19

Chapter II

Derek Walcott: Poet as ‘Schizophrenic’

Schizophrenia, in psychology, is a mental state in which a person is

wracked by tension due to contradictory feelings. In his poem “Codicil’

Walcott metaphorically describes himself as “Schizophrenic wrenched by two

styles” (CP 97). In fact, a detailed analysis of Walcott’s poetry and plays

clearly reveals that he is a person full of ambivalent and contradictory

disposition. This schizophrenia in Walcottian sensibility is the product of his

genealogical, cultural and linguistic background. In “What the Twilight Says:

An Overture,” an autobiographical essay published in 1970, Walcott writes of

the two worlds that informed his childhood:

Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing

could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted

backyards and moulting shingles; that being poor, we already

had the theater of our lives… . In that simple schizophrenic

boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, the

outward life of action and dialect. (Dream 4)

Walcott’s poetic and dramatic works are evidently an offshoot of his

schizophrenic situation, i.e. they arise from a struggle between two cultural

heritages which he has harnessed to create a unique “creolized” style. His

early poems, published in the late 1940’s, reveal his western influences where

he is committed to make a verse “legitimately prolonging the mighty line of

Marlowe and Milton” ( Dream 31).

20

The English and the American critics have given mixed reactions about

Walcott’s use of Western literary traditions during the first phase of his poetic

career whereas he has drawn criticism from Caribbean commentators who

accuse him of neglecting native forms in favour of the Western literary canon,

the legacy of his colonial oppressors.

His early works clearly indicate the influence of the English poetic

tradition, and his entire oeuvre resonates with the traditional concerns of poetic

form. However, a dispassionate study of his poetry will reveal to us that,

though sometimes it betrays a significant relation to tradition, it also manifests

an elegant blending of sources: European and American, Caribbean and

Latino, classical and contemporary. Some of his earlier works, including In a

Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, reveal a poet who follows the European

tradition but, at the same time, is mindful of West Indian landscapes and

experiences. From the very beginning of his poetic career Walcott has been

conscious of developing an idiom adequate to his subject matter. In “What the

Twilight Says: An Overture,” Walcott describes his desire to fill his plays such

as Ti-Jean and his Brothers and Dream on Monkey Mountain with “ a

language that went beyond mimicry, one which finally settled on its own mode

of inflection, and which begins to create an oral culture of chants, jokes, folk-

songs, and fables” (Dream 17). His play Dream on Monkey Mountain makes

an effective use of the native dialects. It also satirizes the bureaucratic idiom of

colonialism. As for Walcott, language becomes a route to racial identity and a

necessary resource for the survival of West Indian communities.

21

During the 1960s, though Walcott did much for the development of the

Little Carib Theatre and the rewriting of earlier dramas, his primary focus was

on poetry. The four volumes he published between 1964 and 1973 continued

his exploration and expansion of traditional forms and at the same time

concerned themselves with the position of the poet in the post colonial world.

His collection, The Castaway and Other Poems, published in 1964, draws on

the figure of Robinson Crusoe and suggests the isolation of the artist. In these

poems Walcott through his poetic personae, presents himself as a castaway

from both his ancestral cultures, African and European, stemming from both,

belonging to neither. Walcott’s castaway is a new Adam whose task is to name

his world. This castaway is a poet who creates and gives meaning to

nothingness. The Gulf, another collection of his reveals the poet’s breach

between himself and all he loves, between his adult consciousness and his

childhood memories, between his international interest and the feeling of

community in his homeland. Another Life, Walcott’s book-length

autobiographical poem, too explores these themes.

This schizophrenic situation is the main concern in his dramatic

writings in the 1970s as well. They address the problems of Caribbean identity

against the backdrop of political and social strife. They try to find solutions to

these problems in the individual. The plays of this period, The Joker of Seville

(1974), O Babylon! (1976) Remembrance (1977) and Pantomime (1978)

address these issues. Remembrance deserves our special attention in the sense

that its protagonist, Albert Perez Jordan, a school master, finds himself in a

schizophrenic situation which resembles that of the poet. Jordan lost his elder

son in 1970. There is the Black Power uprising and he remains distressed by a

22 political commitment he cannot understand. Unable to connect with his family

or with his own past, Jordan finds himself divided between an older generation

committed to tradition and a younger one playing at revolution.

His comedy Pantomime, too, is noteworthy in this respect as the

characters in the play confront similar divisions but here the issue of race

comes to the fore. In this play Walcott reverses the Crusoe-Friday roles and

the reversal highlights the fraught relationship that binds the black to the

white, master to slave, colonizer to colonized. In the play Jackson, a black

hotel servant, plays Crusoe and his white employer plays Friday. Jackson’s

ability to synthesize his calypso talents with a poetic use of the English

language suggests a respect for differences and a possibility for healing old

wounds. Through his persona Walcott here reveals his strategy to overcome

his schizophrenia through a careful fusion of diverse elements.

Walcott was born as a ‘Mulatto’, a person of mixed blood. As has

already been mentioned, he is the descendant of two white grandfathers and

two black grand mothers. His ‘mulatto angst’ takes its passionate expression in

the poem “A Far Cry from Africa,” which has been cited as an excellent

explication of his ambivalence. The subject of the poem is the bloody conflict

between the Mau-Mau revolutionaries and the British colonialists in Kenya.

Walcott perceives a remarkable parallel between the Mau-Mau−British

ideological conflict and his internal struggle to find cultural balance:

23

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 the 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? (CP 18)

Regarding the predicament Walcott finds himself in, Carolyn Cooper

observes:

The ambiguity of the poem’s title demonstrates Walcott’s

ambivalence: The Mau-Mau revolution against British colonial

policy is a powerful cry, whose intensity distance cannot

diminish. The shared experience of British colonialism which

blacks in the Caribbean and in Kenya have survived, establishes

a bond of empathy. But despite that commonality of experience,

Walcott recognizes that his own experience is distinct, a far cry

from the Kenyan. He abhors the savagery of British colonialism

and the violence it elicits, yet he is bound to British culture

which has provided him the language he must use to indict it.

But Walcott develops from the simplistic either /or dualism of

his early career. The answer to the questions posed in “A Far

Cry from Africa” is that he cannot choose. (160)

24

In “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” an introductory essay to a

collection of his plays, Walcott carefully delineates three stages in his artistic

development. First, he withdraws himself into the world of English literature

which he perceives as another life. Then he moves into the peasant world with

its folk rhythms and vitality expressed in Creole; and finally he makes an

earnest attempt to synthesize the two cultures.

In his essay “Meanings” (1970) Walcott describes this creative cultural

synthesis as the positive legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean. He identifies

“formalism” and “exuberance” as two diverse and extreme temperaments

which have been fused in the Caribbean psyche:

I think that many of what are sneered at as colonial values are

part of the strength of the West Indian psyche, a fusion of

formalism with exuberance, a delight in both the precision and

power of language. We love rhetoric, and this has created a style,

a panache about life that is particularly ours. Our most tragic folk

songs and our most self-critical calypsos have a driving, life-

asserting force. Combine that in our literature with a long

experience of classical forms and you’re bound to have

something exhilarating; in the best actors in the company you can

see this astounding fusion ignite their style, this combination of

classic discipline inherited through the language, with a strength

of physical expression that comes from the folk music. (51)

25

This is Walcott’s manifesto, his pronounced objective, for the

expression of which he devotes his entire literary career, both dramatic and

poetic. What one must notice here is Walcott’s attitude towards effecting a

fusion of diverse elements. His charge that the exuberant folk music lacks

“classical discipline” and the notion that discipline is a literary virtue, may be

objectionable to a post-colonial critic but his call for synthesis or fusion cannot

be overlooked.

In his autobiographical poem Another Life Walcott describes the

painful contrast between himself and his alter ego, Gregorias, as a contrast of

the classical and romantic styles. He confesses his envy of Gregorias who

“abandoned apprenticeship / to the errors of his own soul” (CP 201). Though

Walcott had been an admirer of the Western classical canon at that time, he

had equally admired ‘the explosion of impulse’ (CP 201) in the works of

Gregorias, his friend and fellow artist. Though his work had no classical

discipline and had been grotesque, it had possessed an aboriginal force. What

Walcott seeks is the fusion of both styles:

I hoped that both disciplines might

by painful accretion cohere

and finally ignite. (CP 200-201)

This attitude of Walcott towards the unrefined and natural works of

Gregorias is a clear vindication of Walcott’s ambivalence. Though an

exponent of the classical discipline, Walcott, at the same time, admires the

untrained romantic explosion or the errors of Gregorias’ soul. This

ambivalence leads Walcott to the awareness that a deft fusion of the classical

26 style represented by the Western literary masters and the untrained romantic

style of artists like Gregorias would open up great vistas of development for

Caribbean literature.

Here Walcott recognizes the value of cultural and linguistic holism. But

this attitude is not typical of St. Lucia, his native island. Mervyn Alleyne in

“Language and Society in St. Lucia” describes a fundamental schism

between Creole and English, which has its origins in the master-servant

polarity of the period of slavery:

The two languages which face each other in St. Lucia are clearly

different in nature and function. Creole incorporates the entire

history of the indigenous people of the island. Consciousness of

this history is achieved through Creole, as this language is the

repository of the folklore of the people. Creole is the vehicle for

proverbs; for handing down traditional popular customs

ceremonies, rituals. Traditional techniques, by which a large

percentage of the population still lives, are expressed in Creole.

On the other hand, English is the vehicle of very formal and

artificial occasions; it is the medium through which all official,

national and inherited institutions function. Creole is used to

describe the non-official, private and fundamental mores of the

people; . . . As one expects, Creole is a more living, more

creative and more spontaneous means of expression. English as

spoken in St. Lucia is very conservative and particularly among

people who have no opportunity of speaking it with Standard

English speakers and whose contact with English has been

exclusively through the school, it is very literary. (211)

27

From Mervyn Alleyne’s observation it is clear that there exists a

cultural dualism in St. Lucia. Franz Fanon’s renowned work Black Skin, White

Masks explores the potential of such pervasive cultural dualism to create

psychological conflict in the colonized Afro-Caribbean who unconsciously

idealises European culture and debases the African and is unable to reconcile

himself to his African origins. Fanon states:

To come back to psycho-pathology, let us say that the Negro

lives an ambiguity that is extraordinarily neurotic. At the age of

twenty – at the time that is, when the collective unconscious has

been more or less lost or is resistant at least to being raised to the

conscious level – the Antillean recognizes that he is living an

error. Why is that? Quite simply because – and this is very

important – the Antillean has recognized himself as a Negro, but

by virtue of an ethical transit, he also feels (collective

unconscious ) that one is a Negro to the degree to which one is

wicked, sloppy, malicious, instinctual. Everything that is

opposite of these Negro modes of behaviour is white. This must

be recognized as the source of Negrophobia in the Antillean. In

the collective unconscious, black = ugliness, sin, darkness,

immorality. (169)

Though the main concern of this chapter is the schizophrenia expressed

in Walcott’s poetry, it may not be proper to ignore his play Dream on Monkey

Mountain, undoubtedly his most renowned play. It deals with the same

subject. The play graphically records the neurotic epidermalization of

28 inferiority in the Negro, which Fanon has dealt with thoroughly in his work.

The play treats the psychic disequilibrium of its central character, Makak, the

monkey man, the derided charcoal burner, who longs for the alchemical

transformation from coal to diamond. Two parallel plots have been developed

here. First, we have the literal story of Makak, who descends from Monkey

Mountain where he lives and from where he comes into town with his friend,

Moustique, to sell coal. They separate, and later in the day Makak finds his

friend drinking rum in a café. In a fit of rage Makak smashes up the café and is

arrested for his misdeed. He spends a night in jail, where he is taunted by the

jailer, Lestrade, and is released the next day. Then there is the complex

interweaving of this literal plot with the symbolic dream sequences. The

structural device employed here enables Walcott to dramatize Makak’s

tortured psyche.

Walcott deftly uses the dislocation of time sequences, the unannounced

shifting of locales, and the ambiguity of action–what is reality and what is

dream – all to evoke Makak’s disoriented personality. Cooper’s critical

observation of the play is very pertinent in this respect:

The ambiguity of the play’s ending makes Dream on Monkey

Mountain quite controversial. The play can be interpreted as a

parody of the messianic, millenarian black leaders such as

Marcus Garvey, who advocated repatriation for Africans in the

diaspora. But Makak’s retreat to the mist of Monkey Mountain,

to the imagination of his people, can also be interpreted as

Walcott’s metaphoric expression of the deeply embedded

29

cultural vision that haunts black people, deprived of a secure

sense of personal and communal identity. In the poem

“Laventville” Walcott poignantly describes the loss of ancestral

memories of the uprooted Africans in the Caribbean as a “deep,

amnesiac blow.” (163)

This loss of ancestral memory and the loss of identity are the

preoccupations of Walcott as a poet and playwright. The Antillean is a self–

imposed prisoner in his own cell / shell of amnesia. The poignancy of loss is

manifest in the following lines from “Laventille.”

Something inside is laid wide like a wound,

Some open passage that has cleft the brain,

some deep, amnesiac blow. We left

somewhere a life we never found

customs and gods that are not born again

some crib, some grill of light

clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld

us from that world below us and beyond,

and in its swaddling cerements we’re still bound.

(The Castaway 35)

Makak, the derided monkey man in the play, in fact, represents all

black people who have been deprived of their African ancestry and past and

who have therefore struggled to redeem the lost tradition to find the lost paths.

30

Through Makak, Walcott in the play undertakes a therapeutic process

of recovery from that ‘amnesiac blow’ experienced by the black all over the

world. In fact, it is apt on the part of Walcott to undertake this task of healing

as he himself is a Mulatto, half English and half Negro, through his parental

lines.

Makak feels a need to reconnect with ancestral traditions and in this

sense his aspiration is similar to that of the old East Indian men marooned in

the West Indies, depicted by V. S. Naipaul in his novel A House for Mr.

Biswas. The novel portrays these old men at evening, in the twilight of their

years, caught in the crevices between cultures:

In the arcade of Hanuman House, grey and substantial in the dark,

there was already the evening assembly of old men, squatting on

sacks on the ground and on tables now empty of Tulsi store

goods, pulling at clay cheelums that glowed red and smelled of

ganja and burnt sacking. Though it was not cold, many had

scarves over their heads and around their necks; this detail made

them look foreign and, to Mr. Biswas, romantic. It was the time

of day for which they lived. They could not speak English and

were not interested in the land where they lived; it was a place

where they had come for a short time and stayed longer than they

expected. They continually talked of going back to India, but

when the opportunity came, many refused, afraid of the unknown,

afraid to leave the familiar temporariness. And every evening

they came to the arcade of the solid, friendly house, smoked, told

stories, and continued to talk of India. (194-95)

31

Walcott’s Poem “The Saddhu of Couva” too deals with the theme of the

East Indian, alienated from both the past and the present. Walcott, in this

poem, assumes the persona of an East Indian elder, a holy man, for whom

sunset is a particularly pensive time of day. The day’s end evokes a profound

doubt about the efficacy of faith in the old traditions:

When sunset, a brass gong,

vibrate through Couva,

is then I see my soul, swiftly unsheathed,

like a white cattle bird growing more small

over the ocean of the evening canes.

and I sit quiet, waiting for it to return

like a hog-cattle blistered with mud,

because, for my spirit, India is too far. (CP 372)

These old men are deprived of their memories of India. “India is too

far” indicates that not only India even the fragments of Indian culture that have

been preserved in the Caribbean are losing their iconic power in the ravishing

fire of time that consumes the past.

I knot my head with a cloud,

my white moustache bristle like horns,

my hands are brittle as the pages of Ramayana.

Once the sacred monkeys multiplied like branches

in the ancient temples; I did not miss them,

because these fields sang of Bengal,

behind Ramlochan Repairs there was Uttar Pradesh;

32

but time roars in my ears like a river,

old age is a conflagration

as fierce as the cane fires of crop time. (CP 372-73)

The following lines aptly portray the diminishing faith in the gods and

the nostalgia of the aged:

Suppose all the gods too old,

Suppose they dead and they burning them,

supposing when some cane cutter

start chopping up snakes with a cutlass

he is severing the snake–armed god,

and suppose some hunter has caught

Hanuman in his mischief in a monkey cage.

Suppose all the gods were killed by electric light? (CP 373-74)

The old Saddhu painfully recognizes the pervasive loss of respect for

the past. He ejaculates: “There are no more elders./ Is only old people.” Then

he retires, like Makak to Monkey Mountain: “I ascend to my bed of sweet

sandalwood” (374).

Cooper identifies the strategy adopted by Walcott in his search for a

solution to the Caribbean problem of cultural identification in a pluralistic

society:

The routinization of the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica is a

classic solution to the larger Caribbean problem of cultural

identification in a pluralistic society; one recognizing the cultural

ambiguities of his environment, Walcott is able to transform the

33

paradoxes of his Caribbean heritage into vibrant art. His early

poems, the privately published collections of the late forties and

early fifties, awkwardly articulate the young poet’s gropings to

define himself in relationship to the ubiquitous fragments of

British, French and African Culture. (166)

Walcott often uses images and metaphors to explain his search for

identity and the poet’s task for effecting the unification of Caribbean

sensibility. He draws on the image of the biblical swineherd/prodigal son to

express his sense of cultural alienation.

And the swineherd, whose pastoral seclusion ridicules

The dry black city, dies of fattened conceit

Suffering is applauded, encouraged and dissolves

In a kind English woman’s smile among the olives,

They fawned over the fact my mind was maimed,

Dissecting at each tea-party the surprising abortion

Of my contradicting colour. (Epitaph 29-30)

Walcott, being a perceptive analyst of his own poetry, describes his

early self conscious works in the following words: “My first poems and plays

expressed this yearning to be adopted, as the bastard longs for his father’s

household. I saw myself legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe,

of Milton, but my sense of inheritance was stronger because it came from

estrangement” (Dream 31).

However, later, Walcott liberated himself from the clutches of the

tradition of English literature and paid attention to the voices of the indigenous

culture. Commenting on his transformation he recalls how “he began marathon

34 poems on Greek heroes which ran out of breath, lute songs, heroic tragedies,

but these rhythms, the salvation army parodies, the Devil’s Christmas songs

and the rhythms of the street itself were entering the pulse beat of the wrist”

(Dream 32).

Schizophrenia is discernible even in the use of language. The poet is

divided in his loyalty towards English and the Vernacular. During the second

phase of his poetic career Walcott employs Creole vocabulary to a

considerable extent. A survey of his poetry from 1948 to 1979 reveals a high

incidence of Creole lexical items. But here too Cooper notices subtle

differences in the use of Creole terminology between the early and the later

poems of the period. Her observation in this regard is worth noting:

But what is significant is that in the early poems the use of

Creole is normally limited to the realistic representation of the

idiolect of a reported Creole speaker. It is not the voice of the

poet himself that speaks in Creole. Though one cannot assume

that the personae of the poems are identical with Walcott, it is

clear that the personae of these early poems do not normally

speak in Creole. The poem “Pocomania,” in the early collection

In a Green Night, clearly demonstrates the separation of the two

poetic voices. The first two stanzas express the point of view of

the worshippers at a pocomania ritual – an African-derived,

indigenous religion. The use of “de” for “the” and “bredren” for

“brethren” indicates a Creole sensibility. Except for one

additional “de” in the fourth stanza, the rest of the poem

35

proceeds in English, and ends with a comment on the naiveté of

the deluded worshippers, evading truth in their escapist rituals:

“Have mercy on these furious lost./whose life is praising death

in life” (In a Green Night 35). The voice of indictment is

English: The Creole and English perspectives confront each

other and diverge. (167)

But in Walcott’s later poetry one comes across a point of convergence.

The poem “Origins” is noteworthy in this respect. Here, Walcott presents the

point of view of the New World writer who is quite convinced of his creative

potential. If the young Walcott’s concerns had been the loss of standards and

the insecurity about the quality of indigenous accomplishments, the later

Walcott has now been allayed of the doubt elicited by the setting sun of the

empire. Now, the poet uses the Caribbean Creoles with great confidence and it

indicates that his sensibility is no longer dissociated. The NewWorld

landscape generates its language, its unique metaphors, which the poetic

imagination liberates:

Was it not then we asked for a new song,

As Colon’s vision gripped the berried branch?

For the names of bees in the surf of white frangipani,

With hard teeth breaking the bitter almonds of consonants,

Shaping new labials to the curl of the wave,

Christening the pomegranate with a careful tongue,

Pommes de Cythere, bitter Cytherean apple. (CP 14)

36

The poet has undergone a transformation of consciousness. He is

engaged in a process of giving new names to old social relationships. The title

poem of The Star-Apple Kingdom presents a Caribbean politician engaged in

the arduous task of social reconstruction. The central character in the poem,

fashioned after Jamaica’s nationalist leader, Michael Manley, attempts to bring

the Makaks of the Caribbean from the fringes of national consciousness:

Strange, that the rancour of hatred hid in that dream

of slow rivers and lily-like parasols, in snaps

of fine old colonial families, curled at the edge

not from age or from fire or the chemicals, no, not at all,

but because, off at its edges, innocently excluded

stood the groom, the cattle boy, the house maid, the gardeners,

the tenants, the good Negroes down in the village,

their mouths in the locked jaw of a silent scream. (CP 384)

But, here the visionary politician is seen as caught between the devil

and the deep sea. His task of making history is made more difficult since the

naive optimism of the poor who expect miracles and the cynicism of the rich

who think miracles impossible cannot be converged into a common point of

agreement. The poet, too, like his protagonist, is caught between these two

diverging predicaments:

. . . [his soul] entered a municipal wall

stirring the slogans that shrieked his name: SAVIOUR!

and others: LACKEY! he melted like a spoon

through the alphabet soup of CIA, PNP, OPEC,

37

that resettled once he passed through with this thought:

I should have foreseen those seraphs with barbed–wire hair,

beards like burst mattresses, and wild eyes of garnet,

who nestled the Coptic Bible to their ribs, would

call me Joshua, expecting him to bring down Babylon

by Wednesday, after the fall of Jericho; yes, yes,

I should have seen the cunning bitterness of the rich

who left me no money but these mandates (CP 389)

Walcott presents his childhood vision of the star apple kingdom, the

mythical submerged city of dreams, which can restore faith:

Star–apples rained to the ground in that silence,

the silence was the green of cities undersea,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

and the men with barbed-wire beards saw

in that creak of light that was made between

the noises of the world that was equally divided

between rich and poor, between North and South,

between white and black, between two Americas,

the fields of Silent Zion in Parish Trelawny,

in Parish St. David, in Parish St. Andrew,

leaves dancing like children without any sound,

in the valley of Tryall, and the white silent roar

of the old waterwheel in the star- apple Kingdom (CP 394-95)

38

Cooper states that “Walcott’s apocalyptic star-apple kingdom, though

difficult to conceptualize in practical political terms, is a compelling metaphor

for the reconciliation of opposites that must be accomplished in contemporary

Caribbean societies. The Caribbean politician, like the visionary artist, must

believe that the pervasive dissociation of sensibility in these societies of

fractured cultures can be healed.” (169)

Shabine, the persona in Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight,” is a

Creole speaking, red nigger sailor. He recounts his experience of living in the

Caribbean. Through Shabine, Walcott identifies the dissociation of sensibility

endured by the colonized. The negative and positive connotations ascribed to

the words “Casuarina” and “Cypress,” the one indigenous to the Caribbean,

the other standard English, are of immense psychological significance:

Once the sound “cypress” used to make more sense

than the green “casuarinas,” though, to the wind

whatever grief bent them was all the same,

since they were trees with nothing else in mind

but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave;

but we live like our names and you would have

to be colonial to know the difference,

to know the pain of history words contain,

to love those trees with an inferior love,

and to believe: “Those casuarinas bend

like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain

like sailors’ wives. They’re classic trees, and we,

if we live like the names our masters please,

by careful mimicry might become men. (CP 353-54)

39

Both Walcott and Shabine, his persona, reject the posture of mimicry.

The poet holds that the Caribbean artist has to create a new language to enable

him to redeem his personhood. “In What the Twilight Says: An Overture”

Walcott speaks of the role of this new language in forging the distinct

Caribbean sensibility:

What would deliver (the New World Negro) from servitude was

the forging of a language that went beyond mimicry, a dialect ...

which had the force of revelation as it invented names for things,

one which finally settled on its own mode of inflection, and

which began to create an oral culture of chants, jokes, folk-songs

and fables; this, not merely the debt of history was his proper

claim to the New World . . . It did not matter how rhetorical,

how dramatically heightened the language was if its tone were

true . . . and the only way to recreate this language was to share

in the torture of its articulation. This did not mean the jettisoning

of “culture” but, by the writer’s making creative use of his

schizophrenia, and electric fusion of the old and the new.

(Dream 17)

Indeed, Walcott makes creative use of his schizophrenia by assimilating

the cultural and linguistic features of each of his ancestors. He creates poetry

and drama that express a fusion of the oral and the literary traditions of the

Creole and the English cultures. The dynamic cultural ambivalence of

Walcott’s mixed African and European ancestry is very well reflected both in

his poetry and in his drama, both in theme and in language. Walcott has

always been willing to draw on the total heritage available to him as an alert

40 and enquiring human being. About his identity and pedigree he himself states:

“Mongrel as I am, something pricks in me when I see the word Ashanti as with

the word Warwickshire, both separately intimating my grandfather’s roots,

both baptizing this neither proud nor ashamed bastard, this hybrid, this West

Indian” (Dream 10). But as a poet and playwright he has a wider ancestry than

that; the whole world is his family, and he has argued that “maturity is the

assimilation of the features of every ancestor” (“The Muse of History” 1).

Walcott has described his background as a “genteel, self-denying

Methodist poverty” (“Leaving School” 6). In order to understand the

significance of these words one has to, first of all, understand his environment.

His father died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were only

one year old. Their mother, who was headmistress of the Methodist infant

school, worked hard to keep them at college, by taking in sewing. As his

works such as “Leaving School,” “What the Twilight Says: An Overture”,

“Meanings” and Another Life exemplify, Walcott had a thorough grounding in

European history, art and literature, and was also in contact with the black

Africa-based culture of the St. Lucian majority. He was not European; and

circumstances kept him somewhat apart from the majority of St. Lucians; they

were black whereas he was part white; they were predominantly Catholic

whereas he was a Methodist; and he was a lover of English on an island where

the mass of the people speak a French patois. He is in constant search for a

language, a form, that will seem entirely appropriate. For most of his career

Walcott has written both in dialect and in Standard English. Sometimes a

fusion of the two serves to suggest ‘that dramatic ambivalence,’ as in these

lines from Another Life:

41

But I tired of your whining, Grandfather,

in the whispers of marsh grass,

I tired of your groans, Grandfather,

in the deep ground bass of the combers, (CP 209)

Both in his poetry and in his plays Walcott draws on anything and he is

often conscious of his attempt to fuse elements drawn from different sources.

He himself states: “I am a kind of split writer: I have one tradition inside me

going one way, and another tradition going another. The mimetic, the

narrative, and dance element is strong on one side, and the literary, the

classical tradition is strong on the other” (“Meanings” 47-8).

Walcott has been consistently hostile to any force which seeks to limit

his creativity or restrict access to anything which might feed it. “Most black

writers,” he has said “cripple themselves by their separatism. You can’t be a

poet and believe in the division of man” (Rodman 252).

His entire oeuvre explores and dramatizes divisions within himself. As

such, his focus is usually on reconciliation, acceptance and compassion. He is

aware of the fact that history is a trap as it is the record of the manifold

cruelties unleashed on his people and hence he has recently sought ways to

avoid it. He states: “the truly tough aesthetic of the New World neither

explains nor forgives history. It refuses to recognize it as a creative or culpable

force” (“Muse” 2).

42

In the earlier works of Walcott one can discern the overwhelming

influence of Eliot, Pound, Dylan Thomas and Auden. These works have been

charged against these influences. In “The Muse of History” he justifies these

influences contending that imitation in itself is not a vice but a virtue

especially when imitation leads to a metamorphosis as far as literary

productions are concerned.

In the later Walcott, however, it is difficult to make a distinction

between influence and allusion. From The Castaway onwards he becomes

more and more original by employing various poetic techniques of his own.

Mervyn Morris observes:

In The Castaway Walcott begins to try on a series of masks:

Crusoe, Friday, Adam, in particular. The dominant concerns are

isolation, estrangement from society, hunger for human contact;

separation from other persons, from other races, from history,

from God. The title suggests William Cowper’s poem of that

name; there the castaway ‘Of friends, of hope, of all bereft . . .

wag’d with death a lasting strife, / Supported by despair of life.’

The epigraph to “Crusoe’s Journal” might well have been

applied to the volume as a whole; taken from Robinson Crusoe,

it begins: “I looked now up on the world as a thing remote,

which I had nothing to do with, no expectation from, and indeed

no desires about” (148).

43

The poet in isolation finds himself in greater imaginative activity and

increased awareness of the natural world. In this sense his isolation and

introversion are a blessing in disguise. For,

If I listen I can hear the polyp build,

The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea.

Cracking a sea-louse, I make thunder split. (CP 58)

This Crusoe-like predicament enables Walcott, the schizophrenic, to be

more imaginative and hence creative. This enables him to make something out

of nothing and thereby absolves himself and his people from the Naipaulian

invective of uncreativity.

A number of poems in The Castaway and The Gulf are concerned with

the poet’s vocation and craft. Poems like “The Flock,” “Crusoe’s Journal,”

“Crusoe Island,” “Codicil” etc are examples. Sometimes, the effort is to

establish a tension between surface plainness and actual complexity: in “A

Tropical Bestiary” the sea crab is envied . . . ‘obliquity burrowing to surface/

from hot plain sand:” and the tarpon provokes the question:

Can such complexity of shape,

such bulk, terror, and fury fit

in a design so innocent? (CP 62)

The poem entitled “Homecoming: Anse La Raye” exemplifies the

divided psyche in Walcott. This poem touchingly expresses the poet’s

embitterment. It clearly evokes the two worlds which represent his self-

division. Having returned to his homeland St. Lucia, the poet has been

44 swarmed by pot-bellied children. Neither they nor the grown-ups in the island

recognize the poet. They mistake him for a tourist. The bitterness of this

‘welcome’is expressed directly in the lines: “They swarm like flies/round your

heart’s sore” (CP 128). This makes him quip that “there are homecomings

without home.” The isolation and the disillusionment he felt at this

ignominious return is very well expressed in Walcott’s sudden switching over

from the communal ‘we’ at the beginning of the poem to the distanced,

isolated “you,” referring to himself and his failed ambition: “You . . . hoped it

would mean something to declare/today, I am your poet, yours” (128). About

this switch over from “I/We” to “you” throughout the poems in The Gulf,

Katie Jones, a Walcottian critic, comments that “this is a rcurrent technique in

The Gulf in which the poet is often divided into “I” and “you” dramatizing his

self division in a Yeatsian manner” (qtd. in Brown 45).

The poem “Mass Man” in the same collection too expresses the poet’s

isolation. He is writing for his own people but they are not listening.Still, the

poet expresses his commitment to his art and his people and states that “my

mania is a terrible calm” (CP 99).

His “Ruins of a Great House” and “A Far Cry from Africa” reveal a

recurring concern with the relationship between the black people and the

white, between the colonized and the colonizers. In these poems Walcott

seems to identify himself with both sides. In “Crusoe’s Journal,” for example,

he explains of Crusoe/Friday:

45

like Christofer he bears

in speech mnemonic as a missionary’s

the Word to savages,

its shape an earthen, water- bearing vessel’s

whose sprinkling alters us

into good Fridays who recite His praise,

parroting our master’s

style and voice, we make his language ours,

converted cannibals

we learn with him to eat the flesh of Christ . (CP 93)

Here one can discern a skilful focusing of colonial ambivalence. Even

the spelling ‘Christofer,’ instead of ‘Christopher,’ is purposefully used as it

suggests literally ‘bearer of Christ’ and hints at a connection with the evil

bearer of light, Lucifer. The ‘Word’ in itself is ambivalent as it may suggest

both the logos of St. John’s Gospel and the beginnings of literature. The word

‘savages’ too is nicely ironic as it may mean both the ‘gentiles,’ unaware of

Christ’s message and the African slaves who the colonial masters think are

uncouth and uncultured as cannibals. Similarly, ‘Good Fridays’ suggests not

only ‘Good Friday,’ a significant day of suffering, but also ‘good niggers.’ The

phrases ‘converted cannibals’ who learn to eat the flesh’ are also fraught with

irony and ambivalence. His praise and ‘his language’ also contain a suggestion

that God and the English man similarly, require reverence and this suggestion

seems to be further reinforced in “our masters” which is suggestive of both

Crusoe and the Master, Christ (Morris 149). Later in the poem the persona

identifies with Crusoe:

46

…So from this house

that faces nothing but the sea, his journals

assume a household use;

we learn to shape from them, where nothing was

the language of a race. (CP 94)

Poems like ‘The Glory Trumpeter,” “Goats and Monkeys,”

“Laventille,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Lines in New England,” “A

Change of Skin,” “Elegy,” and “Blues” present black-white tension or conflict.

In all these poems Walcott focuses almost entirely on the blacks. Despite their

racial emphases, the poems usually advocate compassion. In this context the

poem entitled “The Gulf” is worth considering:

The Gulf shines, dull as lead. The coast of Texas

glints like a metal rim. I have no home

as long as summer bubbling to its head

boils for that day when in the lord God’s name

the coals of fire are heaped upon the head

of all whose gospel is the whip and flame,

age after age, the uninstructing dead. (CP 107-108)

The reference to the ‘coals of fire’ is from Romans 12: 19-21 which

states that “vengeance be left to the Lord” and advises kindness to the enemy,

“for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.”

47

According to Morris:

‘The whip and flame’ suggest both white hatred and black: the

slave-master’s whip, the flame for the branding iron, and the

slave’s preoccupation with remembered suffering, as well as the

fires lit by slaves in rebellion or by 1960s black militants in

American cities. The weary movement of the final line reminds

us that violence has a long history. So many have died, and yet

we have not learnt: ‘age after age, the uninstructing dead.’

(“Derek Walcott” 150)

Walcott’s book-length autobiographical poem Another Life is of great

critical importance as it is of considerable range and flexibility. Like “What

the Twilight Says,” it is alternately self-critical and combative. Since it is a

poem preoccupied with visual art and memory, many recurrent images are

drawn from painting, photography and cinema. The book contains twenty-

three chapters and is divided into four main parts, each preceded by a strictly

relevant epigraph. Part One, “The Divided Child,” introduces us to the young

artist and his island environment; the landscape, his mother, some village

characters presented like figures from classical mythology, impressions of the

religious and commercial life, and the colonial education imbuing the values

of a whiter world; “he fell in love with art/and life began” (CP186). In Part

Two, “Homage to Gregorias,” art and life are pursued mainly in the company

of the towering Gregorias (Dustan St. Omer), painting, drinking, arguing.

Guided by a senior painter, Harry Simmons ‘that astigmatic saint” they vow

never to leave the island until they have recorded it in art: “For no one had yet

written of this landscape / that it was possible . . .” (CP 195).

48

The poet discovers that, unlike in the case of Gregorias, his talent is not

for painting, “I lived in a different gift, / its element metaphor” (201). Part

Three, “A simple Flame,” deals mainly with the 1948 fire which burnt down

most of the capital, Castries, and with the poet’s love and loss of Anna,

(Andreuille), the school girl introduced at the end of Part One:

“her golden plaits a simple coronet

out of Angelico” (CP 187).

Their love is undermined by the poet’s love of art:

So every step increased that subtlety

which hoped that their two bodies could be made

one body of immortal metaphor.

The hand she held already had betrayed

them by its longing for describing her. (CP 236)

He found “life within some novel’s leaves /more real” than Anna,

“already chosen / as his doomed heroine” (238-39). The lyrical flow contains a

disturbing combination of fulfillment, rejection, guilt. At the end of Part Three

there is a passage which underlines the basic structure of the poem and

redirects our attention to one of its most central concerns, the inter-relation

between art and life:

Three lives dissolve in the imagination,

three loves, art, love and death,

fade from a mirror clouding with this breath,

not one is real, they cannot live or die,

49

they all exist, they never have existed:

Harry, Dunstan, Andreuille. (CP 257)

Here ‘three lives’, evidently refers to three persons whom Walcott has

loved. ‘Three loves’ indicates three subjects of which he loves to write viz, art,

love and death, and these are variously associated with the three persons.

Walcott is looking into a mirror from close enough so that it becomes cloudy

and the word ‘breath’ suggests the breath of creation. The poet resorts to

cinematic technique here. Looking into the clouded mirror, he sees himself in

and through three of the important figures in his life, Harry Simmons, Dunstan

St. Omer and Anna (Andreuille). In ‘reality’ they all exist, live, die. But

Walcott has recreated them in his imagination and they have become figures of

art which ‘never have existed,’ and ‘cannot live or die.’ Like everything else in

the poem, they exist in “Another Life.”

Part Four of the poem, “The Estranging Sea” laments the suicidal death

of Harry Simmons, Walcott’s mentor poet. When Walcott started writing this

poem, Harry was alive and, in fact, it was partially in celebration of him that

the poem was written. The bereaved Walcott laments: “When I began this

work, you were alive, / and with one stroke, you have completed it!” (CP 282).

As for Walcott, Harry represented the fervour and intelligence of a

whole country. Here Walcott lashes out at the society which neglects its artists

and causes the death of Harry. Walcott also repudiates some of the black

power postures fashionable in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He is, in fact,

“sick of the black angst” and calls the black power literature the “literature of

50 the factory” (287). What he wants is to obliterate history and to “begin

again,/from what have always known, nothing” (CP 286).

The last part of the poem asserts the holiness of creation. The

concluding lines recall the recurrent imagery of fire and light. They address

Gregorias, the poet’s companion in art and drunkenness:

Gregorias, listen, lit,

we were the light of the world!

We were blest with a virginal, unpainted world

with Adam’s task of giving things their names (CP 294).

Walcott, too, like his friend Dunstan St. Omer, Gregorias in the poem,

had initially tried his hand at painting but soon realized that it was not his

vocation. Accepting his failure as a painter, Walcott recognizes the importance

of metaphor to him:

in every surface I sought

the paradoxical flash of an instant

in which every facet was caught

in a crystal of ambiguities. (CP 200)

The ‘crystal of ambiguities’ referred to here is quite characteristic of the

paradoxical nature of Walcott’s poems. They are ambiguous yet lucid like a

crystal. They are ‘many faceted’ and yet ‘transparent’!

In his collection of poems entitled Sea Grapes Walcott makes a sincere

attempt at rediscovering his language. He seeks to arrange his words in time

and space so as to create an aura around them. A line in “Names” refers to ‘the

51 right of everything to be a noun.’ In “Sainte Lucie” the persona seeks to

repossess the nouns of his French patois:

Come back to me,

my language.

Come back,

cacao,

grigri ,

solitaire,

ciseau. (CP 310)

In these poems Walcott sets out to call himself to the Adamic task of

the New World poet in naming and reclaiming things.

Many of the poems in Sea Grapes are ‘reticent’ in the sense that they

‘wish to hide’ as they move towards ‘silence.’ The prevailing mood of this

volume is that of ‘resignation.’ The middle-aged poet seems to accept his

vocation of searching for distantly Caribbean elements, bidding farewell to his

earlier loyalties:

Now, I require nothing

from poetry but true feeling,

no pity, no fame, no healing. Silent wife,

we can sit watching grey water,

and in a life awash

with mediocrity and trash

live rock-like. (CP 336)

52

In the poem the colour grey is ascribed a new value:

grey has grown strong to me,

it’s no longer neutral. (340)

The poet’s sense of elation gives way to silence:

One could abandon writing

and be the greatest reader in the world.

At least it requires awe ,

which has been lost to our time. (CP 324-25)

Some poems in the collection tend to be largely curses. “Party Night at

the Hilton” and “Lost Federation” abuse politicians and “At Last” addresses

the exiled novelists.

“The Cloud” presents Adam as having an advantage over both God and

the Serpent: “Neither could curse or bless.” But through Sea Grapes, as in

Another Life, Walcott does both. The collection contains two of the best poems

which bless. They are “For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, Saint

Lucia” and “Oddjob, a Bull Terrier.” The latter ends with:

in the drizzle that comes to our eyes

not uttering the loved thing’s name,

the silence of the dead,

the silence of the deepest buried love is

the one silence,

and whether we bear it for beast,

53

for child, for woman, or friend,

it is the one love, it is the same,

and it is blest

deepest by loss

it is blest, it is blest. (CP 335)

In his essay “The Muse of History” Walcott preaches a philosophy of

moderation; he contends that the New World poet should not allow himself to

be carried away by the winds of emotion but that he should possess a balanced

attitude of anger, compassion and tolerance. The fruit of the New World is a

mixture of the acid and the sweet, the apples of its second Eden have ‘the

tartness of experience’. (“Muse” 25). Poems in Sea Grapes endorse this vision

of the poet.

Apart from these poetic collections, some of his plays, especially those

in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, are also indicative of

Walcott’s developing skills, and show his growing skill in blending varied

materials and influences. In fact, it is this fusion of diverse elements, both in

his plays and his poetry, that makes Walcottian critics and readers all over the

world review him as compassionate, realistic and cosmic in outlook.

Morris makes a brief critical analysis of his plays such as The Sea at

Dauphin, Ti-Jean and His Brothers and Malcauchon in Dream on Monkey

Mountain and Other Plays. The Sea at Dauphin (1954), Walcott’s naturalistic

play, is grounded in the life and language of St. Lucian fishermen and has its

own authentic force. The play is about Afa, an angry fisherman, attacking God

and the church alike:

54

Dirt and prayers is Dauphin life, in Dauphin, in Canaries,

Micoud.

Where they have priest is poverty.” (Sea at Dauphin 73-74)

But towards the end of the play we understand that Afa does possess

kindness, love and compassion and his anger is expressive of his determination

to survive. The sea is both positive and negative. It is positive and, in fact, a

preserver, to the fishermen who earn their daily bread, their very life, out of it.

The sea is a destroyer as well but it may also be a comfort. Having lost his

wife Rama, old Hounakin seeks to return to the womb of the sea saying: “I did

feel to die in Dauphin sea so I could born” (69).

Even to the godless Afa it may be the final mother. “The land is hard,

this Dauphin land have stone / Where it should have some heart.The sea / it

have compassion in the end” (61).

‘Compassion’ is a key word in Walcott’s attitude as well as in his

oeuvre. He invests heavily in compassion. Walcott’s play Ti-Jean and His

Brothers is a clear vindication of the schizophrenic attitude discernible in

almost all his works. Even the Devil in this play has his moment of human

feeling. But the Devil is not permanently humanized, not permanently

defeated; and the fight between good and evil will continue. The devil sends a

challenge to a poor mother and her three sons who live in a forest. Any one

human who can make the devil feel anger, rage and human weakness will be

rewarded by the Devil; anyone who fails will be eaten. Gros Jean’s brute force

and Mi-Jean’s book learning are easily outwitted by the Devil’s cunning. Ti-

Jean’s humility and common sense carry him through. Unlike his brothers, he

55 pays attention to his mother’s advice; courteous to the animals of the forest, he

is assisted by them, and he refuses to play the game by the Devil’s rules. He

castrates the Devil’s goat that will not remain tied; instead of counting cane

leaves, he has the Devil’s property burnt down. Unlike Gros-Jean he uses force

intelligently. Unlike Mi-Jean he puts his mind to practical use. Their penalty

was death (though they live in the memory of others); Ti-Jean’s reward is

life, not only for himself but also for the Bolom, the unborn. Ti-Jean asks the

Bolom: “Is life you want, child?/you don’t see what it bring”? And, like Jules

in The Sea at Dauphin, the Bolom chooses “to enter life:” (163)

I am born I shall die/ I am born, I shall die!

O the wonder, and pride of it! I shall be man!

Ti-Jean, my brother ! (163-64)

In the play Walcott seems to be suggesting a necessary interrelation

between good and the evil, between God and the Devil, eternal absolutes.

Ti-Jean can be perceived as an allegorical rendering of the contest

between good and evil. It can also be viewed as a politico-historical allegory

where the black man contends with the white oppressor. Walcott presents the

Caribbean black man in three stages of response to white power, from slave

(and other) violent rebellions (Gros Jean), through the attempt to master the

white man’s book learning (Mi-Jean), to the ultimate triumph of the small man

(petites gens-little people) combining force and native intelligence. “Ti-Jean

frees the Bolom of the black or Caribbean future from thraldom to the white

oppressor” (“Derek Walcott” 157).

56

Ti-Jean and His Brothers is notable for its use of St.Lucian folklore.

Walcott explores the possibilities of dialect speech, the art of story telling and

the African art of the story teller. In it he acknowledges his varied influences

such as Lorca, Brecht and the Japanese Noh theatre.

In the play Malcauchon, too, Walcott employs St.Lucian life and

legend. The conteur warns the audience initially: “Don’t believe all you heard

or read / Chantal the tiger cannot dead” (Dream 171). Chantal is a derelict, the

wood demon used to frighten children into behaving properly. Ironically, this

is precisely what Chantal does for adults in the play. The play presents

Chantal, the criminal-turned judge and confessor, forcing others to stop

behaving like beasts. Chantal prefigures Makak, the hero of Dream on Monkey

Mountain. In and through the dream Makak has become something more than

what he actually is. He has grown into a representative figure of myth, a

prophet.

The Apparition, the white lady in Dream on Monkey Mountain,

deserves special attention and Makak’s beheading of the White Lady at the

instigation of Lestrade is of much significance. The Apparition actually

inspires Makak to a belief in his own dignity. By association with the moon,

which emerges at the critical moment, she appears to be the source of Makak’s

healing power. Yet, at the end of the play, Makak is persuaded to behead the

Apparition. The element of ambivalence, a pervading characteristic of

Walcott’s poetry and drama, is discerniblehere too. Morris observes:

Makak has loved the Apparition because, at one level of

meaning, she is part of him, his deeper self, his Jungian anima.

57

She has always known his name. That he must now behead her,

exclaiming. “Now, O God, now I am free” - and whom is he

addressing? - is more of nightmare than an act of liberation,

though in a sense it is both. (160)

Through the ritualistic beheading of the Apparition Walcott wants to

suggest that the overwhelming awe of everything white must be got rid of by

every colonial who wants to liberate himself. Makak’s return to the Monkey

Mountain at the end of the play is of great symbolic significance. He is, in fact,

going back home, back to the beginning, to the green beginning of this world.

The play presents an Adamic vision. It explores the comprehensive

ambivalence at the heart of Walcott’s work.

Walcott has said, “Schizoids, in a perverse way, have more personality

than the normal person, and it is this conflict of our social psyche that by

irritation or a sense of loss continues to create artists.” He further asserts in the

same article that we are “deprived of what we cannot remember, or what,

when we visit its origins never existed the way we imagined, or where we

remain strangers, contemptible cousins, the children of indentured servants

and slaves” (“Pivotal One” 23).

The Picaro in Walcott’s The Fortunate Traveller portrays this kind of

“tormented ambiguity” to borrow a term from James Livingston (Caribbean

Rhythms 208). Because the “ambiguity,” is usually associated with meaning

rather than with personal attitude, as intended here, “ambivalence” is chosen

as the operative word for the purpose of this discourse.

58

The Fortunate Traveller is full of ambivalence. Both the poet and the

persona share it and they are brought together by an artistic process which is

marked by image patterns. The main image used is that of a journey that

simultaneously regresses to the past and advances into the future. While

progressing through forward moving time the journey at times recedes to

history and memory and it eventually reveals an apocalyptic vision. Walcott’s

artistry in the Fortunate Traveller is a matter of serious concern. It is an

artistry steeped in ambivalence–in a pattern of dual ambivalence and

paradoxical elements expressed by the complex personality of the traveller.

Though Walcott is critical of those writers who look to the brutal

history of the West Indies for inspiration (Rohlehr 10), he presents in his main

persona a quester who is ironically forced to confront his origins and the

events of his past in the mirrored reflections of the present. Clement H. Wyke

observes:

The Fortunate Traveller represents a journey through the

modern world of American and European civilization, through

the passage across the Mason-Dixon line and it is merely a

repetition of the old order of victim and victimizer, conquered

and conqueror, native dweller and foreign intruder. Walcott,

consciously or unconsciously, is negating the statement made in

“Laventille”: “The middle passage never guessed its end.”

(CP86). Instead, The Fortunate Traveller illustrates the counter

claim of Brathwaite that the passage has guessed its end. Its end

is inextricably bound up in its beginning. The process of the

59

journey and of the quest is not only constructed from the social

memories of the past, but the outcome is shaped by and mirrored

in this process. (56)

The poem presents a tortured convergence of many parallel and

divergent elements. The very structure of the poem “North-South-North”

accentuates the contrasting and complementary social realities of the

American South with its blatant black-white dichotomies and the north where

the lines are more subtly drawn but nevertheless still exists.

In The Fortunate Traveller Walcott successfully effects the fusion of

diverse elements. Here the reader witnesses a convergence of Caribbean, Afro-

American and European realities through the deft use of symbols, myths and

geographical landmarks. In style also, one can discern the contrastive merging

of standard language and local dialect through which Walcott accomplishes

“that dramatic ambivalence[which] is part of what it means to be a West

Indian” (“His Works” 156) . He also brings together the concrete and the

abstract, the biographical and the historical, the physical and spiritual, the

social and the psychological, the linear and the cyclical, and this-worldly and

the apocalyptic.

All these conflicting elements reveal the divided man, the chizophrenic,

in Walcott. It manifests a poetic mind in conflict, a man who once described

himself as “a kind of split writer” (qtd. in King, West Indian Literature 145);

in Walcott’s memorable phrase, he is “divided to the vein” (CP 18).

60

Walcott recurrently uses the image of the pulse beat and the vein. If it is

used to depict the cultural and linguistic contradictions portrayed in “A Far

Cry from Africa;” it is also used in his poetic collection Midsummer (1984) to

describe his own tortuous procedure of artistic composition:

A trembling though, no bigger than a hurt

wren, swells to the pulse beat of my round palm,

pecks at its scratch marks like a mound of dirt,

oval wings thrumming like a panelled heart.

Mercy on thee, wren; ….

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

but if you died in my hand, that beak would be the needle

on which the black world kept spinning on in silence,

your music as measured in grooves as was my pen’s .

Keep pecking on in this vein and see what happens:

the red skeins will come apart as knitting does.

It flutters in my palm like the heart beat thudding to be gone. (50)

The verses make clear that the intense experience of creating poetry is

as painfully replete with passionate contradiction and conflict as the quest of

the traveller across the rugged landscapes of life.

Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage bears some resemblances to

Walcott’s The Fortunate Traveller as in his poem Byron too had demonstrated

this congruency between art and life and between the artist and his literary

pilgrim. Walcott, in one of the Gulf poems endorses the Miltonic principle of

61 the poet as a poem and as a creator pulled into the very life of the personages

of his creation:

Resisting poetry I am becoming a poem.

O lolling Orphic head silently howling,

my own head risen from its surf of cloud (The Gulf 12)

Walcott’s troubled response to deep racial memory is inextricably

linked with both the process and product of his own creative impulses. In

poem 50 of Midsummer Walcott speaks of how some of his poems lie “where

stones are deep, in the sea’s memory” (CP 504). The poet associates this

memory with his father, Warwick Walcott, whose name is linked with

Warwickshire in England. He, then, speaks of moving his father’s grave from

the “blackened Anglican headstones/ in Castries” (CP 504). Wyke observes:

One need not construct autobiography from this poetic

commentary to establish the functional truth which preoccupies

Walcott’s imagination here. Evidence adduced thus far helps to

delineate the poetic personality behind the creation of the

principal quester in The Fortunate Traveller.

The reader is therefore not surprised to see an interesting pattern

of tensions and ambiguities between the attitudes and behavior

of the traveller himself and the poet who creates him. There are

ironic contradictions and unconscious parallels and divisions

which define the movement and direction of the poem and its

central personage. Opposites and mirror images appear as part of

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the dynamic between poet, poem and reader. In our observation

of this process we must remember Walcott’s words in “What the

Twilight Says: An Overture:” “the torment of all self appointed

schizoid saints is that they enact their opposite.” (58)

The traveller in Walcott’s poem deserves our special attention. His

prototype is the hero of the picaresque romance by Thomas Nashe entitled The

Unfortunate Traveller or the Life of Jack Wilton (1594). Walcott has made a

slight ironic modification of Nashe’s title. Nashe’s traveller experiences the

same sense of displacement as Walcott’s. Jack Wilton describes himself as “a

certain kind of appendix or page, belonging or appertaining in or unto the

confines of the English court” (966). Unlike Walcott’s traveller, he indulges in

racy invective but, like him, he indulges in wit and terse colloquialisms.

Jack Wilton is an ambivalent character which is indicative of his dual

personality. He is a phoney, parading as a gentleman and displaying mock-

erudition and pretentious courtly manner whereas Walcott’s adventurer is

more serious and controlled by the burden and destiny of his race and

background. But in the world of both travellers one can discern irony through

incongruous and opposing pattern of behaviour as a strong determinant. The

journey pursued by the fortunate traveller, like Jack Wilton’s, first appears to

be diversified as he moves from place to place, but nothing “nobler” occurs.

From North to South to North again the traveller encounters an ironic

repetition of the same human hardships and calamities. But unlike Nashe’s,

Walcott’s vision of the future is more sombre and ominously apocalyptic.

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A brief analysis of Walcott’s The Fortunate Traveller will be very

helpful to understand how his character, the traveller, reflects his

schizophrenic personality and how it acts as a means for his creative genius.

The first section of the Fortunate Traveller is entitled “North” and it

introduces us to the territories of the New England coastal cities the traveller

passes through in the first phase of his journey. The first poem in this section

is entitled “Old New England.” The title itself is reflective of the ironic

doubleness of the character’s world and the paradox involved in these poems.

The idea underlined here is that the new order is the same as the old because

the new world is the repetition of the old one. The evils of the old world are

being repeated in the new dispensation as well. Here the visual images of

black and white contain meanings which invert their usual stereotypic

symbolism. Here ‘white’ becomes associated with violence and destructive

victimization. Lines and phrases like the “white church spire whistles into

space / like a sword fish” (CP 399) and the statements “white meeting house”

“wounds” the hill-side with its spire, causing “brown blood” to trickle down

(399); and God uses “the white lance of the church” as his harpoon (400) are

all examples of the inversion of symbols with a negative ascription of

meaning.

However, the colour black or brown is identified with objects that have

been defiled or damaged or destroyed by other surrounding forces or

influences. The “Black Clippers,’ for instance, “are tarred with whales’ blood”

(399). This blood in the second stanza of the poem is associated with the

wound produced by the spire of the white meeting house”(399).

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Wyke throws light on the rationale behind the use of these images. He

observes:

These images awaken in the mind of the reader the atrocities of

early White American settlers who caused the blood of Indians to

flow while controlling them with a hypocritical religious system

centralized in the “White meeting house” of the church. In this

context, the colour black becomes transferred to the destructive

religious world of white colonialist settlers but with the poignant

twist of being linked to a normally good object–the Bible;

however, there is a harsh transformation in the meaning of the

colour as it assumes the ambiguities of a deceptive, white

Christian religion. The good Bible is black, but the reality

represented by its use is symbolized by a blackness that is

socially stigmatized by those who use the Bible as a weapon. (60)

The image conveys complex and contrasting meanings. It is also noted

for its underlying tinge of poignancy.

The hill side is still wounded by the spire

of the white meetinghouse, the Indian trail

trickles down it like the brown blood of the whale

in rowanberries bubbling like the spoor

on logs burnt black as Bibles by hellfire. (CP 399)

The title “Old New England” itself is a name that captures all the ironic

contrasts and ambiguities of colonial history. The names of the ports of call of

the ship recall the cities of the original centres of British colonization. The ship

moves along “New Bedford, New London, New Haven” (399).

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This older view of foreign dominance brings in memories of the

repeated moments of peaceful contract yielding to bloody belligerence. Hence,

the “spring wind startles an uproar of marching oaks with memories of a war”

(399). The cyclical forces of nature and time awake memory. The spring wind

suggests the beginning of a new season of life, but that expectation is reversed

by the realities of violent warfare and death. By this means, time becomes an

annihilating force, using the past to erase the present and leaving the evidence

of this obliteration on the landscape by peeling “whole countries from the

calendar” (399).

Wyke observes:

For Walcott, although memory can be awakened, it, like history,

inevitably goes through a process of obliteration. In Walcott’s

play Remembrance (1980), Jordan, who sounds like an alter ego

of the playwright, emphasizes this principle when he speaks of

his son Frederick: “Erase history from your mind and make it

your own … history, gossip, rumor, and what people go say?

Blank it out!” (75). This action, however, is paradoxically

counterbalanced by remembering the dead “arranged in your

memory, grave after grave, like empty desk in a classroom” (86).

The artistic concern with fame and perpetuity that is affected by

this paradoxical process can nevertheless be satisfied: “It doesn’t

matter where you born, how obscure you are, … fame and

fortune are contained within you. Your body is the earth in

which it springs and dies” (86). Accordingly, we ourselves

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become the living monuments and receptacles of the dead past

and the glorious future. (61)

The Fortunate Traveller presents other contrasting images also. Here,

the reader, like a metaphysical poet, is compelled to yoke violently together

the apparently dissimilar images, i.e. the image of the church spire, an image

of peace, which “pierces heaven,” with those of ‘sword fish’ and ‘rocket’ (CP

399). In this kind of linking of religion with the instruments of violence one

can discern a deconstructive pattern of images collapsing into similarity as an

expression of the artistic sensitivities of the poet: Wyke comments:

These sensitivities are also shaped and activated by the racial

memories of a past filled with the dividedness of what may be

known as “the commonwealth experience” portrayed so

poignantly by the arrivants of Braithwaite’s trilogy. Walcott’s

Traveller, on the surface of things, is not Braithwaite’s

Arrivants, but despite Walcott’s claim that “history cannot be

ambiguously recorded” (“Muse”11), we see a tortuous ambiguity

underlying the powerful language of his poem. (62)

In the four remaining poems of the first part of The Fortunate Traveller

Walcott provides more distinguishing features for his persona. Here the

traveller uses the first person pronoun for the first time and he confesses his

inner insecurities before a new and yet strangely familiar cultural environment.

“Sometimes I feel sometimes/ the Muse is leaving, the muse is leaving

America (CP 401).

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In direct conflict with this impulse is the attraction to America: “I am

falling in love with America” (402). Compounding the difficulty is the process

of cultural acceptance and the thwarted linguistic confusion which Walcott

frequently accentuates as a theme of his poetry: “I must put cold small pebbles

from the spring / upon my tongue to learn her language” (402).

Wyke continues:

The experience of adapting linguistically is further complicated

by the ancient and contemporary associations of geographical

names and the histories which both differentiate and identify

them. The Carthage of America triggers rich ancient associations

with the African city by the same name and in particular with

Cato’s ominous words, Delenda est Carthage, (“Carthage must

be destroyed”). The ambiguities of ancient and modern history

become a veritable montage of names and places which

transcend time and location, bringing together Caribbean,

American, Greek, African and Middle-Eastern recollections. All

of these particulars are integrated in the poet’s imagination under

the counter-pointed title “North and South.” (62-63)

In this poem Walcott magically merges inner and outer landscapes as

part of his own dual perspective so that snorkeling over the sunken mythical

island of Atlantis, travelling like a tourist in Tobago by a glass-bottomed boat

to Buccoo Reef and going through the streets of Manhattan are easily

integrated with “the white glare/ of the white of [Dante’s ] inferno”:

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to snorkel over Atlantis, to see, through a mask,

Sidon up to its windows in sand, Tyre, Alexandria,

with their wavering seaweed spires through a glass bottom boat,

and to buy porous fragments of the Parthenon

from a fisherman in Tobago, but the fear exists,

Delenda est Carthago on the rose horizon,

and the side of Manhattan are sown with salt,

as those in the North all wait for that white glare

of the white rose of inferno, all the world’s capitals.

(“North and South,” CP 405-406)

The traveller is affected by a sense of disorientation; so too are the

author and the reader. He experiences a shameful sense of colonialist self-

deprecation: I accept my function / as a colonial upstart at the end of empire, /

a single, circling, homeless satellite” (405).

Another strong sentiment is that of exile: “I am thinking of an exile

farther than any country,” and the present environment becomes “this heart of

darkness” (406).

The traveller also identifies himself with the persecuted fugitive, the

Jews of the Diaspora (408) and with the monkey. ‘Monkey’ is a symbol for

Walcott and it has been explored in Dream. However in his essay “What the

Twilight Says” the symbol becomes more ambiguous as on the one side the

mimic quality of the monkey brings human beings into a darkness which is

total, but on the other side the journey back to the ape is necessary for the

69 artist-actor to articulate his origins. This ambiguous situation of entrapment is

clearly presented by Walcott in the following words:

The noblest are those who are trapped, who have accepted the

twilight. If I see these as heroes it is because they have kept the

sacred urge of actors everywhere: to record the anguish of the

race. To do this, they must return through a darkness whose

terminus is amnesia. The darkness which yawns before them is

terrifying. It is the journey back from man to ape. Every actor

must make this journey to articulate his origins, but for those

who have been called not men but mimics, the darkness must be

total, and the cave should not contain a single man-made

mnemonic object. (Dream 5)

Both for the poet and for the persona, being a monkey is a state of

double anguish, one dimension fulfills the demands of our origins, the other

the mimetic function of being an artist. In the poems of “South,” too, one can

discern the same patterns of ambiguity as in the case of “North.” Walcott here

juxtaposes the following opposite dualities: movement and stasis: downward

collapse and upward dominance: the fall of the native’s gods, the traditional

order before the ascendancy of the intruder’s God:

Hurucan

You scream like a man whose wife is dead,

like a god who has lost his race,

you yank the electric wire with wet hands. (CP 424-25)

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“Hurucan” presents the image of a fallen deity. But to this suicidal

image Walcott adds the ironic contradictions of termination and continuity: “I

decompose, but I composing still”(432).The poem “Piano Practice” introduces

this paradox in the following lines: “Perhaps the fin de siècle isn’t really

finished, may be there’s a piano playing it somewhere” (404).

Here time is represented with both linearity and circularity in playful

patterns. Both are controlling reflections of “that tired artifice called history”

(421). Moreover, the direction portrayed is linearity which signifies futility;

for example, “The shark racing the shadow of the shark” (433). The pattern

may also be circularity, which reflects meaninglessness:

. . . my premonition of the scene

of what passing over this Caribbean.

Is crab climbing crab-back, in a crab-quarrel,

and going round and round in the same barrel. (CP 433)

“The Spoiler’s Return,” in the middle section of The Fortunate

Traveller presents a contrast of tones. The contrast is achieved by juxtaposing

the formal tone of the three opening lines of Lord Rochester’s The Satire

Against Mankind (1675) with the humorously mocking attitude of Spoiler’s

Calypso on “The Bedbug” (54), a composition sung originally by a popular

Trinidadian Calypsonian. In addition, Walcott employs the voice of lament

through a parody of Naipaul: “I see these islands and I feel to bawl / ‘area of

darkness’ with V.S. Nightfall (CP 433).

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Walcott also accomplishes tonal shifts in the poem through local

Trinidad dialect organized according to Calypso verbal rhythms. “Things ain’t

go change, they ain’t go change at all,” to my old chorus: “Lord I want to

bawl” (CP 437).

These tonal shifts, by mingling literary and oral voices, are rooted in the

artistic psyche of Walcott, the “divided child” and “cultural schizophrenic.”

Wyke analyses this section of the poem as follows:

The middle section concludes with a strong Naipaulian mood

which leaves the traveller envying “the octopus with ink for

blood” (FT 83), and becoming a “mackerel that leap(s) from its

element, / trying to be different…married to nothing” (82).

Although the outlook is pessimistic here, it is important to

remember that for Walcott there is a need at times to regress to

nothing as the source of creativity. According to him, “If there

was nothing there was everything to be made” (“WTS,” Dream

4). As Figueroa concludes, speaking of Walcott’s preoccupation

with nothing in Another Life, “nothing” is not preoccupation

with vacuity but with the concept of “un-historicity” applied to

the Anglophone Caribbean. “Nothing” is at once a comment on

traditional views and a search for identity based on self -

knowledge and real knowledge of history, which “rejects

acceptance of doctrinaire concepts.” (66)

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The third and final section of the Fortunate Traveller presents a

timeless apocalyptic world, which is dramatically introduced by a quotation

from the Book of Revelation describing the advent of famine during the

Tribulation period of the end times. The traveller’s journey progresses through

the cruelties of the past and those of the present age. This pilgrimage is

painful, yet profitable in the sense that the traveller eventually comes to accept

the “twilight” of contradictory and ambivalent experiences as a necessary

birthplace for renewed creativity, self enactment and self discovery. Wyke

interprets it in the following way:

This section presents the traveller as experiencing a schizoid

perspective of himself and his world. This is apparent in his use

of personal pronouns as he moves back and forth from a singular

“I” to a collective “we”: “I remember / a gecko,” “we are

roaches”, “we are the first / to scuttle …/ back to Geneva, Bonn,

Washington, London” (FT 88-90). This collective focus then

returns to the personal: “I cannot bear to watch the nations cry,”

and “I was rehearsing the ecstasies of starvation,” and “I found

my pity desperately researching the origins of history” (90-91).

Again there is a shift from the personal to the collective as the

traveller describes himself as “we savages” then again there is a

reversal to “I envisaged an Africa flooded with … Light” (91).

This rapid shifting from the individual to the collective and vice

versa is indicative of a self-division which “pushes the traveller

to search for wholeness of being by “seeking in all races a

common ingenuity.” (67)

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The title “Fortunate Traveller” itself is ambiguous and ironic. The irony

is brought home effectively in the lines: “you are so fortunate, you get to see

the world”. The reply is “Indeed Sirs, I have seen the world” (FT 92). The

lines are replete with multi-directional meanings and they convey trenchant

irony and ambiguity. The traveller has indeed seen the world, but the

experience is not gratifying as what he has seen are scenes of cataclysmic

human tragedies. He is “fortunate” only in the sense that he is not one of the

victims, but racial memory may contradict this feeling; he has paid the price to

be fortunate–received “Iscariot’s salary,” the price of blood.

The traveller finally returns to the islands. This section too reveals

ambivalence as he becomes another Marlowe who has peered into the heart of

darkness. But the difference here is that his return, unlike Marlowe’s to the

European capital city of Brussels, is to the Caribbean setting of the agricultural

peasant world of the Africa Kurtz. (FT 93-94)

The forceful transposition of white and black images throughout the

poem brings home the grave concern of the poet and the quester, that the new

is merely the old in another form. It is reminiscent of Walcott’s problem with

history–it contains in its process the poet’s unrelenting determinism in

universalizing all particulars, repeating all pasts, confounding all rationales,

cancelling all conclusions and making all attempts at new beginnings. At every

stage of the time line of history the stream of memory bifurcates in backward

and forward movements.

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The concluding piece of the last section of The Fortunate Traveller

entitled “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” is an appropriate climax to a

dramatic portrayal of divided pilgrimage. Helen Vendler calls this “the best

poem in the collection” (Vendler 26). The poem presents the dualities of

absences and presences: love is absent, as we learn from the repeated phrase

from 1 Corinthian 13.. “and have not charity” (FT 97); God is absent; for in

the third section of the poem we learn that “God is dead” (95); time is absent:

“there was no longer dusk, or season, decline of weather”(98). Light is

however present, but it is a “phantasmal light / that not the narrowest shadow

dared to sever” (98); there is battle, but paradoxically, it is one in which

“starlings [are] waging peaceful cries” (98); the nations like birds were present

with their “multitudinous dialects and twittering tongues” (98). This final

poem is also notable for its ambiguous merging of light and darkness. Wyke

makes a pertinent observation on this imagery:

Following the “passage of phantasmal light” is the “icy

sunlight”; then there is “the light/ that you will see at evening/ in

yellow October.” Ultimately, as the poem ends there are “falling

suns” and a seasonal pause between “dusk and darkness,

between fury and peace.” We are however told that this

environment is “as our earth is now, it lasted long” (99). The

ambiguity is pervasive here at the very end as well, as the

statements in Derridean manner keep undermining their own

truths. If the season “lasted one moment” like a pause, how can

it also last long? If the phantasmal light cannot be severed by the

narrowest shadow, how can there be dusk and darkness? In fact

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we were told “there was no longer dusk” (98). If this is the

apocalyptic future, how are things the same as “our earth is

now”? These colliding questions make up the tormenting world

of the colonial; it is an inner and outer world of “fury and

peace,” but this peace is a phantasmal peace, tangible only in a

deceptive way, and quite unsubstantial. (69)

This predicament of Walcott as well as that of his traveller persona is a

vindication of the childhood experience of the poet. Walcott, like his

protagonist in the poem, is full of ambivalence. But this poetic ambivalence, as

far as Walcott is concerned, is creative. This intrinsic ambivalence enables

Walcott to lead two lives; the interior life of poetry and the outward life of

action and dialect. On the whole this split in Walcott’s psyche results in his

wonderful creativity that turns out to be a blessing not only to the Caribbean

literature, but to the World Literature as a whole.

The twilight atmosphere of this concluding poem of The Fortunate

Traveller throws light on Walcott’s metaphysical vision reflected in his

metaphorical use of the idea of ‘twilight’ which in his mind, becomes “a

metaphor for withdrawal of Empire and the beginning of our doubt” (Dream 4).

The image of dusk and twilight is emphasized as a place of discovery

and the starting point of birth and creativity. These images are discernible in

Another Life also where Walcott asserts that we must “begin with twilight,” a

“twilight eager to complete itself” (CP 146). It is the environment in which a

“divided child” develops into a poet.

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Through the fortunate traveller, his alter ego, Walcott as artist expresses

his sacred urge “to record the anguish of the race” (Dream 5).

In short, Walcott, through his poetic and dramatic works, attempts to

express his schizophrenia, his divided psyche, using a number of contrasting

images especially, the ‘twilight’ image which is all the more suggestive as it

points to the artist’s task of starting everything anew. The ‘twilight’ in itself is

a split image as it is indicative of an end and a beginning. It hints at both dawn

and dusk−the dawn of a new era, a new Eden where the artist is the second

Adam. As for the poet, it becomes “a metaphor for the withdrawal of Empire

and the beginning of our doubt” (Dream 4). It is also indicative of the

dusk−the disintegration of the colonial empire−the end of the old world and its

painful memories. The ambiguities and contrasts are quite characteristic of

Walcott, the divided child. It is through these contrasting images that he gives

a vibrant expression to the “interior life of poetry” and the “outward life of

action and dialect” (Dream 4). Ambivalence is a pervasive aspect in

Walcottian oeuvre. It is all the more discernible in the use of metaphors. The

metaphors such as the sea, twilight and journey exemplify the ambivalence in

the poet’s psyche. Hence the detailed exegesis on these metaphors in chapter

4, it is expected, will further complement this discussion on the

‘schizophrenia’ echoed in Walcottian poetry. Moreover, Walcott’s concept of

history as a ‘nightmare’ and his attempt at by- passing the horrors of the

Caribbean history by advocating an Adamic task of naming and homecoming

have to be viewed as a natural corollary to his ambivalent situation, his divided

psyche. Hence an exploration of Walcott’s concept of history is undertaken in

the following chapter.