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Walcot's "The Sea is History" makes an interesting companion piece to Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck." Both use the sea as as a metaphor for the histories that are eclipsed or hidden by "official history"--whose patriarchal and racist agendas are unmasked by Rich's and Walcot's poems, respectively. The two poems share other parallels: both take us to the ocean floor and thus have us revisit the history inscribed there. Walcot's poem is much more ironic: he parallels the the slave trade and gruesome sufferings of the Middle Passage and beyond to Hebrew and Christian cultural sign posts. Rich's poem is more elusive about the history that is purportedly revealed. This makes sense. If the history can be described in any detail, it's just old-fashioned history. This is perhaps a weakness in Rich's poem; the narrator of the poem dives into the wreck and discovers "the wreck, and not the story of the wreck". But the poem never discussed explicitly the wreck of the past--i.e., what was done to women. Rich is probably more incensed by woman's erasure in history than by their documentable subjugation.
Walcot, of course, by imposing a Hebraic/biblical historical template onto African suffering and struggles for literation, is, as I said, being ironic and perhaps making the same point as Rich, a little more ferociously, about erasure and the double-bind that the subjugated must feel--A sense that you either have no history or that your history, to be history, must parrot some official historical development, even to obsurd lengths--e.g., "the synod of flies", etc.
Michael Lee from United States