The Antilles Quotes

“There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.”
― Derek Walcott, The Antilles

“Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture.”
― Derek Walcott, The Antilles

“I should like to keep these simple joys inviolate, not because they are innocent, but because they are true”
― Derek Walcott, The Antilles

“Here is where a real fresco should be painted, one without importance, but one with real faith, mapless, Historyless.”
― Derek Walcott, The Antilles

“That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.”
― Derek Walcott, The Antilles

“It is not that History is obliterated by this sunrise. It is there in Antillean geography, in the vegetation itself. The sea sighs with the drowned from the Middle Passage, the butchery of its aborigines, Carib and Aruac and Taino, bleeds in the scarlet of the immortelle, and even the actions of surf on sand cannot erase the African memory, or the lances of cane as a green prison where indentured Asians, the ancestors of Felicity, are still serving time.”
― Derek Walcott, The Antilles