Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/101992/10199936.000

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                                                                                LITERATURE, Page 65

Bard of the Island Life


Derek Walcott's Nobel Prize rewards a career spent bringing
new subjects and cadences to the English tongue

By PAUL GRAY


    In handing out Nobel Prizes in Literature, the Swedish
Academy is sometimes accused of political correctness, of paying
undue attention to geopolitical and ethnic considerations. So
in one respect, last week's award to poet Derek Walcott was
unsurprising. Of mixed ancestry (African, Dutch, English),
Walcott was born 62 years ago on the tiny Windward Island of St.
Lucia in what was then the British West Indies. A native
Caribbean writer had never before won a Nobel Prize.

    But nobody suggested after the announcement was made that
Walcott had won the laurel, worth $1.2 million, on charity. He
has long been regarded as one of the finest living poets in
English, an accolade made even more impressive by the struggles
Walcott underwent to earn it.

    Both of his parents were schoolteachers, although his
father died when Walcott was only one, and the house in St.
Lucia that he, his twin brother and older sister grew up in was
filled with books. But the allure of the English language, and
of the English poetry recited aloud in his classrooms, came
tempered with a sense of exclusion from white British culture,
the resentment felt by a subject of an alien, occupying power.
In one of his early poems, he pondered his faraway African
heritage and asked,


    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?


    The tension between these divided loyalties animates
nearly all of Walcott's poetry. Rather than seeing his position
as impossible -- a poet on the margins of two mutually
exclusive cultures -- Walcott adopted this dilemma as one of his
principal subjects. In this respect, much of his work is
self-conscious; the point of contact between language and
experience is, of necessity, the presiding poet, and the more
difficult this contact is, the more visible the poet's struggle
becomes.

    But Walcott never whines or indulges in unseemly
confessions; he is, in fact, inordinately harsh with himself.
Sometimes he claims his material is beyond or beneath the power
of his art. In Gros-Ilet, he describes a small, desolate island
village and concludes, "This is not the grape-purple Aegean. /
There is no wine here, no cheese, the almonds are green, / the
sea grapes bitter, the language is that of slaves." At other
times, he is worried that his devotion to the English language
has severed him from the people of his childhood. The Light of
the World portrays the visiting poet on a bus filled with
village inhabitants:


    And I had abandoned them, I knew that there

    sitting in the transport, in the sea-quiet dusk,

    with men hunched in canoes, and the orange lights

    from the Vigie headland, black boats on the water;

    I, who could never solidify my shadow

    to be one of their shadows, had left them their earth,

    their white rum quarrels, and their coal bags,

    their hatred of corporals, of all authority.


    Such moments revivify nostalgia in the original, classical
Greek sense: nostos (return) plus algos (pain). For years
Walcott has divided his calendar equally between Boston, where
he teaches literature and creative writing at Boston University,
and a residence in Trinidad, a base for his frequent travels
elsewhere in the Caribbean. This regular shuttling between two
worlds has kept his poetry balanced between heartless skill and
artless passion. The speakers of Walcott's poems are half
strangers wherever they find themselves, not because they want
to be but because they have no choice. In The Lighthouse, an
island vendor approaches the poet and smiles: "Fifty? Then/ you
love home harder than youth!"

    This is a specific statement about a concrete emotion --
Walcott rarely generalizes or resorts to abstractions -- and yet
it echoes well beyond its given point of utterance. At their
most intense, Walcott's 10 volumes of poetry convey all the
strangeness and exotica of island life -- of poor, forgotten
people surrounded by water on a margin of the earth -- and make
the whole spectacle as familiar as the view across the street.

    It is misguided to praise poets for their subjects. Many
of them, like Walcott, had little choice in the matter. What
poets do with their inheritances means everything. And Walcott's
language has evolved from his early, rather stilted imitations
of English poets into an instrument of marvelous flexibility:
capable of grand, sweeping imagery but also of harsh
interruptions and interjections, slang, pidgin and Creole patois
and subtle Caribbean syncopations. The combined effect is a
verbal radiance, of scenes illuminated by "a moon so bright /
you can read palms by it."