How does Walcott's dual identity help his poetic genius?
Born in Saint Lucia in 1930, Derek Walcott was a poet whose writings thrived on challenging the human mind and social consciousness. His poetry unveiled the marriage between the beauty of the islands and its continual growing pains of post-colonialism.
Walcott descends from a background of mixed races, as both of his parents were born in interracial marriages. The intermixed racial heritage of his family reflects the historical situation of European colonization of the West Indies. As a native St. Lucian and a British colonial subject, he was exposed to two cultural traditions at once, and this bifurcated experience would prove integral to his work.
At the time of Walcott’s childhood, St. Lucia was under British colonial control, and his education featured British writers, history, and customs, along with lessons in Greek and Latin literature. The influence of a British education on Walcott was strong, and he felt a keen pull from both British literature and the folk traditions and oral literature of the indigenous population of the West Indies. However, given his hybrid literary and familial identity, he maintained some ambivalence regarding his colonial education.
Walcott’s poetry is greatly inspired by his heritage, upbringing, and the history of the West Indies. His poetry explores his identification with both Caribbean and English ancestry. It is also inspired by the ocean and the sea. From the 1950s Walcott divided his time between Boston, New York, and Saint Lucia. His work resonates with Western canon and Island influences, shifting between Caribbean patois and English, and often addressing his English and West Indian ancestry.
In Walcott’s work, the poetic creativity and imagination can serve to explore and at times unite and reconnect historical gaps, cultural tensions, and racial divisions. The work of Derek Walcott could arguably be perceived as participating in the creation of an international wishful myth of a racial paradise, where the colonizer and colonized cross-fertilize equally to create a unique, vibrant culture and have equal access to power, resources, and privileges. But Walcott’s agenda of cross-cultural fertilization never denies or subdues the importance of the colonial scar or the long-term disempowerment of people of African descent. In fact, much of his writing is obviously about the wounds, alienations, and distortions created by the colonial situation and about the poverty and despair of his contemporaries.
For Walcott poetry was a source of strength and knowledge and beauty and healing power, it was a magical mechanism of discovery and creation, a common database, almost, available to mankind regardless of the language or the culture. And yet, he was proud, happy, excited to have been around at a time when Caribbean literature, certainly in English language, was pretty much in its infancy. With no other tongues but his genius he yanked that child straight into adolescence, which is why his production can be intimidating.
The language that Walcott uses originated from his experiences derived from his multicultural background which is the distinctive feature portrayed in his art. In Walcott's poems, multilingualism manifests itself in different ways: as different voices in a single poem; as variations in linguistic registers, either within a single poem or between a group poem; and as a dialogue between different cultures, for example African and European. These varied forms of expression exist within the postcolonial paradigm and reveal tensions between the poet and his culture. Walcott, however, does not allow these forces to disappoint his poetry; on the contrary, he blends them to form a new and unique culture and language. Walcott's multilingual and multicultural acquired skills come as a result of his openness to the world through education as well as his career.
Walcott calls himself a “single circling homeless satellite,” which sounds absurd because he clearly has a home which is rich in varied culture. The feeling of actually being “homeless” is because his education had at least partially targeted Europe, while his racial demeanor and regional loyalty made him likely to remain a “satellite” and not fully rooted to a unique region. It is this diversity that attracts many readers to Walcott: his recognition of European cultural influence and anchoring in the Caribbean at the same time was almost unprecedented at the beginning of his literary career.
Even though the roots or genesis of the West Indians can hardly be traced, Walcott falls on language which he portrays as a mirror of culture; it emanates from singular cultures but gradually becomes multicultural as it comes across other languages. All modern languages have evolved through the interaction of multiple ethnic groups, speaking different languages or dialects, and the language as a product of those continual contacts reflects a single culture's positioning within the surrounding world. When West Indians interrelate with the varied races and cultures that constitute their society, they develop a new language which they identify with and thereby forge a mirror of their culture that is unique to the local geography. The local language then ceases to exist because it now comprises a blend of Standard English or standard French which have been revived as a creole. There are overtones of Creole in Walcott's poetry because he realizes that writing only in Standard English language makes him no different from native British writers: therefore, in order to assert his identity as a West Indian, he brings in words and names from native languages to enrich his writing style.
