The Poetry of Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott is the great poet of cultural hybridity. He had a complex cultural heritage. He was born in 1930 in St. Lucia, a British colony at the time, but with a heritage of French colonialism. His father was white and English; his mother was black and descended from slaves. To complicate things further, his family were Methodists in a largely Catholic community. This complex heritage made Walcott identify with Irish authors. I’m not making this up. In an interview with Edward Hirsch in 1977, Walcott said: “The whole Irish influence was for me a very intimate one. When the Irish brothers came to teach at the college in St. Lucia, I had been reading a lot of Irish literature: I read Joyce, naturally I knew Yeats, and so on. I’ve always felt some kind of intimacy with the Irish poets because one realized that they were colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean. . . . Now, with all of that, to have those astounding achievements of genius, whether by Joyce or Yeats or Beckett, illustrated that one could come out of a depressed, deprived, oppressed situation and be defiant and creative at the same time. As a Methodist in a Catholic country, I also sympathized with the most rebellious aspect of Irish literature, priest-hating and such” (Conversations 59). Walcott thinks particularly of Joyce and Stephen Daedalus and the famous ending of Portrait of the Artist: “to forge. . .the uncreated conscience of my race.” In another interview with Hirsch, in 1985, Walcott comments: “It’s amazing Joyce could say that he wants to write for his race meaning the Irish. You’d think that Joyce would have a larger, more continental kind of mind, but Joyce continued insisting on his provinciality at the same time as he had the most universal mind since Shakespeare. What we can do as poets in terms of our honesty is simply to write within the immediate perimeter of not more than twenty miles really” (Conversations 105). Here we see the poles between which Walcott’s poetry moves--universality and provinciality. Perhaps we should speak of universality through provinciality—Walcott hopes to find the universal in the provincial. Indeed, he begins from a universal fact—we are all originally provincials.
So we see two sides to Walcott’s poetry. 1) it is anchored in European literary tradition, specifically influenced by T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and Joyce 2) it is postcolonial—he sees himself as expressing Caribbean experience. But these are not simply opposed. It sums up what we’ve been seeing--as English becomes a world language, European and non-European literature work together. What I’ve been trying to do in this course is to show that European and non-European literature are not simply at odds with each other, not just opposites. That’s why we’ve been reading them together. We want to rethink European literature in light of non-European. For one thing, many European authors are in effect postcolonial, especially Irish writers like Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney. By the same token, many postcolonial authors draw upon European literature—Achebe, Rushdie, and Coetzee. Maybe the most emblematic fact in the course is that the most famous African novel, Things Fall Apart, is named after a Yeats poem. Many postcolonial authors have been nourished by the tradition they rebel against. And many European authors have been rebels against European traditions themselves.
Still, this creates a very problematic situation for authors. Walcott feels torn between his European and his African heritage. As he so eloquently put it in his poem “A Far Cry from Africa”: “how choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?” (Walcott 18). This issue takes the concrete form of deciding what language to write his poetry in. Walcott chose to write in English, but he was troubled by the colonial heritage of the language of the mother country. That question could have been asked by Yeats or Joyce: “how choose between this Ireland and the English tongue I love?” Like so many other authors we’ve seen, Walcott feels that he can make English his own—like the Joyce figure in Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island,” Walcott could say: “The English language belongs to us” (Opened Ground, “Station Island,” section XII, p. 245). He said as much in another interview: “I do not consider English to be the language of my masters. I consider language to be my birthright. I happen to have been born in an English and a Creole place and love both languages. It is the passion, futility and industry of critics to perpetuate this ambiguity. It is their profession. It is mine to do what other poets before me did, Dante, Chaucer, Villon, Burns, which is to fuse the noble and the common language, the streets and the law courts, in a tone that is true to my own voice, in which both accents are heard naturally” (Conversations 82). Notice: many European authors have been bilingual or trilingual. Robert Burns was a Scottish author living under English rule and he learned to negotiate between English and Scottish in his poetry. The experience of postcolonial authors is not new--many traditional authors have had to deal with similar problems.
Walcott is postcolonial but he doesn’t stress the uniqueness of his experience as a Caribbean author. He doesn’t want to be isolated as someone exotic. He looks for continuities with other authors, traditional European authors. His fundamental experience as a Caribbean author is exile and displacement. But that’s the fundamental experience of many authors—often they don’t feel that they fit in—they are not at home. Walcott’s linguistic heritage is polyglot. He comes from St. Lucia, an island where they speak English and French. But in a sense that’s true of all writers in English--the language itself is a mixture of English and French--ever since the Norman Conquest in 1066. Chaucer was bilingual; he was writing for a French-speaking court; he even wrote a few of his poems in French. Many of his poetic sources were French. When Walcott won the Nobel Prize, some people said: “Isn’t it remarkable that someone from a small, obscure, provincial island became a great writer?” Walcott’s answer to such comments: that’s the story of every writer; every writer somehow begins as provincial and he has to learn how to break out of his original neighborhood. The importance of neighborhood, of the local: we’ve seen that in Heaney and Faulkner. But you have to learn to move beyond it. Walcott sees Shakespeare as the great example of this: “It’s like Shakespeare’s leaving Warwickshire and going to town. If Shakespeare had remained true to his countryside, we might have great speech but how could that have been arrested? How could one expect him to talk in an incoherent language to other people in London—to write in an incoherent language that is totally thickened with provincialisms. So what does one say? Shakespeare is a phony for writing Troilus and Cressida? Why is he not true to his roots? And of course he was attacked for that. He was attacked for being pompous and pretentious; Robert Greene attacked him for that. And then the people who envied him asked ‘Who is this country boy?’ To remain purely a country boy all the time is to deny yourself the width of ambition Shakespeare, as one example, demonstrates” (Conversations 130-31). Walcott correctly points out that Shakespeare started out as a provincial and learned to move from the periphery of his culture to the center. He had to get beyond his provincial country dialect and learn the metropolitan language, the language of London. I would bet that he had to lose a heavy Warwickshire accent just to get a role on the London stage. This is just what Walcott had to learn to do—to go from the margins to the center of culture. And notice: he imagines that critics at the time complained that Shakespeare lost touch with his roots; he betrayed his origins. The same charge has been made against Walcott, Achebe, and Rushdie. The example of Shakespeare helps Walcott to defend himself. Again, we see the two poles for him: the universal and the provincial; the global and the local; the world and the neighborhood. Walcott is not so much concerned with the nation state. We might use the formula: think globally; write locally. Or maybe: think locally; write globally.
Walcott is always looking for what he has in common with other writers, not just what makes him different. In particular he identifies with the ancient Greeks and the Jews, the two peoples at the center of Western civilization--Athens and Jerusalem. Despite the fact that many critics would think that Walcott should feel alienated from Western civilization, he evidently doesn’t believe that this cultural material is alien to him. On the contrary, he embraces it because for him the central cultural experience is diaspora. He links the Jewish diaspora, the Greek diaspora, and the African diaspora. He explores this theme in “North and South” (Walcott 408). Here Walcott presents himself as a “child of the Diaspora.” His formative experience was indeed the African diaspora. On his mother’s side, his ancestors were forcibly brought to the New World in the slave trade. His people suffered oppression and persecution for centuries. But he also has oppressors in his family heritage. With a vision of “white-robed horsemen,” he is haunted by images of the Ku Klux Klan. Out of all this complex heritage, Walcott identifies with the Jews—“maybe we are part Jewish”--not biologically but culturally—they are another people of the diaspora. Indeed, the original diaspora. We talked about the Irish Diaspora when we studied LDJ, but here we go back to the original meaning of the term--the scattering of the Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD. Walcott is the great poet of diaspora; he shows that diaspora is a fundamental human experience. In “Negatives” (Walcott 124), an African event, the slaughter of the Ibo people in Biafra by the Nigerian Hausas, reminds him of the slaughter of the Jews in Nazi Germany: “The Ibos, you see, are like the Jews, / very much the situation in Hitler’s Germany, / I mean the Hausas’ resentment.” Walcott again identifies Africans with Jews this time because of the common issue of genocide. Walcott raises the same issue in “A Far Cry from Africa” (Walcott 17), where the rebellious Kikuyu in Kenya are regarded as “savages, expendable as Jews.” On the one hand, Walcott wants to show that African experience is analogous to some of the central experiences of Western culture. On the other hand, Walcott wants to give a more balanced view of Western experience—it’s not all a matter of oppression and victimizing. Western people have been victims too. Walcott portrays the suffering and victimization of the African people—he is the great poet of the horrors of the Middle Passage and the slave trade in general. But he shows that there have other horrors in the 20th century, some of them visited upon European people.
Writing about the Holocaust in “A Fortunate Traveler” (Walcott 461), Walcott uses the opportunity to turn the tables on Europe. He takes us back to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but now we learn that it’s not in Africa—it’s in Europe; it’s the Holocaust:
The heart of darkness is not Africa
The heart of darkness is the core of fire
in the white center of the holocaust.
The heart of darkness is the rubber claw
selecting a scalpel in antiseptic light.
Walcott conjures up a vision of the concentration camps (he mentions Dachau), with Nazi doctors experimenting on human subjects. As we have seen, it was a common European view that Africa provides the standard of barbarism. For Walcott, nothing in African history is as barbaric as Nazi Germany. Here is the central postcolonial gesture--the Empire strikes back, teaching Europe a lesson. The most sophisticated European science carried far enough turns into barbarism. Conrad already hinted at this in Heart of Darkness--the doctor who experiments on Marlow, measuring his skull, shows how medicine can become inhuman and inhumane. It’s an inadvertent foreshadowing of the German concentration camps. Indeed, the very term “concentration camp” was originally a British coinage (an obvious euphemism) used during the Boer War to describe their prisoner of war camps for the South African insurgents (only later did the term become Konzentrationslager).
Thus Walcott profoundly identifies with the suffering of the Jews in the 20th century. He also identifies with the ancient Greeks. In “Sea Grapes” (Walcott 297), Walcott sees parallels between his Caribbean experiences and the world of the ancient Greeks. He sees “a schooner beating up the Caribbean,” and thinks that “could be Odysseus, home-bound for the Aegean.” Walcott comes from an island--Homer came from an island. The Greeks were an island people--a seafaring people—the people of a diaspora. There was no separate country called Greece in the ancient world. Greek settlements were scattered all over the Mediterranean and even the Black Sea. The Greek world was wherever people spoke Greek. The Odyssey is one of the founding works of Western literature, and it’s a story of exile and displacement--a man desperately struggling to get back home. In Walcott’s literary career, his identification with the Greeks culminates in Omeros--his greatest work—in which he retells the Odyssey in a Caribbean setting, with a character named Achille. Walcott was struck by his parallels with Homer--an oral poet, a bard, a singer of tales—much like Walcott and other Caribbean poets. We saw Yeats make a similar identification with Homer in several poems, including “No Second Troy,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” and “Leda and the Swan.” Postcolonial poets see Homer as a model--he was the teacher of the ancient Greeks--in some sense he gave them their culture. Postcolonial authors want to do the same for their newly independent people. Walcott likes to introduce “a hint of the Homeric” (“The Man Who Loved Islands,” Walcott 421) into his poetry. He is constantly mapping the Mediterranean onto the Caribbean. This was important to him as a poet, but be careful. Hybridity is not simply the solution: “The classics can console. But not enough” (“Sea Grapes,” Walcott 297). For Walcott, there’s a limit to the power of the classics.
In “The Hotel Normandie Pool” Walcott turns to the Latin classics and explores his parallels to Ovid. Ovid was one of the most famous classical poets—and very much at the center of the Western literary tradition. But Ovid offers yet another story of exile and displacement. Ovid began his literary career at the court of the Roman Emperor Augustus, the very center of the Roman Empire and the Roman literary world. But in 8 AD, Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea (in what is now Constanta, Romania, a statue of a scowling Ovid dominates a downtown square)--just about as far away from Rome as you could get in those days. In Ovid’s world, he moved from the center to the periphery; in Walcott’s, he moved from the periphery to the center. For Walcott, the experience he has in common with Ovid is exile and displacement. In Tomis, Ovid could not feel at home:
Then Ovid said, “When I was first exiled
I missed my language as my tongue needs salt,
in every watery shape I saw my child,
no bench would tell my shadow ‘Here’s your place.’ (Walcott 443)
Ripped from Rome, Ovid felt alienated in Tomis. He had the same problem with language we’ve seen in so many of our authors. And the same problem with place we’ve seen---remember Hamm’s anguished question in Endgame: “Am I in the center?” On the imperial frontier, Ovid was caught between the colonial language (Latin) and some native language; the birds try to get him “to learn their tribal tongue” (Walcott 444). People accused Ovid of being a toady, of currying favor with his imperial masters, including the Emperor himself:
And where are those detractors now who said
that in and out of the imperial shade
I scuttled, showing to a frowning sun
the fickle dyes of the chameleon? (Walcott 444)
This resembles the critics who accuse Walcott or Achebe of selling out to their ex-colonial masters, writing in English, the colonial tongue. But Ovid was not a toady—he got himself banished from the imperial court in Rome. In fact, his writings were critical of Augustus and the Roman Empire; that is what got him in trouble in the first place. Poets are rebellious and subversive--even a poet of the Roman Empire. The poet is critical of authority—that is Walcott’s point of identification with Ovid. The classic poet serves him as an example of subverting authority, not supporting it. This is how Walcott is able to draw upon the classical tradition in literature even in a postcolonial gesture.
The other European tradition Walcott turns to is the ancient Hebrews, and in particular the Bible. His poem “The Sea Is History” offers a remarkable set of parallels between stories in the Bible and the experience of African slaves brought to New World. Walcott maps the experience of Africans slaves onto the books of the Bible. For example, he compares the story of Exodus to the journey of slaves in ships out of Africa. Paradoxically, he views the Middle Passage on the model of Exodus. Walcott did not invent this idea out of thin hair. It’s actually deeply rooted in African-American experience. Think of the powerful spiritual “Go Down, Moses.” Slaves in the US drew upon the Bible to come to terms with their experience as slaves. That’s why slave masters in the American South tried to keep their slaves from reading the Bible. This is a perfect example of cultural hybridity. The Hebrews enslaved in Egypt and then later the Babylonian captivity of the Jews become emblems of African American experience. Let us not forget that a fundamental and repeated experience in the Hebrew Bible is exile and displacement.
In his poem “New World” (Walcott 300-301), Walcott goes all the way back to the origins of Western culture, the Garden of Eden story. And it turns out to be another story of exile and displacement, the loss of paradise. Once again Walcott creates a parallel with the experience of African slaves. This is a fundamental human experience--the loss of paradise, which takes the form of finding you have to work hard, something slaves learn all too well. Walcott’s hope is that we can find a new Eden, but we’ll have to work hard to bring it about. For the Africans brought forcibly to the Caribbean, in a sense it was a loss of Eden, but in another sense it was a second chance at Eden in a new world. Walcott doesn’t minimize the horrors of the slave trade--in fact, he stresses it throughout his poetry. Here he sees something satanic about the slave trade--the serpent was part of the bargain. But maybe something good can come out of it after all:
Adam had an idea.
He and the snake would share
the loss of Eden for a profit.
So both made the New World. And it looked good. (Walcott 301)
Punning on “profit” and “loss,” Walcott proposes a new version of Milton’s Fortunate Fall--that we have to make something good out of the fall--by our labor. Our labor is our creativity and we may appropriate God’s right to say of the world we build that it is good. For Adam, labor is “joy that was difficult / but was, at least his own” (Walcott 300). Walcott in effect says: don’t just sit around and lament the past--the loss of Eden. Try to create a new Eden—that’s the meaning of the New World--we have to look to the future.
This is the theme of his essay “The Muse of History” (Postcolonial Studies Reader, 373-74), a moving attempt to come to terms with the fraught legacy of slavery in his life: “I accept this archipelago of the Americas. I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to the ancestor who bought me, I have no father, I want no such father, although I can understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper ‘history,’ for if I attempt to forgive you both I am falling into your idea of history which justifies and explains and expiates, and it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial love, since your features are anonymous and erased and I have no wish and no power to pardon. You were when you acted your roles, your given, historical roles of slave seller and slave buyer, men acting as men, and also you, father in the filth-ridden gut of the slave ship, to you they were also men, acting as men, with the cruelty of men, your fellowman and your tribesman not moved or hovering with hesitation about your common race any longer than my other bastard ancestor hovered with his whip, but to you inwardly forgiven grandfathers, I, like the more honest of my race, give a strange thanks. I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift.” Faced with the horror of slavery on both sides of his family, Walcott struggles to find something to affirm in his family history. And he arrives at a powerful image of cultural hybridity: “the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice.” This hybridity has its positive and negative aspects. It’s a fruit but it’s “bitter.” Walcott turns to the past of his people, but he doesn’t want to dwell on it, to get lost in endless recriminations. Who is responsible for all this suffering? Notice: Walcott blames both sides of his heritage--on the white side of his family, the slave buyers; on the black side, the men who sold their fellows into slavery. This was all horrible. And yet Walcott gives “strange thanks” for this—it’s what placed him in the Caribbean, potentially a new Eden for the poet. This is what gave him his hybrid heritage. He lost one Eden but gained a new one—it’s up to him now to make something of it.
Walcott sums up the challenges facing him as a poet in a poem called “Names.” It begins with Walcott’s sense of displacement; he is now living “with a different fix on the stars,” but now he has to adjust to his new home—"But now my race is here” (Walcott 305). He has to make the best of it as a new opportunity. In fact, it’s a rich cultural opportunity. In the Caribbean, Walcott has a fresh start: “My race began as the sea began, / with no nouns, and with no horizon” (Walcott 305). Walcott recovers Adam’s privilege: he can name things afresh. Africans had their languages taken away from them by slaveowners, who didn’t want them to be able to communicate. They put slave gangs together from different tribes so that they could not communicate and plan rebellion. But this yields a new opportunity: to create language anew. “I began with no memory” (Walcott 305)—that’s what gives Walcott a clean slate as a poet. It’s horrible—you’ve been ripped out of your culture, you’ve been denied your own language, but it’s also a chance to build a new culture. And it will be a new culture because of the hybridity of the Caribbean:
The goldsmith from Benares,
the stonecutter from Canton,
the bronzesmith from Benin. (Walcott 306)
People from India, China, and Africa come together in the Caribbean islands. They’ve all been ripped out of their cultural homes, but thereby given a clean slate. The sea has wiped the slate clean—the task now is “to trace our names on the sand / which the sea erased again” (Walcott 306).
Walcott views the challenge of the New World as one of language--of names and naming. How do you fit old words to new experiences? Confronted by all the new experiences of the New World, how did the newcomers respond?
And when they named these bays
bays,
was it nostalgia or irony? (Walcott 306)
In the paradoxically named poem “Old New England,” Walcott calls our attention to the fact that everything in the New World was named after the Old World: “New Bedford, New London, New Haven” (Walcott 399). We could easily add New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and so on. Was this homesickness? Were the new arrivals desperately clinging to their old experiences by clinging to their old names? Were they hoping to find something of their old home in their new home?
Or were the Old World names applied ironically? Did they perhaps realize how inappropriate the old names were to the New World. In fact, “New England” didn’t look like Old England to the original colonists. It was a frightening place; it seemed barbaric and uncivilized. If New England looks like Old England today, it’s only due to years of effort--remaking it to look like England. Walcott is struck by the original gap between the New World and the Old:
In the uncultivated forest,
in uncultivated grass
where was there elegance
except in their mockery? (Walcott 306)
The New World sites did not live up to their names; the reality fell far short of the promise of the names. The aristocratic elegance of Europe was replaced by the humble circumstances of America:
Where were the courts of Castille?
Versailles’ colonnades
supplanted by cabbage palms
with Corinthian crests,
belittling diminutives,
then, little Versailles
meant plans for a pigsty,
names for the sour apples
and green grapes
of their exile. (Walcott 307)
The colonization of the New World, viewed today in grandiose terms in retrospect, was in fact at the time a form of exile for the colonists. They had to give up the sweet apples of their homeland for the sour apples native to their new home. The colonists were stuck with their new circumstances and had to learn to make the best of a fundamentally dire situation.
But the colonists were not merely the passive recipients of their new experience. They had the opportunity to change things. And they had the linguistic resources needed to respond to the new experience; indeed, language proved crucial to their mastering of the New World:
Their memory turned acid
But the names held;
Valencia glows with the lanterns of oranges. . . .
Being men, they could not live
except they first presumed
the right of every thing to be a noun.
The African acquiesced,
repeated and changed them. (Walcott 307)
The human ability to name things is perhaps our greatest power in confronting and dealing with the world. The slaves in the New World had to yield to new languages, but even they had a chance to rename things. The polyglot colonial environment gave the newcomers a range of choices when it came to naming things. In the Caribbean, for example, the new inhabitants had the choice of English or French names:
Listen, my children, say:
moubain: the hogplum,
cerise: the wild cherry,
baie-la: the bay. (Walcott 307)
We’re not captives of language when we can maneuver between different languages. “Names” builds up to a remarkable conclusion:
and children, look at these stars
over Valencia’s forest!
Not Orion,
not Betelgeuse,
tell me, what do they look like?
Answer, you damned little Arabs!
Sir, fireflies caught in molasses. (Walcott 308)
Weighted down with Old World names of stars--sometimes classical (Orion); sometimes Arabic (Betelgeuse)—we may be unable to capture the novelty of our New World experiences. But poetry is always possible. For Derek Walcott, stars are “fireflies caught in molasses”—a remarkable Caribbean image for stars. This is his answer to the critics who complain about his use of the colonial language, English. They view our relation to language as passive. Language makes us, we don’t make language. This may be true of most people; they tend to be shaped by the language they speak. But it’s not true of poets. They are creative in their use of language. They don’t just accept language as they find it. Poets are constantly remaking language, renaming things. That’s the function of metaphor and other figures of speech.
Walcott thus has great hopes for New World poetry. That’s the opportunity he’s been given as a Caribbean author: “I’m forty-seven now, and I can still remember the tremendous elation I had at eighteen just standing on a little hill somewhere and looking around at the sea and the sky and the town, knowing that nobody had really written about this. It was exhilarating to know that I was privileged to be the first one to put down the name of a certain town, or fisherman, or road—a privilege very few writers ever have” (Conversations 54). This is what is Edenic about Walcott’s Caribbean experience; it restores to him Adam’s privilege of naming things: “so the privilege of just looking at these places and seeing their totally uncorrupted existence remains an Adamic experience. Looking across at the mountains, or walking on a beach that is really deserted on an early morning, you can’t avoid the feeling that this is a new world” (Conversations 54). Certainly in the case of slaves, but in many other cases as well, it was horrible to be exiled to the New World—it involved a gut-wrenching sense of displacement and disorientation. But displacement also means a freshness of perspective—and that is the hope of a poet. This way of thinking goes all the way back to the Romantics—particularly Wordsworth and Blake. The poet should see things the way a child sees them, see things as if for the first time. That’s what Walcott can do as a postcolonial poet in the Caribbean.
Throughout this course, we’ve been watching the way English spread around the world as the language of literature. In many ways this was a sad story because it was at the same time the story of the growth of the British Empire, and that had many negative economic and political effects. But the cultural effects were not necessarily negative. The spread of English created new and unprecedented cultural opportunities, opportunities for complex hybridization in literature. “North and South” is one of Walcott’s most penetrating reflections on the British Empire, a sort of grudging elegy for it. He pictures a scene in the Bahamas, one of Britain’s former outposts in the Caribbean:
and see the full moon again
like a white flag rising over Fort Charlotte
and sunset slowly collapsing like the flag. (Walcott 405)
At its height, it used to be said: “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” Now it has set, and the British Empire has collapsed. That leaves Walcott in an odd position: “I accept my function / as a colonial upstart at the end of an empire” (Walcott 405). That’s a wonderful way of describing many of the authors we’ve been studying. Walcott sees European empire in retreat everywhere across the globe:
I can listen to its guttural rattle in the shoal
of the legions’ withdrawing roar, from the raj,
from the Reich. (Walcott 405)
This is not very complimentary to the British Empire. Walcott associates the “raj” with the “Reich.” The British empire was not the antithesis of Nazi Germany, as it would like to think of itself. The British rule in India was fundamentally the same as the Nazi attempt to rule over Europe.
Walcott is, then, happy to celebrate the death of the British empire, but he has a caveat: “It’s good that everything’s gone, except their language, which is everything” (Walcott 405). Walcott is willing to separate political effects from cultural. Thanks to postcolonial literature, the death of the British Empire has been a kind of rebirth of the English language. The English language has always had a spirit different from the spirit of the British Empire. The Empire tried to be exclusive. We saw the English fear of “going native” all the way back in Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King.” In their colonies, the British tried to keep themselves separate from the natives. By contrast, the English language has always been inclusive; after all, it started as an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon and French. It then took in Greek and Latin words. And then Indian words (bungalow) and African words (trek). This inclusive tendency made it easy for writers around the world to appropriate English for their own purposes. English truly became a world language in the 20th century. At the beginning of the century, there was a widespread fear that the English language might be played out, exhausted--too much literature had been written in it already. Surveying modern literature in “Three Movements,” Yeats wrote: “What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?” But as a result of English spreading around the globe, the language has been revitalized. New voices, with distinct perspectives, have brought out new possibilities in the English language. Among many things, this course has been a tribute to the vitality of the English language and its still untapped cultural possibilities. It took a combination of postcolonial authors from all around the world to show the English what could still be done with their age-old language.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
William Baer, ed. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1996
Seamus Heaney. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998
Derek Walcott. Collected Poems, 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986
Derek Walcott. “The Muse of History.” The Postcolonial Studies Reader. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, eds. London: Routledge, 1995
Myths of Creation
