An Interpretation of Derek Walcott's "Crusoe's

Journal"

"My Crusoe, then, is Adam, Christopher Columbus, God, a missionary, a beachcomber,

and his interpreter, Daniel Defoe. He is Adam because he is the first inhabitant of this
second paradise. He is Columbus because he has discovered this new world, by accident,
by fatality. He is God because he teaches himself to control his creation, he rules the
world he has made, and also, because he is to Friday, a white concept of Godhead. He is
a missionary because he instructs Friday in the uses of religion [. . .] He is a beachcomber
because I have imagined him as one of those figures of adolescent literature, some
derelict of Conrad or Stevenson [. . .] and finally, he is also Daniel Defoe, because the
journal of Crusoe, which is Defoe's journal, is written in prose, not in poetry, and our
literature, the pioneers of our public literature have expressed themselves in prose. [. . .] I
have tried to show that Crusoe's survival is not purely physical, not a question of the
desolation of his environment, but a triumph of will [. . .] We contemplate our spirit by the
detritus of the past."
-- Walcott, "The Figure of Crusoe"
Overview

Walcott's poem is a meditation on the kind of poetic and

cultural transformation needed to survive against the
complicated Caribbean experience of colonialization. His
figure of Crusoe is a shape-shifter like the mythic figure of
Proteus, who not only learns how to adapt to changing
circumstances but also how to make a poetic symbol by
which he understands the world. The figure of Crusoe is
both individualistic and communal. He is communal
because he is representative of the Caribbean people. He
shapes his journal/experience/poem in much the same way
that Walcott describes the shaping of a culture in his Nobel
address, "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory". Crusoe
brings together a ruin of objects and symbols and cultural
fragments in order to construct a new vision. Yet this same
process in the poem is fraught with loneliness. Crusoe the
maker is alone in such a project.

Commentary

Epigram: [see n. 1 in the Norton anthology] Crusoe looks upon the world as something
objective and free from his subjective perception and involvement. The poem will
undercut this stance, claiming that subjective perception is part of what we do with the
objects of the world.

lines 1-9: The first lines provide the setting of the poem, a drive past a beach house
between the ocean and the forest in Trindad. On such a trip, the mind of the poet ("the
intellect") must judge the surroundings much like Robinson Crusoe in Defoe's novel had to
gather everything he could from the wreckage of his ship. But here the wreckage and
tools are those of prose.

lines 10-15: Such a tool-making/gathering is like Adam first naming the animals; each word
has a complete newness to it, for it feels as if it were without precedent. In Walcott's
estimation the world is always new for the poet, always being recreated or reconfigured.

lines 16-25: This reconfiguration is also like the arrival of Christopher Columbus and
Christianity in the New World. Converts, such as Defoe's character of Friday who served
and was converted by Crusoe, find that the infusion of the Word alters their cultural and
religious consciousness, yet they also make this language serve their own purposes. For
example, a kind of new, more symbolic cannibalism results as they partake of Catholic
communion.

lines 26-29a: "All shapes, all objects" are from the sea and multiply and alter like the
shape-shifting Greek god Proteus. [The sea in Walcott seems to represent a number of
things. Among others, it stands for the process whereby the natural geography of the
Caribbean tends to display the cultural objects of human history.]

lines 29b-39: The speaker now makes a parenthesis, describing the coast seen off a cliff-
side road as a kind of "stuttering canvas" not only because the scenes pass quickly by but
also because it represents a unclear, broken kind of speech. The passing villages can be
compared to the castaway setting of children's stories like Treasure Island. The young
boy, a particularly lonely image, could be a boy inspired by such images, perhaps even
Walcott himself.

lines 40-41: We are naturally lonely because we must, like Crusoe, construct meaning with
what time (that is, history or the past) gives us.

lines 42-53a: Poetry, like divination, creates something that is without use and apart from
its creator. As such, like gulls' crying, poetry never resigns itself to its isolation, needing
praise from others. Like the character of Ben Gunn, it must learn to be at peace with its
island isolation.

lines 53b-57: [see n. 9] "Like Crusoe, the inhabitants of the Caribbean [or the individual
poet?] have created a new culture out of the debris of their historical experience."

lines 58-70: The intellect with its perception of the world needs a mask/symbol to provide
shape and meaning. Our face is that of a beachcomber (or perhaps Crusoe himself) who
longs to return to innocent Eden. It longs for the experience of faith, a kind of faith that
Adamically names its experience, that chooses its words, including unorthodox beliefs.
The last line can be understand in at least three different ways: 1) see n. 3 in the anthology
-- as a pantheistic reference, so God is present in all things; 2) as another symbol of the
poet's creation of meaning and the loneliness that accompanies it; and/or 3) as the
separation that God feels from his creation which is similar to the feeling of separation in
the human creation of ideas.
Crusoe's Journal

“Its shape an earthen, water-bearing vessel’s/ 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”

These above lines are from the poem Crusoe’s Journal by Derek Walcott. The poem is a
response to the novel 'Robinson Crusoe' written by Daniel Defoe. Which is written as an
autobiography with an underlying message that one could create the British system of rule anywhere
in the world. The overarching theme in this poem is one of the colonizers colonizing. This is seen by
the dichotomy developed with the use of the words ‘his’ ‘ours’ ‘parroting’ ‘alters’ and ‘converted’.
When the poet says ‘we make his language ours’ it alludes to the fact that colonizers made the
natives adopt a subservient role by making them take up English as a language. When Walcott talks
about altering them into ‘good Fridays’ he is talking about the natives becoming subservient, who’
recite His praise’ which could also mean that the natives were converted. 'Friday' was also a
character in the novel who is turned into a slave by Crusoe himself, furthering the colonizing theme.
Another example to back up the religious connotations is that when Walcott says good Friday, he
could also mean ‘Good Friday.’ Which is a religious holiday that takes place during the end of Lent, a
liturgical season we just entered. Additionally, Walcott uses the word converted, which obviously has
religious connotations. Calling them cannibals the colonizers take them and teach them to eat the
body of Christ instead, moving them into a new symbolic sort of cannibalism.

Campbell Corner Language Exchange

"Infinities of Islands":
Reconfigurations of Crusoe's Island in the Work of
Bishop, Coetzee, Tournier, and Walcott

by James McCorkle

Part one

The re-visioning of Crusoe, Friday, and the island upon which they were castaway offers a
register of the connections between postcolonialism and postmodernism. Both involve a
radical decentering of economic, aesthetic, and political identities and structures.
Postmodernism may be posited as the sliding chain of signifiers, where signifier is subsumed
or erased by a subsequent one, resulting in either indeterminacy or accretive space. If this can
serve as an abbreviated description of postmodernism, then what is most striking is the
unmarked interstices within the slide of signifiers, the in-betweenness in the lattice-work of
the accreted space. This translational arranging, and this diaspora of meaning, can describe
postcolonialism. Thus both postmodernism and postcolonialism reveal temporal and spatial
disjunctions which subvert the totalizing effects of dominant metropolitan culture.
Implicit in this brief sketch of postmodernism and postcolonialism are oppositional and
transformational elements. Rather than defining postmodernism as the globalization of
multinational capitalism, postmodernism is the interrogation of that imperative culture
including oppositional positions. This process is subsumed in such a postcolonial project
perhaps best typified by Derek Walcott's poetry. Homi Bhabha describes Derek Walcott's
project as going beyond "binaries of power in order to reorganize our sense of the process of
identification in the negotiations of cultural politics" (233), so as to write "a history of
cultural difference that envisages the production of difference as the political and social
definition of the historical present" (234). Walcott's poetry registers the history of language--
its genealogy and geography--and offers the prospect of a transforming language, one not
rejecting its histories but "turning the right to signify into an act of cultural translation" (234).
The complex of the figures of Crusoe, Friday, and their island provide a narrative in which, in
the works of Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, J. M. Coetzee, and Michel Tournier, the interstitial
condition of identity becomes the primary focus. While Defoe's narrative was an
accumulation and writing over of previous accounts of exile fused with Defoe's economic
doctrine, the recent re-visions of the narrative displace Defoe's interests with a re-reading of
Crusoe's position. Defoe's vision of a cohesive, hierarchial, colonial world driven by
capitalism and theology became praxis as Defoe was writing his narrative. We have become
Crusoe, his name is part of ours, he is the mask that Walcott, Bishop, and Tournier assume to
consider their own identities. For Coetzee, Crusoe is the originary but lost figure who
controls the identities of all who come into contact with him.

The materialist history that Defoe theorized and initiated (where history and the novel, for
Defoe, emerge as discourses supplanting and complementing each other), is not the modality
these writers explore. The perceived failure to engage history on materially explicit terms of
class, economics, gender, or sexuality are criticisms levelled especially at Bishop and
Coetzee. The question of representation, how identities of self and other are constituted, do
not omit or abandon history, but militate, as Brian Macaskill writes of Coetzee, "against facile
and misleading oppositions, and not only generates subtle and affective ways to 'do-writing',
but allows also for the activity of 'doing-listening'" (472). Embedded in the dynamic of self
and others or their representations is the condition of listening. Listening is the interstitial
space where reception, response and transformation are possible. The conditions of reception
are explored, theorized and tested in the texts of Bishop, Coetzee, Tournier, and Walcott. To
listen closely opens an ethical space and temporality. To listen implies an approach to the
other who is speaking, so that the words become shared and dwelled in or upon. To listen is
to accumulate and accomodate histories; the failure to listen results in entrapment within a
restrictive identity. Listening is the opening toward interpretation and a re-vision of one's self
and one's relation to others. Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Crusoe in England," from her final
collection, Geography III, begins with Crusoe's lament that no one has listened thus his
chronicle has been misread:

But my poor island's still un-rediscovered, unrenamable. None of the books has ever got it right.

Crusoe's island, unlike the report of an island being born, named, and "caught on the horizon
like a fly," remains uncharted and unrecognized except as a misidentified feature. Later
Crusoe, when introducing Friday's memory, parenthetically remarks that "Accounts of that
have everything all wrong." What "that" refers to is left undisclosed, necessitating that we
listen carefully to Crusoe's elegy.

Crusoe serves as a mask for Bishop, who avoided writing direct autobiographical poetry.
David Kalstone dates "Crusoe in England" as having its inception in Brazil, reporting that in
a 1965 letter to Bishop's friend, the poet and editor, Howard Moss, the poem needed "a good
dusting" (255). It was not published, however, until 1971. With the death of her companion
Lota de Macedo Soares in 1967, Bishop's desire to remain in Brazil, where she had been
living for over fifteen years, diminished and she returned permanently to the United States.
The loss of Lota was further amplified by the loss of the houses in Ouro Preto and Petropolis,
which Bishop shared with Lota. A castaway since her childhood, these houses represented a
haven for Bishop. The poem, narrated by a Crusoe bereft of his island filled with singularities
and his beloved Friday, uncannily portrays Bishop's bereavements.

Bishop suggests that not to hear Crusoe's lament, to continue to get it "all wrong," is to fail to
hear Bishop's own, albeit mediated, self-definition. Portraying herself as Crusoe, Bishop
considers herself as an outsider: Crusoe's only home is memory. Sexuality, too, is displaced:
neither Crusoe's nor Bishop's homosexuality is directly expressed, instead that identity must
be listened for. This does not mean to suggest ambivalence, but a political and social
necessity, as well as personal temperament, for discretion, and more importantly the
awareness that homosexuality is indeed not listened for, except so as to silence.

Homosexuality remains difficult to name--accounts always get it wrong. Bishop has seized
another text, a different history, and re-visioned it to provide her own history of identity. It is
a Crusoe and Friday who we recognize, but who are also re-enunciated. For Bishop as a
lesbian, a history of desire and presence must be retrieved; failing that, one must be invented.
Or more radically, Bishop transgresses by utilizing an archetypic narrative to open a space to
listen to what has been silenced. Bishop must cross genres and figuratively cross-dress to
disclose her identity. Boundaries are thus revealed but also shown to be permeable or porous.
What is striking about "Crusoe in England," and somewhat parallel to Tournier's Vendredi ou
les limbes du Pacifique, is that it is Friday who appears to re-vision Crusoe's sexual and
spiritual identity:

Just when I thought I couldn't stand it

another minute longer, Friday came.
(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)
Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman!
I wanted to propagate my kind,
and so did he, I think, poor boy.
He'd pet the baby goats sometimes,
and race with them, or carry one around.
--Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.
And then one day they came and took us off.

Crusoe's interest in Friday is not proprietory, though Bishop has indeed problematized the
conditions of desire between the European Crusoe and the exotic, otherness of Friday. While
Crusoe assumes a paternal voice in this passage, that voice is perhaps a variation on the voice
of lament for the loss of an intimate, for Bishop ruptures this passage's enclosing, mirroring,
coupling language with the breaking of the idyll: "they came and took us off." This does not
resonate with rescue or salvation but punishment or imprisonment.

Crusoe's exile in England returns him to a world of interrogating gazes, that of Foucault's
panopticon. His artifacts are desired by a local museum, though "How can anyone want such
things," Crusoe asks, especially since the "living soul has dribbled away" from each object.
Friday's presence suspends the genealogy of disciplinary modalities; prior to Friday's
introduction to the poem, Crusoe describes his recurring nightmare of "islands / stretching
away from mine, infinities / of islands, islands spawning islands" where he had to live on
each, "registering their flora, / their fauna, their geography." Ironically, this is the nightmare
of procreation, belonging to the same genealogy as Crusoe's comment that both he and Friday
"wanted to propagate"--where an economy of reproduction replaces eros.

Crusoe, however, marks a difference in how one constitutes oneself within sexuality, for he
also desires Friday. Desire holds aesthetic values as well as the colonial rejection of
individual subjectivity and possible freedom. "Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body," Crusoe
remarks, thereby combining the gaze's possession and mastery of the body as well as
aesthetic pleasure. That these two modalities may not be exclusive reflects a genealogy that
cannot be erased from Defoe's figure of Crusoe. Indeed, Bishop may be implicitly
scrutinizing her motives in her relationship to Lota. To write from Crusoe's position or to
ventriloquize his voice is then to hear in her own voice the ethos of Crusoe.

Bishop's Crusoe is determined by her own loss and estrangement: Crusoe is appropriated
figure to convey Bishop's condition. Bishop offers a critique of the self, as does Tournier in
Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. However, there is a crucial difference: Bishop's Crusoe
expresses desire for Friday, whereas he is not an object of desire for Tournier's Robinson.
Despite all the roles Robinson insists on Friday performing, Friday seemed to belong "to an
entirely different realm, wholly opposed to his master's order of earth and husbandry" (180,
188) and as Crusoe writes in his journal, "As to my sexuality, I may note that at no time has
Friday inspired me with any sodomite desire" (211, 229). Eros humanizes Bishop's Crusoe--
the absenting of eros, as we shall see, dehumanizes Tournier's figure of Crusoe.

Gilles Deleuze, writing on Tournier's novel, distinguishes between the concrete Other, which
"designates real terms actualizing the structure in concrete fields" and the a priori Other,
which is this structure or "the existence of the possible in general, insofar as the possible
exists only as expressed" (318). The novel is Robinson's meditation on a world absent of all
Others; indeed, what Tournier has indicated is the "otherwise-Other" (319). Rather than
belonging to a shared landscape or perceptual field, Robinson lacks this structure, with its
double fold of concrete and a priori others; instead he lives within a completely different
structure. Though Robinson exhibits no perverse behavior--indeed he seems potently
rational--Deleuze argues Tournier has theorized, by showing, the manifestation of perverse
structure, or the principle from which perverse behavior is actualized: "the perverse structure
may be specified as that which is opposed to the structure-Other and takes its place" (319).

While at first Robinson is discouraged by the absence of others and how cognition and
identity seem structured by the presence of others, he soon abandons these early speculations
in favor of what Colin Davis describes as a "poetic meditation" and a "rejection of discursive
reason and the abnegation of selfhood" so as to "allow the genesis of a new kind of order"
(377-8). While Davis correctly sees Robinson's ambition, at one stage of the novel, to affect a
"reversal of individuation" and a "synthesis of consciousness and nature" (376); the novel
unfolds into a theory of the very renunciation of nature, a removal of being from self and the
world. Thus Robinson's is a journey into the absenting of Others, which describes, perhaps in
extremis, the colonial enterprise. The colonial project is a perverse structure in that it
presupposes the "murder of the possible" or commits an "Other-cide" and an "altrucide"
(320), to use Deleuze's terms. Although Deleuze does not draw together the psychoanalytic
and the historical in this discussion of perversion, Tournier constructs a new myth whose
structure is that of perversion which can describe colonialism. While the absenting of the
other, and thereby the murder of the possible, is replete throughout history, by assuming
Defoe's narrative, Tournier has placed this fiction's description of perverse structure in a
postcolonial context.
Robinson's journey is toward an undifferentiated state where he embodies the solar myth or
merges with the surface of the sky. Robinson's journey takes him through the elements: he is
delivered to the island over water; he moves through the earth in all its degrees from
wallowing in the mire with the peccaries to cultivate the earth, and to curl into the island's
deep cave:

He was suspended in a happy eternity. Speranza was a fruit ripening in the sun whose white and
naked seed, embedded in a thousand thicknesses of skin and husk and rind bore the name Robinson.
(101-2, 106)

While enmeshed in the element of the earth, Robinson slides between the realities of the
island and phantasms, memories, and reveries. Tournier's organic metaphor of shedding and
ripening, however, does not designate generation or fertility. Instead, Robinson acts
incestuously to drain the island of its life:

. . . he could not conceal from himself the fact that although his own belly might be filled with milk
and honey, Speranza herself was being exhausted by the monstrous maternal role he had imposed
upon her. (108-9, 113)

Robinson grows more than he can consume; in fact, he creates prohibitions against
consumption. All his activity is directed toward accumulation. His accumulation, however, is
the consumption of the entire island, which is the primary effect of a colonial economy.
Robinson transforms his desire. He sees himself as both the agent of monstrous generation--

Even worse, I came near to sullying her with my semen. What hideous ripening might not that living
seed have produced, in the dark, vast warmth of the cave? I think of Speranza swelling like a loaf in
which the yeast is working, her bloated body spreading of the surface of the waters, eventually to die
in disgorging some monster of incest. (109, 114)

--and, as the outcome of that hideous coupling, he implicitly names himself as that "monster
of incest." Increasingly, his desire and his sexual identity becomes undifferentiated and
objectless. Desire, language, and memory are all interwoven. As desire loses its sexual energy
in its course toward an undifferentiated condition, words and memories lose their energy.
Writing in his journal, Robinson expresses this solar desire, which will separate himself from
the world of others:

To say that my sexual desire is no longer directed toward the perpetuation of the species is not
enough. It no longer knows what its purpose is! For a long time memory was sufficiently active in me
to feed my imagination with objects of desire, non- existent though they were. But that is over now.
Memory has been sucked dry. The creatures of my imagination are lifeless shadows. I may speak the
words, woman, breasts, thighs, thighs parted at my desire, but they mean nothing. Words have lost
their power; they are sounds, no more. Does this mean that desire has died in me for lack of use? Far
from it! I still feel within me that murmur of the spring of life, but it has become objectless. Instead
of flowing submissively along the course set for it by society, it floods out in all directions like the rays
of a star, as though in search of a channel, the course wherein all the waters will be joined and flow
together toward a goal. (113, 118-9)

Robinson indicates that his journey is toward some transcendent and imperial goal. A total,
celestial unity is his aspiration; instead of integrating or submitting his desire to the demands
of society, his desire becomes over-arching, drawing all desire into a radiating golden flood.
Part two

Robinson is his own interrogator. As he moves from the identification with the elemental
earth, past the violent, regurgitative fire of Friday's inadvertent explosion of the storage cave,
to his solar or airy identification, Robinson maintains a rigorous self-examination. Aware that
a "new man seemed to be coming to life within him, wholly alien to the practical
administrator," Robinson realized that he "must continue his labors, while observing in
himself the symptoms of his own metamorphosis" (119, 125). While the text is deployed as
two narratives, one the diachronic, omniscient narrator or analyst and the other being
Robinson's journals, the increasingly synchronic trace of the analysand, what both narratives
describe is Robinson's study of the self's relationship to itself. This examination of one's
relationship to oneself, or what Foucault has termed ethics, seeks to reveal "how the
individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions" (228). This
shift of emphasis from the usual understanding of the study of ethics, does not, as Arnold
Davidson notes, deny the "importance of either the moral code or the actual behavior of
people" (228). Robinson, in committing his "Other-cide," creates an ethics which is solely a
rapport or discourse with himself. Furthermore, this discourse is directed increasingly toward
what Foucault has termed telos, the final aspect of four in his study of ethics contained in his
volumes of The History of Sexuality. Here, what is of concern is what we aspire to be or what
our desired being might be. Robinson seeks to ascend out of himself, time, and history: in his
apostrophe to the sun, Robinson pleads,

"O Sun, deliver me from the pull of gravity! . . . O Sun, cause me to resemble Friday. . . . But if my
aeolian comrade draws me to himself, O Sun, is it not that he may guide me toward you? Sun, are
you pleased with me? Look at me. Is my transformation suffciently in the manner of your own
radiance?" (202-3, 217).

Friday's presence altered the arrangement of power. Power, particularly after the explosion,
which destroyed Robinson's reconstruction of European social and geographical organization,
shifts from judicial, economic, and disciplinary, to that of the aspiration for ascension and the
complete annihilation of self and other. The subjection of Friday, although never total,
disappears after the explosion. Friday emerges, for Robinson, as his guide. However, it would
be a mistake to see Friday as a Virgilian mentor: Friday is Robinson's mirror insofar as
Robinson constructs that mirror. Following his own desires and the wish to enter the world of
possibility that the Whitebird offered, Friday is separate from Robinson's aspirations.
Ironically, it is Friday who compels Robinson to maintain his journal, fashioning quills from
albatross feathers and ink from porcupine fish. Though writing may have seemed to have
been rendered impotent, Friday recognizes that it is Robinson's guide toward the condition he
aspires to. The logbook is increasingly synchronic, in that history and time fuse into a single
moment; the writing is Friday's double, for it anchors Friday's image in Robinson's
imagination as his being-to-be:

He carries his body like a sovereign affirmation, he bears himself like a monstrance of flesh. His
animal beauty proclaims itself, seeming to create a nothingness around it. .....

He smiles at me and, raising his hand in a gesture like that of an angel in a religious painting,
points to the sky, where the southwesterly breeze is dispersing the clouds that have
accumulated during the past several days, to restore the untrammeled reign of the sun. (206,
221)

Writing traces Robinson's aspiration toward a solar subjection, where total submission is
demanded the sun's "all powerful majesty," whose "golden weight" pressed on the expanse of
sea and island (171, 181). This solar reign transforms Robinson: the intrusive landing of the
sailing vessel Whitebird inserted Robinson into the world of possibility and history also
returned him to his age. Its departure returns him to his solar idyll and to his own image of
himself within that solar reign: "The glowing light clad him in an armor of unfading youth
and set upon his head a helmet flawlessly polished and a visor with diamond eyes" (235,
254). At this moment, Robinson is rendered completely inhuman, he has become a "sun-god."
Writing stops at his self-imaged ascension; with the cessation of writing comes the ending of
our listening, for we (complicitous with the omniscient narrator or analyst) cannot hear the
inhuman Robinson. The question of listening and writing is central to Coetzee's Foe. Here, as
in Tournier's novel, Friday is the primary figure, around which all else is defined or seeks
definition. Friday is most often portrayed as having an animal vitality and playfulness; in
Tournier's fiction the image of the noble savage is completely assumed by Robinson.
Tournier's novel depicts the production of colonial identity in terms of perversion and the
economy of desire: "It is always in relation to the place of the Other," Bhabha writes, "that
colonial desire is articulated: the phantasmic space of possession that one subject can singly
or fixedly occupy, and therefore permits the inversion of roles" (44). Tournier's Robinson
reads Friday much as he reads the random passages of the bible for self-illumination.
Coetzee's Friday, however, ironically disallows the production of identity or it takes place
only with its futility fully evident. As Richard Begam has argued, in Foe Coetzee "seeks to
represent the unrepresented as unrepresented, to show precisely the necessity of enabling
them to represent themselves"; in so doing, this is "a novel whose postmodernism is
ultimately pressed into the service of its postcolonialism" (125).

In Foe, writing is depicted as a means of gaining power, either to exert subjection or to elude
it, and thus to be able to represent one's identity. Friday and Foe are parallel but independent
figures from whom Susan Barton seeks her own identity. Foe occupies a position of apparent
power as he is situated in the rising dominant literary economy of journalism and the novel.
Even so, Foe is besieged by creditors, forcing him into hiding and furtive movements. In so
portraying Foe, Coetzee has made any salvation he could offer Barton ironic. What Barton
seeks cannot be maintained in the literary economy Foe participates in: her narrative will be
erased for there is no means of representing it from his position. Barton asserts that writing
requires and insists upon truth: to Captain Smith's comment that the bookseller's (a conflation
of the author and the publisher) "trade is in books, not in truth," Barton replies "If I cannot
come forward, as author, and swear to the truth of my tale, what will be the worth of it? I
might as well have dreamed it in a snug bed in Chichester" (40). Barton implicitly is caught
between veracity and art: she recognizes that her narrative, as spoken, "passes the time well
enough," but fears "its charm will quite vanish when it is set down baldly in print" (40).

Barton distrusts the written word. In the remarkable exchange between Barton and Foe, she
argues that "Letters are the mirrors of words. Even when we seem to write in silence, our
writing is the manifest of a speech spoken within ourselves or to ourselves" (142). Foe
responds that "Writing is not doomed to be the shadow of speech" and that indeed "May it not
be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?" (142-3). It is that
Barton insists on listening, and that there would thus be an authentic narrative to be
recounted, that in part determines her imprisonment to what will never be heard: her
daughter's fate and Friday's story. In turn, insisting on authentic speech imprisons others, such
as Friday, to Barton's prescribed discipline. Of course the opposite--some form of inauthetic
speech or writing--offers no hope. The problem lies the very positing of the notion of
authentic speech and the implicit oppositional dynamics that term evokes.

Truth is, however, only a commodity for Barton. The truth of Crusoe's life on the island is
locked in Friday, as is the truth of his mutilated condition. While Barton is engaged in
recovering a narrative of the island prior to her arrival, this narrative is analogous to the
harvests of gold and souls desired by Europeans in their conquest of the new world. Although
Barton protects Friday from falling into the hands of slave-traders--albeit her credulity is the
cause--Friday remains in her thrall in as much for his being her possession as for her concern
for his safety. Friday is seen by Barton as an obdurate innocent whose origin is simply Africa.
Friday, however, holds Barton enthralled, hence she cannot release herself from him. Barton's
reading of Friday is not sufficient; she realizes that her representation of him remains
incomplete. Coetzee, however, suggests that no representation can describe Friday--unless it
is Friday's own. Barton's desire for obtaining Friday's identity amounts to her own
colonization of Friday's body and soul. Indeed, Foe reveals this: "We deplore the barbarism of
whoever maimed him, yet have we, his later masters, not reason to be secretly grateful? For
as long as he is dumb we can tell ourselves his desires are dark to us, and continue to use him
as we wish" (148). Foe succinctly describes the cynicism of the metropolitan ethos of the
postcolonial period.

Coetzee's fiction suggests that any description of colonial power must be cited in the
immediate locale and in the intimate relations of individuals. Barton herself reveals this in her
journal-like letters to Foe: "To tell my story and be silent on Friday's tongue is no betters than
offering a book for sale with pages in it quietly left empty. Yet the only tongue that can tell
Friday's secret is the tongue he has lost!" (67). Coetzee has placed Barton in the middle of
writing; her voice has no historical context as recognized by the dominant culture, compared
to Crusoe's or Foe's. Nor does she have a legacy: her search for her stolen daughter is
fruitless; the child who claims her as her mother is a chimera. There is no writing after
Barton, that is she does not initiate or inspire a tradition; instead her discourse disappears into
the text of Crusoe's story. The struggle for representation is a linguistic and aesthetic one--as
Foe states,

You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of a being such as
Friday. Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by
day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say
he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? You will respond: he
is neither cannibal nor laundryman, these are mere names, they do not touch his essence, he is a
substantial body, he is himself, Friday is Friday. But that is not so. No matter what he is to himself (is
he anything to himself?--how can he tell us?), what he is to the world is what I make of him.
Therefore the silence of Friday is a helpless silence. He is the child of his silence, a child unborn, a
child waiting to be born that cannot be born. (121-22)

Foe's power is that he shapes the discourse and forms of representation. Those accorded no
recognized place in the culture--indeed Barton and Friday are literally transients in England--
are represented or silenced by those like Foe; their social position is formed by the
possibilities of discourse: as those possibilities are foreclosed and severed, they become
increasingly positionless. Thus the aesthetic discourse informs and merges with the economic
and political.

Each of these works of Coetzee, Tournier, and Bishop is an anti-pastoral. As anti-pastorals,

the landscapes of these works are never humanized and subdued, that is rendered into simple,
peaceful and productive gardens. Tournier's Robinson parodies pastoral productivity in his
obsessive accumulation and prohibitions against consumption. His cultivation of the island is
disciplinarian and panoptic, suggestive of expansionist projects. His ethical telos is an escape
from Speranza's elements of earth and water, ascending instead into the abstracted solar
identity of air and fire. Robinson does not so much pervert the idea of utopia but shows the
perversion inherent in utopian thinking.
In Bishop's poem, Crusoe reflects that his island was "a sort of cloud-dump," the landscape
was pocked with "fifty-two / miserable, small volcanoes I could climb / with a few slithery
strides," and the "whole place hissed." Indeed, this island is ruled by the sounds of Eden's
serpent. In its desolation, Crusoe finds it claustrophobic, his very language is repetitive and
imploding:

--a glittering hexagon of rollers

closing and closing in, but never quite,
glittering and glittering, though the sky
was mostly overcast.

Upon Crusoe's return to England, however, he finds his life and England desiccated: implicit
in his lament of Friday's death is the desire for the nostalgic return to their shared idyll.
Crusoe's brief description of Friday evokes a pastoral innocence: "He'd pet the baby goats
sometimes, / and race with them, or carry one around." With Friday, the island becomes
hospitable and perhaps Edenic. Crusoe, however, is unable to break the silence about his
relationship with Friday--like the silence surrounding their homosexual love, the silence
surrounding the island as a site of their idyll suggests that any Edenic vision or return is
unspeakable. Bishop, furthermore does not suggest that the labor of cultivation was central,
rather the labor of desire and love re-presented the island to Crusoe and (Friday we are to
presume). This re-presentation shifts the defining features of the pastoral and renders it
unrepresentable.

Teresa Dovey describes Coetzee's novels as "atopias" or drifting habitations (qtd. Barnard,
38), a term derived from Roland Barthes, who defines it in contrast to utopia, which is
"reactive, tactical literary, it proceeds from meaning and governs it" (49). Bishop's and
Tournier's islands are also "atopias" in that they are unanchored representations--their
meaning drifts: the island is never a defined topography. Human desire and memory change
that topography; yet how do we read these topographies? The island's topography vanishes
below the sky's horizon for Tournier's Robinson. For Bishop's Crusoe eros transforms the
island he perceived as excremental--"The island smelled of goat and guano"--an island that
spawned nightmares of infinitely dividing, propagating islands. Eros remains unwritable; it is
the gap in Crusoe's language or in the means Cursoe has to represent eros outside its
conventional form or its generic pastoral versions.

In the narrative of Foe, the island was the original prison, for Barton initially could desire
nothing but her escape from it. But in time, Barton nostalgizes the island and desires to return
for it would, she believes, complete or fill in the lacunae in the narrative that is otherwise
silent about Friday's mutilation. As she nostalgizes the island and the dead Crusoe, the island
reveals that her condition of imprisonment extends from the island and implicitly predates her
arrival on the island. Barton finds herself moving through a series of maze-like enclosures
that are architectural in their physical and narrative structures. Encamped in one of Foe's
houses, she tells Friday that "In Mr. Foe's house there are many mansions." These
"mansions," however, are the place for cast-offs: "There is place yet for lepers and acrobats
and pirates and whores to join our menagerie" (77). Barton explicitly inhabits a Foucauldian
"carceral archipelago" where punitive techniques are transported "from the penal institution
to the entire social body" (298). Each place she has inhabited has been a prison where she
labors and is interrogated. In her series of letters to Foe, Barton remarks that "the life we lead
grows less and less distinct from the life we led on Cruso's island. Sometimes I wake up not
knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every
day" (71).
The possibility of the garden, figured as an Edenic site, becomes impossible in each of these
three works. Indeed, Barton, like Friday, labored on Crusoe's barren stone terraces, which she
remarked would one day be misinterpreted as the "ruins of a cannibal city, from the golden
age of the cannibals" (54-55). This ceaseless labor, done only to satisfy Crusoe's belief in the
eventual arrival of salvation in the form of someone bearing a sack of corn to sow,
supplements the labor of Friday in the ruined gardens of Foe's house. As Friday ekes out a
harvest of beans and carrots, it might be said that he "keeps alive 'the idea of gardening'
almost by its negation: the idea of plenty through starvation, the idea of self-affirmation in
self-erasure," as Rita Bernard writes of K in The Life and Times of Michael K (53). If the
gardens of language, of eros, and of life are subject of depletion and abandonment or
perceived to be barren or constitute forms of confinement in the depictions of the island(s) in
Bishop's, Tournier's, and Coetzee's works, Walcott may offer a differing view.

Walcott's figure of Crusoe is part of his more embracing figure of the castaway, which
includes such characters of his as Shabine (from "The Schooner Flight") and Omeros.
Walcott's poems enact the profound schism defining postcolonial literature: while the poems
create a new language, they also demonstrate a profound unease with the position of the
colonial. In the poem "The Castaway," Walcott invokes a mythic creative power:

If I listen I can hear the polyp build,

The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea.
Cracking a sea-louse, I make thunder split. (58)

The castaway, is however, condemned to solitude so vast the building of coral reefs can be
heard. The castaway, or implicitly the colonial, is left at the extreme periphery, longing for
transport toward the center: "The starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel / Of a sail."
The dilemma Walcott examines is that of creating a postcolonial voice from the traditions left
by the colonial powers. Because of circumstances of history, Walcott does not belong
expressly to the metropolitan center, as once could argue that Tournier, Bishop, and Coetzee
do, though by increasingly lesser degrees.1 While all of these writers belong very much to the
center of international literary interests should not be overlooked, it is Walcott that is
attempting the affirming task of re-visioning language. Whereas the narrative of Crusoe
provides the frame for the critique of the self in Bishop, Coetzee. and Tournier, Walcott finds
in the figure of Crusoe the image of the castaway who must make anew from the shipwrecks
of cultures.

Furthermore, the island itself is the source of language rather than a place to be drained of
resources. While the narrative of the poem "The Castaway" depicts debilitating isolation and
the meanness of survival, the poem's language expresses aesthetic richness, concision, and
power that transcends the narrative's expression of bare survival.

Walcott's two poems that explicitly evoke Crusoe, "Crusoe's Island" and "Crusoe's Journal,"
find in Crusoe a didactic, that is instructional, figure. Walcott writes in "Crusoe's Journals,"
that

from this house

that faces nothing but the sea, his journals
assume a household use;
we learn to shape from them, where nothing was
the language of a race (94)
While Walcott sees the postcolonial writer as forming new languages, Walcott also does not
fail to consider the ironic reversals in this absorption of past dominant cultures into a new
culture,

altering
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. (93)

It is this absorption of voices and styles, of languages and cultures, that marks the
translational and transnational postcolonial vision that is Walcott's. Nothing loses its history;
thus irony coincides with a language of transformation.

Walcott insists on the primacy of human community. That Coetzee cannot represent the
possibility of a just and shared human community (that Friday is mute) implies the
significance and necessity of such a community. That Bishop does not find for Crusoe the
words to express eros again suggests the necessity of forming the means to share in eros.
Tournier's Robinson turns away from the shared space of community, transfiguring himself
into a golden but frightening abstraction. Walcott celebrates human presence, but sees in art
only the most limited ways of expressing it, as at the close of "Crusoe's Island":

Now Friday's progeny,

The brood of Crusoe's slave,
Black little girls in pink
Organdy, crinolines,
Walk in their air of glory
Beside a breaking wave;
Below their feet the surf
Hisses like tambourines.

At dusk, when they return

For vespers, every dress
Touched by the sun will burn
A seraph's, an angel's,
And nothing I can learn
From art or loneliness
Can bless them as the bell's
Transfiguring tongue can bless. (72)

Rather than portraying the postcolonial condition in terms of subversion and transgression,
Walcott establishes the right to signify and the right to one's presentness. Human community,
where there is a solidarity among ethnicities, is the postcolonial desire, as suggested in such
poems of Walcott's as "Names" or "The Schooner Flight" or Omeros. Against this vision of
community is Crusoe's fate, where isolation--that of the castaway, elite, or the separatist--
"sent him howling for a human voice / ... / his own brain rotting from the guilt / Of heaven
without his kind" (69).
If Coetzee presents the difficulty--if not impossibility--to present the colonial other and
instead focuses upon the mutilation of the other, then Walcott offers a the voice of that other.
Tournier presents a radical theory of the abnegation of self and other, where the world
collapses into a single spatial and temporal point. Robinson has radically misread Friday,
hence Friday flees. Bishop offers a differing view of Crusoe: her poem must be read
transgressively so as to reveal its commentary on sexuality and desire. Like Walcott, she finds
in Crusoe's narrative a way of questioning herself. Yet, her Crusoe cannot find a language to
express himself openly; only Walcott begins an exultation, for as he writes in The Antilles,
the writer "finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself,
branch by branch, leaf by leaf. . . . This is the benediction that is celebrated, a fresh language
and a fresh people, and this is the frightening duty owed."
KEYWORDS:
Derek Walcott Poetry Caribbean Poetry Caribbean Culture Colonialism Identity

In his Nobel Lecture, Derek Walcott described the experience of watching a Ramleela
performance in a village in Trinidad, remarking: "... Two different religions, two different
continents, both filling the heart with the pain that is joy.” The pain that fills Walcott’s heart
is the pain of a fragmented identity. This pain is also joy, the joy of a hybrid existence. Derek
Walcott (b. 1930), a Caribbean poet and playwright who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1992, published his first collection of poetry at the age of fourteen, in which he described the
beautiful and rich landscapes of the Caribbean Islands. As Walcott understood his
surroundings, he realised that his identity was fraught with racial and colonial tensions. In his
early poems, Walcott confronts the conflicts of his European and African ancestry.

However, in these poems, the paradoxes of his identity remain largely unresolved. In
Walcott’s later poems, one observes a heightened historical and political awareness. This
analysis discusses an early poem, “A Far Cry of Africa” (In a Green Nigh: Poems, 1948-60,
1962), and two later poems, “Names” (Sea Grapes, 1976) and “The Sea is History” (The
Star-Apple Kingdom, 1979), in order to highlight the ways in which the poems present a
search for a Caribbean history while exploring the racial, colonial, and cultural tensions
inherent in Caribbean identity. Moreover, this analysis reveals Walcott’s celebration of the
hybridity and cosmopolitanism of Caribbean culture.

Walcott attempts to rewrite the history of the Caribbean people from a subaltern perspective.
He celebrates the hybridity and cosmopolitanism of Caribbean culture, but he never loses
sight of its colonial past and remains critical of the forces shaping its future.

It is first important to understand the historical and political context in which Walcott
wrote these poems. The Caribbean Islands, which served as Walcott’s subject and inspiration,
are a group of scattered islands between the North and South America that were occupied by
the Caribs or the American-Indian tribe before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

The different islands were colonised by the British, the French and the Dutch. The colonisers
brought-in slaves from parts of Africa to work on the land. When slavery was abolished by
the Emancipation Act of 1863, the colonisers began “importing” labour-force from India and
China.

An imaginative reconstruction of the situation of the first generation of people who were
brought to the Islands is attempted by a number of Caribbean writers and poets. When
Columbus “discovered” the Islands, he assumed that the native population did not exist.
While the natives were denied human existence, the position of the slaves and the indentured
labourers was hardly any better.

They were displaced from their homeland, brought to an entirely unfamiliar environment, and
forced to work. They could hardly communicate with one another. Over the years, the
different Diasporas developed a language of communication (Pidgin and Creole), and the
intermixing of cultures (Native American, African, Indian, French, British and Dutch)
resulted in a hybrid culture.

The later generations inherited this hybrid culture. Though the later generations did not
experience displacement or colonisation first-hand, the inheritance of an identity informed by
such complexities resulted in a form of cultural schizophrenia. Walcott’s poem, “A Far Cry
from Africa” explores this psychological condition. The central question asked in the poem is,
“I who am poisoned with the blood of both / Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” (26-27).
Walcott evokes the Mau Mau rebellion of Kenya and holds both the Europeans and the
Kenyans responsible for the bloodshed. He is critical of the colonial discourses based on
statistics and laws that justify the killing of the Kenyan people.

However, he can neither turn away from his English identity, nor from his African ancestry.
Frantz Fanon theorises this psychological conflict as Negrophobia in Black Skin, White
Masks. According to Fanon, the black man “lives an ambiguity that is extraordinarily
neurotic” (169). In the black man’s “collective unconscious,” being black means being
“wicked, spineless, evil, and instinctual,” the opposite of being white (169). In “A Far Cry
from Africa,” therefore, Walcott confronts this psychological conflict but the paradoxes in his
identity remain unresolved because the central question is never answered.

In his later poems, such as “Names” and “The Sea is History,” there is a more mature and
historical understanding of the racial, colonial, and cultural tensions in the collective
Caribbean identity. Both “Names” and “The Sea is History” trace the beginnings of the
Caribbean “race” (referring to the social concept but also meaning journey). In the first part
of “Names,” Walcott describes how his race began with no nouns, no horizon, no memory,
and no future. The shift from “my race” and “I began” to “our souls” and “our names” is
significant as it marks the growth from an individual to a collective sensibility. Walcott writes
that his race began as the sea began. The reference is to how African slaves were brought to
the Caribbean Islands via the sea. They had to leave behind their homeland and the memory
of their native culture was lost. Walcott uses the image of an osprey’s cry to describe the
condition of these people- “and my race began like the osprey / with that cry, / that terrible
vowel, / that I!” (I. 24-27). This cry is the agonizing cry of the displaced people in an effort to
define an identity (the “I”).

While tracing the beginnings of the Caribbean race, Walcott is searching for a particular
moment in history when “the mind was halved by a horizon” (“Names,” I. 11). By this
phrase, Walcott means the introduction and the internalisation of the binary opposition
between the black and the white. Walcott is unable to find the moment when this opposition
was placed into the mind because the history of the Caribbean Islands remains, largely, the
history documented by the European colonisers. This history is governed by the discourse of
orientalism. In Orientalism, Edward Said discusses the various institutional apparatuses that
promoted certain statements about the ‘orient’: about its homogeneity, mystical appeal, and
barbarity. These statements validated the “truth” about the ‘orient’ and formed the discourse
of orientalism. The ‘occident’ had the agency to “gaze at” the ‘orient’; the ‘occident’ assumed
the knowledge of and power over the ‘orient’. Through this discourse, a binary opposition
was created between the ‘occident’ and the ‘orient’ where the former was empowered and the
latter was increasingly disempowered and primitivised. Walcott’s attempt to locate the
historical moment when the world was halved fails because the history of the Caribbean
people is informed by these European discourses.

The challenge for Walcott is to rewrite this history from a subaltern perspective. In this
regard, a significant question to be addressed is- In which language is this history to be
written? The debate surrounding language has been an important one in many postcolonial
countries. In Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes, “Language, any language,
has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture” (13). For
Ngugi, language carries the values of a community which are passed on from one generation
to another (hence, the importance of memory). These values accumulate over time to form
the culture of the community, and culture forms the basis of people’s identities. However, the
question of language for the Caribbean people is again a complex one.
The African slaves and the Indian indentured labourers who were brought to the Caribbean
Islands spoke different languages and dialects. They were forced to learn the colonisers’
language (what may be called the adopt phase). As they attempted to learn the language, they
altered it with pronunciations and mispronunciations (the adapt phase). Over time, they
mastered the coloniser’s language and began using it in a manner to write back to the empire
(the adept phase).

Walcott explores these three phases in “Names.” The second part of the poem describes how
the colonisers named everything on the Caribbean Islands after places and structures in
Europe. This naming process was important to the colonisers for both nomination and
domination. The poem describes how the Africans first agreed to the names (adopt), repeated
them (adapt) and then changed them (adept). Repetition of the names also suggests mimicry-
repeating the words or actions of the coloniser in a comic manner in order to subvert them.
However, as Walcott writes in “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” “What would deliver
[the New World Negro] from servitude was the forging of a language that went beyond
mimicry… the writer’s making creative use of his schizophrenia, an electric fusion of the old
and the new” (17).

Therefore, in “Names,” mimicry of the French words spoken by the teacher is not enough, the
words must be spoken in “fresh green voices” (II. 66) to forge a new language. The creation
of a new lexicon is represented by the description of the stars in the last line of the poem- the
student sees the stars as “fireflies caught in molasses” (II. 82) as opposed to the constellations
of Orion or Betelgeuse. The metaphor stands for the condition of the African slaves who are
like fireflies capable of emanating light but caught in the coloniser’s physical and ideological
trap.

Walcott’s task, as a poet, is to aid the forging of this new language. Historically, in the
Caribbean Islands the fusion of the different languages produced Pidgin and Creole.
However, Walcott writes mostly in English and sometimes in French. There remains a debate
between the relative importance of Creole and English in encapsulating the diversity of
Caribbean culture. What is important to note, in this regard, is that Walcott appropriates the
coloniser’s language to challenge the coloniser’s discourse and to rewrite the history of the
Caribbean people. “The Sea is History” is a suitable example. The poem, in an odyssey-like
fashion, traces the events in the history of the African slaves and compares them to the
mythical events in the Bible.

For example, in the first part of the poem, the arrival of the African slaves on the
Islands is described by drawing a parallel with the events in the Genesis. Walcott not only
uses Biblical allusions, he also extensively uses the sea as a metaphor. The history of the
Caribbean people lies in the “grey vault” (I. 3) of the sea. The sea is the only witness to the
suffering of the African slaves brought to the Islands, many of whom died on the way and
have turned into corals lying in the sea-bed. In the poem, the expansive nature of the sea
stands for the complexity of Caribbean history which cannot be understood by the coloniser’s
markers of history- monuments, battles, martyrs, Renaissance etcetera.

The poems “A Far Cry from Africa,” “The Sea is History,” and “Names” can, therefore, be
effectively seen as presenting an understanding of the complexities inherent in Caribbean
history and identity. These poems are also attempts on the part of the poet to rewrite the
history of the Caribbean people from a subaltern perspective. However, Walcott’s poems not
only uncover the many oppressions that the Caribbean people have been subjected to in the
past, but also present a celebration of the hybridity and cosmopolitanism of Caribbean
culture. Postcolonial theorists like Homi K. Bhabha and writers like Salman Rushdie see
hybridity as a critical position.
In The Location of Culture, Bhabha does not see hybridity as a means of resolving different
elements of identity. Rather, he sees hybridity as “repetition of discriminatory identity
effects.” This repetition, according to Bhabha, creates an excess that unsettles colonial
authority in manner so as to “turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power”
(112). Rushdie sees hybridity as a vantage point in a postcolonial postmodern world, which
allows one to question both the host-land and the homeland.

As already mentioned, Walcott advocates the creation of a language which is an “electric

fusion of the old and the new.” This fusion or hybrid formation is celebrated in Walcott’s
poetry. Firstly, it is celebrated through metaphors. Though these metaphors are in English,
they capture the natural landscape of the Caribbean Islands in an extremely vivid manner. The
layered metaphor of the threshing of grains and the appearance of the dust as ibises in “A Far
Cry from Africa” is an apt example- “Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break / In a
white dust of ibises…” (11-12).

Other examples include the metaphor of the osprey’s cry in “Names” and the metaphors of
the sea in “The Sea is History.” This creation of the hybrid language and culture is seen in
Walcott’s poems as empowering. In “Names,” the palms of Caribbean Islands are seen as
greater than Versailles since no man has made them and no man shall destroy them, “except
the worm, who has no helmet, / but always the emperor” (II. 74-75). The comparison of the
Caribbean people to worms is significant for it represents the power of supposedly trivial
beings.

Another way in which hybridity is celebrated in Walcott’s poems is through polyphony. As

one is aware, Walcott is a well-known dramatist besides being a poet. A number of his poems
are very dramatic in their use of imagery and voice. In “Names,” for example, besides the
voice of the poetic persona, there is the voice of the French teacher. Similarly, in “The Sea is
History,” there is the voice of the unnamed coloniser who asks the questions- “Where are
your monuments, your battles, martyrs?” (I. 1) and “but where is your Renaissance?” (I. 33).
The cultural theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, theorised polyphony and heteroglossia in his
discussions of the novel in “Discourse in the Novel.” Bakhtin writes, “Heteroglossia… is
another’s speech in another’s language… [it] constitutes a special type of double-voiced
discourse” (324). The potential of subversion of political structures through multiple voices is
suggested in Bakhtin’s theorisation, and the same ideas have been taken up by postcolonial
theorist like Bhabha in the discussion of hybridisation through which the gaze is turned back
at the empire. In Walcott’s poems, the incorporation of multiple voices is both a celebration
of the hybridity of Caribbean culture as well as a means of subversion.

It must also be noted that while Walcott celebrates the hybridity and cosmopolitanism of
Caribbean culture, it is in no way an uncritical stance. In the celebration of hybridity, it is
possible that the imbalances of power relations may be either neglected or negated. Walcott,
however, never loses sight of the colonial past of the Caribbean Islands. In an interview
recorded in Conversations with Derek Walcott, Walcott says:

The whole idea of America, and the whole idea of everything on this side of the world… is
imported; we’re all imported- Black or Spanish… The difficult part is the realization that one
is part of the whole idea of colonization… the rare thing is the resolution of being where one
is and doing something positive about that reality. (203)

Furthermore, Walcott is not blind to the shortcomings of the culture and politics of the newly
independent states in the Caribbean Islands. In the second part of “The Sea is History,” for
example, he is critical of the social and political institutions of the new independent states-
the council of priests is compared to flies, the bureaucrats are herons which can’t fly high,
and the politicians are like bullfrogs bellowing for votes. The implication is that the new
states are still nascent in their culture and politics; there is still a long way to go for the
“rumour” of “History, really beginning” (II. 79-80) in these states to echo throughout the
world.

In conclusion, Walcott, in his poems, explores the racial, colonial, and cultural tensions
inherent in the Caribbean history and identity. Through his poems, he attempts to rewrite the
history of the Caribbean people from a subaltern perspective. He celebrates the hybridity and
cosmopolitanism of Caribbean culture, but he never loses sight of its colonial past and
remains critical of the forces shaping its future.