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Background and Youth
Black and White Ancestry
Derek Walcott was
born in 1930 on St. Lucia, an island then belonging to the
British Empire, but which became independent in 1979. St. Lucia
has a hybrid British/French culture, having alternated as a
colony of either England or France across the centuries.
Walcott’s ancestry is also mixed, with both his maternal and
paternal grandmothers being black. His mother was a respected
teacher at a Methodist infant school while his father died when Derek was only one year old.
St. Lucia became independent in 1979, but
maintains its hybrid British and French culture to this
The Young Painter
His civil servant father had been an
amateur painter, and the son has also devoted much of his
grown-up life to painting, not to mention the many references to
the great names in art all through his literary works. When
growing up in Castries, the capital of St. Lucia, young Walcott
attended St. Mary’s College where his most important mentor was a
painter, Harold Simmons. He soon took an interest in great
European artists like Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh.
A 1969 photo of Derek Walcott painting in
Trinidad (left) and a self-portrait (oil on canvas) done in
Photo by Peter Ireson
Published Poet at 14, Dramatist at 16
While the town of Castries had an
Europeanized culture, Afro-Caribbean folk customs and traditions
dominated the countryside of St. Lucia. Walcott published his
first poem when he was just fourteen. At sixteen he wrote five
plays and had his first collection of poetry published. By the
age of twenty, Walcott was ready to found a theatre company on
his own, the ST. LUCIA ARTS GUILD. In its inaugural year, this
company produced his play Henri-Christophe, whose subject
was taken from the colonial history of another Caribbean island,
namely Haiti.
At 16, Walcott wrote five plays.
Copyright (C)
The Bruce King
Collection
Academic Studies
After graduating from St. Mary’s College,
Walcott continued his studies in another part of the Caribbean,
on the island of Jamaica, where he attended the University
College of the West Indies at Mona. Here he obtained his
bachelor’s degree in 1953. At the University College, he was both
the editor of the student magazine and the president of MONA
DRAMATIC SOCIETY.
The Search for an Identity
A central theme that runs throughout
Walcott’s works is his search for identity. From the beginning,
he has intensely felt the antagonisms between the cultural
heritage of the Old World and the traditions of the new one. In
his critical work Derek Walcott, published in 1999, John
Thieme describes the conflicts Walcott has experienced between
the positions of European and African, Anglophone and
Francophone, Standard English and Creole, and Methodist and
Catholic. In the earlier collections of poetry, Thieme traces “a
sense of lost perfection, cracked innocence and psychic
fragmentation,” which he considers to be a result of the racial
divisions of the Caribbean society. In one volume after another,
by means of a variety of important poems, Walcott tries to find
expressions for the difficulties inherent in Caribbean identity.
In “A Far Cry from Africa” (1962) he depicts his desperate
dilemma in rather brutal formulations:
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned by the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
Yet, in his fascinating essay of 1970,
“What the Twilight Says,” where he delivers a report about the
origin of his interest in the theatre, he sounds more optimistic,
hoping to be able to make creative use of his cultural
schizophrenia.
In the poem “The Schooner Flight” (1979), Shabine, a Walcott
persona, gives an often quoted definition of the identity of a
person from a small country in the Caribbean:
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I am nobody, or I am a nation
In reality, this meant:
I had no nation now but the imagination
In a somewhat later work, “North and South”
(1981), this poem’s persona gives another effort to express an
identity, referring to himself as
a colonial upstart at the end of an empire,
a single, homeless, circling satellite
At an early stage, Walcott was seized by an
interest in the situation of St. Lucia. This grew into a promise
to chronicle his island, a vow taken together with a painter
friend. Walcott’s early play, Henri-Christophe, was
connected with this intense desire to depict and express the
essence of his Caribbean surroundings.
In a later context, Walcott managed with
deeper penetration than ever before to give form to a mature
attitude to this theme, with a kind of acceptance of the
trespasses of his ancestors through the centuries. Here follows
the end and epitome of his extremely interesting essay “The Muse
of History,” published in 1976 and re-published in 1998 in the
essays with the title “What the Twilight Says”:
I accept this archipelago of the Americas, 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, and
it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial
love, since your features are anonymous and erased and I have
no wish and no power to pardon. You were when you acted your
roles, your given, historical roles of slave seller and slave
buyer, men acting as men, and also you, father in the
filth-ridden gut of the slave ship, to you they were also men,
your fellowman and tribesman not moved or hovering with
hesitation about your common race any longer than my other
bastard ancestor hovered with his whip, but to you, inwardly
forgiven grandfathers, I, like the more honest of my race, give
a strange thanks.
These are moving words for a person who
feels himself exiled from the Eden of his grandfathers. We may be
sure that this reconciliation has cost Walcott much but provided
him with deep inner peace. But if we think of its universal
consequences, this does not mean that there should exist any
universal forgiveness for brutality. Thus, Walcott has no
forgiveness when he asks in Omeros whether he might have
broken his pen when he started writing poetry forty years
earlier, if he had realized that
this century’s pastorals were being
by the chimneys of Dachau, of Auschwitz, of Sachsenhausen
Fascinated by the thoughts of
explorers.
Copyright (C) Anders Hallengren 2000
Photo: Anders
Hallengren
Walcott is also fascinated by thoughts of
the first men to discover and visit the world to which he
belongs. These were explorers like Columbus, Walter Raleigh, and
James Cook, as well as rebels like Toussaint and
Henri-Christophe. To Walcott, Robinson Crusoe, more than anybody
else, is a real archetype, and his long poem, “Crusoe’s Island”
(published in the 1965 volume The Castaway), contains in
addition to a detailed geographic and psychological
characterization, simple, lucid lines like the following
Upon this rock the bearded hermit built
Goats, corn crop, fort, parasol, garden,
Bible for Sabbath, all the joys
Which sent him howling for a human voice.
Exiled by a flaming sun
The rotting nut, bowled in the surf,
Became his own brain rotting from the guilt
Of heaven without his kind,
Crazed by such paradisal calm
The spinal shadow of a palm
Built keel and gunwale in his mind.
In the 1978 play Pantomime, Walcott
used only two characters, Robinson and Friday, in an ironic,
modernized variation of their personal relationship that takes
place on the island of Tobago. In his important, autobiographical
collection of poetry, Another Life, 1973, he also speaks
about the task of those who first came over the seas to inhabit
the American world:
We were blest with a virginal, unpainted world
with Adam’s task of giving things their names
An important part of Walcott’s poetry and
drama has as a partly subconscious program, the
“Caribbeanization” of earlier, European motives. Thus, when he
studies and admires the plays of John Synge and his depiction of
Aran fishermen, as well as the filmatic work of the Japanese
director Akira Kurosawa, he works by creating St. Lucian
counterparts, simple fishermen speaking their patois.
“Preparing the Net,&#, oil on canvas
by Derek Walcott.
Copyright (C) Derek Walcott
The Dramatic Work
Walcott’s dramatic work is as important as
his poetry. Today, he has written about twenty-five plays,
although not all of them have been published. He has defined
himself as “not only a playwright but a company,” the reason
being that he has worked as much as an instructor and as founder
of theatre companies as a playwright. After starting “St. Lucia
Arts Guild” in 1950, he opened “Little Carib Theatre Workshop” in
1961. He had then hired a small troop of part-time actors, who
could survive because they had other part-time occupations
besides. They were nevertheless working under unsure economic
conditions, with occasional contributions from the Rockefeller
Foundation. In 1966, Walcott’s company changed its name to
“Trinidad Theatre Workshop”. As its success gradually grew, the
new company made guest performances abroad – in Jamaica, Guyana,
Toronto (Canada), Boston, and New York (the USA). Walcott himself
has worked at different places teaching, including Boston
University as a professor of drama.
Among Walcott’s earlier plays, Ti-Jean
and his Brothers has a background in Caribbean folklore,
while Dream on Monkey Mountain, his dramatic masterpiece,
takes place on his own island of St. Lucia. The latter work’s
social inspiration derives from Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories about
the black Orpheus, as well as from Frantz Fanon, the French
sociologist who impressed the peoples of the Western colonies so
deeply with his work Les Damnés de la Terre
Dream on Monkey Mountain
The Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967)
belongs to the twentieth-century genre called dream plays,
connected with works by playwrights such as Strindberg as well as
by Synge and . The play’s
main character is Makak (French patois for “Ape”), a black
charcoal-burner who comes to town, gets drunk, and is taken into
custody by Corporal Lestrade, a mulatto guard who is the
maintainer of law and order during the later years of the
colonial power. In a dream scene of a mock trial that was
probably inspired by Kafka and Hesse, Lestrade accuses Makak of
being intoxicated and damaging the premises of a local salesman.
However, in another vivid dream sequence, Makak is crowned king
in the romantic Africa of his roots, surrounded by his wives, his
warriors, and the masks of pagan gods.
In a second mock trial, a number of great
Western characters (e.g., Plato, Ptolemy, Dante, Cecil Rhodes,
Florence Nightingale) are accused of neglecting other races and
sentenced to death by the African tribes. Lestrade has now given
up his confession to the Western world, shouldered his black
inheritance, and sworn allegiance to Makak. The poor
charcoal-burner is acquitted from the charges, and able to
withdraw to his West Indian world with a deepened sense of
The dream visions in this play seem to
belong both to Makak and to the collective atmosphere of the
plot. Ironic effects appear throughout the events. At the same
time as Makak’s romantic dream of Africa is presented, he
cherishes a fantasy of a white protectress who takes care of him.
But, as suggested by Lestrade, he gives up this dream, brutally
beheading the woman with an African sword. This is a sacrifice
that expresses a sound reaction against a fantasy life alienated
from reality. Makak’s character also bears symbolic similarities
with Christ: in prison, he is followed by two robbers, and from
Good Friday he is able to look forward to the moment of
resurrection on Easter Sunday. The prison can be understood as a
symbol both of life itself and of colonial rule. In a
sophisticated way, this play expresses central components of
Walcott’s attitude to the political, racial, and psychological
problems in his post-colonial world.
In Dream on Monkey Mountain, Walcott
makes a great effort to interpret the nature of Caribbean
identity. Colonialism has been important in damaging the human
soul and humiliating the inhabitants of this part of the world.
But there is no point trying to build castles in the air, as when
Makak dreams of his African roots. At the end, in the epilogue,
this simple-hearted visionary proletarian is acquitted, while
Western civilization with its great characters is sentenced to
death. Regardless of this, hate and revenge are negligible – in
fact, negative – factors to the writer Walcott.
From Seville to Babylon
By Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958),
Walcott had more seriously started to embrace song and dance in
the plot. He had been very successful with his first musicals,
The Joker of Seville (1974) and O Babylon (1976).
The former is a re-working of Tirso de Molina’s play El
burlador de Sevilla, and deals with the Don Juan character
and its sexual and moral aspects, while at the same time taking
up folk traditions and folk music (calypso) from Trinidad. O
Babylon goes back to Walcott’s experiences in Jamaica and
deals with the opinions of a religious and political sect of this
island, the Rastafarians, and their rejection of Western culture.
In Dream on Monkey Mountain, the dances, the miming, and
the masquerades take on an even wider role.
A poster done by Derek Walcott for the
play “O Babylon”.
Copyright (C) Derek Walccot
The “Homeric” Works
From his early youth, Walcott had a great
interest in both the sea and the Homeric world, calling the
latter “an echo in the throat.” Comparatively recently, he
devoted two works to this subject: Omeros (1990) and
The Odyssey – A Stage Version (1993). Omeros is a
work divided into one hundred and ninety-two songs, written in a
rhythmic blank verse with a richness of poetic metaphors and
similes. In the French title, Walcott makes poetic pun in that
mer evokes the sense of both “sea” and “mother,” and “o”
signifies the sound blown through a conch from the sea. This
great work presents a reversible world, a colonial or
post-colonial model corresponding to the original Homeric world.
This is an epic poetic tale, with a multitude of different short
stories, flashbacks, conversations, monologues, episodes,
descriptions, and impressions, depicting in a minutely detailed
way the Caribbean world and all its everyday life, its human
beings, animals, nature, waters, and woods.
The book cover of “Omeros”, using
the painting done by Derek Walcott (right).
Copyright (C)
1990 Farrar, Straus and
In Omeros, Homer himself appears in
a row of different shapes. He is the blind Greek poet himself,
the blind popular poet Seven Seas, the African griot or
rhapsodist, the famous American painter Winslow H o m e r (with
his paintings from the Atlantic Ocean), Virgil (the Roman
counterpart to the Greek poet), and a blind barge-man who turns
up on the stairs of the London church St. Martin-in-the-Fields
with a manuscript refused by the editors. Even the personalities
correspond to the Homeric ones: Philoctete,
Major Plunkett, a contemporary P Achilles, here the son
of an A Hector, Helen, intentionally
made into a very commonplace and approachable young Caribbean
woman. Walcott’s post-colonial world, a world where many slaves
had classic Greek names, in many different ways corresponds to
Rome and Greece. How could the poet, he says, while listening to
the quarrel of two fishermen in his hometown, avoid thinking of
quarreling Homeric characters?
Walcott’s text is crowded with thoughts and
reflections on history: “the farthest exclamations of history are
written by a flag of smoke,” exemplified by Troy, Carthage,
P “art is history’s nostalgia,” implying that literature
carries the same guilt as history and history is midden built on
midden. Likewise, as a background to the life of people in our
time, Walcott refers to violent events in history: the siege of
Troy, the extermination of the Aruac people in the Caribbean by
conquistadors, the eighteenth-century fights in the Caribbean
between the English and French navies, as well as the prolonged
catastrophe that extinguished most native Americans. Or the cruel
attacks on African villages by slave traders, the perpetual
tragedy of the captives who had to leave their homes, their
families, their professions, and their tools, to try to create a
new identity beyond the A Ibos, Guineans, and many
“Domino Players”, (gouache on paper),
done by Derek Walcott in 1999.
Copyright (C) Derek Walcott
The Odyssey
In a similar manner, the theatre production
The Odyssey testifies to Walcott’s deep interest, or
rather involvement, in the Homeric world. There are, indeed,
similarities between Omeros and The Odyssey, but
there are also major differences. As a dramatic work, The
Odyssey is divided into two acts, the first with fourteen
scenes, the second with six. The speeches are short, usually only
one line each, with the exception of the songs sung by the blind
Billy Blue, who is a more modern version of Homer. Now and then,
in a number of lines, the speeches have endings that form natural
rhymes. The characters are well-known from Homer and include
Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, who has to wait for his return from
T Telemachus, his old nurse on
Ithaca, Eurycleia, who is the first to recognize him when he
comes back at last from and Eumaeus, the
shepherd. There are also the kings visited by Telemachus when he
seeks his father: Nestor of Pylos and Menelaos of Sparta. We meet
with the sailors of Odysseus’ King Alcinous and his
daughter Nausicaa on the isle of the P Cyclops, t Circe, and in a short scene,
corresponding to the sixth song of Homer’s work, Odysseus’ own
mother Anticlea in the Underworld.
This does not mean, however, that all these
characters are copies of those in the Greek Odyssey. Walcott is
strikingly independent in forming different personalities. This
work is not characterized by the same breadth and depth of the
descriptions as in Omeros, but its dramatic verve, its
liveliness, and its exquisite sense of humor distinguish it. We
may accompany Odysseus from the victory at Troy, over his
different stations on his way home, as well as we become more
closely acquainted with Telemachus on his different expeditions
and with Penelope in her difficult position in Ithaca. And the
final scenes where Odysseus comes home and is at last recognized
by Penelope and Telemachus do not lose any of the thrilling
effects connected with the original Homeric situation. With its
light, witty dialogue, it is in some ways more accessible than
its poetic relative. Together, these two works provide some idea
of Walcott’s rich cultural and political outlook over the seas
and continents of the human world.
* J?ran Mj?berg (b. 1913) is a retired
professor of comparative literature and the author of literary
studies as well as books about different countries (Iceland,
Mexico, USA). His first work, Dikt och diktatur, appeared
in the last year of World War II and was a survey of Swedish
fiction and poetry that was inspired by a criticism and
condemnation of Hitler and Nazi ideology (). He has been
lecturer at the University of Oslo () and taught
Scandinavian languages and civilization at Harvard University
from 1949 to 1953. Teaching at V?xj? (V?xj?
Katedralskola) from 1953 to 1969 and at Lund University from 1969
to 1980, he has more recently published a presentation of Latin
American literature (Latinamerikanska f?rfatare,
1988), a study on visionary poetry during different epochs
(De s?g himmel och helvete, 1994), a book
about the role of architecture in fiction and drama
(Arkitektur i litteratur, 1999) and studies on the
lyrical contribution of the Swedish poets
First published 26 June 2001
To cite this section
MLA style: A Single, Homeless, Circling Satellite: Derek Walcott, 1992
Nobel Literature Laureate. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2018. Sun. 19 Aug 2018. &https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/article/&
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