Comment 3 of 4, added on March 12th, 2009 at 7:07 AM.

I like how the man from the U.K wrote beautifully about David Walcott, and the American was looking for a football hero and had the audacity to call David Walcott's poem's garbage... Why do I live in this cesspool of ignorance...

for shame U.S... for shame...

Joe Hadley from United States

Comment 1 of 4, added on April 6th, 2005 at 6:48 AM.

Derek Walcott’s poetry is born of a culture that grew from a colonial structure whose disparate elements were, in turn, drawn from various parts of Europe and uprooted from Africa. This West Indian culture destroyed and replaced almost entirely the original Caribbean culture and Walcott’s own ancestry reflects this mixed heritage. West Indian writers have, therefore, a recoverable pre-colonial history that is at best fragmentary and is best represented in vernacular language and popular oral culture. For these reasons, it is perhaps not surprising that Walcott is not driven to create new forms and is at ease using the Western European traditions of literature and orature in combination with Caribbean popular traditions.

‘The Schooner "Flight"’ was written partly as a tribute to Piers Plowman, a work produced at a point in English history when written literature was moving into the ascendancy but still depended largely on its oral traditions. Walcott’s poem combines elements of Trinidadian calypso and English ballad form, which are both based in oral cultures. As Seamus Heaney has pointed out, the language used is ‘woven out of dialect and literature’ whereby a singular idiom is evolved ‘out of one man’s inherited divisions.’ The metre is based upon iambic pentameters which is the medium of English blank verse but it also lends itself to the lilting rhythms of Creole. The metre facilitates the shift between the various registers of language:

"Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn,
I stood like a stone and nothing else move
but the cold sea rippling like galvanize…
I pass me dry neighbour sweeping she yard."

This shifting, combined with the movement of verb tenses and the economy of words, emphasises the spoken quality of the verse. In Part I, Shabine gives us Walcott’s manifesto making clear that his use of language is integral to the form of this poem:

" …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; in simple speech
my common language go be the wind."

Common in this context means not only the vulgar vernacular but also shared language. Shabine/Walcott’s intention is to weave out of a mixed heritage of spoken languages (his ‘sound colonial education’ is both solid and aural) a sense of nationhood instead of dissipation into nothingness - ‘either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.’

The sense of orality is reinforced by other devices. In his announcement, ‘let me tell you how this business begin,’ Shabine/Walcott uses what Fred d’Aguiar has pointed out is a storytelling device which ‘serves as a reminder and marker of the original impulse of the story, which is an oral one even though it’s being read.’ In addition, Walcott draws enthusiastically upon European literary traditions. His poem owes much to Homeric epic poems, which themselves draw upon oral ballad traditions:

"I saw God
like a harpooned grouper bleeding, and a far
voice was rumbling."

This evokes Poseidon the Earthshaker of Book V of the Odyssey. Romantic poets, particularly Keats and Coleridge drew upon English oral traditions and there are resonances of Part IV of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in ‘Shabine Encounters the Middle Passage.’ This engagement with a wide range of colonial literary history is a symbolic reinforcement of Shabine/Walcott’s engagement with social history. Nationhood is created by imagination and the Caribbean’s only heritage from history is language. Like other colonised peoples (notably the Irish, perhaps), the Caribbean peoples have turned an imposed culture, history and language to their own purposes and made it their own in a new literature that revalues Creole oral culture and history at a worth equal to colonial literature and history.

It is clear that Walcott, rather than aiming at a radically new literary form, wishes to assimilate colonial heritage. In doing this, however, he does not merely reproduce it in a new setting but speaks in a specifically Caribbean voice and succeeds in creating a sense of Caribbean nationhood and history that emanates from Creole oral traditions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cuddon, J A, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (3rd edition), Penguin Books 1991

Homer, trans. E V Rieu, The Odyssey, Penguin Books 1946

Seymour-Smith, Martin, Guide to Modern World Literature (3rd edition), Macmillan Press 1985


Deirdre Shaw MA from United Kingdom