De-Capitalize

In Walcott’s essay, The sea is history, he explicates on the concept of de-capitalizing history. He says, “The word called history is the question…I’m talking about the idea of history becoming a deity, a force, as much as science has become a deity.”

Walcott objects to history becoming an inaccessible force that “is” and wants to replace it with something that “does.” Walcott criticizes criticism when he says, “There’s no history in art, for example. The criticism of art is historical, but art itself does not contain history.” Walcott seems to emphasize that history is over-emphasized and art (or meaning-making) is de-emphasized and de-formed from looking at it through an historical, teleological perspective.

He says, “For the artist to deliver himself from the bondage of time, which is called ‘history’ is the only way he himself can burst through.” An artist must dismiss himself from history (however pleasant or terrifying) or else he is “under the same burden of science, politics and the state.”

This concept of controlling and ruling time is the job of Empires and of dictators but artists should not convince themselves that they are the culmination of other epochs of artistic history. Artists are outside of the realm of time because each one follows a unique progression not to be reproduced or repeated. So when he is asked, “‘Where is your history?’ I would say, ‘It is out there, in that cloud, that sky, the water moving.’ And if the questioner says, ‘There’s nothing there,’ I would say: ‘Well that’s what I think history is. There’s nothing there.’ The sea is history.’” [1]

And very literally the sea is where the history of the Caribbean peoples is often located. The slaves and indentured servants were brought on the sea, died on the sea, were buried in the sea. Even the colonials came and left on the sea.

When you read this poem, see if you can decide where History "is" according to Walcott.

The Sea is History

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands
out there past the reef’s moiling shelf,
where the men-o’-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself.
It’s all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea-fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Comorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations—
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History;

then came, like scum on the river’s drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges’ choirs,
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves’ progress,
and that was Emancipation—

jubilation, O jubilation—
vanishing swiftly
as the sea’s lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.[2]

Walcott both emphasizes and de-emphasizes History in this poem. Because the poem ends with "History, really beginning," Walcott is indicating that History is not behind us but in front, made and discovered through writing, through art, through meaning making.

Walcott writes his own History everyday. So do we.

My history today is this blog entry, the clean bodies of my two sons playing in their beds upstairs, and the weariness in my fingertips.

What's yours?

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[1] Birbalsingh, Frank, ed. Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. All quotations used in the above passage come from the essay included in this collection called, The sea is history. This essay was compiled from a speech given at a reading of Walcott's poem of the same name in 1979.

[2] Walcott, Deek. Collected Poems: 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984, 364-367.