"I Have Become the Sea's Craft": Authorial Subjectivity in Derek Walcott's Omeros and David Dabydeen's "Turner"

For the current generation of Caribbean writers, the task of positioning their writing in relation to colonial history has been in some ways eased, in others complicated, by the relative success of the previous generation. Now, besides choosing to evade, embrace, ignore, or reinterpret the long shadow of the Western literary tradition, Caribbean writers must also consider their relationship with their own: with Frantz Fanon and the politics of négritude, with V. S. Naipaul's vast success and unapologetic Eurocentrism, with Jean Rhys's rewriting of a Western classic from a West Indian perspective. For poet, novelist, and critic David Dabydeen, who emigrated from Guyana to England as a teenager, the work of earlier Caribbean writers is both enabling and daunting.¹ When asked by Mark Stein about the influence of this earlier generation on its successors, Dabydeen was quick to acknowledge the positive effects of the older writers' pioneering achievements: "The very fact that they achieved meant that it was relatively easier for us to publish because there was already Derek Walcott, there was already George Lamming, there was already Sam Selvon, there was especially V. S. Naipaul" (Interview 233-34).

Yet the stature of these literary ancestors can simultaneously seem intimidating to young writers; Dabydeen comments in the same interview: "[Y]ou had a sense that there was a body of writing to which you had a certain responsibility and which also presented a challenge. . . . When you're following Walcott and when you're following Lamming, certainly when you're following Naipaul, how can you achieve excellence?" (234). Dabydeen's own writing takes this responsibility and challenge seriously, intertextually engaging with his predecessors' texts in ways that both affirm and complicate them.² His 1994 poem "Turner," though written in response to a European art object, J. M. W. Turner's painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840), also engages indirectly with a Caribbean precursor, Derek Walcott's lengthy 1990 poem Omeros.³ In its wide-ranging depiction of the inhabitants of a St. Lucian fishing community, Omeros creates a sense of Caribbean cultural identity that is fluid and hybrid, grounded not in history but in the "amnesiac Atlantic" (61), whose transformation of the slave bodies drowned in it metaphorically frees a space for "the new naming of things" (Walcott, "Muse" 428). In "Turner," Dabydeen likewise depicts a seascape as a site for identity formation. Yet "Turner" complicates Walcott's predominantly positive figuration of the sea by focusing more intently on the formation of individual subjectivity than on the construction of a shared cultural consciousness. In so doing, Dabydeen's much darker poem both illuminates the creative power of Walcott's vision and exposes it to questions about the fragmentation of all subjects.

Postcolonial poets' frequent use of the sea as an enabling metaphor parallels a contemporaneous political and theoretical concern with fluidity expressed in a variety of poststructuralist discourses. In attempting to articulate the relationship between poststructuralist theory, identity politics, and poetic representation, theorists Homi K. Bhabha, Carole Boyce Davies, and Stuart Hall have each grappled with the difficulty of constructing a politics based on difference, one which, in Hall's words, could "build those forms of solidarity and identification which make common struggle and resistance possible . . . without suppressing the real heterogeneity of interests and identities" (166). Such a construction depends on the simultaneous assertion and erasure of individual identities, as depicted by Bhabha in his essay on Fanon. It must seek a common ground, "a generalized purpose of resistance to domination" (Davies 56), while always questioning that space, recognizing that any sense of shared identity "always appear[s] historically in articulation, in a formation, with other categories and divisions and [is] constantly crossed and recrossed by the categories of class, of gender, and ethnicity" (Hall 166). As Bhabha writes, "the political must always pose as a problem, or a question, the priority of the place from which it begins, if its authority is not to become autocratic" (309). Metaphorically...