Brendan de Caires lives in Toronto. He has written book reviews for the Caribbean Review of Books, Kyk-Over-Al and the Literary Review of Canada.
After a fifty-year career as poet and playwright, Derek Walcott has a lot to say. On November 23, he sat down for a ‘reasoning’ at the University of Toronto’s Hart House Theatre, with Christian Campbell, a young Bahamian poet whose Running the Dusk recently won the best first collection prize at the UK’s Aldeburgh poetry festival. In a meandering conversation, they touched on the challenges facing a West Indian poet then and now, correspondences between the shape of the Blue Mountains and rhythms of Bob Marley, the need for a panoptic view of Caribbean culture, and the surprising observation that rap music, America’s most articulate rebellion against the nightmare of Black history has – in a move Walcott described as ingenious – ended up using heroic couplets as its weapon of choice.
Before the discussion, Walcott read “The Light of the World”, a long poem from his 1998 volume The Arkansas Testament, in its entirety. The poem recounts a minibus journey in Castries during which the beauty of a local girl and the fullness of life in his fellow islanders strikes the narrator with epiphanic force. When the bus leaves him behind in the dark he watches the passengers continue in their illuminated transport (Walcott rarely passes up a chance for a good pun) and their departure fills him with sadness and envy: “There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give them / but this thing I have called ‘The Light of the World.’“ But Walcott’s poetic offering turns out to be a glorious nothing, for while it serves no immediate purpose – the beauty in the bus travels on unaware –it transfigures the passengers with the magic of art, delivering them into global embrace of literature. As the critic Paula Burnett has observed “The poem’s narrator, apparently Walcott himself, is both home and away — a sharer but also different, othered by his intellectual role.”
Despite a disgraceful whispering campaign which cost him a well-deserved appointment as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Walcott remains remarkably generous towards academia. After decades of resisting the temptation to become “othered by his intellectual role,” he nevertheless clearly relishes any opportunity for an intelligent discussion about the Caribbean, its landscape and history, and the challenges it presents to contemporary writers and artists. Early in the conversation, Campbell quoted a line from the title poem of Walcott’s latest collection, White Egrets: “The perpetual ideal is astonishment.” In context the line refers to egrets “picking ticks/with their electric stab” before flying off with wings as “certain as a seraph’s when they beat” but it could just as easily refer to the epiphany in the minibus. When Walcott responded to the cue, it soon became clear that his astonishment, though secular, usually requires attention which borders on the religious.
As a child the poet watched his father painting and learned the importance of close observation. Later, realizing in the company of Dunstan St. Omer that he could not bend paint to his purposes as easily as words, Walcott retained a painter’s eye but opted for poetry . One striking result of this confluence of talents is his ability to shift images from one context to another. In White Egrets, for instance, the second poem begins with a description of two cats “cradled in one arm/ belly upturned to be stroked by a brush / tugging burrs from their fur.’ Then, having established the presence of these real cats, Walcott turns towards the sea. Its endless retreat and return reminds him of the operations of memory. Throughout these transitions the language remains feline:
Watch how spray will burst
like a cat scrambling up the side of a wall,
gripping, sliding, surrendering; how, at first,
its claws hook then slip with a quickening fall
to the lace-rocked foam. That is the heart, coming home,
trying to fasten on everything it moved from,
how salted things only increase its thirst.
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Walcott also spoke candidly about his early life in St Lucia. He recalled the importance of his mother’s support, and her loan, from her wages as a seamstress, of the money used to self-publish 25 Poems — the collection which so enchanted the young Vidia Naipaul (With hindsight that money, which he never repaid, turned out to be a downpayment for his entire career.) He also pulled no punches when describing the atmosphere of self-contempt in a culture that distrusted blackness and was wary of dark skinned people occupying positions of public trust, such as bank tellers. He drolly recounted the local announcement of World War Two–a man on a bicycle riding to one street corner after the next, blowing a bugle and shouting La guerre! La guerre! And in one remarkable digression he remembered turning up a week late for an appointment with Sir Arthur Lewis in New York. Reportedly, Sir Arthur was unfazed.
Walcott also moved beyond anecdotes and spoke feelingly about his imaginative debt to the Caribbean and the importance of finding a voice that was true to its West Indian roots, yet conversant with and articulate within the traditions of European literature. This should have made the conversation catch afire, but for most of the evening it felt as though Walcott and Campbell could have been born in different centuries. Neither seemed capable of finding enough common ground to pursue this idea any further.
Intriguingly, the only moment of undeniable overlap came when Walcott seized on one of Campbell’s asides and congratulated him for realizing that “poetry takes place in the present tense.” This remark reminded me of a line from “A Letter from Brooklyn”, in which an old lady writes to Walcott, mistakenly using a present tense when talking about his father: “He is dead, Madam, but God bless your tense.”
In his scholarly monograph on Walcott, the critic Edward Baugh notes that “A Letter from Brooklyn” offers evidence of “the poetry entering upon what is to be perhaps its most characteristic modus operandi, one in which images natural to the occasion that produces the poem, suggest metaphorical possibilities which are then exploited to carry the force and meaning of the poem.” In this poem the old lady’s spidery handwriting turns into web of memory, in White Egrets cats turn into a sea and heart which clutch at the past. Over the years this Ovidian shapeshifting has allowed Walcott to slip, almost unnoticeably, between past and present contexts, and scaled up to his longer poems the method has enabled him to move between whole traditions.
Perhaps inevitably the conversation turned to Caliban and the problems of deciphering him in a postcolonial context. In The Tempest, Caliban is a brutish “demi-devil”who wishes to ravish Miranda and “people the isle with Calibans” but he can also be seen as a suppressed colonial subject whose language suggests hidden promise. Walcott blithely finessed a great deal of academic waffling on this matter by pointing out that Caliban is given the full force of Shakespeare’s music . “His consolation is the poetry.
He gets the best lines in the play.” So while Prospero speaks the language of power and magic, it is Caliban’s gift that brings the isle to life. In this sense, he prefigures the dilemma of a postcolonial poet trying to be heard above the master’s discourse. Much more could have been said along these lines but Walcott moved briskly on from one anecdote to another.
At one point he spoke about the joy of having worked with a handful of actors who could both sing calypso and recite Shakespeare properly. He then intriguingly suggested that the first skill lent an indescribable depth to the second, as though Caliban’s music was being reinserted into Prospero’s language.
Much has been written about Prospero’s belated acceptance of Caliban near the end of the play, especially the line: “this thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge mine.” Depending on which critic you choose, this can be staged as Prospero’s heartfelt acceptance of his reviled subject, or as a final, patronizing dismissal. I suspect that for the young Walcott it was also a historical challenge for Caliban’s heirs to take up, one that required a thoughtful, suitably measured response. In two magnificent book-length poems, he eventually showed what Caliban might sound like if granted Prospero’s language and for that alone West Indian literature will forever owe him a great debt.
Watching Walcott in Toronto, patiently picking over the threads of his life and work, I recalled that he had just taken up a three-year appointment as the inaugural Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the University of Alberta. Oxford’s loss will be Alberta’s gain, I thought, but what a strange place for the Caribbean’s greatest living poet to sing his swansong. Unbidden, a famous line from Laurence Sterne drifted into my head, “They order this matter much better in France.” Yes, they probably do.
Editor’s Note: On behalf of contributors to the Diaspora Column, I would like to extend condolences to the family and friends of Jamaican journalist John Maxwell, who left us on Friday December 10th. The Jamaica Observer, where he worked for many years, described him as the journalist’s journalist, fearless, fired more than any other reporter for speaking truth to power, and armed only with a biting pen. In 2000 he published an important book, How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Journalists and Environmentalists, drawing on his tireless work on sustainable development. On one post on his blog, Maxwell’s House, John wrote: ‘We are all Maroons now, whether we know it or not, wherever we are on the face of the Earth, whoever we are, black, white or in-between, male or female, human, as long as we are alive, animal or vegetable, on land or in the sea or the air, our very existence is under attack. If we want to survive we have to take action. We need to resist the destruction of our own and our planet’s integrity, resist degradation and deformity and protect ourselves from extinction.’ Tributes also recalled Maxwell’s radio talk show, Public Eye, where the extensive space he afforded to domestic workers in Jamaica helped influence the introduction of a national minimum wage policy. To many of us across and outside the region we had come to know and respect him for his columns on Haiti following the coup that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and for his commitment to raising awareness in the wider Caribbean of our debt to the people of Haiti. Ezili Danto of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network thanked him for standing ‘with Haiti’s people in its quest for justice’, saying that ‘the Haiti that we are was never invisible to you’. Danto also referred to Maxwell as a ‘great rooted mapou tree upon which all who came into contact with you found rest and support,’ and dedicated a song, Yon Moupu Tanbe, to John’s memory. You can listen to it at: http:// www.margueritelaurent. com/ pressclips/ MapouTonbe.mp3
Battling lung cancer, courageous to the end, he died in his beloved homeland.
Walk good, John.
Alissa Trotz, Editor of the In the Diaspora Column.
