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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 23 APRIL, 2017
The poet Laureate Derek Walcott
who died on March 17,
2017 was from St Lucia, but Trinidad became his other
island home shortly after graduating fromThe UWI, Mona,
in 1953.
Trinidad is figured throughout his works, in particular
in
The Prodigal
, which is in many ways a love song to both
St Lucia and Santa Cruz where his daughters live. Santa
Cruz became in this work a source of images that reflected
his intense spiritual relationship to land and to poetry.
The immortelle offered a metaphor for heaven and the
breadfruit and frangipani became homilies to the beliefs of
his people.
Walcott revelled in the use of words and the many
double meanings that words have accumulated through
their use in the vernacular. He was given to political
criticism and had an acerbic wit, in keeping with the
tradition of calypso. He ranted at the governments of
Trinidad and Tobago and of St Lucia for their treatment
of the arts and his condemnation of the rape of Caribbean
landscapes by foreign investors and in the name of tourism
is well known. He spoke often of the tribulations endured
by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, though there were
recurring explosive relations between himself and this
flagship company he formed in the fifties. The evening
before his funeral Wendell Manwarren paid tribute in
a passionate rendition of one of Makak’s speeches from
“Dream on Monkey Mountain”
.
As a performance it
demonstrated Walcott’s insistence on remaining true to the
Caribbean voice.
Community was of vast importance to him. At the
academic celebration of his work hosted by The UWI in
2010, he wept openly. In many ways his response to this
Nobel Celebration was an indication of his humility and his
understanding of the role of the artist as one who spoke for
and on behalf of his people and of the artist as one who was
obliged to work hard and shape something new.
In 2015 I asked him whether he had any regrets and his
answer was, “I could have been a better writer.” This, from
a man who had by then received every honour and acclaim
for his poetry, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1992. The response lends credence to Professor Emeritus
Ken Ramchand’s praise for Walcott as
a “supreme example
of the joy of plain and simple hard work as well as
dedication to a calling, which in his case, occupied
over 80 years and with that, a humble awareness that
no matter what result and reward you have to believe
in it and have to strive always towards the unreachable,
unnameable ultima Thule.”
He was a man for whom friendship was sacred.
Many of his poems speak of such friendships: with
Seamus Heaney, and with Joseph Brodsky, two other poet
laureates, for example. But he commemorated so many.
His penultimate collection, “White Egrets,
”
remembers
many whose toil he saw as sacred work, including August
Wilson, Wilbert Holder and Aimé Cėsaire. But with typical
generosity he pays tribute to the living amongst whom he
numbered poets, scholars, actors and friends.
Derek was a hard taskmaster, as those who worked
with him knew well. But he mentored young poets,
B Y J
including our own graduate Vladimir Lucien. Many of
these students visited him in St Lucia and he continued
teaching virtually until a short time before his death. At
his funeral these students, and poets whose work he had
nurtured from St Lucia and elsewhere, and painters such
as Jackie Hinkson, lined the aisles in tribute. And it is no
small matter that his funeral focused on his relationship
with other artists and writers, many of whom like the
Trinidadian Robert Antoni were present.
Walcott taught at Boston University after leaving
Trinidad, but despite his many departures to different
places such as Italy, the “here” and the “elsewhere” of
his existence were never about which was better, or of
metropolitan privilege, but rather how each echoed “home.”
For him privilege resided in his islands.
He later went on to become Professor of Poetry at the
University of Essex where he spent several months every
year. There he worked with the Lakeside Theatre on the
production of
“O Starry Starry Night.” In this play, though
most clearly expressed in the St Lucian premier, the human
body acts as a spatialisation of experience. The body and its
occupation of space is the manifestation of desire, trauma
IN MEMORIUM
Walcott with his two daughters, Professor Elizabeth
Hackshaw (left) and Anna Walcott-Hardy, and former
Campus Principal Professor Clement Sankat at The UWI
Nobel Laureate Celebrations on his 80th birthday.
PHOTO: ANEEL KARIM
