Celebrating Derek Walcott: Anita Patterson

DW_headshot_IMG_0416This month we are celebrating our friend and founder, Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. We held a private event here at BPT featuring a number of Derek’s colleagues, friends, and former students who honored him by telling stories and reading his (and their own) work. The invited audience was treated to selections from his work including The Ghost Dance, The Joker of Seville, and many others. 

We shared essays about Derek in the program for the event, and want you to have the opportunity to read them too. Enjoy!

I am grateful to Derek Walcott for the wisdom and beauty of his poetry, and because he has taught me that education and craftsmanship have the potential to release us from our servitude to history, bringing peace of mind through love and acceptance. I have reflected for many years on these lines from Omeros, where we learn,

…the right journey
is motionless, as the sea moves around an island
that appears to be moving, love moves around the heart—
with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand
knows it returns to the port from which it must start. (291)

Walcott writes in the modernist tradition of T. S. Eliot, Aimé Césaire, and St.-John Perse, poets who drew their strength from a fertile desert, the diverse cultural rubble of the New World. For Walcott, as for Césaire and Perse, this multifaceted legacy on the frontiers of empire fostered elation, an awakening to new possibilities in what Walcott has called “the tidal advance of the metropolitan language” (“Muse” 51). Like Eliot, Walcott embarks on an odyssey to discover and reassemble shattered New World histories, where the end is a homecoming, Walcott’s knowing acceptance of his poetry’s beginnings in a Caribbean port. Receiving the gifts of memory and heritage conferred by family, community, and the landscape of his native island, in Omeros the poet’s homecoming brings his father’s advice to fruition:

“Once you have seen everything and gone everywhere,
cherish our island for its green simplicities,

…The sea swift vanishes in rain,
and yet in its travelling all that the sea-swift does
it does in a circular pattern. Remember that, son.” (187-188)

In 1974, Walcott explained how the modernist ideal of the craftsman figured in his own self-conception as a poet from the Caribbean archipelago:

In the indication of the slightest necessary gesture of ordering the world around him, of losing his old name and rechristening himself, in the arduous enunciation of a dimmed alphabet, in the shaping of tools, pen or spade, is
the whole, profound sigh of human optimism, of what we in the archipelago still believe in:  work and hope (“Caribbean” 13).

A year earlier, Another Life honored the artisanal achievement of the poet’s mother, a seamstress who imposed order and significance on a childhood lived within the chaotic panorama of contemporary New World history:

Your house sang softly of balance,
of the rightness of placed things. (157)

One reason for Walcott’s great success as a poet is that his devotion to craft affirms solidarity with the invisible, nameless, countless, laboring men and women who, believing in work and hope, built his Caribbean island heritage. Not all of us have the brilliance and strength to achieve such a homecoming, but Walcott’s lifelong commitment to poetry and teaching gives me hope that future generations of students and readers will continue to discover the wondrous possibilities of the New World in his work.

—Anita Patterson

Anita Patterson is Professor of English at Boston University, where she teaches courses on American literature, modernism, and black poetry of the Americas. In her book Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (2008), she developed a more global and comparative perspective, exploring the dynamics of influence and intercultural dialogue among New World poets such as T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, Aimé Césaire, St.-John Perse, and Derek Walcott.

Works Cited
Walcott, Derek.  Another Life.  Collected Poems, 1948-1984.  New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986.  143-294.
—.  “The Caribbean:  Culture or Mimicry?” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16.1 (February 1974). 3-13.
—.  “The Muse of History.”  What the Twilight Says.  New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
—.  Omeros.  New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.