Derek Walcott

For more information on Derek Alton Walcott, visit Britannica.com.

Nobel Prize winning poet and dramatist from the West Indies, Derek Alton Walcott (born 1930) used a synthesis of Caribbean dialects and English to explore the richness and conflicts of the complex cultural heritage of his homeland.

Derek Alton Walcott was born in Casties, St. Lucia, West Indies, on January 23, 1930. The son of a civil servant and a teacher, he was of mixed African, Dutch, and English heritage. He received a B.A. from St. Mary's College, St. Lucia, in 1953 and attended the University of the West Indies at Kingston, Jamaica. A Rockefeller fellowship brought him to the United States in 1957; he studied under the American stage director Jose Quintero, returned to the islands in 1959 to found the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. He taught in St. Lucia, Grenada, and Jamaica and at many American universities: Boston, Columbia, Harvard, Rutgers, and Yale.

Walcott was married to dancer Norline Metivier and had three children by previous marriages. Unlike fellow West Indian writer V. S. Naipaul, he kept a home in Trinidad and was a familiar and revered figure in his homeland. Walcott received a five-year "genius" grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1981.

Central to both Walcott's drama and his poetry is an exhilarating tension between two disparate cultural traditions, the Caribbean and the European. Sometimes the two idioms jostle uncomfortably; yet upon occasion they combine with stunning effect to form a brilliant synthesis.

Walcott observed: "My society loves rhetoric, performance, panache, melodrama, carnival, dressing up, playing roles. Thank God I was born in it… ." In his dramatic works, this vivacious island culture, with its historical roots and its political subtexts, takes precedence. Henri Christophe: A Chronicle (1950), his first play, explores the popular story of a 19th-century slave who became king of Haiti. Another early play, The Sea at Dauphin (1953), experiments with French/English island patois, transforming it into a powerful poetic tool. Dream on Monkey Mountain (Obie Award winner, 1971) illustrates the way the dreams of a poor charcoal vendor, however flawed and quixotic, help preserve tribal memories within the sterile colonial world. O, Babylon (1974) employs interludes of dance, along with a contemporary score by Galt McDermott, to recount events in a small Rastafarian community during the 1966 visit of Haile Selassie.

In all these dramas, Walcott struggled to be true to his roots without sacrificing literary virtuosity. He was eager to incorporate native elements, "chants, jokes, folk-songs, and fables," into his dramas;" to write powerfully … without writing down … so that the large emotions could be taken in by a fisherman or a guy on the street"; "to get something clean and simple into my plays … something Caribbean"; and to achieve a balance "between defiance and translation." The central character of Remembrance (1979), a retired schoolteacher of Port of Spain who loses one son to a revolution, another to the "slower death" of art, may reflect his powerful, if conflicting, loyalties.

While Walcott's plays were often commended for their colorful performances, they tended to meet resistance from more stringent critics. Pantomime (1978), which examines the ambiguous relationship between a Tobagan innkeeper and his servant, is one example. Though Walter Goodman found it "fresh and funny … filled with thoughtful insights," Frank Rich downgraded the play for lacking the "esthetic rigor" of Walcott's poetry.

This poetry is, indeed, extraordinary - complex, powerful, almost Elizabethan in its delight in form, its flamboyant eloquence and lush imagery. From the beginning - his first poem was published in a local newspaper when he was 14 - Walcott sought inspiration among great poets of the English language; Shakespeare, Marvell, Auden, Eliot, Lowell. Nevertheless, Caribbean rhythms, themes, and idioms inevitably find their way into the verse - through vivid dialect personae like Shabine, the sailor in The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), often regarded as the poet's alter-ego; in the perennially anguished voice of a "divided child," "schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles," that lurks beneath the cosmopolitan surface.

Walcott's range as a poet was remarkably varied and generous. Another Life (1973), a sweeping, open-hearted narrative, can be ranked among the best verse autobiographies in the language. The exuberant ten-poem sequence The Star-Apple Kingdom, which consolidated Walcott's stature as a major poet, features multiple narrative voices tracing the arc of the Caribbean archipelago through space and time, with near-epic scope.

In The Fortunate Traveller (1981) the poet chronicled provocative journeys of self-discovery through New England and the American South to Dachau and other places that illuminate his sense of himself as artist and man. The 54 separate poems in Midsummer (1984), a diary in verse, offer a year's worth of meditations on approaching middle age, divided linguistic allegiances and the consolations of art. The Arkansas Testament (1987) contains a stunning love sequence, along with the powerful title work, a further exploration of the poet's role as racial and cultural exile. This poignant, accomplished volume shows the poet working at the height of his powers.

Walcott's other popular poems include "A Far Cry from Africa" (1962), "Codicil" (1965), "Sainte Lucie" (1976), "The Schooner Flight" (1979), and "North and South" (1981). Collected Poems (1948-1984) (1986) provides an excellent selection of his work.

Walcott's epic-length Omeros, which echoed the Iliad and the Odyssey was chosen by The New York Times as one of the best books of 1990. Omeros took up the classic themes of abandonment and wandering, but it also revealed Walcott's love for his native Caribbean. During an interview, Walcott once described the fondness he had for his native homeland surrounded by the sea: "nobody wishes to escape the geography that forms you. In my case it is the sea, it is islands, I cannot stay too long away from the sea."

In 1992 Walcott received the Nobel Prize in literature. His verse play The Odyssey was produced on stage in New York and London in 1993. His love of grand themes continued with the publication of a collection of poems titled The Bounty (June 1997). In Bounty Walcott used his poetic talents to eulogize the beauty of his native land. Walcott's contributions to West Indian drama and poetry were immense. He created a world-class theater ensemble in a post-colonial environment and used his poetic skills to describe the culture and beauty of his Caribbean.

Further Reading

James Altas' article in the The New York Times Magazine, "Derek Walcott: Poet of Two Worlds," (May 23, 1982) gives a lively, balanced picture of the poet. Essays in the New York Review of Books by Helen Vendler (March 4, 1982) and Joseph Brodsky (November 10, 1983) are provocative, yet fair. Robert D. Hamner's Derek Walcott (1981) and Irma Goldstraw's Derek Walcott: An Annotated Bibliography of His Works (1984) are quite useful as well. The poet's revealing essay "What the Twilight Says" appears in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970). Rei Terada's Derek Walcott's Poetry: American Micicry (Northeastern University Press, 1992) is recommended. A collection of critical perspecitves on the works of Walcott was edited by lifelong friend Robert Hammer: Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcot (Critical Perspective No. 26; Passeggiata Press, 1993).

poet; playwright

Personal Information

Born Derek Alton Walcott, January 23, 1930, on Castries, St. Lucia, West Indies; immigrated to United States, late 1950s; son of Warwick (a civil servant and teacher) and Alix (a teacher) Walcott; married Fay Moston, 1954 (divorced, 1959); married Margaret Ruth Maillard, 1962 (divorced); married Norline Metivier (actress and dancer; divorced); children: one son, three daughters.
Education: University of the West Indies, B.A., 1953.

Career

Poet and playwright. Teacher at St. Mary's College, Castries, 1947-50 and 1954, Grenada Boys' Secondary School, St. George's, 1953-54, and at Jamaica College, Kingston, 1955. Feature writer, 1960-62, and drama critic, 1963-68, for Trinidad Guardian (Port-of- Spain, Trinidad); feature writer for Public Opinion (Kingston), 1956-57. Co-founder of St. Lucia Arts Guild, 1950, and Basement Theatre, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad; founding director of Little Carib Theatre Workshop (later Trinidad Theatre Workshop), 1959-76; Boston University, assistant professor of creative writing, 1981, visiting professor, 1985--. Visiting professor at Columbia University, 1981, and Harvard University, 1982 and 1987. Also lecturer at Rutgers University and Yale University.

Life's Work

Caribbean poet Derek Walcott is the recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize for literature, one the world's most prestigious awards. Walcott won the prize on the strength of his many works of poetry and his plays about island life in a post-colonial era. He is the first native Caribbean writer ever to win a Nobel for literature. His poetry confronts his own mixed ethnic legacy--Walcott is of African, Dutch, and English descent--as well as the multi-ethnic character of the West Indies in general. In the 1981 biography Derek Walcott, Robert D. Hamner wrote: "Nurtured on oral tales of gods, devils, and cunning tricksters passed down by generations of slaves, Walcott should retell folk stories; and he does. On the other hand, since he has an affinity for and is educated in Western classics, he should retell the traditional themes of European experience; and he does. As inheritor of two vitally rich cultures, he utilizes one, then the other, and finally creates out of the two his own personal style."

Walcott's central preoccupation has concerned the union between two racial and social strains that has produced the unique Caribbean culture. He has worked from the "schizophrenic" point of view of an islander raised to respect and appreciate the culture of an enslaving colonial force. Hamner noted that Walcott "is a living example of the divided loyalties and hatreds that keep his society suspended between two worlds." Likewise, New Yorker correspondent Jervis Anderson claimed that in ancestry and cultural heritage, Walcott "epitomized the composite New World culture in the Caribbean--roughly half black and half white--and he had no desire to elevate one component above the other. The two were reconciled in his view of himself as an artist and a 'divided child.'" In one of his best-known poems, Walcott perhaps spoke for himself when he wrote: "I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, / ... I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

Walcott and his twin brother, Roderick, were born January 23, 1930, in Castries, a colonial town on the small eastern Caribbean island of St. Lucia. At the time of Walcott's birth, St. Lucia was part of the British protectorate, but its past as a French colony was evident in the Creole dialect and religious practice of its citizens. Both of Walcott's parents were schoolteachers. His father died when Walcott was only a year old, but his mother compensated for the loss by nurturing her two sons' love of reading and study. She surrounded her children with English literary classics, recited Shakespeare to them, and encouraged them to appreciate poetry and drama.

In those days Castries was a picturesque town with large, ornate Victorian homes nestled among bright tropical gardens. Anderson noted that, as a youth, Walcott spent little time admiring the displays of affluence in the city. "His attention was drawn more strongly to the shanties of the poor, in Castries and elsewhere on the island, occupied by fascinating characters, some of whom later appeared in his book-length autobiographical poem, 'Another Life,'" Anderson commented. "Beyond the sociology of the land, young Walcott's imagination was transfixed by the sea: its sounds; its fishermen and schooner men; its far horizon of limits and possibilities; the dangerous seductions of its calm and stormy moods; its record of local drownings; its legends of shipwreck and isolation." This youthful fascination with St. Lucia's seafaring class would one day be translated into powerful poetry in the Homeric tradition. Walcott told the New Yorker: "Islands are great places to live in because the sea is close and there is the elemental feeling of things that are bigger than you are."

In school, Walcott learned English as a second language and became captivated by the works of Great Britain's best poets. At the same time he was well aware that England was the seat of the colonial rule that encouraged slavery during previous centuries. He therefore approached the European canon with an ambivalent attitude that would remain with him--and shape his own writings--through the decades to come.

"Walcott's growth into a free-spirited artist clashed on occasion with the island's religious establishment, and around the age of nineteen he began thinking of leaving St. Lucia," Anderson reported. Walcott rebelled against the rigid Catholicism of his homeland and sought a more congenial atmosphere for continued studies elsewhere. In 1950 he departed for the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. The institution had only been established for a few years, but already it was "a virtual laboratory of regional integration," to quote Anderson. Islanders from all parts of the Caribbean descended on the University of the West Indies, and their close association helped to forge a sense of regionwide community. In the New Yorker, Walcott described Jamaica as "amazingly exciting. There was good theatre, good Jamaican painters, fine galleries, gifted poets and prose writers, most of whom I came to know very well."

Walcott lost little time in making his own contribution to Caribbean arts. His first play, Henri Christophe: A Chronicle, was written and produced in St. Lucia while he was still an undergraduate. Another piece, Henri Dernier, played on radio in 1950. He also began to publish poetry, art criticism, and essays in periodicals such as the Trinidad Guardian and Jamaica's Public Opinion. After earning his bachelor's degree in 1953, he returned to St. Lucia to teach at St. Mary's College, the high school he had attended.

By 1954 Walcott was spending substantial time in Trinidad. His plays The Sea at Dauphin and Ione premiered there in the mid-fifties, and he became deeply involved with the establishment of a resident theater project on the island. In 1957 he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study theater arts in New York City. There he worked with Off-Broadway directors and companies, appropriating the skills he would need to establish a repertory group in Trinidad. "The New York experience was an unhappy one for Walcott," claimed Anderson. "He felt terribly alone in the city, an alien in its racial and theatrical communities--repelled, almost, by its segregated sensibilities. Neither Broadway nor Off-Broadway seemed the right model for the kind of theatre he had envisioned for the West Indies."

Walcott returned to Trinidad and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in the capital city of Port of Spain. The group performed some of Walcott's plays and others that explored the myths, rituals, and superstitions of West Indian folk life. The workshop eventually folded, but Walcott found an audience for his plays in New York City at the Off-Broadway Public Theatre. There, in 1971, his most famous drama, Dream on Monkey Mountain, drew enthusiastic reviews and an Obie Award as best foreign play of the year.

Poetry drew more and more of the writer's energies as the 1960s began. At first he published primarily in magazines, but in 1962 his verse came to the attention of editors at the British publisher Jonathan Cape. Cape released Walcott's first major collection, In a Green Night, in 1962. The volume was well received; in fact, poet Robert Lowell was so impressed that he visited Trinidad to meet Walcott. "I remember sitting on the living-room floor while Lowell showed me some of the poems he was working on," Walcott told the New Yorker. "I was so flattered to hear this great writer asking me what I thought of his work. When he returned to New York, he called up Roger Straus and urged him to sign me on as a new writer. I've been with [publisher Farrar, Straus] ever since."

Having found a congenial publisher, Walcott turned out numerous books of verse. His work was hailed for its expressive language--"an old-fashioned love of eloquence, an Elizabethan richness of words and a penchant for complicated, formal rhymes," to quote New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani. Critics also commended Walcott for his brave exploration of the question of cultural ancestry. In the New York Review of Books, poet Joseph Brodsky called the Caribbean "the place discovered by Columbus, colonized by the British, and immortalized by Walcott."

In the early 1970s Walcott began to spend part of the year in the United States, teaching creative writing at universities such as Columbia, Rutgers, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. Farrar, Straus published volumes of his poetry regularly, including The Gulf (1970), Another Life (1973), Sea Grapes (1976), The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), The Fortunate Traveller (1981), Collected Poems (1986), The Arkansas Testament (1987), and Omeros (1990). In 1981 Walcott received a sizeable sum of money from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation--a no-strings-attached award that has come to be called the "genius grant."

In 1997, Walcott published a collection of poems entitled The Bounty. The opening (title) poem, an elegy to the author's mother elegy to the author's mother, is followed by a series of poems that evoke the island of St. Lucia. A later volume of poems, Tiepolo's Hound (2000), weaves together a biography of the Carribean-born painter Camille Pissarro with Walcott's own life story.

The New Yorker reported that Walcott was in the running for a Nobel prize for years before he received it. Walcott tried not to be distracted by the politics of the prize. "Look at some of the great writers who died without winning the Nobel Prize--[James] Joyce, [W. H.] Auden, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges," the author told the New Yorker. "Why should my chances be any better than theirs?... It got to the point where I learned to put the whole business out of my mind." Walcott kept busy writing and teaching at Boston University, where he began holding a part-time position in 1982.

The Nobel committee announced Walcott's selection on October 8, 1992. The date is doubly significant since 1992 marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Caribbean. From Sweden came the announcement that Walcott had been chosen for his "poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by historical vision" and his "multi-cultural commitment." In Walcott, the committee stated, "West Indian culture has found its great poet." Perhaps nowhere was the joy more visible than on St. Lucia, where the weekly newspaper in Castries devoted an entire 40-page issue to its native son.

The 1992 Nobel Prize for literature came with a cash award of $1.2 million. Its effects are far more lasting than mere dollars, however. Walcott's stature in the literary community is assured, and his opinions on everything from poetry to politics will be sought and valued. Most certainly, Walcott has earned the distinction--long held by some critics and fellow poets--of being among the very best writers in the English language. For his own part, Walcott accepted the acclaim with humility. His work, he told the New Yorker, "had already been written in the mouths of the Caribbean tribe. And I felt that I had been chosen, somehow, to give it voice. So the utterance was inevitable.... I was writing it for the island people from whom I come. In a sense, I saw it as a long thank-you note."

In 1993, Walcott published The Odyssey: A Stage Version, a play that intersperses the story of Odysseus' protracted wanderings from fallen Troy to his home at Ithaca with a commentary by the blind singer Billy Blue. The Capeman: A Musical (1998) was the joint work of singer/songwriter Paul Simon and Walcott. The play, based on actual events that occurred in Spanish Harlem in the 1950s, tells the story of a 16-year-old Puerto Rican boy sentenced to die in the electric chair. Also in 1998, Walcott returned his attention to his home land with a collection of essays about West Indian culture entitled What the Twilight Says. In 2001, Farrar, Straus brought out The Haitian Trilogy. In the book, three plays, Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours (originally commissioned in 1958), and The Haytian Earth, tell the story of the West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest, and rebellion.

Awards

Rockefeller grant, 1957, 1966, and fellowship, 1958; Jamaica Drama Festival prize, 1958, for Drums and Colours: An Epic Drama; Arts Advisory Council of Jamaica prize, 1960; Guinness Award, 1961, for "A Sea-Chantey"; Borestone Mountain poetry awards, 1964, for "Tarpon, " and 1977, for "Midsummer, England"; Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, 1962; named fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 1966; Heinemann Award, Royal Society of Literature, 1966, for The Castaway, and 1983, for The Fortunate Traveler; Cholmondeley Award, 1969, for The Gulf; Eugene O'Neill Foundation- Wesleyan University fellowship, 1969; Gold Hummingbird Medal, Order of the Humming Bird, Trinidad and Tobago, 1969 (one source says 1979); Obie Award, 1971, for Dream on Monkey Mountain; honorary doctorate of letters, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 1973; O.B.E. (Officer, Order of British Empire), 1972; Jock Campbell/New Statesman Prize, 1974, for Another Life; Guggenheim fellowship, 1977; named honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1979; American Poetry Review Award, 1979; International Writer's Prize, Welsh Arts Council, 1980; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant, 1981; Los Angeles Times Prize in poetry, 1986, for Collected Poems, 1948-1984; Queen Elizabeth II Gold Medal for Poetry, 1988; Nobel Prize for literature, 1992; St. Lucia Cross, 1993.

Works

Selected Writings

• Henri Christophe: A Chronicle (play), Advocate, 1950.
• The Sea at Dauphin (play), University College of the West Indies, 1954.
• Ione: A Play with Music, University College of the West Indies, 1957.
• In a Green Night (poetry; includes "A Far Cry from Africa"), J.
• Cape, 1962.
• Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus, 1964.
• The Gulf (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1970.
• Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, Farrar, Straus, 1970.
• Another Life (autobiographical poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1973.
• Sea Grapes (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1976.
• The Star-Apple Kingdom (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1979.
• The Fortunate Traveller (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1981.
• Collected Poems, 1948-1984, Farrar, Straus, 1986.
• The Arkansas Testament (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1987.
• Omeros (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1990.
• The Odyssey: A Stage VersionFarrar, Straus, 1993.
• The Bounty (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1997.
• (With Paul Simon) The Capeman: A MusicalFarrar, Straus, 1998.
• What the Twilight Says (essays), Farrar, Straus, 1998.
• Tiepolo's Hound (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 2000.
• The Haitian Trilogy(includes Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The Haytian Earth), Farrar, Straus, 2001.

Further Reading

Books

• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• Black Writers, Gale, 1989.
• Hamner, Robert D., Derek Walcott, Twayne, 1981.

• Ebony, February 1993, p. 46.
• Jet, October 26, 1992, p. 14; December 28, 1992, p. 24.
• Newsweek, October 19, 1992, p. 73.
• New Yorker, June 26, 1971, p. 30; December 21, 1992, p. 71.
• New York Times Magazine, May 23, 1982, p. 32.
• New York Review of Books, November 10, 1983, p. 39.
• New York Times, March 21, 1979; August 21, 1979; May 30, 1981; May 2, 1982; January 15, 1986; December 17, 1986.
• New York Times Book Review, September 13, 1964; October 11, 1970; May 6, 1973; October 31, 1976; May 13, 1979; January 3, 1982; April 8, 1984; February 2, 1986; December 20, 1987.
• Time, October 19, 1992, p. 65; April 5, 1993, p. 13.

— Anne Janette Johnson

Quotes:

"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."

"I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars."

"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole."

"Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic."

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott at his honorary dinner, Amsterdam, May 20th 2008
Born	January 23, 1930 (1930-01-23) (age 79) Castries, Saint Lucia
Occupation	Poet, Playwright
Nationality	Saint Lucia
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1992
Children	Peter Walcott, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Anna Walcott-Hardy

Derek Alton Walcott (born January 23, 1930) is a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He is best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.

Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remains active with its Board of Directors. He also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981 with the hope of creating a home for new plays in Boston, Massachusetts. Walcott retired from teaching poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University in 2007. In fall 2009, he will commence a three year distinguished scholar in residence position at University of Alberta. He continues to give readings and lectures throughout the world. He divides his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.

Contents 1 Walcott as playwright and theorist 1.1 Padel controversy 2 Works 2.1 Poetry collections 2.2 Plays 3 Further reading 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Walcott as playwright and theorist

Walcott has published more than twenty plays. The majority of these plays have been produced by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, and have also been widely staged elsewhere. Many of them deal, either directly or indirectly, with the liminal status of the West Indies in the postcolonial period. Epistemological, ontological, economical, political, and social themes make regular appearances in Walcott's plays.

In his 1970 essay on art (and specifically theatre) in his native region, What the Twilight Says: An Overture (published in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays; see bibliography), Walcott bemoans the lasting effects of over 400 years of colonial rule. He reflects on the West Indies as colonized space, and the problems presented by a region with little in the way of truly indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. He states: “...we are all strangers here (10). [...] Our bodies think in one language and move in another...”(31). In this manner, Walcott shifts his poetic language between formal English and patois to highlight the linguistic dexterity of the Caribbean people. While recognising the profound psychological and material wrongs of the colonial project, Walcott simultaneously celebrates the hybridisation of Antillean cultures. His epic poem Omeros exposes the complex cultural strains that converge in his native St. Lucia, celebrating at once the European, Amerindian, and African heritage shared by the islanders.

Discussions of epistemological effects of colonization inform plays such as Ti-Jean and his Brothers and Pantomime. One of the eponymous brothers in Ti-Jean and his Brothers (Mi-Jean) is shown to have much information, but to truly know nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser, and as such is unable to be synthesized and thus is inapplicable to his existence as colonised person.

Walcott probes the colonial dialectic in his two-hander Pantomime. In the play, Walcott revisions the story of Robinson Crusoe / Man Friday in an effort to destabilize the colonial power constructs. Reversing the roles of master / servant, Walcott temporarily lends to Trinidadian Jackson, a guest house factotum and calypso singer, the role of Crusoe, with Harry, a British ex-patriate and owner, the identity of “Thursday,” thus resetting Daniel Defoe's legend in pre-colonial days. Recalling his fascination with the Edenic concept of naming ("Muse" 3-5), Walcott highlights the problem that faces the Caribbean writer by having Jackson re-appropriate the material objects around him, re-christening them in a pseudo-African language, calling the table “patamba,” the chair “banda,” etc, recalling the poesía negra's use of jitanjáfora (jitanjáfora is a term for the use of onomatopoeia in Spanish) mentioned earlier. The scene at first reflects Jackson’s agency: he has the ability to resurrect the language of his ancestors and regain ownership of the material of his island, teaching his minion Harry, the Anglo Thursday, his new tongue and establishing authority over his surroundings. The impossibility of his mission surfaces, however, as Jackson immediately forgets the words he had just spoken: Harry: "You never called anything by the same name twice."

Jackson's inability to resurrect a dead language reflects the Caribbean's lack of a single, discernible cultural history; Harry's retort reveals the violence inherent in the linguistic indoctrination of the colonial powers: language through the barrel of a gun. Walcott writes in English, the language of Trinidad, but he also makes full use of the local dialects, or what Barbadian writer Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls “nation language,” and portrays Jackson as code-switching throughout the play to reveal his culture’s linguistic dexterity.

Walcott's plays weave together a variety of forms; including those of the folktale, morality play, allegory, fable, ritual and myth; as well as using emblematic and mythological characters to address issues in non-realistic ways.

Padel controversy

In 1981 Walcott was accused of sexual harassment of a freshman student at Harvard, and ^[1] reached a settlement in 1996 over a sexual harassment allegation at Boston University.^[2]

In 2009 Walcott was a leading candidate for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry but withdrew his candidancy, after a whispering campaign suddenly brought these two sexual harassment allegations to light.^[3][4]

The position was awarded to Ruth Padel, but she resigned after only 9 days, when her involvement in the smear campaign against Walcott was revealed. Padel's comportment in the affair was roundly criticized by a number of respected poets in a letter of support addressed to Walcott and published in the Times Literary Supplement^[5].

Works

Poetry collections

Years are linked to "[year] in poetry" articles:

• 1948 25 Poems
• 1949 Epitaph for the Young: Xll Cantos
• 1951 Poems
• 1962 In a Green Night: Poems 1948—60
• 1964 Selected Poems
• 1965 The Castaway and Other Poems
• 1969 The Gulf and Other Poems
• 1973 Another Life
• 1976 Sea Grapes
• 1979 The Star-Apple Kingdom
• 1981 Selected Poetry
• 1981 The Fortunate Traveller
• 1983 The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden
• 1984 Midsummer
• 1986 Collected Poems, 1948-1984
• 1987 The Arkansas Testament
• 1990 Omeros
• 1997 The Bounty
• 2000 Tiepolo's Hound
• 2004 The Prodigal
• 2007 Selected Poems (Edited, selected, and with an introduction by Edward Baugh)
• Forthcoming "White Egrets"

Plays

• (1950) Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes
• (1951) Harry Dernier: A Play for Radio Production
• (1953) Wine of the Country
• (1954) The Sea at Dauphin: A Play in One Act
• (1957) Ione
• (1958) Drums and Colours: An Epic Drama
• (1958) Ti-Jean and His Brothers
• (1966) Malcochon: or, Six in the Rain
• (1967) Dream on Monkey Mountain
• (1970) In a Fine Castle
• (1974) The Joker of Seville
• (1974) The Charlatan
• (1976) O Babylon!
• (1977) Remembrance
• (1978) Pantomime
• (1980) The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!: Two Plays
• (1982) The Isle Is Full of Noises
• (1986) Three Plays (The Last Carnival, Beef, No Chicken, and A Branch of the Blue Nile)
• (1991) Steel
• (1993) Odyssey: A Stage Version
• (1997) The Capeman (lyrics, in collaboration with Paul Simon)
• (2002) Walker and The Ghost Dance

Further reading

• Baer, William, ed. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996.
• Baugh, Edward, Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision: Another Life. London: Longman, 1978.
• Baugh, Edward, Derek Walcott. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
• Breslin, Paul. Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: U. Chicago, 2001. ISBN 0-226-07426-9
• Brown, Stewart, ed., The Art of Derek Walcott. Chester Springs, PA.: Dufour, 1991; Bridgend: Seren Books, 1992.
• Burnett, Paula, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.
• Hamner, Robert D., Ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1993. ISBN 0-89410-142-0
• Hamner, Robert D. Derek Walcott. Updated Edition. Twayne's World Authors Series. TWAS 600. New York: Twayne, 1993.
• Heaney, Seamus, ‘The Murmur of Malvern’, in The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings. London: Faber and Faber, 1988, pp. 23-29.
• King, Bruce, Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama: ‘Not Only a Playwright But a Company’: The Trinidad Theatre Workshop 1959-1993. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
• King, Bruce, Derek Walcott, A Caribbean Life. Oxford: OUP, 2000.
• Lennard, John, 'Derek Walcott' in Jay Parini, ed., World Writers in English. 2 vols, New York & London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004, II.721–46.
• Parker, Michael and Roger Starkey, Eds. New Casebooks: Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1995. ISBN 0-333-60801-1
• Sinnewe, Dirk, Divided to the Vein? Derek Walcott’s Drama and the Formation of Cultural Identities. Saarbrücken: Königshausen und Neumann, 2001 [Reihe Saarbrücker Beiträge 17]. ISBN 3-8260-2073-1
• Terada, Rei, Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.
• Thieme, John, Derek Walcott. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999.
• Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, 1970. ISBN 0-374-50860-7

See also

• Black Nobel Prize laureates

References

1. ^ Dziech, Billie Wright; Linda Weiner (1990). The lecherous professor: sexual harassment on campus (second ed.). Urbana. IL: University of Illinois Press. pp. 29-31. ISBN 0252061187. http://books.google.com/books?id=Cy9g0huofa0C. 
2. ^ Griffiths, Sian and Jack Grimston. "Sex Pest File Gives Oxford Poetry Race a Nasty Edge.", in The Sunday Times, May 10, 2009
3. ^ Cole, Olivia. "Nobel Winner Quits Oxford Poetry Race Over Sex Claims.", in The London Evening Standard, May 12, 2009.
4. ^ "Ruth Padel under pressure to resign Oxford post over emails about rival poet Derek Walcott". Daily Telegraph. 2009-05-24. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/5378474/Ruth-Padel-under-pressure-to-resign-Oxford-post-over-emails-about-rival-poet-Derek-Walcott.html. Retrieved 2009-05-24. 
5. ^ Al Alvarez, Alan Brownjohn, Carmen Bugan, David Constantine, Elizabeth Cook, Robert Conquest, Jonty Driver, Seamus Heaney, Jenny Joseph, Patrick Kavanagh, Grevel Lindop, Patrick McGuiness, Lucy Newlyn, Bernard O’Donoghue, Michael Schmidt, Jon Stallworthy, Michael Suarez, Don Thomas, Anthony Thwaite, 'Oxford Professor of Poetry', Times Literary Supplement, June 3, 2009, p. 6.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Derek Walcott

• Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott
• Postcolonialweb.org on Walcott
• Trinidad Theatre Workshop
• Lannan Foundation Reading and Conversation With Glyn Maxwell
• International Poetry Forum Readings (scroll down)
• Boston Playwrights' Theatre
• Open Source (radio show) with Christopher Lydon: Calabash ‘08: First, the fireworks...
• Sex Pest File Gives Oxford Race a Nasty Edge

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