Let me begin then, on a discordant note, as I struggle with my thoughts on Derek Walcott. I have read him as a student of literature and an anti-historian in the last decade, I have read him as one who writes myth when no history is available, I have read him as a torn and stricken feminist. And I have tried to make sense of the terrible beauty that he has offered the world at a time when decolonisation was still more theory than praxis.
Jacobin/Jacobean
In India, English Literature is a much prized disciplinary bent in college. We call our majors our subject or our discipline. What should mean a branch of knowledge then carries with it a double connotation, that of obedience.
I have wondered for years whether various methods of studying literature can ever make it disciplined. For surely, literature escapes definition when you seize it with both hands. The task of the great writer is to disobey, to resist, to challenge. The truths that anthropology or sociology cannot hope to fathom must be expressed.
Who will speak truth to power? Who will extricate the buried language of memories that are almost forgotten, but not quite? Surely it cannot be the professional historian who looks for archives. And yet, at 18, how far does one understand that there are experiential realities that have no visible archives?
To answer this question (albeit partly, or perhaps to not answer it at all) I turned to Walcott’s first play Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes – a historical one, on the slaves who became king of Haiti: Henri Christophe and Dessalines. Christophe, haunted by the memory of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Christophe, who is courageous and resourceful. Christophe, who in turn becomes cruel.
On one hand we have the Black Jacobins, the Haitian Revolution of the heady 1790s. On the other, working almost like prolepsis, is the form of the Jacobean tragedy. It is almost as if the Jacobeans foreshadowed the intrigues, the cruelty, the haunting tragedy of Christophe who must kill Dessalines, whom L’Ouverture disapproved of. Revolutionary violence becomes a vicious cycle of death in which the tragedy of the individual towers over the rest. The play begins with Hamlet: “The cease of majesty/Dies not alone but like a gulf doth draw/What’s near with it…”
The intertwined histories of the French and Haitian Revolutions would be written about by scholars in the years to come. Recent scholarship in the years after CLR James’s breakthrough book on the Black Jacobins have placed Haiti not on the fringes of the age of revolution but at its very epicentre. Yet the cunning wordplay of Jacobin/Jacobean is there to remind us of the role of English literature in the architecture of the colonised self and display to us how the fashioning of this 20th century literary self (much like the history of the Enlightenment and revolutionary thought) is a history of connections and entanglements.
Every post-colonial writer enacts himself as a schizophrenic and delusional Hamlet in the Western print market, caught between audiences and languages, between the tangible violence of a colonial past and the hybrid multiplicity of the present. In this present, we must still write to resist global and capitalist structures of reading and writing and education, even as we get co-opted into its glistening and uneasy whiteness. The malcontent, now a real or imaginary immigrant, has (like Hamlet) only the ghost of an origin.
“We contemplate our spirit by the detritus of the past.”
Walcott’s obsession with Robinson Crusoe throughout his literary corpus echoed and paralleled his metaphor of the sea as a constant trope. It is perhaps not strange that the abridged Robinson Crusoe, along with the adventure stories written by later 19th century writers of the Empire such as Kipling and Stevenson, is a staple for Indian children.
Tales of survival teach us grit and determination to make it in the face of insurmountable odds. Yet Crusoe is foundational and also the most terrifying, because he is overwhelmingly alone. In Coetzee’s postcolonial retelling Foe, the story expands to include a woman’s voice.
In Walcott’s work, however, Crusoe remains the story of the male exile and the castaway who makes something constructive and beautiful out of that “natural loneliness”. And, in fact, in Walcott’s Nobel acceptance speech, Crusoe is no more a white man seeking to make terra nullus habitable. He is instead, transformed. Crusoe now is the poet who has emerged from the Antillean experience which is the survival of the Middle Passage and of indenture:
“The original language dissolves from the exhaustion of distance like fog trying to cross an ocean, but this process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process that the poet faces every morning of his working day, making his own tools like Crusoe, assembling nouns from necessity, from Felicity, even renaming himself. The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind.”
The myth of Crusoe being made positive can leave a woman rather uncomfortable, because the world of Robinson Crusoe is inordinately gritty, inordinately male. (Why is why Susan Barton in Foe provides an experience of Crusoe that provides an uneasy comfort as we challenge along with Coetzee a foundational and patriarchal myth.) When I first read Walcott in my first year at college, the scandal over his Oxford University professorship of poetry was yet to break out.
While some have attributed his withdrawal from the race to an alleged smear campaign run by Ruth Padel, his foremost competitor, the competition was a historic one. Would Oxford have its first woman or first Caribbean Nobel laureate as professor of poetry? The media projected Walcott’s withdrawal as the result of an elaborate attempt to besmirch his reputation, whereas his history of sexual harassment at Harvard University is well documented.
Amongst otherwise laudatory obituaries in international media, only a sole opinion piece in the New York Times questioned the deification of Walcott, undoubtedly a great writer but also a sexual predator. The two things, as I realise after a decade of reading and re-reading him, are not incommensurate by any standards and perhaps even consistent.
This is the visible poetry of the Antilles, then. Survival.
As someone who desires to write the history of a small and literate group of individuals in modern South Asia, I have often wondered at how many of my colleagues manage to write histories of South Asian people who did not write and ruminate as much as my historical protagonists, who are indeed conveniently located in the 19th and 20th centuries. My historical characters are politically and socially overly documented, indeed, overtly documented. Some of them indeed claimed to write for peasants as well meaning socialists. Being a literary historian however has made me appreciate how the distinctions between low and high literature, between orality and print, between manuscript and print, between minstrel and scribe, all of these was turned upside down in the colonial period.
The state writes the history of ordinary people from day to day and the seasons meld into one another. Even as we are all under increased surveillance, we have also collapsed into an amorphous mass. Meanwhile, our indigenous people are daily being displaced violently and live in grinding poverty and destitution even as successive post-colonial governments exploit the land for what it is worth.
We still wait, wait for revolution. Wait for change. Wait for each rock to split into each nation. We stare at the saffron clad bullfrogs to come baying at us for votes, and we gaze at the khaki mantis police killing imaginary terrorists. Even the furred caterpillar judges can no longer provide the equality we once hoped for in a land torn apart by religion and caste. We can only wait, and like Walcott, use a bewildered schizophrenic language to posit resistance.
Once upon a time indentured labourers were piled up in ships and sailed off across the Indian Ocean to Walcott’s country, the Caribbean. Some died, some survived. So it goes. We wait.
“...and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo
of History, really beginning.”