19 Chapter II Derek Walcott: Poet as ‘Schizophrenic’ Schizophrenia, in psychology, is a mental state in which a person is wracked by tension due to contradictory feelings. In his poem “Codicil’ Walcott metaphorically describes himself as “Schizophrenic wrenched by two styles” (CP 97). In fact, a detailed analysis of Walcott’s poetry and plays clearly reveals that he is a person full of ambivalent and contradictory disposition. This schizophrenia in Walcottian sensibility is the product of his genealogical, cultural and linguistic background. In “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” an autobiographical essay published in 1970, Walcott writes of the two worlds that informed his childhood: Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles; that being poor, we already had the theater of our lives… . In that simple schizophrenic boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, the outward life of action and dialect. (Dream 4) Walcott’s poetic and dramatic works are evidently an offshoot of his schizophrenic situation, i.e. they arise from a struggle between two cultural heritages which he has harnessed to create a unique “creolized” style. His early poems, published in the late 1940’s, reveal his western influences where he is committed to make a verse “legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe and Milton” ( Dream 31).
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19
Chapter II
Derek Walcott: Poet as ‘Schizophrenic’
Schizophrenia, in psychology, is a mental state in which a person is
wracked by tension due to contradictory feelings. In his poem “Codicil’
Walcott metaphorically describes himself as “Schizophrenic wrenched by two
styles” (CP 97). In fact, a detailed analysis of Walcott’s poetry and plays
clearly reveals that he is a person full of ambivalent and contradictory
disposition. This schizophrenia in Walcottian sensibility is the product of his
genealogical, cultural and linguistic background. In “What the Twilight Says:
An Overture,” an autobiographical essay published in 1970, Walcott writes of
the two worlds that informed his childhood:
Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing
could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted
backyards and moulting shingles; that being poor, we already
had the theater of our lives… . In that simple schizophrenic
boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, the
outward life of action and dialect. (Dream 4)
Walcott’s poetic and dramatic works are evidently an offshoot of his
schizophrenic situation, i.e. they arise from a struggle between two cultural
heritages which he has harnessed to create a unique “creolized” style. His
early poems, published in the late 1940’s, reveal his western influences where
he is committed to make a verse “legitimately prolonging the mighty line of
Marlowe and Milton” ( Dream 31).
20
The English and the American critics have given mixed reactions about
Walcott’s use of Western literary traditions during the first phase of his poetic
career whereas he has drawn criticism from Caribbean commentators who
accuse him of neglecting native forms in favour of the Western literary canon,
the legacy of his colonial oppressors.
His early works clearly indicate the influence of the English poetic
tradition, and his entire oeuvre resonates with the traditional concerns of poetic
form. However, a dispassionate study of his poetry will reveal to us that,
though sometimes it betrays a significant relation to tradition, it also manifests
an elegant blending of sources: European and American, Caribbean and
Latino, classical and contemporary. Some of his earlier works, including In a
Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, reveal a poet who follows the European
tradition but, at the same time, is mindful of West Indian landscapes and
experiences. From the very beginning of his poetic career Walcott has been
conscious of developing an idiom adequate to his subject matter. In “What the
Twilight Says: An Overture,” Walcott describes his desire to fill his plays such
as Ti-Jean and his Brothers and Dream on Monkey Mountain 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” (Dream 17). His play Dream on Monkey Mountain makes
an effective use of the native dialects. It also satirizes the bureaucratic idiom of
colonialism. As for Walcott, language becomes a route to racial identity and a
necessary resource for the survival of West Indian communities.
21
During the 1960s, though Walcott did much for the development of the
Little Carib Theatre and the rewriting of earlier dramas, his primary focus was
on poetry. The four volumes he published between 1964 and 1973 continued
his exploration and expansion of traditional forms and at the same time
concerned themselves with the position of the poet in the post colonial world.
His collection, The Castaway and Other Poems, published in 1964, draws on
the figure of Robinson Crusoe and suggests the isolation of the artist. In these
poems Walcott through his poetic personae, presents himself as a castaway
from both his ancestral cultures, African and European, stemming from both,
belonging to neither. Walcott’s castaway is a new Adam whose task is to name
his world. This castaway is a poet who creates and gives meaning to
nothingness. The Gulf, another collection of his reveals the poet’s breach
between himself and all he loves, between his adult consciousness and his
childhood memories, between his international interest and the feeling of
community in his homeland. Another Life, Walcott’s book-length
autobiographical poem, too explores these themes.
This schizophrenic situation is the main concern in his dramatic
writings in the 1970s as well. They address the problems of Caribbean identity
against the backdrop of political and social strife. They try to find solutions to
these problems in the individual. The plays of this period, The Joker of Seville
(1974), O Babylon! (1976) Remembrance (1977) and Pantomime (1978)
address these issues. Remembrance deserves our special attention in the sense
that its protagonist, Albert Perez Jordan, a school master, finds himself in a
schizophrenic situation which resembles that of the poet. Jordan lost his elder
son in 1970. There is the Black Power uprising and he remains distressed by a
22 political commitment he cannot understand. Unable to connect with his family
or with his own past, Jordan finds himself divided between an older generation
committed to tradition and a younger one playing at revolution.
His comedy Pantomime, too, is noteworthy in this respect as the
characters in the play confront similar divisions but here the issue of race
comes to the fore. In this play Walcott reverses the Crusoe-Friday roles and
the reversal highlights the fraught relationship that binds the black to the
white, master to slave, colonizer to colonized. In the play Jackson, a black
hotel servant, plays Crusoe and his white employer plays Friday. Jackson’s
ability to synthesize his calypso talents with a poetic use of the English
language suggests a respect for differences and a possibility for healing old
wounds. Through his persona Walcott here reveals his strategy to overcome
his schizophrenia through a careful fusion of diverse elements.
Walcott was born as a ‘Mulatto’, a person of mixed blood. As has
already been mentioned, he is the descendant of two white grandfathers and
two black grand mothers. His ‘mulatto angst’ takes its passionate expression in
the poem “A Far Cry from Africa,” which has been cited as an excellent
explication of his ambivalence. The subject of the poem is the bloody conflict
between the Mau-Mau revolutionaries and the British colonialists in Kenya.
Walcott perceives a remarkable parallel between the Mau-Mau−British
ideological conflict and his internal struggle to find cultural balance:
23
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of the British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live? (CP 18)
Regarding the predicament Walcott finds himself in, Carolyn Cooper
observes:
The ambiguity of the poem’s title demonstrates Walcott’s
ambivalence: The Mau-Mau revolution against British colonial
policy is a powerful cry, whose intensity distance cannot
diminish. The shared experience of British colonialism which
blacks in the Caribbean and in Kenya have survived, establishes
a bond of empathy. But despite that commonality of experience,
Walcott recognizes that his own experience is distinct, a far cry
from the Kenyan. He abhors the savagery of British colonialism
and the violence it elicits, yet he is bound to British culture
which has provided him the language he must use to indict it.
But Walcott develops from the simplistic either /or dualism of
his early career. The answer to the questions posed in “A Far
Cry from Africa” is that he cannot choose. (160)
24
In “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” an introductory essay to a
collection of his plays, Walcott carefully delineates three stages in his artistic
development. First, he withdraws himself into the world of English literature
which he perceives as another life. Then he moves into the peasant world with
its folk rhythms and vitality expressed in Creole; and finally he makes an
earnest attempt to synthesize the two cultures.
In his essay “Meanings” (1970) Walcott describes this creative cultural
synthesis as the positive legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean. He identifies
“formalism” and “exuberance” as two diverse and extreme temperaments
which have been fused in the Caribbean psyche:
I think that many of what are sneered at as colonial values are
part of the strength of the West Indian psyche, a fusion of
formalism with exuberance, a delight in both the precision and
power of language. We love rhetoric, and this has created a style,
a panache about life that is particularly ours. Our most tragic folk
songs and our most self-critical calypsos have a driving, life-
asserting force. Combine that in our literature with a long
experience of classical forms and you’re bound to have
something exhilarating; in the best actors in the company you can
see this astounding fusion ignite their style, this combination of
classic discipline inherited through the language, with a strength
of physical expression that comes from the folk music. (51)
25
This is Walcott’s manifesto, his pronounced objective, for the
expression of which he devotes his entire literary career, both dramatic and
poetic. What one must notice here is Walcott’s attitude towards effecting a
fusion of diverse elements. His charge that the exuberant folk music lacks
“classical discipline” and the notion that discipline is a literary virtue, may be
objectionable to a post-colonial critic but his call for synthesis or fusion cannot
be overlooked.
In his autobiographical poem Another Life Walcott describes the
painful contrast between himself and his alter ego, Gregorias, as a contrast of
the classical and romantic styles. He confesses his envy of Gregorias who
“abandoned apprenticeship / to the errors of his own soul” (CP 201). Though
Walcott had been an admirer of the Western classical canon at that time, he
had equally admired ‘the explosion of impulse’ (CP 201) in the works of
Gregorias, his friend and fellow artist. Though his work had no classical
discipline and had been grotesque, it had possessed an aboriginal force. What
Walcott seeks is the fusion of both styles:
I hoped that both disciplines might
by painful accretion cohere
and finally ignite. (CP 200-201)
This attitude of Walcott towards the unrefined and natural works of
Gregorias is a clear vindication of Walcott’s ambivalence. Though an
exponent of the classical discipline, Walcott, at the same time, admires the
untrained romantic explosion or the errors of Gregorias’ soul. This
ambivalence leads Walcott to the awareness that a deft fusion of the classical
26 style represented by the Western literary masters and the untrained romantic
style of artists like Gregorias would open up great vistas of development for
Caribbean literature.
Here Walcott recognizes the value of cultural and linguistic holism. But
this attitude is not typical of St. Lucia, his native island. Mervyn Alleyne in
“Language and Society in St. Lucia” describes a fundamental schism
between Creole and English, which has its origins in the master-servant
polarity of the period of slavery:
The two languages which face each other in St. Lucia are clearly
different in nature and function. Creole incorporates the entire
history of the indigenous people of the island. Consciousness of
this history is achieved through Creole, as this language is the
repository of the folklore of the people. Creole is the vehicle for
proverbs; for handing down traditional popular customs
ceremonies, rituals. Traditional techniques, by which a large
percentage of the population still lives, are expressed in Creole.
On the other hand, English is the vehicle of very formal and
artificial occasions; it is the medium through which all official,
national and inherited institutions function. Creole is used to
describe the non-official, private and fundamental mores of the
people; . . . As one expects, Creole is a more living, more
creative and more spontaneous means of expression. English as
spoken in St. Lucia is very conservative and particularly among
people who have no opportunity of speaking it with Standard
English speakers and whose contact with English has been
exclusively through the school, it is very literary. (211)
27
From Mervyn Alleyne’s observation it is clear that there exists a
cultural dualism in St. Lucia. Franz Fanon’s renowned work Black Skin, White
Masks explores the potential of such pervasive cultural dualism to create
psychological conflict in the colonized Afro-Caribbean who unconsciously
idealises European culture and debases the African and is unable to reconcile
himself to his African origins. Fanon states:
To come back to psycho-pathology, let us say that the Negro
lives an ambiguity that is extraordinarily neurotic. At the age of
twenty – at the time that is, when the collective unconscious has
been more or less lost or is resistant at least to being raised to the
conscious level – the Antillean recognizes that he is living an
error. Why is that? Quite simply because – and this is very
important – the Antillean has recognized himself as a Negro, but
by virtue of an ethical transit, he also feels (collective
unconscious ) that one is a Negro to the degree to which one is
wicked, sloppy, malicious, instinctual. Everything that is
opposite of these Negro modes of behaviour is white. This must
be recognized as the source of Negrophobia in the Antillean. In
the collective unconscious, black = ugliness, sin, darkness,
immorality. (169)
Though the main concern of this chapter is the schizophrenia expressed
in Walcott’s poetry, it may not be proper to ignore his play Dream on Monkey
Mountain, undoubtedly his most renowned play. It deals with the same
subject. The play graphically records the neurotic epidermalization of
28 inferiority in the Negro, which Fanon has dealt with thoroughly in his work.
The play treats the psychic disequilibrium of its central character, Makak, the
monkey man, the derided charcoal burner, who longs for the alchemical
transformation from coal to diamond. Two parallel plots have been developed
here. First, we have the literal story of Makak, who descends from Monkey
Mountain where he lives and from where he comes into town with his friend,
Moustique, to sell coal. They separate, and later in the day Makak finds his
friend drinking rum in a café. In a fit of rage Makak smashes up the café and is
arrested for his misdeed. He spends a night in jail, where he is taunted by the
jailer, Lestrade, and is released the next day. Then there is the complex
interweaving of this literal plot with the symbolic dream sequences. The
structural device employed here enables Walcott to dramatize Makak’s
tortured psyche.
Walcott deftly uses the dislocation of time sequences, the unannounced
shifting of locales, and the ambiguity of action–what is reality and what is
dream – all to evoke Makak’s disoriented personality. Cooper’s critical
observation of the play is very pertinent in this respect:
The ambiguity of the play’s ending makes Dream on Monkey
Mountain quite controversial. The play can be interpreted as a
parody of the messianic, millenarian black leaders such as
Marcus Garvey, who advocated repatriation for Africans in the
diaspora. But Makak’s retreat to the mist of Monkey Mountain,
to the imagination of his people, can also be interpreted as
Walcott’s metaphoric expression of the deeply embedded
29
cultural vision that haunts black people, deprived of a secure
sense of personal and communal identity. In the poem
“Laventville” Walcott poignantly describes the loss of ancestral
memories of the uprooted Africans in the Caribbean as a “deep,
amnesiac blow.” (163)
This loss of ancestral memory and the loss of identity are the
preoccupations of Walcott as a poet and playwright. The Antillean is a self–
imposed prisoner in his own cell / shell of amnesia. The poignancy of loss is
manifest in the following lines from “Laventille.”
Something inside is laid wide like a wound,
Some open passage that has cleft the brain,
some deep, amnesiac blow. We left
somewhere a life we never found
customs and gods that are not born again
some crib, some grill of light
clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld
us from that world below us and beyond,
and in its swaddling cerements we’re still bound.
(The Castaway 35)
Makak, the derided monkey man in the play, in fact, represents all
black people who have been deprived of their African ancestry and past and
who have therefore struggled to redeem the lost tradition to find the lost paths.
30
Through Makak, Walcott in the play undertakes a therapeutic process
of recovery from that ‘amnesiac blow’ experienced by the black all over the
world. In fact, it is apt on the part of Walcott to undertake this task of healing
as he himself is a Mulatto, half English and half Negro, through his parental
lines.
Makak feels a need to reconnect with ancestral traditions and in this
sense his aspiration is similar to that of the old East Indian men marooned in
the West Indies, depicted by V. S. Naipaul in his novel A House for Mr.
Biswas. The novel portrays these old men at evening, in the twilight of their
years, caught in the crevices between cultures:
In the arcade of Hanuman House, grey and substantial in the dark,
there was already the evening assembly of old men, squatting on
sacks on the ground and on tables now empty of Tulsi store
goods, pulling at clay cheelums that glowed red and smelled of
ganja and burnt sacking. Though it was not cold, many had
scarves over their heads and around their necks; this detail made
them look foreign and, to Mr. Biswas, romantic. It was the time
of day for which they lived. They could not speak English and
were not interested in the land where they lived; it was a place
where they had come for a short time and stayed longer than they
expected. They continually talked of going back to India, but
when the opportunity came, many refused, afraid of the unknown,
afraid to leave the familiar temporariness. And every evening
they came to the arcade of the solid, friendly house, smoked, told
stories, and continued to talk of India. (194-95)
31
Walcott’s Poem “The Saddhu of Couva” too deals with the theme of the
East Indian, alienated from both the past and the present. Walcott, in this
poem, assumes the persona of an East Indian elder, a holy man, for whom
sunset is a particularly pensive time of day. The day’s end evokes a profound
doubt about the efficacy of faith in the old traditions:
When sunset, a brass gong,
vibrate through Couva,
is then I see my soul, swiftly unsheathed,
like a white cattle bird growing more small
over the ocean of the evening canes.
and I sit quiet, waiting for it to return
like a hog-cattle blistered with mud,
because, for my spirit, India is too far. (CP 372)
These old men are deprived of their memories of India. “India is too
far” indicates that not only India even the fragments of Indian culture that have
been preserved in the Caribbean are losing their iconic power in the ravishing
fire of time that consumes the past.
I knot my head with a cloud,
my white moustache bristle like horns,
my hands are brittle as the pages of Ramayana.
Once the sacred monkeys multiplied like branches
in the ancient temples; I did not miss them,
because these fields sang of Bengal,
behind Ramlochan Repairs there was Uttar Pradesh;
32
but time roars in my ears like a river,
old age is a conflagration
as fierce as the cane fires of crop time. (CP 372-73)
The following lines aptly portray the diminishing faith in the gods and
the nostalgia of the aged:
Suppose all the gods too old,
Suppose they dead and they burning them,
supposing when some cane cutter
start chopping up snakes with a cutlass
he is severing the snake–armed god,
and suppose some hunter has caught
Hanuman in his mischief in a monkey cage.
Suppose all the gods were killed by electric light? (CP 373-74)
The old Saddhu painfully recognizes the pervasive loss of respect for
the past. He ejaculates: “There are no more elders./ Is only old people.” Then
he retires, like Makak to Monkey Mountain: “I ascend to my bed of sweet
sandalwood” (374).
Cooper identifies the strategy adopted by Walcott in his search for a
solution to the Caribbean problem of cultural identification in a pluralistic
society:
The routinization of the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica is a
classic solution to the larger Caribbean problem of cultural
identification in a pluralistic society; one recognizing the cultural
ambiguities of his environment, Walcott is able to transform the
33
paradoxes of his Caribbean heritage into vibrant art. His early
poems, the privately published collections of the late forties and
early fifties, awkwardly articulate the young poet’s gropings to
define himself in relationship to the ubiquitous fragments of
British, French and African Culture. (166)
Walcott often uses images and metaphors to explain his search for
identity and the poet’s task for effecting the unification of Caribbean
sensibility. He draws on the image of the biblical swineherd/prodigal son to
express his sense of cultural alienation.
And the swineherd, whose pastoral seclusion ridicules
The dry black city, dies of fattened conceit
Suffering is applauded, encouraged and dissolves
In a kind English woman’s smile among the olives,
They fawned over the fact my mind was maimed,
Dissecting at each tea-party the surprising abortion
Of my contradicting colour. (Epitaph 29-30)
Walcott, being a perceptive analyst of his own poetry, describes his
early self conscious works in the following words: “My first poems and plays
expressed this yearning to be adopted, as the bastard longs for his father’s
household. I saw myself legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe,
of Milton, but my sense of inheritance was stronger because it came from
estrangement” (Dream 31).
However, later, Walcott liberated himself from the clutches of the
tradition of English literature and paid attention to the voices of the indigenous
culture. Commenting on his transformation he recalls how “he began marathon
34 poems on Greek heroes which ran out of breath, lute songs, heroic tragedies,
but these rhythms, the salvation army parodies, the Devil’s Christmas songs
and the rhythms of the street itself were entering the pulse beat of the wrist”
(Dream 32).
Schizophrenia is discernible even in the use of language. The poet is
divided in his loyalty towards English and the Vernacular. During the second
phase of his poetic career Walcott employs Creole vocabulary to a
considerable extent. A survey of his poetry from 1948 to 1979 reveals a high
incidence of Creole lexical items. But here too Cooper notices subtle
differences in the use of Creole terminology between the early and the later
poems of the period. Her observation in this regard is worth noting:
But what is significant is that in the early poems the use of
Creole is normally limited to the realistic representation of the
idiolect of a reported Creole speaker. It is not the voice of the
poet himself that speaks in Creole. Though one cannot assume
that the personae of the poems are identical with Walcott, it is
clear that the personae of these early poems do not normally
speak in Creole. The poem “Pocomania,” in the early collection
In a Green Night, clearly demonstrates the separation of the two
poetic voices. The first two stanzas express the point of view of
the worshippers at a pocomania ritual – an African-derived,
indigenous religion. The use of “de” for “the” and “bredren” for
“brethren” indicates a Creole sensibility. Except for one
additional “de” in the fourth stanza, the rest of the poem
35
proceeds in English, and ends with a comment on the naiveté of
the deluded worshippers, evading truth in their escapist rituals:
“Have mercy on these furious lost./whose life is praising death
in life” (In a Green Night 35). The voice of indictment is
English: The Creole and English perspectives confront each
other and diverge. (167)
But in Walcott’s later poetry one comes across a point of convergence.
The poem “Origins” is noteworthy in this respect. Here, Walcott presents the
point of view of the New World writer who is quite convinced of his creative
potential. If the young Walcott’s concerns had been the loss of standards and
the insecurity about the quality of indigenous accomplishments, the later
Walcott has now been allayed of the doubt elicited by the setting sun of the
empire. Now, the poet uses the Caribbean Creoles with great confidence and it
indicates that his sensibility is no longer dissociated. The NewWorld
landscape generates its language, its unique metaphors, which the poetic
imagination liberates:
Was it not then we asked for a new song,
As Colon’s vision gripped the berried branch?
For the names of bees in the surf of white frangipani,
With hard teeth breaking the bitter almonds of consonants,
Shaping new labials to the curl of the wave,
Christening the pomegranate with a careful tongue,
Pommes de Cythere, bitter Cytherean apple. (CP 14)
36
The poet has undergone a transformation of consciousness. He is
engaged in a process of giving new names to old social relationships. The title
poem of The Star-Apple Kingdom presents a Caribbean politician engaged in
the arduous task of social reconstruction. The central character in the poem,
fashioned after Jamaica’s nationalist leader, Michael Manley, attempts to bring
the Makaks of the Caribbean from the fringes of national consciousness:
Strange, that the rancour of hatred hid in that dream
of slow rivers and lily-like parasols, in snaps
of fine old colonial families, curled at the edge
not from age or from fire or the chemicals, no, not at all,
but because, off at its edges, innocently excluded
stood the groom, the cattle boy, the house maid, the gardeners,
the tenants, the good Negroes down in the village,
their mouths in the locked jaw of a silent scream. (CP 384)
But, here the visionary politician is seen as caught between the devil
and the deep sea. His task of making history is made more difficult since the
naive optimism of the poor who expect miracles and the cynicism of the rich
who think miracles impossible cannot be converged into a common point of
agreement. The poet, too, like his protagonist, is caught between these two
diverging predicaments:
. . . [his soul] entered a municipal wall
stirring the slogans that shrieked his name: SAVIOUR!
and others: LACKEY! he melted like a spoon
through the alphabet soup of CIA, PNP, OPEC,
37
that resettled once he passed through with this thought:
I should have foreseen those seraphs with barbed–wire hair,
beards like burst mattresses, and wild eyes of garnet,
who nestled the Coptic Bible to their ribs, would
call me Joshua, expecting him to bring down Babylon
by Wednesday, after the fall of Jericho; yes, yes,
I should have seen the cunning bitterness of the rich
who left me no money but these mandates (CP 389)
Walcott presents his childhood vision of the star apple kingdom, the
mythical submerged city of dreams, which can restore faith: