HYBRIDITY AND WALCOTT’S POETRY

Prepared for Professor Themeem T

Prepared by – Mehr Khurana

Hybridity, with its resonances of cross-fertilization, has gained much currency as a con-
ceptual tool in the postcolonial context. A case in point is the work of Derek Walcott,
who stands at the confluence of the already hybrid Caribbean culture, and the occidental
poetic tradition. At a basic level, hybridity refers to any mixing of east and western
culture. Within colonial and postcolonial literature, it most commonly refers to colonial
subjects from Asia or Africa who have found a balance between eastern and western
cultural attributes. This paper aims to explore hybridity in Derek Walcott’s poetry.

Derek Walcott was born in 1930 on the island of St. Lucia. He was the child of a civil
servant and a schoolteacher and the descendant of two white grandfathers and two black
grandmothers. Though his first language was a French-English patois, he received
an English education, an apprenticeship in language that his mother supported by
reciting English poetry at home and by exposing her children to the European classics
at an early age.
It is first important to understand the historical and political context in which Walcott
wrote his poems. The Caribbean Islands, which served as Walcott’s subject and
inspiration, are a group of scattered islands between the North and South America that
were occupied by the Caribs or the American-Indian tribe before the arrival of
Columbus in 1492. The different islands were colonised by the British, the French and
the Dutch. The colonisers brought-in slaves from parts of Africa to work on the land.
When slavery was abolished by the Emancipation Act of 1863, the colonisers began
“importing” labour-force from India and China.

An imaginative reconstruction of the situation of the first generation of people who

were brought to the Islands is attempted by a number of Caribbean writers and poets.
When Columbus “discovered” the Islands, he assumed that the native population did
not exist. While the natives were denied human existence, the position of the slaves
and the indentured labourers was hardly any better. They were displaced from their
homeland, brought to an entirely unfamiliar environment, and forced to work. They
could hardly communicate with one another. Over the years, the different Diasporas
developed a language of communication (Pidgin and Creole), and the intermixing of
cultures (Native American, African, Indian, French, British and Dutch) resulted in a
hybrid culture.
The later generations inherited this hybrid culture. Though the later generations did not
experience displacement or colonisation first-hand, the inheritance of an identity
informed by such complexities resulted in a form of cultural schizophrenia. Walcott’s
poem, “A Far Cry from Africa” explores this psychological condition. The central
question asked in the poem is, “I who am poisoned with the blood of both / Where
shall I turn, divided to the vein?”. Walcott evokes the Mau Mau rebellion of Kenya
and holds both the Europeans and the Kenyans responsible for the bloodshed. He is
critical of the colonial discourses based on statistics and laws that justify the killing of
the Kenyan people.

However, he can neither turn away from his English identity, nor from his African
ancestry. Frantz Fanon theorises this psychological conflict as Negrophobia in Black
Skin, White Masks. According to Fanon, the black man “lives an ambiguity that is
extraordinarily neurotic”. In the black man’s “collective unconscious,” being black
means being “wicked, spineless, evil, and instinctual,” the opposite of being white (169).
In “A Far Cry from Africa,” therefore, Walcott confronts this psychological conflict but
the paradoxes in his identity remain unresolved because the central question is never
answered
Derek Walcott’s art arises from his schizophrenic situation, from a struggle between
two cultural heritages which he has harnessed to create a unique creolized style. His
early poetry booklets, published in the late 1940s with money borrowed from his
mother, reveal a self-conscious apprentice determined to make what Walcott called
“legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlow and Milton.” English and
American critics often have been ambivalent about his use of the Western literary
tradition and Walcott has also drawn criticism from Caribbean commentators, who
accuse him of neglecting native forms in favor of techniques derived his colonial
oppressors. To be sure, his early works seem overpowered by the voices of English
poetry, and his entire oeuvre respects the traditional concerns of poetic form. But if his
poetry demonstrates a significant relation to tradition, it also manifests an elegant
blending of sources — European and American, Caribbean and Latino, classical and
contemporary. Later works, including In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, reveal a
poet who has learned his craft from the European tradition, but who remains mindful
of West Indian landscapes and experiences

Though his poetry displays a passion to record Caribbean life, this tendency is more
apparent in Walcott’s drama, which draws consistently not only on his native patois,
but also on regional folk traditions. In the 1950s, after taking a degree from the
University College of the West Indies, Walcott wrote a series of verse plays,
including Henri Christophe which recounts an episode in Caribbean history using the
diction and plotting of Jacobean tragedy. His subsequent forays into dramatic
writing, The Sea at Dauphin and Ione, mingle the influences of J. M. Synge and Greek
drama with a new emphasis on West Indian language and customs. During this period
Walcott also taught and wrote as a journalist in Grenada, before moving to Trinidad,
where he gathered a group of actors and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop.
While in Trinidad, Walcott developed a mature dramatic idiom in plays such as Ti-
Jean and his Brothers and Dream on Monkey Mountain, which put an elevated dialect
in mouths of common West Indian folk. In What the Twilight Says, Walcott describes
his desire to fill these plays with “a language that went beyond mimicry, one which
finally settled on its own mode of inflection, and which begins to create an oral
culture, of chants, jokes, folk-songs, and fables.” Chronicling a peasant fantasy of
rejecting the white world and reclaiming an African heritage, Dream on Monkey
Mountain not only makes effective use of native dialect, but also satirizes the
bureaucratic idiom of colonialism. Language becomes a route to racial identity and a
necessary resource for the survival of West Indian communities.
Walcott advocates the creation of a language which is an “electric fusion of the old
and the new.” This fusion or hybrid formation is celebrated in Walcott’s poetry.
Firstly, it is celebrated through metaphors. Though these metaphors are in English,
they capture the natural landscape of the Caribbean Islands in an extremely vivid
manner. The layered metaphor of the threshing of grains and the appearance of the
dust as ibises in “A Far Cry from Africa” is an apt example- “Threshed out by beaters,
the long rushes break / In a white dust of ibises…”

Other examples include the metaphor of the osprey’s cry in “Names” and the
metaphors of the sea in “The Sea is History.” This creation of the hybrid language
and culture is seen in Walcott’s poems as empowering. In “Names,” the palms of
Caribbean Islands are seen as greater than Versailles since no man has made them and
no man shall destroy them, “except the worm, who has no helmet, / but always the
emperor”. The comparison of the Caribbean people to worms is significant for it
represents the power of supposedly trivial beings.
Another way in which hybridity is celebrated in Walcott’s poems is through
polyphony. As one is aware, Walcott is a well-known dramatist besides being a poet.
A number of his poems are very dramatic in their use of imagery and voice.

The poem, A Far Cry from Africa creates the binary of Orientalism and depicts the
poet’s inner conflict, owing to his mixed origins. It focuses on the brutalities of
colonization both in Africa as well as the Caribbean islands. The title itself is very
significant and can be read in more than one way. A “far cry” suggests the literal and
metaphorical distance between him and Africa. Thus, he looks at it from a third
person’s perspective.
It can also mean the cry or the shriek from the violence in Africa that the wind and
Kikuyu has brought him from the distant lands of Africa. Another meaning can be the
paradox that African paradise has been tampered with and is actually the sight of
inhuman slaughters. The poem opens with the imagery of massive bloodshed in
America, which was the result of the clash of British power and Kenyan rebellion.
However, he cannot bring himself to sympathize with any side because he loves his
African roots but also his English education that has enabled him to understand all these
aspects of imperialism and colonization. He observes how colonization has reduced the
Africans to the status of savages that must be ‘hunted’. He then condemns the colonial
ideologies of apparently rational thinking:
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
The last two lines of the first stanza compare the Africans with the Jews and Walcott
invokes not just the Biblical imagery but also the disturbance in the Nazi Germany
during the Second World War.
The second stanza examines Africa’s side and how the Africans have been bestialized.
The cries of the ibises can either stand for the cry of pain or for the cry of civilization.
He says that Africa has survived since the birth of mankind. He refers to the white ibis
which is found in the Americas and tries to connect it with Africa as being the land of
civilization since the dawn of mankind. He then mentions the drum beating tradition and
says that the cultural richness of African tribes has been dismissed as irrational by the
colonizers. He celebrates the hybridization of the many cultures that assimilate together
to make Africa and the West Indies. He creates the binary between the colonizer and the
colonized by calling them superman and gorilla respectively. He cites Spain to indicate
either the tensions in the Spanish Civil War or the discoveries of the Americas by
Columbus. Thus, he again connects his European and Caribbean identities.
The poem ends with the poet asking the reader five different questions, pertaining to
his conflicted cultural identity. He says that he is torn between the English language and
the oppression of the colonizers on his homeland. He says that he cannot turn a blind
eye to the slaughter that they have carried out in Africa but can also not abandon his
English education. He, therefore, implies that he will always be located somewhere
between the two cultures – that he is both the gorilla and the superman. He says that his
historical location originates from Africa but his present revolves around his English
literacy which gives him the power to subvert the colonial structure by using the
colonizer’s language and criticize his own malpractices. A Far Cry from Africa is more
of a pessimistic account but it weighs colonization in the scales of both the Caribbean
land and Africa. It provides an objective account of both and leaves it open to the readers
to interpret this friction between his cultural identities.

The poem, Names has been divided into two parts. The title signifies the abstract entity
of name, which can stand for two things – nomination and domination. While the first
section talks about nomination, from the perspective of the natives, the second part
depicts the idea of domination through naming. The poem celebrates Walcott’s mixed
ancestry as he moves back and forth between Europe and the West Indies.
 The poem begins with his “race”, which could either mean his ethnic identity or his
race, his contest with himself to find his identity. The poem says that his race
(incorporating both meanings) originated with the sea, when the European forces had
not yet found his homeland.
with no nouns, and with no horizon,
He talks about having “no nouns”, which can be read as him shedding any cultural
identities that he could be associated with. His consciousness is a tabula rasa, devoid of
any names and recognized only by the pronoun, “I”. He repeatedly mentions the horizon,
which stands for the binary between Europe and the Caribbean, between the self and the
Other. He says that the Caribbean lands have existed long before these binaries halved
them. This repetition suggests a continual search which has no results. He has “no
memory” and “no future” because his journey has transcended the barrier of time. The
pronoun “I” can mean multiple things. It can stand for Identity, or the Individual
consciousness or the sound of a shriek which is uttered so as to make existence felt. The
sea-eagle imagery is invoked to assert that the Caribbean existence is not two-
dimensional – the sea provides them the depth. The last stanza depicts the poet’s attempt
to mark out an identity which the sea erases. This can be read as the sea’s negation of
the identity given to him by the colonizer. Thus, the indifference arises from the
enforced European ideals upon the Caribbean lands.
Similar to A Far Cry from Africa, Walcott tries to give an objective account so as to
depict the multi-cultural facet of the West Indies. The second section looks at the
anxieties of the colonizer. Since he is overpowered by nostalgia for their homeland, he
is unable to appreciate the beauty of the Caribbean islands. He cannot see beyond the
“uncombed forest” and the “uncultivated grass”. The colonizer yearns for the glories
and the grandeur of Versailles, Castille and Valencia and thus, his consciousness of
foregrounded by the poet. Since he cannot find these glorious structures there, he tries
to cope up by naming monuments in West Indies after them and thereby creating an
“imaginary homeland”. Here the natives become the Other as the colonizer has to deal
with his acidic and sour memories. The last three stanzas invoke the power dynamics in
the colonial society. The natives become children and the colonizer takes on the role of
the teacher who teaches them about their own country through a Eurocentric view. The
natives, on the other hand, subvert the colonial authority by using their creole accent
and tone to utter the European and English words. Thus, the power keeps on shifting.
The worm from A Far Cry from Africa comes in here again who takes over the colonizer
as their ruler.
tell me, what do they look like?
Answer, you damned little Arabs! Sir, fireflies caught in molasses.
In these concluding lines, Walcott cites another imagery to denote the relationship
between the colonizer and the natives. The natives, here, produce their own images and
metaphors in the colonizer’s language, thereby attaining the Adept part in the process of
colonization. The fireflies are the Caribbean people who are stuck in the history of
colonization, or the molasses. Even though they are caught in it, they have their own
light. This light might not be constant but it is their own, which frees them from the
authority of the colonizer.

The Sea is History examines the poet’s sense of disillusionment with the idea of his
origin. He looks for answers to his cultural and ethnic dilemmas and alludes to historical
and mythological tales to find metaphors that can explain this disillusionment. He is
aware of the fact that the blacks do not have any history of their own so through this
poem, he tries to provide them a historical backbone. This poem also propagates the
homogeneity of the Caribbean islands, and urges the natives to celebrate this multi-
cultural existence which the British do not have. It also draws a demarcation between
the Old Testament and the New Testament of the Bible and draws parallels between
them and the history of slavery.
The poem begins with the colonizer asking the natives where their grand monuments
are and whether they have any glorious history of their own.
Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is history.
In the above lines, the poet calls the sea “the grey vault”, which means coffin. After this,
instead of directly explaining the significance of this, he begins telling the origins of
slavery in the Americas. He alludes to the hardships suffered by the slaves who were
brought to the Americas in the fifteenth century. By doing so, he gives evidence of
having history dating back to the Renaissance.
like a light at the end of the tunnel, the lantern of a caravel, and that was Genesis.

Here, he is talking about the origin of slavery that marked the Caribbean islands. He also
refers to Mayflower, the first ship (or caravel) that was used by the Spanish and the
Portuguese to bring the slaves from Africa to the Americas. The tunnel and light imagery
used here stands for the inhuman conditions that the slaves were exposed to in their
journey to America. Thus, he is condemning the colonizer for these inhuman slave
practices. Similar to the Biblical imagery of Genesis, he then talks about the Exodus of
Israelites from Egypt as well as the Jews. In this way, he refers to the violent history of
Europe and also says that the shark (colonizer) has overshadowed the remains of their
own lineage which are buried in the sea. Therefore, the sea becomes the Genesis of the
natives. Similarly, he alludes to the 1692 Port Royal earthquake and the large fish
swallowing Jonah, and says that the Caribbean Renaissance is resting safe in the sea.

He then shifts to the New Testament and the animal imageries occur again. However,
in this part, the varying animal metaphors stand for the diversity in the West Indies. As
Ajanta Dutt says, through this section, Walcott is trying to provide a voice to the natives.
...in the salt chuckle of rocks… of History, really beginning

In the above lines, Walcott talks about the Caribbean islands coming together,
celebrating their mixed cultural identities and becoming one, unified consciousness. He
urges them to write a new history together. He says that earlier the Caribbean was the
sight of history writing, but now it will become history, which is dissociated from all
these colonial influences.

In conclusion, Walcott, in his poems, explores the racial, colonial, and cultural tensions
inherent in the Caribbean history and identity. Through different references and
allusions, Derek Walcott depicts the colonial power structures in the West Indies. He
uses English to subvert the colonial sovereignty of the British by showing how the
natives learning the European languages is a way to gradually take the upper hand. By
repeatedly using the animal imagery, especially the fireflies, he investigates the origins
of the Caribbean history and provides them a new identity of their own. Talking about
his mixed lineage, Walcott says, “The problem is to recognize our African origins but
not to romanticize them.” Thus, these poems explore the racial, colonial and cultural
tensions inherent in Caribbean history and identity and by doing so, it celebrates the
hybridity and cosmopolitanism of Caribbean culture.

****************************************************************

Works cited –
Journal of Caribbean Literatures - David E. Hoegberg

Karuna Rajeev – Derek Walcott

Hamner, Robert D., “Mythological Aspects of Derek Walcott’s Drama,” in Ariel

Fragmented Identities in Derek Walcott’s A Far Cry from Africa: A Psychological Conflict - Shivender Rahul

Derek Walcott - Eden Baugh

Collymore, Frank A. “An Introduction to the Poetry of Derek Walcott”

McCorkle, James. “Re-Mapping the New World: The Recent Poetry of Derek Walcott”.
King, Bruce. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life