Fireflies Caught in Molasses

“We were blest with a virginal, unpainted world/with Adam’s task of giving things their names (294).”[1] ---Derek Walcott

The issue of naming/re-naming is foregrounded in Walcott’s Another Life. This concept is particularly salient for the Caribbean artist/writer because of the accused “mimicry” of the New World poet and the ever-present need to represent themselves to a dominating majority that had “named” them, their islands, their landmarks, their history. Naming or re-naming is a powerful statement, a potentially revolutionary act of which Walcott explores in Another Life and his poem, Names. Part Two of Another Life begins with a vow that Walcott and his friend Dunstan St. Omar made “that we would never leave this island/until we had put down, in paint, in words,/as palmists learn the network of a hand,/ all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines, every neglected, self-pitying inlet/muttering in brackish dialect…(194).”[2] Walcott indeed spends the rest of his life naming his island, his home, his identity, his twilight.

In his poem, Names he says:

These palms are greater than Versailles
for no man made them,
Their fallen columns greater than Castille,
For no man unmade them
except the worm, who has no helmet,
but was always the emperor,

and children, look at these stars
over Valencia’s forest!

Not Orion,
Not Betelgeuse,
Tell me, what do they look like?
Answer, you damned little Arabs!
Sir, fireflies caught in molasses (308).[3]

Describing the stars as "Fireflies caught in molasses" is both a delightful and different way of naming. But Walcott also insinuates that this description is both ingenious and revolutionary, that the power of words can and should match the power of armies, of Historians, of colonials, and of ill-fated revenge.

Walcott's emphasis on naming/re-naming counters the oft-made criticism that he is not an “authentic” representation of the Caribbean because of his use of western conventions and language.

Why does Walcott emphasize naming? What is the power in a name?

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[1] Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems: 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.