Communication Images in Derek Walcott's Poetry

By Sadia Gill

This book investigates the potential purpose of recurrent communication images in the poetry of Derek Walcott. The recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, Walcott is one of the most important postcolonial poets of the 20th century. His poetry delves into the dynamics of Caribbean marginalization and seeks to safeguard the paradigms

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vernon Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781622732708

Book preview

Abstract

This book investigates the potential purpose of recurrent communication images—page, book, noun, etc.—in the poetry of Derek Walcott. The recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, Walcott is one of the most important postcolonial poets of the 20th century. His poetry delves into the dynamics of Caribbean marginalization and seeks to safeguard the paradigms characteristic of his island home. The tiny island of St. Lucia has found its renown considerably enhanced by the global eminence of its native son. Several major studies have examined Walcott’s use of poetic devices, notably his use of metaphor and related imagery, which he typically locates in the nature of the tropics.¹ Omeros, 1990, which can be considered his masterpiece, has been studied with respect to its relationship to the epic genre and its themes; but the images of communication in the work have not been studied. This lacuna can be seen in the critical literature devoted to his entire collections as well.

I shall develop in this book that Walcott’s poetry expresses the emergence of a worldview that contemporary theory considers postcolonial. The role of memory is crucial to his imaginary: poetry is communication and communication is memory.² I propose to examine the means the poet brings into play in order to demonstrate the relevance of the Caribbean in the contemporary world—firstly through a study of communication imagery and secondly through an examination of the conclusions he reaches through these means.

The quantitative table I have developed demonstrates that Walcott was especially reliant upon images of communication from the 1980s. Extensive textual analysis indicates that the place and contextual meaning of communication images, for example page, mirrors the historical plight of the Caribbean region; likewise, line expresses an identity deficit. Finally, my book will demonstrate that Walcott’s extensive use of images of communication in his poetry contributes to a fluid notion of self that embraces multiculturalism while maintaining the imaginary intact.

Acknowledgements

I felt such freedom writing.³

Derek Walcott

The marginalized can love Walcott’s poetry, and I decided to explore the road not taken of his verse. For this venture, I got continuous support from Dr. Natalie Scott and Dr. Yamini Ranganathan. Natalie guided me to research the significant aspects from my Master’s thesis. She provided tremendous help on White Egrets (2010), especially on The Acacia Trees and Spanish Series. After understanding my idea to sketch communication images, Natalie drew the images of the main examples which are also used for the book front cover. Yamini’s support on data research and analysis was incredible. With her critical insights, I was able to improve different aspects of this book. Her talent to explain Walcott’s poetry makes me believe she is a born communicator. The guidance of Natalie and Yamini enabled me to traverse this untrodden region, and as a result the manuscript got almost half a dozen publishing contracts from good academic independent US publication houses. I am eternally grateful to Natalie and Yamini. This book could have been dedicated to both of them.

I am also deeply grateful to Prof. Antonia MacDonald, Prof. Pramod K. Nayar, and Dr. Catherine Douillet for their keen interest in this project. Despite their busy schedules, due to the originality of this work, they provided time. Their feedback was phenomenally useful. Prof. A. James Arnold’s support was magical; his advice on choosing the right publisher was truly great. I regret that the entire manuscript could not get his editing, though even his feedback just on abstract helped gigantically. Prof. Robert Hamner, Prof. Robert J. C. Young, Prof. Jeffrey Gray, Prof. Edward J. Chamberlin and Prof. Lorna Goodison all deserve high praise for tolerating my emails tirades.

How can I thank Prof. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton? I am deeply grateful to her as her supervision of my Master’s thesis indeed laid the foundation of this book. I must thank Prof. Patrick Vincent whose advice to pursue Master of English Studies from Neuchatel University worked out so well. I thank Ms Emilie Pellaton for her aid during the exam in Neuchatel.

One person who has taught me a lot is Prof. Gabriele Rippl. I am grateful to her. The images of writing were the brainchild of Prof. Shaista Sonu Sirajuddin, so I am eternally grateful to her. I also thank poets Trevor Carter and Omar Tarin, who guided me in decoding Walcott’s poetry; and Dr. Amra Raza, Ms. Ayesha F. Barque, Ms. Farwa Shah, Mr. Sohail Afzal and Mr. Zulfikar Ali, who supported me when I was in a frayed state. I am grateful to the bestselling authors Ramit Sethi and David Perry, whose writings I found moving. I also thank Sandeep Maheswari, whose Asaan rhymes very well with my Chaatan.

I thank my family, especially Papa for his silent support and Vicky.

Foreword

Derek Walcott is the poet of the dispossessed, the marginalized, the migrant, the human beings who feel left out, alone with their pain and suffering. The author from the tiny island of Saint Lucia speaks of the very local experience of the Caribbean region—its postcolonial wounds, the suffering of its fishermen and other ordinary, working-class people, its tensions with the colonialist power, and its natural grandeur and beauty. And yet his localized poetry, which is often profoundly anchored in the Caribbean region, transcends its geography, invoking other timeless stories of dispossession around the globe, and propelling the local stories to a universal dimension, transforming human hopelessness into splendor. Walcott speaks particularly to those who have experienced the hardships of loneliness, exile, and, obviously, colonialism and its complex impact on culture, the people and the mind, but he also speaks to those who have difficulties feeling at home in a harsh, difficult modern world. Ultimately, his voice speaks to the wounds of the human experience beyond borders.

When I first heard Walcott at the University of Iowa campus in 2002, I was a doctoral student working on issues of identity conflict and processes of nation-building in the multi-ethnic island of Trinidad. Everyone in the audience in the large university lecture hall—a mixture of professors, writers, and students from a wide array of cultural origins and personal backgrounds—was transfixed. Complete silence and reverence in the room welcomed Walcott and his words. He read excerpts from his masterpiece Omeros. His voice was powerful and dignified. His words moved us to the core. He left us feeling shaken but also stronger, our souls strengthened by his hopeful and aspiring poetry.

The author of this book, Sadia Gill—like many of us, a citizen of the world in continual transit and personal quest for meaning and belonging—was also touched by Walcott’s rare emotional beauty. Originally from Pakistan and living in Switzerland through many hardships as a young woman in exile, Gill undertook a task of passion and dedication, reading, interpreting, and making sense of Walcott’s difficult poetry and its vast scholarship, and producing here a remarkable book based on a meticulous analysis of Walcott’s use of specific imagery of communication. While several other scholars have focused on Walcott’s predominant use of Caribbean imagery (its land, nature, vegetation, and fauna), as well as various postcolonial issues (e.g., history, memory, violence), Gill focuses on images taken from the semantic field of communication, distinguishing five significant categories of the field of communication and their associated words that are ubiquitous and also crucial in Walcott’s liberatory poetics: writing tools (with words such as pen, page), narratives (e.g., fiction, book), poetics (e.g., stanza, meter), language (e.g., speech, dialect), and grammar and punctuation (e.g., syntax, hyphen). Walcott is on a quest for the imaginative manufacturing of a new language away from the colonial empire’s impositions on speech and mind, and such words are, as Gill demonstrates, pivotal to his poetic exploration and re-creation of the English language, a re-creation that is central to his poetic mission and universe. Each chapter focuses on one of these five categories taken from the field of communication, using an innovative quantitative and qualitative approach that reveals the importance of such imagery in Walcott’s work. Gill addresses the question of Walcott’s overall intentions when he uses words such as pen, book, parenthesis, prose incessantly throughout his work and argues that Walcott stitches the old world with the new one through these images. Gill’s study is an exploratory journey of Walcott’s verbal stitching. Readers and scholars of Walcott will enjoy her engaging examination of Walcott’s poetic craft.

Catherine Douillet, Ph.D

Department of Social Sciences

University of Wisconsin-Platteville

List of abbreviations

AL      Another Life

CP       Collected Poems 1948–1984

IaGN      In a Green Night

M       Midsummer

O      Omeros

SG      Sea Grapes

TAT      The Arkansas Testament

TB      The Bounty

TC      The Castaway and Other Poems

TFT       The Fortunate Traveller

TG       The Gulf and Other Poems

TH       Tiepolo’s Hound

TP      The Prodigal

TSAK      The Star-Apple Kingdom

WE      White Egrets

Introduction

I open their books⁴

Introducing Derek Walcott

Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, through his poetry, immortalizes the Caribbean by giving it a status of lyrical reality (Brodsky 175). One wonders why Walcott eternalizes his island. It seems it enables him to make it relevant for the world, by developing a rich picture of his place and people through his poetic imagination. He becomes their conscience by projecting their troubles and hopes through his verse; it provides the space through which it is possible for him to make his country bountiful. In order to understand his verse, one needs to dig out his roots. Walcott, the Saint Lucian born in 1930 to mother Alix (a teacher and artist) and father Warwick (a painter and poet), appears as a prodigy of the wrong age and colour (AL 3) due to his hybridity. Island life and culture are intrinsic to Walcott’s poetry, as demonstarted in the themes he chooses to write about. His mastery of English and his ability to deal with Caribbean social and cultural diversities make him one of the greatest poets alive. He is both a poet and a caretaker of his land as his verse reflects his burning desire to bring the Caribbean to the forefront. It is his long-lasting belief that nature should be preserved to enhance human imagination and creativity, and at times one finds postcolonial literature that demonstrates the same belief.

Postcolonial literature and Walcott’s poetry

The term postcolonial literature refers to all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day and it emerges from the experience of colonization (Ashcroft et. al. 2). It shows the cultural troubles caused by colonization, which exist even today and against which Walcott desires to write. In order to resist the cultural assault, creative minds in the postcolonial world raise their voice against it. After the period of decolonization, when the colonial armies and bureaucracies might have withdrawn, the Western powers still used maximum indirect control over erstwhile colonies via political, cultural and above all economic channels (Childs and Williams 5). The postcolonial world, on the one hand, gets rid of the colonial mechanism, yet on the other, it still has to face the very old imperial control. This situation invites artists and writers to shine light on the hidden agendas of the Western powers. The basic concept of postcolonialism is the right of all people on this earth to the same material and cultural well-being (Young 2). Human beings need to be treated on the basis of equality. Walcott believes everybody’s created equal (Moyers) and indeed his verse reflects his fight for the right of equality not only for his people but also for other marginalized people. The prolonged colonization of the Caribbean has resulted in a lack of literary resources. Since he realizes that Caribbean literature is deprived of privilege, he defines the undefined and even points out that the new Caribbean literature yearns for structure and does not want to escape from it, as there has been neither burden nor excess of literature (Hirsch). Walcott coins everything anew because of a lack of foundation and henceforth his poetics is entirely original in the English language, which is comprehensible to many.

Patricia Waugh remarks that: language is an independent, self-contained system which generates its own ‘meanings’ (3). Language remains a main concern for the writers who belong to postcolonial regions. Walcott believes in the scope and depth of language and one can see that he uses it in his poetry to generate new images as well as ideas to convey his poetic vision. Postimperial writers prefer to write in English, to delete the lingual monopoly and to reach a broader range of audiences. According to Walcott, The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself (Hirsch 73). Walcott remains clear about the ownership of the English language, and imagination is fundamentally vital in his poetics. Some of the important characteristics of postcolonial literature are: struggle over the word, giving things their names, trying not to take history as language, celebration of language and establishing true relation with the new world by utilizing prior experiences of the old (Ashcroft et al. 49–50). The postcolonial writers say that language is a tool to be employed by them against colonialism. Likewise, Walcott enacts the Adamic role in his poetry to name and assign the Caribbean in a new poetic angle. He applies a mixture of English and Creole in his poetry, especially in Omeros, to illustrate the significance of native language and the common people. It is demanding for contemporary writers to represent the working-class folk as literary subjects and to allow their language to be printed in literary forms (Donnell and Welsh 30). Postcolonial writers want to include local cultural content. Walcott epitomizes the ordinary life of his compatriots, so the content and characters of his poetics primarily reflect the ordinariness and daily livelihoods of his people.

An important feature of postcolonial literature is the loss of identity, due to loss of sense of place and loss of name, and due to a divided self (Deena 34–35). It is evident in this literature that the writers favor locating and analyzing the reason and cause behind the displacement of self in the colonized zones. Walcott also deciphers these aspects in his poetry, whence verse seems to be in a constant quest to build the collective Caribbean self. According to B. K. Das, Post-colonial theory claims that the major theme of literature from post-colonial countries can be taken as resistance to the former colonizer and it indicates that the writers who write back to the centre are representing the people of their society authentically (135). Consequently, postcolonial writers express the reality of the common people’s experience. Walcott in his poetry discloses the actuality and banality of the Caribbeans, and for that reason echoes the current troubles and pains faced by his people.

Exile is central in postcolonial literature. Edward W. Said proclaims that it is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience—it is an incurable gap between the self and its true home and the pain can never be forgotten (173). Exile remains paradoxical as in certain cases it can neither be avoided nor treated. Walcott adopts a self-chosen exile to comprehend the world. To Homi K. Bhabha displacement is central to hybridity, which represents that ambivalent ‘turn’ of the discriminated subject into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification—a disturbing questioning of the images and presence of authorities (162). If a person loses his place or origin, and name, and his self is imperialized, then it is a task to bring it back, which Walcott opts to perform. Mind and soul become central in his poetry as he tries to purge the pent-up feelings for bringing the self back to the center. The important characteristics of the postcolonial literature are history and origins, a sense of collective belonging, identity, exile, hope and self-belief, and these features form the base of Walcott’s verse with special emphasis on the Caribbean.

Caribbean theory

According to Ashcroft et al., the Caribbean theory is significant in Walcott’s poetry, as we come to know that the problematic of writing itself in the settler colonies is based on the relationship between: 1) the imported European and the local, 2) ancestry and destiny, and 3) language and place (144). They collectively mention an important feature of postcolonial identity, which is that we become ourselves, truly our own creators, discovering word for object, and image for the word by giving importance to ancestors rather than to Europeans, and that Walcott’s poetry is based on the Caribbean art where the antagonistic energies of that past are metamorphosed into a creative syncretism in the present (Ashcroft et. al. 148). There is evidently a tug of war in the writings of the postimperial poets as they struggle to comprehend the two different worlds, the native as well as the foreign. Walcott’s poetics focuses on the troublesome colonial features of the Caribbean history, which he positively utilizes to construct a communal identity. He comprehends that the soul of the Caribbean is wounded due to colonial atrocities; hence, he struggles to find a remedy to heal the wounds. Being sensitive to his people’s problems, his poetry indicates his endeavor to stitch the self together. From a very early age, he remains conscious of his own voice, and is proactive about his position in the literary world. To achieve this, he creates a new voice and he wants this voice to be recognized and nurtured.

Walcott as a postcolonial painterly poet

Walcott believes there is a great relationship between painting and writing words, and though he understands that poetry cannot help his painting, it can happen the other way round, as knowing what color you’re going to use and having an idea of symmetry and structure and light from the practice of painting certainly helps craft verse (Ferris). According to Walcott, there is a strong tie between the art of poetry and painting. Due to his profound understanding of these arts, his poetry is painterly. The engagement of both visual and verbal forms of art connection can be traced in his poems, which provide a dense range of images, and one is bound to appreciate the power of painting, which he utilizes to paint his images in poetry. The salient postcolonial characteristics on which he works in his poetry are the ragged history, the broken base: his world, his people and his place, the imperial aggression and domination on several aspects especially on linguistic levels, the making of identity, power of exile (even self-chosen), travel, invasion, and healing through spirituality. He believes that imperialism can be viewed without bitterness, as hatred can propel vengeance (Hirsch). Conceivably, this is one of the main reasons Walcott’s poetry continuously swims in the sea of altruism, so that both his page and his land can be fertile.

Walcott believes that, it is the ordinariness, not the astonishment, that is the miracle (233). It may appear ordinary through the lenses of history and art but when one loses cultural perceptions the commonplace becomes luminous; poetry and beauty come out of the ordinary (Hamner 5). In Walcott’s poetry, it is always the ordinary that is extraordinary. It is indeed associated with the concept of defamiliarization, in which a writer presents an object in a strange way, mainly to draw attention to certain aspects that would otherwise be ignored or overlooked. His vision includes spreading the benevolence of nature to people through his words. Ultimately, his message reaches a global scope, and makes one realize how the colonized regions are relevant. Unlike a layman who finds humans crushed because of their past, Walcott helps his people to overcome apparently painful issues. He always believes in the power of nothingness and ordinariness, as he trusts that a lot can be created from it.

For Walcott, the writing of poetry is hard to separate from prayer because it is a religious vocation (Hirsch). In Walcott’s Nobel Lecture, he compared Antillean art (and hence his own) to the restoration of a broken vase, our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, which he lovingly reassembles. He is interested in repairing the psychological damage done by the colonizers because of his inherent positivity, and he desires to rebuild the self through it. While composing poetry, he makes an effort to convey his beliefs about the literal history of the Caribbean and tries to recycle it through the images in his writing. He simultaneously indicates how the Caribbean people can address the otherwise unbearable and unspeakable burden of their history. Joseph Brodsky mentions that for the poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line (Heaney 378). For Walcott, his lexical choices are vital because he advances his vision through it and creates an essence of national identity that is based on reality so that no one would question the facts.

In his Nobel Lecture, entitled The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, Walcott states: The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one’s biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island (79). His perception of his land is that of a noun that tries to find its own way to grow in his hands. He inspects different aspects of history, nature, identity, and magnitude of altruism. He continues to question himself, while composing poetry as if he wants to make sure that a new world can be created through the leftover history. Consequently, he shapes a new world altogether, which proclaims new destinations for his main concerns: history and its blankness, nature and its power, identity crisis and its redress, and journey and its enlightenment. He pays attention to the use of the English language and connects it with the local one in order to reach a wider range of people. Through his verse he paints the various aspects of postcolonial characteristics; subsequently, he depicts the connections between place and people.

Main argument

Arguably, Derek Walcott uses images of communication to express his postcolonial views. Imagination is integral to identity and postcolonialism, as he believes in no nation now but the imagination (TSAK 8). Poetry is a form in which he uses imagination like a song, so that his readers’ minds can be enriched. He also states that poetry is communication and communication is memory (White 163). Communication images help to present a visual picture in his readers’ minds and to heal memory, which he believes to be fluid, therefore can be rectified. His poetics perhaps reveals that the periphery of the dispossessed can move towards both individual and collective awareness. For example, his verse not only paints his autobiographical outlook but also envelops the communal dimensions, and ultimately his poetry documents the combined memory realms for deeper and richer communication.

One of the distinct possibilities of Walcott’s choice of the domain of communication imagery is that perhaps he believes in the construction of a unified poetic vision, which can help the people. Though his message is rooted in his people’s empowerment, still, due to the enriched power of communication in his poetry, it crosses the boarders to convey the message of multiculturalism and altruism. Images of communication are significant in the entire course of his poems, as it unfolds his life-long effort in his poetry, but unfortunately has remained mainly unnoticed till now. He stitches the old world with the new one through these images. In his poetry, the gravitational power of communication images is hard to ignore, as the recurring usage of these images in his verse reminds us of the significance of the Caribbean. Scholars and critics have often elucidated images such as page and noun but not in the domain of communication, and here an extensive study on images of communication across his poetry collections is examined because they act as anchor for his poetry.

Communication images

Poetry is communication and communication is memory. ⁵

Derek Walcott

Image and poem go hand in hand, as a poem comes into being in one line and half and that first and a half may be an image (Jacobs 5) that can be used by the poet to craft a full poem. An image enables Walcott’s imagination to create and complete a whole poem; hence a single word can create a communicative process in his mind to shape a poem. A poem in particular and poetry in general are used as a tool of communication across generations to narrate and remember stories. Literature as such is a communication that speaks via words. Rodger D. Sell in Literature as Communication: The Foundations of Mediating Criticism ascribes that:

Communication can be thought of as a semiotic process by which people try, at least ideally speaking, to negotiate a balanced, and even shared view of that entity. In doing so, they inevitably open themselves to the possibility of mental re-adjustments, whose scope can range from the merely very minimal to the absolutely all-embracing. (3)

Communication is a sequential transfer of message from one to another and it depends on the comprehensibility of the receiver for receiving feedback. It dwells on a deeper level of understanding and it transcends the boundaries of mental horizons, so as to create an impact in the imaginative cognitive process, and the message can evolve into a life-changing medium. Hereafter, words as a component in the communicative process have a powerful impact on the human mind. To Walcott, communication remains eternally vital and he tries to apply it to decoding the mysteries of the colonial trials. In communication, sharing with people is