Trace the key issues of postcolonial literature in Dereck Walcott’s

poems ‘A Far Cry From Arica’ and ‘Names’.

“History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake. – Joyce”

Postcolonial literature displays a dynamic consciousness of what it means to produce literature

in a culture and language conditioned by colonial history, at a juncture when the colonized are
yet to free themselves from the defining influence of that conditioning. Dereck Walcott was
born in 1930 in Castries on the island of St. Lucia in the British West Indies. He had two white
grandfathers and two black grandmothers which gave him a dual heritage that is reflected in his
literary works. He is mixed of black, Dutch and English descent. He won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1992.

During the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of Africans were
abducted from their homelands, enslaved and shipped across to the colonies in the Caribbean
to work on sugar plantations. Caribbean history is a tale of massive enslavement and
subsequent deracination of the colonized subjects and is therefore characterized by a
propensity to devalue their identity. The practices of slave-selling and plantation economy in
the West Indies ensured the virtual destruction of African cultural communities within a few
generations.

Caribbean poetry is often preoccupied with the need to respond to the displacement painfully
experienced by the enslaved ancestors. Walcott evolves a discourse of liberation in which the
postcolonial subject refuses to surrender to a Eurocentric view of history within which it is
framed and subjugated, thereby taking away the colonizer’s agency to constitute and christen
the world it inhabits. His poetry offers him the possibility of coming to terms with the
‘forgotten’. It offers the postcolonial subject the ability to transcend the dilemma and
predicament associated with having a formerly colonized identity through an imaginative
exploration of that very same experience.

Walcott’s poems ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ and ‘Names’ articulate postcolonial subjectivity in a
number of ways. In his hands, this hybrid language is merely a tool to destabilize the nostalgic
longing for an ancestral culture as well as decenter established Eurocentric narratives. In his
poem “A Far Cry from Africa”, Walcott addresses the concerns of the identity crisis and the
inability to align himself with either west or Africa. The first stanza of the poem gives a detail
account of the Mau Mau rebellion of 1952-60 in present day Kenya, Africa.
The Mau Mau were generally seen as a terrorist outfit by the colonizers. The Mau Mau caused a
divisive split in the Kikuyu community between those who were loyal to the British and those
who had aligned themselves to the Mau Mau. The Kikuyu people were forced into
concentration camps where they were inhumanly tortured and castrated. Walcott also refers to
the infamous murder of a six year old British boy who was killed by the Mau Mau. The
ambivalence of Walcott’s position with regard to his dual ancestry also provides a sort of
underlying irony to the animalistic imagery in the poem. The poet distances himself from both
the African and the British sides. The violence committed by both the parties has alienated him
from either cause.

“As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.” The emphasis here is on
the hierarchy that distinguishes the weak from the strong. In natural world the strong thrive
through their killing of the weak. Walcott allies this is to the racial dynamics of colonization.
Walcott sarcastically points out the difference between the beast and the men where beasts kill
to feed themselves while a man seeks greater status through tyrannizing his fellow men.
Walcott uses irony to examine how the veneer of civilization cloaks the true motive of the
colonizing project. Also, he uses the metaphor of gorilla to depict the colonial perception of the
African as brutish, animalistic and unintelligent.

The poet is making a reference to the schizophrenia that plagues Caribbean and other
postcolonial writers. In spite of the brutal history of colonization, the colonized races have
come to regard the culture and the language of the colonizer as part of their own history.
Walcott’s use of creole in his literary works is seen as an assertion of his hybrid identity. It is this
writing in two tongues that allows Walcott to counter the dilemma of a dual heritage. The poet
makes rhetorical questions that reflect the guilt for the use of love of the English tongue and
culture. The questions do not only suggest his own internal turmoil nut also prevents him from
becoming an absolute defender of the colonizer’s culture. The poem revolves around key
postcolonial concerns : the vestiges of the colonial past and its relation with a neocolonial
world, the cultural ambivalences resulting from a formerly colonized subject’s engagement with
Eurocentrism, and the disruptive reappropriation of metropolitan tradition by indigenous
culture.

The other poem “Names” of Walcott is dedicated to Edward Braithwaite whose works engages
with the black identity, cultural history of the Caribbean population and the aftermath of
slavery. The poem begins with a pun on the word ‘race’ as significant of both racial identity and
his own particular trajectory. In this poem, Walcott addresses the nuances and the very fact of
language in the construction of the racial identity: “with no nouns, and no horizon, / with
pebbles under my tongue”. Walcott suggests that naming then is not only a linguistic act but is
rooted in a matrix of power. The precolonised past has to be forgotten for a colonized future to
exist. The poem suggests that the loss of memory is simultaneously a wound that cannot be
healed and also a site for subjectivity in the colonized self.

The poet refers to Levantine in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. The poem has a
sense of loss for the early Europeans in leaving their own country. The word “sad” invokes a
sense of nostalgia for the homelands left behind to explore and colonize the new world. The
poem refers to the pull that the colonized subject feels for both the native culture alongside
that of the colonizer. The lack of future is also affirmative since it implies the movement of the
colonized subject outside the narrow trajectory of a Eurocentric progressive view of history.
Walcott is making a reference to the need to escape the chains of history.

The poem reflects the poet’s views to desist from looking at the dual heritage of the two
cultures as either separation or amalgamation. Walcott choice of adjectives like “terrible”
indicates that an individual’s coming into identity is a painful process mired in divisive
affiliations. Walcott seems to see history as nothingness. Walcott argues that the privilege of
naming of the New World by the colonizers eliminates the ethnic past. Naming also involves
“the amnesia of the races” that makes “imagination as necessity”. In short, imagination and by
association language allows the colonized subject to create his identity. The trauma and loss
associated with colonization is undercut by a simultaneous regard for the colonizer’s culture
and history to which the racial amnesia of an African past acts as a counterfoil.

Language is a solution that Walcott offers to bring together these two opposing tendencies. The
native tongue is trained to speak an alien language that in the act of speech no longer remains
alien. Walcott’s use of the colonizer’s language to retrace a racial ancestry through a linguistic
trajectory becomes the dominant preoccupation of the poem. Walcott’s “Names” can therefore
be seen as the poet’s outlining of some of his linguistic concerns in his works.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. The text’s Introduction by Someshwar Sati.
2. Dereck Walcott’s Introduction by Karuna Rajeev in the text.
3. The Muse of History by Dereck Walcott
4. Walcott, Writing and the Caribbean: Issues and Directions by
Edward Baugh

Submitted by:
Adeeba Siddiqui
Roll no. : 16/909
Postcolonial Literature Assignment
Semester - VI