The Prose of a Poet: Analysis of Derek Walcott’s Writing Style

When the Swedish Academy awarded poet and playwright Derek Walcott the Nobel Prize in 1992, they recognized his contribution to Caribbean literature as a brilliant response to the “complexity of his own situation”. Walcott’s life and work has always been reflective of this complexity wherein they inhabit an intersection of variant cultural forces. Ajanta Dutt, in Neruda, Walcott and Atwood: Poets of the Americas cites Walcott’s friend and fellow-poet James Dickey who speaks of the poet’s troubled predicament: “Here he is, a twentieth-century man, living in the West Indies and in Boston, poised between the blue sea and its real fish, and the rockets and warheads, between a lapsed colonial culture and the industrial North, between Africa and the West, between slavery and intellectualism, between the native Caribbean tongue and the English learned from books, between the black and white of his own body, between the sound of the home ocean and the lure of European culture”. These relationships are major subjects in Walcott’s work and he identifies himself as a truly native Caribbean poet. In the Nobel Laureate’s oeuvre we therefore witness the intense physical beauty of the Caribbean islands, the troubled relationship between his roots and colonial heritage, and the problems of a fragmented postcolonial identity.

Walcott's Life and Literature Style

Born on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia when it was still a British colony, Walcott’s first language was a French-English patois but he received an English education. English also became his poetical and hence political tongue, a tongue which had its roots in a far-flung empire. He spent half his life in what he calls ‘the prehistoric Eden of his childhood’ and the other half teaching in the world’s newest empire-United States. Walcott’s poetry arises from this schizophrenic situation, from a struggle between two disparate cultural forces. It is through this predicament he has harnessed to create a unique “creolized” style. While critics in the new and old empires are often ambivalent about Walcott’s indebt to the Western literary tradition, his Caribbean contemporaries accuse him of adapting an imperial style. While it is indeed true that his early work reflects the voices of English poetry but if Walcott’s poetry at times appear to betray a native tradition, it also manifests a profound blending of European, American, Caribbean, African, classical and contemporary cultures. Walcott therefore, is a poet who has learned from the European tradition and perfected the complex experience of a West Indian; a poet who developed a new critical idiom to adequate his subject matters. In “What The Twilight Says: An Overture” a set of introductory essays to a collection of his plays (also serves as an autobiographical essay and his seminal non-fictional work), he writes of the tied allegiance to the two worlds he grew up with: “Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles; that being poor, we already had the theater of our lives. In that simple schizophrenic boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, and the outward life of action and dialect.”

This paper aims to look at Walcott’s style as a writer struggling with the confining alternative between affiliating himself to and reacting against the European tradition; his unique predicament which is expounded in “What The Twilight Says: An Overture” as a case for postcolonial writers confronting the problems of tradition and history. Postcolonialism as a movement started reflecting on the paradigm of loss as a result of colonial oppression. It went on to voice the modes of resistance and protest used by the people of the colonies. However, with time, there emerged shifts in postcolonial thinking and the condition today is transcending the paradigms of resistance and protest. Postcolonialism pleads for freeing history from colonial ideology by way of creating narratives of revision. It looks at examining core aspects of alternative and vernacular modernities. Postcolonial thinking today, has marked a significant shift from the logic of accommodation of a troubled past to the reality of enabling participation. This idea is most reflective in one of the essays from Walcott’s collection- “The Muse of History”. This paper shall look at “The Muse of History” as the primary text to study Walcott’s style.

“The Muse of History” (first published in Ordre Coomb’s Is Massa Day Dead?) can be read as a creative manifesto to Walcott’s ideas of colonial history and poetic tradition. In an intensely personal and self-analytical way, the essay explores the political, cultural and historical experiences Walcott has been through as a Caribbean writer. Walcott is more of an aesthete here where he speaks of the power of poetry against the jaded cynicism of the New World poets, who overtly victimizes the schizophrenic condition of the third world experience. Walcott speaks of freeing history from the shackles of a troubled past and enabling a postcolonial praxis of the Caribbean experience. He adapts as his epigraph a quotation from Joyce: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” and goes on to call history the “Medusa of the New World”. Walcott divides the writers of the New World into two groups: “classicists” and “radicals” and to him both are victims of tradition. However, he offers a mild consideration towards the classicists who for Walcott are “able to subtilize arrogance, which is tougher than violent rejection”. As for the radicals, he believes that open rebellion against tradition only help to perpetuate it.

Both these arguments are made with exceptional subtlety and Walcott also manages to keep himself at a distance from these two groups. He observes that both the classicists and radicals have only managed to offer a prolonged servitude towards history. This has given space for two kinds of literature to arise: one is the literature of remorse written by the descendants of colonial masters and the other the literature of revenge written by descendant of slaves. Walcott calls this a “self-torture” and says this self-torture arise when the poet or the writer of the new world sees history as language, where he “limits his memory to the suffering of the victim”. Thus, for Walcott, this language becomes a language of enslavement where the writers write with a “phonetic pain”, a “groan of suffering” and with the “curse of revenge”. This is when creativity is the most affected as there is a constant perusal of the master’s pernicious indictment so much so that it becomes a practice of “self-deceit”. The main argument of Walcott is that the past is fed as an idea by the conservatists and revolutionaries as different versions of simultaneity where the oppressive event of colonialism plays itself out. According to him such poets who cast themselves as victims of history, cannot separate the rage of the oppressed from the beauty of their speech. Such poets would not want to look at the beauty of the Caliban’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Even if the oppressed uses the language of the oppressor-it becomes the language of enslavement; it is also viewed as an act of servitude, not victory (We can here draw parallels between Walcott’s and Achebe’s views of using the English language).

Walcott hints at the possibility of a new imagination of the elemental wonder of man; one which will speak of oriental maturity, where the oppressed will finally move beyond the perspectives of the oppressor. Such entrapments for Walcott also act as aesthetic obscurities which affect the style of an author writing from the colonies. To find a new critical idiom in such situations, one has to move beyond the polemics and pathos of the colonized condition. For such polemics and pathos have, for Walcott, only venerated the victim needlessly without ascribing her or him a perennial freedom. Walcott at this point, through his beautifully charged poetical language asks the poets of the New World to write from an unencumbered consciousness; a consciousness which will perhaps bring the awe of a primitive wonder, for it is only wonder and awe through which true poetry arise. The New World poets according to him should neither forgive nor explain history. They should look to create a new order and a new philosophy of happiness and elation by beginning everything afresh- “to accept belief in a second Adam, the re-creation of an entire order, from religion to the simplest domestic rituals”. Walcott is at his poetic best when relating to the sense of taste, he compares the New World poetry with the second Eden as having a “tartness of experience”. Here is the Noble Laureate preaching about poetry through prose, making a renewed case for celebrating mystery in poetry and calls forth a messianic belief in celebrating the New World poetry.

Walcott’s Poem “The Sea is History”

One of his the best poem 'The Sea is History' is a beautiful poetic correspondence to the prosaic rhetoric in “The Muse of History”. I would like to bring to notice the treatment Walcott offers to the troubled history of the New World through the metaphor of the scar. It is not as if Walcott is in complete abhorrence to the lived experiences of trauma in the islands. Edward Hirsch in “Derek Walcott: Either Nobody-or a Nation” comments Walcott has repeatedly sought “to give voice to the inlets, beaches, the hills, promontories, and mountains of his native country”. Walcott recounts the tragedies of the West Indian oppressed: “But who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or for revenge?”. The scar serves as a recurrent metaphor for cultural hybridity in both the poem and the essay. It signifies cultural convergence in the New World without effacing the violence of colonization. In the poem “The Sea is History”, there is an appearance of a scarred memory of people who lived through robbery and as thieves- “brigands who barbecued cattle, / leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore/then the foaming, rabid maw”. At the end of “The Muse of History” Walcott movingly recalls the violent past deposited in his body and being. But the scars left by the slave-master’s whip are metamorphosed into an optimistic symbol, an image to be remembered for magnificence and not for an unnerving past. The scars, according to Walcott, should speak of: “the monumental groaning and shouldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice”. Even though there are wounds and scars in the memory of the archipelagos, Walcott never reduces the bitterness of the condition by deeming to cure it completely; rather he appeals to constitute a new synthesis of this condition.

To speak of Walcott’s prose style is to again appreciate him for his poetic genius. As Femi Abodunrin marks in her paper “The Muse of History”: Derek Walcott and The Topos of unnaming in West Indian Writing, the essay is replete with geographical and architectural topos, and rich natural imageries like his poetry. As a poet Walcott made extensive use of patois and developed a creolized style but as a prose writer he perfected the wisdom he acquired in the second language. In “What the Twilight Says” and more particularly “The Muse of History”, Walcott was more of an aesthete than a poet. The essay also explains why and how Walcott makes use of certain metaphors, for example, at the very beginning of the essay he makes a sardonically self-mocking comment by referring himself as “the mulatto of style”. He identifies Neruda, Whitman, Borges and St. John Perse as New World poets who are successful in overcoming the schizophrenic dualism. One thing worthy of noticing is how Walcott is essentially a male aesthete. It is only Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys and Emily Dickinson who are referred to in passing. Such omissions have given immunity to many critics in believing that Walcott has never really considered appreciating the cerebral caliber of the female poets except a few. Such a view also further hints at the sexual harassment charges against him to be true claims.

We never know what to make of these charges and often as readers we are confronted with the problems of appreciating the author and making a moral call. As readers too, I believe, we are limited to believe and check for the immediate reality we are presented with which is here-Walcott’s brilliant use of a hybrid style. On every subject he takes up, Walcott the essayist brings to bear the lyric power and syncretic intelligence that have made him one of the major poetic voices of our time. There is no denying that he made creative use of his restricted dualism and assimilated two disparate cultural forces without being indifferent to their historical antagonism. Rather having confronted that antagonism Walcott gives us a style enriched with oral and literary fusions of the Creole and English cultures. English in writing and Caribbean in consciousness, we have a poet in the archipelagoes who serves testimony to the true dynamics of such a shared history- his name is Derek Walcott.

Work Cited

• Abodunrin, Femi. “The Muse of History”: Derek Walcott and The Topos of {Un}naming in West Indian Writing. Journal of West Indian Literature, vol.7, no.1, 1996, pp. 54–77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23019892. Accessed 24 Apr. 2020.
• Dutt, Ajanta. ed. Neruda, Walcott and Atwood: Poets of the Americas. Worldview Publications, Delhi, 2016. Print.
• Hirsch, Edward. “Derek Walcott: Either Nobody—or a Nation.” The Georgia Review, vol. 49, no. 1, 1995, pp. 307–313. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41401643. Accessed 24 Apr. 2020.
• Walcott, Derek. “The Muse of History” in What the Twilight Says: Essays (1970). (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), pp. 36-64. PDF.