In memory of Derek Walcott

The day of his death was a dark, cold day.

The signal achievement of Derek Walcott, 87, was to produce outstanding poetry. The scope of that achievement was monumental.

Here was a poet whose style encompassed all forms, all fashions.

But beneath his verse was a fierce politics. He believed in the Caribbean, he understood its unique qualities, the power – or the potential power – of its melting pot. He placed post-colonial societies back in their rightful place, near the top of human civilization.

“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole,” Walcott famously said in his Nobel lecture upon being awarded that prize in 1992. “The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments.” He continued, “And this is the exact process of the making of poetry, or what should be called not its ‘making’ but its remaking, the fragmented memory, the armature that frames the god, even the rite that surrenders it to a final pyre; the god assembled cane by cane, reed by weaving reed, line by plaited line, as the artisans of Felicity would erect his holy echo.” From his first book 25 Poems to his last Morning, Paramin, Walcott made an argument for understanding the value of our experiences.

He saw our society not in passive terms, but in active ones. If his compatriot and sometime antagonist VS Naipaul thought history had served us a bad deal, Walcott found the game was not over.

While some perceive Walcott as using Western literature to express his own views and concerns, the truth is he was actually doing something far more profound. He was saying there was no disconnect in the first place. West and East are all equal in the sea. “I was the well of the world,” he once wrote. “I wore the stars on my skin.” But this was no politician or peddler of rhetoric. Walcott was also a playwright and a painter. His contribution to regional theatre was the result of an inexhaustible belief in this art form.

Walcott was born in 1930 in Castries, Saint Lucia. His father, a watercolourist, died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were only a few years old. His mother ran the town’s Methodist school.

After studying at St Mary’s College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he worked as theatre and art critic.

At the age of 18, he made his debut with 25 Poems, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962).

In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop which produced many of his early plays. Today, sadly, the fate of the TTW is unclear. After it was removed from its premises on Hart Street, Port-of- Spain, it was relocated to Belmont but may soon be in search of a new home unless it receives financial assistance.

We join the nation in expressing our condolences to Walcott’s family and to those members of the literary and artistic community who were close to him. His monument is comprised of his many books, glittering works of art that demonstrate the acuteness of his vision and his awesome talent for imagery, metaphor, rhyme and the surprise.

Even in his recent collaboration with the painter Peter Doig, he demonstrated a capacity to playfully relish in poetry’s primal relationship with art through ekphrasis.

While he will be remembered for many great poems, such as The Schooner Flight, Love After Love and The Light of the World, it was in one of his finest earliest poems, Mass Men, that Walcott set out the blueprint he was following.

Addressing the spectral image of a slave, and perhaps his reader, he wrote, “Someone must write your poems.” May he rest in peace.