In Praise of Derek Walcott’s Epic of the Americas
This content was originally published by JULIAN LUCAS on 23 April 2017 | 9:45 pm.
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The last place “Omeros” took me was to St. Lucia, where just over a year before Walcott died I attended the Nobel Laureate Week celebrations for his 86th birthday. During a catamaran ride around the island, while dozens of guests danced and drank on deck, the poet sat anchored in his wheelchair like Odysseus tied to the mast. His eyes read the passing landscape like a poem in progress: checking the scansion of the shoreline, firming the mountains’ metaphors, making sure there was nothing he had missed.
A Walcott Starter Kit
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If you want to explore Walcott’s poetry, these five works are a good place to begin.
‘MIDSUMMER I ’ (‘MIDSUMMER,’ 1984)
Begin with this window-seat epiphany from the poet in flight, sky liner notes rivaled only by James Merrill’s “A Downward Look” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Night City.” Walcott approaches Trinidad in a plane recast as a pond’s gliding insect: “The jet like a silverfish bores through volumes of cloud.” From this altitude, all his major themes appear in dioramic miniature: the Odyssean homecoming, this contiguity between language and landscape (“sharp exclamations of whitewashed minarets”), and the Caribbean’s existence beyond official histories. Landing is loveliest — each successive layer of the rematerializing world yields a “shelving sense of home.”
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‘ THE SEA IS HISTORY ’ (‘THE STAR- APPLE KINGDOM, 1979)
The orator Demosthenes liked to practice speaking on the seashore, voice raised in challenge to the roaring surf. The ocean is an ancient argument, and here Walcott makes it answer a contemptuous dismissal of the islands’ history. “Where are your battles, your monuments, martyrs?” asks the voice of a metropolitan skeptic — and the poet’s strident answer is “the sea.” Underwater, Caribbean pasts fuse with biblical scenes and the rhythms of marine life, evoking both classical underworlds and the sunken island afterlife of Haitian Voodoo. Bones from the drowned of the Middle Passage are reborn as a living Book of Exodus: “mosaics/ mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow.”
‘ LOVE AFTER LOVE ’ (‘SEA GRAPES,’ 1976)
If Walcott had a pop song, “Love After Love” would be it. Uncharacteristically free of proper nouns (no Latinate tropical flowers or seaside villages with soft Creole names), it is a simple, tender promise of healing after heartbreak:
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror.
A celebration of return from love’s tempestuous self-exile, the poem’s interior landfall is ultimately inseparable from Walcott’s grander voyages. Concentrically nested in all his circumnavigations of history are the wanderings and homecomings of the individual heart.
‘ THE ANTILLES: FRAGMENTS OF EPIC MEMORY’ (1992)
Evoking a Trinidadian performance of the Hindu epic “The Ramayana,” Walcott begins his 1992 Nobel Lecture by celebrating the hybrid beauty of Caribbean civilization. The speech is not only a paean to a region but a defense of the islands often dismissed (even by V. S. Naipaul, Walcott’s nemesis) as shapeless derivations of those African, Asian and European “originals” from which its people retain only shards. But it is in this “gathering of broken pieces” that Walcott finds the archipelago’s poetry: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”
‘ANOTHER LIFE’ (1973)
Rare is the artist lucky enough to grow up with his country. “For no one had yet written of this landscape/ that it was possible,” says Walcott in this luminous autobiography, a verse chronicle of his artistic apprenticeship during the twilight of colonialism and the early years of St. Lucia’s independence. The book’s highlight is Walcott’s young friendship with the painter Dunstan St. Omer (Gregorias in the poem), companion and competitor in his quest to immortalize the island. Among the most moving tributes to home in poetry, “Another Life” makes it clear why St. Lucia gave Derek Walcott a state funeral — his coffin swathed in the national flag designed by St. Omer.
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