DEREK WALCOTT

THE LAUREATE OF ST LUCIA

 

Courtesy the London Guardian

Sunday Express

September 17, 2000

Pages 50, 51, 53, 54

 

Raised in poverty by his widowed mother, he went on to win the Nobel Prize and claim a place for Caribbean literature at the centre of world culture.  But he has faced controversy over his defence of colonial artistic traditions.  NICHOLAS WROE, of the London Guardian, on an outspoken poet whose professional and personal life has been marked by turbulence.  The following is an excerpt.

 

When Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992 the citation said he was honoured "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."

 

This vision and commitment were forged in the extraordinary cultural melting pot that is the Caribbean.  There is English, Dutch, Creole and African all represented within two generations of his lineage.  He was brought up in a British colony as an English-speaking Methodist, but St Lucia was mostly a Creole-speaking Catholic island.  In social terms he was from an intellectual elite, while economically he was harshly poor.  Black and white have of course played a big part in Walcott's life, but t is the colours in between that have defined the man and his work.  Or as he put it in his 1979 autobiographical poem "The Schooner Flight":

 

I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger and English in me,

and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.

 

The writer, Marina Warner, first saw Walcott at a reading in a former 18th-century prison in Dublin.  "He read a section of his poem "Omeros" where a woman opens a box and the whole of the empire spills out in these rolling stanzas packed with colonial symbolism," she recalls.  "Derek was surrounded by portraits of Lord Lieutenants of Ireland in their uniforms and medals.  To see him reading these lines there, in his wonderful, rumbling Paul Robeson style of delivery, was a marvelous moment.  It really was history talking back."

 

Warner points out that he is simultaneously a profound critic of how the Caribbean has been treated by empire but is also very aware of the cultural legacy and riches that connection brings.  "He operates within this interesting contradiction all the time.  He has a white grandfather and has green eyes.  He is the patchwork quilt of the Caribbean."

 

The novelist Caryl Phillips claims that Walcott "has shown that there is a sense of what I would call 'big history' in the region, rather than seeing it as a set of scattered islands off the United States where small history happens.  This is a place where much larger forces are at work."

 

Poet David Dabydeen, who like Phillips was born in the region, notes that Walcott's approval for things like his "sound colonial education" can make him unpopular with "people who believe in an easy flag-waving and drum-beating nationalism."  But while his work combines forms from English, Russian and Greek poetry, it also contains Caribbean rhythms and sensibility, explains Dabydeen.

 

"He shows that the seemingly diverse traditions of creole and Mediterranean are not so diverse after all.  The fact is that Europe is there in the form of the English, the Spanish, the French and the Dutch."

 

Walcott's latest work, the 160-page poem "Tiepolo's Hound", is another boldly ambitious explication of the synthesis between the Caribbean and the western world.  It tells the story of the impressionist painter Camille Pissaro, a Sephardic Jew who was brought up on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, went to France in his mid-20s and helped to change the face of European art.  The poem also tells the story of Walcott, another outsider and artist working against the prevailing fashions who left his Caribbean home to pursue his visions.

 

As a young man Walcott considered being a professional painter, and the poem is illustrated with his work.  "But the text does say how hard I find painting and how much of it is failure," he quickly explains.  "It's not saying here's Pissaro and here's me.  But is does show the relationship between the writing and the painting."

 

Walcott covers some interesting art historical ground and makes a good case that Pissaro's wintry depictions of Paris are infused with Caribbean colouring.  But it is the key question of why Pissaro chose to leave the region that most preoccupies him.  It is quintessential Walcott material.

 

"There was no reason why he should have stayed in St Thomas," he says.  "If it is possible to feel bored and restless with contemporary St Thomas, imagine how it felt 150 years ago.  Of course there's the business of him being white and Jewish, and it may be an anachronistic question or the wrong question about the wrong time.  But I am still interested in the idea of why he went.  I wonder whether painting that landscape and the black faces was ever a real choice for him.  Was it considered a proper subject or was that at the time completely out of the question."

 

Bruce King has written a major biography of Walcott that will be published by Oxford University Press in October.  In "Tiepolo's Hound", he sees Walcott again putting the West Indies at the centre of history rather than tangential to it.  "This is the real difference between him and Naipaul.  Naipaul sees Trinidad as a backwater and Derek says, 'No, we are part of world culture.  A lot of things have happened here.'  Just because they don't have an economic base it will always be difficult to talk about West Indian independence, and perhaps it will always be a colony in an economic sense.  But culturally it is amazing what has been produced there.  And this is what he sees himself contributing to.  To dismiss it all like Naipaul does is absurd."

 

According to Caryl Phillips, Walcott has, almost single-handedly, created a poetic tradition in the Caribbean.  That has been both a help and a hindrance to him.

 

"If you are working in the shadow of Yeats or Wordsworth you always have someone to measure yourself against.  You are not on what Heaney calls 'a peasant's pilgrimage.'  But Derek didn't have that comforting notion that there had been people before him.  It makes what he has done even more remarkable."

 

Dabydeen says Walcott's impact on the status of Caribbean writing has been profound.  "When he won the Nobel Prize in 1992 we all won the Nobel Prize.  The symbolism of this on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the region was immense.  There is enormous local pride.  There is a fish cake named after him in St Lucia, Columbus Square is now Walcott Square, and he carries all this with a great deal of the humility."

 

In a sense Walcott was born into the cultural officer class of the region.  His people were the teachers, preachers and local administrators.  His father, Warwick Walcott, was a civil servant working for the attorney general.  He was an opera fan, had a sizeable library, wrote poetry and painted.  He was a significant figure in the local artistic scene and had set up a literary society and staged plays.  His mother, Alix, was a headmistress.  Derek and his twin brother Roderick, a theatre director who died earlier this year, were born in the largest town in St Lucia, Castries, in 1930.  They had one older sister.  Their father died when the boys were aged one, leaving his wife to bring up the children during a depression.  Alix Walcott was an extremely forceful woman and very well read.  Walcott remembers her singing Methodist hymns around the house and reciting great chunks of poetry and prose.  "Things like Cardinal Wolsey's farewell speech.  She knew a lot of Portia's speeches and had played her in a production put on by my father.  She was a real ham and a performer, and I always hoped that one day she would recite something of mine like that."

 

In order to provide for the family she took in sewing work, but Walcott says he wasn't conscious of any deprivation.  "My mother hid the struggle from us children.  She complained about her salary and she had a tough time.  Although she became a headmistress she still had to do a lot of sewing.  The more I think about her the more remarkable I realise she was.  And she understood straight away when I said that I wanted to write."  Walcott was also encouraged at his school, St Mary's College, by some of the younger teachers and the headmaster.  "They made me feel that this is what I should do.  The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10.  When I look back that is phenomenal encouragement."  By the age of 14 his precocity had sparked an island row when a priest accused him of heresy after one of his poems, which said that God could be better found through nature than through preaching, was published in the local newspaper.

 

Walcott's education was, apart from its location, identical to that of middle-lass children in England at the time, and the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who visited the school in the early 50s, noted that "it had a completely English atmosphere."

 

Astonishingly this tiny island school has produced two Nobel Prize winners, Walcott and the 1979 economics laureate Sir Arthur Lewis.  Coincidentally they were both born on January 23.  Walcott just missed out on the island scholarship to Oxford because he was bad at mathematics and so went to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, where he studied French, Latin and Spanish.  "I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England.  Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen."  He says he had a terrific time at university but didn't do any work, preferring to spend his time in the drama group and writing for the newspaper.

 

"There was the excitement of a new Caribbean being created," he says.  "There were new writers and artists emerging.  Obviously colonialism was there and racism and history and so on.  We had our anger, but it was kind of great to be angry - it had its own vigour.  It wasn’t at all sour or vengeful."

 

After university he taught in schools in St Lucia, Grenada and Jamaica, as well as contributing articles and reviews to papers in Trinidad and Jamaica.  In 1953 he went to live in Trinidad, where he continued to write poetry and plays.  He and his brother had always written small plays which they performed themselves in the house.  His first publicly performed plays were put on in St Lucia in 1950.

 

Later that year he won a Rockefeller scholarship to study theatre in New York.  Walcott ended that trip early after suffering from homesickness but has subsequently worked a great deal in American theatre.  In 1998 he was the co-lyricist in Capeman, Paul Simon's $11m Broadway debacle.  It was based on the life of Puerto Rican Salvador Agrón, who as a 16-year-old in the 1950s had murdered two white teenagers while wearing a red satin cape.  The case had become a cause célèbre for radicals in the 60s and the musical attracted massive publicity.  When it closed after just two months it was the most expensive failure in Broadway history.  Even before its spectacular collapse Walcott had begun to dissociate himself from the show, complaining that his work was being butchered by the succession of directors brought in to salvage it.  Ultimately he regarded the project as a waster of four years' work.

 

When Walcott returned to Trinidad in 1959 he formed the Trinidad Theatre Workshop.  It celebrated its 40th anniversary last year.  "We've had some terrific actors," he says.  "People sometimes dismiss it because it is not a professional theatre, but that's just because the economic context means it can't sustain professional theatre, it doesn't mean the performances are not first class."

 

When Walcott's play, Ti-Jean, was performed in Central Park in New York in the early 1970s, two of the actors, Hamilton Parris and Albert Laveau, attracted rave reviews - better than those for the play itself.  The theatre's reputation for excellence has since attracted overseas directors like the RSC's Terry Hands and Greg Doran, and the company has won awards when touring in America.  But Walcott has still had to fight along, bitter and largely unsuccessful battle with the Trinidad authorities to obtain state funding for what is a national theatre in all but name.

 

"The quality of literature that has come out of the Caribbean over the last 40 years has been phenomenal," he says.  "Who could have foreseen that a place like Trinidad, which is of the scale of some English counties, could have produced both Naipaul and CLR James?  And there is equivalent potential there in the theatre.  You would think that a society would say that art is as necessary as roads and sewage.  But the attitude is that art is an amateur activity, which is not just short-sighted thinking, it is illiterate and ignorant thinking."

 

Caryl Phillips sees why he is so angry.  "It's not as if vast amounts of money are needed, but even this wasn't forthcoming.  It has grated on him as an individual.  He made very early on a serious commitment to the Caribbean in terms not just of his aesthetic but also the physical and emotional trajectory of his life."

 

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