His-Story

“For every poet it is always morning in the world, and History is a forgotten insomniac night…The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of History” (Walcott 79).[1]

“Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent” (69). [2]

“All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory; every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase (82).[3]

“…the Caribbean is both a new and an old society. Old in history, new in the experiment of mult-national concentration in small spaces. To look backwards is to think linearly, the fate of any concept of progress. Linear thinking is not inevitable. The African experience is historically remote, but spiritually ineradicable….What is radical in history is ephemeral. What is radical in art is eternal. Truths exist in all societies, no one race has that privilege. What we owe the past as human beings we owe completely” (Baer 79).[4] ---Derek Walcott

“History, taught as morality, is religion. History, taught as action, is art. Those are the only uses to which we, mocked as people without history, can put it. Because we have no choice but to view history as fiction or as religion, then our use of it will be idiosyncratic, personal, and therefore, creative” (Walcott 37).[5]

“The truly tough aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor forgives history. It refuses to recognize it as a creative or culpable force” (37).[6]

“I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift” (64).[7]

“For the artist to deliver himself from the bondage of time, which is called ‘history’ is the only way he himself can burst through” (Birbalsingh)[8] ---Derek Walcott

“‘Where is your history?’ I would say, ‘There’s nothing there’…The sea is history” (Walcott)[9]

“The Classics can console. But not enough” (Walcott 297).[10]

“Where history is being made now, in these islands, is not in the quick political achievements, not in the large agricultural schemes, but in the deepening stream of the way we are now learning to think. To see ourselves, not as others see us, but with all the possibilities of the new country we are making” (Hamner 15).[11] ---Derek Walcott

“We must not commit that heresy of thinking that because ‘we have no past’, we have no future” (39).[12] ---Derek Walcott

“Yet I feel absolutely no shame in having endured the colonial experience…It was cruel, but it created our literature (50).[13] ---Derek Walcott

“One of the more positive aspects of the Crusoe idea is that in a sense every race that has come to the Caribbean has been brought her under situations of servitude or rejection, and that is the metaphor of the shipwreck I think. Then you look around you and you have to make your own tools. Whether that tool is a pen or a hammer, you are building in a situation that’s Adamic…” (79).[14] ---Derek Walcott

“There is a great danger in historical sentimentality. We are most prone to this because of…slavery. There’s a sense of skipping the part about slavery, and going straight back to a kind of Eden-like grandeur, hunting lions, that sort of thing. Whereas what I’m saying is to take in the fact of slavery, if you’re capable of it, without bitterness, because bitterness is going to lead to the fatality of thinking in terms of revenge. A lot of the apathy in the Caribbean is based on this historical sullenness.” (79).[15] ---Derek Walcott

“Because the easiest thing to do about colonialism is to refer to history in terms of guilt or punishment or revenge, or whatever. Whereas the rare thing is the resolution of being where one is and doing something positive about that reality” (Hartman).[16] ---Derek Walcott

“There, in her head of ebony, there was no real need for the historian’s/remorse, nor for literature’s. Why not see Helen/as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow,/swinging her plastic sandals on the beach alone,/as fresh as the sea-wind” (Walcott 271).[17]

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[1]Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. Included is Walcott’s Nobel Lecture, “Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.”

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Baer, William, ed.Conversations with Derek Walcott. Literary Conversations Ser. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. This is an excerpt from an interview by Leif Sjoberg in 1983.

[5] Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says: Essays.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Birbalsingh, Frank, ed. Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. This is from an essay entitled, ‘The sea is history’ by Derek Walcott.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems: 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984. This is from the poem, “Sea Grapes.”

[11] Hamner, Robert D., ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, Inc., 1993).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Hartman, Steve. “Derek Walcott: History and Imagination.” Writers Online 3.1 (1998).

[17] Walcott, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.