Derek Walcott, acclaimed Caribbean author, writes to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage. Born in 1930 in the island of St. Lucia, Walcott has a melancholic relationship with Caribbean history which shapes the way he carefully composes within “The Sea is History.” Walcott’s application of Biblical allusions seeks to revise and restore Caribbean identity.
Born on the island a former British colony in the West Indies, established poet and playwright Derek Walcott developed a burning passion for writing as a young man. His family descended from a line of slaves in the West Indies, and the legacy of slavery is a common theme threaded throughout his work. Both mother and father were schoolteachers and strongly supported Walcott’s love of reading. In the poem “Midsummer” he wrote: “Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen, that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse (Poetry Foundation, 1).” This early vocational recognition enthused Walcott and at the age of fourteen he published his first poem in the local newspaper. By 19, Walcott had self-published his two first collections, 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949), which he distributed himself on street corners. Continuing as a prolific poet, Walcott penetrated the literary world with his publication of the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), “a book which celebrates the Caribbean and its history as well as investigates the scars of colonialism and post-colonialism” (Poetry Foundation, 1). This book closely parallels with the theme of “The Sea is History” and is perhaps one of the first publications that inspired a long and distinguished career seeking to r...
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...continues to see Walcott’s need to reiterate that there is an identity lost and his aim to restore the Caribbean character.
There is a sense of a Caribbean writer’s role as a “revolutionary hero” who must paint his words to restore a Caribbean sense of identity. This dedication t to the Caribbean’s story of struggle is, without a doubt, far from “dismissed” in Walcott’s work. Walcott delicately articulates that “In the Caribbean, history is irrelevant. Not because it is not being created, or because it was sordid; but because it has never mattered, what has mattered is the loss of history, the amnesia of the races, what has become necessary is imagination, imagination as necessity, as invention.” In order to explain the present conditions of the modern Caribbean, he cannot avoid recounting the tragic phases of its colonial past, as he does in “The Sea Is History.”
History can significantly influence the ways in which a place, along with its community, evolves. Now considered postcolonial, not only are Hawaii and Antigua heavily defined by their colonial pasts, but they are also systematically forced into enduring the consequences of their unfavorable histories. Through their unconventionally enlightening essays, Jamaica Kincaid and Juliana Spahr offer compelling insights into how the same idea that exists as a tourist’s perception of paradise also exists as an unprofitable reality for the natives who are trapped in their pasts yet ironically labeled as independent. The lasting impacts of colonialism on the history of Antigua and Hawaii can be noted through their lasting subservience to their colonizing
...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.
Green, Cencilia. (1997). Historical Roots of Modern Caribbean Politics. Against the Current. Vol. 12, (4), 34-38.
Langley, Lester D. The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth Century; The University of Georgia Press (Athens, 1982).
- - -. "Slave Ships." 1996. Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1998-2000. Comp. Clifton. Rochester: BOA Editions, 2000. 121. Print.
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).
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
To show how stories can affect colonialism, we will be looking at British authors during the time of colonialism. During this period of British colonialism, writers like Joyce Cary, author of “Mister Johnson” wrote novels about Africa and more specifically, a Nigerian named Johnson. Johnson in this novel is represented as “[an] infuriating principal character”. In Mr. Cary’s novel he demeans the people of Africa with hatred and mockery, even describing them as “unhuman, like twisted bags of lard, or burst bladders”. Even though Cary’s novel displayed large amounts of racism and bigotry, it received even larger amounts of praise, even from Time Magazine in October 20, 1952. The ability to write a hateful novel and still receive praise for it is what Chinua Achebe likes to describe as “absolute power over narrative [and...
de Las Casas, Bartolomé. The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account. Translation, Briffault, Herma, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London © 1992.
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. "Creolization in Jamaica." The Post-colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. New York: Routledge, 1995. 202-205.
In her essay, “Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean”, journalist Polly Pattullo presents an inside view of the resort industry in the Caribbean Islands, and how it truly operates. Tourism is the main industry of the Caribbean, formerly referred to as the West Indies, and it is the major part of the economy there. Pattullo’s essay mirrors the ideas of Trevor M.A. Farrell’s perspective “Decolonization in the English-Speaking Caribbean” in which he writes about the implicit meaning of the colonial condition. Pattollo’s essay illustrates that colonialism is present in the Caribbean tourism industry by comparing the meaning of it presented in Farrell’s perspective. In this essay I will explain how these two essays explain how decolonization hardly exists in the Caribbean.
...ur flag, planted coconut trees and our hedges. You asked a man what he did…he simply said he worked for the Americans” (Naipaul 258). This passage seems to display the opinions of Naipaul towards the colonialism of foreign nations in third world countries; the narrator states that it was the Americans who recovered the unpleasant lands that once were Trinidad and created from them a beautiful beach. It is for this reason that Naipaul faces the criticism of writers such as Walcott, whose writing praises the history of Trinidad as rich and beautiful while Naipaul tends to focus on the dark side of third world development and foreign imperialism. In conclusion, over V.S. Naipaul’s career he has proven his aptitude in the wielding of the English language and introduced to the literary world his own unique style while also attracting the animosity and criticism of many.
Throughout history an even today, Caribbean scholars contend that Caribbean relations are characterized by an interplay of race, class and gender. Clarke agree with this statement and said that, “The social structure of the Caribbean region is based on differences associated with class, race or colour, ethnicity and culture (Clarke, 2013). These three (3) components of race, class and gender affect each other in one way or the other. In other word, one’s class position may be dependent on his or her race or gender or one’s gender may determine his or her class position in society. It is important to note that the interplay of race, class and gender in the Caribbean differs from island to island. This essay will discuss the extent to which
Every human being, in addition to having their own personal identity, has a sense of who they are in relation to the larger community--the nation. Postcolonial studies is the attempt to strip away conventional perspective and examine what that national identity might be for a postcolonial subject. To read literature from the perspective of postcolonial studies is to seek out--to listen for, that indigenous, representative voice which can inform the world of the essence of existence as a colonial subject, or as a postcolonial citizen. Postcolonial authors use their literature and poetry to solidify, through criticism and celebration, an emerging national identity, which they have taken on the responsibility of representing. Surely, the reevaluation of national identity is an eventual and essential result of a country gaining independence from a colonial power, or a country emerging from a fledgling settler colony. However, to claim to be representative of that entire identity is a huge undertaking for an author trying to convey a postcolonial message. Each nation, province, island, state, neighborhood and individual is its own unique amalgamation of history, culture, language and tradition. Only by understanding and embracing the idea of cultural hybridity when attempting to explore the concept of national identity can any one individual, or nation, truly hope to understand or communicate the lasting effects of the colonial process.
Trevor Rhone's Old Story Time Today's Jamaica seems overly preoccupied with the issues of class and colour. In Old Story Time Trevor Rhone mirrors a Jamaica struggling with the same subject in the Mid Twentieth century. Discuss these concerns of the play in detail making comparisons/contrasts to the current Jamaican and Caribbean societies.