Through Loins and Coins: Derek Walcott's Weaving of the West Indian Federation

Roughly a third of the way through Derek Walcott's Drums and Colours, Paco, the half-West Indian native, half-Spaniard, takes revenge on the Europeans who have ravaged his home islands. Encountering the young Walter Raleigh and his cousin Humphrey Gilbert, Paco tells them the legend of the golden city that will drive the two Englishmen to the New World and their eventual deaths. Scratching the name "El Dorado" in the sand and setting up a tiny log as part of what starts to be a map of the New World, he says:

This El Dorado is a golden country, I showed it once to an officer called Quadrado. Oh I've tossed like an old cork on the seas of the world. Seen whales and marvels in my old age, but this, This bewilders belief. This bit of log, mates, Tells of a golden city in the heart of Guiana, And these two words, they mean the gilded king. But it'll take another coin to unlock my tongue.

(38)

Paco knows better. He knows as he tells the two boys about the city of gold that he is referring to nothing more than a legend. The map that Paco sketches in the sand refers to something that does not exist. To put it another way, the log in the map signifies a place that isn't there. "El Dorado" and the king are signifiers without a signified.

There is a grim irony to Paco's revenge, however. He has learned that he can be a successful beggar by selling the dream of El Dorado or other New World fictions. He has learned at the same time, though, that "whales and marvels really do exist." As he tells Raleigh, "I was like you my boy, before I saw the great legend / That Quadrado called Europe" (38). That is, even if the signifiers that drove him from the islands to Europe—most importantly gold, the emblem of a European father who has murdered the rest of his family—did not represent what he thought they did, they nonetheless have taken him to a world he could not have imagined. He dies in squalor, but as a hybrid Euro-Arawak believing in his old gods as he looks westward from an English shore, he dies with a degree of self-reconciliation that has evaded him since his birth.

As a result of his story, Raleigh and Gilbert both become New World explorers. Gilbert dies at sea during his travels, and Raleigh, driven mad by his dreams of El Dorado, breaks peace with the Spanish, loses his son in a pointless raid, and is executed in England for his pains. And yet, even if the dream of El Dorado has proven false, it has taken the two explorers to worlds they could not have imagined. Their pursuit of the legend has put them in the forefront of a great historical transformation. As Berrio puts it, "you are English, your star in the ascendant" (46). Raleigh's life, though ending in ignominy and regret, winds up giving birth to a new possibility of New World vision, colonialism and, eventually, nationalism. Walcott makes that idea explicit when he has the chorus observe after Raleigh's execution, "The blood that jets from Raleigh's severed head / Lopped like a rose when England's strength was green" (57). Paco may have told his story in a grand desire for revenge and a petty hope for spare change, but his invocation of the mythical El Dorado has driven Raleigh to his destiny and helped to play out the history of the West Indies.

In a broader sense, Drums and Colours, like Paco's story, is a play about a thing that does not exist. It was commissioned by a department in the proto-governmental apparatus that would become the government of the West Indian Federation to serve, in Noel Vaz's term from the introduction to the play, as an "epic" (2) for the Federation. At the time Walcott was writing it—in New York City...