Derek Walcott’s Caribbean

following address was delivered as Caribbean Studies Association and University of Bahamas Distinguished Lecture, in Nassau, Bahamas, on 6 June 2017.THE CARIBBEAN IS AN INFORMING SUBJECT AND FOCUS of Derek Walcott's writing. In his 1992 Nobel lecture, he writes for and about Caribbean. title, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, indicates subject, focus and geocultural point of view. If one read lecture without any previous knowledge of Walcott, one would have no reason to think that he was St Lucian. Only two islands are mentioned by name: Trinidad, where lecture is set, so to speak, and Guadeloupe. However, one could be in no doubt that one is listening to a Caribbean person, one speaking for region as a whole. His argument is against belittling charge of historylessness that region would seem to have internalised. It is against the way that Caribbean is still looked at, illegitimate, rootless, mongrelised.1 It is for seeing, [a]t last, islands not written about but writing themselves.2 This latter quotation picks up moving recollection with which, two decades earlier, Walcott's autobiographical long poem Another Life had ended, recollection that [w]e were blest with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam's task of giving things their names.3These realisations inform his representation of Caribbean, whether in poetry or in drama; they are subsumed in his career-long writing about, for and to Caribbean. In his precocious long poem Epitaph for Young, published when he was nineteen years old, he wrote: There is not a West Indian He was in process of becoming one of key makers of West Indian literature. Also at age nineteen, his first decidedly West Indian play, Henri Christophe, albeit modelled on Elizabethan and Classical tragedy, was produced by St Lucia Arts Guild, of which he was a co-founder. He directed play himself. He was to return to Haitian Revolution a decade later, in Drums and Colours, pageant he was commissioned to write to celebrate opening of Parliament of Federation of West Indies. Then, a quarter of a century later, he directed, on Morne in Castries, his last representation of Haitian story, Haitian Earth, to commemorate one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of abolition of slavery in Caribbean.To return to Nobel lecture: There is a force of celebration . . . when a writer finds himself a witness to early morning of a culture that is defining itself, by branch.4 He means Caribbean culture, and he was to be inevitably, actively caught up in tensions, complexities, arguments and counter-arguments that such defining has involved. These arguments and complexities were spawned by process of coming to terms with legacy of Caribbean colonial history and issues that came with it, issues of race, ethnicity, socio-economic inequality, language, and relationship of Caribbean literature to literature of coloniser. complexities and disagreements are not cause for regret or a sense of failure, but rather, markers of procreative, energising vitality of culture, however defined, when looked at with open eyes. As J. Edward Chamberlin has said, There are many ways of being a West Indian, and many ways of being a poet.5Branch by branch - Here is Walcott characteristically, tellingly responding to Caribbean landscape, using it to image and organically convey Caribbean sensibility and experience: flora, fauna, topography, and always, for Walcott, sea. As he says in Nobel lecture, the noun 'Antilles' ripples like water, and sounds of leaves, palm fronds and birds are sounds of a fresh dialect, native tongue.6 This rippling of brightening water had been sung thirty years earlier in his lyric poem A Sea-Chantey:Anguilla, Adina,Antigua, Cannelles,Andreuille, all l's,Voyelles, of liquid Antilles,The names tremble like needlesOf anchored frigates,Yachts tranquil as lilies,In ports of calm coral

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