The Missing
Now as I watch the progress of the plague,0 AIDS The friends surrounding me fall sick, grow thin, And drop away. Bared, is my shape less vague ?Sharply exposed and with a sculpted skin?
I do not like the statue's chill contour, Not nowadays. The warmth investing me Led outward through mind, limb, feeling, and more In an involved increasing family.
Contact of friend led to another friend, IO Supple entwinement through the living mass
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258 6 / DEREK WALCOTT
Which for all that I knew might have no end, Image of an unlimited embrace.
I did not just feel ease, though comfortable: Aggressive as in some ideal of sport, 15 With ceaseless movement thrilling through the whole, Their push kept me as firm as their support.
But death?Their deaths have left me less defined: It was their pulsing presence made me clear. I borrowed from it, I was unconfined,
20 Who tonight balance unsupported here,
Eyes glaring from raw marble, in a pose Languorously part-buried in the block, Shins perfect and no calves, as if I froze Between potential and a finished work.
25 ?Abandoned incomplete, shape of a shape, In which exact detail shows the more strange, Trapped in unwholeness, I find no escape Back to the play of constant give and change.
Aug. 1987 1992
DEREK WALCOTT
b. 1930 Derek Walcott was born on the island of Saint Lucia in the British West Indies, where he had a Methodist upbringing in a largely Roman Catholic society. He was educated at St. Mary's College in Saint Lucia and the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He then moved to Trinidad, where he worked as a book reviewer, art critic, playwright, and artistic director of a theater workshop. Since the early 1980s he has also taught at a number of American colleges and universities, especially Boston University; in 1992 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a black poet writing from within both the English literary tradition and the history of a colonized people, Walcott has self-mockingly referred to his split allegiances to his Afro-Caribbean and his European inheritances as those of a 'schizophrenic,' a 'mongrel,' a 'mulatto of style.' His background is indeed racially and culturally mixed: his grandmothers were of African descent; his grandfathers were white, a Dutchman and an Englishman. Schooled in the Standard English that is the official language of Saint Lucia, Walcott also grew up speaking the predominantly French Creole (or patois) that is the primary language of everyday life (the island had traded hands fourteen times in colonial wars between the British and the French). In his poetry this cross-cultural inheritance is sometimes the source of pain and ambivalence, as when in 'A Far Cry from Africa' he refers to himself as being 'poisoned with the blood of both.' At other times it fuels a celebratory integration of multiple forms, visions, and energies, as in parts of his long poem Omeros, which transposes elements of Homeric epic from the Aegean to the Caribbean.
Even as a schoolboy Walcott knew he was not alone in his effort to sort through
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his vexed postcolonial affiliations. From a young age he felt a special affinity with Irish writers such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and J. M. Synge, whom he saw as fellow colonials?'They were the niggers of Britain'?with the same paradoxical hatred for the British Empire and worship of the English language. He has repeatedly asked how the postcolonial poet can both grieve the agonizing harm of British colonialism and appreciate the empire's literary gift. Walcott has also acknowledged other English and American writers?T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, and Robert Lowell?as enabling influences.
Over the course of his prolific career, Walcott has adapted various European literary archetypes (e.g., the Greek character Philoctetes) and forms (epic, quatrains, terza rima, English meters). He has ascribed his rigorous concern with craft to his youthful Protestantism. At once disciplined and flamboyant as a poet, he insists on the specifically Caribbean opulence of his art: 'I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.' Although much of his poetry is in a rhetorically elevated Standard English, Walcott adapts the calypso rhythms of a lightly creolized English in 'The Schooner Flight,' and he braids together West Indian English, Standard English, and French patois in Omeros. H e has a great passion for metaphor, by which he deftly weaves imaginative connections across cultural and racial boundaries. His plays, written in an accurate and energetic language, are similarly infused with the spirit of syncretism, vividly conjoining Caribbean and European motifs, images, and idioms.
A Far Cry from Africa
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu,1 quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.2
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
5 Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
'Waste no compassion on these separate dead!'
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
10 To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters,3 the long rushes break
