Derek Walcott and the Centering of the Caribbean Subject

Abandoning Dead Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott's Poetry, by Patricia Ismond. Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Tobago: U of the West Indies P, 2001. x + 309 pp. ISBN 976-640-107-1 paper.

Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetry, by Paula Burnett. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000. xiii + 381 pp. ISBN 0-8130-1882-X cloth

The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante, by Maria Cristina Fumagalli. Cross / Cultures 49. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott, by Paul Breslin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. ix + 333 pp. ISBN 0-226-07427-7 paper.

In January 2000 Derek Walcott turned seventy. Over the preceding fifty years he had, by resolve and painstaking effort, by intelligence and by genius, established himself as one of the most considerable poets of the twentieth century. It seems only fitting, then, that his attainment of his "three score and ten" should have been accompanied by a small spate of major individual studies of his work. Bruce King's biography, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford: Oxford UP), appeared in 2000, to be followed shortly by the four studies being noticed here. 1999 had seen the publication of John Thieme's Derek Walcott (Manchester: Manchester UP), a standard-format survey of Walcott's work, more or less of the same mode as Robert Hamner's much earlier Derek Walcott (New York: Twayne,1981, updated edition 1993). Hamner's Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott's Omeros (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1997) was the second book-length study of a Walcott long poem, the first being Edward Baugh's Derek Walcott: Memory As Vision: Another Life(London: Longman, 1978). Bruce King's Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford UP), the story of Walcott's Trinidad Theater Workshop, appeared in 1995.

None of the studies under review is unreasonable or startling, and, as the general rule, arguments are based on sound, indeed impeccable scholarship. Each has is distinctiveness in terms of changes rung on inevitable topics for Walcott criticism. These center on his search for a Caribbean voice and poetics, and include: his deep and at times problematic relationship to the Western canon; his engagement with the ideological, "political" aspects of the question as to what constitutes Caribbeanness, and more particularly the Europe/Africa divide and interface; his position and creative achievement in relation to the linguistic dynamics-Standard English vs. Creole-of the anglophone Caribbean; and, central to all of the above, his "quarrel with history." These will continue to be areas of lively debate about Walcott, both as to his meaning and as to how satisfying the critics find it.

It is instructive to compare the ways in which the four critics cut and carve and highlight in order to bring Walcott's vast body of work into manageable perspective, and to hear how they speak to, around, or in difference from one another, or how an area of inquiry summarily acknowledged by one is explored in depth by another. For instance, it is as if Burnett sets up a cue for Fumagalli's book when, in her chapter on the issue of language in Walcott, she makes a link between him and Seamus Heaney:

Heaney sees Walcott as a sharer of the same tradition of [sic] himself, each with his own wry angle on the political meaning of Englishness, but each with a clear and incontrovertible knowledge that all that has been written in the language is his to enjoy and to use, from the beginning. (130)

(Breslin barely mentions Heaney once, and Ismond not at all.)

Similarly, there are two long, richly detailed paragraphs in Burnett's chapter on "The Gift of Place," which succinctly suggest Walcott's distinction in using "the islands' natural phenomena" (44) to establish a bank of fresh metaphors and a Caribbean...