SUNDAY 23 APRIL, 2017 – UWI TODAY
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Dr Jean Antoine-Dunne is a Walcott specialist and
recently retired as a Senior Lecturer in Literatures in
English and Film at the St Augustine campus.
Her book Derek Walcott’s Love Affair with Film,
published by Peepal Tree Press, is due out in October.
E A N A N T O I N E - D U N N E
Tribute to
and repression. These all appear as the sources of artistic
potential and production.
“O Starry Starry Night” pays homage to St Lucian
artist, Dunstan St Omer, who died two years ago and
as with so many of Derek’s other works, foregrounds
the interactive relationship between the arts and his
multifaceted talents. Derek was a fine painter and
continued painting until almost the end.
His final work in 2016, “Morning, Paramin” was
a collaboration between himself and the painter Peter
Doig. In a sense it continues in the tradition of “Tiepolo’s
Hound” (2000) in which as a painter he meditates on the
nature of light and perception. The inclusion of his own
paintings in “Tiepolo”
engages readers in the debate about
the relationship between word and image, but also on the
marginalisation of the black in the context of European art.
He wrote essays, many of which have become central
to the debate about what constitutes Caribbean art and
Caribbean identity. His Nobel speech “The Antilles” has
already provided critics and politicians with a language of
definition in its imaging of a broken vase:
“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the
fragments is stronger than that love which took its
symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits
the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love
that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the
cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars.”
It is significant that for the poet this is “the exact
process of the making of poetry, or what should be called
not its “’making’ but its remaking”. For Derek Walcott was
a supreme craftsman. In “Arkansas Testament” he reflects
on the artisan-like process of making poetry. But this
craftsmanship was of necessity a quest for an echo of the
landscape and the asymmetrical nature of life and art in
the Antilles. His perpetual search for such a form led to an
apprenticeship to many masters, and evolved over the 70
years of his career. It led to a search for new metaphors that
would come from the land and history. So for him the word
pommerac represented an historic language bequeathed
by the colonisers and also signified a vestigial trace of the
Aruac presence and the many layers of trauma that have
made the Caribbean the rich repository of culture that it is.
This idea is equally present in his plays. At the
rehearsals for
Steel
, he sought to ensure that the very
movement of the Caribbean body and the music of the
place would shape the production. He brought into one
theatrical space the raga and the dance movements of
masqueraders and of Shouter Baptists as part of his ongoing
attempt to show Caribbean art as syncretic process and as a
meeting of different cultures.
Many of his plays did not receive the same recognition
as his poetry, though it might be argued that the stage
was his great love. But no one could deny the beauty and
the success of “The Joker of Seville,” in particular at its
Boston performance. “The Joker”
exemplified that unique
combination of witty social commentary, sexual innuendo,
characterisation and beautiful poetic language all united by
music and movement. It is equalled only by “Ti Jean” which
has seen many incarnations, finally emerging as “Moon-
Child” in 2011.
Walcott also wrote film scripts. Many of these are
stored in The UWI and University of Toronto archives,
but only two have been produced: “The Rig”
and “Haytian
Earth.” His work anticipated the now current conversations
about the relationship between film, digital and literature.
The long poem, “Omeros,” is filmic in its structure and
in this way allows the poet to create a conversation between
the major writers of the Caribbean, including Kamau
Brathwaite, VS Naipaul and Wilson Harris, whose concept
of simultaneity he sought to express through montage.
In this work he returns to the debates of the ’60s and ’70s
about the importance of Africa. He also pays homage to
those influences that he had long acknowledged, from
Homer to Yeats and Joyce to Lowell and Chamoiseau. Its
multifaceted and polyphonic structure makes it an epic
beyond compare.
Derek Walcott’s loss leaves a huge gap that cannot be
filled. But his legacy as a man and as an artist remains.
For Professor Emeritus Gordon Rohlehr,
“Walcott was a mega mind, an enormous intellect,
which was constantly searching out the pathways we should
traverse. He never dabbled but delved deeply into literary
imaginaries, into mythic and the folk sensibilities, into the
visual as painter and filmmaker, into song as the producer
of musicals. Consider for example that our understanding
of what he produced would be incomplete until we take
into account the over 500 pieces which he wrote on diverse
topics in the “Trinidad Guardian” in the six to seven years
he spent as a journalist there.”
Walcott’s life and work transcend simple assessments.
It is this sense of a complex intervention into the nature
of Caribbean art and the sensibilities of the region and his
project of giving voice to this multiplicity that may well be
viewed as his most enduring gift to the Caribbean.
PHOTOS COURTESY THE DEREK WALCOTT COLLECTION,
THE ALMA JORDAN LIBRARY
