I was speaking with my professor (hey Winnie) a couple of days ago about this blog. I was confused as to its direction, looking for instruction on where I should go. Yes, trying to beg the teacher for answers to the questions. Don’t shame me. You’ve done it.
ANYWAY, she said (as if I already knew this) that this blog (hey blog) made a claim that history is personal. AHA! Is that what this blog is about? Oh blogging muse, why didn’t you tell me this before I started?
Walcott makes the claim that history is myth, that history is amnesia, that it is important, unimportant, bitter, sweet, that history is fiction, is religion. And above all this, by writing himself into Omeros, by writing about “What the Twilight Says” when he is indeed an example of what it says, by writing auto-biographically in Another Life, in Tiepolo’s Hound, in The Schooner Flight and others, he not only claims that history is personal but shows us that it is.
In the 1965 essay, The Figure of Crusoe, he describes Crusoe’s loneliness, his madness and then he presents its medicine, “He publishes every day the newspaper of himself in the journal he now keeps. The craftsman, the artisan, has become the writer. Crusoe can now look at Crusoe as another object. It is this act that saves his sanity (38).”[1]
Is personalizing history the path to sanity for those of us fractured by the past’s contradictions? And what should be our methods of historiography? Journal? Blog? Memory? Imagination?
[1] Essay included in: Hamner, Robert D., ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott.
1 comment:
Interesting thought. Maybe that's why I turn to blogging when things get hectic. It's the Crusoe in me trying to stay sane.
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