The Paradigm of Rejection and Micro-ownership in Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight”

Derek Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight” (1979), an almost 500-line, intermittently rhyming, largely iambic mini-epic divided into eleven sections, consists of a series of rejections. After asserting the existence of an unrealized identity by rejecting the option that he is “nobody,” the Caribbean poet-sailor Shabine initially attempts to discover that identity by belonging to a “nation,” Great Britain, and then a racial categorization, “the niggers” (43, 154). The overarching thematic paradigm of the poem, whose plot follows Shabine as he sails the Caribbean, consists of the contrast between a collective and individualistic identity. After rejecting and being rejected by the collective identities of nation and race, Shabine rejects “the love of [his] woman” in favor of his “imagination” and then rejects imagination and the abstraction of “poetry” for his exercise book of poems (173, 153, 276, 283–84). In each of the instances that constitute this paradigm, Shabine rejects collectivism in favor of individualism. As “The Schooner Flight” progresses, the scope of both sides of the paradigm is winnowed so that Shabine has rejected continually larger aspects of human existence: nationality, race, human contact, the individual/self, and finally his own poetry. By the end of “The Schooner Flight,” Shabine has rejected everything but the feeling that motivates his poetry.

Walcott is notable, although certainly not alone, in his embrace of the paradigm of rejection. Ascetics such as Gary Snyder and curmudgeons such as Charles Bukowski alike figure rejection as positive. Walcott is unique, however, in his embrace of rejection alongside his fairly traditional Western notion of ownership. At multiple moments in the poem, Shabine delineates between what he does and does not own. In each instance, Shabine’s personal ownership is aligned with an individualistic identity. By simultaneously embracing the seemingly oppositional paradigms of rejection and ownership, Shabine arrives at an implicit recognition of the morality of micro-ownership: it is morally necessary to own as little as possible (or, put differently, to reject as much as possible), but ownership of at least a personal feeling or idea is necessary for rejection to be considered in moral terms.¹ Shabine is only able to make the moral decision to “keep [his] own promise” after explicitly asserting ownership of “[his] poetry” (274–76). Rejection is moral in “The Schooner Flight,” but rejection without some conception of ownership is simply nihilism. Rejection and ownership are complementary in “The Schooner Flight” because they are both incompatible with a personal identity based on a sense of belonging. Shabine’s rejection of the national identity of Great Britain and his assertion of ownership of “the one thing I own . . . my poetry” both result in Shabine’s abandoning the possibility of realizing his identity by belonging to either Great Britain or the masses of people who own something besides their own poetry (275–76). Walcott’s figuration of rejection and ownership produces a telescopic route to identity in which Shabine eventually rejects belonging as immoral in concept and practice. The presence of ownership alongside Shabine’s rejection of belonging as a basis for personal identity results in Shabine’s micro-ownership of the feeling that motivates his poetry—a desire to escape a sense of guilt that he did nothing to incur. Shabine’s micro-ownership of this universal desire allows him ultimately to identify not as British, Black, or poet but as human.

Favorable criticism of Walcott often focuses on his mastery of the English language while less sympathetic theorists such as V. S. Naipaul sometimes question Walcott’s negotiation of the stylistic and ideological “contact zone” between Europe and the Caribbean. In language-based criticism, rejection generally figures as a rhetorical device while in identity-based criticism Walcott is often faulted for rejecting either Europe or the Caribbean. Jason Lagapa and Paula Burnett have both noted the presence of rejection in Walcott’s poetry. Rather than viewing rejection as either a stylistic or moral choice, however, both Lagapa and Burnett largely attribute it to Walcott’s Caribbean heritage—and, in particular, the Caribbean cultural tradition of picong, defined by...