Derek Walcott's Poetics of the Environment in The Bounty
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The Mexican Nobel Laureate, Octavio Paz, in an essay about modern poetry once argued quite simply: "the immense, stupid, and suicidal waste of natural resources must come to an immediate end if the human species wishes to survive on this earth" (156). Although commonplace, Paz's point is instructive because it demonstrates that we have come to identify the end of time as synonymous with the destruction of our natural environment. Untouched nature, uncontaminated by human hands, signifies something eternal that defies the inexorable march of human history toward an apocalyptic end. This is one justification for wilderness preservation; wilderness expresses hope against the telos of environmental degradation. Environmental change, global warming, depletion of species, the rising level of the ocean, all become signs of nature outside the Garden, subject to historical contingency and ultimately to death, and of nature's apparent mortality. Hence, in our day, natural degradation so easily lends itself as evidence of the inevitable death of nature and the end of human history, especially within an imaginary influenced by Christian apocalypticism. The problem is how to avoid this unfruitful dichotomy that apocalyptic thinking produces: nature must either be outside history and therefore eternal or within history and therefore doomed. In either case, it would seem that human history is defined by its inevitable end, thus freeing us of the ethical burden of imagining and acting in the interest of other futures.
What is perhaps remarkable about Paz's argument is his suggestion that poetry might have the power to hold off the end of history and reverse the trend toward "universal destruction and contamination of lakes, rivers, seas, valleys, forests, and mountains" (157). For Paz, the natural world is vulnerable to an apocalyptic end because it has been left in the hands of the market that simply "does not know how to choose. Its censorship is not ideological; it has no ideas" (144). Consequently, we live in a state of "aesthetic impoverishment," unable to make judgments of value and therefore vulnerable to market forces that commodify nature for its own profitable ends. To prevent the end of history, Paz insists that the metaphorical work of poetry must teach us how to judge values and to establish relationships between ideas and culturesthat otherwise would appear unrelated. He explains that "the operative mode of poetic thought is imagining, and imagination consists, essentially, of the ability to place contrary or divergent realities in relationship. All poetic forms and all linguistic figures have one thing in common: they seek and often find, hidden relationships. In the most extreme cases, they unite opposites" (158). He calls these [End Page 201] relationships "buried realities" that are "restor[ed] to life" through the poetic imagination. Although this suggests that poetry mnemonically recovers lost truths from the past, its function is to rhetorically construct a fiction of historicism. Poetry's rhetoric of fictional historicity emphasizes the creative work of forging relationships of commonality in the present despite the lack of historical evidence that would have necessitated such relationships, something that is particularly pertinent to cultures such as that of the Caribbean, which have suffered significant violence to historical memory. Although the memories might be necessary to the reconstruction of identities in the wake of colonial violence, their fictionality is rendered more transparent. Whereas to some this might be the lamentable condition of subalternity, for Paz poetry's power is in its defiance against historical causation; it takes up the vestiges or detritus of the past, as if to create evidence of historical memory in what might otherwise appear to be an edenic landscape. Nature in this schema is both historicized and transcendent, performing a balancing act that neither historical archeology nor poetry's rhetoric can bring to a definitive end. My argument is that the work of Derek Walcott performs the function Paz ascribes to poetry; Walcott's nature is neither a sign of the Eternal Garden nor the inevitable victim of human destruction. It becomes a sign of an always ending, always dying present that paradoxically makes poetic language potentially always new and new futures always possible.
