LITR 5831 Colonial-Postcolonial Literature                                                        Research Posts 2011

Mallory Rogers

Caribbean Authors and Their Commitment to Multiple Cultures

The principles of social discourse for post-colonial literature especially, piques my interest the most, because even today, the way in which Caribbean colonists are portrayed remains a hot topic that is readily discussed openly and passionately by the very authors who write their stories. In my first posting, I researched how the female Caribbean author Edna Brodber used her background to influence the way we read about and interpret colonial natives’ roles in Caribbean literature. Her work’s theme was that of a minority—a non-immigrant culture that the West came into uninvited.  This allowed her stories to remain separate from those of the settlers’ culture, and provided a means to resist essentially dissolving into their way of life. However, male authors from the Caribbean, such as Dereck Walcott, provide an alternate rationale for their story-telling, one suitable more to be considered a blend of minority and immigrant literature that accepts change and adaptation. 

Like my first posting with Brodner, I began my research by exploring the Walcott’s background. According to the Nobel Prize website (http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/derek-walcott-110.php), Derek Walcott’s and his twin brother, Roderick, were born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, a ex-British Caribbean paradise island. With both his maternal and paternal grandmothers’ lineage hailing from descendents of slaves, the Walcott’s grew up on the isolated volcanic island that imposed a strong influence on their lives, and thus formed his deep-roots to his native society. Derek’s father, a watercolor artist, died when the twins were only a few years old; and Walcott’s mother assumed the role of mother and father, as she ran the town’s Castries Methodist School. With a mother so closely involved in education, it is no surprise that Derek went on to pursue a college education locally at St. Mary's College and then at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.  At the age of 18, Derek Walcott took his father’s creative instincts as an artist and merged it with his mother’s education background, and made his poetry debut with the title 25 Poems. Then, at the age of 23, Derek began to travel in an effort to experience different cultures. He ended up in Trinidad, where he eventually found work as a theatre and art critic. Six years after, he moved to Trinidad and went on to create the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, where many of his early plays would be produced.  In 1962, Derek Walcott left the production arena and returned to his pen and paper, completing his ultimate breakthrough collection of poems titled, In a Green Night.

Today, Derek divides his time between Trinidad, his home as a writer, and Boston University, where he shares his knowledge through teaching two courses: literature and of course creative writing. He writes stories of non-settlers who, unlike Brodner’s steadfast characters who denounce change, embrace the newly introduced culture yet still reference and record their own traditions. This makes for the emergence of characters that, under seemingly repressive circumstances, have managed to craft and create stories of their own journeys that go beyond the immediate threat of the dominant culture, and not just stories – such as Brodner’s - of resistance to the dominant cultures “invasions.”

Walcott's works culminate in a combination of both new and old world traditions. As a result, with each publication and production Derek created, his work became more and more world-renowned and he became known for his exception style of fusing his traditional Caribbean roots with the cultural blend of African, Asiatic and European elements he experienced through his travels. Because Walcott’s work has a sense of sharing and borrowing of ideas from multiple cultures, it has essentially become well-known for shaping colonial discourse, especially in regard to the Caribbean.

Catherine Douillet of AmeriQuests (Volume 7, 2010) says the central themes of Walcott’s writings include a focus on, “the intricate relationships between the colonized and the colonizer and the ways in which the Caribbean self embraces, and is split, between different places and loyalties” (http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/ojs/index.php/ ameriquests/article/viewArticle/169/183). Douillet goes on to say that Walcott’s influences on Caribbean literature also suggest that he uses his characters to show “the ways in which the Caribbean should position itself in the postcolonial world,” and through his characters, “Walcott [provides] a model of Caribbeanness that values the fertilizing nature of cultural and racial multiplicity…a model where the Caribbean writer, and therefore his characters, breathe and ultimately merge two different traditions: African and European, into one.” With this conception, Walcott’s work serves his characters by providing them with an inevitable alternative to characters portrayed by female Caribbean authors such as Brodner, who believe the two very different cultures have to remain separate in order to pay homage to their roots.

In a review published in Caribbean Beat in March 2005 (http://nicholaslaughlin.net/walcott-prodigal.html) of Walcott’s book-length poem, The Prodigal, author Nicholas Laughlin says Walcott’s poem shows his struggles with remaining true to his past, and positioning himself for success in the future when he says:

[Walcott’s] struggle with a sense of dividedness comes from being the hybrid son of a hybrid culture, neither African nor European yet also both. The poem also comes of mastering the forms of English literature so as to write about a place and a people far outside that literature’s traditions. Throughout the piece, Walcott tries to describe and understand the birth of his vocation in 1940s St Lucia, as he semi-mythologizes himself as “a prodigy of the wrong age and color,” torn between his love for his native landscape and the knowledge that only by leaving can he truly fulfil his promise. These two central themes — making the world “real” through the power of poetry, and the anxiety of dividedness drive the narrative of The Prodigal. Walcott stories of his fortunate travels through Europe, the United States, Mexico,  and South America are discussed and portrayed, as he tells the story of his culminating homecoming, once again, to St Lucia. Ultimately, the poem helps Walcott decide whether his exile from the Caribbean is a betrayal and whether the poetry he composed compounds that treachery or redeems it.

We know that each culture has its own way of creating an ordered world. For Brodner, her characters’ stories remained separate from those of the settlers. Walcott’s writing however, provides its readers with an entirely new social order to explore--a hybrid of cultures where old tradition is on the same playing field as new traditions, and the two intertwine and coexist. Walcott’s adaptations of characters related to what was happening around him, and seemed to come very natural especially considering he himself was born into a dual-culture.

Walcott’s fused characters, and thus his contributions to Caribbean literature were so unique and likewise significant to the world of literature, that in 1992 he was named the first black author to receive the $1.2 million Nobel Prize for Literature "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment" (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1992/). As per the transcript on the Nobel Prize website, Derek used his Nobel Banquet speech to share his personal feelings on the rationale for his work with the audience:

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Distinguished Representatives of the Nobel Foundation, Honourable Members of the Academies, the Karolinska Institute and Election Committees, Students, Ladies and Gentlemen, The honour that you pay me is accepted in the one name that comprises all of the supposedly broken languages of the Caribbean. They cohere in this moment, a moment that recognises their endeavour and one which I receive with pride and humility on their behalf. Pride in the continuing struggle of Antillean writers, humility in the glare of representing them by my own evanescent image.

Both Brodner and Walcott are alike in the fact that they both write for a certain purpose: to keep the conversation of cultural discourse alive. While female Caribbean authors such as Brodber create traditional characters who mirror their pasts for the sake of passing on history, Walcott preserves the emergence of a new-age culture—the characters who take what works for them from the dominant culture and merge it with what worked from their traditional culture. Brodner and Walcott  are both interested in recording their stories and preserving their culture’s history forever. The difference lies in their styles lay in the fact that Brodner uses her mother and father’s stories as a basis to record history, while Walcott uses what’s happening in the present. As readers, we turn out to be the real winners in the authors' battle, as we read about traditional Caribbean history from female authors like Brodber and we read about the modern version through male authors such as Walcott.