott’s Omeros, the narrator puts it: “When would it stop, / the echo in the throat, insisting,

‘Omeros’; / when would I enter that light beyond metaphor?” (271).

In addition, Walcott’s ‘metaphor’ is linked to his coined Adamic naming. In the introductory pages to her book, Ismond ranks Walcott’s “subversive counter-discourse with the European tradition of metaphors and its muse” uppermost in his total achievement (13).

Subversion of tradition, however, is not a distinctively Walcottian achievement. Subversion of

Western tradition is at the heart of most post-colonial writers’ careers (Ismond 2; Ashcroft et al. 145). Therefore, Ismond specifies Walcott’s subversive achievement in his “metaphoric naming of the elementals of his virgin landscape; and, continuous with this naming, a sense

(surviving presence) of prehistory as it interfaces and intersects with a burdened empirical history in that landscape” (13). The process recalls Glenn Hughes’ staging the process of creating an image: “First to possess, then to create –that is the true process of the artist” (133).

To recap, Walcott’s ‘metaphor’ and Pound’s ‘image’ function identically. Eventually, it is about transcending limits: transcending time into timelessness, for instance. Process-wise,

Walcott’s ‘metaphor’ and Pound’s ‘Image’ are complex. To present “an intellectual and emotional complex …. instantaneously” the image should be carved patiently. Likewise,

Walcott describes, in “31/ Italian Eclogues” poem, how “metaphors / breed and flit in the cave of the mind” (The Bounty 69). Walcott’s description reflects largely on the structure of the different chapters in the present study as every chapter (sub-chapter) traces the chronological development of a particular ‘watery’ image across Walcott’s poetry volumes. As it unfolds, every section re-casts the breeding and the flitting of the respective image. This aspect of breeding and flitting accounts for the willed restricted use of another term in this study: symbol.

In terminology text- and handbooks, ‘symbol’ is defined relative to ‘image.’ In a few words, a ‘symbol’ evolves from an ‘image.’ Concisely, it is a reused ‘image.’ Precisely, 18

reused over and over again. The evolutionary line is manifest, for example, in Wellek and

Warren’s aforementioned eight-item list of literary analysis methods. Where ‘image’ and

‘metaphor’ are item number 3, ‘symbol is 4. Most importantly the two items are enlisted as if parts of the same sentence: “(3) image and metaphor, the most centrally poetic of all stylistic devices which need special discussion also because they almost imperceptibly shade off into

(4) the specific ‘world’ of poetry in symbol and systems of symbols which we call ‘myth’”

(157). The transitional verb “shade off” is interesting as it bespeaks of evolution. Later in the book, the authors, refer to the ‘symbol’s’ characteristic “recurrence and persistence,” or in a word “frequency” (189). Abrams argues almost similarly. But he points out an important nuance of signification. Abrams associates “persistent and sustained” figuration with so-called

“private symbols” in contrast to “conventional” and “public” symbols (320-323). To apply these distinctions on Walcott, it is for good reason that his watery images be viewed as symbols, rather than images. For example, when Walcott used the sea to represent

(Caribbean) history for the first time, it is an ‘image.’ With repetitive figuration in Walcott’s corpus, it becomes a symbol, or to use Abrams’ meticulous phrasing a private symbol. But for a good couple of reasons ‘image’ is chosen.

In the first place, this study manifests in its different chapters Walcott’s dexterous tinkering of the different watery images. The chapters present, to adopt Breiner’s term, bricolage as a process that unfolds across Walcott’s volumes for the images do not figure from first occurrence as finished products. Rather Walcott experimented with various figurations before settling for one. So, in its “persistent” recurrences, the image is often slightly modified that the recurred image could not be literally perceived a mirror image of its precedent. Walcott’s ‘tinkering’ of the images is best seen in analogous terms to his favorite impressionist painter: Monet. Like Monet bent on painting the selfsame scenery endlessly but registering a minute detail now and then, Walcott returns to the same image and revisits the 19

same river again and again only to register a new experience, a new aspect, a new dimension on each occasion. Accordingly, each chapter traces the subtle additions in Walcott’s alternative order for the respective images and their corresponding symbolism.

Persistence and recurrence aside, using ‘symbol’ as cleverly defined by Abrams risks imposing the hypothetical thesis statement as early as the first line of this study. In other words, this study sets on answering the question posed in the opening: “whether or not

Walcott reproduces the conventional symbolism associated with one or another watery body?” using ‘symbol’ freely and loosely would pronounce Walcott’s watery images are

“private symbols.” In effect, adopting ‘symbol’ implicitly answers the question irrespective of textual evidence. So, ‘symbol’ and ‘symbolism’ are used in many places in this study to mean signification and presentation and, indeed, the very verb ‘symbolize’ accompanies ‘image’ in most contexts.

1.4 The Post-Colonial ‘Thing’

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” So goes Jane Austen’s iconic line that opens Pride and

Prejudice. No less universal nor less acknowledged truth in academia is that to research a

Third-World-born author, a scholar is, by default, perceived a post-colonial scholar. I was brought into this realization as early as the PhD entrance exam. Then, I was asked to offer an overview of my research project to be completed by the end of the PhD program. After the brief overview, one of my interviewers put the question about the nationality of the poet I am researching i.e. Derek Walcott. I responded plainly: “St. Lucia, a Caribbean island.” My interviewer followed up in a matter-of-fact manner and tone: “So, there must be the post- colonial thing to it.” No more was said for the interview time was up.

I was bewildered by two words in my interviewer’s follow-up comment: “must” and

“thing.” For one thing and -ism wise, the research’s subtitle “Watery Images in Derek

Walcott’s Poetry” would rather go in the direction of Imagism than in the post-colonialism

“thing.” For another thing, why would it be a “must” that a St. Lucian poet need inescapably be researched within the frame of the post-colonial theory?

Anyway, I went on researching the images of water in Derek Walcott’s poetry as I first planned to do. The post-colonial “thing” reappeared again when I submitted the first portion of my research to my supervisor for comment. One of the major substantial feedbacks I got concerned a place in one chapter where I mentioned the post-colonial question in passing. My supervisor recommended that I need elaborate and go deeper into post-colonialism and post- colonial debates.

Revising the respective chapter in light of this piece of feedback, I suddenly found myself researching the post-colonialism “thing” rather than the images of water in Derek

Walcott’s poetry. In other words, my research starts going in a drastically different direction than I originally intended it to be. The background and the foreground were completely swapped. Besides, the already fat “The Sea” chapter grows fatter, unnecessarily fatter, it should be added. The argument thread of the chapter was broken by the elaboration. Most importantly, I felt being forced to identify and be framed as a post-colonial scholar.

Instead of risking the unity of my research and my scholarship identification, I opted for annexing this commentary to the “Introduction.” In a few words, it is to absolve myself of the post-colonial “thing.” It is simply to make a statement that other “things” or areas of critical and aesthetic analysis are possible. This study approaches the images of water in

Walcott’s poetry mainly aesthetically and critically and set to examine how Walcott has worked conventional symbolism of watery images in his poetry or re-worked and adapted them to his Caribbean reality. Telegraphically put, a Walcottian scholar can look into

Walcott’s work beyond and/or out of the post-colonial box “thing” altogether in the same way 21

Stewart Brown, for instance, freely spots a variety of topic categories in his popular anthology: Caribbean Poetry Now. Brown anthologizes Caribbean poems on private concerns as in “Childhood and Adolescence,” “One Love,” and “Old Folks, Death and Grief” chapters; on culture and spirituality as in “Folks” and “Gods, Ghosts and Spirits;” on social and societal concerns as in the “Home-City Life,” “Home-Country Life,” and “Exile and Homecoming” chapters; on women as in “Her Story” and yet on national identity crisis as in “Roots.”

Indeed, this variety is the book’s praise. The anthology is recommended in the summary

(typed on the back cover) as “the ideal choice for those wishing to enjoy the range and liveliness of Caribbean poetry.” In other words, it is an approach that champions opening the field of Caribbean literature studies and celebrate diversity, or “range.” The post-colonial theory operates in the opposite direction, closing up and narrowing down. In the

“Postcolonialism/Post-Colonialism” entry, Ashcroft et al. point out the coined term ‘post- colonial’ “was part of an attempt to politicize and focus the concerns of fields such as

Commonwealth literature and the study of the so-called New Literatures in English” (Key

Concepts 204).

Moreover, at the early phase of research I consulted two books on the art of poetry and poetry reading and analysis, namely John Lennard’s The Poetry Handbook and Glyn

Maxwell’s On Poetry. The former book is a practical example of, to adopt Ashcroft et al.’s words, the politicization underlying the post-colonial theory. Lennard’s ninth chapter on

“History” particularly represented a warning case against forcing a poem into the unfitting post-colonialism frame, for the latter will inevitably deform the former. Coinciding with my research area into Derek Walcott’s poetry, Lennard closes each chapter with a close analysis of Derek Walcott’s poem “Nearing Forty.” The closing section orderly offers a practical application of the corresponding chapter’s topic (Metre, Form, Layout, Lineation and so on).

The methodical procedure that moved from the technical to the practical works perfectly well 22

all through with Walcott’s exemplary poem. The “History” chapter, however, disrupts this smooth functioning. Lennard initial lengthy comment in the “Nearing Forty” section categorically places the poem off the chapter’s subject’s scope:

The title [i.e. “Nearing Forty”] suggests closer involvement with biography

than history at large, and lyric inwardness excludes the historical concerns

courted by satirical and narrative poetry. That in no way lessens the

importance of locating Walcott as a Caribbean poet whose island and people

have suffered a violent history, often at British hands, but does focus that

importance on Walcott as an individual, and I will come to it under

‘Biography’. The recent publication of some drafts of the poem, making

available an aspect of its textual history, is directly connected with the death

of John Figueroa, its dedicatee, and also belongs under ‘Biography’, but less

personal history is explicitly and complicatedly invoked in two ways: by the

epigraph, and particular intertextual association of “water clerk” (303).

The title, the content (a reflection on mid-age crisis) and the context (John Figueroa’s death) all point unequivocally to biography. From this introduction Lennard draws the conclusion that the poem “is explicitly” invoking history. This is the logic and line of argument that governs the paragraph above. Lennard is compelled to maintain his fixed chapter-by-chapter outline. So, ‘history’ must be automatically extracted from Walcott’s poem as was ‘lineation,’

‘meter,’ and ‘form’ etc. But then, calling biography “personal history” and context “textual history” is sheer wordplay to retain the chapter’s subject (‘history’) even if linguistically

(phonically).

The ‘explicit’ history Lennard alludes to is clearly the history of colonization “at

British hands.” Hence, the historical reading of the allusions must by default be a post- colonial one. Not only self-contradiction shines in jointly coordinating “explicitly and 23

complicatedly,” but also the ensuing elaboration advances in a roundabout manner that justifies “complicatedly” yet complicates “explicitly”. Lennard excavate narrowly and lengthily to unearth the explicit allusion to colonization and its legacy.

More than in reading the epigraph, the far-fetched historical reading is strikingly visible in Lennard’s postcolonial reading of “water clerk” that appears in Walcott’s “Nearing

Forty.” The analysis opens with an anecdotal paragraph:

The intertextual spark that connects “water clerk” is not formally

acknowledged in the same way as the epigraph, and the term is not a

quotation as such, but so far as Walcott’s intent is held to matter, I think it

highly likely he was aware of his reference and the word constitutes an

allusion. In first attempting to understand the presence of this “water clerk

[/] who weighs the force of lightly falling rain”… I mentioned that OED2

[Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition] offered illustrative quotations from

1898 and 1973. These, from obscure sources, are cited as the earliest and

latest uses known to the editors; beyond harbour-life the term is not

common–encountering it I had to hunt for the meaning–but in the OED

[Oxford English Dictionary] offices are ten further recorded usages, all from

the same high-canonical text: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (306).

The very verb “hunt” signifies the amount of effort exhorted to give “Walcott’s figure a gendered identity and history” (308). The manner of this quote-hunt, rummaging one dictionary after the other, is far from straightforward. Furthermore, settling for the OED rather than the OED2 merely for it goes in the post-colonial direction is not objective, to say the least. Topping all this, the underlying assumption that Walcott consulted the OED while writing “Nearing Forty” is uncanny.

Lennard goes on arguing for an identification holding between Walcott and Jim and 24

Jim in a roundabout way. For example, Lennard connects the fact that Conrad was 43 by the publication of Lord Jim and the reflection on mid-age crisis in Walcott’s poem as a ground for identification with Conrad’s novel (306). Another leg of Lennard’s argument is to do with:

the presence in Conrad’s third passage [the third quoted occurrence of

“water clerk” in Lord Jim] of the reiterated ‘niggers’ … though Conrad may

in Lord Jim as a whole criticise the imperial honour-codes by which Jim

lives and is hounded, the historical fact and consequences of those codes for

many colonial subjects (including Walcott) remain, intransigent and

unpalatable. (310).

No satisfactory answer is provided for the question: how does coloniality and racism fit in

Walcott’s personal mid-age crisis? This and similar questions has hardened my resolution that

I should keep the post-colonial issues to their normal size, neither diminish nor amplify them.

For searching dictionaries for the trace of a quote and examining a fat novel for the trace of intertextuality is not the way to read a poem or a work of literature. Devoting six pages to pinpoint the postcolonial allusion in ‘water clerk” tells the allusion is cryptic rather than explicit.

To avoid misunderstandings, this is not to argue that the post-colonial “thing” is totally irrelevant to critically analyzing Anglophone Caribbean literature in general. Where Ashcroft et al. felt the “need to be careful about falsely prescribing postcolonial theory as a panacea,”

(Key Concepts viii) this section argues for and urges a careful acceptance of the validity of prescribing the post-colonial reading to approach all and any Third-World literature. The historical moment of colonization is a crucial formative episode in the Caribbean history.

Walcott’s life, as said earlier in this “Introduction,” coincides with St. Lucia’s move from colonization to independence. Hence, his career, too, registers and documents this transition.

The brief allusions to post-colonial debates in this study testify to this recognition of the 25

importance of the historical moment of colonization. The reference to Joseph Conrad could be a highly representative and testifying example, given the discussion of Lennard’s analysis of

“water clerk” above. The allusion to Conrad has been acknowledged in this study twice: in

“The Sea” and “The River” chapters. References are specifically made to Conrad the novelist and Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, respectively. But then, the textual context compels and explicitly alludes to both. In “The Sea” chapter Conrad is named in the very poetry line under discussion (Another Life 70), not buried in a dictionary’s exemplary citation. So is the reference in “The River.” Indeed, in the latter case two textual clues support the intertextual reading. There is the very reference to “Heart of Darkness” (The Fortunate Traveller “The

Fortunate Traveller” 93). However, that the words are not italicized and later, indeed, typed in lower case, only the preceding reference to “Kurtz” makes intertextuality explicit (93-94).

Also, Walcott’s identity (national and poetic) crisis has been contextualized by the imperatives of his postcolonial reality. But the deliberate “briefness” of such discussions and contextualizing instances signal their secondary weight (as contexts) compared to the study’s main focus (content); watery images. In addition, that Walcott’s concerns of history and identity are shared by the post-colonial theory’s concerns does not cancel the validity of tackling them from another perspective (aesthetically, for instance). The places where I refer to Walcott’s crises of history and identity, for example, are more concerned with their realization in the watery images. Most importantly, these agonizing concerns are universal concerns not post-colonial ones. In sum, this section questions the orthodox monopoly assumed by the post-colonial theory over these concerns.

2. THE WATER

Proportionate to the water-land ratio (7:1), water recurs prominently in the arts; mainly, as a life-giver (birth, new life, etc.). Besides, ancient mythological archetypes and

Christian baptism affixed ‘water’ with the rebirth dimension and kindred symbolism of clean, pure and fresh beginning. However, ‘water’ appeals to Walcott due to its dualism. Water is a crucible of contradictions; amongst which are: giving yet claiming lives; calm up yet turbulent deep down; alluring decipherable surface yet dispiriting depth of mysteries, etc. Water, in this sense, is a felicitous stretch for Walcott to experiment with his “career-long concern with eroding Manichean binaries and his development of a poetics of migration” (Thieme 199).

Binaries monopolize the central position in post-colonial artistic calls. The Caribbean is no exception. Bill Ashcroft et al. depict the colonialist-postcolonial relationship in terms of center and margin. In the postcolonial context, Ashcroft et al. proposes ‘abrogation’ as a strategy towards compromise; ultimately, to move forward past the colonization’s legacy. But then, the authors warn: “the abrogation of that centre does not involve the construction of an alternative focus of subjectivity, a new ‘centre’. Rather the act of appropriation in the post- colonial text issues in the embracing of that marginality as the fabric of social experience”

(103). A similar tone (though a reverse line of argument) concludes Orientalism. Edward

Said’s study cautions: “the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism” (328). Whereas

Ashcroft et al. assume the constructed alternative is eventually about centralizing the margin,

Said’s paradigm divines the route will go towards marginalizing the center. Still, both studies question the feasibility of internalizing the colonialist’s binaries in undoing them. Rather, the post-colonial needs embracing his marginality as such, both studies imply. Ironically, both proposals are ultimately still working within the binaries of center and margin. Theoretically,

Walcott takes note of this trend towards embracing the marginality. He uses the metaphor of 27

parenthesis to denote marginality as, he explains, “the parenthesis becomes the subject of the modern poem. ... Most contemporary verse is a poetry of asides, most modern poems could be in parentheses” (“Magic Industry: Joseph Brodsky” 143). But binarism is just one aspect of the water-as-crucible image; namely, hosting contradictions.

‘Water’ is a crucible in two senses; first, a container where contradictions naturally co- exist and this captures the underlying principle of Manichean binarism. Second, it is a crucible where contradictions melt into a “third truth;” namely water. ‘Third truth” is a founding doctrine in Walcott’s credo as will be manifested in this study6. What follows in this chapter demonstrates how the “third truth” doctrine merges with the water image in both predictable and unpredictable ways.

2.1 Spellbound by Water

Water hypnotizes Walcott (or his imagined personae) all through. In Walcott’s debut,

In a Green Night (1962), water “trance[s]” him (“Castiliane” 46). In the title poem of The

Gulf (1969), Walcott talks of “the amnesia of drumming water” (29). Midway in his career, in

Omeros (1990), water still “mesmerizes” (130). And, relatively recently in Tiepolo’s Hound

(2000), Walcott is filled with the “awe of the mesmeric lure of water” (34).

Not only does Walcott fall under the spell of Water but he also uses ‘water’ in composing spells and prayers. In “A Sea-Chantey,” Walcott pronounces the sacred beauty of the Caribbean landscape:

The music uncurls with

The soft vowels of inlets,

[…]

The colours of sea-grapes,

6 For more, see Walcott’s “The Figure of Crusoe” p. 39, 40.

The tartness of sea-almonds,

[…]

The rosary of archipelagoes,

[… ]

The amen of calm waters,

The amen of calm waters (Green 66).

Although the repetition involved in the closing lines echo spell formulae, the religious overtones in “amen” plus the reverent tone dominating the lines, make of this pronouncement more of a prayer than a spell. Setting the poem’s scenes on the Sabbath (65) and records them against the chiming church bells (65), too, favor the ‘prayer’ reading.

Water is, indeed, embedded into the deeper level of “A Sea-Chantey.” Ismond finds the poem’s “musicality” to stand out from amongst its other merits. Ismond particularizes:

“Walcott’s technical strategy is a well-chosen and closely-focused one; he sets out to echo the liquid sounds of water in the phonics of the poem, and thereby to distill ‘sea-music’. These liquid notes are rung from the sounds that name the distinct features of the setting” (34). On one level, Walcott fulfills his pledge to portray his beloved Caribbean waters in his poetry (in its very music). On another level, this integration of water in Walcott’s poems is an early statement of him identifying with his home waters; foreshadowing his intimate identification in The Fortunate Traveller (65) as will be shown below. Simultaneously, Walcott’s prayer above foreshadows the underwater hymn in the title poem of The Star-Apple Kingdom. On the latter occasion, the persona “heard the drowned choirs under Palisadoes, / a hymn ascending to earth from a heaven inverted / by water” (49).

Ultimately, Walcott spots in water the epitome of the Caribbean experience. In “Sainte

Lucie,”7 he employs musicality again to deliver this meaning:

cool thin water,

this is important water,

important?

imported?

water is important

(Sea Grapes 37).

The coincidence of sounds (“musicality”) in “important” and “imported” augments their semantic consonance. Most of Walcott’s crises – history, identity, and poetic expression – could just as consonantly be characterized: important and imported. Mining for a history, pursuing an identity, looking for a poetic voice are urgently important for Walcott. The reiterated “important” above bespeaks of urgency as of importance. Yet, they are crises for they cannot avoid drawing on different cultures and traditions (“imported”). Beside musicality, punctuation is crucial. Whereas both “important” and “imported” are initially followed by question marks signifying hesitancy; at the close of this reflection, the first question mark is revised. It cedes to an affirmative “is.” The second question mark

(“imported?”) is not directly revisited. Rather, to overcome the “imported” aspect Walcott immediately follows up:

also very important

the red rust drum

the evening deep

as coffee

the morning powerful

important coffee

7 Poem’s title is italicized in the original.

the villages shut

all day in the sun.

(Sea Grapes 37).

In these lines, Walcott pairs important water with the importance of any and all things Saint

Lucian (i.e. any and all that is not imported). In this sense, Walcott and the Crusoe figure of

The Castaway identify. Both hold solemnly to the homely commonness (domestic ‘trifles’) instead of eclipsing them by the grand tradition. At the close of “Crusoe’s Journals,” Walcott shifts from admiring Crusoe’s craftsmanship whereby

from this house

that faces nothing but the sea, his journals

assume a household use,

We learn to shape from them, where nothing was

the language of a race (Castaway 52) to a generalization whereby

all of us

yearn for those fantasies

of innocence, for our faith’s arrested phase

when the clear voice

startled itself saying ‘water, heaven, Christ,’

hoarding such heresies as

God’s loneliness moves in His smallest creatures. (53).

Both excerpts share the will to create of elemental nothingness an eternal thing. However, it is not a movement forward from the elemental to the eternal. Rather its direct opposite. It is a move backward aiming at restoring the sacredness of what has become banal. This idea is plainly expressed in Walcott’s essay “Crocodile Dandy: Les Murray,” regretting how “We 31

turn our wells on through faucets, and by commonness and familiarity we diminish the elemental sacredness of water” (186).

This reversal (commonness to sacredness) recurs in Another Life, though irony is inevitably involved in this reading. In the first Book of the poem entitled “The Divided

Child,” Walcott talks of the island’s “Noon, / and its sacred water sprinkles” (44). Edward

Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh annotate the lines, ironically, as a reference to: “A light shower around noon [that] is a common occurrence in the islands” (259). The gap is manifest between “common” and “sacred.”

Another Life is important on yet another level. Where water spellbinds Walcott in other poems, in Another Life, Walcott self-binds with water. Another Life is Walcott’s poetic autobiography, an appropriate genre to bind Walcott and water on a natal level. Upon news of

Harry Simmons’ suicide, Walcott dramatizes his reaction:

I knelt because I was my mother,

I was the well of the world,

I wore the stars on my skin,

I endured no reflections,

my sign was water,

tears, and the sea,

my sign was Janus,

I saw with twin heads,

and everything I say is contradicted.

I was fluent as water,

I would escape

with the linear elation of an eel, 32

a vase of water in its vase of clay,

my clear tongue licked the freshness of the earth (139).

On this occasion, the bond is metaphorically spotted to originate in Walcott’s zodiac sign

(Janus). Three decades later, in Tiepolo’s Hound, a hereditary component is spotlighted. In the latter poem, Walcott, from behind the narrator mask, reminisces about his father’s self-portrait and indulges in his physiognomy. Walcott reads out

from the blank unfurrowed brow

of his self-portrait, that he embodied the tenderness

of water, his preferred medium,8 its English reticence

but also its fragile delight, like a prediction

of his own passing9, … (12).

Water is contradictorily reticent yet divines and foretells the future. Similarly, Walcott reads in his father’s lineaments a passion for water and in water’s delightful lines the ill omen of

Warwick Walcott’s early death. This scene is one realization of water-as-crucible of contradictions. But then, water as a “third truth” that transcends its contradictions is water’s symbolic appeal for Walcott. In this sense, whereas Tiepolo’s Hound’s narrator “becomes a student of water / and its biography” (122), Walcott’s autobiography, Another Life, is study on water.

The natal bond itself is advanced further almost a decade after Another Life (1973). In

The Fortunate Traveller (1981), the bond is elevated to an intimate one: “Aquarian, I was married to water” (“The Hotel Normandie Pool” 65). Rather than a natal imperative, the latter

8 Warwick Walcott was a watercolorist.

9 Warwick Walcott died prematurely (aged 31).

is marital, intimate, and willed.

“Aquarian” is still open to the natal interpretation, referring to Walcott’s zodiac sign.

Aquarius is known alternatively as Water-carrier or Water-bearer. The syntactically parallel lines, in Another Life, “my sign was water” and “my sign was Janus” (139) are significant. In their annotations to Another Life, Baugh and Nepaulsingh constellate the horoscope, the god

Janus images and Walcott’s concerns in their comprehensive analysis. Baugh and

Nepaulsingh emphasize two particularly interesting characteristics of Janus: functionally,

Janus is the “god of doorways and beginnings;” in terms of physiognomy, Janus figures “as having two heads, joined at the back and facing opposite or contradictory directions (the old and the new years) simultaneously” (324). Like Janus, Walcott sees “with twin heads”

(Another Life 139). Unlike Janus, nevertheless, Walcott is frustrated with repeatedly being

“contradicted” (ibid). For the Roman god, beginnings (past), ends (future) and his now- position (present) are concurrent. Janus is at peace with the fact. The St. Lucian poet, on the other hand, is torn by the ‘seemingly’ polarized views.

To round up, the “sign” (Another Life 139) is literally the zodiac sign. But it could be read as a pun to mean ‘clue,’ too. Walcott’s thirst for making sense of his Caribbean experience is to be quenched and answered by water.

As has already been established, water is a hoard of contradictions. Another important feature of water is shape-shifting. Water is a ‘body’ susceptible to shaping and re-shaping; mainly, because it is shapeless. Furthermore, water is tasteless and colorless; just right for the

Caribbean experience of lack (historyless, identityless, and artless). For example, Walcott colors the colorless water to mirror his New World waters and their associated symbolisms.

He uses the colored waters as metaphors of the different watery bodies that define geographically and topographically his region.

In literature, Ferber mentions that “Green is often the color of the sea” and instances in 34

particular Shakespeare and Milton (90). However, ‘green’ traditionally symbolizes the freshness and vigor of springtime season, and the unripeness of springtime age (89). In line with this triptych of symbolisms, ‘green’ comes to signify delusion and “inconstancy” (90).

Although ‘inconstancy’ has negative implications, it is the very promise for the (Caribbean) green history to materialize in defiance of constant and fixed notions. Obviously, this encompasses the pains and the gains of Walcott’s approach to New World history: fresh perspective; hence, unripe. In addition, Ferber alludes to the interplay between green and blue in some poems. Indeed, it is a trademark metaphor for Wallace Stevens to play “the green of nature against the blue of art or imagination” (32, 89). In “Against Women Unconstant,”

Chaucer, too, contrasts green’s delusion with blue’s connotation of faithfulness (90) in the poem’s refrain: “Instead of blue, thus may ye wear all green” (qtd. in Ferber 31). Ferber reads the tropes thus: “the blue of constancy, the green of the changeable earth” (31). Whereas

‘green’ derives symbolism from the ephemerality of spring, ‘blue’ draws on sky/heaven, i.e.,

“hope … constancy … purity … truth … the ideal” (32).

Walcott adopts these implications in his poetry. In Tiepolo’s Hound, one scene contrasts Camille Pissarro’s St. Thomas and Pissarro’s Europe (France):

This was not the Synagogue of Peace and Loving Deeds

close to Dronningens Street by the blue water;

no, this was Europe; this is where the seeds

are sown in shattered crystal of slow slaughter. (103).

That Europe is the land of “slaughter” implies St. Thomas is the land of peace; hence, St.

Thomas’ water is blue. Ostensibly, the colors are factual; actually, metaphorically-loaded.

In a Green Night is an appropriately illustrative example of Walcott’s chameleon-like

‘water’ image. In “A Sea-Chantey,” two images are juxtaposed. One image goes: “Daybreak 35

is breaking / On the green chrome water,” and the other: “The histories of schooners / Are murmured in coral” (65). In yet another poem in Green (“Choc Bay”), the Roman goddess

Venus figures “dead in green water” (24). However, one ‘green’ differs from the other. In “A

Sea-Chanty,” the solemn murmurous hymn of buried histories is resurrected on the green water. The image in “Choc Bay,” on the other hand, offers the antithesis of resurrection.

Venus, symbolizing Western tradition (myths and histories) goes to a watery grave. The image is cast in an effigy-burning procession; except for ‘drowning’ substitutes ‘burning.’

Hence, the speaker is disinclined to recite prayers for the drowned goddess. Instead, he turns his devotions to the less divine, though not the least sacred, beauties of his island. He prays:

for the rare

Width of blue air,

For the hawk’s heel straying

Over blue fields, I still am praying,

For the wheeling spokes

of gulls from the crusted wreck,

I kneel to the shell’s mass,

With the crab in hiding in salt grass,

And at the bells of leaves I pay respect. (“Choc Bay” 24).

The poet’s conversion reasons the dramatic shift: exalting the mundane (St. Lucia) and demeaning the Olympian goddess. In the process, Walcott demonstrates that rather than stony and fixed, notions of ‘sacred’ and ‘banal’ beauty are elastic and volatile (green). Volatility is manifest in the various insular realizations of beauty that replaced its sui generis icon: Venus.

Consequently, Venus’ sea-tomb is monotonously green. In the speaker’s naturalistic account of his beloved island, on the other hand, shades could be spotted. On the later occasion, the speaker discerns a shade on the green sea surface: “grey sea’s tears” (25). In effect, Walcott 36

communicate a message on history writing. While the traditional accounts of histories (for

Walcott, the sea stands for history10) are one-sided/one-colored, Walcott’s alternative history allows for shades. This concurrence recurs. For one example, “some flash of lime-green water, edged with white” trumpets the speaker’s announcement: “I have swallowed all my

[past] hates” (Another Life 140). For another example, Shabine of “The Schooner Flight” talks of the “Caribbean so choke with the dead” (The Star-Apple Kingdom 7). Outwardly,

Shabine’s complain coincides with the image of Venus “dead in green water” (Green “Choc

Bay” 24). Nevertheless, Walcott royally colors and furnishes Shabine’s Caribbean Sea:

“emerald water, / whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent” (7). And what follows consists of an account of the coral makeup of Caribbean history by way of elaborating “The histories of schooners / Are murmured in coral” lines (Green “A Sea-Chantey” 65) and explicating

Another Life’s line: “lime-green water, edged with white ” too (140). Shabine reports:

I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans,

dead-men’s-fingers, and then, the dead men.

I saw that powdery sand was their bones

ground white from Senegal to San Salvador (The Star-Apple Kingdom 7).

Whereas the tomb of tradition is a green sea, the sea hoarding the Caribbean history is a sleek satiny emerald. In the latter case, the sea becomes a treasury rather than a tomb. Obviously, the shift is affected by the precious gem (“emerald”) and lustrous fiber (“silk”). Furthermore,

“rippled” implies the shades and subjectivities involved in alternative histories in contrast to the monochrome (single-perspective) conventional history. In Omeros, water hoards the history of Native Americans, too:

“Somewhere over there,” said my guide, “the Trail of Tears

started.” I leant towards the crystalline creek. Pines

10 See “The Sea” chapter of this study.

shaded it. Then I made myself hear the water’s

language around the rocks in its clear-running lines

and its small shelving falls with their eddies, “Choctaws,”

“Creeks,” “Choctaws,” … (177).

However, building on Ferber’s account, Walcott’s move from green to blue marks maturity in perspective. Approaching history through the Western paradigm is a green alternative. What he needs is not just a narrative, but a whole different approach to history; namely, a new blueprint via the exercise of imagination. The shift is realized in the image from “XXXIV” poem:

My eyes flashed a watery green, I felt through each hand,

channel and vein, the startling change in hue

made by the current between Pigeon Point and Store

Bay, my blood royalled by that blue. (Midsummer).

Indeed, the direct link between blue waters and coming of age (maturity) is established in an earlier poem in Midsummer: “The sun has fired my face to terra-cotta. / It carries the heat from his kiln all through the house. / But I cherish its wrinkles as much as those on blue water” (“XXV”). These lines point, too, to a reconciliation that comes with maturity.

Moreover, Omeros’ narrator joins Omeros in a long stare “at the blue dividing water” (283).

The mentioned divide is further described to encompass a “gulf” (283). What lies on the sides of that divide (gulf) are: Walcott the “boy” when Omeros’ “name was as wide as a bay … the word ‘Homer’ meant joy,” and Walcott the fulfilled but “injured author” (283).

One would, at this point, join voice with Walcott’s speaker in “In the Virgins”: “Is the blue water all?” (The Star-Apple Kingdom 22). No. Walcott’s palette for his home waters has other colors in store. While Walcott uses springtime green and heavenly blue for the sea 38

circling the islands; his colors for the inland watery bodies are rather down-to-earthly, gloomy, and far from vernal.

As with other colors, the reader needs to mind the line separating factual reporting on the island’s waters’ colors and their metaphorical manipulation and symbolic reaches. For example, if the reader insists on a metaphorical reading of ‘orange’ in “orange water … the stained sea” image (White Egrets “53” 85), the resultant reading will be interpolated. The sea figures orange simply for the scene is set at dusk. If allowed, the metaphorical reading, if allowed, should be secondary (or peripheral) to the literal report. Also, in the river images, the factual accounting of brown rivers of the Caribbean landscape is distinguished from the mood-colored ‘brown’ ones. In the same page in Another Life, the narrator reports on “the brown creek that is Rampanalgas River” but is petrified by its “ghostly white and brown,”

(143); the latter phrase is, indeed, repeated twice in the same page.

Of the first (literal) case, readers can find two examples of brown river images in

Omeros. The first instance goes:

In the devastated valleys, crumpling brown water

at their prows, …

[…]

… Achille could hear the tunnels

of brown water roaring in the mangroves (53).

On another occasion, too, “Achille wanted to scream, he wanted the brown water / to harden into a road, but the river widened ahead / and closed behind him” (134).

Of the other case (metaphorical colors), examples abound. Sailing along a nameless

‘Guyanese’ river, the German missionary Koenig perceives the river in idealistic, indeed glamorously silver, colors: “Around the bend the river poured its silver / like some remorseful mine, giving and giving / everything green and white” (The Star-Apple Kingdom 44). For 39

missionaries, the New World is a land of promise: silver, green and white. However, that

Koenig is the only survivor of the missionary group justifies the shift in perception: the silver, green and white- giving river reveals itself “like some remorseful mine,” and the green gets modified into “the dull green” (44).

In The Fortunate Traveller, glamour and darkness (blackness) are seen to co-exist in the river. Needless to say that ‘black’ has cross-times and cross-cultures negative symbolic connotations ranging from evil to death11. In the title poem, the narrator reflects on “the blinding coinage of the river / that, endlessly, until we pay one debt, / shrouds, every night, an ordinary secret” (96). Although shrouds are always in white, they wrap the dead. The image recalls Another Life’s “ghostly white” (143). The water is darkened with blackness in two poems in The Fortunate Traveller: “The moon shines like a lost button; / the black water stinks under the sodium lights on / the wharf” (“Port of Spain” 61); “I stare into black water by whose hulls / heaven is rocked like a cradle, / except, except for one extinguished star”

(“Early Pompeian” 74).

In Omeros, the water’s (specifically, the sea’s) coloration and the poem’s themes mix and match. When Achille sketches the sea as his “home” and Edenic “garden” seawater figures royally “purple-blue” in color (126). On an earlier occasion, however, Achille probes the sea for a Caribbean history. Then, the very majestic waters are overshadowed:

Why? Asked the glass sea-horses,

curling like questions. What on earth had he [Achille] come for,

when he had a good life up there? The sea-mosses

shook their beards angrily, like submarine cedars,

while he trod the dark water. … (45).

11 See Ferber p. 27-29.

Indeed, by page 170, darkness reaches out and mars the previously purple surface when some

“faint sidereal drone [was] interrupted by the air / gusting over black water”. Ten pages later,

Catherine Weldon (the epitome of Native American suffrage) “like Achille on the river, … /

… she heard a loon’s / wooden cry over black water.”

In conclusion, Walcott’s use of ‘water’ realizes his “third truth” doctrine. Water as the transcending host of contradictions represents Walcott’s achievement at using the Western tradition to voice his Caribbean landscape. In Robert Bensen’s words: “The West Indian reverence for ancestors became for Walcott a need to assimilate tradition, to assume its features, to make it part of his visual vocabulary. He believed that his knowledge of tradition would augment his treatment of the island’s watercolor seas, its vegetation ripe for oils”

(336). The end product of this merging (tradition and experience) is fresh metaphors:

2.2 Fresh Metaphors

In “L” (Midsummer), Walcott metaliterarily reflects on the volume’s poems and then as if in a litany he prays: “Let them be, in water, as my father, who did watercolors, / entered his work.” But, what would come of baptized poems? A few lines earlier, Walcott describes the volume’s poems thus:

These poems I heaved aren’t linked to any tradition

like a mossed cairn; each goes down like a stone

to the seabed, settling, but let them, with luck, lie

where stones are deep, in the sea’s memory.

To put these shards of lines together, the reader needs to travel back to an earlier volume,

Another Life. There, Walcott praises how Methodists’ “text was cold brook water,” and resolves: “I would be a preacher, / I would write great hymns” (24). To gloss these lines,

Baugh and Nepaulsingh quote Walcott’s notebooks where he writes: “We were Methodists

and our saints were practical men; reformers and abolitionists who used plain language. …

Their plain water was the way. They were without mystification of incense and liturgical chants” (246). So, Walcott’s hymn: “Let them [poems] be, in water” (Midsummer “L”) is to relieve poems from mystifications; in this context, to get them not “linked to any tradition”

(ibid). In his praise, in Another Life, Walcott emphasizes

the Jacobian English rang, new-minted,

the speech of simple men,

evangelists, reformers, abolitionists,

their text was cold brook water (24).

It is, in other words, a baptism of New World poetry. The honesty of art as a form of plain water finds expression on yet another occasion in Another Life. Praising the art of Harry

Simmons, Walcott draws the following allegory:

It was they [people] 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 (134).

Ultimately, simplicity approaches infantile innocence in Another Life. The child who toys with the coconut-shell boat in the Rampanalgas River is portrayed as “a child without history, without knowledge of its pre-world, / only the knowledge of water runnelling rocks”

(143). In the last line, Baugh and Nepaulsingh commentate: “the water here assures the man’s survival in nature as part of it” (329). What is pertinent to this section on the water of baptism and post-baptism freshness is the conclusion of the scene, where New World people are described thus: “the races that crossed the water … the crossing of water has erased their memories” (143). Ismond’s analysis of this conclusion evaluates the literal weight of the 42

metaphoric cross as follows:

This deeply significant image of the “crossing of water” surfaces here to

take a permanent place in the Walcott credo. … It is now the historic

crossing as perilous journey, and, as such, gathers associations of the

Christian cross as sacred, mythic icon of the sacrificial rite of passage.

Consistent with the dialectical viewpoint of this work, the implicit emphasis

is that the self thus forged in the crucible of that crossing, timeless and

mythic in its spiritual imperatives, is the ultimate achievement. In the

context of Walcott’s wider vision, this is the core reality in which the

possibility of self-(re)creation/renewal consists. (218, forward slash in the

original).

It should be noted, however, that the resultant freshness is not absolutely salutary. It is inextricable from the disadvantageous state of the poet in face of the post-baptism

(postlapsarian, indeed) stretches of nothingness that make up his materials and tools. In

Another life, Walcott soliloquizes on this dilemma: “the tireless hoarse anger of the waters / by which I can walk calm, a renewed, exhausted man” (147). This dilemma is best expressed in “XV”:

The imagination no longer goes as far as the horizon,

but it keeps coming back. At the edge of the water

it returns clean, scoured things that, like rubbish,

the sea has whitened, chaste. Disparate scene. (Midsummer).

The double-facedness of the water-crossing experience is emphasized by Ismond as one that “encodes the total experience of uprootment from and dispossession of original settings, rerooting in and possession of others. It also comprehends the sum total of the pains and gains involved in the process” (219). If the pain of the crossing is losing all tradition and 43

facing a blank to start from, what is the gain? The answer has already been alluded to: fresh metaphors. The carving of these fresh metaphors is by itself a metaphoric gesture.

Any and every thing the ‘crosser’ utters becomes the word and all he creates becomes the world. In Walcott’s theory, this is about metaphor as metamorphoses. It is the “new waters” (Ismond 18) of the New World that gives a new life. In “A Sea-Chantey,” the narrator describes the Adam-like poet of the New World standing at the shore: “Now an apprentice washes his cheeks / With salt water and sunlight” (Green 65). The water washes away tradition and it washes the poet ashore to terminate his apprenticeship and make him the master of his New World (his shore/island). In an appropriately entitled poem “The Harbour,” the poet realizes he is being ushered into a new harbor/world where it yields futile “Braving new water in an antique hoax” (Green 15). In “Steersman, My Brother,” the poet arrives at the harbor faithless and cargo-less (Green 40). The urge to move beyond the wreckage necessitates that the poet desperately clings to the rescued tools realizing

Now, what rides

The violent waters of my life, is mere craft

Of words, and thirst

for those fresh springs of grace (Green 40).

First, one needs to mind the gap between “Braving” in “The Harbour” (Green 15) and ‘riding’ in “Streersman, My Brother” (Green 40) as it signals a shift in the poet’s resolution.

Consonant with this verbal shift is how the dysfunctional “antique hoax” (Green 15) is replaced with “a mere craft / Of words, and thirst / For those fresh springs of grace” (Green

40). Furthermore, in “Steersman, My Brother,” the promising freshness of generous and inexhaustible grace

derides

That earlier, steady trust 44

That there are harbours, there are fields of light,

But vision cannot see them for time’s dust. (Green 40).

This is yet another example where gains and pains are inextricable. Indeed, up to “Islands”, the poet is shown restlessly to

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 (Green 77).

In the following volume, The Castaway, the poet is a castaway; forsaken “in a green world, one without metaphors” (“Crusoe’s Journal” 51). Rather than ‘seeking’ metaphors, he is now experimenting with new metaphors and/or fresh metaphorical reaches. Walcott draws parallels between Columbus’ missionary enterprise in the New World and the poet’s mission towards New-World poetry. Each

bears

in speech mnemonic as a missionary’s

the Word to savages,

its shape an earthen, water-bearing vessel’s

whose sprinkling alters us

into good Fridays … (ibid).

The weight of the ‘word,’ however, is not easily discarded: “parroting our master’s / style and voice, we make his language ours, / converted cannibals” (ibid). Internalizing the master’s ‘word,’ in Walcott’s view, involves mongering the ‘word.’ It is a form of verbal cannibalism. The ‘word’ will always remind the poet he is giving his world’s “new waters” the antique relish (or, the “antique hoax” word [Green 15]). New waters are to be realized in 45

new words. There is the subjugation tone to it in: “alters us / into good Fridays who recite His praise” (ibid). Realizing the limits of creating via the old word, Walcott’s imagination “ebbs, conventional as any water-clerk” (Gulf “Nearing Forty” 68) for he is educated into taking

“conventional for convictional” (67).

Another Life marks a turning point, in this sense. Walcott’s ebbing imagination flows in the poem. Here, I need return to Walcott’s reaction to Harry Simmons’ suicide, especially the part where Walcott says:

I was fluent as water,

I would escape

with the linear elation of an eel,

a vase of water in its vase of clay,

my clear tongue licked the freshness of the earth (139).

In effect, the New World poet comes to embody the ‘word.’ In “Crusoe’s Journal,” the word’s function is portrayed thus: to “shape an earthen, water-bearing vessel” (51). In Another Life,

Walcott self-portrays his function as a New World poet in like terms: “a vase of water in its vase of clay” (139). The images of water and clay vases are particularly important that they are better analyzed as motifs. Professional painter Harry Simmons himself is described as a painter whose people “smoothed the wall / of his clay-coloured forehead” and in tribute

Simmons held “the clear water of their simple troubles” (Another Life 134). Walcott, in the previous comparison, contrasts his failure as a painter with his fellow successful nationals

(Simmons and St. Omer). This reflection proves a formative experience for Walcott and an informative one for Walcottian scholars. Patricia Ismond points out Walcott’s discovery about the differences between painting and poetry writing in medium and in temper. On the canvas, the painter transposes his instinctual experience of his world via the immediate impression of colors (165). The poet’s, on the other hand, is a reflective experience; his medium (the 46

word/metaphor) mediates his experience (166). Precisely, metaphor is an in-between in poetry. Consequently, Gregorias’ art makes him the namer of his world; in a oneness with his world (ibid). In Ismond’s words, while Gregorias is a “pacesetter,” Walcott is a “runner”

(ibid). Unlike Gregorias, Walcott “in the more classic orientation of his search, lagged behind in apprenticeship to the traditions of the colonizer” (ibid) for the word’s imperatives are undeniable. Walcott’s achievement at comprising his World’s “new waters” and “the more classic orientation of his search” is crystalized in pairing “St Omer’s Dionysiac passion and his own metaphysical bent into a new wholeness” (ibid). In other words, it is Walcott’s synthetic project towards a fresh “third truth.” In Walcott’s words:

but I lived in a different gift,

its element metaphor,

while Gregorias would draw

with the linear elation of an eel

one muscle in one thought,

my hand was crabbed by that style,

this epoch, that school

[…]

Gregorias abandoned apprenticeship

to the errors of his own soul,

it was classic versus romantic

perhaps, it was water and fire,

[ …]

His work was grotesque, but whole,

and however bad it became

it was his, he possessed 47

aboriginal force and it came

as the carver comes out of the wood.

Now, every landscape we entered

was already signed with his name. (Another Life 59).

To be sure, fiery ardency has ever inspired envy in aspiring poets. It is not a peculiarly

Walcottian obsession. Harold Bloom holds:

Most of what we call poetry – since the Enlightenment anyway – is this

questing for fire, that is, for discontinuity. Repetition belongs to the watery

shore, and Error comes only to those who go beyond discontinuity, on the

airy journey up into a fearful freedom of weightlessness. Prometheanism, or

the quest for poetic strength, moves between the antinomies of thrown-ness

(which is repetition) and extravagance (Binswangerian Verstiegenheit or

poetic madness, or true Error). The handful – since the old, great ones – who

break this cycle and live, enter into a counter-sublime, a poetry of earth, but

such a handful (Milton, Goethe, Hugo) are sub-gods. The strong poets of

our time, in English, who enter/greatly into the contest of wrestling with the

dead, never go so far as to enter this fourth stage or poetry of earth. Ephebes

abound, a double handful manage the Promethean quest, and three or four

attain the poetry of discontinuity (Hardy, Yeats, Stevens) in which a poem

of the air is achieved.” (Bloom 79/80, italics in the original).

Walcott’s peculiarity is about spotting the potential of water, rather than fire, to absolve him from the poetic sin of ‘continuity.’ In addition, rather than earth, it is water that represents the very locale for a “counter-sublime.” Taking over the functions of both fire and earth makes water the symbol of Walcott’s “third truth.” This meaning crystalizes in the image of writing on water. It is a writing yet it does not commemorate anything (in contrast to 48

writing on earth). The image presents a form of writing that suits the unwritten Caribbean and yet it is a form of writing that transcends the conventional (metropolitan) idea of writing. As will be shown below, tracing the image in Walcott’s volumes indicates it becomes a motif in

Walcott’s corpus.

2.3 Writing on Water

We ‘write on water’ if our souls are drowned

Within the origin of life, the sea.

[…]

That though our proudly ribbed endeavours sink

In dirt, or swirling sea,

Our souls, like plants, yearn for the shores of light.

So does Walcott resolve in the first lines of “Steersman, My Brother” (Green 39). Though

Walcott specifies later, in the above excerpt, the ‘sea’ as his canvas or page, water as such is used in many other places. On the latter occasions, Walcott portrays animals’ prints on water to reify the task of drafting a New World history and composing a New-World-poetry (and in the process asserting an identity). As mentioned before, the image of writing on water occupies a notable place in Walcott’s writings.

In Another Life, Walcott says: “I was fluent as water, / I would escape / with the linear elation of an eel” (139). Earlier in the book, Walcott praises Gregorias (surrogate of St.

Lucian painter Dunstan St. Omer) who was drawing with “the linear elation of an eel” (59).

Both artists are compared to eels, the slender, long pen-like fish. Later in the book, too,

Walcott returns to writing on water. One scene goes

as the cordage of mangrove tightens

bland water to bland sky heavy and sodden as canvas,

[…]

acids and russets and water-coloured water,

let the historian go mad there

from thirst. Slowly the water rat takes up its reed pen

and scribbles. Leisurely, the egret

on the mud tablet stamps its hieroglyph.

The explorer stumbles out of the bush crying out for myth.

The tired slave vomits his past.

The Mediterranean accountant, with the nose of the water rat,

ideograph of the egret’s foot (141).

Historians and explorers die of thirst in the arid (historyless) Caribbean. On the other hand, rats and egrets are ardently immersed in writing (actually coding) their narratives in hieroglyphs and ideograms. This contrast implies that, in due course, the scribbling water rat and the stamping egret would be contentedly fulfilled; the traditional historian and archeologist fret in anguish. Most importantly, the animals figure advantageous in comparison to the conventionalists (historian, archeologist, explorer, etc.) The animals have the true authority and the final word. Another implication in this image is that history and historylessness are matters of dispositions. Rather than a Caribbean devoid of history, the image suggests it is the historian’s imagination that is deserted.

Earlier in the poem, too, a relatively similar image is presented. Instead of a surface to write on, water figures both as a lens that concentrates light and as a film where images are kept (93, 94). Walking with Anna by the lagoon at night, the poet observes how the “dark water’s lens had made the trees one wood / arranged to frame this pair” (93). It is significant that water made the scattered trees a wood for it reflects Walcott’s ultimate search for a 50

synthetic “third truth”. The pair (Anna and the poet) walked on “content / that the black film of water kept the print / of their locked images when they passed on” (94). The last detail is problematic for it talks of water preserving images and this contrasts with the transience and ephemerality of imprints and marks stamped on the water earlier. But the romantic atmosphere and tone of the scene allows for such a trust in water immortalizing the pair’s rendezvous.

John Thieme lingers on Walcott’s water as camera image in Another Life. Thieme reads functional parallelisms between Walcott’s water/camera (lens and film) and John Keats’

Grecian Urn (93). Fluid and transient, “water cannot preserve their image for posterity” nonetheless, Walcott’s Another Life, “can, and does, do exactly this” (93). Furthermore,

Thieme spots the crucial difference between Walcott’s and Keats’ images. Scribal and pictorial artists alike, Thieme says, are ever caught in the classical paradox involved in

“immortalizing the fugitive nature of experience in artistic form” for “like Keat’s grecian urn,

[immortalizing artists] deny movement and process” (137). For Walcott, the paradox is further complicated by the imperatives of his immediate Trinidadian Carnival culture, Thieme registers. The Trinidadian culture emphasizes “‘becoming, change and renewal’12 rather than stasis and completion” (Thieme 137). In a few words, the Carnival culture values “process, as opposed to product” (137). This ‘paradox’ accounts for, rather than complicates, Walcott’s opting for water. Water’s transience is a medium honest to the New World landscape and the

New World experience. Poetically put, Walcott holds: “this is the true element, / water, which commemorates nothing in its stasis” (Omeros 297).

Rather than the water/camera image, Ismond focuses on the scribbling water rat image, only to draw conclusions similar to Thieme’s. Both critics find in the images traces of

Walcott’s skepticism of the orthodox view of history as a state of “completion” (Thieme 137);

12 Quoted from Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World.

or alternatively, one of “achievement” (Ismond 212). Rather than in achievement, Walcott views Caribbean history as one of lack and loss (Ismond 210, 211). But rather than

“becoming” (Thiem 137), Ismond argues Walcott portrays the Caribbean history as one of

“torpor … stasis and absence of meaning” (211). Ismond’s arguments bear on her analysis of the image of the writing rat. She reads the image as a satiric parody of traditional historians

(211). Writing on water, on the other hand, is more serious in its signifying that lack (the nothing) is translucent; a “visionary recognition” (211). Ironically, the concrete footprint of the egret symbolizes “the profoundly mythic signature of what Walcott envisions as the finding of earth” Ismond holds (212, emphasis added).

Moreover, not only is New World fauna bent on scribbling a New World history.

Flora, too, has a narrative. In the title poem of The Arkansas Testament, one corner of the scenery shows “the wincing muzzles of deer / make rings [on the lake] that widen the idea / of the state past the calendar!” (114). At the same time and place (the very lake of the very scenery),

The pines huddle in quotas

on the lake’s calm water line

that draws across them straight as

the strokes of a fountain pen. (114).

To round up, writing on water quenches Walcott’s thirst for a history, an identity and a poetic voice. Rather than finished products, these are negotiable constructs. Writing on water, in this light, functions as a palimpsest. Rather than once-and-for-all ‘completed’ narratives, these constructs are susceptible to a continuous writing and rewriting (ever in a state of

“becoming”). Walcott’s concept of writing on water coincides with Ashcroft et al.’s argument of the subversive function of writing per se at the hands of post-colonials:

writing, once seized, retains the seeds of self-regeneration and the power to 52

create and recreate the world. By inscribing meaning, writing releases it to a

dense proliferation of possibilities, and the myth of centrality embodied in the

concept of a ‘standard language’ is forever overturned. It is at this moment that

English becomes english (86).

In what follows, I will offer an overview of Walcott’s crises (historylessness, identitylessness, and New-World poetry) and his conceptualizing them into fluid (negotiable) constructs:

2.3.1 History: “This is the music of memory, water.”13

“In any case, all poems are written at a particular historical moment, and one way of approaching them (as all art) is location in history,” so does Lennard outline his stand as to the relevance/irrelevance of history in analyzing a poem (293, underlining in the original).

Otherwise, the alternatives are, Lennard holds, either the critic would approach the poem

“ahistorically” or approach the history contextualizing the poem as “value-free” (291, italics in the original). Moreover, where Lennard grants the critics the options of ‘ahistorical’ reading or the resorting to an objective, value-free history, he is not as resilient when it comes to post-colonial poetry. In particular, the one that is informed by English literature. In this context, Lennard contends the question of history could not be dismissed. Citing Spenser’s supervising Queen Elizabeth I’s atrocious policy in Ireland and the political sponsorship of

Forster’s A Passage to India, Lennard substantiates “the complicity of canonical texts with imperialism” (292). Subtracting history in the post-colonial context, then, Lennard asserts is

“blindness, censorship, or willfully averting one’s eyes” (ibid). The present section approaches the question of history reversely.

Whereas Lennard’s argument takes ‘history’ to lexically connote the temporal milieu in which the poem is composed, this section traces the place of history and time in Walcott’s

13 The Prodigal: a Poem (“1” 8).

poetic output and total achievement. To slightly modify Lennard’s argument: in the context of

Walcott’s Caribbean, history is the very topic/center, rather than at the fringes of the poem’s context.

As a start, this section will briefly14 contextualize the question of ‘history’ in post- colonial debates. In the prefatory pages to Orientalism, Edward Said sets two categories

(accurately, drives or incentives) of history study apart. Lennard’s concept of history fits under Said’s category of “knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes” (xix). In the post- colonial context, on the other hand, the study of history falls under the category of

“knowledge … that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency, and outright war” (ibid). In an earlier moment, Said puts it straight, his stand as to the latter category: “My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and unwritten” (xviii). In a few words, history could be a statement of identity. But, most importantly it is a fluid rather than a fixed construct. Philip Davis, in Why Victorian

Literature Still Matters, indeed, goes as far as asserting that “the only use of history for literature: that history should be made imaginably personal and present” (Davis 21). Unlike

Lennard’s, Davis’ ‘history’ identifies with Said’s second category. History is ever open to be

“imaginably personal and present.”

In fact, in Said’s judgment, ‘history’ is an elaborate statement of identity. It is a narrative. The weight of ‘history’ as central to Said’s argument in Orientalism is significantly supplanted by ‘Narrative,’ ‘Narration,’ and ‘Story’ in his collected essays Culture and

Imperialism (a sequel to Orientalism). It is to be noted that ‘narrative’ is not supplanting history in simplistic, metaphorical terms; rather, it is modifying, or better (re)naming

14 As this study takes the water imagery in Walcott’s poetry as its focus, the post-colonial dimension will be carefully and economically emphasized so as to keep one main line of argument connecting the study (as has also been established in the “Introduction”).

‘history.’ In the full picture of Said’s theory, ‘history’ and ‘narrative’ are intertwined. Said’s rather overstatement “nations themselves are narrations” (Culture and Imperialism xiii, emphasis in the original) reproduces his earlier argument whereby “history is made by men and women [i.e. nations] … unmade … unwritten” (Orientalism xviii). How else can history be unmade, more so unwritten but via narrative(s) (alternative, discursive-, counter-, or otherwise)? One rationale behind this narrative-making/meaning-making, Said reasons, is for nations to validate “their own identity and the existence of their own history” (Culture and

Imperialism xii).

In the post-colonial context (setting), the significant weight of the ‘history’ question is proportionate with the swelling burden of its evident disfiguring imprints in the lived present.

In Said’s words, it is the “past within” translating itself into “scars of humiliating wounds … instigation for different practices … potentially revised visions of the past tending toward a new future … urgently reinterpretable and re-deployable experiences, in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory taken from the empire” (Culture and Imperialism

31).

Furthermore, these arguments aptly enlighten Walcott’s perception of the concurrence of past, present, and future. Past/history is present (continuously re-enacted); past presages future. To reconcile with the past, then, is to control present and future. Consequently, it is to control time. The act is, then, liberating for Walcott.

Walcott sums up the debate: “If you have to be in a place where you create your own time, what you learn, I think, is a patience, a tolerance, how to make an artisan of yourself rather than being an artist” (Hirsch 74). For, time (and eventually, history) is a construct.

2.3.2 Identity

Ostensibly, a harmony would hold between the river as an identity image and

Thieme’s argument that in Walcott’s works “Identity is … seen as a fluid construct” (180).

Nevertheless, Thieme’s elaboration that Walcott stabilizes his fluid identity by a willed

“complicity in the social fiction of the unitary self” (180) shows clearly how the question of identity is particularly problematic and would clash with the classical image of a smoothly flowing river.

Like history, identity is a post-colonial crisis. Bill Ashcroft et al. locate the crisis to arise from the post-colonial realization that identity lies “in difference rather than in essence” and a “difference from the metropolitan” for that matter (165). For Walcott, it is about asserting difference form the Black continent, in addition. This post-colonial concern with identity is inextricable from the entrenched sense of displacement. Ashcroft et al. note that post-colonial literature is mainly about crystalizing a working self-place relationship (8). They outline the crisis thus:

A valid and active sense of self may have been eroded by dislocation,

resulting from migration, the experience of enslavement, transportation, or

‘voluntary’ removal for indentured labour. Or it may have been destroyed

by cultural denigration, the conscious and unconscious oppression of the

indigenous personality and culture by a supposedly superior racial or

cultural model. The dialectic of place and displacement is always a feature

of post-colonial societies whether these have been created by a process of

settlement, intervention, or a mixture of the two. Beyond their historical and

cultural differences, place, displacement, and a pervasive concern with the

myths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to all post-colonial

literatures in english (9, italics in the original).

In metaphoric terms, if the aforementioned processes planted a barrier-like ‘dash’ in the ‘self-place’ relationship, the post-colonial artist’s task is about bringing down the barrier. 56

Walcott’s dash, in this regard, is buttressed by both processes. Forging his identity is not only about breaking away from the cultural chains of the metropole but also cutting the umbilical cord attaching him to the Black continent: Africa. His is a quadruple identity crisis: connect with/ disconnect from the European/ African traditions. And it bears on Walcott’s treatment or reworking of the river of identity image15. Edward Said’s title for his autobiography: Out of

Place encapsulates eloquently Walcott’s identity crisis.

The alienation (displacement) is further complicated by the estrangement evolving in communicating the experience of place. The last dimension is posed by the metropolitan language. In Ashcroft et al.’s words, it is manifest in: “The gap which opens between the experience of place and the language available to describe it” (9). This provides another occasion to identify Walcott’s dilemma in rendering his Caribbean experience with Said’s in writing his autobiography.

In the prefatory pages to Out of Place, Said imparts to his readers the methodological obstacle he faced writing his life account:

The basic split in my life was the one between Arabic, my native language,

and English, the language of my education and subsequent expression as a

scholar and teacher, and so trying to/ produce a narrative of one in the

language of the other –to say nothing of the numerous ways in which the

languages were mixed up for me and crossed over from one realm to the

other –has been a complex task. Thus it has been difficult to explain in

English the actual verbal distinctions (as well as the rich associations) that

Arabic uses to differentiate between, for example, maternal and paternal

uncles; but since such nuances played a definite role in my early life I had to

try to render them here.

15 More in “The River” chapter below.

Along with language, it is geography –especially in the displaced form of

departures, arrivals, farewells, exile, nostalgia, homesickness, belonging,

and travel itself –that is at the core of my memories of those early years

(xv/ xvi).

Seemingly, ‘split’ sounds exaggerated. Nevertheless, knowing that the lingual split has its cultural and identity crises concomitants justifies ‘split’ and qualifies ‘basic’ in the above excerpt. Indeed, whereas the language crisis is a ‘split,’ its concomitants, Said says, are:

“ghosts that continued to haunt me from school to school, group to group, situation to situation” (137). Walcott’s Caribbean experience is far more complicated. Rather than a split of lingual binarism, the Caribbean is polylingual. The unique Caribbean lingual standard is usually referred to as Creole continuum. Ashcroft et al. précis, the Creole Continuum theory as follows:

[it] states that the Creole complex of the region is not simply an aggregation

of discrete dialect forms but an overlapping of ways of speaking between

which individual speakers may move with considerable ease. These

overlapping ‘lects’, or specific modes of language use, not only contain

forms from the major languages ‘between’ which they come into being, but

forms which are also functionally peculiar to themselves (Bickerton, 1973:

642). (44).

This crisscrossed map of identity differs from the conventional straightforward self- place oneness. Hence, Derek Walcott self-identifies with Joyce’s Stephan Daedalus, rather than with Edward Said. Walcott experiences divides in character and personal allegiances; the latter include lingual, religious and national allegiances. In his “Leaving School” essay,

Walcott perceives Daedalus as the archetype of splits and divides: “Like him [Daedalus], I was a knot of paradoxes: hating the Church and loving her rituals, learning to hate England as 58

I worshipped her language, … a Methodist-lecher, a near Catholic-ascetic, loving the island, and wishing [I] could get the hell out of it” (32, square brackets in the original). A personality thus forged is what Ashcroft et al. called: “double vision” whereby a love-hate relationship holds between the post-colonial and the metropole; or, what the metropole represents (25, 36,

108, 109)16. Rather than pulls tearing Walcott, these conflicts cripple him as is visually denoted by the deliberate barred prison-like square brackets of the “I” in the above quote from

“Leaving School.” This state of decrepitude is projected on the river image as will be detailed in “The River” chapter.

In an interview with EXPRESS journal17, Walcott holds that claiming a pure Caribbean

(Trinidadian, in this context) identity is a form of self-deception: “people [he means especially poets] have overblown reputations, and tend after a while to believe in their own reflections” (Milne 60). This perception coincides partially with Harold Bloom’s: “Identity recedes from us in our lives the more we pursue it, yet we are right not to be persuaded that it is unattainable” (Bloom 65). However, both Said and Walcott realize that ‘recession’ is the quintessence of identity. Towards the end of Out of Place, Said reconciles with the fact: “Now it does not seem important or even desirable to be ‘right’ and in place (right at home, for instance). Better to wander out of place” (294). For, Said goes on, “With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place” (295). In poem “4” of The Prodigal: a Poem, Walcott finds no dissonance at all in loving two ‘homes’:

I lived in two villages: Greenwich and Gros Ilet,

and loved both almost equally. One had the sea,

grey morning light along the waking water,

16 Ashcroft et al. coined the term to encapsulate D. E. S. Maxwell’s theory “on the disjunction between place and language” p. 23.

17 entitled “Derek Walcott,” by feature writer Anthony Milne, conducted in 1982. 59

the other great river, … (29).

Indeed, in an earlier poem in The Prodigal: a Poem, a homage is paid to Hudson, too (7).

America could be read as the third home, in this sense. Ismond reads Walcott’s approach thus:

Walcott foregrounds the origins of the Caribbean as a place coming into

existence from the diasporas of the older world; it is a place, therefore,

where many of the world’s ancestries and races meet. […] Walcott

describes … the “intricately swiveled Babel” of the multiple voices of the

peoples that meet in these waters. The Babel of their varied tongues and

creeds is pictured as so many different channels/passages/to the one main,

common course of destiny. … many yet one

(Ismond 219/220, first forward slash in the original).

Given all this, Walcott’s treatment of the split or divide is unique. Rather than pursuing an essential identity or asserting his difference from Africa or from Europe,

Walcott’s identity follows a different rhetoric. Like water, the Caribbean man is a crucible where the African and the European identities melt into a “third truth”: the Caribbean identity.

2.3.3 Poetic Voice

Although searching for a poetic voice is not a ‘construct’ in the fashion of ‘history’ and ‘identity,’ it could be analyzed along the same lines of fixity versus fluidity. Generally speaking,

Cultural production in (post-)colonial situations inevitably exists in a hybrid

discursive continuum and individual writers are rarely, if ever, able to

immerse themselves fully in either of the opposed roles of enslaved

imitators or emancipated originator. So, although it remains important to

locate writers precisely in terms of the specifics of their discursive

positioning, the ‘line’ between being an assimilator and being assimilated

can be far from clear-cut (Thieme 30).

Specifically speaking of Walcott, Thieme maps out Walcott’s dilemma in like terms:

Walcott’s “artistic practice … alternates between an attempt to achieve the stasis of classical art and a realization that kinesis is inevitably the stock-in-trade of a postmodern, post-colonial poet” (Thieme 197). The kinesis involves the restless adopting of roles (assimilator and assimilated). Still it should be added that this is a poetic dilemma, not peculiarly post-colonial.

In the “Preface” to The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Bloom asserts “The largest truth of literary influence is that it is an irresistible anxiety” (xviii). Despite the

“imagistic, temporal, spiritual, psychological” complex of “defensive” relations implicated in

‘influence,’ Bloom contends the catalyst fueling the anxiety of influence is a creative act for which he coined the term “poetic misprision” (xxiii). Most importantly, Bloom commences his study with: “Poetic influence … is necessarily the study of the life-cycle of the poet-as- poet” (Bloom 7).

Where the questions of identity (racial and poetic) and of discourse (poetic counter- discourse) are at the heart of Walcott’s oeuvre, his speechless river is a perfect clean slate to pursue an alternative- or counterstatement of poetic identity. Walcott could put whichever words/ narratives in its tongue. In Walcott’s words: “If there was nothing, there was everything to be made” (“What the Twilight Says” 4). Walcott’s curse (speechless river) is his blessing. His is, to use Bloom’s words, a Hegelian disposition: “a hero of poetic history and victim of it” (62). The greatest of Hegelians might in this context be T. S. Eliot, the greatest theorist to formulate a working relation holding between tradition and the individual talent.

The most important aspect of Eliot’ work is the way his allusions in “The Waste land” to

“marginal texts” paved the way to the texts’ admission into the Great Tradition. In this regard,

Breiner argues to the effect that “Only Eliot’s use of them [i.e. the texts] has made them 61

famous” (202). Eliot’s maxim being: “Literature must be judged by language, not by place. …

Provinciality of material may be a virtue … provinciality of point of view is a vice” (qtd. in

Hughes 211). In Walcott’s poetics, however, the Caribbean provinciality is Walcott’s antidote to the burden of the colonizer’s language.

In “The Master of the Ordinary: Philip Larkin” essay, Walcott pays the same ancient credit and tribute to the Muses’ Mount Helicon for housing poetry. But rather than sighting fluent poetic expression along the flowing river all the way up to its mouth, he locates, or rather equates, poetry with the very making it through the “narrow spring” mouth and no farther than the immediate “mountain-cold brook of Helicon” (169). Walcott’s narrower coordinates of poetry capture both poetic fluency and originality as is evident in his qualifying follow-up statement whereby he asserts: “it is not its narrowness that matters but the crystalline, tongue-numbing cold of its freshness, which, in the largest works, still glitters like an unpolluted spring” (169). The statement bespeaks of the immediacy of poetry’s beauty: immediacy in both senses of transience and surprise. Moreover, it recalls another concrete immediacy: Walcott’s geometric rhetoric of poetic honesty.

Three years before the “Philip Larkin” essay, in the 1986-interview, “The Art of

Poetry,” with Edward Hirsch, Walcott pronounces poetic “honesty is simply to write within the immediate perimeter of not more than twenty miles really” (72). The metaphoric and the literal values of Walcott’s interview statement are equally valid. Walcott literally preaches drawing material from the Caribbean. Obviously, this tenet is Walcott’s answer to the imperious work of English and the Old Masters of English tradition. Lennard reports

Walcott’s remarks made in South Bank Show according to which Walcott’s generation cautiously evaded composing poems on mangoes and breadfruits (both are cultivated and native to the Caribbean islands) (331). For the Caribbean trees fail to stand the comparison with a dignified Shakespearean Warwickshire oak (ibid). So meditating his Caribbean 62

landscape, such a poet ends with composing poems on the foliage of an oak. This is not only about the Caribbean poet betraying his home. Imposing the grandeur of the English setting undermines the artistic value of his poetry. In Longinus’ words, “beautiful words are, in a real and special sense, the light of thought. Yet their majesty is not of service in all places: to apply to trifling details grand and solemn words would appear much the same as if one were to fasten a large tragic mask upon a little child” (55).

Unlike his contemporaneous fellow artists, Walcott achieves a trade-off between the oak and the mango. To exemplify this navigation across poetic meridians, I will outline

Walcott’s answer to the imperatives of English poetic forms and English language.

In Walcott’s poetics, form seems to be a benign form of poetic colonization. A view that contrasts with established theories of prominent poetry scholars (some are West Indian poetry scholars as is Breiner). In his Handbook, Lennard holds that the formal layout of poems is essentially a package of cultural implications up to a point that even “layouts that seem to us self-evident are culturally acquired and transmitted” (89). On the other hand, Glyn

Maxwell poeticizes the function of form: “the form and tone, and pitch of any poem should coherently express the presence of a human creature. Content, matter, subject, these all play little part. Form plays almost every part, which is why I continue to say that who masters form masters time. … a poet can shape time in a poem, and form is how that’s done” (29). In this sense, form functions as a narrative. The Caribbean poet’s predicament could be understood in reverse terms of Said’s sketch of the Orientalist’s predicament. The latter experienced a discrepancy upon their first genuine contact with the Orient; an Orient that extensively undermines the bookish Orient of their education. Said portrays the situation as a conflict between Narrative and Vision. Prior to contact, the bookish Orient freely “violates the serene

Apollonian fictions asserted by vision” (Orientalism 240). Contact, on the other hand, declares “The defeat of narrative by vision” (239). Walcott’s predicament is the reverse: his 63

vision is subjugated to the narrative that the European form compels. A state that is elaborated in Breiner’s Introduction.

To be sure, Lennard’s and Maxwell’s stands underpin Breiner’s line of argument regarding the role of form in West Indian poetry. The gist of Breiner’s thesis is that English forms overpower the West Indian poet and the West Indian setting; forms estrange the one from the other (103, 113). The forms born out of the English (by extension, the European) setting conventionalize, in their turn, the nuances of rendering that setting. Consequently, mediating the poet’s Caribbean experience, the English form subverts his/her Caribbean tropical setting into a malformed European one. Breiner perceives this failure as a

“Foucauldian epistemic misfit” (108). Naturally, the ‘misfit’ bespeaks of the divergence holding between the form and the experience. As a result, Breiner notes how early poetic attempts in the Caribbean betray a felt gap between experiencing the Caribbean setting and the media (i.e. English poetic tradition, form, etc.) available to render that experience (121).

The tension results in either of two tones, Breiner reports: apologetic or defensive (121, 123).

Walcott, indeed, fits under Breiner’s third category of poets. The latter group spots the potential of registering their realities within the formal possibilities of Western poetic forms

(124)18. Lennard describes Walcott’s undertaking as one of reworking the “named elements” to create a “nameless form” perfected in his poem “Nearing Forty” (75). Eventually, Walcott enlarges the possibilities of the ‘fixed’ English forms to render varied experiences. Walcott takes a partially similar note as Breiner. But he used ‘camouflage’ to describe his undertaking; with all the implications of flexible, smooth and continuous changing of color implied in the term. The process is best elaborated in Walcott’s analysis of the function of cultural mimicry in his essay “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” For Walcott, mimicry is creative.

Allegorically, just as camouflage in insects is simultaneously adaptive and defensive, so is

18 For more see Breiner p. 135.

cultural mimicry: a willed “design” used by the New World artist “both as defense and as lure” (55).

‘Liquidizing’ fixed categories is yet manifest in Walcott’s relation to the colonizer’s language: English. Surmounting his balkanized identity via applauding the fractured New

World experience poses the problem of the lingual medium to poetically communicate this

New experience. English language is not only the colonizer’s tongue but also imposes an authoritative lens through which to experience the Caribbean place. (Breiner tellingly and cleverly uses the word ‘Filter’ all through his book to tackle this issue). Ashcroft et al. outline the dilemma thus: “The history of the slave trade and its social patterns made it impossible for the slaves to be unaware of the significant part language played in their continuing enslavement” (144). Ismond terms Walcott’s lingual enslavement “servitude” (18). Both terms are imbued with connotations of chaining ‘fixity.’ What are Walcott’s options to succumb this fixity to shaping and re-shaping? A simple answer lies in adopting his ancestors’ tactic : double entendre as elaborated by Ashcroft et al.:

subject to a tragic alienation from both language and landscape, the

transplanted Africans found that psychic survival depended on their facility

for a kind of double entendre. They were forced to develop the skill of being

able to say one thing in front of ‘massa’ and have it interpreted differently

by their fellow slaves. This skill involved a radical subversion of the

meanings of the master’s tongue. (145).

Indeed, in Walcott’s case, Ashcroft et al. appropriately use the word “appropriation”:

not all Caribbean theorists reject the language of the master or strive to

effect such radical subversion of its codes. As an alternative strategy Derek

Walcott advocates appropriation and celebration, arguing that to the

Caribbean writer falls the enviable task, (unavailable to Europe and 65

Europeans) of ‘giving things their names’. In Walcott’s view it is a common

Caribbean error to ‘see history as language’ (Walcott 1974b: 3), specifically

in terms of the history of slavery and the language of the master. Instead, he

proposes an Adamic celebration of/ language, invoking the poet’s

excitement in establishing ‘original relations’ with his ‘new’ universe, the

newness qualified of course by the prior experiences of the old. (49/50).

Walcott’s conclusion coincides with Said’s in approaching canonical texts:

What has been of special interest for me has been the extension of post-

colonial concerns to the problems of geography. … a re-read/ing of the

canonical cultural works, not to demote or somehow dish dirt on them, but

to re-investigate some of their assumptions, going beyond the stifling hold

on them of some version of the master-slave binary dialectic. … a re-

appropriation of the historical experience of colonialism, revitalized and

transformed into a new aesthetic of sharing and often transcendent re-

formulation. (Orientalism 350/ 351).

To understand why Walcott opted differently from other post-colonial artists and theorists, I will refer to Sven Birkerts’ essay “Heir Apparent.” Birkerts’ account of Walcott’s peculiar relation to English19 rationalizes Walcott’s compromising attitude to tradition:

In part this is a matter of temperament. But there is also the matter of the

poet’s unique relation to the English language. He acquired in the Caribbean

an English very different from that spoken by his counterparts in England

and America. Not only is the region a linguistic seed-bed, with every kind of

pidgin and dialect, but successive waves of colonization (and oppression)

have left phenocrysts of all descriptions. (334).

19 Birkerts was, then, rationalizing Walcott’s observing metric rules especially.

In sum, the present study argues that Walcott’s ‘appropriation’ (or, re-shaping) is neither less radical nor the least subversive than other post-colonial artists’. First, Walcott trades off roles with the ‘word.’ Rather than its server, he becomes its master. In his words,

English “is the empire, and great poets are not its vassals but its princes” (“The Muse of

History” 51). Ismond finds the mission a “formative struggle” aiming at a “genuine impulse to serve the landscape” (Ismond 18, 20). Eventually, Walcott and the ‘word’ adapt to (serve?) the New World. Pertinent to the present argument on ‘liquidizing’ fixed constructs, Ismond notes that Walcott “has achieved, in the process, a genuine revitalization and extension of this language [i.e. English]” (18). Consequently, hosting contradictions yet transcending them makes water just a felicitous symbol germane to Walcott’s artistic undertaking.

Gathering from all that, water is the thirst quencher. Walcott has a thirst for a history, an identity and a poetic voice. Water, like Walcott, is historyless, identityless and tongueless.

Water in this understanding symbolizes the New World experience; its potential in its very lack. Put differently, water’s mute tongue makes possible putting any words in its mouth; its shapelessness makes it susceptible to take any shape at the hands of any artist; its colorlessness invites the artists to give it the color that goes with his artistic temperament.

Particularly, Walcott’s concept of metaphor as a tool of metamorphosis derives from these contradictions and possibilities. In its totality, the metaphor of water is Walcott’s scepter and wand in inscribing the unwritten New World experience.

In the following chapters, the study will decipher the different aspects of the New

World experience as coded by Walcott in different watery bodies of the Caribbean.

3. THE SEA

There is a semi-consensus amongst artists that the ocean is life-giving20: Hesiod’s version of the Greek creation story, Homer’s epithet for the ocean: “begetter of all things,”

Plato’s metaphoric reading of the epithet to designate that “all things are the offspring of flux and motion” (Ferber 180). On the contrary, consensus is absent when it comes to

‘ephithetizing’ the sea. For Hesiod and Homer, the sea is “sterile” and “barren” (180).

Similarly, Goethe’s Faust challenges the sea that is “unfruitful itself, [that] pours out unfruitfulness” (180). Shelly uses “deaf sea” in Cenci (Ferber 181). Contrariwise, Homer himself talks, in the Iliad, of a “much-roaring” sea. So does Emerson, in “Seashore.” For

Emerson, seas “chide” (Ferber 181). Unlike the ocean, or other watery bodies, the sea is the unresolved poetic mystery. This is one level of meaning in Yeats’ line (from “Prayer for My

Daughter”): “the murderous innocence of the sea” (ibid). Walcott expresses a similar meaning in “XLIII”: “I resist the return / of this brightening noun [i.e. ‘the sea’] whose lines must be translated / into ‘el mar’ or ‘la mar,’ and death itself to ‘la muerte’” (Midsummer, italics in the original).

Keats’s talk of the “eternal whisperings” of the sea is one key to reconcile these discordant sea renderings. Another key is Jungian psychology that poses the sea to symbolize the depths of the unconscious, individual and collective. Homer’s “much-roaring” sea is, then,

“sterile” for he failed to decipher its message despite the roar. As deciphering is an interpretation of these “whisperings,” the sea is fertile locale for exploring an artist’s tribulations in contradictory terms. Artists project their fears and longings on the fluid, shape- shifting, and meaning-shifting body.

20 See more under “The Ocean” section in “Other Bodies” chapter.

Gathering from the above, Walcott is no exception from other artists. To unravel the mystery of time, Walcott resorts to the hoard of mysteries; the sea. To read Walcott’s opting for the sea autobiographically is valid, of course. Such reading has limits, nevertheless.

Walcott grew up in an insular setting and was necessarily shaped by a sea culture. Walcott, in fact, epithetizes the Caribbean “the theatre of the Sea” (qtd. in Hirsch 65). Hirsch, himself, contextualizes “The Art of Poetry” interview thus: “One is always aware of the sea in St.

Lucia –an inescapable natural presence” (65). However, that St. Lucia faces both the Atlantic

Ocean and the Caribbean Sea does not make Walcott’s settling for the sea image to symbolize the time mystery and historylessness innocent. The Atlantic is as historically ‘burdened’ as is the sea in the Caribbean context. The Atlantic is the site of the infamous Middle Passage; the original historical moment and the traumatic experience that resonates forcefully in the present-day Caribbeans’ collective (un)consciousness.

In fact, Walcott uses both massive bodies in his poetry. Differently, it should be added.

In his study, Thieme notes these nuances. The ocean is an escapist location for islanders; it releases (53) rather than fosters and fuels the troubled mind. On one occasion, Thieme specifies, the individual finds “release from the constraints of the social world of the island”

(53). On another occasion, he adjusts and extends his point: “release from the schisms of

Caribbean social and political history” (161). The conscience is relieved, too. Collectively,

Thieme argues that the ocean offers islanders, fishermen especially, an alternative religion liberating them from “the Catholicism that controls the lives of the St. Lucian peasantry” (53).

Social, political and religious schisms aside, the ocean is a haven for the schizophrenic novice artist, besides. Bloom finds it safest for the “ephebe,”21 to start from “ocean, or by the side of ocean” (79). Bloom contrasts the calm oceanic/“instinctual” impulse with the

“antithetical impulse” stage where the poet’s struggle with antitheses that replaces the

21 ‘ephebe’ is Bloom’s term for a beginner poet.

paradisiac innocence of the ocean/instinctual stage (79).

Knowingly or otherwise, Walcott takes Bloom’s advice to heart. As an ‘ephebe,’ in

Walcott’s second major volume, Walcott’s speaker “never tire[s] of ocean’s quarrelling, / Its silence, its raw voice” (The Castaway “Lampfall” 58). The emphasis on rawness is in tune with Bloom’s tagging the ocean “instinctual.” In his review of Walcott’s The Gulf and Other

Poems entitled “Withering into Truth,” Gordon Rohlehr drops a comment on the preceding collection, The Castaway. Rohlehr notes that, in The Castaway, “Ocean becomes a placid void, image of the life emptiness of the Crusoe-like castaway figure who haunts the book”

(213). “Codicil” (a couple of pages after “Lampfall”) testifies to Rohlehr’s reading.

In “Codicil,” the poet tires of the ocean. Not only is the poet “nearing middle // age”

(61) but he also nears a critical point in his career where he should decide for a style. He is

“Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles” (61). In Bloom’s words, his is an “antithetical impulse.” Seeking liberation from the “hack’s hired prose” style, it feels an imperative to

tan, burn

to slough off

this love of ocean that is self-love. (61).

Schizophrenia is projected on the sea itself in The Gulf. In “Homecoming: Anse La

Raye,” the sea is “boring,” yet “paradisal” (51). Moreover, the aforementioned determination to “tan, burn / to slough off / this love of ocean” is rationalized. Walcott is beyond the

“instinctual impulse.” In the “Guyana” sequence (The Gulf), he realizes “age … says more than an ocean” (45). In “Landfall,” the “seamless ocean” is antithetically juxtaposed to “the tiered sea” (The Gulf “Landfall, Grenada” 49).

However, the shift is not a once-and-for-all move, let alone seamless. One example suffices. Whereas in Another Life, “the ocean [is] cannonading, come!” (53), the ocean’s cannon-like voice is humbled in the following volume: Sea Grapes. In the “Natural History” 70

sequence, for example, the grand: “ocean, / a god once, rages, at a loss for words” (31).

Unlike the “eternal whisperings” of the sea, oceanic truths are finite.

In Sea Grapes, the shift from the ocean to the sea is categorical and absolute. In the aforementioned “Natural History” sequence, for instance, the poet likens “To have misplaced your instinct for the sea” to “to blunder with each cataracted eye / staring past panic” (31).

Moreover, using the expression “man’s will to ocean” two lines below clearly places the ocean in the realm of instincts as the phrase triggers other wills and drives of the instinct in the reader’s mind. The classical Freudian wills and drives to death (or “Thanatos” in post-

Freudian psychology), to pleasure, etc. is one example. Another example and no less classical is Friedrich Nietzsche’s will to power.

Whereas, by Sea Grapes, the poet doubts the ocean would ever provide answers beyond the ‘raw’ instinctual ones, by the next volume: The Star-Apple Kingdom, doubts are asserted. In the appropriately entitled poem “The Sea Is History,”22 the ocean aimlessly “kept turning blank pages // looking for History” (26). In The Fortunate Traveller, the ocean “turns dim” altogether (“Jean Rhys” 46).

By Midsummer (1984), the ephebe’s instinct for the ocean’s ‘rawness’ is supplanted by its extreme opposite. The poet plainly says: “the lines I love have all their knots left in”

(“XXV”). In “XLIII”, too, the poet stands puzzled by the mystery of time and seeks solace in prayer. He prays “to write / lines as mindless as the ocean’s23 of linear time”. Still, a literal reading of these lines is invalid. In Midsummer, the poet is as mindless as leaving his poems untitled. Bensen, indeed, describes the volume using the words: “sketchbook” and “diary”

(338). Structurally, too, the poems are written in pentameter, the closest metric pattern to

22 “The Sea Is History” will be analyzed thoroughly in the closing section of this chapter.

23 One of the examples where the ‘ocean’ is used interchangeably with the ‘sea;’ a usual thing among islanders of the Caribbean Archipelago.

common speech. Also, Walcott is as free in recording his observations as to never mind his rhymes in the volume. So, the mindless lines Walcott craves, in “XLIII,” are about release from the authority of the time question, especially because his rationale of the prayer goes:

“since time is the first province of Caesar’s jurisdiction.”

However, the prayer is never answered for “like time, the sea / can’t turn over on its side to die like a gray empire / brought down by its weight” (Midsummer “XLV”). In a later poem (“XLVIII”), Walcott figures helplessly downed by the weighty task: “the scansion of the sea.” So, he rests his “pen on a desktop, a broken oar, a scepter / swayed by the surf.”

Terming his task ‘Scansion’ is particularly significant. It signals to Walcott to pursue a different scheme.

The ‘scansion’ image is informed in The Arkansas Testament. In “A Latin Primer,” there are two kinds of scansion: the (conventional) verse scansion and the sea scansion. As to the former, the speaker’s attitude goes:

I hated signs of scansion.

Those strokes across the line

drizzled on the horizon

and darkened discipline. (22).

More so for, the speaker reasons:

They were like Mathematics

that made delight Design,

arranging the thrown sticks

of stars to sine and cosine. (22).

As to the latter scansion type: the sea scansion, admiration predominates. In contrast to pre-calculated scansion signs, the sea is more welcoming for the experimenter poet:

Raging, I’d skip a pebble 72

across the sea’s page; it still

scanned its own syllable:

trochee, anapest, dactyle. (22).

Rather than scanned, the sea theorizes on scansion.

Most importantly, the time-ocean relation is overturned in The Arkansas Testament.

While the ocean was earlier a potential provider of answers in questions of time/history; in

Testament, the ocean is apprenticed to time/history: “a different age is whispering to the ocean” (“Oceano Nox” 54). Rather than an ocean dictating ephebe Walcott, Walcott and the ocean undergo training under the tutelage of time. Moreover, that the image where “clocks resume their [seemingly linear] motion” (ibid) precedes the whispering age image augments that the “different age” is non-linear, let alone straightforward.

The shift in attitudes recurs yet in Omeros. Less straightforwardly than in the previous volumes, however. Rather than superficial, the contrast runs deeper to the bottom. The- simple-versus-the-knotty contrast is mirrored in the sandy ocean floor versus the muddy seabed. Rather than “corrugating sand / that showed you its ribs;” Achille notes “the sea-floor was mud” (45). Later, Achille dives into the knotty, muddy mystery of history to realize later in the book that mud is more knotty than he envisions erstwhile: “The deepest terror was the mud. The mud with no shadow / like the clear sand” (134). But then, “a light inside him wakes, / skipping centuries, ocean and river, and Time itself” (134). The mystery Walcott is after does not show itself, rather it should be unearthed. But then, what is it that bewildered

Walcott about Time? More of this to come below:

3.1 Walcott and Time

Even if Derek Walcott maintains, in his seminal essay “The Muse of History” (1974), that “existentialism is simply the myth of the noble savage gone baroque” (41), the keynote of

his canon is existentialist. Hardly any Walcottian scholar overlooks it that Walcott’s idée fixe is existentialist at heart24. Even his aforementioned existentialism-is-myth thesis is context- bound. The discourse, then, warns against the existentialist demarcation of the Old and the

New Worlds that corresponds to and defines history’s ‘end’ and ‘beginning.’ Walcott disputes this existential positivism just to insist (in positivist terms): Time is nonlinear. Walcott premised his ‘existentialism-is-myth’ on time’s evident non-linearity (ibid). Walcott’s nonlinearity proposition frustrates the classical existentialist linearity. Walcott’s design is to free ‘time’ and, eventually, ‘history’ from the existentialists’ square and clean bars (beginning and end). And, in the process, to free his people from the sustained trauma of History. Time is shape-shifting, Walcott proposes. Consequently, past could always be present and redeemed.

Perhaps it is ironic that two articles of the existentialists’ manifesto elucidate Walcott’s counter-existentialist, nonlinear model.

In their “Annotations” Baugh and Nepaulsingh allude to the existentialists’ formative postulate whereby “to exist” (inherent in all entities), is contradistinguished from “to have existence” (peculiar of choosing humans) (307). Allegorically, along the linearity proposition, the Old World has existence; the New World simply exists in the Old’s chart of existence. In the context of the ‘history’ crisis, it translates: the Old World writes (active); the New is written (passive). Walcott renders this idea poetically in Another Life. Reminiscing about T.

E. Fox-Hawes, the English headmaster at St. Mary College, Walcott recalls envisaging

“history through [Fox-Hawes’] sea-washed eyes” (70). The headmaster is the archetypal

Western scholar (historian). Fox-Hawes’ eyes delineate Walcott’s field of vision. And, they filter his perception and perspective. Furthermore, the ‘history’ Walcott perceives is informed by Fox-Hawes’ spectrum of interests: “parades, / sailing, and Conrad’s prose” (70). Walcott

24 See Patricia Ismond pp. 128, 170, 220, 222, 223, 244, 253; John Thieme pp. 52, 53, 82; Edward Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh’s “Annotations” to Another Life pp. 307-308, 312, 313, 317-322, 324, 332-333.

revolts against this prescribed vision. Rather than chanting “Hymns of battles not our own,”

Walcott and his fellow schoolchildren had better see for themselves; see into and lament their

“history of ennui, defence [sic], disease” (70). In existentialist terms, to have history, rather than be history. Whereas the linear paradigm perceives history as fixedly past and done with, the nonlinear alternative allows for undoing and re-doing. The latter paradigm is conspicuously promising for Walcott’s despondent race. In “The Figure of Crusoe,”25 Walcott contrasts his artistic and literary conclusions with those of Trinidadian Nobel laureate V. S.

Naipaul and Barbadian novelist George Lamming. In analogy to the Old World history and art, the New World (specifically, the Caribbean) is deprived of both, Naipaul and Lamming conclude (39, 40). Walcott terms his contrastive conclusion a “third truth” (39).

But then, the burning question is that of viability. Allegorically speaking, holding to the nonlinearity proposition involves a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith.” In Walcott’s words, his third truth promises “fertil[izing]” (40) the Caribbean Waste Land. A formidable task. Here comes another existentialist doctrine to support nonlinearity: (ir)rationality.

Walcott accommodates the existentialist doubt of rationality to attest to his nonlinearity argument. Doubting rationality distinguishes the philosophy of two prominent existentialists; French Blaise Pascal and Danish Soren Kierkegaard (Baugh and Nepaulsingh

313). However, Walcott’s doubt is not antithetically faith-based as in Pascal’s and

Kierkegaard’s philosophies; both religious philosophers. Eventually, Pascal’s and

Kierkegaard’s doubts are quintessentially rational. A “rational madness” for that matter (“The

Muse of History” 41). ‘Rational’ for it sees history “as sequential time, of a dominated future” yet ‘mad’ for the self-same reason (ibid). Walcott, on the other hand, doubts rationality and the “vision of progress” altogether (ibid). In other words, Walcott questions the separatism

25 Originally, “The Figure of Crusoe” was delivered orally by Walcott at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, on 27th October 1965.

involved in the linear, progressive paradigm, whereby past, present and future are still viewed as independent temporal entities. In Walcott’s view, on the contrary, they are inextricable. A view that crystalizes only later in Walcott’s career. Generally, Walcott’s try to conceptualize

‘time’ fluctuates between tracing its motion and/or stasis and what either option entails.

Motion upholds either the linear or the cyclical perception of time as both presuppose a time in constant motion. Stasis, on the other hand, opens up on two extremes of either infinity or nihilistic nothingness. What follows traces the evolution of Walcott’s stasis-conclusion.

In In a Green Night (1962), Walcott’s cursory reading of the waving waters assures him of a time in motion. In “Steersman, My Brother,” one stanza opens: “Motion is all our truth, a whirling sphere / Of change, decay and ebb” (Green 40). The year time is then caricatured to exemplify Time: “Yearly the cyclic hope renews its round, / The things of sand and water creep and fly, / And draw the axle of the groaning year” (40). From these lines, the reader gathers, first, that time ‘motion’ assumes a cyclical pattern. Second, at this point, the link between time and water is rather tacit. In the following stanza, however, the link is voiced and the generic ‘water’ is specified: the sea. The stanza opens: “The sea pursues its cycle as we live, / Indifferent to what trust controls the wheel” (40). To forge the link, Walcott places the time cycle image and the sea cycle one in the same position: both open stanzas. That this couple of stanzas is juxtaposed suggests they complement the argument. Thematically, they are coupled. Thus, when the speaker in “Castiliane,” says: “Another trance of mine is moving water” (Green 46), he fuses in the image of “moving water” the two cycles; especially that the other trance is “the male, malodorous sea” (46).

Almost two years later, Walcott would slightly (but significantly) rework the sea motion. In the “The Figure of Crusoe” essay, Walcott enunciates: “the sea has that great emptiness of motion” (38). Up to 1986, the motion/stasis debate persists. The sea, too, persists to epitomize time’s motion/stasis. In “The Art of Poetry” interview, Walcott says: “There is a 76

continual sense of motion in the Caribbean – caused by the sea and the feeling that one is almost traveling through water and not stationary. The size of time is larger – a very different thing in the islands than in the cities” (Hirsch 74). However, it is “almost travelling” (ibid).

The uncertain ‘almost’ comes to replace the positivist “is” in the “Steerman, My Brother” poem. This is a significant turn for it signals doubt. Perhaps, time does not move.

By Omeros (1990), the debate is carried out in an indecisive tone. Water/time alternates between motion and stasis. At one point in the epic, Seven Seas26 shares with the narrator:

there are two journeys

in every odyssey, one on worried water,

the other crouched and motionless, without noise.

For both, the “I” is a mast … (291).

But ‘stasis’ figures somehow advantageous over ‘motion’ in the poem. At least, so Seven

Seas counsels: “but the right journey / is motionless” (291). So, the epic’s mast-like “I” dithers about which journey to embark upon. Eventually, he opts for the motionless water

“which commemorates nothing in its stasis” (297). However, ‘stasis’ itself is subverted at

Walcott’s hands; it is no longer a state of inertia.

Paradoxically, Walcott’s stasis is one of continuity. However, as this continuity assumes a manner of briskness, it is undetected and passed as non-action. An aspect of time’s timelessness that is first expressed in Tiepolo’s Hound when the speaker realizes that “water has one tense and cannot run backwards” (116). Most importantly, water is specified later in the poem to be the sea. Hound’s narrator analogizes his Caribbean “monadic climate [that]

26 The title character, in Omeros, is a shape-shifter; incarnated as Homer (Omeros), Seven Seas (i.e. sea), and Walcott himself.

has no history” to “a tireless sea / with its one tense” (137). The three tenses of past, present and future are boiled down to one tense. Four years later, in The Prodigal: a Poem, Walcott accredits to water his view of time. The narrator recognizes “Time passed differently than it did on water” (“1” 6).

It should be added that Walcott’s philosophy of time meditates not only on time’s nature but also on the nature of the individual experience of time. In Walcott’s philosophy, we live in time. A concept that matures across Walcott’s volumes. Bensen traces this development and notes: “Where the young painter in Another Life wanted to surround his island’s shacks with a gilt framework, the seasoned master in Midsummer concludes that ‘the frame of human happiness is time,’ knowing that the frame of time is art” (339). Time delineates existence just as Walcott’s art attempts to delineate ‘time.’ Time is environment, in other words. To use Walcott’s word, it is humans’ “element.”

Walcott uses ‘element’ several times in his poetry. Significantly, in these instances, the word replaces either of three entities: the water, the sea or time/history. Consumed by the question of time, the persona in “VI. A Georgetown Journal” of the “Guyana” sequence decides: “safest, I had unimagined time; / thus we forget our element” (The Gulf 44). Walcott, here, employs a pun where “unimagined” could be either adjectival; meaning ‘beyond imagination, or verbal: a verb coined by Walcott to mean undo or do without. The context of these lines favors the ‘verbal’ reading for the ensuing lines describe those mindless of the time question. They are likened to “a fish that gasps with surprise on the nib of a hook” (44).

In The Fortunate Traveller, the generic “fish” is identified. Beachcombing, the persona narrates:

On fading sand I pass

a mackerel that leapt from its element,

trying to be different – 78

its eye a golden ring,

married to nothing. (“Store Bay” 82).

By inference, the fish’s element is water. By inference, too, ‘water’ is specifically the sea for the sea is mackerel’s habitat; its element. The inference is asserted yet by ‘element’s’ third

(and three) occurrences in Omeros.

In its first Omeros appearance, the element is unequivocally the sea: “the one element that had made them all // fishes and men; Darwin claimed fishes equal / in the sight of the sea” (Omeros 156). Indeed, the man-fish oneness is incarnated in Achille earlier in the book.

In his underwater journey, Achille figures: “breath[ing] water, a walking fish in its element”

(142). Achille’s image flashes back to an identical image in “A Tropical Bestiary” sequence; namely, in “Tarpon.” The dying tarpon, the narrator reports: “gaped with a gold eye, drowned

/ thickly, thrashing with brute pain / this sea I breathe” (The Castaway 22). By its third appearance, in Omeros, the “element” is open to various readings: “this is the true element, / water, which commemorates nothing in its stasis” (297). Literally, it is water. Figuratively,

“commemorates” implies it functions time-like. Furthermore, the sea is subsumed in ‘water’ if one considers the position of the speaker (he stands by the seashore watching a crab’s anabasis). Ultimately, the water, the sea and time are, here, welded in the word: ‘element.’

In brief, the three manifestations of the ‘element’ alternate across Walcott’s poetic canon in the same fashion Walcott moves between the ‘water,’ the ‘ocean’ and later the ‘sea’ as the image for time/history. There are backs and forths in Walcott’s search into the image that bests the others. This means that Walcott’s theory of the sea symbolizing time did not proceed through clear-cut stages, where deciding on the ‘ocean’ as the proper image of all water bodies to symbolize time does not mean a no-return to ‘water’ during the ocean stage; nor a once-and-for-all abandoning of the ‘ocean’ in the ‘sea’ one. There are several crisscrosses as will be manifested in the “3.3 Sea Is History” section below. 79

3.2 Walcott and History

Islands are geographically circumscribed by the sea. In the Caribbean, the Caribbean

Sea defines the Archipelago nominally, too. Still, Walcott sees otherwise; he poeticizes his insular terrain. The (Caribbean) Islands, Walcott ascertains, are rather “circumscribed by that oceanic sadness called History” (“A Letter to Chamoiseau” 219). Walcott validates his statement. Biographically speaking, Walcott is an islander. More so, an islander consumed by the question of history. In addition, capitalizing “History” personifies the momentum of the question. But what answer it exacts from Walcott?

In principle, Walcott’s philosophy of history has affinities with Edward Said’s arguments, whereby history is an open territory: “My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and unwritten” (Orientalism xviii). In “The Muse of

History,” Walcott holds: “history is fiction, subject to a fitful muse, memory. … history is written … is a kind of literature without morality” (37). All, Walcott goes on, “depends on whether we write this fiction through the memory of hero or of victim” (37).

Along his paradigm, Walcott is not sympathetic with assuming either the hero or the victim roles. Ultimately, re-writing emanates from a blind “servitude to the muse of history,” which produced the first-hand writings in the first place (37). Also, re-writings will eventually result in a “literature of recrimination and despair” (ibid). Put differently, fulfilling either role reproduces the very narrative that the ‘player’ seeks to subvert. The slave is doomed to produce “a literature of revenge”; the master “a literature of remorse” (ibid). Walcott calls the former “the new magnifiers of Africa” all through “The Muse” essay and he complains of the magnifiers’ “oceanic nostalgia for the older culture and a melancholy at the new” (42). In poetic terms, it is “the ancestral swell / of the ocean” (Omeros 127). The “ancestral swell” is further deciphered: “that elemental noise / of the windward, unbroken breakers, Ithace’s / or

Africa’s, all joining the ocean’s voice” (Omeros 130). What the magnifiers need, Walcott 80

contends “is not tradition … but history” (“The Muse” 42). Otherwise, magnified writing

“yellows into polemic or evaporates in pathos” (37). In actual fact, Walcott dismisses the magnifiers’ work with a scarcely veiled contempt speaking of their “masochistic recollection”

(44).

For the most part, Walcott takes issue with that nostalgic revival of Africa for it is done in spite. In Breiner’s words, it is using tradition “as a defensive weapon (as in

Negritude), a consciousness of alternative centrality, of race not simply as a mark to bear, but as the mark of a substantial heritage” (155). Earlier, Breiner cites the repetitive use and abuse of the Middle Passage episode by the West Indian writers, by the American Black Power movement, by the Negritude movement, and even by the legitimizers of racialism in Britain

(1962-immigration restriction laws) to exemplify his argument. All these users/abusers approach the episode with the aim of “transforming the Middle Passage … to a traumatic but finite episode” (141). So argues Patrick Taylor in “Myth and Reality in Caribbean Narrative:

Derek Walcott’s Pantomime”. Taylor compares such revivalist enterprises to restoring a non- existent pre-colonial paradise (295-297). These are the very reasons why Walcott despises the culture of carnival in the Caribbean, or, “the carnivalization of history”27.

Walcott’s own answer to the question is that “amnesia is the true history of the New

World” (“The Muse” 39). ‘Amnesia’ is an interesting aspect of Walcott’s philosophy of time.

The peculiarity of the Caribbean archipelago is decisive here; literally, “place is extremely important” (Ashcroft et al. 35). Whereas the project of post-colonial writers is about

“transmuting time into space” epistemologically, favoring the latter over the former (Ashcroft et al. 35). In post-colonial insular settings, on the other hand, writers undertake the question differently. There, “the vistas are not of the place, but of the sea, tempting the eye away from the place. … [that is] without a history” (Breiner 204). Rather than possessing a place, West

27 See Thieme pp. 66, 67.

Indian writers start with “dispossession” (ibid). When Ismond argues that place is “focal in the alternative order of possibilities” in Walcott’s credo (194), she overtly contradicts

Breiner’s argument of the centrality of dispossession. But that she explicates earlier that her study focuses on “The physical/naturalistic landscape – which naturally incorporates sea(scape) par excellence in Walcott – [as] a major ground of exploration” (14), she corroborates Breiner’s thesis as to the sea’s centrality in the post-colonial alternative order: the drifting away from place; dispossessing place.

Likewise, tracing Walcott’s concept of ‘history’ is about interpreting his concept of

‘nothing,’ which, in turn, manifests his concept of ‘amnesia’: the true history. Ismond reads

‘amnesia’ as Walcott’s “response to the history of the region” (49). The equation of history with nothingness is rampant in Walcott’s poetry. “The Almond Trees” poem (The Castaway), for example, opens “There’s nothing here … no visible history, // except this stand / of twisted, coppery, sea-almond trees” (36). The sea-almond tree exception is interesting here for rather than a something it turns out to signify death and annihilation, no less ‘nothing’ than nothing. In “The Figure of Crusoe,” Walcott describes how, in “The Almond Trees” poem:

“trying to describe the absence of history, tradition, ruins, I saw the figures of ancient almond trees in a grove past Rampanalgas on the north coast, as a grove of dead, transplanted, uprooted ancestors” (39). Literally, like the coppery trees, Walcott self-identifies as “rootless on his own earth, chafing at its beaches” (“What the Twilight Says” 19). These comparable images qualify Ismond’s argument that Walcott and his race are history’s castaways28.

The idea of a Caribbean of nothingness recurs in a significantly entitled poem “Air”

(The Gulf). At the poem’s close, Walcott likens the task of the Caribbean historian to

a hoarse

warrior summoning his race

28 Ismond pp. 49, 60.

from vaporous air

between this mountain ridge

and the vague sea

where the lost exodus

of corials sunk without trace –

There is too much nothing here. (37).

To be sure, Walcott’s ‘nothing’ has in its underpinnings the allusion to James Froude’s well-known account characterizing the Caribbean as the land of nothing and no people. The latter proposition is qualified by Froude thus: “There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own.” Walcott’s deliberate celebration of his region’s nothingness is foresighted. When Edward Said puts forward the thesis that the Orient is a construct, he elaborates: “in discussions of the Orient, the orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence … Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective absence” (Orientalism 208). When Walcott embraces Froude’s

‘nothing,’ he is undermining Froude’s short-sightedness. In this sense, “nothing” is what the traditional historian (Westerner) failed to see; Walcott’s qualified “too much nothing” is his

(or the native historian’s) reading the nothing/“absence” anew.

In the first place, that the speaking voice in “Air” is native seriously challenges

Froude’s “no people” statement. In the second place, the “too much” (37) phrase undermines

Froude’s “nothing” as such. There could not be much nonentity! Walcott unearths the ‘too much’ buried under Froude’s ‘nothing.’ It is his answer to the nothing in the same fashion

Said’s humanism is “the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history” (Orientalism xxix). Writing history as an antidote to the injustices inflicted upon colonials finds full expression in Walcott’s penultimate volume The 83

Prodigal: a Poem. In this Poem, Walcott’s frustration with the injustice and his torment in undoing it is reflected in the telegraphic phrases: “The facts! The Facts! The history. The cause. / You need a history to make your case” (“14” 82). For, the argument goes on, “Dates.

The one thing about which there is no discourse. / Dates multiplied be events, by consequences, / are what add up to History” (83).

“Nothing” is notably fleshed (or, ‘skeletoned’) yet in Omeros. The shape-shifting ‘I’ makes a statement: “For those to whom history is the presence // of ruins, there is a green nothing. […] We think of the past // as better forgotten than fixed with stony regret” (192).

The turn is significant. In “The Almond Trees,” ‘nothing’ is plain and barren; in “Air,” it is amplified: “too much nothing” and eventually, in Omeros, it becomes the Basin’s cornucopia:

“a green nothing.”

It all amounts to coming to terms with the elemental, primal character of the

Caribbean. In Balakian’s reading, it is precisely “in the cosmogonic [green] conditions of his landscape [that Walcott finds] a protean identity as a man and an epic consciousness for his culture” (349). In phantasmagorial terms, Balakian puts it: “The warm Caribbean waters become an amniotic bath for this poet whose memory encompasses, at once, phylogeny and ontogeny” (349). In “The Muse of History,” Walcott slightly adjusts the “bath” image, holding that “The Caribbean sensibility is not marinated in the past. … It is new … its complexity, not its historically explained simplicities, which is new” (54). In Ismond’s reading, the promise lies in “the historyless condition and virgin needs of [Walcott’s] region”

(56). Balakian and Ismond, in other words, sight the embryonic in the primordial. Rather than eliminating, amnesia promises “a complex, novel … fresh naming” (Ismond 56). Ismond rationalizes that “the pain of an absurd past” coupled with Walcott’s promising Adamic naming authenticates Walcott’s “definition of landscape and history as negation [i.e. nothing]” (60). An idea that Walcott re-works poetically in Tiepolo’s Hound: “We are 84

History’s afterthought, as the mongoose races / ahead of its time” (96).

Setting on the task of Adamic naming, “Names” opens: “My race began as the sea began, / with no nouns, and with no horizon” (Sea Grapes 32). In such an amniotic situation,

Walcott is left with two alternatives, both bitter but in degrees. One is to take it with patience the sea’s (history’s) claiming one’s present and future. In “The Dream” (Sea Grapes), the speaker daydreams:

I stood on the sand, I saw

black horsemen galloping towards

me, …

[…]

… They

rode through me, …

… as fresh as the waves

and older than the sea. (27).

The Dreamer here identifies with the entranced speaker of “Oceano Nox” (The Arkansas

Testament). The latter, too, stands vulnerable and paralyzed in face of “the mesmerizing wake of History” (54).

Alternatively, the Caribbean is to dive “to the seabed” and probe into the bitter sea, or

“the sea’s memory” (Midsummer “L”).

Torn between these two pulls, Walcott’s heroes, epic and ordinary alike, eventually embark on a journey to puzzle out the mysteries of the past/history. The journey always takes a sea route for that matter.

More than any watery body, it is the ‘amnesiac’ sea that comes to be associated with history, better still, history’s lack. A lack Walcott’s persona encounters initially while wandering in London; “the shadow capital of the West Indies” (Breiner 96). It is in England 85

where he comes tete-a tete with “his fear // of history [that] was its lack” (The Gulf “A

Change of Skin” 26). Walcott, indeed, pushes the perception of London’s centrality to the

West Indies to its limits in “The Bright Field” (Sea Grapes). The latter poem opens with the speaker’s state of mind: “My nerves steeled against the power of London, […] I, who moved against a bitter sea” (68). On its heels comes a stanza that concludes: “London, / heart of our history, original sin” (68).

In Omeros, terror extends to all metropolitan cities. The narrator recollects:

the weight of cities that I found so hard to bear;

in them was the terror of Time, that I would march

with columns at twilight, only to disappear

into a past whose history echoed the arch

of bridges sighing over their ancient canals

for a place that was not mine, since what I preferred

was not statues but the bird in the statue’s hair. (204).

The search for history, then, is about filling the void (lack) and outbraving the terror.

In the aforementioned “Names,” the particulars to cultivate the ‘green nothing’ are shown at the speaker’s disposal: “that terrible vowel, / that I!” plus a “history fold[ing] over a fishline”

(Sea Grapes 33). Equipped, the beachcomber sets about, he says: “to trace our names on the sand” (33). To the puzzlement of the speaker, his relentless attempts are doomed to a frustrating failure as “the sea erased [the names] again” (33). The sea signals a notice:

Caribbean history lies in the sea not on shore. The sea beckons the speaker in.

The signs are deciphered by the wandering speaker of Tiepolo’s Hound: “my monadic climate has no history. … No scansion … no epochs … no date // or decades” (137). The 86

history seeker is left alone with “a tireless sea / with its one tense” (137). The sole tense is plainly explained in (ironically entitled) The Bounty: “the only tense / is the past” (“16/ Spain”

42). The one-tense conclusion is Walcott’s fermented theory of time. It is Walcott’s alternative to the rational, linear paradigm.

Traditionally, the cyclic view of time is the classic alternative to the linear one.

However, terming Walcott’s view of time ‘cyclic’ misses many points. The cyclic view shares with the linear one its separatism. The past, the present and the future are separate realms in both stands. Whereas the timeline visits the past, the present and the future in its one-way route, the cycle of time revisits the three realms in an endless, orbit-like course. Walcott’s oneness is anti-separatist.

Baugh and Nepaulsingh spot this intricate distinction of Walcott’s philosophy in the image of “groyned mangroves” (Another Life 149) which they read as “natural and philosophical; it is Kierkegaardian, because it meets and repeats itself; and, /if it meets and repeats itself, does it not exist, contrary to what existentialists claim?” they ask (332/ 333).

Ismond, too, holds that Walcott’s “philosophical perspective on history-in-time” echoes T. S.

Eliot’s “sense of the temporal and timeless/mythic together (Four Quartets)” (222). In

Walcott’s philosophical alternative, the ‘three’ tenses are concurrent and inextricable.

Literally, one tense. In aforementioned Tiepolo’s Hound, the wandering speaker concludes that “water has one tense” (116). Four years later, in The Prodigal: a Poem, Walcott renews:

“Time passed differently than it did on water” (“1” 6). Walcott’s time theory endures the test of time (four-year interval). Indeed, in Tiepolo’s Hound, water is specifically incarnated as the sea: “a tireless sea / with its one tense” (137); the sea being the incarnation of Walcott’s

‘History’. The tense could figure as the present continuous, figuratively not grammatically.

The past, the present and the future are in a continuous state of happening, are unified in what

Walcott understands by ‘History.’ Rather than cyclic, in Walcott’s philosophy, time recycles 87

the past, the present and the future; all endlessly (will) reenact ‘history.’ The idea echoes in

Omeros:

This was history. I had no power to change it.

And yet I still felt that this had happened before.

I knew it would happen again, but how strange it

was to have seen it in Boston, in the hearth-fire. (217).

Rather than about displacing linearity, Walcott’s fresh perspective is an attempt to capture the New World experience. Nevertheless, it ultimately embodies the collapse of boundaries; at least, it blurs them. Given Walcott’s skeptical attitude to linearity, making history as the starting point of his alternative paradigm is ironic. History, in Walcott’s view, is a lived present in the Caribbean Basin; history foretells the archipelago’s future, too.

Time/history “meets and repeats itself.” It meets and repeats the pressing quest for a

Caribbean identity. Indeed, Ismond argues that “the historylessness/unhistoried condition …

[is] seminal in Walcott’s approach to the question of identity” (210). Given its centrality,

Walcott’s life-, career-long obsession with ‘History’ has consumed the bulk of this study (the present chapter on the sea image is the longest). Walcott’s fully-fledged philosophy of time meeting and repeating itself instantaneously underwent different stages that parallel Walcott’s journey in his fine-tuning the various watery metaphors; the sea, especially. Overlapping rather than in successive stages, it should be added.

So far, this highly theoretical part illuminates Walcott’s philosophy of time. It surveys

Walcott’s journey after clues into understanding time. He was a student of water and its rhythms. The dubious clues will develop into statements when disclosed by the sea as will be shown in the following section. In effect, rather than welding “topographical contemplation, social commentary … personal reflection … social and cultural history” (Thieme 36), Walcott 88

transposes his psychological landscape on the Caribbean seascape.

3.3 Sea Is History

The sea image in Walcott’s works is a salient image. Reading Walcott’s poetry in full, it is certain the reader will ponder the sea’s ‘possible’ meaning(s). Among many others, three prominent scholars remarkably did: John Thieme, Patricia Ismond and D.J.R. Bruckner; the first two are established Walcottian scholars. Thieme argues that the sea is “a central metaphor for the existential situation” in Walcott’s folk culture (53). The argument of the present chapter coincides with Thieme’s argument as to the centrality of the sea image.

Nevertheless, this study argues that the ‘sea’ permeates Walcott’s corpus rather than being a metaphor whose centrality is contextually-bound to Walcott’s plays: The Sea at Dauphin

(Thieme 52-53) and Harry Dernier (Thieme, 44).

In this sense, I come closer to Patricia Ismond’s arguments. Ismond holds that

Prominent among these [i.e. Walcott’s metaphors] is Walcott’s encircling

sea metaphor and its many facets: the Atlantic of the earliest Walcott as

image of the amnesiac middle passage and the loss of Africa … the seas of

the region as image of the collective Caribbean unconscious with its

submerged terrors of historical calamity … and, comprehending all, the “sea

of history” conceit, where the sea becomes the locus of the intersection of

the temporal/empirical and the timeless, of the simultaneity of endings and

beginnings (15).

But the present study argues the sea image is central to Walcott’s poetry in its totality rather than the Caribbean-phase poetry, restrictedly, as in Ismond’s.

D.J.R. Bruckner reads the sea to mirror Walcott’s preoccupation with language;

English language versus Caribbean patois. Bruckner contends that Walcott

thinks the New World needs a whole new language, too, and he is supplying

a great deal of it. But that, too, he credits to his home waters. It is not simply

that the Creole patois of the islands changes pronunciations of many words

in other tongues (the three syllables of the name Achilles, for instance,

become ah-SHEEL in the Antilles), but Mr. Walcott contends that the sea

itself affects the rhythm of the islander’s speech. (397).

Indeed, Ismond parallels Walcott’s release from “the colonizer’s Word/World” with exploring “new waters” (18). This parallelism coincides with Bruckner’s; superficially, however. Ismond, in this context, uses ‘water’ to metaphorically connote Walcott’s “genuine revitalization and extension of this [i.e. English] language” (18). Bruckner, on the other hand, is dead earnest about the sea regulating the Caribbean patois rhythm. In other words, the sea literally partakes in creating the new language, in Bruckner’s analysis.

The present study argues differently. Concisely put, the sea saturates Walcott’s works because it is coalesced with his search for history. Despite Ismond’s and Bruckner’s spotting the centrality of the language dilemma in Walcott’s career (as in the career of most post- colonial writers and artists), Bruckner’s reading, in particular, fails to capture the core of the central image. Bruckner’s reading imposes an anthropological reading of the environment and its interactive role in shaping Caribbean peoples and their linguistic peculiarities. It reduces

Walcott’s poetic achievement to a linguistic fieldwork. The metaphorical reading is missing.

Even when Ismond praises “A Sea-Chantey” poem “for the musicality and original freshness with which it renders the Caribbean sea setting” she restricts the prominence of that rendering in “echo[ing] the liquid sounds of water in the phonics of the poem, and thereby to distill ‘sea- music’. These liquid notes are rung from the sounds that name the distinct features of the setting” (Ismond 34). So is Bensen’s reading of the relatively long and slow verse in

Midsummer: “The poems press toward the white margin like a sea of words at high tide. And 90

because time moves slowly in the tropics, the line takes longer to ripen, all motion slows but that of the mind and the mind’s eye” (339). Reading the sea sounds to reflect on a poem’s phonics or verse-length to reflect a rising sea is crude formalism. Such formalist analysis plays down the sea’s thematic weight.

When Walcott characterizes Achille (typifying Caribbean islanders) as

shar[ing] the same privilege

of an archipelago’s dawn, a fresh language

salty and shared by the bittern’s caw, by a frieze

of low pelicans. … (Omeros 295, emphasis added), he gives an occasion to support Bruckner’s argument. Nevertheless, that Walcott’s surrogate

“I” immediately asserts: “The sea was my privilege” (295) undermines reading the sea as a metaphor for language. The sea hardly symbolizes, or is, one with language. Otherwise, why would the narrator carefully distinguish between his and Achille’s advantages (language vs. sea)? A salty language differs from a salty sea.

In Ferber’s Dictionary, the “Sea” entry commences thus: “We are at home on the land.

The sea has always been alien and dangerous, and those who have made it a second home have learned special skills and habits” (179). Ferber proceeds qualifying his general statement. He cites how the sea and art have ever co-existed. The sea is employed in literature as early as Homer’s Odyssey (8th Century BC) well into Melville’s Moby Dick, Conrad’s novels, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Patrick O’Brian’s Master and

Commander, Ferber surveys and enlists (179). Of course, Ferber’s list could yet be elongated to include names like: Coleridge, Kipling and Masefield among many others. Ferber argues that even science fiction owes much to “sea stories” (179). The sea’s place in art, Ferber explains, is proportionate with its depth, mysticism and capacious connotative scope. 91

Paradoxically, the sea symbolizes “chaos,” in contrast to “orderly lands,” yet, it bridges opposites (Ferber 179). It is a chaotic harmonizer. Among the ‘bridged’ opposites that

Ferber enumerates is: “time and timelessness” (179) which is particularly pertinent to this chapter on Walcott’s the-sea-is-history image. The other surveyed opposites are there, too, in

Walcott’s poetry. In Omeros, for example, Achille stands puzzled: “thinking of the stitched, sutured wound that Philoctete / was given by the sea, but how the sea could heal / the wound also. And that was what Ma Kilman taught” (242, emphasis added). In “On Hemingway” essay, Walcott stitches yet more opposites. The sea, Walcott tells “starves or feeds” (110).

The sea’s bosom, too, hosts “omens and promises” (ibid). In her reading of Omeros, Mary

Lefkowitz points out how unlike Homer’s Achille whose undersea mother, goddess Thetis aids him, Walcott’s Achille’s is “beautiful but unfeeling Sea-Mother (mer-mere) … [she] can support or destroy him” all the same (401).

Walcott perceives the earth relative to the sea, too, as outlined in Ferber’s Dictionary.

In a few words, it is easier to map out the solid earth. The sea, on the contrary, slips from the charting hand. In the title poem of The Castaway, whereas the persona could confidently asserts: “We end in earth, from earth began” (9), his “starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel / Of a sail” (9). This line anticipates the “‘I’ is a mast” line in Omeros (291). Longing for a sail connotes Walcott’s existentialist hunger for a ‘thing.’

Indeed, Walcott’s sea shifts meaning significantly. Where Walcott’s juvenilia29 reflects Walcott’s “morbid obsession with decay, ageing and dying” (Thieme 26). In a Green

Night volume30 marks “a coming of age for Walcott, the first step towards his Odyssean journey towards becoming a Caribbean Homer” (Thieme 38). Concurrent with coming of age,

29 Comprising: 25 Poems (1948); Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949); Poems (1951).

30 Considered Walcott’s first major volume that brought him international literary visibility. In fact, Gordon Rohlehr holds that it “was a landmark in the history of West Indian poetry” (212).

the sea image comes into visibility in Green. But it figures contradictorily. Whereas, in

“Return to D’Ennery, Rain,” the sea is “So murmurous of oblivion” (33); in “Pays Natal,”

Walcott’s addressee’s “breath, as in sea-conch forever, / Was the ancient sigh of the sea” (62).

On one occasion, the sea speaks in an undertone, almost subdued. On the other, it sighs.

Besides, on the former occasion, the sea’s faint voice is oblivious; symbolizing transience. On the latter, it is rather eternal as implied in “forever” and “ancient” range.

In the folds of the Green volume, however, the ostensible contradiction is reconciled in the opening image of “Steersman, My Brother”: “We ‘write on water’ if our souls are drowned / Within the origin of life, the sea” (Green 39). Writing on water is analogous to holding the last straw for the ‘drowned,’ historyless Caribbean soul, but a futile one for it is doomed to oblivion; it vanishes once scribbled. The image of writing on water recurs in other poems to denote writing history. Ismond examines, in particular, the writing water rat in

Another Life. Ismond reads the act of the water rat to parody “the deciphering, recording historian” (211). The parody involves both reduction of the historian’s task and, most importantly, an inversion whereby “the water rat has the true authority, displacing that of the historian” (ibid). In addition, writing on water epitomizes Walcott’s concept of ‘nothing.’ It captures, Ismond goes on, his crystalizing “visionary recognition of/no-thingness, its translucence” (211/212). Furthermore, Ismond reads the parallels in the image of the writing water rat and the print of the egret’s foot; the latter being the “mythic signature of what

Walcott envisions as the finding of earth” (212). Walcott invests in the image of the egret to broaden his image of the nothingness of history, especially in his late volumes. In Tiepolo’s

Hound, for example, the egret is the clerk of history:

The ochre shallows of the lagoon reflect

the setting empire of an enormous sky,

its end recorded by a clerical egret

pecking through dead leaves for our history. (88).

Indeed, Walcott entitled his last published volume (to date): White Egrets (2010).

In what follows, four poems by Walcott will be analyzed to manifest how the sea comes to be Walcott’s image for history. First, a relatively short poem will be analyzed: “The

Sea Is History.” The poem marks the point when Walcott resorts to the sea instead of the ocean to answer the question of time/history. Then, three more works by Walcott will be analyzed: two book-length poems (Another Life and Omeros); one long poem, by poem- length standards (“The Schooner Flight). Length is one criterion in selecting these representative works. Because examining the consistent equation of the sea and time

(precisely history) qualifies, in length, this chapter’s argument of the sea symbolizing history.

Chronology is yet another criterion. Another Life comes from the early 70s summing

Walcott’s aesthetics and poetics to date. “The Schooner Flight” and “The Sea Is History” (The

Star-Apple Kingdom) trumpets the 80s as Omeros the 90s. The chronological criterion testifies to the image’s consistency, temporally speaking.

In Another Life, I will analyze the places in the poem where Walcott uses the ‘sea’ and

‘history’ interchangeably. In “The Schooner Flight,” Shabine’s journey into the past is analyzed with focus on the crucial role of the sea in the journey/quest. Omeros is examined along both lines: interchangeability of the ‘sea’ and ‘history;’ the different characters’ agonies

(or wounds) caused by history and the role of the sea in reconciliation (healing).

3.3.1 “The Sea Is History”

It has been mentioned above that Walcott doubts the ocean will ever answer the time question in The Star-Apple Kingdom. “The Sea Is History” poem falls in this volume. Indeed,

Walcott’s philosophy of time embodied in the sea neared maturity in this very poem. Also,

The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979) falls in the Caribbean phase of Derek Walcott’s poetry, as suggested in Ismond’s monograph. The phase ranges, in Ismond’s analysis, from 1948 to

1979 (1). As The Star-Apple Kingdom concludes the ‘phase,’ it offers the concerns and the achievements of the phase in their ultimate, mature form. In Ismond’s reading, Walcott’s chief concern during the Caribbean phase is “Caribbean identity and self-definition” (Ismond

1). Exploring his Caribbean identity, Ismond adds, takes an “anticolonial, revolutionary route

[that] turns primarily on a counter-discourse with the dominant mode of thought of the colonizer’s tradition, against which he pursues an alternative, liberating order of values and meanings, generated from the different time and place of his Caribbean, New World ground”

(2). In “The Sea Is History,” especially, the value under “transvaluation”, Ismond contends, is

“the traditional idea of history” (9, 10). In this poem, Walcott’s “alternative definition answers particularly to the charge of Caribbean historylessness” (10). Indeed, Walcott’s revisionist attempt is spotted by both Ismond and Thieme.

Like Ismond, Thieme holds, in the poem, “The Caribbean natural world – in this case the sea itself – offers an alternative history which has far more relevance to the lived experience of Caribbean peoples than the linear records of colonial society” (160). However, whereas Ismond views the process “dialectical” and “subversive” (2, 13), Thieme finds it

“adversarial” (160).

Bill Ashcroft et al. triangulate their reading of Walcott’s philosophy of history in the poem with Thieme’s and Ismond’s. Walcott, Ashcroft et al. hold, is after “fresh but not innocent ‘Adamic’ naming” (33). First, for this is the genuine alternative to the archipelago’s writers’ “prison of perpetual recriminations” (ibid). Second, for the fresh naming “of place provides the writer with inexhaustible material and the potential of a new, but not naive, vision” (ibid). Rather than “destructions of the historical past” (ibid) subversive, adversarial 95

or otherwise, Walcott presents an alternative authoritative narrative. This narrative builds on

Said’s depiction of history as “territory taken from the empire” (Culture and Imperialism 31).

To adapt Said’s discourse, Walcott’s theory is about demonopolizing that territory.

In “The Sea Is History,” in particular, Walcott is engaged in fumbling the ashes of the past. ‘History,’ in the title, is a pun. It could be history in the sense of something gone and forgotten or history as all that happened and passed in the past. In the poem, Walcott resorts to the sea to uncover episodes crucial to the overall makeup of Caribbean history. The process is not an innocently objective uncovering, nor, to use Walcott’s phrase, a “masochistic recollection” (“The Muse of History” 44). Walcott’s reconstructive imprints and touches inform the resurrected body.

Though bound to the Jamaican context (the reference to Port Royal, for instance [26]), the episodes Walcott alludes to make Jamaica a metonym of the Caribbean archipelago.

Ismond finds Walcott’s attempt to reconstruct the Caribbean history to amount to “a head-on argument with the Western notion of a history of achievement” (54). The question-answer structure of the opening lines testifies to this ‘head-on’ reading:

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?

Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,

in that gray vault. The sea. The sea

has locked them up. The sea is History. (25).

Walcott, here, celebrates the sea as the founding principle of history. This eulogist beginning, however, turns tragic. The assertive tone in “sea is History” above promises answers. But that certainty is undermined when readers learn that history is “locked … up” in the sea’s “gray vault” as it suggests simultaneously existence and non-existence. It is there yet irretrievable.

Also, being “locked” it makes a statement on the present state of affairs. The Caribbeans are locked in an endless turning of “blank pages” (26). The sea is not only pivotal to 96

understanding history but also consequential and far-reaching. It has a bearing on the lived present and will have on the future.

Literally, the “sea is History” statement is valid. The most important chapters in the

Caribbean history are SLAVERY and COLONIZATION. Slavery had a sea route.

Colonization, too, had a sea route through which the slavers/colonizers’ Caravels appeared and vanished. Recovering such a momentous portion of history is epic/heroic. That it is

“locked” in a “vault” adds yet more momentum to the epic/heroic undertaking of restoring it.

The poem commences in medias res with a question exacting a Caribbean history. The answer is a succession of images set in a submarine milieu implying the narrator is reproducing an experience of phantasmagoria. Stanzas three and onwards could be read as fragmented chapters of the Caribbean history, allegorizing and simultaneously subverting

Biblical episodes. The Biblical episodes are employed for their historical meaning and implication, not their Biblical weight. Two particular chapters designate Walcott’s philosophy of time.

In the poem, Walcott equates the Biblical Genesis (the beginning) with the Middle

Passage; the Biblical Exodus (the end) with uprooting Africans from Africa. Chronologically speaking, Africans were, first, uprooted and enslaved; then, shipped across the infamous

Middle Passage route. Walcott disturbs chronology: beginning and end are reversed. In simplistic terms, end precedes beginning. Interestingly, “The Sea Is History” ends with the declaration: “History, really beginning” (28, emphasis added). So, History begins towards the end of the poem. Besides, it begins with a Middle Passage.

The reversal in chronology is proportionate with the reverse in the episode’s symbolism. In “The Muse of History,” Walcott elucidates:

And yet it is there that the epic poetry of the tribe originates, in its

identification with Hebraic suffering, the migration, the hope of deliverance 97

from bondage. There was this difference, that the passage over our Red Sea

was not from bondage to freedom but its opposite, so that the tribes arrived

at their New Canaan chained. There is this residual feeling in much of our

literature, the wailing by strange waters for a lost home. (44).

Ismond’s analysis of “the sea is history” conceit enlightens the poem’s last line: “the sea becomes the locus of the intersection of the temporal/empirical and the timeless, of the simultaneity of endings and beginnings” (15). ‘Beginning’ recalls the pun in the title.

Beginning, too, could connote a continuous state of reenacting or that it is ever present. The latter reading subverts the very title: History is present. This is the full statement of Walcott’s concept of time: History is not past; it is, was and will be. The title “The Sea Is History,” in light of this reading would translate: The Sea is Time. Walcott’s closure of “The Sea Is

History” identifies him with the literary conclusions of Homer: “Homer, who tired of wars and gods and kings, / had the sea’s silence for prologue and epilogue” (Midsummer

“XXXIV”).

Indeed, in Walcott’s Homeric epic Omeros (will be analyzed below), Walcott holds

“Time is the metre, memory the only plot” (129). Furthermore, Walcott reflects his concept of time in Omeros’ structure. Traditionally, the genre follows “in miniature, the pattern of classical [Homeric and Roman] epic, beginning in medias res [i.e. in the present] and proceeding by flashback [the past], reversion, and continuance [the future]” (Lennard 281).

Omeros encompasses a single day that reenacts the span of 300 years. Reenacting in both senses: recalling and repeatedly living. What Omeros’ structure tells of the concurrence of past, present and future is significant but more so for it is incarnated in the Sea. Omeros closes: “the sea was still going on” (325). It is significant that besides the sea, time is the only other presence that haunts the book: “Time was that fearful friend / they talked to, who sat beside them in empty chairs, / as deaf as they were; who sometimes simply listened” (165). In 98

fact, time haunts the whole of Walcott’s corpus. Up to the 2004-collection, The Prodigal: a

Poem, Walcott’s surrogate “I” is left by the harbor with “only one subject –Time” (“15” 90).

Thus, the juxtaposition of the Biblical Genesis and the Middle Passage questions the conventional (European) concept of ‘history’ moving linearly and, simultaneously, presents a

Caribbean concept derived from the abrupt, random nature of the Caribbean history

(incarnated in the sea). The abrupt deracination of slaves of diverse traditions and heritages and the ensuing random regrouping and transplanting in new lands does not fit in the smooth linear paradigm.31 In this sense, Thieme understands why “the Caribbean natural world – in this case the sea itself – offers an alternative history which has far more relevance to the lived experience of Caribbean peoples than the linear records of colonial society” (160). In other words, the sea is the best emblem of the contradictory perception of the Middle Passage (the

Caribbean history) as an event of annihilation that launches the history of the New World, an episode of existence and a non-existence simultaneously. Alternatively, a beginning and an end.

An important point about Walcott’s sea-is-time image is that the mystery never gets unraveled. In The Arkansas Testament, for example, an image goes: “the sea made furrows that had nothing to do with time” (“Gros-Ilet” 34). The irrelevant furrows could undermine the sea-is-time scheme. However, the overt contradiction is reconciled by a line from “Marina

Tsvetaeva” of the same volume. In the latter poem, time and the sea co-habit the same line:

“Time, that’s half of eternity, like the sea in a window” (47). The “furrows” could then be read to belong to the part of eternity beyond human cognitive reach. The sea is time but what we can comprehend of that infinite entity is delineated by human finite perception. Like the speaker’s vintage point in “Marina Tsvetaeva” is demarcated by the window frame so is the sea of one people may have furrows indecipherable by people on the other end of the sea. In

31 See also Ismond pp. 71-72.

his meditations on the parallels between Sicily and St. Lucia, the narrator intimates:

The sea was the same

except for its history. The island was our patron saint’s

birthplace. They shared the same name:

Lucia. The heat had the identical innocence

of an island afternoon, but with a difference,

the way the oleanders looked and the olive’s green flame.

(White Egrets “8. Sicilian Suite” 16).

3.3.2 Another Life

Though it may sound a deliberate overstatement to tag Another Life ‘epic,’ Thieme does not hesitate to assert “Another Life deserves to be ranked alongside it [Omeros32]” (184).

More importantly, Thieme reads in Another Life the first poetic articulation33 of Walcott’s

“idea … that the Caribbean natural world … offers an alternative history” (160).

At one point in the book, Walcott’s ‘I’ converses with an imaginary Grandfather.

Capitalizing the initial in ‘Grandfather’ may cast Him as a generic grandfather, not a biological one. Especially that Walcott used lower case twice, in the verso, where he was reporting autobiographically on his: “white grandfather’s face” and “black grandfather’s voice” (66). This means the capitalized version in the recto is intended. Also, ‘Grandfather’ alliterates with God. Indeed, in the poem’s Manuscript One, a note appears where Walcott finds heritage (ancestral, traditional and historical) literally: “a God who tortures me” (qtd. in

Baugh and Nepaulsingh 273).

In the poem, the speaker addresses the Grandfather specter thus:

32 Omeros is considered decisive in nominating Walcott for and awarding him the Nobel Prize in 1992.

33 The first prosaic articulation being “The Muse of History” (Thieme 160).

100

I tired of your whining, Grandfather,

…

I tired of your groans, Grandfather,

[…]

I hoped for your sea-voices

to hiss from my hand,

for the sea to erase

those names … (67).

The sea erasure is closely related to Walcott’s ‘amnesia’ as the only true history. The image is also born out of the Caribbean place. Walcott tells Hirsch: “To me there are always images of erasure in the Caribbean … There is a continual sense of emotion in the Caribbean – caused by the sea and the feeling that one is almost traveling through water and not stationary” (74).

The sea erasure image here is perfected in Sea Grapes. In appropriately entitled

“Names,” the speaker portrays his race’s being to be inaugurated by “that terrible vowel, / that

I!” (33). Orally, the “I” echoes the “sea-eagle screams” in the poem and, visually, is embodied in the shape of the stick in the beachcomber’s hand (ibid). With the I-shaped stick, the speaker sets about the task “to trace” and write his race into being “on the sand / which the sea erased again” (33). On the surface of it, the sea/history conspires against Walcott and his race’s quest for an inscribed existence: a history. But the sea erasure could be interpreted otherwise. The race should realize their history is coalesced with the sea; the sea is the locale for tracing history and identity. The sea tries to get the race back on track. In fact, the speaker opens with a premise “My race began as the sea began” (32). Tracing his race afterwards on the sand is not a sound conclusion.

In contrast to “Names,” rather than desperately inscribing names fated to an imminent sea erasure, the beachcomber, in Another Life, is desperate “for the sea to erase / those 101

names” (67). Also, unlike the daring speaker of the latter Sea Grapes (1976), the speaker, in

Another Life (1973), is hesitant and dubious as to what the sea has to impart on History. He is torn between two opposite pulls: one part of him longs to the faintest “hiss” of Grandfather; the other part prays all that is Grandfather to vanish. He becomes as impatient with

Grandfather’s “whining” and “groans” (67) as he had been with the race’s. And this is one manifestation of I’s perceiving of himself as a “tortured child” in the book (ibid).

It runs through Book One (“The Divided Child”) and Book Two (“Homage to

Gregorias”) this tone of resentment. Prior to his encounter with Grandfather, the speaker mourns “whole generations died, unchristened [sic], / growths hidden in green darkness, forests / of history thickening with amnesia” (53). Few moments before the encounter, the speaker puts it: “He [Gregorias34] had his madness, / mine was our history” (66). A few pages after the encounter, the speaker speaks collectively of his fellow islanders: “madmen for a sea

/ so blue it stains” (70). The staining deep blue shade cancels out the literal reading of the sea.

Accentuating the intense shade implies what crazes them is the deep-buried history. Staining one’s hands is an uncomfortable feeling. So, that it “stains” suggests it is to do with the most repelling portion of Caribbean history: slavery. What augments this reading further is the image’s re-use in Tiepolo’s Hound. Contemplating his uncle’s shed, Hound’s narrator moves abruptly from the shed’s “African torpor” to “the sea’s blue door locked at the end of the street” (23). The swift move links the black slaves’ history with the blue sea especially that both images are of inaction: torpor and locked. More important, in addition to the deep sleep and the deep locked secrets, the sea hue is qualified a few lines below: “so blue // it stained your hand, not epilogue but prologue” (ibid). That it is a “prologue” it recalls Walcott’s

Genesis-Middle Passage analogy in “The Sea Is History.” In Walcott’s last volume, White

Egrets, the staining sea image occurs yet for the third time. In poem “53,” the speaker hears

34 Walcott, models Gregorias on his friend and national painter Dunstan St. Omer.

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“the chuckle / of the chain in the stained sea” (85). It is significant that in this last occurrence, rather than staining, the sea is stained. On the previous two occasions, Walcott describes the slavery episode relative to the slaves’ descendants (today’s Caribbeans). In White Egrets, on the other hand, Walcott talks of slavery relative to whites (the slavers) for the chain dangled and is trailed by “white yachts” (85). In other words, whites stained the black with the staining slavery episode.

A different sea-blue shade yet, in Another Life, signifies the other traumatic portion of

Caribbean history: colonization. Reminiscing about his school days at St. Mary’s College, one staff person persists in Walcott’s memory: T. E. Fox-Hawes, the English Headmaster. More so for Walcott “saw history through the sea-washed eyes” of Fox-Hawes (Another Life 70).

The color is blue and washed, for that matter. Although the blue eyes could be biographical and innocent, charging them with history is not. First, the portrayal draws on Walcott’s the- sea-is-history image. Second, of Fox-Hawes’ interests, Walcott reports emphatically on his love of “parades, / sailing, and Conrad’s prose” (70). Baugh and Nepaulsingh refer to Fox-

Hawes’ reportedly marked admiration of “naval warfare and military matters” (277) to account for the association in this line of “parades,” “sailing,” “Conrad’s prose”. This passion reflects in Fox-Hawes’ delivered lecture in 1944 (Castries), significantly entitled “The War at

Sea,” as reported in Voice of St. Lucia (ibid). Obviously, the “choleric, ginger-haired headmaster,” “lonely Englishman” (Another Life 70) is the prototype colonizer. What is of interest here is the light sea-blue hue coloring his eyes. Whereas Caribbeans got past colonization (hence, it is a washed-blue episode), slavery still enslaves (stains) them, at least mentally. The different blue shades show slavery is far more nauseating and atrocious than colonization.

This is the first occasion in the book where the ‘sea’ and ‘history’ replace one another in the self-same discourse on madness for history. It could yet be argued that the 103

interchangeability is somehow implicit.

However, in Book Three (“A Simple Flame”), interchangeability closes in on visibility. The speaker identifies closely with the islander’s malaise and generalizes it: “Any island would drive you crazy”35 and more so for “all that iconography of the sea” (98). Earlier in Book Two, the malaise is generalized to a global level. This is achieved in the “undersea museum” image (66). The sea is portrayed as a porous hoard of ancient history. Among the treasures of the “undersea museum” are Sidon, Tyre and Byzantium. Baugh and Nepaulsingh annotate the allusion to the Phoenician cities (Sidon and Tyre) to factually refer to their fame for quality sand and quality cedars that won them the trade market of antiquity (272). Still,

Baugh and Nepaulsingh acknowledge the museum image to imply it is through the sea that

“ancient history can be imagined” (ibid). Similar conclusions are reached in their reading of the “the sea-wrack of submerged Byzantium” (Another Life 66). Both critics cite the contemporaneous archeological reports to enlighten the lines. In brief, the reports confirm the

“submerged” part of the great Mediterranean city (present-day Istanbul) is the site of the

Biblical flood of Noah, whereby the Mediterranean is said to overflow into today’s Black Sea

(272). Plus literal reports’ annotation, the figurative reading of the lines is assertively present.

Baugh and Nepaulsingh report the lines are to be read in the context of Walcott’s credo and aesthetics: “In the poet’s mind, these old cities and empires represent ancient history, from the other side of the Atlantic, that makes its way to the New World across ‘an oceanic past’ …

The poet watches the sand and sea on a New World beach and imagines that this ancient history crumbles and washes itself away” (272). In effect, the sea museum tour is another image where the sea is portrayed as the locale of history and antiquity.

In Book Four, significantly entitled “The Estranging Sea,” the sea-history interchangeability is elaborately fortified. Chapter 19 of the Book records Walcott’s contempt

35 In the poem, it is never mentioned who is the line’s speaker (See Baugh and Nepaulsingh p. 299).

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of history mongers; the “blacker than blacks” (qtd. in Baugh and Nepaulsingh 315). Walcott depicts this category of blacks as

Those36 who peel, from their own leprous flesh, their names,

who chafe and nurture the scars of rusted chains,

… those who charge tickets

for another free ride on the middle passage (127).

In a few words, “Those” are engaged in a deliberate self-maiming. Peeling flesh is a reference to the contemporaneous fad-like practice of disowning one’s European name given upon slavery and claiming (reclaiming, in some cases) an African one instead (Baugh and

Nepaulsingh 316). The image: “old Pharaohs peeling like onionskin / to the archeologist’s finger –all that / is the Muse of history” (Another Life 142) plus the coincidence of writing

Book Four with writing the “The Muse of History” essay37 (Baugh and Nepaulsingh 328) validates the reading.

What is of extreme relevance in Chapter 19 to this chapter on the-sea-is-history image is the follow-up image. There, the radicals who appease and cash in on the horrors of history;

“hoarding the sea-glass of their ancestor’s eyes” are branded: “sea-lice, sea-parasites on the ancestral sea-wrack, / whose god is history. Pax” (128). Leeching off history; leeching off ancestors on both occasions is depicted by Walcott to equal leeching off the sea. In other words, the ‘sea’ and ‘history’ are interchangeable; near synonyms. The previous example shows the use of the ‘sea’ for past/history. Reversely, in Tiepolo’s Hound, the ‘past’ is used for the sea where “the cabinetmaker // near the wreck where urchins leap into the past” (26).

The urchin is called in full the sea-urchin (a marine species of echinoderms).

36 Baugh and Nepaulsingh read “those” all through Chapter 19 of Book Four to exclusively refer to “the extremists of the black consciousness movement” p. 315.

37 In “The Muse of History,” Walcott calls the mongers “the new magnifiers of Africa” p. 42.

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The following section offers yet another leap in analyzing the-sea-is-history image.

Rather than working on the words and lines level, the analysis will trace the role of the sea in the journey for a history (the plot level). The first of these odysseys is Shabine’s of “The

Schooner Flight.”

3.3.3 “The Schooner Flight”

In “The Language of Exile,” Seamus Heaney, praises “The Schooner Flight” as

“epoch-making” (304). In its verse, Heaney credits Walcott of doing “for the Caribbean what

Synge did for Ireland, found[ing] a language woven out of dialect and literature” (304). In other words, Walcott overcomes what Breiner calls “Foucauldian epistemic misfit” and defines as “a new consciousness that their [West Indian poets’] perception of their surroundings was mediated by ‘the filter of English eyes’” (Breiner 108). West Indian writers often experience this ‘misfit’ when they attempt to render their surroundings via the English language and model their renderings on English literature models (or, molds).

“The Schooner Flight” opens The Star-Apple Kingdom collection. It consumes roughly a third of the volume (20 pages out of 58). Thus, in relative terms, the poem is long.

Genre-wise, it has all the epic elements, in miniature. It is to an epic like a novella to a novel.

The successive chapters of the poem trace Shabine’s pre-journey state-of-mind, the sea- journey, and the aftermath. The closing chapter, “After the Storm,” recounts the journey retrospectively. Indeed, Thieme tags the poem “a mini-epic which prefigures Omeros” and ranks Shabine as “Walcott’s most developed Ulysses figure” (162). The poem depicts

Shabine’s imaginary journey into his race’s history. The protagonist who self-identifies as “a seafarer” (14) is an exile. He is exiled from his home island, Trinidad. The seafarer embarks on a voyage into the past.

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“The Schooner Flight” reiterates in the ultimate form “the fundamental [thematic] values” already articulated in Another Life, Ismond notes (238). Threading the different stops in Shabine’s journey from onset to rest, Ismond pieces together paramount episodes in the

Caribbean history. Shabine’s journey symbolizes a “historical itinerary” (238). What is significant is that the fragmentary islands where Shabine stops chronicle in their contemporaneous state the region’s history of fragmentation:

the journey starts from the more developed island of Trinidad in the south;

proceeds upwards to Barbados, appropriate as site of the re-encounter with

the colonial heritage; then to the more primal settings of the smaller islands

to the north –St Lucia, as site of Walcott’s native roots, and Dominica,

home of a community of aboriginal Caribs. … the interior process of this

odyssey is rediscovering, reclaiming, and regrounding self in a

consciousness and identity whose potentiality is already there from what has

been traversed in the region. (238).

Unlike Walcott’s nameless, surrogate ‘I’ of Another Life, the hero of “The Schooner

Flight” is named and identified. Nevertheless, “The Schooner Flight” is no less autobiographical than Another Life in its central preoccupations. The identification between

Shabine and Walcott may have some cracks on the physical side (the reference to “red niggar”, for example). Though some parallels are still there: “a rusty head sailor with sea- green eyes” (4). Apart from physiognomy, the identification applies to educational background, (patrilineal and matrilineal) lineage, and schizophrenic agonies (formulating an identity statement ranks uppermost amongst these). Shabine introduces himself:

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, 107

and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation (4).

Moreover, writing “The Schooner Flight” in 1976 was concurrent with Walcott’s failed second marriage caused by Walcott’s affair with Norline Metivier. This coincidence explains the passages in the poem where Shabine reflects and regrets his failed marriage. One representative passage of this coincidence goes:

I swear to you all, by my mother’s milk,

by the stars that shall fly from tonight’s furnace,

that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home;

I love them as poets love the poetry

that kills them, as drowned sailors sea. (5).

(Note from the above quote, how a sailor’s passion for the sea is as indispensable as the poets’ passion for poetry. The speaker in Another Life has both passions, too).

However, the opposing pulls that trapped the ‘I,’ in Another Life: the desire to see through the sea into the past and the fear of facing what the sea would impart, are overcome by Shabine. In “The Schooner Flight,” Shabine’s eventual journey is willed and undeterred, which justifies cladding his ordeal with a heroic/epic grandiose:

Well, Shabine has bridled the horses of the sea;

[…]

I who have no weapon but poetry and

the lances of palms and the sea’s shining shield! (16, emphasis added).

Initially, Shabine is portrayed as repulsed by the present state of affairs on the island of Trinidad. The corrupt islanders are presented as immersed in a rampant consumerism that plagues and consumes them. Unlike his fellow wealthy, corrupt islanders, “all the silver

[Shabine] had was the coins on the sea” (6). Although Shabine’s diving into the sea away from the plagued island is escapist on the face of it, its engagement with the question of the 108

Caribbean history casts a different light on the undertaking. Shabine is conscious of the

Caribbean past’s bearing on the present. Hence, his journey’s end-goal is therapeutic, not only heuristic.

Shabine’s pre-journey state-of-mind recalls previous dives propelled by the ‘history’ questions and ensuing unquenched thirst for answers:

I couldn’t shake the sea noise out of my head,

[…]

… this Caribbean so choke with the dead

that when I would melt in emerald water,

whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent,

I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans,

dead-men’s-fingers, and then, the dead men.

I saw that powdery sand was their bones

ground white from Senegal to San Salvador,

so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month (7, emphasis added).

This hypnotized frame of mind brings Shabine into a full realization that the task is so formidable so he put off the third go. In the final chapters of the poem, Shabine experiences a series of interconnected disillusionments, symbolized in the loss of faith (an area of further identification holding between the poet and his persona):

and that was the faith

that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel

in Chisel Street, Castries, when the whale-bell

sang service and, in hard pews ribbed like the whale,

proud with despair, we sang how our race

survive the sea’s maw, our history, our peril, 109

and now I was ready for whatever death will. (18).

The assuring, comforting light of faith is displaced by “a fresh light that follows a storm”

(ibid). However, that the light is juxtaposed to “havoc” (ibid) implies the storm is not past yet, at least, the light is not as illuminating and restorative as it appears.

Bringing the traumatic, swollen, buried past up to the surface is the first step towards reconciliation. It allows diagnosis and proper cure to redeem the present. However, the tragedy of Shabine is that his journey never reaches that end. This is rather realistic. The journey proves a predicament. In a way, Shabine’s melancholy is fueled rather than eased at the close of the journey.

A possible reading of “fresh light” is the association between the present (rather than the past) sea in havoc and the storm. It affirms Shabine’s initial hypothesis that the present corrupt state of affairs on the island buds of a germinal seed-ill rooted in the past. Suddenly, the sea is past and present simultaneously. This flash of recognition enlightens Shabine’s earlier statement whereby he pronounces: “Until I see definite signs / that mankind change,

Vince, I ain’t want to hear. / Progress is history’s dirty joke” (14). If any talk of progress is ever allowed, in this context, its movement is backward; the present is no more than a lived past. Nevertheless, “while the whole sea still havoc;” Shabine could sight “its bright wake”

(18). This is rather optimistic. But optimism is undermined by the poem’s closure.

The end of “The Schooner Flight” is rather enigmatic. In Another Life, the meditating

‘I’ could only hypothesize about a relation of the present turmoil of the Caribbean islands back to the past embodied in the sea. His fear to face the past, kept the ‘I’ planted ashore. On the contrary, Shabine dives into the depths of the sea and comes tete-a-tete with the past. But like the ‘I’ of Another Life who never reaches home (due to his passivity), Shabine’s journey did not reach its destination. The poem closes: “My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last. /

I stop talking now. […] Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea” (20). It is a 110

mysterious, open ending. It is far from clear if Shabine survived the sea. But that the closing lines contrast with the epic portrayal of Shabine “bridl[ing] the horses of the sea” (16) earlier suggests a tragic fall. The tamer of the sea is most likely tamed by the sea in the end.

3.3.4 Omeros

Omeros is conventionally perceived as Walcott’s opus magnum and, publication-year- wise (1990), it contextualizes Walcott’s reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

Above all, naturalistic details stand out in the book/poem. Different critics linger on different naturalistic images. Ismond, for example, dwells on the abundant details of marine life forms:

“sea’s flora and fauna” (258). Bruckner, on the other hand, finds it particularly compelling the superabundant profuse of bird species that “fill the skies of the book the way old gods filled the skies of Homer” (398). What holds Bruckner is that Walcott has never been a reported ornithologist; neither professional nor dilettante for that matter. But then Bruckner cites an anecdote to contextualize Walcott’s seeming ‘expertise’ in this field. A friend of Walcott’s,

Bruckner relates, presented him with an inventory pamphlet cataloguing the archipelago’s birds (398). Walcott responds: “and there were so many [bird species] it amazed me, and then

I found myself thinking about the scansion in the list, the rhythm, and so, there they are” (qtd. in Bruckner 398). Still, like Ismond, Bruckner is dazzled by the seascape imagery in Omeros.

But, rather than the sea’s flora and fauna, Bruckner holds: “the greatest character [in Omeros] is the Caribbean Sea itself” (398). After all, Walcott’s personality and literary preferences are shaped by the sea waves, Bruckner rationalize (398). In addition, Bruckner notes, besides

Homer, Walcott expresses an admiration of Dante in Omeros (398). Not only does Dante’s poetic mastery appeal to Walcott, Bruckner goes on, but also “the Italian poet’s love of the sea” (398).

Like Walcott and Dante, Omeros’s characters are passionate about the sea. And their

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different stories advance towards a reconciliation with the sea. The constants of the many storylines (subplots) in Omeros are: wounds (which are then revealed to be inflicted by the sea/history) and heals (incarnated in the sea, too). As early as Book One, Walcott addresses the readers directly, in a meta-literary manner: “affliction is one theme / of this work, this fiction, since every ‘I’ is a // fiction finally” (28). Even Major Plunkett’s head wound, the narrating voice plainly says: “I have [it] stitched into Plunkett’s character. / He has to be wounded” (ibid) as if to fit in this frame of wounds and healing.

Even Major Plunkett’s wound, like the post-colonial characters’, is to do with history.

All through the poem, Plunkett is shown engaged in finalizing some history book on St.

Lucia. The narrator tropes Major Plunkett’s treatise as follows: Plunkett “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). On the recto to these lines, Walcott pronounces his self- defensive approach. Walcott yearns to “enter that light beyond metaphor” (271). Rather than reducing history to a metaphor, Walcott uses metaphor to explore the grandest truth: history.

In Major Plunkett’s version of St. Lucia history, the Major incarnates the island’s history in Helen, his household maid. This incarnation alludes to the epithet of St. Lucia:

Helen of the West Indies. That epithet is historically charged and elucidates the contrasting approaches: history-to-metaphor and metaphor-to-history. The epithet was born of The Battle of The Saints which was fought between the French and the English. During the Battle, the island was claimed and changed hands several (thirteen38) times and that fact won it the epithet. In this light, Plunkett imposes his reading of the Battle and pushes the ‘meriting’ epithet to its limits whereby Helen, the St. Lucian housemaid, becomes Plunkett’s metaphor of the island’s epic ‘glory.’ In reverse, the narrator casts Helen in a tragic light. He retraces

Helen and her peoples’ plight back to history (embodied in the very The Saints’ battle).

38 See Walcott’s “Leaving School” essay p. 24.

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Whereas Plunkett’s project is about restoring a lost Eden, Walcott’s is about “locating not

Eden, but the Fall” (Thieme 37). Either way, both Plunkett and the narrator analogize history with the sea. For Plunkett, the sea is the glorious battlefield; trumpeting expansion. On the contrary, for Walcott’s people, the sea is the Middle Passage, it concludes uprooting and prefaces colonization.

The main journey in Omeros is Achille’s. A sea-swift guides the sea-journey into the past; into his African roots. It follows a more or less similar route as Shabine’s in “The

Schooner Flight.” It identifies with the quest in Another Life, too. In Another Life, the persona diagnoses the plight of the present-day Caribbean to originate in the past/the sea. However, the diagnosis is carried out from a distance. Shabine, on the other hand, wades and then dives into the sea but the poem’s end leaves it open whether or not the quest to the past is ever attainable. In Omeros, the epic’s hero is the closest of Walcott’s protagonists to ‘Ithaca.’

Achille is a typical Caribbean fisherman who commences his days with a “ritual / baptism” consisting of sprinkling his sail with seawater (129). With this baptism, an unidentified “something was rising” (ibid). The something is identified in yet more indefinite terms: “some white memory … a white turning body” (ibid). In contrast to Achille’s blank memory, in the background of the ‘baptism’,

A gull

screeched whirling backwards, and it was the tribal

sorrow that Philoctete could not drown in alcohol.

It was not forgetful as the sea-mist or the crash

of breakers on the crisp beaches of Senegal

or the Guinea coast. … (129).

The gull’s memory is more far-reaching than Achille’s immediate sea stretch; the gull’s 113

screech identifies Achille’s blank memory with the history stretching as far as Senegal and the

Guianese coast.

Another voice yet identifies Achille’s memory crisis with history, namely, it is the griot’s song in Book Three. Like the gull’s screech, the griot’s song travels back to “the margin of Guinea” (149). However, the latter voice is played in an undertone, compared with the gull’s screech. In Achille’s view, the griot’s song is a “prophetic song / of sorrow that would be the past. It was a note, long-drawn / and endless in its winding” (148, emphasis added). The prophecy/song opens: “We were the colour of shadows when we came down / with tinkling leg-irons to join the chains of the sea, / for the silver coins multiplying on the sold horizon” (149). More than prophetic, the song is revelatory. This revelation marks the anticlimax of Achille’s crisis with the blank memory.

Naming the plight facilitates naming the antidote: a history that will inscribe the void and fill in the blank memory. The route is backwards in time, making of the sea-swift a fitting compass and companion for Achille. The sea-swift migrates in an east-to-west trajectory along the Atlantic and back again (Thieme 185). Thus equipped, Achille embarks on his phantasmagorical journey “backwards” to Africa, his Ithaca. Achille’s fellow islanders share his plight (historylessness) and his sea (purgatorial) journey.

Philoctete, the limp, is another wounded character in Omeros. Initially in the book,

Philoctete is introduced by the narrator. The narrator recounts (in third-person pronouns) the episode of Philoctete’s wound thus:

The sore on his shin

still unhealed, like a radiant anemone. It had come/

from a scraping, rusted anchor. The pronged iron

peeled the skin in a backwash. … (9/10). 114

Readers later meet Philoctete, with him accounting for his sore. Then, the scene is staged as follows: “Philoctete, his trouser-legs rolled, stares out to sea // from the worn rumshop window” (19). The stare could be a meditative act or merely a careless, innocent scanning of his surroundings. However, the immediate lines afterwards cancel out this reading. The following image shifts to Philoctete’s limp: “The itch in the sore / [that] tingles like the tendrils of the anemone” (19). Alliteration aside, the images’ placement links the ‘sea’ and the

‘sore’ spatially and thematically. Especially that the stare outside exacts the stare inside where

Philoctete reflects on the origin of the sore. Philoctete gives his own version of the sore and its germ:

He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles

of his grandfathers. Or else why was there no cure?

That the cross he carried was not only the anchor’s

but that of his race, … (19).

In Thieme’s words, Philoctete’s is a “sense of ancestral wound” (186). Whereas the scene moves from Philoctete’s scanning the sea to feeling his sore foot; a parallel mental move takes place. In the latter move, in the above excerpt, Philoctete moves from his sore foot to his ancestral sore (history).

Philoctete’s path to healing is guided by the Obeah woman Ma Kilman. Ma Kilman prescribes Philoctete a weed. Interestingly, the weed’s seed, Ma Kilman tells, was carried by the sea-swift ages ago all the way from Africa to the New World. More interestingly yet, the weed’s habitat is the sea. However, the cure raised gnawing doubts. Under the shade of the sea-grapes, Achille sits: “thinking of the stitched, sutured wound that Philoctete / was given by the sea, but how the sea could heal / the wound also. And that was what Ma Kilman taught” (242). On the face of it, it is irreconcilable the plight’s root is the curing root. 115

The scene of Philoctete’s healed sore is telling in this regard. Then, Philoctete “stood like a boy in his bath with the first clay’s / innocent prick! So she [Ma Kilman] threw Adam a towel. / And the yard was Eden. And its light the first day’s” (248). Thieme reads the scene to imply “reversing the trauma of the Middle Passage [past] through an African-derived remedy”

(186). The cluster of words designating freshness in the healing scene makes the healing analogous to regaining Paradise. Rather than a root healing a wound, the scene implies it is about reversing it.

The gloomiest of fates, in Omeros, is Hector’s. Hector represents the unrepentant sinner. Hence, he is denied purgatory and ushered into inferno. Like Achille and Philoctete,

Hector, too, is inflicted with “that obvious wound / made from loving the sea over their own country” (302). If Hector is the epic’s tragic hero, his tragic flaw is a love unconsummated.

Hector keeps a distance from the sea even in the ‘wading’/wedding scene: “at the shallow’s edge, [Hector] gave a quick thanks, / with the sea for a font, before he waded, thigh-in” (9).

He never ventures beyond “the shallow’s edge” or more than thigh-deep. His love-notes are

“quick thanks” paid in passing.

Even when he dives to rescue his canoe, he appears pragmatic towards the sea. The loving sea tries repeatedly to reconcile him to its bents, but to no avail. First, “calm and depth” (51) penetrates him beneath his capsized canoe. The sea is sending him the first currents of peace amidst the storm. However, love is dismissed. Then, Hector’s relentless attempts to out-run/outwit the current are relentlessly downed (51). It is only when Hector accepts “the right rhythm” and “the beat,” he is delivered out of his turmoil. Eventually, he is delivered and “could swim / with the crumbling surf, not against the sea’s will” (51).

However, being delivered out of his misery/crisis, he discards the sea altogether.

Hector leaves his fishing canoe for a van, The Comet (116). This act is a symbolic gesture alluding to his throwing all that is past behind and heading to a new beginning away from it. 116

A symbolic gesture that is fatal. At first, Hector becomes vulnerable to bangs (wounds) caused by “the blue sea [that] burst his heart again and again” (108). That “Hector was buried near the sea he had loved once” (232) is a symbolic punishment. As if his resting place near the lost/unrequited love is a perpetual restlessness. Unquenched thirst. Up to the very end, the sea keeps lashing Hector’s grave located where “rain / rose upwards from the sea, and the corrugated iron // [/] of the sea glittered with nailheads” (234/235). This reversal of the rain movement is one manifestation of the island’s “revers[ing] its elements” (234) and is proportionate with Hector’s sin where he seeks beginning in the present (the Comet van) not in the past (the canoe).

To recap, in Omeros, the sea is the wound/bond/thread that stitches the book’s subplots together on many levels. The sea inflicts and stitches the one wound; the past/history.

Achille’s wound is ignorance/lack of the past/history/ancestors, the sea fills the void and

Achille is healed. Philoctete represents an Achille who had earlier probed the depths of the sea/past but rather than sailing back ashore to the present with a healed amnesia, he dwells in the horrors of the past, this is his wound, his sore. The sea in its generosity offers Philoctete a cure as well, the weed. Philoctete’s doubt of the weed’s viability, however, hinders his overcoming the sore. And this is the symbolism of his cure, the weed. To work, Philoctete needs trusting it. Symbolically, knowing the past is a cure for Achille but residing in it is

Philoctete’s wound. Only coming to terms with the sea/past can eliminate the sore.

Hector is an Achille who never dares diving beyond thigh-deep into the sea. Yet,

Hector is a Philoctete who submits to the sea’s beat and rhythm and is delivered from imminent drowning. But once ashore, he abandons the sea/past and heads to celebrate the present and embrace the future promised by his van, The Comet. Sadly, the Comet proves fatal. The present cannot do without the past.

Major Plunkett presents an anomaly to this pattern for he functions within a different 117

paradigm. His history book is premised on the coincidence of St. Lucia’s glory and The Battle of the Saints that ends with the British claiming the island. Plunkett’s account skips the past that torments the Caribbean characters in Omeros; one of brutalizing, slavery and the Middle

Passage. Plunkett’s history book is symbolic, to be sure. Said’s argument of the interplay between the Orient’s presence and absence in writing the Orient (the process known as

‘Orientalism’) elucidates Plunkett’s undertaking. Said contrasts the authoritative presence of the Orientalist in historical narratives to highlight the absence of the Orient (208). The process is held in a deadlock. Claiming presence left the Orient with the vacuum territory: absence.

Settling in absence, the Orient allows the Orientalist to occupy the realm of presence (208).

Walcott’s Omeros, on the other hand, is symbolic of Said’s argument, in Culture and

Imperialism. There, Said argues “post-colonial writers bear their past within them –as scars of humiliating wounds … as urgently reinterpretable and redeployable experiences, in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory taken from the empire” (31). Omeros is the native’s counter-narrative of Plunkett’s ennobling The Battle of the Saints, whereby the Battle dates the degrading fall of the island, not its glory. However, it is still interesting that the sea, in Plunkett’s case, continues to mean the past. It is “the smell of the sea” that carried him to

“One sunrise in Lisbon, / walking along its empty wharves, he had wondered / where in this world he and his new wife could settle” (257).

The bond-like function of the sea is taken over by the sea-swift as described in the penultimate chapter of the epic:

I followed a sea-swift to both sides of this text;

her hyphen stitched its seam, like the interlocking

basins of a globe in which one half fits the next

into an equator, both shores neatly clicking 118

into a globe; […]

Her wing-beat carries these islands to Africa,

she sewed the Atlantic rift with a needle’s line,

the rift in the soul. … (319).

Unlike the sea-bond, however, the sea-swift hyphen-bond is about bridging the temporal three centuries and the spatial New and Old worlds. The sea-bond, on the other hand, is stitched in a oneness with the characters’ wounds and cures. To make amends between Achille and

Hector, Philoctete reminds them of the “common bond / between them: the sea” (47) alluding to the shared ancestral history. The narrator joins in the bond identifying with Philoctete whose wound and cure cohabitate the sea. The narrator says: “we [the narrator and Philoctete] shared the one wound, the same cure” (295). It is significant that the title character is incarnated as the sea (Seven Seas); besides Omeros and Walcott himself. In other and a few words, the sea-swift occupies an Athena-role (Thieme 186) while the sea bears a role of higher order embodying the past/history.

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4. THE RIVER

The river is a flowing water stream. In literature, it flows with symbolisms, besides. In the arts, in general, the river stands out as a symbol of identity and volubility. The interrelation of river and identity, national identity for that matter, dates back to antiquity.

Ferber cites the efflorescence of lyrics celebrating and extoling the Rhine in 1840s-Germany to testify to this aspect’s endurance (171). Walcott uses the river in a similar fashion in “The

Glory Trumpeter.” The poem opens with a character-portrait of some Eddie: “Old Eddie’s face, wrinkled with the river lights, / Looked like a Mississippi man’s” (Castaway 25). This symbolic aspect of the river originates in the habit of naming an area after its river(s), and the parallel habitual concomitants of identifying the area’s natives with the river “they drink” and identifying the area’s poet as “the poet of river X” (Ferber 171). So, in “Koenig39 of the

River,” Walcott analogizes colonizing the land and its people to taming its rivers. Koenig the prototype colonizer boasts:

The German Eagle and the British Lion,

we ruled worlds wider than this river flows,

[…]

… we ruled rivers as huge as the Nile,

the Ganges, and the Congo, we tamed, we ruled

you when our empires reached their blazing peak.

(The Star-Apple Kingdom 45).

This nexus of habits feeds yet the classical habit of employing the swan as a symbol for poets; the swan being both riverine and a singing riverine-bird at that. Somehow, this

39 German ‘Koenig’ and English ‘king’ are cognates.

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symbolic association advances the-poet-of-river X formula. Examples include the epithet

Horace coined for Pindar of Thebes: “the swan of Dirce”. Horace’s coinage had been later adapted to Shakespeare, too, in the “Swan of Avon” epithet (Ferber 171).

Under volubility, on the other hand, Ferber details how the river denotes “eloquence

… ‘fluency’ … Poetic genius” (171). So, Horace praises Pindar’s poetic genius thus:

As a river swollen by the rains above its usual

banks rushes down from the mountain,

so does Pindar surge and his deep

voice rushes on (qtd. in Ferber 171).

In Greek tradition, Mount Helicon, the Mount of the Muses houses two springs:

Aganippe and Hippocrene, from which flow Olmeius and Permessus rivers; respectively

(Ferber 171). The water of these rivers is believed to give poets inspiration (ibid). This myth persists. The metaphor of fluent flow of speech has yet been pushed to its limits and been extended to bear on the flow of the mind acts, too. The talk about the “stream of consciousness” and Freud’s theory with its “hydraulic metaphors” are representative examples (Ferber 172).

Last but not least, standing for “time itself,” Ferber argues, informs the poets’ habit of tracing “the phases of a river from its source to its mouth as ages in a human life” (173, 172).

The rationale of this tradition comes from Plato. Heraclitus reports of Plato saying “all things are in process and nothing stays still, and likening existing things to the stream of a river he says that into the same river you could not step twice” (qtd. in Ferber 173).

Walcott has extensively reworked the river’s symbolic facets to answer for the decisive issues (crises) of identity: racial, national, poetic and the passage of time. Hence,

Walcott’s river is overburdened and figures pitifully lean and clogged.

In the following sections, the arguments proceed from theoretically mapping out these 121

crises to analyzing their artistic realization in Walcott’s poetry.

4.1 Time

The striking echo of Plato in the following lines from “XII”: “the Stoics, muttering in their beards what every kid knows, / that to everything there is a time and a season, / that we never enter a river or the same bed twice?” (Midsummer) confirms the present chapter’s argument that Walcott subverts the river’s cluster of symbolism consciously.

Besides, the present section’s argument stands yet on another leg: Walcott’s pronounced skepticism of the linear time scheme (as has been outlined in “The Sea” chapter).

Ferber argues that when poets read the clear-cut river phases to mirror corresponding life phases (or, “ages”) of the poet, the person, the nation, etc., they ultimately realize ‘the-river- is-time’ facet of the river’s symbolisms (172, 173). In “The Road Taken: Robert Frost” essay,

Walcott voices his skepticism of both sides of this symbol. Walcott argues neither life nor poetry could be read linearly. To linearly piece together a poet’s life or to reconstruct a poet’s life out of his verse lines are equally undermined in the essay. For, Walcott explicates:

Skimming a great poet’s life, we pause when some fact darkens and jolts the

rate of the summary, clouding the passage, and we seize on something

historical that corroborates a poem. But this is the wrong way to read a

poem and a life. … there is a difference between a poem and a journal. The

poems essentialize the life. The poem does not obey linear time; it is, by its

belligerence or its surrender, the enemy of time; and it is, when it is true,

time’s conqueror, not time’s servant. (210, italics in the original).

To be sure, the line set rigidly between poetry and prose relative to (dis)obedience of linearity is not peculiarly Walcottian. It is a stand that is advocated and advanced by poet and poetry critic Glyn Maxwell, for instance. Although Walcott’s ‘enmity’ discourse and tone are

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ameliorated in Maxwell’s phrasing, still the latter kept the theory’s essence intact:

(dis)obedience. Maxwell is assertive as to the nonlinearity involved in experiencing a poem despite the manifest formal linearity of the verse lines on the page:

For let’s remind ourselves how singular poetry is … owing to the medium

of poetry’s creation, and to its relationship with time. …/ … . Here the

experience is not linear: one can encompass things in one’s ‘own time’. A

poem on a page is linear, or suggests linearity without compelling it, but

time remains one’s own – or, more exactly, voice upon time does. […] Poets

are voices upon time. (13/14, emphasis in the original),

Maxwell explains.

Walcott’s above-mentioned concept of time is transposed onto his reworking of the orthodox ‘the-river-is-time’ image. Like other poets surveyed in Ferber’s Dictionary, Walcott views time analogous to the river. In “The Saddhu of Couva,” Walcott announces: “time roars in my ears like a river” (The Star-Apple Kingdom 34). Rather than flowing smoothly, however; Walcott’s time river is notably fierce. And this is just one example of Walcott’s disturbing the image’s easy flow. In “Midsummer, Tobago,” Walcott devotes the bulk of the poem to a naturalistic reporting of the island’s landscape:

Broad sun-stoned beaches.

White heat.

A green river.

A bridge,

scorched yellow palms

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from the summer-sleeping house

drowsing through August. (Sea Grapes 72).

The remainder of the poem turns to Walcott’s inner landscape reflecting on

Days I have held,

days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,

my harbouring arms (72).

The outside-inside shift implies the one side informs the other. Pondering the external side illuminates Walcott’s internal reflections. In “Midsummer, Tobago,” the talk is of past and present days. Future tense is integrated to this riverine time scheme in the following volume,

The Star-Apple Kingdom, when Koenig talks of future in terms of “a fiction / in which there is a real river and real sky” (“Koenig of the River” 43). It remains notable that Walcott’s river, in “Midsummer, Tobago,” is ‘green’ and Koenig’s disposition is rather optimistic when he follows up and declares: “I’m not really tired, and should push on” (43). Given other contexts where the river exposes Walcott’s lack of identity, roots, or poetic voice, this verdant optimism stands out, especially that the river changes color through Walcott’s poetry. To integrate the “green river” image in the overall context of Walcott’s poetry, Frank

Collymore’s comments on Walcott’s poem “Travelogue” are worth quoting at some length. In a talk, entitled “An Introduction to the Poetry of Derek Walcott,” delivered in the Literary

Society, Collymore introduces and comments on selected poems from Walcott’s first and self- published poetry volume: 25 Poems. In “Travelogue,” Collymore spots

the concomitants of the youthful vision: all its idealism with its capacity for

love and friendship, and, too, the reverse side of the picture –all its swift

capacity for being hurt, its uninhibited despair. For, to the youth, the 124

progress of time is not to be measured by the same clock as it is to those

who have attained maturity. In our youth we are able to keep pace with time

–its progress is ours; later, we lag behind, and, as we watch its waters

outpace us we are only too conscious of its rapid flight. But, in the first

flush of early manhood, when we are able to keep abreast of the river, days

and months are disconcertingly long, and there seems to be little, if any,

prospect of accomplishment (91, emphasis added).

Relevant yet is Edward Baugh’s compact survey of Walcott’s oeuvre over twenty-five years in appropriately entitled “Ripening with Walcott.” In retrospect, Baugh totalizes Walcott’s quarter-a-century output in an all-comprehensive phrase: a “self-portrait” (278). In other words, Walcott’s thematic concern is Walcott himself. Before perfected, the portrait develops from “feverish, [yet] precocious youth to mellow middle age” (ibid). Baugh’s reading and

Collymore’s analysis do not only throw beams of light on Walcott’s optimism (greenness) in

“Koenig of the River” but also enlightens the deliberate shift in the river’s color through

Walcott’s volumes.

In the first regard of dispositions, the green river sounds out of place. Walcott’s green river figures in Sea Grapes (72) when Walcott was forty-six. He is a good way through his middle age and this contradicts with Collymore’s proposition of youth’s idealism. However, that Walcott frames his green river with images of discolor tempers the image’s idealism. The images of sun-stoning, intense heat and bleached palms all imply the ‘green’ river is soon to melt in this inferno.

As Walcott comes of age, his river dims, color-wise. For example, in Walcott’s last published volumes to date, White Egrets, gray and black ousts the verdure of Walcott’s earliest volumes. In poem “16. In the Village,” for example, Walcott regrets his talent is unfulfilled. More so for his life draws to an imminent conclusion: 125

My veins bud, and I am so

full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.

The notes outside are visible; sparrows will

line antennae like staves, the way springs were,

but the roofs are cold and the great grey river

where a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,

moves imperceptibly like the accumulating

years. … (46).

To borrow Collymore’s words, Walcott’s life river outpaces his talent. Not only is the river dimly colored, but it is also analogized in cold and wintery terms; both suggesting a sense of looming death: death that will claim Walcott and his unwritten poems. This theme looms large in the White Egrets volume, indeed. In an earlier poem, “9. Spanish Series,” Walcott shares his fears with his readers and complains of:

Time that had gnawed at the stone and

eaten its heart. You, my dearest friend, Reader,

its river running through reeds and lights on the river

by the warp of a willow coiled like an ampersand (24).

Still, neither Collymore’s comments nor Baugh’s analysis rationalize Koenig’s optimism. I accounted for the latter’s disposition otherwise. Koenig is a missionary who sails alone on an unidentified river banked by a bush that summons up all kinds of wild imaginings. As the lines of the poem unfold, it is revealed that his fellow missionaries have all died; drowned in the river. As a result, his mental disposition is hallucinatory; he confuses what he sees with what he remembers. In the poem, readers learn: “He [Koenig] felt his reason curling back like parchment / in this fierce torpor” (The Star-Apple Kingdom 42). So does the poem’s perspective curl back and forth between first and third person. The optimistic 126

confidence in his ability to go on is a defense mechanism adopted in face of his predicament.

The scene, then, is a daydream to escape his nightmarish situation:

The others had died,

like real men, by death. I, Koenig, am a ghost,

ghost-king of rivers. Well, even ghosts must rest.

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

in which there is a real river and a real sky,

so I’m not really tired, and should push on. (43).

The real and the fictitious are swapped. Koenig thinks of himself as a ghost; his dead fellow missionaries as real men. He longs for a fiction to deliver him out of his reality. Furthermore, this fiction is set with a real river and real sky. In conclusion, the rationale of Koenig’s optimism is his very irrationality.

Walcott’s reproduction of the classical river image undergoes a notable subversion when it chronicles the age of his nation. The nation’s river is tamed, branched and reduced to faint threads. Whereas a “green river” chronicles Walcott’s youth, there is little room for hope when Walcott chronicles his nation’s lifetime. Unlike Koenig for whom future is his only deliverance, Achille anticipates no hope for his nation. Back from his imaginary journey into some River of Ancestry in Africa, mature Achille of mature Walcott (1990) “foresaw their

[his people’s] future. He knew nothing could change it. / The tinkle from coins of the river, the tinkle of irons. / The son’s grief was the father’s, the father’s his son’s” (Omeros 146). To reverse this deadlock is as formidable a task as to reverse the river’s course. So, like Koenig, 127

Achille eventually resorts to irrationality as his promise:

and the one thought thudding in him was, I can deliver

all of them by hiding in a half-circle, then I could

change their whole future, even the course of the river

would flow backwards, past the mangroves. … (148).

The river as time, in this wider context, is both crippled and crippling.

A key poem in this regard is the appropriately entitled “The River” poem in The Gulf.

In substance, the poem is about a river lacking essence. There “was one, once;” now, it stands

“reduced by circumstance” (53). Accordingly, the river’s features are contrasted, in the poem, between once and now. Once, “it could roar through town, / foul-mouthed, brown-muscled, brazenly / drunk, a raucous country-bookie” (53). Now, on the other hand, it could hardly stand as

it has grown

too footless for this settlement

of shacks, rechristened a city;

its strength wasted on gutters (53).

The river’s muscles, too, shrink to shriveling “brown integument” (53). Its roaring mouth now hosts a “tongue [that] stutters” (53). The recession culminates in the image of a close death:

“it dies a little // daily, it crawls towards a sea” (53). More so, for the Caribbean footless river

“never understood the age / what progress meant” (53). Since Caribbeans are rootless and historyless (as “The Sea” chapter explores and the present section suggests), time signifies stasis rather than progress. Without history, an original point or virtual temporal beginning, any talk of moving forward (or otherwise) seems nonsensical. This reading illuminates further 128

the river’s laborious “crawl[ing] towards a sea” (53), the sea being Walcott’s image for the past and history as has already been concluded in “The Sea” chapter of this study.

Walcott returns to the same image in Midsummer where “the thawed river, muscling toward its estuary, / swims seaward with the spring” (“XLV”) and yet again in Tiepolo’s

Hound. In the latter book, the image is perfected. The wandering narrator figures to reflect upon

that point where a river, straining to join the sea,

submerges itself in a sand bank, though its surface

corrugates from the eddying wind, it contentedly

nibbles the mangrove roots … .

At high tide in the rainy season they both bear one

into the other, to share the thundering shore

but now the wind-grooved lagoon, ark of the heron

…

is damned by the sand bank to a circular motion

fretful to find release, a union known once (87).

Circularity is no less static than motionlessness. The sea is the last straw for the dying river.

The river is moving seaward (towards the past) as its only hope to survive the present. So as the Midsummer’s river never makes it to the sea, the “damned” river in Tiepolo’s Hound never quenches its thirst for one. The scene, in Tiepolo’s Hound, tellingly concludes with “a clerical egret / pecking through dead leaves for our history” (88). The narrator’s journey itself 129

concludes with restlessness as his “grief [is] unhealed / by the sacral egrets at a river’s mouth”

(151).

Lack of progress as a feature of time in the Caribbean informs the river image in two more poems. In the title poem of The Star-Apple Kingdom, the movement of the river is repetitious:

The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel

sprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees,

and all of the windmills and sugar mills moved by mules

on the treadmill of Monday to Monday, would repeat

in tongues of water and wind and fire, in tongues

of Mission School pickaninnies, like rivers remembering

their source, … (46).

‘Fell’ suggests progressive movement; downward for that matter, however. Repeating ‘mill’ plus the very verb ‘repeat’ further undermines the idea of progress. That the river repetitively remembers its origin undermines the idea yet more. ‘Forward’ is out of place as ‘remember’ signals rather backwards.

In Omeros, too, Achille’s imaginary sailing along the River of Ancestry is dramatized in similar terms. The journey’s climax and anticlimax are portrayed thus:

For hours the river gave the same show

for nothing, …

…

… Then the river coiled into a bend.

He saw the first signs of men, tall sapling fishing-stakes 130

he came into his own beginning and his end,

for the swiftness of a second is all that memory takes.

Now the strange, inimical river surrenders its stealth

to the sunlight. And a light inside him wakes,

skipping centuries, ocean and river, and Time itself (134).

In conclusion, the motif of repetition explains why Walcott does not specify and detail the different river phases in his poetry. When the past is assertively the present as is the case in the Caribbean, the Caribbean poet has no use for phases. But, this repetition accounts for the motif of crossing the river by way of breaking out of this deadlock.

4.2 Crossing the River

Since “rivers mark territorial boundaries, crossing them is often symbolically important” Ferber remarks (170). In Walcott’s case, the boundaries are geographical, cultural and ideological. Hence, crossing the river would designate transcending these schisms into the

“third truth” realm. The question to be tackled: has Walcott ever crossed the river?

The Fortunate Traveller is a good start into inspecting this symbolic aspect of the river image. The very structure of the volume implies the theme of crossing meridians. The volume falls into three parts: “North,” “South,” and “North.” This structure suggests the trajectory followed by the volume’s Traveller. Indeed, Thieme reads the “North” parts as framing the

“South” one. Thieme, notes, too, that: “While this geographical dichotomy does point up distinctive differences between them [North and South], the sense of the ‘other’ place, whether it be the temperate North or the tropical South, is omnipresent” (166). Furthermore,

Thieme differentiates between the North poems whose central theme is “falling in love with

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America”40 and the “South” ones where the poet is tormented by a sense of exile at home

(166, 167). So, the journey from North to South and back North reflects this state of restlessness. This explains why the structure underpins (latently) Walcott’s next volume:

Midsummer; and is reproduced (manifestly) later in The Arkansas Testament. Walcott negotiates these binaries in these volumes; experimenting with possibilities.

In Midsummer, for example, Walcott shows the meridians disappear at high summer.

The midsummer motif connects the volume’s fifty-four lyrics as the midsummer moment is shown to melt the South and the North regions in its tropical heat41. Indeed, in The Fortunate

Traveller, neither South nor North figures privileged. In Midsummer, privileges, if any, are somehow controversial. Balakian, for example, calls Midsummer “Walcott’s most American book … [as] he appears more at home in his exile, a cosmopolitan poet absorbing the pulse of many cultures” (354). On the other hand, Thieme holds that the midsummer moment is eventually “associated with the Caribbean and the quintessential Walcott’s setting of a St.

Lucian beach” (174). Both readings could be validated from Walcott’s essay “The Garden

Path: V. S. Naipaul.” At one point, Walcott wonders: “What happens in the summer in New

York? Why is the sticky, insufferable humidity of any city summer preferable or more magical than the dry fierce heat of the Caribbean, which always has the startling benediction of breeze and shade? Why is this heat magical in Greece or in the desert and just heat in

Trinidad?” (127). Midsummer was published in 1984; “The Garden Path: V. S. Naipaul” in

1987. The above posed questions imply Caribbean summer still lacks in dignity despite the volume-length attempt at normalizing meridians. This supports Balakian’s reading that

America persists to be the ideal. But, the rhetorical tone that underlies Walcott’s trio of questions might favor Thieme’s. Either way, that the questions sound pressing three years

40 The line “falling in love with America” is quoted from Walcott’s poem “Upstate” (Fortunate Traveller 6).

41 See Thieme pp. 169, 170, 172, 174 and King p. 366.

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after Midsummer signalizes these questions remain unresolved; meridians uncrossed.

In The Arkansas Testament, debate has no room. The North-South structure of The

Fortunate Traveller is evident in the Testament’s structure. The latter volume is halved into two parts: ‘Here’ and ‘Elsewhere.’ Thieme notes that “the binary partition that structures the volume is an extremely porous one and the two worlds are seen to interpenetrate one another in both predictable and unexpected ways” (175). Still, that ‘Here’ is the Caribbean credits it with the privilege (ibid). Up to The Bounty, meridians persist. Thieme meticulously notes, in the latter volume, “homecoming remains an ideal to be pursued, not a goal which has been reached, an exhortation rather than an attainment, and Walcott’s poetry in the collection as a whole remains as poised between worlds, discourses and value-systems as ever” (195). In the appropriately entitled poem “8/ Homecoming,” the narrator fluctuates between feeling at home and restlessly homeless:

My country heart, I am not home till Sesenne sings,

[…]

… I watch the bright wires follow

Sesenne’s singing, sunlight in fading rain,

and the names of rivers whose bridges I used to know (The Bounty 31).

Although the narrator misses the homeliness feeling, a song could make him at home. He remembers the river names yet knowledge of the rivers’ bridges (the crossing facilitators) is receding.

In The Fortunate Traveller, the poet fears his Northern love is a betrayal to his home; yet, back home, he feels betrayed; or estranged from his home island, to say the least. Hence, the crossing is never perfect. The title poem (which appears in the concluding “North” part), exemplifies this imperfect crossing. The travelling narrator reports:

I sat on a cold bench 133

under some skeletal lindens.

Two other gentlemen, black skins gone gray

as their identical, belted overcoats,

crossed the white river.

They spoke the stilted French

of their dark river (88).

Crossing the river is not complete for it is superficial. The ‘bleached’ gentlemen neither overcome the ‘white’ legacy of colonialism nor do they restore their ‘black’ African heritage: their tongue is French; and “stilted” for that.

In Omeros, the crossing is unattainable. For one reason, weather conspires against the enterprise. The rain is seen to facilitate the river’s cause:

It was as if

the rivers, envying the sea, tired of being crossed

in one leap, had joined in a power so massive

that it made islands of villages, made bridges

the sieves of a force that shouldered culverts aside. (53).

For another reason, the mission is portrayed as formidable as hardening the flowing river. In the River of Ancestry, Achille “wanted the brown water / to harden into a road, but the river widened ahead / and closed behind him” (134). And when attainable, it is never about overcoming the Pre-cross imperatives. Omeros’ narrator crosses the river but still he identifies with his fellow Islanders who have not yet:

Privileges did not separate me, instead

they linked me closer to them [fellow islanders] by that mental chain 134

[…]

… The river

had been crossed, but the chain-links of eyes in each face

still flashed submission or rage; … (210).

As the river crossing so is “Travelling up or down rivers might also mark changes in symbolic states” Ferber says (170). In George Eliot’s words, “our lives glide on: the river ends we don’t know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore”

(qtd. in Ferber 170). Of Ferber’s examples, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is particularly illuminating in reading Walcott’s up/down journeys especially that Walcott alludes to the piece in his downriver journey. Marlow journeys up the Congo and in the meanwhile he delves “into something primitive and horrible, though whether it is Africa itself or the character of the Europeans is left ambiguous” (Ferber 170). As if, in response, if not in riposte, Walcott reverses Conrad’s journey course in “The Fortunate Traveller.” Rather than up, “Sunday / wrinkles downriver from the Heart of Darkness” (93). Rather than horrid and primitive Africa, the Traveller asserts in a succession of statements:

Through Kurtz’s teeth, white skull in elephant grass

the imperial fiction sings. …

… .

The heart of darkness is not Africa.

The heart of darkness is the core of fire

in the white center of the holocaust.

The heart of darkness is the rubber claw [/]

selecting a scalpel in antiseptic light,

the hills of children’s shoes outside the chimneys,

the tinkling nickel instruments on the white altar (93/94). 135

Walcott’s journey is not a simple parody of Conrad’s metaphor for Africa. Where the journey up the Congo, brought Marlowe closer to horrid Africa, Walcott’s downriver images expose the horrid legacy of (European) colonization. In contrast, Philip Davis perceives Conrad as

“harbinger of the twentieth century and its horrors, conceiving of civilized life as a thin, barely cooled layer of molten lava that at any moment might break and plunge the unwary walker into the fiery depths below” (152). In other words, Davis’ statement evinces he does not blame Conrad for his share in these horrors for Conrad registers his insights rather than propagates imperialist designs. Walcott believes otherwise, however: Heart of Darkness (and its likes) sanctifies colonization.

Journeying up the river brings no consolation for Walcott (or his personae) as is the journey downriver. Either course is always banked with images of colonization and its legacy.

In The Arkansas Testament, the narrator contemplates:

the brown river flowed uphill,

its noise coiled round the Morne,

and it left the old sugar mill

to look after its cane alone (“Roseau Valley” 18).

The sugar mill stands still and the cane fields are a persistent reminder of the colonization era and the slavery episode and their atrocities. That the one (the mill) is deserted and the latter

(the cane field) is entrusted to such a custodian indicate colonizers unapologetically laid the islands waste.

4.3 “I was a knot of paradoxes”

In her study of Walcott’s Caribbean-phase poetry, Ismond defines the phase thematically by its concern with “Caribbean identity and self-definition” (1). Robert D.

Hamner, on the other hand, uses a four-phase scheme so as to organize Critical Perspectives

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on Derek Walcott. Ismond’s 1948-to-1979 phase-block occupies three of Hamner’s four phases. In the “Introduction,” Hamner comments on his scheme. First, his phases’ titles echo the chapter-titles of Walcott’ autobiographic poem Another Life. Accordingly, Hamner’s phase-scheme goes: The Divided Child: 1948-1959; The Estranging Sea: 1960-1969; Homage to Gregorias: 1970-1979, and A Simple Flame: 1980-1990 (4, 5, 7, 9). Accepting either of

Ismond’s or Hamner’s schemes would neatly place In a Green Night (1962) among the volumes of the identity crisis. Hamner terms the crisis ‘divide.’ In terms of aesthetics, the volume is a watershed for the Caribbean. For Walcott himself, Thieme sees in the volume both “a major step forward” and “the first clear step on his Odyssean journey towards becoming a Caribbean Homer” (34, 38). And Walcott did, in actual fact. For Walcott’s Basin,

In a Green Night marks “the most impressive period of West Indian poetry thus far” (Breiner

98). Not less for Walcott appeared to be “the first poet produced in some sense by the West

Indies” than for “the quality and promise of its poetry” (ibid).

Exploring the identity crisis, or divide, takes the form of charting a dry river in Green.

As the title in “A Far Cry from Africa,” for example, literally suggests, the poet is physically at a great distance from the ‘home’ of his blood. The content explores a distance in sentiment, too. The poem is a meditation carried out in retrospect on the 1950s-Uprising of the Mau Mau

(part of the native Kenyan Kikuyu ethnicity) against European colonizers42. Half the poem

(two stanzas) reflects on the historical Uprising with the persona disavowing allegiance to either the slaughtered colonizers or their slaughterers; despite the latter’s anticolonial just cause. The other half (two stanzas) transposes the persona’s indecisiveness towards the historical Mau Mau Uprising (i.e. his racial loyalty) on the dividedness of his identity.

Walcott is of a mixed white-black ancestry. Ultimately, both questions (the historical and the racial) remain open and unresolved in the poem. So, the poem’s river is a “parched river”

42 Wikipedia contributors. "Mau Mau Uprising."

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which contrasts with the ‘generously’ flowing “Bloodstreams” of the opening scene (18).

‘Parched’ comments on both identity (dried out) and the speaker’s state (thirsty for an identity). The poem concludes with a statement of hybrid identity. Rather than reconciling the divide, the statement entrenches the divide:

I who am poisoned with the blood of both,

Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

I who have cursed

The drunken officer of British rule, how choose

Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? (18).

This elaborate statement paved the way to navigate a new ‘third’ platform to forge an identity that answers to the Caribbean experience. The “third truth” finds expression in The Star-Apple

Kingdom. Through Shabine, Walcott reworks the above statement into:

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation (4).

Whereas in the Green version identity was bifurcated, in the Star-Apple one, it is forked. But, in the former volume, identity is an irreconcilable binarism (schizophrenic); in the latter it is a black hole that absorbs all.

The ‘divide’ imposed by the colonization-annihilation concomitants is realized in riverine imagery in yet another poem in the debut volume, Green. In the recto of “A Far Cry from Africa” appears “Ruins of a Great House.” It is a country-house poem contemplating the fall of the British Empire and its enduring legacy. The once one-river identity is split, in

“Ruins”. Indeed, it is clogged by colonization. The clog’s build-up process is symbolized by the image of lime trees that used to grow in the garden of the 19th-century colonial mansion, 138

the Great House. The speaker observes: “It seems that the original crops were limes / Grown in the silt that clogs the river’s skirt” (19). The land’s gift, the silt, turns its very curse for it allures the colonizers, in the first place. This gift-turning-curse image re-appears in Omeros:

“a brown river // that was dammed with silt” (247). That the house stands in ruins may justify the river back to flow. That the lime used to feed on the silt, which, in turn, clogs the river reads: colonizers prospers on the colonized’s divide. Walcott elaborates on the silt and the

Empire relation yet in poem “7” (The Bounty), where

the rusted enamel tin

of the moon stuck in the silt at the depth of the ochre river

and the chocked canals were part of an imperial decay,

parliament and poor plumbing; … (30, emphasis added).

It is notable in the above images, how Walcott’s river of identity gradually comes to figure palely yellowish and brownish; down-to-earthly. This recalls and contrasts with the green river of Sea Grapes (72). It falls here in place to trace the spectrum of the river colors in

Walcott’s poetry as it is particularly linked to colonization, its lingering legacy and the surviving imprints in the problematic Caribbean identity.

The rather optimistic tone of a healed injury and a restored river flow in “Ruins” persists in “Tales of the Islands” sonnets (Chapters) sequence in the same volume, Green.

Although the “Tales” sequence explores the lasting imprints of colonization in different

Caribbean islands/societies, its river is romantically gold. Unlike the slaver’s lime that is nourished by the fertilizing silt in “Ruins,” the aureate river Dorée in the “Tales” is fertilized by lime; a different sort of lime, to be sure. The first ‘Tale’ is entitled “la rivière dorée” which translates: ‘the golden river’. The sonnet portrays an image of

The marl white road, the Dorée rushing cool

Through gorges of green cedars, like the sound 139

Of infant voices from the Mission School,

Like leaves like dim seas in the mind; ici43, Choiseul (26).

Rather than blocked by exploitive schemes of the colonizers or eclipsed by the colonizers’ faith codes (as will be shown below in Another Life), the Dorée finds a way through the cedars. In other words, it co-lives with the cedar (vestiges of the Empire). Furthermore, despite its coming from “Mission School” there is a promising tone for a better future in the

“infant voices” image. This becomes apparent in the juxtaposition of the rushing Dorée image and the marl road. Marl is a lime rock known for its fertilizing properties and acid- neutralizing components44. Among lime’s other uses, however, is treating water. Precisely, lime is added to water to bring the level of acids down; of oxygen up. In other words, it restores a healthier balance among the elements. In the river of identity context, this translates into the prospect of a hybridized identification. This reading of marl as a symbol of the hybridized identity potential is augmented by the image of the river of identity in The

Fortunate Traveller. In “Beachhead”, the speaker contemplates “a channel / of the river” and projects his conflicting ancestral allegiances on the river. The river “is pushed back / by the ancestral quarrel // of fresh water and salt” (22).

The romantic Dorée appears yet again in The Arkansas Testament. In stark contrast to the aforementioned “ochre river” where the “tin / of the moon [is] stuck” (The Bounty “7” 30), the Testament’s is a “sunlit river D’Oree” (“The Villa Restaurant” 25). Ostensibly, the latter

Dorée undermines the present argument that surveys the chronological dimming in the river’s color. However, it is not. The poem is a dedicated register of the speaker’s sensual infatuation with the “terra-cotta waitress” at the restaurant. The river visualizes the waitress’ eyes. So, the

Testament’s Dorée is in line with the argument; Walcott temperamentally colors the river

43 French for: (over) here.

44 Wikipedia contributors. "Marl."

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image to match his attitude to the theme at hand.

The image of the aureate Dorée River needs to be compared with the argentic river in the “Conqueror” poem in Green. The persona describes the scenery of an imagined painting depicting a pastoral scene in the Caribbean “amber landscapes, [which are] hardly true to life” (67). Unlike the golden Dorée, here, “a mounted traveler / Splashes a silver river scarcely flowing / Through banks of ageing poplars” (67). That the river is “scarcely flowing” recalls the “parched river” of “A Far Cry from Africa” (Green 18). As if the optimistic tone of golden rivers and the restored river flow is a temporary break to steam off Walcott’s frustrated identity crisis (and river image).

In later volumes, the brown color prevails. Examples include: the “brown, clogged river” of Another Life (33); “the small … brown creek” in “Koenig of the River” (The Star-

Apple Kingdom 45); “the brown river [that] flowed uphill” in “Roseau Valley” (The Arkansas

Testament 18); and the brown river running through Omeros (139, 145, 148, 247).

Color aside, the clogged identity river of Green develops in Walcott’s subsequent volumes. The example from Another Life stands out. In this book, Walcott “most fully fulfilled his vow to realize St. Lucia on the printed page” (Thieme 87). In its aesthetic craftsmanship and grandeur, Lennard finds Another Life comparable to William

Wordsworth’s Prelude (61). However, whereas in the Prelude the reader detects

Wordsworth’s “sense of [his] life as itself epic” Walcott’s poem betrays his “need for epic dignity” (Lennard 61). It is an interesting coincidence with the argument of this section that

Ferber, indeed, praises Wordsworth as the “great poet of rivers” and testifies the praise alluding to Wordsworth’s The Prelude (172).

In Another Life, the clogged river scene is set and portrayed thus

a stone church by a brown, clogged river,

the leper colony of Malgrétoute. 141

A church, hedged by an unconverted forest,

a beach without a footprint, clear or malformed,

no children, no one, on the hollow pier (33).

Like the ruined Great House, the stony church neighbors the river. The church is as iconic of the Empire as is the Great House, too. However, that the House is no longer explains the rather ‘optimistic’ tone that closes the lime garden scene whereby: “The imperious rakes are gone, their bright girls gone, / The river flows, obliterating hurt” (Green 19). That the Church stands still and functions (its bell chimes; its priest goes about his business [33]), on the other hand, explains the image of a still “brown, clogged river.” The Empire, colonizing the land, ceased to be but colonizing the people’s conscience survives as implied by the “church, hedged by an unconverted forest” (33). It is a religious code imposed on the native faith codes. The scene is one possible manifestation of the dividedness of “The Divided Child,” the title of Book One in Another Life (where the scene appears).

The complexities of Caribbean history do not facilitate internalizing the conventional symbolism of the river of identity. Unlike the classical identification with glorious native rivers, Walcott and the Caribbeans identify with rivers that are flagging and feeble: “those rivers, threads of spittle” (The Star-Apple Kingdom “Sabbaths, W.I.” 23). ‘Spittle’ does not only signify the river is on the verge of dying but it also stripes the symbol of its conventional dignity and pride. The Star-Apple Kingdom’s spittle-river has been foreshadowed a decade earlier (in The Gulf), in a more benign belittlement version: “frothing shallows of the river”

(“Guyana” 38).

Indeed, The Gulf (Walcott’s third published volume) signals in its title an entrenched sense of estrangement from place. In the title poem itself, the persona travels South and North in America to finally identify with the American South for “the South felt like home” (29). 142

Among his list of the South’s homely features is “the sluggish river with its tidal drawl” (29).

In a quite patriotic tone, Walcott ascribes, in “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” essay, to the black South the credit of founding America saying squarely: “America is black” (51).

Most importantly he uses the epithet “river-cultures” to identify the founding slave-fathers’ communities (ibid).

In another poem from The Gulf, “D’Aubaignan,” the river mirrors Walcott’s identity crisis. The child’s cry in the poem: “the river’s mirror drowned me!” sums and summons

Walcott’s crisis to the surface. It awakens his “terror,” namely, his “knowledge of rivers and friends” (Gulf 52). Prosaically, though no less lyrically, Walcott spells his terror in “The

Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” essay: “the river, stilled, may reflect, mirror, mimic other images, but that is not its depth” (53). In a few words, it is the river’s simplistic superficiality.

This unease points to the decisive hypothetical aspect of Walcott’s identity crisis: identity is a fathomless (perhaps, unfathomable) and multi-faceted construct. This ‘knowledge’ is part of the gulf that widens between Walcott and his fellow islanders. At one point, in “The Muse of

History,” Walcott begrudges the latter their ‘unawareness’: “Fisherman and peasant [who] know who they are and what they are and where they are, [for] when we show them our wounded sensibilities we are, most of us, displaying self-inflicted wounds” (63). The crisis is poetically portrayed in Omeros. In the poet’s homecoming scene, the gulf/“gap” is manifest in the brief chat between him and the driver. The driver’s rhetorical question “The place changing, eh?” (228) opens up the gap. From the driver’s perspective, that the “old rumshop

[sic] had gone” is a change. From the poet’s, on the other hand, that the “river / with its clogged shadows” remains clogged undermines the idea of change (228). The gap as a theme, however, binds him ironically to the other characters in Omeros. With a difference, nevertheless.

Omeros’ characters suffer from gap/wound that separates/links them to the home 143

Black continent, not the home Caribbean island. Collectively:

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 the rain,

the bright sound for the sun, a hissing noun for the river,

and always the word “never,” and never the word “again” (152).

The loss of identity is formally reinforced by the internal-rhyme of “river” and “never.” The comma effects a caesura in the last line, allowing for a coincidence of sounds (full rhyme).

The same formal technique (rhyme) is employed on another occasion, in Omeros, yet again.

The attainability/ unattainability of a lost identity is expressed in the full-rhyme of “river” and

“ever” in the scene when

Crouching for his friend [i.e. Hector] to hear,

Achille whispered about their ancestral river,

and those things he would recognize when he got there,

his true home, forever and ever and ever,

forever, compère. … (232, italics in the original).

The rhyme scheme is integrated to the theme of problematic identity permeating the whole epic. The rhyme scheme here is, to use Lennard’s terms, “thematic,” rather than “semantic,”

(205, italics in the original). Furthermore, Lennard’s distinction between the thematic function of full-(perfect) rhymes and half-rhymes is equally important. The former, Lennard asserts

“chime, or confirm sense” (191). The latter, on the other hand, “tend dissonantly to question sense” (191). Building on that, the impossibility of restoring the river of identity is confirmed in the most assertive terms: never ever. 144

For Maxwell, on the other hand, it is “the distance between rhymes” (116) rather than the degree of fullness that matters. The wider the distance, the more “subconscious” is the impact. Maxwell’s analysis, then, adds another dimension to reading the “never” buried in the middle of the line (152) and the end-rhyme “ever” (232). The ‘repeated’ “ever” is to be considered, too. For Maxwell, in fact, “Regarding repetition, there is none in poetry … Ever”

(53). Between the first occurrence of the word and its subsequent “technically identical” recurrence(s), there is implied “the need to say the same again” that compels the ‘repetition,’ hence: “Either side of that are different worlds” (53, italics in the original). Whereas the word/line, in its first appearance “outran thought,” it “walks in step with it” in its reappearance (53). This translates, in Achille’s case above thus: the first ‘ever’ is extracted from the “forever” by way of underscoring the persistence implied in “forever”. The second lean “ever,” on the other hand, exposes Achille’s doubt.

In his dream journey back to Africa, “Achille felt the homesick shame / and pain of his

Africa” (134). The homesick shame is epitomized in Achille’s failure to “remember the name

/ of the river” (134). Later, the river discloses its identity: “The river was sloughing its old skin like a snake … branch of the Congo” (135). However, the dream vanishes and Achille is aroused by “the sluggish odour / of river” (143), the river of his Caribbean island. In other words, Achille awakens to the ephemerality of the ancestral sentiments. It is as ephemeral as is the quest for a national identity.

Walcott has been treating the river of identity image as early as his first volume. That the question is still unresolved up to Omeros reflects the complexities involved in attaining one. The divide is further complicated in Walcott’s epic verse-novel (Omeros). Walcott’s voice in this epic is discernible and unapologetically direct. Rather than speaking from behind a mask or a surrogate character, Walcott employs what Hamner terms a Dantesque “reflexive consciousness” meaning that he “participates in his own Narrative” (“Introduction” 11). On 145

par with this shedding of masks is the blurring of past-present and Europe-Africa polarities towards a “New World identity,” Hamner argues (ibid). Seeking an identity that overcomes the originary split is epitomized in Philoctete more than other Omeros’ characters. Ma

Kilman, the local bar owner who, in addition, is portrayed as a Sybil figure in the epic due to her skills and knowledge into the secrets of the Obeah mystic tradition, diagnoses Philoctete’s plight to be “the branched river of his corrupted blood” (19). Like his creator (Walcott),

Philoctete is torn between the African-European splits and poisoned by both. The poison or corruption is symbolic of the two heritage’s crippling effects towards a new identity-rhetoric.

The Caribbean Adam and Eve scene in “Sainte Lucie” (Sea Grapes) abstracts this poisoned, corrupted blood motif. To make do with his Caribbean fall, Adam “has killed snakes / that has climbed out of rivers” (47); with all the poisonous, corrupted and sinful implications of

‘snakes.’

Ma Kilman, herself, goes through a similar journey to restore her Obeah skills and resurrect the Obeah gods Erzulie, Shango and Ogun. Though the delineations of the gods are fading, they never die out as they are reserved but “subdued in the rivers of her blood” (242).

Thieme finds the compromising approach to be manifest in the structural employment of intertextuality by way of saying identity is “an intertextual construct” (88) rather than a unified self. I would add that the compromise is realized, too, in the nuances of language use in Walcott’s poetry. I would exemplify this aspect by contrasting the preposition-use in rendering the religious colonization. Conquering the religious identity of the slaves as a form of clogging rivers is not unique of Another Life (33). It figures also in “Koenig of the River”

(The Star-Apple Kingdom):

They had all caught the missionary fever:

they were prepared to expiate the sins

of savages, to tame them as he would tame this river 146

subtly, as it flowed, accepting its bends (43).

Where clogging allows for finding a way to flow, faintly for that matter, taming is an orchestrated (colonized) flow. For another example, in the image’s re-appearance in “33/ A

Santa Cruz Quartet” (The Bounty), the relation of church and river is further reworked.

Whereas, in Another Life, the church’s position relative to the clogged river is “by” it

(reconciled co-existence), in the “33” poem, the river is rather eclipsed: “the unseen … river behind the squat chapel of La Divina Pastora” (72).

4.4 “the river’s startled flowing”

The ages old association between the river and poetry makes it “Not surprisingly [that] poets have found rivers companions, counterparts, exemplars, and teachers” (Ferber 172). It is equally not surprising, and for the self-same reasons, that Walcott and his fellow Caribbean artists are companionless and parentless, and, poetically speaking, speechless. Indeed,

Walcott literally perceives Caribbean artists as “orphans of the nineteenth century” (Another

Life 77). More so for they were passionately “sedulous to the morals of a style, / [they] lived by another light” (ibid). This section will offer a survey of Walcott’s journey into finding a poetic home/voice as manifested in his dialectic engagement with the classical image of the poetry river.

In “Derek Walcott: Contemporary,” Bedient finds Walcott’s sense of “the twentieth- century dislocation” particularly visible in The Fortunate Traveller where Walcott sounds

“nostalgic for a home in poetry but finding none–not even [in] ‘the river’s startled flowing’”

(313). The quoted phrase of the startled river is excerpted from Walcott’s poem “The Bridge” in Sea Grapes (62). Sea Grapes (1976) is the volume that Balakian ranks as “a quieter and more austere book [than Another Life]” (352). Indeed, the very title of Sea Grapes stands out and has drawn critical attention. In “Ripening with Walcott,” Baugh reads in the poems’

147

rhythmic repetition an embodiment of the volume’s “incantatory effect which heightens the feeling of epiphany and celebration” (283). The very feelings are incarnated in the title’s sweet-acidic grapes. Moreover, Baugh notes the volume’s imagery is dominated by

“elementals –earth, wind, sea, rock, tree, moon, light, dark, and so on” (283). The latter part of Baugh’s analysis is a manifestation of Walcott’s holding to the nothingness of his

Caribbean home. Likewise, King comments on the elementals which he calls the

“commonplace images” (368). Rather than their commonness (nothingness), King locates

Walcott’s genius in privatizing these images; turning them into “an elaborate system of private symbols” (368). This is another realization of the sea grapes image: the co-existence of sourness and sweetness; too common yet highly personal. Thieme, too, lingers on the tropical rounded fruit, the sea grapes. The tiny globes of sea grapes comprise sweetness and bitterness as said before. The co-existing tastes make the spherical fruits metaphoric of the

New World experience and condition; sourly “postlapsarian” yet sweetly fresh and liberating from the old order (Europe) (Thieme 94-96). Walcott, indeed, specifies in his “The Muse of

History,” the fruits are metaphoric of the New World poetry (41). Whereas sourness and sweetness are inextricable in the rounded fruit, in the volume their proportions could be measured. Thieme holds that Sea Grapes’ poems are sated more with sourness than sweetness. As sourness lasts longer on the tongue after eating sea grapes, so sourness in the volume’s imagery “lingers longest in the [reader’s] mind” (95, 100). Walcott, again specifically of Caribbean poetry, asserts: “In such poetry … it is the bitterness that dries last on the tongue” (“The Muse” 41).

However, a different poem in The Star-Apple Kingdom, which Bedient analyses at some point, represents Walcott’s “dislocation” far more strongly than the one quoted from

Sea Grapes (i.e. “the river’s startled flowing”), namely “Forest of Europe,” which is tellingly dedicated to Joseph Brodsky. Bensen finds in the Russian poet (Brodsky) the epitome of “the 148

artist exiled from the land that sustains his art” (346). Dislocated and at a third-person remove from himself, Walcott empathetically describes Brodsky’s estrangement, in “Forest” thus:

Who is that dark child on the parapets

of Europe, watching the evening river mint

its sovereigns stamped with power, not with poets,

the Thames and the Neva rustling like banknotes,

then, black on gold, the Hudson’s silhouettes? (39).

Indeed, the mix of ‘black’ and ‘gold’ is just one manifestation of Walcott’s disposition.

“Forest of Europe” is representative. The dark child is brought to the foreground of the parapets and the black color appears to the fore of the silhouettes’ gold background, somehow the bitter stands out over the sweet. Furthermore, the “dark child” and “silhouettes” images sandwich the Thames and the Neva. Yet the image’s negative is: the dark child is marginalized from the rivers of power (and poetry).

In like terms, Walcott’s metropolitan education compels him to “have written poems on the Thames” (The Gulf “Hic Jacet” 70). Unlike his Caribbean archipelago, England has

“the royal river … [and] the legendary landscapes” (Sea Grapes “Midsummer, England” 67).

Walcott’s expressed tragedy is: “the [royal] River … wash[es] out my name” (Sea Grapes

“Dread Song” 26), in return. In “The Muse of History,” Walcott finds it contradictory migrating physically to England and becoming a (Caribbean) poet for he envisions: “the only thing I could see myself becoming, a West Indian poet” (63). Similarly, Walcott’s unrequited devotion to the Thames is a poetic migration that violates even Walcott’s geometrics of poetic honesty whereby the honest poet is “to write within the immediate perimeter of not more than twenty miles really” (Hirsch 72). Walcott’s dedication to the Thames is a poetic migration to

England. The infatuation with the “royal river” starkly contradicts with Walcott’s statement of identity: 149

you is Walcott?

you is Roddy brother?

Teacher Alix son?

and the small rivers

with important names (Sea Grapes “Sainte Lucie” 38).

The ‘belittled’ river image, here, is symbolic of Walcott’s displacement; both racial/national and poetic.

In Hirsch’s interview, Walcott squarely puts it: “I’m content to be a moderately good watercolorist. But I’m not content to be a moderately good poet. That’s a very different thing”

(70). This pronouncement justifies the problems posed in treating the river as a classical image of poetic talent and fluent expression. To be accurate, it is the disbelief in easy flow of the poetry river. This particular symbolic manifestation of the river is to be understood in the context of the full picture of Walcott’s theory of poetry composition.

As does the identity river image expose Walcott’s ancestral uprootedness and dislocation, the poetry river exposes his poetic homelessness and displacement. The first river image accounts for the second, undoubtedly. Being the source of “eloquence”, “fluency,” and

“Poetic genius” at one and the same time (Ferber 171), complicates further Walcott’s situation.

It is notably remarkable that, in addition to the role of the Mount Helicon of the Muses in informing the image of river symbolizing poetic fluency, Ferber notes that the image derives, too, from Cicero and Quintilian’s coined word for ‘fluency’ translating “the river of speech” (171, 172). Poets experimented, Ferber goes on, with the Quintilian coinage extensively up to a point where they start deploying the image’s inverse: “the speech of the river” (172). The counter-image is as exhausted as is its ‘straight’ counterpart, anyway. Not only that “‘babbling brook’ is a cliché” but also that “every variety of speech has been heard 150

in rivers: they babble, brawl, murmur, prattle, rave, shout, sing, and so on” (172). Walcott, indeed, portrays the river as the custodian of the race’s speech:

The only interpreter

of their [Achille and his father] lips’ joined babble, the river with the foam,

and the chuckles of water under the sticks of the pier,

where the tribe stood like sticks themselves, reversed

by reflection. … (Omeros 136).

This facet of the river-image (i.e. speech of the river) is of a particular importance for Derek

Walcott. Walcott, who is historically homeless and culturally rootless, without a river to identify with, uses the speaking river image to portray his poetic homelessness. But what would Walcott’s speechless river utter? Paradoxically, speech.

Maxwell’s poetics informatively tell-all. The key idea of Maxwell’s book is that composing poems is an interplay between “two materials, one’s black and one’s white” at the poet’s disposal (11). One of this piebald “yins and yangs” possible realizations is “sound and silence” (ibid). To think “the white sheet is nothing” is poets’ gravest of lapses, Maxwell warns (ibid). Committing or evading the mistake is the line between prose writers and poets.

The former approach the white material as “a tabula rasa,” the latter know “it’s half of everything” (ibid, italics in the original). Writing poems, Maxwell counsels, is all about

“skillful, intelligent use of the whiteness” (ibid). This conclusion sums up Walcott’s total achievement in intelligently spotting the yangs out of the yins of his speechless, New World river.

Walcott makes the best of the New World white sheet, exclaiming: “O happy desert!”

Significantly, this phrase appears in Walcott’s essay: “The Figure of Crusoe.” Walcott, the artist, self-identify with Crusoe on many levels: 151

Crusoe’s survival is not purely physical, not a question of the desolation of

his environment, but a triumph of will. He is for us, today, the twentieth

century symbol of artistic isolation and breakdown, of withdrawal, of the

hermetic exercise that poetry has become, even in the New World, he is the

embodiment of the schizophrenic Muse whose children are of all races. …

like all of us uprooted figures, he had made his home, and it is the cynical

answer that we must make to those critics who complain that here, no art, no

history, no architecture, by which they mean ruins, in short, no civilization,

it is “O happy desert!” We live not only on happy, but on fertile deserts, and

we draw our strength, like Adam, like all hermits, all dedicated craftsmen,

from that rich irony of our history. (“The Figure of Crusoe” 40, emphasis

added).

In their account of Walcott’s achievement, Baugh and Nepaulsingh underline the nothingness aspect: “Accepting the nothing he was given, the poet creates defiantly out of the derelicts of life around him” (“Reading Another Life: A Critical Essay” 182). For the self- same set of reasons Walcott identifies with Robert Lowell. In “On Robert Lowell” essay,

Walcott empathizes with Lowell’s felt “pain of making poems” as both poets do not trust in

“inspiration” but rather “in labour” (89, 100). Walcott’s iconic definition: “Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main” (“The Antilles”45 70) captures further the complexities facing Walcott as a New World poet. This definition alludes to the self-imposed whiteness

(nothingness) involved in avoiding the influence of poetic tradition.

So, as the sea stands, in Walcott’s poetry, for the history of nothing, so is Walcott’s poetry river mute and devoid of sounds. The process is designed. Symbolically, Walcott

45 In full: “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” It is Derek Walcott’s Nobel Prize lecture delivered in December 7, 1992.

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drains the river of sounds to suggest terminating his poetic apprenticeship to Tradition. Re- filling the river’s tongue with the New World sounds is as symbolic. The latter gesture signals inscribing the New World talent.

Silencing the river proceeds by piecemeal and from strongest to faintest sounds. First, in “The River” (Gulf), harsh-sounds are ceded as the river “surrenders its gutturals / to the stern, stone Victorian bridge” (53). Next, a decade later, in the title poem of The Star-Apple

Kingdom, the feebler sounds vanished: “No vowels left / in the mill wheel, the river” (49).

Having Maxwell’s insightful analysis on “the emotional work of vowels and the storyboarding of consonants” in a poem (35), it is clear how with lost sounds other things get lost, too. Which would explain why in another poem of The Star-Apple, “the river poured its silver / like some remorseful mine, giving and giving” (“Koenig of the River” 44). What the native river has to say is poured down a drain for the native artists fall short of decoding its message, just as the “native reading an inverted / newspaper” (44) would never know the news it tells.

It would take Walcott roughly another decade to restore articulation to his river of speech: vowels first, gutturals (deluded, nevertheless) later. Put differently, the river was first vocalized, and then enunciated. In The Arkansas Testament appears a poem, in the HERE

(Caribbean) section, entitled “Cul de Sac Valley” where Walcott’s speaking river (a rivulet for that matter) is a toddler trying its throat:

In the rivulet’s gravel

light gutturals begin,

in the valley, a mongrel,

a black vowel barking,

sends up fading ovals (10). 153

A similar journey has been undertaken by Walcott to carve a working relationship with the ‘word’: English. In “Koenig of the River,” Koenig, the hallucinating missionary

“get[s] this river vexed / with his complaints” (42). Letting the river sleep, instead, is about

Walcott’s ultimate resolution, shared in his Nobel Prize lecture. Being “told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture” (“The Antilles” 77).

By inference, once the river’s inferiority is mocked, the poet is best mocks the mocker; never complain to (nor of) the river.

Walcott’s full realization of this alternative is dramatized in “Koenig of the River.” In the poem, Koenig announces: “this was a river, and Koenig, his name meant king” (42). His fancied coronation is about restoring some mission: “noble, / based on some phrase, forgotten, from the Bible” (43). Koenig is approaching the New river within his Old taming/naming schemes. Koenig did not stop for a while and asked: “Did the river want to be called anything?” (44). In other words, christened? Furthermore, directing his question to the river,

“The river said nothing” (44), perhaps, a silent protest of the very approach.

The poem’s (“Koenig”) silent sleeping river recalls Rampanalgas River, in Another

Life. Breiner finds that “The climax of Another Life is a celebration of the holiness of

Rampanalgas” (207). A holiness that is undermined by the setting of the Trinidadian river and its namesake village relative to the sea (Walcott’s image of history) (ibid). As with rivers, it is never known if Rampanalgas River wanted “to be called anything?” As with rivers, too, it got named all the same somehow. The silence of the river, in this case, mystified the name.

Where Baugh and Nepaulsingh detect a Spanish origin in the name representing “what the

Spaniards thought it looked like from the sea: a backside (nalgas) stuck up in the air like ramp

(rampa)” (328) Both scholars compare their reading to Ismond’s insights whereby the name derives from Amerindian native language. Accepting the validity of Ismond’s argument, however, Baugh and Nepaulsingh still insist the name must have, later, “been Hispanicized” 154

(328). Either way, the Spaniards tamed the river. Moreover, Ismond argues that Rampanalgas is “a concrete manifestation of historylessness/unhistoried condition” making it “a fitting site for his counter-discourse with the Old World Western muse of history” (210, 211). It is the quintessential site for a Caribbean speech of the river.

Particularly, the reference, in “Koenig,” to the cognate words of ‘koenig’ and ‘king’ is pertinent to this section on “the speech of the river.” Basically, Walcott’s poetic stuttering is to do with the complex of associations of the available speech: English. Indeed, the language as a power discourse is a post-colonial concern in all post-colonial settings. In the Caribbean, in particular, it played “a much more tainted / historical role” as a tool of eliminating any possibility of slaves rebellion (Ashcroft et al. 25/26). Rather than adapting their reality to

English, the Caribbean poet has the task of adapting English to his reality. In a few words, it is about giving the world an upper hand over the word. A process that is facilitated by the versatile nature of English46.

Translating ‘koenig,’ in this light, locates the poem in Walcott’s stage where his world has not yet gained the upper hand. Ashcroft et al. go on in their argument on the colonizing power of language and cite how “glossing gives the translated word, and thus the ‘receptor’ culture, the higher status” (65). Though both words ‘koenig’ and ‘king’ belong to the Western lingual traditions, translating the one into its English counterpart implies English is the self- evidently comprehensible tongue.

It is significant that whereas ‘Koenig’ is translated into English in the very body of the poem (not glossed marginally, not even pushed away from the text in a foot- or endnote),

‘Omeros’ is used in its Greek origin. In Thieme’s reading, Walcott “frustrates the attempt to

46 See Ashcroft et al. pp. 38-39.

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assign them47 to a single culture” (155, italics in the original). A lot of water, it seems, has flown in the river since “Koenig”. Whereas glossing and translating is condescension, untranslated words represent a political gesture (Ashcroft et al. 65). The move has a double message: metonymically, it is an act of “inscribing difference” (52); linguistically, it subverts the word/world relation signifying “the importance of discourse in interpreting cultural concepts” (63). However, using ‘Omeros’ in its Greek original remains controversial.

Apparently, the use of the Greek name has the implication of a lingering literary colonization; namely, “of need for classical validation” (Thieme 155). Thieme’s argument is generalized to include the use of the Greek poet’s name and the other characters’ Greek namesakes. In addition, such identification with the Greek culture has its origin in the metropolitan education (Breiner 90, 115) which further augments the lingual colonization implied by the untranslated ‘Omeros’ beside the literary one.

Still, the allusion to Homer has the appropriation dimension to it. On one level,

Walcott’s choice identifies with Joyce’s employment of Homer’s Odyssey as read by Said:

“Joyce’s choice of the Odyssey, for example, does not say, ‘Look what happened to the noble

Greek idea when it descends to Dublin 1904,’ but rather, ‘Odysseus is like Bloom,

Telemachus like Daedalus, Ithaca like Eccles Street, Chapter 18 like Chapter 1, and so on’”

(Beginnings, 10). Furthermore, the Greek word bears another reading involving a subversion of the Western tradition. Homer’s “indeterminate identity” (Thieme 155) identifies with the

Caribbean artist’s displacement. This is reflected in the poem’s indeterminacy in portraying

Omeros (Homer). On some occasions, Omeros figures as a Westerner; on others, the poet’s hybrid Greek culture is shown to derive more from Eastern tradition than Western, Thieme observes (155). Walcott’s poetic homelessness is epitomized, in other words, in this

47 The reference, in “them,” points at Omeros and the other characters (identifying with parallel Homeric namesakes) in Omeros.

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indeterminacy. Walcott would, in like terms, find his home precisely in his hybridized situation. A hybridity that is even reflected in Walcott’s reworking of the Homeric epic. At

Walcott’s hands, the form “conflates the genres of epic, nature poetry, autobiography, historiography and metaliterary poetic essay to create a hybrid form which, like the travelling poet, crosses meridians” (Thieme 184). This cross-genres (or, inter-genres) strategy facilitates forging a hybridized poetic identity as did the intertextuality in forging a hybridized national one (see “I was a knot of paradoxes” section above).

For after all, Omeros’ narrator is after capturing his own hybridized formula. He longs to “stop, / the echo in the throat, insisting, ‘Omeros’; / when would I enter that light beyond metaphor?” (271). Bloom cites Blake’s theory of Poetic Influence which enlightens further

Walcott’s extoling Omeros yet wishing to escape his ghost. In Blake’s theory, tied to whomever precursor and whichever tradition is eventually a form of poetic enslavement

(Bloom 29). Although the “unitary” self-made poet is a myth, Bloom argues (35), allowing himself to be “flooded … to drown” in his precursor, the ‘poet’ will become at his best “only a reader” (57, italics in the original). Thieme argues to the same effect:

Simply to absorb European intertexts is to remain a ‘colonial’ poet. In

contrast, creative adaptation and counter-discursive subversion of such

influences suggests a ‘post-colonial’ consciousness, even if Europe still

remains a departure-point and the work is being produced in the colonial

period. Of course, most literary texts habitually operate in terms of a

hybridized admixture of discursive elements rather than a straightforwardly

complicitous or adversarial response to what is perceived of as ‘tradition’

and so the opposition suggested in the previous sentence over-/simplifies in

its starkness. Thus the watershed between ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’

becomes more difficult to define than might initially seem to be the case 157

(29/30).

Thieme, later in the book, spots two remarkable metamorphoses in Walcott’s Omeros. Within

Walcott’s corpus, Thieme observes: “Where Another Life transforms autobiography into epic,

Omeros moves in the opposite direction, interlinking epic with autobiography” (154). Within

Omeros itself, on the other hand, Homer undergoes a transformation whereby he ultimately becomes “the common property of different periods and cultures” (Thieme 156). This transformation is facilitated in the poem by two processes, Thieme adds: “the passage of time” and “a spatial relocation” (ibid). In effect, Walcott (or his surrogate) takes his father’s advice to heart. In Omeros, the narrator is visited by his father’s ghost. The ghost who had satisfactorily answered his artistic call imparts to his aspiring son:

But before you return, you must enter cities

that open like The World’s Classics, in which I dreamt

I saw my shadow on their flagstones, histories

that carried me over the bridge of self-contempt,

though I never stared in their rivers, great abbeys

soaring in net-webbed stone, when I felt diminished

even by a postcard. …

[…]

I longed for those streets that History had made great,

but the island became my fortress and retreat,

[…]

But there is pride in cities, so remember this: 158

Once you have seen everything and gone everywhere,

cherish our island for its green simplicities,

enthrone yourself, if your sheet is a barber-chair,

a sail leaving harbor and a sail coming in,

…

… The sea-swift vanishes in rain, [/]

and yet in its travelling all that the sea-swift does

it does in a circular pattern. Remember that, son (187/188).

Ultimately, Homer’s metamorphosis comes to embody the ideal Caribbean artist (precisely, his crisis) as preached by the father above. Homer who has been alternately assigned to

Western and Eastern traditions without definite conclusions (or a resting place) in this regard of cultural allegiances represents the Caribbean artist’s restlessness. The Caribbean artist

(Walcott, for example) is a Homeric Odysseus: navigating “The World’s Classics” yet nostalgic to praise his “island for its green simplicities.”

In conclusion, both facets of the identity river symbolism (national and poetic identity) are intertwined in Walcott’s treatment of the river image. Rather than straightforward and easy flow, Walcott realizes that his poetic identity identifies with his forked river of national identity. Finding an identity (poetic and national alike), in Walcott’s case, is ever a restless drawing on and resorting to diverse traditions. Restlessness in itself becomes Walcott’s statement of identity. Thieme, indeed, contends that Walcott’s “movement along a discursive continuum … offers emancipation from the Manichean binaries that had stifled Walcott’s earliest attempts to create an art which would both be uniquely his own and an expression of 159

the distinctive hybrid legacies that had shaped Anglophone Caribbean culture” (152). In a few words, Walcott’s privilege is his Caribbean multiple traditions. Creativity is about elegantly moving across and drawing on these traditions rather than identifying with one tradition

(stream). And this state of restlessness eventually proves liberating.

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5. OTHER BODIES

5.1 The Ocean

Linguistically, the sea and the ocean were used synonymously in antiquity and are still in present-day American English. Coincidently or otherwise, in Ferber’s Dictionary, the entry for “Ocean” retains a pair of homophones: “see Sea” (145).

In a few words, the ocean stands as a life giver in arts. Ferber, for example, surveys the consistent figuration of the ocean in ancient creation myths: Eastern and Western (180).

The seeming consensus in portraying ocean is partial, however. The accounts differ in two respects: first, the extent of the ocean’s role in creating life (magnitude); second, the creation of the ocean itself (genesis). Indeed, where the differing accounts credit the ocean a high magnitude they remain highly inconclusive as to ocean’s genesis. The genesis mystery provides a fertile area of imaginary speculations in literature and a reason for lack in consensus holding amongst these speculations even within the same tradition. For example, from the Greek tradition, Ferber cites Hesiod’s and Homer’s versions of the creation myth. In

Hesiod’s version, after emerging out of “Chaos”, Earth (Theogony), mate-less, begets Sea

(Pontos); mating with Heaven, on the other hand, Earth begets Ocean (Okeanos): the

“perfects river” circumscribing our world (qtd. in Ferber 180). In Homer’s version that appears in his Iliad, on the other hand, the ocean corresponds to genesis itself; the source of all: gods, humans and things (Ferber 180).

Homer’s poetic talent, indirectly, gives rise to yet another symbolism of the ocean.

Traditionally, the river is the literary symbol of poetic fluency (as has been elaborated in “The

River” chapter of this study). Homer’s greatness, however, cannot be contained in a river course. It flows beyond a river stream. His is oceanic greatness. The first to draw the simile

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between Homer and the ocean was the Roman rhetorician Quintilian in his Institutio Oratoria

(Institutes of Oratory). The epithet survives. Ages afterwards, Lord Byron, in his satiric poem

Don Juan, likens himself to Homer as both report of wars but then Byron admits: “To vie with thee would be about as vain / As for a brook to cope with ocean’s flood” (qtd. in Ferber

181); reducing his poetry river to a brook and aggrandizing Homer’s to an ocean. Similarly, in his classic sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” John Keats compares his discovery of George Chapman’s translation to Cortez’s discovery of the Pacific (Ferber 181).

It should be added that Chapman’s version appealed to Keats for its notable plainness in contrast to previous popular refined and highly cultured translations. As will be shown below,

‘plainness’ is a feature that informs Walcott’s treatment of the ocean image.

In his poetry, Walcott tests the conventional symbolism of the ocean in his Caribbean context. His test ends up an experiment. Walcott proceeds working the ocean image within the aforementioned meanings of greatness: great creations and great creators; only to realize the Caribbean lacks in both.

In the tradition of Byron and Keats, Walcott compares his achievement relative to that of Byron himself, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift and others of the English poetic tradition in “The Spoiler’s Return.” Eventually, Walcott concludes these poets have

“names wide as oceans when compared with mine” (The Fortunate Traveller 60). Their poetic achievement eclipses his. However, the oceanic greatness dwindles as Walcott proceeds to register the achievement of Nobel laureate Chilean poet: Pablo Neruda.

In a poem dedicated to and entitled “For Pablo Neruda,” Walcott perceives Neruda’s poetry as “hoarser / than the chafed Pacific” (Sea Grapes 54). Whereas Homer’s greatness nears the ocean’s, Neruda’s excels it. Still, Neruda is received poorly in his home. Neruda’s hoarse voice, the speaker goes on, echoes “soundless as snow on / the petrified Andes” (54).

Walcott elaborates further on the plighted literary landscape in the New World to show the 162

plight afflicts both the home artists and the artists’ home. Walcott projects Chile’s topography on Neruda’s plight, which is, then, projected and shown to plight Chile. This meaning culminates when Neruda is symbolically posed resting his palm against his broken heart:

emissary in a black suit, who

walks among eagles, hand, whose

five-knuckled peninsula

bars the heartbreaking ocean (54).

The idea of an unappreciated home land is informed yet in Midsummer. In “XXV,”

Walcott portrays St. Lucia as an unwritten, unpainted island in terms of “the muse of this inland ocean still waits for a name.” In other words, St. Lucia’s artistic prospects are oceanic; yet lie dormant.

Walcott identifies with Neruda’s malaise. Reconstructing the St. Lucia of his boyhood,

Walcott recalls, in “Leaving School” essay (1965), the one and only thoroughfare in St. Lucia; forming a route between the capital city Castries and Morne Fortune. The road terminates at the coast facing the Atlantic. At this point in his reminiscences, Walcott describes the Atlantic coast as “heart-breaking” (26); foreshadowing Neruda’s “heartbreaking ocean” image.

Indeed, poetic perfection, in Walcott’s judgment, is “to write / lines as mindless as the ocean’s of linear time” (Midsummer “XLIII”). This state of mindlessness abstracts Walcott’s perception of the ocean as an emblem of perfection. Here is the context of the ocean’s plainness. The ocean’s vastness and unfathomable depths makes its heart unspoiled.

Alternatively, unembellished. This feature of the ocean is emphasized twice in Walcott’s poetry. In “Landfall, Grenada,” appears the image of the “seamless ocean” (Gulf 49). In

Another Life, the image is rephrased: “the untroubled ocean” (151). Resorting to an untroubled ocean is about escaping the Caribbean ‘troubled’ inland.

Consequently, Walcott does not linger by the side of the ocean. It does not take him 163

long to see the step for what it is: escapism. In “The Sea” chapter, I cited Bloom’s stance whereby “the ephebe’s first realm is ocean, or by the side of ocean” (79). In the present section, it is particularly pertinent Bloom’s follow-up argument whereby the ocean or its side is “reached … through a fall” (79). In other words, the ephebe has recourse to the ocean by way of escaping his/her fallen reality. Hence, the moment Walcott abandons the ocean dates the maturity of his poetic vision. On a par with that, the ocean image does not occupy as considerable a space as is the sea, for instance, despite the former’s association with central thematic preoccupations: history, identity and poetry writing (i.e. the tringle of Walcott’s fallen reality).

In this regard, Walcott is comparable to his fellow diasporic Caribbeans who mistake the New World for the Promised Canaan48. The seamless, untroubled ocean eventually cracks and exposes the troubling imperatives of the New World experience. As the Hebraic diaspora is reversed in the Caribbean diaspora, so is the image and the symbolism of the ocean.

In his noted essay “Some Subtleties of the Islands,” on Derek Walcott’s “Tales of the

Islands” sequence, John Figueroa spots this reversion. Figueroa references the inversion of the conventional relational nexus of the ocean, the shipwrecked and the island in Walcott’s sequence. Traditionally, the shipwrecked sole rescue from the ocean is an island. On the contrary, Figueroa goes on, the Caribbean man who is “shipwrecked on his own shores, longs for the ocean” (164). These inversions reflect the inner conflict that seized ‘ephebe’ Walcott by the side of the ‘paradisiac’ ocean. Bloom highlights the conflicting impulses that seize the

‘ephebe’ by the side of the ocean thus: “What is instinctual in him would hold him there, but the antithetical impulse will bring him out and send him inland, questing for the fire of his own stance” (79). In Walcott’s situation, the instinctual stands for all that is primitive and

48 The Caribbean-Hebraic Canaan analogy appears in “The Muse of History” (44) and “What the Twilight Says” (15) essays.

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untroubled ideal. Eden. Walcott, the Caribbean shipwrecked Crusoe, would see in a short time the Caribbean oceanic dystopia for what it is. Monosyllabically, hell. At least, a fall.

Consequently, this revelatory shift propels Walcott’s quest for fire. Indeed, as early as In a

Green Night (1962), Walcott yearns for the ocean’s noise to hiss. He braces up to bid the

“Bitter and sleepless … ocean’s curse” a farewell (“Nearing La Guaira” 21). The curse lingers, however. At least, in the hearts of his fellow Caribbeans. Up to Omeros, one reads:

“the ancestral swell / of the ocean” (127)49 persists.

Walcott’s resolution reflects on his second major volume: The Castaway (1965).

Rohlehr contextualizes his review of The Gulf (1969) with the imagery and the thematic concerns of The Castaway: The Gulf’s antecedent. In Rohlehr’s view, the theme of maturity that comes with time passage predominates in The Castaway. In parallel, he holds that the ocean image stands out in the volume. With maturity, Rohlehr rationalizes; a sense “of

Walcott’s imperfect homecoming” obsesses him (213). As a result, the ocean image itself matures. Rather than a perfect state of pre-fall innocence, Rohlehr notes: “Ocean becomes a placid void, image of the life emptiness of the Crusoe-like castaway figure who haunts the book” (213). Along Bloom’s paradigm, Walcott, in The Castaway, nears the final phase of the ephebe stage. His instinctual/antithetical struggle is in its way to be resolved or overcome.

Not only does the ocean image stand devoid but also the ocean’s poetic and symbolic vis-à- vis emerges to be fire, Rohlehr observes (213). It has been referred to Bloom’s view above whereby the quest for fire designates the ephebe’s maturity. However, rather than resolving the instinctual-antitehtical struggle as it functions along Bloom’s paradigm; fire ignites an additional conflict in Rohlehr’s analysis. For the fires of experience “not only ripen experience into art, but wither the mind into dry despair” (213).

Not only is the ocean decolored into a void but also its roars are gradually subdued

49 Additional reference to the ocean-Middle Passage association is found in Omeros pp. 45, 130.

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across Walcott’s volumes. In The Castaway, the ocean’s voice changes pitch: “ocean’s quarrelling, / Its silence, its raw voice” (“Lampfall” 58). Indeed, readers learn, the poet “never tire[s]” of these voice variations (ibid). In Another Life, the ocean’s pitch keeps on changing; downward, for that matter. In the first appearance, the image goes: “the ocean cannonading, come!” (53). In the second, the talk is rather of the “ocean’s hiss” (64). Factually, the ocean’s voice is steady and monochrome as Walcott himself records. In “On Robert Lowell” essay,

Walcott reconstructs the setting of the house that housed Walcott and late Lowell’s meetings as follows: “on a small cliff above the white noise of the Altlantic” (104). Hence, the shift in the ocean’s voice in Another Life (from “cannonading” to “hiss”) mirrors Walcott’s disposition and stance to the theme at hand: the New World experience as opposed to the

Edenic ocean. Eventually, in the “Natural History” sequence of Sea Grapes, the ocean is reduced in both: voice and stature: “ocean, / a god once, rages, at a loss for words” (31).

‘Void’ is a key word in reconciling the divergent meanings of the ocean in Walcott’s poetry. The void translates in Walcott’s poetry into either a symbol of pre-Fall state or a mirror of the postlapsarian situation. Rohlehr reads it as a “void … within the poet’s mind and heart, and therefore imposes itself on all he sees” (217). These meanings derive from the fact that the ocean is the site of the Middle Passage that historicizes the twilight (trumpeting dawn or sunset; all depends on the vantage point) of the Caribbean history: “ocean’s curse.”

Hence, examining the ocean image in Walcott’s poetry is about exploring the double faces of the ocean image: Eden and the Fall. The ocean emerges as an Eden in Walcott’s poetry when he emphasizes its pristine quality. This quality is realized via associating the ocean with nature: the unspoiled essence or condition. In “Codicil,” the ocean and the self are used synonymously: “love of ocean … [is] self-love” (The Castaway 61). Venturing out into the ocean, then, is a venture into the inner ocean of the naked self. And this is one level of

Rohlehr’s reading of the ocean as an image mirroring the void that monopolizes Walcott’s 166

inner thoughts. Moreover, the ocean is equated with the primitive sub-self (the unconscious) in a poem from “The Natural History” sequence (Sea Grapes). Walcott warns against

“misplac[ing] your instinct for the sea” (31). In contrast, Walcott finds it harmonious to talk of “man’s will to ocean” (ibid). The ocean is the pool of instincts and unconscious wills: the primeval id as opposed to the tempered, cultivated superego. It is particularly significant that these lines appear in the poem entitled THE TURTLES; turtles play a crucial role in many

New World native creation myths that envisage life in its most primitive state. A similar juxtaposition has been effected in a previous poem of the self-same sequence. No less significant, the poem’s title is THE WALKING FISH; fish occupies a similar weight in the scientific creation ‘myth’: Darwinian evolution. In THE WALKING FISH, while “the sea breathes … the Atlantic remembers” (29). The Atlantic is associated more with memories and remembrances: romantic nostalgia. Romantic escapism and nostalgia for perfection. In addition, the verbs point to opposing temporal directions. Breathing is more about the now and here; remembering signals days of yore.

Another aspect of the pristine ocean is the image where becoming one with the ocean is portrayed as a scene of vestal virginity: a virgin marriage. In Another Life, the poet’s beloved Anna is portrayed “riffling daylong the ocean’s catalogue / of shells and algae” (98).

Of the many living organisms in the ocean, Walcott chooses shells and algae; both are simple and primal forms of life. In addition to associating ocean with primitivism, Anna, the ocean surveyor, is depicted as a “bride” and a nun and is cladded in white (98). This word-cluster is bound by color (white) and manner (chastity and innocence.) This bridal scene is another manifestation of the ocean’s unspoiled essence or condition. The image in Another Life

(1973) foreshadows the bride image in The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979). In “The Schooner

Flight,” the last section opens with Shabine depicting the after-storm scene. From among others, Shabine emphasizes a detail of watching “the veiled face of Maria Conception / 167

marrying the ocean, then drifting away / in the widening lace of her bridal train” (18, emphasis added). This image of chastity and innocence contrasts with the image contextualizing the “After the Storm” section that goes: “the whole sea still havoc” (18). Anna and Mary Conception (or her statue) are veiled nuns married (committed) to the ocean, which is nature and self.

These symbolisms of untroubled essence come to a crescendo when Walcott uses the ocean to connote truth, pure and simple. In fact and act, the meanings of primeval life and unsullied (bridal) depth informed the ocean-is-truth image. In “At Last,” the narrator analogizes the truth that lies buried under the said or printed words to the absolute truth resting in the ocean:

under the snowdrift

of the white page, of the white /

ocean, all is buried,

generations, generations (Sea Grapes 77/78).

Since Walcott’s call is to inscribe his region’s existence on the tabula rasa of the New

World, the ocean is a place that offers him the luxury of exploring the unexplored and to register his voice on the ocean’s welcoming blank page. Hence, in “XLIII” (Midsummer),

Walcott lays stress on the ocean’s tolerance of differences and adjusting to them. In Cuba, the speaker, to his wonder, notes: “This is my ocean, but it is speaking / another language, since its accent changes around / different islands.” In “XLVII,” too, the emphasis falls on the ocean’s hospitality. In the latter poem, the link between the ocean’s virgin page and Walcott’s hope for a Caribbean narrative log is plainly established. The speaker extols the “Ocean, / whose pride is that no man makes his mark on her, / still offers such places for the selfish pen.” The image is elaborately informed in Omeros:

The ocean had / 168

no memory of the wanderings of Gilgamesh,

or whose sword severed whose head in the Iliad.

It was an epic where every line was erased

yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf

in that blind violence with which one crest replaced

another with a trench and that heart-heaving sough

begun in Guinea to fountain exhaustion here,

however one read it, not as our defeat or

our victory; it drenched every survivor

with blessing. It never altered its metre

to suit the age, a wide page without metaphors.

Our last resort as much as yours, Omeros (295/ 296).

The ocean lines that are erased upon inscription are the best emblem of Walcott’s conceptual

‘nothing’ as enriching rather than undermining the Caribbean experience.

The successive gaps and lacks flaw the seamless, untroubled ocean image. In its totality, the more Walcott projects his Edenic craves on the ocean page the more the latter exposes the fallen New World reality. This double-facedness of the ocean image results from the escapist incentive that impelled Walcott to resort to the ocean. Thieme, for example, sets the ocean as a haven from the fallen inland reality. Initially, Thieme specifies, for Walcott, the

“ocean … offers release from the constraints of the social world of the island” (53). Later in the book, the chain extends as more links are named. Then, Thiem’s argument goes: “ocean 169

appears to be an element which offers release from the schisms of Caribbean social and political history” (161, emphasis added). It is also notable that ‘schisms,’ here, supplants

‘constraints.’ The change suggests not only the New World speaker is crippled but schizophrenic. Schizophrenia is manifest in the disintegrated presentation of the ocean image itself: a fallen Eden. In the context of Thieme’s earlier argument, he alludes to the religious link of the chain that constrains Caribbeans, in general. According to Thieme, the ocean

“becomes a religion which is preferable to the Catholicism that controls the lives of the St.

Lucian peasantry” (53). The ‘seamless,’ ‘untroubled’ ocean, in this sense, promises Walcott a restored wholeness and a harmonious unitary alternative order contrasting with his fallen, fragmented and schizophrenic Caribbean order. This act of resorting to the ocean takes the form of consulting a book: the ocean book. Walcott consults the ocean on two occasions in his poetry: in Another Life and in “The Sea Is History” (The Star-Apple Kingdom). On both occasions, Walcott seeks a rationalization of his Caribbean fallen situation.

Another Life presents a poetic account of Walcott’s life in reminiscence. Significantly the book (Another Life) opens with the image of an open ocean-book:

I begin here again,

begin until this ocean’s

a shut book, and like a bulb

the white moon’s filaments wane (3).

In “Reading Another Life: A Critical Essay,” Baugh and Nepaulsingh read the ocean-book image thus: “the ocean is like a book out of which life emerges to be read” (187). Baugh and

Nepaulsingh elaborate further on this image in their annexed annotations to Another Life. In the “Annotations,” they inspect the literary roots of this image; the crisscrossed allusions involved, and its relation to Walcott’s familial background (221). Confused and disturbed upon fresh news of his tutor and renowned St. Lucian painter Harry Simmons’ suicide, 170

Walcott’s only way to rationalize is to probe the pages of the ocean. Literally, the ocean separates them as it physically stands between Walcott (in Trinidad) and now dead Simmons

(then, in St. Lucia). Metaphorically, Walcott stands at an ocean-wide distance from comprehending Simmons’ fatal stroke. Still, he scans the ocean “for information, as it were, about his master’s death” (“Annotations” 222). Simmons’ death, paradoxically, opens the ocean book of life.

That the poet is doomed to a continuous beginning and beginning again, Walcott’s disposition seems desperate. Because the ocean stands for the Edenic state, its answers are detached from the fallen reality (Walcott perceives Simmons’ suicide as a failure). This is one level of the continuous beginning. The other level is to do with the ocean standing for the

Middle Passage. The implied message is that part of the Middle Passage fall is that

Caribbeans are never past the fact of their fall. Rationalizing their fall is just as romantic. At one place, Walcott’s surrogate “I” wonders where truth lays. Among the pondered possibilities is “that flashing buckle of ocean?” (57). To his disappointment, the speaker realizes late (and later in the book) how childish is this judgment. It is as childish as

“emptying the Atlantic with an enamel cup” (66). In other words, it is an escapist enterprise.

The ocean’s book is consulted yet again in “The Sea Is History” as said before. Then, the question was: “Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? / Where is your tribal memory?” (25). In a few words: Where is your history? The quest is for Walcott’s existential agony and Holy Grail: history. It is, hence, significant that the ocean’s response is depicted thus: “the ocean kept turning blank pages // looking for history” (26). This image has many levels of meaning. Rather than yielding answers, the ocean joins efforts with the narrator. The ocean rummages its pages for an answer. That the ocean continues “turning … pages” means a Caribbean history is unattainable yet. That the ocean’s are “blank pages” thickens the sense of despair. Structurally, too, history and the ocean are placed in separate stanzas implying 171

they are not mutual.

On some occasions, the ocean image implies a rigid line denying the fallen Caribbean any access into the Edenic realm (ocean). In The Fortunate Traveller (relatively, a volume that halves Walcott’s poetic corpus), the halving line is compared to a door: the ocean halves:

“ocean divides: a bronze door” (“From This Far” 30). To be sure, ‘bronze’ is used to connote the rigidity of the divide. In other words, the reference is to the alloy’s solidity rather than its coppery shine. In actual fact, the door is nauseating, color-wise. In Green (twenty years before The Fortunate Traveller), the door is painted in dirt. In “Tales of the Islands” (Chapter

VII), Walcott describes a pool in the island: Maingot pool. Its name is derived from a native

Arawak plant that grows in the swamp50. Topographically speaking, the pool forms a natural borderline between the Atlantic and the island’s jungle. It is the ocean’s bronze door. But

that pool [is] blocked by

Increasing filth that piled between ocean

And jungle, with a sighing grove

Of dry bamboo, its roots freckled with light

Like feathers fallen from a migratory sky (29).

Not only is the ocean door into Paradise locked. It is also blocked. The sensory imagery of the scene contributes to this block. First, they are all images of unease: sighing and dryness, for instance. Second, the imagery reproduces the feeling of a “block” in the reader as they arrest the reader’s different senses: sighs (auditory image), dryness (tactile and haptic), freckled roots (visual), fallen feathers and migration (kinetic). Additionally, these images suggest what stands between Caribbeans and regaining Paradise is their history of forced migration and deracination; very briefly, the Middle Passage chapter.

50 The original Arawak word is “ma(i)ngue” and evolved later into different linguistic forms: “mangle” in Spanish; “mangle” in French (pronunciation “maingl”); “maingot” in English. (“Annotations” 264).

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Thieme advances this association between the ocean and the Middle Passage episode to be the seed-idea of Walcott’s associating the sea with history. In other words, the ocean image has been crystalized in Walcott’s the-sea-is-history conceit (Thieme 53). Literally, the

Middle Passage, the dividing, defining, decisive line in the Caribbean history commences in the ocean. Furthermore, Thieme reads in the episode of the dead, “uprooted tree washed across the ocean”51 to be an emblem of “the legacy of the Middle Passage” (74). Thieme’s reading applies to the aforementioned bamboo trees of Maingot pool, too. In The Castaway, too, the motif of a tree bordering the ocean is used again. In symbolically named poem “The

Almond Trees,” an image complex where one image shades off the other is carefully arranged: images of the ocean; historylessness, and the sea-almond trees. Combing the beach early in the morning, the speaker reports:

There’s nothing here

this early;

cold sand

cold churning ocean, the Atlantic,

no visible history,

except this stand

of twisted, coppery, sea-almond trees

their shining postures surely

bent as metal, … (36).

The meticulous use of “stand” is suggestive especially that it is neither necessitated by the rhyme scheme nor by the metric rhythm. Thus, ‘stand’ is deliberate and recalls the previous images of the bronze door and the Maingot pool. Like the locked door and the blocked pool,

51 In Walcott’s play Dream on Monkey Mountain.

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the sea-almond trees stand between the Caribbeans and their lost Eden. Also, like the dry, freckled bamboos, the sea-almonds are “twisted” and “coppery.” Likewise, the simile drawn between the dry bamboos and fallen feathers is implied in the bent posture of the sea- almonds.

In fact, Thieme is not the only scholar who reads Walcott’s treatment of the ocean image to anticipate the-sea-is-history conceit. Ismond’s reading coincides with Thieme’s. In actual fact, rather than a preceding stage, Ismond reads the ocean image as one facet of

Walcott’s sea image (15). In her survey of Walcott’s early poetry, Ismond notes the prominence of the ocean image. The ocean symbolizes, Ismond says, “the amnesiac middle passage and the loss of Africa” (ibid). Ismond’s analysis, in its own turn, recalls Rohlehr’s reading whereby the ocean is “placid void” (213) cited above. In substance, all of these readings, on their own, are facets of Walcott’s concept of nothingness, one of whose manifestations is a historyless Caribbean as has been investigated and established throughout this section.

5.2 The Rain and The Dew

5.2.1 The Rain: “The Muse of Amnesia”52

Proverbially, the rain is a bad omen. The wise saying “save something for one’s rainy days” that encourages stocking funds for the bad days along with idioms like “come rain or shine,” “take a rain check,” “it never rains but pours” show rain as a synecdoche for the bad part of life’s happy-sad contrast. The last of these idioms is particularly interesting. Though it is implied that “pouring” is about big problems, still rain is about problems. It is to be pointed out that “as fine as rain” is an idiom where rain figures positively. Still, proportionately

52 “27” (The Bounty 60).

174

speaking, the last idiom is one amongst an all-pervasive rain-gloominess association. From its wide spectrum of connotations, Ferber focuses on rain’s gloomiest and brightest: a “bad luck” and a “fertilizing force” (165). In a word, the rain is an omen, bad or good.

In contrast to Walcott’s statement that “midsummer is the same thing everywhere”

(“XXXIV” Midsummer), dissimilarity is notable between the rainy weather in the

Archipelago and elsewhere. In Europe and the States, the raindrops figure notably lustrous and bountifully round. In poem “XXXV,” the rain image in the Welsh setting is one of fertility. The rain drops are rounded and likened to seeds: “the rain-seeded glass”

(Midsummer). Also, in Wales, the rain enlightens and is enlightened by the sun; not only a passive recipient of light but also a producer of light. This reciprocity is depicted in “Streams”

(The Arkansas Testament): “the sunlit rain” (80); “the rain-lit sun” (81). Similarly, Irish Mrs.

Maud Plunkett, in Omeros, nostalgically moans: “I miss the light northern rain, I miss the seasons” (48). At the time, Maud was residing in St. Lucia.

In Tiepolo’s Hound, Parisian rain figures prominently on five occasions. On each occasion, another dimension of beauty and fertility is added to the Parisian rain. On the first occasion, Parisian rain is shown to have a body that is lacking in the Caribbean rain as will be shown below. From the beginning, Parisian rain is dignified and shown to have a history:

“Even the rain / gusting across her [Paris] lamps had history” (36). On the second occasion (or figuration), the rain radiates, too, like Welsh rain (and American rain as will be shown shortly). In the rain, the narrator describes the city as “beaded Paris” (39). In the poem,

Parisian rain identifies with the fertilizing rain-seeds of Wales, too: “the water seeds in furrows, grain by grain” (39). Furthermore, Parisian rain falls as artfully as brushstrokes. In the book, Parisian rainy scenes “are linked / by the rain’s brushstrokes, with fresher skill”

(39). From his table in Café Guerbois, the narrator watches the light, bright beads of rain:

Black downpours on a clouded, drippling day, 175

tinkle of rain like cutlery in the leaves,

pencil-thin drizzle. Deep in the brown café

he watched ropes of water twisting from the eaves (Tiepolo’s Hound 48).

What has been said of the Continental rain applies to the rain in the States. In poem

“XXVII,” the narrator watches “American rain, / stitching stars in the sand” (Midsummer). On one level, “stars” alludes to the American flag of stripes and stars especially that the narrator mentions afterwards “the flag on the post office” (ibid). Obviously, this image of luminous stars contrasts with the St. Lucian rainfall image where “asterisks of rain [were] puckering the sand” (Omeros 321). The latter image is deprived of fullness; an asterisk to a star is as a skeleton to a fleshed body. So, the Caribbean rain lacks body. Also, where the American rain stitches, the Caribbean rain creases and furrows; it puckers.

The English rain is a problematic case in this paradigm of the Caribbean vs. the metropolitan rain. The English rain is not all identifiable with light and bright rain brushstrokes of America or that of Europe nor is it all identifiable with the Caribbean biting and piercing rain strokes and streaks. History resonates unapologetically when it comes to picturing the English rainy scenes. In “Midsummer, England,” Walcott describes the rain scene in England thus: “the noble monuments pissed on by rain, / the imperial blood corrupted, the dark tide” (Sea Grapes 67). Rather than ‘drizzles,’ ‘falls,’ ‘pours,’ etc., rain pisses. The verb ‘piss’ is repulsive. Indeed, Walcott uses the very verb to describe the unpleasant St. Lucian rainy weather in Omeros: “God pissed on the village for months of rain” (248). Ironically, rather than unpleasant, the narrator feels the pissing English rain is

“love-nourishing rain” (Sea Grapes 67). Humiliating the “noble monuments” of the Empire is a revenge exacted by the rain. Perhaps, this imagined revenge accounts for the summer that penetrates the rainy gloomy scene:

summer persists through the pain, 176

it forces the leaf

and tries, through love-nourishing rain,

to dissolve individual grief,

history and heartbreak (Sea Grapes 67).

In other words, the various lines read in their totality as reconciliation with the bitter past. But this reconciliation is as imagined as is the revenge. It never materializes. Up to Omeros,

Walcott’s tone sounds unreconciled with the English rain for it is still ‘English.’ Even if a scene like “umbrellas politely revolving in its [London’s] rain” bespeaks of elegance, still, it is undermined by a previous image where English rain sounds disheartening and dispiriting:

“Level-voiced London unnerved him” (253). Having all this in mind, it reads paradoxical (at least, irreconcilable with the general atmosphere of the English rain) that Tiepolo’s Hound’s narrator reports of “the polite noise / of rain beading the windows of the car” (151) on his tour in England. But it is not. For he follows up: “as if this was the drizzle of Pontoise” (151) by way of rationalizes the unusual politeness. Polite rain remains foreign to England. Fluctuation persists in portraying the English rain, however. So, rather than unusual, politeness is taken for granted in White Egrets. In “11,” in the grey, foggy city: “Deferential rain / falls ceremonially on cafés and cobbles, / umbrellas blossom and a decent haze” and the city’s rainy weather is praised: “This is poetry’s weather, this is its true home” (35). Elegance is never rationalized in White Egrets.

In the Caribbean, the rain is almost uniformly a portent prognosticating evil or evil reminiscence, especially in the early volumes. To use Walcott’s word, “premonitions”

(Another Life 132). Indeed, in poem “37,” Walcott talks literally of “oracular rains” (The

Bounty 78). But a change in disposition could be traced across Walcott’s volumes. In early volumes, the speaking voices dread rain. Hopeful sun rays find a way in the mid-stage volumes to mitigate the gloominess. In late volumes, rain is somehow embraced. 177

In shape, rather than bulbously round drops, the Caribbean rain, in Walcott’s poetry, falls like strokes and streaks; it is pinned and pointed: “wires;”53 “Pins;”54 “nails;”55

“knives;”56 “lances;”57 “scissors;”58 “needles;”59 “slanted spears;”60 “arrows”61.

Even when rounded, rain is no less painful than pins, nails, knives, etc. It is likened to a “stone”62 and to “pebbles”63.

Spread and extended, rain is still a “shroud”64 or a “net”65.

In color, the Caribbean rain is “black”66. Even when it is “white”67 still, in effect, it

‘blackens’68 the Caribbean landscape unlike its white counterpart (whitening agent) in

Switzerland, for instance. The Swiss rain in Zermatt is “white” and heralds white “snow” that,

53 “Return of D’Ennery, Rain” (Green 33); Another Life (11); “33/ A Santa Cruz Quartet” (The Bounty 72); “11” (The Prodigal: a poem 69); “22” (White Egrets 53).

54 “A Change of Skin” (Gulf 26); Omeros (50).

55 Omeros (50, 222); Tiepolo’s Hound (27).

56 Another Life (132).

57 “North and South” (The Fortunate Traveller 14); Omeros (50); “27” (The Bounty 60); Tiepolo’s Hound (27).

58 “A Sea Change” (The Fortunate Traveller 19).

59 “The Spoiler’s Return” (The Fortunate Traveller 59); “XVII” (Midsummer).

60 “XXXIV” (Midsummer).

61 Omeros (16).

62 “Return of D’Ennery, Rain” (Green 34).

63 “Hurucan” (The Fortunate Traveller 40).

64 “Return of D’Ennery, Rain“ (Green 34); “27” (The Bounty 60).

65 “Return of D’Ennery, Rain” (Green 34).

66 “Dark August” (Sea Grapes 69); Omeros (50, 222).

67 “Return of D’Ennery, Rain” (Green 34); “The Banyan Tree, Old Year’s Night” (Green 71).

68 “The Banyan Tree, Old Year’s Night” (Green 71).

178

in its turn, “whiten[s]” the landscape69. That the narrator characterizes the prevalent whiteness dominating the Swiss resort as “the colour of envy” (White Egrets “20” 51) tells of the deliberate use of the “white” and the “black” rains. Walcott of the black rain lands envies the

Metropole its white rain.

What all these clusters of shapes (longitudinal, rounded, and level) have in common is pain; infecting or recalling pain. Indeed, Walcott rhymes rain with pain in three poems: “Hic

Jacet” (Gulf 70); Another Life (99); “Midsummer, England” (Sea Grapes 67). It is significant that Walcott puts rain at various distances from its rhyming pain. The longest distance occurs in “Hic Jacet”; the shortest (one-line) in “Midsummer, England” and a non-distance (semi- couplets) in Another Life. In On Poetry, Maxwell argues rhymes’ distance is as telling as meter’s length (116). In both cases, the shorter the more visible the form is and hence the plainer the connection between form (rhyming words, in this case) and theme (words’ meanings) is (ibid). In reverse, a longer distance signifies “the impact of the rhyme is subconscious, kin to musical motif” (ibid). The rain, in this sense, is consciously and subconsciously painful. It coincides with the present section’s argument that Maxwell talks of the rhyme technique used by poets to make the impact yet more subconscious: half-rhyme.

Maxwell exemplifies his argument with “(‘stone’/ ‘rain’)” (ibid). Coincidently, Walcott internally rhymes ‘rain’ and ‘stone’ twice in “Return to D’Ennery, Rain,” (a very important poem for this section): in the third and the fourth stanzas, (Green 33, 34). However, where

Maxwell argues that half-rhyme entertained popularity in the early 20th century to soften “the sense of rhyme” (116, italics in the original), Walcott asserts the sense as his half-rhymes were internal occupying the same line (of verse and thought). However, it is not always as smooth as this. For example, “When the wind brings the harbor rain in sheaves,” in “Roots” poem (Green 60), rain is consonant with gain on the sound level:

69 “20” (White Egrets 51).

179

From all that sorrow, beauty is our gain,

Though it may not seem so

To an old fisherman rowing home in the rain (Green 61).

The presence of the though-clause above shows the divergence rather than the coherence holding between ‘rain’ and ‘gain,’ nevertheless. In other words, ‘pain’ and ‘gain’ rhyme formally (internally) but they do not thematically. This exposes the limits of Maxwell’s formalist argument. In line with this reading, ‘rain’ and ‘ruins,’ in Omeros (192) cohere semantically and thematically more than ‘rain’ and ‘gain’ though the former pair does not rhyme in terms of form (occupying the same line or lines’ position).

Factually, Walcott speaks of two sole seasons in the Caribbean, the Pays Natal (to use

Walcott’s title for a poem in In a Green Night): summer and winter: “There … It’s hot, or it rains” (Omeros 192). Like most crises facing Walcott, the island’s climate is binary: sunny/rainy. This polarity of the weather receives a notable emphasis. Up to the 2004-volume,

The Prodigal: a Poem, there seems a compulsion that urges Walcott to reiterate the fact. Half the year in the Caribbean witnesses “rain / edged with sunlight, […] The rest of the year is rain” (“11” 66). The rainy season stands at the sharp, negative edge of the weather paradigm.

For example, in “The Banyan Tree, Old Year’s Night,” it is the “bad weather” (Green 71) and figures nightmarish in “Oceano Nox” (The Arkansas Testament 55). In contrast to the hellish weather, “In the Virgins” portrays the sunny weather in “paradisal” colors (The Star-Apple

Kingdom 22). Like dwellers like visitors. Tourists vacation in the Caribbean to immerse themselves in an Eden. But then, Walcott rhetorically asks in the 1992-Nobel Prize lecture:

“What is the earthly paradise for our visitors?” (“The Antilles” 81). And the answer, in its first part, is “Two weeks without rain” (ibid).

Furthermore, the rainy-sunny binarism reminds Walcott that his world and word is a meager shadow of the Old World and its four seasons. For instance, in Omeros, Maud 180

Plunkett, Irish born St. Lucia resident nostalgically moans: “I miss the seasons” (48). The narrator takes Maud’s moan as an “insult” and annotates her monologue to imply St. Lucian

“climate lacked subtlety” (ibid). Walcott’s home seasons are phantom seasons. Another example from Tiepolo’s Hound is sufficiently representative. In the latter poem, the

Caribbean rainy weather is

mimicking winter, without cold, of heatless

clouds with their somber presumption of wisdom

over this superficial sunshine, the tiring bliss

of perpetual summer (29).

This succession of images embodies Walcott’s earlier assertion, in “Conqueror” that his

Caribbean “amber landscapes, [are] hardly true to life” (Green 67).

In addition, rather than falling, the Caribbean rain pours. Literally, it never rains in the

Caribbean but pours. In other words, rain is a threat. Light or fine rain is foreign in the islands. Instead, rain acts en masse: “in sheaves” (“Roots” Green 60). Rain is likened to invaders in some poems. In “North and South,” the invaders are identified. Rain is portrayed

“marching like a Roman legion” (The Fortunate Traveller 14). In “XXXIV,” rain’s advancement is portrayed in martial terms, too, “the slanted spears / of the rain to march on in

Anabasis” (Midsummer). In Omeros, too, rain is “marching” (221). Although Omeros’ rain is unidentified with particular invaders, some identification could be inferred. The image of the rain legions is contextualized by images of lances of cane and the sugarcane “squared fields”

(221); thus the marching rain that threatens the sugarcane crops recalls colonization: “the bitter history of sugar” (221). The image of warring rain recurs thrice in Tiepolo’s Hound; twice in Book One: “This was the other season, / the siege of slanting lances, flowering 181

water” (27) and “the rainy season laid siege to the house” (28). In Book Two, rain’s strong hold dominates the whole country as “the island, [is] besieged by paralyzing rain” (38). These implications of threat brought by rain are to be put in their Caribbean context.

The experience of rainy days is portrayed in unpleasant colors in the Archipelago; indeed, in the colors of mud and filth. In “Return to D’Ennery, Rain” one reads: “rain is muddying” (Green 33). Omeros offers a doubly unpleasant image of rain; olfactory- and visually speaking: “God pissed on the village for months of rain” (248). Rain is dreaded by the islands’ flora, fauna and islanders alike. Even in Walcott’s late volumes that are marked by reconciliation with what the rain signifies, ‘rain’ is still an unwelcomed guest. In poem

“27” of The Bounty, for instance, the narrator praises the falling rain but never paints rain in praising colors. Rather in alarmingly ghostly ones:

Praise to the rain, eraser of picnics, praise the grey cloud

that makes every headland a ghost, and the guttering blech-

braided water, praise to the rain and her slow shroud,

she is the muse of Amnesia which is another island,

spectral and adrift where those we still love exist

but in another sense, that this shore cannot understand,

for reminding us that all substance thin into mist

and has its vague frontiers, the country of memory

and, as in Rimbaud, the idea of eternity,

is a razed horizon when the sky and the sea are mixed

and the solid disappears like the dead into essences

which is the loud message of the martial advancing rain

with its lances and mass and –sometimes alarming our senses –

the kettledrums of advancing thunder. Before her the grain 182

bows and darkens, the tide cowers then rises, … (60).

In the Archipelago, rain is trumpeted by “panic” (Tiepolo’s Hound 27). In itself, rain is

“Irascible” (Tiepolo’s Hound 33). In its turn, the rain, for islanders, trumpets imprisonment. In the opening line of “Return to D’Ennery, Rain” (Green 33), rain foretells a frustrating silence and motionlessness70. But imprisonment seems a light statement. Depending on fishery for breadwinning, the rain is a sentence of capital punishment for fishermen at sea. Examples of the fishermen perspective on rain could be found in the closing image (stanza) of “Roots”:

When the wind brings the harbor rain in sheaves,

The yellow fort looks from the historic hill,

(As it were Poussin, or fragment from Bellini)/

Its racial quarrels blown like smoke to sea

From all that sorrow, beauty is our gain,

Though it may not seem so

To an old fisherman rowing home in the rain (Green 60/61).

Fisherman Shabine of the “The Schooner Flight” represents an individualized example yet

(The Star-Apple Kingdom 17). Significantly, the life threat facing Shabine is dramatized in the tenth chapter entitled “Out of Depth”: signifying an episode of survival and deliverance from an imminent death. Achille, too, the St. Lucian fisherman and protagonist of Omeros, is shown in an after-rainstorm scene assessing the damage rain brought to his fishing boat and tries to repair and undo what he can (53, 54). Other professions, too, are badly affected by the rain, though less fatally. In “Tales of the Islands,” the Indian prostitute complains “That rain affects the trade [prostitution]” (Green 27).

For the islands’ animals, rain is an unwelcome, thick-blooded comer. The feathery, fluffy creatures are beaten and stoned rather than touched by rain. In “Return to D’Ennery,

70 See also Tiepolo’s Hound p. 38.

183

Rain,” Walcott portrays “a beaten heron” taking refuge on the beach (Green 33); and later he portrays their matchless pain: “No cry like herons stoned by the rain” (34). The furred beasts have no better experience. The wet season is as unpleasant for insects; winged and creepy- crawly alike. The tiny creatures fear even distant rain. So, the approaching rain makes

“cicadas … frantic” (Midsummer “XVII”).

The rain invasion is just as dreaded by plants and trees and as long-lasting. In

“Conqueror,” readers learn that in the amber Caribbean landscape, flora is conquered by the legions of rain for “harvest rusts in rain” (Green 67). Dread permeates all plants and trees; consumes all parts from leaves to roots. Prior to the rain are found images of “shaken leaves”

(Green “Roots” 60). While falling, “Irascible rain threshed in the cedar leaves” (Tiepolo’s

Hound 33). Post-rain, the burden endures significantly. The scenes are ones of resurrection after ‘death’ or of surviving one. In “Oceano Nox,” the scene goes: “After the morning rain, the shuddering almond / will shake the sweat of nightmare from its bent head” (The Arkansas

Testament 55). Another “almond / that shuddered with rain” is found in Omeros (54). In

Another Life, too, the yam is shown way from recovering:

But darkness hid

never departing wholly as it promised

between the yam leaves on the riverbank

on whose bent heads the rain splintered like mercury (63).

Ginger lilies represent a tragic case. When they begin to sprout, they crave rain, in their innocence. The image appears in Another Life and Omeros with slight nuances in line breaks and word forms. In the former poem, “the beaks / of fledging ginger lilies / gasped for rain”

(52). In the latter poem, in Maud Plunkett’s garden, budding lilies are described thus:

the orange beaks of the ginger-

lilies gaped for rain. She knew that it was silly 184

but she heard them screeching with the ceaseless hunger

of fledglings. … (254).

The tragedy arises from an earlier scene in Omeros where readers learn how the fledging lilies’ progenitors are suffocated rather than quenched by the island’s rain:

rain-maddened lilies chose a death by water,

like pregnant virgins in Victorian novels.

Maud rescued some. In rain hat and yellow slicker,

she bent over their beds in the gentler drizzles (55).

Gathering from the above, the rain orchestrates the Caribbean and all its living organisms to a tone of alarming melancholy. In sum, rain heralds pain. Artists are no exception. The first stanza of “Return to D’Ennery, Rain,” closes with the image: “personal grief melts in the general wish” (Green 33). At the image’s heels comes the image: “The rain is muddying unpaved inland roads” (ibid). Both are images of blurriness. Towards the end of the second stanza “The rain seeps slowly to the core of grief” (Green 33). So the image of

“personal grief” is pressed between two images of the rain: one of mud and one of seepage.

The word “seep” coupled with the terminal position of the word “grief” visually designates a real seepage of grief forced out by too much pressure by the rain. Walcott’s elegy on the

Jamaican singer Bob Marley in “The Light of the World” (The Arkansas Testament) augments further the association of grief and the rain: “Marley’s songs of a sadness as real as the smell / of rain on dry earth, or the smell of damp sand” (51). In fact, the epigraph to the poem is from one of Marley’s sad songs that goes: “Kaya now, got to have kaya now, / Got to have kaya now, / For the rain is falling” (48). (‘Kaya’ is Marley’s word for weeds).

Unlike the sea which has one tense (see “The Sea” chapter); the rain conjugates pain 185

in two tenses. In Walcott’s poetry, rain recalls past pains and foretells future ones. Mainly, the pain is one of loss. The pain-loss link is implied in images of erasure that accompanies or follows rainfall. In “The Schooner Flight,” Shabine awakens in section 11 “After the Storm” to a psychological “nakedness”:

I finish dream;

whatever the rain wash and the sun iron:

the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam,

is clothes enough for my nakedness (The Star-Apple Kingdom 19).

Similar examples of the rain erasure can be found in Another Life (40), Omeros (55) and The

Bounty (“27” 60).

On some occasions, it is the erasure affected or recalled by rainfall. For example, in

“A Change of Skin,” the speaker’s “fear” of historylessness is “prickled” by “Pins / of fine rain” in England (Gulf 26). An identical employment of the rain image is found in Another

Life. Walcott describes a photo picturing Harry Simmons bent on drawing with chalk the faded outlines of Arawak hieroglyphs in a jungle in the immediate vicinity of Dauphin

(“Annotations” 264). It is paramount, here, that “the lost Arawak hieroglyphs and signs / were razed from slates by sponges of the rain” (Another Life 54). The Arawaks’ history is rain- worn. That Walcott mourns earlier the Arawaks’ “life [that is] older than geography” lost to the rain connects the image with the one of historylessness in “A Change of Skin.”

Another realization of the rain erasure is that of a drained mind. This coincidence of the two images recurs four times through Walcott’s poetry. The minute difference in these occurrences is one of chronological order. But, in effect, the mind is deserted by the rainfall: simultaneously or consequentially. In the first volume, In a Green Night, there are two examples. In the “Return to D’Ennery, Rain,” the image is one of concurrence:

And as this rain puddles the sand, it sinks 186

Old sorrows in the gutter of the mind,

[…]

The rain beats on a brain hardened to a stone (33).

In “The Banyan Tree, Old Year’s Night,” (Green), the temporal relation is vague: “And was that infant melancholy mine? // If it were so, it still remains, its sources / Blank as the rain on the deserted mind” (72). The third example occurs in the title poem of The Fortunate

Traveller. Then, it is again far from clear if the image is one of concurrence or succession:

There is no sea as restless as my mind.

[…]

... Louder, since it rained,

a gauze of sand flies hisses from the marsh (95).

That restlessness is accelerated by the rainfall favors the ‘succession’ reading especially that restlessness is dated with “since.” The last example is found in The Arkansas Testament.

“Streams” offers the clearest sequence; one of succession for that matter:

Whenever the sunlit rain

has trawled its trickling meshes

on the dark hills back of the brain,

I keep hearing a Wales

so windswept it refreshes (80).

The lost can be anything: age/youth, memory, beloved ones. Lost history has already been alluded to above in the lost Arawak hieroglyphs and in Walcott’s dismay at his historylessness. Walcott’s mission at inscribing a history of his New World is likened to a sail heading to a harbor in the rain that blurs all horizons in two poems. In the “Map of the New

World,” the speaker’s laborious mission at chronicling the archipelagoes is depicted thus:

At the end of this sentence, rain will begin. 187

At the rain’s edge, a sail.

Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands;

into a mist will go the belief in harbors

of an entire race.

[…]

The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp.

A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain

and plucks the first line of the Odyssey (The Fortunate Traveller 25).

Conspicuous affinities hold between the above scene and the image of Seven Seas in Omeros.

The scene in “Map of the New World” is compressed in a line from Omeros. Shape shifting

Seven Seas, the archetypal rootless, historyless man of the New World is described thus:

“blind as a sail in rain” (Omeros 53). Obviously, in “Map” the tone is more hopeful as the mission heads towards (a prospective) fulfilment when the nameless man “plucks the first line of the Odyssey.”

The gravest of personal losses is the demise of the dearest and nearest, however. It is irreversible. In this context, the images are about embracing the loss and the rainfall rather than resenting and despising it. This meaning resonates forcefully in “For Pablo Neruda.”

Walcott’s motto being the Chilean poet’s71 advice:

You said

when others like me despaired:

[…]

wear the wind, soaked with rain

like a cloak, above absences (Sea Grapes 54).

71 Pablo Neruda is the pseudonym of Nobel Laureate (1971) Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto

188

As a rule, dreading ‘absences’ of friends and family, losing them to death, is compared to the ups and downs of weather. The rain comes unexpectedly in the islands and takes one by a storm. So does death:

we tremble for them[friends and family],

we look seaward and muse

it will rain.

We shall get ready for rain;

[…]

the readiness is all;

what follows at your feet

is trying to tell you

the silence is all:

it is deeper than the readiness,

it is sea-deep,

earth-deep,

love-deep (Sea Grapes “Oddjob, a Bull Terrier” 74).

Whereas “readiness” has a submissive tone to it, “silence” betrays a sense of defeat.

In poem “11” of The Prodigal: a Poem, Walcott revisits his deceased acquaintances. It is the rain that recalls (recites) the names up from Hades’ domain. As the sky’s seam unstitches, Walcott’s first response is:

I thought of the dead

I know. …

[…]

There were so many names the rain recited:

Alan, Joseph and Claude and Charles and Roddy (66). 189

Joseph refers to the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, the dedicatee of “31/ Italian

Eclogue” of The Bounty. Though the second part of the latter poem depicts a scene of light: windows, open book, argentine water, the fact that Joseph is no longer causes that even “light hurts like rain” (The Bounty 65). On Walcott’s obituary list, there is yet the tragic demise of his painting tutor and national artist Harry Simmons.

Simmons’ death, the huge loss in Walcott’s life is recounted and recalled in a rainy setting. Simmons’ death (suicide) hovers and haunts Walcott’s Another Life. Rain becomes a default image when Walcott reminisces about the late master (123, 135). Baugh and

Nepaulsingh, indeed, note that rain “is repeated in many lines in Book Four, especially when the poet gets news about Harry’s death” (“Annotations” 314). Book Four “The Estranging

Sea” reflects for the most part on Simmons’ death and the possible reasons leading up to the tragedy. Tears, rain, and death paint the scene when Walcott first receives the letter telling him of Simmons’ death (at the time, Walcott was in Trinidad):

The rain falls like knives

on the kitchen floor.

The sky’s heavy drawer

was pulled out too suddenly.

[…]

Tears, like slow crystal beetles, crawl the pane.

On such days, when the postman’s bicycle

whirrs drily like the locust

that brings the rain, I dread my premonitions.

A grey spot, a waterdrop

blisters my hand. 190

A sodden letter thunders in my hand (132).

Book One of Another Life touches yet on a less severe loss though not less serious for that matter. It is Walcott’s mother’s loss of her sons to age. They grow up bigger than her hug.

The loss is depicted in an image of dissolving: “They melt from you, your sons” (12). Instead of sons, her “arms grow full of rain” (ibid).

Reflecting on his bygone age (youth), the rain is as assertively present in Walcott’s

“Nearing Forty.” The poem is autobiographical in theme and personal in concerns. “Nearing

Forty” reveals Walcott’s anxiety on approaching middle age:

Insomniac since four, hearing this narrow,

rigidly-metred, early-rising rain

recounting, as if its coolness numbs the marrow,

that I am nearing forty, … (Gulf 67).

Coming of age, decades later, rain recounts Walcott’s (lost) childhood. In “XIII,” the speaker reports: “the asphalt’s skin / smells freshly of childhood in the drying rain”

(Midsummer). The parallelism between the rain and the bygone childhood is reproduced in

“5/ Parang”: “Remember childhood? Remember a faraway rain?” (The Bounty 28).

Dead faith is signaled by the shrouds of rain, too. This image appears twice in

Walcott’s volumes. In the first volume, the speaker in “Return to D’Ennery, Rain” meditates:

Why blame the faith you have lost? Heaven remains

Where it is, in the hearts of these people,

In the womb of their church, though the rain’s

Shroud is drawn across its steeple (Green 34).

The second occurrence is found in Omeros:

People were praying,

but then the gods, who were tired, were throwing a fête, 191

and their fêtes went on for days, and their music ranged

from polkas of rain to waves dancing La Comète,

and the surf clapped hands whenever the patterns changed (53).

In both cases, the rain signals unanswered prayers and the fruitlessness of faith. However, losing faith appears as a process across Walcott’s poems. Whereas, in “Return to D’Ennery,

Rain,” Walcott suspects that perhaps “the rain cuts us off from heaven’s hearing” (Green 34); by “Steersman, My Brother,” in the same volume, he doubts heaven altogether. In the latter poem, it is a raindrop that filled the speaker’s cup of doubts to its brim. The speaker rhetorically wonders: “How He, who makes his gospels death and war, / Has equally the silent raindrop wrought” (Green 41). By Omeros, faith is ridiculed and commercialized:

Now, like a large coalpot with headlands for its handles,

the Sea cooks up a storm, raindrops start to sizzle

like grease, there is a brisk business in candles

in Ma Kilman’s shop. Candles, nails, a sudden increase in

the faithful, and a mark-up on matches and bread.

In the grey vertical forest of the hurricane season,

when the dirty sea returns the wreaths of the dead,

all the village could do was listen to the gods in session,

playing any instruments that came into their craniums,

the harp-sighing ripple of a hither-and-zithering sea (Omeros 52).

A different sort of faith is also enshrouded by the rainfall. In “The Walk,” Walcott’s 192

devotion to and exaltation of the Western classics waver. The poem opens:

After hard rain the eaves repeat their beads,

those trees exhale your doubts like mantled tapers,

drop after drop, like a child’s abacus

beads of cold sweat file from high tension wires,

pray for us, pray for this house, borrow your neighbour’s

faith, pray for this brain that tires,

and loses faith in the great books it reads (Gulf 69).

Lost love is one more loss that is reproduced against a rainy backdrop. Walcott’s lost first love is detailed in Another Life. Seeing Anna twenty years after “their edenic love”

(“Annotation” Baugh and Nepaulsingh 296) ceased, Walcott projects the “grave deep wrong

… wound” inflicted on him by Anna on “The rain season [that] comes with its load […] it drizzles wearily” (95). Moreover, it is in the encounter scene afterwards where Walcott rhymes ‘pain’ and ‘rain’ without any distance, or intervening lines (99). The other intimate loss was that of his first marriage. Revisiting their marital house, Walcott reminisces: “House where marriages go bust […] House whose rooms echo with rain” (Omeros 173).

Even the political loss of the short-lived Federation of the West Indies72 is shown to be worse and more ephemeral than the rain. In fact, the rain is dignified by way of further degrading politics and politicians:

Listen, you

could still come with me again,

to watch the rain coming from far

72 Higman pp. 267-271; Gibson pp. 267-268.

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like rain, not like votes/

like the ocean, like the wind,

not like an overwhelming majority,

you, who served the people a dung cake of maggots,

that rain cannot extinguish

the processional flambeaux of the poui

(Sea Grapes “The Lost Federation” 19/20).

In “A Sea Change,” corrupt, fallen politicians and politics are identified with falling rain thrice. Initially, the travelling narrator casually observes: “Islands hissing in rain, / light rain and governments falling” (The Fortunate Traveller 19). A few lines later, the Traveller rhetorically wonders:

Can this be the right place?

These islands of the blest,

cheap package tours replaced

by politics, rain, unrest? (19).

In the image’s third occurrence, the target is corrupt laws (lawmakers, by implication): “The rain moves like the law, / slowly” (20).

Relevant to this context is Shabine’s lost faith in political change; revolutionary or otherwise. In the section entitled “Shabine Leaves the Republic,” Shabine observes a group of protesters (known as The Twelve) and foretells of their cause:

I no longer believed in the revolution.

[…]

… Young men without flags 194

using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.

They kept marching into the mountains, and

their noise ceased as foam sinks into sand.

They sank in the bright hills like rain, … (9).

Walcott’s final and irreversible separation from his native island is marked by rainfall.

This is a deep loss in Walcott’s life that he uses the self-same lines twice in his poetry volumes. The scene is depicted first in “Chapter X ‘adieu foulard’73” of “Tales of the Islands.”

The poem will be quoted in full for the effect results from the gradual progression of the separation from land that concludes with rainfall:

I watched the island narrowing the fine

Writing of foam around the precipices then

The roads are small and casual as twine

Thrown on its mountains; I watched till the plane

Turned to the final north and turned above

The open channel with the grey sea between

The fishermen’s islets until all that I love

Folded in cloud; I watched the shallow green

That broke in places where there would be reef,

The silver glinting on the fuselage, each mile

Dividing us and all fidelity strained

Till space would snap it. Then, after a while

I thought of nothing, nothing, I prayed, would change;

73 Translates ‘Goodbye headscarf.’

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When we set down at Seawell74 it had rained (Green 30).

As said before, the poem appears in full75 in Another Life (115).

In is notable that all the previous lamented and mourned losses are past losses. But the rain, in Walcott’s poetry, designates and foretells future losses, too. In “The Bridge,” for example, the narrator watches two lovers/a couple in the moments prior to their final separation. From the female perspective, the future separation/loss of love is portrayed thus:

“the woman / will sense in her eyes dawn’s rain beginning” (Sea Grapes 62). Although the rain, here, is a metaphor for tears. Still settling for raindrops rather than for dewdrops, for instance, makes the choice symbolic. Especially that the dew, rather than the rain, is conventionally associated with the dawn break moment.

Despite all gloom, a careful analysis of the different volumes would reveal a change in the depiction of that gloominess. The images of rain are uniformly gloomy in the 60s-volumes but some sun/hope penetrates the rain images in the 70s’ volumes and onwards. It is important to note that the change is more in attitude to the pain brought by the rain. Where the rain is only feared and weighs the archipelago’s flora in the earlier phase; in the latter phase, the rain is shown to be potentially nourishing and uplifting as concentrated in the image of the fern in

Another Life: “rainstorms richen its / roots” (125). Though the image involves an investment in the fern’s vascular system, the metaphoric suggestion is there, too: from the womb of the storm, life is born. It is mentioned above that in Book Four of Another Life the rain image as a death herald is outstandingly notable (“Annotations” Baugh and Nepaulsingh 314). However,

74 Seawell: the airport found in Seawell, Christ Church in the island of Barbados. In 1976, the airport was renamed after the first premier of Barbados, late Sir Grantly Herbert Adams (Wikipedia). 75 Differences in punctuation are noted, however. In Another Life, initial uppercase is dropped all through; commas are inserted after “narrowing” and “precipices”; a comma replaces the semicolon after “mountains” and a period replaces the one after “cloud”; a semicolon replaces the first comma in the penultimate line. Also, in the latter poem, gerund “breaking” replaces “That break” phrase; and “Dividing” becomes “tightening.”

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both critics elaborate later76: “The rain that permeates this section of the poem is obviously associated with death, but it is not entirely unrelated to life, to spring, and to love … although the season is not spring but ‘raw’ for the poet, its rain also saturates and nourishes the soil he loves” (321).

Likewise, Baugh and Nepaulsingh contrast Hardy’s rain image: “Down their carved names the raindrop ploughs” in “During Wind and Rain” poem with Walcott’s “water runnelling rocks” in the Rampanalgas scene in Chapter 22 (Another Life 143). Walcott reproduces Hardy’s line as an epigraph earlier in Chapter 20 (129) that carries the news of

Simmons’ death and unfolds Simmons’ suicide note. Whereas the image of ploughed gravestone in the epigraphic quotation coheres with the melancholy of death and suicide, the water-stone dynamic is different in the Rampanalgas scene. In the latter case, both critics note

“the raindrop is not ploughing gravestones carved by city builders [as in Hardy’s poem]; the water here assures the man’s survival in nature as part of it” (329).

In “Dark August,” too, the rain is juxtaposed to life; marking the shift in Walcott’s treatment of the rain image: “So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky / of this black

August” (Sea Grapes 69). Rather than exaggerated optimism, studying the poem reveals the shift is caused by a compromise with the rain’s gloominess. It is part of life and embracing it is about a balanced embracing of life itself; a realistic perspective. The speaker is anxious for the sun to “rise and turn off the rain” (ibid). However, as the sun was “parting the beads of the rain,” he “would have learnt to love black days like bright ones” (ibid). That rain is still

“black rain” (ibid) augments that Walcott’s change is one of perspective (to realism) not only one of disposition (towards optimism). In a later poem in the volume, this embracing of life’s whiteness and blackness is expressed thus:

76 Then, Baugh and Nepaulsingh were annotating the “The rain falls like knives / on the kitchen floor […] The raw season is on us” lines (Another Life 132).

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Rain will keep hammering the grass blades into the ground.

I admire this violence;

love is iron. I admire

the brutal exchange between breaker and rock.

They have an understanding (“Force” 73).

Images of balance persist in the volumes of the 80s. The first of these is The Fortunate

Traveller. This understanding is expressed in “The Spoiler’s Return”: “what the rain rots, the sun ripens some more, / all in due process and within the law” (57).

The year 1990 witnessed the publication of Omeros. Despite images like “the sun lifts the sheets of the rain” (192), rather than balance between the Archipelago’s raw climatic conditions: rainy and sunny, the sun-rain proportion is confusing in the book. Characteristics of the rain are confusingly fine yet frightening at one and the same time. Sensationally, the rain is “shinning” yet smells of “a singing iron” (249). In addition, characteristics of sun and rain are swapped: “the rain was shining … the sun was raining” (ibid).

The second and last volume of the 90s is The Bounty. The rain/sun (dark/white) dichotomy is further upset. In poem “27,” the rain dethrones the sun:

two drops

startle the flesh and the sun withdraws behind drapes

like a king or a president on the palace balcony

who hears the roar of a square and thinks it is only

the rain, it will pass, tomorrow will be sunny,

praise to the rain its hoarse voice dissolver of shapes,

of the peaks of power, princes, and mountain slopes (60). 198

In fact, the rain is crowned among the deities and the celestial bodies. Walcott’s speaking voice extols the rain as, appropriately “the muse of Amnesia” (ibid). He pays the muse its due praise but as a dweller of “the country of memory” he consents to the limits of optimism.

Understanding the rain’s nature does not necessarily result in a peaceful embrace of its painful laws. This necessitates further understanding of the ‘rainy’ law. In poem “31/ Italian

Eclogue,” Walcott appears apprenticed to the rain: “I will study the opening horizon, the scansion’s strokes of the rain, / to dissolve in a fiction greater than our lives, the sea, the sun”

(The Bounty 67).

The confusion in the rain as a signifier of gloom and as a shining body is realistic.

Hence, rain’s defeat of the sun is not definite or straight. There are other rounds in the penultimate volume, The Prodigal: a Poem. In poem “11,” “The sun fought with the rain in the leaves and won: / then the rain came back and it was finer out to sea” (67).

In the last volume to date, White Egrets, the rain has the upper hand again. In the title poem, the rainfall is still coalesced with the immanency of death. The rainfall brings up to

Walcott’s mind “friends, the few I have left, / [who] are dying” (9). Yet it brings back the missed white egrets. The rain remains a mystery. So, Walcott opts for another tutor: the white egrets themselves. Out of his apprenticeship, Walcott comes out as confused as before, nevertheless. The lesson is about surviving the rain and remaining beautiful in the rain:

I hadn’t seen them for half of the Christmas week,

the egrets, and no one told me why they had gone,

but they are back with the rain now, …

…

where they used to be in the clear, limitless rain

[…]

… the egrets stalk through the rain 199

as if nothing mortal can affect them, … (9).

Furthermore, in contrast to previous images of the rain as rusting harvests and a darkening force that is dissipated only by the sun, with “White Egrets,” the attitude is reversed. For Walcott is trying to depict the other season (sunny) from the egrets’ perspective:

“it will be the dry season, the hills will rust, / the egrets dip their necks undulant, bending, / stabbing at worms and grubs after the rain” (9).

5.2.2 The Dew

Not only are the dew and the rain identical in shape, but also some poets use the dew and the rain interchangeably or extend the rain’s symbolism to bear on the dew. For example,

Ferber points out that Latin poet Claudian uses the dew image to symbolize the rain ‘sexually’ fertilizing earth (165). In effect, the dew is portrayed rather positively and linked to life.

In contrast, Walcott uses the dew to connote death brought upon different races by the whites. Proportionally speaking and frequency-wise, the dew figures significantly less than the rain in Walcott’s poetry. This limited appearance might in a way echo Walcott’s image of the dew as an image of reductionism. The image is perfected in likening the dew to a prism where the different colors (races) are derivative from an originary white color. In the post- colonial context of Walcott’s Caribbean, this translates: the dew symbolizes the White supremacy. Paradoxically, it is the birth achieved via death. And this explicates why even when colored, the dew is carefully given the tint of death and blood. Title-less Chapter VIII of

“Tales of the Islands” is set “at the hour / Of bleeding light and beads of crimson dew” (Green

29).

The prism of the dew embodies the rhetoric and practice of colonization. On one side, there is the image of the annihilation of races: evanescence of the multi-color spectrum. On the other side appears the image of the supremacy of the white race. This idea of many colors

200

condensed in one is best elaborated in Midsummer:

I was there to add some color to the British theatre.

“But the blacks can’t do Shakespeare, they have no experience.”

[…]

Praise had bled my lines white of any more anger,

and snow had inducted me into white fellowships,

while Calibans howled down the barred streets of an empire

that began with Caedmon’s raceless dew, and is ending

in the alleys of Brixton, burning like Turner’s ships (“XXIII”).

Dew is raceless in these lines for it is uniformly White. It stands for the Empire and

(specifically, in the above lines) the Empire’s supremacist art(s).

But, the image undergoes a significant modification in White Egrets. Poem “13. The

Spectre of Empire” portrays the image of transcending racial allegiances. Unlike the Empire where the White rose to power via annihilating other races, Walcott depicts the power of the sun in transcending all races when the prism vanishes all together. Walcott portrays the fall of the Empire thus: “Its promontories, docks, its towers and minarets, / with the power that vanished as dew does from the grass / in the rising dawn of a sun that never sets” (40).

Wordplay (pun in ‘sun’ signifying the celestial star and the terrestrial British Empire) is involved in these lines.

In addition to extermination of races, the white colonizers enslaved races. In the positive image of the fern roots enriched by rain (see “The Rain” section), there is yet the negative image of the dew chaining the fern: “its sweat / gleams, it is chained in its own dew”

(Another Life 125). Though the image of the chained fern is contrasted to “the delicate / ribs of some men” in the poem, alluding to the slaves proctored to the Caribbean (ibid), the contrast is shown to be superficial. Both are chained and enslaved. But whereas the fern “is 201

locked into earth” by the chains of dew, the black slaves are “Uprooted” altogether (ibid).

Perhaps this associative link with colonization explains why Walcott likens the dew drops to sweat in his poetry77; not to beads (as is the metropolitan rain) or to stones (as is the

Caribbean rain). In other words, the refreshing white dew (the prosperity of the colonizers) is the very sweat exuded by enslaved laborers.

5.3 The Waves and The Tides

This section traces the images of the waves and the tides full-on. Having explored

Walcott’s use of the sea image as a symbol of the past/history, it is for a good reason that

Ferber’s entry for ‘Wave’ refers readers back to the ‘Sea’ entry (229). Citing Shakespeare,

Shelley, Emily Bronte, and D. G. Rossetti, Ferber exemplifies how waves, in literature, have stood for “a measure of time” (181, 182). Derek Walcott could just as well be annexed to

Ferber’s list. In Another Life, the waves measure the time in the island:

At the Malabar Hotel cottage

I would wake every morning surprised

by the framed yellow jungle of

the groyned mangroves meeting

the groyned mangroves repeating

their unbroken water line.

Years. The island had not moved

from anchor.

Generations of waves,

generations of grass, like foam

77 “Fragments and Epitaphs” (Green 50); “The Wind in the Dooryard” (Sea Grapes 58).

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petalled and perished in an instant (149).

Reading through Ferber’s ‘Sea’ entry, it is for good organizational reasons, too, that images of the waves and those of the tides are grouped in one section in this chapter. Under

‘Sea,’ one reads how tides, too, signify time. Etymologically speaking, Ferber points out:

“‘tide’ originally meant ‘time’” (182). This coincidence of symbolism enlightens Thieme’s phrase “the tidal wave” in analyzing Walcott’s “The Sea Is History” poem (161). But then, measuring time is not the same as being, in essence, time per se. This understanding is present in Walcott’s treatment of the waves and the tides’ images as will be manifested here.

Having emphasized the centrality of the Caribbean Sea in Walcott’s art, Bruckner concludes “his [Walcott’s] own vision of the world is shaped by waves” (398). Walcott himself asserts, in “4” of The Prodigal: a Poem: “Our [i.e. Caribbeans] only cavalry were the charging waves” (25). In The Fortunate Traveller, the waves are interwoven in the Caribbean experience fabric. It becomes the emblem of the region, a figurative fabric, i.e. a flag: “from

Orpheus to Onassis, / the sea has flown one flag: / white-barred waves on unalterable blue”

(“From This Far” 29). This image shows clearly Walcott’s concept of time in the Caribbean.

That the waves are the measure of temporal progression, their incessant lines printed on the fixed background (the sea? history?) undermines the idea of progress as superficial, in the region. This image, indeed, weakens Baugh and Nepaulsingh’s reading of the aforementioned lines from Another Life. Although Walcott’s home island figures, they argue, as “the fixed immovable center in the poet’s Dantesque universe,” they annotate Walcott’s “from anchor” to inform the image of stationary island into one suggesting “the island has changed and now becomes moveable, like a ship” (333). The reading is especially weak for the context of the anchor image is “The island had not moved / from anchor.” Rather than a raised anchor, the image suggests the island-ship is moored to the sea bottom. As the waves measure time, the

Caribbean waves chronicle a moored experience. 203

In addition to shaping his vision, Walcott paints images of the waves sculpturing his body physically as if to connote the waves shape him in every respect. In “THE WALKING

FISH” part of the “Natural History” poem, the image appears twice. On the verso, the narrator watches a dead fish lying on the beach and in a revelatory tone he identifies with the fish:

There was a shape across the bay,

stunned on the sand.

it was like a huge fish, or a man

like a huge fish.

It did not move. I could not look away.

It was here I began.

The waves

scudded over my back;

where they snagged they formed scales

scalloped at the edge. My ducts

subside now. Bellows (Sea Grapes 28).

On the recto, the image of a washed back persists: “Waves, waves wash over my back” (Sea

Grapes 29).

Indeed, Bruckner’s aforementioned words (398) paraphrase Walcott’s own words in

“Choc Bay”:

And I, with a black heart

Heart, and my back

Healing from history, by the sea

Pink, shell-sharp dawn, 204

Have heard the story

Of each white goddess whom the waves

Bearing time’s bitter legends gave

To those whose lives are circled by the sea (Green 24).

In terms of locality, the lines show the first difference between the waves and the tides images as they appear in Walcott’s poetry. The waves are skirting the sea-circle, in Walcott’s poetry.

The tides, on the other hand, are located more towards the sea’s interior/center. In fact, in the stanza preceding the one just quoted in “Choc Bay,” the distinction is made apparent because the tides and the waves are juxtaposed, which makes the difference rather more visible. The tide image is farther from the shore: “And there, salteyed daughter / Of the sea, that opens its weedhaired tides” (23). In contrast, the narrator stands “Deaf to the rout / of waves on the reef-turreted shore” (ibid). The direct opposite of ‘there’ appears plainly in “As John to

Patmos”: “here surrounded / By the strewn-silver on waves” (Green 12). The closeness to shore keeps being emphasized with an explicit here on some occasions like the one just cited.

An implicit here alternates with an explicit counterpart on other occasions. Standing by the shore, the beachcomber in the title poem of The Castaway, says: “The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea” (9). So is silence broken when “a wave / coughs once, abruptly” in

“Parades, Parades” (Sea Grapes 22). In “Crusoe’s Island” of The Castaway, too, a group of girls are portrayed to “Walk in their air of glory / Beside a breaking wave” (57).

This placement is deliberate. First, Walcott equates time with past/history. So, both the waves and the tides represent subdivisions of the past. Second (and consequently), that the tides and the waves stand for time (or measure time), their consistent placement, if taken along a virtual timeline relative to the shore (present) reads: the tides represent the past (its core/center); the waves are a past reaching out to the present. This explains the image in

Another Life: “the waves arriving with stale news” (105). In like terms, in “The Schooner 205

Flight,” waves are “the rotting waves” (The Star-Apple Kingdom 5). Up to The Bounty, the waves

are bringing the same old news,

not only the death-rattle of surf on the gargling shoal,

but something further than the last wave, the smell

of pungent weed, of dead crabs whose casing whiten ( “22” 55).

By White Egrets, maturity itself is treated relative to the waves’ news and messages:

“Only the sun on the seafront stays the same / to an old man on a bench for whom the waves are not news” (“24” 55). This development is one possible realization of Ferber’s argument that “the endless repetitiveness of both of them [tides and waves] … lures us as if to a peaceful sleep or death” (182). Walcott, indeed, repeatedly highlights the rhythmic repetitiveness of waves78 and in “31/ Italian Eclogue,” he is, indeed, lured by the “waves’ incantation” (The Bounty 69). Whether it is a spell to death or sleep is not definite in these lines. Tracing the answer to this question shows a move from the former to the latter, another sign of maturity in dealing with the burden of the past.

In “The Schooner Flight,” the waves are ghostly in Shabine’s phantasmagorical encounter with the middle passage (the formative historical episode in the collective

(un)consciousness of the Caribbeans). Then and there, “all [he] could hear was the ghostly sound / of waves rustling like grass in a low wind” (The Star-Apple Kingdom 11). In Omeros, the ghostly sleep reading is presumed:

This was the shout on which each odyssey pivots,

that silent cry for a reef, or familiar bird,

not the outcry of battle, not the tangled plots

78 See “22” (The Bounty 55); “25” (The Bounty 58); (Tiepolo’s Hound 97) and “8. Sicilian Suite” (White Egrets 20).

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of a fishnet, but when a wave rhymes with one’s grave,

a canoe with a coffin, once that parallel

is crossed, and cancels the line of master and slave (159).

In “22” of The Bounty, however, “everything near extinction” at nightfall (55).

Everything but “the waves in the dark that strangely console / with their steadiness” (55). The gap is visible between fearing a ghost and welcoming a consoling presence.

Still whereas the waves (and the historical episodes they stand for) undergo a change in signification, images of the tides do not. In general, the tide is painted in negative colors in

Walcott’s poetry. During tropical Aprils, “the tide burns / Black” (Green “To a Painter in

England” 16). In “A Tropical Bestiary” poem, some eel falls an easy prey to “the darkening talons of the tide” 79 (Castaway 19). In “Midsummer, England,” too, it figures as “dark tide”

(Sea Grapes 67).

Not only do the tides signify death and atrocious episodes of Caribbean past, but also they are a tomb where Walcott drowns artistic and religious antiques. What augments this reading further is the juxtaposition of the two images in aforementioned “Choc Bay”: “Mary, the sea-lost, Venus, the sea-born” (Green 23). This pair of images shows the fate of Walcott’s boyhood faiths: Christianity and the Western canon of classics. The former dies, thus belongs to the tides; the latter persists longer and is carried on the waves. Especially that the last meaning persists up to the following (Fifth) stanza in the image: “Of each white goddess whom the waves / Bearing time’s bitter legends gave” (24). So, the image of Mary goes:

Deaf to the rout

of waves …

Deaf to the wailing horn,

She drifts, she rides (23)

79 The lines appear in the OCTOPUS part.

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implies naivety of missionaries. This idea is elaborated in the following stanzas. The ‘horn’ is specified: “the horn / of the conch, pink as her flesh” (24) with obvious allusion to the myth of

Venus’ birth. As if, Walcott abandons the church bells and answers the new divine call of

Venus’ conch. Also, he hopes Mary will be “Forgiving boyhood that it should have grown”

(25). But it is important to notice that Venus and the classics are heading to the same fate of

Mary and Christian faith. The “wailing horn” (23) is replaced with “the wailing dawn” (24).

Dawn here heralds a new day/age/epoch/time. Most importantly, dawn wails and mourns “For

Venus dead in green water” (24). The beginning of change is spotted in Walcott’s announcing:

For the morning sky

And the sea, I

Waded in the first, lost light,

My mind as high as the birds,

The salt washing my heel (25).

It is reversing the previous images. Dawn is past and taken over by morning signaling the coming of a new beginning; new faith (a faith in his own art). Rather than “salteyed” Walcott is salt-ankled for he has just waded into the sea/the past. The verb ‘wade’ is doubly significant. For one thing, it implies daring the sea and taking initiative. For another thing, it reverses “the rout / of waves on the reef-turreted shore.” Rather than the wave/the past reaching out to the shore/ the present, Walcott wades; moves from his shore (the now- moment) into the sea. In other words, Walcott wants to speak back to the past/history that shapes all aspects of present Caribbean experience. Thus, the action of wading is a symbolically discursive gesture of Walcott’s writing back to the canon through generating new metaphors. Metaphors that are drawn from the Caribbean present experience that seeks to re-read the past. Rather than shaped by the waves, the New-World artist sets about shaping 208

the waves. Ultimately, in Omeros, “the waves were swaying to the stroke of his hand” (286).

This aspect of the wave image recurs in Walcott’s poetry. In “A Careful Passion,”

Walcott’s reflects again on his sea-circumscribed, wave-shaped insular experience: “There80 the green wave spreads on the printless beach” (Green 43). Rootless and historyless, the

Caribbean artist dwells on a “printless” narrative-less beach; giving way to the waves to inscribe an assertive narrative. As with Walcott, there is always hope in the womb of despair.

In “A Careful Passion,” the spreading waves inform the image of “Wave after wave of memory silts the mind” (43). Accumulatively, the ‘stale’ waves are enriching. Indeed, the waves become an ideal to be pursued; an artistic model. In “Islands,” one aspect of the ideal poetic style the narrator seeks is: “Cold as the curled wave” (Green 77).

Though, in a different context, Walcott praises verse that emulates the waves:

[poet Robinson] Jeffers’s long lines, like a wave gathering and breaking, is

already an inevitable self-evident truth, a metre that gathers its reflection to

break and shudder the supposed solidity of the shore of the republic,

carrying garbage in its wash sometimes, and obviously, admirably striving

to achieve distance, not through any subtle domestic irritations but through

the sarcasm of rage, from the hawk-height of the sublime coasting on its

own serenity (“The Road Taken: Robert Frost” 206).

Ironically, Walcott’s verse is praised for emulating the tides: “The poems [in Midsummer] press toward the white margin like a sea of words at high tide. And because time moves slowly in the tropics, the line takes longer to ripen, all motion slows but that of the mind and the mind’s eye” (Bensen 339).

Eventually, a change in treating the wave images is detectable. Rather than repulsive, in latter volumes the waves appear inviting and seductive. Shockingly, the seduction is

80 The reference is specifically to the small southern islands of the Archipelago.

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depicted in graphically erotic terms. In “Menelaus,” for example:

a wave hoists its frilled skirt.

I wade clear, chuckling shallows

without armour now, or cause,

and bend, letting the hollows

of cupped palms salt my scars (The Arkansas Testament 101).

No less erotic is the scene of the waves in “8. Sicilian Suite”:

My memory’s nostrils prick at these odours,

of burnt concrete, or tar, the smell of words

drying like kelp in a rock-pool to a door’s

hinges opening like a heart. Gulls rise

like screeching gossips past the hotel windows

and a bosoming wave unbuttons her white bodice (White Egrets 18).

5.4 The Snow and The Ice

The snow and the ice figure few times in Walcott’s poetry. Although the snow and the ice share the same physical features, Walcott attaches to them opposing connotations: negative and positive; respectively. The snow is about death and termination of life; the ice is about the non-end: an infinite beginning. This contrast is most visible in poem “2” of The

Prodigal: a Poem. The images of the ice, the icicles and the snow recalls the landscape in

Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ice Maiden” to the narrator’s mind. On the one hand, there is

“the absolute, / these peaks […] this empire, this infinity of ice” (14). On the other hand, there is the fairytale’s “snow-locked horror” (15). The opposition in these figurations is, again, historically grounded. For example, a tone of defiance is detectable in the image from

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“Conqueror”: “On those unconquered peaks, it may be snowing” (Green 67). The snow is identified with the colonizers and with colonization: in color it refers to the white race of the former; in manner (heaps of falling snow) it recalls the continual waves of colonization that the Archipelago witnessed. Especially that the context of the Caribbean “unconquered peaks” includes images of “murderous teeth” and “torturer’s claws” (ibid).

5.4.1 The Snow

Factually, the snow is foreign to the Caribbean Archipelago. In “2/ Signs,” Walcott puts it: “In this dry place without ruins, there is only an echo / of what you have read. It is only much later / that print became real: canals, churches, willows, filthy snow” (The Bounty

21). In a later volume (The Prodigal: a Poem), the Caribbean narrator is magnetized by the scene of the snow as he “had never seen so much snow” (“2” 15).

Walcott invests in this fact (of foreignness) and works the snow image into a symbol of the Other: the Western Other/the colonizer and what they stand for. Hence, the snow is neither a foreigner nor a late comer in Walcott’s poetry. The snow image appears in Walcott’s poetry as early as In a Green Night. In “Fragments and Epitaphs” appears “Greenwich

Village, Winter” fragment. This fragment opens with a metaliterary reflection on writing: “A book is a life, and this / White paper death” (50). And it concludes with: “Each word, / Black footprints in the frightening snow” (ibid). These lines are foundational of subsequent treatment of the snow image in the following volumes. Rather than straightforward, however, the link between the snow, death and horror is inferred from the structural parallelism that governs the lines in this allegory on writing. In a different context, the image refigures in

“Forest of Europe”: “the winter forest / looks like an empty orchestra, its lines / ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow” (The Star-Apple Kingdom 38). Again, in these lines, the snow spreads lifelessness: “an empty orchestra.” Still, using “lines” and “manuscripts” make the

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lines a possible reproduction of Walcott’s reflection in “Greenwich Village, Winter.”

Especially because “Forest of Europe” is dedicated to Joseph Brodsky, the exiled Russian poet. But reading “lines” as rows of the forest’s trees is valid, too.

On the contrary, a celebratory tone dominates the snow fall scene in Another Life:

At nights in the Cantonment,

when the mouth of the full moon sang through the ruins,

choirs of black carollers patrolled the barracks

singing of holly and fresh-fallen snow (89).

Whereas in the “Greenwich” fragment the inscribed words are a metaphorical triumph over imminent death (i.e. snow); in the song, here, the falling snow is the only hopeful image that arises out of the immediate spatial ruins of the Cantonment and the temporally far memories of Anna. However, the snow is fresh because it accompanies the first throbbing of the poet and Anna’s love. Indeed, the scene appears in Book Three entitled “A Simple Flame.” The flame, here, signifies Walcott’s first artistic and emotional callings. That the innocent lovers separate, or love dies, later, shows that the belief in fresh snow is naïve. The snow song proves a bad omen. A moment later, the poet is indeed disillusioned; likening Anna to the snow but with a shift in associations:

Who were you [Anna] then?

…

foreign as snow,

far away as first love,

my Akhmatova! (97).

With Anna, freshness (innocence and simplicity) is gone: the fresh love and the fresh sense of snow have dissipated. Even the reference to Akhmatova alludes specifically to the Russian poet’s renowned simple style (Baugh and Nepaulsingh 297). 212

The negative symbolism of the snow is resumed in Sea Grapes. In “Over Colorado,”

Walcott presents a portrayal of Walt Whitman:

his snow-soft whisper,

Colorado, rust and white;

the snow his praise, the snow

his obliterator (50).

That the soft snow yields to rust and praise obliterates grants the negative aspect of snow’s symbolism the lasting last word. The same treatment of the snow image recurs in “For Pablo

Neruda.” Both poems appear in the same volume. Also, both dedicatees are compared relationally to the pacific: “Whitman’s beard unrolled like the Pacific” (50); Neruda’s “voice grows hoarser / than the chafed Pacific” (54). The snow image in both cases, too, is used to render the respective poet’s achievement and career; tragic all the same. The image of

Neruda’s

voice

falling soundless as snow on

the petrified Andes, the snow

like feathers from the tilting

rudderless condors (54) recalls Whitman’s “snow-soft whisper,” as softness is implied in the texture of the feather-like snow in Neruda’s case. But the kinetic image of the fallen snow, the fallen feather and the heartbroken-poet image associates the snow more with death. Heartbreak is indeed ocean- derived: “heartbreaking ocean” (54). But then, the heartbreaking ocean itself is portrayed, a page later, thus: “snowblowing ocean” (55).

In yet another poem in Sea Grapes, Walcott reflects implicitly on his own 213

achievement and career in like terms. In “At Last,” which is dedicated “to the exiled novelists,” Walcott is mainly concerned with artists (novelists for that matter) exiled physically from their homes and those exiled emotionally deriving material from overseas.

Walcott’s message is for the artist to draw material from their home. The message is carried out in a snowy imagery. The image is dialectical, nevertheless. It is about burying under the snow foreign themes and resurrecting from under the snow native ones. Walcott advises the estranged novelist:

let your fur-shrouded

Aryan horsemen

melt in the snowstorm,

till the page is again

blank (77).

In lieu of Aryan knights, the blank page is to celebrate the epic of his uprooted people:

under the snowdrift

of the white page, of the white/

ocean, all is buried,

generations, generations.

[…]

Generations, generations,

[…]

… those who

perished in the snows or

under the snow-torn billows (77/78).

What augments further Walcott’s identification with the exiled novelists is applying the same rhetoric to himself. New England’s snow literally estranged Walcott in poem “XXXI.” The 214

closing scene of the poem opens: “The Fall is all around us” (Midsummer). The “snow, mixed with steam, blurring the thought of islands” image that closes the poem illuminates the fact that the pervasive fall refers beyond the season.

The extermination of Native Americans, in particular, is a tragedy portrayed in a succession of snow images. In “Forest of Europe,” for instance, the narrator likens the snow to invaders preying on and deceiving Natives:

Growing in whispers from the Winter’s Congress,

the snow circles like Cossacks round the corpse

of a tired Choctaw till it is a blizzard

of treaties and white papers as we lose

sight of the single human through the cause (The Star-Apple Kingdom 39).

In fact, the same meditative temperament encapsulates the life circle of trees, in the poem; concisely “–paper to snow –” (ibid); the snow being death: the journey’s end. In Omeros,

Walcott identifies his race’s contracts with Native American’s treaties: “Our contracts // were torn like the clouds, like treaties with the Indians” (175). His own plight is identified with the

Indians’ experience of death by the snow: “My face frozen in the ice-cream paradiso / of the

American dream, like the Sioux in the snow” (175). Omeros is particularly important in this argument of the connection of Native Indians’ genocide and the white snow. In Catherine

Weldon’s letter to the Indian agent, she rhetorically asks:

I look to the white church spire and often think,

Is the cross for them also? The resurrection

of their bodies? The snow and the blood that we drink

from our broken Word? Ask your wheat-headed soldiers (182).

Omeros, on his turn, feels for Catherine and her race who tire “of fighting the claws of the 215

White Bear, / dripping red beads on the snow’” (217). However, Omeros tries to help

Catherine overcome her past memories of the white snow:

Look Catherine! There are no more demons outside the door.

The white wolf drags its shawled tail into the high snow

through the pine lances, the blood dried round its jaw;

it is satisfied. Come, come to the crusted window,

blind as it is with the ice, through the pane’s cataract;

see, it’s finished. It’s over, Catherine, you have been saved (217).

However, Omeros’ efforts are to no avail. Catherine answers Omeros’ assurances:

“I’m one year older,”

she said to the feathery window. “I loved snow

once, but now I dread its white siege outside my door.”

Years severed in half by winter! … (218).

The scene with Omeros and Catherine ends in yet more images of snow and death and burial:

“every street a grave / with snow on both sides” (218).

Catherine’s dread of the snow recalls Walcott’s own “mistrust [of] the dark snow” in

“North and South” (The Fortunate Traveller 14). A mistrust that hardens into panic in The

Prodigal: a Poem. The Alps’ “meadows of snow” inspire and stir in the narrator fear:

my fear [that] was white

and my belief obliterated …

… everything was white,

white was the colour of nothing, not the night (“2” 9).

In the third section of poem “2,” it becomes default that “with snow […] the heart darken[s]” 216

(11). In poem “4” there is even a talk of “the snow’s nightmare” (The Prodigal: a Poem 24).

Up to poem “17” fear persists and haunts the narrator in the Alpine resort of Zermatt:

O Altitudino! And my fear of heights.

But in Zermatt it was the clear, dry cold

that is the delight of skiers and of angels

over riven crevices where the old snow was packed

and the new snow almost blinded. … (The Prodigal: a Poem 96).

Not only does snow recall past deaths but it also foretell future ones. Whereas the snow delineates the street-grave in the sepulchral scene with Catherine, snowy whiteness prophecies Joseph Brodsky’s death in Walcott’s last volume. In the title poem of White

Egrets, Walcott reminisces of a time he spent with Brodsky in St. Croix. Walcott lingers on

Brodsky’s petrification at the sight of a white bird. Its identity is not particularized. It is “a sepulchral egret or heron” (10), the narrator reports in a tone that deems the species unimportant or irrelevant. For it is not the bird that upsets them but the omen it carries. This is obvious in the mortuary implications of “sepulchral” and the line: “the bird was such a spectral white” (10). What makes the omen inescapable is that its presence resurrects “the unutterable word [i.e. death]” (10). More importantly, however, Brodsky’s transition from the realm of life to that of death is designated by the egrets abandoning its natural wintry, snowy realm: “what got him, who loved snow, what brought it on” (10). Literally, indeed, Walcott doubts: “The huge bird was / suddenly there, perhaps the same one that took him [i.e. claimed

Brodsky’s life]” (10).

5.4.2 The Ice

The ice is, by nature, as foreign to the Caribbean as is the snow. The snow accumulates and heaps and buries. The accumulative aspect of the snow image was

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emphasized in Walcott’s poetry by way of designating it is a formidable task to unearth what lies beneath. With the ice image, on the other hand, transparency is accented. The brittle transparency, it should be added, that allows for cracking and retrieving is particularly emphasized. The focus is on, to use Walcott’s words, “the clarity of ice” (The Prodigal: a

Poem “2” 11). And, Walcott is more interested in unearthing what lies beneath the clear layer.

Seeing through the ice, Walcott finds a lot of buried races and histories; just like those beneath the snow. As with the snow, too, Native Americans receive a significant focus. So, though “barren”, the narrator of “Forest of Europe” glimpses under the icy stretches in

Oklahoma “a Gulag Archipelago / under this ice, where the salt, mineral spring / of the long

Trail of Tears runnels these plains” (The Star-Apple Kingdom 38). Another reference is made to “lakes [that] hardened with ice” in the Great Plains in Omeros (213). However, the latter reference is a literal description of the Plains’ landscape81.

Cracking or breaking the ice is about facing the wrongs of history and reconciling with their bitterness. Reconciliation with the past/history comes only later in Walcott’s poetry, nevertheless. In Omeros, Philoctete, with his sore leg heads to Ma Kilman’s No Pain Café to seek cure. (Philoctete’s wound is to do with history as discussed at the close of “The Sea” chapter). Ma Kilman hands Philoctete

the usual medicine for him, a flask of white

acajou, and a jar of yellow Vaseline,

a small enamel basin of ice. …

…

… [to] anoint the mouth of the sore on his shin (18).

81 Similar literal occurrences of the ‘ice’ with little figurative weight or symbolism are also found in “Storm Figure” (The Arkansas Testament 44) and Omeros p. 219.

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Although the local application of the ‘medicine’ suggests the ice heals the physical sore, the talk about Philoctete’s “chest [that] was a sack of ice” (21) suggests the relief is emotional as well. The ice figures as prominently in the ritual scene of healing. Then, Ma Kilman uses the shaman traditions to cure Philoctete:

An icy sweat

glazed his scalp, …

[…]

… With a rag

sogged [sic] in a basin of ice she rubbed his squeezed face (247).

To be sure, there are limits to reconciliation. As is evident in the aforementioned line from

Omeros when Omeros invites Catherine to reconcile with the tragic history of her race (217).

He encourages her to look through the ice-crusted window and see for herself that the tragedy is past. Catherine sees all but all never cools her fears. Catherine’s case is a realistic examination of the ice-reconciliation promise.

5.5 The Waterfall and The Fountain

In this final section, the study surveys the images of the waterfall and the fountain.

Their superficial difference may raise questions about the suitability of them occupying the same section. Analyzing them as kinetic images, however, shows them to belong together.

Kinetically speaking, the waterfalls and the fountains present images of influx. Still, one body pours; the other jets. In kinetic terms, one moves straight down (one-way); the other moves in an up-and-down convex.

5.5.1 The Waterfall

The waterfall image appears sparingly in Walcott’s poetry. Indeed, in its appearance in 219

“VIII” poem it has not much symbolic value. It is more of a literal (passing) description:

Midsummer bursts

out of its body, and its poems come unwarranted,

as when, hearing what sounds like rain, we startle a place

where a waterfall crashes down rocks. Abounding grace! (Midsummer).

As a center of a poem’s focus or a poem’s theme, the waterfall figures in three successive poems of the “Guyana” sequence. One of these poems (IV), indeed, is entitled “The Falls.”

This poem, in particular receives a notable attention in Ismond’s study. In a word, Ismond reads the waterfalls to symbolize the “cosmos” (85). Ismond, later offers a full-on account of this symbol. In fact, given the image’s single major appearance in Walcott’s oeuvre, the account is cosmic (in size). The account occupies almost two pages. Two paragraphs are of paramount importance to this subsection and will be quoted in full. In the first of these,

Ismond elaborates on the cosmic aspect of the image:

The waterfall has served, archetypally, as a powerful symbol encoding

complex metaphysical and mythic ideas. It is the natural, elemental form

which most strikingly manifests the principle of cosmic motion known as

the Heraclitean flux – the cyclic transmutation of the four elements (fire, air,

water, earth) into one, indivisible cosmic energy. Its graphic image as “the

smoke that thundered” is emblematic of the core metaphysical idea in the

Heraclitean concept: the reconciliation of conflicting elements (fire and

water as the most polarized) into one harmonized continuum. Thus the

quester [in “The Falls”], in seeking a door through the waterfall, aspires to a

transcendent state beyond his earthly and mortal sphere, where he remains a

creature susceptible to separate, conflicting properties (burning or

drowning) (Ismond 93). 220

In the other paragraph, Ismond concentrates on Walcott’s direction of the waterfall scene. In particular, Walcott’s placement of the town and the flower relative from the falls:

coincidence of town and waterfall … on Walcott’s part, [represents] the

intuitional grasp of one indivisible life principle extending through external

nature and nature in the human, and its essential wholeness. Thus it is the

graphic picture of the flower above the waterfall (an original feature at

Kaieteur Falls), which, with sudden revelatory impact, crystalizes the

pattern of the human relation to the totality of its world. Poised above the

waterfall, the flower, as a lesser form, is not threatened by its tremendous

force: it is creatively accommodated by its very frailty, its “weightlessness”,

to be borne along by the greater flow, and sustained within it. Thus

creatively adjusted, it remains less than essence/totality, but attains its own

wholeness and completeness as efflorescence, flowering out of essence. The

course of its passage/destiny along the great flux, therefore, even as it moves

towards finitude, constitutes its own fulfillment and completion. It is in the

light of this deeply perceived design that Walcott’s questing persona

renounces the desire to attain essence and, instead, orient himself as “a

flower” within the totality of the wider flux (Ismond 95).

The flower image referred to in the above quote goes (and closes the poem): “He was a flower, / weightless. He would float down” (Gulf 41). Alliteration aside, the coincidence of

‘flower’ and ‘fall,’ rather than that of town and fall, is more pertinent to this section on

Walcott’s treatment of the waterfall image. Its recurrence in the fifth poem of the “Guyana” sequence augments further the importance of this collage of images. In “A Map of the

Continent,” a fish takes over the quester’s place: “the fish thrashing green air / on a pen’s hook, // above the falls reciting its single flower” (Gulf 42). To understand the adaptation 221

aspect of the image, it is necessary to examine the “pen’s hook,” against two other preceding pens: the lexicographer’s and the Red Indian’s. The former “in his cell records the life and death of books;” the latter, “the naked buck waits at the edge of the world” (ibid). There is an implicit parallelism holding between the two men’s tools; pens. They share the feeling of their tool’s burdening weight as well: “One hefts a pen, the other a bone spear” (ibid). Despite their apparent difference in mission, they still share the wrong approach to the cosmic laws. The lexicographer dates and delineates life with his pen; in a word, tames it. The Indian, on the other hand, ambushes the living to outwit them. Each of them is smartly described to reflect their differing attitudes. The taming lexicographer is locked “in his cell.” The Red Indian

“waits.” In contrast, the fish caught “on a pen’s hook,” simply celebrates, or ‘recites,’ the bending of the flower and its obedience of the cosmic laws, embodied in the roaring, thundering falls.

In the sixth poem of the “Guyana” sequence entitled “A Georgetown Journal,” the lexicographer’s task is mirrored in that of “the rootless surveyor,” (Gulf. 44) with a difference.

The surveyor’s task is accomplished: “thunderous falls have been measured, / the thickening girth of the continent has been buttoned” (ibid). But, the following image suggests that the end is reached but the goal is never achieved except in the surveyor’s imagination. Hence, the surveyor believes now

a man knows his weight to the stone,

his worth to the inch,

yet imagines he hears in his hair

the rain horses crossing savannahs

and his pores prickle like water (The Gulf 44).

These successive conclusions and assertions imply the vanity of man’s attempt at mapping

(taming) the cosmos. 222

So, Walcott’s narrator in Omeros opted for and adopted the fish’s approach, rather than the lexicographer, the surveyor or the Indian. Instead of transcribing its language, coding its behavior or catching its laws, the narrator bends over a creek and shares:

I made myself hear the water’s

language around the rocks in its clear-running lines

and its small shelving falls with their eddies, “Choctaws,”

“Creeks,” “Choctaws,” … (177).

In the image’s last appearance, in the title poem of White Egrets, Walcott likens the egrets’ color to “the colour of waterfalls, / and of clouds” (9). He then moves from their spectral identification with the waterfalls to their immortality: “the egrets stalk through the rain / as if nothing mortal can affect them, or they lift / like abrupt angels, sail, then settle again” (9).

5.5.2 The Fountain

In Walcott’s poetry, the fountain image figures more sparingly than the waterfall.

Characteristically, the fountains and the springs share with the waterfalls their influx.

Symbolically, the fountains share with the rivers their association with poetry writing. Where the latter stands for poetic fluency (see “The River” chapter), the former, Ferber recounts “are sacred to the Muses and sources of poetic inspiration” from antiquity onwards (80).

Consequently, like his feeble and stuttering river, Walcott’s fountains are receding and could hardly be said to jet.

A fountain figures for the first time in Walcott’s poetry at the onset of “The Banyan

Tree, Old Year’s Night.” And, from the start it is a “withered fountain” (Green 71). The poem’s Tenth Stanza concludes with the narrator wondering: “Did I divine / Some secret in

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the fountain’s failing arch, / And was that infant melancholy mine?” (Green 72).

Afterwards, the fountain image disappeared for almost three decades from Walcott’s poetry to spring again in Omeros. Ironically, after that long absence, the fountain: “had uttered its last sigh” and then resigns as the image of “the dead fountain once” suggests (257).

It is notable that the island’s dead fountains sharply contrast with their metropolitan counterparts. On his tour in Milan, Walcott expresses an envy stirred by the city’s landmarks, amongst which are: “Envy of statues […] Envy of fountains […] / Envy of columns … Envy of bells” (The Prodigal: a Poem “4” 25). That Walcott has “no such memorials on the island”

(ibid) to inspire classical, canonical poetry explains the rarity of the fountain images and reflects on the tiny space of this section.

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6. CONCLUSION

This study has analyzed the watery images in all Derek Walcott’s poetry volumes to date; 14 in number. Precisely, the study traced and presented the evolution of the corresponding images across Walcott’s volumes: the water, the sea, the river, the ocean, the dew, the rain, the tides, the waves, the snow, the ice, the fountain and the waterfall. Rather than a romanticized approach, this study has adopted a more serious view of Walcott’s seemingly idyllic depictions of the Caribbean landscape, the watery images especially.

Assessing Walcott’s watery images closely, the study has revealed the complex issues that inform Walcott’s poetic renderings of these images. What initially reads as static descriptive images proves later highly meditative and actively reconstructive as follows:

6.1 Results

“The Water” chapter demonstrated that water’s dualism, or dualistic signification

(symbolizing birth/rebirth and a posed life-threat, for instance) is highlighted in Walcott’s poetry. The water image, in this sense, identifies with the nature of Walcott’s urgent crises: identity, history, and poetic voice. All three crises are polarized definitions in the Caribbean setting. “Identity” is a Black/White question in the Caribbean. “History” is a disputed concept that opens on two possibilities: presences/absence. The crisis with artistic identity (or, poetic voice) is similar to the national identity crisis as it alternates between identifying with the

(White) canonical tradition and the non-canonical. But then though it is a life-giver and a life- claimer, water is neither life nor death, rather it is water: an identity that transcends dualisms.

In this sense, the water image embodies Walcott’s conceptualized answer to Manichean binarism that perpetuates his crises. Walcott’s coined term for ‘transcendence’ is “third truth.”

So, he would rather identify as a Caribbean, both black and white yet neither all-black nor all-

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white. The “third truth” concept is represented in Walcott’s poetic image of “writing on water” for it is writing, yet it commemorates no symbols or signs as does ‘conventional’ writing.

“The Sea” chapter detailed Walcott’s crisis with history. The first half of the chapter

(sections 3.1 and 3.2) outlined the crisis theoretically. In section 3.1, Walcott’s non-linear

‘time’ is contrasted with traditional linearity. In a few words, the linearity paradigm proposes that time progresses forwardly or moves cyclically whereby the ‘past,’ the ‘present,’ and the

‘future’ are set apart along the timeline or in the time cycle. Walcott’s paradigm, on the other hand, rejects this separatism. Rather than three, time has one sense. Section 3.2 named the tense: the past/history. Walcott’s paradigm derives from the Caribbean reality. Rather than past and done with, history (in the form of legacy), in the Caribbean, is forcefully present in the day to day reality. In the absence of any signs to reverse this persistence of history, the archipelago’s past foretells the region’s future, too. Like the time, like the sea. Rather than any watery body, it is the sea that identifies with Walcott’s concept of non-linearity as it has one tense82. The other half of the chapter (section 3.3) exemplified in further detail the concordance between Walcott’s concept of one-tense-time (i.e. history) and Walcott’s sea image via analyzing four poems. The poems are: “The Sea Is History,” Another Life, Omeros and The Schooner Flight.” In these poems, the sea image figures as an embodiment of history in two senses. On some occasions, the sea and the history are used interchangeably (‘literal’ synonyms). On other occasions, the sea figures to fill the different characters agonizing void: history (metaphorical synonyms).

Analyzing the river as a conventional image of time passage, (national) identity and

(poetic) fluency, subversion is a key word in “The River” chapter. In literary tradition, the time river streams forward and the identity river flows with pride. In Walcott’s poetry, the

82The Bounty (“16/ Spain” 42); Tiepolo’s Hound (116, 137).

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course is reversed. Rather than forward, Walcott’s are receding rivers. The river’s fading threads substitute canonical streams and flows. In line with Walcott’s nonlinear time paradigm and his static time passage (detailed in “The Sea” chapter), Walcott’s time river

(thread) hardly moves (forward or in whichever direction). Walcott’s identity river is as feeble as his time river, but it is belittled in stature, in addition. Whereas the former is designated as

‘thread,’ the latter is ‘spittle.’ The colonization’s active involvement in degrading the identity river is verbally designated. In terms of process, colonization (or, colonizers) tames the identity river(s). In terms of legacy, colonization branches it. These images of reduction and belittlement, in their turn, inform the treatment of the poetry river whereby the traditional river of fluency stutters.

The last chapter “Other Bodies” looked on yet more water images. The first of these is the massive body: the ocean. Examined against its conventional symbolism of grand creation

(Genesis) and Homeric canonical artists-creators, the ocean image turns an image of void (or to use Walcott’s term ‘nothingness’) in the Caribbean context. In the first respect, the

Caribbean story begins with annihilation rather than creation. In the second, the Caribbean artists are denied access to the canon, let alone recognized oceanic greatness. Identifying with either of the ocean’s symbolic ramifications (Edenic, it should be added) is perceived by

Walcott an escapist step. Escaping the fallen Caribbean reality.

“Other Bodies” shifts from the massive ocean to the tiny spheric watery bodies: the rain and the dew images. The rain is traditionally an omen, bad or good, and this binarism is preserved in Walcott’s poetry but with an important modification (contextualizing). In Europe and USA, the good (round and fertilizing) rain predominates. The Caribbean islands, on the contrary, know only of the bad rain. In Walcott’s poems that reflect mainly on the Caribbean, the rain stands for evil. Namely, the evil is one of loss. Losses vary in gravity: from the loss of youth and Platonic love to the demise of the dearest. This meaning is coded in the rain erasure 227

scenes (whether the erasure is synchronous or subsequent relative to the rainfall). However, a change in Walcott’s attitude to the evil brought by the rain is noted across the volumes.

Alarm, melancholy, and surrender in presence of the ‘evil’ rain eloquently tag the rainy scenes in the early, mid- and late volumes, respectively.

With the dew image, on the other hand, evil is the first and the last word. Contrary to the established dew image of fertility (life), Walcott’s dew is coalesced with death as a colonial practice. This meaning is concentrated in Walcott’s portrayal of the dew as a prism.

Where the physical prism refracts the white color into bands of colors, the dew prism (of colonization) reverses this course of diversification as it annihilates other colors (races) to assert the White supremacy.

“The Waves and the Tides” section explored the complementarity that holds between this pair of watery images. Rather than subverts, Walcott appropriates the images’ symbolism to his philosophy of time-is-the-past (history). Traditionally, not only does tide and time alliterate but the former was the word for the latter, as revealed by etymological surveys. The waves, on the other hand, are conventionalized time gauges (measuring progression). This distinction is reproduced in Walcott’s poetry via careful placement of these bodies relative to the shore whereby the shore represents a ‘virtual’ present moment. Hence, as the image of time’s essence, the tide is positioned centrally in Walcott’s time paradigm, i.e. towards the sea

(time) center. In a word, off-shore. For the same reason, the waves (time measures) are more of littoral images, incessantly reaching out for shore. But both images signify stasis all the same. The fixed centrality of tides implies motionlessness; the ever-arriving waves are no less static as they ever break with ‘old news.’ This freezing of images that signify time’s progress mirrors the Caribbean experience that is locked in its past. In other words, a Caribbean where the present is shaped by the past.

In the penultimate section, “Other Bodies” examined another pair of interrelated 228

images, the snow and the ice. Both bodies figure as images of foreign climatic conditions.

This factual foreignness is magnified and got charged with historical symbolism at Walcott’s hands. The foreign bodies were associated with the historical Other: the colonizer, his practices and persisting legacy. Mainly, both white bodies shroud genocide images. Native

American genocide(s) are notably emphasized. The difference is, however, to do with the shroud’s thickness: the snow thicker, the ice thinner. Thickness figured in reverse proportion to reconciliation chances. In scenes where a disposition towards reconciliation with the past and moving forward dominates, history is seen through ice. In scenes of desperation, history is buried under snowy heaps that echo the formidability of unearthing, facing and reconciling with the buried body.

“Other Bodies” closes with “The Waterfall and The Fountain” section. Both are kinetic images of gushing water but the gush direction is decisive and thematically relevant in

Walcott’s treatment of these images. Presenting an image of the irreversible cosmic laws, the one-way flowing waterfall is symbolically representative. The generous and aesthetic curvy fountain water that visualizes the trance of poetic inspiration is dead or dying in the Caribbean islands.

In principle, the survey into the watery images in Walcott’s poetry exposes the collision between Walcott’s black blood and white legacy as they are projected on these images. In general, Walcott’s watery images problematize the correspondence between

Walcott’s Caribbean experience and his Western artistic legacy. The images highlight the incompatibilities. Where the Western tradition celebrates the divine flow of rivers, for instance, Walcott mourns his dying Caribbean threads of rivers. Unlike metropolitan gushing fountains, Walcott’s home fountains are lifeless. A fertilizing dewdrop is death-infecting (or, - recalling) in the islands, etc.

Eventually, subverting the images’ symbolism only serves to emphasize their 229

belonging to the Caribbean. The reworking is eventually a metamorphosis whereby the symbol-loaded image is re-presented in Walcott’s poetry as an image of nonentity which echoes Walcott’s conceptualization of the Caribbean as a place of “nothingness.” As manifested in this study, Walcott’s Caribbean experience identifies with water per se on a literal level. Just like water is defined by its lacks: tasteless, odorless, colorless, so has the

Caribbean been repeatedly referred to as a region of nothingness; a place of lacks: historyless, identityless and artless. On a metaphorical level, Walcott’s treatment of the various watery images reflects water’s characteristic fluidity, too. Just like water takes the shape of its container, Walcott adapts the conventional symbolism of the different watery bodies to his

Archipelago’s reality.

6.2 Future Work

Although it has been said above that this study is comprehensive, it does not claim filling all notches in Walcott’s corpus. The gap between providing and exhausting is to be recognized. The study is comprehensive in restrictedly two senses. First, it inspects all the watery images in Walcott’s poetry. Not only the major bodies (the water, the sea and the river) but also the minor ones like the fountain, the ice, the dew, etc. are represented in this study. The latter category has been traditionally overlooked by critics and scholars or been eclipsed by the thematic weight of the former category. Second, the study examines all

Walcott’s poetry volumes to date. Yet, the study does not exhaust even the very watery images in Walcott’s writings. The study of the watery images could yet be enlarged in scope to include Walcott’s plays, for example, (as the present study concentrated on Walcott’s poetry).

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7. SUMMARY

This study analyzes all watery images in all of Derek Walcott’s poetry volumes to date

(i.e. 14 volumes). The analysis occupies four chapters. The first three chapters analyze the major watery bodies: the water, the sea and the river. These chapters are entitled accordingly:

“The Water,” “The Sea” and “The River.” The fourth major chapter entitled “Other Bodies,” on the other hand, analyzes the minor watery bodies in its subsections that are entitled: “The

Ocean,” “The Rain and The Dew,” “The Waves and The Tides,” “The Snow and The Ice” and

“The Waterfall and The Fountain.” ‘Major’ and ‘minor’ denote persistent figuration and recurrence in Walcott’s poetry.

As it unfolds, the study shows that Walcott projects his personal and national crises

(like identity and history) on the various watery images. This projection is achieved via reworking the image’s conventional symbolism so as to match the Caribbean experience.

Accordingly, the study’s chapters and sections merge the theoretical outline of the various crises and the practical examination of their realization in Walcott’s poetry, namely, as coded in the watery images. Also, the analysis proceeds chronologically, tracing each watery image across the volumes. The chronological approach shows the reworking of the image as a process whereby the image passed various stages and underwent meticulous fine-tuning across the volumes and/or the poems of a particular volume. Also, the chronological approach testifies to the deliberate subversion of traditional symbolism. For it makes visible the juxtaposition of the conventional and the subverted symbolism in some contexts. The striking and careful contrast between the image of bountiful rains in Europe and their bodiless

Caribbean counterparts is exemplary.

Key Words: Caribbean, Derek Walcott, watery images, subversion.

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8. SHRNUTÍ

Tato práce analyzuje všechna vyobrazení vody v kompletním díle Dereka Walcotta (tj.

14 svazků). Analýza je rozdělena do čtyř kapitol. První tři kapitoly se zabývají hlavními vodními útvary – vodou, mořem a řekou – a v souladu s tím jsou nazvány „Voda“, „Moře“ a „Řeka“. Následující čtvrtá kapitola s názvem „Ostatní vodní útvary“ analyzuje méně významné vodní útvary v podkapitolách „Oceán“, „Déšť a rosa“, „Vlny a mořské dmutí“,

„Sníh a led“ a „Vodopád a fontána“. Tyto útvary ve Walcottově poezii figurují neustále a opakovaně.

Tato práce dokazuje, že Walcott do různých vyobrazení vody promítá své osobní a národní krize (např. krizi identity nebo historické krize). Této projekce dosahuje přepracováním konvenčního symbolismu daných vyobrazení podle svých zkušeností z Karibiku. Proto kapitoly a podkapitoly práce spojují teoretický popis různých krizí a praktický výzkum jejich ztvárnění ve Walcottově poezii, která jsou ukryta ve vyobrazeních vody. Tato analýza postupuje chronologicky a zabývá se veškerými vyobrazeními vody ve

Walcottově díle. Díky chronologickému přístupu lze na jednotlivých svazcích či dokonce básních jednotlivých svazků prokázat autorovu postupnou a pečlivou práci na zdokonalování vyobrazení vody. Dále tato práce díky svému chronologickému přístupu dokazuje Walcottovu

úmyslnou subverzi tradičního symbolismu. Juxtapozice konvenčního a subverzního symbolismu je v některých kontextech očividná. Jako příklad může posloužit nápadný a pečlivý kontrast mezi hojnými evropskými dešti a jejich nevýraznými karibskými protějšky.

Klíčová slova: Karibik, Derek Walcott, vyobrazení vody, subverze.

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