Walcott's Traveler and the Problem of Witness

Bibliographic Data

ID3377690
AuthorsJeffrey A Gray (0000-0002-6631-6150, corresponding author), Jeffrey Gray
Year2005
Volume28
Issue1
Pages117-128
Publication date2005-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCallaloo (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0161-2492 • E-ISSN: 1080-6512
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/cal.2005.0013
OpenAlexW1982585364
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited4

Walcott's Traveler and the Problem of Witness Jeffrey Gray (bio) There was no treachery if he turned his back on the sun that plunges fissures in the fronds of the feathery immortelles. —Tiepolo's Hound (71) Derek Walcott has rejected descriptions of himself as exile or emigré, but he has, in many poems, described himself as a traveler. He has set his poems not only in St. Lucia but in Manhattan, Miami, St. Petersburg, Cracow, Rome, San Juan, and London; he has written not only of island fishermen but of John Clare, Balzac, Pisarro, Antonio Machado, Ovid, and Kurtz. But if to translate is to betray, so travel, home voices say, is a kind of treachery. Emerson thought we were responsible to places: they depend on us and become venerable by our "sticking fast" to them. "The soul is no traveler," he wrote in "Self-Reliance" (159).Walcott often seems to agree: "Traveling widens this breach," he writes at the end of his 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says" (39). And, graver still, in his Nobel acceptance speech: "The Traveler cannot love, since love is stasis and travel is motion" ("Antilles" 77). Yet, to many Caribbean writers, the artist's need to leave the Caribbean has been simply self-evident. Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and, of course, V.S. Naipaul are a few among the large group of such artists. Condé was virtually unknown in her native Guadeloupe until her books were published in France. Césaire began the Notebook of a Return to My Native Land while vacationing in Yugoslavia and completed it in Paris.1 Brathwaite has taught for years at New York University, and Naipaul's home base has long been the English countryside. Writing in the St. Lucian Star on the occasion of the Nobel award, John Robert Lee admonished his compatriots: "If Derek Walcott lived here he would not be popular. . . . Derek had to go outside. Do not foolishly blame him for that. Our generation has to stay home and make it here. A hard ground. But he has made the path clear for us" (qtd. in Burnett 10). That this defense needs to be made at all suggests that, if travel raises questions for writers in general, the questions are graver for Caribbean writers. From "A Far Cry from Africa" and "The Divided Child" onward, Walcott has crafted hundreds of metaphors for conflicted identity, creolism, the subject poisoned by, gifted by, caught between, or shuttling between two worlds. The awards and distinctions conferred on him have reflected this emphasis. Homages on the occasion of the 1992 Nobel Prize celebrated Walcott's exile status, his homecomings, and his commutes between Boston, St. Lucia, and Trinidad. Apparently unconscious of racist overtones, Swedish [End Page 117] Academy member Kjell Espmark characterized Walcott's poetry as "a meeting place of the virtuosity of Europe and the sensuality of a Caribbean Adam" (Grunquist 153). Perceived, then, as an ethnic Caribbean poet, or as hybrid of Europe and Africa, Walcott is subject to a burden of representation, and therefore to a kind of criticism, to which many poets are not. No one demanded of Robert Lowell or Elizabeth Bishop that they speak for their people; no one now demands of John Ashbery that he be faithful to local, ethnic, or national constituencies. Readers in search of such fidelities simply turn elsewhere. Can the Caribbean poet-traveler speak for home, "wherever that may be?"2 Critics who have found Walcott's work too distanced from the material realities of the Caribbean usually voice one of at least three related complaints: they cite the poet's immersion in European traditions—they ask, in other words, whether Walcott is re- or decolonizing the Afro-Caribbean by stealing literary types from former slavers. Second, they may note, as Paul Breslin has of "Another Life," the poet's tendency toward the sublime and the allegorical, his movement from the historically concrete to the universally symbolic. Specifically, Breslin is uneasy with "claims to Adamic transcendence of history . . . claims of elemental kinship to the earth that circumvent cultural mediation . . . " (177). Finally, critics may question the poet's biogeography. Although Walcott has repeatedly emphasized

Art · Art history · Literature · Miami · Poetry · Soul · Theology · Witness · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Philosophy

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