....................Biographies................. DEREK WALCOTT
by
Robert D Hamner Born: Castries, St. Lucia; January 23, 1930
Principal Collections In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, 1962; Selected Poems, 1964; The Cast-away and Other Poems, 1965; The Gulf and Other Poems, 1969, 1970; Another Life, 1973; Sea Grapes, 1976; The Star-Apple Kingdom, 1979; The Fortunate Traveller, 1982.
Other literary forms There
is debate as to whether Derek Walcott is first of all a poet or a
playwright since his writing has from the beginning been devoted
equally to poetry and drama. His work in theater led him to found the
Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 (Port of Spain, Trinidad), where he
served as producer-director for almost twenty years. Even during this
period many of the plays he was writing were poetic. During his
Workshop tenure, he was also arts columnist for the Trinidad Guardian,
frequently reviewing plays, books, painting exhibitions, and films,
occasionally speaking out on behalf of creative artists in the West
Indies. His Obie award-winning play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) was televised by NBC in 1970. Recordings include a reading of his own work by Caedmon, Poets of the West Indies; and the sound track of The Joker of Seville (1974) by Semp Studies, Ltd. (Port of Spain).
Achievements Proclaimed
an accomplished poet upon the appearance of his first book of poems
(printed privately in 1948), Walcott has steadily gained a wider,
international audience. Success has also attended his work as the
leading dramatist of the West Indies. The Negro Ensemble company
production of Dream on Monkey Mountain in New York led to an Obie Award in 1971. In 1974, the Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned him to write The Joker of Seville. Many of his plays are performed in the United States, England, and Europe. Critical
recognition has led to numerous honors: among them, the Guinness Award
for Poetry, 1961; the Royal Society Literature Award for The Castaway and Other Poems, 1965; the Cholmondeley Award for The Gulf and Other Poems, 1969; the Jock Campbell Award for Another Life,
1973; and the Welsh Arts Council International Writer’s Prize, 1980. In
1957, he received a Rockefeller grant to study theater in New York. As
a poet living and writing in the West Indies from the 1960’s through
the 1970’s, Walcott demonstrates that a Caribbean artist can be
successful without emigrating to one of the metropolitan centers. More
than that, he incorporates the landscape and unique themes of the West
Indies into his work, making them available not only to his own people
but to the outside world as well. Being of mixed blood, living as an
artist in a society of transplanted cultures – from Africa, Asia, and
Europe –and inheriting the history of conquistadors, slaves, indentured
servants, and colonial rulers, he is peculiarly well qualified to speak
for twentieth century man. In
the final analysis it may be that his greatest contribution to letters
is his assimilation of past literary masters along with the various
cultures of his Caribbean heritage. At one time or another, he echoes
the English Meta-physicals, Irish novelists, T. S. Eliot, Bertolt
Brecht, the Japanese Noh theater, St.-John Perse, and various island
dialects. Leading figures in the poetry and plays include Adam and Eve,
Robinson Crusoe, Christopher Columbus, Don Juan, Henri Christophe, and
numerous other less notable representatives of various races. He runs
the gamut of language from high seriousness to the vulgar. In between
there are humor, music, and the words of living men.
Biography
Derek
A. Walcott was born with twin brother Roderick on January 23, 1930, in
Castries, the capital of St. Lucia. On both the maternal and paternal
sides of his gamily, he was descended from a white grandfather and
black grandmother. The fact that his family was Methodist in
predominantly Catholic St. Lucia added further to the difficulties of
his identity. The death of his father shortly after he was born was
compensated for the friendship of the painter Harold Simmons, whose
influence is commemorated in Walcott’s autobiographical poem Another Life.
Simmons encouraged him to see the unexplored beauty of his native
surroundings and the expressive forms of the great artists of Europe. Although
birth on an obscure island could easily suggest cultural deprivation,
Walcott argues that his classroom experience of classical literature
and history – Greek, Roman, British – was vital and inspiring. That,
together with the African slave-tales still current on the island, led
him at an early age to admire both sides of his dual heritage. As is
indicated in his Introduction to Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, he now sees irony in the fact that while he regretted not being blacker and poorer, he still wrote his early play Henri Christophe: A Chronicle (1950) in highly elaborate Elizabethan verse. His
early poetry reflects the same paradox including personal and regional
subject matter in verse forms highly imitative of Andrew Marvell, T. S.
Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Rather than denying either the island or his
classical sources, he makes the fortunate choice of blending them. His
resolution is recorded poetically in Another Life; he assumes "Adam’s task," the naming of things in the New World. Using
money borrowed from his mother, he had his first book of poems
privately published and then sold copies in the streets of Castries.
With his brother and a few friends he founded the St. Lucia Arts Guild
in 1950, the same year in which he received a British Colonial
Development Scholarship to attend the University of the West Indies in
Jamaica. After taking his baccalaureate in 1953, he married Faye
Moyston in 1954. They spent a year in New York on a Rockefeller grant
in 1958, then settled in Trinidad, where a year later he began the
Trinidad Theatre Workshop. After
his first marriage ended in divorce in 1959, he married Margaret
Maillard in 1962. From the two marriages, he has three children; his
son Peter is the eldest. Evidence of his personal struggle to remain in
the Caribbean and support himself as a writer is contained in many of
the articles he wrote for the Trinidad Guardian. He often used
his column in the 1960’s and early 1970’s as a forum to define the
characteristics of West Indian arts, and to argue the cause of a
national theater. He succeeded in establishing his career in the West
Indies before finally moving to the United States in the late 1970’s.
Following divorce from his second wife and resignation from the
Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1977, Walcott has taught in various
universities. He now resides in Brookline, Massachusetts, teaching at
Harvard and Boston College, while continuing to write poetry and drama
and directing theater productions.
Analysis What
will deliver the New World black from cultural servitude, Derek Walcott
argued in 1970, can be nothing less than the forging of a new language,
the re-creation of names for things in the New World. Revolutionary as
his cords may sound, his formula is not a simplistic call for mere
change. Rejecting the divisive claims of extremists for racial
"purity," he calls for creative use of the West Indian’s innate
schizophrenia, an "electric fusion of the old and the new." He has been
criticized for being too Western, for not being "African" or "West
Indian" enough, but he has made the difficult decision to accept all
sides of his multiple heritage. Walcott is thus unintimidated by the
term "assimilation." With
the multifaceted culture of the West Indies on which to draw, Walcott
has rich poetic sources. His favorite themes center on individual
struggles to reconcile the disparities of human existence – past and
present, black and white, individual and society, poet and audience.
For the problems delineated in his poetry and plays, Walcott offers no
easy solutions. For the problems delineated in his poetry and plays,
Walcott offers no easy solutions. It is their complexity that matters,
together with the aspects of human nature that they reveal. Beginning
as a skillful craftsman dependent upon his admired predecessors, he
progresses to a fully mature poet, speaking in his own voice, resonant
with the sounds of the greatest poetry in the language. Significantly, the title of Walcott’s first major volume, In a Green Night,
is taken from Andrew Marvell’s "Bermudas," a poem about the European
encounter with a tropical paradise. Walcott’s poem "Ruins of a Great
House" takes up the story after slavery and imperialism have made their
marks. Referring to Rudyard Kipling, then to Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir
Francis Drake, and some unnamed slave whose remains lie rotting beneath
an abandoned estate, the narrator reflects bitterly on abuses inflicted
by "Bible and by sword." His anger is deflected, however, when, in the
light of Hon Donne’s "Meditation XVII," he recalls that England had
also suffered its colonial past. The poem ends with a line from Donne,
the narrator contemplating the implications of his turn of thought.
More explicitly, "A Far Cry from Africa" raises the question of the
speaker’s having to choose between ancestral Africa and his birthright
in the English tongue. From In a Green Night to The Gulf and Other Poems, through Selected Poems and The Castaway and Other Poems,
there is a certain degree of overlap because each successive volume
reprints material from the one before it. Cumulatively, they reflect
Walcott’s widening range of interest. There are the occasional dialect
poems with frequent references to West Indian landscapes, but added to
the echoes of foreign influences the new settings in North and South
America, England, and Europe become more frequent. Each of these
volumes contains its share of outstanding poems, but the one book which
is most representative of Walcott’s work is his sixth, Sea Grapes. Walcott’s Sea Grapes is
his first organically unified collection. A pattern of subtle links
brings together virtually every aspect of his poetry. The title poem,
which comes first, signals that a circular voyage is about to begin.
The homeward bound Caribbean schooner is transposed into that of
Odysseus, returning from the victory at Troy. By means of another
classical allusion, the poem returns to the New World. The blinded
Cyclops heaving his boulder at Odysseus creates a ground swell of waves
which carry their rhythm all the way to Caribbean shores. Thus does
Walcott pay homage to his poetic origins. "Sea Grapes" takes as its
theme the timeless division within man between "obsession" and
"responsibility." This is but another version of the polarities of
Walcott’s life and work. On the one hand there is intuitive feeling
(associated with the African races), and on the other hand reasoned
restraint (a characteristic attributed to Caucasians). The moment of
human feeling, not race, is the issue in this poem. The conclusion is
that while the classics offer some consolation from age to age, they do
not eliminate the agony of choosing. Although much of the territory of Sea Grapes has
figured in Walcott’s earlier work, there is no redundancy. Not only
does Walcott exercise greater control over a style which was once
elaborately Elizabethan, but in his maturity, he also modulates
individual poems and seems to weigh them in their interrelationships
throughout the entire collection. While each poem retains its
integrity, there are movements or groupings of ideas which work
together. Subtle transitions from one center of interest to the next
are provided at key junctures so that overall continuity is discernible. Geography,
with inevitable cross-cultural references, provides the key to the
three major movements of the collection. "Sea Grapes" begins the
largest section, twenty-one poems concentrating on the Caribbean and
ending in a tribute to St. Lucia. Three poems devoted to Frederiksted
in the Virgin Islands draw attention to the corruption of tourism.
Then, after a two-poem interlude invoking art, Walcott offers three
philosophic verses on one of his favorite subjects, Adam in Eden. One
of these, "New World," exhibits his bitter humor. Having lost Eden,
Adam and the serpent look to the New World for profit. Adam’s
descendants, at least those who continue to betray their "brother,"
then become the object of political satire in the next eight poems.
Disgusted with the long history of changes which makes no difference,
he reaches the conclusion in "Bread Song" that the tribal creed
requires letting things remain the same. Relief
from satirical bitterness is provided in "Natural History," a poem
which paves the way for the more constructive attitude that dominates
the crucial poems rounding off the first section of the book. It
recounts man’s evolutionary development from a "walking fish" into the
atomic age. Leading up to the centerpiece of the collection, "Names"
refers to the many fragments of the Old World that have washed up on
Caribbean shores, among them, Canton, Benares, Benin, Castile, and
Versailles. "Sainte Lucie" comes as the dramatic climax of the first section of Sea Grapes.
As the book’s centerpiece, it is the longest and most stylistically
diverse poem in the book. In the first two of the five subdivisions
comprising "Saint Lucie," Walcott runs through the local place names
and the French patois that give his birthplace its unique identity. Following this, the third division is a local conte (narrative song) in patois
which is translated in the fourth section into English. Rhythm arises
naturally from the spoken words, sometimes merely relying on a
succession of names of places and native fruits, at others turning to
dialogue between speakers, ebbing and flowing until it reaches a prayer
of adoration at the end. The fifth and concluding part, subtitled "For
the Altar-piece of the Roseau Valley Church. . . ," centers upon a
mural created by Walcott’s friend Dunstan St. Omer (the "Gregorias" of Another Life).
In the mural, St. Omer depicts not ethereal saints, but the local
people engaged in their daily lives. Admitting that Roseau valley is
not Eden, Walcott still finds faith and the "real faces" of angels
among the people. Combining
the spiritual and the everyday in "Sainte Lucie," Walcott displays the
balance of perspective that keeps him from straying from the discipline
required by his art. There is in this regard a parallel with Walt
Whitman, another "national" poet, whose name is invoked in "Over
Colorado," the poem which opens the second major section of Sea Grapes. Recalling Whitman here, Walcott suggests that visionary prophecies have gone awry in places other than the West Indies. One
of Walcott’s aim in this fourteen-poem group is to re-create various
foreign scenes; another is to acknowledge his gratitude to certain
writers: Pablo Neruda, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad. One of the most
notable poems in this division, "The Bright Field," introduces a man
steeled against the massiveness and noise of London, reminiscing about
bullock-carts in cane fields far away. Images coalesce and distance
evaporates in the thought that birds circling overhead in London beat
their wings to the same rhythm as pelicans in his native skies. With a
slightly different emphasis, "The Bright Field" takes up a familiar
theme from "Ruins of a Great House" (In a Green Night). While
the earlier poem presents a painful confrontation with West Indian
history, "The Bright Field" affords a unification of apparent
opposites: colonized individual and colonial metropolis, rural past and
urban present. Touching as he does the outer points of his extended
world, Walcott returns with the interchanging images of "The Bright
Field" to his beginning in the West Indies; thereby, the structure in Sea Grapes completes its circle. "Dark
August" introduces the concluding group of eleven poems in a voice more
somber than before, denoting wisdom acquired through experience. The
speaker observes that he is slowly learning to love dark days and
bitterness. In "The Morning Moon," he can express pleasure in the
cycles of nature, down to the white hairs appearing in his beard.
Similarly in "To Return to the Trees," he finds gray symbolizing
strength. Like the trees of the title, the speaker sends down the roots
of his language, securing his hold on the earth. With this final stanza Walcott settles upon the core of his strength. Sea Grapes exemplifies his adept handling of each level of written and spoken language. Whether in the patois of St. Lucia or in the pages of the classics, his treasured sources serve him well both in poetry and in drama. Since
much of his poetry has been composed for the stage, it would be useful
to take into consideration the characteristics of Walcott’s poetic
drama. Like his early lyrics, the early plays clearly reveal specific
influences. Despite their obvious West Indian content, Henry Christophe is Elizabethan and The Sea at Dauphin (1954) is deliberately modeled on J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea
(1904). Once again, however, he found a means of harmonizing foreign
influences and native elements. While studying in New York in 1958, he
discovered – through Betolt Brecht’s adaptation of Noh and Kabuki
theater – a precedent for the kind of dramatic creation that he
envisioned for the West Indies. Looking to Brecht’s example, he could
combine poetry with song, dance, acting, mime, symbolism, and masked
pageantry, and hold all together with a narrative line. Although
Walcott credits Brecht and Oriental artists for their inspiration, it
should be noted that all of the elements that he came to use are
readily available in the West Indian carnival (with which he was
familiar from an early age) and that he began experimenting with
stylized production techniques before his acknowledged encounter with
Brecht; Drums and Colours (performed April, 1958) introduces carnival players, and Ti-Jean and His brothers (1957) has mime, masked characters, and ritualistic overtones. Walcott’s fusion of themes and forms from diverse sources is powerfully illustrated in his recent collection The Star-Apple Kingdom, a vigorous affirmation of the West Indian milieu. The opening poem, "The Schooner Flight," is narrated in patois by
a seaman-poet, Shabine. Recalling his past and conducting the reader
through a brief history of his life, he arrives at the position of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, appreciating the simple
things. Recounting, without approving, the inequities of West Indian
existence, Shabine adapts and lives fruitfully. The
title poem focuses on a Jamaican inheritor of the colonial past. In a
dream sequence of satirical bitterness, he thinks of the new power
brokers and exploiters who corrupt the potential of newly acquired
self-determination. At dawn, the dream subsiding, he retains a moderate
anger over injustices, but reaffirms commitment to his island. As his
eye falls upon a map, he envisions the archipelago from Jamaica to
Tobago as a line of turtles, attracted like lemmings by a yearning for
Africa. Crying out a warning with "anger of love," he comes to himself
and his anguish dissolves. His reconciliation with the present reality
is fittingly underscored by the final image: he calmly "cracked the day
open and began his egg." This playful turn of phrase is vintage Walcott
who remains appreciative of the Metaphysical’ verbal dexterity; it
concludes an energetic and precisely orchestrated volume, the
achievement of a mature poet in the full possession of his own style. From
the beginning of his career, Walcott has eschewed originality merely
for originality’s sake. His preference is to adapt that which is
available, no matter what its source, to his own design. As a result,
he not only prolongs an already rich tradition, but he also infuses it
with further riches drawn from his West Indian environment. Major publications other than poetry PLAYS:
Henri Christophe: A Chronicle, 1950; The Sea at Dauphin, 1954; Ti-Jean
and His Brothers, 1957; Drums and Colours, 1958; Dream on Monkey
Mountain, 1967; The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!, 1978; Remembrance
and Pantomime, 1980. Bibliography Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision: Another life, 1979. Hamner, Robert D. Derek Walcott, 1981. ____________. "Derek Walcott: His Works and His Critics – An Annotated Bibliography, 1947-1980," in Journal of Commonwealth Literature. XVI, no. 1 (1981), pp. 142-184. Robert D. Hamner
Source: Critical Survey of Poetry: English Language Series, V. 7 Frank N. Magill, ed Salem Press, Englewood Cliffs, 1982 In an address I delivered at the Central Library in Castries some time ago and which I had entitled The West Indian Contribution To Western Christian Civilization, I informed the audience that the closest thing to the ancient Greek City states were the West Indian islands. I reminded the audience, also, that when one considers the considerable contribution the ancient Greek City states
had made and which forms the basis of Western Civilization it is not
size, it is not strength, it is not power, it is what one does with
what one has that matters. And the West Indian islands, show that
one can have very little and still achieve the things which stand out
among the greatest achievements of mankind. St. Lucia has
produced two Nobel Prize winners in one generation, one in science that
is, economics and the other in humanities, that is literature.
Those are remarkable achievements by any standard in an island only 14
by 27 miles. I
know of over 140 literary prizes which are offered every year to
writers of distinction, be they novelists, short story authors,
prestigious. The Nobel Prize in literature is one of the awards
stipulated in the will of the late Alfred Nobel, the Swedish scientist
who invented dynamite. The awarding authority is the Swedish Academy in Stockholm . The
first English writer to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature was
Rudyard Kipling in 1907, and the first black writer to receive it was
Wole Soyinka of Nigeria in 1986. Derek Walcott’s closest friend, the Russian poet, the late Joseph Brodsky, was the winner in 1987. Derek
Walcott had been recognized years ago as a superlatively gifted and
disciplined craftsman. He is a write who has never been satisfied
with his progress and development, and one can discern the constant
improvement in his work with each new volume of poetry and each new
piece of dramatic creation. Whatever
the subject that one pursues one ought always to strive for perfection,
for improvement and for greater excellence. My motto which I
coined in my favorite classical language, Latin, is Aut Opimum, Aut Nihil (Either the best, or nothing). Our two Nobel Prize winners were the products of the education system in St. Lucia at
the time. An education system that was thorough. The
achievements of the late Sir Arthur Lewis and Derek Walcott are also
laudatory tributes to the caliber of people who had been their
teachers. In those days teachers taught. People did not
enter the teaching profession for want of something better to do, as
happens now. They felt their calling almost from their student
days and they went into the school system with an obsessive dedication
and with one aim – to teach, and, always, to get the best results from
their students. Castries ,
in those days, had only four primary and two secondary schools, but
they produced an army of educated people. It is true that the
syllabus was geared towards the academic, but the products of those
schools went on to become lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers,
judges, economists, historians, educators and writers. They were
able to go into those professions because they had been taught all the
rudiments of the English language and that mastery enabled them to read
and to grasp the contents of any textbook with absolute ease and
clarity of perception. They also left the formal school system
with the mastery of at least one foreign or classical language.
In St. Lucia , that classical language was Latin, the basis of Standard English. That
classical language also gave them a consummate competence in the use of
English. That grounding in Latin Grammar and sentence structure,
where every word in a sentence mattered – for it had a specific role to
play in that sentence – ensured that students were able to master that
English language both orally and in writing. What those products of the old school system have done, today’s youth would do well to emulate. It
has become fashionable in certain circles here to sneer at excellence,
to reject and to laugh at standards; to accept values that are foreign
and inimical to us. But what people like Sir Arthur Lewis and
Derek Walcott and the other West Indian writers have been doing (Roger
Mais, George Lamming, Wilson Harries, Sir Vidia Naipaul, CLR James) is
to create values of which we can be proud. In the French
Antilles, Aime Cesaire, Edourd Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau and Leon
Damas are doing the same. Edward Brathwaite of Barbados ,
historian and poet, experimented with the elements that were about him
and created works of art that are closer to the West Indian people, to
express the unique experience of the West Indian people. He has
put it beautifully in one of his poems where he says: “I must be given words to shape my name to the syllable of trees
I must be given words to fashion futures like a healer’s hand
I must be given words so that the bees in my blood’s buzzing brain of
memory will make flowers, will
make
flocks of birds, Will make sky, will make heaven,
The heaven open to the thunder-stone and the volcano and the unfolding
land.” Walcott
has been accused by some of his critics for being too Eurocentric in
his writing, simply because he uses the English language so
superbly. He read the best of the English classics, yes. He
absorbed everything that was worth absorbing from them,
naturally. He learned from them how to handle language. But
those images which occur and recur in his poetry are not
European. They are St. Lucian for the most part, or West Indian,
generally. His feet are firmly planted in the West Indian
soil. There were no Chantal’s, no Makaks, no Souris ,
no Afas, nor any of those enduring and notable personages, peasants
all, in the European works that Mr. Walcott had read and whom we
encounter in his plays… He wrote about Castries, about Choc Bay,
about Roseau, the Maboya Valley, about the village of Dennery (Imprisoned in these wires of rain I watch this village stricken with a single street…), about Choiseul (The marlwhite road, the Doree rushing cool through gorges of green cedars), defining, in the process, The several postures of this virginal island, as he says in one of his poems. Not
all that he saw pleased him. Some things made him, sorrowful and
reflective. But, as a genuine artist, he could not stand aside
and ignore them; he could of avoid them. He was moved by what he
saw and experienced, and in one of his poems, he confesses: “All that I have and want are words To fling my griefs about And salt enough for these eyes.” Another great West Indian poet, one of the most formidable of black intellectuals still alive today, Aime Cesaire of Martinique , had felt the same compulsion to write about what he saw around him: “A sea of griefs is not a proscenium A man who wails is not a dancing bear. “ Therefore he vowed: “I
should arrive lithe and come back to this land of mine and should say
to this land whose mud is flesh of my flesh: ‘I wandered for a long
time and I am returning to the deserted foulness of your wounds’. I
should come back to this land of mine and Say to it: ‘Embrace me
without fear … If all I can do is speak, at least I shall speak for
you’. And
I should say further: ’My tongue shall serve those miseries which have
no tongue, my voice the liberty of those who founder in the dungeons of
despair.’” The
classics imposed and encouraged a discipline that is entirely absent in
modern-day popular literature. Those works on which Mr. Walcott
grew up are called classics because the stories are universal; they are
models in entertainment value and of excellence. Walcott did not
reach there by attending blockos every weekend, by indulging in illicit
drugs and wasting his leisure hours in idleness and other puerile
pranks. No.
He read and he wrote, seeking to improve upon everything that he had
done before, for always he strove for excellence, for greater
perfection. Indeed, in one of his early poems written at the age
of nineteen, he confesses: “… I seek As climate seeks its style, to write Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight, Cold as the curled waves, ordinary As a tumbler of island water.” The world acknowledged his success in that endeavor and bestowed upon him the highest honor. |
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