traitor

Jahan Ramazani argues that the wounds of Plunkett, Philoctete, Achille, Hector, Helen, and even Walcott himself show that Walcott is a poet of affliction despite Walcott’s desires to the contrary (405-406).[1] Walcott departs from other “third world” poets because he universalizes the “wound” crossing racial and cultural boundaries. He is often criticized as devaluing the genuine ills of slavery and colonialism in order to appeal to a wider, western audience.

“Is Walcott, a poet of cross-cultural affliction, a “fortunate traveler” of transnational trope? Because he sets this politically loaded metaphor spinning, does he irresponsibly confound distinctions between colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed? How can this cross-racializing of the wound be reconciled with the asymmetrical suffering that marks colonialism and post colonialism, let alone slavery? (415).[2]

Ramazani then answers these questions by saying, “…for Walcott, the greater falsification would lie in an aesthetic separatism blind to the webbed history of the Caribbean, of his ancestors, and of his imagination and hostile to the cross-racial and cross-historical identifications the New World offers” (415).[3]

By writing for a reader that is both Caribbean and decidedly not-Caribbean, by cross-racializing the “wound” of history, is Walcott an in-authentic representation of his people or an advocate for the humanity in both victim and victimizer?

“Like Philoctete’s wound, this language carries its cure” (Walcott 323).[4]

“The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself” (Hamner 73).[5] ---Derek Walcott

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[1] Ramazani, Jahan. “The Wound of History: Walcott’s Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction.” PMLA 112.3 (1997), 405-417.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

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

[5] Hamner, Robert D., ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, Inc., 1993. This is a quote from the essay, “The Art of Poetry” that Walcott wrote in 1986.