Derek Walcott

"Poetry, which is perfection's sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery." (from the Nobel Lecture, 1992)

Derek Walcott was born at Castries, St Lucia, an isolated Caribbean island in the West Indies. His father, a Bohemian artist, died when he was very young. His mother, a teacher, encouraged him to read poetry. Walcott, was educate at St Mary's College, Castries. He received a scholarship to the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. His first play, HENRI CHRISTOPHER, was performed in 1950. In 1953 Walcott moved to Trinidad and in 1958-59 Walcott studied theater in New York.



From 1953 to 1957 Walcott worked as a teacher at schools on several Caribbean islands. He then started his career as a journalist, writing features for Public Opinion in Kingston and features and drama critics for the Trinidad Guardian. In 1950 Walcott founded the St Lucia Arts Guild. He has worked as a professor of poetry at the University of Boston, and divided his time between Trinidad and the USA.



"I sang our wide country, the Caribbean Sea

who hated shoes, whose soles were as cracked as a stone,

who was gentle with ropes, who had one suit alone,

whom no man dared insult and who insulted no one,

whose grin was a white breaker cresting, but whose frown

was a growing thunderhead..."

(from Omeros)

As poet Walcott made his debut at the age of eighteen with TWENTY FIVE POEMS, which was privately printed. His widespread recognition as a poet came with IN A GREEN NIGHT (1964). It manifested his primary aims: to create a literature truthful to the West Indian life. In THE FORTUNATE TRAVELLER (1981) and MIDSUMMER (1984) Walcott explored his own situation as a black writer in America who has become estranged from his Caribbean homeland. The very titles of such books as CASTAWAY (1965) and THE GULF (1969) referred to his feelings of artistic isolation. Among the subjects Walcott, of both African and European ancestry, has continually returned, is the story of Robinson Crusoe, and the multicultural mixture of identities.



"I who am poisoned with the blood of both,

Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

I who have cursed

The drunken officer of British rule, how choose

Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?"

(from A Far Cry from Africa, 1962)

Walcott's has called himself "a mulatto of style." His most ambitious work to date is the epic poem OMEROS (1990), which takes its title from the Greek word for 'Homer', and recalls the dramas of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in a Caribbean setting. It consist of sixty-four chapters divided into seven books. The central characters are two fishermen, Achilles and Philocrete. Among its subjects are sufferings of exile and the contemporary Caribbean life. The task of the bard is sing of lost lives and a new hope. The Odyssean figure of Shabine in 'The Schooner Flight' expresses his rage against racism and rejection of colonial culture:



"I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger and English in me,

and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

From 1959 to 1971 Walcott was the founding director of the Little Carib Theatre (later the Trinidad Theatre Workshop). He has written a large number of plays for stage and radio. Of these DREAM OF MONKEY MOUNTAIN was commissioned originally by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 1960s but produced finally in the USA. The works is considered to be his most impressive play. Walcott has also collaborated on several musicals with Galt McDermott, best-known from the hippie musical Hair.



Walcott has written both in standard English and in West Indian dialect. His plays examining the postcolonial condition owe much to folk and Creole tradition and history. They combine story-telling, singing, dancing, and the rhythms of calypso with richly metaphorical speech which mingles verse and prose. His autobiographical works include the poem ANOTHER LIFE (1973), inspired James Joyce's self-examination in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The semi-autobiographical spiritual biography TIEPOLO'S HOUND (2000) was about the painter Camille Pissarro and the poet himself. The book was published with reproductions of Walcott's paintings. Walcott' success has inspired many aspiring Caribbean writers. His twin brother Roderick is also a playwright.



Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott's life and work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. His father, a Bohemian watercolourist, died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were only a few years old. His mother ran the town's Methodist school. After studying at St. Mary's College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he has worked as theatre and art critic. At the age of 18, he made his debut with 25 Poems, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962). In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop which produced many of his early plays.



Walcott has been an assiduous traveller to other countries but has always, not least in his efforts to create an indigenous drama, felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements. For many years, he has divided his time between Trinidad, where he has his home as a writer, and Boston University, where he teaches literature and creative writing.