1980
The Sound of the Tide'
Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them comes a moment when centers cease to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but languages. Such was the case with Rome, and before that, with Hellenic Greece. The job of holding at such times is done by the men from the provinces, from the outskirts. Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends—they are precisely where it unravels. That affects a language no less than an eye.
Derek Walcott was born on the island of Saint Lucia, in the parts where "the sun, tired of empire, declines." As it does, however, it heats up a far greater crucible of races and cultures than any melting pot north of the equator. The realm this poet comes from is a real genetic Babel; English, however, is its tongue. If at times Walcott writes in Creole patois, it's not to flex his stylistic muscle or to enlarge his audience but as a homage to what he spoke as a child—before he spiraled the tower.
Poets' real biographies are like those of birds, almost identical— their real data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography is in his vowels and sibilants, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors. Attesting to the miracle of exis-
· This piece originally appeared as the introduction to Poem.s of the Caribbean by Derek Walcott (Limited Editions Club, 1983).
tence, the body of one's work is always in a sense a gospel whose lines convert their writer more radically than his public. With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written. If Walcott's origins are to be learned, the pages of this selection are the best guide. Here's what one of his characters tells about himself, and what may well pass for the author's self- portrait:
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.
This jaunty four-liner informs us about its writer as surely as does a song—saving you a look out the window—that there is a bird. The dialectal "love" tells us that he means it when he calls himself "a red nigger." "A sound colonial education" may very weU stand for the University of the West Indies, from which Walcott graduated in 1953, although there is a lot more to this line, which well deal with later. To say the least, we hear in it both scorn for the very locution typical of the master race and the pride of the native in receiving that education. "Dutch" is here because by blood Walcott is indeed part Dutch and part English. Given the nature of the realm, though, one thinks not so much about blood as about languages. Instead of— or along with—"Dutch" there could have been French, Hindu, Creole patois, Swahili, Japanese, Spanish of some Latin American denomination, and so forth—anything that one heard in the cradle or in the streets. The main thing is, there was English.
The way this third line arrives at "English in me" is remarkable in its subtlety. After "I have Dutch," Walcott throws in "nigger," sending the whole line into a jazzy downward spin, so that when it swings up to "and English in me" we get a sense of terrific pride, indeed of grandeur, enhanced by this syncopatic jolt between "English" and "in me." And it's from this height of "having English," to which his voice climbs with the reluctance of humility and yet with certitude of rhythm, that the poet unleashes his oratorial power in "either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation." The dignity and astonishing vocal power of this statement are in direct proportion to both the realm in whose name he speaks and the oceanic infinity that surrounds it. When you hear such a voice, you know; the world unravels. This is what the author means when he says that he "love the sea."
For the almost forty years that Walcott has been at it, at this loving the sea, critics on both its sides have dubbed him "a West Indian poet" or "a black poet from the Caribbean." These definitions are as myopic and misleading as it would be to call the Saviour a Galilean. This comparison is appropriate if only because every reductive tendency stems from the same terror of the infinite; and when it comes to an appetite for the infinite, poetry often bests creeds. The mental as well as spiritual cowardice, obvious in these attempts to render this man a regional writer, can be further explained by the unwillingness of the critical profession to admit that the great poet of the English language is a black man. It can also be attributed to completely busted helixes or bacon-lined retinae. Still, its most benevolent explanation is, of course, a poor knowledge of geography.
For the West Indies is a huge archipelago, about five times as big as the Greek one. If poetry is to be defined by the subject matter alone, Mr. Walcott would have ended up with material five times superior to that of the bard who wrote in the Ionian dialect and who, too, loved the sea. Indeed, if there is a poet Walcott seems to have a lot in common with, it's nobody English but rather the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, or else the author of On the Nature of Things. For Walcott's descriptive powers are truly epic; what saves his lines from the corresponding tedium, though, is the shortage of the realm's actual history and the quality of his ear for the English language, whose sensibility in itself is a history.
Quite apart from the matter of his o^ unique gifts, Walcott's lines are so resonant and stereoscopic precisely because this "history" is eventful enough: because language itself is an epic device. Everything this poet touches mushrooms with reverberations and perspectives, like magnetic waves whose acoustics are psychological, whose implications are echo-like. Of course, in that realm of his, in the West Indies, there is plenty to touch—the natural kingdom alone provides a great deal of fresh material. But here's an example of how this poet deals with the most de rigueur of all poetic subjects—with the moon—which he makes speak for itself:
Slowly my bodygrows a angle sound, slowly I become a beU,
an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire.
(from "Metamorphoses, 1/Moon")
And here's how he himself speaks about this most un- palpable poetic subject—or rather, here's what makes him speak about it:
a moon ballooned upfrom the Wireless Station. О mirror, where a generation yearned for whiteness, for candour, unreturned.
(from Another Life)
The psychological alliteration that almost forces the reader to see both of the Moon's o's suggests not only the recurrent nature of this sight but also the repetitive character of looking at it. A human phenomenon, the latter is of a greater significance to this poet, and his description of those who do the looking and of their reasons for it astonishes the reader with its truly astronomical equation of black ovals to the white one. One senses here that the Moon's two o's have mutated via the two Ts in "ballooned" into the two r's of "O mirror," which, true to their consonant virtue, stand for "resisting reflection"; that the blame is being put neither on nature nor on people but on language and time. It's the redundance of these two, and not the author's choice, that is responsible for this equation of black and white—which takes better care of the racial polarization this poet was born to than all his critics with their professed impartiality are capable of.
To put it simply, instead of reductive racial self- assertion, which no doubt would have endeared him to both his foes and his champions, Walcott identifies himself vith that "disembodied vowel" of the language which both parts of his equation share. The wisdom of this choice is, again, not so much his o^ as the wisdom of his language— better still, the wisdom of its letter: of black on white. He is simply a pen that is aware of its movement, and it is this self-awareness that forces his lines into their graphic eloquence: