"The Future of Old Trinidad": The Performance of National Cultural Identity in Two Plays by Derek Walcott

"The Future of Old Trinidad": The Performance of National Cultural Identity in Two Plays by Derek Walcott CAMILLA STEVENS In the postcolonial dialogue regarding the invention of a cultural tradition in the Caribbean - a region inhabited almost entirely by ancestral exiles and therefore a place perceived by some to be lacking origins or history - the processes of cultural and racial hybridization have been the subject of much debate.I Derek Walcott, the SI. Lucian born poet and dramatist, has negotiated these issues in his creative works for over five decades. Since the 19505, Walcott has worked to develop a West Indian theatre by founding the Little Carib Theatre (later known as the Trinidad Theatre Workshop), a company that developed a unique style of West Indian performance, and by writing plays that draw on European literary models, as well as on Asian and African forms. 'walcott's literary project articulates what he terms a hybrid, "mulatto" aesthetics that reflects the Caribbean, a cultural crossroads that has synthesized components of dissimilar cultures.2 Walcott's position is a nuanced one, for his hybrid aesthetics work to deconstruct Eurocentric and nativist oppositions, just as they refuse to erase differences by promoting a reductionist and unproblematic syncretic West Indian identity. Walcott's art is thus well known for resisting the master discourses of colonialism and nationalism that tend to produce totalizing representations of postcolonial collective identity, and it creates a space for understanding the interplay among the many practices and discourses that organize Caribbean identities. Gareth Griffiths has examined, in postcolonial narratives from the late 1970S and early 1980s, strategies that steer writers away from regressive, essentialist statements on cultural origin and identity towards more productive oppositional and liberationist stances (438). Griffiths finds a positive trend in texts that capture the paradoxical, syncretic nature of many postcolonial societies because they question "both a cultural politics which seeks to incorporate the post-colonial world back into some new universal and Eurocentric paradigm and that which seeks simply to reconstitute the local and traditional outModern Drama, 46:3 (Fall 2003) 450 National Identity in Two Plays by Derek Walcott 451 side a very conscious awareness of historical change and present political realities" (443). Indeed, in many postcolonial societies, the formation of a national identity, a process so crucial to decolonization, was characterized by a cultural nationalism that obscured the complex relationships among national constituencies from different cultural backgrounds. Walcoll's work has never fit comfortably into the nationalist model, in part because, thematically, much of it illuminates the heterogeneous composition of West Indian culture from a regionalist perspective. His corpus of plays can be divided into two broad periods. His well-known earlier works, including Ti-Jean and his Brothers (1958) and Dream on Monkey Moulltain (1970), are characterized by their use of poetry, myth, Western tragic models, and Asian and Brechtian stylization.3 In creating an aesthetic that embodies the hybridity of West Indian culture, Walcott has frequently employed metatheatrical devices, such as storytellers, framed plays, and role playing.4 His metatheatrical reworkings of European theatrical forms and texts produce what Richard Hornby calls a "dislocation of perception" (32) that, in the postcolonial context, can serve to displace imperial authority.' In Walcoll's later period, furthermore, Lowel Fiet notes, "[TJhe act of performance itself, the play and/or plays within the play, rehearsals , creative processes, theatre settings. and actor/writer/artist characters become increasingly prominent metaphors in the interpretation of Caribbean culture and society" (139). My view coincides with Fiet's that Walcott's drama from the late 1970S and early 1980s is more overtly self-reflexive, and in this essay, I wish to explore further the metaphor of performance in Beef, No Chicken (1981) and The Last Carnival (1982), two plays that, in spite of Walcott's international fame (he won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature), have received relatively little critical attention.6 Whereas, in his earlier work, Walcott may have used metatheatrical strategies in an effort to define a West Indian theatre and identity, these plays tum to examining identity as the unstable performance of a composite of various socially and culturally constructed roles and positions. Walcott's use of metatheatrical techniques...