LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Student Poetry Presentation, 2003

Reader: Krisann Muskievicz
Respondent: Cynthia Garza
Recorder: Emily Masterson
June 10, 2003

Walcott, “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”

In “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” Walcott addresses postcolonial hybridization through a representation of dangerous and lonely scene in modern New York.  The speaker describes a Christmas-time experience in the Village during which he is enveloped by drunkenness, violence, and isolation.  Emerging from a bar in Sheridan Square, the speaker follows a set of footprints to a diner where he sees a man beaten to a pulp.  The violence, and possibly the speaker’s separation from those around him, causes him to feel the weight of the white outside: “The night was white.  There was nowhere to hide.”  

Walcott’s cosmopolitan life provides an important background to this poem.  Kasi Havlaty, from the 2001 class, posts an interesting quote about Walcott’s multicultural experiences.  Citing Emory University’s website for Postcolonial Studies, Havlaty quotes James Dickey as saying, “Walcott is a man posed between the blue sea and its real fish and the rockets and warheads, between a lapsed colonial culture and the industrial North, between Africa and the West, between slavery and intellectualism, between the native Caribbean tongue and the English learned from books, between the black and white of his own body, between the sound of the home ocean and the lure of European culture.”  Because of Walcott’s hybridized heritage, he is in a unique position to discuss the role reversal of a black man entering a white world.  An understanding of Walcott’s cosmopolitan life adds depth to the speaker’s message in “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.”  The speaker does not belong to his surroundings, just as Walcott’s personal history may place him in many houses without a home.

Walcott refers to a specific period of his own personal isolation in “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.”  Bruce King, in Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, discusses Walcott’s experiences in New York in 1958.  King explains that Walcott arrived in New York during October of that year on a Rockefeller scholarship to study drama.  Walcott was in New York for nine months on the scholarship, and his stay was characterized by isolation and frustration.  He initially stayed in a hotel for transients and his room was small, minimally furnished, and had one window that looked out onto a brick wall.  He later moved to a busy loft that offered him little privacy.  The people he encountered through the scholarship were, primarily, white actors, actresses, and artists.  Walcott’s acquaintances, as well as his living quarters, were very different than anything he knew from St. Lucia, and the differences were very stark to him.   King states, “America struck Walcott as loud and snarling, especially after being brought up to speak softly in the educated British manner” (147).  The snarl echoes in “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.”  Walcott writes, “I longed for darkness, evil that was warm. /  Walking, I’d stop and turn.  What had I heard / wheezing behind my heel with whitening breath?”

Question:

Thinking of colonial and postcolonial literature, we tend to think of white Westerners going into underdeveloped communities populated by people of color.  However, “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” glimpses Walcott’s experience as a black man from St. Lucia entering the dangerous urban jungle of New York.  How is this reversal also a representation of postcolonial literature?

Discussion:

Cynthia Garza: I tried to find something with “the self” and “the others” since we talked about that yesterday. In this poem, I think we can agree that Walcott is the self and the other would be New York, the unknown streets. These images are complete opposites of what we normally think of as colonial and postcolonial literature. Walcott goes into the imagery of opposites. We normally associate white with something good, but here is white as the unknown and the unwelcome. Dark is normally something stark, and here it is a comfort because Walcott says, “I long for darkness.” The imagery is completely flipped over. The other thing we noticed is that the poem ends in a couplet, so that seems significant.  

I was confused by the analogies of stew…does it fit in with the melting pot discussion of the time period? I didn’t get the bleeding on the virgin snow… 

Krisann Muskievicz: Blood on virgin snow may be Christian Christmas imagery…  

Dr. White: I thought about Valley Forge, which is a standard image of a harsh winder. Or the Chritmas drinking song, “Good King Wensceslaus.”  

Kelley Gutridge: Snow is ugly after sitting on the ground.  The purity becomes corrupted.  Walcott may be saying something about colonization.

Greg Johnson: I was looking at that also but as the virgin snow as truth, and there’s blood on the truth.  

Dr. White: The nativity story of Krisna (a god figure for Hinduism) is translated into the Christmas story in God of Small Things…let’s refocus on Krisann’s question. 

Ashley Salter: Doesn’t this have to do with the third wave that we’ve been talking about?  

Cynthia Garza: He sounds desperate to me, even the end. “The night was white but there was no where to hide…”  There is sadness in his experience in white New York.