Walcott, Dabydeen
Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and Professor David Dabydeen yesterday sanctioned the legitimacy of the diversity of Caribbean dialects and modes of expression.
Speaking at a ‘master class’ for interested and budding Caribbean writers and readers at Castellani House in Georgetown, Walcott said that Caribbean dialects and modes of expression were the products of particular historic circumstances and constituted the effective medium of communication in specific communities. Therefore, they must be regarded as a legitimate language.
Walcott cited a number of Caribbean classic works by such authors as V.S Naipaul and Sam Selvon, which utilized and celebrated the palpable reality of Caribbean dialect. Both Naipaul and Selvon in such works as The Suffrage of Elvira, A House for Mr. Biswas, A Night Watchman Occurrence Book and Ways of Sunlight, utilized indigenous dialect in the construction of legitimate literature.
Walcott said that a relevant desideratum was a fusion of Caribbean cultural inputs in the creation of a unique cultural composition.
Both Walcott and Dabydeen acknowledged, when the issue was raised by this newspaper, that a certain level of literary, and, by extension, cultural inaccessibility existed between Caribbean peoples. This inaccessibility lies in a certain incomprehensibility by some Caribbean cultural locations of other cultural Caribbean locations. Louise Bennett’s Jamaican dialect and David Dabydeen’s Collie Odyssey were cited as examples of this.
Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, it has been asserted, has had a strong influence on Walcott’s life and work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. His father, a Bohemian watercolourist, died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were only a few years old. His mother ran the town’s Methodist school.
After studying at St Mary’s College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he has worked as theatre and art critic. At the age of 18, he made his debut with 25 Poems, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962). In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop which produced many of his early plays.
Walcott has been an assiduous traveller to other countries but has always, not least in his efforts to create an indigenous drama, felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements.
