The Privileges of Being Born in. .. A Backward and Underprivileged Society: Derek Walcott's Prodigal Provincialism

Si mwen di-ou sa fè mwen lapèn Ou pè kwè sa vwè, Si mwen di-ou wachè tjè mwen Ou pè di sa vwè, Si mwen di-ou kwvè tjè mwen Ou pè kwè sa vwè.¹

St. Lucian folk song as performed by Sessenne²

Reading Derek Walcott's essays, his interviews, and his poetry, one is struck by the fascinating regularity with which the word provincial occurs and by his constant care to rid the concept of perceived negative associations. This is hardly surprising. Typically, provincialism is a descriptor of the parochial, the unsophisticated, and the countrified. In this millennium, faced with the economic imperatives of liberalized trade borders, and with globalization as our new mantra, provincialism is often used within the contexts of narrow mindedness and myopia—the dangerous singularity of perspective—and has accordingly been condemned. But provincialism is also the valorization of the local, the home-grown, the ordinary, the folk—what in St. Lucian kweyol we refer to as gen bitasyon.³ It is this definition of the provincial to which Derek Walcott has found himself drawn, what he, in an interview with Carl Jacobs, defended as "a deeper communion with things that metropolitan writers no longer care about, or perhaps cannot care about. And these things are attachment to family, earth and history" (4). However, this articulation of a comfortable provincialism is hardly one to which Walcott adheres unwaveringly. Indeed, as this article will show, Walcott's preoccupation with being labeled and dismissed as provincial is a recurring and often troubling one. In exploring Walcott's contradictory stances on provincialism—his quarrel with this designation and later his apologia and reconciliation—this article acknowledges that the expansive geography of Walcott's imagination has necessarily generated myriad subject positions in relation to provincialism. Often Walcott has adopted a defensive posture—provincialism has been celebrated as an almost spiritual connection with the St. Lucian landscape and its peoples. At other times, he has seen his attachment to home as parochial and has painfully negotiated the treacherous label of insularity. Yearning for a larger experience, he has then condemned provincialism as a singularity of vision, the inability to realize the relationship between the part and the whole, the local and the international, the Caribbean and the world. And in recent times, having weathered a variety of conflicted articulations of a Caribbean aesthetics, he has seen provincial spaces as crucial to his centering and restoration as artist.

As Another Life has made clear, the provincial space—the local(e)—provided the most immediate inspirational source of Derek Walcott's early artistic endeavors, be these creative or visual. Walcott had, under the mentorship of Harold Simmons "grown to learn [a] passionate / talent with its wild love of landscape" ("To a Painter in England" lines 4–5), and this intense awareness of and appreciative response to the St. Lucian landscape was, in turn, acknowledged as shaping his multicultural national heritage. Through what seemed to be an articulation of a national romanticism, Walcott's poetry then offered the promise that in viewing nature imaginatively and creatively, landscape became more than mere background and was instead validated as a source of order and harmony. Thus, for Walcott, provincial life afforded one the opportunity to learn more about community, the imagination, society, humanity, mortality, and God. It allowed one to be part of what William Wordsworth, the British romantic poet and one of the more famous provincials, described in Tintern Abbey as "a sense sublime / of something far more deeply interfused" (lines 95–96). Ultimately, as collections such as 25 Poems, In a Green Night, and Another Life confirm, to be provincial is to appreciate the simplicity of life as it occurs in the province, to be outside of the hurly burly and be content with living on what many would dismiss as the margins of society. At that time, Walcott recognized the merits of his island society, what he has elsewhere described as "the healthy vulgarity of living in a backward . . . place." He was able to root...