335“the still pond and the egrets beating home”
Derek Walcott, First to See Them
How quickly it could all disappear! And how it is beginning to
drive us further into where we hope are impenetrable places, green
secrets at the end of bad roads, headlands where the next view
is not of a hotel but of some long beach without a figure and the
hanging question of some fisherman’s smoke at its far end.
The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives. They draw their
working strength from it organically, like trees, like the sea
almond or the spice laurel of the heights.oward the climax of his 1992 Nobel Prize
acceptance speech, Derek Walcott (b. 1930) fends off any touristic image of
his native islands. He means to reclaim their selfhood, their genius, and if sea
almond and spice laurel can’t be found in an unabridged dictionary, that too
speaks for a special place. You can see Walcott, a fine naturalist painter, visually
calling up a landscape he cherishes: “the next view... some long beach without
a figure,” “the hanging question of some fisherman’s smoke.”
“I have felt from my boyhood that I had one function and that was somehow
to articulate, not my own experience, but what I saw around me,” he says about
his West Indian childhood. “I’m the first person to look at this mountain and
try to write about it. I’m the first person to see this lagoon, this piece of land.
Here I am with this enormous privilege of just being someone who can take
up a brush.” He could be Adam or Columbus, this “first person to see” those
“green secrets.” Yet Walcott ’s homeland is no Eden for working Caribbeans,
whose precursors saw the land long before Columbus.
So what has a poet to do with his culture ’s endangered survival?
There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself
a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by
branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn.
That “self-defining dawn” comes after long colonial status. Of course the West
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