Derek Walcott (1930) was born at Castries, St Lucia, an isolated Caribbean island in the West Indies. His father, Warwick, was a Bohemian artist; he died when Walcott was very young. “I was raised in this obscure Caribbean poet,” he later wrote in a poem about his family, “where my bastard father christened for me his Warwick.” Walcott’s mother, Alix, was a teacher. She was very well-read and taught her children poetry.
A central theme that runs throughout Walcott’s works is his search for identity and history. From the beginning, he has intensely felt the antagonism between cultural heritage of the Old World and the traditions of the new one. It seems to revolve around ‘Quest’, the quest for their identity because they feel they have fragmented personality since they are divided between dual heritage and mixed race. Although, Caribbean are of two blood, their skin colour is dark and have the English education and western culture. Now they do not know how to decide. They do not know whether to leave their African ancestry or to continue their indebtment to western education and culture. This is the concern that has troubled the intellectual group of West Indies. So, they seem to look at themselves as divided men.
Walcott tries to find expressions for the difficulties inhered in Caribbean identity. In “A Far Cry from Africa,” he depicts his disparate dilemma in rather brutal formulations:
“The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I am poisoned by the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” (Dutt, 2002, line 26-28)
He expresses how he is torn between “Africa and the English tongue. Derek Walcott often described himself as a “mongrel”; both grandmothers were African and both grandfathers where European. He hated t...
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...e to sense the real beginning of their history either in the form of rumor without any echo or in the form of sound produced by the waves. He says, “There was the sound/like a rumor without any echo/of History, really beginning” (line 78-80). With the ray of hope the poem ends, because Walcott believes their history was in consciousness but now after their independence every individual history will be written or it will be in their memory.
The creative poets such as Walcott try to recreate their history by writing such poems. By means of creative skills he tries to recreate their past moments. By drawing analogies from the Bible he concludes that Biblical analogies are more mythical than historical. He tries to give voice to the communities because his island remained as historically an orphan island. He tries to find answers for the division of blacks and whites.
...did through his poems. Although the themes of slavery, past and longing were depicted in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poems, he provided a different aspect in each one; portraying ‘A Drowsy Day’ of a lonely reminiscent narrator, who was trapped in their confined home as well as their mind, being unable to escape from the constant swirl of memories. He uses ‘An Old Memory’ to convey the past as positive and full of hope, although disappointed by his present day, the past remained to have a ‘subtle charm’ – contrastingly in ‘Sympathy’, the poet describes the past as ‘cruel’, thus portraying it in a more dark and unwelcome light. Arthur Miller portrays the past as full of regret for Biff, but also of ambition for his father. All of these texts portrayed the past as a place where identity was stronger, however it could be argued that the past was where slaves had no identity.
This week’s articles carry a couple related, if not common, themes of imagined, if not artificial, constructs of race and identity. Martha Hodes’ article, “The mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” offers a narrative based examination of the malleable terms on which race was defined. To accomplish this she examines the story of Eunice Connolly and her family and social life as a window into understanding the changing dimensions of race in nineteenth-century America and the Caribbean, specifically New England and Grand Cayman. While Hodes’ article examines the construction of race in the Americas, Ali A. Mazrui’s piece, “The Re-Invention of Africa: Edward Sai, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond,” looks at the construction of African identity. Although different in geographic loci, the two articles similarly examine the shaping influences of race and identity and the power held in ‘the Other’ to those ends.
...d issues of post-colonialism in Crossing the Mangrove. It is clear that Conde favors multiplicity when it comes to ideas of language, narrative, culture, and identity. The notion that anything can be understood through one, objective lens is destroyed through her practice of intertextuality, her crafting of one character's story through multiple perspectives, and her use of the motif of trees and roots. In the end, everything – the literary canon, Creole identity, narrative – is jumbled, chaotic, and rhizomic; in general, any attempts at decryption require the employment of multiple (aforementioned) methodologies.
...spoke a Spanish Creole. This made a clear distinction between the two and made it easy for the government to identify the difference. The reader sees how such themes of Birth and Death show so prominently throughout the characters that one must focus on how birth and deaths affect the concept of the individual relating to their own Negritude. It is culture, not skin tones but rather the beliefs and values that each country be it Haiti or Dominican Republic relate to. Danticat’s novel helps us understand the strengths and limits that Rene Depestre states in The Birth of Caribbean Civilisation “there is a progressive ‘negritude’ that expounds the need to rise above all the alienations of man . . . and there is “an irrational reactionary and mystic version of ‘negritude’ which serves . . . as a cultural base for neo-colonialist penetration into our countries” (244).
Afrocentricity, as defined by Asante, is a “consciousness, quality of thought, mode of analysis, and actionable perspective where Africans seek, from agency, to assert subject place within the context of African history” (Asante 16). In essence, all roads converge and diverge with the African continent, with its rich history of pioneering triumphs and profound tribulations; Africa and all of her descendants are the end all, be all of one’s focus. There are five criteria to Afrocentricity: “(1) An interest in psychological location; (2) a commitment to finding the African subject place; (3) the defense of African cultural elements; (4) a commitment to lexical refinement; (5) a commitment to correct the dislocations in the ...
Green, Cencilia. (1997). Historical Roots of Modern Caribbean Politics. Against the Current. Vol. 12, (4), 34-38.
Set in St. Lucia, Walcott’s Omeros reveals an island possessing a rich past. St. Lucia, a former colony, has a history of ‘pagan’ religion and tradition, a different language, and an economic background based namely on fishing. Locals must try to reconcile their heritage prior to colonization, the influences of colonization, and how to create a new culture from the ashes of the others (Hogan 17).
For the purpose of this chapter, these words by Stephen Vincent Benet in his foreword to Margaret Walker’s first volume of poetry, For My People (1942) are really important. They give an idea about the richness of the literary heritage from which Walker started to write and to which she later added. This chapter is up to explore those “anonymous voices” in Walker’s poetry, the cultural and literary heritages that influenced her writings. Margaret Walker’s cultural heritage, like her biological inheritance, extends back to her ancestors in Africa and the Caribbean. It is quite genetic, something she got by birth; which is quite there just by being African American. Echoes of ancient myths, lost history, mixed bloods, and complex identities are brought about along with the skin colour and the racial origins.
Since Carraway’s voyeuristic ways allow him to fill in so many blanks that he otherwise would have had no knowledge of (particularly his knowledge of the cigarettes Gatsby smoked during the war, or how Jordan Baker was, in addition to being a liar, an occasional shoplifter), it is fitting that African-Ameri...
The ocean is what connects the people of the Caribbean to their African descendants in and out of time. Through the water they made it to their respective islands, and they, personally, crafted it to be temporal and made it a point of reference. The ocean is without time, and a speaker of many languages, with respect to Natasha Omise’eke Tinsley’s Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic. The multilingualism of the ocean is reminiscent that there is no one Caribbean experience. The importance of it indicates that the Afro-Caribbean identity is most salient through spirituality. It should come to no surprise that Erzulie, a Haitian loa, is a significant part of the migration of bodies in Ana Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt. Ana Maurine Lara’s depiction
On the surface the poem seems to be a meditation on past events and actions, a contemplative reflection about what has gone on before. Research into the poem informs us that the poem is written with a sense of irony
2. Knight, Franklin W. The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Pres, 1990.
In order to develop her argument, Mould relies on the texts of three authors and their contributions to the postcolonial discourse: Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Homi Bhabha’s foreword to the 1986 edition of this book, and Chilla Bulbeck’s, Re-Orientating
Walcott, D. (1986) A Far Cry From Africa. Collected Poems, 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus.
There are many cases of prejudice and discrimination in this book. When Martin sees the Jamaican girls standing outside the club he imm...