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| Pride: Derek Walcott |
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Born 23rd January, 1930, St Lucia. We celebrate the life and work of our home-grown Nobel Prize winner and ‘poet of the people’, acknowledged the world over as one of the greatest writers of his generation.
People often think of the Caribbean as a place of easy going charm and boisterous fun, of superb athletes, gifted sportsmen, popular musicians and laid-back, larger-than-life characters. But there is another side too, one of outstanding artistic and intellectual achievement, witnessed by a remarkable tally of three Nobel Prize winners, outstripping many far larger countries and regions. Interestingly, two of these laureates come from a single island, St Lucia. The latest of these, poet and dramatist Derek Walcott, has long been regarded as a major voice in the language. The poet Robert Graves said of him that he ‘handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries.’ Derek Alton Walcott was born in Castries, St Lucia, in January 1930. His father died when he was just a year old; his mother was a teacher with a passion for literature, which she shared with her son. A star pupil, he won a scholarship to the University College of the West Indies, in Kingston, Jamaica, where he graduated in 1953. After teaching for a while at his old school, he moved to Trinidad to make his name as a writer. Awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to the United States in 1957, he divided his time thereafter between Boston and other Ivy-League universities, (where he taught creative writing) and home, now Trinidad, where he founded the hugely influential Theatre Workshop. Dramatic works and poems flowed from his pen, and his fame became international. Walcott’s lifelong struggle – and achievement – has been to reconcile the two strands of his ancestry, the Afro-Caribbean and the Western. His father carried both English and Dutch blood in his veins; his mother was of pure African descent. The English he wrote in was tainted for him by its association with colonial oppression, but it was also the instrument through which he explored and challenged the world. Alongside its wealth of learning, it draws freely on ‘nation’ language, a strategy to embody the cultural diversity of the region he so highly valued. His plays involve all the ‘rhetoric … panache, melodrama, carnival … chants, jokes, folk-songs and fables’ so beloved in his culture. For all his erudition, Walcott is very much a poet of the people. His output has been prolific – 19 books of poetry and nearly 30 plays, along with several works of prose. He is also a gifted visual artist. This shows in his powerful evocations of landscape, and in one work of particular interest, Tiepolo’s Hound, the part-autobiographical study of another high achiever from the region, the painter Camille Pissarro. Walcott has always been haunted by the presence of the sea, and his 1992 Nobel Prize was triggered by another long poem, Omeros. In it he transforms the two great epics of Homer into a celebration of the islands’ humble fisherfolk. Now 81, he continues to receive the very highest accolades. Only this January he was awarded the prestigious T S Eliot prize for White Egrets – ‘a moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet.’ |
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