The Antilles

by Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on December 10, 1992. His Nobel lecture is a stirring evocation of the multivalent wholeness of the culture of the Antilles, forged out of a violent history against a land- and seascape of immemorial dimensions. "Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped," writes Walcott. "Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture." He finds the image of this culture in the city of Port of Spain, Trinidad, "mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven." And watching a group of East Indian Trinidadians reenact the Hindu epic the Ramayana in the small village of Felicity, he meditates on the sacred celebration of joy, the rehearsal of collective memory, that is the very essence of human experience, beyond history. Walcott's lecture is a powerful reenvisionmg of the themes that have energized and informed his poetry.

Genres: Essays, Poetry, Nonfiction, 20th Century

42 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1993

About the author

Derek Walcott was a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."

His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He was best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.

Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remained active with its Board of Directors until his death. He also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981. In 2004, Walcott was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, and had retired from teaching poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University by 2007. He continued to give readings and lectures throughout the world after retiring. He divided his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.

Reviews

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writing is first-rate. One wants to say “obviously,” but it’s never obvious. The tension in Walcott’s Antilles, however, is that the Adorno shtick he’s advocating simply cannot hold in Trinidad or much of the Caribbean. It is unproductively sentimental and without much seriousness to suggest that the culture of the Antilles, having been formed by centuries of intermingling - African, French, Spanish, English, Taino, Indian, Chinese, etc., - should now be protected from further encroachment; taken on its own terms, as it is now. The aspirational vision of a Caribbean where ancestry is immaterial to trace and where everyone is nothing other than Trinidadian, Jamaican, St. Lucian, etc., is moreover so patently unrealistic, as the independence movements in Guyana and Trinidad, fractured neatly between blacks, Indians and various others, showed us. When it comes to the rough times, the question in cosmopolitan places is always a simple one: who are my people?

From this brutal but hopeful and elegantly presented idea of the Antilles, we are made weary of both the foreign observer (Perse, Froud, Leigh-Fermor, etc.) as well as the self-imposed exiles (e.g., Naipaul) who want to use the yardstick of Europe and “civilization” to measure the Antilles. The simple answer to the inquiry as to why Trinidad is not like London, with its planned architecture and its order, is this: Trinidad is not London, and you miss the point of being here when you ask that question. But in this version of authenticity, primitivism is never far behind, such that Walcott, speaking from the Nobel dais, the acclaimed writer (acclaimed by whom other than those he seeks to impart these lessons to?), can no longer speak for his people. He’s been exposed to too much, has probably taken on the baggage of the foreign observer himself, and so, while still from the Antilles, is not of the Antilles. When Walcott looks at Felicity and the Ramleela spectacle, he’s rightly ashamed. Why does he know so little about this beautiful tradition? Yet immediately he begins to praise Ramleela, he falls victim to what he chides us against, for surely, as he says, the practitioners of Ramleela have always assumed its beauty, never even thinking of its purported primitivism. That requires a different cultural framework for comparison, one that assumes hierarchy. And they have none because they do not think to compare themselves with anyone so far away as in Europe.

Then, the visions of the Caribbean in the moneyed West: warm beaches, calypso and drums, piña coladas, etc., and the corrupt government officials who make all these possible for Western tourists and retirees. The consequence is that you can never find an empty beach again, and the erosion of Antillean culture and ways of life marches on. Transcendence and the sublime have been taken out of life (Adorno again), and people’s lives, their music, culture, and food, are props in the cultural play of their wealthy observers (Edward Said, probably).

The entire speech is fragmented in its positive ideas (hence the subtitle, perhaps), and the tone is often elegiac when it aims to be celebratory. Maybe that’s because Walcott feels he’s on the defense. The argument is that the Antilles don't need defending to those not from there, yet here he is, defending them. Moreover, Walcott doesn’t know what to do with the issue of what modernity has done to the physical and spiritual beauty of his home, but he thinks there’s a lot there still worth celebrating, even if it cannot be protected. Like Adorno, he knows what he hates and is so good at presenting that. Yet despite what seem to me to be deficiencies in argument, his writing is so wonderful, and if his ideas seem to me unreconciled, that may be because they’re unreconcilable.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning. Here we see a poet toward the tail of his career and life, still with the freshness of his origins. He is able to see patterns and newness. It is a wonderful homage to the Antilles as well as a commentary on humanity and history/History. I appreciated a lot of the points he brought up: the intermixing of cultures, the importance of unimportance, the unimportance of colonial "importance", language-making and language reclaiming, the way an islander views home vs. how a tourist views the island myopically and astigmatically. And more. All said in Walcott's characteristically beautiful writing. This is a book I plan to return to for inspiration and one of the manifold answers to "Why do we write?"

[Yordanos · Rating 4 out of 5]

First time reading anything by Derek Walcott and what a great introduction this offers -- poetic and poignant in its shrewd observations, commentary, and analysis (both of his internal and external worlds), and utterly gorgeous writing steaming with imaginative and grounded prose, that is as lush and lyrical as the vibrant people and geography he so lovingly portrays.

I'm looking forward to exploring more of Walcott's work and crossing my fingers that I'll find similar abundance in his other writings.

[Avatara Smith carrington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Changed my life.

[Vuma Lilli · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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.

This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent."

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot to chew on in Walcott's 40+ pages of reflection on his homeland. Like... Is Paris or New York or Tokyo really more of a muse than Port of Spain? Can a poet truly separate one's self from a complicated, problematic lineage? When is something derivate and when does it morph into something new? Why is judgment an obstacle to joy? How does tourism obliterate culture? Great poets can communicate much in small spaces. This brief lecture illustrates that point, powerfully.

[Valerie Brett]

Not rating because it was beautiful & seemed interesting but I can’t exactly say I understood it

[vale figueroa · Rating 5 out of 5]

hermosísimo

[Christopher Stella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just gorgeous.

[Meag · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reread this at least once a year and a different part resonates with me each time.


Two quotes I have always loved and often think about:

What is hidden cannot be loved. The traveller cannot love, since love is stasis and travel is motion. If he returns to what he loved in a landscape and stays there, he is no longer a traveller but in stasis and concentration, the lover of that particular part of earth, a native. So many people say they “love the Caribbean”, meaning that someday they plan to return for a visit but could never live there, the usual benign insult of the traveller, the tourist. These travellers, at their kindest, were devoted to the same patronage, the islands passing in profile, their vegetal luxury, their backwardness and poverty. Victorian prose dignified them. They passed by in beautiful profiles and were forgotten, like a vacation.

To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture.