History as Muse

In Walcott’s essay, “The Muse of History,” he calls history the “medusa of the New World” and claims that writers who are obsessed with its wrongs and who reject all European influences should, “…know that by openly fighting tradition we perpetuate it, that revolutionary literature is a filial impulse, and that maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor (Walcott 36).”[1]

Walcott has been described as having “twin ancestry, black and white” because he is the descendent of a white grandfather and a black grandmother on both his maternal and paternal sides. This ancestry, Paula Burnett claims, he shares with the Caribbean people (Burnett 2[2] and Hamner 6[3]).

Walcott has posited that there is assimilation in culture formation. But, are acts of assimilation and association in writing/art expected? Required? Inexcusable?

“But who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or for revenge (Walcott 39)?”[4]

“That amnesia is the true history of the New World (39).”[5]

“The recriminations exchanged, the contrition of the master replaces the vengeance of the slave, and here colonial literature is most pietistic, for it can accuse great art of feudalism and excuse poor art as suffering (39).”[6]

“It is this awe of the numinous, this elemental privilege of naming (link to naming) the New World which annihilates history in our great poets, an elation common to all of them, whether they are aligned by heritage to Crusoe and Prospero or to Friday and Caliban. They reject ethnic ancestry for faith in elemental man (40).”[7]

“This is not existentialism. Adamic, elemental man cannot be existential (41).”[8]

“But the tribe in bondage learned to fortify itself by cunning assimilation of the religion of the Old World. What seemed to be surrender was redemption. What seemed the loss of tradition was its renewal. What seemed the death of faith was its rebirth (43).”[9]

“At this stage the polemic poet, like the politician, will wish to produce epic work, to summon the grandeur of the past, not as myth but as history, and to prophesy in the way that Fascist architecture can be viewed as prophecy. Yet the more ambitious the zeal, the more diffuse and forced it becomes, the more it roots into research, until the imagination surrenders to the glorification of history, the ear becomes enslaved, the glorifiers of the tom-tom ignoring the dynamo (43).”[10]

“The Caribbean sensibility is not marinated in the past. It is not exhausted. It is new. But it is its complexity, not its historically explained simplicities, which is new (54).”[11]

“…once I had decided to make the writing of poetry my life, my actual, not my imaginative life, I felt both rejection and a fear of Europe while I leaned its poetry. I have remained this way, but the emotions have changed, they are subtler, more controlled, for I would no longer wish to visit Europe as if I could repossess it than I would wish to visit Africa for that purpose (63).”[12]

“Fisherman and peasant know who they are and what they are and where they are, and when we show them our wounded sensibilities we are, most of us, displaying self-inflicted wounds (63).”[13]

“I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to the ancestor who bought me, I have no father, I want no such father, although I can understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper “history,” for if I attempt to forgive you both I am falling into your idea of history which justifies and explains and expiates…(64).”[14]

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[1] Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1998. Other essays in this book are his Nobel Lecture, “Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” “What the Twilight Says,” and essays on Robert Frost, Hemingway, V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Brodsky, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, and Les Murray.

[2] Burnett, Paula. Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.

[3] Hamner, Robert. Derek Walcott. Updated ed. Twain World Author’s Series. 600. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.

[4] Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.