Dig: A Cultural Poetic Investigation of Derek Walcott

Her-Story

2007-05-06T16:43:00.000-07:00

“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).”[1]

When the idea of this blog was born, it was meant to be about Walcott, and then it evolved to be about Walcott and dialogic discourse, and then about naming and History and his-story. And it is true that it also has been largely about by my own “self-inflicted” wounds.

Has this blog been academic? Sometimes. In my writing, has Walcott’s work been oversimplified? Broken up into themes? Has it been reduced to absurdity? Maybe. But has it been personal? I hope so.

Because if there is anything I’ve learned from my study of Walcott’s oeuvre, it’s that each name is one’s own, that meaning-making is intimate, and that twilight often speaks in a whisper just loud enough for one person to hear.

A sea-eagle screams from the rock,
And my race began like the osprey
With that cry,
That terrible vowel,
That I! (33)

--Derek Walcott, Names[2]

[1] Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1998.

[2] ---. Sea Grapes. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1971.

Local

2007-05-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

“The more particular you get, the more universal you become” (412).[1]

---Derek Walcott

[1] Hamner, Robert. “Conversations with Derek Walcott.” World Literature Written in English 16, No. 2 (November 1977): 409-420.

Associations

2007-05-04T15:55:00.000-07:00

“I had sewn her, stitching deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black stitches wavered into script and I began to feel that I was writing, that this creature I was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form—a unity perhaps more rightfully given, not made; continuous, not interrupted; and subject to divine truth, not the will to expression of its prideful author.” [1]

--Creator

-- female, Mary Shelley/Shelley Jackson, English/American

“I was gathered together loosely in her attention in a way that was interesting to me, for I was all in pieces, yet not apart…I began to invent something new: a way to hang together without pretending I was whole.”[2]

--Creature

-- female, no name, Eve, no home

“Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god. In other words, the way that the Caribbean is still looked at, illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized. ‘No people there,’ to quote Froude, ‘In the true sense of the word.’ No people. Fragments and echoes of real people, unoriginal and broken (67).” [3]

“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole (69).”[4]

--Creator and Creature

--male, Derek Walcott, Adam, Caribbean

[1] Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Engironment: Storyspace. Cambridge: Eastgate Systems, 1995

[2] Ibid.

[3] Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. This quote is from his Nobel Lecture entitled, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.”

[4] Ibid.

Trust the Tale

2007-05-03T16:10:00.000-07:00

This is the right light, this pewter shine on the water,
not the carnage of clouds, not the expected wonder
of self-igniting truth and oracular rains,
but these shallows as gentle as the voice of your daughter,
while the gods fade like thunder in the rattling mountains.

---The Bounty, Derek Walcott[1]

The twilight (pewter shine) in this poem “says” that the sea (“let your knuckled toes root deep in their own soil”) should be where the Caribbean person’s roots are. And also that these gentle shallows (“...as gentle as the voice of your daughter”) will lead while “the gods (lower case) fade like thunder in the rattling mountains (parenthesis added).” Here, Walcott again rejects the concept of "history as deity" and instead dismisses it as thunder (powerful but quick to fade away). This cements Walcott’s dualistic idea that the sea is history (meaning literally that the sea holds the graves, the memories, and the stories of his people) but also that history is like the sea: forever changing, unidentifiable, and unwilling to be conquered.

[1] Walcott, Derek. The Bounty: Poems. New York: Farrar,, Straus, and Giroux, 1997. All quotes from this poem come from page 37 of Walcott’s Poem “The Bounty.”

Hey Blog

2007-05-02T17:05:00.000-07:00

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. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, Inc., 1993.

History as Muse

2007-05-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

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]

[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.

Teaching Walcott?

2007-04-30T05:42:00.000-07:00

Helpful Links:

Nobel Lecture
Texts of Blues, Midsummer, Tobago, Codicil, A City's Death by Fire
Walcott reading A Lesson for This Sunday
General overview of Walcott with links to biography, works, history of the islands, and postcolonial theory
Text of Love After Love
Links to scholarly articles
Text of A Far Cry From Africa and The Schooner 'Flight'
Review of Selected Poems in the Iternational Herald Tribune
Audio Interview from the BBC

Subject Formation

2007-04-29T17:40:00.000-07:00

I was recently at an engagement party for my husband's co-worker. The tone of the party was informal, the party planners had ordered Italian take-out, and there were kids and adults spilling drinks in almost every room. Actually, it was a strange mixture of people, conversations were scattered and often forced.

A quiet woman in a brilliant green shirt looked even more uncomfortable than the rest of us. I couldn’t easily identify what caused her insecurity but her presence made me feel like I was in Junior High. I felt compelled to right my former pre-teen wrongs and befriend her.

“Hi. What’s your name?”

“Allyson.” We shake hands. Formally.

My name is Mara.

She responded, “Really?" Pause. Then she looked directly into my eyes and coldly said, "Mara means bitter, doesn’t it?”

And suddenly as if the party no longer existed, I said rather slowly, “Yes. It does. How did you know that?” (Usually only ardent Bible readers make the association with the verse in Ruth, “And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.”).

She responded, “I read baby name books a lot.”

When I was young, I was told that my name was Hebrew for Mary, a monicer replete with positive associations (at least for some). I was also told that my whole name ,Mara Lise was a translation of Mary Elizabeth, one that could easily fit into the British novels that I fancied. My name had always seemed both positive and “normal,” good traits for a name.

Mara, as I have since learned, is not the direct translation of Mary, but its negative version, the “other’ side of the binary. Mary/Mara. And, if differences are how humans create and interpret meaning, then the last letter of my name changes it from one associated with the mother of God to one associated with Naomi’s hardship, with her bitter fate.

What’s in a name? Apparently everything.

Fireflies Caught in Molasses

2007-04-28T18:23:00.000-07:00

“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?

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

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

Mimicry is Culture

2007-04-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

"History is built around creation and achievement, and nothing was created in the West Indies (29)."[1]

---V.S. Naipaul

"Nothing will always be created in the West Indies because whatever will come out of here is like nothing one has ever seen before."[2]

---Derek Walcott

Walcott’s article, “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” provides an interesting counter-argument to Naipaul’s accusation that Caribbean writers are “mimic men” (6).[3] He notes that all endeavors in the New World are mirroring the Old World to a certain extent, but that through language (something he sees as escaping the bonds of mimicry) American writers create something that more organically reflects what is American, that includes its connection to the Old World but that somehow is also unique. “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 (13).”[4]

This creative use of history (as Walcott advocates for in much of his work) is the “nothing” that Caribbean writers should embrace. “We know that we owe Europe either revenge or nothing, and it is better to have nothing than revenge. We owe the past revenge or nothing, and revenge is uncreative."(12).[5]

[1] Naipaul, V.S. The Middle Passage. London: Andre Deutsch, 1962.

[2] Chamberlain, Edward J. “The Literary Manuscripts of Derek Walcott.” The Halcyon 25 (2000)

[3] Walcott, Derek. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs. Vol. 16 No. 1 (Feb., 1974): 3-13

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

traitor

2007-04-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

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

[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.

Wound(s)

2007-04-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

Philoctete’s wound (from a rusted anchor) carries a fetid odor. Ironically, its cure, “a foul flower” also reeked so badly that Ma Kilman was forced to wear a cologned handkerchief over her face in order to pick it (246 and 237).”[1] The wound and its cure are again connected with this line, “The mulch it was rooted in carried the smell, when it gangrened, of Philoctete’s cut” (238).[2]

Why does Philoctete’s wound and its cure mimic each other? Is the cure for the wound of history, history itself?

“The still island seasoned the wound with its salt; he scooped the bucket and emptied the bilge with its leaves of manchineel, thinking of the stitched, sutured wound of Philoctete was given by the sea, but how the sea could heal the wound also” (242).[3]

[1] Walcott, Derek. Omeros. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

Write Your Self

2007-04-24T03:54:00.000-07:00

Your body must be heard.

-----Helene Cixous[1]

Often it happens in the early mornings while I'm studying. Or after a busy day of kids' activities, preschool, grad school, therapy. I'll notice it start with a quiver, a tiny movement that stops my eyes mid-sentence. Or I'll detect tiredness in my back that seeps through my arms making them keep time to some unseen conductor.

I try to stop it. I think, "I'm just over-tired" or "I'm too young" or "Please, no." Sometimes I pretend it's not there, I shift positions or dismiss it. Is it slight? Yes. Is it undetectable to my husband, my children? Yes. Could it be nothing? Yes. But it's terrifyingly real to me.

You see, my dad has Parkinson's disease. And so does my thirty-six year old brother.

This legacy that I carry, an integral part of my inheritance, often possesses my consciousness. Which one of my boys might inherit? Both? Neither? And as is often the case with a chronic disease, I'm not especially interested in knowing how to die, but more accurately, how to live with this wound.

[1] Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1 (1976): 875-94.

Plunket-try

2007-04-23T03:46:00.000-07:00

Derek Walcott in Omeros only cites from one history book written by the Englishman, Harry H. Breen. Breen’s book, St. Lucia: Historical, Statistical and Descriptive published in 1844 presents a euro-centric depiction of Walcott’s home (Dick 106). In fact, one of Omeros’ main characters, Major Dennis Plunkett, recites from this book (and forces his wife to memorize a certain passage). Rhona Dick argues an implicit and explicit connection between Plunkett and Breen in that they both argue St. Lucia’s importance as a Caribbean Gibraltar, write with “blunt and unsurprising racial prejudice about the black inhabitants of the island,” the history that both men record is not especially detailed, and from his descriptions of the local landscape Breen implies that he admires St. Lucia where he was a resident, like Plunkett, for a number of years.[1]

Plunkett is indeed a flawed historian (as we can assume that Breen is as well), one who corrects the errors he finds in a pamphlet picked up from a local museum, who argues with an iguana over the naming of the island (the original name of St. Lucia was Iounalo, an Aruac name), and one who rejects the “type” of history written by “black pamphleteers” as “Folk-malarkey” (Walcott 91-92).[2] However, Walcott also portrays Plunkett as an empathetic white colonial, he is not simply a washed up soldier writing the history of an island that he “conquered,” but also a widower, a fellow “farmer,” and a man searching for an identity in “history” not unlike Walcott himself. Plunkett escapes “typing” because he is portrayed by Walcott as surprisingly empathetic.

One example of the poet’s multi-dimensional portrayal of Plunkett is shown in the overt tenderness that Plunkett displays when Maud, his wife, dies. “The Major stood, then staggered/ to clutch the linen, burying his face inside her./ He rubbed their names against her stomach. “Maud, Maud,/ it’s Dennis, love, Maud. Then he stretched beside her… (Walcott 261).[3] This tenderness allows the reader to feel pity, the nascent beginnings of empathy for Major Plunkett.

Another example is when “Walcott” meets Plunkett after Maud’s funeral service. Walcott noticed, “his khaki shirt/carrying a black armband, and I saw that he was one of the farmers, transplanted to the rich dirt of their valleys, a ginger-lily from the moss/ of Troumasse River, a white, red-knuckled heron/ in the reeds, who never wanted the privilege/ that peasants from habit, paid to his complexion” (Walcott 268).[4] Walcott’s own observation of Plunkett is very charitable. He implies that Plunkett is innocent of pride and although their interaction after this observation betrays some of Plunkett’s pride and Walcott’s frustration with it, Walcott is admittedly kind to this character who could easily be portrayed as a type.

As Dick mentions, Walcott even compares Plunkett to his own father (Dick 111).[5] Following the comparison to Walcott’s father, he also makes a connection from Plunkett to himself when he says, “That khaki Ulysses/ there was a changing shadow of Telemachus/in me, in his absent war, and an empire’s guilt/ stitched in the one pattern of Maud’s fabulous quilt” (Walcott 263).[6] The poet, here, implies guilt on the part of Maud and Plunkett (by association with all things “empire”) but does not explicitly say that Plunkett is aware of his “guilty” role in the affairs of the island. And yet, later, there is an acknowledgement (a somewhat enlightened one) of his own guilt in the ongoing history of St. Lucia.

For example, Plunkett enjoys taking a “shawled” Maud to five o’clock Mass (255).[7] Usually the road they drive is peaceful, filled with sleepy-eyed manual laborers waiting for their ride. “Until, one morning, screeching round the cold asphalt,/twin lights had challenged him with incredible speed,/blinding him, until they veered and their driver called:/ ‘Move your ass, honky!”(255).[8]

When Plunkett gets out of the car to get “that sonofabitch!” Maud remains inside the Rover, shaking. Plunkett demeaningly insists that the driver give him the key to the transport. He asks the driver if he was drunk and yelled that they were nearly killed. “And furthermore, I resent the expletive you used. I am not a honky./ A donkey perhaps, a jackass, but I haven’t spent/damned near twenty years on this godforsaken rock/ to be cursed like a tourist” (256).[9] Hector says in response, “Pardon, Major,/I didn’t know that was you…” (256).[10]

After finally recognizing Hector, Plunkett softens, asks about Helen, shakes his hand again, and finally warns Hector about his new responsibility (that of driving a transport instead of a canoe). And when Plunket gets back in the Rover, he says to Maud, “My fault.”

In a literal sense, Plunkett fired Helen, who was taken in by Hector, and for whom (presumably) Hector quits the ocean and begins driving a transport to earn more money. But, there is a more figurative meaning to Plunkett’s admitting that this incident was his fault. Hector’s removal from the sea to acquire more money follows a western paradigm forced upon a non-western country. The empire that defines Major Plunkett is also the one that demeans and changes those around him, and the fact that he is (even marginally) aware of this makes Walcott’s portrayal of Major Plunkett as a flawed but responsible character appealing and humane.

Plunkett is a prejudiced historian, one who is blind to some of the consequences of his actions. But, he is also a man who is not blind to every consequence and one who takes responsibility for those things that he views as his fault. Plunkett is one who, even in anger, can joke about himself, a man who acknowledges fault without excuse or explanation.

In conclusion, I agree with Rhona Dick that Walcott is questining the supremacy of written and western history in Omeros, that he is likening poetry to history because both are manipulated creations of a humanmind, and that he is using Plunkett to typify some of the flaws of "objective" history. But, Walcott also allows Plunkett to apologize for his own involvement in Colonial rule, he uses him, an "other," to reflect what is human in all of us (grief, identity search, pride, guilt), and he effectively portrays him as a fully fleshed person, not a one dimensional "type."

[1] Dick, Rhona. “Remembering Breen’s Encomium: ‘Classic Style’, History and Tradition in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35 (2000), 105-115.

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

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Dick, Rhona. “Remembering Breen’s Encomium: ‘Classic Style’, History and Tradition in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.”

[6] Walcott, Omeros

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

De-Capitalize

2007-04-22T17:39:00.000-07:00

In Walcott’s essay, The sea is history, he explicates on the concept of de-capitalizing history. He says, “The word called history is the question…I’m talking about the idea of history becoming a deity, a force, as much as science has become a deity.”

Walcott objects to history becoming an inaccessible force that “is” and wants to replace it with something that “does.” Walcott criticizes criticism when he says, “There’s no history in art, for example. The criticism of art is historical, but art itself does not contain history.” Walcott seems to emphasize that history is over-emphasized and art (or meaning-making) is de-emphasized and de-formed from looking at it through an historical, teleological perspective.

He says, “For the artist to deliver himself from the bondage of time, which is called ‘history’ is the only way he himself can burst through.” An artist must dismiss himself from history (however pleasant or terrifying) or else he is “under the same burden of science, politics and the state.”

This concept of controlling and ruling time is the job of Empires and of dictators but artists should not convince themselves that they are the culmination of other epochs of artistic history. Artists are outside of the realm of time because each one follows a unique progression not to be reproduced or repeated. So when he is asked, “‘Where is your history?’ I would say, ‘It is out there, in that cloud, that sky, the water moving.’ And if the questioner says, ‘There’s nothing there,’ I would say: ‘Well that’s what I think history is. There’s nothing there.’ The sea is history.’” [1]

And very literally the sea is where the history of the Caribbean peoples is often located. The slaves and indentured servants were brought on the sea, died on the sea, were buried in the sea. Even the colonials came and left on the sea.

When you read this poem, see if you can decide where History "is" according to Walcott.

The Sea is History

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands
out there past the reef’s moiling shelf,
where the men-o’-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself.
It’s all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea-fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Comorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations—
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History;

then came, like scum on the river’s drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges’ choirs,
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves’ progress,
and that was Emancipation—

jubilation, O jubilation—
vanishing swiftly
as the sea’s lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.[2]

Walcott both emphasizes and de-emphasizes History in this poem. Because the poem ends with "History, really beginning," Walcott is indicating that History is not behind us but in front, made and discovered through writing, through art, through meaning making.

Walcott writes his own History everyday. So do we.

My history today is this blog entry, the clean bodies of my two sons playing in their beds upstairs, and the weariness in my fingertips.

What's yours?

[1] Birbalsingh, Frank, ed. Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. All quotations used in the above passage come from the essay included in this collection called, The sea is history. This essay was compiled from a speech given at a reading of Walcott's poem of the same name in 1979.

[2] Walcott, Deek. Collected Poems: 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984, 364-367.

Auto/Biography

2007-04-21T17:39:00.000-07:00

“Because I had been christened a prodigy, I couldn’t endure failure…”[1]

---Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott was born to a painter and a headmistress on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, entitled “The Helen of the West,” in 1930. [2] His father died one year later leaving Derek, his twin brother, Roderick, and an older sister.

Derek was raised a member of a religious minority and was tutored under the close friends of his late father. He was inspired to paint and write partly because of these influences.

He published his first poem at the age of fourteen in a local newspaper. He borrowed $200 from his mother to publish his first book of poetry, 25 Poems, at the age of 18 and sold it on the streets of St. Lucia himself. From those beginnings, he founded an arts guild, a theater, wrote plays, essays and poems, newspaper articles, reviews, took a degree, married three times, traveled the world, won a nobel prize, and kept writing and painting and writing and writing and writing .[4] His prolific body of work is almost as overwhelming to summarize as it is to read.

1944: “1944” published in The Voice of St. Lucia
1948: 25 Poems
1949: Epitaph for the Young
1951: Poems
1954: Premiere of The Sea at Dauphin
1958: Premiere of Drums and Colours and Ti-Jean and His Brothers
1959: Premiere of Malcochon
1960-1962: Feature writer, Trinidad Guardian
1963-68: Drama Critic, later freelance writer, Trinidad Guardian
1964: Publication of Selected Poems
1965: Publicatio of The Castaway
1967: Premiere of Dream on Monkey Mountain
1968: Publication of The Gulf
1970: Publication of Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays
1973: Publication of Another Life
1974: Premiere of The Joker of Seville
1976: Publication of Sea Grapes. Premiere of O Babylon!, Premiere of Remembrance,
1978: Publication of The Joker of Seville’ and O Babylon! Premiere of Pantomime
1979: Publication of The Star-Apple Kingdom
1980: Publication of Rememberance and Pantomime
1981: Publication of The Fortunate Traveller, Premiere of Beef, No Chicken
1983: Premiere of The Last Carnival, Premiere of A Branch of the Blue Nile
1984: Publication of Midsummer. Premiere of The Haitian Earth to mark the 150^th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.
1986: Publication of Three Plays. Publication of Collected Poems
1987: Publication of The Arkansas Testament
1989: Premiere of The Ghost Dance
1990: Publication of Omeros
1992: Nobel Prize for Literature. Premiere of The Odyssey: A Stage Version
1993: Publication of The Odyssey: A Stage Version. Publication of The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (The Nobel Lecture). Premiere of Walker
1997: Publication of The Bounty
1998: Publication of What the Twilight Says
2000: Publication of Tiepolo’s Hound
2002: Publication of The Haitian Trilogy. Publication of Walker and The Ghost Dance
2004: Publication of The Prodigal
2007: Publication of Selected Poems

[1] Hamner, Robert D., ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, Inc., 1993, 25. This is taken from an essay written by Walcott entitled, “Leaving School.”

[2] Ibid, 25-26.

[3] Ibic, 26-27.

[4] Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott. Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Chronology listed on pages ix-xii.

Cry. Far.

2007-04-20T17:50:00.000-07:00

History is illusive. It’s tauntingly simple and overwhelmingly complex. It’s something that one can discover, remember, imagine, and create. And much like Derek Walcott’s own description of his play, “Dream on Monkey Mountain,” it can be “illogical, derivative, contradictory.”[1]

But what does that mean? In the face of its own absurdity, why is history important? Why do authors like Walcott try to understand it, deal with it, and “create” despite and because of it?

In Walcott’s poem, “A Far Cry From Africa,” he literally opens up a can of worms (“Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:/ “Waste no compassion on these separate dead!”) revealing his “mixed” ancestry and his search for a place within it. This poem is at the relative beginning of Walcott’s long and fruitful career of explicating the un/importance of history, of genealogy, of identity.

I Who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?[2]

Can we turn from Africa, from history, from genealogy and live? Why? Why not?

[1] Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970, 208.

[2] ---. Collected Poems: 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984, 18.

His-Story

2007-04-18T17:33:00.000-07:00

“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]

[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.

Genealogical History

2007-04-17T02:50:00.000-07:00

Michel Foucault in his essay entitled, “7 January 1976” introduces the concept of the “genealogy” and how it relates to historical knowledge and literary criticism. He says that genealogies are:

Naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. I also believe that it is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges, these unqualified, even directly disqualified knowledges…a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it—that is through the re-appearance of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work (Newton 130-131).[1]

In using word knowledges instead of knowledge, Foucault is introducing a more nuanced view of history than previously acknowledged and that he explicates when he says, “…history is the complex interrelationship of a variety of discourses, the various ways—artistic, social, political, and so on—that people think and talk about their world” (Bressler 220).[2]

The importance of multiplicity, layers of discourse, of the idea that history is neither linear (no definite beginning, middle, end) nor teleological (purposefully moving forward to a culminating point, or known end) typifies both the theories of Foucault but also connects him to the theories of Cultural Poetics or New Historicism (Bressler 218-219). This view of history also connects these theorists to the work of Derek Walcott. Walcott said in a 1983 interview with Leif Sjoberg that, “I do not believe in heroes. I do not believe in human progress, that is, that man gets better. How can one, after Auschwitz, My Lai, Beirut…” (Baer 80)[3]

Do you believe in human progress (or the teleological view of History)?

Should history be written by Historians or Foucault-inspired genealogists, both?

Is the task of the historian an objective or subjective one?

[1] Newton, K.M., ed. Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. 2^nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

[2] Bressler, Charles E., ed. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 4^th Edition. NewJersey: Pearson Education, 2007.

[3] Baer, William, ed. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Literary Conversations Ser. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. This is from an interview included in this book entitled “An interview with Derek Walcott” by Leif Sjoberg in 1983.

Theory, Polygamy?

2007-04-16T03:27:00.000-07:00

Mikhail Bakhtin uses the term “hybridization” to describe the meeting of speaker/writer and listener/reader (Bressler 46)[1] He claims that in certain types of writing, truth resides in this dialogic interaction. He says that “…truth…is an active creation in the consciousness of the author, the readers, and the characters, allowing for genuine surprises for all concerned” (46).

Bakhtin describes this meeting as “carnivalistic,” a setting that reveals a sense of “joyful abandonment” where many voices are simultaneously heard and able to influence the hearers (46).

Obviously, the terms hybridization and carnival have obvious (too obvious?) connections to the Caribbean. But, the search for a collective and individual post-colonial Caribbean "truth" despite and because of hybrid ancestry, violent history, and the mixture of cultures/religions is not an isolated search occurring in the paradisiacal islands of the Caribbean alone.

It is a modern quest, for a modern identity, in a modern time. In a global society, there are few whose parents/ancestors share the same race, ethnicity, economic status, morals, and religion. There are few who can claim “home” as one town, one state or even one country. There are few family histories that don’t come with adventure and chaos, shame and joy. And even if there is a person who met this simple description, when has an identity search (or a search for one's own "truth") ever been a simple endeavor? The Caribbean writer’s (and Walcott’s specifically) hybrid aesthetics are almost universally applicable. Even to those of us who seem an unlikely candidate for its application.

I come from a two-parent home with an arguably monolithic history. My parents are both members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, they share households and finances. They are both of European descent and come from the western United States. And yet, as I grow older, my own seemingly unified background deconstructs itself with the nuances of hybridity, with the dismay of conflict, and with the haunting of History.

I am the product of a long line of opinionated, flawed, and strong women. My grandmother raised nine children while working full-time as a night nurse. Her daughters, my six Aunts (and mom) pursued careers, managed family farms and family businesses, raised copious amounts of children, survived difficult marriages and still can’t help but cross their legs and giggle at almost every opportunity.

These women are my Mount Rushmore, my historical and institutional memory. Recently as I was reading a popular book, I was reminded of another (controversial) face for my mountain. This book recounted a history of fundamentalism. It covered settlements in Utah, Arizona, Canada, and Mexico. It spoke of the nascent beginnings of these sects, their destructive past and present, and their arguably dysfunctional relationship with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (from which these groups are off-shoots).

As I was looking at the maps in the book, I noticed a telling similarity between the locations of these sects and the birth and marriage locations of my great grandmother. I compared and dissected the similarities with both amazement and dismay. My great grandmother lived before these sects became disassociated with mainstream culture, but her closeness to their beginnings made me wonder who this person “really” was.

Emma Isabella Carroll married my great grandfather at the age of 21. He was 53. She was his third wife. They were married in Mexico in 1889 (one year before the Manifesto where then President of the church, Wilford Woodruff, outlawed the practice of polygamy for LDS saints). They had five children together in less than ten years. He was murdered by a neighbor over water rights on his front porch, in front of my great grandmother and their children when their youngest was four months old. Emma raised five children on the milk and meat from the sheep and cattle left to her from the sale of my great grandfather’s ranch in Pipe Springs, Arizona (the proceeds of which were divided among the three wives and a co-owner of the ranch).

In my grandfather’s history, he speaks lovingly and lauditorily of his mother mentioning her frugalness, her strength, her faith. He said, “She will always stand out in my mind as one of the great women of that day. She was active in the church and took part in public affairs.”

I can read the words of my grandfather and guess at their accuracy. I can look at her genealogical records (although she is shown to be born after she was married). I can think of her, wonder, try to empathize. And yet, she is silent. I have no record of her. Maybe with all of her responsibilities, she just didn’t have the luxury of reflection. But, her account might have illuminated something about being a woman in that culture, at that time, something about fundamentalism, and maybe through the often distorted mirror of history, something about me, about my culture, about my beliefs.

Was the religion she was raised in responsible for the fundamentalist culture to follow? Was the “weirdness” or “immorality” of polygamy an oddity of excess or ascetics? What does an off-shoot say about the mainstream? Does it reflect weakness in the institution or the individual?

As an active member of the mainstream church from which these fundamentalist off-shoots sprung, these questions are haunting for me. They are part of my own hybrid aesthetics. They are what make me, like Derek Walcott, wonder what the twilight says.

“But I see what it is, you are not from these parts, you don’t know what our twilights can do. Shall I tell you?

--Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Walcott 3)[2]

[1] Bressler, Charles E., ed. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 4^th Edition. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2007.
I will include full references within the text of each blog post.

[2] Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 1998. This is the quote used at the beginning of his essay of the same title.