DEREK WALCOTT

Derek Walcott



Derek Walcott

Introduction

Derek Walcott is a playwright and poet of contrasts: a Caribbean poet who weaves together the patois of his native St. Lucia and the poetic styles, themes, and diction of classical Greece and the European tradition. Walcott's work contains references to and echoes of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Dante, John Donne, William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, and T. S. Eliot. By refusing to choose between Europe and the Caribbean, Walcott creates a truly brilliant hybrid voice and identity. Although he does not explicitly identify himself as an American poet, his work echoes the American poetic tradition of Walt Whitman, the first great American poet of the democratic voice, and Robert Lowell, whose historical sweep and formalism can be heard in Walcott's work. Walcott has also proclaimed an admiration for the colloquial tradition in American poetry, best represented by the African-American tradition of Etheridge Knight (Walcott, 1993, 37).

Walcott's poetry is shaped and colored by the tradition of the Old World, by the figures of Adam, Robinson Crusoe, and especially Homer. But in his book-length poem Omeros, readers encounter a Homer who is not simply transplanted from classical Greece, but instead is a hybrid, a Homer who can speak in the Caribbean. He is a poet of craft because it is only the craftsperson as in Walcott's image of the disciplined carpenter in "Cul de Sac Valley" who will be able to make a language with which to speak, a language both cosmopolitan and local, a poetry that is as material as the carpenter's wood.

"A Far Cry from Africa"

Derek Walcott's meditation on cultural identity in the colonial and postcolonial world reflects his complicated family history: Born in 1930 on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia while it was still a British colony, the grandchild of two black and two white grandparents, raised speaking French-English patois while formally educated in English, Walcott writes as someone without a simple, unified cultural or national identity. "A Far Cry from Africa" explores a condition of cultural exile, the condition of someone "a far cry from" home listening with ambivalence to "a far cry from" home (Thieme, 1999, 13).

The double sense of Walcott's title introduces a host of dualities in the poem: black and white, colonized and colonizer, Africa and Europe, most obviously, but also the tension between the abstractions of ideology and embodied, lived experience. Walcott suggests that ideology academic, political, and religious obfuscations of the violence that people suffer in colonial conflict is part of the situation's brutality. He examines how rationalizations and dogmas that justify such violence achieve a life and power of their own, absorbing the suffering of others into persuasive abstractions: The violence of beast on beast is read as natural law, but upright man seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. These lines remind us of the role of religion in colonial domination, on the one hand, and show us that the pain suffered in such conflicts cannot be effaced or excused by ideology, on the other (Terada, 1992, ...