Callaloo (28:1, Winter 2005) Special Issue on Derek Walcott

Callaloo

Volume 28, Number 1, Winter 2005 Special Issue: Derek Walcott

Guest Editors: Paul Breslin and Robert Hamner

CALLALOO

INTRODUCTION Out of the Ordinary, Derek Walcott

Derek Alton Walcott was born into a world divided by colonialism. As a native St. Lucian, of mixed racial parentage, his bloodline flowed from Africa and Europe. Early education through the British-based educational system impressed on him the Western canon: Dante, eighteenth-century English metaphysicals, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Homer, and Virgil. For theater his models are equally varied: Synge is behind The Sea at Dauphin; Brecht and Oriental techniques figure in Drums and Colours and Malcochon; Strindberg underlies the atmosphere in Dream on Monkey Mountain. Then Shakespeare informs A Branch of the Blue Nile. In fact, because of the nationalist fervor attendant on Caribbean independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s, Walcott’s penchant for assimilation resulted in the critical assumption that both his feet were firmly planted in the camp of European humanism. The aesthetic and political designations are aptly summarized in Patricia Ismond’s “Walcott vs. Brathwaite,” where his metropolitan sophistication is contrasted with Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s vernacular-oriented “nation poetry.” Thus emerges a critical controversy for which Walcott has never seen any viable substance. Added to the evidence of the works themselves is Walcott’s explicit argument that any apprentice should learn from great artists of the past. In a 1966 article for the Trinidad Sunday Guardian, Walcott describes his learning curve: “the poet by acquiring all of these demons, becomes himself . . . Great poets sound both like themselves alone and like all the great poetry written” (“Young” 5). The conclusion is obvious: Walcott does not believe in the “anxiety of influence.” Nevertheless, equally inevitable in terms of structure and content is Walcott’s interpolation of personal Caribbean experience throughout everything he has ever written. Colonial education in Western classics came to Walcott in the tropical environment of his St. Lucian birthplace. On that small island, the scale by which things were to be measured should have been daunting. After all, the canonical “Great Tradition” upholds the imperial superiority of conquistadores, explorers, and colonial expansion from the metropolitan center. Elsewhere, out on the periphery were supposed to lie unimportant territories and peoples to be brought to order and improved so that they might become worthy beneficiaries of civilization. Looking about his birthplace, the young Walcott somehow came to realize that his unheralded surroundings were eminently remarkable despite their historically marginal status. That which may be disdained as local, parochial, ordinary, provincial, or insular has at the same time the virtue of being close, familiar, and unexpectedly rich in potential. Such a realization prompted the exultant vow in Another Life, he and his friend Dunstan St. Omer swore:

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 1–6

1

CALLALOO that we would never leave the island until we had put down, in paint, in words, as palmists learn the network of a hand, all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines, every neglected, self-pitying inlet muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves ....................................... . . . forests, boiling with life, goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille. (52)

Later in undertaking the monumental task of Omeros, Walcott argues that although he would not attempt to ennoble the peasantry (Bruckner 13), he has no qualms about making an issue of the extraordinary within the ordinary (“Reflections” 233). To Walcott’s innovative way of rethinking the balance of values, the world around us in the present should not be diminished by comparison with the storied past. Long before the Western world sanctified the ancient Greeks through the magnifying lenses of art and history, they were primitives striving on a very fundamental level merely to survive (Brown and Johnson 216). This expansive way of incorporating apparently disparate cultural elements is one of the features of Walcott’s oeuvre that brought him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. It is also one of the features that impressed me as I undertook the study of his work in the early 1970s. When Paul Breslin and I decided to put together a collection of essays in honor of Walcott’s seventy-fifth birthday, we had no way of knowing what themes and issues, given the breadth of his interests, potential contributors might wish to address. As we expected, the response to our call for papers was enthusiastic and ranged widely over different aspects of Walcott’s career as poet, playwright, essayist, and amateur painter. The abundance of excellent essays and creative material that came into our hands made the selection process difficult, but it also gave us an opportunity to put together a varied cross section of the interests generated by his prolific output. One thing we did not anticipate was that, despite the differences in themes and critical approaches among the contributions selected for inclusion in this issue of Callaloo, in one way or another each writer touches upon some aspect of Walcott’s conviction that beauty may be found at the heart of ordinary life, in the most mundane places. Essential to the reconciliation of Walcott’s apparently disparate heritages is his conviction that art must be thoroughly grounded, and the artist in an emerging society has a profound obligation to give expression to a society that has not yet created its own authentic voice. In one of his Guardian columns, he formulates three pressing requirements confronting colonial poets. First, they must find a credible mode of presentation somewhere between vernacular and established “standard English”; second, a school anthology of poetry exemplifying their own society must be created for young students; and third, new poets must realize that form is as important as subject matter. The insistence on structure does not undervalue content; in fact, Walcott traces fundamental roots to the mythology of folk imagination, an 2

CALLALOO imagination that may have lost much of its efficacy for the West Indies through the African Diaspora. Descending from ancestors forcibly separated from ethnic origins and subjected to an alien culture in a strange land, succeeding generations must come to terms with complex origins. He insists that the “good poet is the proprietor of the experience of the race, that he is and has always been the vessel, vates, rainmaker, the conscience of the king and the embodiment of society, even when society is unable to contain him.” Concomitant with that high calling, Walcott continues, is the daunting challenge of creating a language and an aesthetic. “I often think that the poetry written in the West Indies by people like myself is still precocious and artificial for this society, a society which has not settled and whose languages have a Protean vitality that has not yet formalised its own syntax and accent” (“Poetry” 3). Whether working with a stage script or lyrical verse, a poet sufficiently “precocious” to exploit the rhetorical virtuosity of Milton and Shakespeare had also to negotiate the mixture of St. Lucia’s languages, ranging from British and West Indian standard English to the local French Creole vernacular. Actors on stage have the advantage of portraying their meaning orally, visually, and physically; there is no established graphology for an inherently fluid vernacular expression. In transferring the life, character, and voice of his subjects to the page, Walcott had to do justice to his countrymen and at the same time make his work accessible to audiences abroad. When a North American visitor asked how he could avoid the danger of sacrificing artistic quality for provincial authenticity, Walcott answered, “the more particular you get, the more universal you become” (Hamner 24). This may be taken as a reaffirmation of the idea that fundamental human truth translates across class and national boundaries despite conventional, racial, temporal, and geographic differences. In other words, the colloquial, the ordinary, even that which is so mundane in a given context as to be taken for granted, has latent potential for epiphanic revelation. Perhaps it is the quality of genius that enables an artist to seize upon the obscure detail, making us aware of the significance of what lies before our very eyes. Walcott’s juxtaposition of disparate worlds necessitates our being able to adjust preconceived terms of understanding, no matter whether our frame of reference is basically cosmopolitan or provincial. It is significant that the personal celebration of life in The Bounty is expansive, transcending human distances in place and time. The book closes with advice to an exiled Oedipus at Colonus to accept the quiet obscurity of a specific place, “this pewter shine on the water, / . . . these shallows as gentle as the voice of your daughter, / while the gods fade like thunder in the rattling mountains” (Bounty 78). Such emphasis in these lines on a broken man adjusting to banishment on an isolated shore epitomizes all the shipwreck imagery that has marked Walcott’s poetry from his youth. Representative prototypes shift over the decades from a postlapsarian Adam to Robinson Crusoe to Odysseus. European settlers in the West Indies may have had ambitious dreams, but they were no Adamic innocents; enslaved African and, later, indentured laborers transported from Asia might dream of rescue as Crusoe did, but there was no fabulous pathway back to any lost Ithaca for them. Nevertheless, the tale of their exile in the New World has proven to be rife with artistic potential.

3

CALLALOO With publication of Tiepolo’s Hound in 2000, Walcott presents, side by side, the career choices of two Caribbean-born artists. Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), from St. Thomas, decided to pursue his fortunes back in Europe, where he was active in the nascent French impressionist movement. In contrast, Walcott himself anchors his work in the West Indies, regardless of where his physical and intellectual wanderings might take him. Fortuitously, for Walcott, the metropolitan center that proved attractive for past generations of artists, such as Pissarro, leaves him a wealth of relatively unexplored material—not the least of which is the self-reflective aspect of artistic representation. In “Triangulation and the Aesthetics of Temporality in Tiepolo’s Hound,” the final essay in this issue of Callaloo, George Handley draws attention to the affinities between Pissarro and Walcott’s objectives, and marks a poignant difference between their perspectives. Aligned with Walcott’s lifelong goal of naming things in the Caribbean was Pissarro’s equally “dogged determination to portray nature within a small and unremarkable geographical space.” Despite this common objective, however, Walcott’s postmodern consciousness forces him to confront the gap between sign and signified. This emerges in Omeros where he questions his objectification of Helen and Achille for the sake of art. When it comes to the aesthetic of verse and visual image in Tiepolo’s Hound, Handley concludes, “Without this poetic discourse on the limitations of art, Walcott’s paintings might run the risk of becoming nothing but postcards of a Caribbean vacation.” One virtue of the ephemeral moment is that in and of itself it inspires artistic tribute; perhaps one virtue of art is its witness to that inspiration. In closing my introduction, it would not be amiss, perhaps, to draw attention to the fact that in addition to making poetry for the page and stage for over six decades, Walcott, from the beginning of his career, has also concerned himself with puzzling out the ramifications of his esoteric position as an artist on the fringes of history’s grand map. Over the years, major tenets of that position are spelled out in his own words. Never reluctant to confiscate anything that would suit his purpose, he, early on, made use of the archetypal castaway in “The Figure of Crusoe” (1965) to explain his design. I am trying to make a heretical reconciliation between the outer world, and the world of the hermit . . . the poet and the objects surrounding him. . . . By objects I mean everything that can be loved, person, animal or thing, because a poet has no more respect for one noun, the thing by which an object is called, than he has for another, whether this is fish, stone, wife, cloud or insect, all are holy as he names them, although in his other life he cannot love them all equally, since he is not a saint. (“Figure” 35) As an unsanctified mortal, Walcott is left to deal with the selections that fall in his path. Obvious among those selections is the polyglot assortment of languages from around the Caribbean. Whether he expresses himself in “standard English,” English Creole, or French Creole, Walcott’s most vital resource has been his imagination. As

4

CALLALOO he puts it in “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” (1992), “like Crusoe . . . The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong” (“Antilles” in What 70). Participating in the birth of a new literature, Walcott capitalizes on the fact that he is free to manipulate raw elements, to reconfigure fragments of old customs, and to reassess the terms of his creativity. What is more, while the established canon is being challenged, he may even profit from the fortuitous error. In “Caligula’s Horse” (1988), he commends the “perpetual ignorance of poetry, the induced chaos from which a poem begins . . . That is one part of the poetic process, accident as illumination, error as truth, typographical mistakes as revelation” (138). Chance insight extends beyond orthography as well, impinging on the very adjudication of accepted values. In his epigraph for the first part of Another Life, Walcott excerpts from André Malraux’s Psychology of Art the anecdote regarding Cimabue, Giotto, and the source of artistic inspiration. The epigraph ends, “What makes the artist is the circumstance that in his youth he was more deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of the things which they portray” (Another 1). As has been well documented, Walcott advocates artistic openness and assimilation from models bequeathed by history; however, he is well aware of the dangers of stagnation, of slavish acceptance of canonized opinion. “Reflections on Omeros” makes it clear that although a young painter may discover a way of seeing by observing the work of a master, the artist must eventually achieve his own insight. In Walcott’s words, “[T]he conceit behind history, the conceit behind art, is its presumption to be able to elevate the ordinary, the common, and therefore the phenomenon. That’s the sequence: the ordinary and therefore the phenomenon, not the phenomenon and therefore its cause. But that’s what life is really like—and I think the best poets say that . . . it is the ordinariness, not the astonishment, that is the miracle, that is worth recalling” (“Reflections” 232, 233). Viewed through the lenses of history and art, the ordinary may easily be deemed negligible, but if we set aside the cultural perception, sometimes the commonplace becomes luminous: poetry and beauty out of the ordinary. Derek Walcott shares that insight when he writes of the Caribbean; furthermore he sends us back to discover its presence in the Western canon when he draws on Dante, Virgil, and Homer. An inevitable hazard of dealing with a living author is that the next publication will open a new vein if not contradict all that has come before it. Thus Walcott’s latest book, The Prodigal (2004), although it signals no radical departure, comes too late for discussion within these pages. While we await his next publication, the essays and creative pieces comprising this issue of Callaloo are but a token of our appreciation and the esteem in which Derek Walcott is held by scholars and readers around the world. —Robert Hamner

5

CALLALOO WORKS CITED Brown, Robert and Cheryl Johnson. “Thinking Poetry: An Interview with Derek Walcott.” The Cream City Review 14.2 (winter 1990): 209–33. Bruckner, D. J. R. “A Poem in Homage to an Unwanted Man.” New York Times, 9 Oct. 1990, 13, 17. Hamner, Robert. “Conversation with Derek Walcott.” Conversations with Derek Walcott. Ed. William Baer. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1996. 21–33. Walcott, Derek. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. ———. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. ———. The Bounty. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. ———. “Caligula’s Horse.” Kunapipi 11.1 (1989): 138–42. ———. “The Figure of Crusoe: On the Theme of Isolation in West Indian Writing.” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert Hamner. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993. 33–40. ———. “Poetry—Enormously Complicated Art.” Trinidad Guardian 18 June 1962, 3. ———. “Reflections on Omeros.” South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997): 229–246. ———. “Young Trinidadian Poets.” Sunday Guardian 19 June 1966, 5.

6

CALLALOO

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 7

7

© Robert Hamner

CALLALOO

Derek in Dallas

114

Derek Walcott

CALLALOO

© Thomas Sayers Ellis

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) x–x

257

© Robert Hamner

CALLALOO

Walcott, 2000

263

CALLALOO

DEREK WALCOTT’S “REVERSIBLE WORLD” Centers, Peripheries, and the Scale of Nature

by Paul Breslin

A few paragraphs of this address are borrowed from my book, Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott, but it was otherwise composed for the occasion. This is the text of the Derek Walcott lecture for Laureates Week, St. Lucia, delivered in Castries on December 22, 2003. When Walcott received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, he became the second St. Lucian to be so honored, joining the late Sir Arthur Lewis, who won the prize in economics in 1979. Because the two laureates, born 15 years apart, shared a January 23 birthday, St. Lucia decided to honor the occasion annually during the week in which that date falls. The Laureates Week program is sponsored by the Governor General, Dame Pearlette Louisy, with the assistance of the National Cultural Centre. The speaker was introduced by Deirdre Williams, librarian at Sir Arthur Lewis Community College; the audience included the Governor General, Prime Minister Kenneth Anthony, and Derek Walcott himself. I have removed the opening protocol remarks and lightly edited the text for publication here. I am deeply honored to have been invited to give the Derek Walcott Lecture for Laureate Week, 2003. The honor is also a challenge, for you have asked a foreigner to speak to you about one of your own, a man who, after many years in Trinidad and the United States, still could say, in his 1985 Paris Review interview with Edward Hirsch: “I’ve never felt that I belong anywhere else but in St. Lucia” (Hamner 79). Last year’s address was given by a St. Lucian-born scholar, Dr. Antonia MacDonald-Smythe, of St. George’s University, Grenada. Her theme, as many of you may remember, was the celebration of “provincialism” in St. Lucian art. She sought to “reclaim the term and invest it with positive characteristics.” To be a provincial in her sense affirms “good old-fashioned national pride,” not “prejudice and intolerance.” It affirms, also, the “almost spiritual connection between the landscape and the people who inhabit it.” Nonetheless, she maintains, the provincial does not exclude the global or cosmopolitan. Rather, the provincial redefines the cosmopolitan by seeing it from a different vantage point: “Walcott’s sustained exposure to World History and Literature gave him an understanding of the world as merely a collection of provinces.” And so “the microcosm of St. Lucian life is replicated in the wider international world.” Today, I shall return to Dr. MacDonald-Smythe’s insights about the relations of the provincial and the cosmopolitan, not to dispute them, but to look at them from a different perspective. It cannot help being different, because I came to Derek Wal8

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 8–24

CALLALOO cott’s writings from different beginnings: I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, known in my country as “the Second City,” as opposed to the first, New York. From a New York point of view, Chicago is one of the provinces; from almost any other U.S. perspective, with the possible exception of Los Angeles, it is the Big City. To be a Chicagoan is to occupy a curious middle position on my nation’s map of peripheries and centers. And to be an American is to be a citizen, however disaffected at times, of the present empire, whose economic and military power has potential for benevolence or wanton harm. The greatness of Walcott’s poetry was as immediately plain from my U.S. perspective as it is from yours, although I quickly recognized that considerable study of Caribbean history, literature, and language would be necessary before I could hope to write intelligently about it. Even after years of research and travel, I still read through eyes that opened to different landscapes and ears long accustomed to other varieties of English, with a mind formed by life-long North American residence, most of it in cities: Chicago, Philadelphia, New York. Today I shall try to tell you what his achievement looks like through my North American eyes, although I may be looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

The Provincialism of the Center Let me begin with a short digression. In December 2002, I paid my first visit to the new Hayden Planetarium, in the heart of our first city, Manhattan. The central structure is a hollow sphere, 87 feet in diameter. Within it, hundreds of people may be seated to watch images of the heavens projected on its sky-shaped interior. But the inspired part is the exhibit outside. There, a rail runs halfway around the sphere, with stations along the way where the visitor is invited to pause. At the first of these, a placard explains that if the sphere were the size of the known universe, a small scalemodel atop the rail would be the size of our galactic cluster. Then the sphere is to be the size of our cluster, and another small model represents our own galaxy. We continue down and down: if the sphere is the galaxy, a tiny dot is our solar system. If the sphere is the size of the sun, our planet has a 10-inch diameter, and the city in which we are absorbing this lesson would fit on the head of a pin. By the time we reach the end, we are asked to imagine the sphere as the size of a virus, and a tiny model as a hydrogen atom; then the sphere as the atom, a marble-sized ball as an electron . . . at which point the journey stops—not because we are sure there is nothing smaller, only because if anything is, we cannot detect it with our finest instruments. When, after this astonishing walk, one turns around to look at the city beyond the museum’s glass wall, its power to dwarf and intimidate has been strangely diminished The quickened sense I took from this experience, of the unsoundable depth of space, the incomprehensibly numerous forms that it harbors, has also come over me after reading certain of Derek Walcott’s poems. In Another Life, the young Walcott and his friend “Gregorias,” whom you know as Dunstan St. Omer, vow that they “would never leave the island” until they had “put down, in paint, in words, / as palmists learn the network of a hand, / all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines. . . .” (Collected 9

CALLALOO Poems 194). Reading this, I feel as I did at the microcosmic stations of the planetarium. If one were to give each ravine in St. Lucia, and each “ochre track seeking some hilltop,” its full and loving artistic response, the task would defeat a lifetime’s effort. And that is just one island. What happens when, at Shabine’s request in “The Schooner Flight,” we “[o]pen the map” and find More islands there, man, Than peas on a tin plate, all different size, One thousand in the Bahamas alone. . . .? We are still absorbing this vision of local plenitude when, just ten lines later, the poem’s scale leaps into the macrocosm: There are so many islands! As many islands as the stars at night on that branched tree from which the meteors are shaken like falling fruit around the schooner Flight (Collected Poems 360–361). The earth itself becomes just “one / island in the archipelago of stars,” and the Caribbean, with the thousand islands of the Bahamas tucked away inside it, shrinks to invisibility. There are many such startling shifts of scale in Walcott’s poetry, going back at least as far as “Origins” (1964), where he praises “Those who conceive the birth of white cities in a raindrop” (Collected Poems 16), linking the metropolis to a water drop— which, for all we know, may be clinging to a banana leaf somewhere in the Roseau Valley even as I speak. I value Derek Walcott’s poems for many reasons besides the magnificent power of language that first drew me to them when, at the age of twenty, I discovered his Selected Poems (1964) in a New York City book store. And high on that list of reasons is this: that in reading him, as in confronting the virtuoso exhibit at the planetarium, I am forced to confront my own culture’s provincialism—a provincialism of the center, next of kin to the arrogance of empire. This provincialism is too impressed with its own artifacts, forgetting that the proudest city is just a dot on the face of the earth, and earth itself just a dot in the sky. Placed against this scale of nature, we are all small islanders and forget it at our peril. Is there something about growing up on a small island, surrounded by ocean stretching away in all directions, under a sky not yet erased by lights and smoke, that nourishes this sense of natural scale? Are those who grow up in great cities blinded to natural scale by the overbearing stimulus of the man-made urban environment? In this respect, the island poet may have an advantage, but great poets from my part of the world have evoked the scale of nature also—a vigorous imagination can leap the barriers that habit and environment place in its way. Marianne Moore, writing about the ocean, says: “It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing / but you cannot stand in the middle of this” (Moore 49). And Ezra Pound, a poet to whom Walcott pays homage by allusion in his early poem Epitaph for the Young, a poet who had much arrogance and folly to answer for, nonetheless wrote, in Canto 81, these justly famous lines: 10

CALLALOO The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world, Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry. . . . (Pound 556) In the line about the ant and the centaur, we find, as in Walcott, the startling leap between minute and gigantic orders. These lines stand, like so many of Walcott’s, in humility before a world too rich for us to understand in its entirety, a world that sets limits to our “place” within it.

Disappearance of “Nature” in the Academy So far, I have blithely bandied the word “nature” without acknowledging its slipperiness. As the late Raymond Williams remarked in Keywords, “Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language.” Picking his way among the Oxford English Dictionary’s fifteen definitions, each with its subcategories, he distinguishes three “areas of meaning: (i) the essential quality and character of something; (ii) the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both; and (iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings” (Williams 184). Even so, as he concedes, these areas often slide over into each other, and the history of the word “nature” is long and tangled. The third of these “areas of meaning” is the least controversial; even those who do not believe nature to have a stable essence, or to be the handiwork of a Creator, would accept it as the name for something that exists. But sense two is religious, presuming as it does that something or someone directs the order of the world. And sense one assumes that things can have an unchanging essence that is always and everywhere the same. If you work in an American English department, as I have for over twenty-six years, you will find that most of your colleagues dismiss senses (i) and (ii) as ideological mystifications, even though some may grant that such illusions are strategically useful in postcolonial narratives of self-determination. For those who accept Derrida’s assertion that there is “nothing outside the text” (Derrida 158), even sense three, “the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings” (Williams 184), can only be experienced at a remove: we cannot know the material world, only its representation within a linguistic system of signs. The skeptical erasure of the terms “nature” and “human nature” has come about for complex reasons, not all of which I claim to understand. But it began, I believe, with a necessary and bracing criticism of unexamined ideological certainties, a criticism which any of you who have studied postcolonial literary theory will recognize. Taken for granted in the first concept of Nature, sense one is the assumption that things (and human beings) have an “essential nature” that can be read on the face of their appearance. The trouble is that we too easily read the effects of culture, once we 11

CALLALOO get used to them, as the inherent nature of things. We “naturalize” them, and in thus mistaking culture for essence, we commit the intellectual error of essentialism. The pernicious effects of such essentialism, in the ideology of colonial racism, are so wellknown that they need little discussion here. Africans, or Indians, or Caribbeans, or people of color generally, are said to be a certain way by nature; Europeans, or white people generally, are said to be a different and superior way. The systematic exploitation that has created difference can then be rationalized as an inherent part of nature. It is then a short step from Williams’s first area of meaning to his second: if racial differences are taken to mark “the essential quality and character of something,” then they must have been intended by “the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both.” How shall mere human beings quarrel with the will of God? But in rightly objecting to such naturalizing of our own intellectual bad habits, we have not, in my judgment, made fine enough distinctions among the different kinds of claims made about the essence of human beings and our place within the larger natural realm. The three terms I want to distinguish here are “race,” “nation,” and “humanity,” what Her Excellency the Governor General referred to, in her remarks Monday night, as “the species Homo Sapiens.” The first may be quickly dispatched. The amount of melanin in one’s skin has no inherent correlation whatsoever with traits such as intelligence that contribute to human accomplishment. No reputable scientist thinks otherwise. If race continues to matter, it matters only because some people, unfortunately, refuse to let go of it. What, then, of “nation”? There is an old joke to the effect that in European Heaven, the chefs are all French, the lovers all Italian, the mechanics all Swiss, the policeman all English, and the organizers all German. Whereas in European Hell, the chefs are all English, the lovers all Swiss, the mechanics all French, the policemen all German, and organization is left to the Italians. The stereotypes this joke depends on are overgeneralizations, of course, but suppose for the sake of argument that they contain a kernel of truth. Is there anything about being born in a certain part of the world that “naturally” makes one a dreadful chef but a humane policeman, or a great lover and an incompetent bureaucrat? It does not take too much reflection to answer no, of course not: raise the Swiss child as an Italian, and you will end up with a suave lover and a lousy mechanic. Nations, then, are of our own making—and unmaking, as the recent history of Eastern Europe reminds us. “It is not man / Made courage, or made order, or made grace” (Pound 556), but it was men and women who slowly, over centuries, created the national cultures of the world. A nation, as Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities, does not exist until thinking makes it so (Imagined Communities 15). Nations come into existence in the mind, when people who have never met nonetheless begin to think of themselves as sharing the same aspirations, the same destiny. So when Derek Walcott’s Shabine says “I had no nation but the imagination,” he is in this sense very much like the rest of us. The political embodiment of this shared identity in a nation-state may or may not be realized. Although the brief attempt to create a West Indian Federation failed some forty years ago, the notion that West Indian people share a common heritage and cultural style is still very much alive. 12

CALLALOO The skeptical debunking of claims for “natural” human difference on the basis of race or nationality has been necessary and welcome. The problem begins when the theorists attack the idea that because we are one species, certain human traits are “universal” despite our local differences. It is easily shown that time and time again, people unreflectively assume that their own way of doing things is “universal,” that one way, usually the European way, is the natural human estate, and that deviations from it need to be “corrected.” And of course different cultures invent their own elaborate ways of doing things, and we recognize the unique value of these cultural styles. Nonetheless, it does not follow from these observations that all universals are false universals. If there were no abiding constants in human experience—perhaps just simple things like the fact of two sexes rather than, say, five, or the need for food and water, the use of language—then there could be no understanding of any human experience beyond our own village. Or even, perhaps, beyond the inside of our own skulls. We would be provincial not in Dr. MacDonald-Smythe’s honorific sense, but in the narrowest, least flattering sense of the word. The great poets delight in the rich particularity of their own cultural traditions, without which universals would be barren abstractions. But they are counting on the possibility of cultural as well as linguistic translation, on the power of their words to reach across differences and to remind us of our common humanity. At fullest stretch, post-structuralist theory overreaches itself by claiming that there simply is no nature in any of Williams’s three senses of the term. When we think we perceive “the essential quality and character of something” (sense one), we mistake our biased categories of interpretation for inherent traits of the thing we claim to interpret. And if we accept the Derridean idea that we have no access to the world except through linguistic signs, and that we cannot move beyond linguistic signs to some central origin or cause that has generated them, we must also do without sense two, “the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both.” For that definition assumes that there is, if not a god, then at least a shaping force that is cause and origin of our world as we find it. When even sense three comes under suspicion as a mere cultural construct, then nature, as something within which human beings are grounded, and which sets limits on our adventures in cultural construction, simply disappears. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that in the professional vocabulary of an up-to-date U.S. literature department there is no such thing as nature, only naturalized cultural categories. Dr. MacDonald-Smythe’s claim for an “almost spiritual connection between the landscape and the people who inhabit it” would be attacked as naïvely essentialist if made at a North American literary conference. And believe me, I would be catching heavy fatigue1 for saying there what I am saying to you here. When I hear someone confidently asserting that our experience is culturally constructed all the way down, a voice strikes up in the back of my head, chanting “Pull down thy vanity, it is not man / Made courage, or made order, or made grace.” Or it mutters these lines, from Walcott’s “Names”: These palms are greater than Versailles, for no man made them, 13

CALLALOO their fallen columns greater than Castille, no man unmade them (Collected Poems 308) As Walcott remarked when I first spoke with him in April 1989, a lot of North American poetry reads as if it had been written by people who spend too much time indoors. One could say the same of North American literary criticism. Nature looks much more like a cultural construct when seen through the library window than when you have to contend with it every day. If you are outdoors at midday in St. Lucia—or for that matter, in Chicago on a hot July day—you are unlikely to experience the thing beating down on your head and pouring sweat down your back as a linguistic sign representing the sun. It feels more like what Walcott, in Another Life, calls “blare noon” (Collected Poems 185). At such times, in his account of it, Nature is a fire, through the door of this landscape I have entered a furnace. I rise, ringing with sunstroke! (Collected Poems 199) The passage contains several metaphors, likening nature to a fire, the landscape to some sort of building with a door to the furnace room, and the speaker to a bell struck by the sun. What you notice, however, is not rhetorical artifice but bluntly delivered force. The metaphors arrive in short, declarative statements, unimpeded by adjectives or the slow machinery of simile, which would have assured us, with “like” or “as if,” that metaphors are just figures of speech, not to be taken too seriously. The language emulates the intensity of what it evokes. In “The Muse of History,” Walcott admires “the great poets of the New World,” who reject servitude to “history” in favor of an Adamic vision, “capable of enormous wonder,” of “the greatest width of elemental praise of winds, seas, rains.” These poets “seek spaces where praise of the earth is ancestral” (What the Twilight Says 38). To the extent that he follows their path, he sidesteps the colonial and postcolonial traditions of “writing back” to empire by subversively reinterpreting canonical works such as The Tempest or Jane Eyre. Although he has also contributed to the literature of “writing back,” in his treatments of Robinson Crusoe in a group of early poems and the play Pantomime, or of the Iliad and Odyssey in Omeros, subversion is not his only or even primary response to the European canon. And writing back is a preliminary move, clearing away the clutter of empire from the New World Adam’s open space, rather than an end in itself. Placed on the scale of nature, the exchange of picong between hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses appears grotesquely comical, too petty and obsessed to justify such frenetic gestures. For him, nature is prior to culture and contributes to its formation. “Where have cultures originated?” he asks in “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” (Hamner 56). “By the force of natural surroundings. You build according to the topography of where you live” (Hamner 56). Walcott’s poems never lose touch with the physicality of the world, and much of their greatness arises from the power with which they evoke the look, feel, sound, and 14

CALLALOO touch of things. And even, sometimes, the smell. One of the most remarkable passages in Omeros describes the blind Seven Seas rising to begin his day. Although he cannot see it, “He could feel the sunlight creeping over his wrists” (Omeros 12); he cannot only find his way about, but sense in great detail what is happening around him, because “He saw with his ears” (Omeros 12). Words too are blind, yet Walcott, with his painterly eye and subtle ear, finds ways to use them that make images light up in the mind. This power remains undiminished in his recent long poem, Tiepolo’s Hound, whether he is describing St. Lucia—“lights in the shacks bud orange across the Morne, / and are pillared in the black harbour”—or Pontoise, on the other side of the Atlantic, where light falls on “a reaper / [who] flails with a scythe to raise contentious crows, // abandoned aqueducts, tree-hidden stations, / cloud puffs of steam over a toysized train” (168, 68). Walcott remains committed to “the language’s / desire to enclose the loved world in its arms” (Omeros 75) to call into imaginative presence everything that it names.

St. Lucian Measures: Sea and Island When I speak of “the scale of nature,” I mean both the scale of a scale model (as in the Hayden Planetarium), which measures the size of objects, and also the scale you find in the market place, which measures their weight to determine their value. In Derek Walcott’s poetry, the natural world provides a larger setting in which human activity is enclosed, against which we can gauge the size and importance—and the limits to the size and importance—of our actions. In this respect, as Dr. MacDonaldSmythe suggested in her address last year, he has something in common with English Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, another poet for whom “the landscape becomes more than mere background but is instead validated as a source of order and harmony.” But Walcott’s Caribbean landscapes are not those of Wordsworth’s sheepdotted English Lake District. England may be an island, but unless you are near the coast, you can easily imagine that you are on a continental landmass. You can forget the proximity of the sea. But in St. Lucia, you are always aware of the sea: you can smell it and feel the wind arriving from it even when you cannot see it. But you usually can. When you go inland, the landscape becomes mountainous. Even if you are in a valley, there will be a ridge or a morne somewhere nearby. Climbing up to stand on “the very spine of St. Lucia” as Walcott has put it (What the Twilight Says 34), you can see the coast, with the sea stretching beyond, and sometimes Martinique to the North or St. Vincent to the South. Despite the constant awareness of the vast sea stretching away, the island itself feels small and intricately folded within itself, with valleys and villages often tucked out of sight until the last turn of the road. Or at least, this is the impression it makes on someone like me, brought up in the flat prairies of the North American Midwest. And yet, a sense of extensive space is compressed within its foldings. The island is only twenty-seven miles long, but the drive from Cap to Vieux Fort feels like an epic 15

CALLALOO journey, with the road winding in switchbacks so much of the way. The contrast between the vastness of the surrounding sea and the intimate scale of the island, with the additional complication of a hidden depth within the island’s small compass, sustains Walcott’s imagination, early and late. A specifically St. Lucian scale of nature is his first frame of reference. His poetry makes us feel that something of infinite value is harbored in the smallest, most easily overlooked places within the island. “This is a rich valley,” he says of Roseau in “Sainte Lucie”; “it is fat with things.” An even smaller focal point, within Roseau, is Dunstan St. Omer’s altarpiece in the Jacmel church, “the pivot of this valley / round which whatever is rooted loosely turns.” And yet he always reminds us that the richly inhabited microcosm nests inside a larger world extending far beyond it: he suddenly juxtaposes St. Omer’s painting with painting of the Italian renaissance, as if it had been done “Five centuries ago / In the time of Giotto,” on the other side of a dividing ocean (Collected Poems 319–20). Walcott is akin to some other Caribbean writers in this way of imagining space. I think of Wilson Harris’s remark, in “Tradition and the West Indian Writer,” that to create a “native tradition of depth,” the Caribbean writer must focus on “the smallest area one envisages, island or village, prominent ridge or buried valley, flatland or heartland,” until each thing “is charged immediately with the openness of imagination” (Harris 31). Or of Lorna Goodison’s poem “To Us, All Flowers are Roses,” which lovingly recites the names of Jamaican places too tiny to be found even on a very good map. “There is everywhere here,” she says (Goodison 69), finding an inexhaustible plenitude within a small country. Sometimes, Walcott has envisioned his calling as an attempt to rescue everything on the island, no matter how small, from perishing. In Another Life, the young poet, about to leave St. Lucia, prays: if I must go, make of my heart an ark, let my ribs bear all, doubled by memory, down to the emerald fly marrying this hand, and be the image of a young man on a pier, his heart a ship within a ship within a ship, a bottle where this wharf, these rotting roofs, this sea sail, sealed in glass. (Collected Poems 250) The hand that writes is “marr[ied]” to the ephemeral fly. Marriage is a metaphor: The artist’s pact with the vocation of writing appears again in “Jean Rhys,” who at the poem’s ending appears with “her right hand married to Jane Eyre, / foreseeing that her own wedding dress / will be white paper” (Collected Poems 429). And we find it once more in Omeros, where the ghost of Warwick Walcott enjoins his son to “Do just that labour / which marries your heart to your right hand” (72). To be an artist is to keep 16

CALLALOO faith, not to break the marriage between the imagination and what sustains it; and for Walcott, what sustains the imagination is the life of the place that nurtures it. But if Walcott writes in one vein as a lover and conservator of his island, the island teaches him, among other things, that everything vanishes, despite the artist’s care. In “Names,” he envisions his people “with nothing in our hands // but this stick / to trace our names on the sand / which the sea erased again, to our indifference” (Collected Poems 306). In his 1985 interview with Hirsch, he says “there are always images of erasure in the Caribbean—in the surf which continually wipes the sand clean, in the fact that those huge clouds change so quickly” (Hamner 74). The need to remember, preserve, and cherish must contend with an awareness that much has been forgotten or simply wiped away. In “Air,” the “hot jaws” of the rain forest have “devoured / two minor yellow races, and / half of a black” (Collected Poems 113). The rain forest, like the swamp in the 1964 poem of that title or the serene beach of “The Almond Trees” (1965), is a place of “widening amnesia” (Collected Poems 60) with no visible history, because the fierce tropical climate has dissolved all trace of past events. Nonetheless, Walcott’s description of “erasure” should not be confused with Froude’s notorious libel of Caribbean nothingness. For to describe a surface as “erased” is to be aware that something was once written there, though it is no longer visible. The erasure in the island landscape is in one respect an opportunity, a chance to start afresh without the burden of Caribbean history. “The great poets of the New World,” he wrote in “The Muse of History,” have a “vision of man in the New World as Adamic” (What the Twilight Says 37). But it is also a reminder of loss. Walcott’s New World Adam knows that something has been erased to create this Eden. The powerful closing lines of “Laventille” connect that erasure to the Middle Passage: 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 grille 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. (Collected Poems 88) The juxtaposition in the last line of birth and burial points forward toward what Walcott calls, in Omeros, his “reversible world.” To become Adamic is to erase history, but also to recover an earlier moment, before the iron of history entered the soul. Walcott’s Adamic stance entails remembrance as well as forgetting. To attend to history is to remember, but to give history too much attention is to become its prisoner, thus forgetting the Adamic possibilities of the present. Remembering and forgetting become mirror images. This is one sense in which the world depicted in Walcott’s poetry is “reversible.” Once we recognize this, it should not surprise us that the qualities of the sea, like those of the island, can also be converted back and forth between opposites. “The Sea 17

CALLALOO Is History,” as the poem of that title says. To descend into it is to find “bone soldered by coral to bone” (Collected Poems 364). In “The Schooner Flight,” Shabine tries salvage diving only to find “this Caribbean so choke with the dead” that he goes mad from the spectacle of “bones / ground white from Senegal to San Salvador” (Collected Poems 349). And yet, in “The Star-Apple Kingdom,” the title poem of the volume in which these two poems appeared, the sea figures as restorative mother. The troubled Prime Minister “slept the sleep that wipes out history, / he slept like the islands on the breast of the sea, / like a child again in her star-apple kingdom” (Collected Poems 391). In these poems, Walcott wrestles with the difficult paradox described by another St. Lucian poet, Kendel Hippolyte, in his poem “Night Vision”: “Because we see with history / it is difficult to see through it. And yet we must / or we become it, become nothing else but history” (Hippolyte 27).

Reversible Space, Reversible Time In one sense, “reversibility” is a property of space, such that microcosms suddenly grow larger and macrocosms smaller. Places that a European might think of as peripheral, like the Jacmel Church in St. Lucia, become centers, and places that loom large in European history, like Versailles, become secondary, less important than the palm trees of a Caribbean island. And I have tried to show that Walcott accomplishes these shifts of value in part by juxtaposing the vastness of the natural world with the minute particulars of a beloved place; also, that he asks us to see from multiple perspectives, so that opposite qualities are found in the same objects. But in Omeros, time as well as space becomes strangely elastic. What can Walcott mean when he writes: “I re-entered my reversible world” (Omeros 207)? How can the English expatriot Dennis Plunkett find a “son” in a midshipman who died in 1782, over two centuries before the narrative present of the poem, during the Battle of the Saints? How can Achille speak with his African ancestor Afolabe? And how can Walcott himself stroll on the wharf conversing with his father, who died when the poet-to-be was but one year old? We have less difficulty with the idea of space as reversible. If we can go from here to there, we can return from there to here. And indeed, many West Indians have recrossed the ocean to settle in the old world, as Louise Bennett’s poem, “Colonization in Reverse” (Selected Poems 106–7) wittily reminds us. But time is different. We experience it as flowing in one direction only, from past toward future, and we know of no path of return save memory, which cannot bring back the full presence of what is gone. The connection, I believe, becomes apparent when we reflect that we are aware of time only because of movement in space: passage of time registers as movement from one place to another. Even one’s own body slowly becomes a different “place,” as those who have reached my age know all too well. At first, it may seem that Walcott engages in a wishful sleight of hand, turning irreversible time into reversible space so that history can be undone. But after long familiarity with Omeros, I begin to think the opposite is more nearly true: he recog18

CALLALOO nizes that for the uprooted peoples of the Caribbean, spatial displacement can feel as irreversible as distance in time. Walcott never forgets that for a diasporic people, the voyage through space has proved a one-way journey, from some distant origin to one’s present home. Virtually everyone now living in the West Indies is descended from ancestors who lived on the other side of the Atlantic, whether in Europe, Africa, Asia, or various combinations of these. Moreover, he does not forget that returning across space to the point of origin cannot reunite a diasporic people to that origin, because time has changed both those who left and those who were left behind. Nonetheless, in Omeros, all diasporic routes have to be retraced. We follow Dennis Plunkett to England, Midshipman Plunkett to Holland, and Achille to Africa, thus dispersing into three characters Walcott’s own ancestry. The Walcott persona wanders all over Europe and North America as well. But after all these travels, no character can return to a lost point of origin and remain there. Instead, the retracing opens a new communication between present and past on terms other than either a nostalgic pretense of fully recovered origin or a fatalistic acceptance of the narrative of dispersal and loss. Philoctete, the fisherman who believes that the sore on his leg “came from the chained ankles / of his grandfathers,” that “the cross he carried was . . ./ . . . that of his race” (Omeros 10), is healed only when Ma Kilman remembers how to find the restorative plant whose seed was brought by the sea-swift from Africa. So baldly summarized, that plot might seem to imply that authenticating power flows one way only, from Africa to the New World. But “in its travelling all that the sea-swift does / it does in a circular pattern” (Omeros 188). With those words in mind, we begin to see the significance of Walcott’s decision to write, “I re-entered my reversible world,” rather than simply “I entered.” The reversible world may be entered from either end, and there is nothing to do when you come to the end in one direction but to turn around and go back in the other. It is an unfinished and unfinishable shuttling back and forth between past and present, present and future, by which we provisionally shape who we are, whence we came, and where we are going. It is also important that incomplete recognitions, and even misrecognitions, contribute to the cure of historical wounds. When Achille makes his hallucinatory voyage to Africa, his encounter with Afolabe reaches an impasse. Asked for the meaning of his name, Achille can only reply that “In the world I come from / we accept the sounds we were given” (Omeros 138). Afolabe cannot accept the notion of an arbitrary name; if the sound means nothing, “then you would be nothing” (Omeros 137). Afolabe can only insist: if you’re content with not knowing what our names mean, then I am not Afolabe, your father, and you look through my body as the light looks through a leaf. I am not here or a shadow. And you, nameless son, are only the ghost of a name. (Omeros 138–39) Nonetheless, as Ma Kilman says to Philoctete about Helen’s unborn child, “Achille want to give it, / even is Hector’s, an African name.” Helen resists the idea, but Achille insists “that Helen must learn / where she from” (Omeros 318). So even though 19

CALLALOO Achille’s encounter with Afolabe has ended in a question for which “[t]here was no answer” (Omeros 139), their exchange has left Achille more aware of the African part of his Caribbean identity, despite the impossibility of full mutual recognition. Another result of the poem’s many journeys of “reversal” is a challenge to hierarchy. Walcott anticipates this theme in “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” There, he dismisses the idea of some boundary marking Old World originality on one side and New World imitation on the other: “There was no line in the sea which said, this is new, this is the frontier, the boundary of endeavor, and henceforth everything can only be mimicry” (Hamner 54). In this essay, Walcott uses the metaphor of passing through a mirror to describe the reversal of the westward voyage: once we have gone behind the mirror, we realize that the image we have seen in it is only that, an image, and not our essential selves. The circular passage from old to new worlds and back again, always repeatable, eventually casts doubt on the notion that one endpoint of the journey is origin, the other destiny; rather, we live by a continual negotiation of multiple origins that converge in the place and time we live in, now.

Reversible Metaphor and Reversible Myth The most remarkable implication of reversibility in Omeros, however, concerns not the represented world of time and space, but the very means of representation, poetic language itself. Walcott has long advocated the metamorphosis of history into myth, but in Omeros the step from history to myth is only the first stage. In the end, even myth must be renounced as well if we are to see Helen “as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow” (Omeros 271). Even myth casts a shadow; only the primal gaze of the sun is shadowless. The image is quite precise, as you would expect from a poet who is also an accomplished painter: from the sun’s perspective, you would see no shadow, for the shadow would be covered by the object itself, fully bathed in light. Art, if it aspires to that shadowless purity of vision, must undo its own artifice. Dennis Plunkett, the expatriate Englishman, persuades himself that “Helen needed a history” (Omeros 30). By “Helen” he means not only the beautiful young woman who used to work in his house, but also the island as “Helen of the West.” From this figure of speech, he embarks on a strange quest for “Homeric parallels.” He makes of the lost Midshipman Plunkett a Telemachus to his Odysseus, and he finds prophetic import in the name of the ship commanded by the French admiral DeGrasse, the Ville de Paris, which recalls the abductor of Helen. “Is this chance, / or an echo?” (Omeros 100), he asks. Through much of the poem, he gets enthusiastic help from the poet in building his Homeric house of cards: the pigs at Plunkett’s farm recall Odysseus’s men enchanted by Circe; the rivalry between Achille and Hector for Helen retraces the war at Troy; and even the games on a St. Lucian beach are like the games in the Iliad: “As in your day, so with ours, Omeros, / as it is with islands and with men, so with our games” (Omeros 30). But the inner logic of the poem leads the poet to undo his own elaborate construction. Walcott has bluntly said that “the last third” of Omeros “is a total refutation of 20

CALLALOO the efforts made by two characters”—Plunkett, the fabricator of history, and “the writer, or narrator (presumably me, if you like) who composes a long poem in which he compares this island woman to Helen of Troy. The answer to both the historian [Plunkett] and the poet/narrator, the answer in terms of history, the answer in terms of literature—is that the woman doesn’t need it.” Finally, “to get beyond art is the ideal of the artist” (“Reflections” 232–34). The building and dismantling of historical and mythical scaffolding, then, is another instance of reversibility: it is necessary to push the parallels to their farthest extreme to test them and discover their ultimate futility. The poem eventually sheds its own form, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. While we are attending to the bold strokes of Homeric parallel, we may not catch the extraordinary subtlety of Walcott’s metaphor-making process, which, when we look back at it having read the entire poem, turns out to have been undermining the binary parallels all along. For in its most familiar use, metaphor pairs things in a fairly simple way: this is that, or is like that. Consider, for instance, the second line of a oncepopular poem by Alfred Noyes: “The moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas.” This metaphor is immediately graspable and pleasing: we envision a crescent moon, resting on its convex side, amid turbulent clouds. Moon is to clouds as ship is to seas, and there’s an end of it. It’s enjoyable, easy, and not terribly significant. Walcott’s way with metaphor is more fluid, insidiously undermining such simple matchings of literal and figurative meaning. In Chapter IX, Walcott links Hector’s two occupations, fishing and transport driving, through a natural description: “The wind changed gear like a transport with the throttle / of the racing sea” (Omeros 49). The progression here is typical of Walcott’s logic of metaphor: the wind is the tenor of a metaphor whose vehicle (no pun intended) is a transport; then the transport’s throttle is the tenor of another analogy in which the vehicle is the sea. So nature is like machinery, which in turn is like nature. This circular figure suggests that Hector remains with the sea, and the sea with him, even though he has left it. Walcott’s penchant for metaphors that circle back on themselves, turning figurative meanings into literal meanings, literal meanings into figurative ones, is of a piece with the poem’s erosion of boundaries, meridians of distinction, and hierarchies of periphery and center. “I sang our country, the wide Caribbean sea” (Omeros 320), writes Walcott toward the close of the poem, and indeed water, the element of renewal, fluidity, and unceasing change, is for Walcott the imagination’s home—as no solid land, however dearly beloved, could ever be. Elsewhere, he plays on the watery associations of his Aquarian birth sign, and also on the fact that his birthday falls in a month named for a god with two faces, looking forward and backward at once. Even the poetry of Homer, which represents the art at its highest achievement, turns out to be derived from the energies of ocean, the largest, most untamable presence on the earth. When he meets the spirit of the Greek poet, he confesses that he has not read the Homeric epics “all the way through” (Omeros 283). Upon reading that, the professor in me sniffs indignantly and announces a test, but a test would miss the point. For when Walcott continues with “I have always heard / your voice in that sea, master” (Omeros 283), he pays Homer the highest compliment possible: the Greek bard has achieved the 21

CALLALOO ideal of the artist, to get beyond art. The voice of Homer and the voice of the sea are one. To hear the sea, really to hear it with the soul’s ear, is to read Homer also.

Coda: Camille Pissarro’s Reverse Diaspora Like many Caribbean writers, Walcott has been concerned with the one-way diasporic journey from old worlds to new. “Have we melted ourselves into a mirror,” he asks in “Names,” “leaving our souls behind? / The goldsmith from Benares, / The stonecutter from Canton, / The bronzesmith from Benin” (Collected Poems 306). Those multiple origins, irretrievable, remain as a haunting absence. But in Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), he has traced a reverse journey from west to east, by which the obscure Sephardic Jew Jacob Pizarro of St. Thomas crossed the Atlantic and became the great French impressionist painter, Camille Pissarro. Born a century after Pissarro, Walcott still grew up in a Caribbean where to be educated meant going away, and pursuing an ambitious career in the arts usually meant staying away. Indeed, by entering the first graduating class of University College of the West Indies instead of attending university in England, Canada, or the U.S., he veered from the usual career path for talented West Indians of his generation. And unlike many of his contemporaries, he has managed to maintain at least part-time residence within the Caribbean throughout most of his career. He has been acutely aware, however, that the vocation of artist, hard to sustain anywhere, is especially hard to sustain in the islands. In his two tours of duty as a journalist, in Jamaica in 1956 and 57 and in Trinidad from 1959 to 1967, he tirelessly insisted on the need for stronger support of the arts—a theme taken up once more last Monday by Christine Samuels in her remarks at this week’s opening event. Pissarro’s defection to Europe, then, is a painful story for Walcott. Would it somehow have been possible for Pissarro to stay in St. Thomas and give the Caribbean its own great nineteenth-century artist? Or could Jacob Pizarro become Camille Pissarro only by emigrating to Paris and drawing on the shared energies of that vital center? In St. Thomas he had no teacher but an obscure Danish draftsman, Fritz Melbye, who had been sent by the colonial government to sketch New World flora. After slipping out of St. Thomas with Melbye to spend two years in Venezuela perfecting his draftsmanship, he persuaded his family to let him go to France. In Paris he fell into the company of Cézanne, Monet, Gauguin, and Degas, the great painters of his day. He learned from them and, it is likely, taught them something as well. Part of what he had to give was the freshness of perception that came of his island upbringing. Joachim Gasquet recalled the painter’s claim that “he had the good fortune to be born in the Antilles; there he learned to draw without a teacher” (J. Pissarro 19). And Pissarro’s great-grandson Joachim finds it “remarkable how much of the artist’s future visual concerns” could be found in early sketches from the St. Thomas years. He also notes the juxtaposition of disparate styles and techniques within a single painting. One might add that such an amalgamation, “in an idiosyncratic manner” (Pissarro 22, 43) of multiple styles, is a hallmark of Caribbean 22

CALLALOO aesthetics. Even in France, Pissarro remained in some respects a West Indian painter, but to mature he had to leave the West Indies and become, in some important ways, a French painter. Once he left to pursue an artist’s career in France, he never crossed the Atlantic again. As in Omeros, the Walcott figure telling the tale has a quest parallel to that of his protagonist. Just as Pissarro must follow his vocation to Europe, the narrator goes off in quest of a painting he once saw but cannot precisely remember. In it, a single brushstroke perfectly rendered the inside of a dog’s thigh. This is a mere incidental detail in a feasting scene, but it haunts him as an image of elusive perfection. He cannot say whether the painter was Tiepolo, or perhaps Veronese. His search for the lost painting leads him to great museums all over the world, and eventually to Venice, where he finally decides to abandon the pursuit. “Research” might clear the matter up, “but I refused. Faith was a closed church” (Tiepolo’s Hound 117). Better to leave his memory of the painting, like his attempt to piece together Pissarro’s life, “inexact and blurred,” preferring “the exact perspective of loss” (Tiepolo’s Hound 8) to the false clarity of fact. Just as, in Omeros, the elaborately constructed scaffolding of Homeric myth and military history finally implodes on itself, the obsessive hunt for the lost hound becomes irrelevant once the narrator sees that the true object of his quest is not the aristocratic hound of the lost painting, but the “ochre pot hounds” who “forage for scraps of garbage” (Tiepolo’s Hound 37) in the villages of his island. Watching such a dog “who shook with local terror” rescue “a starved pup,” he concludes: this was the mongrel’s heir, not in a great fresco, but bastardy, abandonment, and hope and love enough perhaps to help it live like all its breed, and charity, and care, we set it down in the village to survive like all my ancestry. The hound was here. (Tiepolo’s Hound 139) Like the circular journey of the swift in Omeros, this quest ends where it began—in St. Lucia, where his poems, restlessly sailing the oceans in search of what has been lost, return to find it patiently waiting, here.

NOTE 1. Trinxidadian word (familiar to most St. Lucians also) meaning “Continuous teasing, banter, or joking at somebody’s expense” (Allsopp 226).

WORKS CITED Allsopp, Richard. Ed. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Oxford/New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London/New York: Verso, 1983.

23

CALLALOO Bennett, Louise. “Colonization in Reverse.” Louise Bennett, Selected Poems. Ed. Mervyn Morris. Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s Book Store, 1982. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP: 1976 [corrected 1997]. Goodison, Lorna. To Us, All Flowers Are Roses. Urbana/Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1995. Harris, Wilson. Tradition, the Writer, and Society: Critical Essays. London/Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1967. Hippolyte, Kendel. “Night Vision.” Unpublished manuscript. MacDonald-Smythe, Antonia. “In Celebration of the Provincial in the St. Lucian Arts.” 24 Jan. 2002 Moore, Marianne. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: Penguin, 1982. Pissarro, Joachim. Camille Pissarro. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1993. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. London: Faber & Faber, 1960. Walcott, Derek. “Another Life.” Collected Poems 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. ———. Collected Poems 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. ———. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” (1974). In Robert Hamner, Robert. Ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Boulder, CO: Rienner, 1997. ———. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. ———. “Reflections on Omeros.” South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (1997). ———. The Star-Apple Kingdom. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. ———. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. ———. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998 Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.

24

CALLALOO

LINE for Derek Walcott

by John Robert Lee

“The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places; yes, I have a goodly heritage.”—Psalm 16:6 i. Within the boundaries of my mortgaged peace, bordered by unruly ficus, some struggling croton, forsaken fallen palms and other anonymous waste— Veronica’s scattered variety of roses, Simone’s sensible vegetables, Kamara’s clump of scruffy cat-tails, and, swimming in Babonneau air like a tentacled sea-anemone, the breadfruit; only today, “Jules’ tree-trimming crew” from Desbarras sawed down the ant-infested mango. Among other unknown pretty-flowered bush—from Joy’s time, the elegant Easter spider-lily, in all her seasonal fragrance.

ii. “to every line there is a time and a season.” (DW) When have I not measured this land by your lines? When have I not tracked blue-smoke pits to their river-stone roots by your metaphor? When have I not walked, Walcott, by your fire-scorched love, through uptown lanes of old Castries, strolled the revolving corners of Chaussée, Coral, Broglie, Victoria? You leave us your covenants with the everlasting fretworked eaves of Riverside Road, gommier canots and their men from Dauphin to Vieux Fort, the epiphanic groves of Mon Repos, the stone chapel of Rivière Dorée, the turning leaves’ whispering of Methodist hymnals on Chisel Street. © John Robert Lee 2003. John Robert Lee is a St. Lucian poet.

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 25–28

25

CALLALOO It’s what’s left, at the end of the line (I imagine you insisting) that scans our lives, marks our season’s faith, and amortizes all indentured loans.

iii. “qu’est-ce que la poésie, si elle mérite son sel, sinon un langage qui passé de main en bouche?” (DW) The cross-hatching drizzle imitates flaking snow. It’s not Boston, just Castries, near the Square. Snow, or warm rain, whatever city, the sketchy common news these days is of war in ancient lands, terror in towns whose subways we’ve negotiated, vice parading proud banners in new Gomorrahs. And while the bellowing fog of Babel’s collapsing ziggurats chokes 5th Avenue with the same old hatreds— from some obscure archipelagic galaxy, unknown nebulae, light-years ahead, sign fresh canticles to patient watchers on Becune’s surf-battered coast and on hill-top hamlets of Plateau.

iv. “but come, girl, get your raincoat, let’s look for life in some café behind tear-streaked windows…” (DW) I didn’t see any 36 views of Mount Fuji. From the bullet-train to Kyoto, Fuji wasn’t there for the film. Like Morne Gimie in July, forest worlds floating in self-indulgent cloud. I did see Kabuki—at a theatre near Ginza Station, on Harumi Street in Tokyo— language winged like pagodas, lines played for wood-block prints of Tokaido traffic, teahouse courtesans, bombastic actors. Didn’t see Hiroshima. Or Nagasaki. Sound a gong, lay a blossom on the lily pond of the Golden Pavilion—for Roddy, Brodsky and André Tanker. For these gracious, courteous, transmigrated souls, pour a rice saké as you pass the Shinto shrine near your hotel. These lives line your work, as ours— shoguns and faithful companions following some Minshall dragonfly muse, from Gulag to Santa Cruz,

26

CALLALOO faith drawing our straggling band to this sepulchral escarpment—as in some “View from Moule à Chique, after Hokusai.” Or, after Apilo.

v. “The only art left is the preparation of grace.” (DW) Did Blake see angels sitting in the neighbours’ trees? Did an angel smile at me on a train platform in cold Boston one Winter? Will Christ come with Ezekiel’s four-faced seraphim and their fiery wheels? In this dark networking age, the schoolmen assassinate the Author, desecrate the groves of wonder, scrabble on their bellies to find significance in the dung of scarabs; in columns of sneers, they sniff out apostasy, line-up heretics, trigger disputes. Orwell warned us of those tenured tyrants. Come Virgil and Dante, Aesop and Pascal, come griots and chantwèls, come Ti Jean and Anancy, come, fireflies peeping from evening bush of Monchy, chase ‘way those soucouyants! We passing through Vanity Fair, learning our lines, Grace steering us, to reach in front the Ancient of Days, Who sitting on the circle of the created stratosphere.

vi. “I am going down to the shallow edge to begin again, Joseph, with a first line, with an old net, the same expedition.” (DW) After the largesse of Sweden—gold medal, hand-written scroll, krona quickly gone in the exchange; after the depth of the blue N circled on the Konserthuset carpet, after the cramped hands weary of inscribing yet another title page— did you sense the hound stirring to its feet as you entered the Grand Hotel? Faithful guardian of the craft that brought you here, he would not leave his master to banquet whisperings of sirens, braided tongues of polite laughter, even generous cushions under his exhaustion. He points Pissaro’s island. He scents Becune Bay. He is eager for the Bounty of futile mutinies that fall as cedar settling scarlet around the patient Hound.

27

CALLALOO vii. Okay. Time for this procession to begin. The legacy gathering. The Monsignor waiting in the appointed place. M’sieu Kendel, take the shac-shac please. Call violon, bones and mandolin. Princess Jane, you carrying the Choiseul panier of petals. Majèstwa Dixon, please to bring your dear stentorian self. You leading this line. Chantè Fish Alphonse, where you? The weedova dancers ready?—And now, if it please your floral majesties, King Derek and Queen Sessenne, to grace us with your pleasantries—we must go up, to bring our arts’ offerings to the Son, the First in Line, the End of metaphor, the Psalm of the Embracing Voice…

NOTES The epi-graphs are taken from the poetry of the Bible and Derek Walcott. * The Walcott lines: (ii) from “Italian Eclogues” [The Bounty] (iii) from the French translation of “Forest of Europe.” Trans. by Claire Malroux [The Star-Apple Kingdom]—“what’s poetry, if it is worth its salt, but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?” (iv) from “Piano Practice” [The Fortunate Traveller] (v) from The Bounty [Section Two, #1 (Untitled)] (vi) from “Italian Eclogues” [The Bounty] canots – St. Lucian fishing canoes hewn out of gommier trees. Becune – sea-side location of Derek Walcott’s St. Lucian home. Plateau – in the high hills of Babonneau, northeastern St. Lucia. Kabuki – traditional Japanese theatre. Roddy – Roderick Walcott, twin brother of Derek Walcott, died in 2000. Brodsky – Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, Nobel prize in1987, died in 1996. André Tanker – Trinidadian musician, who composed music for Walcott’s plays, died in 2003. Minshall – Peter Minshall, Trinidadian carnival designer. Moule à Chique – mountain on the southern tip of St. Lucia, crested by a lighthouse. Apilo – nickname of Dunstan St. Omer, St. Lucian artist, lifelong friend of Walcott. Chantwèl – female lead singer of St. Lucian folk groups. Soucouyants – vampire-type creature of St. Lucian folklore. Krona – Swedish currency. Konserthuset – the Stockholm Concert Hall in which the Nobel Prize ceremony is held. Shac-shac, violon, bones, mandolin – musical instruments used by St. Lucian folk bands. Kendel Hippolyte, Jane King-Hippolyte, MacDonald Dixon, Fish Alphonse – St. Lucian poets, friends of Walcott. Choiseul – St. Lucian village, famous for its crafts, like straw baskets (panier). Majèstwa – St. Lucian Creole word for magistrate, a character in the street theatre of the flower festivals unique to St. Lucia. Chantè – male lead singer of St. Lucian folk groups. Weedova – a St. Lucian folk dance. Sessenne – St. Lucia’s leading folk singer. *Thanks to Derek Walcott for permission to use the lines from his poems.

28

CALLALOO

CREOLE LANGUAGE IN THE POETRY OF DEREK WALCOTT

by Laurence A. Breiner

The perception of Walcott as a poet primarily in dialogue with the European tradition encourages an assumption that he writes in metropolitan standard English. Yet instances of Caribbean creole in his poetry are significant, and more frequent than they may appear at first glance. To investigate Derek Walcott’s use of creole language in his poems, and the implications of that use, we should begin by taking note of how the language of poetry written in a creole cultural setting differs from spoken language. The process of creolization occurs at all levels of culture, and although its effects are large scale and highly visible, its actual operations are often very localized and unconscious. To a considerable extent, creolization is a matter of individuals making routine adjustments to a multicultural setting. The process moves forward through small appropriations and accommodations: one cook borrows ingredients from another, one dancer learns someone else’s steps, a speaker modifies his language so his listener will understand more easily.1 Consider a very simple example. Two people are conversing, and they happen to pronounce a key term differently. By the end of the conversation, it is likely (but not inevitable) that they will both be pronouncing the term the same way. Furthermore, the shared pronunciation will usually be that used by one of the two speakers, not some intermediate compromise. Why? Sometimes the explanation seems easy—we might expect that an employee would always yield to the pronunciation of his boss. But the analysis of such situations is not always so simple, because the issues that come into play are subtle, including relative status, perceived status, individual selfconfidence, and linguistic assurance. And what happens when the same people converse again on the same topic? Do they tacitly accept the “winning” pronunciation from the first conversation, or does the unacknowledged contest begin again? On a microscopic scale, those are the dynamics of creolization. As that example suggests, the development of language in multicultural settings provides some of the best-documented and most readily analyzed evidence for the dynamics of creolization. The Caribbean region constitutes perhaps the world’s most extensive and most varied site of creolization as a result of the very different histories of [enslavement and] colonization that unfolded on each of those islands. The inhabitants have come from Africa, Asia, and Europe. As a consequence, many metropolitan languages are spoken. In addition, the region presents a uniquely rich assortment of creole languages. These languages have historical affinities with different European languages (French, English, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese), they

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 29–41

29

CALLALOO have developed along different lines, and they stand in quite different relations to the languages of the [enslavers and] colonizers still spoken in the area.2 For instance, in Haiti it has been customary to regard metropolitan French and Haitian creole as separate, even opposed, languages. One speaks either one or the other. To combine them in a single utterance would be regarded as bizarre. This is the case even though the creole naturally includes many elements of French; in fact, the official orthography for Haitian creole programmatically works to make written creole look less like French, reinforcing the sense of opposition between the two languages. For example, the Haitian creole expression meaning “for me” is written pou mwe so that visually the relationship to the metropolitan equivalent pour moi is obscured; to the ears of most Francophones, the aural affinity is much more apparent. Jamaica, on the other hand, offers a fine example of what linguists call a “creole continuum.” The creole that developed in Jamaica is more African in lexicon and syntax, and therefore less comprehensible to most speakers of English, than that of any other Anglophone Caribbean territory. But it is acceptable and indeed customary for Jamaican speakers to move very freely along this continuum, often in a single utterance combining elements from standard English and Jamaican creole, and not necessarily always combining them in the same way when saying more or less the same thing on another occasion. The choices made available by the continuum are an important expressive resource for Jamaican speech, and distinguish it from the speech of other Anglophone islands. So far I have been talking about speakers, but to approach Walcott’s work from this angle, I want to concentrate on the special case of writers. Whatever their behavior as speakers, writers in creole societies usually make much more self-conscious, aggressive choices about the language of expression to employ in their work. If speakers may be said to enact creolization in their utterances, writers are better described as reflecting upon it, bringing to the surface choices that speakers routinely make without premeditation. Writers understand that linguistic choices take on greater importance when they are made in the special arena of literature, and as a result, the diction of a Caribbean literary text often has particularly rich political and ideological implications. A number of choices are available to writers working in a creole milieu. Some West Indians always write in the standard Caribbean version of the relevant metropolitan language. This may be true even if they themselves habitually speak in a creole. One likely motive is that they desire what they write to be perceived (and evaluated) as serious literature. Creole languages are still often associated with low status, and of course a text in creole is less likely to be published prestigiously in London or Paris. On the other hand some write only in creole (whatever their individual speech habits). It may be that to do so seems socially relevant and engaged or politically expedient, or it may be that the writer’s primary goal is to reach a creole-speaking audience (for obvious reasons, poets and dramatists are more likely to do this than novelists). Between these extremes, there are writers who make more complex choices, and these choices become part of the significance of their work—part of what the work means. For example: in their pioneering novels, the Jamaican Vic Reid (New Day 1949) and the Trinidadian Sam Selvon (A Brighter Sun 1952) use invented literary languages 30

CALLALOO inspired by their respective creoles, but they are pointedly not faithful transcriptions of creole. Most significantly for the development of West Indian fiction, they use these creolized languages not solely within dialogue (where it can be understood as the language of the represented characters, not of the writer or of his text), but for the voice of narration itself. Written before independence, these texts among others are committed to demonstrating the creative resources of Anglophone Caribbean speech, as well as its depth, such that it can generate a variety of distinct literary variants— just as spoken British English supports written variants as diverse as Henry Fielding and Virginia Woolf. Taking a different approach, with different implications, V. S. Naipaul, in his early novel Miguel Street (1959), presents a first-person narrative in which the narrator always speaks standard English, except that whenever he quotes his younger self, we find he is speaking creole. This suggests a tension in the work between an impulse to verisimilitude in dialogue and a desire for acceptance as a metropolitan literary text. Such a tension can be felt in many colonial texts. What is remarkable in Naipaul’s case is that no attention is drawn to this anomaly. This is a first-person narrative, yet the novel offers no acknowledgment or dramatization of what amounts to a significant (and presumably calculated) shift in its protagonist’s self-presentation, some time between his experiences and his narration of them. For Walcott, too, the relation to creole as a literary medium is unusually complicated. He has thought deeply about the matter, not only because he is a poet, but also (as we will see) for reasons that have to do with his circumstances. For one thing, the language situation in his homeland is unique; for another, he made his reputation during the Anglophone Caribbean’s transition to independence, a period when any author’s decision to use creole—or to avoid creole—was highly politicized. Possession of Saint Lucia, Walcott’s homeland, passed back and forth between England and France more than a dozen times during the colonial period. The resulting pattern of language distribution in the island is unusual. Very broadly speaking, a French-based creole is the primary language of the rural areas, where the population is predominantly black, predominantly Catholic in religion, and relatively poor. English is the language of the towns (because it was the language of British administration and British law), and so it is the language of nearly all the island’s Protestants, and nearly all St. Lucians of mixed racial heritage. There are of course varying degrees of formality in the use of English (and for that matter in the use of creole), but there is no creole continuum in the strict sense, because the creole is grounded in a different European language. These factors undoubtedly had a formative impact on the poet. Walcott was born to a middle-class Protestant mulatto family, and lived in the heart of the capital, Castries. During his childhood he spoke English at home (that is, standard Eastern Caribbean English) and learned metropolitan French at school as a foreign language. The language of his education was English, but to complicate matters, many of his teachers were from Ireland. He would have heard his island’s French-based creole everywhere, and certainly understood a good deal of it, but there were strong—and strongly enforced—inhibitions against speaking it. It was the language associated with the Catholic rural poor, not the class to which his family belonged. But after World War II, in Walcott’s late adolescence, an increasing sense 31

CALLALOO of national identity precedes the movement toward independence, and in that atmosphere he had even more reason to think of creole as “his” language, the language—one of the languages—of his people and country. To complicate matters further, Walcott attended university in Jamaica, the Anglophone island which possesses the most distinctive form of Caribbean English, characterized by a true creole continuum and by very significant divergences from standard English in lexicon and syntax as well as in pronunciation. Walcott himself has written that, “pure Jamaican is comprehensible only to Jamaicans” (Joker 155–56). In Jamaica, Walcott witnessed the beginnings of a move toward linguistic insularity as a feature of the politics of independence. Not long after his years at the university, Jamaica emerged as the center for the formulation of an aesthetics of what is usually called “orality” or “orature” for West Indian poetry. In the contexts of regional independence and of the international Black Power Movement at the end of the 1960s, intellectuals and artists worked to increase knowledge about Caribbean folk cultures generally and (more specifically) about survivals of African cultures. For literature, this entailed a high valuation of the region’s oral creole languages, which were doubly privileged by intellectuals. Creoles (despite their essential hybridity) were associated with the pristine authenticity of the folk, the segment of society least tainted by colonialism. Moreover, orality was regarded as a link to African cultural roots, which were predominantly oral rather than scribal. The issues were hotly debated, but there is no question that West Indian poetry was transformed by a new openness to creole expression, and by a presumption (or at least a pretense) that poetry should be a matter of oral performance rather than of writing. It has been convenient to fall back on the old “Brathwaite versus Walcott” dichotomy to characterize Walcott’s resistance, even opposition, to that movement.3 The Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic trilogy The Arrivants (1967, 1968, 1969) was the single most important catalyst for the development, and his presence in Jamaica sustained it powerfully, while Walcott has been acerbic about it in highly visible publications.4 But it has also been convenient to ignore the fact that Walcott has written a substantial body of verse in creole intended for oral performance. I mean of course his plays, one of which, A Branch of the Blue Nile (1986), even takes the literary use of creole as one of its themes. Let us approach the role of creole in his poems by considering the language of an early play, The Sea at Dauphin. The play depicts a day in the life of fishermen in a remote Saint Lucian village. Walcott’s work is modeled on an Irish play, J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904), and like that model it aims to communicate a sense of the characteristic language of the people it depicts. After initial productions in Trinidad and St. Lucia, the play was brought to Jamaica in 1956. At the time, Slade Hopkinson— who was the director—wrote an article in the local newspaper that amounts to a barely disguised advertisement for the play. It includes the following comment: “the idiom is a little difficult to the non-St. Lucian . . . [but] the meaning can be found in the action, gestures, facial expression, and intonations of the actors” (14). Obviously Hopkinson was writing these encouraging words because Jamaicans had some trouble with the St. Lucian creole of the dialogue. From experiences like this, Walcott seems to have learned that in performance, despite the support of “gestures, expres32

CALLALOO sions, and intonations,” one cannot be sure that creole language is accessible even to a West Indian audience. The lesson only became more compelling as he began to reach an international Anglophone audience. When he began to publish his plays in England and America, he seems to have been acutely conscious of the need to make adjustments on account of the absence of those performative supports from the printed text. There is one more thing to be said apropos of Hopkinson’s remarks, however. He is not in fact talking about the language of the play as most readers (and audiences) know it. Here is a short but typical sample of the play as it appears in the familiar Farrar Straus edition of 1970: AFA: He taking long, old man. A! Augustin I have a tin belonging Ratal in the bow, see if it there. (Afa is helping Hounakin unballast the canoe.) You ever sail yet, Papa? (Hounakin shakes his head.) Fish line? (Hounakin shakes his head.) Fish net? Nothing? (Dream on 56) Now here is the same passage as it was published a few years after the first stage productions, in 1960: AFA: He taking long, old man. A! Augustin I have a tin belonging Ratal in the bow, see if it there. (Afa is helping Hounakin unballast the canoe.) You ever nager yet Papa? (Hounakin shakes his head.) Faire peche? (Hounakin shakes his head.) Faire nasse? Nothing? (Tamarack Review 82) In revising the text, Walcott has removed specific phrases in the French-based creole of his island—language which would present the most immediate stumbling block for his Anglophone readers (as it presumably had for his Jamaican viewers). What he has not changed at all is the syntax of the passage, which remains creole. The expression “faire nasse” for example is Saint Lucian creole for “fish with a net” (and note that Walcott’s orthography preserves the relationship to metropolitan French, rather than attempting phonetic representation of the sounds, as is the objective of the orthography of Haitian creole). When Walcott later revises the phrase to “fish net,” the result reassuringly resembles English, though in fact the structure of the phrase would not be normal in either Eastern Caribbean English or Anglophone creole. Thanks to this compromise, West Indian readers will recognize the creole speech behind the printed words; other Anglophone readers may hear it only as picturesque or quaint, but at least their engagement with the play will not be impeded. Learning from the compromises necessary both in the theater and in the process of metropolitan publication of his scripts, Walcott seems to have concerned himself less about the standards that apply to live performance, and more about grapholect—that is, about the form of language that can succeed on the page, when a play is printed. His careful experiments in this line distinguish him sharply from the best of the performance poets, who often seem quite nonchalant about the printed form of their work—indeed often leaving it to editors. Thus Mervyn Morris is largely responsible 33

CALLALOO for printed appearance of the poems of Michael Smith; similarly Morris and Rex Nettleford use somewhat different orthographies for their respective editions of the poetry of Louise Bennett, even though both have the same publisher. This discussion of The Sea at Dauphin suggests that at the time when Walcott first felt the impact of the orality movement, he already had practical reasons for moving in the opposite direction. The orality movement participated in the politics of independence by reinforcing the promotion of distinctive—and insular—national languages. Walcott had become more interested in the viability of a Caribbean grapholect. He sought a representation of Caribbean speech on the page which balances accuracy with accessibility. His goal was not scientific transcription, but a written medium that could communicate features of spoken creole while remaining readily comprehensible for any Anglophone reader. His motivation was very much that of a man of the theater—to reach a wider audience, and in particular a wider Caribbean audience. Relatively straightforward mimetic representation of local speech is the rule in many of the plays, and Walcott is adept at it. By contrast, Walcott as a poet generally chooses standard English as the medium for his engagements with the tradition of literature in English. Only a few of his poems use creole. The example of other Caribbean poets who write primarily in standard English would lead us to expect that these few would be “dialect” poems. Poets such as the Jamaican George Campbell or the Tobagonian Eric Roach published only a couple of poems in creole, almost as novelties. These poems take the form of dramatic monologues or dialogues for folk voices that are plainly not the voice of the poet, and aim usually for comic or pathetic effect. But Walcott does not follow that pattern. His poems in creole are few, but they are not just instances of creole; instead they are sustained reflections on the nature of creole and of creole speakers. Caribbean speech is almost always distinctly bent in Walcott’s poetry. I mean that his goal is neither to reproduce speech with ethnographic accuracy, nor on the other hand to make it in some sense “literary” (as did Reid and Selvon when they first wrote in creole). Unlike his plays, in which characters are presented as using creole quite unselfconsciously, the poems that use creole always approach the language in a way that can only be called cagey and metapoetic. His poems in creole are about using creole. His experiments begin quite early. The revisions of Dauphin belong to one line of investigation which has to do with what is sometimes called “punning syntax.” Walcott explores ways of writing in a manner that can appear to be both standard English and creole at the same time, by revealing and exploiting unexpected points of coincidence. For example, one very frequent resource for this effect is the widespread West Indian habit of turning adjectives into near-verbs. The opening phrase of “The Schooner Flight” presents a good example: “In idle August, while the sea soft . . .” (Collected Poems 345). A speaker of standard English assumes this is a dialectal “distortion” of a standard English expression, “when the sea is soft.” But Walcott’s use of while is a clear indicator that the word soft functions like a verb—as if “softing” were something the sea could do. This “punning” effect is something like what happens when a composer of music designs a tune so that it can be harmonized in more than one key. The harmonic implications of the notes themselves will mean 34

CALLALOO different things in the different tonal contexts. The medium of a Walcott poem is the printed page, and we have seen that he is often seeking grapholectal—rather than performative—solutions to the problem of audience. Thus the syntactical punning is usually a matter of notation; two different readings can be realized from the printed text, neither sounding wrong, though neither is absolutely normal. The effect for all readers is thus a heightening of attention to the language of the text—that is, precisely a poetic effect. At the same time, Walcott has long been interested in the effects available through forthright juxtapositions of standard English and creole elements—emphasizing the differences rather than working in the common area where the two languages overlap. The most familiar early example is from the verse sequence entitled “Tales of the Islands” (1958). In the crucial lines, Walcott depicts the “black writer chap” whose wife was cavorting up the beach with other men, “while he drunk quoting Shelley with ‘Each / generation has its angst. But we has none’” (Collected Poems 25). One goal here is an insistence that “highbrow” words like “Shelley” and “angst” are quite at home in a creole context, which has been firmly established by the verbs. The narrator of this poem is presented as an unashamed speaker of creole (he says “while he drunk” instead of “while he was drunk”). By contrast the “black writer chap” is depicted as lapsing involuntarily into a creole pattern he would not normally use (“we has none” instead of the standard “we have none”). But perhaps Walcott’s wittiest move in this passage is that the drunken writer’s slip of the tongue makes it appear that the supposed quotation from Shelley itself is in creole. Here is the same kind of balancing act in another fairly early poem, “Parang” (1962): Boy, every damned tune them tune Of love that go last forever Is the wax and the wane of the moon Since Adam catch body-fever. (Collected Poems 33). This has some of the features of a “dialect poem” in the traditional sense of the term: these are words voiced by a creole-speaking peasant character on the occasion of a traditional folk celebration. But at the same time in this passage and elsewhere in the poem there are patent echoes of rhythm and diction from the late poetry of Yeats (reference to the phases of the moon is a distinctive fingerprint of late Yeats). This is intentional. Walcott will not allow us to assume that these literary elements are somehow beyond the intellectual scope of his speaker. His gesture in these and similar instances is not conciliatory, not a genuflection to the European tradition, nor is it an instance of unconscious colonial mimicry of that tradition. Instead, the poem entails an assertion of the scope of creole sensibility. Walcott had seemingly abandoned the field of creole expression to the orality poets from about Independence (circa 1962) through the mid-1970s. His return to that arena is signaled very explicitly by two poems: the first is “Names” (1975), pointedly dedicated to Brathwaite, the leader of the orality movement, and explicitly engaged with Brathwaite’s poem “Naming.” In Brathwaite’s poem the power to name depends 35

CALLALOO on unmediated perception: “the eye must be free / seeing” (217). The end of Walcott’s poem offers an illustration that complicates the issue. A schoolmaster in Trinidad asks, “children, look at these stars . . . tell me, what do they look like?” (Collected Poems 308). From the context it appears that he wants the students to see the stars as a constellation; specifically, to recognize them as the constellation named for the Greek mythological figure Orion. The children’s response, the result of their “free seeing,” is not so colonized as the teacher’s, and Brathwaite would approve of that, but Walcott seems to be raising some questions about its precise value: “Sir,” they reply, “fireflies caught in molasses.” “Names” is immediately followed in the collection entitled Sea Grapes by “Sainte Lucie” (1976). This is a long, five-part poem whose position vis-à-vis creole expression is too complex to consider thoroughly here. But two points are pertinent. First, the central section is a narrative written in the French creole of St. Lucia. This is by far the most extended passage in French creole in any of Walcott’s poems. In a headnote, Walcott says that this is something he “heard on the back of an open truck . . . some years ago” (Collected Poems 314). Considering the length of the narrative, some readers have been skeptical about that claim that this is someone else’s composition. In any case, the following section of the poem offers Walcott’s very literal translation. In contrast to what he does in revising The Sea at Dauphin, here Walcott makes no attempt to reproduce the texture of creole. There are a few expressions that follow the rules either of French creole (“Iona said like this”) or of English creole (“we both holding the same beat”), but the normal language is standard (Collected Poems 318). The poet gives us a creole poem and an English poem. But they are the same poem. The point of the gesture here is clarified by the other pertinent feature of “Sainte Lucie,” its inclusion of the well-known prayer that inaugurates for Walcott a renewed relationship to creole: “come back to me, my language” (Collected Poems 310). The remainder of this essay concentrates on three poems written after Walcott’s language “comes back to him,” poems in which he strenuously engages with and negotiates the means, objectives, and aesthetics associated with the term orality. Two are intentionally provocative about stereotypes of creole speakers and creole sound. The third I would characterize as Walcott’s re-inscription (I use the word advisedly) of Jamaican performance poetry. In “The Schooner Flight” (1979), Walcott undertakes a full-scale elaboration of a point I noted in connection with “Parang.” Shabine, the narrator and protagonist of this poem, is a creole speaker with patent and unashamed access to “a sound colonial education” (Collected Poems 355). Shabine is a common seaman, but also a poet. Through this poet-sailor, Walcott again makes a claim that creole expression is not inconsistent with breadth of knowledge or depth of sensibility. The poem begins with a telling juxtaposition that establishes the nature of the character. Here are Shabine’s opening words (already mentioned in another connection): “In idle August, while the sea soft. . . .” This alludes to the first line of William Langland’s fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman: “In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne. . . .” To quote Langland is of course a nod at the canon of the Great Tradition—this passage appears in almost any general anthology of English literature. At the same time, the allusion also makes the point that, like Shabine, Piers 36

CALLALOO himself is a poet whose folk roots are apparent in his politics and his social status, and that he too is a speaker of non-standard English. Despite this implied argument from precedent (that is, from the example of Langland), the voice of Shabine has particularly provoked some metropolitan critics, who still tend to associate the use of creole with limited education and narrow emotional scope. On the basis of that assumption they find such a character unbelievable: only illiterate peasants speak creole. Anticipating this objection, Walcott has already written the critics into his poem in the figure of Vincie, the shipmate who ridicules Shabine for writing poems. Shabine responds as (presumably) Walcott would. He stabs Vincie, and observes then how “he faint so slowly, and he turn more white / than he thought he was” (Collected Poems 355). The warning to the critics is quite explicit. In “The Spoiler’s Return” (1981), a famous old calypso singer of the 1940s and 1950s, known as The Mighty Spoiler, comes back from Hell to visit Port of Spain. Spoiler talks a Trinidadian creole very tart, very beautiful, and incidentally full of allusions to dead white men—the kindred spirits who are now his cronies in the afterlife. Paul Breslin characterizes this as “the poem in which Walcott most strongly claims a merging, rather than dualism, of English canonical and Creole traditions” (5). The most flagrant juxtaposition in the poem brings together the colonial calypsonian and an aristocratic British satirist from the Age of Reason, incorporating quotations from Spoiler’s most famous calypso, “The Bedbug” (1953), and from the best known poem of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, his “A Satire Against Mankind.” In the instance cited here, the first four lines quote Rochester verbatim, but the next two lines are Spoiler’s: Were I, who to my cost already am One of those strange, prodigious creatures, Man, A spirit free, to choose for my own share, What case of flesh and blood I wished to wear, I hope when I die, after burial, To come back as an insect or an animal. (Collected Poems 433) The sharpest observation on Walcott’s craft here is from Breslin (himself a poet): “The calypso couplet, since it can be heard either as accentual tetrameter or iambic pentameter, slips unobtrusively into Rochester’s frame, continuing not only his thought but, to a surprising degree, his manner” (5). When Walcott finishes working his magic on the direct quotations, the two sound like the same poet, and that poet is very Trinidadian. This near assimilation of Spoiler and Rochester is of course the same sort of maneuver as that which brings together Shabine and Piers Plowman, and the motivation here is comparable. But one of the poem’s finest subversions is how Walcott positions Spoiler in relation to the Great Tradition when the singer addresses his supposed literary masters in the lines just preceding those quoted above: So back me up, Old Brigade of Satire, back me up, Martial, Juvenal, and Pope . . . join Spoiler’ chorus, sing the song with me . . . (Collected Poems 433) 37

CALLALOO The invocation of great Roman and English satirists make this sound at first like an argument from authority, like those occasions when another provincial vernacular writer—Michel de Montaigne—tells his readers how delighted he is to find that Plutarch or Seneca shares an opinion with him about something (50). But Spoiler is not just acknowledging that more famous predecessors can attest to the universality of what he sings, as if his own words did not have much weight. It is important to recognize that he is using a metaphor from his own profession: the great writers are his back-up singers, out of the spotlight, and interjecting the occasional shouts of “oh yeah” or “Ah tell you,” which are characteristic of calypso performances. This is Walcott’s conception of the creole performing poet. The image of the back-up group leads to the last poem I want to consider, “The Light of the World” (1987), which can be described as Walcott’s characteristically bent version of a dub poem (Collected Poems 48–51). The term dub poetry identifies the subgenre of Jamaican performance poetry with the closest ties to Jamaican popular music, specifically to the classic reggae of the 1970s. This was poetry intended for spoken performance with musical accompaniment. The name of the genre indicates its affinity to a unique feature of the Jamaican music scene. The B side of reggae singles was customarily a purely instrumental version of the song recorded on the A side. This track was called the “version” or “dub version.” At a club or a street party, the deejay would play the B side and at the same time improvise (“dub”) his own verbal performance in Jamaican creole over the recorded music he was playing. These improvisations were typically in a boasting style, and were the basis for the individual deejay’s reputation with his audience. The practice is comparable to that developed a bit later by American rap musicians. Walcott’s poem plays with the idea of a verbal text being improvised over a prerecorded musical track, but at the same time it teasingly refuses to be a dub poem. The situation of the poem is simple: Walcott, back in his native Saint Lucia, rides the transport minivan from the Market in Castries to his tourist hotel up the coast. Superficially at least, the theme of this poem is almost too familiar: sitting among them in the dark van, Walcott meditates on his alienation from his people. He remains the observing outsider, expressing himself throughout the poem in standard English. Another poet is present in the poem as well. During the trip, music of the great reggae star Bob Marley is playing on the van’s sound system. Walcott’s epigraph identifies the song specifically as “Kaya,” and the presence of the epigraph suggests we are to understand that the music is playing not only throughout the trip, but metaphorically also throughout the poem. From one perspective, this poem celebrates, with a touch of envy, the ordinary St. Lucian people on the transport and the intimacy of their relationship with Marley, the Jamaican National Hero who provides the music of their lives. The woman who fascinates him, the “Beauty” as he calls her, is completely at home in the music, humming along with the choruses. He envisions her as a potentially heroic figure, like the woman depicted in Delacroix’s painting “Liberty Leading the People.” By contrast, Walcott (the passenger) does not join the chorus, nor can he see himself as in any sense leading the people.

38

CALLALOO Some details, however, indicate that such an account of the poem may not be complete. The women may look to him like a leader, or more precisely like a figurative leader: “Liberty,” an inspiring image. But in reality hummers of choruses are not typically leaders. The leader here must be Marley because it is Marley who sings the verses, who leads the way; the travelers only join in the choruses. He is the people’s true poet, and his song sustains them on their journey through life. And yet Walcott has chosen a peculiar song for his purposes. “Kaya” is mostly chorus, with very few other lyrics, and composed in a language that on the page looks like standard English except for one Rastafarian idiom (“turn I loose”). It is indeed a song about being transported from the mundane (“I feel so high, I even touch the sky”), but the medium is ganja (kaya is a common Jamaican term for marijuana). The only other line that seems suited to the issues of Walcott’s poem is not a very good fit: “I feel so good in my neighborhood / so here I come again.” Many of Marley’s songs frankly invite political action and engagement, and many use language much farther from the metropolitan norms of standard English. Why has Walcott chosen this one rather than one of the others? Its particular features seem to undercut the point of the poem. Those details invite another perspective. There are two poets’ voices here, Walcott’s and Marley’s, and so two concurrent songs. Marley’s is a fixed performance, mechanically reproduced and playing for an audience sitting motionless in the dark, in their transport. Walcott’s is the living voice in the foreground, and we are being invited to hear him as a deejay, playing the B side of the Marley tune and improvising his own performance, his own story, over the classic track. In contrast to the recording, Walcott presents himself as speaking directly and personally to his readers, and like any deejay routinely exploiting the recorded artist as part of his direct, “live” engagement with his own immediate audience. In the end Marley’s tune has become the accompaniment to Walcott’s poem. The effect is to invoke the model of dub poetry without actually imitating its form or its texture. The riders in the transport are situated in relation to Marley’s music as a listening audience is situated in relation to the recorded sound of the B side. The trick here is that Walcott has situated himself, in relation to the music, as an improvising deejay. The words of the poem emphasize his sense of distance from his fellow passengers, but the working out of the analogy strongly implies another relationship: if Walcott is a deejay, and the passengers are a listening audience, the force of the analogy leaps the existential gap, and seems to say that he indeed performs for them. The poem expresses the gap; the analogy suggests it can be closed. Not in fact a deejay or a reggae star, Walcott is nevertheless their poet, and they are his people. I have been suggesting rather than fully arguing a number of points, which it may be useful to summarize here. In the context of the dominant aesthetic of orality, what distinguishes Walcott among West Indian poets is his interest in problems of grapholect, and in solutions to those problems, which can generate poetic value. Based on his early experience in the theater, he is concerned with methods of making creole language accessible to a wider audience. At the same time, he is also committed to broadening his audience’s sometimes narrow conception of what kinds of people speak creole, and of the variety of ways that creole language can sound. He has developed techniques for exploiting the common linguistic ground shared by both 39

CALLALOO creole and standard English. For different expressive purposes, he is adept at combining standard English and creole elements in ways that draw attention to their differences. Yet when Walcott combines a move toward creole language with a move toward the metropolitan language and its literary tradition, he does not imply an opposition, as if there were a need to balance transgressive creole with the weight of that tradition. His impulse is always a creolizing impulse. As in the theater, where he strives to combine what he calls “classical” and “creole” acting techniques, Walcott in his poetry is a self-described “mulatto of style” (Dream on 9). Behind all his linguistic experimentation, motivating it all, is the poet’s continuing renegotiation of his relationship to his people and their common language.

NOTES 1. In English, the term creole arose in the seventeenth century and was initially applied to persons—it referred to people of either European or African heritage who were born in the Americas. During the following century the term broadened to include plants and animals which had been introduced from elsewhere but subsequently altered by local climate and environment. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term creolization appears quite late (1890), and at first refers only to the acclimatization of animals and plants. Now, of course, the term is used much more broadly to identify the entire process of interaction between cultures in direct and extended contact with one another. 2. For the purposes of this paper, I use standard English as usual to refer to standard British usage of the grammar books. However, within the Caribbean the term standard also applies to the most prestigious Caribbean version of a metropolitan language—the language of education and the press. Jamaican or Barbadian English varies from British English, but only about as much as Canadian standard English does; Haitian standard French varies much less from the corresponding metropolitan standard French. I use the term creole very broadly to refer to the distinct languages that have developed through “long and persistent” contact between two (or more) languages, one of them European. On definitions of creole language see Peter A. Roberts, West Indians and Their Language. 3. Critics have been trying to get past this overly glib dichotomy since Pat Ismond’s essay “Walcott versus Brathwaite.” 4. See especially “The Muse of History” (1–28), “What the Twilight Says: An Overture” (3–40), and Another Life.

WORKS CITED Bennett, Louise. Jamaica Labrish. Ed. Rex Nettleford. Kingston: Sangster’s Bookstores, 1966. ———. Selected Poems. Ed. Mervyn Morris. Kingston: Sangster’s Bookstores, 1983. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. The Arrivants. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973. Breslin, Paul. “Milton Waylaid by the Midnight Robber.” Caribbean Studies Association Conference, May 29–June 3, 2000 [typescript]. de Montaigne, Michel. “On the Education of Children.” Essays. Trans. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958. Ismond, Pat. “Walcott versus Brathwaite.” Caribbean Quarterly 17.3–4 (Dec. 1971), 54–71. Hopkinson, Slade. “So the Sun Went Down.” Sunday Gleaner 15 Apr. 1956. King, Bruce. Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Langland, William. “Piers Plowman.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, v. 1. Ed. M. H. Abrams et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1962. 241. Marley, Bob, and the Wailers. “Kaya” Kaya. Island Records, 1978. Naipaul, V. S. Miguel Street. London: Andre Deutsch,1959. Reid, Vic. New Day. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.

40

CALLALOO Roberts, Peter A. West Indians and Their Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Selvon, Sam. A Brighter Sun. London: Wingate, 1952. Smith, Michael. It A Come. Ed. Mervyn Morris. London: Race Today Press, 1986 Synge, J. M. Riders to the Sea. The Complete Plays of John M. Synge. New York: Random House, 1935. Walcott, Derek. “A Branch of the Blue Nile.” Three Plays. . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. ———. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. ———. Collected Poems 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. ———. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. ———. The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!: Two Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978. ———. “The Muse of History.” Is Massa Day Dead? Ed. Orde Coombs. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1974. ———. “The Sea at Dauphin.” Tamarack Review 14 (1960). ———. Three Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. ———. “What the Twilight Says: An Overture.” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. Wilmot, John. “A Satire Against Mankind.” Poems. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1953. 118–124.

41

CALLALOO

BIRTHDAYS

by Mervyn Morris

The game is metaphor. “Birthdays : reassuring corners in the long, dark room of time.” “Reminder knots,” another voice proposes. “Birthdays are reminders time is heartless, beauty fades.” There is no string of time unravelling till the end is cut, only a dark pool swirling— letters, matches, galliwasps, toothpaste tubes and railway tickets, myriad markers from our lives in seminal confusion, falsified by cuckoo-clocks and calendars. I, celebrating birthdays in the whirlpool, dream: something will grow in time.

42

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 42

CALLALOO

AT A POETRY READING

by Mervyn Morris

Negotiating strangers and inscrutable desires, the old pretenders hope to be accepted as constructive liars. If, playing parts, they can avoid the spurious (the false pretence, the histrionic fraud) and manage the occasional epiphany, some of the other actors will applaud.

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 43

43

CALLALOO

PEELIN ORANGE for D.W.

by Mervyn Morris

Dem use to seh yu peel a orange perfec an yu get new clothes But when mi father try fi teach mi slide de knife up to de safeguard thumb I move de weapon like a saw inna mi han an de dyamn rind break An if yu have de time yu can come see mi in mi ole clothes peelin

44

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 44

CALLALOO

OF MEN AND HEROES Walcott and the Haitian Revolution

by Edward Baugh

The Haitian Revolution has exercised the Caribbean literary imagination to significant effect. It has spawned major works by some of the region’s most distinguished writers. Outside of Haiti itself, there is the Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949), and, from the French Caribbean, two plays: Edouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint (1961) and Aimé Césaire’s La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1970). Walcott has returned to the subject again and again, over a period of nearly forty years. His Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes (1950), first produced in 1949, was his first substantial play. The Revolution provided one of the four major segments of his historical pageant Drums and Colours (1961), first produced in 1958. His major work on the Revolution, The Haitian Earth, was first produced in 1984. These works reward comparison, which, in a limited way, is the project of this paper. They constitute a fertile microcosm in which to explore Caribbean imagination, its continuities and variations. We must also put alongside these fictive works C. L. R. James’s famous historical account, Black Jacobins. What is more, his little-known play of the same title was first produced even earlier, in 1936. Walcott’s The Haitian Trilogy conveniently collects all three of his dramatic engagements with the Revolution: Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours and The Haitian Earth. To compare his treatment of the Revolution in the three is to enhance understanding of his evolution as a dramatist, a Caribbean dramatist, both in content or world view and in style, as well as to enhance understanding of the hold of the Haitian Revolution on Caribbean imagination. The development reflects his foundational contribution to a Caribbean theater rooted in the experience of the common people, drawing on their arts of performance, including their language, and in the context of the colonial experience of the region. A central motive in this endeavor was to address the apparent or supposed absence or dearth of home-grown heroes. In chapter 12 of Another Life, Walcott recalls how, still a teenager, he was fired by the dream and difficulty of making a new world of art in his island(s). It was to be an art made out of native materials, like the “plain wood” (Collected Poems 216) with which the carpenter, Dominic, worked, giving off “the smell of our own speech” (Collected Poems 217), and taking the Caribbean artist beyond a hankering after “the marble [of] Greece” (“Ruins of a Great House,” Collected Poems 19) and all that it stood for, the hankering after “heroic palaces / netted in sea-green vines” (“Royal Palms” 16). The train of thought in chapter 12 of Another Life reaches a crucial point when the poet exclaims:

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 45–54

45

CALLALOO Christ, to shake off the cerecloths, to stride from the magnetic sphere of legends. To change the marble sweat which pebbled the wave-blow of stone brows for the sweat-drop on the cedar plank, for a future without heroes, to make out of these foresters and fishermen heraldic men! (Collected Poems 217) The “gigantic myth” and “the stone brows” of Classical sculpture connote the heroics that attach to the “great tradition” of Classical art and literature. It was in his plays that Walcott was most directly and definitively to take the “stride,” a shaping movement in his effort to make a Caribbean drama. “To make of these foresters and fishermen / heraldic men,” instead of “heroes,” is “a succinct statement of what [Walcott] aimed to do in plays like The Sea at Dauphin, Malcochon, Ti-Jean and His Brothers and Dream on Monkey Mountain” (Baugh 43).1 The stride may be traced in the movement from Henri Christophe and Drums and Colours to the four plays in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970), as well as The Haitian Earth, even if the movement is not neatly chronological. Further, whatever meaning Walcott may be understanding from the term heraldic man will retain perhaps more than a trace of “hero.” In other words, in resorting to the former term, Walcott retains some of the connotations of the latter, while eschewing others. Also, in heraldic man the word man in the sense of general, ordinary man, is no doubt almost as crucial as heraldic, as an aspect of the distinction between heraldic man and hero. The passage quoted from Another Life is a rewrite of a passage from the unpublished manuscript of “Another Life,” part prose, part verse, from which the published poem evolved. On October 17, 1965, Walcott wrote: The powerful truth is that no shadows haunt us now. We have moved away from the magnetic sphere of legends, giant stone statues and gesturing myths. We have a past without heroes. We can look back on servitude as natural and human without any desire for revenge.2 Whereas in chapter 12 of Another Life Walcott records how he had been haunted by the gigantic shadows of European art and literature, by 1965 he could say confidently that he had laid those ghosts. This does not mean that he had simply rejected them, but that he could now live easily with them, in a productive working relationship that might still involve a creative tension. The quotation from the manuscript “Another Life” also helps to suggest how Walcott’s desire to replace “heroes” with “heraldic men” connects with his quarrel with history. If heroes are towering men, larger than life, then the idea of history he counters is that of history as the deeds and impact of heroes. By contrast, heraldic men would be simple, ordinary persons (“foresters and fishermen”), close to the earth, the elements, who, by their experience and integrity, become icons representative of the 46

CALLALOO generality, the common people, just as figures in heraldry, as on coats of arms, are symbolic, representative of a group, in some cases a nation. The heraldic figure calls attention not to itself but to what it stands for. As regards the genre of drama, the traditional hero connotes grandeur, size, expansiveness, grandiloquence, and in tragedy the will to power and the Aristotelian hubris. Also pertinent here is Walcott’s “confession” in his 1970 essay “Meanings,” an essay that explains his ambition as a West Indian dramatist as it had evolved up to Dream on Monkey Mountain: 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. In Dream on Monkey Mountain I tried to fuse them, but I am still after a kind of play that is essential and spare the same way woodcuts are clean, that dances are clean, and that Japanese cinema is so compressed that gesture does the same thing as speech. (Hamner 48) We may read in this statement rough equations between the heroic, the literary, the classical, and the grandiloquent on the one hand, and the heraldic, the indigenous, and the essential on the other. The dualism acknowledged in this passage is cognate with that between Walcott’s yearning for a plain style in his poetry, and his instinct for metaphorical richness and elaboration. Whereas in this passage the expansive style is identified with the literary, and the spare style with gesture and physical presence, the polarities are also played out within the field of oral expression. Walcott’s plays as a whole move between these two styles, or seek to make them work together. He never altogether eschews the literary and classical. One must also note that volubility and rhetoric as such are not alien to Caribbean oral tradition, where they have a different “color” from that which they have in the English literary and oratorical traditions, sometimes acting as parodic subversions of them. Henri Christophe and Drums and Colours both invest (the latter in a pointedly qualified way) in the idea of the hero, the hero as great man. Christophe chronicles the Haitian Revolution from after the death of Toussaint L’Ouverture to the death of Christophe. The account centers on the two dominant men of that period: first on Dessalines, and then, after he has been assassinated at the behest of Christophe, on Christophe. As the title suggests, it is very much Christophe’s play. The focus on the outstanding individual, the heroic hero, so to speak, is set in the epigraph to Part l, a quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (act 3, scene 3): The cease of majesty Dies not alone but like a gulf doth draw What’s near it with it; it is a massy wheel Fix’d on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortis’d and adjoined, which, when it falls,

47

CALLALOO Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boist’rous ruin. We are on familiar Aristotelian–Shakespearean ground, where the time-honored action is the ascendancy and fall of the great individual, the tragic hero, who towers above ordinary men, and whose fall, by reason of his greatness, brings the whole world crashing down with him. The young Walcott, in his reaching after a theater that would speak to and for the West Indies, was excited to see in Christophe a Caribbean hero in the ClassicalElizabethan mould: “Full of precocious rage, I was drawn . . . to the Manichean conflicts of Haiti’s history. The parallels were there in my own island, but not the heroes. . . .” (Dream on 11). He speaks of “their tragic bulk . . . massive as a citadel at twilight.” “Their anguish was tragic . . . ;” “such heroes . . . had size, mania, the fire of great heretics” (Dream on 13). Nothing would have seemed amiss if Walcott had called this play a tragedy rather than a chronicle. “Those first heroes of the Haitian Revolution,” he writes, “to me, their tragedy lay in their blackness” (Dream on 12). He emphasizes that this is the central theme of Henri Christophe, and the play does advert to the race theme often enough, and it is imaged in the relationship between the black revolutionary leaders and the white Archbishop Brelle, who has a major part in the play. However, by and large, the race/color issue is treated as a given and invoked conveniently to explain motivation. It begins to take on a life of its own, a prickly vibrancy, only in the final confrontation between Brelle and Christophe. The engine of the play’s action is rather the sheer will to greatness of the “heroes,” and, as a consequence, the passion of each, Dessalines and Christophe, to be absolute ruler, and the machinations they practice to attain their ends. Christophe boasts, “I am proud, I have worked and grown / This country to its stature. . . .” (Trilogy 91); “I shall build chateaux” (Trilogy 74); “I will be a king, a king flows in me” (Trilogy 68). We are told that Christophe is a more complex person than Dessalines, that he has a conscience, and he professes, however fleetingly, a concern for the country. However, the energy of the portraiture is focused on, for example, his obsession with being made king, rather than president, and on his overweening desire to build monuments to his greatness, his Citadel and chateau. In this play, history is a mighty force, a great impersonal personality, a kind of metahero, with whom one can be on even terms if one is of like stature. For Christophe, history is his peer, his towering twin. His hubris is partly in his idea of his relationship to history: “I will make history, richer than all kings” (Trilogy 62); “It is I, who, history, gave them this vice to shout anarchy / Against the King” (Trilogy 101). The ambiguity afforded by the placing of the word history in this sentence underscores the nature of the presumed relationship. History may be read as either vocative (Christophe is addressing history) or in apposition to I (Christophe is history). The fascination with heroes will also mean a fascination with the grand style, in language, verse form, and movement. As Walcott admitted, his “first poems and plays expressed [a] yearning to be adopted, as the bastard longs for his father’s household. I saw myself legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe, of 48

CALLALOO Milton. . . .” (Dream on 31). The appeal to Walcott of the heroes of the Haitian Revolution also lay in the fact that they afforded him a Caribbean story that would lend itself to the mighty line. The grand style of Christophe satisfies this project, but with a difference. Although it will recall the blank verse of Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton, it is not blank verse, but free verse, with a recurring suggestion of iambic pentameter within a general dissolution of the iambic beat, and often a line that is longer than pentameter. The language, for all its grandeur, is appropriately modern, the heightening due partly to Walcott’s characteristic metaphorical energy, which owes something to Shakespeare. The play resonates with echoes of Shakespeare and Marlowe, whether in language or situation. For instance, Vastey’s fatal and evil trapping of Brelle and infecting of Christophe’s mind with the notion of Brelle’s treachery through the business of the planted letters recalls Iago’s manipulation of Othello and Desdemona. The speech in which Christophe expatiates on the lofty, wind-swept location of his Citadel (Trilogy 73) recalls the speech in King Lear in which Edgar evokes for the blind Gloucester the dangerously magnetic view from the cliff overlooking the beach. The Messenger’s speech reporting the assassination of Dessalines is infused with the bloody excesses of Tamburlaine. Creole, a mild form, and in prose, is used only in the scene with the murderers in ambush preparing to kill Dessalines, and that is just as Shakespeare would have done, dialect prose for “low” characters. Again, the Africanness of Dessalines and Christophe, over and above the mere fact that they are blacks, is hardly considered, and that only ironically, when Christophe, dying, is attended by a witch doctor. Even so, Christophe has no faith in gods of any kind, whether Christ or Damballa, but he asks that the witch doctor “try again . . . / The old herbs, the antique magic . . . ” (Trilogy 97). Whereas Christophe begins with the news of Toussaint’s death in exile, the Haitian segment of Drums ends with Dessalines and Christophe conspiring to betray Toussaint to Leclerc, the commander of the French forces. By shifting the focus from Dessalines and Christophe to Toussaint, Walcott goes beyond a youthful zest for the histrionic display of overweening egotistical ambition to consider a more complex, more humane, more reflective, and reasoning kind of leader. By using the Haitian Revolution as one of the four segments of his pageant-play, which was written and produced to mark the inauguration of the short-lived Federation of the West Indies, Walcott enhances the suggestion, incipient in Christophe, of the relevance of the Haitian experience to the idea and possibility of nationhood in the Caribbean. Spanning the history of the West Indies since the arrival of Christopher Columbus, Drums was another ready-made vehicle to accommodate “heroes.” It tells the story of “four heroes” (Trilogy 123): Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, Toussaint, and George William Gordon, each representing a different period in the history. The first two stand for imperialism and colonialism, the last two for resistance and revolt. But there is comparatively little heroics in Drums. For instance, in the Columbus segment, such heroics as emerge are no more than a nimbus of nostalgia exhaled by Columbus, now no longer “Admiral of ocean, and a tamer of tides” (Trilogy 145). Although Toussaint is identified in the prologue as one of the play’s four heroes, once again classical grand heroic is eschewed in what is shown. He is presented as a 49

CALLALOO good man who had the courage to do what necessity and his conscience demanded, and who, in doing so, proved himself a great leader. His compassion and evenhandedness are made much of. We first see him overcome by dismay on discovering the body of Anton, mulatto son of Calixte-Breda, on whose estate he, Toussaint, had been a coachman-slave. Outstanding in warcraft, Toussaint is nonetheless the man of peace, concerned not with his own power, but with the well-being of the people after the revolution. Against Dessalines’ vengeful bloodlust, he counsels: “Revenge is nothing. / Peace, the restoration of the burnt estates, the ultimate / Rebuilding of these towns war has destroyed, peace is harder” (Trilogy 241). The first scene of the Haitian segment shows us the privileged whites, the slaveowning class. They behave in such a way as unwittingly to evoke our sympathy for the revolutionary cause of the blacks even before we meet them, by showing what they (the blacks) are up against. The issue of race and color thus becomes, more immediately than in Christophe, part of the dynamic of the action. The setting is the mansion of Leclerc, the French General who has been sent by Napoleon to put down the rebellion. Present are Leclerc, General de Rouvray, whom he is replacing, Madame de Rouvray, Armand Calixte-Breda, the planter on whose estate Toussaint is slave and coachman, and Anton, Calixte-Breda’s illegitimate son, whom he passes off as his nephew. Leclerc’s wife, Pauline, Napoleon’s sister, will join the group later. Liveried black slaves, voiceless and as if invisible, stand in the background and wait on the whites. The latter’s casual dehumanizing of the blacks is nicely introduced. Calixte-Breda dismisses Anton’s caution that he should “never underrate the authority of the people” with “Slaves are not people, they are intelligent animals” (218). Leclerc sneers amusedly at “Generals who were slaves. . . . / You know, Napoleon calls them ‘gilded Africans’” (218); and Pauline intends to be witty and sophisticated when, having just been touring the slave compounds, she asks to be excused if she “reek[s] a little of the parfum d’Afrique” (221). In this group, Anton, neither quite insider nor outsider, functions as a voice that can speak for the oppressed blacks. He has just returned from Paris, full of the spirit and ideals of the French Revolution. This idealism is in turn given a dimension of passionate, embattled personal interest, being an early manifestation of that mulatto angst which was to become a Walcott topos. When Anton tells Pauline that his mother was one of Calixte-Breda’s house slaves, and that “He [Calixte-Breda] recognized her in darkness, in that republic / And that act in which complexions do not matter” (227), we hear the germ-sound of the idea that will develop, years later, into Shabine’s brilliant formulation which begins, “I met History once, but he ain’t recognise me. . . .” (Collected Poems 350). The recurrence of recognize deepens the resonance of the double meaning in each instance. Anton functions as a link between the presentation of the whites and the presentation of the blacks, biologically (by virtue of his mixed blood) and in terms of plot, and metaphor. Empathizing with the slaves, he describes for Pauline the horrible acts of cruelty that are done to them in public spectacle. At the same time, foreshadowing Makak’s bewitchment by the white moon-woman, he is smitten by Pauline, “White and lovely as the moon, and equally remote . . . ” (229). Angry, bitter, confused, Anton exits, insisting on returning alone to the Calixte-Breda estate. The next, brief scene 50

CALLALOO shows him walking through the cane fields, drunk. He is set upon by a group of rebellious slaves, and murdered for having the blood of his father in him. The representation of the spirit of violent, bloody revolt in this scene is developed at the beginning of the next scene, with a ritualistic celebration of revolt, led by Boukmann, who breaks the Christian cross as he invokes “serpent Damballa” (234) and exhorts his followers, “Kill everything white in Haiti today!” (235). Anticipation of Makak in his African dream scene! Boukmann and his followers then exit, leaving Anton’s corpse. Toussaint, at this time still Calixte-Breda’s coachman, enters and sees the corpse. He is overcome with anguish and the consciousness of his dilemma (“This poor boy hated nothing, nothing” [255]), but he also knows now that things have changed irrevocably and that his life must take on a new responsibility. Here, established in one quick stroke, is the dilemma of humanity that will distinguish Toussaint. The next scene takes place some time later, when the revolutionary forces of Toussaint, Christophe and Dessalines are gaining ascendancy, with Toussaint primus inter pares. When the scene opens, Dessalines is looking down on Les Cayes, as that city is being sacked by Toussaint’s troops. Dessalines gloats over the carnage, and at the fact that Toussaint has “scattered the forces of the mulatto Rigaud” (227). Christophe joins Dessalines, and later Toussaint. The very fact that we see them tired from battle, rain soaked and splattered with mud and gore, removes from them the ceremonial gloss they wore in Christophe. Although Christophe is not so elated as Dessalines by the bloodbath, and can say that “Revenge is tiring” (241), he is ready to begin plotting with Dessalines to betray Toussaint, whom Dessalines describes as “most power drunk” and having “monarchic aims” (240). This description fits Dessalines himself, and also Christophe, but does not accord with the Toussaint whom we hear in this scene—responsible and level headed, a man of action, but also a man of conscience and compassion. The scene builds to a climax when soldiers bring before Toussaint his former master, Calixte-Breda, whom they have found “hiding in the ruins” (243). This confrontation opens up a volatile range of emotions, deep historical wounds, and prejudice. It is a confrontation that will recur and be artistically refashioned in subsequent Walcott works, notably Pantomime. Dessalines, impatient of the long, private audience that Toussaint is allowing to this enemy, seizes his pistol to shoot Calixte-Breda. Toussaint takes the pistol from him, as if to take responsibility for killing Calixte-Breda himself. But he cannot bring himself to do it. When, on his command, in which he takes no pleasure, a sergeant takes Calixte-Breda outside to shoot him, Toussaint is weeping. To Dessalines, this is only a sign of weakness, and encourages him to resume his effort to persuade Christophe that they should deliver Toussaint into the hands of Leclerc. So the emphasis shifts from overweening personal ambition and boastful display of iron will. Toussaint’s stature is measured by the width and depth of his humanity. In this regard, the fact of his weeping, his painful understanding of the necessity demanded by “the times” (249), is to his credit. In Ti-Jean and His Brothers (written at much the same time as Drums), when, at the climax, Ti-Jean seems about to defeat the Devil, the latter pulls one of his devilish tricks and shows Ti-Jean a vision of his 51

CALLALOO mother dying. Ti-Jean weakens, but the animals encourage him to stand firm, to sing in praise of life: “Sing, Ti-Jean, sing! / Show him you could win! / Show him what a man is!” (Dream on 162). Ti-Jean sings a song of thanksgiving to God, and as he sings he weeps. By his tears, as much as by his courage in adversity, he shows “what a man is.” To the extent that he embodies the fullness and complexity of “what a man is,” Toussaint proves himself a hero. The de-emphasizing of heroics in Drums is enhanced by the Caribbean tone that Walcott gives to the play by framing it in a popular Caribbean performance mode. The prologue is given over to a Carnival band, led by Mano (a popular Trinidadian male nickname, but also a name suggesting “man,” quintessential and unadorned man), and including Pompey, a calypsonian, who, by virtue of his name, is a kind of parody of the Classical heroic tradition. The band sets about to ambush, playfully, a road march coming down the street, and to change the theme of the march to “War and Rebellion” (119). The idea is of conscious role playing: the episodes from history, from the stories of heroes, are to be reenacted by the common people of the Carnival. The performance strategy implies the appropriation of the grand historical narrative by the grassroots tradition. The Carnival figures return at the end to bring the play to a close. Curiously though, they hardly engage in any direct winding up of the preceding action and, indeed, make hardly any reference to it. The Carnival group virtually takes over the play for the last two scenes and the epilogue. The play ends in a style quite different from that in which the four heroes were represented. Pompey is an anti-hero, but when he “dies,” Mano’s prayer over the body refers to him as “one significant fragment of this earth, no hero / But Pompey . . . Corporal Pompey, the hotheaded shoemaker. / But Pompey was as good as any hero that pass in history” (187). The foregrounding of the common people is complete in The Haitian Earth. This play is Walcott’s most comprehensive theatrical account of the Revolution, and the primary point of view is that of the people. The chronicle begins even earlier than it had begun in Drums, showing some of the events leading up to the Revolution. These include the torture and execution of Ogé and Chavannes, the mulattos who had dared to seek “rights for the mulattos” (309) from the French Assembly, and scenes showing the different local milieux out of which the three warrior-heroes of the Revolution— Dessalines, Christophe, and Toussaint—emerged, and the bursting of the seed of revolution in them. Anton’s role changes somewhat in this account. He joins Rigaud’s mulatto army to fight the blacks, thereby representing the fact that the blacks were up against the mulattos as well as the whites. Documentary material also becomes part of the action. Leclerc reads to the captured Toussaint a letter of instructions from Napoleon. Later, an aide reads to Napoleon a letter sent to him by the imprisoned Toussaint. Various features of the composition of the play indicate a cinematic intention. The many brief scenes, some of which convey information by purely visual means, the quick cuts, time and space leaps, montage effects, stage directions that are really camera directions—these are all appropriate to a fluid representation of the varied, wide-ranging sweep of action. Space does not allow here for appreciation of how there is also a change in the style of the language to help convey the more stripped-down, 52

CALLALOO earthy, unadorned quality of this play in comparison to Drums and even more so to Christophe. The point would be conveniently illustrated by comparing the two versions of the one scene from Drums that is repeated in Earth, the scene in which General Toussaint confronts his former owner, Calixte-Breda. We may also note in passing that the African factor in the blacks is more evident in Earth than it was in Drums, and that this is not unrelated to the relative prominence of the folk factor in Earth, as in the chorus of peasant women and the singing by which they express themselves. The Haitian Earth is perhaps even less about the fortunes of the great men than it is about the common people, who do not appear as individual persons in the historical record. Pompey and Yette, fictional characters, are carried over (at least the names) from Drums and are now the true protagonists, perhaps even more so than Toussaint. Yette is now a mulatress of low social station, and Pompey a slave driver on the Calixte-Breda estate. The story of the vicissitudes of their romantic relationship, which represents the idea of harmony between blacks and mulattos, is interwoven with the chronicle of the historical figures, whose actions impact severely on the lives of the ordinary folk. The three “heroes” of the Revolution—Dessalines, Christophe, and Toussaint—still have their major roles, but they are now even more flesh and blood, more humanized than before, generally to their discredit in the case of Dessalines and Christophe, because what is represented, even more sharply than earlier, is their human weaknesses and maleficence, and to his credit in the case of Toussaint. The other two are granted their moments of grand self-assertion and heroism, as in Christophe’s eloquent, lyrical recollection of Dessalines in battle at D’Ennery: “Across the ridges, the soldiers saw your body / Half-welded to its horse, like a black centaur” (423). But Walcott’s presentation confirms the view that the first and greatest tragedy of the Revolution was the betrayal, banishment, and death of Toussaint, and his heroic stature is here configured in the extent to which he is a man with whom we can identify, and to which he meets his responsibilities as a man, especially those which require him to make hard, painful, even seemingly cruel decisions, in the interests of the discipline of his forces and the best interests, not of himself, but of Haiti. The tragedy is not of the individual great man, but of Haiti itself, “the Haitian earth.” Dessalines boasts, “I am the beginning, / And I am the end. Haiti is me” (426). The play persuades us of the common people’s prior claim, whispered by Pompey to Yette in a moment when the future seems bleak: “But you and I, we is Haiti, Yette” (386). Christophe’s final exit now is not that of the grand death speech, to a crescendo of drums, which concludes Christophe, but of his pathetic request to be helped into bed. In a final act of egotistic ill will, he had just ordered the execution of Yette, who had sought to place a curse on him for corrupting the Revolution. Right after Christophe’s order, the play ends on a countervailing note, with Pompey, simple but strong, burying Yette’s body and pronouncing his uplifting benediction on her. Pompey’s final entrance, carrying Yette’s body, is to a single, stark drumbeat. The general paring down of things, of the reaching after heroics and grandiloquence, is reflected in the relatively down-to-earth style of the play. Against Christophe’s dying boast to Pompey—“When men like you / Are tired, they will look up into the clouds / And see it [his Citadel], and take strength; the clouds themselves / Will have to look up to see it” (430)—Pompey replies: 53

CALLALOO It had one talk then, I remember, under the old coachman [Toussaint], and that talk was not who was king but who would make each man a man, each man a king himself; but all that change. We see them turn and climb and burn and fall down like stars that tired, and cut my hand, my head, my tongue out if you want, Your Majesty, but my life is one long night. My country and your kingdom, Majesty. One long, long night. Is kings who do that. (431) In that statement, which affirms Pompey’s manhood, is the gravamen of the play and the culmination of the graph of its action. “My life is one long night”—Pompey speaks for Haiti. He articulates the bleak wisdom toward which Walcott’s long artistic engagement with the Haitian Revolution has worked. This wisdom already existed in Vastey’s epigrammatic reflection in Christophe, “We were a tragedy of success” (103), but now it is fully earned. It is also a mark of Walcott’s widened vision that The Haitian Earth ends holding up to our commendation, not a man, not Toussaint or Pompey, but a woman. The final speech is Pompey’s tribute to Yette as he digs her grave: “You will be a country woman with a basket / Walking down a red road in the high mountains” (454). As Makak lives in the dream of his people, as Ti-Jean is the man in the moon. An icon. Heraldic woman.

NOTES 1. This idea became a center-piece of Patrick Anthony’s Ph.D. thesis “Symbol, Myth, and Ritual in Selected Plays of Derek Walcott.” 2. The manuscript is housed in the West Indies Collection of the Library, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

WORKS CITED Anthony, Patrick. “Symbol, Myth, and Ritual in Selected Plays of Derek Walcott.” Diss. University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, 2000. Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision: “Another Life.” London: Longman, 1978. Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo. 1949. Césaire, Aimé. La Tragédie du roi Christophe. 1970. Glissant, Edouard. Monsieur Toussaint. 1961. Hamner, Robert. Ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Boulder & London: Lynne Rienner, 1997. James. C. L. R. Black Jacobins. 1938. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Walcott, Derek. “Another Life.” Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. ———. Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. ———. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. ———. Drums and Colours. 1961. ———. The Haitian Earth. ———. The Haitian Trilogy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. ———. Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes. 1950. ———. “The Royal Palms.” Negro Verse. Ed. Anselm Hollo. London: Vista Books, 1964.

54

CALLALOO

ENTER TIRESIAS

by Seamus Heaney

He saw all with his ears. for Derek Enter TIRESIAS, blind, led by A BOY TIRESIAS My lord, my countrymen, I know you’re there. We have been going the roads, the pair of us, Going by the one same pair of eyes. The man that’s blinded always needs a guide. CREON Tiresias, you venerable man: What’s the news you have for me this time? TIRESIAS News that you would be as well to heed. CREON When did I not, prophetic father, heed you? TIRESIAS And isn’t that why your ship has stayed on course? CREON You kept me right. I know it. In my bones. TIRESIAS Then know this: where you are standing now Is a cliff edge, and there’s cold wind blowing.

from THE BURIAL AT THEBES, a version of Sophocles’ ANTIGONE

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 55–59

55

CALLALOO CREON Why do you always put that shiver through me?

TIRESIAS Because I have the power to see and warn. I know things once I sit in that stone chair And the birds begin to skirl above my head. But in all my years as augur, I never heard Screaming the like of what I heard this day. It had no meaning to it. I knew by the whirl of wings And the rips and spits of blood the birds were mad. I was afraid, so once the blaze was lit On the altar stone I brought my offerings But the fire had no effect. It wouldn’t take And none of the bits would burn. Slime, Slime was what I got instead of flame. Matter oozing out from near the bone. The fat stayed raw and wept into the ash. Everywhere there was this spattered gall From the burst gall bladder. Slurry, smoke and dirt . . . Some deep fault caused that. The boy here saw it And I rely on him as you on me . . . There was no sign to be read. The rite had failed. Because of you, Creon. You and your headstrongness. That body lying out there decomposing Is where the contagion starts. The dogs and birds Are at it day and night, spreading reek and rot On every altar stone and temple step, and the gods Are revolted. That’s why we have this plague, This vile pollution. That’s why my birds in flight Are meaningless. They’re feeding on his flesh. Consider well, my son. All men make mistakes. But mistakes don’t have to be forever, They can be admitted and atoned for. It’s the overbearing man who is to blame. Pull back. Yield to the dead. Don’t stab a ghost. What can you win when you only wound a corpse? I have your good at heart, and have good advice. The easiest thing for you would be to take it. 56

CALLALOO CREON Why am I standing out here like a target? Why is every arrow aimed at me? You, Tiresias, You and your whole fortune-telling tribe Have bled me white. But not any more. Whoever wants can cross your palm with silver But they still won’t get that body under ground. None of your pollution talk scares me. Not if Zeus himself were to send his eagle To scavenge on that flesh and shit it down, Not even that would put me back on my word. Nothing done on earth can defile the gods. But even the wisest on the earth, old man, Corrupts himself the minute he takes bribes And starts delivering fake truths on demand. TIRESIAS This is bad. Does nobody realize— CREON Does nobody realize what? TIRESIAS That the greatest boon Is trustworthy advice. CREON And witlessness Has to be the greatest threat. TIRESIAS As you should know. It is your problem, Creon. CREON I don’t want to trade insults with a prophet. TIRESIAS It’s an insult to imply I am a fake. CREON You seers are all the same. You have your price. TIRESIAS Rulers too have a name for being corrupt.

57

CALLALOO CREON You realize you are talking to your king? TIRESIAS A king my words once helped to save this city. CREON Your second sight has been well warped since then. TIRESIAS My second sight scares me and should scare you. CREON Scare me then, but don’t expect a bribe. TIRESIAS Talk of bribes won’t shield you from the truth. CREON The decisions that I take aren’t up for sale. TIRESIAS Then listen, Creon, and listen carefully. The sun won’t ride his chariot round the sky Very much longer before flesh of your flesh Answers for your enactments, corpse for corpse. This is what you’ll get for thrusting down A daughter of the sunlight to the shades. You have buried her alive, and among the living You have forbidden the burial of one dead, One who belongs by right to the gods below. You have violated their prerogatives. No earthly power, no god in upper air Exerts authority over the dead. Henceforth, therefore, there lie in wait for you The inexorable ones, the furies who destroy. Then tell me, when the lamentation starts, When woman-wail and man-howl rake your walls, Tell me I’ve been bribed. And tell me it again When enemy cities rise to avenge each corpse You left dishonoured on the battlefield. They turned to filth, remember, and the crows Defiled themselves in the filth and would fly back To foul each city with droppings of its dead.

58

CALLALOO I am not the target. I am the archer. My shafts are tipped with truth and they stick deep. Come boy, take me home. Let him affront Somebody younger now, and learn to control His tongue, and see things in truer light. Exit TIRESIAS and BOY

59

CALLALOO

THROUGH LOINS AND COINS Derek Walcott’s Weaving of the West Indian Federation1

by Joe Kraus

Roughly a third of the way through Derek Walcott’s Drums and Colours, Paco, the half-West Indian native, half-Spaniard, takes revenge on the Europeans who have ravaged his home islands. Encountering the young Walter Raleigh and his cousin Humphrey Gilbert, Paco tells them the legend of the golden city that will drive the two Englishmen to the New World and their eventual deaths. Scratching the name “El Dorado” in the sand and setting up a tiny log as part of what starts to be a map of the New World, he says: This El Dorado is a golden country, I showed it once to an officer called Quadrado. Oh I’ve tossed like an old cork on the seas of the world. Seen whales and marvels in my old age, but this, This bewilders belief. This bit of log, mates, Tells of a golden city in the heart of Guiana, And these two words, they mean the gilded king. But it’ll take another coin to unlock my tongue. (38) Paco knows better. He knows as he tells the two boys about the city of gold that he is referring to nothing more than a legend. The map that Paco sketches in the sand refers to something that does not exist. To put it another way, the log in the map signifies a place that isn’t there. “El Dorado” and the king are signifiers without a signified. There is a grim irony to Paco’s revenge, however. He has learned that he can be a successful beggar by selling the dream of El Dorado or other New World fictions. He has learned at the same time, though, that “whales and marvels really do exist.” As he tells Raleigh, “I was like you my boy, before I saw the great legend / That Quadrado called Europe” (38). That is, even if the signifiers that drove him from the islands to Europe—most importantly gold, the emblem of a European father who has murdered the rest of his family—did not represent what he thought they did, they nonetheless have taken him to a world he could not have imagined. He dies in squalor, but as a hybrid Euro-Arawak believing in his old gods as he looks westward from an English shore, he dies with a degree of self-reconciliation that has evaded him since his birth. As a result of his story, Raleigh and Gilbert both become New World explorers. Gilbert dies at sea during his travels, and Raleigh, driven mad by his dreams of El Dorado, breaks peace with the Spanish, loses his son in a pointless raid, and is

60

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 60–74

CALLALOO executed in England for his pains. And yet, even if the dream of El Dorado has proven false, it has taken the two explorers to worlds they could not have imagined. Their pursuit of the legend has put them in the forefront of a great historical transformation. As Berrio puts it, “you are English, your star in the ascendant” (46). Raleigh’s life, though ending in ignominy and regret, winds up giving birth to a new possibility of New World vision, colonialism and, eventually, nationalism. Walcott makes that idea explicit when he has the chorus observe after Raleigh’s execution, “The blood that jets from Raleigh’s severed head / Lopped like a rose when England’s strength was green” (57). Paco may have told his story in a grand desire for revenge and a petty hope for spare change, but his invocation of the mythical El Dorado has driven Raleigh to his destiny and helped to play out the history of the West Indies. In a broader sense, Drums and Colours, like Paco’s story, is a play about a thing that does not exist. It was commissioned by a department in the proto-governmental apparatus that would become the government of the West Indian Federation to serve, in Noel Vaz’s term from the introduction to the play, as an “epic” (2) for the Federation. At the time Walcott was writing it—in New York City, of all places—the Federation had not yet been formally established. More significantly, even the idea of the Federation barely existed outside of the people who were working directly to bring it into being. With much of the Caribbean public perceiving federalism as “advice” from colonial empires, the idea of the Federation had limited popular support in the islands themselves. The residents of the separate islands, between which travel remained perilous until the time of the airplane, felt little kinship. Even the intellectuals of the Caribbean were divided in their feelings about federation.2 The government that emerged from such dissension and doubt was, in the words of one historian, “the weakest federal body in Modern times” (Gooding 59). The nationalist theoretician Hugh Seton-Watson argues for a careful distinction between states and nations. He writes, “A state is a legal and political organization, with the power to require obedience and loyalty from its citizens. A nation is a community of people, whose members are bound together by a sense of solidarity, a common culture, a national consciousness” (1). If we set aside the question of whether the West Indian Federation had powers sufficient even to be considered a state, we are still left to recognize that the Federation itself was not a nation. From Trinidad to Jamaica through Dominica and St. Lucia, the chain of islands included some places that spoke French Creole, Spanish Creole, and English Creole; some of the distinct communities were destitute and others rich in oil reserves; some were relatively populous and some had barely the population of a small American city. With different literary traditions, different histories, and little historical interaction, the islands of the Federation could not be considered a nation in Seton-Watson’s (or, for that matter, virtually anyone’s) definition. That is, the ultimate signified for Walcott’s play is the imaginary nation occupying the area of the emerging state of the West Indian Federation. Walcott demonstrates the emptiness of his play as signifier at the very end when the executed Pompey suddenly stands up, alive, in the middle of his own funeral. Just before he rises, Ram mourns him by calling out, “O I can’t talk enough to tell you, but for this Pompey dead, stupid as he did seem, I wish I could talk. Oh where the fellar 61

CALLALOO with the language to explain this to man” (99). With words failing him to describe Pompey’s death—a death that is entirely without meaning if he turns out to have died for a nation that does not exist—he looks to someone else’s language to make sense of it all. Yette’s response is a shocking one, considering the many violent deaths we have seen throughout the course of the play. She says, “All you is taking this too serious, is only a play. / Pompey boy, get off the ground, before you catch cold” (99). Soon after she says so, Pompey does indeed rise. The spell of the drama is broken. The figures of stage need not signify all the killing and dying that has taken place. We are presented with the possibility that they refer to nothing in the same way that the Federation itself, as it is invoked in the play, refers to something that does not yet exist.3 If the West Indian Federation is imaginary as Walcott writes his epic in honor of it, however, it is nonetheless more real than El Dorado. Or, to be more technical, it is a signifier for which a signified might be brought into being. By writing a history of the West Indies as a full community, in contrast to a history he might have written of Barbados, Haiti, or Jamaica, he is in part involved in forging the West Indies into a nation. Such a project requires, outside the political sphere, implanting the idea of nationhood in the citizens of the federated islands. Although Berrio warns of the El Dorado myth that “pages and pages part before you . . . But El Dorado has no meaning,” Walcott himself must reverse the process. The pages and pages of his play must help to turn something that has no meaning into something that is indeed real.4 In the rest of this essay, I undertake a twofold study of Drums and Colours. First, I consider the project as a whole in light of theories of nationalism and imagined communities. Second, I look at the ways in which the play itself manipulates themes of parenting and exchange of wealth—the “loins and coins” of my own title—as well as the extended metaphor of weaving in an effort to conjure the new nation of the West Indian Federation. “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist,” writes Ernest Gellner. He then qualifies his idea, “but it does need some pre-existing differentiating marks to work on” (168). That is, the idea of the nation must, somehow, precede the fact of the nation. Such a formulation would seem to be promising for the project behind Drums and Colours. It would seem to indicate that Walcott’s fusion of different histories into one federated history could indeed be a precursor to nationhood. Seton-Watson seems to agree when he writes, “All that I can find to say is that a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they have formed one” (5). That is, if all that is wanted to form a nation is an idea and the people to accept it, then there would seem to be nothing preventing the formation of the West Indian nation. The how of nation formation is a good deal more complicated, however. Gellner hints at that complexity when he writes, “In general, both an intelligentsia and a proletariat is required for an effective national movement” (169). As I have mentioned, the West Indian Federation movement was primarily the project of an educated elite, a group that certainly included Walcott himself. Benedict Anderson describes the fundamentally different ways in which communities in different eras 62

CALLALOO and with different degrees of social and industrial organization have developed into nations. Describing a succession of waves in which nations established themselves, starting with proto-nationalistic feelings in Renaissance Europe through the establishment in the early nineteenth century of the United States and most of the Western European nations, through the assertions of nationalism around old language groupings like Ukrainian or Serbian, he concludes with a consideration of the “last wave” of nation formation that took place in former colonies throughout Africa and East Asia. Central to that phase of nationalism, he insists, is the fact that the educated elite came to a sense of nationalism because they found themselves needed throughout the colony where they encountered other educated individuals with the same thwarted hopes for advancement overseas. As Anderson puts it, “Out of this pattern came that subtle, half-concealed transformation, step by step, of the colonial-state into the nation-state, a transformation made possible not only by a solid continuity of personnel, but by the established skein of journeys through which each state was experienced by its functionaries” (105). The journeys to which he refers are within the confines of the colonial administrative area, areas that in parts of the world would become the nations of Mali, Vietnam, and the Congo. The West Indies, with sporadic and ineffective exceptions, had no such history. They were islands with discrete administrations. Although they otherwise fit the model for the last wave of nation formation, they lacked a central, historical element.5 Without a proletarian push for nationalism, and without a history of common journeys throughout the island chain to forge the idea of nationhood within the intelligentsia, the proposed West Indian Federation faced profound challenges. It called for creating an idea that barely existed, where other ideas of last-wave nationalism formed more spontaneously out of the colonial past. Walcott himself demonstrates that peculiar tension in a brief essay he wrote in 1970 to describe the ease with which he was able to write Ti-Jean and his Brothers, a play he wrote during a fiveday hiatus he took from the more tortured work on Drums and Colours. He writes: The epic history was written under commission to intense pressure, which is another good day of working if you are a professional playwright, but the small geyser of joy which was “Ti-Jean and his Brothers” is an experience which I remember with amazement and delight, without making any claims for its quality, and the reason why I record this is that it ejects, like all springs, a clear and natural truth: it was the least forced, the most spontaneous, the least laboured of my plays so far, both to rhythm and concept, it was the most West Indian thing I had done and it was created under the pressure of sudden loneliness and exile. (“Derek’s Most West Indian Play” 7) It seems significant, for the context of a look at the project behind Drums and Colours, that the work of Ti-Jean came so readily to Walcott. If Ti-Jean was the easiest play for Walcott to write, we cannot assume that Drums and Colours was the most difficult, but we can see that it took noticeably greater effort. Where Ti-Jean was a celebration of St. Lucian folklore and folk rhythm, Drums and Colours was an evocation of something 63

CALLALOO that did not truly exist; it was an artificial synthesis of historical strands. Writing TiJean was a “geyser of joy” for Walcott, whereas Drums and Colours became merely “a good day of working.” Most telling, though, is Walcott’s claim at the end of his remarkably long sentence, that Ti-Jean was the “most West Indian thing I had done.” We might assume that it was the most St. Lucian thing he had ever done, but he distinctly uses the label “West Indian.” He does not acknowledge the irony, but we are free to do so. The surest way he finds of evoking a spirit of West Indianism is not the great fusion of separate island histories that he undertakes in Drums and Colours, but rather the celebration of a tiny, parochial folklore. Such an idea, if Walcott actually held it in 1957, would surely have augured poorly for the West Indian Federation as well as Drums and Colours. In his essay, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson argues that “All third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as . . . national allegories” (69). That is, he argues, every text produced by a third-world writer should be seen as centrally concerned with the impoverished condition of the writer’s third-world homeland visà-vis the developed first world. Further, the critic should read such texts as allegories of the postcolonial condition. Because allegory generally presumes (or is demonstrated by) establishing correlations between what the text depicts and what we know of history, there seems no difficulty in applying Jameson’s theory to Drums and Colours. Historical figures like Columbus, Raleigh, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dessalines, and George William Gordon signify their historical counterparts. Some fictional figures like Quadrado and Bartolome signify historical types, if not specific historical figures. Other characters, like Paco, Anton, Mano, Pompey, Calico, and many others, represent different permutations of West Indians. The stage itself signifies Jamaica, Haiti, Barbados, England, Spain, or the decks of assorted ships. And yet, there remains the unsettling hole at the center of the allegory: the Federation itself signifies a thing that has not yet come into being. In a stinging retort to Jameson’s argument, Aijaz Ahmad points out that Jameson determines how he will see and what he will find in the literature he examines at the very moment that he labels it “third world.” By approaching it as the product of the oppressed, Ahmad argues, Jameson confines it to certain, limited possible meanings for himself as a first-world reader. Ahmad writes: I have said already that if one believes in the Three Worlds Theory, hence in a “third world” defined exclusively in terms of “the experience of colonialism and imperialism,” then the primary ideological formation available to a leftwing intellectual shall be that of nationalism; it will then be possible to assert, surely with very considerable exaggeration but nonetheless, that “all third-world texts are necessarily . . . national allegories.” (8) In other words, the first-world vantage that Jameson acknowledges is necessarily limited.6 As Edward Said argues throughout Orientalism, the idea of Jameson’s third world is more a construction of the first world than it is truly representative of the 64

CALLALOO third. Ahmad, himself a Pakistani poet and critic, challenges the very notion of three worlds and, in a nice move, asks how we should ultimately consider Jameson, a firstworld resident with second-world (Marxist) political inclinations and third-world sympathies. Although Walcott is unquestionably a product of the West Indies, I think it is worth considering that he began writing Drums and Colours while he was on his first visit to New York (“Derek’s Most West Indian Play” 7). He wrote at least a portion of the play during the first extended time in his life that he had a vantage on the West Indies from outside them. Although I do not at all want to imply that he wrote the play with a firstworld perspective, I would like to consider the play for a moment in light of Ahmad’s corrective to Jameson. That is, as soon as an intellectual takes a view of the third world in which one presumes the business of seeking colonial self-determination as paramount, one limits his or her capacities to see other dramas within the colonial setting. Drums and Colours is, finally, a look at the West Indian Federation from outside itself, from the vantage of a well-educated artist–poet–playwright. It is necessarily a look from outside the Federation; the Federation does not yet exist. The vantage Walcott has on the not-yet-existent Federation both during his New York stay and the writing he did on the play in the West Indies proper limits the range of concerns he can include. That is, the play is a national allegory, but not for the reasons Jameson argues. It had to be a national allegory because there was no vantage on it possible for Walcott but the privileged one of the educated outsider. With such a theoretical context, the situation of the play seems fairly well circumscribed, but Walcott nonetheless finds ways to examine the nature and history of the nation he seeks to call into being. To that end, he uses two principle methods: he samples historical incidents from across the West Indies, and he threads stories together from the coming of Columbus to the dawn of the new Federation. The first of those methods is apparent simply from the span of locations and times he depicts. With scenes set during six or seven generations of West Indian history, and in locations representing much of the area of the islands as well as the ships and countries responsible for colonialism, the range of times and locations represents all of the recorded history of the area. Moreover, this range provides Walcott opportunity to include characters from the many different strains that came to inhabit the island in the wake of the near extinction of the native tribes. The second method Walcott uses in writing the play is considerably more complicated. As the play’s producer, Noel Vaz, writes: Should the piece be a history lesson told in a series of tableaux with commentary—a pageant, in fact, colorful and shifting, but at best a facile invention with real significance? Or might it be conceived as a dramatic text with a linked sequence, a saga told by a poet with concern and insight? After reading scripts by a Trinidadian and two Jamaican authors, we soon realized that to stage scores of little disconnected scenarios, fodder for a dozen possible films, would be unsatisfactory and well-nigh impossible. Finally, in August 1957, the Extra-mural Department commissioned Derek Walcott, poet

65

CALLALOO and playwright, to write the “Epic” as it was subsequently called. (Drums and Colours 1) That is, to make the play an epic as opposed to a series of discrete playlets, Walcott would need to bring to the project a poetic sensibility capable of synthesizing his many different sources. Note the parallel in Vaz’s description of the two alternatives for constructing the play to the two alternatives confronting the West Indians themselves: They could either remain discrete islands or could make the more difficult effort to come together as a united federation. To write a play that would serve as an epic for peoples who barely recognized themselves as a community, Walcott would have to weave a tapestry out of the strands of history the different islands offered up.7 One image that serves to tie the whole play together is the very image of weaving itself. In an early scene, Columbus in chains is left to talk alone with Paco, the walking sign of the New-World natives his voyages have doomed to corruption and extinction. He tells Paco: I was a weaver’s son, strange how we start. While I worked patiently at my father’s shuttle, I could not guess the web of destinations, That I would weave within the minds of men. (16) Columbus’s metaphor is apt not simply for the project of the play, but also for describing the nature of the West Indies as a place of dreams, death, and, eventually, freedom for countless explorers, refugees, and slaves. His “web of destinations” is a pattern that subsequent generations follow as they choose to come to the Caribbean or are taken there in the holds of slave ships. The Jew continues the metaphor after he confronts the prejudice of Garcia and the slave brokers in booking passage for the New World. In his prayer he says, “I embark across the whalethreshed water, / Because my days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle / And are spent without hope” (24). In unwittingly announcing a connection to Columbus, the Jew demonstrates his own part in the warp and woof of the history Columbus’s voyages of exploration first set in motion. It is no coincidence, of course, that the Jew is expelled from Spain at the same time as Ferdinand and Isabella are bankrolling such voyages. The consolidation of power manifest in the Spanish Inquisition resulted in a centralized government with the wealth and ambition to expand its trade opportunities with the Far East. The weaving image emerges again late in the play when Yette finds herself thrown out of the planter’s house. She turns to him, calling out, “You and your selfrighteousness, I going tell them about you, mister! They should call you Calico, you offcolour planter, you!” (79). Calico is a coarse fabric that has been bleached to appear whiter than it really is. With the result, Yette implies that the planter has some African blood in him, that he is woven of threads he will not acknowledge. Following on the identical theme, there is a character named Calico who is active in the congruent

66

CALLALOO actions of the revolutions of 1833 Jamaica and the framing scenes from the founding of the Federation. In each case, the character represents a racial hybrid made possible by the exchanges of population from Europe and Africa with the New World. Each individual Calico, and by extension each separate West Indian, has been woven on the loom that Columbus erected and set the pattern for. Alongside the weaving motif are the more dramatic and related themes of the exchange of money and the uncertainty of paternity. Both themes serve as clear links from one scene to another and from one era of the action to the next. More clearly than any other aspect of the play, the story of the coin Quadrado gives to Paco and the many stories of the miscegenation and mixed race adoptions of the different characters in the play accomplish the weaving together of a new, unprecedented West Indian identity. Quadrado dominates the first scene of the play as Paco’s protector in the face of the boy’s humiliation and eventual assault by Garcia and Bartolome. He emerges as an officer of some vague importance whose career is on the decline now that Columbus has been dishonored. He barks commands to the various crew members but, although they obey him, it seems nonetheless that he stands for an order that will not hold. As Garcia sneers to Paco when Quadrado is off stage, “There is thy officer meditating on a biscuit. / Dids’t thou not study the spectacle of the admiral?” (8). Quadrado’s authority seems already to be fading even as his ship edges from the New World of his fortune back to the Spain of his birth and coming death. It is in that context that he befriends Paco and gives him the gold coin, advising him that he will need gold to survive in Europe. Next to Garcia and Bartolome, he appears an enlightened conquistador, a civilized man doing what little he can to stop the genocide of the native peoples. But his past betrays him. When Paco runs to his arms to escape Garcia’s torment, Garcia calls out: Before the affliction of his conscience, this one Spent all his energies subjugating Indians, Some by torture, some by terror, some in the mines. He did some service for the Tainos too, Quadrado, You were not called that then, were you, teniente? (19) That is, Quadrado turns out to have been among the cruelest of the conquerors, committing atrocities and running the mines with ruthless efficiency. Having held responsibilities in the land of the Tainos, the tribe from which Paco’s mother came, he may personally have been responsible for the deaths of Paco’s brothers, who, he tells Quadrado elsewhere, were killed by the dogs for refusing to work. Suddenly, the gold he has given Paco no longer seems simple charity. When Paco tries to give it back, Quadrado says: I was called the butcher, but I resign that office. Others will follow who will learn evil better, These gestures of affection which I attempt, . . . I bear because I sought a change of heart 67

CALLALOO . . . I gave the coin Because I felt I owed thee some affection, It may be too late. (19)

That is, he gives the gold as a form of expiation and confession, but in neither instance does it represent what he says he intends with it. Insomuch as it is a confession to Paco of the evil he has done the West Indian natives, it fails because he does not confess anything to Paco until the sailors make him. As expiation it fails because, as he acknowledges, “It may be too late.” It is too late for Quadrado to undo the evil he has perpetrated or too late to reverse the pattern of evil he has helped to establish. Others will perpetuate the cruelty and genocide even as he himself is returning to Spain. Paco’s family has been slaughtered, and all he has from the exchange is a tiny bit of gold. Commenting on that exchange in a scene set a generation later, Berrio, the Spanish administrator of the region, tells Raleigh that the days of plunder are passing: As Governor, I pursued my Catholic precepts Brought here by our first admiral and Las Casas That when men take away out of a country They must restore by something else. Our mines are finishing and the more profitable pursuits Of growing cities, establishing Christian culture, Is now the general concern. . . . (46) What the Spanish have taken out of the West Indies is the gold. Although Berrio suggests that what they restore is religion and civilization, we have good reason to doubt him. Paco earlier describes Quadrado’s advice to look after his gold piece as a “catechism” (14) and, at the play’s end, there is such a polyglot mass of religions on the island that Pompey’s friends cannot decide on what religious rites to follow during the funeral. The Spanish have certainly failed in making the islands a bastion of the Catholic faith. What then do the Spanish restore to the West Indies? I suggest it is a sense of—to borrow from Gertrude Stein—“there-ness.”8 It is the Spanish who name the islands and who, along Columbus’s pattern, bring the different slaves and immigrants who eventually melt together into the modern West Indian. They connect the Caribbean to the cultures of Europe and Africa that will come to be as much a part of the West Indies as the native cultures. Immediately after scratching the sand with his map of El Dorado for the young Raleigh and Gilbert, Paco sketches another map for them. As he draws, he says: . . . Well this here’s the whale’s bath, The great Atlantic, where a city drowned, Here’s a dead wealth of yellow weed, Sargasso, And these moss covered pebbles at my old boots, 68

CALLALOO These are the emeralds which Columbus christened Salvador, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Innumerable islands, then the Isle of Trinity, And there, among the tangles of this seaweed, Where I put down a gold coin in its tangle, There is the city of Manoa, El Dorado. (39) This map, with the exception of El Dorado, is one with signifieds existing for its signifiers. There is an Atlantic Ocean, and there are islands of the sort Paco describes. The islands are emeralds when Columbus arrives; they take on a new value within the commercial system that he represents and become more than simply the land on which people live and die. They become sources of wealth and sites for a brand new kind of people. In the same way that Paco recognized the gold piece by saying, “It is called money, my office, / We did not call it that when in the ground” (11), Columbus’ naming and exploiting of the islands transforms them into something unprecedented. If there is an exchange operating in the Spanish taking the gold away, then what they return are signifiers for the previously nameless and unrepresented islands.9 Columbus and the Spaniards do not so much Christianize the West Indies as they christen them. We are left still with the final line of Paco’s second verbal map. The piece of gold he puts in the seaweed stands for El Dorado, which does not exist.10 The piece of gold, therefore, while firing countless dreams through its potential referents, is another signifier without a signified. As Quadrado tells Paco and then Raleigh repeats verbatim to Keymis, “gold outlasts the wearer” (12, 50). That is, gold may signify many things, but it is always inconstant. We are left with the irony that what the Spaniards take away signifies nothing (or signifies an any-thing that renders it without any consistent meaning), while what they leave in exchange are the signifiers that make possible a new world. Because Paco dies immediately after showing the boys the map, the gold coin he used to signify El Dorado passes on to Raleigh. From Raleigh the coin goes to Jeremy Ford, the carpenter killed in the same attack during which Raleigh’s son dies. Calico turns out at the play’s end to be the great-grandson of Ford (87) and, having inherited the coin, he passes it on to Ram. Yette winds up with the coin, or one just like it, soon after. Although the particulars of its transmission grow vague, the coin provides a concrete link between all the different generations of the play. The gold that outlasts the wearer, the signifier that signifies constantly different things, is a thread running throughout Columbus’s pattern for the New World. When Yette says of the coin, “It’s been worn and rubbed and abused, worn shiny / Like some of the good women of the world. Make a good chain, though” (97), we are a considerable distance from the belated affection behind Quadrado’s initial impulse to give it to Paco. She sees women in it; Paco saw his dead brothers, and Raleigh saw a bewilderment of riches. The gold remains in the Indies, belonging at last to Yette, but as the Federation dawns, the coin’s power to awaken hunger in its owner dissipates. As Yette says, “Mano this is only a symbol. It is not evil in itself. And it have good uses if power won’t abuse it” (99). Yette holds it as much for the sake of history as for its purchasing power. She 69

CALLALOO looks for neither revenge nor conquest in it. The gold is safe in her hands, back in the transformed islands it originally came from and where she is content to let it signify nothing but itself. Even as the gold passes from hand to hand, there is the parallel theme of who will father (the play consists almost entirely of men) the generations that become the West Indians. It is perhaps the central drama of the play; the characters who survive one scene pass on their racial characteristics and their cultural wisdom to subsequent generations. It is a drama whose end we see at the very beginning of the play; we know from the framing action that Mano, Pompey, Yette, Ram, and Calico are the modern West Indians. Nevertheless, those people are the design on the tapestry that Columbus has set the pattern for. They are the West Indian Federation in its most fully realized fashion. Inasmuch as Drums and Colours is an epic of the Federation, the people themselves are the destination at the end of the epic journey. Having given Paco the coin, Quadrado tells him, “Think of me not as your officer, but as your father” (12). In a related transaction, the Jew buys the slave boy to save him from the broker and says, “I take care of thee, as my own son, / For we are outcasts together in one sorrow” (35). In each case, gold determines a kind of paternity. Men without children acquire sons who will carry some piece of them forward. The piece that Paco carries, however, is the gold coin, the signifier of nothing. Even though Paco comes from the aboriginal tribes of the island, he dies on the shores of England, and his progeny are not represented in the modern West Indies. The genocide set in motion by Columbus and Quadrado is complete by the play’s end. Paco’s line continues as nothing but a worn piece of gold. In contrast, the slave boy turns out to be the direct ancestor of Mano, the leader of the Jamaican revolution and chief spokesman at the dawn of the Federation. Although the Jew purchases the right of fatherhood of the boy, he is actually the third father the boy knows in the short space of the Middle Passage voyage. The boy’s father is the Ashanti King, Mano. At the dawn of the Middle Passage scene, the king is barely alive. Having been defeated in a war with the Ibo, he finds himself and his family sold into slavery by his enemies. Told to dance by the sadistic Garcia, now captain of his own slave ship, he stumbles and cannot lift himself. He dies aboard the ship without saying a single word. The second putative father for the slave boy is Garcia, who takes the boy from the dead king and demonstrates his intention to raise him, if not as a son, at least as an investment. Garcia has no love for the boy, but he recognizes his responsibility as a slave trader to see that the boy lives long enough to make it to the New World markets. By the end of the play, we see that Mano turns out to be the great-great-grandson of the slave boy (86). Furthermore, his full name is Emmanuel Mano, a hybrid that represents two of his respective forebears. From his ancestor, the king, he takes Mano, an African name that strikes some of the other West Indians as an odd throwback. Calico says, “Mano, Mano, what a name for a general. Why it could be anybody.” And Pompey echoes him, “How a man could have a name so anyhow, Mano? Mano whom, Mano what?” (84). Nevertheless, “Mano” demonstrates a kinship with the imported African slaves; it is a link that signifies flesh and blood, a link that signifies life itself. At the same time, Emmanuel, the Hebrew word for “God is with us,” demonstrates a 70

CALLALOO different kind of descent from the Jew. It shows that he is descended as well from the man who acquired his ancestor with gold. Like the West Indies in relation to the Spanish, the Jew and the boy have parted with gold in exchange for identity. Emmanuel Mano is a hybrid that should have been impossible. The “outcasts together in one sorrow” have indeed merged into one person in the modern West Indies. Like the slave boy, Anton Calixte is an example of someone with multiple possible fathers. Calixte, the wealthy white planter, loves and supports Anton but lives by the fiction that he is only his nephew, not his son. Calixte introduces him to society and gives him authority on the farm, but he refuses to acknowledge him publicly as son and heir. In contrast, Calixte’s coachman, Toussaint, “loves [Anton] as his son” (65). Toussaint, the thoughtful and strong servant, finds himself “tormented with division, / Between duty to his people and the love of our family” (65). It is only his love for Anton that keeps him from acting publicly on his impulse to free the slaves of Haiti and establish a new republic. The one man is Anton’s father by blood, the other through affection. Anton himself marks a fragile negotiation between the forces of colonialism and the forces of revolution. He is a mulatto, half African and half French. He is accustomed to being served by the slaves and workers of Calixte’s estate, but he is also sensitive enough to the violence around him that he complains of it to the General’s wife as part of his effort to seduce her. He wants to satisfy the legitimate claims of Haiti’s different peoples virtually within his own person, but he is ultimately unable to do so. Part of the difficulty of his situation is reflected in the ambiguity of his murder. We cannot tell whether he is killed by slaves resentful of his position or by agents of the jealous general. His hybrid status is reminiscent of the cross-bred West Indians of the Jamaican revolution a generation later, but it has no place in revolutionary Haiti. With his death, the middle ground vanishes and all that remains is a violent civil war. Toussaint, whose love once bound him to a servile position, rapidly emerges as a general every bit as ruthless as he is masterful. An odd reversal takes place when Toussaint and Calixte meet face to face after Toussaint’s revolution has been successful and he is killing the remainder of his enemies. Formerly master and slave, now prisoner and triumphant general, they demonstrate a volatility unique to the West Indies. Calixte, recognizing his own death, asks, “that first boy you murdered. / . . . My son, my son Anton, that was so far, / You have forgotten it” (75). In response, Toussaint mocks, “Your son? What son? / He was your nephew then.” Despite having the opportunity, Toussaint does not bother to deny the charge against him. Whatever atrocities he committed as a soldier, he was not responsible for Anton’s death. By the same token, however much Calixte may have wronged his slaves, he loved Anton and treated him well. Yet, having denied Anton as a son once, Calixte cannot reclaim him. Similarly, Toussaint lets slip his opportunity to acknowledge his own paternal feelings for the boy. Where the slave boy becomes a fusion of the two distinct lines of the African king and the Jew, Anton is left with no one for a father. Anton’s descendants do not go on to be citizens of the emerging West Indian Federation.11 If Anton’s direct descendants do not become part of the West Indian mix, others who boast a similarly mixed ancestry do. Calico, whether the planter who kicks Yette 71

CALLALOO out of his estate or the man who joins the Jamaican revolution, has the same sort of mixed blood. Ram comes from the East Indies. General Yu, from China, specializes in cooking a soup containing a little of everything. As he describes it, “I have included various weeds, ingredients, to concoct a new savour, fragments of finished meat, flowers, spinach, all in one green swamp” (86). When Pompey dies, Mano settles on a bizarre hybrid blessing to recite over him: In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, In the name of Tamoussi, Siva, Buddha, Mahomet, Abraham, And the multitude of names for the eternal God, Amen . . . (98) That is, the people and the faith of the modern West Indians is a coming together of bits and pieces from around the world. It has some of the best and some of the worst of the different peoples who have taken themselves or been taken to the new world with the new possibilities opened up in the wake of Columbus. The final speech of the chorus acknowledges not simply the hybrid quality of the West Indian people, but of Drums and Colours as well. As he says: That web Columbus shuttled took its weave, Skein over skein to knit this various race, Though warring elements of the past compounded To coin our brotherhood in this little place. (100) Whether it be through biological reproduction—from the loins—or through economic power—with coins—the West Indian brotherhood has been minted. As history has woven the story of the people across time and islands, so Walcott has sought to weave his separate strands into a play that signifies the people he sees constituting the new Federation. We cannot read the failure of the Federation as the play’s failure, but we can recognize the profound ambition behind a play that sought to signify a nation where one had not been before; his effort to do so remains a remarkable attempt at defining and celebrating a people. In some of his more mature work such as Another Life and Omeros, he would be free to attempt such a definition again without the pressures of the Federation’s peculiar political circumstances, but he would never again be in a position to speak so directly to the historical, political moment of his audience.

NOTES 1. I want to acknowledge the influence of Paul Breslin on the structure and scope of my arguments. Many of my observations grow out of materials that he shared with me from Nobody’s Nation, and he shepherded this project in its early form. 2. Earl Gooding reviews the historical battle over federalism versus islandism within the intelligentsia in his chapter, “The Problem of Nationalism: Islandism versus West Indianism” (71– 95).

72

CALLALOO 3. Jean Franco argues that a comparable trend took place in South American novels in the two decades before Walcott wrote Drums and Colours. As she writes, “Going back to the forties and fifties, the novel, which, in the nineteenth century, had offered blueprints of national formation more and more became a skeptical reconstruction of past errors. The novel made visible that absence of any signified that could correspond to the nation” (205). 4. I am aware that I am treating this theatrical piece as a textual one. I do so for two reasons. First, because this is a poetic drama, I acknowledge with Harry Berger that there is a significant difference between a dramatic text mediated through the semiotics of the body and one mediated through the more direct experience of the reader. Because Walcott wrote most of it as an individual separate from the members of the company who would stage it, his own relationship to it was chiefly a textual, rather than performative, one. Second, Drums and Colours was performed only once, so far as I have been able to determine, and it, therefore, exists primarily as a written text. 5. Anderson suggests another significant difference between the West Indian situation and other postcolonial contexts: because the West Indies had no shared language, they could have no shared print culture. The news of a given day might include more than just what happened on a single island, but it seldom included a sense of islands that were far away or where another language was spoken. 6. In the course of another corrective to Jameson, which argues that the very notion of national allegory is suspect in a discursive context where genre and style have been hybridized along with the concept of the nation, Jean Franco makes a similar point. Arguing that Jameson’s view and the critical impulse to view South American literature in a postmodern context are both forms of extrapolation, she writes, “Extrapolation reduces the complexity of intertextual allusions and deprives texts of their own historical relation to prior texts” (210). 7. It is tempting here to recall the ease with which Walcott, despite his own professed federalist inclinations, wrote Ti-Jean and his Brothers as an expression of islandism. The work for him seems to have come in the broader synthesis he needed to imagine federalism. 8. Several recent theorists offer what I regard as glosses to Stein’s famous quip in their examination of place as something experienced rather than something essential. Some of those include Derek Gregory, who attempts in Geographical Imaginations to reconcile traditional geographic studies with contemporary critical theory; Edward S. Casey, who argues that contemporary philosophy has ignored a tradition of philosophy grounded on the significance of place; Tim Cresswell, who argues that a social theory of transgression implicitly defines a corresponding sense of social space; and Gaston Bachelard, whose pioneering work informs many of the others. 9. I recognize that the islands had pre-Columbian names and that Walcott often makes use of them in his other works. In the context of Drums and Colours, however, he does not, and it is as if such names do not exist. 10. Whether this piece of gold is the same one that Quadrado gave Paco is impossible to determine. On page 35, Paco claims he lost Quadrado’s piece. Furthermore, there is additional ambiguity as the coin passes from one hand to another. I do not think I am violating the terms of the play by insisting nonetheless that we can assume either that it is the identical gold coin or that the separate pieces represent a constant signifier. 11. For that matter, Anton’s entire island community remains outside the new Federation; Haiti never became part of it.

WORKS CITED Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.’” Social Text 17 (1987): 3–27. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983. Berger, Harry. “Bodies and Texts.” Representations 17 (1987): 144–66. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Breslin, Paul. Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1993.

73

CALLALOO Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Franco, Jean. “The Nation as Imagined Community.” The New Historicism. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1989. Gellner, Ernest. Thought and Change. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964. Gooding, Earl. The West Indies at the Crossroads. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1981. Gregory, Derek. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994 Jameson, Fredric. “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Seton-Watson, Hugh. Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. Boulder, Co.: Westview, 1977. Walcott, Derek. “Another Life.” Collected Poems: 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. ———. “Derek’s Most West Indian Play.” Sunday Guardian Magazine. 21 Nov. 1970: 7. ———. “Drums and Colours.” Caribbean Quarterly 7 (1961): 1–104. ———. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. ———. “Ti-Jean and his Brothers.” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Noonday, 1970: 81–166.

74

CALLALOO

“IMAGES OF FLIGHT . . . ” “This time, Shabine, like you really gone!”

by Jane King

When Walcott presented me with his Rodway Prize in 1996, at a ceremony which was one of the high points of my life, he made a speech in which he said that it is difficult to sustain the writing of poetry in the Caribbean. I have not fully understood why he thinks so and have foolishly never remembered to ask him, but through several years of teaching the Wayne Brown Derek Walcott: Selected Poetry to A-Level students in Saint Lucia, I have been brooding on Walcott’s relationship with the Caribbean. My brooding came to a head last year when I was reading Patricia Ismond’s Abandoning Dead Metaphors. So at this late stage, I feel I have (happily) to pick one more argument with the teacher who did Gerard Manley Hopkins with me for my own A Levels. My students are always on the lookout for articles on Walcott that they can read. The argument I make here began when I found myself exercising my head on where, geographically, the persona in “The Flock” is situated. Ismond writes that Walcott, situated in a winter landscape (possibly in the United States) is watching a flock of birds migrating south in search of tropical warmth—a scene which echoes his own yearnings for his “different sky.” (79) And this troubled me because I have always assumed that the location of the persona was the tropics, where he sits meditating upon his need for a “sense of season” (The Castaway 15), which he sees as more easily available in a temperate climate. The poem seems to me one of several early attempts Walcott makes to convince himself that the tropics really can be a productive place for poetry, when all along his real (although possibly subconscious) conviction is that he will be forced, ultimately, to go through that open door he fears so much in “Cold Spring Harbour,” into the “white world of men” (The Gulf 61), which, surely, like the literary world of “Love in the Valley” is also largely the world of white men, cold, scary, and childless “(because you are missing your children)” (The Gulf 61) as that world may be. There is not much in the language of the poem itself on which either side of this debate can fasten. The sepulchral knight rides “in iron contradiction crouched / against those gusts that urge the mallards south” (The Castaway 15). And of the mallards themselves, he notes that

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 75–86

75

CALLALOO A season’s revolution hones their sense, whose target is our tropic light, while I awoke this sunrise to a violence of images migrating from the mind. (The Castaway 14) The target of the mallards in their southern migration is “our tropic light,” “our different sky”—I had happily assumed that the our locates the poet/persona within that light, but I take the point that a homesick person in an alien winter landscape could still describe the tropical landscape of home as his own. But the sentence seems to want to place the persona in opposition to the location of the mallards and teal. The picture seems to me more pleasing and more balanced if the ducks migrate south while the images migrating from Walcott’s imagination pass them heading north, the crossing of those flocks cementing the connection between the worlds of north and south, a connection that Walcott feels he needs for his poetry. Their yearning for our tropic light then is implicitly balanced by his yearning for their sense of season, their alertness to the passing of time, provided by their temperate climate. But still, the tropics are where the metaphors come, and where the metaphors come from: our light is the tropic one. Most of Walcott’s metaphors, his tropes, will be drawn from the tropics as long as he continues to write. His success as a poet comes yes, from his genius with the word, but he never forgets that he was “blest with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam’s task of giving things their names . . .” (Another Life 152). Blessed by birth in the tropics with a wealth of material that had not previously been mined, and that helped to give him a readership. The tropics will always be home, and always be material, but his attitude to them is ambivalent. Many of the early poems explore the difficulty he finds he has in sustaining a life of poetry writing in the Caribbean. The snow and the cold are frightening, but they are also desirable. The snow is the blank page, not only here, but also in “Love in the Valley” and in the early fragment “Greenwich Village.” It is frightening as writing is frightening, requiring, in “Greenwich Village,” “rum courage” (In a Green Night 50) and here in “The Flock,” the courage of the lone knight on a constant quest through an alien, unwelcoming landscape. The knight here explicitly symbolizes the poet himself traveling through the silence of the page, “making dark / symbols with this pen’s print across snow” (The Castaway 15). “The Flock” looks at our need to keep working despite our discomfort and our loneliness, because we do not have infinite time to work. The world, “as it revolves upon its centuries” will survive us and “our condemnation” (The Castaway 14–15). Hence the prayer in the last stanza, that the mind will always “greet the black wings that cross it as a blessing” (The Castaway 15)—always be ready to do the lonely work whenever the inspiration strikes. Of course, the wintry images could be used to argue that the persona is situated in the wintry climate, but I think not. I think they are metaphors chosen to highlight the isolation of the poet in his tropic landscape. He has an ambivalent attitude to his calling; it is necessary and important, but it is lonely and uncomfortable, and he exists in a wintry state in the middle of the tropics. In this poem, he seeks to remind himself to be grateful for the work; it is what will survive “after that equinox when the clear eye clouds” (The 76

CALLALOO Castaway 15). The poem can be read as the opposite of “Allegre,” in which he celebrates the beauties of the tropical landscape but warns of the difficulties of achieving while living among the beauty which can cause such elation: Yet to find the true self is still arduous, And for us, especially, the elation can be useless and empty . . . (In a Green Night 59) The landscape provides the metaphors, but makes it difficult to use them. A wintry landscape paradoxically makes it easier for him to create. The figure of the knight in “The Flock” is problematic for some Caribbean readers precisely because it is such a European image. For Walcott, the knight is an image of the lone hero “vizor’d with blind defiance” (The Castaway 14) who does what he has to do in the face of anyone who would try to stop him. This knight has appeared before in “The Conqueror” (In a Green Night 67), where he was just as lonely, tired, and depressed. He was foreshadowed by the paddler in “The Harbour” who, leaving the yearning female arms of the harbour, was “[b]raving new water in an antique hoax” (In a Green Night 15) and he is echoed by Ti Jean and his brothers, who sing that there comes “a time for every man / To leave his mother and father / . . . And march to the grave he one” (Dream on 104). Even when this persona is given a Caribbean face, he still has the isolation of the observer who is not part of the festivities. In “Mass Man,” he worries about the delusions of power he sees in the putting on of masks by powerless men, and the hero becomes explicitly the tormented, lone poet, suffering for the masses: Upon your penitential morning, some skull must rub its memory with ashes, some mind must squat down howling in your dust, some hand must crawl and recollect your rubbish, someone must write your poems. (The Gulf 19) There are Caribbean readers who can be as distressed by the portrayal of carnival in “Mass Man” as they are about his use of the European figures of the knight and of Crusoe as personae through which to explore his relationship to his islands. Ismond reminds us that The Crusoe-Friday and Prospero-Caliban contexts are now well established in both West Indian literature and postcolonial criticism as classic paradigms of the colonial encounter. Walcott’s perspective decidedly shifts away from the Friday/Caliban aspect, contrasting with Lamming, for example, whose approach though Caliban gives primacy to the issues of dispossession and resistance. In choosing to arrogate a position usually identified with the master, Walcott engages in something of a subversive act: he tacitly refuses the condition of servitude and inferiority as the primary term of his identity. Properly focussed, and seen in

77

CALLALOO the historical context of a literature in its younger, pioneering phase, it represents a fully revolutionary act, and signs his particular orientation towards independence. (48) This is a brave attempt to sanitize the poet’s choice of a European persona by claiming that the choice is revolutionary and subversive—that Walcott is fighting back against Europe by choosing Crusoe, the castaway, as a persona for several of his early poems. It is sad, though, that we should still need such attempts, that there should still be a need to see the Caribbean—or indeed Europe—as such a monolithic, consensusdominated entity. I do not believe that Walcott has ever felt the need to reject the influences of European art and literature, and I do not see why we should try to read this into his work. Nor should we try to place a duty on Walcott or any other Caribbean writer to be constantly complimentary about our lives here. Of course, it is just my assumption of Walcott’s need for the north that Ismond wishes to challenge; her book is an attempt to locate all that Walcott values in the Caribbean, to see the sense of void and negation, the horror that haunts Walcott’s earlier books as a reaction to colonialism and its effects, rather than a reaction to life in the Caribbean itself. For Ismond, the abandoning of dead metaphors is an abandoning of things European and colonial. Of “The Castaway,” she writes The concluding movement of the poem presents the poet’s psyche haunted by the tracings of these foundered metaphors, their wreckage in his setting, in which the figurations of a dismembered, crucified Christ are discernible: The green wine bottle’s gospel choked with sand, Labelled a wrecked ship, Clenched seawood nailed and white as a man’s hand. (Ismond 46) These things certainly seem to be on the rejection list, but first on the list in this rather problematic piece are a number of exclusively tropical images . . . the almond’s leaf-like heart, The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut Hatching Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly and maggot . . . (The Castaway 10) This poem presents us with images of horror and disgust. Our origins are in our entrails, he muses, as he sees himself stagnating on this tropical beach, prematurely forced into the mundane pleasures of an old man with his “contemplative evacuation” (The Castaway 9), during which he meditates upon dog feces turning white in the sun. It reminds him of the coral, which is building on the reefs nearby, so that, as in “The Swamp,” even growth is disgusting, reminiscent of rotting. His isolation is driving him crazy; he must lie still or he will run mad. The only other reference to

78

CALLALOO Europe here is the allusion to Crusoe, conveyed in the desperate searching of the horizon for even “the morsel” of a sail, and the fear of insanity manifesting itself in the fear of the multiplying of his own footsteps—presumably a fear that he might mistakenly begin to believe that he had company on his deserted island, that he was not, in fact, alone with his tropes. As is the way with Walcott, that horizon-as-thread metaphor proves too good to use only once, and it resurfaces in “Homecoming: Anse La Raye” where it is quite explicit about the need to get out of the Caribbean. The starving children of Anse La Raye cluster round the disgusted poet, not recognizing him as their own, thinking him a tourist. He counsels himself to [s]uffer them to come, entering your needle’s eye, knowing whether they live or die what others make of life will pass them by like that far silvery freighter threading the horizon like a toy; for once, like them, you wanted no career but this sheer light, this clear infinite, boring, paradisal sea . . . (The Gulf 50) (We can note in passing that our solitary hero figure here, despite being a “solemn Afro-Greek,” [The Gulf 50] borrows attributes from Christ.) We could construct a good argument about how Europe and colonialism made the Caribbean boring, but that surely is not what Walcott is arguing here, or indeed in any of his early books. The “images of flight” (The Castaway 15) in “The Flock” are most obviously connected to the birds flying from its first stanza, but Walcott never allows a word a single meaning if it can carry more than one. The flight here is connected to the horror of the passage of time, the awareness of the insignificance of the individual in the face of . . . the dark inflexible direction of the world as it revolves upon its centuries (The Castaway 14) upon its “. . . iron axle . . .” (The Castaway 15), and the fear which the poet seeks to erase in the writing of this piece is the fear that, living in the tropics, he may lose his “sense of season” (The Castaway 15), may fall prey to “the elation which can be useless and empty” (In a Green Night 58) and lose his creative zeal. It foreshadows the explicit desire to flee, which Shabine’s taxi driver recognized as a desire which had occurred more than once in his passenger, hence his laughing: “This time, Shabine, like you really gone!” (The Star-Apple Kingdom 3). In fact, images of entrapment and the desire to escape begin to appear in The Castaway and become even more evident in The Gulf. I suggested that the desire to escape may initially have been subconscious. I say so because interviews with Walcott at the time when these poems were being written discuss the playwright’s need for his Caribbean company of actors with whom the 79

CALLALOO plays were developed, and without whom they could not be performed. But if the playwright needed the Caribbean, the poet was beginning to chafe against it. The very image of the castaway begs the question—cast away from what? Where is the sail meant to come from? Somewhere, surely, where life does not pass people by, the way it is certain to pass by the Anse La Raye children. I have already considered “The Flock” and “The Castaway” as poems in which the poet suggests fear of and disgust with his situation. Other early hints of a desire to flee appear in “Lampfall,” where it is domesticity that seems to trouble him. The family is gathered on the beach around the Coleman lamp, but the poet is being pulled through the depths of the sea of his subconscious by “. . . an old fish, a monster / Of primal fiction . . .” (The Castaway 58): And I’m elsewhere, far as I shall ever be from you whom I behold now Dear family, dear friends . . . (The Castaway 58) In the last three stanzas of the poem the language becomes paradoxical and ambivalent, suggesting a conflict within the writer. All day you’ve watched The sea-rock like a loom Shuttling its white wool, sheer Penelope. (The Castaway 59) The image of the surf as white wool being woven and unwoven is felicitous, but what are we to make of the person who has watched it all day? Why has he? Is he bored? Is he immobilized by his conflicts? Both? And who is Penelope? The weaving sea, or the faithful poet, who stays with his family at least physically, even while poetry trolls his mind deep “[t]hrough daydream, through nightmare . . .” (The Castaway 58). And what are we to make of Penelope? Most poets use her as a model of fidelity assuming that this is a positive thing, but is this so for Walcott at this period of his life? In “The Walk,” which I examine next, he writes “. . . How terrible is your own / fidelity, O heart . . . (The Gulf 69). But we still need to finish dealing with “Lampfall,” which then looks at the warmth of the picnicking family gathered round the lamp on the dark beach in the following terms The coals lit, the sky glows, an oven. Heart into heart carefully laid Like bread. This is the fire that draws us by our dread Of loss, the furnace door of heaven. (The Castaway 59) That we are drawn to this fire “by our dread of loss,” like, as the poem began, “the moth-flame metaphor” (The Castaway 58), suggests a genuine ambivalence toward this familial love, which, although it is warm, may also be deadly, and although it is heaven, is approached, surprisingly, through a furnace door suggestive of the other

80

CALLALOO place. This stanza is followed by a reference to another unfortunate mythological lady: At night we have heard The forest, an ocean of leaves, drowning her children, Still, we belong here. There’s Venus. We are not yet lost. (The Castaway 59) Why are we thinking of drowning children? (And do I mean that participle to be a verb or an adjective?) What is the significance of not yet being lost? The poet seems to be trying to convince himself, in the teeth of some very strong negative emotions, that he does indeed “belong here.” Like you, I preferred The firefly’s starlike little Lamp, mining, a question, To the highway’s brightly multiplying beetles. (The Castaway 59) Leaving aside the question of the “you” to whom the poem is suddenly addressed, we can wonder whether the poet protests too much his preference for the rural Caribbean firefly over the metropolitan highway. By the time we come to The Gulf, this restlessness has become much more palpable. “Ebb” again shows the ambivalence to the domestic situation. It begins with boredom—“Year round, year round, we’ll ride / this treadmill . . .” (The Gulf 9)—with the drive through an ever more polluted tropical landscape, on a road that goes through one “last sacred wood” (The Gulf 9). But even through the lattices of the coconut leaves in that sacred wood, everything the poet sees seems trapped and struggling . . . there always is some island schooner netted in its weave like a lamed heron an oil-crippled gull; (The Gulf 9) and everything seems doomed to go forever round in circles “like the washed-up moon” (The Gulf 9), which seems to follow the car. The schooner—surely another of these boats for which “the starved eye devours the seascape” (The Castaway 9) desperate for escape—is “out too far” (The Gulf 10). Too far out, presumably, to be boarded by a desperate poet. In any case, it itself is “crippled” (The Gulf 10) and out of its element; it tries “to tread the air” (The Gulf 10). The poem ends, like “Lampfall,” with an effort to convince—convince whom? the reader? the poet?—someone, that despite the boredom, the persona is happy where he is From this car there’s terror enough in the habitual, miracle enough in the familiar. Sure . . . (The Gulf 10)

81

CALLALOO “Lampfall” and “Ebb” convince me utterly of “the terror in the habitual” but it takes others (“Nearing Forty,” for instance) to convince me of the great desire of the poet to find the “miracle in the familiar.” Here, the familiar is surely almost completely maddening; the poet in his car, or at his family picnic, is every bit as isolated as the castaway who dare not move lest “[a]ction breed frenzy” (The Castaway 9). It does seem, though, that a new element has entered here; he has begun to question the role he plays in his own boredom: For safety, each sunfall, the wildest of us all mortgages life to fear. (The Gulf 10) A mortgage, after all, is a deliberately executed contract, a more conscious act than simply being drawn “by our dread of loss [to] the furnace door of heaven” (The Castaway 59), but to mortgage your life to fear seems a dubious bargain. And the consciousness of his own ambivalence is conveyed in that last word followed by the poet’s own ellipsis “. . . Sure . . .” (The Gulf 10), which, with its sarcasm, undermines the attempt to convince anyone of the persona’s happiness. In “Nearing Forty,” the poet fears failure, and in a poem of one brilliantly written long sentence, explores his attempt to find the “miracle . . . in the familiar.” He explains that . . . your life bled for the household truth, the style past metaphor that find its parallels, however wretched in simple shining lines, in pages stretched plain as a bleaching bedsheet over a guttering rainspout . . . (The Gulf 67). But, by “The Walk,” the bleeding of the life has begun to overpower the capacity to produce the shining lines, and the poet bleeds in a landscape which itself seems ill. Even after loss of faith, prayer seems the only answer, and the exhausted poet begs someone—some lost childhood saint? the reader?—to pray for us, pray for this house, borrow your neighbour’s faith, pray for this brain that tires, and loses faith in the great books it reads; after a day spent prone, haemorrhaging poems, each phrase peeled from the flesh in bandages (The Gulf 67). And all this bleeding is for nothing because his work has never been more “like a housemaid’s novel” (The Gulf 67). Finding, when he tries to go for a walk, that he can go no further than his neighbor’s gates, he castigates himself for his “terrible . . . fidelity” (The Gulf 67) and contemplates his “life’s end,” thinking maybe that he should “abandon all.” He has passed cats who seemed to him “lions in cages of their

82

CALLALOO choice” (The Gulf 67); now his house turns into a lion and, treating him as a cat does a mouse it has caught, “paws” him back. The trap here is painted as a domestic situation, but I suggest that the domestic situation seems like a trap largely because it is the only thing that can keep him in the Caribbean. He feared, remember, to go through the door into that winter landscape in “Cold Spring Harbour” because he was missing his children (The Gulf 61). He needs to get on one of those boats to somewhere where life does not pass people by. In short, he needs another life, and through the thought processes in the poems of The Castaway and The Gulf, has argued himself into a position to reach out and embrace that life, sad though it may be at first. “Winding Up,” from Sea Grapes, begins I live on the water alone. Without wife and children. I have circled every possibility to come to this . . . . . . We do not choose such things, but we are what we have made. (Sea Grapes 91) Of course, it might be argued that the poems on which I have focused suggest domestic difficulties rather than political ones. I have tried to argue that they suggest a growing feeling of entrapment in a landscape alien to his life’s work. Many have looked at poems that suggest a disenchantment with Caribbean politics and I need to do no more than allude to some of this work here. “Parades, Parades” (Sea Grapes 29) for instance, with its disgust with our mimicry and its monotony. Then there is Chapter 19 of Another Life, described to me recently by a young Rhodes Scholar as a “problem.” A problem, apparently because it fails to find anything good in the black power positions it condemns. This is the chapter that curses all o’ dem big boys so, dem ministers ministers of culture, ministers of development, the green blacks and their old toms, and all the syntactical apologists of the Third World explaining why their artists die, by their own hands, magicians of the New Vision. Screaming the same shit. (Another Life 127) They are “like primates favouring scabs . . . whores with slave-bangles . . . academics crouched like rats . . .” (Another Life 127). They are like the imitative politicians of “Parades, Parades,” but they are worse, because theirs is imitation of the worst aspects of the slave owners. And they do it explicitly to exclude These are the dividers. ................... they measure the skulls with callipers and pronounce their measure 83

CALLALOO of toms, of traitors, of traditionals and Afro-Saxons. They measure them carefully as others once measured the teeth of men and horses, they measure and divide. (Another Life 128) I would happily quote the whole chapter; it is, in the words of my young friend, “a wonderful rant.” But for him it is also highly problematic. Its concern really is the impossibility—or indeed the deadly danger—of attempting art in the political climate of the postcolonial Caribbean. The artists keep dying throughout this chapter, and the intensity of the feeling is fueled by the suicide of Harold Simmons, who is eulogized so eloquently in the following one. I have had students resist Walcott’s admiration of European art, too; students who have looked for irony in the prayer in Chapter 7 of Another Life Our father, who floated in the vaults of Michaelangelo, Saint Raphael, of sienna and gold leaf, it was then that he fell in love. . . . . . that the lances of Uccello shivered him, like Saul unhorsed, that he fell in love with art, and life began. (Another Life 44) Too “Eurocentric” for many Caribbean students, especially coming right after the apology for provincialism at the beginning of the same chapter. One of the defects of provincialism for which he apologizes is that all he knows of the seasons is what he has read . . . then, pardon life, if he saw autumn in a rusted leaf. What else was he but a divided child? (Another Life 41) This need for a “sense of season” that I discussed begins, in Another Life, to be satisfied in a sinister way, through the suicide of the artists of the Caribbean: Well, there you have your seasons, prodigy! For instance, the autumnal fall of bodies, deaths, like a comic brutal repetition, and in the Book of Hours that seemed so far, the light and amber of another life, there is a Reaper busy about his wheat, one who stalks nearer, and will not look up from the scythe’s swish in the orange evening grass, and the fly at the font of your ear sings, Hurry, hurry! (Another Life 134) 84

CALLALOO Hurry with the work, because death is ever nearer. You need the seasons to remind you that time is passing, but if you do not have the seasons, your friends’ suicides will start to do it. I have looked at poems from the early, Caribbean books, but we can give the last word to the most recent poem, Tiepolo’s Hound, where the struggle between the Caribbean and the metropolis is repeated as Walcott imagines Camille Pissarro’s wrestling with his decision to leave Saint Thomas. Walcott himself appears in the book, but of course, Walcott is the more fortunate traveler for having been born a century later when travel and return had become so much easier. Pissarro’s leaving would become a real exile from the Caribbean. Nonetheless, his story gives Walcott scope to muse once again on the dilemma. . . . isn’t his the old trial of love faced with necessity, the same crisis every island artist, despite the wide benediction of light, must face in these barren paradises where after a while love becomes an affliction? (Tiepolo’s Hound 24) The “barren paradises” recall that “infinite boring paradisal sea” (The Gulf 51). Finally, though, Walcott sees Pissarro as having had no other choice What would have been his future had he stayed? He was Art’s subject as much as any empire’s, he had no more choice than the ship . . . (Tiepolo’s Hound 29) Which seems a pretty explicit statement of the impossibility of pursuing art in the Caribbean. Perhaps even more annoying for the students who persist in trying to read Walcott as anti-European is the next section where Pissarro looks at the “sunshot vacancy” of “[t]hose islands” Perhaps he saw their emptiness in terror of what provided nothing for his skill until his very birthplace was an error that only flight might change, and exile kill. The Old World lay ahead, the New receding, as primal Edens soon exhaust their use, the Old is subtler, varied, with more breeding, given its history what should he choose? (Tiepolo’s Hound 29–30) There is surely only very mild irony in those marching rhymes, and it attaches itself to the “breeding” to be found in the “Old World.” Pissarro chose an Old World metropolis when he escaped the Caribbean, whereas Walcott chose a New World one, which gives him some space for mockery. But that, Upper Sixth, is another story.

85

CALLALOO WORKS CITED Ismond, Patricia. Abandoning Dead Metaphors: the Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry. Mona, Jamaica: UWI Press, 2001. Walcott, Derek. Another Life. London: Jonathon Cape, 1973. ———. The Castaway. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965/1969. ———. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: The Noonday Press, 1973. ———. In a Green Night. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. ———. The Gulf. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969. ———. Sea Grapes. London: Jonathan Cape, 1976. ———. The Star-Apple Kingdom. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. ———. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.

86

CALLALOO

TABLEAU: DEREK WALCOTT A Verse Essay

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you This essay, its ten words for syllables, line by line succumbs to its paragraphic weight, as one by one eight gather over their ninth life, its twelve occasions mythwork like months to a mayfly. Edmund Spenser’s house of exile aches. Midway comes the idea that a palm frond’s a page, each hem of the sea a quotation mark, the mind (on the mend from itself, mending itself) a New Nation like New York, New London, perhaps New Paltz; peelingly beautiful: an lemon rind quizzing the permanence of its tabletop, like an opened tulip does dirt. The sea is blue, the sea is green, the sea is yellow when the sea is of sea and sun. It erases. The seasons erase. A mirror erases its subject and asks the vanished subject to love itself whole again. Great, skybreaking tutor; allegorist and allegory; what did you begin with painted birds dotting your painted island in curatorial iambics; and then the length, the length, the length, your ambition strong like Spenser, who politicked in Ireland, while courting epic, and caged that woe, that dark exilic woe, in lined bars, lambent?

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 87

87

CALLALOO

THE PRIVILEGES OF BEING BORN IN . . . A BACKWARD AND UNDERDEVELOPED SOCIETY Derek Walcott’s Prodigal Provincialism

by Antonia MacDonald-Smythe

Si mwen di-ou sa fè mwen lapèn Ou pè kwè sa vwè, Si mwen di-ou wachè tjè mwen Ou pè di sa vwè, Si mwen di-ou kwvè tjè mwen Ou pè kwè sa vwè.1 St. Lucian folk song as performed by Sessenne2 Reading Derek Walcott’s essays, his interviews, and his poetry, one is struck by the fascinating regularity with which the word provincial occurs and by his constant care to rid the concept of perceived negative associations. This is hardly surprising. Typically, provincialism is a descriptor of the parochial, the unsophisticated, and the countrified. In this millennium, faced with the economic imperatives of liberalized trade borders, and with globalization as our new mantra, provincialism is often used within the contexts of narrow mindedness and myopia—the dangerous singularity of perspective—and has accordingly been condemned. But provincialism is also the valorization of the local, the home-grown, the ordinary, the folk—what in St. Lucian kweyol we refer to as gen bitasyon.3 It is this definition of the provincial to which Derek Walcott has found himself drawn, what he, in an interview with Carl Jacobs, defended as “a deeper communion with things that metropolitan writers no longer care about, or perhaps cannot care about. And these things are attachment to family, earth and history” (4). However, this articulation of a comfortable provincialism is hardly one to which Walcott adheres unwaveringly. Indeed, as this article will show, Walcott’s preoccupation with being labeled and dismissed as provincial is a recurring and often troubling one. In exploring Walcott’s contradictory stances on provincialism—his quarrel with this designation and later his apologia and reconciliation—this article acknowledges that the expansive geography of Walcott’s imagination has necessarily generated myriad subject positions in relation to provincialism. Often Walcott has adopted a defensive posture—provincialism has been celebrated as an almost spiritual connection with the St. Lucian landscape and its peoples. At other times, he has seen his attachment to home as parochial and has painfully negotiated the treacherous label of insularity. Yearning for a larger experience, he has then condemned provincialism as a singularity of vision, the inability to realize the relationship between the 88

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 88–101

CALLALOO part and the whole, the local and the international, the Caribbean and the world. And in recent times, having weathered a variety of conflicted articulations of a Caribbean aesthetics, he has seen provincial spaces as crucial to his centering and restoration as artist. As Another Life has made clear, the provincial space—the local(e)—provided the most immediate inspirational source of Derek Walcott’s early artistic endeavors, be these creative or visual. Walcott had, under the mentorship of Harold Simmons “grown to learn [a] passionate / talent with its wild love of landscape” (“To a Painter in England” lines 4–5), and this intense awareness of and appreciative response to the St. Lucian landscape was, in turn, acknowledged as shaping his multicultural national heritage. Through what seemed to be an articulation of a national romanticism, Walcott’s poetry then offered the promise that in viewing nature imaginatively and creatively, landscape became more than mere background and was instead validated as a source of order and harmony. Thus, for Walcott, provincial life afforded one the opportunity to learn more about community, the imagination, society, humanity, mortality, and God. It allowed one to be part of what William Wordsworth, the British romantic poet and one of the more famous provincials, described in Tintern Abbey as “a sense sublime / of something far more deeply interfused” (lines 95–96). Ultimately, as collections such as 25 Poems, In a Green Night, and Another Life confirm, to be provincial is to appreciate the simplicity of life as it occurs in the province, to be outside of the hurly burly and be content with living on what many would dismiss as the margins of society. At that time, Walcott recognized the merits of his island society, what he has elsewhere described as “the healthy vulgarity of living in a backward . . . place.” He was able to root himself in that local space, proudly asserting: “Moi c’est gens Ste. Lucie / c’est la moi sorti; / is there that I born” (“Sainte Lucie” 314). This affirmation of the power of his provincial space then served as fuel for his poetic power. As artist, Walcott perceived his poetic mission as a commitment to record the epiphanic wonder he feels when he sees the St. Lucian landscape. The ecstasy generated by the immortal beauty of the land provoked in him the imperative to write about: “the several postures of this virginal island” (“To a Painter in England” line 29), to give life to the hitherto un-named and unacknowledged. In this Adamic task, Walcott the provincial, celebrated his circumscribed world, and celebrated it as a member of that folk community. As artist of the people, he saw himself as having a chance to tell their stories, both in poetry and in drama. Now the materially dispossessed could gain stature through art and could claim ownership of ancestral memory. Such optimism allowed Walcott to respond to Froude’s dismissive: “no people here in the true sense of the word, with a purpose or character of their own” with the snappy boast that “if there was nothing, there was everything to be made” (4). Filled with this capacity for wonder, Walcott’s individuality was superceded by a sense of community and although it is a small place, much of Walcott’s poetry suggests that he found both power and pleasure in his provincial location. But, in many ways, these pleasures of a small place were short lived. With time, the power of provincialism was to slowly become insufficient to his ongoing desire to capture in words all the contours of his visual world. Having from an early age 89

CALLALOO apprenticed himself to poets such as William Wordsworth, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and A. H. Auden—poets whose cultures had shaped the life experiences reflected in their poetry—Walcott was, by virtue of copying from them structures with which to explain his world, imbibing much of the angst that overlaid their works. Indeed, it was the universality of many of the issues explored in the works of these poets that drew Walcott to them. Imitation now brought with it its own form of socialization and from these poets he was being influenced into an artistic sensibility that had at its core a more mature malaise than that typically experienced by a young man coming of age in a British colony. It was Walcott’s sense of artistic fellowship with them that would drive his ambition to make a career as a poet, his expectations of success and fame, his sense of being special— even superior—in a society that his mentor, Harold Simmons, had already understood to have no sympathy for the artist. Ironically, in introducing Walcott to the works of regional and international poets with which to establish literary community, Simmons had also exposed Walcott to an artistic milieu with which prolonged association would contribute to the estranging of a provincial vision. Accordingly, Walcott, in a 1968 interview with Dennis Scott, would express dissatisfaction with the simplicity that defines the provincial. His artistic vision having been so thoroughly layered by his western aesthetic associations, he now felt that his poetry ought to reflect this density and complained that his poetry was becoming plain: “I find myself at 38 writing almost so directly that I wish I were younger in terms of . . . Well I wish I were more ‘important’ or complicated” (11). Although “importance” is relative, it is undoubted that Walcott was growing more sociopolitically complicated; he seemed a complex and conflicted artist whose rage at an unaccommodating world permeated his polemic engagement with other Caribbean writers. Artistic life in the Caribbean reflected Walcott’s wished-for complexity—discussions on the relationship between art, culture, and politics had grown shrill, important, and complicated. There was a dynamic cross-fertilization of ideas; writers such as Wilson Harris, Edward Brathwaite, and George Lamming were themselves fashioning their vision of a Caribbean aesthetic. Employed as a reviewer for The Trinidad Guardian, Walcott was inevitably brought into conversation with those ideas. Moreover, Walcott’s life circumstances had done much to exacerbate this rage. Unlike many Caribbean writers, he had chosen to remain in the region rather than seek the market opportunities so readily available in England. Having eventually settled in Trinidad, working as a journalist, playwright, and director, Walcott dared to dream of making a living from his writing—be it his poems, plays, or newspaper articles— in a society that had yet to mature into a consciousness that accommodated such ambitions. In a sociopolitical landscape that judged survival as the only appreciated effort, Walcott was to discover slowly and painfully that art, although it could grant him imaginative freedom, could not generate economic independence. For although Trinidad was a more cosmopolitan space than St. Lucia, although its multiculturalism evoked for Walcott the aesthetic richness of ancient Greek civilizations, it was still a small Caribbean island that did not recognize the value of the artist; it was still parochial in the ways it sought to limit the artist to race, ethnicity, and social class. Nor 90

CALLALOO was this myopia singular to Trinidad; whereas many Caribbean governments recognized the value of the arts, it was a luxury they saw themselves as being unable to afford.4 They were, accordingly, unwilling to dedicate limited resources to its development and ultimately only paid lip service to the idea of culture as a viable export. As Walcott so scathingly expressed it: “The folk arts [had] become the symbol of a carefree, accommodating culture, an adjunct to tourism, since the state is impatient with anything it cannot trade” (“What the Twilight Says” 7). Intent on making a living as a director and producer of plays, Walcott was constantly thwarted by the reality that, to date, few governments had devoted resources to the creation of national theaters, and what passed for theater was the trivia of a bastardized culture offered up as tourist entertainment. In seeking to create a Caribbean theater, Walcott’s experiences were teaching him that “deprivation [would become] his major theme,” given that “the sparse body of West Indian theatre still feeds on the subject of emaciation and what it produces: rogues, drunkards, madmen, outcasts,” and that his would be the daunting task of setting this against “the pastoral of the peasant” (“What the Twilight Says” 19). These were some of the realities that brought Walcott to a lamentation of the limits of provincialism. Written initially as the foreword to Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, “What The Twilight Says: An Overture” is an essay that expresses that dissatisfaction with limits, even those which previously Walcott had claimed to delight in. Once he had felt that “there was a great joy in making a world which so far, up to then, had been undefined. And yet the imagination wants its limits and delights in its limits. It finds its freedom in the definition of those limits” (Baer 105). Now, in “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” Walcott chafes at the leash of ideological restrictions that come in identification with a Caribbean homespace and can “no more ask / for the safe twilight which . . . calm hands gave” (“The Harbour” line 4). Wanting to venture beyond the moorings of socially acceptable definitions of the Caribbean artist and the roles and responsibilities attendant to such, he seemed interested in identity formation that was personal rather than political, that allowed him to be an individual without requiring that he speak for the tribe. At the same time, he was deeply sensitive to the reality of an ideology of engagement that had become part of Caribbean life in the 1970s, and in his conflicted articulation of a Caribbean aesthetic, his polemic voice was becoming tinged with bitterness at the narrowness of choices available to the Caribbean artist. “What the Twilight Says: An Overture” is as much an autobiographical essay on the development of an artist as it is a discursive exploration of the forms, traditions, and languages available to the Caribbean artist. With great lyricism, Walcott outlines the difficulties and the challenges he faced as an emergent dramatist, his struggles to hold on to an ideology of art in spite of various political pressures, and the growing conflict with a provincial faith. If, as he claims in this essay, now was a time marked by the “withdrawal of Empire and the beginning of our doubt” (4), the doubt comes because he is newly cognizant of the dubious comfort of his earlier provincialism; because in the fading of empire, the dialectic tension between province and metropolis becomes more apparent. Even as he vows in his essay that his mission is to create an “electric fusion of the old and the new,” so that he can justifiably and liberally take 91

CALLALOO from aspects of both worlds, the province—economically debilitating, ideologically conflicted, and confrontational, corrupted now by political narrow mindedness— seems suddenly inadequate to such a task. In detailing the ways in which he is developing as an artist and the concerns for which his drama has become a vehicle, Walcott exposes in this essay his earlier dreams of a shared vision of an innovative and radical Caribbean theater. Only now he has discovered that the dream can be bartered by some for the silver of a pseudo-radicalism that judges Caribbeanness on the basis of race. At a time ripe with theorizings of a Caribbean aesthetic that was being defined in terms of Black nationalism and a cultural allegiance to an African past, Walcott was finding these positions to be too rigid, too limited to the development of his oeuvre, in so far as these articulations dismissed Western traditions and English, the imperial language to which Walcott had long been attached and from which he had derived much artistic inspiration. Yet, his allegiance to a colonial canon had not divorced him from Afro-Caribbean community. He continued to be partial to his folk terrain: its culture, its speech rhythms, a way of life that constantly evoked connectivity to an African past. Engaging with the intersections of literature and politics, this essay is also about Walcott’s anxiety to locate himself within both a regional and an international poetics, his discovery that it had become a time for choice, a time where location in the interstices does not guarantee one’s safety. Now liminality was being judged as political incorrectness—as an escape from a commitment to ideology. But for Walcott, not choosing was itself a choice, one that offered the Caribbean man, necessarily hybrid because of his diasporic experiences, full access to all existing artistic traditions. In their articulations of nationalism and a rejection of colonial “high culture,” Caribbean intellectuals seemed to require from the artist a public testimony of regionalism, a loud rejection of the spiritual mentors that Walcott has found within English Literary culture. At the same time, these movements, in validating an Africaninfluenced aesthetic, seemed to demand that the artist solely align himself ideologically and artistically with an African revival. However, for Walcott the insincerity governing these pronouncements did not enliven African gods and were in fact propagating a disservice against an African ancestral past. False allegiance therefore becomes blasphemy. Moreover, given current practice, in the sacrifice of art to propaganda, Africa, according to Walcott, remains a place one can never truly enter because these mechanized rituals betray the artist as an innate unbeliever. “Pastoralists of the African revival should know that what is needed is not new names for old things, or old names for old things but the faith of using old names anew” (“What the Twilight Says” 10). The complexities and seeming contradictions embedded in this statement characterize much of the essay. Concerned with a delineation of the constituents of Caribbean identity, “What the Twilight Says: An Overture” probes at the language available to the artist in his expression of that identity. Preoccupied with “purifying the language of the tribe,” aware of the pungent criticism that such an intervention would elicit from his Caribbean contemporaries, Walcott, in this essay, sketches a polemic that, in defending his deliberate ‘inbetweenity’ as a valid ideological position, explains his perception of the language of the folk as requiring the alchemy of metaphor before it could 92

CALLALOO be distilled into art—a perception that ideologically placed him in polar opposition to Kamau Brathwaite’s theorization of “nation language.” The essay is, however, as careful in establishing that Walcott’s fondness for standard English—the language of exegesis and the mother lode of metaphor—was matched by his attachment to the provincial rhythms of Caribbean speech, the music of its dialects. Accordingly, he was not prepared to make a choice. He would instead use both to create something new: What would deliver him 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. (17) The anxiety generated by this desire to forge a new world language underlines much of “What the Twilight Says: An Overture.”5 Walcott’s bipolar location allows him as colonial hybrid to claim the privileges of both the English and African linguistic traditions: “mongrel as I am, something prickles in me when I see the word Ashanti as with the word Warwickshire, both separately intimating my grandfathers’ roots, both baptising this neither proud nor ashamed bastard, this hybrid, this West Indian” (10). This love affair with words was to generate its own infidelity. Indeed, words often seemed inadequate to the representation of a space that was rapidly becoming overdetermined, a place that Walcott felt himself belonging to and a place by which he simultaneously hated being defined. As the artist with a social responsibility, he felt himself called upon to represent the folk, to bring to life their culture and their lives. But in doing so, Walcott, with a contrariness that his foreword and the plays in the collection Dream on Monkey Mountain constantly expose, was elevating these lives to a level of “truth” that was universal to the poor, regardless of the specifics of their psychosocial history. In disregarding the specifics of race, he believed he was ennobling the Caribbean folk by virtue of his re-presenting them in biblical or classical images. The fact that the Caribbean man had emerged from a particular diasporic experience—a history that Walcott had deemed amnesiac and was therefore unwilling to valorize—meant that secreted in ancestral memory, pressed into one’s tongue, echoing in one’s ear, were old names for new things and old names for making sense of a new reality. The folk were not tabula rasa on which he could mount a drama of faith or of truth as he perceived it. “What the Twilight Says: An Overture” is an exposé on the learning of this lesson. These separate interventions impact on the rhetorical voice of the essay. “What the Twilight Says: An Overture” often shifts between the first and the third person, a stylistic indication of the psychic schism that is slowly dividing the artist. Walcott chooses to use the autobiographical first person when describing his earlier dramatic ambition. The voice changes to the third-person singular when he refers to the general plight of the artist in society. Indeed, the lyricism of the essay is most marked when 93

CALLALOO he uses the first person and the voice acquires an almost belligerent didacticism as it launches into his polemic. At the level of rhetoric, the individual, artistic voice is at psychological, ideological, and linguistic odds with the community voice; on a metanarrative level, the schism also relates to the separation between the poet and the people for whom and to whom he wishes to speak. It relates to the ideological alienation that exists between Walcott and other Caribbean artists/intellectuals. Ultimately, the faith to recreate becomes a faltering one. In “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” Walcott seems to recognize that not only is the provincial imagination limited by available experiences, but that the ideological and sociopolitical responsibilities imposed on the artist constitute another form of limitation. These become burdensome in so far as they require that the artist engage in the gargantuan task of making “deprivation lyrical,” of having to perform the alchemy that “transmutes despair into virtue” (3). Where Walcott had earlier celebrated the happy poverty of the folk, he now, in seeing his world with the eyes of a malcontent, focuses on the “ramshackle hoarding of wood and resisting iron” (3) that encircles and imprisons. This is the space he is expected to turn into the golden light of art, the crude aesthetic that he must refine through artistic and dramatic orchestration (35). Only now he records not so much the peoples’ dream but their anguish. In his jaundiced eyes, the folk, embraced as fashionable by “reactionaries in dashikis” (27), endure lives to which myth cannot give gloss. Where he had once enjoyed the island noises, Walcott now yearns for respite from its raucous chaos of curses, gossip, and laughter. The naked voluble poverty that surrounds him seems to threaten to overwhelm his voice, and becomes the darkness from which he seeks to escape. Where once he had seen Caribbean people as the potential subject of myth, Walcott now fears that they may be without history, incapable of heroism and unable to be redeemed even through the alchemy of art.6 “What the Twilight Says: An Overture” is ultimately an essay about resignation: “To be born on a small island, a colonial backwater, meant a precocious resignation to fate” (14). And here Walcott’s fate seems to be that of not belonging, if only because his mixed racial ancestry precludes it. But, ironically, it is his imagination, once fired by the zeal of telling the story of an “unstoried land,” that now estranges him in so far as it allows him to escape his island bonds, to cease to be part of the folk. Yet, in his escape, he still yearns to “enter that life without living it” (16). The earlier enthusiasm about his Adamic task of naming gives way to self-doubt, to a questioning of the earlier ambition that had insisted that he was “message-bearer for the millennium” (4). Those claims suddenly seem prodigious and ultimately vainglorious. Finally, in this essay, Walcott questions the perversity that made him remain “wrecked on the rock” of the Caribbean while other, more pragmatic artists fled to metropolitan centers, the myopia that made him believe that his provincial “whirlpool was the naval of the world” (36). There is now a sense of Walcott as outsider, as observer. Significantly, he had felt himself similarly estranged when, as a child, his race and social class had prevented him from joining the street theater of the St. Lucian masquerade. In observing local actors and their inability to rise to tragic status—their constant co-opting of the grand gestures of tragedy and existentialism into the pappyshow of picong and the noisy 94

CALLALOO carnivalesque, he can now respond to a folk choral performance with a blistering review of its tawdry imitations, its insincerity, its cheapness, its lack of professionalism—all executed in a language that is “furiously ungrammatical, emphatically crude” (30). Having worked in vain to purify the language of the tribe, dissociation is now inevitable. “Everything is immediate and this immediacy means overbreeding, illegitimacy, migration without remorse” (20). Indeed, this essay is the wry admission that the Caribbean artist who chooses to remain in the region inevitably grows tired of civic martyrdom, tired of being unappreciated, tired of being unrewarded for his artistic efforts. The provincial mind that once celebrated the pastoral comes to recognize this space as “the ragged, untutored landscape . . . as uncultured as our syntax” (31), and now leans toward departure, to journeys to metropolitan spaces and language, to true cities. Now, in the reconceptualization of his provincial world as a twilight one where there is no dawn, no new beginnings, Walcott consoles himself with the grandiloquence of a self-ordained martyr: “The noblest are those who are trapped, who have accepted the twilight” (5). Yet this acceptance of the twilight is accompanied by an acridity of perspective, where as artist, Walcott’s rendering of this provincial world is marked by judgmental distance. There is, moreover, the resignation that such is the consequence of provincial habitation—the inevitable recognition that landscape and history will fail the artist (32). The rage that now drives him, the impotence he feels as he sets about ennobling the folk through theater, constitutes the thematic centerpiece of “What the Twilight Says: An Overture.” Indeed, in describing his essay as an overture, Walcott seems to be calling Caribbean dramatists into a consciousness of their roles and responsibilities in revolutionizing “new nations [where] art is a luxury and theatre the most superfluous of amenities” (32). The essay, in articulating an aesthetic whose true vision comes in an allegiance to art rather than to money or power, becomes an act call that gathers like-minded actors to begin a performance that seems ambitious in its scope, oftentimes hopeless, yet very necessary. But this essay is an overture in yet another sense. It is an act of propitiation, as much an essay on self-defense as it is an essay of pacification. For it is here that Walcott is wrestling with his provincial self in a negotiation of imminent and inevitable departure. There is the strong sense that Walcott is preparing for a mental leave-taking. Walcott, I am arguing, is planning to leave his mother’s home—the Caribbean—a space cluttered with “forced affirmations of identity” (20) to journey to his father’s household—Western literary tradition—and the company of the likes of Marlowe and Milton that he, as bastard, has long yearned for. But regardless of his migration, Walcott is still held fast by the power of provincialism. Indeed, it is as though the Caribbean province requires from Walcott acknowledgement of an ancestral debt—leave-taking is therefore not unencumbered and requires some degree of appeasement. Walcott the artist remains connected to motherland: “It was not a vision but a memory though its detail was reduced, as in dreams and in art. But knowing the place could not tell me what it meant” (38). The essay ends with a description of a hilltop experience where his troupe of actors has an epiphanic moment at Morne Fortune in St. Lucia. Significantly, Walcott does not share that epiphany, “I was with them and not with them,” if only because he now realizes 95

CALLALOO that to stay in this provincial space is to deny himself self-actualization, even though leaving may seem to be a spiritual betrayal. “What the Twilight Says: An Overture” suggests that, ultimately, exile is the only choice available to the provincial artist. Nonetheless, the secret of his provincial home continues to haunt Walcott. The ache of that haunting varies. In his father’s household, sharing in the fellowship of artistic inquiry, he discovers that traveling has widened the breach between himself and his one-time subject—the folk. Now the gulf created can only be bridged with the language that he once described as the fire stolen from Gods. In The Gulf, a collection of poetry published the same year as “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” Walcott articulates the alienation that comes through migrations, “the fear / [that] thickened his voice, that strange familiar soil / [that] prickles and barbered the texture of [his] voice” (29). Reluctance at having abandoned his provincial space coexists with the freedom he enjoys from being a “single, circling, homeless satellite” (“The Fortune Traveler” 11) in a cosmopolitan space. But such homelessness—the forsaking of a provincial space—has come at a price. It was always the fate of the West Indian to meet himself coming back, and he would discover the power of simplicity, the graces of his open society, only after others had embraced it as a style. (“What the Twilight Says” 27) Undoubtedly, in the years following the publication of “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” Walcott became an acclaimed cosmopolitan writer by virtue of his thorough and innovative intervention into classical European and contemporary American literary canons. As to Walcott’s now-contested provincial status, Gordon Rohlehr’s comment in “Literature and the Folk” as to what constitutes the Caribbean artist is an apt one: Most things in the West Indies are fluid, and most people caught in a series of interlocking continua, making it difficult to place anyone precisely—especially any ‘educated’ person. Since West Indian writers inhabit various landscapes and milieux, few artists have been concerned simply with doing any one thing; most with either doing justice to their sense of schizophrenia, or with drawing creatively on a wide variety of agonising experiences. (83) In many ways, Walcott’s artistic journey could be described as a search for home—for community to replace the one left; a place where his creative schizophrenia needs no defense, where his artistic voice requires neither explanation nor modulation. Poetry for him has become the meeting place of different dialects and discourse communities. The ease with which Walcott enters into poetic conversation with Naipaul and Chamoiseau, Yeats and Joyce, Larkin and Brodsky seems to gesture to his ongoing need for community and suggests that in spite of their varying nationalities, these artists are similarly driven, all speaking the same language of belonging and alien96

CALLALOO ation, love and loss, life and death. Moreover, they all share with Walcott a provincial disposition in so far as their emphases are on the specifics of their homespaces. Thus, in establishing kinship with these various artistic and intellectual communities, Walcott was to learn that multiple subjectivity is both a postcolonial and postmodern condition. It was this lesson that was to generate his return to a Caribbean homespace and to a reenergized celebration of his provincialism. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” marks this return. In this essay, Walcott can reconsider the issue of Caribbean theater and can now see folk activities as having a dignity and power that does not require the validation of the writer. Involved in a theater of faith, the provincial, be he actor or audience, poet or playwright, “believes in what he is playing, in the sacredness of the text” (67). He is unaffected by the visual echo of history that in the past distracted the writer—Walcott. Now, in viewing this unselfconscious staging of a folk performance, Walcott with a humility that stands in contradistinction to the scathing commentary on similar folk performances in “Twilight,” comes to a new acceptance that as writer he can (and has) misread the provincial text in so far as the learnt biases of his socialization have predisposed him to interpretations of Caribbean folk life that are yet to accommodate the paradoxes implicit to such performances. “I was polluting the afternoon with doubt and with the patronage of admiration” (67). Accordingly, in accepting ambiguity as part of diasporic experiences, Walcott no longer has the arrogance and the burden of having to explain the folk. They are outside of his interpretation in so far as their performances are what the outstanding theorist on Caribbean culture, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, describes as “processes, dynamics and rhythms that show themselves within the marginal, the regional, the incoherent, the heterogeneous, or if you like, the unpredictable that coexists within us in our everyday world” (5). Significantly, Walcott can recognize his ongoing intellectual and artistic performances to be similarly contradictory and unpredictable, an awareness that, in turn, reconnects him to the folk. And his imagination is fired anew. In “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” Walcott returns to his polemic as articulated in “What The Twilight Says: An Overture”; that is, the acceptance that through a historical accident, this Caribbean space has become a site of repetition, chaos, and creativity, overloaded with history, fable, myth, and symbolism. No longer does he need to aggressively defend cultural instability, to argue unequivocally that hybridity is not a crime but is, instead, a Caribbean condition. Accepting hybridity as a given, he extends his engagement with hybridity to include the East Indian in the Caribbean, and his sense of cultural connectedness to them. Older, a more fortunate traveler, Walcott has come home to the realization that “we make too much of the long groan which underlines the past” (68). He, like the other Caribbean theorists whom twenty or so years before he had found so contentious, needs to adjust his attitude to the past and to history. Only now, the past to which he is referring is both historical and personal. Old anxieties about locatedness and former grievances about acceptance all subside in the realization that it is better to accept present abundance than to focus on past loss. In “The Muse of History,” an essay presented initially as a lecture for an international conference on the relationship between art and society in a Latin American environment, Walcott had claimed: 97

CALLALOO The Caribbean sensibility is not marinated in the past. It is not exhausted. It is new. But it is its complexity, not its historically explained simplicities, which is new. Its traces of melancholy are the chemical survivals of the blood which remain after the slave’s and the indentured worker’s convalescence. It will survive the malaria of nostalgia and the delirium of revenge, just as it survived its self-contempt. (54) This testimony to survival as an essential Caribbean condition is reiterated and elaborated upon in his Nobel laureate lecture. On a personal level, his provincial imagination has survived much travail. On a larger, more political level, the polemic he had so vigorously defended in the past, has with time, proved justified. In the change of attitude to his past he comes to a new appreciation of his present, one to which he lovingly testifies in “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” for indeed his Nobel laureate lecture reads like a love song to the islands, an ode to the space that has restored his provincial faith. Now he sees Caribbean art as restorative where before he has seen it as restrictive: Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments are stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole . . . It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and the pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, whose icon and sacred vessels [are] taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is the restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. (69) He returns to and amends his old position articulated in “What the Twilight Says” about the virtues of deprivation. Watching the simple performance of Ramleela, Walcott concedes that Caribbean cultural performances, although they lack the structure of organized theater, still possess a magic and a power. This felicitous understanding of the power of culture significantly comes from Felicity. “The name Felicity makes sense” (67). Specifically, he recognizes that the designation of deprivation is one that is assigned from outside and that what the metropolis may view as lack may well be seen by the provincial as the space of possible plenitude, a testimony to survival and continuity. Significantly, this position resonates very deeply with that held by Wilson Harris, a Caribbean writer who had earlier on made peace with all the natives of his person.7 Walcott is also closer aligned to a position articulated by Kamau Brathwaite in The History of the Voice. In this polemical essay, Brathwaite had asserted: “at last our poets today are recognizing that it is essential that they use the resources that have always been there, but which have been denied to them—which they have sometimes themselves denied” (297–98). In his return to the Caribbean landscape as

98

CALLALOO the source of his inspiration, Walcott is also reentering into dialogue with other intellectuals on the issue of a Caribbean poetics, a conversation with which, in “What the Twilight Says,” he had been somewhat impatient. Moreover, in the reconstitution of these discourse communities, Walcott seems to have arrived at an equanimity that allows for the admission that how the world apprehends the Caribbean, its colonial province, no longer matters. Walcott, in “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” can identify the biases with which his provincial world is viewed by outsiders: “the elegiac pathos, the prolonged sadness, its tristes tropiques” (76), after all, he was once similarly prejudiced. In his selfreflexivity, Walcott can also confess to being inflected with a writer’s perspective, which in distancing itself from the subject, misunderstands and misrepresents it. In many ways, “The Antilles: Fragments Of Epic Memory” is the return of this penitent prodigal: one who now feels privileged to be from a backward place. His evocation of the folk, his celebration of Sessenne Descartes, the folk singer whose song introduces this essay, confirms the enduring power of that space. Sessenne is no longer the debilitating folk to which he refers in “What the Twilight Says: An Overture.” Instead, she is the evocation of home so that as he writes in the poem “Homecoming”: My country heart, I am not home till Sessenne sings, a voice like woodsmoke and ground-doves in it, that cracks like clay on a road whose tints are the dry season’s whose cautros tighten my heartstrings. The shac-shacs rattle like cicadas under the fur-leaved nettles of childhood, an old fence at noon, bel-air, quadrille, la comette, gracious turns, until delight settles. (31) Sessenne becomes the muse who leads Walcott back to being the provincial Caribbean man. It is her voice that he hears, her song that he sings, albeit in a language that he has long been concerned with purifying, one that now he is willing to concede needs no explanation and is somehow beyond his purification. The wrestling with language has subsided in his reconciliation with history, which now he sees not as muse but as “a forgotten, insomniac night.” In accepting that “metre is one’s biography,” he can concede that one can “fall in love with the word, in spite of History” (79). And these words, regardless of their linguistic ancestry, are all that he has. Having learned that he cannot ask Caribbean culture to be what it cannot be, that Caribbean cultural activism needs no champions, just followers, he can equate the Ramleela performance to dialect. These islands are now sites from which he, like the other native intellectuals, draws “working strength.” Only now the referential space has grown from island to archipelago, and potentially from archipelago to the world. In conclusion, even as we celebrate Walcott’s international stature as Nobel laureate, we can accede that although he is at home in the metropolis, he has with time and experience, made that space comfortable by affirming what it shares with the province—that is, the capacity of man, no matter what his locale, to rise to the stature of myth. Moreover, the naming and renaming that has been so often noted as a 99

CALLALOO Walcottian characteristic, relates to the reconfiguration of place, so that now, what is typically considered the province, shifts in focus to the center of influence. Ultimately, the world, transfigured through art, becomes a province and Walcott can insist: “My community, that of any twentieth century artist, is the world” (Baer 83). His liberal borrowing—for some, his problematic intertextuality—can now be explained as a feature of his provincial notion of art as a communion of the imagination, as an act of community, not an act of cultural colonization. Walcott’s works allow us to recognize that world as one in which the particulars of St. Lucian life have generated in him a universality of vision. I wish to suggest, moreover, that the universality of this vision becomes apparent in awards such as the Nobel Prize. Here, the designated center has recognized the merits of the province, but more important, such awards provide proof that the province can become the center. Indeed, what he proclaimed to the world on the podium in Sweden is that insular spaces continue to drive his poetry, to “frame stanzas that might contain the light of the hills on an island blest by obscurity, cherishing our insignificance” (84).

NOTES 1. If I say this causes me pain you should believe that’s true, If I say you’ve broken my heart You should say that’s true, If I say you’ve pierced my heart You should believe this is true. (translation mine) 2. Marie ‘Sessenne’ Descartes is a popular St. Lucian folk singer. 3. This Kweyol phrase is used to describe the countrified, unsophisticated, parochial, what we in St. Lucia would uncharitably label country-bookie. 4. St. Lucia is also an example of this shortsightedness. In spite of governments’ many assurances, it is only recently that some semblance of a theater has been created. Indeed, its national theater was established as a temporary structure, that through longevity assumed some permanence and underwent some refurbishing. 5. In The History of the Voice, Kamau Brathwaite talks about the need to find a rhythm that approximates the natural experiences of the Caribbean and about the inadequacy of the pentameter as a vehicle of that experience. Walcott’s own response is a Creole poetics, different from “nation language.” Thus, in an interview with Hammer, Walcott is able to approach the notion of a Creole poetics in the following way: “The issue of language: my real language, and tonally my basic language, is patois. Even though I speak English, it may be that deep down inside me the instinct that I have is to speak in that tongue” (Baer 29). 6. Ultimately, what Walcott is defining as history is the grand record of deeds and thus, in the absences of these myths, the artist is left with the sigh, and the task of having to create afresh. 7. See Wilson Harris’ articulation on a multicultural Caribbean aesthetic in his essay “Tradition, The Writer and Society.”

WORKS CITED Baer, William, ed. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992. Braithwaite, Edward Kamau. The History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: Oxford, 1984.

100

CALLALOO Froude, James A. The English in the West Indies; or The Bow of Ulysses. New York: C. Scribner Sons, 1888. Harris, Wilson. Tradition, the Writer, and Society: Critical Essays. London: New Beacon, 1967. Jacobs, Carl. “There’s No Bitterness in our Literature.” In Conversations with Derek Walcott, ed. William Baer. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. Rohlehr, Gordon. “Literature and the Folk.” My Strangled City and Other Essays. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Longmans Trinidad, 1992. Walcott, Derek. 25 Poems. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Guardian Commercial Printery, 1948. ———. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. ———. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” ———. The Bounty. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. ———. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. ———. “Homecoming.” The Bounty. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. ———. In a Green Night. ———. “Sainte Lucie.” Collected Poems 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982. ———. “The Sea at Dauphin.” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. ———. The Fortunate Traveler. London: Faber and Faber, 1982. ———. The Gulf. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. ———. “The Harbour.” ———. “The Muse of History.” ———. “To a Painter in England.” ———. The Star Apple Kingdom. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. ———. “What the Twilight Says: An Overture.” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. ———. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. Wordsworth, William. “Tintern Abbey.”

101

CALLALOO

GOING

by Kendel Hippolyte

Along the Sunday morning road, west coast, uphill from Canaries to Soufriere, my son asks from the backseat:”Daddy, where are we?” And, reaching to pluck a name and finding none, i slip, falling into a crevasse, the meaning of the question, the meaning of my not having an answer, rushing upward past me as i clutch at blurred-green-bush-brown-rock, not grasping anything. Approaching Soufriere, i wonder: Suppose i had been able to say “Belvedere” or “Bouton” or – what then? He’d have said “Oh” and then most probably “How far is it to Soufriere?” In the intuitive logic of a child, where you are going tells you where you are. i think of answers others might have given to his question: “We’re in an area of prime real estate.” “Da is where my grandfather planted tangerines.” “The Kalinago had a settlement here three hundred years ago.” True. But in his logic, where are we? Entering town, an old man, sitting in his doorway as we drive past, chewing meditatively, shifts the question to another corner of his mouth; a lanky youth, a black branch snapped in a sudden wind, just up ahead, gusting across the narrow street, scuds closer, the question a belligerent rasp of sandals on hot asphalt. If my son asked now “Where are we?”, i’d say:”In Soufriere, passing the church.” Sunday morning, the scent of Vaseline and talcum powder, an incense offering; children, their foreheads shining, delicate dark collarbones fragrantly dusted white, always; boys awkward in new shoes, long-sleeved shirts, girls dressed like birthday cakes; the glistening of pink and yellow taffeta rustling in Sunday light around the church. On the level grey stretch of road now before The Still, i can almost forget the sudden vertiginous mindfall that my son’s question had dislodged me into. Then at the last curve – not quite a corner, too gentle – we pass an elderly lady, someone of my mother’s age, waiting at the road’s edge for a van. We pass so close that i could touch her – though, not really. She is unreachable. In the peach organdie and poplin, lace-trimmed, scallop-collared fussy graciousness of her church dress,

102

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 102–103

CALLALOO hand-millinered hat, white purse, white block-heeled shoes, gold earrings and brooch to match, she is standing in another time. She is standing in the middle of the last century of the old millennium in Saint Lucia, when the mass was still intoned in Latin and all the priests spoke French. She is waiting to go to church. But, in truth, in this moment held above us like a communion wafer, the church, the square, the streets, the town are waiting, in a kind of offertory, for her. When she enters the church, all will settle into place and know where they are. She is going, leaving me the now augmented burden of my young son’s question. When she goes, she will take the green curve of the roadside with her, the “Bonjou, tout moun” as she enters the van, the Sunday morning light and before we know it, like an unanswered question, night will come.

103

CALLALOO

IMITATION VERSUS CONTESTATION Walcott’s Postcolonial Shakespeare

by Reed Way Dasenbrock

A great deal has been written already on the topic of Shakespeare and the postcolonial. A number of postcolonial writers and theorists have marked out positions vis-á-vis Shakespeare, and one can make two broad generalizations concerning this body of material. First, postcolonial theory has largely presented the postcolonial as in opposition to the classic. Salman Rushdie, in a famous phrase, referred to how the “Empire writes back,” and this implies a position of antagonism or contestation, of a critical stance toward the European/colonial past, including the literary past.1 A major theme of postcolonial literature has indeed been to “write back” against the European descriptions of the postcolonial world, whether that be Achebe’s and other African writers’ critique of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Coetzee’s and other writers engagement with Daniel Defoe, especially Robinson Crusoe, or a variety of Indian reactions against Kipling and Forster. For writers in English, it is perhaps not too much to say that the figure of the literary past is Shakespeare, so a general stance of contestation vis-à-vis the literary past should lead directly to a stance of contestation toward him. Yet it is perhaps worth noting that the purest example of writing back against Shakespeare is not found in Anglophone literature, but rather in the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, which is a chilling retelling of Othello written in Arabic and set in contemporary England and the Sudan. The other key site of such a critical engagement with Shakespeare can be found in the involvement of many Caribbean writers with the themes of The Tempest, again an involvement which expresses itself in the work of Aime Cesaire and Roberto Fernández Retamar as well as Anglophone writers such as George Lamming.2 Nonetheless, the stress on contestation, on writing back, found in postcolonial theory does not do full justice to postcolonial literature. I would like to suggest that postcolonial theory has been far more committed to the notion of antagonism between the postcolonial and the European literary tradition than the writers have themselves. To rewrite a text means necessarily to have a complex set of attitudes toward the model one is rewriting; contestation alone in my view does not ever fully explain the traffic between the original and the rewrite. The way many postcolonial writers take off from classic texts, rewriting them with a complex mixture of motives and emotions, is in crucial respects a continuation of the heritage of modernism.3 Joyce is a particularly useful reference point here: in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young Stephen Dedalus is committed to an aesthetic of ‘writing back,’ as is expressed in the famous scene with the Dean of Studies where they discuss the word tundish. As Stephen subsequently reflects when thinking about the scene later: 104

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 104–113

CALLALOO How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (182) Moreover, much of the way Homer, Shakespeare, and other models are handled in Ulysses is comic and deflationary in a way which can be read as an anticipation of the antagonism found in something like Season of Migration to the North. Yet Joyce extends Homer as much as he deflates him: his imitation—although creative or strong, not weak—is an homage as much as a critique. Imitation coexists with contestation in a way which is not new in literary history. My sense is that this double-voiced relation is far more characteristic of the relation between works of postcolonial literature and their models than any more simplistic model of writing back. Relevant here in general is the fact that postcolonial writers seek to establish relations to classics in their own cultural traditions nearly as often as they do to classic Western texts: examples here would include Timothy Mo’s complex updating of Journey to the West in The Monkey King, Shashi Tharoor’s rewriting of the Mahabharata in The Great Indian Novel, as well as—more problematically—Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. This is not an either-or: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s great novel, Paradise, for instance, can be read as a retelling of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but it is also a retelling of the Joseph story from the Bible, or rather the Yusuf story from the Koran, with a potential nod to Thomas Mann at the same time. The cultural space in which these writers work is a complex one, and their works reflect this directly. Derek Walcott’s Omeros—to begin to move nearer to my topic here—is a complex rewriting of the Iliad, but it also stands in a close relation to Dante and contains many references to West African oral epic.4 So no simple model works here any more than it does for writers in the Western tradition. To pretend otherwise is to replace the complexity of a rich literature with the simplifications of an impoverished theory. There has been, of course, a good deal of that. Another respect in which the discussion of Shakespeare and the postcolonial has been simplified is that the discussion has focused on two Shakespeare plays, The Tempest and Othello, to the exclusion of the thirty-odd other plays in the canon. These plays are indeed obvious places to start, given the Orientalist concern with European– African relations in both plays, given the intersection of The Tempest with the themes of the era of European discovery and the initial phase of settlement, and given the availability of a reading of Caliban as a figure for the indigenous population of the Caribbean. There are therefore good reasons for The Tempest and Othello to be the top two Shakespeare plays for postcolonial writers and theorists.5 But this does not mean that they should be the only two. Shakespeare’s work offers other points of departure for the postcolonial writer beyond The Tempest or Othello. Antony and Cleopatra is certainly one such point of departure, for whatever Cleopatra’s actual racial or genetic identity, her relation to Antony involves virtually all of the European/non-European themes that inform Othello as well. (Titus Andronicus might be another, although I am pleased to say that I am not aware of any postcolonial text using Titus as a point of 105

CALLALOO departure.) So it seems to me that the discussion on Shakespeare and the postcolonial to date has worked with too narrow a conception of the stance postcolonial writers take toward Shakespeare and too narrow a sense of Shakespeare’s work.6 What I want to do in this essay is to discuss Derek Walcott’s 1983 play, A Branch of the Blue Nile, not just because it is an important work of postcolonial literature that has been neglected, but also because its particular sites and modes of engagement with Shakespeare usefully complicates the received view of the relationship between postcolonial literature and Shakespeare.7 A Branch of the Blue Nile (the title will concern us a bit later) is a play about a theater company in Trinidad which is putting on a production of Antony and Cleopatra. This is not a star-studded or well-established troupe, so there is some concern about whether they have the resources to mount a Shakespeare production, as well as some doubt about whether they should. The first scene is a rehearsal, and the actors are having some difficulty maintaining the proper Shakespearean tone. When an actor speaks Cleopatra’s line, “Saw you my lord?” (214), another actor responds, “Your lord? No. He gone out,” and the switch into West Indian dialect causes everyone to break up in laughter. When Sheila, playing Cleopatra, recites Cleopatra’s speech after Antony’s death in Act IV, working hard to maintain the diction, she normalizes/ modernizes the tense: The soldier’s pole is fallen: young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds are gone. (219) This leads to her being corrected by the English director, “the odds is gone. Singular, Marylin, please” (219). But the difficulty the actors are having traversing the gap they feel between themselves and this “classic text” is echoed by the English director, who here confuses Marylin with Sheila. Sheila goes on to express this difficulty in what follows: Two months I’ve suffered. Did I sound like her? Did it, did it sound like I’d lost the world. (219) This is not the only play they are rehearsing; they are also rehearsing a “dialect play,” set presumably in Trinidad or at least the Caribbean, written by one of the troupe. In a sense, the two plays represent the artistic choices for the Caribbean artist as they are often presented, either to imitate European models in a move surely to be criticized for inauthenticity, or to embrace the art of the people. But Walcott in the very way he dramatizes this choice complicates it wonderfully. For the actors have as much difficulty with the dialect as they do with the Shakespeare: “I know it’s beneath us now.” “Beneat’! No H! You stubborn bitch! Beneat! She ain’t from England.” (244) The play, with fake banana trees and actors in peasant clothing, may represent “the real Caribbean,” but this is as artificial and as far away from the lives of these characters as Antony and Cleopatra. The actors seem as out of place in the “native” play 106

CALLALOO as they are in the “foreign,” and indeed the two seem to have crisscrossed in their minds. As the actress goes on to say, I just have this other metre in my head. Go back and sit down. Sit down by your pardner Harvey. All you making us schizophrenic. We talking Shakespeare like ‘rangutang people . . . And viceversa. [Points to the two directors {one of whom is black, the other white}]. Over there you see our split personality. (244) One way around this might well be to split the difference, and in an odd way this is indeed what happens in the actual performance of Antony and Cleopatra in Act II. The only scene of Shakespeare’s play acted out in Walcott’s is Cleopatra’s final scene, when the clown brings her the asp with which she commits suicide. Cleopatra does her lines from the play, but the Clown’s lines are an adaptation in dialect of what the Clown says in Antony and Cleopatra: “Remember’st thou any that have died on ‘t?” “Too many, lady. Male and she-male, sure. Yesterday self sold me a sample: a straightforward lady that butter couldn’t melt in she mouth but a little crooked with the truth, which is just natural for any Adam’s wife, fainted forever from giving it a little suck.” (262–63) This intentional attempt to split the difference is echoed in unintentional comedy. In the on-stage performance of the scene, a stagehand rolls out on stage a prop from the other play, “a cutout of banana or fig trees,” just as Cleopatra begins her suicide speech, and the cutout blocks the cutout sphinx that had set the stage as in Egypt. Just after Cleopatra declaims, “Now to that name my courage prove the title,” the English director shouts out to the stagehand: “Wilfrid! Wilfrid! Move the figs! [Wilfrid goes to the sphinx.] Not the F.E.G., not the effigy, the figs! Move the fucking bananas!” (265) Wilfrid’s antics are greeted with applause, and the intentional conflation of ancient Egypt and modern Trinidad collapses into an unintentional one. Of course, bananas or at least figs would work as well as a sphinx to help set the scene in Egypt, and this seems actually less incongruous than the clown speaking dialect. In any case, the production is panned in the newspaper, in a review entitled “BARD GOES BANANAS” (268), and although the reviewer understands that the indigenizing move of the dialogue was intentional but the scenery was not, nonetheless, he does not separate the two as he views both as travesties of the original:

107

CALLALOO Today I am deeply pained to report that the only indigenous thing onstage last night, in Mr. St. Just’s abbreviated, aborted, and abominable mounting of Antony and Cleopatra, was a bunch of bananas inadvertently trundled onstage during the farewell speech of Cleopatra, about which more later. Certain things remain sacred, or else our civilization is threatened . . . (269) Walcott is of course having fun here, undoubtedly with disastrous Trinidad Theatre Workshop performances in mind,8 but one can discover—as in Shakespeare—seriousness beneath or amid the fun. The critic is “incensed” because “rewriting the clown’s speech in local dialect [which] had him fooled for a while” is “desecrating the Bard” (267), but of course this is wonderfully 180 degrees off. It was precisely the function of clowns in Shakespeare to connect the audience to the play in a way the exalted language did not, so it could be said that the director here is truer to Shakespeare by treating him as a working playwright trying to connect with a largely popular audience than is the critic treating “the Bard” as someone who can be “desecrated” as if his works were holy Writ.9 This is not simply a point about Shakespeare; Walcott is obviously reflecting on the situation of the Caribbean artist. If the Caribbean artist is faced with two conflicting imperatives, represented here by the two plays under rehearsal, Walcott wishes us to embrace this particular contradiction rather than trying to eliminate it. To depict “authentic Caribbeanness,” one does not need to restrict oneself to what in the Abbey Theatre was called P.Q. (Peasant Quality) because the authentic Caribbean is the confused, hybrid, syncretic, conflicted space of Walcott’s play, not the stage Caribbean of figs or bananas depicted in the local play. “I perform Shakespeare, and he winces not,” Walcott seems to be saying. Nonetheless, the Shakespeare of relevance to the Caribbean cannot be handled as a dead text, as an object to be reverenced; it must be brought into connection with the lived realities of the Caribbean, intentionally or unintentionally. This is indeed what happens in the play: two actresses take on the role of Cleopatra, and for both it has a powerfully transformative effect, if different in the two cases. Here, we need to move from the question of imitation by the playwright to the question of imitation in the theater, to move from the question of writing to the question of acting. Part of what is going on in the somewhat confused rehearsal scene (Act 1, Scene 1) from which I have already quoted is a confusion between the roles in the play and the roles of the actors outside the play: Sheila, the actress originally cast in the role, is having an affair with the actor cast as Antony, Chris (the author of the banana play), who nonetheless will not leave his English wife. The troupe is quite aware of the parallels between the situation in the play and in real life, or more precisely between Shakespeare’s play and Walcott’s: What’s all this sexual hesitation, Sheila? You know how sensual his corpse is to her? I’m not her, Harvey. I can’t play all that. Play what you feel about Chris, not Antony. Just leave my personal life out of this, please. (213) 108

CALLALOO What happens across the rehearsal process is that Sheila does “play all that,” does grow into the role and finds the mimetic enabling and enhancing: You catch fire today, girl. Yes. God damn it and God forgive me, but yes. (238) But this surrender to the power of imitation is momentary, because she decides that God might damn it and is unlikely to forgive her. Sheila quits the theater, flees the dangerous mimetic space of the theatre, and joins a branch of the Seventh Day Adventists.10 It is at that point that the title of the play begins to make sense, for Sheila represents her conversion in terms of a shift in rivers: then from somewhere, next door, I heard this evangelical meeting—the voice wasn’t shouting, but lulling, like a river, as if the Nile herself had changed her voice. It wasn’t the Nile anymore but the river Jordan. (281–82) Here, of course, Walcott is drawing on a powerful Christian typology, the opposition between Egypt and Israel, which structures the Book of Exodus and has been so important to Protestant thinking, particularly the Protestantism of the African Diaspora. She presents this turn as a turn from imitation to being herself: To change our voices, that’s idolatry; to be someone else for money is harlotry. How can we be another till we find ourselves? And once we find ourselves, we don’t need others. (282) If Sheila identifies with the role she is playing so much that she fears the consequences, Marylin in contrast identifies with having a role to play. She therefore grows into the role in a different way, loving being cast as the diva, loving her favorable reviews, and very much becoming Cleopatra, not the private lover, but the star, the queen, the publicity hound. That this is a shallower imitation and is not really the essence of the theater is shown in the complex resolution of the play. When Sheila joins the church, this is presented not just by her but also by her minister as a retreat from imitation: I glad to see that when you render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, you ain’t rendering as Cleopatra, that lecherous serpent of Egypt, rendered. . . . To hear any other voice but His is to desecrate this place a little bit, because this is a temple, not a theatre, and while we appreciate your coming, we don’t give no performance here. (260)

109

CALLALOO But just as you cannot draw a line between the theater and real life, neither can you draw a line between theater and church as confidently as Brother John does here. His language first of all echoes the literary critic who criticized the production of Antony and Cleopatra. Brother John fears desecration by the theater, and the critic fears desecration in the theater, but this means that the theater is not simply opposed to the holy but can at the same time partake of it. Brother John’s language also unconsciously betrays the fact that the Holy is somewhat theatrical in nature. If “to hear any other voice but His is to desecrate this place a little bit,” Brother John himself is desecrating as he speaks. Of course, he would respond by saying that his voice is attempting to render His voice, but this too—as he must admit—is an imperfect rendering, capable of falling hazard to all the risks of rendering. Another way of putting this is that in “a temple” as well as in a theater, there is still a structure of role playing. One may be speaking His words but they are spoken by us, in a setting that is not untheatrical. Sheila thinks with Brother John that she is escaping the realm of imitation by reorienting herself from the theater to the church, from the Nile to the Jordan: ‘cause the Caroni isn’t a branch of the river Nile, and Trinidad isn’t Egypt, except at Carnival, so the world sniggles when I speak her lines, but not in a concrete church in Barataria. (285) But Sheila has not avoided the theatrical or the imitative or the mimetic by moving from the theater to a concrete church. For what should be clear enough to us if not yet to Sheila is that the Caroni is not the Jordan and that Trinidad is not Israel except at Church. She has not escaped the world of imitation, she has simply shifted from one imitative system to another. Characters in the play certainly realize this also. Brother John wonders if she has forsaken her earlier theatrical self quite as thoroughly as she had thought: Tha’ is natural in the theatre, but, Sister, here the congregation is not an audience, and the devout aren’t actors. Tell me, didn’t you hear some damned fool clap and shout “Bravo!”? Didn’t you? (287) But this doubt is a focused doubt about whether she has escaped the theatrical, not a larger doubt about whether the Church represents such an escape. That, of course, is the doubt the “damned fool” is expressing, and he is her former lover, Chris, who has come back from Barbados. Chris’ return disrupts Sheila’s illusion of having found her true self in the branch of the Jordan. When he comes up to her after the service, he says, “I was in the audience, I mean, oh shit—excuse me—the congregation” (288). His dismissal of the difference between the theater and church, Nile and Jordan, audience and congregation, is of course rejected by Brother John, “You was the fool who clap, nuh?” (288). But this intrusion by the world of the theater into the world of the church breaks Sheila’s illusion that she has escaped the theatrical by moving to the church. 110

CALLALOO Sheila admits to him that “I don’t see the congregation. It’s like the theatre. The difference is that it’s day. No spotlight moon” (289). But this realization that her performances in church are diurnal equivalents of her performances in the theater does not mean that she oscillates back from the world of the Jordan to her former identification just with the Nile. Seeing both church and the theater, the Jordan and the Nile, to be caught in a play of representation, she now sees that this does not mean that one (either one) is authentic and the other an imitation. Rather, she comes to see them as connected precisely because through imitation, we can arrive at something real: If he gave me his Truth, what shall I do with it? And why does he give it to me through Shakespeare? Maybe Jesus came back and he was Shakespeare. (260) Armed with this new insight, she returns to the theater and finds some of the troupe at work rehearsing a new play, which Chris has written in Barbados, called “A Branch of the Blue Nile.” This play is about the troupe itself, about the scenes depicted in the beginning of the play. But this return to the concerns of the present does not eliminate the theatrical in favor of the real—it simply marks Walcott’s claim that the real is the theatrical. Where does this leave us? A Branch of the Blue Nile is about many things, but one of its themes is the inevitability of imitation. An influential analysis of Walcott’s work, Rei Terada’s Derek Walcott’s Poetry, which does not discuss this play, reads Walcott’s poetry in terms of a theme of mimicry.11 But mimicry defines imitation in such a way that the original being mimicked is valued over the imitation or mimicry. But this makes no sense of the degree to which Walcott is a man of the theater. Art is imitation if one is of the theater, and the choice is not whether to imitate, it is what to imitate and how. The primary model is not valued over the contemporary realization of it, because text leads necessarily to performance and is brought to life by it. The original is dead until we stage it, act it, perform it, revive it. This is not, for Walcott, a choice between authenticity and mimicry, because authenticity is not possible after the original production, nor is it a choice between originality and imitation. The original is dead, as in the Odyssey, until someone alive brings fresh blood and allows the dead to speak to and through them. For anyone who has run a theater company in the way Walcott has, it is natural to pose these issues in terms of a choice of repertory, and this is given concrete form in A Branch of the Blue Nile in the choice between Shakespeare and the banana play. The banana play is not a serious option for Walcott, and I think this is true not just for the theater for Walcott but also for the Caribbean. After 1492, after the middle passage, there is no authentic indigenous culture that is not already staged, already itself an imitation. The role of the artist in this context is not to lament this loss of authenticity, to criticize imitation as desecration; rather, it is to celebrate the world of possibility opened up by this space, by this transformation.

111

CALLALOO NOTES 1. Rushdie’s phrase was then used as the title of an influential early survey of postcolonial literature. 2. In “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” Rob Nixon surveys this body of work. 3. I have explored this relationship, primarily through a discussion of Walcott’s Omeros, in “Homer . Dante . Pound . . Walcott: The Post in Post-Modern isn’t the Post in Post-Colonial.” 4. I have explored this in “Haephaestus or Ogun: Taking the Comparative Fork in the Road.” 5. A good place to see this, in addition to the essay by Nixon already cited, is in Loomba and Orkin’s Post-Colonial Shakespeares. 6. Only one essay in Loomba and Orkin mentions Antony and Cleopatra, Michael Neill’s “Postcolonial Shakespeare? Writing away from the centre,” who in a brief discussion of A Branch of the Blue Nile, quotes Sheila’s speech on pages 284–5, which I discuss later, and finds in it “a profound ambivalence about what it means for Shakespeare to ‘end up’ in her West Indian mouth” (180). The perspective of this essay, a critique of “glad hybridity,” is quite different from my own. Another relevant example is Paula Burnett’s full-length study, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, which situates her entire reading of Walcott in terms of a reading of The Tempest and contains exactly one (parenthetical) reference to A Branch of the Blue Nile. More evidence of Walcott’s interest in Antony and Cleopatra is the poem “Egypt, Tobago” (Collected Poems 1948-1984 [368–71]). 7. On the neglect, it is worth noting that none of the general surveys of Walcott’s poetry (Burnett, Terada, Ismond, Breslin) aside from Thieme’s or his biography (King) contains an explication of the play, although King’s Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama (see n. 8) does discuss the play. There is only one essay on the play, Stephen P. Breslow’s useful reading of the play in terms of Bakhtinian heteroglossia. 8. Bruce King’s Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama is the most complete account of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop we have or are likely to have, and he discusses A Branch of the Blue Nile and its initial staging in Barbados and subsequent staging in Trinidad in some detail (319–23, 331– 35). He comments, “Perhaps the best tribute to the effectiveness of Branch is that many Trinidadians, in recognizing similarities to local theatre history, sought for exact parallels. I have been told by many actors who have been in Walcott’s productions that he or she is the basis of a character in the play. Perhaps, but as others make the same claim for the same character it might be better to regard the characters as composites of people Walcott knew over the years” (334). 9. David Wiles’ analysis of the role of the clown in Shakespeare’s drama is apposite: “The neoclassical argument proposed that the theatre audience look passively into a mirror containing an image of their society—but the Elizabethan clown’s performance rested on the assumption, or illusion, that the audience are active participants, necessary helpers in the creation of theatre” (x). 10. John Thieme’s brief analysis of the play in Derek Walcott suggests a different analysis of why Sheila leaves the theater, which is that she sees the theater as “a white preserve in the postindependent Caribbean” (142) with Shakespeare as “an alien discourse” (141). This might adequately represent her attitudes as she leaves the theater but doesn’t make sense as a description of her final perspective nor as a description of Walcott’s. 11. Terada’s point of departure is Walcott’s 1974 essay, “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” But of course Walcott’s choice of the term mimicry comes from V. S. Naipaul and is not necessarily of his own choosing. In Terada’s analysis, “all of Walcott’s poetry after 1974 builds upon [the] conclusions” of “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” (25). My own sense is that her analysis makes a good deal more sense of the poetry than the drama—which she leaves off to one side— but I think her adoption of Walcott’s adoption of Naipaul’s term mimicry gives the whole discussion a more negative valance than it should have. My own sense is that imitation is a more useful term than mimicry, and also reflects my view that although Naipaul is an important rival for Walcott, he is not an important influence. An examination of the role of imitation in Walcott’s poetry rather than his drama would also have to reckon with the influence of Robert Lowell.

112

CALLALOO WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Breslow, Stephen P. “Trinidadian Heteroglossia: A Bakhtinian View of Derek Walcott’s Play A Branch of the Blue Nile. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert Hamner. Boulder: Three Continents, 1993. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Burnett, Paula. Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Dasenbrock, Reed Way. “Haephaestus or Ogun: Taking the Comparative Fork in the Road.” Unpublished manuscript. Dasenbrock, Reed Way. “Why the Post in Post-Colonial Is Not the Post in Post-Modern: Homer . Dante . Pound . Walcott.” Ezra Pound and African Modernism. Ed. Michael Cole. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 2001. 111–23. Dasenbrock, Reed Way. “Haephaestus or Ogun: Taking the Comparative Fork in the Road.” Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Paradise. Hamner, Robert, ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Boulder: Three Continents, 1993. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Vintage, 1993. Joyce, James, Ulysses. King, Bruce. Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama. King, Bruce. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Loomba, Ania, and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. London: Routledge, 1998. Mo, Timothy. The Monkey King. Neill, Michael. “Post-colonial Shakespeare? Writing away from the centre.” Post-Colonial Shakespeares. Ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin. London: Routledge, 1998. Nixon, Rob. “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest.” Critical inquiry 13 91987): 557– 78. Rushdie, Salman. Satanic Verses. Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. ———. Othello. ———. The Tempest. ———. Titus Andronicus. Terada, Rei. Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992. Tharoor, Shashi. The Great Indian Novel. Thieme, John. Derek Walcott. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999. Walcott, Derek. “A Branch of the Blue Nile.” Three Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983. ———. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert Hamner. Boulder: Three Continents, 1993. ———. Collected Poems 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. ———. Omeros. Wiles, David. Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

113

CALLALOO

GAUDEBO pour Derek Walcott

by Claire Malroux

Gaudebo—parole soufflée en rêve Dans le merveilleux latin qui perdure Quoique perdu pour toutes nos écoles Allons nous réjouir sur l’autel du Seigneur\ Chante Racine ou un ancien catéchisme Gaudebo pour cet enfant en sabots Avançant sur la plaine où le vent pousse La neige buissonnière sans alphabet Sinon les bosses du monde et ses plaies Gaudebo car descendant l’allée du jardin Dans les siècles des siècles de juin Il recevait le sacrement de l’aube; La nuit dans le seul globe de son oeil Ramenait les étoiles, coeurs glacés Mais palpitants, et embrassant les saisons La rivière parlait en voyelles frottées Contre le rauque ivoire des rochers Que de temps s’est écoulé pour la gorge Brûlée obstruée de cailloux se délie! Presque autant que pour déboucher sur la lande Nue de la mort après les péripéties Mais parce que sans faillir le gargouillis Comme d’un sexe doucement mouillé Monte des raciness vers l’autel de l’inutile Gaudebo

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 115

115

CALLALOO

GAUDEBO for Derek Walcott

by Claire Malroux

Gaudebo—word breathed out in a dream In the lovely Latin which survives Although lost to all of our schools Let us rejoice at the Lord’s altar Intone Racine or an old catechism Gaudebo for that child in wooden clogs Coming across the plain where the wind sweeps The truant snow whose only alphabet Is the planet’s bruises and wounds Gaudebo for on the garden path In the world without end of June He received the sacrament of dawn; For the sole orbit of his eyes, the night Gathered up stars, frozen but Beating hearts, and, embracing the seasons The river spoke in vowels rubbed raw against The raucous ivory of the rocks How much time had to pass for that scorched Throat blocked with stones to break loose! As much as it took to emerge on the nude Moor of death after so much wandering But because a sound unfailingly froths up Like a woman’s gently moistened sex From the roots to the altar of idleness Gaudebo

From Claire Malroux, Edge, trans. Marilyn Hacker (Winston-Salem NC: Wake Forest Univ. Press, 1996), p. 64 (Malroux’s French) and p. 65 (Hacker’s English translation).

116

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 116

CALLALOO

WALCOTT’S TRAVELER AND THE PROBLEM OF WITNESS

by Jeffrey Gray

There was no treachery if he turned his back on the sun that plunges fissures in the fronds of the feathery immortelles. —Tiepolo’s Hound (71) Derek Walcott has rejected descriptions of himself as exile or emigré, but he has, in many poems, described himself as a traveler. He has set his poems not only in St. Lucia but in Manhattan, Miami, St. Petersburg, Cracow, Rome, San Juan, and London; he has written not only of island fishermen but of John Clare, Balzac, Pisarro, Antonio Machado, Ovid, and Kurtz. But if to translate is to betray, so travel, home voices say, is a kind of treachery. Emerson thought we were responsible to places: they depend on us and become venerable by our “sticking fast” to them. “The soul is no traveler,” he wrote in “Self-Reliance” (159). Walcott often seems to agree: “Traveling widens this breach,” he writes at the end of his 1970 essay “What the Twilight Says” (39). And, graver still, in his Nobel acceptance speech: “The Traveler cannot love, since love is stasis and travel is motion” (“Antilles” 77). Yet, to many Caribbean writers, the artist’s need to leave the Caribbean has been simply self-evident. Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and, of course, V.S. Naipaul are a few among the large group of such artists. Condé was virtually unknown in her native Guadeloupe until her books were published in France. Césaire began the Notebook of a Return to My Native Land while vacationing in Yugoslavia and completed it in Paris.1 Brathwaite has taught for years at New York University, and Naipaul’s home base has long been the English countryside. Writing in the St. Lucian Star on the occasion of the Nobel award, John Robert Lee admonished his compatriots: “If Derek Walcott lived here he would not be popular. . . . Derek had to go outside. Do not foolishly blame him for that. Our generation has to stay home and make it here. A hard ground. But he has made the path clear for us” (qtd. in Burnett 10). That this defense needs to be made at all suggests that, if travel raises questions for writers in general, the questions are graver for Caribbean writers. From “A Far Cry from Africa” and “The Divided Child” onward, Walcott has crafted hundreds of metaphors for conflicted identity, creolism, the subject poisoned by, gifted by, caught between, or shuttling between two worlds. The awards and distinctions conferred on him have reflected this emphasis. Homages on the occasion of the 1992 Nobel Prize celebrated Walcott’s exile status, his homecomings, and his commutes between Boston, St. Lucia, and Trinidad. Apparently unconscious of racist overtones, Swedish

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 117–128

117

CALLALOO Academy member Kjell Espmark characterized Walcott’s poetry as “a meeting place of the virtuosity of Europe and the sensuality of a Caribbean Adam” (Grunquist 153). Perceived, then, as an ethnic Caribbean poet, or as hybrid of Europe and Africa, Walcott is subject to a burden of representation, and therefore to a kind of criticism, to which many poets are not. No one demanded of Robert Lowell or Elizabeth Bishop that they speak for their people; no one now demands of John Ashbery that he be faithful to local, ethnic, or national constituencies. Readers in search of such fidelities simply turn elsewhere. Can the Caribbean poet-traveler speak for home, “wherever that may be?”2 Critics who have found Walcott’s work too distanced from the material realities of the Caribbean usually voice one of at least three related complaints: they cite the poet’s immersion in European traditions—they ask, in other words, whether Walcott is reor decolonizing the Afro-Caribbean by stealing literary types from former slavers. Second, they may note, as Paul Breslin has of “Another Life,” the poet’s tendency toward the sublime and the allegorical, his movement from the historically concrete to the universally symbolic. Specifically, Breslin is uneasy with “claims to Adamic transcendence of history . . . claims of elemental kinship to the earth that circumvent cultural mediation . . . ” (177). Finally, critics may question the poet’s biogeography. Although Walcott has repeatedly emphasized his ties to St. Lucia and to the Caribbean in general, he has taught in the United States for the past twenty years and now spends half the year in Boston; he was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company to stage the Odyssey in London, helped Paul Simon pen the short-lived Broadway musical The Capeman, and staged Robert Pinsky’s translation of the Inferno.3 These are sore points with critics such as Dionne Brand, who insists that Walcott sees the Caribbean “with the eye of the imperial stranger” (Gingell 44). Moreover, fame has a double edge in the Caribbean. Although Walcott’s many awards represent long overdue acknowledgement of Caribbean literary value, they also confirm the work’s appeal to, and coherence within, old centers of power in Europe and America. As Paula Burnett observes, for a Caribbean artist to be given an award can be seen as a sign of the North’s “growing enlightenment, in that the honour is going to a hitherto unacknowledged quarter,” or “as yet another manifestation of neo-colonialism, in that once again the north acts as global arbiter of quality and manipulator of power. The ambivalence is acute” (Burnett 1–2). The crucial thing to say about this conversation is that it is carried on at a complicated and compelling level in the poems themselves, which are frequently haunted by the fear that the poet’s border crossing—geographical, linguistic, and metaphorical—distances him from his origins. Of these three kinds of movement, the last becomes most conspicuous in a discussion of poetry, for at least two reasons: first, the movement of figuration is itself a betrayal of presence (or of the dream of presence), and second, the fields of postcolonial studies and new historicism have for at least twenty years taken the narrative almost exclusively as their object of study. If poetry dispenses with plot, with character, with continuities of time and place, how can the poet speak for home? Can he or she be both exile and neighbor? The problems of literal, geographical travel are perhaps too obvious to require further emphasis, especially given the many instances in Walcott’s poems where he 118

CALLALOO places the subject position of the privileged, often airborne traveler under scrutiny.4 But, as I have begun to suggest, geographic travel viewed as betrayal has its corollary in the slippage between language and the physical world, and, even while Walcott’s metaphors abound and luxuriate, the poems made up of them regularly offer a critical commentary on this very process of figuration and its consequences. It is such commentaries that I would like to examine in what follows. Walcott’s linguistic turn, although impossible to overlook, is not as often commented upon as his postcolonial predicament. Perhaps critics have too readily assigned linguistic play, in its most irreferential sense, to Los Angeles and Buffalo, and too little noticed it in the poetics of the Caribbean, in spite of the obvious instances of Walcott, Brathwaite, Chamoiseau, and others. The landscape of contemporary poetry, notable in the poetry anthologies published in the United States, too often depends on a division between a poetry of subjectivity on the one hand and a poetry of linguistic experiment on the other. Discussions of the former, which has much more currency in the classroom, tend to be content rather than medium centered; this is particularly true of collections representing literatures seen as ethnic. For Walcott, forms and meters, a penchant for the theatrical, the trompe l’oeil, crafty homophonic slippages, world-as-text metaphors—aesthetic and intellectual play, in other words— are what fascinate. It might be said that Walcott offers the most striking example in contemporary poetry of the awkward meeting and mutual misrecognition of the postcolonial and the postmodern.5 When, in “The Schooner Flight,” the poet-sailor Shabine refers to “my pages the sails of the schooner Flight” (347), he suggests a textual rather than a geographical adventure. Like Elizabeth Bishop, whose first published poem, “The Map,” explores the pleasurable aesthetic confusion between sign systems (colors, lines, and names), material oceans and shores, and national entities, Walcott has written many poems deploying world-as-text figures.6 He describes islands “like words . . . Erased with the surf’s pages” (In a Green Night 77), “shelves forested with titles, trunks that wait for names” (The Gulf 75), “The monotonous scrawl of the beaches” (Another Life 22), an ocean that “kept turning blank pages // looking for History” (Star-Apple Kingdom 25). By the time we come to Midsummer, the trope hypertrophies: Walcott speaks of “pages in a damp culture,” “canefields set in stanzas,” “bright suburbs [that] fade into words” (I), “boulevards [that] open like novels / waiting to be written. Clouds like the beginnings of stories” (XLIII), so that finally it becomes impossible to know whether we are traveling through landscape or language.7 This mutual enfiguring of nature and language constitutes at once an irreferential play, an inquiry into the relation between “reality” and representation, and an assertion of Walcott’s sense of the world as mythic (of which more later), existing outside of linear history. From a mimetic standpoint, what are the consequences of this conversion of nature into text? In “Homecoming,” from The Bounty, the vegetation of the poet’s native island rises up to accuse him. “Nature”’s voice is unequivocal in its disapproval of both the poet’s geographic and linguistic travel. When the oleanders, casuarinas, and breadfruit trees speak in this sequence, they speak as critics, as the traveler’s guilty projection of the rooted “home” from which he has long been a fugitive. They reject both his subject position and his universalist claims: 119

CALLALOO it was on an ochre road I caught the noise of their lives, how their rage was rooted, shaking with every gust: their fitful disenchantment with all my turned leaves, for all of the years while theirs turned to mulch, then dust. “We offered you language early, an absolute choice; you preferred the gutturals of low tide sucked by the shoal on the grey strand of cities, the way Ireland offered Joyce his own unwritten dirt road outside Choiseul.” “I have tried to serve both,” I said, provoking a roar from the leaves, shaking their heads, defying translation. “And there’s your betrayal,” they said. I said I was sure that all the trees of the world shared a common elation of tongues, gommier with linden, bois-campêche with the elm. “You lie, your right hand forgot its origin, O Jerusalem, but kept its profitable cunning. We remain unuttered, undefined,” and since road and sun were English words, both of them endowed in their silence the dividing wind. (32) At one level, this is a late installment of the “where shall I turn” topos that Walcott has been writing all his life. But at another, this is a meta-commentary on the poet’s life work. The trees rage at the poet’s supposed treason, his “turned leaves.”8 We may think first of the tropism of leaves themselves, then of literary tropes as turns, and then of the acts of reading or writing: turning pages (or turning phrases) is that textual activity which has drawn or withdrawn this poet from island realities. But most of all, given the theme of the return home, we may think of turning back or away, the turning of a turncoat, who no longer recognizes nor is recognized by his home.9 Moreover, when something turns, it turns toward death—when milk sours, it turns; when leaves turn, they become brown, as would be the case of an uprooted plant. While the poet’s leaves were turning—northward—the trees’ leaves had “turned to mulch, then dust.” The first of these transformations ensures other, newer growth, sacrificing one generation of leaves to protect another, but disintegration follows that sacrifice. The island vegetation hears he poet’s reply, “I have tried to serve both,” as betrayal. His next assertion that “all the trees of the world share[d] a common elation / of tongues . . . ” is worse than betrayal; it is a universalism that erases the specificity of island life. The poet has capitalized on his talent—”profitable cunning”—without giving back what is owed to its origin. He has “turned” his gift elsewhere, northward. But the chief accusation of these rooted beings is not that the poet has absconded but that he has failed to represent them to the world, to turn them into text: “We remain unuttered, undefined,” (32) they say. This charge, valid in the sense that things remain unuttered even after we have turned them into text (there being no language that will restore presence) is scarcely credible in the context of Walcott’s work. Walcott rivals both Pablo Neruda and St John Perse in his naming of the world, especially its vegetation, detritus, seawrack—even while he converts this specificity into textual terms. (See for example, “Sainte Lucie”: “Pomme arac, / otaheite apple, / pomme cythère, / pomme granate, / moubain, / z’anananas. . . .,” etc. [Sea Grapes 36].) 120

CALLALOO But “unuttered, undefined” may refer more to nature’s insatiable appetite for signs than to the insufficiency of Walcott’s gesture of naming (or even the insufficiency of “English words,” presented as mute, devoid of evocative capability). The casuarinas ask too much: Because no name can define, the process of naming must be continuous and endless. No matter how much utterance takes place, “we remain” unuttered, because we remain: “we” (the trees) are rooted. In this way, the trees revenge themselves on the mobile poet, wanting him tethered to themselves, and their rootedness confers on them an intimidating authority. Their demand, that language also be rooted, is an impossibility.10 Linguistic nature, in this “Homecoming” (Walcott has written several), takes on a meaning beyond that of the poet’s habitual troping. Nature speaks and yet demands a voice. The voices of the trees, raised in reprimand, mourns its own lack. From the poet’s standpoint, Nature’s demand for transformation into language is its principal feature. He faces a world of objects that demand signing and meaning, that demand to be something other than themselves. The other charge that the trees bring against the poet is that of universalizing (“all of the trees of the world share[d] a common elation / of tongues . . . ”), equally treacherous from their standpoint. Indeed, to see the universal as betrayal is simply another way of naming language as treasonous. What is being betrayed, in both cases, is the specificity of a given event or moment. Uniqueness must be sacrificed if one wishes to tell a story, because there exist no terms for uniqueness; as Saussure observed, a linguistic sign uttered only once is incomprehensible. Again, the trees’ demand is impossible to meet. In working out this argument between the aberrant, “faithless” traveler and the rooted, demanding “home,” “Homecoming” presents us with a key paradox in Walcott—that of the witness in the act of denying the possibility of witnessing—a paradox that emerges also in other poems of The Bounty and of The Arkansas Testament. “Homecoming” presents a case of unreliable narrators, a dialogue in which we see what neither of the characters—poet or root-bound nature—see: that the accusations, clearly projections by the anxious returning traveler onto nature, are unfounded and indeed unfoundable. In its celebration of universals, The Bounty strongly evokes its generic predecessor Midsummer. It is in Midsummer (1984), and not in any of the three intervening books, that Walcott set up the form, style, and topoi of The Bounty (1997). Both books consist of big, prosey, descriptive blocks of poems, and both books are exuberant; indeed, the two titles are the most celebratory in Walcott’s oeuvre. The controlling metaphor of the earlier volume is that of midsummer as a high point in which one season spans all climates: . . . let imagination range wherever its correspondences take it, . . . let it come back tired to say that summer is the same everywhere. . . . (VIII)11 Sameness as absence of difference—in seasons and in countries—occupies The Bounty also, in whose title poem, addressed to his mother, the poet writes “there is one season, our viridian Eden” (15), and mourns that 121

CALLALOO [t]here is no change now, no cycles of spring, autumn, winter, .... no climate, no calendar except for this bountiful day. (15) Later in The Bounty, he makes the connection of that tropical sameness to island life: but here we have merely a steadiness without seasons, and no history. . . . (35)12 This sameness of the seasons suggests an advantage to the poet: the freedom to metaphorize extravagantly, not to memorialize rootedness but to build a mythic world. In The Bounty, we see Walcott’s universalism as a mission to write out of history, or at least out of the linear history he deplores in his 1974 essay “The Muse of History.” In that essay he offers Whitman, Neruda, Perse, Césaire, and Borges as examples of writers gifted with a New World Adamic vision, poets who reject a version of history defined as linear and culpable. Midsummer is explicit about this project: my own prayer is to write lines as mindless as the ocean’s of linear time, since time is the first province of Caesar’s jurisdiction. (XLIII, ii) Put this way, as a strike against Caesar, the project sounds revolutionary. Seen from a historicist standpoint, however, it sounds quietistic or “transcendental.” Certainly in many sectors of the academy today, universalism is seen as, at best, naïve and benighted; at worst, as a disguise for attempts to depreciate if not erase difference. But the charge of betraying historical reference could be better founded—were it not already incorporated into the poem— in a sequence such as “Signs,” also from The Bounty, in which the war in Bosnia immediately generates its own simulacrum, in the form of a film. After references to “David’s star” and “the ethnic cleaning,” comes the line “Arc-lamps come on, and with them, the movie-setting . . . .” ( The Bounty 22), followed by references to “soot-eyed extras,” a “shot” which “elegiacally grieves,” and a “sequel.” Taken as a mourning of presence, rather than an abdication of witness, “Signs” evokes a contemporary problem: that of the televiewer who, in assimilating indiscriminate mixes of reportage, commentary, fiction, and advertising, fails to distinguish generically and historically between them. The proliferation of simulacra precludes any sharp distinctions between the events presented. Far from endorsing a nothing-but-text theory, however, “Signs” explores the competition between material realities and representations. Indeed, “Signs” is key to the paradox in Walcott that I have suggested here, in that, although the poem itself generates a surplus of signs, the poem’s narrator speaks against signs, not only for the pre-Biblical reason that “the ancient tongue / that forbade graven images makes inevitable sense” (The Bounty 22), but for the reason behind that injunction: signs limit and define, pretending to contain the uncontainable.

122

CALLALOO The paradox is that even the conviction that the poet must escape, the burden of witness leads Walcott, aphophatically, to witness. Announcing his unwillingness to recover historical tragedy compels him to acknowledge that tragedy. Admittedly, the refusal may sometimes appear as a serious loss of proportion, as in “Summer Elegies,” from The Arkansas Testament, much of which reads as if it had been a draft of “Signs”: There is sometimes more pain in a pop song than all of Cambodia, . . . the heart puts love above it all, any other pain—Chernobyl, a mass murder— The world’s slow stain is there; we cannot remove it. (Arkansas Testament 96) But here too, apophasis is at work: the staggering scale of what went wrong in Cambodia or in Chernobyl is the un-representable. In “Steam,” from the same volume, a Holocaust survivor says, I believe in 10. In my hands. But more than 1,000,000 tires them like crabs. All those bald zeros add up to a lie. . . . (68) In what appears to be a refusal to represent colossal suffering, the not-to-bementioned 1,000,000 are mentioned, in the same breath as the inadequacy of language, poetry, or the human sensibility to grasp them. Much of “Elsewhere,” also from The Arkansas Testament, seems to rewrite Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” suggesting that ordinary lives go on, in spite of suffering “elsewhere.” But “elsewhere” also suggests that the signified is never here, that it is always unrecoverable. Even were the dreadful to happen here—as in the saying that “It can’t happen here”—it would be elsewhere; it would lie beyond representation. Walcott writes, elsewhere, in one-third or one-seventh of this planet, a summary rifle butt breaks a skull into the idea of a heaven where nothing is free. . . . (66) The “idea of a heaven,” rather than “heaven,” marks again a maneuver from the place to the construction. Indeed, from here to the end of the poem, the linguistic takes over, particularly the familiar world-as-text figures: Through these black bars hollowed faces stare. Fingers grip the cross bars of these stanzas and it is here, because somewhere else their stares fog into oblivion thinly. . . . (67) 123

CALLALOO These lines suggest that they are the only means of accomplishing witness, as the bars behind which one can see the faces of the inmates. “[I]t is here,” because elsewhere the prisoners dissolve, to our view, into an impenetrable fog, just as those vast numbers of the dead in “Steam” dissolve to the understanding. Is the poem then a way of apprehending this suffering? Can we see the missing and disappeared by looking through the grid of these lines? The prospect does not seem likely in a poem that questions the whole operation of representation. However, the end of “Elsewhere” takes up the question of subjectivity, where work can be done: The world is blameless. The darker crime is to make a career of conscience, to feel through our own nerves the silent scream of winter branches, wonders read as signs. (67) The passivity of this, and the denial of its promise to go “somewhere” rather than to relegate all presence to “elsewhere,” when so much is at stake, will make it unappealing to readers for whom “to make a career of conscience” is not a bad idea at all. For Walcott, “it” has to be here in the art, because otherwise it is always elsewhere, which is to say, nowhere, unlocatable. The “darker crime” is that which history according to Caesar has conditioned us to commit: to see all phenomena as pain, as a story of victimhood. Although Walcott’s thinking and his poetics may have passed through many changes over the years, this idea, and this refusal, is consistent, from the early essay “The Muse as History” to the much later books of poems. One of the poems in Midsummer addresses rather explicitly the problem of locating “it”—the suffering, the tragedy, the crimes—in art. In section XVIII, the poet, nostalgic for still life painting, stresses the inadequacy of art for anything but surfaces: the depth of nature morte was that death itself is only another surface like the canvas, since painting cannot capture thought. (XVIII) But the surfaces change, he records, after the First World War. A new set of images, no less superficial, replaces all those pleasant subjects—bustled skirts and boating parties: like dried-up tubes, the coiled soldiers piled up on the Somme, and Verdun. And the dead less real than a spray burst of chrysanthemums, the identical carmine for still life and for the slaughter of youth. (XVIII) This may be the baldest admission in Walcott’s poetry of the inevitable textuality of art, which must relish and revel in its own medium. It is also a refusal, among many such, of history according to Caesar. As a theory of representation, it is not for everyone. The Adamic mythmaking role Walcott sees for the poet means that play,

124

CALLALOO language’s awareness of itself, does not take second place, even in, or especially in, the most historically referential moments. This last reflection is linked to one of Walcott’s chief poetic ironies: the idea, again (as with the speaking trees of “Homecoming”) always introduced by other voices in the poem, that craft is at odds with “faithful” representation. If language itself thwarts the urge to recover a paradise of presence, self-conscious artistry exacerbates the problem. Walcott’s artistry has long been a subject of Walcott’s artistry. The first section of “The Schooner Flight” ends with a promise to write well and honestly, and Shabine the sailor-poet pledges, Well, when I write this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt; I go draw and knot every line as tight as ropes in this rigging. . . . (347) Walcott sometimes begins a poem with a prayer: “Let these lines shine like the rain’s wires in Santa Cruz / before they leave me, like the mist . . . ” (The Bounty 73). In “The Bounty,” the poet refers to “these tinder-dry lines of this poem I hate . . . ” (5) But one must write, he says, because “we have no solace but utterance” and because it is my business and my duty . . . to write of the light’s bounty on familiar things that stand on the verge of translating themselves into news. . . . (16) It is this question of “duty,” especially the duty to represent, that complicates craft. In Omeros, the poet’s father tells him to come back after his travels and be true to his birthplace, devoting himself to its depiction in poetry. He shows him a vision of the island women of the past, carrying baskets of coal up ramps into a ship. This, says his father, “is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice” (76). The poet-narrator would seem to find in this encounter with history the confirmation of his vocation, a confirmation offered in numerous other poems as well. But at the poem’s end, led through hell by Homer, he sees the poets as “selfish phantoms” who “saw only surfaces” and who are condemned “to weep at their own pages.” Walcott reflects that “that was where I had come from. Pride in my craft.” He sees himself sliding toward them, “falling // towards the shit they stewed in,” before Omeros pulls him free. “Pride in my craft” now fills the poet with remorse. The Dantesque descent suggests the guilt of the poet who cannot represent, not for lack of, but because of his poetic skill. The writing of the poem is continually imbued with the sense of the vanity of writing the poem. The confession of guilt and inadequacy is of course a poetic device in itself, one that allows the process it questions: a meditation on representation and the traveling poet. The aesthete, the watercolorist, the poet who delights in surfaces, whether of his fellow poets’ work or of the sea-wrack and sea-grapes that are strewn through his poems, cannot stop puzzling over that artistry, constantly questioning its relation to social pressures and hungers that the world cries out for him, he thinks, to represent.13 125

CALLALOO I have talked here about more than one kind of “transport” in Walcott’s poems. First, the metaphorical displacement, the turning so strongly to metaphor that its ground in the world slips away; second, transport in the sense of ecstasy, if not in the collective rocking of the bus passengers listening to Bob Marley, in “The Light of the World,” then at least in the pleasure of a rhetorically rich text, a linguistic thickness relished by writer and reader; and finally the physical, geographical sense of “transport.” Of these three, given the coordinates of subject position I mentioned at the outset, it is geography to which one must return. If it is permissible for the European poet to seek stasis from Europe, going South for inspiration, escape, and pleasure, is it not for the Caribbean poet also? No one begrudged the English Romantics their flight to the Mediterranean. The reverse migration, from South to North, has had different consequences and has been burdened with different expectations. The Caribbean poet’s situation continues to be constrained by the commitment of fidelity to island realities. Walcott has interiorized this constraint in many of his poems. I have suggested a dialogism in those poems, in which the poet creates a speaker who argues with his own demons of duty, and who, because he can never silence them, makes poetry out of that conversation. The “Flight” that so often figures in Walcott’s poems, whether in “The Schooner Flight,” “The Fortunate Traveler,” Omeros, or other works, is a flight toward an expression unencumbered by the demand to witness, a flight from the political to the personal, from the collective to the individual. Fortunately, it is incomplete. The very movement toward surfaces which Walcott’s poems both perform and thematize constitutes a form of witness—not raw, not transparent, not a testimonio—but a faithful witness to misrepresentation, to the troubled, inevitable gap between life and the poem.

NOTES 1. There are abundant parallel examples from many nations, not all “third world.” James Fenton mentions the Vosnesensky poem in which Gauguin travels from Montmartre to the Louvre by a detour through Java, Tahiti, and the Marquesas. Seamus Heaney’s course is similarly instructive: “from Belfast and Dublin via county Wicklow, from Ulster to Stockholm via California and Harvard” (Fenton 40). Here the individual history is the collective history. 2. The line is from Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel” (94). 3. Should the argument need to be made, Walcott has stated, “I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean poet.” Walcott lived and worked in St. Lucia and Trinidad for decades before he left to the United States in 1981 to begin teaching in Boston. On a trip to England he carried with him, as he said in “Another Life,” the images of Castries, making of his heart an ark, “a ship within a ship within a ship, a bottle where this wharf, these rotting roofs, this sea, sail, sealed in glass” (Another Life, 108). He has described Omeros as a thank-you note to the people of St. Lucia. He has said of his home islands, “I feel very needed. In the Caribbean, meeting people anywhere. . . . I feel as if I could speak for them” (Montenegro 214). His Nobel Prize money has been dedicated to funding repairs to the Trinidad Theater Workshop, which he founded, setting up a Caribbean poetry prize, and, most ambitiously, establishing the Rat Island Foundation, off the coast of St. Lucia, dedicated to development of the arts. 4. Apart from the ships of Omeros and “The Schooner Flight,” and, in at least one crucial case (“The Light of the World”) a bus, travel in these poems is by plane. In “The Schooner Flight,” the poetsailor Shabine looks up from his skiff at a jet plane and decries industrial “progress.” At the conclusion of “Tales of the Islands” (In a Green Night), the poet looks out the airplane window at the receding landscape, a scene repeated in Another Life (“I watched the island narrowing.

126

CALLALOO . . .” [115]), as well as in “The Gulf,” where the receding vista is that of the United States. In the opening poem of Midsummer, the jet “bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud” (I), while in “The Fortunate Traveler,” the most extended critique of privileged mobility, the jet fades “like a weevil through a cloud of flour” (89). 5. Examples of this meeting in prose today abound, though less so in the English Caribbean than in the Spanish and French—Patrick Chamoiseau and Maryse Condé in French, Rosario Ferré and Christina García in Spanish come to mind. In poetry, there is Kamau Brathwaite, but his experiments with “sycorax type” and, as Nathaniel Mackey points out, his “movement from landscape to wordscape” (139) are of a different kind. Brathwaite spells to simulate a Jamaican accent (“aweakened by gunshatt”), or his slippages reveal a political/historical purpose when, for example, chatter is written shatter, umpire becomes empire, or Uncle Tom’s “hut” becomes his “hurt.” 6. In Midsummer, Walcott uses this same map-territory metaphor, as if answering Bishop’s poem: we had crossed into England— the fields, not their names, were the same. (xxxv) 7. Midsummer has no page numbers, only poems numbered by Roman numerals. 8. The casuarina is a leafless tree, much discussed in the earlier poem “The Schooner Flight,” where the sailor Shabine sings back to the casuarinas, just as here the poet talks back to them. 9. For one of these several meanings, we can turn to the title poem of The Arkansas Testament: “a breeze turned the leaves of an aspen / to the First Epistle of Paul’s / to the Corinthians” (108), the biblical passage which is incidentally the source of the refrain in “The Fortunate Traveler.” 10. Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) continues the trope of trees and mobility: “ . . . we, as moving trees, must root somewhere . . . ” (160), and extends the rootedness to language: “Our tribes were shaken like seeds from a sieve. / Our dialects, rooted, forced their own utterance . . . ” (157). 11. This is also a commentary on travel and poetry: as Walcott’s father later tells him in Omeros, after you have traveled everywhere, you need to return and represent your home: “Once you have seen everything and gone everywhere, cherish our island for its green simplicities . . . . . . all that the sea-swift does it does in a circular pattern” (187). 12. The echoes of this theme are practically innumerable throughout Walcott, but to mention two relatively recent ones: “There is no history now, only the weather” (Tiepolo’s Hound 71); and, a comment made in a talk at City College regarding the four seasons: “If you don’t have these marking the year, you don’t have stages of maturity, and in a sense you don’t have ‘time.’” One of the effects of this timelessness and history-lessness, Walcott added, is the impossibility of dating a writer, or of labeling him or her “postcolonial,” or “commonwealth.” Beyond this, Walcott’s poems contain many depictions of the tropics as static and torpid. In Midsummer the poet depicts Puerto Rico as an island where “things topple gradually,” where “only a mare’s tail switches,” and where what finally brings sleep is “a sacramental stasis” (Midsummer XLIII, viii). 13. Walcott is particularly haunted by the commitment of East European poets: “Why do I imagine the death of Mandelstam / among the yellowing coconuts . . . ?” (“Preparing for Exile” Sea Grapes 17). He cites Anna Akhmatova, who did not (could not) leave home: No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be. (“The Silent Woman” Sea Grapes 23) What distinguishes Walcott from Akhmatova is the issue of travel, because travel, fortunate or otherwise, was not an option for the Russian poet. Walcott suffers the malaise that has plagued many North American poets who have looked to Eastern Europe, Latin America, or China with a qualified envy, countries where repressive regimes confer on writers a subversive importance that they lack in the land of instant absorption.

127

CALLALOO WORKS CITED Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1927–1979. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. Brathwaite, Kamau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Breslin, Paul. “‘I Met History Once, But He Ain’t Recognize Me’: The Poetry of Derek Walcott.” TriQuarterly 68 (Winter 1987): 168–83. Burnett, Paula. “Hegemony or Pluralism? The Literary Prize and the Post-Colonial Project in the Caribbean.” Commonwealth 16.1 (1993): 1–20. Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a return to my native land. Trans. Clayton Eshelman and Annette Smith. Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. Chamoiseau, Patrick, Raphael Confiant, and Jean Bernabé. Éloge de la Créolité. Édition bilingue francais/anglais. Trans. M.B. Taleb-Khyar. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” Ed. Carle Bode. The Portable Emerson. New York: Penguin, 1981. Fenton, James. “The Orpheus of Ulster.” New York Review of Books 11 July (1996): 37–41. Gingell, Susan. “Returning to Come Forward: Dionne Brand Confronts Derek Walcott.” Journal of West Indian Literature 6.2 (1994): 43–53. Grunquist, Raoul. “Does It Matter Why Walcott Received the Prize?” Research in African Literature 25 (1994): 151–7. Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. Montenegro, David. “An Interview with Derek Walcott.” Partisan Review 57.2 (1990): 202–14. Walcott, Derek. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. ———. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory: The 1992 Nobel Lecture.” The New Republic 28 December (1992): 261–67. ———. The Arkansas Testament. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987. ———. The Bounty. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. ———. The Fortunate Traveler. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981. ———. The Gulf. London: Cape, 1969. ———. In a Green Night. London: Cape, 1962. ———. “Lecture.” City College, New York. 19 Nov. 1999. ———. Midsummer. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984. ———. “The Muse of History.” Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean. Ed. Orde Coombs. New York: Anchor, 1974. ———. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. ———. “The Schooner Flight.” Collected Poems 1948–1984. New York: Noonday, 1984. 345–361. ———. Sea Grapes. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976. ———. The Star-Apple Kingdom. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. ———. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. ———. “What the Twilight Says: An Overture.” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. 3–40.

128

CALLALOO

KINGDOMS

by Adam Zagajewski

I like to dream of those dead kingdoms. Su Tung P’o I like to dream of those dead kingdoms where brass gleams and sings and upright fires blaze on hilltops, where someone’s love dwells. One late afternoon in November, I take the commuter train coming home from a long walk; around me tired businessmen and a sad old lady hugging a dachshund. The conductor, alas, is a very clumsy shaman. Life strides above us like Gulliver and laughs loudly and cries.

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 129

129

CALLALOO

CAMOGLI

by Adam Zagajewski

Tall old houses by the beach and a drowsy cat waits for fishermen on furled white nets: a quiet November in Camogli— pensioners sunbathe on lounge chairs, the lazy sun circles and pebbles roll slowly on the beach’s gravel, but it, the sea, keeps coming shoreward, wave after wave, as if eager to see what’s become of summer’s plans, and of our dream, which used to be our youth.

130

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 130

CALLALOO

DESCRIBING PICTURES

by Adam Zagajewski

We usually catch just a few details— grapes from the seventeenth century, still gleaming, and perhaps a fine ivory fork, or a cross’s wood and drops of blood, and great suffering, which has already dried. The shiny parquet creaks. We’re in a strange town— almost always in a strange town. Somewhere a guard stands and yawns. An ash’s branch sways outside the window. Describing static pictures is remarkably absorbing. Scholars devote theses to it. But we’re alive, full of memory and thought, and at moments feel a special pride since the future shouts in us and its hubbub makes us human. Transl. from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 131

131

CALLALOO

“STILL GOING ON” Temporal Adverbs and the View of the Past in Walcott’s Poetry

by Emily Greenwood

When he left the beach the sea was still going on. Omeros (7.LXIV.iii)1 The last line of Omeros hints at the open-ended eternity of art. At one level, the ending revisits Homer’s Odyssey, in which the odyssey is projected beyond the frame of the poem.2 At another level, the ending of Omeros launches the poem’s afterlife: like the sea, the poem will continue to re-sound. Moreover, the present poem is added to the wave sequence of Walcott’s poetic oeuvre; it echoes Walcott’s earlier poetry, as it in turn will be echoed in subsequent poems. At yet another level, by ending with a line whose sense resists the formal closure of the poem, Walcott reminds us, through his use of the past continuous tense and the temporal adverb still, that works of art persist in the absence of their authors, and that literature and the literary tradition continue, oblivious to mortal generations. I want to take the unassuming word still as my point of departure for an exploration of Walcott’s subtle use of temporal adverbs in his poetry—an aspect of his language that has not attracted much attention. Although scholars have focused on the importance of time and tense as ideas that have preoccupied Walcott throughout his poetic oeuvre, they have tended to look to metaphor as a vehicle for his complex and idiosyncratic approach to chronology and history.3 However, the full extent to which Walcott’s concept of time infuses and informs his use of language can be seen by his pointed use of temporal adverbs. These adverbs establish subtle and unobtrusive relationships between present and past, adding depth of field to the view of the past that is offered in the metaphors. Walcott has repeatedly stressed that the insistence on linear, historical time serves to perpetuate the colonial condition, by enforcing a temporal sequence in which the so-called new world must necessarily be belated and secondary. This anti-historical conception of time is expounded in the prose essay “The Muse of History,” which provides the most insightful commentary on the concepts of history and time that inform Walcott’s poetry.4 This renunciation of historical time is also figured spatially in Walcott’s poetry through the use of culturally neutral, unmarked spaces such as the sea, or the air (specifically light), to level epochs and empires, leading to the image of

132

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 132–145

CALLALOO “landscapes with no tenses” (Tiepolo’s Hound, IV.26.ii, p. 161).5 Readers of Walcott have become alert to the role of metaphor in his poetry as a trope that orders the relationship between the New World and the Old, holding them both in parallel, in an imaginary space.6 John Thieme has written, rather neatly, of Walcott’s endeavor, through the depiction of neutral, tenseless spaces, “to assert a parallel spatial collocation rather than a linear temporal debt” (154); whereas Tim Cribb has described the centrality of the sea as both a medium for and a symbol of Walcott’s art (poetry and painting): Walcott is pre-eminently the poet of the sea not only because he is an islander, but also because his art is like the sea. The sea carries things between continents and casts them arbitrarily into new worlds. Its tides wash beaches and make them new as if continually starting again. [. . . ] It is the sea as medium, then, a medium like art in its capacity to transform, that supplies Walcott with an endless metaphor. (177)7 Throughout Omeros Walcott sustains the consubstantiation of sea and poem: the sea is inscribed and envisaged as a text,8 and Walcott’s art is given substance and reality through its association with sea (the real empire, and the real history).9

Looking Past Metaphor Walcott’s engagement with the Greek and Roman past is characterized by ambivalence and equivocalness. One of the reasons why metaphor alone is not adequate to capture the subtlety of this engagement is that it enforces a two-world typology where contending poles are made artificially alike, to reflect a deeper similarity. For the metaphor to be instantly recognizable (for the translation to work) the difference has to be elided/glossed over. Walcott himself is critical about his compulsive practice of reaching after foreignizing metaphors and similes, and this should deter us from accepting these figures of speech as a straightforward explanation of the relationship between the Caribbean and Greece in Walcott’s poetry. Let me supply an example of what I will call the “destabilization of simile” from Omeros. At an early stage in the epic (I.VIII.iii, p. 47), the character Philoctete tries to reconcile the rival fishermen Hector and Achille, who remain intransigent. The narrator glosses their stance as “Like Hector. Like Achilles.” But he also suggests that such figures of speech are due to a failure of vision, or a trick of the light (a graecizing myopia). He describes his encounter with the vision of Helen and how its effect was beyond the reaches of figurative language: I saw her once after that moment on the beach when her face shook my heart, and that incredible stare paralysed me past any figure of speech, (I.VI.iii, p. 36) 133

CALLALOO Later in the epic he singles out the figure of metaphor and asks why he cannot see Helen “as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow.” This train of thought culminates in the question ‘when would I enter that light beyond metaphor?’ (VI.LIV.iii, p. 271). In Omeros, the sea is envisaged as a blank canvas of history, but without the margins of time, and without the rulings of metaphor. It is the metaphor that manages to transcend metaphor: It [sc. the ocean] never altered its metre to suit the age, a wide page without metaphors. (VII.LIX.i, p. 296) I say without the “rulings” of metaphor because I get the impression that Walcott sees metaphor and simile as introducing hierarchical relationships that recall the imperialist’s claim to precedence and priority. In an interview with Shaun McCarthy in October 1990, Walcott complained about the tendency of critics to judge poetry chronologically, he argued that whenever something new appears, in a particular work from overseas (seen from the perspective of Europe), critics compare it to preexisting works that are already familiar to them and thereby harness the novelty of this unfamiliar work by saying “it’s like x, or like y”: “The critic will say you see we did it before and now you are learning how to do it” (18).

Temporal Adverbs in Walcott’s Poetry The concern to elude conventional, historical time and linear chronology is manifested in the poem “Sea Grapes,” a poem that was first published under the title “Sour Grapes” in the American Poetry Review in January 1976.10 Paradoxically, Walcott affirms the tenselessness of the relationship between the Caribbean and “Homeric” Greece through a careful use of tense and temporal markers11: That sail which leans on light, tired of islands, a schooner beating up the Caribbean for home, could be Odysseus, home-bound on the Aegean; that father and husband’s longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name in every gull’s outcry. This brings nobody peace. The ancient war between obsession and responsibility will never finish and has been the same

134

CALLALOO for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since Troy sighed its last flame, and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough from whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the conclusions of exhausted surf. The classics can console. But not enough. (Collected Poems 297) Poised at the end of the tenth line, the phrase “the ancient war” alludes to the Trojan war: a war that is still being fought (present continuous) in Omeros (1990), long after Sea Grapes (1976). However, if one construes time in Walcott’s empire of art as cyclical and repetitive, then we might say that the war is being fought all over again. In the next line the literary allusion is reevaluated; the “ancient war / between obsession and responsibility” also has a private history within the lifespan of the poet, for whom the themes of obsession and responsibility have specific connotations.12 The “war” works simultaneously as a reference to Walcott’s life, and as a reference to Homeric epic.13 Walcott uses tense to stress continuity with his own past and with past literature: the ancient war “will never finish and has been the same.” In this line the future tense (modified by the temporal adverb never) and the past continuous tense (‘has been’) raise the aspect of time as if only to negate it: this situation is eternal and unchanging. The homeostasis between then and now is reflected in the line “for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore,” where for and or mirror each other on either side of the caesura: Odysseus and Walcott “reflect” one other. Walcott’s use of the word since further complicates the role of time in the poem: The ancient war between obsession and responsibility will never finish and has been the same for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since Troy sighed its last flame, and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough from whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the conclusions of exhausted surf. As a polysemic word that is hard to pin down, since aptly expresses the complex relationship between past and present, and the complexity of Walcott’s relationship with Homer. As used here, since may be construed in four different ways (and in all four ways simultaneously): (i) as a temporal adverb; (ii) as a preposition; (iii) as an adverbial conjunction; (iv) as a causal conjunction. I interpret since as either a temporal adverb or a temporal conjunction. The temporal adverb since suggests

135

CALLALOO continuity with the past: the ancient war has been the same ever since Troy burned and since Polyphemus tried to kill Odysseus.14 It places the Trojan war on the same continuum as Walcott’s domestic and literary wars. As a preposition, since can also have this continuous sense: from that time till now. The adjective last (“since Troy sighed its last flame”) adds yet another twist to the complex use of time and tense in the poem. Although technically an adjective qualifying the noun flame, last could also be construed as a transferred adverb. Hence “since Troy sighed its last flame,” could be read as “since Troy last sighed its flame.” In this case, the pattern is one of recurrence or repetition, as opposed to continuity. This evokes the cyclical view of the past envisaged by Yeats’ in the poem “No Second Troy,” which ends with the question “Was there another Troy for her to burn?”15 According to this latter interpretation, Troy and the Trojan War are endlessly repeated in different contexts. Similar tricks with time are in evidence in Omeros, where Walcott expands on the relationship between Greece and St. Lucia in the empire of the imagination. The phrase “tricks with time” is itself lifted from a passage in Omeros in which Walcott writes of the separation between autobiographical self and narrator: the one in the present here and now, the other journeying across time and engaging with the literature of other civilizations.16 I want to scrutinize some of these “tricks with time” in a passage at the beginning of Omeros (I.II.ii, p. 9): The rest walked up the sand with identical stride except for foam-haired Philoctete. The sore on his shin still unhealed, like a radiant anemone. It had come // from a scraping, rusted anchor. The pronged iron peeled the skin in a backwash. He bent to the foam, sprinkling it with a salt hiss. Soon he would run, hobbling, to the useless shade of an almond, with locked teeth, then wave them off from the shame of his smell, and once more they would leave him alone under its leoparding light. This sunrise the same damned business was happening. This is our first proper introduction to the character Philoctete. He is mentioned in the second line of the poem, as a local who “smiles for the tourists,” but no details of his identity are given at this point. The name itself serves as a Homeric marker and implants expectations: is this Philoctete going to be the same as the Philoctetes of the epic cycle or the Philoctetes of Sophocles?17 We are told that Philoctetes’ shin is still unhealed, and this temporal adverb stresses continuity with the (Homeric) epic past.18 We wait for the explanation, which hangs over a line (and over the page in the English edition)—again there is a play with our mythological expectations. We may be waiting to hear, “it had come / from a snake bite,” or a recognizable variation on the

136

CALLALOO snake bite, instead what we get is: “it had come / from a scraping, rusted anchor.” This shuttling back and forth19 between mythical/literary past and literary present is interspersed by a temporal adverb that focuses the reader’s attention on the present: “Soon he would run, / hobbling, to the useless shade of an almond,” where the adverb soon alerts us to the fact that this is a familiar scene in the world that is sketched in Walcott’s poem. The pattern of repetition and recurrence that is suggested by the phrase once more (“and once more they would leave him alone”), draws a parallel between the alienation experienced by the St. Lucian Philoctete in Walcott’s poem and Philoctetes in Greek mythology; but any easy analogy and cross-temporal correspondence is undermined by the following sentence: “This sunrise the same damned business was happening.” This sentence affirms two contradictory positions simultaneously. “The same damned business” recalls “Sea Grapes,” where “the ancient war has been the same,” and the Caribbean present is on the same continuum as the ancient Greek past.20 But the mention of sunrise reminds us of the omnipresent theme of sunrise as a new dawn, and the concept of the Adamic or amnesiac beginning of literature in the New World, which pervades both Walcott’s poetry and his critical essays.21 It is also the tense with which Omeros begins: “This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes” (I.I.i, p. 3). Can there be continuity between Homer’s Greece and Walcott’s St. Lucia when the epic memory in the Caribbean is amnesiac? Does art persist in the absence of history? To answer these questions it is necessary to probe deeper into the interplay of tenses in “Sea Grapes,” and to examine the extent to which the poem also plays, intertextually, with literary time. The retitling of the poem from the original title “Sour Grapes” to the later title “Sea Grapes” is a natural shift that is made explicit in the later poem “Gros Islet” (from The Arkansas Testament). This poem, which recalls “Sea Grapes,” pushes the line that “The Classics can console. But not enough.” even further. The events that the poem describes take place at a festival being held at Gros Islet (a village on the NW coast of St. Lucia), where Walcott looks at himself and his companions from the outside, and sees them as dreamers who project anachronistic, foreign image associations onto the landscape of the Caribbean: So their eyes looked down, amused, on us, and found we were walking strangely, and wondered about our sense of balance, we slept as if we were dead, how we confused dreams with ordinary things like nails, or roses, (Arkansas Testament 34) The idea that the Homeric shadows, or “mythical hallucinations” as Walcott calls them elsewhere (Omeros I.V.iii, p. 31), obstruct his ability to participate fully in island life is widespread in his work. The cluster of images that refer to comparisons between the Caribbean and (ancient) Greece (although not always ancient) as dreams, shadows, smoke, and hallucinations, acknowledge the fictionality of this relationship. Unlike Mediterranean grapes, Caribbean “sea” grapes are naturally “sour grapes”22: 137

CALLALOO This is not the grape-purple Aegean. there is no wine here, no cheese, the almonds are green, the sea grapes bitter, the language is that of slaves. (Arkansas Testament 35) Just as parallels with Homer do not repair the situation in “Sea Grapes,” in “Gros Islet” the analogies with Homer are apparently not relevant to ordinary life in St. Lucia. There is nothing in common between the Aegean and the so-called New Aegean. And yet, once made, the analogy persists, and it is as though the sea grapes are bitter because, in spite of the similarity between Greece and the Caribbean, the equation is biased, historically, toward Greece. “Sea Grapes” contains within its compass many of the motifs that remain central to Walcott’s poetry—the poetry continues to move through the same landscape. At the beginning of this paper, I observed that Omeros ends with the “sea still going on.” If the sea elides the gulf between Homer and Walcott, then it also elides the intervals between Walcott’s poems. Thus the blind giant (Polyphemus) in “Sea Grapes,” is the symbolic lighthouse—“that Cyclops whose blind eye / shut from the sunlight” in the second chapter of Omeros: Only in you, across centuries of the sea’s parchment atlas, can I catch the noise of the surf lines wandering like the shambling fleece of the lighthouse’s flock, that Cyclops whose blind eye shut from the sunlight. Then the canoes were galleys over which a frigate sawed its scythed wings slowly. In you the seeds of grey almonds guessed a tree’s shape. and the grape leaves rusted like serrated islands, and the blind lighthouse, sensing the edge of a cape; paused like a giant, a marble cloud in his hands, to hurl its boulder that splashed into phosphorous stars; then a black fisherman, his stubbed chin coarse as a dry sea-urchin’s, hoisted his flour-sack sail on its bamboo spar, and scanned the opening line of our epic horizon; now I can look back to rocks that see their own feet when light nets the waves, as the dug-outs set out with ebony captains, since it was your light that startled our sunlit wharves where schooners swayed idly, moored to their cold capstans. (Omeros 1.II.ii, 13)

138

CALLALOO Within Omeros the Cyclops puts in several appearances. The intrusive tourist’s camera is a Cyclops,23 and the Cyclops’ flock recurs as a metaphor for the wave-crests of the Caribbean sea.24 Beyond the frame of Omeros, but in a work that “stages” many of the core motifs of the epic, the Cyclops is the panoptic Eye of the nightmarish totalitarian state in The Odyssey. A Stage Version (63–72). The recurrence of these motifs gives the lie to the pessimistic ending of “Sea Grapes,” where the Homeric hexameters are washed up, as exhausted surf on the St. Lucian shoreline. These hexameters survive as the “surf lines” in the passage from Omeros above, or as “the waves that crepitate from the culture of Ovid” in The Bounty (I.v, p. 11). But the relationship between Homeric Greece and the Caribbean is once again given depth of field by the use of tense and temporal adverbs. In this extract of Omeros the adverb sequence (then . . . then . . . now . . . when . . . as . . . since) punctuates the shift from Homer’s Greece to Walcott’s Caribbean and complicates the relationship between the different stages. The first “then” is equivalent to “at that time” (in Homer’s Greece the vessels that are now canoes were galleys). The same temporal adverb is repeated six lines on, but this time “then” needs to be construed slightly differently. Like the first instance, it can still mean “at that time,” because the event referred to is in the past, but it also implies that the action of the black fisherman scanning the opening line of our epic horizon is subsequent to (and even consequent upon) the chain of events in Homer, so “then” also means “next”—the poem maps out a progression which leads to the “now” of the present. And this is the next temporal adverb: “now I can look back.” This backward glance is positioned at the end of a line, allowing the reader to trace the narrator’s gaze back to Homer momentarily, until the next line reveals that the object of the backward glance is the rocks on the coast. And yet the presumption that the backward glance looks to Homer is not misjudged, because this section of the poem ends with a wind turning the pages back to Omeros— Homer as conceived of by Walcott25: A wind turns the harbour’s pages back to the voice that hummed in the vase of a girl’s throat: “Omeros.” (1.II.ii, 13) The idea that the fisherman’s action is not just subsequent to, but consequent upon, Homeric epic, is also hinted at by the word since, which, as before, may be a temporal adverb, a preposition, an adverbial conjunction, and a causal adverb. The narrator is able to look back to a three-dimensional, living, illuminated landscape, because (construing since causally), Omeros’ light has startled the Caribbean poetic landscape into life. The progression suggested by the temporal adverbs—then . . . then . . . now—is reversed by the retrospective of the narrator’s mind. The meeting between the epic St. Lucian landscape and Homeric epic is revealed to be as much a result of reading backward and using the here and now of the Caribbean to tease out potentialities in Homeric epic, as it is a result of traditional literary influence (Homeric epic “influencing Walcott”).26 But to speak of “traditional literary influence” is itself too simplistic. As Walcott keeps insisting, both through the spoken and the written word, there is no tense in the empire of art and there are no straightforward, linear trajectories.27 139

CALLALOO Walcott’s manipulation of literary time has evoked comparison with Borges, the past master of upsetting linear time in literary history. Writing about the following lines from the poem “Map of the New World,” A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain And plucks the first line of the Odyssey. (Collected Poems 413) John Thieme observes: “As with Omeros, this suggests that the poem about to be written is actually The Odyssey, not a derivative Caribbean by-product. Just as in Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ where the fictional Pierre Menard produces his own verbatim version of Cervantes’ novel without any indebtedness to it, so the implication here is that a completely new work is about to be undertaken” (167). In a parallel literary move, Walcott creates his literary precursor: his Homer is his own invention—Walcott writes Homer in his own image.28 And this applies not only to Omeros, but to all of the poems that engage with Homeric epic. This inversion of time and tense is not confined to other literature; it operates in Walcott’s own poetry as well. The schooners that “swayed idly” in the second chapter of Omeros evoke the sail that leans on light in “Sea Grapes”: “a schooner beating up the Caribbean / for home” (Collected Poems 297). Although Omeros postdates Sea Grapes in real chronology, this section of Omeros describes a situation that is prior to the image with which “Sea Grapes” begins. This literary chronology is then further complicated by the intertextual relationship of both poems to the poem “The Schooner Flight” (in The Star-Apple Kingdom 1979; see Collected Poems 345-61). “Sea Grapes” rehearses the idea that is developed in the voyage of Shabine-Odysseus in “The Schooner Flight.” In “Sea Grapes,” one of the bridges between the narrator and the imaginary Odysseus figure is the notion, expressed by a simile, that Odysseus is “like the adulterer / hearing Nausicaa’s name in every gull’s outcry.” In the pivotal scene in Omeros where the narrator and Omeros confront each other (VII.LVI.iii), the gulf between them and the silent gap in their conversation is “broken by the outcry of a frigate-bird.” The mention of the frigate-bird recalls “A Latin Primer,” a poem in which Walcott addresses, explicitly, the antagonism between the “classical” past of Europe and the present world of the Caribbean. In that poem Walcott reaches an impasse that has been precipitated by his situation as a Latin master, a mouthpiece of colonial discipline. This impasse is reflected in silence, in Walcott’s inability to answer the question: where were those brows heading when neither world was theirs? Silence clogged my ears with cotton, a cloud’s noise; (The Arkansas Testament 23) This impasse/silence is finally broken by the apparition of a frigate bird,29 which points the way to a meeting of worlds, cultures, and civilizations, where the patois name ciseau-la-mer (sea scissors), provides a “native metaphor” that transcends the 140

CALLALOO bird’s Latin name, Fregata magnificens. This identification of native metaphors opens up the way for a mutually enriching dialogue between the cultures of the GrecoRoman past and the cultures of the Caribbean.30 So when the (same) frigate bird’s outcry interrupts the silence between the narrator and Omeros, it reminds us of the solution offered in “A Latin Primer,” and of the gull’s outcry in “Sea Grapes” that connects two dissimilar civilizations. These birds have acquired their own history in Walcott’s oeuvre, and they act as carriers of meaning across vast swathes of literature. The far-reaching significance of the humble temporal adverb still in Walcott’s poetry is best seen in “Italian Eclogues” (The Bounty 64–9). The eclogues are dedicated to Walcott’s friend and fellow poet, Joseph Brodsky, who died in January 1996. Walcott puns on the word still, which recurs five times in five lines: Say you haven’t vanished, you’re still in Italy. Yeah. Very still. God. Still as the turning fields of Lombardy, still as the white wastes of that prison like pages erased by a regime. Though his landscape heals the exile you shared with Naso, poetry is still treason because it is truth. (2.31.i, p. 16) The poem plays out the semantic range of this word, as it shifts from temporal adverb, to adjective, and then back again. At the same time, through the use of the word still, the poem denies the stillness of death. Ovid (Naso) has not vanished, the exile (of death) has not been final in his case, in that he is still read and still talks to poets such as Walcott (most famously in the poem “The Hotel Normandie Pool” [in The Fortunate Traveler 1981; see Collected Poems 439–45). Nor was Ovid’s literal exile from Italy total, in that his exile poetry found its way back to Rome. This offers optimism for Brodsky, whose poetry was not stemmed by imprisonment and persecution in Soviet Russia, nor his exile, and will not be stemmed by his death. Furthermore, it reaffirms the idea of the eternity of poetry, which “is still treason” as a result of its commitment to truth. Here the adverb “still” blurs the centuries between Ovid and Walcott: poetry persists. I have focused on the adverb “still,” but there are many other temporal adverbs at work in Walcott’s poetry, and these adverbs work in concert to create what I have called “depth of field,” and to add contours to the seemingly “tenseless” landscape of Walcott’s poetry. There is a productive tension between iterative adverbs, which suggest repetition and cyclical patterns, such as “again”; and adverbs that suggest continuity, such as “still” or “always.” To take two examples from Tiepolo’s Hound: i) Iteration: And here is where my narrative must pause, my couplets rest, at what remains between us, [...] Again I lift the oars of this couplet, my craft resumes its theme: (3.xiv.1, p. 87)

141

CALLALOO ii) Continuity: Time takes on hand and helps us up the stair, Time draws the shades down on our clouding eyes; they go together, painting and white hair, [. . .] in landscapes with no tenses, views that know that now, as always, light is all we have. (4.xxvi.ii, p. 161) In the first passage, Walcott is resuming his narrative after a digression lasting a few couplets, but he is also resuming the oar-stroke that has sustained his poetic craft throughout his life, this metaphor takes us back to the craft that Walcott left in the final chapters of Omeros.31 Themes recur from poem to poem. In the second passage the emphasis is on light—the constant of all art, always.

Untimely/For All Time In the early stages of his poetic career, Walcott was often accused of imperialism— of behaving like an Afro-Saxon and selling out on the Caribbean through his engagement with the classical tradition of European literature—and of anachronism in his adherence to traditional form in his poetry.32 The poetry was not black enough and not contemporary enough for many of its readers. In retrospect, it is Walcott’s untimeliness, and his refusal to be confined by the expectations of present generations, that has ensured him the stature of a poet for all time. This is poetry that is hard to place, chronologically, and it is poetry that is historically versatile, for all its contempt for history. Walcott’s poetry sustains a dialogue with phantom artists and invisible choirs of poets, ranging from Homer to Brodsky. Long may they keep him awake, as he has long kept them from sleeping: “What keeps me awake is tribute—to the dead, who to me are not dead, but are at my elbow. All I ask is an approving nod from them, as Verrochio may have nodded at Leonardo, his assistant, or was it vice versa?” (Baer 83).

NOTES This article is a small thank-offering for the gift of Derek Walcott’s poetry, and for the fact that he—like the sea—is still going on. 1. Recently, Tim Cribb has applied this trope to Tiepolo’s Hound: “It is the reader who has to find the answers to this question in the blanc du papier between the couplets, for it is in these gaps that Walcott, like the sea in Omeros, is still going on” (184). 2. In book 11 of the Odyssey (lines 100–137), the prophet Tiresisas tells Odysseus about the voyage that still awaits him after he reaches his home in Ithaca; Odysseus will know that he has reached the end of his travels when he reaches a shore that fits the description given by Tiresias. Tiresias’ prophecy is echoed in the later poem Tiepolo’s Hound, where the narrator muses: “I shall finish in a place whose only power / is the exploding spray along its coast,” (4.XXVI.ii, p. 162). 3. See, in particular, Nana Wilson Tagoe’s study of the link between Walcott’s developing concept of history and the direction of his poetic style in Another Life (51 and passim).

142

CALLALOO 4. D’Aguiar has discussed Walcott’s “New World” version of history in this seminal essay (165). 5. See The Odyssey. A Stage Version (122), where Demodocus comments: “The sea speaks the same language around the world’s shores.” Cf. also Tiepolo’s Hound (III.17.ii, p. 101–2): “that is fiction’s treason, / to deny fact, alter topography / to its own map.” 6. See Nogales (3 and passim) on the facility of metaphor to integrate new knowledge with old. 7. Cf. also Tagoe 1991, who discusses Walcott’s use of metaphor in Another Life to expand and extend the actual and the present through correspondence with remote lands and times. Hardwick 1997 discusses the way in which Homer and Walcott use similes to achieve what she terms “perspective transformation”—the transforming of what is unfamiliar into terms familiar to the audience. 8. On images of the sea and navigation as metaphors for the poetic process in Omeros, cf. Dougherty (2001, 19–20) and Dougherty (1997). 9. See Walcott’s essay “The Sea is History” in Birbalsingh (22–28). The essay was originally a talk given to accompany a reading of the poem “The Sea is History” (The Star-Apple Kingdom 1979) at York University, Toronto, in January 1989. 10. King discusses the biographical context for this poem, as well as the transformations that the poem underwent, from “Sour Grapes” to “Sea Grapes” (333). 11. I say “Homeric” Greece advisedly. Walcott’s ahistorical engagement with Homer is facilitated by the fact that they occupy an empire of art. Homer’s Greece is a poetic, imaginary representation of a fusion of different historical epochs, in the same way that Omeros has a complex, distorting relationship with St. Lucia—which is not to say that it lacks “truth.” Walcott has discussed this imaginary realm in “The Muse of History”: “There is a memory of imagination in literature which has nothing to do with actual experience, which is, in fact, another life, and that experience of the imagination will continue to make actual the quest of a medieval knight or the bulk of a white whale, because of the power of a shared imagination” (What the Twilight Says: Essays 62). 12. Thomas discusses the parallel—developed in the poem—between literary tensions in Walcott’s work (Walcott succumbing to the influence of the classics), and tensions in his private life. 13. Obsession and responsibility are recurrent motifs in the Iliad, where Paris’ obsession with Helen is contrasted with Hector’s responsibility toward the Trojans, and where the Achaeans are endangered by Achilles’ irresponsibility. For its part, the Odyssey explores Odysseus’ responsibility toward his companions, his family, his home, his subjects in Ithaca, and toward the past and future. 14. Polyphemus the Cyclops twice hurls boulders at Odysseus in the Odyssey (the first one at 9.481– 486, and the second at 9.537–542). 15. “No Second Troy” was written in December 1908, and published in 1910 in The Green Helmet and Other Poems. Stewart Brown has suggested that Yeats’ practice of “transposing” classical myth on a provincial island influenced Walcott’s approach to Greek and Roman mythology (24). 16. “Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator; / he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys / in every odyssey, one on worried water” (Omeros 7.LVIII.ii, p. 291). 17. One may also ask, “Is this Philoctetes going to be the same as the Philoctetes of Heaney?” Heaney’s The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes was published in 1990 (the same year as Omeros) and was first performed on 1 Oct. 1990, in Derry—a performance that Walcott attended (King 513). Conversely, an audience/readers may bring their knowledge of Walcott’s Philoctete to a performance/reading of Heaney’s play. On Walcott’s Philoctete, cf. Hardwick 2000, chap. 6 (“Walcott’s Philoctete: Imaging the Post-Colonial Condition”). 18. Although the Iliad and the Odyssey contain references to Philoctetes, he does not feature as a character in either. 19. For the idea of the shuttle as an image of the repetitiveness of literature, see Walcott’s The Odyssey. A Stage Version (Prologue 1): “Andra mou ennepe mousa polutropon hos mala polla . . . / The shuttle of the sea moves back and forth on this line, / All night, like the surf, she shuttles and doesn’t fall / Asleep.” 20. This “sameness” is invariably complicated; see Hardwick: “The sameness of this language is, in fact, constituted by diversity and by recognition that this involves a dynamic interplay of cultures” (2000, 119). Hardwick is commenting on Demodocus’ claim that “The sea speaks the same language round the world’s shores” (The Odyssey, A Stage Version II.IV.122). See also note 5 above. 21. See, in particular, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” and “A Letter to Chamoiseau,” (p. 219; both essays in Walcott’s What the Twilight Says: Essays).

143

CALLALOO 22. See Walcott’s comment in “The Muse of History” on the “bitter memory” in New World poetry: “The golden apples of this sun are shot with acid. The taste of Neruda is citric, the Pomme de Cythère of Aimé Césaire sets the teeth on edge, the savour of Perse is of salt fruit at the sea’s edge, the sea grape, the ‘at-poke,’ the sea almond. For us in the archipelago the tribal memory is salted with the bitter memory of migration” (What the Twilight Says: Essays 41). 23. “Achille would howl / at their clacking cameras, and hurl an imagined lance! / It was the scream of a warrior losing his only soul / to the click of a Cyclops, the eye of its globing lens” (Omeros VII.LIX.iii, p. 299). 24. “And Achille himself had been one of those children / whose voices are surf under a galvanized roof; / sheep bleating in the schoolyard; a Caribbean / whose woolly crests were the backs of the Cyclops’ flock, / with the smart man under one’s belly” (Omeros VII.LXIV.ii, p. 323). 25. On the significance of this name and the complex relationship that it signals with ancient Greece, see Farrell (p. 164). 26. On “reading backward” from Walcott to Homer, see Dougherty 1997, especially pp. 336, 339, and 355–56. Dougherty has exemplified this idea of “reading backward” by taking Walcott as her point of departure for her own monograph on Homer’s Odyssey (2001, chap. 1). 27. I cite just two examples here, but this insistence is ubiquitous in Walcott’s work. The first quotation comes from a talk given at Duke University in the spring of 1995, that was recorded and transcribed by Gregson Davis, and published as “Reflections on Omeros”: “If you think of art merely in terms of chronology, you are going to be patronizing to certain cultures. But if you think of art as a simultaneity that is inevitable in terms of certain people, then Joyce is a contemporary of Homer (which Joyce knew)” (Davis 241). The second example comes from a talk given at Toronto University in January 1989 to accompany a reading of “The Sea is History” (from The Star Apple Kingdom): “There’s no history in art, for example. The criticism of art is historical, but art itself does not contain history” (Birbalsingh 22). 28. See Borges’ essay “Kafka and his Precursors” (363–65). 29. Technically a reappearance, because the frigate bird is first mentioned in the third stanza of the poem (p. 21). 30. See Thieme: “here metre, metaphor and lexical juxtaposition—of Latin and francophone Creole, within the primarily English vocabulary of the poem—enact the linguistic intermingling of Walcott’s mongrelised practice and again help to shape a distinctive cross-cultural, Odyssean idiom, which paradoxically is at the same time very much here in the Caribbean” (177). 31. “[L]ike Achille’s, my craft slips the chain of its anchor, / moored to its cross as I leave it;” Omeros (VII.LXIV.ii, p. 323). This metaphor features in the dedication to Omeros: “For my shipmates in this craft, For my Brother, Roderick, & for Roger Straus.” 32. Walcott refers to this sort of criticism in Another Life: “they measure the skulls with callipers / and pronounce their measure / of toms, or traitors, of traditionals and Afro-Saxons” (270). Birbalsingh comments on the social phenomenon of “Afro-Saxons” in the Caribbean in the 1950s.

WORKS CITED Baer, William, ed. Conversations With Derek Walcott. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. Birbalsingh, Frank, ed. Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Borges, Jorge Luis. The Total Library. Non-fiction 1922–1986. Ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne J. Levine, and Eliot Weinberger. London: Penguin, 1999. Rpt. of “Kafka y sus precursors.” La Nación 19 Aug. 1951. Brown, Stewart, ed. The Art of Derek Walcott. Bridgend: Seren Books, 1991. Cribb, Tim J. “Walcott, Poet and Painter.” The Kenyon Review 23.2 (Spring 2001): 176–184. Also Stand Magazine 2.4/3.1 (March 2001): 176–184. D’Aguiar, Fred. “Ambiguity without a crisis? Twin Traditions, the individual and community in Derek Walcott’s Essays.” The Art of Derek Walcott. Ed. Stewart Brown. Bridgend: Seren Books, 1991. 157–168. Davis, Gregson, ed. The South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997). Special Issue: The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives.

144

CALLALOO ———. “With No Homeric Shadow”: The Disavowal of Epic in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997). Special Issue. The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives. Ed. Gregson Davis. 321–333. Dougherty, C. “Homer after Omeros: Reading a H/Omeric Text.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997). Special Issue. The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives. Ed. Gregson Davis. 335–357. ———. The Raft of Odysseus. The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Farrell, Joseph. “Walcott’s Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997). Special Issue. The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives. Ed. Gregson Davis. 247–273. Hardwick, Lorna. “Reception as Simile: The Poetics of Reversal in Homer and Derek Walcott.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 3 (Winter 1997): 326–338. ———. Translating Words, Translating Cultures. London: Duckworth, 2000. King, Bruce. Derek Walcott. A Caribbean Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. McCarthy, Shaun. “An Interview with Derek Walcott.” Outposts: Poetry Quarterly 171 (1991): 4–24. Special issue. Derek Walcott: A Celebration. Nogales, Patti D. Metaphorically Speaking. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1999. Sjöberg, Leif. “An Interview with Derek Walcott.” Conversations With Derek Walcott. Ed. William Baer. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. 79–85. Tagoe, Nana Wilson. “History and Style in Another Life. The Art of Derek Walcott.” Ed. Stewart Brown. Bridgend: Seren Books, 1991. 51–66. Thieme, John. Derek Walcott. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1999. Thomas, Ned. “Obsession and Responsibility.” The Art of Derek Walcott. Ed. Stewart Brown. Bridgend: Seren Books, 1991. 85–98. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. American edition published in 1990 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. Collected Poems 1948–1984. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. American edition published in 1986 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. The Odyssey: A Stage Version. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. American edition published in 1993 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. “The Sea is History.” Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English. Ed. Frank Birbalsingh. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 22–28. Text taken from a recording of a talk given at York University, Toronto 18 Jan. 1989. ———. The Bounty. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. American edition published in 1997 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. “Reflections on Omeros.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997): 229–246. Edited transcript of a talk given at Duke University in the Spring of 1995, ed. G. Davis. ———. The Arkansas Testament. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. American edition published in 1987 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. What the Twilight Says: Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. American edition published in 1998 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.

145

CALLALOO

WALCOTT

by Mc. Donald Dixon

Perplexed by blood warming these veins, like you, I cannot choose. Home is this brittle shore, a cluster of shacks unlatched by wind and rain, knowing love cannot spare its people from the worms rent, or the termites itch in the groin. These sad whispers feed the muse. Its lisping tongue stutters to unveil those tales that haunt your plays— parodies of good and evil transposed at dusk, when the wind dances with casuarinas. They shape the silence. A language too brittle for my use, until I learnt to soften its edges with spit and built the paradigm of fond neglect, to misplace nouns at my irresolute will.

146

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 146

CALLALOO

FORGETTABLE VACATIONS AND METAPHOR IN RUINS Walcott’s Omeros

by Natalie Melas

But in our tourist brochures the Caribbean is a blue pool into which the republic dangles the extended foot of Florida as inflated rubber islands bob and drinks with umbrellas float towards her on a raft. This is how the islands from the shame of necessity sell themselves; this is the seasonal erosion of their identity, that high-pitched repetition of the same images of service that cannot distinguish one island from the other, with a future of polluted marinas, land deals negotiated by the ministers, and all of this conducted to the music of Happy Hour and the rictus of a smile. (The Antilles) He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is the convulsive possession. (Caillois 30) It is difficult to take up Derek Walcott’s book-length poem Omeros without saying of it, as critics regularly do, that it is a monumental achievement. One can propose a catalogue of features that earn it this distinction: its virtuosic versification combining a kind of hexameter with a Dantesque terza rima; its complex narrative; its subtle and polyvalent reflexiveness; the sheer variety of its registers of diction and plot; the wealth and resonance of its imagery. But the phrase “monumental achievement,” particular when it applies to the intrinsically historical genre of epic resonates oddly with the antihistoricist postcolonial aesthetic Walcott develops in his earlier essays whose discourse on amnesia would seem to resist, if not actively oppose, conventional notions of monumentality, posed as these are in a redemptive relation to history. “History is irrelevant in the Caribbean,” he writes point blank in “The Caribbean: Culture of Mimicry” (5). In the “The Muse of History,” the essay in which he elaborates this argument most fully, he explains himself in words that are no less provocative: “the truly tough aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor forgives history. It refuses to recognize it as a creative or culpable force” (2). Another Life (1965–73), a long autobiographical poem that records the early phase of Walcott’s warns against the epic genre (“Provincialism loves the pseudo-epic” [183]), presumably because, given the banality of history for the colonial, the disproportion between

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 147–168

147

CALLALOO the bombast of the genre and the insignificance of provincial life is a recipe for mock epic. A witty catalogue of vignettes of local characters presented under the names of heroes from Greek mythology demonstrates the proposition. Epic monumentality is clearly not here a viable possibility. How is it then that Walcott attempts just such an epic twenty years later and avoids parody? One way to approach the question is to look in the text for the techniques Walcott develops to carve out a space for “an epic of the dispossessed,” in the words of Robert Hamner’s apt title. Omeros is, for instance, highly reflexive for it stages the conditions of its own writing in two authorial figures and prominently features a metadiscourse on its own operations. If self-consciousness creates a distance from parody, other rhetorical strategies preempt it, such as the elaborate “rhetoric of disavowal” Gregson Davis outlines in which Walcott secures legitimation for the work’s epic scope in the very gesture of disavowing any epic intention or pretension. Another approach to Omeros’ evasion of parody is to look at the text’s context, its broader conditions of possibility. St. Lucia itself is no longer provincial in the sense that it was in the twilight of empire for it has gone, along with so much of the region, from a backwater of colonial history to a tourist Mecca. The island is no longer a forgettable speck on the fringe of empire but an objectless destination, and it is this commodification of the place itself, I argue, that creates the backdrop against which the affliction of postcolonial history expunged from the essays becomes at once irrelevant and necessary. Tourism can resembles imperialism in many respects, particularly in the Caribbean where it wears uncannily similar faces, with relatively wealthy white visitors (although there is also an increase in black middle class heritage tourism) served by black natives.1 But there are also important differences and these pose an extraordinary challenge to the very foundation of Walcott’s aesthetics. History, for one thing is irrelevant to tourism, not because it is not manipulable or marketable, but because, to echo Walcott’s sentence, it is not what matters.2 There is no cultural necessity involved in tourism’s domination and economic exploitation, for these require neither the alibi of civilizational superiority and its arch and banal commensuration nor the ethical accounting of injury and guilt. Necessary continuities are alien to tourists, for their incursions are eminently transitory, and their relation to the people who inhabit their destinations are, to use Dean MacCannell’s words “temporary and unequal” (177). Colonialism’s historical relations subsist as vacant markers, often appearing accidental to the point of eluding even irony. There is for instance in St. Lucia an exclusive resort located between two distinctive peaks called the Pitons and built on the grounds of a former estate, the Jalousie plantation, a name the resort apparently adopted without hesitation. Derek Walcott himself was a vocal opponent of the project, writing in the local paper that “[t]o sell any part of the Pitons is to sell the whole idea and body of the Pitons, to sell a metaphor, to make a fast buck off a shrine.” You might as well, he adds, install “a casino in the Vatican” or “a take-away concession inside Stonehenge” (2–3).3 Despite the opposition, Jalousie Plantation Resort and Spa opened in 1992, the year of the quincentennial, which is also the year Walcott was awarded the Nobel prize. Unlike imperialism with its pomp and finery, its haughty monarchs and popular jubilees, tourism is faceless and decentered. Its most visible subject, the one who bears 148

CALLALOO its name and consumes its diversions, is precisely not the one who profits from it, who, in turn is for all practical purposes unlocatable, because the majority of the tourist industry in the Caribbean (and elsewhere) is a multinational venture. Jalousie Plantation Resort and Spa, formerly a copra plantation owned by an English aristocrat, now belongs to a Swiss-based corporation, headed by an Iranian-born businessman, and managed by an Ohio-based subsidiary (Patullo 3). It is little wonder that a distinct nostalgia hangs about the remorseful imperialist inhabitant of St. Lucia in Omeros, Dennis Plunkett, an authorial figure within the poem who is, along with his wife, perhaps its most elaborately developed character and stands as the Historian to Walcott/narrator’s Poet. To him at least the Walcott persona can say, “O Christ! I swore, I’m tired of their fucking guilt, and our fucking envy!” (Omeros 269). This debanalization of the imperialist historian is all the more noteworthy when we consider that Plunkett is another version of the schoolmaster who imperiously prompted the schoolchild’s recitation in “Another Life”: “Boy! Name the great harbours of the world!” (Another Life 172). Plunkett offers a nexus for an extraordinarily rich array of colonial discourses and as the white resident alien in the poem he is as eminently given to representation in the ample and measured mood of valediction as the tourist, an alien in transit, seems to resist representation in Walcott’s poetic lexicon. Tourists never appear as full characters or even complete human figures (they appear as body parts, as grilled or frozen meat, and once as corpses) and only speak once. Plunkett has the imperialist’s long memory, exacerbated by an old head wound that leads him to hallucinate or relive the trauma of the Second World War and to catalogue obsessively the loss of imperial possessions. Tourists, on the other hand, travel light and manifest the occupational amnesia proper to leisure, for vacations are, as Walcott phrases it in The Antilles, eminently “forgettable.” The tourist precisely does not integrate leisure time into an individual or collective attempt to link past and present; she or he brings back clichés, in the form of souvenirs and photographs that, in the words of a ubiquitous advertisement “preserve the memories,” seal them off for display as transportable vestiges of the otherwise immaterial consumption of place. The imperial historian’s ultimate condemnation of the Caribbean, “there are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own,” (Froude 337) today would apply most readily not to locals but to the tourists, who, for their part have come to seek local “color” and count among themselves a good number of “people lovers.” Crass, happily undifferentiated, blithely inauthentic, amnesic, but always, ultimately blameless, the tourist is a transient occupier who comes bearing gold and seeks only gratification. But then, the tourist is always already a stock figure, a type, a cheap shot, but a futile throw, because tourism itself is a dispersed and invisible target. In an extended and complex passage toward the middle of Omeros, the Walcott/ narrator figure confronts tourist development and in the process counterposes his Art not to History but to poverty. Looking out onto “the cinder-blocks // of hotel development” as a transport takes him to his hotel, Walcott asks: . . . Didn’t I want the poor to stay in the same light so that I could transfix them in amber, the afterglow of an empire, 149

CALLALOO preferring a shed of palm-thatch with tilted sticks to that blue bus-stop? Didn’t I prefer a road from which tracks climbed into the thickening syntax of colonial travellers, the measured prose I read as a schoolboy? (Omeros 227) Faced with the exigencies of a new era, the postcolonial poet is suddenly haunted in a particularly acute and complicit way by the colonial past, in which he recognizes above all the power of its language in the formation of his poetry. That Art which had promised to make a landscape possible, now must ask itself if it is not instead a sublimation of poverty. Walcott’s unstinting self-examination—“Why hallow that pretence / of preserving what they left, the hypocrisy / of loving them from hotels[?]”—leads him to a staggering reversal of the opposition between Adamic Art and nostalgic History posed in the essays: “Art,” Walcott writes in Omeros, “is History’s nostalgia, it prefers a thatched // roof to a concrete factory” (Omeros 228). The phrasing here is complex and revealing: Art is not nostalgia for History but the nostalgia of History. This relegates the aesthetic not only to a derivative and compounded obsolescence (it gazes longingly backward from the point where History’s backward look leaves off), but it also makes it static, a process of representation that “transfixes in amber,” that preserves what the people have already left behind. It is an art inimical to change. Comparing his craft to that of skilled manual craftsmen whose labor is no longer needed in the era of cinderblocks, Walcott quite openly poses his virtuosic epic poem of the tourist era as a manifest anachronism. Following this confessional moment, Walcott/narrator digresses on tourism in a rhetoric in which the third-person plural subject they is to such an extent indeterminately conflated with the authorial I that the two perspectives enter into a resemblance verging on identity. We find the familiar purist’s accusations of Caribbean culture’s hybrid inauthenticity now displayed in souvenirs “ . . . their dried calabashes of fake African masks for a fake Achilles / rattled with the seed that came from other men’s minds” (Omeros 228). This is followed by the equally familiar retort of the people’s intrinsic beauty: “So let them think that. Who needed art in this place / where even the old women strode with stiff-backed spines and the fishermen had such adept thumbs, such grace // these people had, but what they envied most in them / was the calypso part, the Caribbean lilt (Omeros 229).” Up to the hackneyed outsider’s typing of “these people,” the passage is vintage Walcott and could indeed belong to many of his characterizations in Omeros (of Ma Kilman or Achille, for instance) but this “poetic” rhetoric merges, over the silent distancing of a stanza break, right into the graceless platitude of the tourist’s language (“the Calypso part”). By the end, the passage’s very obscurity makes it hard to distinguish tourist from expatriate, poet from locals: . . . the gold sea flat as a credit-card, extending its line to a beach that now looked just like everywhere else, Greece or Hawaii. Now the goddamn souvenir 150

CALLALOO felt absurd, excessive. The painted gourds, the shells. Their own faces brown as gourds. Mine felt as strange as those at the counter feeling their bodies change. (Omeros 229) The interchangeability of tourist destinations, an equivalence that requires no other criterion of comparability that the money form, extensive in the scope of its exchange as the sea itself, infects this stanza with a contagious undifferentiation. To whom does the souvenir feel excessive, to the visiting poet who has earlier shopped at Helen’s trinket stall in the market or to the tourists suddenly overtaken by selfdisgust? Whose faces are brown as gourds, the tanned tourist, the black locals whose African origins are banalized in the fake masks, or the visiting Afro-St. Lucian poet? What are the faces at the counter—the masks for sale, the tourists buying them, the employees selling them—and what change comes over whose bodies? Across the white space that separates the two stanzas, Walcott absorbs into his language a very different comparatism from that developed in his theoretical essays. Art is no longer posed against imperialism’s historical commensuration, but against exchange, a sheer equivalence mediated by no fixed norm or standard and amenable to any content. Walcott’s aesthetic here briefly experiences its own incapacity to make strong distinctions. The interchangeability that tourism’s commodification of place endows upon St. Lucia, Greece, and Hawaii, equivalent for marketing purposes as islands offering the leisure of sun, sea, and sand, bleeds over into the formerly fixed positions of colonial domination (colonizer/colonized; victimizer/victim; History/Art;), blurring distinctions to the point where tourist, poet, local, and souvenir merge into a composite syntactical mass. Tourism, the marketing and consumption of leisure space, currently among the world’s largest industries, is an exemplary form of a new phase of capitalism, variously named neocapitalism, late capitalism, or global capitalism.4 Perhaps the most relevant theoretical investigation to the dilemma that Walcott confronts in Omeros is Henri Lefebvre’s elaboration of this phase of capitalism in terms of an extension of the mechanisms of commodification to space itself: The entirety of space must be endowed with exchange value. And exchange implies interchangeability, the exchangeability of a good makes that good into a commodity, just like a quantity of sugar or coal; to be exchangeable, it must be comparable with other goods, and indeed with all goods of the same type. The ‘commodity world’ and its characteristics, which formerly encompassed only goods and things produced in space, their circulation and flow, now govern space as a whole, which thus attains the autonomous (or seemingly autonomous) reality of things, of money. (353) Lefebvre goes on to specify that capitalism roughly divides the world into two kinds of regions, “regions exploited for the purpose of and by means of production (of consumer goods), and regions exploited for the purpose of and by means of the 151

CALLALOO consumption of space” (353) of which tourist destinations, or leisure spaces, are primary examples. Space then is divided and reified, that is, detached from any larger context or process, so that as a commodity it can be bought and sold, or produced (in the narrow sense) and consumed. Its value is determined in relation to other commodities on the basis of an abstract equivalence alone. It is important to draw a simple distinction with colonialism’s production of space, which has a political dimension in the assertion of sovereignty which involves a governmental apparatus and the institutions of cultural assimilation needed to secure it, and an economic dimension which is, of course, the exploitation of labor and the extraction of raw materials. Tourism’s space of consumption neither conforms to the appropriative strategy of private property nor colonial modes of domination and exploitation. No entity, no particular power, and no particular discourse lays a strong, appropriative claim to the land; rather, it is packaged and marketed for profit as a leisure space to be consumed. Tourism is not new in the Caribbean,5 but it grew dramatically with the advent of the jet plane in the 1960s and the consequent expansion of mass vacation travel, until it became for most islands the economic mainstay by the 1980s and 1990s. The total population of St. Lucia in 1992, for example, was about 135,000. That same year, 341,282 people visited the island, of whom about 160,000 were cruise ship passengers (Cameron and Box 533). This disproportion alone is, one might say, of epic proportions. Walcott awakens from the colonial nightmare of History to the global or neocolonial daydream of tourism. The elaborate postcolonial aesthetic he developed in his essays no longer articulates a distinct resistance because the target has changed. The autonomy of the aesthetic and its power to detach representation from historical commensuration here confront the autonomy of the commodity form in its circuit of exchange. Tourism can seem a negligible aspect of Omeros because it hovers almost exclusively in the poem’s far background. I will argue that it is precisely the tourist’s presence and particularly his and her depropriating gaze that makes the epic form necessary to commemorate a disappearing life in a place that is on the brink of forgettability, in the true sense of the word. Unlike colonialism, tourism is almost invulnerable to direct opposition because it can always change places. Walcott, however, has built his poetry from an art of mimicry that doubles the very thing it dissimilates and in Omeros he continues to develop this strategy by transforming the accidental nature of tourism, its apparent disjunction from the continuities of historical necessity, into a poetic contingency. The epic form in Omeros is ultimately articulated in terms of a spatial problematic rather than a historical one, that is to say, its foundational aim is to endow a cultural viability to a people’s existence in a place rather than to a people’s unity and destiny in historical time. In the time of tourism, St. Lucia is a place become display, totally visible, detachable, transportable. Where there ought to be the density of historical memory, there is someone else’s souvenir: “Their past was flat as a post-card, and their future, / a brighter and flatter post-card, printed the schemes / of charters with their poverty guaranteed tour” (Omeros 57). The epic distance created in Omeros, thus, does not deploy the conventions of heroism or depend on the ennobling aesthetic of mythical action. It takes the form of a wideranging metaphorical ruination of monumentality that dislocates the place from the platitude of tourist images through an extension of accidental similitudes. 152

CALLALOO Tourists may not crowd Omeros but you do not have to look far to find them. The poem begins with the click of a camera: “This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.” Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking his soul with their cameras. “Once wind bring the news to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars, because they could see the axes in our eyes.” (Omeros 3). For a few extra bucks, he will show them his scar. But, “he does not explain its cure. // ‘It have some things’—he smiles—’worth more than a dollar.’” Tourists occupy the very place of a classical epic’s invocation to the Muse (“Sing in me Muse of the polytropic one, who wandered much after he sacked the holy city of Troy,” are the first two lines of Homer’s Odyssey) except that they are invoked not as transcendent tellers, the ultimate authorities for the poem’s representation of the distant past, but as listeners called forth with a curiously didactic line (“This is how . . . ”). The Muse of tourism presents itself as an elusive audience or a position of address rather than as a transcendental inspiration. Omeros’ opening gesture is also a transaction between tourist and local which turns a story and a scar to profit. It is perhaps tempting to say that Philoctete is positioned here as the victim of tourism, but the phrase “taking his soul with their camera,” a tired cliché among so many others in the richly futile lexicon of tourist insult, warns us against any uncomplicated oppositional roles. The scene is an instance of commodification in action, but a highly ambiguous one in many respects, not least of which is that the story Philoctete will not tell (how the wound was cured) is precisely his story as it unfolds in the poem. Philoctete, that is, reveals to the tourists his scar (a healed wound) and addresses them precisely as a recovered victim. It is important, too, that the first speaker in the poem is the fisherman Philoctete, for he represents the most conspicuous reversal of Walcott’s censure of the militantly “wounded sensibilities” of History’s postcolonial elegists. Philoctete is an uncannily exact personification of the militant writers, “those who peel, from their own leprous flesh, their names / who chafe and nurture the scars of rusted chains, / like primates favouring scabs, those who charge tickets / for another free ride on the middle passage” excoriated in “Another Life”(269). He bears the “incurable” wound of slavery on his shin and throughout the poem explicitly personifies the pain of a history of dispossession. He occasions the following lines, for instance, with their overt allusion to Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: who set out to found no cities; they were the found who were bound for no victories; they were the bound, who leveled nothing before them; they were the ground (Omeros 22)

153

CALLALOO The tourist gaze thus quite directly calls forth the injury of colonial history, even if, or perhaps because, ultimately that gaze remains immune to ethical commensuration or the rhetoric of revenge. Many critics have noted the sharp departure in the poem’s plot and thematics from the stance of the essays, particularly concerning the African dimension of St. Lucian culture and the trauma of history. Of course, times have changed and Walcott is no longer compelled by the polarities of a polemic that pitted militant black nativism against the divided consciousness of his mulatto style. The puzzle, however, is in the relation of the prominent trope of the wound of history to, on the one hand, the flaunted Hellenic analogies and allusions, and on the other hand the muse of tourism, or at least the phantom audience of tourists. In my reading, this last is determining, for it fundamentally alters the nature and the stakes of representation and especially of cultural comparability and equivalence. Interpretations of the poem that do not take central account of tourism tend to read the politics of comparison in the poem in terms of an overcoming of the colonial/anticolonial opposition. In an important essay, Jahan Ramazani, for instance, examines the figure of Philoctete as a “deindigenized” Caliban. The Greek name, belonging to a relatively minor figure in the mythology surrounding the Trojan war functions to legitimize (Ramazani’s term) black suffering, so that while “granting cultural authority to Europe, Walcott also reclaims it for Caribbean blacks” (54). High European culture here is positioned in its colonial guise as a medium of cultural authority and legitimacy which endows value upon its subjects. Walcott, Ramazani argues, both avows and undercuts this authority. At stake in the comparison of Greece to the Caribbean is thus a politics of influence and cultural assimilation that pits dominant against subordinated cultures. Hellenism is a classic topos of colonial cultural assimilation, of which Sartre gives a memorable account in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (1961): “ . . . from Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we hurled forth words ‘Parthenon! Fraternity!’ and, somewhere in Africa, in Asia, mouths opened: . . . thenon! . . . nity! And European humanism could congratulate itself on having ‘Hellenized the Asiatics, created a new species, Greco-Latin negroes.’” (37–38). The operative questions for Ramazani’s postcolonial reading are the following: Is Walcott recolonizing Caribbean literature for Europeans by using this and other Greek types? Or is he decolonzing it by representing Caribbean agony? Does the poet reenslave the descendant of slaves by shackling him with a European name and prototype? Or does he liberate the Afro-Caribbean by stealing from former slavers and making it signify their brutality? The answer is that Walcott overcomes this reductive opposition, “becoming neither a Eurocentric nor an Afrocentric poet but an ever more multicentric poet of the contemporary world” (64, 64). Ramazani defends Walcott’s hybrid practice both from the charge of “Greco-Latin negro” assimilation and from the nativist charge that it violates the integrity of discreet cultures. In this culturalist postcolonial reading, the poem’s addressees are taken to be either the Eurocentric establishment or its Afrocentric opposition. If we add tourists to the mix, then the poem’s postcolonial cultural politics can be seen to unfold on a postcultural stage, a context in which culture no longer primarily functions according to the colonial paradigm of assimilation where it forms or de-forms colonial subjects, 154

CALLALOO but circulates instead through the export of mass culture on the one hand and in the homogenizing representations of an increasingly centralized media. The muse of tourism can hardly be expected to remember the assimilatory imperative of the civilizing mission whose Greco-Latin negroes would register in her framework, if at all, as interruptions of the necessary backdrop of recognizably authentic local color, simulated or not. Most readers of Omeros are also potential tourists, wittingly or unwittingly consumers of Caribbean leisure space or of the inescapable and seductive representations of the area in advertisements, with their redeployment of the familiar colonial tropes—enchanted island, pre-lapsarian paradise, Robinsonnade and the romance of the shipwreck, the plantation fantasy of complete dominion, the racial fantasy of complete mastery.6 This is not to say that the problem of colonial cultural assimilation has been superseded in much of the Anglophone Caribbean. High school students are, for instance, not generally exposed to much literature of the Caribbean in their literature curricula. Nor is tourism an inescapable context or theme in much of the poetry written in the Caribbean, which addresses other social and aesthetic problems much more prominently and indeed rarely takes up tourism at all. Tourism is, nonetheless, a determining context for U.S. critics and for Walcott himself (and perhaps other U.S.-based writers) whose poetry like his person shuttles between the U.S. and the Caribbean and who, therefore, is particularly attuned to perceptions and representations of his native land abroad. This sensitivity pervades his Nobel speech, entitled as a guidebook might be, The Antilles, and incommensurably subtitled, as no guidebook is likely to be, Fragments of Epic Memory. In this text, Walcott contrasts the discourse of colonial travelers with that of tourism and ends on an acutely ambivalent note regarding his own inevitable participation in the process: “The fear of selfishness that, here on this podium with the world paying attention not to them but to me, I should like to keep these simple joys inviolate . . . ” (The Antilles). If the very title Omeros, invoking as it does the monumental source of the Western tradition in a slightly estranging spelling, provokes a postcolonial question of assimilation, authenticity, and interculturation, this question is radically diverted through the figure of Omeros in the poem, whose main role is ultimately to rescue Walcott from the “love of poverty” that implicates him by analogy with those who have sold out the island to tourism. In one of the poem’s most baroque fabulations, an extended scene that begins the last of its seven books, Walcott/narrator hallucinates an encounter between himself and Omeros. From his hotel balcony, he sees an object floating up on the beach which manifests itself alternately as the marble or plaster classical portrait, an ebony figure of an old African griot, and Seven Seas, the local story teller. This composite Omeros leads Walcott by the hand as Virgil had Dante, but this time through a St. Lucian version of the inferno in which there seem to be two main circles, one reserved for tourism’s speculators and the other for self-serving poets. The “Pool of Speculation” is reserved for the “souls who have sold out their race, . . . saw the land as views / for hotels and elevated into waiters / the sons of others” (Omeros 289). The demonic speculators try to pull Walcott/narrator down, but Omeros leads him “along the right path. . . . ” Walcott, however, almost falls into the next pit, the “backbiting circle” of poets. “Selfish phantoms with eyes . . . who saw only surfaces in nature and 155

CALLALOO men, and smiled at their similes” (Omeros 293). Walcott recognizes himself in the dwellers of this pit and but for Omeros, Omeros might have ended here: And that was where I had come from. Pride in my craft. Elevating myself. I slid, and kept falling toward the shit they stewed in; all the poets laughed, jeering with dripping fingers; then Omeros gripped my hand in enclosing marble . . . (Omeros 293) The rhetoric of disavowal finds a particularly robust and comical incarnation here in the hyperbolically monumental hand that lifts the poet from his “slide” into selfelevation. Nonetheless, an equivalent relation to the island obtains between the pride of poets who elevate themselves and sublimate poverty and the greed of speculators who “elevate into waiters the sons of others.” The carnivalesque hyperbole that surrounds the figure of Omeros turns serious when, in the form of Seven Seas, he lectures the transatlantic poet: “You ain’t been nowhere, you have seen / nothing no matter how far you may have traveled / you have learnt no more than if you stood on that beach” (Omeros 291). At the end of their little journey, Omeros drives this lesson home with a direct link to poverty in stern words that echo Walcott’s self-questioning in the passage discussed previously: . . . ”You tried to render their lives as you could, but that is never enough; now in the sulphur’s stench ask yourself this question, whether a love of poverty helped you to use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone?” (Omeros 294) Walcott reflects on the relation of art to poverty in several of his prose works. In “Twilight,” for instance, speaking of the arduous labor of his early theatrical work, he writes about the “gilded hallucinations of poverty . . . as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted backyards, under their dusty trees, or climbing to their favelas, were all natural scene-designers and poverty were not a condition but an art.” But he warns unequivocally that “the last thing which the poor needed was the idealisation of their poverty,” because “the empire of hunger includes work that is aimed only at necessities. . . . Hunger induces its delirium, and it is this fever for heroic examples that can produce the glorification of revenge” (3, 19). The stakes in Omeros have changed considerably, for the enemies consigned in Michelangelo fashion to the pit of hell are no longer the militant intellectuals who prey on the people’s deprivation but tourism’s speculators and their promises of progress out of poverty. So Omeros’ question is one that is in large measure aimed at this poem itself, with its explicit aim to commemorate a disappearing mode of life with the use of other eyes, most especially,

156

CALLALOO those of the great blind bard himself. “When,” Walcott/narrator laments shortly before his encounter with Omeros, “would I not hear the Trojan War / in two fishermen cursing in Ma Kilman’s shop? / When would my head shake off its echoes like a horse // shaking off a wreath of flies? When would it stop, / the echo in the throat, insisting, ‘Omeros’; / when would I enter that light beyond metaphor?” (271). The answer is, of course, never, or at least, not until the last line of the poem, but the encounter with Omeros allows Walcott to have his metaphor and disavow it too, for by the end of the chapter, “the nightmare was gone. The bust became its own past.” And by the start of the next chapter, the poet can speak of this “homage to Omeros my exorcism” (294). The answer to Omeros’ challenge to the poem, that is, whether it has used his “other eyes” merely to sublimate poverty and conserve it in monumental marble, hinges on how successfully Walcott can make him disappear. Omeros, like its namesake the bust, is a self-effacing monument. Walcott devises an elaborate verbal edifice made up of many narratives told or perceived by two major narrators and several minor ones and an extravagant web of imagery, metaphor, and allusion only to undo much of it at the end, leaving only a kind of poetic memory, or, more precisely, clues for a different and differential forgetting. Critics have often remarked on Walcott/narrator’s confession to Omeros during their encounter that he never read his books “all the way through,” a claim Walcott himself has repeated in interviews (Bruckner C23). This may well be, as Gregson Davis argues, another instance of the rhetoric of disavowal; nonetheless, it is hard to deny that the Homeric poems inform the text of Omeros only in the most general way. The theme of the journey, particularly a filial journey of homecoming that reconciles fathers and sons recalls the Odyssey, as does the island itself and its seafaring ways. The Iliad echoes through the central plot, the conflict between two fisherman, Hector and Achille, over a beautiful woman named Helen. The explicitness and contingency of the Homeric template, however, distinguish Omeros most strikingly from its modernist precursors. Homer’s Odyssey is to Joyce’s Ulysses the hidden epic code; however ambivalent the cultural filiation, the text’s operations are unintelligible without knowledge of the ancient precursor. In Omeros, Homer is much more detachable; his indispensability lies, paradoxically, in the very incidental nature of his connection to the Caribbean. It is possible to write a great deal about Omeros without ever referring to Homer in any thoroughgoing way, or indeed mentioning him at all. In part this has to do with the fact that the Homeric aspect of Omeros is overwhelmingly associated with the metafictional operations of its two primary authorial figures, Poet and Historian, and also because, as such, the Homeric dimension of the text is overwhelmingly tropological. If one engages in the thought experiment of removing Homeric allusion from Omeros, one finds that most of the narrative remains unchanged. What disappears, however, is the text’s manifest monumentality, which this little experiment reveals to be largely a product of metaphor. Homeric epic exists or subsists in Omeros not so much as a precursory exemplum, of which this is a postcolonial or postmodern or Caribbean version (the way one could say that Ulysses or self-evidently, Kazantzakis’ The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel are versions of Homer), but rather as a font of metaphor. Homer and Omeros unleash a copious lexicon for relations and affinities that mobilize accidental and incomplete similitudes. Critics have found this proliferating metapho157

CALLALOO ricity excessive and uncontrolled, even metastatic. Paul Breslin suggests that the poem does not consistently sustain the “critique of its own analogical method” (272) and that the overwhelming Homeric comparison “might be seen as a lingering wound of colonized consciousness, motivated by an insecure longing to claim the founding authority of the European canon” (266). I cannot say that the reading I propose derives from the poet’s conscious intention, but I will argue that whether or not the Homeric analogy betrays the unconscious vestiges of colonial comparison, it can also be seen to work instrumentally as a textual effect deployed in resistance to tourist representations. This excessive metaphoricity becomes a node of resistance if we think of the tourist brochure and its marketing of authentic Caribbean culture as Omeros’ countertext rather than the discourse of colonial cultural assimilation. Omeric comparisons are modes of metaphorical interchangeability that, in contrast to the system of exchange that brokers commodified space, detour around equivalence.7 In the very distances this metaphoricity and the mirage-like immanence of its disappearance establish between vehicle and tenor, we learn to read for an ontologically resistant depth in the place. This resistance is constituted from a differential effect of metaphor. Forced and excessive, these comparisons play across a spectrum defined by sameness and difference and marshal the extraordinary array of metaphor’s gradations against the flatness of commodified space. From its very title on, a slightly skewed rendition of the modern Greek pronunciation of Homer (Wmhros pronounced “O-meeros” in Modern Greek) that is estranging enough so that most people are not sure exactly how to pronounce it, Omeros announces an incommensurability at the core of its flaunted allusion to the classical model. The first book, substantially the longest of the seven, functions as an extended invocation or prelude which introduces all the characters and provides a multiple etiology of the poem’s title and its comparative relation to the classical reference. Omeric incommensurability as it is developed here occupies a spectrum defined by minimal and maximal differentiation. Omeros enters the poem via a minimal differentiation at the end of Walcott’s introduction of the local blind bard, old St. Omere, also known as Seven Seas, occupied with his morning ritual: The dog scratched at the kitchen door for him to open but he made it wait. He drummed the kitchen table with his fingers. Two blackbirds quarrelled at breakfast. Except for one hand he sat as still as marble, with his egg-white eyes, fingers recounting the past of another sea, measured by the stroking oars. O open this day with the conch’s moan, Omeros, (Omeros 12) The plainness of the first stanza is leavened in the second stanza’s first line with a single simile comparing Seven Seas’ stillness to marble, and though by association his fingers now recount another sea, the entire stanza could still easily refer uniquely to 158

CALLALOO the diegetic character of Seven Seas. By the opening of the third stanza, however, he has retroactively become Omeros. Cloaked in a simile that brings this flesh and blood figure into relation with a “blind bust,” the moment of difference at which one could pinpoint precisely where Seven Seas leaves off and his classical or archaic analogue begins is obscure. The St. Lucian bard and the ancient epic poet are minimally differentiated. Leading into the much-quoted scene where Walcott/narrator first hears “Omeros,” there is a passage that elaborates an analogy between Homer’s time “across centuries / of the sea’s parchment atlas” and the St. Lucian present: “Then the canoes were galleys / over which a frigate sawed its scythed wings slowly” (13). The analogy between prehistorical (taken broadly) Greece and ahistorical or posthistorical St. Lucia is one that Walcott draws fondly upon in his commentary on Omeros (“Reflections” 238–39), but although it figures at various points in the poem, it tends, as in this passage, to be elaborated in terms of metaphorical associations and not in the syllogistic form of an analogical argument. The analogy between the Mediterranean and the Caribbean is not uncommon in historical writing on the Caribbean where the two seas and the regions they define are compared as the crucibles of two great phases of world history, the first encompassing Classical antiquity and the late middle ages and the second the era of global modernity initiated by Columbus’ voyage.8 Walcott alludes to this world historical paradigm (see Omeros 37–8, inter alia), but keeps his poetic project well clear of it, preferring instead the stark discontinuities of an immediate juxtaposition of archaic Greece and the contemporary Caribbean. As though to exaggerate disjunction over a potentially explanatory historical analogy, at the end of this passage Walcott segues into the origin of the title “Omeros,” which is accidental to the highest degree, as much from a historical as from a literary perspective: A wind turns the harbour’s pages back to the voice that hummed in the vase of a girl’s throat: “Omeros” III “O-meros,” she laughed. “That’s what we call him in Greek,” stroking the small bust with its boxer’s broken nose, and I thought of Seven Seas sitting near the reek of drying fishnets, listening to the shallows’ noise. I said: “Homer and Virg are New England farmers, and the winged horse guards their gas-station, you’re right” I felt the foam head watching as I stroked an arm, as cold as its marble, then the shoulders in winter light in the studio attic. I said, “Omeros,” and O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was both mother and sea in our Antillean patois, os, a gray bone, and the white surf as it crashes

159

CALLALOO and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore. Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has ebbed. The name stayed in my mouth. (Omeros 14) The dissimilitude here is maximal, for the figure of Homer insistently diverts all abstract likeness in its relation to the Caribbean. The simile that just a few pages previously merged Omeros with Seven Seas here disaggregates into the thought of a particular subject contemplating not a bard or a text or a landscape, but a mundane object, a reproduction of a portrait. Detached from the immateriality of language (not to speak of history or tradition), the Homer-object is at once territorialized by its proprietor as a transportable souvenir of a particular place, Greece. As an object, the bust of Omeros is, strictly speaking, not susceptible to the usual dangers of poetic cultural assimilation. Instead, it circumvents the legitimacy of cultural traditions by circulating in the contingency of “real” space—St. Lucia, New England. The connection between Homer and the St. Lucian Bard Seven Seas, or the New England Farmers Homer and Virg occurs on the mode of free association. The work of this crucial passage is to transform the purely accidental nature of Homer’s appearance to the poet in the form of a plaster bust in the possession of one of his lovers who just happens to be Greek into a contingent foundation for the poem. Homer in the shape of Omeros comes (h)ome to the Caribbean by passing through the accidents of space rather than the necessity of time. The dislocation that will bring the name into St. Lucian patois adds an extra turn to this insistent materialization because it is transmitted in the oral materiality of language, rather than in its written universality (“The name stayed in my mouth.”). And if all this multiple dissimilation of Homer through Omeros’ materiality did not suffice, the transfer of the name from Greek to patois also takes a carnal form because it coincides with Walcott/narrator’s sexual encounter with the bearer of the Omeros-object. Indeed as the caresses of the Greek woman’s marmoreal body begin, the precise moment when Walcott seizes the name Omeros for his poem, it is difficult to distinguish between the Homer-object and the flesh-and-blood woman: I felt the foam head watching as I stroked an arm, as cold as its marble, then the shoulders in winter light in the studio attic. I said, “Omeros,” Under the bust’s blind eye, sight turns to touch turns to speech. The bust’s momentary incarnation in the woman’s body coincides with its etymological metamorphosis into patois, so that the passage’s manifest creolization, o, mer, os, also distinctly lets an homme’s eros be heard. And this peculiarly carnal and incarnated translation allows an immediate contact between discrepant historical moments. No longer buffered by the absolutions of Tradition’s continuity, Homer confronts slavery. In its incarnated form, antiquity’s “inculpable marble” might be seen to widen its mouth to a scream: 160

CALLALOO . . . then the lowering shallows of silk swirled at her ankles, like surf without noise and felt that another cold bust, not hers, but yours saw this with stone almonds for eyes, its broken nose turning away, as the rustling silk agrees. But if it could read between the lines of her floor like a white-hot deck uncalked by Antillean heat, to the shadows in its hold, its nostrils might flare at the stench from manacled ankles, the coffled feet scraping like leaves, and perhaps the inculpable marble would have turned its white seeds away, to widen the bow of its mouth at the horror under her table In maximal differentiation likeness is evacuated as a form of cultural mediation. The name Omeros is so radically detached from any original or authentic high-cultural referent that it becomes available to a new etymological appropriation in which no claim to comparison with the original adheres. O-mer-os, shattered like a word-object into fragments enters into metaphorical relation with the Caribbean landscape alone. Shorn of analogy or any temporal reference, the (re)naming of ‘Omeros’ is perhaps as close as a reader can get to seeing New World “Adamic naming” in action. The radical contingency behind the origin of the poem’s title also informs the origin of its plot. Although here, too, a proper name is the catalyst, it engages likeness and difference in a very different way. The scene, reminiscent of the multiple and chance intersections of various characters in a single topography in modernist narrative (Mrs. Dalloway’s London, Ulysses’ Dublin), unfolds on that ultimate space of consumption, the beach. Walcott/narrator sits at a hotel terrace “waiting for the cheque,” while Major Plunkett and his wife Maud enjoy a weekly drink at a different locale, “their Saturday place,” and “the tourists revolved, grilling their backs in the noon barbecue,” when suddenly the waiter frowns into the distance. Walcott/narrator turns around and now the mirage dissolved to a woman with a madras head-tie, but the head proud, although it was looking for work. I felt like standing in homage to a beauty that left, like a ship, widening eyes in its wake. “Who the hell is that?” a tourist near my table asked a waitress. The waitress said, “She? She too proud!”

161

CALLALOO As the carved lids of the unimaginable ebony mask unwrapped from its cotton-wool cloud, the waitress sneered, “Helen.” And all the rest followed. (Omeros 23) The poem’s conceit is thus born of accident and formed through contingency as the poet’s singular, mirage-like vision of a woman is amalgamated contingently with the voices of worker and tourist in leisure space (“Who the hell is that?” “She? She too proud!” “Helen.”). All three speakers see the same woman, but they all see her differently, and Walcott’s fellow gazers are clearly cut off from “all the rest that followed,” that is, from the poem itself. Meanwhile, from another side of the beach, Plunkett, his mind as so often addled with war, sees Helen and suddenly “smiled at the mythical hallucination / that went with the name’s shadow” and remembers that the island was once known as the “Helen of the West Indies” because the French and the English fought more than a dozen battles over it in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including the glorious Battle of the Saints when Rodney routed de Grasse and sealed his triumph in the treaty of Paris.9 These “Homeric associations” and “Homeric coincidences” will prompt Plunkett to undertake his “remorseful research” to “give Helen a history.” For the Poet, however, this moment of vision is much more elaborate and it extends into a very particular turn of metaphor. He watches Helen walk down the beach singing “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.” There is smoke up ahead of her. She must decide whether to go through it or around it and “in that pause / that divides the smoke with a sword, white Helen died.” Suddenly a boy on a horse gallops down the beach: . . . the stallion’s sound scalded her scalp with memory. A battle broke out. Lances of sunlight hurled themselves into sand, the horse hardened to wood, Troy burned, and a soundless wrestling of smoke-plumed warriors was spun from the blowing veils, while she dangles her sandals and passed through that door of black smoke into the sun. And yesterday these shallows were the Scamander, and armed shadows leapt from the horse, and the bronze nuts were helmets, Agamemnon was the commander of weed-bearded captains. (Omeros 34–5) The tourist sees a beautiful local woman (we know she quit her last waitressing job because she would not put up with their groping) with a common name. His or her apparently incidental presence is pivotal because he or she is the one who asks her

162

CALLALOO name and sees nothing in it (far as we can tell) beyond the beauty already manifest in her person, a beauty that is part of the leisure space he consumes. The recovering imperialist sees in “Helen” the people in need of a history. The poet, on his side, makes the smoke a door revolving from white Helen to black Helen and hallucinates the Trojan war on the beach before him. The metaphors in this passage are nowhere subtended by the kind of correspondences that induce recognition by uncovering hidden similarities. Nothing about the sunlight in the passage above brings it into similitude with a lance, or the smoke with warrior plumes, much less a door. What makes the passage verge on hallucination is that the metaphors are so sharply detached from the literal things they render. The Homeric association is at once supremely accidental because it partakes fully in the chance convergence of elements that bring it to the poet’s mind and at the same time forced by a single perspective, willed, envisioned, and as such rather than beholding likeness one has the sense of witnessing a metamorphosis: sunlight becoming lances, smoke becoming warriors or a door. It is worth recalling here, however briefly, the discourse on metaphor in Western philosophy, in which, starting with Aristotle, the perception of resemblance links philosopher and poet on an unbroken chain toward the truth, for it is a gift of nature (euphuias; Poetics 1459a7). Because Aristotle’s ontology is grounded in a concept of truth, there is a knowledge available through resemblance and it is ultimately the recognition of an underlying sameness. The point is all the more apparent in Ancient Greek, which signifies similarity and sameness with the same word: homoiôsis or to homoiov. But of course resemblance is not sameness but rather the recognition of sameness. This detour to the same through resemblance occasions a paradox for the chain of Being, as Derrida points out in his analysis of the status of metaphor in philosophy, for the pleasure of mimesis depends on “giving us to see in action that which nonetheless is not to be seen in action, but only in its very resembling double, its mimêma” (239) The perception of resemblance in fact paradoxically precedes the underlying sameness or truth to which it testifies. Even when metaphor is not explicitly associated with metaphysical truth, its workings and its recognition are thought, by anthropologists, for instance, both to uncover and depend on a common culture, or by linguists and critics to plumb the depths of a single language. A crosscultural metaphor is, thus, from a certain perspective, an oxymoron, because it cannot draw on a system of shared commonplaces. Because Walcott’s Homeric associations and hallucinations neither proceed from a perceived resemblance, nor result in the recognition of similarity, they expose cultural boundedness and work on its limit even as, in their play from minimal to maximal difference, they blur the boundaries of sameness. The Omeric metaphor extends the paradox of the mimêma, for, rather than giving to be seen a resemblance that precedes the Same, or the true object of knowledge, Walcott’s metaphor reveals a lone resemblance neither followed nor preceded by a legitimately “true” original. He gives to be seen, culturally speaking, precisely what could never be seen because it makes no further claim to truth. Dislocation here is forced into artifice, just as accident becomes contingency. Helen diverts equivalence but calls forth both minimal and maximal differentiation. The name Helen is identical to the Homeric original; the comparison, linguistically, does not pass through resemblance but through the minimal difference of 163

CALLALOO repetition (and, of course, translation). But if the name is the same, the substantive difference in time and space and cultural context is vast to the point of complete disjunction. The comparison remains in tension between the collapse into nearidentity and the absolute distinction of cultural difference. In Walcott/narrator’s eyes, black Helen and white Helen merge through the mirage of a revolving door of smoke, and mirage is a crucial word for it suggests a complete and completely illusory materialization of desire. The mirage appears with absolute clarity and identity (no verisimilitude here: the scene in the distant desert does not merely resemble an oasis, it is an oasis) and then, just as absolutely, disappears. At the same time however, the passage keeps Helen the figure of speech utterly distinct from Helen the human figure, who walks down the beach singing a Beatles song utterly heedless of the metaphors painting her into a Trojan landscape. This radical distinction between metaphorical epic magnitude and the daily doings of the St. Lucian characters characterizes the poem throughout. We have for instance, the poet’s elevated epic presentation of the pirogues as fateful objects destined to be heroes: “one would serve Hector and another, Achilles.” But the next line, across a chapter heading, presents us with an ordinary fisherman performing an ordinary bodily function we would not dream of witnessing for his Homeric counterpart: “Achille peed in the dark, then bolted the half-door shut” (Omeros 8). Walcott’s Omeric metaphor brings to the mind of this reader the extended Homeric simile, particularly as it occurs in the Iliad, where it exhibits a similarly radical disjunction between tenor and vehicle, or between the epic heroes and the particular magnitude made of them. Here we join Odysseus in the midst of battle as he barely escapes the encircling Trojans: . . . They found Odysseus beloved of Zeus, and around him the Trojans crowded, as bloody scavengers in the mountains crowd on a horned stag who is stricken, one whom a hunter shot with an arrow from the string, and the stag has escaped him, running with his feet, while the blood stayed warm, and his knees were springing beneath him. But when the pain of the flying arrow has beaten him, then the rending scavengers begin to feast on him in the mountains and the shaded glens. But some spirit leads that way a dangerous lion, and the scavengers run in terror, and the lion eats it; so about wise much-devising Odysseus the Trojans crowded now, valiant and numerous, but the hero with rapid play of his spear beat off the pitiless death-day. Now Aias came near him, carrying like a wall his shield, and stood forth beside him, and the Trojans fled one way and another. (Iliad XI.473–486) The Homeric simile establishes a point of correspondence (or, as the scholars call it, a Vergleichspunkt), here between Odysseus encircled by Trojans and a wounded 164

CALLALOO stag encircled by scavengers, and then extends upon it. The extensions, however, instead of clarifying the grounds of comparison, develop into small narratives which, more often than not, wander far from the tenor or subject they purport to qualify. The example here is particularly striking because the simile’s initial correspondence, Odysseus/stag:Trojans/scavengers picks up an extra element, the lion, in the process of its narrative extension. This lion in turn finally comes to correspond to Aias in the narrative. The simile’s narrative develops to the point of contradicting the scene it illustrates: a lion scatters the scavengers and eats the stag, whereas Aias scatters the Trojans but rescues Odysseus. If we focus on the correspondence Odysseus/stag we find that one survives and the other succumbs; if we focus on the unarticulated correspondence Aias/lion, we find that one rescues and the other devours.10 By simile’s end the original equivalence which would subsume the stag’s dire circumstances to Odysseus’ predicament falls apart and each element moves on with a life of its own. The context—with its own contingencies and accidents—from which the metaphorical vehicle is plucked seems to overtake the original similitude. One of the peculiarities of the Iliad, in marked contrast to the Odyssey, is that the stage on which the action develops is nearly devoid of natural detail. There is no weather to speak of; when the Trojan plain unfolds before us, it is from a general’s strategic eye view (even if that perspective is adopted by a woman, as it is by Andromache in book VI): vast groupings of men engaged in battle or preparing for it with two rivers and a few trees as landmarks. On the other hand, among the roughly three hundred fifty extended similes punctuating this bleak narrative, every conceivable face of nature and pastoral life seems to make an appearance, from storms to childbirth, to dolphins, to donkeys in the field, to flies crowding over a pail of milk, to wounded stags escaping scavengers only to succumb to lions. Wolfgang Schadewalt fills up the first three pages of an essay with a selected catalogue of these natural elements and then argues that they seem so exhaustive and precise that they amount to a world on their own, a Gleichniswelt, simile world (130–6). Furthermore, for all the specificity with which the similes are extended, they almost never include references to particular places, so that although the minuteness of detail gives them vivid completeness, they are not exclusively linked to any actual place outside the epic.11 The stag is not on the run in Thrace particularly or in Pylos; instead, these actions are available to Panhellenic signification. As Gregory Nagy has forcefully argued, Homeric epic is among the cultural institutions of the time that aimed to define a translocal Panhellenic totality (115–16). Epic, Nagy argues, suppresses or submerges all direct reference to hero cult, even as it appropriates many of its ritual structures toward the end of constituting its own competing version of immortality. Whereas the cult hero’s immortality is linked to a specific locale, the epic hero’s immortality is entirely contained in the renown epic itself generates by virtue of its circulation among all Greeks. Thus, although one of the effects of the disjunction between simile and action may be to both make ideological links and expose this making, another is certainly to create the illusion of independence for the ordinary cultural and natural world the similes allude to. The importance of the stag in our initial example, thus, may not be its problematic identification with Odysseus, but rather that its brief race into the epic should, by means of its very 165

CALLALOO disjunctive extension, make the poem appear to partake in the extensive and unlimited relations of an ordinary or “real” but translocal Panhellenic totality. Analogy or metaphor thus surprisingly emerges as the pretext for metonymy. It may be the Homeric tour de force to divert attention onto modes of resemblance while the narrative surreptitiously and metonymically alludes to the totality of an imaginary world as though this world were already existing, even as the epic itself brings it into existence. There are no extended similes on the Homeric model in Walcott’s Omeros, but it seems to me that the incommensurable Omeric similitude, one that systematically diverts equivalence, can be said to perform a similar function. In Omeros, however, the tables are turned and it is the similes that carry epic magnitude while the narrative unfurls in ordinary life. The disjunction between the two, which, we remember, can take the form both of maximal and minimal differentiation, makes a notable monumentality appear and disappear in such a way that the ordinary life it shadows becomes aesthetically possible. Homer’s similes create the illusion that the highly wrought epic, with its elevated style, its highly conventional structures and its ideology, encompasses the whole world of nature—potentially extending in a metonymic way, that is, contingently, into the ordinariness of Panhellenic life. Omeric similitude interposes the ontological density and perceptual opacity of a metaphorical and therefore disappearing monumentality into the flatness or interchangeability of commodified space. Whereas the Homeric simile cannily separates specificity from locality, Omeric similitude delocalizes tourism’s reified caricature of local type. Homer or Omeros thus provides Walcott with epic distance, or rather, epicality as distance. Walcott has insisted again and again in published interviews that Omeros is not an epic. I want to suggest that we take his disavowal at its word and think of the poem as epical precisely in the way that it figures its nonepicality. Omeric similitudes suggest a function for postcolonial comparison other than cross-cultural analogy, where the content or substance of one culture is measured against or superimposed on that of another. Walcott instead mobilizes the disjunctive mechanisms of comparison with the ultimate effect of an Omeric incommensurability in which a fragment of epic monumentality arises just long enough for a differential distance and a resistant density to appear and disappear like a mirage.

NOTES 1. For a careful analysis of the tourism industry’s deployment of these tropes, see especially Strachan (78–89). 2. “[I]n the Caribbean history is irrelevant, not because it is not being created, or because it was sordid; but because it has never mattered. What has mattered is the loss of history, the amnesia of the races, what has become necessary is imagination, imagination as necessity, as invention” (“The Caribbean” 53). 3. The ironies in Patullo’s brief and pragmatic account are so outlandish and multilayered, they might be derived from some hitherto unknown manuscript of Jonathan Swift. The area in question, for instance, was sacred to St. Lucia’s annihilated native Arawaks; the resort’s tennis court now covers what was probably their burial ground. On the way to the Jalousie resort, there is a home for the poor and the old named Malgretout (in spite of everything). “Local fishermen are no longer allowed to work the bay where guests now lie on imported sand” (4).

166

CALLALOO 4. See, for instance, Robertson. 5. It’s hard to resist quoting Naipaul casting a jaundiced eye on the scene in 1960: “Jamaica presents to the outside world two opposed images: the expensive winter resort—turquoise sea, white sands, reverential bowtied black servants, sun-glassed figures below striped umbrellas: Tourism matters to you is the theme of a despairing advertising campaign run by the Jamaica Tourist Board to diminish the increasing hostility to tourists—and the immigrant boat-trains arriving at London’s gloomy railway stations: Niggers go home painted in large red letters in Brixton and Keep Britain white chalked everywhere” (The Middle Passage 115). 6. For the early lineaments of this discourse see Hulme, Colonial Encounters and for its rearticulation in late capitalism see Strachan Paradise and Plantation and Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean. 7. Rei Terada introduces the invaluable adjective Omeric (187) in her ground-breaking analysis of Omeros. 8. Gordon K. Lewis devotes a subsection entitled “The Caribbean and the Mediterranean” to this idea in his Main Currents in Caribbean Thought (16–20). See also Strachan, “Paradise and Plantation” for a discussion of this theme. Walcott avails himself of Ancient Greek materials throughout his work, particularly in his plays, such as Ione, with its Homeric cast of characters and The Isle Is Full of Noises. See also Breslin, Nobody’s Nation (37, 246). 9. As put by Frederick Treves: “There can hardly be a spot, that, for its size, has played a more stirring part in the history of arms or in the chronicles of the British navy and army. There is no dot of land that has been so desperately fought over, so savagely wrangled for, as this too fair island. St. Lucia is the Helen of the West Indies, and has been the cause of more bloodshedding than was ever provoked by Helen of Troy” (109). 10. This simile, along with one other in the Iliad which also clearly contradicts its subject (Iliad XII.41), has drawn its share of attention; see Moulton (46). 11. I am grateful to Michael Nagler for pointing this out to me.

WORKS CITED Aristotle. La Rhétorique. Ed. and trans. Nortbert Bonafous. Paris: A. Durand, 1856. Breslin, Paul. Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Bruckner, D. J. R. “A Poem in Homage to An Unwanted Man.” New York Times, 7 Oct. 1991; natl. ed. C13. Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychanasthesia.” Trans. John Shepley. October 31(Winter 1984): 17–32. Cameron, Sarah, and Ben Box, eds. 1994 Caribbean Islands Handbook, 5th ed. Chicago: Passport Books, 1994. Culler, Jonathan. Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Davis, Gregson. “’With No Homeric Shadow’: The Disavowal of Epic in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 2 (1997): 321–33. Derrida, Jacques. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the text of Philosophy.” The Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Hamner, Robert. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1997. Homer. Iliad. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean 1492–1797. New York: Routledge, 1986. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1974. Lewis, Gordon K. “The Caribbean and the Mediterranean.” Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its ideological Aspects, 1492–1900. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1983:16–20. MacCannell, Dean. Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers. New York: Routledge, 1992. Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. Naipaul. V. S. The Middle Passage. New York: Anchor Books, 1962. Ramazani, Jahan. The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2001. Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992.

167

CALLALOO Sartre, Jean-Paul. Preface. Les damnés de la terre. By Frantz Fanon, Trans. Natalie Melas. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Schadewalt, Wolfgang. “Die homerische Gleichniswelt und die Kretisch-Mykenische Kunst.” Von Homers Welt und Werk. Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler Verlag, 1959. Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London: Routledge, 2003. Strachan, Ian Gregory. Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. Virginia: U of Virginia P, 2002. Terada, Rei. Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992. Treves, Frederick. The Cradle of the Deep: An Account of a Voyage to the West Indies. New York: EP Dutton and Company, 1928. Walcott, Derek. “Another Life.” Collected Poems 1948–1984. –———. The Antilles. Fragments of Epic Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992. ———. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry.” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16.1 (Feb. 1974): 3–13. ———. “The Muse of History.” Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean. Ed. Orde Coombs. New York: Doubleday, 1974. 1–27. ———. “Reflections on Omeros.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 2 (1997): 238–9. ———. St. Lucia Star. 26 Aug. 1988. Cited in Polly Patullo. Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean. pp. 2–3. ———. “What the Twilight Says: An Overture.” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970.

168

CALLALOO

WELTSCHMERZ

by Rita Dove

I may in my imagination throw a point high up in the air, or drop it into the depths where I cannot reach it with my body. But in order to make it plausible . . . I must draw it with a pen and write the word “point” next to it, so that the point will mean “point.” —Albrecht Dürer, The Painter’s Manual

He who referred to his wife as “my good Agnes,” and always in connection with the maid—simple girl who cried out in the midst of a miracle, crosses dropped from the sky onto the clean white shirts of her master— what could he say to a creature so devoid of irony, she couldn’t even laugh when he yelled Come out of the rain? Still, the century’s fresh. Three days’ journey to view a beached whale, and by the time he arrives, the whale has been swept to sea again. He stays a while anyway, collects rocks, sketches a Negress so plump and shy she can’t lift her eyes from the tops of his hobnailed boots. Morosity, he writes later, is the penalty for too much thought without exercise. So he digs Dame Sorrow out of metal, carves her slouched among orbs and compasses, swathed in grim drapery—and yet it is his own jaw etched in fury, his gaze he finds burning beneath those extravagant curls. What goes up must come down: Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 169–170

169

CALLALOO the maid saw that with her own silly eyes. Throw up your hands, put it down on paper, in ink . . . what can one say to a woman who refuses to pose nude, even for a famous artist? Gather up your stones, your crab carapaces, your smudged equations for human perfection— and remember a green brooch for the melancholy Agnes.

170

CALLALOO

WALCOTT’S INTERTEXTUAL METHOD Non-Greek Naming In Omeros

by Paula Burnett

“Signs were interchanged . . . ” Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (153)

“Memory is not the province of logic.” Derek Walcott, Epitaph for the Young (15)

All that Greek manure under the green bananas . . . glazed by the transparent page of what I had read. What I had read and rewritten till literature was guilty as History. When would the sails drop from my eyes . . . When would my head shake off its echoes like a horse shaking off a wreath of flies? . . . But it was mine to make what I wanted of it, or What I thought was wanted. Derek Walcott, Omeros (LIV.iii, pp. 271–72) In Omeros, as elsewhere, Walcott acknowledges the charge of imitation, what some see as the anxiety of influence, but it is clear that the acknowledgement is something of a ritual gesture. The impetus of the passage is toward what follows. After the image of the horse shaking off flies (a futile attempt) comes the assertion of ownership—all this literature was “mine”—and of freedom: he can make of it what he will. Then comes a very Walcottian qualifier, almost a disclaimer: or what he thinks others want. It is the middle assertion that is the key, the freedom to use literature in his work, to make it signify, in whatever way he pleases. It is, after all, part of the world and part of experience. For although all signifying practices are necessarily intertextual, those of a writer “more deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of the things which they portray,”1 whose creativity is informed with multiple traditions, are inescapably more so. It should be said at the outset that intertextuality—Jean-Pierre Durix speaks of “the shimmering brocades of intertextuality . . . the dizzying spiral of echoing signifiers” (7)—in Walcott is always complex and open-ended. As John

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 171–187

171

CALLALOO Thieme points out, his work “incorporates and synthesizes disparate cultural intertexts . . . recognizing that the formative influences outlined are themselves hybridized, shifting and unstable” and “already exist in a discursive continuum which is particularly fluid because of the cross-cultural nature of the post-colonial situation” (4). However, the discursive continuum on which Omeros “signifies” (in the Henry Louis Gates sense) may be wider than has hitherto been suggested. By its use of Homeric names the poem openly invites an intertextual reading—although the apparent Greek parallels are never straightforward, and in the last analysis function always as secondary to the world of the poem’s immediacy, its dimension as Caribbean mimesis and mythopoeia—but less conspicuously some of the other, non-Greek names Walcott uses also carry a symbolic literary resonance. They are part of the double project which Robert Hamner defines: he “appropriates the life witnessed by various cultural texts” at the same time as he “textualises the life out of which he has grown” (231). The allusiveness implicit in the Plunketts’ part of the story, and that of Ma Kilman, can modify the reader’s perception, as certain literary echoes cause meanings to sprout in new directions. When explored, such echoes emerge as central to the poem’s figuring of cultural pluralism and spirituality, and its engagement with identity politics, and provide new insight as to the aesthetic decisions which seem to have gone into its making. It is not hard to see that Ireland is important to Omeros. The figure of Joyce is staged unmistakably at significant moments, the Irish landscape is powerfully evoked— particularly literary Dublin with Joyce’s Howth and the Martello Tower, and Glen-daLough, the ancient spiritual center—and Maud Plunkett is given an Irish identity. But the poem’s relationship to Irishness does not end there. Its aged couple, the Plunketts, illustrate the pluralism within whiteness, Maud being the Irish wife of an English husband, Dennis, but the intertextual resonances of their portrayal complicate this simple national binarism, bringing in oblique Irish echoes in relation to Dennis as well as Maud, and inverting the process. The surface of their story is firmly centered in St. Lucia. They are middle-class neocolonials who sought out the island as refuge from a war-torn world, making a living from employing black laborers in agricultural enterprises. In their free time Maud tends her garden (where she grows flowers for sale), embroiders, and plays her Airs from Erin on the piano, while Dennis breeds pigs and occupies himself in local historical research, uncovering a putative “ancestor” with the same surname, who stands in for a nonexistent son, both futureless.2 There will be “No more Plunketts” (XVI.i, p. 88). The dynastic line and the patronymic end with them, a frail couple on their St. Lucian hilltop, and the poem movingly portrays the death of Maud and Dennis’s grief. Read in terms of political symbolism, their day of white ownership and privilege in the island is done, and others are taking over, as the “parable” of the frigate bird suggests to Achille (XXX.i, p. 158), for the family group of Achille, Helen and her child who preside over the poem’s closure symbolize a different future. Yet the portrait of the Plunketts is done with great generosity and tenderness, 3 and as the poem records they represent in a sense Walcott’s own parents, Warwick and Alix Walcott: “There was Plunkett in my father, much as there was / my mother in Maud” (LII.iii, p. 263). 172

CALLALOO However, this reading of the Plunketts through filial piety and love of St. Lucia is not the whole story. In plot terms, their story is integrated not only through their connection with Helen but through the poem’s symbolic structure in relation to the idea of history, and the hurt that is its legacy. The role of Ireland in this is crucial, as it is in a parallel position to St. Lucia. It is portrayed as the home of spirituality and of literature, but shares also the historical role as victim of English colonialism. Walcott, who is never simplistic, takes pains to show the imperialist side of the historical story as morally complex. The Plunketts are central in this. In fact, the apparently even-handed English/Irish binarism of their national identities emerges differently when seen against the symbolism of the Plunkett name, for it is not only an Irish name and an unusual one, it is famous as the surname of a hero and martyr of the 1916 Easter Rising against British colonialism. By giving such a name to the poem’s white Englishman, Walcott is implicitly staging him as “Irish,” and moving him from a potentially negative position in the political map of the poem toward one with highly positive connotations. Dennis’s historical namesake, the Irishman Joseph Mary Plunkett,4 not only took part in the 1916 Easter Rising but was a key figure in it. He was a signatory to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and carried Robert Emmet’s sword into the General Post Office, where he fought until capture. He was executed at Kilmainham Gaol on 4 May 1916, where a plaque today commemorates him among the epoch’s other martyrs to English imperialism, a group so important in Irish history and politics. His story has a romantic dimension too. On the eve of his execution he married his fiancée Grace Gifford. Their marriage had been planned for 24 April, Grace knowing nothing of plans for the Rising. Later she miscarried, was herself arrested and held at Kilmainham, but lived on as a widow until 1955, when she was buried with full military honors in the Plunkett tomb. Walcott’s own mother also lived on into her old age having been widowed early, without remarrying, but in the poem the couple called Plunkett both reach a contented old age together, with a serenity denied both the historical Plunketts and the Walcotts. Eventually, instead of outliving her man, Maud dies before her husband. If the web of this Irish story is laid carefully across the intricacies of Walcott’s poem, its effect is to bring the Englishness of Dennis Plunkett within the orbit of Irishness, to soften it with a certain radiant heroism and romance. The element of tragic romance is of powerful appeal always, and one of the remarkable aspects of the portrait of the Omeros Plunketts is the way Walcott raises the tone to a tragic pitch at Maud’s death. It is a bold move in this substory of small-scale domesticity and unremarkable old age and could easily have failed, overreaching itself to collapse in bathos. But against the odds it succeeds. Dennis’s imagination, stored with the imagery of British pomp as well as of its domesticities, supplies a “march-past” to honor his dead dear, which would have done a national heroine proud. The moment is cleverly conceived and developed—and heartbreaking to read. It is one of the great celebrations of love and loss in literature. On the one hand it clearly honors Walcott’s own mother through its fiction of Maud, but it may also be regarded as ghosted by Grace Plunkett, who unlike Alix Walcott was given an actual ceremonial funeral.

173

CALLALOO There are further parallels. Like Dennis Plunkett, Joseph Plunkett was sick. The wound imagery of Walcott’s poem, which gives it a symbolic framework, is elaborated in Dennis’s case with a wartime head wound that has left him irascible and moody. Joseph Plunkett had long been in ill health from tuberculosis, and had undergone surgery shortly before the Easter Rising to remove a tuberculous lymph gland from his neck. He was still in hospital the day before Easter, when Grace visited him. The image of a doomed youth is strong, its romanticism heightened and made even more relevant to Walcott’s purpose by the fact that Joseph was a man of letters, and thus brings echoes of a literary kind to Walcott’s poem. With Edward Martyn and Thomas McDonagh he founded the Irish Theatre in 1914 for the production of authentically Irish plays, as against those of the Abbey Theatre, which they saw as rather artificial. Also, after his death a collection of his poems was published. Grace was not a writer but an artist, who had studied at Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art. They had met through the United Arts Club to which both belonged, and knew Yeats and Maud Gonne. In fact they were founders of the kind of artistic world that Walcott’s parents had hoped to establish in St. Lucia. The gentle domestic arts and modest intellectual pursuits of Walcott’s Plunketts, such as Maud’s embroidered quilt of Caribbean birds5 and Dennis’s historical research, his life “increasingly / bookish and slippered, like a don’s” (XI.ii, p. 65), emerge as an affectionate tribute to his parents’ high commitment to art—his father as painter and poet, his mother as actress, both as members of an artistic circle—when set against this Irish story, which accompanies it like another harmonic. Just as the Englishness of Dennis emerges as accompanied covertly by the Irishness of Joseph, so the Irishness of Maud is in a sense also harmonized conversely with an English resonance, a reciprocity that serves to cloud any simplistic notion of national identity. The name Maud has two principal literary associations, that of Maud Gonne, and that of Tennyson’s famous poem “Come into the garden, Maud,” which was on everyone’s lips as a song, throughout the British empire, in the days of Dennis and Maud and of Walcott’s parents. Walcott’s Maud is, indeed, a keen gardener, and the poem makes repeated references to “Maud’s garden,”6 so the (rather light-hearted) Tennysonian association seems apt. Also apt is the resonance with the name of Maud Gonne, which is associated not only with the historical Plunketts but famously (and romantically) with the august W. B. Yeats. Maud Gonne is a key figure in Irish literary history as Yeats’s muse (she not only inspired him, he staged her as Helen of Troy) and one of the founders of a nationalist theatre in Ireland. Through the name Maud, a Yeatsian association is thus twinned with a Tennysonian one, Tennyson being a key figure in English literary history, revered in England in his time, much as Yeats was in his, so the choice of Maud as the name for Dennis Plunkett’s wife strikes parallel echoes in both directions across the Irish Sea.7 The Plunketts are thus central to the poem’s portrayal of national identity as always already complex and plural: the world of art contests the circumscribed actualities of political nationalisms, and reflects the realities of individual lives, in which those who, in crude binary thought, may be disparaged as on the oppressor’s side, like the Plunketts and their antecedent, Midshipman Plunkett, can be seen as themselves victims of history, with limited choices and complex allegiances. 174

CALLALOO However, in a society where everyone shares the history of arrival, the Plunketts, in the end, are given their generous portrayal because of their love of the island and their dedication to making it home, a home none the less meaningful for being acquired. This perception shifts into a different key, again intertextual, when close attention is paid to the music Maud prefers. The reader is told more than once that among her favorite Airs from Erin (Erin being one of the names for Ireland) is a song of “Bendemeer’s stream.” On its first introduction it is seen through her irascible husband’s eyes as a tropical rainstorm gets on his nerves: “He felt murderous // as the monsoon when she started playing some tripe / about ‘Bendemeer’s stream,’ each chord binding the house / with nerves of itching ivy; . . . ” (X.i, p. 56). The reader may imagine the song to be a sentimental evocation of an Irish river, murmuring in Celtic twilight to the sea. It seems to fit the colonial version of the post-Victorian parlor or singsong round the bar piano to which the Plunketts are so attuned. Those searching the map of Ireland for a river named the Bendemeer will, however, be disappointed. As Hamner has noted (116), the allusion is a literary, not a geographical, one, the song forming part of the oriental romance Lalla Rookh by the Irish writer Thomas Moore (as the poem later hints).8 Moore held for Ireland a role similar to that Tennyson the Poet Laureate held for England, becoming its National Poet. The Irish dimension, then, opens out here into the exotic imagined East of Orientalism, bringing the Arab world—or a fantasy of it—embracing India and the Middle East, into the coziness of the scene.9 Thus as used by Walcott the song becomes a very Caribbean moment. At the heart of an apparent yearning after a mythic misty Irishness, what is really going on when all the intertextual echoes are heard emerges as something more broadly intercultural and plural, more global, with far-reaching resonances. In one of the inset verse narrations of Moore’s Lalla Rookh, first published in 1817 and subtitled in its dedication an “Eastern Romance,” which had become enormously popular by the late nineteenth century, a lovelorn youth, Azim, is approached by a group of dancing maidens, who leave behind one of their number, “in all that light alone,” with her lute, to sing to him: There’s a bower of roses by BENDEMEER’s stream, And the nightingale sings round it all the day long; In the time of my childhood, ‘twas like a sweet dream, To sit in the roses and hear the bird’s song. That bower and its music I never forget, But oft when alone, in the bloom of the year, I think is the nightingale singing there yet? Are the roses still bright by the calm BENDEMEER? by the calm BENDEMEER? the calm BENDEMEER? No, the roses soon withered that hung o’er the wave, But some blossoms were gathered, while freshly they shone, And a dew was distilled from their flowers, that gave All the fragrance of summer, when summer was gone. 175

CALLALOO Thus memory draws from delight, ere it dies, An essence that breathes of it many a year; Thus bright to my soul, as ‘twas then to my eyes, Is that bower on the banks of the calm BENDEMEER! of the calm BENDEMEER! the calm BENDEMEER!10 Lalla Rookh is on the cusp of the change Said defines, between an aspect of the Orientalism of the eighteenth century, with its belief that “an eighteenth-century mind could breach the doctrinal walls erected between the West and Islam and see hidden elements of kinship between himself and the Orient,” and the rise of academic Orientalism in the nineteenth century (118–19). With its ponderous scholarly footnotes, the work annotates the name Bendemeer as “A river which flows near the ruins of Chilminar.”11 The romantically portrayed maiden who sings to Azim is not named, and afterward “she, who sung so gently to the lute / Her dream of home, steals timidly away, / Shrinking as violets do in summer’s ray. . . . ” The Wordsworthian sentiment of the song relates to remembered pleasure, but here it is connected specifically to a memory of home, and therefore acquires particular poignancy in a postcolonial context, a Caribbean one, where everyone is an “arrivant” with some notion of an ancestral “home” elsewhere. Such a song of nostalgia would obviously strike a chord with Walcott’s expatriate Maud, far from her native shores: “Sometimes the same old longing descended on her / to see Ireland” (V.ii, p. 29). It is possible that it was a favorite of Walcott’s mother, and perhaps she sang it to her children. Or it may be that Walcott’s subsequent reading in Irish literature has produced this reference.12 Either way, the song referred to so insistently suits its new literary context admirably. Thus although the tribute to Irishness that Omeros contains is expanded by a reference to the national poet of Ireland, it is rendered typically Caribbean too through its wider intercultural allusiveness, none the less resonant for being implicit.13 The reader who brings to the poem a familiarity with Moore’s song will be reminded that meanings are never fixed or finished, but always shifting and open to new resonance in fresh contexts. Another of the non-Greek names used in Omeros provides a further illustration of this. The naming of the poem’s healer, its herbalist, the impressive Ma Kilman, also repays attention. Again the name is unusual.14 Its rarity as a patronymic supports the case for a direct intertextual relationship with what seems to be the only literary use of it. Readers of Virginia Woolf will recognize it as the name of a female character in Mrs. Dalloway, where it is described as adapted from the German name Kiehlman (136). However, there are many parallels and rhetorical relationships between the two texts beyond the name itself, such that it would seem Walcott intended his poem to be read against the Woolf. Each Kilman is apparently marginal to the plot of her text, but occupies a focal position in its overall meaning. If the poem is seen as “signifying” on the novel, what it has to say about identity, pain, faith, and gender are revealed in a new light. To examine Woolf’s novel first: Miss Kilman, as she is usually referred to (although her first name, we are told, is Doris), is given a hostile portrayal. She is a middle-aged 176

CALLALOO woman, passionate about religion, who has a powerful hold over the young Elizabeth, Mrs. Dalloway’s only daughter, a hold resented and feared by the mother. The hostility in the portrait seems gratuitously intense. Miss Kilman is ugly (associated with her ubiquitous and loathsome mackintosh), clumsy, greedy, and lacking good taste, and is feared by Mrs. Dalloway for the fervency of her faith (and also, obscurely, for her intelligence and education).15 She underwent a Pauline conversion—“Then Our Lord had come to her (and here she always bowed her head). She had seen the light two years and three months ago” (137)—and now, in Clarissa Dalloway’s eyes, she is making as sure as she can that her daughter becomes religious too. The mother is appalled at the thought that the two have spent the whole afternoon upstairs in prayer.16 There is a suggestion of a lesbian relationship, which Naomi Lee, Woolf’s biographer, relates to Woolf’s own experience as a young woman with older female mentors (160–61).17 More relevant to the Walcott, however, is Mrs. Dalloway’s hostility to Miss Kilman’s religious fervor, which Woolf’s novel stages so powerfully, obscurely linked to a negatively coded idea of love: Love and religion! thought Clarissa, . . . How detestable, how detestable they are! For now that the body of Miss Kilman was not before her, it overwhelmed her—the idea. The cruellest things in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat, on the landing; love and religion. Had she ever tried to convert anyone herself? Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves? (139) It is a side-swipe at another kind of supplanting of the self, centered in the narrative’s account of mental breakdown and the medical world’s response to it. The great topic of the novel, explored through the story of paralleled individuals, is how to be oneself, in the teeth of a world where convention works against it. Mrs. Dalloway regrets past decisions, which she sees as betrayals of her true self and the life of her present, safe in conventional terms, which she does not inhabit with conviction, while her alter ego Septimus Warren Smith has no sense of safety and in acute alienation loses his sense of self altogether. Like Dennis Plunkett in Walcott’s poem, he has been traumatized by witnessing the death of friends in the war (World War I as opposed to Dennis’s World War II), and years afterward, like Dennis, is still suffering from it. Mrs. Dalloway’s self-doubt and anguish are, as it were, played out to their conclusion through the tragic story of Septimus. The two doctors who treat Septimus as his condition deteriorates are both given hostile portraits. The general practitioner, Dr. Holmes, is an insensitive fool who regards his patient’s distress as a “funk,” or cowardice,18 and the Harley Street specialist Sir William Bradshaw is given a venomous portrayal as a sinister materialist, intent on crushing the identity of his patients at the same time as promoting his own self-serving ambition. “Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess” provides him with his bitterly ironized therapeutic power:

177

CALLALOO Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion . . . (110) The book’s ultimate horror,19 however, is reserved for what it calls “conversion,” understood as that loss of identity that happens when another’s ideas are implanted in the mind to the exclusion of one’s own: But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged . . . Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde Park Corner on a tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires power . . . This lady too . . . had her dwelling in Sir William’s heart, though concealed, as she mostly is, under some plausible disguise; some venerable name; love, duty, self-sacrifice. (110–11) It is here that the novel explains its parallelism of religious evangelism with psychiatric medicine. Both are about power over others, a power the novel presents as morally indefensible and deeply damaging. Miss Kilman seeks to control Elizabeth’s mind (in her mother’s eyes)20 as the doctors seek to control that of Septimus. Mrs. Dalloway, like the omniscient narrator, resists. The implication of Woolf’s position on psychosis in Mrs. Dalloway, controversial still, is that its unique sense of self may be preferable to a “normality” imposed by others. Some powerful voices have been raised since her time, however, in support of such a position. One current view is that “brain abnormalities could be associated with exaggeration of the higher mental functions and, in particular, with exacerbation of rational tendencies and self-consciousness—even perhaps of freedom itself”21 (Sass 395). The specific medical application implies a wider political point: that the West’s positive rhetoric of freedom is in conflict with a practice to impose uniformity. And as Sass reminds us, the list of major contributions to modern art and culture by individuals ranging from the schizophrenic to the schizoid is impressive (367), a list to which Woolf’s name might be added.22 She was, he argues, drawn to a “radical dissolution of ego boundaries (Sass 525–26, n. 59.)”23 Like Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, he examines the causes of mental breakdown, specifically schizophrenia, “within the modern sociocultural order itself” (Sass 372). In Woolf’s novel the psychological fragility of both Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus is traced precisely to aspects of the social order they inhabit. Miss Kilman and the doctors are staged as monstrous as part of this project. My suggestion is that Walcott, reading Woolf, was positively drawn to aspects of the book—its championing of difference, its engagement with psychological trauma—but was sufficiently moved by the portrayal of Miss Kilman to want to counter it. There is in particular a phrase in the first few pages of Woolf’s narrative 178

CALLALOO that, with hindsight and given the social map of Omeros, seems like an open invitation. Pursuing Mrs. Dalloway’s stream of consciousness, Woolf introduces her protagonist’s hostility to Miss Kilman, not only for her emotional hold over her daughter and for her religion, but because of the discomfiture she causes, a moral and political doubt: “she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were . . . all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in her” (14). Mrs. Dalloway goes on to say, it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and tyrants. Then comes the key passage: “for no doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.” (14–15). When revisited after the whole text has been read, this passage resonates with the core of the book, with its profound address to philosophical questions as well as its concerns for their political implications. The privileged life of the Dalloways as members of a powerful elite is deconstructed against a reading of the wider society, and the paralleled stories of Clarissa (who has also been ill, implicitly with a psychological illness) and Septimus24 explore an existential doubt: the tension between a faith in the ideal, in love, and depression at its unattainability. “Universal love: the meaning of the world” is a phrase on Septimus’s lips, just as he cries out about “human cruelty—how they tear each other to pieces” (162, 155). Woolf’s book has a high moral seriousness and a concern for human suffering not unlike that of Walcott’s poem. Yet there is a key difference between the two writers, in that Walcott’s work presents spirituality as profoundly positive. His black Ma Kilman implicitly challenges Woolf’s white Miss Kilman. Both have faith but only Ma Kilman heals.25 Although Omeros does not engage centrally with mental illness in the way Woolf’s novel does, it does elaborate through its characters a variety of traumas with psychological effects, and may be closer to a concern with madness than has been recognized.26 The physical wounds of Philoctete, Achille, and Dennis Plunkett are symbols of psychological alienation. In particular, the poem’s ultimate focus is on the mental trauma caused to black people by the history of slavery and its ongoing legacy of racism. Achille’s out-of-body experience in the heart of the book, a dream journey to Africa, is the closest the poem comes to modeling a spiritual experience that others might call a psychotic hallucination,27 described by Seven Seas in terms of a crisis of identity: “His name / is what he out looking for, his name and his soul” (XXIX.ii, p. 154). So although it is not overtly about mental breakdown, through the parallel with Woolf’s novel Walcott’s poem emerges more clearly as centered on psychological distress, its discourse of wounds and healing being symbolic of collective trauma explored through individual narratives woven in repeating patterns. A sequence evoking the pain of black history, for instance, ends with a collapsing of the collective 179

CALLALOO into the symbolic individual story: “Negro shacks // moved like a running wound, like the rusty anchor / that scabbed Philoctete’s shin” (XXXV.i, p. 178). My principal assertion, however, is that for Omeros Walcott wanted to create a persona who would be the antithesis to Woolf’s negative portrayal of Miss Kilman— namely Ma Kilman, a positive figure, a Caribbean woman of a profound spirituality who presides over the poem’s enactment of healing, a psychological process as much as a physical one. She draws on a synthesis of traditional beliefs28 and a Christian faith: “She took Holy Communion / with Maud sometimes, but there was an old African / doubt that paused before taking the wafer’s white leaf” (X.ii, p. 58). As herbalist, she uses the wild plants growing on St. Lucia’s hills to cure the sufferings of her neighbors. The rumshop, the No Pain Café, is her symbolic province, with a wry recognition of the role of alcohol in deadening anguish. Unlike Woolf’s Miss Kilman, she is seen not as a threat but a boon; she serves and is loved by the whole community of poor St. Lucian folk. She is the “Kilman” who emerges when “black” is “uppermost”—for Walcott often asserts that a generous spirituality is one of the strongest identifiers of Caribbean culture. His portrayal of her is mimetic as well as intertextual. The relationship with the Woolf displays an interrogative difference within sameness. We meet Ma Kilman in her shop with its bar (and back room for séances), and also in church, at prayer, a big woman, portrayed, like Miss Kilman, not as elegant or beautiful, but not ridiculed for her appearance as in Woolf’s novel. It is partly to do with the “stream of consciousness” method, in that Woolf portrays Miss Kilman principally through Mrs. Dalloway’s hostile eyes, though also from her own internal point of view as suffering from Mrs. Dalloway’s cruelty: “Ugly, clumsy, Clarissa Dalloway had laughed at her for being that; and had revived the fleshly desires, for she minded looking as she did beside Clarissa” (141). But Woolf uses also a gratuitously cruel omniscient narrator.29 The difference in Walcott’s Ma Kilman is that her own consciousness is centered throughout, so that the physical details, also suggesting a large, inelegant woman, are not cruel, but evoke a sufferer: “Her spectacles swam in their sweat. // She plucked an armpit. The damn wig was badly made . . . She rolled down the elastic bands below the knees / of her swollen stockings.” Crucially the poem’s following of this with an evocation of the grace and sincerity of her prayer asserts Ma Kilman’s dignity and power as well as her sharing in the category of suffering humanity (XLVII.i, p. 236). The narrative then follows her quest for the healing herb from the heights, signaled by the ant messenger, to find the perfect balm for Philoctete’s sore, its seed brought by a bird from Africa. In the forest the physical details are again given immediacy—“Ma Kilman unpinned the black, red-berried // straw-hat with its false beads, lifted the press / of the henna wig, made of horsehair, from the mark / on her forehead . . . Her hair sprung free as the moss . . . ” (XLVIII.ii, p. 243). It is a symbolic moment of transformation, the shedding of the artificial “indoor” culture of a falsely materialist and racist “civilization” (which for black people involves negative self-images and, in consequence, self-hatred) in favor of an attunement to “outdoor” nature, and through it an acceptance of the true, distinctive self. Unlike Woolf’s doctors, she is the “physician” who first cures herself. As she finds the stinking plant that can cure the festering wound, the deep seriousness lends the abjection of the moment passion and dignity: 180

CALLALOO “the cries of the insects led her where she bowed her bare head and unbuttoned the small bone buttons of her church dress. Ma Kilman, in agony, bayed up at the lights moving in the high leaves, like aeons, like atoms, her dugs shifting like the sow’s in a shift of cheap satin. She rubbed dirt in her hair, she prayed in the language of ants and her grandmother, to lift the sore from its roots in Philoctete’s rotting shin . . . ” (XLVIII.ii, p. 244) For all its apparent similarity to Woolf’s treatment of Miss Kilman at prayer, Walcott’s portrayal of Ma Kilman could not be more different. Woolf’s text enjoys the abasement of Miss Kilman, patronizing her, whereas Walcott’s stages a drama of spiritual self-abjection to elevate Ma Kilman to shamanic status. For if Omeros is read in the light of Mrs. Dalloway its discourse of human suffering comes into a particular focus. Woolf presents a dramatic inquiry between the polarities of life and death—represented by Mrs. Dalloway’s party and Septimus’s suicide30—the hope of relations based on love, as against the fear of cruelty, selfishness, and political exploitation. Miss Kilman is the symbol of revolutionary consciousness, of the bitterness of the exploited masses, and therefore unsettles Clarissa Dalloway (and by extension her creator) in her upper-class vulnerability, with her implicit threat of nemesis. Ma Kilman is symbolic of a different revolutionary consciousness, one that is apolitical (the poem mocks overtly political calls for revolution through the figure of Statics; XX, pp. 104–9). It is built not on bitterness but on an ethic of love (not made morally ambiguous, as in Woolf), its objective the healing of the soul; yet she is the apex of the world of the St. Lucian masses, a fact which makes the Plunketts and those like them insecure. For the Caribbean society Walcott portrays is grounded in a sense of moral outrage at the way of the world, which is so unjustly structured, in St. Lucia as everywhere: “There’s too much poverty below us” (X.iii, p. 63). Although Hector dies (as the Homeric echo would suggest), the poem stages a positive resolution for the other characters in terms of collective and individual psychology, of replacing self-hatred with self-esteem. Philoctete, bathed in herbs like a child by Ma Kilman, sees his wound close like that of “a mouth around its own name,” after a lifetime of “shame for the loss of words, and a language tired // of accepting that loss, and then all accepted” (XLIX.ii, p. 248). Dennis Plunkett has his grief salved by attending a séance with Ma Kilman and is accepted into St. Lucianness: “That moment bound him for good to another race” (LXI.i, p. 307). Woolf has no equivalent to the “cure.” Septimus kills himself and Mrs. Dalloway’s engagement with her own troubled experience is open ended, with nothing really altered. As well as inverting certain aspects of Mrs. Dalloway, Walcott seems moved to a positive acceptance of others. Despite the moral complexities of her engagement at intermediate points, Woolf ends her novel firmly with love and compassion as positives, with the observation, “What does the brain matter . . . compared to the 181

CALLALOO heart?” (213)—though the “poor dog” still howls. Walcott’s point of closure is in many ways similar, its positive note harmonized with anguish. The narration of healing is rounded off with an image of love, as Helen and Achille look forward to the birth of Helen’s child, but the image of sacrifice is still there right at the end, providing a somber ground-bass, through the piece of dolphin in Achille the fisherman’s red tin, the subject of the opening dispute with Hector.31 It may be seen as a Caribbean adaptation of the traditional symbol of self-sacrifice in the Christian bestiary, the pelican. The dolphin has long served (from pre-Christian times) as symbol of love, but here it is also an image of sacrifice. And just as Woolf’s last word is a mark of survival, personal survival—“It is Clarissa, he said. / For there she was” (213)—so Walcott’s last note is similarly one of survival, but collectively, of a people’s and a culture’s continuity, with the sea “still going on” (LXIV.iii, p. 325). It echoes the statement about the Middle Passage at the heart of the poem, “they crossed, they survived. There is the epical splendour” (XXVIII.i, p. 149). The destination of this line of enquiry may be a recognition of the common stylistic method of Woolf and Walcott. He builds his narrative in Omeros in what might loosely be called a modernist way, moving fluidly, as she does, in space and time, and between the streams of consciousness of different personae. It looks effortless but is not easy to do. Yet in both Woolf and Walcott there is never a moment’s hesitation for the reader as to where, when, and who are involved. If, then, the connection between the two is read as inviting a reading of Walcott as more of a modernist, it is not only the aesthetic method that comes into sharper focus, but also the psychological landscape of the text. What Sass refers to as “the inwardness of modernism—so often felt to provide a refuge from the depersonalising and fragmenting outer world (as, e.g., with Virginia Woolf)” (544, n. 75) is also keenly present in Walcott. His use of the wound as symbol in Omeros is a manifest of a generalized condition of modernity, itself the product of history. For black people the history of colonialism is the ubiquitous hurt; for poor people it is the history of capitalist exploitation; for others, such as the Plunketts, the hurt derives from war. But there is also the overriding hurt of negotiating a world—that of the modern West—structured on isolation and individualism. It is for this reason that Ma Kilman is focal to the poem as she proffers a different possibility, that of a world structured on mutually supportive communitarian lines. Woolf has no such hope to offer. She models the war-trauma of Septimus, which leads to suicide, and the unspecific trauma of Mrs. Dalloway, which leaves her vulnerable to insecurity and regret, as symptoms of a world heading only for disintegration, a catastrophe which is willed by the revolutionary consciousness of Miss Kilman and which, to Woolf, necessitates her hostile portrayal. She is a threat to the self-indulgent refinement of sensibility of the Dalloway circle, which is seen as the well-spring of the aesthetic, for the world she seeks is feared as implicitly devoid of art. Walcott can see, as Woolf could not, that an alternative world of social egalitarianism need not be stripped of the aesthetic. When he shows us Achille and Philoctete in their dance of celebration, healed, he is staging the folk arts, championing their intrinsic value.32 The irony, of course, is that he is doing so in a kind of poetry that tends to be more accessible to Woolf’s cultural inheritors than to Achille’s, as indeed the poem itself acknowledges. 182

CALLALOO One of the more intriguing aspects of Walcott’s poem is this carnival dance, the narration of which puts equal emphasis on the men’s costuming as women as on their warrior-like heroic masculinity. The androgyny of their dance (and androgyny is a word used in the poem), in a cultural tradition the poem traces back to Africa, strikes echoes from Woolf’s works. There has been much critical discussion of her use of androgyny and her perception of its meaning,33 relatively little of Walcott’s staging of it here, unusually for him. Clearly there is a mimetic reason for the scene in that, as the poem explains, Caribbean carnival is traceable to its African precursors and includes men dressed as women. The performance staging both masculinity and femininity with equal force seems likely to be informed by Jung’s ideas. He regarded the animusanima differences as held in balance in the healthy mind—both present, regardless of the individual’s physiological gender. Illustrations of this Jungian ideal often use an androgynous image. The Homeric relationship between Achilles and Patroclus may also ghost the Achille–Philoctete androgyny, and of course there is the example of Tyresias, but, given the context of the Kilman relationship, Woolf may be relevant too. In Orlando in particular she engages directly with androgyny. In Walcott’s poem as the healed men don breasts and “mitres” (instead of the more conventional African mask, headgear associated with Christian spirituality) for the festival, the black identity which it has been the poem’s quest to secure is celebrated precisely in its pluralism, its carnivalesque flexibility, staged through performed gender roles. This is a symbolic moving on of the structural differentiation of gender roles in which the poem also echoes Mrs. Dalloway.34 It symbolizes a truth Paul Gilroy has defined: “The history of the black Atlantic yields a course of lessons as to the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade” (xi). For ultimately the instability of subjectivity itself, however unsettling and painful, is the good news about the human condition, in that it means that the status quo is not the end (as Walcott’s ironic and negatively coded allocation of the name Statics indicates). Walcott’s poem, like Mrs. Dalloway, looks back interrogatively at the past. It posits a particular wisdom—in rhetorical contrast with Mrs. Dalloway, who is preoccupied with the idea that she chose the wrong husband—that “there is no error in love, of feeling // the wrong love for the wrong person” (XLVIII.i, p. 241–42). This is not an easy or escapist remark, but a mark of relaxed acceptance, a philosophy of inclusion, which offers a way to move forward from what is called history. The poem’s Plunketts had a lifetime with each other as Walcott’s parents did not, with Dennis’s bitter moods accommodated by Maud and not allowed to alter her overall knowledge of their love. Although the rivalry of Achille and Hector over Helen is divisive and the rage of Hector leads to death, the suffering of Philoctete and Achille is finally healed, contained within a circle of acceptance and love. The dream of home of which Maud sings and which sends Achille on his visionary journey is finally resolved in the recognition that home is already possessed, that it is the here and now, the elation of life in the Caribbean, “a self-healing island / whose every cove was wound” (XLIX.iii, p. 249). As the narrator says of Achille’s return from his dream, once the spiritual realization is reached that the boundary between life and death is not impenetrable (understood with a radically different consciousness from that of Septimus)—“when a wave rhymes with one’s grave, / a canoe with a coffin, once that parallel / is crossed, and cancels the line of master and slave”—then the ancient trauma is healed. 183

CALLALOO Beyond dispute, then, one thing Woolf and Walcott have in common is that they allocate high value to art. All artists draw on their experience of the world, a world that includes art, but not all choose to allude to other works of art in their own (although not to do so may often involve a kind of self-censorship). In the Omeros cases discussed, a number of intertextual echoes, around the Plunketts and Ma Kilman, have been “amplified” to highlight both possible creative strategies and particular reader positions. In the final analysis, it seems that Woolf’s work probably had a seminal influence on the development of the poem. If we imagine Walcott reading the novel, provoked by her portrayal of Miss Kilman and prompted by the story of Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway to think about the distinctive form of mental distress of his own people, a new image of the poem’s genesis emerges: its exchange of unresolved, death-bound trauma for life-bound healing, and its key substitution of the shamanic Ma Kilman for Woolf’s negatively portrayed Miss Kilman—these two primary dimensions coming together in a plot that culminates in the drama of symbolic healing, which has no parallel in the Woolf text. If this is right, this intertextuality may be as significant as the Homeric relationship. The elaboration of the wound symbolism across a group of characters—using names from Greek mythology, partly because of the historical fact that slaves were often given such “pagan” names by their colonial masters, and partly because it is a way of asserting that such historically invisible people as Caribbean fishermen and farmers are actually as heroic as any of the revered symbolic figures from Homer, and deserve to be as well known—may, on reflection, seem a subsequent (post-Woolf) development of the germinating idea for the poem, with its Fanonesque focus on the mental trauma that colonialism (and neocolonialism) has imposed on black people, which, brought to consciousness through art, can produce self-healing.

NOTES 1. Walcott quotes this, part of an anecdote about the painter Cimabue, in a passage from André Malraux as epigraph to his 1973 epic poem Another Life. The idea that not only the will but also the duty of the artist is to learn from other art has been expressed by him throughout his life. This concept of apprenticeship is held in tension, though, with a commitment to the artist’s responsibility to his community which involves the idea of mimesis of nature. As his narrator puts it in Omeros, “what I preferred / was not statues but the bird in the statue’s hair” (XL.iii, p. 204). 2. The “historical” youth died in the great naval Battle of the Saints off St. Lucia in the long struggle between France and England for control of the island and other territories, which ended in British victory and the imposition of English on a francophone population: he died but the language survives. 3. Some Caribbean readers, such as Stuart Hall, have found their portrayal generous to a fault (“Derek Walcott”). 4. Plunkett was born the son of a Papal count in Dublin in 1887, and therefore has august lineage in the way the poem’s Plunkett lacks. Walcott ironizes Dennis’s class pretensions, in that he adopts a more middle-class persona in St. Lucia than his English origins warrant. 5. This Penelope-like activity is actually founded on another intertextuality, associated with probably the most famous one in Caribbean culture, in that the historical James Bond, the author of the Caribbean ornithology on which Maud draws, lent his name to Ian Fleming’s hero (the joke presumably being that he “liked birds”). Bond’s Birds of the West Indies was first published in 1936.

184

CALLALOO 6. For example, X.iii, 62. The garden, like the island, is overtly linked to the idea of paradise. Dennis is nursed by Maud from his war wound, acquired fighting a tank battle in North Africa against Rommel’s army, falls in love with her, with a scene high above the sea briefly redolent of Bloom’s courtship of Molly in Ulysses, and they hope for a future “not on this grass cliff but somewhere on the other / side of the world, somewhere, with its sunlit islands, / where what they called history could not happen. Where? // Where could this world renew the Mediterranean’s / innocence? She deserved Eden after this war” (V.ii, p. 28). In keeping with this symbolism, Dennis’s wound is linked to original sin, and their relationship is portrayed as Edenic: “ . . . ’It’s like Adam and Eve all over,’ / Maud whispered. ‘Before the snake. Without all the sin’” (X.iii, p. 63). 7. Although Maud Gonne refused Yeats’s proposal of marriage, it may not be entirely fanciful to postulate a resonance between Dennis and Yeats, each the lover of a Maud. One of Yeats’s bestknown poems, “An Irish Airman foresees his Death,” written after the First World War in 1919, perhaps prefigures with its anti-heroics some of the attitudes to war—its futility—expressed in Omeros, as elsewhere in Walcott’s work: “What was it all for? A bagpipe’s screech and a rag. / Well, why not? In war, the glory was the yeoman’s; / the kids from the drizzling streets . . . ” (V.i, p. 26). Dennis is war wounded in the next global conflict, and although he was not an airman, the portrayal of the death of his friend is evocative of an aeronautical scenario: “that business // of Tumbly’s eyes. The sky in them . . . Tumbly. Blue holes for his eyes” (V.ii, pp. 27–28). It is worth noting that the Yeats poem already has a Caribbean intertext in Fred D’Aguiar’s play A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death (first produced 1991). 8. The poem suggests the Moore attribution, but tentatively: “’There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream’ / was one of the airs Maud Plunkett played, from Moore / perhaps, . . .” (XXXIX.iii, p. 201). 9. Moore’s work reflected the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century vogue for popular Orientalism, which Said describes as “of considerable intensity” and as associated with “[s]ensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy . . . ” (118). 10. The air, given in musical notation with the words of the first two verses in the centenary edition of Moore is marked Andante con Espressione and attributed to W. Hawes (Moore vol. 3, 353). Moore frequently wrote new lyrics to traditional Irish tunes. His Irish Melodies appeared in ten parts between 1807 and 1835. 11. Subsequently a reference to the “high pillar’d halls of Chilminar” is annotated, “The edifices of Chilminar and Balbec are supposed to have been built by the Genii, acting under the orders of Jan ben Jan, who governed the world long before the time of Adam” (359). Baalbek is the site of the ancient city of Heliopolis, today in the Lebanon. It is not clear whether the Bendemeer is an actual river, or by which name the Chilminar ruins or the river may be known now. 12. Another reason why he may have been curious about Moore is his concern to explore ways in which artists associated with Europe often have hidden connections with the Caribbean region. Moore in 1803 became a civil servant in Bermuda, not exactly a Caribbean territory but having much in common with the British colonies of the region, and thus his role may be seen as potentially analogous to those of Pisarro or Gauguin, to both of whom Walcott has given a revisionist history in his art, restoring and publicizing their links with the Caribbean. 13. The process is similar to that used for Meyerbeer’s aria “O Paradiso” in the earlier epic poem Another Life where a song popularized in early recordings as a joyous operatic aria, divorced from its full narrative context of a colonial African tragedy, is enlisted to serve a celebration of the sense of the Caribbean as paradisal (Burnett 142–44). 14. Although it resonates with the many Celtic names using the Kil- prefix, it is rare as a family name in either Ireland or Scotland, whether with single or double l. In fact it seems it may be associated historically rather with the Varmland area of Sweden where there is a town called Visnums-Kil. A genealogical website also records it is as a Russian Jewish name. 15. Elaine Showalter, who describes her oddly as “the repressed governess,” sees her as indicative of the erosion of class barriers in the suffrage movement: “Besides having other unfortunate qualities, Miss Kilman perspires and wears unsuitable clothing and obtrudes her poverty. In joining the movement, women writers had to abandon class distinctions, the privileges of being ladies” (238). 16. “And there was Elizabeth closeted all this time with Doris Kilman. Anything more nauseating she could not conceive. Prayer at this hour with that woman.” “’Kilman arrives just as we’ve done lunch,’ she said. ‘Elizabeth turns pink. They shut themselves up. I suppose they’re praying’” (130–31).

185

CALLALOO 17. “Miss Kilman could not let her go! this youth, that was so beautiful! this girl, whom she genuinely loved! . . . She was about to split asunder, she felt. The agony was so terrific. If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and for ever and then die; that was all she wanted” (145). Her unattractiveness, however, is given as the reason why a heterosexual life is out of the question: “Do her hair as she might, her forehead remained like an egg, bald, white. No clothes suited her. She might buy anything. And for a woman, of course, that meant never meeting the opposite sex. Never would she come first with anyone” (142). This is in a text in which the idea of lesbian love is raised early on: “But this question of love (she thought, putting her coat away), this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?” (37). 18. It is not just Septimus’s paranoia, that “Dr. Holmes seemed to stand for something horrible to him” (155), but an idea externally presented by the omniscient narratorial voice, as Holmes greets him initially with the words, “So you’re in a funk” and reacts with a cry of “The coward!” when his patient flings himself out of the window (102, 164). 19. Early in the novel a “chance” observer of the distress of Septimus and his wife in Regent’s Park, Maisie Johnson, is appalled at its implications and knows she will remember it all her life: “Horror! horror! She wanted to cry” (31). It has moral resonances of Conradian proportions. 20. It seems that the daughter’s role is created as a projection of Woolf’s own relationship when young with women resembling Miss Kilman, but Elizabeth is outside the text’s main concerns. The anxiety belongs to Mrs. Dalloway, who is Woolf’s principal projection. 21. This may, however, Sass adds, be “a possibility almost unthinkable within the classical framework.” Sass is both a professor of clinical psychology and a cultural commentator. 22. Woolf had already had a long history of illness by the time she began to work on Mrs. Dalloway in the autumn of 1922 (see Lee 438, 455 et passim). 23. It is an essentially “schizophrenic progression.” 24. Toril Moi puts the double structure thus: “Septimus can be seen as the negative parallel to Clarissa Dalloway, who herself steers clear of the threatening gulf of madness only at the price of repressing her passions and desires, becoming a cold but brilliant woman highly admired in patriarchal society” (12). 25. Nonetheless Walcott often has sharp things to say about religious institutions and evidently shares some of Woolf’s hostility to practices of “conversion.” See, for instance, the wry irony, redolent of Woolf, in “Turbanned religious cranks / urging sisters with candles to the joy of sects” (X.iii, p. 62). 26. Other Walcott works have addressed the topic, for example, “The Schooner Flight.” 27. Maria Cristina Fumagalli pertinently reminds us that the etymology of hallucinate is from the Latin alucinari, “to wander in the mind” (213). At one level, of course, the text plays it down as just a case of sunstroke. 28. She is seen as “a gardeuse, sybil, obeah-woman . . . ” (Omeros X.ii, p. 58). 29. After Elizabeth has left her in the Army and Navy Stores’ tearoom Miss Kilman is seen as out of control—she “blundered off among the little tables, rocking slightly from side to side . . . lurching with her hat askew, very red in the face” (146–47)—then, when she is at prayer in Westminster Abbey, trying “to rid herself both of hatred and of love,” another worshipper finds himself “a little distressed by the poor lady’s disorder; her hair down; her parcel on the floor . . . her largeness, robustness, and power as she sat there shifting her knees from time to time (it was so rough the approach to her God—so tough in her desires) impressed him . . . ” (148–49). 30. She wrote, “Suppose the idea of the book is the contrast between life & death” (Lee 455). Woolf’s staging of this balance may reflect another Irish intertextual echo, with Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” from Dubliners. 31. Achille’s hands “gloved in blood” underline the theme, despite their “innocent” explanation from his gutting of his catch. 32. Such crossovers are not new. As Adam Lively argues “the traditions of black culture—the traditions of cultural pluralism, flexibility, parody—fed into one of the principal concerns of early twentieth-century high culture: the slipperiness of identity.” For, “aspects of black popular culture transposed into a literary key” have not been unusual (221, 223). 33. Moi regards Woolf’s concept of androgyny not as “a flight from fixed gender identities, but a recognition of their falsifying metaphysical nature. Far from fleeing from such identities because she fears them, Woolf rejects them because she has seen them for what they are” (13). 34. The stories of Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway show masculinity crippled to the point of collapse and the feminine surviving, whereas Omeros typically stages its men as sufferers and its women

186

CALLALOO as agents and survivors. Whether this is regarded as aligned more with misogyny or feminism depends probably on the reader. Suffice it to say that the concerns of postcolonial texts are often congruent with those of feminism. The quest for identity of an alienated group needs a foil.

WORKS CITED Bond, James. Birds of the West Indies. Philadelphia: Academy of Natural Sciences, 1936. Burnett, Paula. Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000. D’Aguiar’s, Fred. A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death. Black Plays (vol. 3). London: Methuen, 1995. “Derek Walcott.” Arena. BBC TV, London. 20 Feb. 1993. Durix, Jean-Pierre. Mimesis, Genres and Post-colonial Discourse. Basingstoke: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Fumagalli, Maria Cristina. The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Hamner. “’Divided in the Vein:’ Derek Walcott’s Transcultural Translation.” Agenda 39.1–3: 2002– 2003, 220–235. Lee, Naomi. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 1997. Lively, Adam. Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination. London: Vintage, 1999. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 1985. Moore, Thomas. The National Moore: Centenary Edition including the Airs of the Irish Melodies, National Airs, etc. (vol. 2). London and Dublin: William Mackenzie, 1817. Plunkett, Joseph. The Poems of J. M. Plunkett. Ed. Geraldine Plunkett. London: Fisher Unwin, 1916. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1978/1991. Sass, Louis A. Madness and Modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of their Own. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977. Expd. ed., 1999. Thieme, John. Derek Walcott. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999. Walcott, Derek. Epitaph for the Young. Barbados, 1949. Rptd in Agenda 39.1–3: 2002–3, 15–50. ———. Omeros. London: Faber, 1990. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Hogarth Press, 1925/1976.

187

CALLALOO

PLAYING WITH EUROPE Derek Walcott’s Retelling of Homer’s Odyssey

by Irene Martyniuk

Since its first public performance on July 2, 1992 and its formal publication in 1993, Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version has justifiably garnered its fair share of attention. While examining a wide variety of issues and ideas surrounding the play, most agree that as a whole, the play exemplifies Walcott’s critical ideas, which he has articulated in such seminal essays as “What the Twilight Says” and “The Muse of History.” In short, most agree that Walcott’s play, while openly retelling a Western master narrative, moves beyond typical European binaries. In the play, there are no clear heroes, or monsters, or even colonizers and colonized. All of the characters shift fluidly in and around such specific distinctions, instead occupying positions on both sides and in other, third spaces. Peter Burian explains, “There is nothing to suggest that Walcott is out simply to reclaim some space for those whom the West has historically marginalized. Rather, he makes them equal partners in a common culture that is complex and diverse, to be sure, but not describable in terms of center and margins, same and other” (“Build” 80). In discussing Walcott’s work leading up to his writing of The Odyssey, Burian adds, “Insofar as such questions [which end “A Far Cry from Africa”] can be answered, Walcott’s poetry answers them not with either/or but with both/and” (“Greek Manure” his emphasis 360). I agree with this positioning and do not intend to rehearse these arguments. Instead, I would like to join in the conversation by suggesting that Walcott’s genius in writing the play is that he does not, in fact, change Homer’s original poem but instead finds a postcolonial perspective that is already present in Homer’s Odyssey. Speaking about his own Omeros, Walcott addresses the issue of his Homeric use, ideas that are also applicable to The Odyssey: “. . . a reinvention of the Odyssey, but this time in the Caribbean. I mean, what would be the point of doing that? What this implies is that geologically, geographically, the Caribbean is secondary to the Aegean” (“Reflections” 232). I would suggest that rather than focusing on what Walcott does and does not change from Homer’s poem, it might be more fruitful in terms of intertextuality to examine both texts together, rather than in comparison. Walcott’s placement of the original story, complete with Greek characters, in a Caribbean setting reveals the true intertextual nature of his work. I would argue that this represents a case of “mutualism,” to use David Cowart’s definition, whereby both the host and guest text benefit from the relationship (4). When considering this symbiotic relationship, Cowart identifies the key question to the relationship: “Does the guest text, that is, manage to cast a new light on the original . . . ?” (9). Even further, 188

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 188–199

CALLALOO he explains, “[The later writer] contrives to make his fiction do self-consciously what its distant model did unself-consciously . . .” (16).1 In particular, the intertextual relationship between Homer’s poem and Walcott’s play helps us to debate the nature of an epic, specifically in its political aspect, and that aspect’s influence on the content of the play. Some insight into this positioning can be gleaned from the critical discussion about Walcott’s Omeros and his own response to such discussions. In viewing the work of Romare Bearden and his cutouts, Walcott argues, “Yes, they may be like Greek vases, but they are simultaneous concepts, not chronological concepts” (“Reflections” his emphasis 240). He continues, “But if you think of art as a simultaneity that is inevitable in terms of certain people, then Joyce is a contemporary of Homer (which Joyce knew)” (241). Although Walcott is, of course, discussing Omeros, which is not such a clear retelling as his Odyssey, his view of intertextuality provides important insights into his next work, and helps us to think about why Walcott would accept an English commission for a specific retelling even as he continually and simultaneously rejects the way Omeros has been repeatedly labeled and analyzed as an epic. Walcott understands, even if his contemporaries do not, that he is also a contemporary of Homer, not beneath his precursor. Walcott’s intertextuality is so closely studied because it has led to Walcott coming under fire from his own culture. Surely the acceptance of the Royal Shakespeare Company commission, no matter how prestigious or financially important to Walcott, did not help his Caribbean image. He explains: “I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t want to take on the idea of doing another—not a directly—Homeric thing like the book I’d just finished, but . . . I began to experiment with the idea of compressing some of the scenes into lines, and essentialising them . . .” (qtd. in Burnett 283). In addition to negotiating familiar characters and texts, Walcott was once again choosing to negotiate a Western master narrative in an intertextual fashion—an epic in particular. Keeping in mind Joseph Farrell’s very useful discussion in “Walcott’s Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World,” about different ways of defining an epic outside of European literature, in such a specifically intertextual moment, it is helpful to remind ourselves of the underlying political nature of epics. Walcott also acknowledges this, noting that “. . . any epic, has a kind of political destiny” (“Reflections” 243). Farrell rejects this political positioning, again in relationship to Omeros, arguing, “As one among many Caribbean islands, the formerly contested possession of rival empires now left to fend for itself [St. Lucia] seems both an unlikely subject for a triumphalist national epic and an unlikely heir to the epic tradition handed down from Greece, Rome, and Christendom in general” (259). However, Walcott asks us to consider precisely this tradition in accepting a commission from his former Empire to rewrite one of their master narratives. Although Walcott himself has implicitly defined epic in a variety of ways, he does acknowledge this political perspective. Although he rejects such a perspective in relation to Omeros, about which he was speaking, it cannot, I believe, be ignored in The Odyssey. Epics are more than just interesting and aesthetically pleasing: they help to form nations. “Poetry confers glory,” Gregory Nagy argues, on individuals in lyrical poetry and on entire communities in epics (16). Peter Toohey adds, “Many epics take 189

CALLALOO a firm stand on the worth of the civilizing process” (8). Glory and honor are thus a part of a community’s progressive cultural development. Sometimes the “community” is multinational. Since the fifteenth century, Europe has collectively recognized two early poems as “Western” epics—Western master narratives that help the people of an entire continent to know and define themselves. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have come to stand as formative epics for nearly every country in Western Europe. Ralph Hexter, referring specifically to The Odyssey, notes, “Apart from the Bible, it is hard to think of any literary work that, in the world we have come to call ‘the West,’ has been so influential through so many centuries as The Odyssey, as both a text and a direct source of characters and incidents” (xv). Indeed, characters such as Achilles, Helen, and Odysseus are frequently thought of as ancestors, not fictional figures. Writers in nearly every country in Europe have, at some time, used Homer through retellings of the original two stories of the Epic Cycle that surrounded them. Homer’s characters have, Hexter argues, become standards in European literature. Penelope is always the faithful wife, Telemachus is always the searching son, and Mentor (Athena in disguise) has even become a part of the English vocabulary to define an intellectual guide (xxii). Europeans, then, have come to rely on Homer’s works as an accurate cultural description of what they are and who they want to be. Contemporary Westerners compare their heroes to Homer’s, and they compare their politics to Homer’s as well. Ultimately, they compare their culture to Homer’s, trying to live up to the ancient Greek standards. This is what W. B. Stanford called “the Ulysses theme.” We should not be surprised that postcolonial writers, given the opportunity to create literary works during decolonization, should turn to the epic, a political genre. But perhaps we are surprised that, in some cases, these “new” epics are actually quite old: retellings of a Western master narrative, told in a Western tongue—English. These writers, too, have been taken by “the Ulysses theme.” Derek Walcott is most certainly one such author. Commissioned by Britain’s RSC, Walcott’s Odyssey represents a different textual approach for the West Indian writer. In contrast to his earlier Omeros, this later work closely follows Homer’s original structure and story; the plot and characters are straightforward retelling, and seemingly do not challenge Homer’s original poem. But Walcott wants his audience to rethink Homer and his epic. As with Omeros, Walcott realizes that simple retellings do not further literature or the postcolonial project to any degree. They simply imitate and reinforce the masterly status of Western texts, as Thäis Morgan has argued. Commissioned by his once imperial masters, Walcott appears to fall into this trap. But Walcott, I believe, outsmarts those who might see his retelling as a submission to neo-imperialism through the very medium and language in which he has chosen to retell Homer’s epic. Most obviously, Walcott’s retelling comes in the form of a play, not a poem. Of course, because the work was commissioned by a theater company, this change would seem to be an obvious requirement, and not an entirely troubling one because, as Lorna Hardwick argues, “In many respects this represents a continuum rather that [sic] a radical change because Greek epic was not only a direct influence on drama . . . it also itself had strong ‘performance’ elements” (par. 3). But if Walcott’s acceptance 190

CALLALOO of a commission from his former imperial masters troubles us, we can see how he uses this opportunity to subvert the same imperial standards that he did in Omeros.2 In the Stage Version, Walcott retains Homer’s characters and adventures, but he fundamentally changes their language, and in this way, fundamentally changes their race—a change that must be acknowledged on the stage.3 Robert Hamner argues, “Whatever vestiges of original sources may be retained through Walcott’s process of adaptation, each original is strategically altered by his West Indian Creole aesthetic” (par. 1).4 Many of the peripheral characters—frequently the seers and servants—speak in a West Indian island dialect, clearly identifying themselves with a rather different archipelago than the Greek islands in Homer’s epic. Billy Blue, the Homeric presence, for instance, frequently alters his language to this same island dialect, describing Odysseus and his adventures in a voice of the island people. If the slaves and prophets see most clearly, it is perhaps because they see differently; they are not European and do not have European mentalities. Hamner explains, “ . . . Walcott’s language tends to be more playful than the original. His text is marked with low puns, innuendo, and witticisms more in keeping with calypsonian picong (from French piquant or pique: insulting, often risqué repartee with a social or personal thrust) and Shakespearean legerdemain than Homer’s kind of word play” (par. 9). Thus, Billy Blue introduces the play: Gone sing ‘bout that man because his stories please us, Who saw trials and tempests for ten years after Troy. I’m Blind Billy Blue, my main man’s sea-smart Odysseus, Who the God of the Sea drove crazy and tried to destroy. Andramoi ennepe mousa polutopon hos mala polla . . . The shuttle of the sea moves back and forth on this line, All night, like the surf, she shuttles and doesn’t fall Asleep, then her rosy fingers at dawn unstitch the design. (1) Billy Blue’s introduction provides the background for a story quite similar to Homer’s epic; a sailor named Odysseus has been trying to reach Ithaca for ten years after fighting at Troy for the previous decade, kept away from his home by the anger of the gods. His wife, Penelope, weaves all day and then undoes her work at night. But the language Billy Blue uses—a mixture of Standard English, island patois, and even island slang—immediately moves the audience away from Homer’s original story. Demodocus explains this global relationship to Odysseus: ODYSSEUS: That’s a strange dialect. What island are you from? DEMODOCUS: A far archipelago. Blue seas. Just like yours. ODYSSEUS: So you pick up various stories and you stitch them? DEMODOCUS: The sea speaks the same language around the world’s shores. (122)

191

CALLALOO Although Walcott’s play closely follows the Western master narrative that we would perhaps like to see him debunk, his peripheral characters come to challenge that narrative’s authority. On the stage, the central action, and indeed the central story lines, are played by and played out by white characters—characters who already carry all of Europe’s traditions on their backs. But constantly describing them, surrounding them, and finally interrogating them are a number of characters who, marked as different, can only be postcolonial. More interesting, these postcolonial characters occupy multiple positions in the narrative, acting simultaneously as slaves and family members, Others and prophets, Egyptians and seers. They are the enslaved Other as well as the source of knowledge and language. With this casting and organization, it is tempting to interpret Walcott’s retelling as a typical reversal of Western dichotomies. Indeed, in many ways, the play mirrors and demonstrates the relationship of the center and the margin. The white characters easily represent the European traditions that must be overturned through the subversive techniques of the once marginalized black islanders. But such a reading simplifies a very complex maneuver on Walcott’s part. As with Omeros, Walcott is not interested in simply reversing or realigning preexisting European constructs. Once again he turns to a political genre, the retelling of a Western master narrative, to find a postcolonial message. But rather than simply replicating what he has already achieved in Omeros, Walcott moves in a different direction. Walcott collapses the Odyssey, contemporary British culture, and Caribbean island culture to retell Homer’s poem as an international epic. To make this close rewriting work, Walcott exploits the genre he has been commissioned to use. Walcott puts three different communities, including both black and white characters, on stage at one time. Although the play is not an epic, the postcolonial issues of the original poem and the contemporary dramatic retelling are figured in and on the skin color of the players. Eurycleia, Odysseus’ old nurse and West Indian native, thus commands Eumaeus, “Not now . . . family crisis here,” to which he responds, “Since when am I excluded from this family?” (16). The two clearly see themselves as both slaves in Odysseus’ household and members of his family, simultaneously standing in both positions. With such a change within the same, Walcott both fulfills reader expectations and eliminates the idea of expectations altogether. Walcott’s play, like the original epic, is political. To emphasize this transformation, the relationship between the white and black characters is continually played with and challenged. Language may identify the islanders as “others,” but it also provides them with protection, particularly when they are being questioned by the Greeks, their masters. The West Indians use language to hide their intelligence and cunning from those, like the representatives of imperialism, who would harm them. For example, when Antinous confronts Penelope about her son’s lack of manners, Eurycleia humbly interrupts, “Dat is him right, sar! His father still Odysseus,” deflecting the suitor’s anger away from Telemachus and onto herself. Antinous is infuriated at her and is ready to punish the servant, but Eurycleia’s clever use of island patois allows Penelope to pacify Antinous by marking Eurycleia as harmless: “She is this house’s foundation. She was his nurse” (18). A nurse, Penelope implies, cannot be blamed for her naïve sentimentality. Eurycleia uses this same defense when Antinous questions her about Athena. He only releases 192

CALLALOO the slave after she insists, “Me no see no sea ca’n, sir! Leggo me wrist!” (19). Of course, in many other scenes, Eurycleia reveals that she is quite articulate in standard English. But this linguistic disguising cannot eliminate the true power sources in the play. In many cases, the island characters are servants. In contrast, Odysseus remains the wily, resourceful, intelligent, white that he was for Homer and the servants remain servants. Thus Walcott uses a typical trope—the false language of the servant or slave that hides an intelligence greater than the master’s—but refuses to use it in a European fashion. Island language may keep one safe, but it does not automatically make one a master. Indeed, Eurycleia is also coded as Egyptian and notes that Egypt was the cradle for Greece. However, this ethnic positioning does not really increase her power within society. Burian explains, “Walcott sets up the convention not least to subvert it, by revealing Eurycleia as the bearer of an older culture and its wisdom . . . but the point is surely not to endorse ‘Afrocentrism,’ but rather to recognize the layered complexities that negotiate difference not only in terms of opposition but also of inclusion” (“You Can Build” 72). The blurring of island and European understandings is achieved through the white characters as well. Frequently, and not surprisingly, the whites are represented as colonizers, imperialists who only raid the islands and experience the culture for the ultimate goal of financial exploitation. Although Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, keeps a houseful of servants, he is himself subject to a kind of imperialism on some of his adventures. Furthermore, and more tellingly, he is oftentimes at the mercy of the language of the island characters. Billy Blue and his incarnations as various poets in the poem often must explain to Odysseus what he is seeing and how he can understand it. Odysseus must, to survive, fall under the power of those whom he supposedly colonized and learn to understand their language. When trapped by Cyclops in the giant’s cave, Odysseus plays word games with Western language and uses a black, almost American, accent to keep Cyclops off balance: “I’m nobody, dude. You’re ugly, I believe it” (emphasis in original 65). The accent makes Cyclops laugh so hard that he cries, thus establishing Odysseus as the giant’s friend, and it is this friendly relaxing of the guard that allows Odysseus ultimately to escape. But Odysseus’ words are clearly marked by Walcott as an “accent,” the supposedly natural speech of an authentically black Odysseus. But although he can mimic an accent, Odysseus must still learn to play with language as his West Indian servants do. Odysseus’ encounter with Cyclops is one of the most interesting and clever scenes in the play.5 Odysseus lands on Cyclops’ island, seemingly in his role of imperializing raider, with his crewmembers bullying the first native they encounter: “Listen, buzz off!” (60). Odysseus is the “normal,” white character, as compared to the single-eyed cannibal Cyclops, and he treats the giant’s land as his own, demanding control: “Is this the Greece that I loved? Is this my city?” (61). He thinks to challenge the Eye, even after he hears of its power: “I’d like to see this monster. Does it ever weep?” (61). But the political situation on Cyclops’ land quickly shifts Odysseus from being the master to being the slave. The native thus becomes the agent of power and the invaders are placed in the role of servitude. Although this scenario does not precisely recreate the British imperial framework, the power dynamics between Cyclops and Odysseus closely resemble the colonial dynamics of the master and his slave.6 This similarity 193

CALLALOO allows Walcott to explore the political relationship between a master and slave within the parameters already created by Homer. In the Stage Version, Odysseus’ sudden loss of power is not a simple reversal of the standard imperial master/native dichotomy. Although not a native of the island, Odysseus is treated that way, exploited by the imperial monster. Cyclops, with his single eye, is both the Eye and the I—the leader of a totalitarian state. Reminiscent of Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984, the Eye watches everybody, monitoring and controlling thought and speech, his secret police detaining anyone whom they believe engages in individual thoughts.7 Realizing the danger his crew faces, the wily Odysseus even further complicates traditional Western standards by purposely losing his identity to save himself and his friends, one of the greatest sacrifices a Greek soldier could make. Ralph Hexter explains that for Homer, “one’s name is meant as a sign of one’s identity. One bears one’s name as one bears a scar, a sign of the original wound” (lxviii). Walcott follows suit. Like his predecessor, Walcott’s Odysseus also renounces his name and identity. He becomes nothing. When asked for his name, the later Odysseus gives the same answer as Homer’s hero—“Nobody” (64). The epitome of the postcolonial mimic man, Odysseus seemingly renounces his entire identity to survive in Cyclops’ world. The giant summarizes, “Nobody. / From nowhere. / Going where he doesn’t know. / Normal” (64), underscoring his own role of “the grey colonel” (62)—the colonial master. Cyclops has no intention of ever allowing Odysseus to survive. He merely wants to educate him enough to use him. This, at base, is the same project Thomas Macaulay proposed for the Indian population. The Indian, for Macaulay, can never be English. Similarly, Odysseus can never be a Cyclops; he has two eyes. Odysseus must presently eat a meal of his own crew with Cyclops, crying when the giant gleefully tells him what is on his plate (67). He seemingly becomes a mimic man, just as Macaulay had prescribed for the Indians: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (430). Cyclops intends to “educate” Odysseus enough for him to convert his shipmates, who will all then become future dinners. But, in fact, Odysseus is more subversive through his mimicry of the mimic man than his brute strength would have allowed him to be in this police state. It is as if this Odysseus has read Macaulay and is ready to respond. It is precisely through the renunciation of a name and identity—becoming Nobody—that Odysseus escapes. Although this parallels Homer’s story, the motives behind Odysseus’ actions are now clearly both racially and politically motivated—this is more than self-preservation. Hamner explains: “[The West Indians] strategic adaptability allowed them to survive in the new World in the same way that Odysseus’ pretending to be Nobody assisted his escape from the Cyclops” (“Odyssey” 105). To become a mimic man is to become, in essence, nobody. Such a person can never fully become English because he always remains foreign, but he is also no longer accepted by his own community because he has betrayed their values in his attempt to gain colonial recognition. Such positioning allows the native to survive in a world where he could easily be silenced, but he pays a steep price for this existence. Odysseus, when he renounces his name, renounces his 194

CALLALOO place among his crew and his people. In an attempt to curry favor with Cyclops, Odysseus sacrifices himself. But because he is, in reality, a wily imitator of a mimic man, and not (ironically) the real thing, Odysseus is able to break free from his attacker and return to his crew with his name and identity intact. He openly attacks and blinds Cyclops, but his victim cannot properly identify his attacker because Cyclops insists “Nobody” has hurt him. This (non)name is even broadcast over the citywide speaker system. Although placed in the abject position of having no identity, Odysseus uses that abyss to retain his life and that very identity which appeared to have meant nothing. As he escapes the island and the police state, Odysseus taunts the now-blind Eye by shouting his real name to the islander. As in Homer’s original epic, this nearly leads to disaster as the updated Cyclops hurls oil drums at the fleeing ship, but it also provides Odysseus with a new identifying moment—a result of his own experience of mimicking the mimic man: “MY NAME IS NOT NOBODY! IT’S ODYSSEUS! AND LEARN, YOU BLOODY TYRANTS, THAT MEN CAN STILL THINK!” (72). He has never been a mimic man, and as he (re)names himself, he defeats the colonial system that has tried to destroy him. Walcott’s retelling of this episode is a clever look at Homer’s original tale and, in construction and events, mirrors the original as well. Cyclops is still a herder, although now of men rather than sheep, and Odysseus still loses a few crew members to Cyclops’ appetite before blinding the giant and making his escape. These similarities are important because they reveal a truth about the retelling: Walcott’s vision of Cyclops and Odysseus represents the fluid and unstable identities of both colonizer and colonized at the same time that it reveals the similarity of colonialism to totalitarianism as already present in Homer’s original poem. Although Homer might not have had the vocabulary and images that Walcott does, the episodes are eerily parallel; Walcott’s retelling works well because it is both Homer’s episode and something seemingly new that was, in fact, already present. It describes a space that cannot be defined as either colonial or European. Odysseus is the hero of the moment, and we cheer for his escape. But he is not the native who has thrown off the mantle of colonial oppression. He is the invader, the “Sacker of Cities” (38). Furthermore, Odysseus himself is not a simple character. He is both a warrior and slave owner—not a benevolent global citizen. Hamner agrees when discussing C.B. Davis’ work and notes that “it may be that Odysseus the dispossessed Ithacan king is himself guilty to some extent of an imperialist mind-set” (par. 34). As proof of this troubling character flaw, Walcott’s Odysseus carries the shield of Achilles, frequently addressing it and worrying over it despite the many other dangers he faces. When Odysseus’ sailors release Aeolus’ winds, Elpenor is killed: COSTA: HELMSMAN OVERBOARD, CAPTAIN! ODYSSEUS: Where’s Achilles’ shield? Gone? FIRST SAILOR: CAPTAIN, THAT WAS THE HELMSMAN! (45) Odysseus remembers having won the shield, and even reminds Ajax of his victory when he sees the warrior in the Hades/Underground. It is the one piece of booty that 195

CALLALOO he is most concerned with retaining, but it is the one piece of booty that is most contested. The shield of Achilles acts as an encompassing symbol of the problematic nature of Walcott’s Odysseus—and Homer’s Odysseus as well. The shield is covered with images of war. But, as W. H. Auden makes clear in “The Shield of Achilles,” the vision of war that Hephaestos creates is only “artificial” (2272). There is nothing real about the world on the device. The sky is “like lead” and there is “no blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood, / Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down” (2272). Despite this artificiality, Walcott’s Odysseus uses the shield as a natural, protective life-saving device. He frequently thinks of himself as turtle-like as he dives underneath the piece of metal for comfort and safety. The contested shield thus becomes his major source of survival, providing him with shelter and a home “on the road” in which to retreat. But if the scenes on the shield are false, so, too, is Odysseus’ life-giving protection, despite his own visions. The shield, supposedly an object of protection, instead becomes a dangerous device, hiding Odysseus away from what he must, in reality, face. Auden and Walcott implicitly argue that both Achilles and Odysseus hide behind false realities, using the cover these lies provide as a means of survival. Odysseus’ supposed wily heroism is just as false and troubling as the war-like scenes on the shield that he uses to gain that heroic status. This protective and all-important device carries the most controversy of all his booty, and it represents Odysseus well. The shield that protects Odysseus also reveals the “shadow” behind his character, to use Piero Boitani’s term. Walcott specifically draws on this shadow in his characterization of Odysseus. For Walcott, Odysseus is both generous and greedy, a troubling character. “He sounds like a rug-seller, not a warrior,” Telemachus declares of his father, and Menelaus agrees: “Oh, he’s coming back well-loaded, you can be sure” (32–33). Through his characters, Walcott contends that Homer’s poem is just as relevant in the current neo-imperial global community as it was in Homer’s time. In the Stage Version, upon his return to Ithaca and his own house in the disguise of a beggar, Odysseus debates prophecy with some of his wife’s suitors. A swallow has passed over the gathering and although Polybus insists that it is just a bird—not a sign—the beggar warns them, “Say your prayers” (142). The group then goes on to discuss of what the bird is a possible sign, due in part to the beggar’s ominous warning. Odysseus, as the beggar, tells the story of his own journeys (in a way that is purposely confusing but also full of warnings to those who can read between the lines), but the suitors give his tales no credence and announce that they will not even shelter him for the night. However, Odysseus ignores their taunts and insists on the swallow as a sign. The beggar warns the suitors, “In a man’s house every monster is repeated” (143). Failing to understand this declaration, the suitors are defeated. But Walcott’s readers must be more wary. That phrase, and the swallow, is a sign to them that Walcott has not been colonized by the Royal Shakespeare Company or even by Homer himself. Like the past colonial overlords and the present neo-imperialists, the suitors ignore the real native threat to their colony. The beggar’s warning is specific to the coming revolution, but it also speaks to the play’s entire project. Indeed, Odysseus is returning to his home, repeating his former role as Penelope’s husband. On a larger scale, Walcott is repeating Homer, a Western master. But in the same way that Odysseus will defeat the colonizing suitors, so too can Walcott appropriate a European narrative to reveal the postcolonial message of that work. 196

CALLALOO The beggar’s statement makes the play become a retelling, not just a “version” of Homer’s Odyssey, despite Walcott’s own title. The beggar cryptically assures the suitors that Odysseus himself will wreak the kind of violence on them that the hero has suffered on his ten years’ journey from Troy to Ithaca. Similarly, Walcott assures his audience that his play is both a new retelling of Homer, intermixed with West Indian island patois and postcolonial concerns, and a legitimate “stage version” of Homer’s epic. His play becomes more than just an intertextual move from genre to genre (epic poem to drama), or a parasitic retelling, as defined by Cowart in his extended study of literary symbiosis. Instead, it presents a symbiotic relationship to its precursor, standing next to its original with equality and authority. Walcott implies that colonialism and imperialism, as monsters, are present in every person’s house, because such monsters are created by those in the house. They do not invade a community; they are a product of the community. The postcolonial writer cannot simply ignore his past, including an education in British and European literature. He must confront his “monsters”—both native and foreign—and learn to live with them in harmony, not fight against them in anger. When the postcolonial can accept his own monsters, including the dark memories of a colonial past, he can joyfully accept his present hybridity. There is no perfect past to return to, no place without Walcott’s metaphorical “monsters.” But this need not condemn the postcolonial to a life of misery. Walcott has blurred the straight dichotomy of colonizer/ colonized not simply as a way of indicting the British through a counterdiscourse. His retelling shows the presence of similar “monsters” throughout the world’s history. This is not to diminish the very real physical and political oppression faced by many colonized peoples throughout the world. But it does provide a way for postcolonial authors to write as heroes and not victims, positions Walcott articulates in “The Muse of History.” As the Philosopher on Cyclops’ island in the Stage Version explains, “With History erased, there’s just the present tense” (61). Using his own distinctions of “History” and “history,” as articulated in his Nobel acceptance speech, The Antilles: Fragments of an Epic Memory, Walcott encourages his readers and viewers to live in a joyful present; a present only possible because of the past, no matter what that past is. And this past is knowable through retellings—retellings that reveal the already postcolonial present in their past stories. By retelling Homer’s Odyssey through a different medium with a conglomeration of West Indian patois and Greek mythology, Walcott excises his own monsters of colonialism. He wrote the play specifically for the Royal Shakespeare Company, a possible act of complicity with those whom the West Indians would reject. But, as his retelling makes clear, there is no simple division between the British and the West Indians. As George Lamming has shown in both his critical The Pleasures of Exile and his fictional Water with Berries, everyone touched by colonialism, including the colonized natives, plays a complicitous role in the imperial system. For Lamming, both Prospero and Caliban have monsters (Pleasures 15). At the end of Walcott’s play, Odysseus tells Penelope, “Monsters, God pity us.” When she asks, “Why?” he simply replies, “We make them ourselves” (159–60). In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow ruminates to his listeners on the differences between himself and Kurtz. Marlow believes that Kurtz did not have a 197

CALLALOO choice as to what nightmare he lived. Thus, he ends his life whispering, “the horror, the horror” (68). But Marlow, having experienced both the natives and the white men as sailors and survivors in his journey up the Congo, and finally having met Kurtz, is in a slightly different situation: he has his “choice of nightmares” (62). Although I believe that Walcott does not see the world as only a nightmare (indeed, his definition of “history” specifically moves away from such a pessimistic understanding of human life), the idea of choice does relate well to Walcott’s project. Every man has monsters, Walcott tells us. There are no simple rights and wrongs, and there are no simple dichotomies. Europeans like binaries because these structures provide a way of ordering the world, a way of fighting entropy and chaos. The postcolonial recognition of a global culture outside of binaries both troubles and scares Europeans because it seems uncontrollable. They must learn, as Homi Bhabha says, that culture can be “beyond control, but . . . not beyond accommodation” (emphasis in original Location 12). Like Marlow choosing his nightmare, Walcott teaches us that we can choose our monsters. And like Marlow, we must acknowledge the presence of these monsters to be able to do the choosing. To that end, we must learn to write and live as heroes, not as victims, no matter what part of the world we see as our home.

NOTES 1. Cowart specifically examines literary symbiosis through the eyes of postmodernism and not postcolonialism. I believe that Cowart’s arguments are quite valid and perhaps even more interesting when viewed in this additional, political perspective. 2. John Thieme describes the negativity associated with Walcott’s entire canon at times within the Caribbean: “This international success raises questions about the extent to which he is a spokesperson for the community and region from which he originated” (2). 3. Bruce King notes, “This would be the first RSC production by a ‘black’ author, and it would be an opportunity for integrated casting, having a truly multiracial company” (529). 4. Hamner’s article, “Creolizing Homer for the Stage: Walcott’s The Odyssey,” has been most helpful in understanding Walcott’s use of language. His research about the language in the play and its implications both validate and broaden my ideas in this paper, and I am grateful for his article. 5. Hamner offers a closer, more politically specific reading of this scene in “Creolizing Homer for the Stage: Walcott’s The Odyssey.” His discussion about Walcott’s specific references to Rastafarian culture enhances my own, more broad, views, I believe. Interestingly, nearly every critic who examines Walcott’s play looks at this particular scene at great length. 6. Lorna Hardwick disagrees, arguing “. . . Walcott’s redrawing of the Otherness of the Cyclops in terms of political tyranny and lack of human feeling both dissolves the distance between Homer and the twentieth century and denies that it is ‘natural’ to exploit ethnic difference as a criterion for ‘otherness’” (par. 28). 7. King adds, “. . . Doran’s [the director of the production] notes suggested that Walcott was overdoing the analogy between the Cyclops and Orwell’s police state” (534). King’s biography of Walcott carefully traces the entire development of the script as well as all its subsequent performances, including a “semi-dramatized reading” of the play at the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York where Walcott read the part of Menelaus (567).

WORKS CITED Auden, W. H. “The Shield of Achilles.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Ed. M. H. Abrams, et al. New York: Norton, 1993. Vol. 2. 2272–73. 2 vols.

198

CALLALOO Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Boitani, Piero. The Shadow of Ulysses: Figures of a Myth. Trans. Anita Weston. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Burian, Peter. “’All That Greek Manure under the Green Bananas’: Derek Walcott’s Odyssey.” South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (1997): 359–77. ———. “’You Can Build a Heavy-Beamed Poem out of This’: Derek Walcott’s Odyssey.” Classical World 93.1 (1999): 71–81. Burnett, Paula. Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, 2000. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1988. Cowart, David. Literary Symbiosis: The Reconfigured Text in Twentieth-Century Writing. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993. Farrell, Joseph. “Walcott’s Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World.” South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (1997): 247–73. Hamner, Robert D. “Creolizing Homer for the Stage: Walcott’s The Odyssey.” Twentieth Century Literature 47.3 (2001): 374–91. ———. “’The Odyssey’: Derek Walcott’s Dramatization of Homer’s ‘Odyssey.’” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 24.4 (1993): 101–8. Hardwick, Lorna. “A Daidalos in the late-modern age? Transplanting Homer into Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version.” 19 Aug. 2003. Hexter, Ralph. A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1993. King, Bruce. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph, 1960. ———. Water with Berries. Trinidad: Longman Caribbean, 1971. Macaulay, Thomas. “Minute on Indian Education.” The Postcolonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 428–30. Morgan, Thäis. “The Space of Intertextuality.” Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 239–79. Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. Stanford, W. B. The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero. 2nd ed. Rev. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968. Thieme, John. “Derek Walcott.” Contemporary World Writers. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1999. Toohey, Peter. Reading Epic: An Introduction to the Ancient Narratives. London: Routledge, 1992. Walcott, Derek. The Antilles: Fragments of an Epic Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992. ———. “The Muse of History.” What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 36–64. ———. The Odyssey: A Stage Version. New York: Noonday-Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993. ———. “Reflections on Omeros.” South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (1997): 229–246. ———. “What the Twilight Says.” What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 3–35.

199

CALLALOO

HORSEPLAY

by Robert Bensen

From a lapse of cloud emerges a mare nibbling her own shadow. For all I’m worth I draw her out as birds draw the sun up in their seine of song. Its blush cannot render her the lovelier, nor time’s delible signature, as my own. Only a thread of ink, raveled from a broken feather, the silken gesture of a claw, tamed to ride and ride through the anthem of her name.

Yes: I fell from grace: in less than a whimper to the part in her mane—in my head its fresh crush lingers’ across the rivalry of winds I've begun to vanish in, beginning with my hair. But she’s all the more there, freckled on the stippled hill, bent ankle tipping her hoof on edge, as dancers idling will.

200

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 200

CALLALOO

DEREK WALCOTT’S POETICS OF THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE BOUNTY

by George Handley

The Mexican Nobel Laureate, Octavio Paz, in an essay about modern poetry once argued quite simply: “the immense, stupid, and suicidal waste of natural resources must come to an immediate end if the human species wishes to survive on this earth” (156). Although commonplace, Paz’s point is instructive because it demonstrates that we have come to identify the end of time as synonymous with the destruction of our natural environment. Untouched nature, uncontaminated by human hands, signifies something eternal that defies the inexorable march of human history toward an apocalyptic end. This is one justification for wilderness preservation; wilderness expresses hope against the telos of environmental degradation. Environmental change, global warming, depletion of species, the rising level of the ocean, all become signs of nature outside the Garden, subject to historical contingency and ultimately to death, and of nature’s apparent mortality. Hence, in our day, natural degradation so easily lends itself as evidence of the inevitable death of nature and the end of human history, especially within an imaginary influenced by Christian apocalypticism. The problem is how to avoid this unfruitful dichotomy that apocalyptic thinking produces: nature must either be outside history and therefore eternal or within history and therefore doomed. In either case, it would seem that human history is defined by its inevitable end, thus freeing us of the ethical burden of imagining and acting in the interest of other futures. What is perhaps remarkable about Paz’s argument is his suggestion that poetry might have the power to hold off the end of history and reverse the trend toward “universal destruction and contamination of lakes, rivers, seas, valleys, forests, and mountains” (157). For Paz, the natural world is vulnerable to an apocalyptic end because it has been left in the hands of the market that simply “does not know how to choose. Its censorship is not ideological; it has no ideas” (144). Consequently, we live in a state of “aesthetic impoverishment,” unable to make judgments of value and therefore vulnerable to market forces that commodify nature for its own profitable ends. To prevent the end of history, Paz insists that the metaphorical work of poetry must teach us how to judge values and to establish relationships between ideas and cultures that otherwise would appear unrelated. He explains that “the operative mode of poetic thought is imagining, and imagination consists, essentially, of the ability to place contrary or divergent realities in relationship. All poetic forms and all linguistic figures have one thing in common: they seek and often find, hidden relationships. In the most extreme cases, they unite opposites” (158). He calls these

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 201–215

201

CALLALOO relationships “buried realities” that are “restor[ed] to life” through the poetic imagination. Although this suggests that poetry mnemonically recovers lost truths from the past, its function is to rhetorically construct a fiction of historicism. Poetry’s rhetoric of fictional historicity emphasizes the creative work of forging relationships of commonality in the present despite the lack of historical evidence that would have necessitated such relationships, something that is particularly pertinent to cultures such as that of the Caribbean, which have suffered significant violence to historical memory. Although the memories might be necessary to the reconstruction of identities in the wake of colonial violence, their fictionality is rendered more transparent. Whereas to some this might be the lamentable condition of subalternity, for Paz poetry’s power is in its defiance against historical causation; it takes up the vestiges or detritus of the past, as if to create evidence of historical memory in what might otherwise appear to be an edenic landscape. Nature in this schema is both historicized and transcendent, performing a balancing act that neither historical archeology nor poetry’s rhetoric can bring to a definitive end. My argument is that the work of Derek Walcott performs the function Paz ascribes to poetry; Walcott’s nature is neither a sign of the Eternal Garden nor the inevitable victim of human destruction. It becomes a sign of an always ending, always dying present that paradoxically makes poetic language potentially always new and new futures always possible.

Nostalgia for Eden Christian discourse has traditionally placed nature in two positions: prior to and after human history. On the one hand, its innocence and newness come prior to the Fall and to the beginnings of human history, and therefore it is relentlessly and nostalgically beyond the reach of history’s irrevocable march forward in time. On the other, the earth becomes paradisiacal and innocent again only after the end of time when it has finally been cleansed of the stains of mortal time. Caught in between these two unreachable possibilities, Western imperialism has historically expressed its nostalgia for terrestrial paradises by exerting its economic will on the wilderness of the New World and other territories whose geographies and historical otherness challenge the integrity of its unilinearity. Landscapes that are imagined to be ahistorical are attractive precisely because they present an opportunity for human beings to unburden themselves of their own histories. It does not take long for such natural spaces to lose their otherness, however, because of the inevitability of human contagion. Moreover, Western societies have shown little tolerance for nature’s otherness, despite its attractions, and thus “Edens” end up as improved, tamed and fully historicized landscapes. In the case of the Caribbean particularly, the environmental consequences of such “improvements” that were part of plantation economies included deforestation, drought, soil erosion, and decreased soil fertility.1 Little wonder, then, that the degradation that ensued only spurred deeper nostalgia as well as greater economic activity. Modern tourism in the Caribbean continues to create an image of a restored earthly paradise, stripped of its history by technology and market 202

CALLALOO commodification. This postcard version of paradise peddled by tourist agencies erases the presence of peasant communities, their economies, and their poverty in specific island locales, and replaces them with visions of white women in bikinis on blank, white sand. Indeed, one of the greatest environmental threats in the contemporary Caribbean is a logic of progress that suggests, as Walcott put it in a recent interview, “it is legitimate to transform every little village in the Caribbean to a mini Miami or a small functioning modern outlet. And you can look at the architecture of the Caribbean and see it change. You don’t know sometimes whether you are in Puerto Rico or Miami. They are identical. And you can continue down the archipelago; this is what tragically is going to happen” (personal interview July 2001). If the past history and present environmental circumstances of the Caribbean are lamentable, nostalgia for what lies before the onset of modernity in 1492, as Walcott himself has charged, does not solve the problem: this “oceanic nostalgia . . . can go as deep as a rejection of the untamed landscape, a yearning for ruins” (What the Twilight Says 42). Ruins in a landscape represent an historical claim on nature’s meaning; preference for ruins over an apparently empty nature is symptomatic of a deep intolerance for the ambiguous relationship nature has to our conception of history and time. In a colonial condition, the local landscape seems insufficient and regrettable in comparison to Europe’s nature, which is seemingly inseparable from its human stories and monuments; by comparison, the light, the vegetation, the vistas, and the culture derived from a native environment signify colonial inferiority. Metropolitan norms internalized in this fashion by locals result in what Walcott once called the “insulted landscape.” In an unpublished lecture from 1980 of this title from which portions were adapted in “The Star-Apple Kingdom,” he commented about the enigma of Caribbean vegetation whose “ad lib inimical shapes seem to lack concepts and divinity” to the eyes trained by European masterpieces. The temptation is to want to reject the messiness and chaos of Caribbean tropical growth in favor of the “god-given cartography of empire, which is always dead ahead, Roman style . . . in which the road stops arguing with the bush, does not observe the contours of the landscape but heads as strict and radial as the fronds of that exemplary palm, out of the center of an imaginary capital” (“The Insulted Landscape”). We need only think of English Gardens or the landscaping at Versailles to understand his comparison here. The preferable and more liberating alternative would be a naturalistic artistic and political culture that follows “the flow of exploration as a river does, both shaping and obeying where it runs, changing its mind or course into an oxbow lake, cascading into the penitential torrent of a waterfall, even admitting the fertilizing algae of stagnation” (”The Insulted Landscape”). Here Walcott describes nature’s inherent spatial and temporal dynamism, a conception of which is often lost in representations of nature because of art’s limitation of having to fix its subject in space and time. As Roland Barthes, among others, has pointed out, nature in art paradoxically and frequently risks becoming a commodity, a mythological sign of something spatially fixed and outside of time.

203

CALLALOO Recovering Eden The commodified version of paradise is perhaps best illustrated in Walcott’s own St. Lucia, where Hilton built the Jalousie Resort and Spa between the famous Piton peaks in the early 1990s. Instead of buying the once privately owned land so as to establish a national park, the government allowed the land to be sold to Hilton where now only residents of this very exclusive spa, typically foreigners visiting the Caribbean, are allowed entrance. This was despite the fact that an environmental impact study recommended against the construction of the spa. Tragically, archaeological artifacts were destroyed in the construction (“Hands Off Piton” 1). Walcott vehemently protested the building of the spa, which earned him criticism from many of the local working class who viewed the development as a much-needed economic opportunity. He and the others who joined to form the St. Lucia Environmental Awareness Council were cast as “Johnnie-come-latelies,” outsiders who merely wanted the mountains for their own privileged pleasure. The problem is how to argue for the protection of the island’s natural beauty without regressing into the kind of Western imperial nostalgia that has contributed to the crisis in the first place, or without assuming a privileged class or gendered position. Walcott’s own struggle with this challenge is evident in his tendency to cast the crisis in sexualized terms. This fight to keep St. Lucia’s environment free from commodification is suggestively cast in Omeros, for example, as a battle between men over the sexual rights to Helen, who alludes both to the classical figure as well as to St. Lucia itself, known as the Helen of the West Indies because of its historical attraction to the imperial suitors of England and France. Walcott writes, for example, that the island’s “breasts were its Pitons” and that the colonial wars were fought in “ruined barracks / with its bushy tunnel and its penile cannon / for her cedars fells in green sunrise to the axe” (Omeros 31). Even in a newspaper article reporting on the protest, the environmental battle becomes sexualized: “Hands off Piton; Walcott Threatens to Get Physical.” In the same interview, Walcott himself casts the spa as a pimp: It is a blasphemy, really, however strong that word may sound, because those things are sacred. . . . I mean, people are protesting what is happening to the earth. I don’t want to sound like someone preaching ecology, but that’s the core of the question, and it’s a moral question. And if people ignore immoral questions of landscape and do what they have to do, then ultimately the damage is incalculable. So the person who is protecting the sacred piece of earth is doing more than the person who thinks that right now concrete and steel and whatever is going to do more for some other generation coming. That’s now a world crisis. It’s an emblem that you can take, that the Pitons is an example of. And I mean more than just to hate the idea of the hotel, or to challenge it, and if possible to have stopped that hotel from being built there because aesthetically it is like a wound, and if I could look down at that hotel and see what I see, and it looks like any other hotel, then the Pitons will become what?

204

CALLALOO They become prostitutes, you’re making them whores. Basically you’re saying it’s okay to violate the landscape, it’s okay to desecrate it. . . . It’s very hard to communicate that to people in Soufriere who can’t feel some ancestral anything about it (personal interview, July 2001). In her important account of Western environmental history, Carolyn Merchant insists that this kind of masculine logic, though aimed at protecting nature against degradation, is the philosophical underpinning of Western culture’s history of environmental destruction. She argues that the two kinds of Edens I have described, the mythical and the technologically enhanced, mutually reinforce the West’s penchant for seeing itself as the savior who will recover nature’s innocence; these Edens have brought together the subplots of Christianity, science, and capitalism, and put imperialism into forward and outward motion, especially since the seventeenth century. In the mind of the colonizer, nature presents itself as untamed, wild, and fallen, and begs for redemption, for a return to prehistoric innocence, at the hands of Western technologies and economies. Whether it is by the plow, the bulldozer, or the sprinkler system, nature is tamed and made innocent by the machine and turned back into the garden. Merchant points out that this narrative, similar to the portrayal of St. Lucia’s natural wonders as a heterosexualized woman, is driven by a male desire to see to it that “the final, happy state of nature natured is female and civilized” (147). Merchant explains that for this reason environmentalism and feminism have tried to reverse the progressive plot of the recovery narrative by positing a declensionist plot: history is seen “as a slow decline, not a progressive movement that has made the desert blossom as a rose. The recovery story is false; an original garden has become a degraded desert. Pristine nature, not innocent man, has fallen” (155). But she is not convinced that such a reversal can avoid the effects of environmental degradation, because even such declensionist narratives do not entirely escape the logic of the recovery narrative. The zealous drive to preserve wilderness and sacred spaces can become complicit in imperialist aims, especially when such discourses efface prior histories in the wilderness. Those histories are typically those of the non-Western victims of imperialism and thus nostalgia for a nature untouched by the human hand can likewise set the stage for a renewed male urge to claim the rights to be the first to ravage and despoil “her.” So far we have failed to conceive of human and natural histories following anything but a linear logic and so she suggests that perhaps we can learn from chaos theory to see natural history as less prescripted and dependent upon our own ethical choices. What I think is most instructive about Merchant’s trenchant critique is the warning it provides against facile anti-Western, or antipatriarchal solutions to the environmental crisis. When Walcott criticizes the tendency of Caribbean writers to lament the seeming emptiness of their own environment, he similarly highlights this crucial paradox: whereas the flaws of Western civilization might be obvious, what is less obvious is that categorical reactions against those flaws sometimes contribute to a refusal to embrace the local environment. This is vital to remember precisely because it has become somewhat commonplace, at least since the rejection of the Adamic 205

CALLALOO thesis of American Studies, to dismiss any evidence of Adamic longing as imperial nostalgia.2 I wish to make the rather difficult but, I believe, crucial argument that although Walcott’s poetics does not entirely escape the entrapment of the kind of paternalism Merchant criticizes (admittedly neither does he categorically reject Christianity), he nevertheless offers an understanding of natural and human histories that provides a possible antidote to our environmental crisis that Paz hopes poetry can provide. In other words, it would be a mistake to reject Walcott’s environmental views simply because of what appears to be a gender or religious bias in his writing. To do so would be as premature and unproductive as outright rejections of Western civilization because of its undeniable racial bias. More so than in his extemporaneous commentary (which may signify the difference a more poeticized and metaphorical response to environmental questions can make), his poetry conveys a tentative balance between the particular personality of the poet and the imagined space of the natural world, one that is instructive of the need for less impatience with the limitations of human representations of nature. My point is that an environmental ethics requires all people, all particulars of culture, to be invited to the table; the ecological crisis cannot be solved by one singular vision of human personality or politics. If we refuse to find sustainable relationships with nature within a given vision simply because it exhibits elements of Western imperialism, what hope have we of identifying an environmental ethic within any context of Western culture? There is no reason, of course, that we have to deem Walcott’s vision acceptable, but must we insist on a blank culture, an absent or completely neutral personality, or be convinced that anyone can occupy such a space? As the poststructuralist account of the environment has made abundantly clear, land is all too often stripped of its relationship to time, commodified and consumed, precisely in the same moment that it is loved; consequently, as W. J. T. Mitchell has argued, the history of loving landscape can become a symptom of imperialism. It would seem that Walcott is not in total disagreement; he states in an unpublished autobiographical essay, “American, Without America”: “There is no such thing as nature. There is this sky, that leaf, that wave just gone, and then the next. Naturelovers are always comfortably equipped. They are the ones who seek transcendental communion with points of equipment: repellents, clothing-changes, battery-lights; and the more they love the outdoors, or nature, the more they carry.” His difference, however, from the poststructuralist critique would have to lie in his persistent and sometimes agnostic belief in an idea of nature that resists such commodification, something that provides a series of experiences with the particulars of physical life, always delimited by the specific circumstances in place and time. When nature is experienced in this fashion, it is simultaneously an experience with space and time. As we will see, Walcott’s poet devotes himself to the contours and specificities of place as they shift and change through time, and thus the distinctions between the natural and the human elements fade into insignificance. This happens because he is no longer self-conscious of his separation from the environment or pretending to stand outside of time. Walcott further explains: “The ones who love nature really hate it. Or they have gone like the deepest love into a contemptuous familiarity. Nor do they imagine that they are being watched, their every isolated gesture of majestic loneli206

CALLALOO ness, by some admiring eye. Hunters and fishermen go deeper and deeper into anonymity without knowing that they love nature, they become nature, and to love nature as we self-conscious, self-dramatising writers do, would be to love themselves” (3). For this reason he states that “any choice that kills the ordinary world is a suicide, the final act of drawing attention to one’s self” (3). Of course, the challenge is to achieve this level of self-erasure without artificial means, without the aesthetic equivalent of wearing heavy recreational equipment. As his own cynical remark about writers reveals, and as his own confession in The Bounty of art’s betrayal also makes evident, this can only be achieved momentarily. Hence, even though every act of artistic creation is momentarily a dissolution of the self, in its finished expressive qualities, in its self-conscious fashioning in response to an imagined audience, it is a suicide, a break from the anonymity of perceiving things and a return to self-awareness. Meanwhile the world goes on about him, indifferent and elusive in its particulars. Walcott rejects technology and market values as the means by which nature can be protected and instead argues for an elemental acceptance of the poetic, and yes Adamic, task of naming things. Walcott’s Adam, however, does not involve the subordination of nature that is implied in the Genesis plot, whereby nature is redeemed from its exiled state outside of the bounds of human history. His Adam is not the innocent first man, but the poet whose “first impulse is . . . awe” for a “second Eden” whose apples “have the tartness of experience” (41). History, in other words, is never removed from Walcott’s nature, and thus naming becomes a more ambiguous act of power because it is not clear if the world reclaims language or vice versa. Language is neither entirely determined by, nor free of, a prior history.3 This requires a poeticization of the environment that in turn produces a word that stands in dynamic balance with the thing it names; words and things stand separate but equal. Poetry admits the possibility of a bridge between language’s autonomous discursive power and an imminent world that, although named, nevertheless is not subsumed.

A Poetics of Environmental Renewal in The Bounty Although Walcott’s environmental poetics can be traced throughout his work, the titular poem of The Bounty, the central focus of analysis in this essay, presents poetry as this bridge in compelling fashion. The opening lines explain: Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah’s elations force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto cores the dawn clouds with concentric radiance, the breadfruit opens its palms in praise of the bounty bois-pain, tree of bread, slave food, the bliss of John Clare (3)

207

CALLALOO Walcott situates the labor of poetry between the Christian notion of paradise and the tourist version of the Caribbean Eden. The labor of the poet—here the models are Isaiah, Dante, and John Clare—is to take place in the mundane world or the “desert,” eschewing the world beyond (the “true Paradise”) and the virtual world created by the market and technology (“the vision of the Tourist Board”). The power of this labor is such that it is capable of forcing roses from the sand. Unlike the progressive recovery narrative of the blossoming desert that Merchant criticizes, Walcott is suggesting that such “roses” are not the result of physical manipulation of nature so that it resembles some original model, but are in fact poetic responses to the bounty of everyday life. This poetics is implied in the movement from Isaiah, a poet-prophet who first announces the millennial notion of the desert blossoming as a rose; to Dante, a more secularized poet-prophet of the Renaissance whose thirty-third canto of the Paradiso ends with his confession that his earthly senses and language cannot adequately describe his vision of God (his terza rima is the model for the title poem); to John Clare, the mad eighteenth-century peasant poet who wrote in an asylum of his praise for the most elemental expressions of earth’s bounty. Walcott later describes these elations: “he stands in the ford / of a brook like the Baptist lifting his branches to bless / cathedrals and snails, the breaking of this new day” (3). Later he introduces Shakespeare’s poor Tom, an inarticulate madman who wanders in communion with natural subjects. The progression of poets moves from praising God and unseen verities to praising the visible and tangible beauty of the earth, but this progression proves to be circular rather than linear because it does not preclude the possibility that the task of elation in earth’s bounty is itself a prophetic, spiritual task, one that responds to a presence beyond the natural world. Isaiah is the poet-prophet who imagines a millennial transformation of the earth, whereby the desert is made to blossom as a rose through the power of God’s word transferred to human beings in the form of poetic prophecy. In the biblical context, the very mundanity of the world, its signification of our alienation from the true paradise, will be transformed, beautified, and redeemed by divine will. This kind of biblical poetry becomes prophecy because it is backed by the tangible force of God’s power and therefore represents His voice. It is a poetry, then, that has a direct correspondence to things for the simple fact that things will be forced to conform to words. It is God’s primordial generative word that creates the substantial world through utterance; matter conforms to the word not the word to matter. In this prophetic model, we do not have to accept the substance of our natural environment because such substance is an illusion; what we should believe in is the Word and its transcendence of life’s many little deaths and rebirths. As Lynn White once famously argued, whenever this rejection of the temporal world emerged in the Christian world, it contributed significantly to the wanton destruction of nature.4 On the other hand, we have the mad poet, John Clare, or even more extreme the dumb poet, Tom, both of whom are overwhelmed by the substantial world and whose poetry is a weak attempt to describe the spiritual weight of the physical world: “I am moved like you, mad Tom, by a line of ants; / I behold their industry and they are giants” (4). This is the bounty of life that “returns each daybreak;” this “madness” 208

CALLALOO apprehends things simply and perceives the smallest miracles of nature. He describes this poetic task as “praise in decay and process, awe in the ordinary / in wind that reads the lines of the breadfruit’s palms” (7). It is an embrace of what the senses can teach us about the natural environment, and by implication, unlike the recovery plot that seems inherent in Isaiah’s blossoming desert; it would seek to honor and protect natural process. It also means that the substantial world of nature is placed a priori to language. Poetry responds to things; it does not create them. However, the paradox of this circle of poets is that as the poet approaches the muteness of a mad Tom and moves farther and farther away from the generative function of language, his poetry becomes obeisant to the natural world and nature therefore functions as an emanation of God because it creates the Word. An additional paradox is that precisely because the miracles of the ordinary are a function of an always-dying natural world, this awareness of the bounty easily slips into existential mourning. Walcott relates the sorrow of his mother’s passing to Clare’s madness: “there is grief, there will always be, but it must not madden, / like Clare, who wept for a beetle’s loss, for the weight / of the world in a bead of dew on clematis or vetch” (5). In other words, the deeper the awe in the ordinary, the more frightful natural process becomes for the simple fact that its only story seems to be that of perpetual death and evanescence in material things. The natural world begins to resemble the eternal light of God witnessed by Dante, who wrote: “ . . . what I could see was greater / than speech can show: at such sight, it fails— / and memory fails when faced with such excess” (299). The point of the poem, however, is not to speak abstractly about nature; it is also a very intimate and personal reflection on the death of Walcott’s mother, Alix. It is the weaving of this personal story into his representations of the natural world that is the most telling of the balance he strikes between the personality of the word and the seemingly transcendent being of nature. He cannot reject the notion that she, for whom this poem functions as an elegy, is no longer present in some form after her death. At the same time, however, he cannot accept the idea that his poetry can somehow claim her, or claim to know of her afterlife. So he remains agnostic, as resistant to knowing of her existence as he is to her inexistence: “But can she or can she not read this? Can you read this, / Mamma, or hear it?” (9). He later admits uncertainty in his expectation that he will see her again: “I half-expect to see you no longer, then more than half, / almost never, or never then—there I have said it” (12). Then he reverses his thinking because he knows that there is something that draws him to her in death, like tears and like his own poetry, that suggests in the end something more than language and mourning can express: “but felt something less than final at the edge of your grave, / some other something somewhere, equally dreaded, / since the fear of the infinite is the same as death, / unendurable brightness, the substantial dreading its own substance, dissolving to gases and vapours” (12). What lies beyond the grave is feared, whether it is God or nothing, because it represents dissolution of the material substance we now are. He implies that existential atheism is as much an act of faith as dogmatic Christian faith; because both respond to what cannot be known with equal certainty, he offers instead agnosticism as his truest form of faith. 209

CALLALOO Language is the medium by which the poet’s substantial being deliberates about that which is insubstantial; its relationship to the insubstantial is a relationship fraught with contradiction because as soon as he invokes his mother, she slips away into the “never” that he finally has the courage to write. Thus, his own poetic deliberations about his mother are inherently treacherous, because language only seems to make more evident the immateriality of that to which it refers. For that reason he remarks that “Faith grows mutinous” (9) and asks for pardon, “as I watch these lines grow and the art of poetry harden me / into sorrow as measured as this, to draw the veiled figure / of Mamma entering the standard elegiac” (5). Of course, there is little that is standard about this elegy; it is a confession of betrayal precisely in the act of elegizing the dead. Measured lines of poetry “harden” him, making his own materiality more evident and more aware of the self-referentiality and selfconsciousness of his own measured lines and hence, of his betrayal. But he is also betrayed by the bounty of nature around him because it seems indifferent to his agony. No matter how hard he tries to relish in the taste of earthly things, he cannot forget that the dead have become “part of earth’s vegetal fury . . . ants carry the freight / of their sweetness, their absence in all that we eat” (13–14). There is irony in nature’s bounty: “and here at first is the astonishment: that earth rejoices / in the middle of our agony, earth that will have her / for good: wind shines white stones and the shallows’ voices” (14). The last phrase, “wind shines white stones and the shallows’ voices,” is comforting as a source of elation precisely because of its beautiful opacity and the Zen-like nothingness of the shallows’ voices, and yet its emptiness also proves indifferent to his suffering. Earlier he writes of a similarly troubling peace in common sights and objects in his environment and states: “My mother lies / near the white beach stones, . . . / yet the bounty returns each daybreak, to my surprise / to my surprise and betrayal, yes, both at once” (4). The dynamic, everchanging, ever-emerging substantial world of nature offers elation in the wake of sorrow and yet also mockery in its indifferent march forward in time. That is, nature represents both the possibility of continuation of meaning, from death and beyond, as well as the perpetual end of meaning. Is not its perpetual rebirth also perpetual death? It is this uncertainty about nature that draws him to it and that in turn fuels the fire of his poetry, because the enigma of nature’s meaning is the same as that of his mother’s death. He can never be sure that nature’s continual dying and regenerating signifies immortality, just as he can never be sure that it does not. Continuity from life to death and back to life is a cycle of Adamic resurgence of language, seeking to greet what called it forth, finding itself divorced from what it names, and then beginning over again. Poetry is both a language of commemoration, in its anticipation of joining a transcendent elation, and mourning for what it fails to signify. Ultimately, Walcott asks how poetry can be both responsive to transcendent light and life without assuming the authority of prophecy and responsive to death without overwhelming the poet with madness and reducing poetry to perpetual elegy. To raise the questions of my introduction, if the poet admits a divine transcendence in nature, must this mean nature is beyond the bounds of human history? Or if nature is defined by its historicity and its ultimate death, on what basis can we identify hope for renewal? Hope, like faith, is found paradoxically in Walcott’s persistent indecision 210

CALLALOO between these two poles. As much as Walcott would like this cycle of life to remain below the radar of religious language and meaning, he cannot help finding a resemblance between both forms of awe. He writes of awe “in the sun contained in a globe of the crystal dew, / bounty in the ants’ continuing a line of raw flours, / mercy on the mongoose scuttling past my door, / in the light’s parallelogram laid on the kitchen floor, / for Thine is the Kingdom, the Glory, and the Power” (8). He goes on to hear the church bells, to see Christ’s story in the vegetation of his St. Lucia, in the “feathery palms that nodded at the entry / into Jerusalem” (8). Even though he describes his childhood religious experience as characterized by a now discarded faith “in His Word,” his dead faith has been rekindled in his celebration of the bounty of life and by his resurrection of memories of his mother. In the “rustling hymnals” he hears the fresh Jacobean springs, the murmur Clare heard of bounty abiding, the clear language she taught us, “as the hart panteth,” at this, her keen ears pronged while her three fawns nibbled the soul-freshening waters, “as the hart panteth for the water-brooks” that belonged to the language in which I mourn her now, or when I showed her my first elegy, her husband’s, and then her own. (8) Here Walcott cites the language of Psalm 42, a poem that continues “as the hart panteth for the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” This scriptural poem itself expresses the confluence he creates because it compares a yearning in nature with a yearning for God, just as he compares the elation he felt as a child at his mother’s Christian instruction to John Clare’s elation at the bounty of nature. Significantly, the elegy he pays to his mother has been made possible because of the language of faith that she taught him. His betrayal of his mother is two-fold; he must acknowledge the treachery of a self-conscious measured sorrow as well as the failure of his own faith. But the power of his elegy is in the confession of its betrayal, something not lost on Walcott. He writes: “nettles of remorse / that shall spring forth from her grave from the spade’s heartbreak. / And yet not to have loved her enough is to love more, / if I confess it, and I confess it” (7). Because it pays homage to what his language has failed to capture, his acknowledgement of betrayal becomes an expression of devotion. The question is, what value does this paradox have for an environmental ethic? Walcott’s rose forced up from the sand is the poem itself, the words of commemoration and mourning that respond to his mother’s death: “There on the beach,” he writes, “in the desert, lies the dark well / where the rose of my life was lowered, near the shaken plants, / near a pool of fresh tears, tolled by the golden bell / of allamanda” (5). While the rose of her body is buried in the ground, it is simultaneously disinterred in the form of this commemoration of her life. The power of poetic language to force the rose up from the sand is not the same power of God’s word to resurrect the dead literally and, like Isaiah’s words, to transmutate the phenomenal through linguistic 211

CALLALOO mandates. Walcott’s metaphors, like all metaphors, are unstable. They do not make equations that collapse the differences between words and things or between human and natural history, but neither do they ignore the possibility of some transcendent reason why such unlikenesses might be equal. The rose then is a metaphor that brings into relation the immaterial and material worlds, words and things, life and death, commemoration and mourning, the timeless and the timely. The poem concludes with his resolution to learn again: my business and duty, the lesson you taught your sons, to write of the light’s bounty on familiar things that stand on the verge of translating themselves into news: the crab, the frigate that floats on cruciform wings, and that nailed and thorn-riddled tree that opens its pews to the blackbird that hasn’t forgotten her because it sings. Her life is continued, ironically and movingly, in the bounty of nature but also in the bounty of the word of the poet. But that continuation is always tenuous and therefore inevitable, because it emerges moment by moment in the transition between what lies beyond nature and time, to what becomes news by virtue of being written. So the poet must keep writing just as assiduously as nature keeps on regenerating itself in its apparent indifference to human perception. This is ethically useful in relation to the environment. Walcott understands that nature is never entirely outside of his own discursive practices and yet he cannot be certain that it is entirely apart from a transcendent reality. Such ambiguity perhaps can teach restraint because it implies that we can neither expect nature to conform to our touristic nor to our theological visions of paradise. It is worth pointing out the striking resemblance this poetics has to what the great American naturalist, Aldo Leopold, once called a conservation aesthetic. Conservation can only avoid commodifying nature for the purposes of wanton consumption if we remember that “recreation is not the outdoors, but our reaction to it. Daniel Boone’s reaction depended not only on the quality of what he saw, but on the quality of the mental eye with which he saw it” (173–74). The creation of outdoor satisfactions depends on our capacity for perception: “It is the expansion of transport [that is, the artificiality of equipment that provides technological access to the environment] without a corresponding growth of perception that threatens us with qualitative bankruptcy of the recreational process. Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind” (176–77). What is it, exactly, that Leopold hopes that we can perceive that will make such an important difference? It is nothing more than the capacity to perceive nature’s perpetual death and rebirth: “I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind’s eye” (51). As a result of such tenacious memory, we have the metaphors before us on this page, to communicate to us this evanescence. Such 212

CALLALOO metaphors convey self-consciousness on the part of the viewer, to be sure, and the artificiality and limitations of representation. The viewer is only tenuously connected to an elusive reality, but precisely for that reason such metaphors teach us respect, preservation, and the impossibility, or at least undesirability, of possession and consumption. This poetics is neither the progressive recovery narrative of nature, nor its declensionist alternative. The “light’s bounty on familiar things / that stand on the verge of translating themselves into news” shows us a cyclical rather than a linear relation between human and natural history. Nature, always dying and being born again, brings its light onto those “familiar things” that have presumably already been adopted into the human story, breathing new life into them and consequently into our metaphors. And when those metaphors become familiar clichés, the “breaking day” will provide another opportunity to start over. This is not a redundant circle but perhaps more like a helix, because it can never be predicted what story new light, or the poet, will tell. Although we might suspect that we have heard Adam’s story before, there is no way to predict what Walcott’s Adam will say. This means that new futures, undetermined by the past, are always possible. It may be that sights and places have become commonplace and risk becoming commodities, but as he writes in “Isla Incognita,” a previously unpublished essay, we must imagine, like Adam, that “we have seen none of it before. It will be impossible of course for how can we tell whether our feeling on seeing that rock and its bay is nostalgia or revelation. Well, combine both and the illumination made by their igniting would be discovery.” We do not need to make a choice between the future or the past; the reconciliation of both emotions that pertain here is in the experience of the elusive present. This is discovery without possession, because as Aldo Leopold states, “the outstanding characteristic of perception is that it entails no consumption and no dilution of any resource” (173). This stands in direct contradiction to the poststructuralist argument that our all-too-human conceptual constructions of nature’s otherness have a history that has been anything but innocuous in relationship to land. While not denying that history, Walcott insists that Adamic discovery of the newness of the world is still necessary, paradoxically, so as to establish a protective but not possessive attitude toward land and a sense of belonging in one’s place. As Paz’s argument correctly intuited, perception of nature’s elusive mutability and the consequential necessity of metaphor help to balance the human in relation to the natural, without on one hand denying their distinct and mutual presence or, on the other, their inevitable confluence. We can hear this tenuous balance in these beautiful concluding lines from “Isla Incognita”: It has taken me over thirty years and my race hundreds, to feel the fibres spread from the splayed toes and grip this earth the arms knot into boles and put out leaves. When that begins this is the beginning of season, cycle time. The noise my leaves make is my language. In it is tunneled the roar of seas of a lost ocean. It is a fresh sound. Let me not be ashamed to write like this, because it supports this thesis, that our only true apprehensions are through metaphor. 213

CALLALOO That is to say, metaphorical representation is the only means by which we can imagine what is most true about ourselves: that we are as natural as trees.

NOTES 1. Two studies that catalogue the environmental effects of Western imperialism, its nostalgia for Eden, and the plantation economy on the Caribbean are Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism and Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism. 2. I am referring to the configuration of the so-called “New American Studies” that purportedly rejects the thesis of American exceptionalism that has been implied in R. W. B. Lewis’s conception of the “American Adam.” (See Lucy Maddox’s Locating American Studies.) Although the argument of this new configuration rightly points to the exclusionary tactics of exceptionalism, the mainstream of American Studies has yet to take seriously the charge to articulate a politics of American Studies that is both socially just and environmentally sustainable. For this reason, we continue to see a serious divide between the aims of ecocritics and American Studies. 3. I have written more extensively on the view of history in nature in Walcott’s poetry “A Postcolonial Sense of Place” and on the ecotheological role of Adam in “The Environmental Ethics of Mormon Belief.” 4. White’s argument inspired nearly three decades of responses in defense of the Judeo-Christian tradition, giving birth to what is now known as ecotheology, the environmentalist approach to religious belief. Although his critique, in the view of some, was overstated, his fundamental claim that religious belief was key to solving the environmental crisis has been adopted by a great number of religions and scholars of religion.

WORKS CITED Alighieri, Dante. Paradiso. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam, 1994. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: The Noonday Press, 1973. Crosby, Alfred. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Handley, George B. “A Postcolonial Sense of Place and the Work of Derek Walcott.” ISLE (Interdisciplinary Study of Literature and the Environment) 6.3 (Summer 2000): 1–22. ———. “The Environmental Ethics of Mormon Belief.” BYU Studies 40.2 (Summer 2001): 187–211. “Hands Off Piton; Walcott Threatens to Get Physical.” The Weekend Voice Saturday, 19 May, 1990: 1. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955. Maddox, Lucy. Locating American Studies: Evolution of a Discipline. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Merchant, Carolyn. “Reinventing Eden.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: Norton, 1995. 132–59. Paz, Octavio. The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Walcott, Derek. “American, without America.” Unpublished essay, 1974. University of West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago campus library. ———. The Bounty. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997. ———. “The Insulted Landscape.” Poetry Audio PR9216.W35x1980. Harvard College Library, 1980. ———. “Isla Incognita.” Unpublished essay, 1973. University of West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago campus library. Forthcoming in Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Ed. Elizabeth De Loughrey, Renée Gosson, and George Handley. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005.

214

CALLALOO ———. Personal Interview. 30 July 2001. Forthcoming as “The Argument of the Outboard Motor: An interview with Derek Walcott.” Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Ed. Elizabeth De Loughrey, Renée Gosson, and George Handley. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. ———. Omeros. New York: The Noonday Press, 1990. ———. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. White, Lynn. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment. New York: Routledge, 1996. 184–93.

215

CALLALOO

“IN GOD WE TROUST” Derek Walcott and God

by Fred D’Aguiar

“Do you believe in God?” I remember the interviewer in the company of another poet and me, asking Derek Walcott in the summer of 1986 at a BBC 2 Arena Caribbean Nights recording on the culture and arts of the Caribbean.1 Derek Walcott paused for a moment and replied, “Only if God gets me another poem.” Laughter erupted and with it a nod of recognition toward the contract with productivity every poet is sworn to at almost Mephistolian cost; laughter and a comic end to a serious subject. The idea of a poet selling a loved one for the price of a poem is not new. What is new or sounds like a new spin on an old thread is Derek Walcott’s idea that the poem itself, namely poetics and poetry as a process, may contain God, indemnify spirituality, and enshrine faith in the middle of an absence of any obvious belief system, by investing in a formal procedure called the composed poem. If this is the case then the evidence should reside in the body of work. Nuggets of wisdom to do with a religious subject should be extractable from the work where the work functions as a surrogate cathedral for a missing conventional God worshipped in a conventional way. As early as 1948 in “A City’s Death by Fire” a poem preserved in his Collected Poems, Derek Walcott expresses a reverence for the trappings of the church that borders on religious conversion.

A City’s Death by Fire

After that hot gospeller had leveled all but the churched sky, I wrote the tale by tallow of a city’s death by fire; Under a candle’s eye, that smoked in tears, I Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire. All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales, Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar; Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire. By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails? In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths; 216

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 216–223

CALLALOO To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails, Blessing the death and the baptism by fire. (Collected Poems 6) A religious vocabulary deployed at landscape, presented here as a cathedral, provides the poem’s momentum. The poet ministers through song in a priestly way but without sermonizing. Philosophical enquiry works as gospel, rather than any declaration of faith or conventional belief. The presiding spirit is more Dylan Thomas than Christ. As a result, the benediction (a favorite word in the poet’s lexicon) privileges art more than the life the art dramatizes God is present in what people do, in their patterns of behavior but God is absent in the behavior of the poet: there isn’t a God as a given entity or assumed presence in the poet’s procedure of writing the poem, although the language of God provides a vocabulary for the poet. This steers the reader toward the poetry as art and artifice, especially in the poem’s metaphorical transformation of the ravaged city. The material reality of the city while reduced to ashes by the fire gives rise to the Phoenix of spiritual awakening. What the art achieves in the early poem is a sort of spiritual elation, and a peace in lieu of understanding but without the religious conversion of being saved, more like a drowning for the poet. The poem as a procedure carries with it a religiosity of a kind easily mistaken for faith in a conventional God. But it is more akin to the poet’s identification with a literary tradition with Christianity as one of its cornerstones than any alignment with faith. A desecrated landscape becomes a shared terrain between this Christian frame and the formal devices of the poem engaged in a joint effort that utilizes the trappings of Christian iconography to shake off its influence. The poem’s success is gauged by the tone of the address. A poem’s tone is a property of the poet buried in the poet’s architecture. Tone is tantamount to a point of view and an opinion held by the poet2 and not necessary for the poem’s success but which forms part of the poem’s overall impact on the reader. Tone, as it stands in this early poem, expresses a need for a deeper meaning in existence beyond the physical and material facts of life. If progress could be measured in this lyric moment, outside of narrative time in its instantaneous marshalling of impulses, then it would move from a religious starting point and head toward the secular, not in a straight narrative line, but in its circuitous tonal progression (rather like this sentence!), its sense of shaking off religious influence for some quality to do with the formal rewards of the sonnet. The sonnet rebuilds the city destroyed by fire with a poetic structure that owes much of its form to an infusion of spiritual thought. Here Walcott functions as spiritual architect. His tone includes an expression of grief over the destruction of the city. The poem’s double procedure is that it grieves for the perished city, while, simultaneously, it builds an alternate and imperishable edifice in the substitute form of a sonnet. This formal device shadows a religious experience and can easily be mistaken for one. Both poem and religion promise knowledge beyond the known world. The religious promise is life after death. For the poem the buried meanings resonate far beyond the surface meanings of the words. Both arts (if I may so address religious belief) invest in a faith in the process: for religion it is worship, for poetry it is poetic practice. Doubt appears to govern both processes. A central tenet of religion—faith— 217

CALLALOO circles the idea of doubt where doubt stars as the brink of faith before faith reasserts itself and casts off doubt. In the crucifixion, even if treated minimally as a parable, there is Christ in his supreme sacrifice on the cross wondering if God has forsaken him. In poetry doubt is necessary for poetic production. The poet doubts she or he is any good until the next poem and then doubts the worth of the thing and then writes another poem just to be sure, just because there is nothing else to be done and out of a compulsion for utterance and in service to the process infected with doubt but resplendent in its routine of faithful repetition and life-affirming practice. Landscape replaces the church and becomes for Derek Walcott a character, not a holy spirit, but flesh invested with spirituality, and that is how it earns his devotion. History relays story for the poet and as such history (with a degree of myth thrown into the mix) replaces the religious fable. Not a bad start for a young poet on an intuitive quest of understanding of his art and craft. Derek Walcott’s Methodist upbringing in St. Lucia placed him in a religious minority in a Catholic majority nation.3 His Catholic schooling and veneration of his Irish Jesuit schoolmasters imbued him with an intuitive logic governed by religious praxis. But so did his use of English in a French Creole nation and his mixed-race background in a black majority country. Doubles typify his life and his search for a distance from each of them as he took what he could use from all of them. The experience made distancing into an art form for Derek Walcott at an early age. This formative experience planted a dichotomy in outlook that would constitute a challenge for the poet, namely, how to break out of a predictable binary dynamic way of thinking into more fruitful imaginative terrain. In addition to his poetry Derek Walcott paints and tries to address painting as another expression of this spiritual quest. What seems to be behind both painting and poetry is a sensory frame at least as a starting off point, largely invested in narrative but not wholly so, which then spirals out into thoughts suggested by images and phrases as a method of moving from one line to another. This formal rigor resembles the trials of the Stations of the Cross, but only in its requirement of formalized difficulty as a necessary impediment before transcendence. This formal rigor makes 1987 seem like a long way from 1948, but not really, if a reader subscribes to the notion of the poet as born not made (“born big so” as the Creole parlance would have it). Not just a struggle with craft but a struggle with place traps the poet in the poem, “The Light of the World.” Strategically placed two thirds of the way into the “Here,” first section of The Arkansas Testament, both a struggle with notions of craft and a wrestle with the idea of belonging to a place preoccupy the poet. The poem is a bus journey with the ordinary folk and the isolated poet ruminating on his place among them and what his art can offer them. Bob Marley, an artist like the poet, but one who has made it among the populous, frames the contemplative act by the poet. Marley is accepted among them, so why not the poet, the poem appears to ask the reader and the answer is an odd give and take of rejection and quiet acceptance, studied distance and guarded familiarity. The poet’s desire for a woman provides an engine of sorts for the poet in his body. Art, in other words, if it is worth anything believes in the sensory as a gateway to the spiritual. In similar terms the woman the poet admires in the poem for her ordinary ripe flesh condition (as the 218

CALLALOO ready-to-eat fruit analogy would have it) becomes transformed by that process of seeing, that particular metaphorical and transmogrifying lens, into a goddess. The poet sings her a hymn of his lust and in exchange her humble standing, plain but young, elevates to heraldic status. This transformative aspect of Derek Walcott’s poetry with lust or desire as a springboard, Marley’s “got to have kaya now” (an epigraph for the poem), serves as sex subordinated, desire deferred to the higher calling of poetry, and takes the poet into the realm of a process of thought and conjecture that easily trumps desire and grows to be an act of sublimated desire. The title of the poem4 confers onto the people a humble gift—the transmutation of biography into art—that transforms their lives and opens a contemplative space that their busy routines appear not to make an allowance for. This twofold artistic benefit—a chronicling art and a transformative one—is bequeathed by the poet to the community that made him, or at least nurtured him, but one he is now distanced from to the point of silence and a near-voyeur’s distance at that. It should be said that the poet is moved to tears by his yearning and his isolation, his love of the people and his loss of familial contact with them. There is a cost to the poet for his artistic privilege and practice of artistic license. Life appears to be busily unfolding around him and he is seconded to it as a chronicler of events to do with it and as its philosopher. While he extracts pithy insights extrapolated from the situation of his body plunged into the environment, he remains mentally apart from it. The transport turns out to be wholly the poet’s, his elevation of his surroundings from the quotidian to the heraldic plane. There is a concomitant teleportation of sorts involved whereby the ordinary and mundane give rise to the poetic and regal. That lust is transformed to desire and then metamorphosed once again into love results in a triple-layered unfolding of the poet’s consciousness. Another concern of the poem is framed by a woman vendor who wishes to board the bus and asks the driver in St. Lucian patois “Pas quittez moi à terre.” Walcott, in an almost DJ-inspired riff of verbal twists and turns by association of sound and meaning, runs with this for a few lines (in an artistic alignment of his prodigious gifts with Marley’s): “which is, in her patios: “Don’t leave me stranded,” which is, in her history and that of her people: “Don’t leave me on earth,” or, by a shift of stress: “Don’t leave me the earth” [for an inheritance]; “Pas quittez moi à terre, Heavenly transport, Don’t leave me on earth, I’ve had enough of it.” The bus filled in the dark with heavy shadows that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left on the earth, and would have to make out. Abandonment was something they had grown used to.” (“Arkansas Testament,” 49–50) His lines hanker toward alexandrines but fall into a loose, because conversational, iambic hiatus typical of blank verse in general but idiosyncratic to Derek Walcott in 219

CALLALOO particular in his mix of Standard English and French patwa5 (with some English Creole) registers. That last line is at least double edged: a religious abandonment coupled to that of politics, nothing new about that twin configuration, but with a second betrayal on the part of the poet who is clearly concerned with the ways his calling as a poet leaves these people behind (those ordinary folk who are not passengers on his form of transport, so to speak) even as he seeks to sustain his vital creative links with them. Ironically, this is a success for the poet. He succeeds in devoting a poem about sex and desire to the ordinary subject, the common folk, who represent a yearning in him for acceptance among them. Their oblivious sense of getting on with life contrasts with his immobility in the face of overwhelming sensation. They occupy the poem just when the poem feels least in communion with them, as if to testify against his fears by invading his art. A potential religious frame is blown away for its profane alternative, not the Holy Spirit but common flesh takes care of this light, not the scripture of an all-powerful consciousness but the poetry generated by humble and vulnerable and culpable flesh and blood. The senior Walcott resembles the young poetic novice and the middle-aged seer in terms of this toying with a Christian tradition in an effort to reach beyond it to poetry’s secular, formal, and gravityless space. That space resides in the formal range of Derek Walcott’s poems rather than as a statement of intent. God is not jettisoned so much as seen to have a built-in obsolescence as far as the craft of the art is concerned. At some point in the poem, once it progresses away from its originating impulses (say, in Tiepolo’s Hound, which has many starts and stops into the Caribbean and Parisian life of Pissarro but then quickly settles into a contemplation about the rewards of artistic endeavor6). The delight resides in the local surprises to do with Derek Walcott’s demonstration of a formal dexterity in and of itself rather than its being pressed into the service of any creed. He reconciles two art forms, painting and poetry. He examines his lifelong and double devotion as painter and poet to the two art forms as an artistic figure made in the Caribbean but mired in a Western Christian literary tradition by latching onto a precursor from the nineteenth century, the painter Pissarro. The Bounty is not God but the manifestations of life on earth and the art of poetry, which seeks to articulate the character of that bounty, what Derek Walcott calls “the awe in the ordinary” (The Bounty, p.7 iii).7 Derek Walcott as bounty hunter uses the bounty of his art and craft to understand nature’s bounty. From one bounty, poetry, to another bounty, nature, Walcott devises the procedure that it takes a bounty to know a bounty. This declaration aligns him with the romantic tradition that saw reasons for religious belief in the obvious evidence of nature, or at least a redress between humanity’s belief in its own superiority over nature and nature’s selfevident magnificence.8 But rather than the romance of Wordsworth to guide him, Walcott opts for a riskier spiritual precursor, in the person of John Clare. Mad John Clare throws into relief Walcott’s own measured grief-ridden tones. Where Clare is mad, Walcott is sad. Walcott mourns his dead mother, “the rose of my life” (The Bounty 15), as though nature’s reclamation of her body imbued all of nature with the love once associated with her body while she lived. But loss itself takes center stage rather than the character of his mother, which says more about the disparity between 220

CALLALOO Clare and Walcott as Walcott positions himself in the poetic tradition than about a requiem for his mother; or put another way, both qualities, grief and loss, belong to the poem but in unequal measures that favor the mood of grief over the loss of the mother. John Clare cuts a pitiful figure in the world of poetry not least because he died relatively young, incredibly poor, and in relative obscurity. The cost of a poetic consciousness out of sync with nature or driven mad by nature’s bounty when it should have been in league with that largesse, qualifies Walcott’s engagement with nature. Walcott’s poetic consciousness is at least historical, whereas Clare’s was most palpably not. Walcott understands Clare’s sacrifice for the greater calling of art as too much of a cost to pay or cross to bear, and he qualifies his engagement as grief not rage, a mourning elegiac stance rather than any combative outlook. Nature is not out to defeat the poet, but must be a resource. Clare’s recognition of a peace in death, after the fact of a life dedicated to poetry and the study of nature “the grass below—above the vaulted sky”9 comes far too late for Walcott and it is swapped by Walcott for a communion between nature and the art of poetry. Whereas Clare went mad in his quest, Derek Walcott calls for repose in nature, a version, if ever there was one, of that line from Clare. But God is nowhere to be found, though, as in the earliest of Derek Walcott’s poetry, the poetics is replete with the vocabulary of the church and therefore coterminous with a spiritual quest. Spirituality is supplied not by worship in a church but by poetic practice devoted to the study of nature. This places Walcott firmly in a romantic tradition with the obvious proviso of his historical consciousness as a necessary qualification of his engagement with Europe. In God We Troust, the name and motto on the new boat or craft of Achille in Omeros, says much about the quality of this historical consciousness as it rubs up against notions of religious belief. The transfigured Greek hero in his commonplace Caribbean island backdrop is part of this elegy to the ordinary or the ordinary as imbued with the heroic. Myth is in cahoots with history—Greek myth meets an African and New World history. The misspelling, which Achille insists on keeping in obedience to his twin language loyalties (to French and English, patios and Creole), subverts the passive noun, trust, from the vessel in which the faithful place their faith to the much more troublesome verb equivalent and suggests a sort of quest or enquiry, or the continuous action of “throstle,” and implies some as yet to be resolved relationship and search in the coalition between the divine spirit and human culpability. As Achille says to the priest who smiles at the name when he blesses the fishing boat, “Leave it! Is God’s spelling and mine” (p 8). The altered terms of engagement of high religion when embraced by the commoner equals the misspelling and required adjustment religion makes to survive as faith in a new setting. A similar adjustment is made to the spiritual quest retooled by the poetry kit: for God read poem. I do not wish to argue that Derek Walcott is bigger than God but more to mean that poetry creates a secular space that replaces God. Poetry as a lifelong devotion takes the place of worship, and, at the expense of religion, poetry becomes the vessel for spiritual quest and fulfillment. More to the point, the formal devices of a poem carry with it inherent spiritual rewards, a deep confirmation of the sensuous life, and 221

CALLALOO metaphorical contemplation as an end rather than a means. Reading Derek Walcott’s lush rendition of this conjured spiritual space—its sheer metaphorical breadth and depth of tone—leaves me entirely convinced about the alternative religious truth in the claims made on his imagination by the Caribbean visual, or should that be victual. Probably both. All this may be academic because the I-speaker in a Walcott poem may sound like the poet distributing the cornucopia of his tone when in fact the I-presence could easily be an assumed identity for the benefit of the poem’s outcome and not the great man at all. Poets are commendably notorious for fronting their utterances, their poems as discourses, with a first-person speaker who has nothing to do with the actual lives of the poets and everything to do with the internal logic and dynamic of the independently spirited poem. I say this because Omeros is peppered with declarations of faith in God by the many dramatic players in the poem, from Philoctete, nursing his wise wound, to Helen in her haughty headdress, to the inebriated bit parts by the cast of outcast Europeans roasting in the Colonies as ex-pats. The tone of the I-speaker, cognizant as it is of the nuanced language of religion hankering after a hard-won spirituality in the middle of vapid materialism, borrows heavily on this religious diction and syntax, and conveys it into the libertarian territory of a veneration of nature. This borrowing from the church of God for the preferred altar of nature results in something lost in the translation. A reader may think Derek Walcott is mounting a sophisticated claim on nature as a part of the overall scheme of an inviolable church, all-encompassing even to the point of domesticating the poetic imagination. Perhaps the safety valve against this sophist claim is the continuous energy of the bawdy calypsonian always rearing his head during the most pious of tones. Characters swear like troopers in Omeros and their bodies, their composed bodies, appear on the verge of spilling into pornographic revelation, stripping away decorum (helped by rum) for the common and sexually explicit, stripped down and bare, though not reduced body, invested in the sensuous. The senses, in at least one sense, do not take prisoners, appear classless and without gender bias, and in this sense alone stands for the libertarian ideal of a freed-up imagination, unmoored from the conventions of time and place through the very contraptions supplied by the poet’s time and location. This contradiction of the senses as a gateway to some other place, using the constraints of time and place to gain ground beyond it, typifies the mission of writing invested in nature and the senses, but with a spiritual goal over and above the pleasures of the senses. And it is this creative impulse that takes Derek Walcott’s poetry beyond the convention of God (“past faith” as he says in his most recent book-length poem, “The Prodigal”) and into the unusual sensuous realm of discovery, surprise and wonder.

NOTES 1. During the break in a roundtable discussion with Derek Walcott, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and me, moderated by Darcus Howe. 2. The poet’s limited understanding expressed in the poem’s tone is delimited by the formal procedures of the poem (the poem’s language, metrics, lines, imagery, stanzas, phrasing, voice, and so on).

222

CALLALOO 3. See the early chapters in Bruce King’s biography for more on Derek Walcott’s childhood. 4. Find its religious basis in John 9:5, John 8:12, and John 12:46 among others. 5. There are more updated terms for this move away from the standard vernacular or received, official code of a language for its street or popular equivalent mixed as it is with West African grammar and diction and descended from the slaves as is the case for former British colonies in the Caribbean. Kamau Brathwaite in his monograph on the beginnings of Jamaica Creole Society introduced the idea of a “nation language” in an attempt to frame the majority use of this officially unwelcome mode of communication. In Trinidad and Guyana, for example, the contribution of South Asian languages to this English instigated by mid-nineteenth-century indentureship from India is another case in point (and subject for a different essay). Walcott’s Nobel acceptance speech acknowledges this Indian influence on his imaginative. See too the enormous scholarship of the two editors of this Walcott Special, both of whom have made lasting contributions to these debates. 6. Omeros engages with myth even as the lives of its characters are circumscribed by religion. Tiepolo’s Hound dispenses with this religious frame and opts for art instead. 7. The awesome list of nature aligns nature’s behavior with poetic modes of enquiry; nature and poetry become synonymous. Walcott repeats the phrase with a slight variance “my awe of the ordinary” on page 8 of Tiepolo’s Hound as emblematic of his epiphany and the premise for the book-length poem. 8. See Wordsworth’s ‘Lines: Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey . . . ’ where he argues for nature as a force in the poet’s life and a prime mover which shapes poetic thought—“ . . . sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; /And passing even into my purer mind,” (lines 27–9). 9. Clare (1793–1864), “The grass below—above the vaulted sky” (from his poem, “I Am”)—a contemplative moment in poetry, if ever there was one, largely invested in stillness, it decrees a study of nature as the subject for the poet. The image also implies a posture of death in nature—the poet laid low but not yet buried.

WORKS CITED Arena Caribbean Nights. BBC 2. Mod. Darcus Howe, prod. by Julien Henriques. June 1986. Clare, John. (1793–1864). “I Am.” King, Bruce. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. London: Oxford UP, 2000. Walcott, Derek. The Arkansas Testament. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. American edition published in 1987 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. The Bounty. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. American edition published in 1997 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. Collected Poems 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992. ———. Omeros. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. American edition published in 1990 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. Wordsworth, William. (1770–1850). “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour.” July 13, 1798

223

CALLALOO

ARTISTS’ SELF-PORTRAITURE AND SELF-EXPLORATION IN DEREK WALCOTT’S TIEPOLO’S HOUND

by Peter Erickson

The symbolic plot of Tiepolo’s Hound can be quickly summarized as working through the overarching opposition between two stark images: the white hound named in the title, which epitomizes the European artistic tradition, and the black mongrel, which represents the reality of Caribbean culture. The tension is increased by the graphic contrast between white and black. Despite Walcott’s belated disclaimer that he “made too much of the whiteness of the hound” (4.19.4; p. 121),1 the racial implications of the two colors are obvious and unavoidable. The poem begins with an insistence on the “epiphanic detail” (1.1.3; p. 8) of the white hound. But, over its long course, the poem enacts a counterepiphany by which the black mongrel gradually gains recognition and eventually supersedes the white hound as the primary focus of attention. As the concept of an aesthetic “epiphany” suggests, Walcott draws on Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. Adopting the figure of the artist as Daedalus, he depicts the confrontation with the Minotaur as an encounter with “my fear, my self, my craft” (4.20.4; p. 127). While echoing Joyce’s commitment “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” Walcott reformulates this quest as his own project “to elevate my race from its foul lair” (4.20.4; p. 128). Thus redirected, the word race is inflected with a specifically Caribbean resonance. One of the poem’s key challenges is to explain by what means—by what process of formal and psychological negotiation—Walcott makes the switch from the symbolism of the white hound to that of the black mongrel. How can what is presented as an absolute obsession to find the image of the white hound be, in the end, so easily abandoned? In retrospect, we can see the poem’s strategy is not so much to reject the white hound outright as to render it irrelevant. Translating the literary form of Joyce’s Portrait into the visual medium of self-portraiture, I shall argue that the consideration of artists’ self-portraits is one of the principal means by which the imagery of the black mongrel becomes the higher priority that displaces the white hound. Visual logic is at the heart of the poem, and I begin with a more general overview of the way Walcott’s own visual art serves as a vehicle for the poem’s conclusion.

The Role of Visual Art in Poetic Discourse Tiepolo’s Hound represents an unprecedented elevation of the visual component of Walcott’s work. Previously, Walcott used single paintings for jacket covers of individ224

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 224–235

CALLALOO ual volumes; the literally exterior and detachable status of the painting kept it separate from the poetry and gave it an exclusively decorative function. In Tiepolo’s Hound, twenty-six paintings are interspersed within the poetic text, thus making the visual element part of the main body of the work. In his first book-length poem, Another Life (1973), published at age 43, Walcott portrays the two major decisions that would shape his career. First, despite his dedication to visual art, he chooses to pursue poetry rather than painting. Second, he emphasizes the need to leave his Caribbean home to make his way in the wider world and to come to terms with European cultural heritage. In both regards, Tiepolo’s Hound, seventeen years later, presents a striking reversal. The readmission of painting brings visual art back into the center of his work.2 The one-way departure dramatized in Book One is Pissarro’s, which heightens the decisive impact of Walcott’s full-circle return to the Caribbean at the poem’s end: “This is my peace, my salt, exulting acre: / there is no more Exodus, this is my Zion” (4.26.2; p. 162). This verbal declaration directly connects with its visual counterpart, the image of Becune Point, the last painting. The two media come together in Walcott’s appeal in the final stanza: “Let this page catch the last light on Becune Point” (4.26.4; p. 163). Page refers both to the written page and to the painted page, each of which the poem places in our hands. The increased prominence of Walcott’s painting does not make him a major painter—he remains a major poet and a minor artist. But this asymmetry is not a reason to underestimate the paintings in Tiepolo’s Hound as having negligible value.3 Rather, the challenge is to see how visual images are coordinated and integrated with poetic text to create the volume’s overall effect. The paintings, as a group, play a lowkey but significant role in facilitating Walcott’s ultimate commitment to Caribbean landscape and culture. Viewed as two different narratives, the poetic text and the visual images are interestingly out of sync. The black mongrel is present from the beginning (1.1.1; p. 4), even before the spectacular vision of the white hound is announced (1.1.3; p. 7). But the repeated, seemingly incidental and inconsequential, references to the black mongrel pass by largely unnoticed. This detail does not register because the revelation of its symbolic meaning is deferred, and the immediate emphasis falls instead on the imperative search for the image of the white hound. Only toward the end does Walcott explicitly formulate the relation between white hound and black mongrel as a choice he must make between two different allegiances and courses of action. Throughout the volume, the paintings silently forecast Walcott’s eventual turn to Caribbean culture. It is as though the paintings know the outcome long before the poetic text is ready to reach this conclusion. While the verse traces its long European trajectory, the paintings never leave home. Collectively, the paintings quietly convey the impression of an unassuming but solid and enduring Caribbean connection by providing a detailed visual foundation. In a poetic passage that repeats the word nine times, Walcott celebrates Camille Pissarro’s devotion to the “ordinary”: “some critics think his work is ordinary, / but the ordinary is the miracle” (4.25.2; p. 155). Walcott’s paintings represent the ordinary in the specific form of Caribbean ordinariness. Because there is a time lag before Walcott is willing to recognize that his version of the ordinary lies elsewhere, the function of the paintings is to serve as a marker, a place225

CALLALOO holder, a groundwork, that maintains the figure of home until the poetic text can fully embrace it. For a book that spends so much time in Europe, it is noteworthy that, out of twentysix paintings, only two are located in the “Old World” (1.5.4; p. 30). Positioned together at the beginning of Book Two, both appropriately coincide with Pissarro’s arrival in Paris to confront European cultural greatness. English Garden, Stratford-onAvon, and St. Malo on the French side of the English Channel designate the general area surrounding the port of entry of Pissarro’s steamship (1.5.4; p. 30) in Le Havre.4 The Stratford location of the first painting evokes Shakespeare as an icon of the great tradition; the statue that dominates the garden is reminiscent of another icon, Venus de Milo. The whiteness of the statue resonates not only with the image of the white hound, but also with the statues in Parisian museums that proclaim Pissarro’s exclusion: “but marbles turn their heads away from him” (2.6.1; p. 35); “There are no Negroes in the pantheon / of bleached albino marbles” (2.6.2; p. 37). In the second painting, the groomed black dog on the leash held by the well-dressed figure on promenade cannot be mistaken for the unkempt, uncared for, mongrel associated with the Caribbean. Rather, the black mongrel is visually present, if at all, in the faint outline of the dog to the right of the red pail in Baiting the Hook (Book Two). This barely perceptible, virtually invisible image is a limit case of the inconspicuousness of Caribbean culture held in reserve. Despite the adjective black, the Caribbean paintings do not exclusively depict an isolated, self-contained black population. Drawing on the idea of mixture implied by the term mongrel,5 the paintings display a racially mixed culture that includes white figures, whose presence is partly explained by the economic reality of tourism. Examples are Beach at Vieux Fort, Doctrine, and The Swimmer in Books Two, Three, and Four, respectively. The representations of Walcott’s partner Sigrid Nama in The Chess Player (Book Two)6 and his daughter in Anna (Book Three) suggest his personal involvement in a circuit of Caribbean–North American travel and, more specifically, in a Boston–St. Lucia route. Anna’s Boston University sweatshirt defines the Northern point of an axis whose Southern terminus is indicated by the tourist map of St. Lucia posted on the wall in the portrait of Nama, to whom the poem is dedicated. The two family portraits are united by their similar profusion of multicolor tropical patterns in cushions, plants, and paintings or window view. This North–South axis presents a different geographical orientation that unobtrusively counters the imperatives of the cross-Atlantic journey and the European destination. The “New World” undercurrent is reinforced by awareness of how, in his prose commentary on art in the 1990s, Walcott constructs a Caribbean artistic tradition consisting of Winslow Homer, Romare Bearden, and, implicitly, himself. The importance of Walcott’s investment in a regional artistic tradition is underlined by the energized lyricism with which he invokes this resource in the notations on Homer in the essays “On Hemingway” and “Jackie Hinkson” and on Bearden in “Reflections on Omeros.” The tie with Bearden is direct: after both appeared in Chant of Saints, a founding text of Afro-American studies originally published as the Fall and Winter numbers of The Massachusetts Review in 1977, their careers intersected when Walcott asked to use The Sea Nymph, one of the images in Bearden’s “Odysseus Collages” 226

CALLALOO (Chant of Saints, plates between pp. 158 and 159), as the cover illustration for his 1979 volume, The Star-Apple Kingdom (King 360). Subsequently, the two collaborated on The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden (1983), and Walcott also wrote a poetic tribute, “To Romare Bearden,” for a 1984 exhibition of Bearden’s work. The conjunction of Homer and Bearden occurs a decade before Tiepolo’s Hound in Omeros where, as Walcott acknowledges throughout “Reflections,” Bearden’s “Odysseus Collages” were deeply influential, and where the force of Homer’s Gulf Stream (1899) is explicitly recognized as a positive inspiration (4.26.1; pp. 183–4). Kobena Mercer’s emphasis on Bearden’s modernism is particularly challenging in this connection because it suggests that, by positioning himself in the role of mediator between Homer and Bearden, Walcott is situated at a fruitful point of tension between traditionalist and modernist styles. At the same time, Walcott’s focus on Homer’s depiction of light calls attention to modernist, and even deconstructive, aspects of Homer’s Caribbean watercolors. In bringing together three artists linked by a shared seascape—Homer in Nassau and the Bahamas, Bearden in St. Martin, and himself in St. Lucia and Trinidad—Walcott creates a richly and densely textured network of visual associations that serves to shield and protect as well as to inspire him. In the context of Tiepolo’s Hound, we can understand Walcott’s own paintings as alluding to his Caribbean predecessors Homer and Bearden and thus offering from the outset an alternative to the European tradition from which, upon arrival, Pissarro is alienated.

The Moment of Gauguin Considered as art history in verse, Tiepolo’s Hound presents a problem of coordination because of its vast, overwhelming range of reference: how is this abundant, diverse material organized? The poem provides two consistent threads for us to follow. The first thread involves a set of two motifs—the image of blacks in Western European art and the genre of artist self-portraits. Throughout, Walcott is careful to record examples of black figures appearing in paintings so that the poem becomes a catalog of such instances. Walcott moves from “Ruben’s black faces // devoutly drawn” (1.3.1; p. 16) and “generous frescoes” with “turbanned Moors at the edge of a feast” (2.6.2; p. 37) to eloquent generalization: “Painting releases our benign surprise / at a coal face, while we take a white hound // for granted, but what if among Three Magis / in the rush manger one lifts a black hand?” (4.19.4; p. 122). As the words devoutly, generous, and benign imply, Walcott is never less than appreciative. For the motif of self-portraiture, Walcott takes Rembrandt as his reference point: “Rembrandt’s self-portraits / in gnawing darkness as light leaves his flesh” (2.6.1; p. 35). Rubens and Rembrandt thus stand as coordinates for two lines of development that are both thematic and structural and ultimately converge in Book Four. The second thread that leads us through the poem’s labyrinth is Walcott’s concentration on two principal painters, Tiepolo and Pissarro. The organizational force of this double focus does not become fully apparent, however, until the final book. In the poem’s overall geographical frame, sites unfold in sequence from the Caribbean of Book One, 227

CALLALOO through Pissarro’s Paris and Pontoise in Book Two, Pissarro’s interlude in London and return to France in Book Three, and finally to Tiepolo’s Venice in Book Four. Although his significance is signaled at the beginning, substantial encounter with Tiepolo is postponed until the end. The effect of this delay is to produce striking differences in the poem’s pacing. Books Two and Three move in a loose narrative manner; the rate sharply accelerates with the tightened dramatic intensity of Book Four. Interestingly, despite the primary attention to Pissarro and Tiepolo in the poem as a whole, the major painter in Book One is Gauguin. The first book belongs to Gauguin by virtue of Walcott’s two successive paintings of Gauguin in the middle of the book. Gauguin serves as an introductory figure that allows Walcott to broach the poem’s key issues. First and foremost is the way “the colour of his Muse” (1.3.1; p. 17) justifies and redirects attention to nonwhite figures: “He made us seek / what we knew and loved: the burnished skins // of pawpaws and women” (1.3.1; pp. 16–17). In the lower left quadrant of Gauguin’s Studio is a prone woman reminiscent of Manao Tupapau.7 Although Walcott discreetly blocks our view of her lower body, the association with Gauguin’s image is sufficient to recall the brown figure’s sexual availability and subservience highlighted by the color-enhanced anus. In shifting to Gauguin in Martinique, Walcott tacitly revises and sanitizes Gauguin’s representation of dark women through the restoration of their decorum and propriety. Here the powerful, directive brown woman stands behind Gauguin with her hand on his left shoulder, her fingers seeming to point downward as though identifying the red spot that defines the artist’s nipple. Moreover, the woman’s headscarf overlaps with the framed inset behind her of the woman mending,8 thereby suggesting a continuum between the two. If the mending woman were to burst out of the frame and emerge as the woman who now stands forth in full size, then we can imagine the former’s dignity and modestly held strength being converted and transformed into the power of the latter. Simply appreciative, Walcott raises no critical questions about Gauguin’s exoticism, unless one hears a trace of irony in the sanctification of “Saint Paul.” For Walcott, the crucial matter is that Gauguin actually painted in the Caribbean island of Martinique9 and hence disrupted the automatic convention by which artistic power flows centripetally toward the European center to the detriment of the periphery. When, at the end of the poem, Walcott expresses his regret at the loss of Pissarro’s potential contribution to Caribbean art—“what colour was his Muse, / and what was there to paint except black skins?” (4.23.2; p. 143)—Gauguin is the name he cites to demonstrate the existence of other possibilities. In this regard, Gauguin’s reversal of direction offers a model that forecasts Walcott’s own symbolic return to the Caribbean. The image of Gauguin also prefigures the importance of self-portraiture. Although technically not a self-portrait because it was painted by Walcott, Gauguin in Martinique depicts the artist with a halo that alludes to Gauguin’s own self-presentation in the 1889 self-portrait.10 Moreover, Walcott portrays Gauguin assuming a stance at the canvas as if he were painting himself. In one of the poem’s greatest nonverbal gestures, Gauguin’s left hand holding the brush is echoed, toward the very end, by the positioning of Walcott’s own hand and brush in his Self-Portrait. 228

CALLALOO “watching from the painting’s side” Walcott’s pursuit of Tiepolo is complicated from the start because not only is the identification of the painting with the sought-after white hound in doubt, but also the identity of the artist is uncertain because of the merging of Tiepolo (1696–1770) with his precursor in the genre of feast paintings, Veronese (1528–1588): “Everything blurs. Even its painter. Veronese / or Tiepolo in a turmoil of gesturing flesh” (1.1.3; p. 8). In fact, despite the poem’s title, he initially thinks in terms of Feast in the House of Levi (1.1.3; pp. 7–8) by Veronese.11 Subsequently, Walcott refers to the two artists as a pair—“my two Venetians” (4.19.2; p. 118), “painted by both” (4.21.4; p. 133). This ambiguity leads to a fusion of the two artists that conveys a broad historical sweep across the Renaissance period. Insofar as Walcott’s long poems participate in the epic tradition, he must come to terms with the racial divisions endemic to the epic in the formative period of Renaissance nationalist expansion and empire building, as demonstrated by Maureen Quilligan. In “Reflections on Omeros,” Walcott defends against this definition of epic: “The difference, I would think (and the reason why I don’t like the idea of its being called an epic), is that a particular epic, any epic, has a kind of political destiny” (243). But Walcott’s denial is an acknowledgment of the problem, a problem he cannot ultimately avoid. In terms of visual culture, the work of Veronese exhibits the presence of African blacks that results from Europe’s increasing international reach. In a summary statement of his studies of Veronese and of the Feast in the House of Levi in particular, Paul Kaplan reminds us not only that the racially inflected Venice of Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) comes chronologically between the two periods of Veronese and Tiepolo, but also that the representation of blacks is a constant that connects the two: “The black retainers who are so common, for instance, in the paintings of Tiepolo, are derived from the sixteenth-century images of Paolo Veronese, and also from the more or less continual black presence in Venice itself” (“The Earliest Images of Othello” 179). From this standpoint, the confusion of Veronese and Tiepolo can be seen, not as an annoying failure of academic exactitude, but rather as a useful compression that makes it possible to address a racial phenomenon that spans two centuries. Walcott’s engagement with Tiepolo culminates in encounters with the series of paintings of Antony and Cleopatra and with Apelles Painting Campaspe.12 As the quest becomes more highly pressured, Walcott more directly identifies himself as the object of the search: “I was searching for myself now” (4.20.2; p. 124). The presence of black attendants in Cleopatra’s retinue is turned to Walcott’s advantage because the transfer of attention from the hound to the Moor redefines the quest and facilitates the shift of focus to Walcott himself: “This was something I had not seen before, / since every figure lent the light perfection, // that every hound had its attendant Moor / restraining it with dutiful attention” (4.20.2; pp. 124–25). This unexpected insight leads by a further transition to Walcott himself and hence to a new sense of urgency: “I was that grey Moor clutching a wolfhound” (4.20.2; p. 124). A similar process of identification plays out in relation to Apelles Painting Campaspe, where the long-sought white hound is suddenly reduced to a tiny pooch—the 229

CALLALOO “white lapdog” (4.21.1; p. 129)—in the lower right corner. Walcott’s attention is drawn to the black attendant as a separate figure: “An admiring African peers from the canvas’s edge”; “The Moor silent with privilege” (4.21.1; p. 129). Again Walcott takes the step of direct identification: “we presume from the African’s posture that I too am learning / both skill and conversion watching from the painting’s side” (4.21.1; p. 129). The status of this final remark is not immediately clear; the tone feels throwaway and sardonic. Yet there is deeper significance at work here connected with Tiepolo’s representation of himself as an artist. For the first time in the poem, the two motifs of images of blacks and artists’ selfportraiture are brought together within a single frame. This convergence prepares us for the impact of Walcott’s self-portrait, which appears as though without warning later in Book Four. The result of the black page’s imagined “learning” by “watching from the painting’s side” is translated into Walcott’s action of taking on the role of artist and portraying himself as a black man, thus uniting the two hitherto separate roles. In Walcott’s self-portrait, the act of self-exploration is literally present in the use of the mirror to produce the artist’s image.13 The painting shows Walcott painting with his left hand; the photograph on the back of the book jacket proves that he is right-handed. The self-portrait brings Walcott full circle back to the Caribbean because he grew up in the presence of his deceased father’s self-portrait—“his own face, with a soft frown” (1.2.2; p. 11), “the blank unfurrowed brow / of his self-portrait” (1.2.3; p. 12). With his own act of self-portraiture, Walcott completes his acceptance of this legacy of his origins.14

“we were there to draw” The entire poem hinges on an extended parallel between Pissarro and Walcott that asks us to consider their similarities and their differences. The sense of similarity comes from the idea that both go forth to challenge the European heritage as outsiders: both are born outside the European center in the peripheral location of the Caribbean (St. Thomas and St. Lucia) and, in addition, both are ethnic outsiders (Jewish and Afro-Caribbean).15 Although Walcott gains enormous poetic and emotional mileage from this genuine feeling of commonality, he also at times exaggerates and overplays the parallel. In an expansive burst, Walcott generously characterizes the rejected group of impressionists: “they were the Academy’s outcasts, its niggers” (2.7.3; p. 45). Yet this generosity seems excessive. At such moments, alliance with Pissarro becomes extremely thin and transparent: investment in Pissarro comes across as a projection in which Pissarro serves as a surrogate or screen for the expression of Walcott’s personal experience. Even more unconvincing and wishful are Walcott’s repeated strenuous efforts to attribute to Pissarro a recollection of the Caribbean as a primary artistic influence: “Camille Pissarro must have heard the noise / of loss-lamenting slaves, and if he did, // they tremble in the poplars of Pontoise, / the trembling, elegiac tongues 230

CALLALOO he painted” (4.25.2; pp. 157–58). This interpretation is a stretch that can only be explained as Walcott’s need to maintain the bond with Pissarro at any cost and to gloss over their differences. The idea of total unity and harmony rests on a conflation of Jewish and AfroCaribbean experience. But the Pissarro–Walcott parallel is most interesting when it breaks down under the pressure of difference. After bringing his relation with Tiepolo to a resolution in the first half of Book Four, Walcott turns to the unfinished business of addressing the differences with Pissarro that he has tried to avoid. Although Walcott planted a hint of accusation at the start—“We is your roots. Without us you weak” (1.4.4; p. 25), only in Book Four does Walcott fully develop its implications. Returning to actual images of blacks in drawings that Pissarro made before leaving the Caribbean, Walcott stages an imagined conversation between the two artists. Sounding a note of betrayal, anger, and estrangement, Walcott acknowledges a separation: “they were never his people, we were there to draw” (4.22.2; p. 136).16 Quickly moving from the impersonal “they” to “we” to the individualized “I,” Walcott personalizes the argument. As in the case of Tiepolo, he now directly identifies himself with Pissarro’s black figures: “but in nineteenth-century St. Thomas / my body filled his pencilled silhouette” (4.22.4; p. 137); “I am being drawn, // anonymous as my own ancestor, / my Africa erased” (4.22.4; p. 138). Particularly graphic is Walcott’s rendering of the sensation of being enclosed and confined by the drawing: “I felt a line enclose my lineaments”; “I shrank into the posture they had chosen”; “keeping my position as a model does, / a young slave” (4.23.1; pp. 140–41). Speaking as the embodiment of the black images drawn by Pissarro and Melbye, Walcott elevates the confrontation to the level of dialogue: “I and my kind move and not move; your drawing / is edged with a kindness my own lines contain, // but yours may just be love of your own calling / and not for us” (4.23.1; p. 141). Pissarro’s reply acknowledges “the black soil of my birthplace” (4.23.2; p. 142), but this cannot alter the fact that “St. Thomas stays unpainted” (4.23.2; p. 143). The result is that Pissarro and Walcott go their separate ways. Pissarro’s one-way journey to France leaves open to Walcott the opportunity to make his commitment to the creation of Caribbean art, an opportunity celebrated in the keyword unpainted: “something still unpainted, on its own ground” (4.22.4; p. 138). At the visual level, this resolution based on the acknowledgment of difference is presented in the meeting of artists’ self-portraits. The theme of Pissarro’s selfportraiture has been broached earlier in the affectionate evocation of his first selfrepresentation: “By forty, bald, he looks twice that old, as / from his alpine dome, a beard’s avalanche // cascades between the banks of sloping shoulders, / silvered with ash as a brown autumn branch” (2.10.2; p. 62).17 Now, in the poem’s last stanza, Walcott faces the late self-portrait in Dallas, one of three self-portraits painted toward the end of Pissarro’s life: “Pissarro in old age, / as we stand doubled in each other’s eyes” (4.26.1; p.159).18 What makes this mutual exchange of gazes even more moving is our knowledge that Walcott’s own painted self-portrait has already been presented and his identity already established. A contrast between the two self-portraits registers difference in visual details. In place of what Walcott calls “the halo of the bohemian beret” (4.26.1; p. 160) in Pissarro, he in a humorous touch wears a humble 231

CALLALOO baseball-style cap with visor. While behind Pissarro is a window opening out to a view of Paris, Walcott’s background is a stark black blank slate suggesting the tabula rasa of the yet unpainted Caribbean. A final visual counterpoint involves the implied dialogue between Pissarro’s late images of the Seine from Ile de la Cité with Walcott’s final painting of Becune Point. Two references to Pissarro—“one on the Ile de Paris’s moss-blackened walls / with barges creasing the mud-coloured Seine” (4.23.2; p. 143) and “his catalogue of views of the great river / dragging its barges” (4.25.2; p. 155)—suggest the specific series of the Seine painted from the hotel window overlooking the Square du Vert-Gallant.19 Although Walcott does not mention it, all these views include the Louvre, and interpretation of the museum’s status in these paintings is crucial. Earlier in the poem Walcott portrays the Louvre from Pissarro’s point of view as an institutionalization of a hostile, closed artistic tradition—“Museums demean him” (2.6.1; p. 34)—and Walcott goes on sympathetically to support Pissarro’s impulse to destroy the old order to make way for a new start—“this anarchist, arms flailing the air, / who would burn the Louvre” (2.7.4; p. 45). One could attribute Pissarro’s previous rejection to youthful immaturity so as to justify seeing the late images of the Louvre as signs of positive response and mature acceptance. However, close examination shows a visual dynamic that is far more complicated and problematic. In The Louvre from the Pont Neuf (1902),20 to take one example, the Louvre stretches across the middle of the painting as a massive band that asserts its visual dominance. Yet, at the same time, other elements counteract this prominence. The Louvre is sandwiched between two even larger bands: the cloud formations press down from above, while below the river current sweeps past on its own course, creating a perspectival line that moves the eye past and away from the museum buildings. The pull of this visual vector is increased by the flow of river traffic going by oblivious to the museum, which is screened by the line of trees in front. On the other side of the river, the solid square, whose activity also competes for our attention, provides a viewing platform that, in theory, offers an excellent vantage point for seeing the Louvre. But, in fact, none of the observers focuses on the museum. The lines of sight lead us in other directions: the four people standing at the side railing on the right seem to peer downward at the water, while the pair at the front rail gazes out in the distance at a point downriver. Our attention is further deflected from the Louvre by the color scheme, in which the predominant drab, beige palate is relieved only by the tiny bits of bright reddish and green color that pull away from the Louvre. The line of color specks runs from the quay below the Louvre on the right to the woman’s hat, the tree trunk, and the brushy vegetation in the square on the left; the largest bits of color are at river level on the boats in the middle. The ultimate effect is to remove the Louvre from the limelight and to put it in its place by surrounding it with alternate and diversionary clusters of visual action. Walcott’s neglecting to mention the Louvre supports this analysis of the Louvre’s downgraded visual priority. Pissarro’s barges, which do draw Walcott’s attention, correspond to the smaller boats that traverse the Caribbean. Pursuing the definition of epic in “Reflections on Omeros,” Walcott reduces it to a single image: “the moving sail, alone on the ocean, not a ship but something small on a large expanse of water, 232

CALLALOO trying to get somewhere” (235). In Tiepolo’s Hound, two paintings—Boy on a Wall, Rat Island in Book One and Pasture, Dry Season in Book Four—show a small, full sail out on the water. In Breakers, Becune Point at the end of the poem, a faint hint of sails in two white triangles on the horizon line provides a possible visual counterpart for the poetic image of the ocean “whose couplets race the furrowing wind, their maker, / with those homecoming sails on the horizon” (4.26.2; p. 162). Whereas Pissarro’s vision must absorb the Louvre to oppose it, Walcott’s Caribbean base means that he must reckon with, and transcend, a different institutional burden—“our open museum of bondage” (3.14.3; p. 89), the aftermath of the middle passage and chattel slavery. Determined to outflank both historical legacies—the institutions of the Louvre and of slavery—Walcott relies on “the salt that cures” (3.14.2; p. 89). This possibility is the difference in Walcott’s mind between the Old World and the New World, and Walcott turns the latter’s lack of culture to advantage by seeing its “sense of complete erasure” (“Reflections” 237) as a blessing—hence his constant appeal to the word benediction—and as a source of artistic freedom. Turning away from Pissarro, he turns in his final painting Breakers, Becune Point to an uncluttered, unfettered image of the sea whose openness represents the constant opportunity for a new start.

NOTES 1. Citations refer, first, to the book, section, and stanza numbers and, second, to the page number. 2. The higher profile that Tiepolo’s Hound gives to Walcott’s painting is anticipated by the 1998 exhibition in Albany, New York, which is documented by the Island Light website and reviewed by Gail Levin and John B. Van Sickle in “Painterly Visions.” 3. In the first wave of commentary, A. Alvarez dismisses the paintings (though not all are watercolors) as “a not particularly relevant selection of his watercolors” (27). To varying degrees, other early critics—Paul Breslin (285–86), Paula Burnett, T. J. Cribb, Adam Kirsch, and Gail Levin and John B. Van Sickle in “Paris No Paradise”—suggest ways in which the accompanying paintings contribute to our sense of the poem as a whole. 4. In discussing Pissarro’s last late series on Le Havre in The Impressionist and the City, Richard Brettell notes that this port was Pissarro’s point of arrival in 1855 (196). 5. The metaphoric extension of “mongrel” as a dog to convey the idea of human hybridity is apparent from Walcott’s usage elsewhere, as exemplified in the 1970 title essay of What the Twilight Says: “mongrel as I am, something prickles in me when I see the word ‘Ashanti’ as with the word ‘Warwickshire,’ both separately intimating my grandfathers’ roots, both baptizing this neither proud nor ashamed bastard, this hybrid, this West Indian” (9). See also Stuart Hall’s account in “Mongrel Selves.” 6. Paul Breslin identifies Nama as the sitter in The Chess Player (286). In the context of the emphasis on visual art, Nama’s professional career as an art dealer is noteworthy (King 461, 551). However, there is confusion in Bruce King’s biography concerning whether, according to the original plan, Walcott (598) or Nama (627) was to write the introduction for what later became Tiepolo’s Hound. 7. Craven’s Treasury of Art Masterpieces, Walcott’s childhood reference work, which contains no Pissarro, has one example of Gauguin: Manao Tupapau (546). Recent discussions of the painting include Richard Brettell’s The Art of Paul Gauguin (no. 154, pp. 279–82), Griselda Pollock’s Avant-Garde Gambits and “Territories of Desire,” and Nancy Mathews (181–83). 8. The posture of the woman engaged in handwork such as sewing or mending is traceable to Gauguin’s early portrait of his wife, Mette Gauguin, 1878 (The Passionate Eye, no. 53), which Fronia Wissman discusses in relation to Gauguin’s Nude Study of 1880 (344–45). Other examples of this stance are Millet’s Woman Mending of 1853 (Murphy, no. 29, p. 60) and Night of 1867 (Tilborgh, nos. 37–38, pp. 107–10). The motif is also abundantly represented in

233

CALLALOO

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

Pissarro’s oeuvre. Although Walcott’s mother supplemented her teaching salary with a sewing business, her stance is associated with a sewing machine (King 12–13; Fordham 83–85; Walcott, Midsummer, poem XVII). The ethnicity of Walcott’s mending woman is not absolutely clear because her brown color might be attributable to the monochromatic effect, which stands out in such sharp contrast to the multicolored presentation of the other frames; nevertheless, I assume that her brownness is intended to be perceived as racially significant. On Gauguin’s stay in Martinique, see Mathews’ account (83–90). Commentary on Gauguin’s 1889 self-portrait includes Brettell’s Art of Paul Gauguin (no. 92, pp. 165–67) and Mathews (142–44). At one point Walcott expresses his frustration with the Veronese–Tiepolo ambiguity by reference to Thomas Craven: “but I had lost the page // in that book of Craven’s where the spectral dog / haunted dark hose, and I felt the old rage // at my stubborn uncertainty. Research / could prove the hound Tiepolo’s or Veronese’s // but I refused. Faith was a closed church / like my old TREASURY OF ART MASTERPIECES” (4.19.1; p. 117). If we open this book, we find only a single image for each artist—in Veronese’s case, Feast in the House of Levi (178) and, in Tiepolo’s case, Rinaldo Taking Leave of Armida (194), a painting Walcott invokes shortly thereafter almost as though he’s taking a surreptitious peek at Craven (4.19.2; p. 119). On these two topics, see, respectively, Keith Christiansen’s “Tiepolo, Theater, and the Notion of Theatricality” and Giambattista Tiepolo (no. 11, pp. 84–86). In the latter, Christiansen identifies the Moor as “probably Tiepolo’s servant Ali” (84). The mirror’s role in self-portraiture is described in Zirka Filipczak’s afterword. Bruce King’s opening chapter on Walcott’s family provides a summary of the father’s life and early death (9–11) and of his artistic legacy (14–15). Nicholas Mirzoeff’s approach in “Pissarro’s Passage” stresses ways in which the artist’s career was shaped by his “Caribbean Sephardic Jewishness” (58). Examples of the drawings are shown in Brettell and Zukowski’s Camille Pissarro in the Carribean. Pissarro’s self-portrait of 1873, which is shown in Richard Brettell’s Impression: Painting Quickly (no. 152, pp. 215–16), was painted when he was 43, not the round number 40 that Walcott uses. But Walcott’s beautifully apt verbal description accurately describes this painting. The three late self-portraits are numbers 1114, 1115, and 1316 in the Pissarro–Venturi catalogue raisonné. The specific portrait to which Walcott refers can be identified as the one described by Richard Brettell in Impressionist Paintings (126–27); it has both “the window frame” (4.26.1; p. 159) and “the bohemian beret” (4.26.1; p. 160), while, of the other two, one lacks the window and one has a hat that is clearly not a beret. This series comprises section 6 of Richard Brettell’s The Impressionist and the City. Another possibility, the Rouen series in section 1, can be ruled out because the poem clearly refers to the Paris segment of the Seine. Richard Brettell gives the title of this painting as The Raised Terrace of the Pont-Neuf in The Impressionist and the City (no. 97, p. 133).

WORKS CITED Alvarez, A. “Visions of Light.” New York Review of Books 47, 8 (May 11, 2000): 27–28. Breslin, Paul. Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Bretell, Richard R. Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860–1890. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2000. ———. Impressionist Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture from the Wendy and Emery Reeves Collection. Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1995. Brettell, Richard R., et al. The Art of Paul Gauguin. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1988. Brettell, Richard R., and Joachim Pissarro. The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro’s Series Paintings. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992. Brettell, Richard R., and Karen Zukowski. Camille Pissarro in the Caribbean, 1850–1855: Drawings from the Collection at Olana. St. Thomas, USVI: Hebrew Congregation of St. Thomas, 1996. Burnett, Paula. “An Ordinary Miracle or Two.” The Independent 2 Sept. 2000: 9. Christiansen, Keith. Giambattista Tiepolo, 1696–1770. New York: Metropolitan Museum, 1996. ———. “Tiepolo, Theater, and the Notion of Theatricality.” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 665–92. Craven, Thomas, ed. A Treasury of Art Masterpieces from the Renaissance to the Present Day. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939.

234

CALLALOO Cribb, T. J. “Walcott, Poet and Painter.” Kenyon Review 23, 2 (Spring 2001): 176–84. Filipczak, Zirka Zaremba. “The 20th Century and the End of the Motif of the Lay Art Viewer.” Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550–1700. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987. 202–05. Fordham, Finn. “Mothers’ Boys Brooding on Bubbles: Studies of Two Poems by Geoffrey Hill and Derek Walcott.” Critical Quarterly 44, 1 (Spring 2002): 80–96. Harper, Michael S., and Robert B. Stepto, eds. Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. Hall, Stuart. “Our Mongrel Selves.” New Statesman & Society 19 June 1992: Special Supplement 6–8. Island Light: Watercolor and Oil Paintings by Derek Walcott and Donald Hickson. Oct. 2–Nov. 15, 1998. University Art Museum, University at Albany. 19 Nov. 2002. Kaplan, Paul H. D. “The Earliest Images of Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 171–86. ———. “Veronese and the Inquisition: The Geopolitical Context.” Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts. Ed. Elizabeth C. Childs. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1997. 85–124. ———. “Veronese’s Images of Foreigners.” Nuovi Studi su Paolo Veronese. Ed. Massimo Gemin. Venice: Arsenale, 1990. 308–16. ———. “Veronese’s Last ‘Last Supper.’” Arte Veneta 41 (1987): 51–62. King, Bruce. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Kirsch, Adam. “Singing the Griot’s Song.” TLS Sept. 15, 2000: 10–11. Levin, Gail, and John B. Van Sickle. “The Painterly Visions of Derek Walcott and Donald Hinkson.” Latino(a) Research Review 4, 1–2 (1999): 46–48. ———. “Paris No Paradise for Pissarro in New Epic Poem.” Art Journal 60, 1 (Spring 2001): 107–09. Mathews, Nancy Mowll. Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Mercer, Kobena. “Romare Bearden: African American Modernism at Mid-Century.” Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies. Ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002. 29–46. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Pissarro’s Passage: The Sensation of Caribbean Jewishness in Diaspora.” Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. London: Routledge, 2000. 57–75. Murphy, Alexandra R., et al. Jean-François Millet: Drawn into the Light. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1999. The Passionate Eye: Impressionist and Other Master Paintings from the Collection of Emil G. Bührle, Zurich. Zurich: Artemis, 1990. Pissarro, Ludovic Rodo, and Lionello Venturi. Camille Pissarro: Son Art-Son Oeuvre. 2 vols. Paris: Paul Rosenberg, 1939. Pollock, Griselda. Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Color of Art History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. ———. “Territories of Desire: Reconsiderations of an African Childhood.” Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement. Ed. George Robertson, et al. London: Routledge, 1994. 63–89. Quilligan, Maureen. “Freedom, Service, and the Trade in Slaves: The Problem of Labor in Paradise Lost.” Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 213–34. ———. “On the Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Slavery.” Edmund Spenser: Essays on Culture and Allegory. Ed. Jennifer Klein Morrison and Matthew Greenfield. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2000. 43–64. Tilborgh, Louis van, ed. Van Gogh & Millet. Zwolle: Waanders, 1989. Walcott, Derek. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. ———. “Jackie Hinkson.” Massachusetts Review 35 (1994): 413–17. ———. Midsummer. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984. ———. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. ———. “On Hemingway.” What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 107–14. ———. “Reflections on Omeros.” South Atlantic Quarterly 96 (1997): 229–46. ———. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. ———. “To Romare Bearden.” Romare Bearden. Rituals of the Obeah: Watercolors, 14 November–15 December, 1984. New York: Cordier & Ekstrom, 1984. Walcott, Derek, and Romare Bearden. The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1983. Wissman, Fronia E. “Realists among the Impressionists.” The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886. Ed. Charles S. Moffett. San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986. 337–52.

235

CALLALOO

TRIANGULATION AND THE AESTHETICS OF TEMPORALITY IN TIEPOLO’S HOUND

by George Handley

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Camille Pissarro was peacefully situated in the city of Louveciennes, some eleven miles from Paris. Otto Von Bismarck laid siege to Paris in an attempt to consolidate Prussian power within the newly united German confederation, and the winds of war eventually chased Pissarro, Claude Monet, and many other refugees across the channel to England. It was there at the various museums of London where Pissarro and Monet engaged in a fruitful visual dialogue with the great landscape artists of England, most notably John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. Although they admired Gainsborough, Lawrence, and Reynolds, among others, Pissarro commented to a friend that “we were struck chiefly by the landscape-painters, who shared more in our aim with regard to ‘plein air’, light, and fugitive effects” (qtd. in Adler, 45). Pissarro took special note of Turner’s capacity to depict the effects of light on snow and ice “by using a number of brushstrokes of different colours placed next to each other, rather than white alone” (Adler 46). The image of these two great impressionists before the work of their English compatriots of art has fascinated art historians because of the influence it suggests that Turner and Constable may have had on the impressionist movement, but the fascination of this encounter for Derek Walcott is more personal. Turner’s 1838 painting, The Fighting Téméraire, which hung in the National Gallery before the eyes of Monet and Pissarro, also appeared in Thomas Craven’s book, Masterpieces of Art, a copy of which Walcott inherited from his deceased father. Warwick Walcott died when his son was only a year old, but he left behind his own amateur copies of Turner and other painters to stimulate his son’s painterly imagination. The work depicts the famous retirement of the ship that had helped England to victory in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar during the Napoleonic Wars against Spanish and French warships. It exhibits the most outstanding visual trait of Turner’s work: the sunset reflected on the water, shining the declining light, halved by the horizon of the sea, directly into the eyes of the viewer. The moon also appears in the image, further suggesting the dividing line between what was and what will be. Turner enables his viewers to contemplate time as the protagonist of so many of his works, infiltrating and affecting every aspect of the historical drama that he depicts, subordinating the event’s significance to the sun’s movement. Turner’s aesthetics of temporality has interested Walcott since he was a boy, as evidenced by his references to Turner’s work in Another Life, his 1974 autobiographical poem, and of course, most recently in Tiepolo’s Hound.1 Seeing historical events through the lens of time’s 236

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 236–256

CALLALOO protagonism, in its small but relentless shifts and changes, has allowed Walcott to explore the various dualities that constitute his world—dualities of racial difference, Caribbean and European cultures, human and natural histories, poetry and painting—without falling into the logic of hierarchies or false dichotomies. Even despite his own intensely historical interest in Camille Pissarro in Tiepolo’s Hound, ultimately Walcott is uninterested in chronology and its implications of patrimonial inheritance or hierarchical alignments of cultures and geographies. Walcott prefers to imagine Pissarro’s encounter with Turner as an anachronistic triangulated meeting of disparate places (France, England, the Caribbean) and times (early 1800s, late 1800s, early twentieth century). He writes: Triangulation: in his drawing room my father copies The Fighting Téméraire. He and Monet admire the radiant doom of the original; all three men revere the crusted barge, its funnel bannering fire, its torch guiding the great three-master on to sink in the infernal asphalt of an empire turning more spectral, like the mastodon. (Tiepolo’s Hound 76) Triangulation is a spatial order used in surveying to be able to delimit a location by means of measuring its distance from two distinct spots. Triangulation not only confirms the distance by means of two witnesses, but it also spatially places the three locations on a similar plane, allowing us to use any two of the points to determine the location of the third. No single location, then, exists without relation to the other two, and hence there is no center nor margin, only relation. Murray Krieger once argued that a fundamental distinction between literature and painting was a difference between temporal and spatial order, respectively. Consequently, ekphrasis is that moment when literature attempts to defy this binary and instead establishes a spatial plasticity (285).2 In Walcott’s poem, triangulation grants a spatial plasticity to the otherwise chronological relationship between the European masters and the Caribbean acolyte, thus eliminating the values of priority and affiliation. Walcott’s father’s imitation of Turner could be gauged, of course, according to metropolitan norms, but once Walcott introduces Monet and Pissarro, both considered to be masters in their own right, they join Walcott’s father on the same plane of space as acolytes, learning not so much from Turner as from the motion of the sun. This ekphrastic spatial seeing, in Tiepolo’s Hound, is what Walcott calls “Time”; it synchronizes and frees the artistic imagination from the chronological constraints and demands of “History.”

237

CALLALOO The Specter of the Past Walcott has long been interested in the paradox that the decline of empire has given birth to rare and unsuspected beauty, and for this reason, he writes that, in decline, empire “turn[s] more spectral” and is thus presumably rendered more worthy as a subject for a work of art such as Turner’s (Tiepolo’s Hound 76). Thus, artists should not look back nostalgically or vengefully for what could have been or should have happened, but should instead devote themselves to the present visual beauty of color’s spectrum as determined by time’s shifting hand. As time and distance from specific locations increase, the result is “sharper definition, sun-startled angles / of trunks over a small stream, bright corners/ we had not thought preserved” (Tiepolo’s Hound 99). If the detritus of the past, as he once argued about Crusoe, has provided the material for present beauty, appreciating such beauty is not an homage to what has happened but rather a way to root oneself in a particular place in the wake of history’s fragmentations and to lay the foundation for future possibilities. But a spectral empire has another meaning. It is also a disembodied ghost—a visage—that haunts by sowing seeds of uncertainty about legitimacy and ultimately about one’s freedom from the past. It is a past that we must confront and exorcise or else, as William Faulkner and Toni Morrison have both thematized so well, what has been repressed will return in a tragic and foreboding manner. A spectral past has the capacity to steal away one’s pleasure in one’s home environment because of its vague call to an undefined and unreachable but once coherent past. This additional meaning is suggested in the first book of Tiepolo’s Hound, where Walcott first introduces us to Charlotte Amalie of St. Thomas in the nineteenth century. He imagines Pissarro’s Jewish childhood; the smells and sights of Dronningens Gade, including “The Synagogue of Blessing and Peace and Loving Deeds” where Pissarro presumably attended; and a “mongrel,” the first appearance of a hound in the poem that he later contrasts with the hound he remembers seeing in a painting. He concludes this opening poem by confessing the artificiality of his reconstruction of the past: Their street of letters fades, this page of print in the bleached light of last century recalls with the sharp memory of a mezzotint: days of cane carts, the palms’ high parasols. (4) The whiteness of the page, by contrast to the black letters of his poetry, serves to make his memory legible. His point is that precisely because the past is unknown and forgotten and the letters, signs, and maps that would tell the story of the past on its own terms have faded, the past is ultimately a blank space to be filled with art, like a white canvas with paint, or a printing plate engraved by memories, as in mezzotint. In the next poem of this first section, Walcott is in Trinidad, thinking about Pissarro, and witnesses through “wooden window frames” a scene in which “a black dog crosses into Woodford Square.” He hears “tribal voices” emerging from a “stone church” nearby, even though these are not the nineteenth-century Jewish voices of 238

CALLALOO Pissarro’s synagogue in St. Thomas (5). Given Walcott’s location in Woodford Square in downtown Port of Spain, this is likely the Greyfriars Presbyterian Church, a church with “walls as bare as any synagogue / of painted images” (5). He asserts that: There was a shul in old-time Port of Spain, But where its site precisely was is lost In the sunlit net of maps whose lanes contain A spectral faith, white as the mongrel’s ghost. (5) Walcott attempts to find a parallel past in Trinidad, his only other home in the Caribbean, besides St. Lucia, for the better part of thirty years, but he fails. The Jewish past of Port of Spain is only vaguely recollected and a black protestant analogy must take its place, again because of the relentless forces of amnesia, against which the brilliant confidence of a “sunlit net of maps” struggles.3 Despite the illuminating light of maps, similar to the “street of letters” in Pissarro’s St. Thomas, which have now been bleached to blankness, the past is inevitably lost. He writes in the concluding poem of the first section that “the exact perspective of loss” means that “the loved one’s features blur” because “as Time draws its veil, / . . . all you remember are her young knees” (8). Time’s passage breaks experience into seemingly unrelated metonymic fragments of a lost whole and thus the work of the artistic imagination becomes necessary. Maps and chronicles of the past exhibit “a spectral faith” by virtue of their confident reconstruction of the past; they do not believe, after their work is through, that any ghosts or traces of an abandoned past remain behind, unaccounted for. They point to a fixed reality without irony and belie their own fictionalization of the past. However, Walcott’s theme throughout the poem is that Time’s movement makes history possible but it also makes amnesia inevitable. Which begs the question: How can art acknowledge the ghosts of the past without exhibiting the arrogance of history’s “spectral faith”? It does so by pursuing the past at the same time that it recognizes the illusions of its imaginative work. Thus, Tiepolo’s Hound pursues the life of Pissarro and the identity of the hound’s creator, but in the end, after an exorcism of the these specters of the past, it abandons the pursuit and embraces the present. Specter then returns to its original register of meaning as aesthetic opportunity in the present made possible by a receding past. Walcott contrasts the “sepulchral” mongrel, a symbol of the reality of Caribbean poverty and uncertain parentage, with Tiepolo’s hound, which is the “mongrel’s ghost.” The titular hound is a haunting specter because it is triply removed from Caribbean reality by virtue of being a European hound, appearing in a painting by an unidentified European master, and emerging in Walcott’s memory and imagination. The mongrel’s reality, however, proves just as difficult to capture concretely as the identity of the hound’s creator. This is because every time the artist seizes upon something real and concrete in the Caribbean present, its representation departs from the real, like a ghost from a dead body. Art necessarily fails because of what is inevitably lost in translation.4 All representations, even poetic and pictorial, fail. Poetry, then, is not what is lost in translation, as Robert Frost once argued, but is more 239

CALLALOO specifically a language, unlike that of History, that self-consciously confesses that it is, at best, a translation and is thus both transparent and opaque, a continuity and a rupture. Tiepolo’s Hound consistently explores its own spectral faith, even at the same time that it confesses its historical doubts. His historical doubts arise when he paints what he sees and yet cannot be content with the results. He wants instead what he once called in Another Life “the paradoxical flash of an instant / in which every facet was caught / in a crystal of ambiguities” (Collected Poems 200). Another Life implicitly argues that metaphor, as opposed to mere visual representation, more ably explores doubts about the meaning of what he sees because of the poet’s awareness of the Caribbean’s multiple and competing historical legacies. He writes: “my hand was crabbed by that style, / this epoch, that school / or the next” and consequently he was always “sideways crawling” as a result of “this classic / condition of servitude” (Collected Poems 201). The results of such “sideways crawling” are anachronistic juxtapositions. In Tiepolo’s Hound, he continues to look out on Woodford Square on an empty and quiet Sunday, but he cannot keep his mind from wandering through several spaces and moments in time: . . . a frilled child with the hoop of the last century, and, just as it was in Charlotte Amalie, a slowly creaking sloop. Laventille’s speckled roofs, just as it was In Cazabon’s day (Tiepolo’s Hound 6). Three images, apparently from the past century, converge here: a child with a hoop skirt, a sloop in the capital of St. Thomas when Pissarro lived there, and the image of Laventille, the birthplace of steel drumming in the hills of Port of Spain in the time of Jean Michel Cazabon, Trinidad’s only painter of international acclaim from the nineteenth century.5 His juxtapositions jump from what is present to what may have once been and establish another triangular relation between his view from the window overlooking the Square, Cazabon’s depictions of the beauty and quaintness of colonial island life, and Pissarro’s early development as a painter in the Caribbean. More to the point, he relates the present and the past, images and words, and what Pissarro became and what he might have been had he stayed in the Caribbean. Chronology would suggest that Walcott’s powers of perception have been colonized. He cannot resist, for example, seeing “brush-point cypresses / like a Pissarro canvas” (6). He even seems to complain about the fact that “I kept seeing / things through [Pissarro’s] eyes” (154) and by comparison, the Caribbean seems to “withdraw before his dream” (154). But he is saved from any inferior servitude implied in such admiration by triangulating Cazabon, Pissarro, and himself, allowing him to share “the conviction their work carries” (155). Using the same triangular logic, he asserts that “Learning / did not betray [his father’s] race if he copied a warship’s / berth, a cinder from a Turner sunset burning” because of the unifying fact of Turner’s 240

CALLALOO and his father’s mutual devotion to rendering light (13). As he explains in a recent interview, his interest is not in art historical categories, but rather in art’s craft in its most elemental sense: My theory about painting is principally light, the theory of light, physical light. This may certainly not apply to abstract representation at all, and therefore I can be a dinosaur in terms of what my opinion is, in terms of the kind of painting that I like to do. There can be a name for it which can be representational, or something. But all that vocabulary comes from the centers. That vocabulary comes from London and Paris and Berlin and wherever. Therefore, when I encounter that vocabulary I feel anger at the fact that my choices are being defined in decades, in centuries, by people who I have nothing to do with, nothing in common with, basically. If someone in Berlin says “nobody paints like that anymore in Berlin, and what we are doing [is a new technique],” whatever that technique is, that is a chronological concept from history that includes art. In other words, “we have exhausted representation.” Therefore I am supposed to fall in line, chronologically, with the evolution of an art, and I am old-fashioned in the sense that I am staying in the kind of a context that may be nineteenth century, that may be eighteenth century, or whatever. What I resist is the definition and chronology imposed on me by the center. That’s what I object to. . . . I consider myself blessed that I was never a part of that, being aligned to a particular school.” (Personal interview, July 2001) Far from being a dinosaur, his anachronistic approach to art history frees him from colonial servitude. He notes, for example, that the reproductions of European masterworks, available to him and to his father before him, passed on their legacies of brilliance through a kind of holy “apostolic succession” (14). This succession is not without its ironies however. He is aware, for example, that these were: Paintings so far from life fermenting around us! The skeletal, scabrous mongrels foraging garbage, the moss-choked canals, back yards with contending odours purifying in smoke, then turn to a sepia page from the canals of Guardi, from a formal battle with banners, the carnival lances of Uccello’s pawing horses, to the chivalric panoply of tossing green bananas and the prongs of the ginger lily. (14) The fifteenth-century historical frescoes of Paolo Uccello and the eighteenth-century landscapes of Francesco Guardi cause a clash of visual comparisons between the apparent paucity of “monuments, . . . battles, martyrs” in the natural and primitive 241

CALLALOO Caribbean, to quote from “The Sea is History,” and the glory of European art (Collected Poems 364); St. Lucia’s “moss-choked canals” contrast the beauty of Guardi’s Venice as do its “tossing green bananas” in comparison to the “lances” in Italian Renaissance depictions of war. But Walcott does not apologize for these colonial ironies. He insists: No metamorphosis was required by the faiths that made all one: rock quarries with lions and crouched saints, or raindrop and dewdrop in measured incantation on the palm of a yam leaf, the communion of paints. (Tiepolo’s Hound 14–15) The dialectic of these two worlds in the poem becomes a single expression of art’s high calling to express the exhilaration of the present.

An Aesthetics of Time Regardless of how revolutionary they may have first been, works of art in museums and in catalogues have a tendency to become conventions of seeing and, when these works are landscapes, clichés of natural beauty. The risk is that a colonial admirer of European art will look around at the local landscape and disparage these particulars of light, vegetation, and vistas as signs of inferiority. Metropolitan norms internalized in this fashion by the locals result in what Walcott once called the “insulted landscape.”6 But if it is extreme to believe in the apparently universal standards of seeing provided by “masterpieces,” it is equally excessive to think of them as having the power to subjugate the colonial’s environmental imagination simply by virtue of being admired. The risk of betraying one’s own local reality increases, according to Walcott, only when we reify art and divorce it from its relationship to time; we fetishize masterpieces if we reject or worship them simply because they are Western. What is important to remember, for Walcott, is the fact that “Time, petrified in every classic canvas, denie[s] the frailty of the painter’s hand” (Tiepolo’s Hound 43). Walcott implies that if we do not acknowledge the dynamic and ever-changing character of the environment, we will forget the anguish all artists experience about what their hands fail to capture. In contemplating art, we must imagine Time’s refusal to collapse into an ordered plot—a History—with a final ending. Walcott explains that the young artist naively believes in the possibility of his own historical evolution into a master painter:

242

CALLALOO . . . .youth feels it has the measure of Time, that there is a plot and metre to Time, structured as if it were fiction, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, except Time is not narrative, triumph resolved by ambition, and Time continues its process even for the masters whose triumph astonishes us, but they are still learning with arthritic fingers and shovel-wide beards, their disasters our masterpieces. (Tiepolo’s Hound 94) In other words, instead of imagining that one can climb a ladder of progressive triumphs, one must submit oneself to reality’s inevitable triumph over art at all stages. As Pissarro himself once commented, “What good is it to look backwards and never at nature, so beautiful, so luminous and so diverse in character? Always in the dust of the old masters, which one pretends not to notice, on the pretext of venerating them. It seems to me that it is better to follow their example and seek those elements in that which surrounds us, with our proper senses” (qtd. in Adler 123). If the young artist understands himself to be an apprentice of light and not merely an apprentice of the masters, his work is no longer condemned to a permanently derivative status; the art of the masters is also seen in relation to Time’s inevitable movement. Such natural apprenticeship also rescues the work of art from becoming a mere artifact of history. William Carlos Williams once wrote that history “portrays us in generic patterns, like effigies or the carvings on sarcophagi, which say nothing save, of such and such a man, that he is dead. That’s history. It is concerned only with the one thing: to say everything is dead. Then it fixes up the effigy: there that’s finished. Not at all. History must stay open, it is all humanity. Are lives to be twisted forcibly about events, the mere accidents of geography and climate?” (188–9). The irony that Walcott and Williams expose is that history turns out to be uninterested in its own medium of time. Because it wants conclusion, narrative structure, and it wants to be able to stand apart from the ongoing flow of time, history is essentially opposed to temporality. Aesthetics, on the other hand, as understood by Walcott, embraces temporality. John Dewey similarly insisted on the need to radically contextualize and particularize works of art within lived human experience. In describing masterpieces, Dewey writes: “the very perfection of some of these products, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions that get in the way of fresh insight. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience” (204). In essence, Dewey insisted that aesthetic experience requires us to imagine that we are painting the work all over again; otherwise, we rob art of its very capacity to teach us to see anew. Walcott reverses the effects of this naturalization of art when he portrays the masters still painting, with their “shovel-wide beards.” 243

CALLALOO If art’s truest subject is Time itself and the reality of constant change that it seeks to artificially arrest, art will of necessity fail but fail meaningfully, because it engages in the mortal fight against death and change. Landscape paintings effectively symbolize the human condition and potentially liberate viewers because they teach elemental devotion to light, which, as the impressionists understood, is not restricted to certain nations, ideologies, or locales. For this reason, Walcott’s interest in impressionism transcends the colonial’s anxiety of influence. He comments that Cezanne’s art, available in “museum missals” to the aspiring colonial, “opened the gates of an empire” (57). But rather than succumbing to the “old argument that the great works we admire / civilise and colonise us,” (57) he insists that the paint is all that counts, no guilt no pardon, no history, but the sense of narrative time annihilated in the devotion of the acolyte, as undeniable as instinct, the brushstroke’s rhyme and page and canvas know one empire only: light. (58) Or as he puts it later in the poem, “There is no history now, only the weather, / day’s wheeling light, the rising and setting / seasons” (71). The apprentice’s devotion to light annihilates narrative time and its interest in plot and historical consequence. The acolyte is devoted to cyclical, ecological time, and is thus paradoxically freed from the chains of servility precisely because the “masters” have now become contemporaries in a world informed by light. The local landscape, then, stands little chance of being insulted precisely because the acolyte has now become servile to the contours of one’s place in a specific time and land. Impressionism is known for this kind of servility. It grew out of a certain fatigue with nineteenth-century naturalism’s penchant for seeing nature allegorically. The impressionists generally did not worry about painting stories, allegorical or historical, or about producing painstakingly elaborated and self-contained compositions; they were happy to disrupt the expectations for local and stable color and for a finished, transparent appearance. Instead they found their art in the perception of light in their immediate environment and sought to expose the prismatic quality of light when closely observed through brief passing moments. This in turn meant that their art violated the painterly convention of focusing primarily on spatial organization and turned instead to temporality, the very medium that two-dimensional frozen images were supposed to be unable to capture. Time, for the impressionists, is the great law of nature; it is what dictates change, and shapes our perception of things, of space, and of our relationship to place. And in order to capture the play of light on the human eye in an instant, it was necessary to contemplate objects deeply and quickly, leaving aside the need for elaboration and even completion. This desire for what some philosophers of the late nineteenth-century called “sensation” or “pure perception” was expressed by Monet: “I have no other wish than a close fusion with nature, and I desire no other fate . . . than to have worked and lived 244

CALLALOO in harmony with her law” (qtd. in Goldwater and Treves 313). Monet’s statement is a bit misleading because he and the other impressionists well knew that such an obliteration of the cultural baggage that we all carry from education, socialization, and memory was well nigh impossible. The art theorist Moshe Barasch explains this apparent paradox: “On the one hand, the impressionists wanted to reach the level of ‘sensation’ which they believed to be an aboriginal, primordial layer of our human experience preceding culture and education, and hence available to every human being. On the other hand, they knew that in practice it is acquired taste, shaped by social conditions and collective memory, that enables the eye to enjoy much of what it perceives, or that prevents it from enjoying other sights” (18). Impressionism clearly wants the cake and to eat it too; it wants reality and appearances, realism and expressionism. This paradox is inherent in the very experience of light since, as the late nineteenth-century German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz put it, “light becomes light [only] when it meets a seeing eye; without that it is merely a movement of aether” (qtd. in Barasch 38). Perhaps it is inevitable that impressionism did not have a very long life as an artistic practice because its objective is as evasive as the sound of the proverbial tree falling in the forest. A sense of meaningful failure, nevertheless, is the cumulative impression we gain of Monet’s haystacks of 1891 or in the more aggressively varied attempts in Pissarro’s work to depict the small rural village of Pontoise from all of its infinite angles and climates in the 1870s. So if we can at least understand Walcott’s interest in impressionism and its usefulness in his context, why, then, Pissarro, of all the impressionists? Although his birth in St. Thomas in 1830, fully one century before Walcott’s birth, his early artistic formation in the Caribbean, and his identity as a Jew are all of expressed interest to Walcott, the aesthetics, Pissarro’s “awe of the ordinary,” more pronounced in his case than in the other impressionists, is of most value to Walcott’s argument (8). Pissarro was a painter of enormous industry who painted thousands of works, drew thousands more sketches and despite his wide-ranging curiosity about various styles and techniques was almost compulsively consistent in motif. He emerged from the nineteenth-century landscape traditions of France having inherited the belief once promulgated by the naturalists of the Barbizon School that it was the artist’s duty to find that coin de la terre, that corner of the earth, that would transmit its unique formal imprint to the work of the artist (Brettell 2). In Cézanne’s opinion, Pissarro “had the good fortune to be born in the Antilles; there he learned to draw without a master” (qtd. in Adler 18). In that raw setting, he “made many an excursion on foot, exploring his surroundings and sketching what he saw” (Adler 15). For this reason, as he eventually came under the influence of a variety of artists in France, he experimented aggressively to find the most appropriate way to capture whatever impressed itself upon him in his environment. Kathleen Adler explains: “Pissarro found that experimenting with different techniques overcame the dissatisfaction he felt with his pictures. He believed that a sound knowledge of his craft was of vital importance to the artist, and he attached a great importance to métier, [ . . . ] working constantly to perfect techniques, never content with what he had already achieved” (80–1). When he first arrived in Paris in 1855, he caught the Universal Exhibition, an exhibition of enormous size, and he was particularly struck by the modest landscapes 245

CALLALOO of Camille Corot, whom he immediately sought out for guidance. Corot, unlike the Barbizon school, broke with tradition and encouraged Pissarro to paint in plein air and later wrote to Pissarro in 1857: “Beauty in art is truth steeped in the impression made upon us by the sight of nature. . . . In nature seek first of all for form; then for the values or relationships between tints, for colour and style” (qtd. in Adler 22). Pissarro later echoed this advice in his old age to one young painter: “Don’t proceed according to rules and principles, but paint what you observe and feel. Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression. Don’t be timid in front of nature: one must be bold at the risk of being deceived and making mistakes. One must have only one master—nature; she is the only one to be consulted” (qtd. in Adler 23). Pissarro was never drawn to the “allegorical excess” of the Barbizon School, despite the comparisons often drawn between him and Jean Francois Millet, who shared his devotion to peasants. Indeed, what perhaps sets Pissarro apart from other impressionists is his dogged determination to portray nature within a small and unremarkable geographical space. One of his critics, Richard Brettell, writes of Pissarro’s years in Pontoise during the 1870s: “he did not wander persistently through the fields in search of motifs. He was for the most part, a fixated rather than an exploratory landscape painter. . . . No landscape painter of the nineteenth century was more bounded, less geographically adventurous, than Pissarro” (37). Brettell concludes: “Pissarro’s landscape of the 1870s is among the most physically constricted in the history of art, rarely extending more than 500 meters from his doorstep” (100). Walcott himself has explained what attracted him to Pissarro: “The inner thing in him was not modest in the wrong sense, it kept its celebration, but it did not do it with distortion or with some thing that came out of an egotistical source. The category you would have to put him in is one in which the search is not for the true thing, or for an expression of identity, but is an absolute search for anonymity. That is what’s there in Wordsworth, the annihilation of the “I” that is there in the presence of nature” (personal interview, Nov. 2001). Aesthetically similar to Walcott’s own visual art, the Pontoise landscapes consistently eschew moral or allegorical rhetoric, something Brettell calls a “lack of passion in Pissarro’s landscapes” that “underlies another reason for his preference for coins more than motifs. The coin lacks strong meaning: it is an odd, framed portion of an environment and is, by definition, part of a larger whole” (105). The images are so unremarkable that “they look as though they had been chosen quite randomly” (Becker 70). Walcott suggests that Pissarro’s early Caribbean experience taught him sensitivity to common, unanticipated beauty, appreciation of brilliant color, and imitative freedom and that this Caribbean influence spread to the many artists Pissarro tutored, including, of course, Cézanne. He writes: Cézanne stayed close to two years in Pontoise, attentive to his older friend’s advice to change his dingy palette to colours brightened by his tutor’s tropical eyes,

246

CALLALOO a different language for a different light, more crystalline, more broken like the sea on island afternoons, scorchingly bright and built in prisms. He should learn to see. (56) Walcott further claims that this tropical sensibility influenced the “visible syntax” of Cézanne’s own remarkable postimpressionist formalism, a style that would open the doors to visual modernism (57). But Pissarro remained faithful to his humility: “There is something uxorious in Pissarro’s landscapes / as if his brush had made a decorous marriage / with earth’s fecundity [ . . . ]”(64). This excessive telluric devotion contrasts the overt expressionism of Cézanne, “whose / canvas rants at the subject it has chosen” (64). Pissarro’s art consistently avoids “Narrative excess” that “had made theatrical melodrama of great art” (64), a virtue of anonymity in art that grows “with the acceleration / of time (65). Eventually “in moderation / of self, of fame, the art of being bored / diminishes conceit, and cherishes the plain / and the repetitive: . . . things without grandeur in their modest shine” (65). Time valorizes the modest self because what shines through the art is the paradoxically immortal value of transient and mundane reality. Walcott and Pissarro’s shared “awe of the ordinary,“ then, manages “to heighten the commonplace into the sacredness / of objects made more radiant by the slow gaze of time” (98). At the same time that he celebrates the possible Caribbean influence in the history of impressionism in France, Walcott is equally concerned with what the Caribbean lost when Pissarro decided to leave. Of course the irony is that despite Pissarro’s undeniable raw talent and seemingly native humility, his work in the Caribbean up to departure for France exhibited a rather flat naturalism, as exemplified by his 1856 work, “Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas,” painted during his first year in France (Figure 1). Although his pre-European work establishes evidence that his fascination with light stems from his Caribbean experience, it also reminds us of what he might never have become had he never left. Walcott insists, then, that Pissarro’s Caribbean origins were transmitted into the aesthetic triumphs of impressionism, but his later transformation in France also denotes the impossibility of knowing all of the costs of impressionism, what it ignored, betrayed, or abandoned to come into being. We can imagine Pissarro’s two women by the sea echoing Walcott’s imagined chorus of fruit vendors and street cripples, crying out to Pissarro as he begins his departure: “be in obscure St. Thomas / our Giotto, our Jerome, our rock-hidden hermit!” (28). He recognizes that not all Caribbean artists leave, that “others took root and stood the difference” (143). These were those, who . . . let the ship go, trailing its red banner out of their harbor, like The Téméraire. St. Thomas stays unpainted, every savannah Trails its flame tree that fades. That is not fair. (143) 247

CALLALOO

Figure 1. “Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas.” © Camille Pissarro. So the fact remains that the Caribbean does not have sufficient representation in art and the poet cannot in truth reclaim Pissarro. The image Walcott uses to tell this story of departure is, significantly, Turner’s portrait of the great ship heading to retirement, only this time it has been transformed into a journey back to Europe and thus a recognition of the staying power of the empire’s centers. Walcott suggests that although the empire may be in decline, and its art worthy of admiration and emulation, the empire remains the protagonist of art history and the problem of the Caribbean’s artistic paint-drain still needs redressing.

The Mad Impressionist in the Attic The power of this line of questioning is akin to Jean Rhys’s portrayal of the Caribbean origins of Rochester’s mad wife from Jane Eyre in her own brilliant tale, Wide Sargasso Sea. The novel demonstrates the subtle ways colonial oppression sustains European faith in narrative truth and teaches us to expect to find skeletons in Europe’s closet. Similarly, Walcott undermines confidence in art history’s narrative of impressionism by highlighting the movement’s Caribbean origins and by triangulating Pissarro’s art with Walcott’s own paintings and with what “[Pissarro] would have made” had he remained (143). Triangulation and the ekphrasis upon which it often depends help to destabilize the certainty of narrative truth, even Walcott’s own. 248

CALLALOO Visual references in his poetry rarely serve his texts, “literally, with a one-to-one correspondence” nor do they function merely as way to “advance some aspect of the narrative” as complements to the literary (Hamner 77; Terada 23). His use of ekphrasis is not simply aimed at using a linguistic metaphor for a visual representation; paintings of Turner, Pissarro, or others are themselves in turn already “textualized” by the traditions of museums, art history, and the subtle discourses of coffee table books and calendars like Craven’s book, all of which “usually control the interpretation of images” (Loizeaux 85) and against which the word must wrestle, as much as with the image of the works themselves. Triangulation of the image occurs also when Walcott anachronistically imagines himself within a drawing by Pissarro and his Danish friend, Fritz Melbye, with whom he first began to paint, “sketching in the shade” (140) (Figure 2). In this accompanying image, we can imagine Walcott’s meaning when he transforms himself into one of their black subjects: “I felt a line enclose my lineaments and those of other shapes around me too” (140). He conforms to the demands of their artistic vision (“I shrank into the posture they had chosen”) and becomes “a young slave, mixed and newly manumitted / last century and a half” (141). This maneuver exposes not the dualism of word and image, but rather a textual consciousness that lies behind the image and a visual consciousness that lies behind the word. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux explains that when “the ‘I’ speaks from within the picture. . . . Prosopopeia . . . ‘overcomes’ the gap between the viewer and viewed, between word and image, between subject and object. The ‘I’ is not countered by illustration, . . . but speaks out of the body of the primary image” (94). Although W. J. T. Mitchell is equally concerned with the dangers associated with a simplified word/image binary, he and others have seen in ekphrasis a corollary to the linguistic struggle to give expression to the “other,” who is conventionally understood as silent and feminized. Mitchell insists that we move beyond the binary understanding of ekphrasis as the relationship between the “speaking/seeing subject and a seen object” by positing the third presence of the “listening subject who . . . will be made to ‘see’ the object through the medium of the poet’s voice” (4). The problem is that when applied to the Caribbean context Walcott explores, Mitchell’s theory prioritizes the European image and its European viewer and still assumes the pliant submission of the seen Caribbean subject, as if dispossessed of its own discursive power. Instead, Walcott triangulates the binary of word and image by imagining that the viewer is also the viewed Caribbean subject and thus repossessed of its own textual and expressive qualities that cannot be reduced by objectification. Of course, Walcott only rhetorically imagines the speech of this seen presence, but in his poetic conflation of subject and object, past and present, and word and image, he exposes the betrayal of representation. Despite the “kindness” of Pissarro’s brush, “yours may just be love of your own calling / and not for us, since sunshine softens pain, / and we seem painless here.” He finally pleads, as one of the subjects lost in the translation of Caribbean reality onto the artist’s canvas, “do not leave us here, / for cities where our voices have no words” (141). The betrayal, then, plays itself out three times: once, because the subjects will not have a voice by virtue of being painted onto a silent, two-dimensional canvas, a second time because this image of the Caribbean will then be transferred to a different 249

CALLALOO

Figure 2. “Sketching in the Shade.” © Camille Pissarro.

250

CALLALOO light and environment in France, and third because Walcott has himself relied on the same limitations of his own poetic representation to make this argument. Triangulation introduces the specter of a haunting, unheeded subjectivity that undermines the solidity and fixity of Pissarro’s painted image. This disrupts the fixity of spatial representation because of the introduction of temporal subjectivity within the image and challenges conventional wisdom that assumes that a visual signifier, as opposed to a verbal one, more readily resembles its signified. If we believe that representation, whether visual or verbal, has obtained this status of a “natural sign,” to borrow Krieger’s term, we will have been seduced by “a dangerous promiscuity” in the perceived “reciprocity” between visual and verbal art, according to Mitchell (2). To believe unapologetically in the porous boundaries between media, we suspect, feels “idolatrous and fetishistic” (2). Walcott exposes the failure of Pissarro’s art to represent Caribbean subjectivity, but not because the word trumps the image. Paradoxically he uses ekphrasis, something as “unnatural” as Pissarro’s painting. Like Prospero, Walcott would have us suspend disbelief in representation’s illusions, so as to allow ourselves to experience gratification in “our semiotic desire for natural sign[s]” and their natural appearances, but only long enough to understand their effects as rhetorical (Krieger 11). The Rhysian rhetorical effect of introducing an underlying Caribbean subjectivity in Western art, a haunting, marginal presence at the very center of empire, keeps visual signs honest about their spatial and temporal limitations even if it means that poetry too must confess its own lies. We are led to ask, along with Walcott, “Are all the paintings then falsifications / of [Pissarro’s] real origins, was his island betrayed?” (143). And the answer is yes, but only because slippage is inevitable, of course, in all art. In Walcott’s imagined conversation with Pissarro, the impressionist responds to the accusation of betrayal: He said, “My history veins backwards to the black soil of my birthplace, whose trees are a hallowed forest; its leaf words uttering the language of my ancestors, then, for ringed centuries, a helpless dimming of distance made both bark and language fade to an alphabet of bats and swallows skimming the twilight gables of Dronningens Gade.” (142) Rootedness, signified so frequently in Walcott by the presence of talking ancestral trees, is weakened by the passage of time and violent transplantation, and consequently the ancestral voices dim to the sound of birds. Nature, in other words, is all that remains of ancestral memory, whether one is a displaced African in the New World, or a twice displaced Jew, who in his journey to France crosses “the deep reversing road / of the diaspora, Exodus” (30). Representing the natural world with kindness and humility, for both Pissarro and Walcott, is how to make meaning of 251

CALLALOO modernity’s ironies and pay tribute, however imperfectly, to the “black soil of [one’s] birthplace.”

The Hound’s Creator Walcott observes self-made Rastafarian priests who “have not seen Dürer’s panels: Four Apostles, / not the Moorish princes of the Renaissance” (132). He praises their absolute originality; they are, more to the point of the poem, parallels to the Caribbean mongrel, “figures not Veronese’s or Tiepolo’s” (132). That is, they are not echoes, nor are they haunted by European specters. He also sees “a young tourist with her head inclined / toward an infant she cradles in her arms / is a Fra Angelico in a blue wraparound, as the wind / begins the incantations of pliable palms” (132). The tourist, perhaps because of her presumably non-Caribbean origins, lends herself more easily to European parallels, and although this initially seems like a contrast of irony, he concludes that the priests, the tourist, and everything surrounding them are all worthy of his art: everywhere a craft confirming images, from a nosing mongrel to a challenging ceiling of cloud. The mind raised on mirages sees my father’s copy of storm gulls wheeling. (132) The “mirages” are the images of European masters, like Turner, reflected through the lens of his own father’s admiration for them. European masterworks are not haunting specters because Walcott first came to know the imitations and reproductions, not the originals. What is always original is the absolute present. Walcott continues: Vessel, apprentice and interpreter, My own delight, before the frames of Time, Was innocent, ignorant and corruptible Monodic as our climate in its sublime Indifferent to seasonal modulations, To schools, to epochs . . . (132) Unlike the “crabbed” work of writing poetry, the monody of the Caribbean’s climate before the easel teaches Walcott to focus on what is present before his own eyes and avoid chasing the derivatives and chronological evolutions of a culture of four seasons. The movement from “vessel” (Craven’s book and other transmitters of tradition) to “apprentice” (his father’s and his own imitation of those reproductions) to “inter-

252

CALLALOO preter” (his own poeticization of European art and his paintings of the Caribbean landscape) is not an evolution but ultimately a triangulation; all three roles are filtered through his poetic imagination, acting equally and simultaneously on each other. The innocence he stresses here is not without risk because his openness to tradition also meant that he was “corruptible” but avoids corruption, because he is able to see art’s greatest purpose, which is not to civilize but to function as “an index of elations; / it ignored error, it trusted its own eyes” (132). Hence, his own historical fascination with Pissarro, like his obsession with the hound, ultimately denounces history, because, in playing the three roles simultaneously, what is crucial was not the true ascription to either hand—rather the consequence of my astonishment, which has blent this fiction to what is true without a change of tense. (133) A change of tense implies priority and evolution, but instead of subjecting himself to this logic of History, he has subjected himself to Time, to an eternally changing, everpresent moment that will always provide enough material for his poetic creation. In the end, he is uninterested in the creator of the hound that has haunted him, because he knows his poetic imagination is its creator. This signifies the alleviation from the weight of such historical questions about Tiepolo or Veronese with which he began; he has learned that all paintings are still lifes, or in the French, nature mortes, “dead nature,” and thus only poetic memory can make meaning of their representations: I painted this fiction from the hound’s arch, because over the strokes and words of a page, or a primed canvas, there is always the shadow that stretches its neck like a spectral hound, bending its curious examining arc over what we do, both at our work’s beginning and at its end a medieval memento mori, or a bow with his arrow at a dog-eared page or blank canvas, for every artisan a skull and a pierced heart. This was true for him now, Pissarro, as it was in the still lifes of his friend Cezanne. (50) The spectral hound, like a spectral history, haunts by implying comparison to an original and a failure to match up. The hound is a sign of self-doubt, but it is not incapacitating, because he transforms the hound from a specter of an original source or model that is to be imitated and against which one is measured, to a specter of doubt caused by the inevitability of death and change. One paints precisely because the

253

CALLALOO evanescence of things inspires love even if it also implies perpetual death. We love and cherish what we know is only temporary and passing. Walcott depends on this love in his moving plea for mercy at the poem’s conclusion, à la Shakespeare’s Prospero: There is another book that is the shadow of my hand on this sunlit page, the one I have tried to write, but let this do; Let gratitude redeem what lies undone. (158) The shadow of his hand is created by the light behind him, the temporality within both he and the scene before him move. Note the rhyming echo between “shadow” and “do,” signifying that what is done, (the “one” poem he has “tried to write”) must be measured against what is “undone.” His own temporality, then, is the one thing he cannot represent, it is the space that light and art cannot illuminate, but rather than hide behind this curtain, he confesses his hand, literally, in the work he has produced. Like Prospero, he confesses the artificiality of his art and hopes that gratitude for what he has been able to accomplish, gratitude for the awe the light inspires, will redeem his artistic failures. This, of course, could be considered an absolutely brilliant poetic flourish to cover up the weaknesses of Walcott’s visual art, most notably his rather predictable color schemes, his routinized stylizations of sea almond trees, and his seemingly unbending stylistic variation. Walcott has not denied the likelihood that his art does not match the brilliance of his poetry, but his defense is not of his art per se but against criticisms that would disregard the particularities for Caribbean experience.7 If we can respond to paintings like Dewey recommends and repaint them in our imagination, we will experience both “the whole / delight of action” (97) as well as the anguish of every artist who “settle[s] before an easel to redeem the fault / that multiplies itself in desperate survival” (98). The aesthetics of temporality here expresses in poetry what painting, on its own, can only obliquely imply. For although the intent of Caravaggio in his stunning still lifes, or those of Cézanne, was to convey this inevitability of change and death, still lifes and landscape paintings lend themselves so readily to timeless icons on calendars and walls. Walcott’s poetry assumes the original role of Caravaggio’s still lifes, which was to express an awareness of temporal fragility. Without this poetic discourse on the limitations of art, Walcott’s paintings might run the risk of becoming nothing but another postcard, this time of a Caribbean vacation. The poem provides the implied aesthetic story of his paintings so that we recognize that they have emerged in the anguish of self-questioning. The paintings, then, obtain more metaphorical weight, like a poetic phrase, precisely because of the temporality of the poem. This juxtaposition of word and image becomes the meeting point between fact and fiction and between the past and the present. If such mergers are disallowed, if we would judge such transgressions as violations, as arrogant or naïve pretenses, we condemn Caribbean light, space, and art to secondary status, or worse, to oblivion, 254

CALLALOO because we imply they are unworthy of our gaze. The dialogue between word and image throughout the poem is always triangulated by time, allowing us to see the possibility of elation in the Caribbean environment. Because all spaces, all light, are made worthy by the “gaze of time” and by the heightened awareness of evanescence that it inspires, then they are worthy of the gaze of the artist; art becomes not only possible but inevitable.

NOTES 1. Walcott’s biographer, Bruce King, notes that in April 1995, Walcott participated in a conference on translation at the Tate Gallery in London, and given the conference’s theoretical and academic nature, it was a surprise that he would have participated at all. King notes that “the Turners upstairs at the Tate were Walcott’s main interest. . . . Seeing the paintings appeared to be his purpose for being at the conference” (586). 2. Krieger has further defined ekphrasis as more than literary representations of visual works of art but the “sought-for equivalent in words of any visual image, in or out of art” and includes “every attempt, within an art of words, to work toward the illusion that it is performing a task we usually associate with an art of natural signs” (9). 3. The very history of Woodford Square demonstrates the folly of such confidence, because the history of that space demonstrates the inevitability of fading memories and markers of the past. The square was first known as “Place of Souls” by the native Indians of the island who lost a costly battle at the site. It was later given the French name Place des Ames in honor of this indigenous past, only to later adopt its more recent English colonial history. The course of St. Ann’s river was changed to further develop the square, so even its natural history has been altered. 4. Walcott here shares more with Turner than his obsession with spectral light and imperial decline. Turner’s unpublished poetry, much of which accompanied his paintings in the form of epigraphs and which was inspired in large part by Byron, was filled with “a keen preoccupation with ineptitude and failed inspiration both in poetry [ . . . ] and in painting” (Brown 17). 5. He later describes the naturalism of Cazabon’s work as “embalmed paysages” that “were all we had, / our mongrel culture gnawing its one bone” because Pissarro and so many other talented artists have chosen not to remain in the Caribbean (Tiepolo’s Hound 154). 6. In a lecture of this title, Walcott addressed an audience at the Guggenheim in New York City in 1980 and explained that to the European eye, the Caribbean vegetation’s “adlib inimical shapes seem to lack concepts and divinity” (“Insulted Landscape”). 7. In a recent interview, he responded to the accusation that his paintings seemed as if they had been painted by numbers: But if you went to the Caribbean and you looked at Caribbean light, that’s what you’d say, that you have to paint it by numbers. Because you’re talking about a primal kind of light; you’re talking about an intensity that is incredible. [ . . . ] So naturally, I would say, in defense of what I’ve been accused of, that the whole of the Caribbean looks like painting by numbers. So it’s not my fault, and I do mix my color. But it’s painful to take that criticism, and they may be right. Gradation and subtlety are important, but the attitude of imperial authority says that grey is the color of a culture, of a real culture. Blatant color, brassy color, bright color is associated with underdeveloped cultures, with underdeveloped people. (“Sharing the Exhilaration” 136)

255

CALLALOO WORKS CITED Adler, Kathleen. Camille Pissarro, A Biography. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1978. Barasch, Moshe. Theories of Art: From Impressionism to Kandinsky. New York: Routledge, 2000. Becker, Christoph. Camille Pissarro. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Catnz Verlag, 1999. Brettell, Richard R. Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1990. Brown, David Blayney. Turner and Byron. London: Tage Gallery Publications, 1992. Dewey, John. “Art as Experience.” Art and its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Stephen David Ross. 3rd ed. Albany: State U of New York P, 1994. 203–20. Egerton, Judith. Turner: The Fighting Temeraire. London: National Gallery Publications, 1993. Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989. Goldwater, Robert, and Marco Treves, Eds. Artists on Art from the XIV to the XX Century. 3rd ed. New York: Random House, 1974. Hamner, Robert. “From Winslow Homer to Marcel Duchamp and the Fortunate Flaw in Derek Walcott’s ‘Omeros’.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 31: 3 (July 2000), 75–103. King, Bruce. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. London: Oxford UP, 2000. Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann. “Ekphrasis and Textual Consciousness.” Word and Image 15:1 (January–March 1999): 76–96. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Ekphrasis and the Other.” Terada, Rei. Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992. Walcott, Derek. “Muse of History.” What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. ———. “The Caribbean: Culture of Mimicry.” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16:1 (February 1974): 3–13. ———. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000. ———. Collected Poems 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992. ———. “Insulted Landscape.” Poetry Audio PR9216.W35x1980, Harvard College Library. ———. Personal Interview. 30 Jul. 2001. ———. Personal Interview. 28 Nov. 2001. ———. “Sharing in the Exhilaration: An Interview with Derek Walcott” (23 Sep. 2000, Salt Lake City).” Interview with Natasha Sajé and George Handley. Ariel: A Review of International Literature in English 32:2 (April 2001): 129–142. Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: New Directions Paperback, 1956.

256

CALLALOO

PRACTICE for D.W.

by Thomas Sayers Ellis

A dank, dark basement entered cautiously from the rear. The first thing you saw were bass cabinets, Their enormous backs an unmovable blackness guarding The door. The first thing you heard was feedback and sometimes Anthony Ross, our manager’s kid brother, Snare and pedal-less, pretending to kick. The floor was worried with slithering cords, Live wires that lifted and looped like vines of verse. The cold brick walls were covered with noise And, like it or not, several mouth-orange cardboard posters —those triflin’, Day-Glo ones that resemble sores When the lights are ON, and sores When they are OFF. The air was thick with Chinese take-out, reverb, The young girls on us, and designer cologne. Our roadies recorded and studied us, just in case. A microphone slept like an orphan on a dirty pillow At the bottom of the bass drum’s navel-less, Belly-impersonating, soul-shaped O. Skin Tight disciplined the congas for not disciplining the bongos And (sho’ you righhht) for not listening. Bbbridoomp, bbridoomp, bridimp boomp. Floor tom. Two-faced cymbals. A hint of high-hat. Sticks. Our drummer sat facing all of this, caged, while the entire Frontline (including Karen, our female vocalist) worked out, Breathing and counting and stepping Like odd numbers. Big Earl and Scarecrow stood behind their guitars the same way

Reprinted from The Maverick Room (Graywolf, Press 2005) by permission of the author.

258

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 258–259

CALLALOO The marines at The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Stood behind rifles. The timbales and rototoms, side-by-side, were Like a finish line of chrome, the bridge (each And every other groove) a horn’s valved prose Asked for, asked for, asked for.

259

CALLALOO

CONTRIBUTORS

EDWARD BAUGH, who has published extensively on Anglophone Caribbean literature, is author of Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision (1978), a study of Another Life, and coeditor (with Colbert Nepaul Singh) of an annotated edition of Walcott’s Another Life. Edward Baugh’s most recent collection of poems is It Was the Singing (2000). He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. ROBERT BENSEN is author of a number of books of poems, the most recent being Two Dancers (2004). He is Professor of English and Director of Writing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY. LAURENCE A. BREINER is Professor of English at Boston University, where he teaches Caribbean literature. He is author of An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (1998), Black Yeats: The Poetry of Eric Roach (forthcoming, 2005), and numerous articles and reviews of Caribbean poetry and drama. PAUL BRESLIN teaches modern and contemporary American poetry and West Indian literature at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. He is author of The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties (1987), You Are Here (poems, 2000), Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott (2001). He is one of the coeditors of this issue of Callaloo. PAULA BURNETT is author of Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (2000) and editor of Penguin’s Caribbean Verse in English (1986), an anthology. She is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Brunel University (Uxbridge, Middlesex, England), where she teaches postcolonial literature and creative writing. FRED D’AGUIAR, a widely publish poet and fiction writer, co-directs the MFA Program in creative writing at Virginia Tech. His most recent publications include Bloodlines (2001), a verse novel about slavery, and Bethany, Bettany (2004), a novel set in his native Guyana. REED WAY DASENBROCK is Professor of English and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of New Mexico. He is author and editor of a number of books, including Truth and Consequences: Intentions, Conventions, and the New Thematics (2001) and Interviews with Writers of Post Colonial World (1992). Mc. DONALD DIXON is author of two novels, Misbegotten (forthcoming) and Season of Mist (2002). He lives in St. Lucia. RITA DOVE, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is a former Poet Laureate of the United States and the current Poet Laureate of Virginia. Her numerous awards and honors include the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the 1996 National Humanities Medal. Her most recent book of poems is American Smooth (2004). THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS, one of the founders of the Dark Room Collective, is an associate professor of English at Case Western University, where he teaches courses in creative writing and African-American literature. He is author of The Maverick 260

Callaloo 28.1 (2005) 260–262

CALLALOO Room, his first volume, which is to be published by Greywolf Press in 2005. He is also author of the chapbook The Genuine Negro Hero, one of the three poets collected in Take Three (1996), and co-editor of On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists (1993). PETER ERICKSON is author of Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (1985) and Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (1991), and coeditor of Shakespeare’s ”Rough Magic” (1985) and Empire in Renaissance England. His new book, Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art, and Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s “Othello,” a volume he is co-editing, are forthcoming. JEFFREY GRAY is author of Mastery’s End: Traveland Postwar American Poetry (2005) and editor of the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry, a project-inprogress. His articles and poems have been published in a number of periodicals, including Contemporary Literature, Novel, American Poetry Review, Atlantic, and Callaloo. He is an associate professor of English at Seton Hall University. EMILY GREENWOOD is a lecturer in Greek literature and classics at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland). She holds a Ph. D. degree in classics from Cambridge University. MARILYN HACKER, an internationally known translator and a former editor of the Kenyon Review, is author of number of volumes of prize-winning poems, including Desesperanto: Poems 1999–2002 and First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960–1979. For Presentation Piece she won the National Book Award. She teaches at the City University of New York and lives in New York and Paris. ROBERT HAMNER is Professor of English and Humanities at Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene, Texas. He is author of Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” (1997), and he has written extensively on Joseph Conrad and on a number of Caribbean writers. GEORGE HANDLEY is Associate Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University, where he teaches courses on the literatures of the Americas. He is the author of Postslavery Literatures in the Americas (2000) and co-editor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2005). SEAMUS HEANEY, whose translation of Beowulf has received much international attention, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He is author of several books of poems and nonfiction prose, including Electric Light, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996, The Spirit Level, Finders Keepers, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, The Place of Writing, and Diary of One Who Vanished. With Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott, he co-authored Homage to Robert Frost, a collection of essays. A native of Ireland, Heaney is Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. KENDEL HIPPOLYTE, who was born in St. Lucia, is a poet, playwright, and theater director. He is author of four books of poetry, the most recent being Birthright (1997); and editor of Confluence: Nine St. Lucian Poets (1988) and So Much Poetry in We People (1990). He teaches at Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in St. Lucia. JANE KING is author of two collections of poems, In to the Center and Fellow Traveller. She teaches literature at Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in St. Lucia. JOE KRAUS, who teaches at the University of Scranton, is co-author of An Accidental Anarchist (2001). He has also published in such periodicals as The Centennial Review, MELUS, and The American Scholar. 261

CALLALOO JOHN ROBERT LEE, a native of St. Lucia, is author of several books of poems, the most recent being Artefacts (2000). He is a graduate of the University of the West Indies. ANTONIA MACDONALD-SMYTHE, a native of St. Lucia, lives in Grenada, where she is Associate Dean of the Schools of Arts and Sciences, Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies, and Professor of English at St. George’s University. She is author of Making Homes in the West Indies (2002). IRENE MARTYNIUK is Associate Professor of English at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts. CLAIRE MALROUX, a native of France, is author of seven books of poems, including Ni si lointain (2004), Suspens (2001), and Soleil de jadis (1998). She is widely known for her French translations of English-language texts, such as the poems of Emily Dickinson and Derek Walcott. Prix Maurice Edgar Coindreau (1989), Grand Prix National de la Traduction (1995), Prix Laure Bataillon, and Chevalier de Arts et Lettres et Chevlier de la Légion d’Honneur—these are some of her honors and awards. NATALIE MELAS teaches comparative literature at Cornell University. Her book, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Compassion is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. MERVYN MORRIS retired from the University of the West Indies, where he was a professor of creative writing and West Indian literature. His books of poetry include The Pond (1973), Shadowboxing (1979), Examination Centre (1992), and On Holy Week (1976). He is also the author of “Is English We Speaking” and Other Essays (1999). CAMILLE PISSARRO, one of the original French Impressionist painters, was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands in 1830, and died in Paris in 1903. He is celebrated for his landscape and cityscape paintings. ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS, a poet, has published in Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, No: A Journal of the Arts, Seneca Review and other periodicals. He is an assistant professor of English and coDirector of the Poetry Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI, who was born in Poland, is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose. His books of poems and essays in Englishlanguage include Tremor (1985), Canvas (1991) Mysticism for Beginners (1997), Without End (2000), Solidarity, Solitude (1990), Two Cities (1995), Another Beauty (2000), and A Defense of Ardor (2004). Much of his work has also been translated from Polish to German, Swedish, and French. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.

262