THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, Oct. 1, 1994 TAG: 9409300053
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E01 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Keith Monroe, staff writer
LENGTH: Long : 362 lines
WHEN DEREK WALCOTT was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, the citation stated that the West Indies had found in him their great poet. True, but only part of the story.
The prize was recognition that Walcott, who will present a reading of his poetry at ODU's 17th Annual Literary Festival on Monday, is no mere regional writer. He's a world figure. A poet, yes, but also a playwright for almost 40 years. His stage adaptation of ``The Odyssey'' previewed Friday night at Washington's Arena Stage (It can be seen through Nov. 6).
Walcott's Caribbean roots go deep, but he long has divided his time between the islands and the United States.
He's a complex man, in other words. In one famous quatrain, a Walcott character describes himself in terms that could also apply to the poet:
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea.
I had a sound colonial education.
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation
He's not nobody. Walcott was born in 1930 on St. Lucia, then a British colony in the Lesser Antilles. His schoolteacher father died when Walcott was very young. He was raised by his mother, the headmistress of the island's Methodist Infant's School, and attended the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.
The ``sound colonial education'' was Walcott's birthright as a citizen of the British Empire in its waning days. Because of it, he grew up loving not just the sea but also Latin and Greek and English literature. Echoes abound in his work.
Walcott is the poet of a world that he has described as
``equally divided
between rich and poor, between North and South,
between white and black, between two Americas. . . .''
Walcott now spends just the fall semesters teaching at Boston College. From January through September, he's in the islands. He founded a theater company in Trinidad almost 40 years ago. He's also a lifelong painter, and the sense of the visible world is strong in his poems. He spoke from his home in Boston in a deep voice with a hint of the lilting inflection of the West Indies.
You're coming to Old Dominion to give a poetry reading. Do you have a set performance, or is each occasion different?
Sometimes if I get to an audience and I feel certain things will work better, I may change. It depends on what I feel. I would like to stay pretty close to my opening plan.
How do you choose which poems you'll read?
Some poems are more effective. They may be more dramatic than the others. It doesn't mean because it goes down better dramatically that it's better than another one that's very quiet. Everything depends on the quality of the audience and the reception things are getting. You can get a pretty quick sense, once you're on, the kind of vibrations that are there.
How did winning the Nobel Prize change your life?
It eased a lot of financial pressure because I was able to buy some land and build something in St. Lucia. In terms of the attendant publicity that goes with it, it was very exacting. The mail is still pretty heavy and the requests for appearances. It became extremely hectic.
Did it have any effect on you as an artist?
No, because I can always go to the Caribbean and work. I always make sure that I work. I had to measure out how much I could do. And the fact that you may have been given an international award doesn't mean when you sit down and judge your own work that the judgment of others is the right or the best thing to go by.
A dramatic version of ``The Odyssey'' is on stage in Washington. Tell us about that.
It was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and they did it at Stratford and also at the Barbican Theatre in London. And what I wanted to do was to make sure that I told the story the way Homer constructed it. Of course, you can't do the whole book on stage and I made certain decisions, certain adaptations closer to a contemporary view of ``The Odyssey.'' But basically my responsibility, I felt, was to set down the story the way Homer had told it.
Many poets have been attracted to the stage, haven't they?
I don't think enough American poets are attracted to the theater. I think, for instance, the American musical form is a very poetic form in the sense that it has lyric structure in the songs. It also has the possibility of writing dramatic verse for dialogue. And I think there's been a kind of calculated exclusion of the poet from the theater because people think that poetry is too removed from reality. Whereas, it is super-reality.
It's just unfortunate that the kind of poetry you get in most of these musicals is either very banal or mechanical in terms of its rhythms.
Despite the fact that you've written many plays and musicals, you are best known in America as a poet. You have gotten more attention as a playwright elsewhere. Why do you think that's so?
I think that immediately any of the plays I've done here are categorized as minority theater or black theater. Whereas the composition of a company in the Caribbean can be very multiracial. It could be Indian. It could be Syrian. It could be Chinese. It could be African. I think the immediate categorizing here has been as black theater. I don't mind that, but I'm just saying that I think it's just looked at as one aspect of minority theater.
What's the connection between poetry and theater?
The great plays are really great poems. Whether it's ``King Lear'' or ``Oedipus Rex,'' that's what they are. As well as being great poems, they have great narrative and great characters, but basically symphonically in terms of their architectonics that's what they all are, massive poems performed by characters. And the peak periods of theater have always been where there's been both poetry and theater - even if it's comic theater.
Most modern poets have written short lyrics. You have, too, but you've also written several book-length poems - ``Another Life'' and ``Omeros,'' for example. You have written narrative poems, song cycles, long autobiographical poems and mythic poems in which you speak almost as the voice of the Caribbean. Did you set out to do that?
They just grew, but on the other hand, there's a lot to say for the Caribbean. And if you think of it as a society that's been kept mute or has been unable to articulate itself for the last 300 years, then it's obvious that the amount that will have to be said will be considerable.
It sounds pompous, but I come from an island that is very beautiful. I love the people, but they can't articulate themselves clearly. So one has to be responsible about articulating what it is they go through. In that sense, I might feel I have a mission.
You're a Caribbean writer, but you have also called yourself ``a colonial upstart at the end of an empire.'' As such, you have borrowed liberally from Western literature. Crusoe and Othello and Achilles and Caliban put in appearances in your work, often in a West Indian context. Are you conscious of blending two traditions?
I don't think the question would arise if I were a European writer. It would not have arisen if I were an American or English writer. I think the sort of mild surprise is that, because I am a Caribbean writer, then people say ``Oh, I see, you're taking certain things and you are reinterpreting them as a Caribbean writer.''
But I don't think that my intelligence is less than some writer living in London or some writer living in America. And if such a writer did what I was doing, then that would be taken as part of the tradition. But the way it gets looked at is as someone trying to enter the club, someone trying to enter the tradition and seeking a benediction saying ``It's OK, he can become a member.'' Or ``He can't really join this club.'' But I haven't got time for that nonsense.
I am shocked and amused, but mainly I am shocked that anyone could call anybody a dead white European male. That comes out of the persistent stupidity of the academy.
But I don't feel offended by that because nobody's going to make me feel as a Caribbean writer that I musn't read Dante because he's a dead white European male. But, there you are. There's that kind of stupidity about a canon that you only encounter if you come into territory where there's a profession about literature in which critics and academics have to find something to make a living by.
So in one sense, you are just a writer who happens to have been born in the Caribbean, but like most writers you admit your head is ``a trash can full of print.''
I can't pretend that I haven't absorbed Nabokov or Chaucer. I'm more of a reader than a writer. I think every writer is more of a reader than a writer and what we put down is virtually what we read. We are shaped by what we read. What we express is really a summation of what experience we've had - of reading even more than of reality.
In your Nobel address, you complained that the Caribbean is sometimes looked on as ``a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed,'' as a place that is ``illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized.''
Does that mean you'd agree with Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, who says Latin America's complex culture may represent a new synthesis, a kind of model for the 21st century?
Yeah, I think so. I think optimistically what used to be looked at as miscegenation is now called multiculturalism. That is certainly a human example very evident in the Caribbean.
We always keep saying in Trinidad all these races live together quite amicably. And this is an actual physical proof of the fact that Muslims and Hindus don't have to slaughter one another. You have Lebanese as a minority, but what happens in the Middle East doesn't happen here. They can't afford it. It doesn't happen. So you have a physical example of communal living.
And I think the same thing is true of the cultural blending that goes on, which is not just a mishmash. I think the shape of the thing that appears to be mongrelized and chaotic to an outside view is the very shape of the underlying culture.
So, are you upbeat about the future of the Caribbean?
If by the future you mean something practical in terms of industry and tourism, I'm very guarded about being optimistic about it. But in terms of the existence of a Caribbean culture that is diverse and very rich and extremely exciting, sure.
We have excellent writers for a small territory. And artists. And that's where my faith lies. In the theater and in the art of the Caribbean. I'm very contemptuous of the politics of the Caribbean. And the art has to continue fighting that kind of cynicism and indifference. So that's very hard. But in terms of the endeavor and the strength and the continuation of Caribbean art, I have a lot of faith in that.
You seem to be making a distinction that often appears in your poems, between history and art. You have said ``for every poet it is always morning in the world and history a forgotten insomniac night.'' And you've called art ``the bread that lasts when systems have decayed.''
I am quite opposed to the idea that those who don't know history will repeat it. That's a view of history that's very egocentric. I don't know what it means. I think the veneration of history permits atrocities. I think even if you could enter the mentality of a certain tribe, to say that `we are the sufferers, it's OK if we suffer,'' that gives permission in a sense for suffering.
What remorse has been learned from the Holocaust? There's no visible sign of remorse in human conduct from the Holocaust. So the Holocaust becomes a part of history. And because it becomes a part of history, it's possible to repeat it.
You've sometimes spoken as if the Caribbean, which has been swept over by history, has nevertheless escaped from it in a sense. You say, ``the sigh of History rises over ruins not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.''
I think that the whole concept of history, of a central idea of history, is that people in the fringe of history, outside the official history are supposed to go down a certain route because that's the way civilization has developed. Yet if you go down that certain route, naturally you are going to wind up a repetition or an imitation of what preceded you.
I consider the Caribbean valuable because it is new and because it is still in may ways virginal and spacious and nothing around reminds you of responsibility to history. That's what I think is optimistic about it. A chance to re-create.
Is that the reason you've been rather skeptical about development? You've spoken of the islands as being ``bulldozed and bowdlerized.'' And you have written,
And while they prayed for an economic miracle,
ulcers formed on the municipal portraits,
the hotels went up, and the casinos and brothels,
and the empires of tobacco, sugar and bananas. . .
Yes, but I've always made it clear that I'm not blaming the outsider, that I'm blaming the betrayers in the Caribbean. I'm blaming the governments who do that. If somebody wants to come and make a buck out of people working for very little money somewhere, I'm not blaming the person that comes to do it. I'm blaming the person who permits that kind of contract to happen.
So I've never just done the very corny, ordinary thing of saying it's a white man doing that or the American doing that. You've got to have collusion. You've got to have bribery. You've gotta have an agreement. And I've continued as much as I can to attack that kind of betrayal.
To understand the Caribbean, who should people read besides Derek Walcott?
They should read the best of the writers we have. They should read Jean Rhys to get a viewpoint from somebody who was a minority, a white woman. They should certainly read Naipaul.
Who are you reading presently?
I'm just reading Marquez's ``The General in His Labyrinth'' which I hadn't read before. And I'm enjoying it a lot.
Have you been influenced by the so-called magic realism of recent Latin American writers?
Sure. I used to worry about that. But if a writer leaves himself open even to contemporary influences, that's perfectly OK. It's very hard sometimes to make a distinction between a section of Ben Jonson and a section of Shakespeare or Kyd.
It's this 20th century thing that says each writer must have a particular tone and must be himself. It's this ego thing. But you can tell in terms of an epoch that it's almost interchangeable. What is absorbed in terms of a style is almost the concept or the thinking of an epoch. The writer is a sponge. There are themes and moods that are inescapable.
Through your work, you have made the Caribbean a part of literature. Walcott's West Indies has now become an imaginative landscape, like the Brontes' Yorkshire or Joyce's Dublin.
I don't know how imaginative it is. A friend of mine once came down to St. Lucia and said he thought before that I was an exuberant writer, but he saw I'm really a minimalist.
You really haven't gotten it, he said, it's much richer. And it's true. I can't capture the complete beauty of the Caribbean. And that's what it is. It's astonishingly so.
The sense of place is very important in your work. Are all writers in a sense provincial, writing about their own piece of ground?
It's almost a helpless condition. Each has a particular place that they venerate. It can be barren or desert or very lush. You think of Hardy's territory, obviously Faulkner. And if there's no particular place, that's what a writer may write about - the absence of a particular place.
I think I'm very blessed in the sense that I have always known from boyhood the exact particular place I want to be is St. Lucia. It's never been lost. I go there and live there and it's reconfirmed everyday that I'm there. So I'm lucky in that respect. I can paint there. I can write there. Not everybody has that. A lot of writers are drifters in a sense.
Do you think that's particularly true of American literature?
There used to be a penalty if you came from the Midwest, and now I imagine if you come from the Pacific coast there's something wrong with you as a writer.
There's a lot of American prejudice about American writers and their geography. Either you had to be dark and tortured and come from the deep South or be rational and luminous and come from New England. Between that was this bland territory called the Midwest. And so there has been a historical geographical prejudice about American writers in their own country.
The poet I really admire for remaining and trying to make something of the American experience is (Hart) Crane, who was very tough. And instead of looking to Europe, he looked toward the Pacific and tried to write ``The Bridge,'' which I think is a triumph of a poem even if he thinks it collapsed.
This may be a very pompous and impulsive statement, but I think if you had to have a kind of graphic representation of American literature in terms of epic design, it would simply be a solitary figure on the horizon.
The horizon is the desert or the plain, and the single figure is that of the cowboy or the wanderer. It could be from Fenimore Cooper if it's in New England or it could be Kerouac. But because of the space of the place, because of the immensity of the place and the freedom and charge associated with traveling toward that horizon, you get a sense of the West and a freedom and exhilaration and a taciturnity in terms of that hero that goes toward the horizon. It's a cliche, but it's true. The rhythm of Crane's ``The Bridge'' is the rhythm of a train going toward the Pacific, crossing the whole country on the tracks of the meter.
You talk to an American and you ask them how far they drive and they say a couple of days. And to Europeans - that's a laugh. And to someone from the Caribbean, that's frightening. Ideas of space and time are very different in this country. ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by BETH BERGMAN
Derek Walcott will read his poetry at Old Dominion University's 17th
Annual Literary Festival on Monday.
FESTIVAL FACTS
WHAT: ODU's 17th Annual Literary Festival
THEME: Cultural Affinities. A rainbow coalition series of
readings by poets, novelists, short-story writers, critics and
essayists drawn from across the cultural spectrum.
FEES: All events are free to the public except the reading by
Derek Walcott, which is $10 for adults, $5 students
CALL: 683-3020 or 683-3991
MONDAY OCT. 3.
8 p.m. - Reading by Derek Walcott, in Mills Godwin Building, Room
102
TUESDAY OCT. 4.
3 p.m. - Readings by Scott Cairns, ODU director of creative
writing and poet, and Susan Power, fiction writer and member of the
Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, in Webb Center, Newport News Room
8 p.m. - Reading by Luis Francia, Filipino poet and critic, in
Chandler Recital Hall
WEDNESDAY OCT. 5
3 p.m. - Readings by Richard Garcia, poet-in-residence,
Children's Hospital, Los Angeles, and Janet Peery, ODU faculty
member and fiction writer, in Chandler Recital Hall
8 p.m. - Reading by Larry Levis, Virginia Commonwealth University
professor and poet, in Chandler Recital Hall
THURSDAY OCT. 6
11 a.m. - Readings by Jeannette Drake, social worker from 1964 to
1991 and poet-in-the-schools in Richmond since 1980, and Evelina
Galang, ODU visiting writer of fiction and nonfiction, in Webb
Center, Newport News Room
3 p.m. - Readings by Kenneth Carroll, Washington poet and
president of the African American Writers Guild, and Michael
Pearson, ODU professor and author of nonfiction, in Webb Center,
Newport News Room
8 p.m. - Reading by Ed Jones, Washington writer whose 1992 short
story collection, ``Lost in the City,'' won the PEN/Hemingway First
Fiction Award and was nominated for the National Book Award, at
Chandler Recital Hall
KEYWORDS: INTERVIEW PROFILE
by CNB