Literary community mourns Derek Walcott

Since the passing of St Lucian poet and playwright, Prof. Derek Alton Walcott, Nigeria’s literary community has been thrown into mourning an iconic wordsmith. His passing is made more poignant in the country with Walcott’s visit in 2008. It was at an Oceanic Bank-inspired business event that morphed into a literary one, where the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature winner had a moment with a section of writers in Lagos at Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos.

Indeed, it was an event had the likes of Toni Kan (author of The Carnivorous City), Sam Omatseye (My Name Is Okoro), Chike Ofili (The Weight of Waiting), Molara Wood (Indigo), Henry Akubuiro (Prodigals in Paradise), Jumoke Verissimo (I Am Memory) and countless others, including literary journalists, in attendance, who drank from the wise and deep well of the Caribbean master.

Toni Kan, who called a gathering of the literary aspect of Walcott’s itinerary, still remembered the occasion vividly, as the great man had a word or two for him on his collection of short stories, Nights of the Breaking Bed, just released at the time.

“Well, I met Derek Walcott in 2008 or so,” recalls Kan. “We spoke and when I gave him my book, Nights of the Breaking Bed, he laughed and said, “Why didn’t you just call it sex.” He was a lovable cad.

“I studied him for my Masters. He called himself a “mongrel” because of the dual heritage that warred in him as a mixed race person. But that dual heritage was a boon and helped in making his masterpiece, Omeros, the wonder that it is. He appropriated elements of the European classical tradition and, fusing it with his African sensibilities, produced a work of staggering genius. Walcott was a great poet, a powerful thinker and a beautiful essayist.”

Also at Walcott’s visit back in 2008 was Omatseye, who went on to interview him. “I remember him as a humorous, grand old,” he recalls. “He had a certain sense of humour. We had an interview. He was a man who was captivated by the whole idea of identity. He was trying to navigate who a Caribbean was in the global world. He told me about the direction of Nigerians who were writing poetry, how they were trying to follow a formula of what had been written before.

“And then he asked me, ‘why did Julia Roberts not sleep with Denzel washington in the movie The Pelican Brief?’ He felt that the white establishment didn’t want to put down their white rose by making her sleep with a black man. He was that kind of man. He also spoke about President Barrack Obama; he was actually commissioned to write a poem and he said he really felt honoured to have done that.

“His loss is a big one to the world of poetry and letters. Walcott loved the idea of staying on stage. You don’t see the likes of Walcott often enough in any age. He domesticated the Greek classical literature (Homer and Odysseus) in Omeros to the local history of the Caribbean; it is the work that actually propelled him to the Nobel Prize in 1992, two years after he wrote Omeros!”

For Akachi Ezeigbo, a professor of English at Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ikwo, Ebonyi State, Walcott’s passing is a sad event and the world of letters would miss him sourly.

“I am saddened by the passing of Derek Alton Walcott, a poet for all times, one of the greatest that bestrode the poetry firmament in the 20th and 21st centuries,” she says. “I salute his creative ingenuity and multiculturalism. 1992 Nobel laureate Derek Walcott was a West India poet and playwright born in St Lucia and noted for his faithfulness in exploring the cultural experiences of his homeland in his works.

“He ardently celebrated the landscape and natural beauty of his native land in addition to his global reach. His historical vision makes him the greatest Caribbean poet as well as one of the greatest poets and playwrights in the world. For me, Walcott’s creativity affirms Chinua Achebe’s famous dictum about writing: “To be universal is to be truly local.” May Derek Walcott’s soul rest in peace.”

Also Tade Ipadeola, poet laureate and winner of The Nigerian Prize for Literature 2013, has this about him, “Truly great poets are rare and Derek Walcott gives us a clear idea why. His craft as a poet reached for the very highest standards known and he set new benchmarks several times over. When he read his poems, the art comes as close to perfection as is humanly possible.

“Poetry was not a ‘hustle’ with Walcott. Drama was more than theatre. His essays reveal a powerful if idiosyncratic imagination. Everything he wrote breathed beauty and conviction. Right up till his last collection of poems, he maintained perfect form.

“Many times, Walcott is described as the imagination of his island but nothing is more reductive of his expansive genius. Few writers of his generation described the world with greater depth of feeling or acuity of intellect. I think he wrote all the poetry a man could possibly write in one lifetime. His death unveils his eminence.”

“Adieu, Mighty Voyager (Derek Walcott 1930 – 2017),” is how Prof. Niyi Osundare of New Orleans University, U.S., captures his tribute to Walcott. “In ‘What the Twilight Says: an Overture,’ one of his early essays and a fittingly dense preface to Dream on Monkey Mountain, a collection of his plays, Derek Walcott declared, ‘I saw myself legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe, of Milton, but my sense of inheritance was stronger because it came from estrangement’.

“He intended no hyperbole by the confessional. Nor does he expect his reader to divine any in it. For in that prodigious mastery of the English language and epic deployment of it, Derek Walcott has few rivals in contemporary literatures in English. And yet, no writer could have been more Caribbean in soul, spirit, and sense. This Fortunate Traveller between two powerful and demanding traditions, one deeply native and Caribbean, the other somewhat native and Western, this “divided child” impacted the literary landscapes (or seascapes) of both in grand, inimitable ways.

“Poet, playwright, painter, essayist, Walcott made an immeasurable contribution to the definition and validation of the irksome “West Indian identity”, its diverse, complex figurations, its tapestry of rainbow dreams, its archipelago of being. In many ways, a journey through Walcott’s works is a voyage through the Caribbean. As clearly shown in his largely autobiographical book of poems, Another Life, the narrative of his life is a chronicle of the Caribbean universe in its relation to the world. Homer gave the world The Iliad with its solidly Greek stamp and puissant heroes; Walcott gave us Omeros, an epic with a profoundly different sense of heroism – a cast with a different characterhood. Both epics echo each other in the sheer largeness of their awe and seamless resonance. For many readers, Omeros remains Walcott’s prime achievement.

“Walcott knew who he was and lent his great talent to helping others do the same. As far back as 1962 when the Black identitarian angst was profound and intense, he thrust these powerful lines into the fray:

‘How choose/Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?/Betray them both, or give back what they give/How can I face such slaughter and be cool?/How can I turn from Africa and live?’

Fare thee well, Mighty Voyager. The literary world blooms on the plenitude of your bounty.”Also for Commissioner for Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), representing Delta State, Dr. Ogaga Ifowodo, who studied Walcott’s Omeros closely for his doctoral, titles his tribute ‘Derek Walcott: Homing-coming of the Healer-Poet of the Caribbean.’

According to Ifowodo, “I imagine Derek Walcott still sailing back to Africa on a dug-out boat, a pirogue, an exact replica of the one on which two of his imaginary but most enduring characters, Philoctete (bearing on his shin the implacable wound of the trans-Atlantic slave trade) and his best friend, Achille, sailed to Africa in his epic of the Caribbean, Omeros. I would say that he has already arrived, probably in Nigeria, the African country which, through naming (Philoctete discovers his true identity on that “return to the source,” reverse Middle Passage journey and is renamed Afolabe or Afolabi), but it is a long, long journey, so I will give him some time.

“Artists, the true ones, that is, don’t die. So Derek Walcott is not dead: The poet is dead, long live the poet! For me, Walcott was not simply a poet to be in awe of and hope to emulate; he was the kind of poet I wished I could be at my best.”

Indeed, I would say of him as he said of another poet (so generous was he in paying homage to the poets he admired), that I would stand up and leave the room if you said anything bad about him! He was the ultimate practitioner of poetry as witness, of art as a historically produced thing, which must bear the impress of experience — if it is to be of any social significance. History does not come with a heavier burden of intolerable pain and grief than in the Caribbean that was his patch of earth. “

Yet, he celebrated the wounded land and people with such passionate love that poetry alone, it seemed, was not enough to span his ardour, hence his many water-colour representations of Caribbean life, flora and fauna. Styled a “Mulatto of style,” he would prove to be the ultimate poet-historian of the Caribbean, unsurpassable in recording the intolerable pain of the islands in “accurate iambics” of the English tongue he confessedly “loved so well” or in the patois of island pain.

“While his early aesthetics seemed to present him as identifying more with the colonising, rather than the colonised, side of his history, that was a total misreading of his acknowledgement of who he, as many a New World African, was: a being “divided to the vein.” He would soon embark on a journey of self-apprehension and affirmation that had him admitting in midlife that he could find no peace until he reconciled with his origins. Omeros, his magnum opus, which seeks to heal the wound of history, was thus very long in the making. There he made the symbolic return to Africa and poetically “healed” the wound of history caused by the trauma of slavery. I have turned to him not only to be awed and inspired by his superb mastery of his art but also as a primary source in the scholarly interrogation of the predicament of the post-colonial subject. The closing chapter of my doctoral dissertation in English and Literary Studies at Cornell is entitled “’Till the Word and the Wound Fit: ‘Healing the Postcolonial Body-politic in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.’”

“Adieu master. There is great rejoicing among the ancestors!”Poet and psychiatrist, Dr. Niran Okewole, also pays his respects to the great man, when he observes, “A few deaths have rocked my world lately – notably Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Umberto Eco – but none brought me so close to the edge of tears as after reading the tweet that Friday afternoon. The passing felt strangely personal, and the first instinct was to find that interview he did with Christian Campbell, in which he read ‘The Light of the World’, starting with the epigraph from Bob Marley – ‘Kaya now, got to have kaya now,/got to have kaya now,/for the rain is falling.’ His voice had that unmistakable lilt; he owned Marley, owned the lyric and the song, owned every stretch of the Caribbean. And he was a leading light of the world.

“I first read about Walcott in 1992, on the pages of Weekend Concord, in an article probably written by Mike Awoyinfa, shortly after Walcott won the Nobel. There was a reference to his majestic verse and devilish ways: “I’m beginning to feel like the beast of Boston”, he was quoted as saying.

There was a poem titled ‘Miramar’, which was different from anything I had read up until that time. Thereafter came the drama (Dream on Monkey Mountain, staged at UI Arts Theatre) and the essays, but Walcott for me, as for most, was the Poet. Reading him chronologically has been a labour of love, from the collections he published in his 30s (In a Green Night, The Castaway, The Gulf) and 40s (Another Life, Sea Grapes, The Star Apple Kingdom) to his 50s (The Fortunate Traveller, Midsummer, The Arkansas Testament), culminating in Omeros, the ‘epic of the dispossessed’, easily one of the top 10 volumes of poetry existing in human civilization. Only in the last year have I allowed myself to touch the ones that came after – Tiepolo’s Hound, the Prodigal, and now, finally, White Egrets.

“It has been a pleasure also to read the critical response, from the love of peers like Seamus Heaney (‘The Murmur of Malvern’) and Joseph Brodsky (‘The Sound of the Tide’) to the near-condescension of otherwise revered critics like Helen Vendler. Through it all, Walcott’s voice grew from the early Caliban, who mastered the language and poetry of Prospero more than its owner, through the mid-career American prism of Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell, through the plunder of the treasures of Western civilization in Omeros, to the ageless, unrelenting hound of history in his later works, with a voice inimitably his, a voice both cosmopolitan and rooted in the landscapes (and seascapes) of home, the landscapes within. He made history personal, and the personal historical, and poetry out of both polarities: ‘For every poet, it is always morning in the world… History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History’.
“God rest ye merry, gentleman!”