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Home · World & Postcolonial Literature · Derek Walcott
Poet · Dramatist

Derek Walcott

1930–2017 · Castries, Saint Lucia

The Caribbean poet who claimed the whole European tradition and rewrote it from the archipelago.

Nobel Prize 1992 · Omeros

Life & Background

Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia in 1930, of mixed African, Dutch, and English descent, in a Methodist family on a predominantly Catholic island — a position of divided inheritance he made his lifelong subject. His father, a painter, died when he was one; his mother, a teacher, ran the household. He published his first collection at eighteen with money borrowed from his mother, and studied at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, writing and directing plays for it for two decades. He taught at Boston University for many years and shared his life between Saint Lucia and the United States. He received the Nobel Prize in 1992 and died in Saint Lucia in 2017.

Omeros

Omeros
1990
Plot summary

A book-length poem in loosely terza rima, set mainly in Saint Lucia. Its central figures are fishermen — Achille and Hector — who are rivals for Helena, a beautiful island woman who works as a maid, and the blind seer Seven Seas. Achille, in a fever, travels back in imagination to West Africa and to the village his ancestors were taken from, meeting his father and learning the name he lost. Around them are the retired English colonel Plunkett and his Irish wife Maud, who researches the island's history and treats Helen as a symbol of it, and a narrator resembling Walcott himself who moves through Boston, Lisbon, London, and Dublin. The poem circles back to the island, the sea, and the men who fish it.

Literary analysis

The Homeric names are deliberate and deliberately unstable: the poem invokes the Iliad only to insist that its fishermen are not allegories of Greeks but people whose lives require no classical warrant, and Walcott repeatedly interrupts the epic frame to say so. The formal question — whether the Caribbean poet inherits the European canon, is excluded from it, or owns it outright — is the poem's real subject, and his answer, worked out in the essay The Muse of History, is to refuse both nostalgia for Africa and resentment of Europe in favour of an Adamic naming of a new world. His use of Creole alongside a high literary English, and his ambivalence about that mixture, sits at the centre of the long argument with Kamau Brathwaite over Caribbean poetics.

Why Walcott Matters

Walcott is the major Anglophone Caribbean poet and the writer who most fully worked through the postcolonial problem of inheritance — what a colonised writer does with the coloniser's literary tradition. Omeros is the standard Caribbean epic; A Far Cry from Africa, written at twenty-seven and asking how he can turn from either Africa or the English tongue he loves, is one of the most anthologised statements of divided identity. His drama, particularly Dream on Monkey Mountain, is significant independently, and he shares with Naipaul and Brathwaite the framing of West Indian literature on most syllabi.

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Key Facts

Nobel Prize 1992
He was cited for a poetic work of great luminosity sustained by a historical vision of multicultural commitment.
Trinidad Theatre Workshop
He founded it in 1959 and wrote and directed plays for it for nearly twenty years.
A Far Cry from Africa
His early poem on the Mau Mau uprising and his own divided descent is his most anthologised work.
Argued with Brathwaite
His use of standard literary English against Brathwaite's nation language framed a defining Caribbean debate.

All Major Works

  • In a Green Night1962
  • Dream on Monkey Mountain1970
  • Another Life1973
  • The Star-Apple Kingdom1979
  • The Muse of History (essay)1974
  • Omeros1990
  • The Bounty1997
  • White Egrets2010
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