Remembering Walcott: History’s possibilities

In a sense I had imposed on him the very position he has been writing against, the pigeon-hole, the boxing up of a poet who has been preoccupied with the idea of history as an inheritance rather than events by which we were trapped. We were not victims of our past.

Rather, his was a hopeful vision.

He asked for an understanding of our present; that the past had brought us into a new space as Caribbean people. It was a regenerative space, a place and time where the imagination had the freedom to flourish because we were a people who had nothing to lose.

My introduction to Walcott came not through his poetry but his essays. I wasn’t at the time interested in poetry, a seemingly unattainable aspect of literature that I naively felt was not as important as works of prose. Ideas were my fascination and I remember moving excitedly from Salman Rushdie’s essay Imaginary Homelands (1982) to Walcott’s Nobel Prize Speech The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (1992), because the idea of fragmented memory had hit a chord.

Both writers had in a sense expressed the idea with the metaphor of a broken vessel, pieced together to form another whole.

The metaphor is one that I revisit up to today. It simplified the world for, if one thinks of culture in this way, it becomes easier to understand the process of creativity that ensues. (I run the risk here of oversimplifying a complex matter but do bear with me). In essence, the pot or the glass vase, whichever breaks, is pieced together to form a new whole, not exactly like the former, but with a new aesthetic, new patterns. And this brings us to Naipaul’s mimic men, another problematic issue for us where culture is concerned.

“History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies,” Naipaul declared in The Middle Passage.

Though I love Naipaul’s work, this was an area of darkness. I couldn’t quite agree and I grappled with this concept of history for a few years before Walcott’s work stepped in to clarify matters.

Three essays in particular have remained important: The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry (1973), The Muse of History (1974) and The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (1992). Their connecting threads remain the same despite the time gaps - history as inheritance and the creative possibilities of our supposed non-history.

Mimicry appears in each one, a necessary theme in discussing history.

For, if the Caribbean is seen as a place where nothing happens (one almost feels like a player on Samuel Beckett’s stage), then it is also seen as a place where the only thing possible is repetition and imitation. But all artists know that art begins with imitation. In his attempt to unravel the puzzle for us, Walcott offers a suggestion, taking an example from the natural world.

“Mimicry is an act of imagination and in some animals, endemic cunning…defense and lure. What if the man in the New World needs mimicry as design, both as defense and as lure.” He goes on to cite Carnival as a perfect example of this, a “mass art form which came out of nothing, which emerged from the sanctions imposed on it.” And what may have begun as imitation eventually ended up in invention and today “in their resulting forms it is hard to point to mere imitation”. In his Nobel Prize Speech, he speaks, 19 years after, of the Felicity Ramleela in a similar fashion.

“They believed in what they were playing, in the sacredness of the text, the validity of India, while I, out of the writer’s habit, searched for some sense of elegy, of loss, even of degenerative mimicry in the happy faces of the boy-warriors or the heraldic profiles of the village princes.

I was polluting the afternoon with doubt and with the patronage of admiration. I misread the event through a visual echo of History - the cane fields, indenture, the evocation of vanished armies, temples, and trumpeting elephants - when all around me there was quite the opposite: elation, delight in the boys’ screams, in the sweets-stalls… a delight of conviction, not loss.” Walcott’s was a vision of hope, a vision of the immense creative possibilities present in our landscape.

I can find no other appropriate way to sum up the optimism inherent in his examination of our history but to commit the crime of stealing Salman Rushdie’s ending of Imaginary Homelands (itself a quote from Saul Bellow) for in essence Walcott is making a similar statement.

It is that “For God sakes, open the universe a little more!”