336 PART THREE
Indies are as old as America, far older if we slough off their European colonial
namings. That ’s his predicament and his strength alike, in this new morning:
to be striking clear of America and Europe both, without denying their deep
place in him.
“Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” asks the early poem “A Far Cry
from Africa.” Born in the onetime British colony of St. Lucia to parents who
themselves were of mixed West Indian and English parentage, Walcott has never
stopped exploring exile, testing his mulatto standpoint “Between this Africa and
the English tongue I love.” This Africa, for him, sends calypso spirit into many
of Walcott ’s plays, while two dialects he ’s absorbed, Creole English and French
Creole, color the tone of his writing—the local flora, fauna, place-names, the
vivid hues of land and sea, town and harbor. He likes the island patois of ciseau
orscisour la mer, for the scissor-tailed tern or frigate-bird cutting the air.
As for “the English tongue I love,” he claims a full tradition: the Bible,
Shakespeare on through Keats, Clare, Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Yeats,
Frost, Williams, Eliot, Edward Thomas, Auden, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes,
plus Melville, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway. Walcott prizes these Anglo and
American voices while clinging to another lineage, French West Indian, the
white “patrician” Saint-John Perse and black “proletarian” Aimé Césaire. He
calls these men, along with Pablo Neruda the Whitman of Chile, New World
poets, bypassing that term’s colonial taint. Their faith goes to “elemental man,” a
“second Adam” renaming, with some bitterness, the tropical cityscape, country-
side, and wild surroundings he stems from. Like his Robinson Crusoe in “The
Castaway,” Walcott finds on empty Caribbean beaches “a green wine bottle ’s
gospel choked with sand,” and “In our own entrails, genesis.” That choked
gut comes from his inner split, the “African” seeking pure green origins via
western culture.
Digging deeper than he had before, Derek Walcott composed his own Gene-
sis in Omeros(1990). Revamping Homer’s Odyssey and the Bible, with hints of
the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, the poet ’s quest starts on his Caribbean island
and ends there after three hundred pages of Dantean triplets. In Book One the
first chapter’s first section begins with origins. “This is how, one sunrise, we
cut down them canoes”—a Creole voice telling tourists how the natives felled
trees to make pirogues, dugout canoes. “Once wind bring the news”
to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars,
because they could see the axes in our own eyes.A native integrity shows up in laurier-cannelles, whose French West Indian name
Walcott won’t translate, like W. S. Merwin with Hawaii’s native trees: “they cut