Derek Walcott: A Personal Response (original) (raw)
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Occupy the Caribbean: Re/Locating the Self in the Poetry of Derek Walcott
The Quint. Vol. 8, N0. 1 (December 2015) pp. 38-63 This paper addresses the poetic work of Caribbean Derek Walcott. It focuses mainly on Walcott’s endeavor to transform space, an abstract realm, into place, an experienced and felt dwelling. Indeed, much of his poetry attempts to redefine the geography of the West Indies, and especially his island Saint Lucia. Walcott has made it a point during his poetic career to use place as a weapon of retaliation. His poetry insists on providing a new cartography while challenging (neo)colonial spatial representations of his land. Constructed as terra nullius by the colonizer or exoticized in tourist brochures, the West Indies remain a locus of mis-representations under the cartographic custody of a foreign gaze.
Identity, History and Caribbean Experience in Select Poems of Derek Walcott
Covenant Journal of Language Studies, 2022
This study examines how history has shaped social identity and the impacts of both on Caribbean experience in Derek Walcott's poetry. Using New Historicism as theoretical framework, it critiques some Caribbean historical realities highlighted in the selected poems and their impacts on society at individual and societal levels with particular emphasis on identity. Four poems from different collections of Walcott are analyzed in this paper, which are "Codicil", "The River", "Love after Love" and "The Sea is History". The conclusions of this critical engagement show clearly that identity in Caribbean reality is inescapably tied to the traumatic history of displacement, enslavement, migration and alienation of the Caribbean peoples.
Strengthening the Marginalized from Within: Derek Walcott’s Poetic Mission
IIUC Studies, 2015
Caribbean poet Derek Walcott , in his commitment to the Caribbean and, of course, with artistic excellence, disappointingly finds his nation still confined to marginalization which is self-imposed, though it was colonially imposed during the colonial period. The issues contributing to this self-imposed marginalization, an otherwise colonial legacy, are the exigent factors Walcott’s relentless poetic efforts address. This paper aims at exploring how Walcott ’s unalloyed poetic dedication of epistemological siginificance, with a view to strengthening the Antillean from within, concentrates on the marginalized nation’s unconscious, imprudent and self-centred thoughts and measures in the issues of Caribbean self, tourism, urbanization, governance, literary tradition and uniqueness of literature in a post-colonial context of agressive Euro-American economy and culture.
Ambivalence in the poetry of Derek Walcott
Ambivalence in the poetry of Derek Walcott
The aim of this paper is of explore the ambivalence in the poetry of Walcott. Walcott presents postcolonial and multicultural ambivalence in his poetry; that is, his poetry demonstrates the Caribbean people " s love and hate of the colonizer " s culture. As he is the son of both Anglo-European and the Afro-Caribbean heritage he is divided in his own identity. We find both attraction and revulsion towards the English culture and language all through his poems. There is common style in his poetry that he tries to reduce the gap between the colonizers and colonized. It is true that sometimes he articulates his misery as a divided self but this is not to attack the colonizer but to reveal his crisis and his recommendation is to universalize the ideas. An endeavour is made below to discover Walcott " s ambivalent in his poetry.
Hybridity and Cultural Tensions in Derek Walcott's Poetry: A Postcolonial Perspective
Kazal Kumar Das, 2020
The paper examines the paradoxes of pain and joy in Derek Walcott's fragmented and hybrid identities and racial and colonial tensions in his poetry. It also deals with Walcott's celebration of the hybridity and cosmopolitanism of Caribbean culture. The paper shows how Walcott never loses sight of his colonial past and how he remains critical of the forces shaping the future of his own culture. The paper points out how he confronts the conflicts of his European and African ancestry from the perspective of postcolonial reality. The paper makes a postcolonial analysis of Derek Walcott's one earlier poem, "A Far Cry from Africa" (In a Green Night: Poems, 1948-60, 1962) and two later poems, "Names" (Sea Grapes, 1976) and "The Sea is History" (The Star-Apple Kingdom, 1979) to highlight his search for a Caribbean history while exploring the racial, cultural and colonial tensions embedded in his Caribbean identity. It also shows the historical and political contexts in which he wrote these poems.
Narrative Rewritings and Artistic Praxis in Derek Walcott's Works: Caribbean Decolonisations
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022
This book focuses on Derek Walcott's literary and artistic wor(l)d. Western postcolonial critique has depicted the Nobel Prize laureate as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century world. This, however, devalues his fundamental contribution to the realm of Caribbean theatre and art. The text examines Walcott's multimodal production, a combination of West Indian folkloric forms and Western-oriented structures and themes, by discussing three of his works - two plays, The Joker of Seville and Pantomime, and a long poem, Tiepolo's Hound. These epitomise respectively a response to Spanish, English, and French cultural legacies in the New World as postcolonial re-writings of Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, and Camille Pissarro's stories. Following Quijano and Mignolo's decolonial approaches and Riane Eisler's partnership perspective, the book uncovers the strategies used by Walcott to respond to the colonial matrix of power.
Ibn Rushd UP, 2018
Critics have frequently addressed the theme of betrayal that runs throughoutDerek Walcott's poetry due to leaving St. Lucia, the island where he was born. Walcott's poetrypresentsconfused characters, divided between their desire forreturning home and the temperament for travelling and adventure.Thisstudy questions the role ofthe socio-political conditionsof the post-independence Caribbean in motivating artists to live abroad. The Caribbean gained independence in the beginning of the 1960s, and confrontedserioustrialsto become a nation throughout the 1970s. Thecritiqueexamines Walcott'sdirect attack on the Caribbean cultureinsome of his most important poems, where the persona is either visiting or leaving his native island.He is a quester who mirrorsthe poet'sanger at the people's difficulties, political corruption, social climbing, and discrimination based on class and colour.
Caribbean Landscape and Visual Imagination - An analysis of Derek Walcott’s Poems.doc
Derek Walcott’s work lends itself to the analysis and evaluation of a plethora of themes and perspectives. This paper seeks to analyze and evaluate the notion of visual imagination in the poetic works of this renowned scholar. The paper looks specifically at three poems in his work, Collected Poems 1948-1984. The poems include ‘Egypt Tobago’, ‘Ruins of a Great House’ and ‘Jean Rhys’. These works will be evaluated with a view to critiquing the extent of their reality, relevance and application in the context of the Caribbean’s landscape and soul. They will also be analyzed with reference to the poems that have been chosen for this presentation. The paper will be examined from a discourse analysis approach, where patterns and variations that stem from these patterns will be assessed.
2020
This paper is based on the hypothesis that Derek Walcott, the celebrated Caribbean poet, and the recipient of Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, reflects the deeply ingrained complexities of colonial experiences in his poetry. In his creative pursuit, Walcott continuously ‘engages and grapples’ with his traumatic background, and addresses the issues of post-colonial fragmented identity. Based on Walcott’s selected poems, this study aims to explore Walcott’s realization of the problems of colonialism, his unflinching love for English language, his ambivalence and hybridity. Key Terms : colonial history, grapples, post-colonial, fragmented, ambivalence, unflinching, ambivalence, hybridity
Ambivalence in Derek Walcott’s Poetry: A Comparative Study
Abstract Walcott has been a melting pot of ambivalence, hybridity and identity crisis. Walcott’s ambivalence is evident in his themes, choice of language and rhetorical devices etc. His ardent love for Caribbean land, its people and language has been frequently uttered through his emotional voice in his poems. At the same time, he possesses a divided societal position living overseas with appreciation for Western society and love for universal appeal of English language. However, he criticizes the brutality of the colonizers for their imperialistic attitude and torture. This has thrown him into ambivalence of choice and disapproval, acceptance and rejection, and love and hatred. Ambivalence is, thus, ever-present a spectre in his poems as well as in his divided self. The article aims at exploring Walcott’s expression of ambivalence, duality, hybridity and postcolonial dilemma in manifesting identity. Keywords: Ambivalence, Hybridity, Dilemma, Postcolonial, Divided Self etc