Trinidad honours its gifted creative spirits — whether dancers, painters, writers, actors or calypsonians — under only two conditions: they are now dead or they have received the stamp of recognition from the First World, which now gives us the courage to honour them too and even boast a little that we always knew they were first class.
Note that Walcott’s Chaconia Medal came only after his Nobel laureate for literature.
Why? His work had always been seminal. I can testify to this as his fan since 1967 when I was involved in a QRC production of his play The Sea of Dauphin, directed by Patrick White, with the gifted Michael Harris as the lead. From then until my graduation in 1971, literature was food to me, whether in English, French, Spanish or Latin. I was even introduced to Vedic literature in English translation by my saroobai, the talented mischievous and energetic RK Heetai.
But it was in the pages of Walcott’s plays, and volumes of poetry, whether read or viewed in a performance at the Little Carib Theatre, that I saw myself reflected — a linguistic richness that embraced creole and patois alongside English; a penchant for dealing with the sublime and the profane in the same work; a landscape that was recognisably West Indian; which replaced fairies and elves with douens, lagahoos and la diablesse.
Walcott made my dreams, my joys, my pains into something authentic, rooted and deep. In Dream on Monkey Mountain, for instance, the protagonist is a drunkard and, possibly, a little mentally imbalanced.
But his dream is rich, human, painful, honest and crying out to be heard.
Even in 1970 during the state of emergency, I discovered in Ti-Jean and His Brothers not just a richly West Indian fable, but many sly references to that traumatic event in our history and a hint at the many undercurrents that led to this watershed.
Earl Lovelace, who is still alive, is doing the same seminal work on the Trinidadian/Tobagonian psyche, though his language mix is less rich and his characters sometimes become convenient mouthpieces for the author’s sociological theses — a distracting flavour in an otherwise humane yet penetrating and cathartic oeuvre.
Derek Walcott, for all his renown, was little understood in this his adopted land, even by ardent fans and well-meaning friends.
Lovelace, for all the accolades he has received in the First World, is little read in TT . Deep inside, he is a lonely man, even as he moves through the crowd at Carnival or a Black Caucus fund-raiser in his quiet, relaxed, unpretentious way, dressed in his favourite whites.
How can an artist make his audience embrace him if that audience, still remembering the sting of massa’s whip, is afraid to believe in itself? Walcott had the patience and the humility for that “long walk to freedom.” When he received the Chaconia Medal, he is quoted as saying, “I am not great.
Greatness is all around me, and I have the honour of reflecting it.” In this he parallels another of my heroes — the gentle Jackie Hinkson, whose place in our art history is hardly celebrated in the way it should be, but who daily enters his workshop and stays there for hours, consistently producing work that has real quality and definite social relevance, for a people lacking the self-respect to embrace what he brings to the table. His Christ in Trinidad series is a case in point.
On this bright Sunday morning in Crown Point, as I cut bushes, then embark on a search-and-destroy mission with my daughter Tamara to eliminate marabunta nests, my eyes refuse to stay dry as I inwardly say goodby to the greatest of my personal heroes yet a man whom I never met in the flesh.
No finer tribute can I pay to the great Walcott than his own closing lines in the poem Hic Iacet (Latin for Here He Lies)” I was that muscle shouldering the grass through ordinary earth.
Commoner than water I sank to lose my name.
This was my second birth.
OSMOND MOSES Tobago
