Walcott, "Crusoe’s Journal" (pp. 92-4)

Reader: Linton Gilling Jr.

June 28, 2001

missionary/

the word to savages/

(Indicates the exploitation of the indigenous people through Christianity)

whose sprinkling alters us/ into good Fridays who recite His praise/ parroting our master's / style and voice, we make his language ours/ converted cannibals/

we learn with him to eat the flesh of Christ/

(Indicates loss of the self, disintegration of culture, values and beliefs. Also forced to adopt European language and religion.)

All shapes, all objects multiplied from his/ (Dominion over colonized)

our oceans Proteus/

of my own island filing past the noise/ (Sense of isolation)

though what is cried is lost.)/ (Objectified, dehumanized, leads to empty void of isolation)

So time, that makes us objects, multiples/

our natural loneliness/

and separate from itself, lives somewhere else/ (loss of self, detached and alienated)

and learn again the self-creating peace/ (let me be, I must reclaim myself)

of islands/

we learn to shape from them, where nothing was/

the language of a race,/ (postcolonialism, trying to reconstruct "the self")

, all of us

yearn for those fantasies/ (longing for selfhood)

of innocence, for our faith’s arrested phase/

when the clear voice/ (Real love still exists through God)

started itself saying "water, heaven, christ,"/

hoarding such heresies/ God's loneliness moves His smallest creatures