Critics’ views are diverse about Standish O’ Grady. Some have criticized him because of his negative connotations and verbosity. Even in the start of the poem he uses three negative adjectives. Some have objected him due to his disgrace for the Canadian land and the native people. He opines about them, “Their only pride a cariole and bells!” Further reasons are his Irish background and his protestant views. Despite of this criticism several critics have appreciated him. According to the writer of The Book of Four Masters he was famous in poetry and learning. Another critic named Steele opines that, “He only is a great man who can neglect the applause of the multitude” 8.4 SUMMARY In long and short we have come to know that the poem Winter in Lower Canada is composed by an Irish poet Standish O’ Grady. It starts from Canadian geography and ends with universal ideas of equality. It basically is in elegiac form on the separation from birth land as well as a satire on the cruel behavior and climate of welcoming land, Lower Canada. Its themes are nature, humanity class discrimination and migration. The poet’s basic idea is weather, people’s intolerant attitude, their lack of emotions and mutual cooperation. But owing to his this style and negative connotations he has been badly criticized by the contemporaries. 8.5 KEYWORDS Woodcock-A woodcock is a small brown bird with a long beak Wilderness- a large area of land that has never been used for building on or for growing things Progenies-someone's children; the young or offspring of animals and plants Mourning-to feel and show great sadness, especially because somebody has died Prostrate-lying flat on the ground, facing downwards Tapestry-a piece of heavy cloth with pictures or designs sewn on it in coloured thread Mirth-amusement or laughter 151 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
8.6 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Interpret - Standish James O'Grady is between imperial romance and Irish Revival ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 2. Analyze O'Grady as a postcolonial poet ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 3. Discuss how O’Grady themes, humanity class discrimination and migration are related ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 8.7 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Tell about the title 'Winter in lower Canada'. 2. What was the poem, 'Winter in lower Canada' about? 3. Mention two themes of the poem, 'Winter in lower Canada'. 4. What do you mean by elegy? 5. How the author connects theme of nature in 'Winter in lower Canada'. Long Questions 1. What are the universal ideas dealt in 'Winter in lower Canada'? Explain 2. Examine Standish O’Grady as a Canadian poet 3. Explain the plot and style of the poem 'Winter in lower Canada' 4. List the images used in 'Winter in lower Canada' 5. Critically analysis the poem ‘The Death of the Bird' B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. The Standish O’ Grady's basic idea is weather, people’s intolerant attitude and their lack of _______ a. Emotions 152 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
b. Love c. Understanding d. Sharing 2. Standish O’ Grady was born in Ireland in ____ a. 1780 b. 1870 c. 1880 d. 1770 3. The title of the poem 'Winter in Lower Canada' has two connotations as on surface level it is about the _____ season Lower Canada and the second interpretation is symbolic a. Winter b. autumn c. cold d. summer 4. In___ the poet starts from Canadian geography and ends with universal ideas of equality and mutuality. a. Winter in Lower Canada b. In Bondage c. Memory d. Daddy 5. In 'Winter in Lower Canada' the word winter is the symbol of barren and waste a. winter b. Autumn c. cold d. summer 153 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Answers 1-a, 2-a, 3-a, 4-a, 5-a 8.8 REFERENCES References book Patel, G. (2007). Poetry with young people. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Thomas J. T. (2004). Child poets and the poetry of the playground. Children’s Literature Bishop, Edward. (1989). A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan Press, London. Spiropoulu, Angeliki. (2010). Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with W.Benjamin. Palgrave, London. Textbook references https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56907/raw-meditations-on-money-1-she- speaks-a-school-teacher-from-south-india Websites https://d7.drunkenboat.com/db20/reviews/finds-larger-chaos-meena-alexanders- birthplace-buried-stones-wallis-wilde-menozzi https://ijllnet.com/journals/Vol_5_No_3_September_2018/23.pdf https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Raw+Meditations+on+Money-a077035217 https://poem.shivyogastudio.in/2021/03/a-school-teacher-from-south-india.html 154 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
UNIT – 9 DEREK WALCOTT: “RUINS OF A GREAT HOUSE”, “A CITY’S DEATH BY FIRE”, “FAR CRY FROM AFRICA” STRUCTURE 9.0 Learning Objectives 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Derek Walcott – Nobel Lecture 9.3 Poem - Ruins of a Great House 9.4 Analysis - Ruins of a Great House 9.5 A city’s Death by Fire – Poem 9.6 A city’s Death by Fire – Analysis 9.7 Text - Far Cry from Africa 9.8 Analysis - Far Cry from Africa 9.9 Summary 9.10 Keywords 9.11Learning Activity 9.12Unit End Questions 9.13 References 9.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to: Analyse the works of Derek Walcott Compare the themes of Walcott’s poem Interpret the characteristics and style of Walcott 9.1 INTRODUCTION Author’s Biography Derek Walcott is a West Indian poet and playwright, who won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature for his depiction of Caribbean life and culture in the post-colonial era. Born into a 155 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
family of English, Dutch and African descent and fed from childhood with English classics, he has inherited the richness of mixed cultures and this he has depicted in his vast oeuvre of plays and poems. Initially trained as a painter, he self-published his first book of poems at the age of eighteen and gained international acclaim as a poet by the age of thirty-two. Although he mostly wrote on the vivid landscape and culture of his homeland, many of his works also express his isolation, resulting from a conflict between his western education and the black folk traditions in which he had been nurtured from childhood. He has been equally active as a playwright, producing around thirty plays. He was also a successful academician, teaching at various American universities. In spite of his success, both his professional and domestic lives have been quite stormy and he was short of money till he received the Nobel Prize. Childhood & Early Years Derek Alton Walcott was born on January 23, 1930 in the colonial city of Castries, located in the eastern Caribbean Island of St. Lucia into a family of mixed descent. While both his grandfathers were whites, both his grandmothers were descendants of African slaves, brought to the island centuries ago. His father, Warwick Walcott, was a civil servant by profession, but by avocation he was a watercolorist and a poet. He was of bohemian nature and died at age 31 from mastoiditis. His mother, Alix Walcott, was a teacher at the local Methodist school and raised their three children singlehandedly. Apart from a twin brother Roderick, who would eventually become an established playwright, Derek had an elder sister named Pamela. They grew up in a house full of books, paintings and recorded music and spoke an English-French patois. At that time, the territory was under British dominance and the official language was English. However, signs of earlier French rule were still there and majority of the population was Roman Catholics as established by the French. Being Methodist, young Derek often felt like an outsider in his own land. As a young boy, he would often go out to watch the poor people living in shanties; some of whom would later appear in his autobiographical poem, ‘Another Life’. He also found the sea, with its different moods and legends, fishermen and schooners, and sounds of the sea, very fascinating. In time, Derek was admitted to St. Mary’s College, which at that time was the only secondary school in the city. Here he began to study English and soon became fascinated by English poems. Soon, like many of his generation, he too began to consider English his own language. 156 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
His mother, Alix, was also very fond of English classics, especially Shakespeare and would often read them out to her children. In this way, an appreciation for poetry and drama began to be instilled in him early in his life. Although he took up English as his language, he was equally conscious about British imperialism and its policies on slavery in the previous centuries. Therefore, he grew an ambivalent attitude, which would one day influence his writings. Like his father, Derek also had an aptitude for painting and started being trained in the art by Harold Simmons, the famed artist, who was also a historian, archeologist, and expert in local folklore. Mentored by him, young Derek learned to appreciate his heritage. He began to write poetry early in his life, having his first poem published at the age of fourteen in a local periodical. Titled ‘1944’, it was a Miltonic religious poem consisting of forty-four lines of blank verse. Although the Catholic clergy condemned it as blasphemous, he did not stop. By 1948, he had a number of poems ready for publication; but there was no publisher to publish them. Undeterred, he borrowed $200 from his mother and self-published his first collection of poems, titled ’25 Poems’. He then sold the copies at the street corner and paid back the amount. In 1949, Derek Walcott published his second book, ‘Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos’. By now, he had also written two dramas, ‘Henri Christophe: A Chronicle’ and ‘Henri Dernier’. The later was broadcast over radio in 1950. But tired of attacks by the clergy, he now decided to leave the island. In 1950, he moved to Kingston, Jamaica, where he enrolled at the University College of West Indies on a Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship. The institution, though established only two years ago, had already started attracting students from all parts of Caribbean and Derek began to flourish in its congenial environment. Coming from a small town, he also found Kingston to be an amazing place. There were good theatres, fine art galleries and gifted poets, writers and artists, with whom he loved to interact and whom he later came to know well. In Kingston, along with his university education, he pursued his literary ambition and wrote a number of poems and plays. In addition, he also published poetry, art criticism, and essays in different periodicals like ‘Trinidad Guardian’ and ‘Jamaica’s Public Opinion.’ In 1953, he received his bachelor’s degree. Early Struggle In 1953, Derek Walcott began his career as a theatre and art critic in Trinidad. But some biographers are of the opinion that he first returned to Castries, where he taught at St. Mary’s College for a year, before moving to Trinidad. 157 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Whichever version is true, it is universally accepted that by 1954, he was well-established at Trinidad because in the mid-1950s he had two of his plays. ‘The Sea at Dauphin’ and ‘Ione’ premiered here. Soon he decided to establish a resident theatre project on the island. In 1958, on earning a Rockefeller Foundation grant with his play, ‘Drums and Colours’ Walcott moved to New York City with the aim of working with off-Broadway directors. He wanted to learn the skills that would help him to establish a repertory group in Trinidad. But he was sorely disappointed. He soon realized that he wanted to create something different and neither the Off-Broadway nor the Broadway was the right model for that. Therefore, he returned to Trinidad and in 1959, founded Trinidad Theatre Workshop along with his brother Roderick in Port of Spain, the capital city of the island. Derek Walcott remained the founder director of the Workshop till 1971. Concurrently, from 1960 to 1968, he also worked as a reporter of ‘Trinidad Guardian’ and covered local news for the paper. At the same time, he continued to explore the history as well as myths, rituals and even the superstitions prevalent in the Caribbean and wrote a number of plays on these subjects, which were staged by his group. He also wrote a number of poems; but the readership was largely confined to Caribbean. International Acclaim In 1962, Derek Walcott’s poems gained the attention of the editors at the British publisher Jonathan Cape’s publication house. In the same year, the publisher released Walcott’s first major collection of poems, ‘In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960’. The book was well received and very soon he was established as a poet. One of his admirers was poet Robert Lowell, who came to Trinidad to meet Walcott. It was largely through his effort that publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) signed him as their new writer. His subsequent publications, ‘Selected Poems’ (1964), ‘The Castaway’ (1965), and ‘The Gulf’ (1969), were hailed for their rich language and complicated rhyme. But more importantly, they expressed his feelings of being caught between his Caribbean traditions as well as beliefs and the European culture in which he had been oriented. From the early 1970s, Walcott started spending more time in the USA, teaching creative writing at well-known universities like Harvard and Columbia. Concurrently, he continued publishing books like ‘Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays’ (1970), ‘The Gulf’ (1970),’ Another Life’ (1973), ‘Sea Grapes’ (1976) , and ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’ (1979). In 1981, he joined Boston University, where he taught literature and creative writing. In the same year, he established Boston Playwrights' Theatre to promote new plays. Concurrently, 158 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
he continued to publish poems and plays on a regular basis. He retired from the university in 2007. Among the works published in 1980s, ‘The Fortunate Traveller’ (1981) and ‘Midsummer’ (1984) explore his situation as a black writer in America. However, ‘Omeros’, published in 1990, is said to be his best. In 2009, Walcott applied for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry, but withdrew his candidature after an allegation of sexual harassment was raised against him. Instead, he took up the position of scholar-in-residence at the University of Alberta Canada, for three years. Concurrently from 2010, he became the Visiting Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex. Also in the same year, he had his ‘White Egret’, a book of poems, published. This is his last major publication. Major Works ‘Omeros’, a book-length epic poem, containing a total of sixty-four chapters divided into seven \"books\", is probably Derek Walcott’s most talked about work. Although the main narrative of the poem takes place in his native island St. Lucia, it loosely echoes Homer’s epic poem ‘Iliad’. In the poem, fishermen Achilles and Hector compete with each other over the love of Helen, a housemaid. The cover for the book, which depicts some of the main characters in the sea, riding a boat, was painted by Walcott himself. Awards & Achievements In 1971 he received Obie Award for Best Foreign Play for ‘Dream on Monkey Mountain’. In 1972, Walcott was elected an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In 1988, he received Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. In 1990, he received Arts Council of Wales International Writers Prize and also W. H. Smith Literary Award, the later for his epic poem, ‘Omeros.’ In 1992, Derek Walcott received the Nobel Prize in Literature \"for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment\". In 2004, he received Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2011, he received T. S. Eliot Prize and Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, both for his poetry collection ‘White Egrets’. In 2016, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Lucia. Personal Life & Legacy 159 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
In 1954, Derek Walcott married Fay Moston, who came from a wealthy Jamaican family. With her, he fathered a son, Peter Walcott, who later became a famous painter and now lives in St. Lucia. The marriage ended in divorce in 1959. He then married Margaret Maillard, with whom he had a live-in partnership before marriage. She was an almoner in a hospital in Port of Spain, but was equally active as a dancer and painter. They had two daughters; Elizabeth Walcott Hackshaw, and Anna Walcott Hardy. This marriage too did not last long. From the middle of the 1970s, he started having an affair with NorlineMetivier, a young dancer in one of his plays. He married her in 1976, but it too broke up before long. In 1987, during one of his readings at Pittsburg, Walcott met Sigrid Nama, a Danish-Flemish- American art dealer. They have been living together since then. Walcott now divides his time mainly between New York and St. Lucia. He has a passion for traveling and has visited different countries around the world. 9.2 DEREK WALCOTT - NOBEL LECTURE Felicity is a village in Trinidad on the edge of the Caroni plain, the wide central plain that still grows sugar and to which indentured cane cutters were brought after emancipation, so the small population of Felicity is East Indian, and on the afternoon that I visited it with friends from America, all the faces along its road were Indian, which, as I hope to show, was a moving, beautiful thing, because this Saturday afternoon Ramleela, the epic dramatization of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, was going to be performed, and the costumed actors from the village were assembling on a field strung with different-coloured flags, like a new gas station, and beautiful Indian boys in red and black were aiming arrows haphazardly into the afternoon light. Low blue mountains on the horizon, bright grass, clouds that would gather colour before the light went. Felicity! What a gentle Anglo-Saxon name for an epical memory. Under an open shed on the edge of the field, there were two huge armatures of bamboo that looked like immense cages. They were parts of the body of a god, his calves or thighs, which, fitted and reared, would make a gigantic effigy. This effigy would be burnt as a conclusion to the epic. The cane structures flashed a predictable parallel: Shelley’s sonnet on the fallen statue of Ozymandias and his empire, that “colossal wreck” in its empty desert. Drummers had lit a fire in the shed and they eased the skins of their tables nearer the flames to tighten them. The saffron flames, the bright grass, and the hand-woven armatures of the fragmented god who would be burnt were not in any desert where imperial power had finally toppled but were part of a ritual, evergreen season that, like the cane-burning harvest, is 160 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
annually repeated, the point of such sacrifice being its repetition, the point of the destruction being renewal through fire. Deities were entering the field. What we generally call “Indian music” was blaring from the open platformed shed from which the epic would be narrated. Costumed actors were arriving. Princes and gods, I supposed. What an unfortunate confession! “Gods, I suppose” is the shrug that embodies our African and Asian diasporas. I had often thought of but never seen Ramleela, and had never seen this theatre, an open field, with village children as warriors, princes, and gods. I had no idea what the epic story was, who its hero was, what enemies he fought, yet I had recently adapted the Odyssey for a theatre in England, presuming that the audience knew the trials of Odysseus, hero of another Asia Minor epic, while nobody in Trinidad knew any more than I did about Rama, Kali, Shiva, Vishnu, apart from the Indians, a phrase I use pervertedly because that is the kind of remark you can still hear in Trinidad: “apart from the Indians”. It was as if, on the edge of the Central Plain, there was another plateau, a raft on which the Ramayana would be poorly performed in this ocean of cane, but that was my writer’s view of things, and it is wrong. I was seeing the Ramleela at Felicity as theatre when it was faith. Multiply that moment of self-conviction when an actor, made-up and costumed, nods to his mirror before stopping on stage in the belief that he is a reality entering an illusion and you would have what I presumed was happening to the actors of this epic. But they were not actors. They had been chosen; or they themselves had chosen their roles in this sacred story that would go on for nine afternoons over a two-hour period till the sun set. They were not amateurs but believers. There was no theatrical term to define them. They did not have to psych themselves up to play their roles. Their acting would probably be as buoyant and as natural as those bamboo arrows crisscrossing the afternoon pasture. 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, in more and more costumed characters appearing; a delight of conviction, not loss. The name Felicity made sense. Consider the scale of Asia reduced to these fragments: the small white exclamations of minarets or the stone balls of temples in the cane fields, and one can understand the self- mockery and embarrassment of those who see these rites as parodic, even degenerate. These purists look on such ceremonies as grammarians look at a dialect, as cities look on provinces and empires on their colonies. Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god. In other words, the 161 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
way that the Caribbean is still looked at, illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized. “No people there”, to quote Froude, “in the true sense of the word”. No people. Fragments and echoes of real people, unoriginal and broken. The performance was like a dialect, a branch of its original language, an abridgement of it, but not a distortion or even a reduction of its epic scale. Here in Trinidad, I had discovered that one of the greatest epics of the world was seasonally performed, not with that desperate resignation of preserving a culture, but with an openness of belief that was as steady as the wind bending the cane lances of the Caroni plain. We had to leave before the play began to go through the creeks of the Caroni Swamp, to catch the scarlet ibises coming home at dusk. In a performance as natural as those of the actors of the Ramleela, we watched the flocks come in as bright as the scarlet of the boy archers, as the red flags, and cover an islet until it turned into a flowering tree, an anchored immortelle. The sigh of History meant nothing here. These two visions, the Ramleela and the arrowing flocks of scarlet ibises, blent into a single gasp of gratitude. Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past. I felt privileged to discover the ibises as well as the scarlet archers of Felicity. The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles, there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts. Looking around slowly, as a camera would, taking in the low blue hills over Port of Spain, the village road and houses, the warrior-archers, the god-actors and their handlers, and music already on the soundtrack, I wanted to make a film that would be a long-drawn sigh over Felicity. I was filtering the afternoon with evocations of a lost India, but why “evocations”? Why not “celebrations of a real presence”? Why should India be “lost” when none of these villagers ever really knew it, and why not “continuing”, why not the perpetuation of joy in Felicity and in all the other nouns of the Central Plain: Couva, Chaguanas, Charley Village? Why was I not letting my pleasure open its windows wide? I was enticed like any Trinidadian to the ecstasies of their claim, because ecstasy was the pitch of the sinuous drumming in the loudspeakers. I was entitled to the feast of Husein, to the mirrors and crepe-paper temples of the Muslim epic, to the Chinese Dragon Dance, to the rites of that Sephardic Jewish synagogue that was once on Something Street. I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad. 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. 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, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their 162 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. 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. Poetry, which is perfection’s sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue’s brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main. The dialects of my archipelago seem as fresh to me as those raindrops on the statue’s forehead, not the sweat made from the classic exertion of frowning marble, but the condensations of a refreshing element, rain and salt. Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured tribes create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an old, an epic vocabulary, from Asia and from Africa, but to an ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture, while nouns are renamed and the given names of places accepted like Felicity village or Choiseul. The original language dissolves from the exhaustion of distance like fog trying to cross an ocean, but this process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process that the poet faces every morning of his working day, making his own tools like Crusoe, assembling nouns from necessity, from Felicity, even renaming himself. The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They survived the Middle Passage and the FatelRozack, the ship that carried the first indentured Indians from the port of Madras to the cane fields of Felicity, that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle. And here they are, all in a single Caribbean city, Port of Spain, the sum of history, Trollope’s “non-people”. A downtown babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven. Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer’s heaven. 163 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities. Another first morning home, impatient for the sunrise – a broken sleep. Darkness at five, and the drapes not worth opening; then, in the sudden light, a cream-walled, brown-roofed police station bordered with short royal palms, in the colonial style, back of it frothing trees and taller palms, a pigeon fluttering into the cover of an cave, a rain-stained block of once- modern apartments, the morning side road into the station without traffic. All part of a surprising peace. This quiet happens with every visit to a city that has deepened itself in me. The flowers and the hills are easy, affection for them predictable; it is the architecture that, for the first morning, disorients. A return from American seductions used to make the traveller feel that something was missing, something was trying to complete itself, like the stained concrete apartments. Pan left along the window and the excrescences rear – a city trying to soar, trying to be brutal, like an American city in silhouette, stamped from the same mould as Columbus or Des Moines. An assertion of power, its decor bland, its air conditioning pitched to the point where its secretarial and executive staff sport competing cardigans; the colder the offices the more important, an imitation of another climate. A longing, even an envy of feeling cold. In serious cities, in grey, militant winter with its short afternoons, the days seem to pass by in buttoned overcoats, every building appears as a barracks with lights on in its windows, and when snow comes, one has the illusion of living in a Russian novel, in the nineteenth century, because of the literature of winter. So visitors to the Caribbean must feel that they are inhabiting a succession of postcards. Both climates are shaped by what we have read of them. For tourists, the sunshine cannot be serious. Winter adds depth and darkness to life as well as to literature, and in the unending summer of the tropics not even poverty or poetry (in the Antilles poverty is poetry with a V, une vie, a condition of life as well as of imagination) seems capable of being profound because the nature around it is so exultant, so resolutely ecstatic, like its music. A culture based on joy is bound to be shallow. Sadly, to sell itself, the Caribbean encourages the delights of mindlessness, of brilliant vacuity, as a place to flee not only winter but that seriousness that comes only out of culture with four seasons. So how can there be a people there, in the true sense of the word? They know nothing about seasons in which leaves let go of the year, in which spires fade in blizzards and streets whiten, of the erasures of whole cities by fog, of reflection in fireplaces; instead, they inhabit a geography whose rhythm, like their music, is limited to two stresses: hot and wet, sun and rain, light and shadow, day and night, the limitations of an incomplete metre, and are therefore a people incapable of the subtleties of contradiction, of imaginative complexity. So be it. We cannot change contempt. Ours are not cities in the accepted sense, but no one wants them to be. They dictate their own proportions, their own definitions in particular places and in a prose equal to that of their detractors, so that now it is not just St. James but the streets and yards that Naipaul 164 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
commemorates, its lanes as short and brilliant as his sentences; not just the noise and jostle of Tunapuna but the origins of C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary, not just Felicity village on the Caroni plain, but Selvon Country, and that is the way it goes up the islands now: the old Dominica of Jean Rhys still very much the way she wrote of it; and the Martinique of the early Cesaire; Perse’s Guadeloupe, even without the pith helmets and the mules; and what delight and privilege there was in watching a literature – one literature in several imperial languages, French, English, Spanish – bud and open island after island in the early morning of a culture, not timid, not derivative, any more than the hard white petals of the frangipani are derivative and timid. This is not a belligerent boast but a simple celebration of inevitability: that this flowering had to come. On a heat-stoned afternoon in Port of Spain, some alley white with glare, with love vine spilling over a fence, palms and a hazed mountain appear around a corner to the evocation of Vaughn or Herbert’s “that shady city of palm-trees”, or to the memory of a Hammond organ from a wooden chapel in Castries, where the congregation sang “Jerusalem, the Golden”. It is hard for me to see such emptiness as desolation. It is that patience that is the width of Antillean life, and the secret is not to ask the wrong thing of it, not to demand of it an ambition it has no interest in. The traveller reads this as lethargy, as torpor. Here there are not enough books, one says, no theatres, no museums, simply not enough to do. Yet, deprived of books, a man must fall back on thought, and out of thought, if he can learn to order it, will come the urge to record, and in extremity, if he has no means of recording, recitation, the ordering of memory which leads to metre, to commemoration. There can be virtues in deprivation, and certainly one virtue is salvation from a cascade of high mediocrity, since books are now not so much created as remade. Cities create a culture, and all we have are these magnified market towns, so what are the proportions of the ideal Caribbean city? A surrounding, accessible countryside with leafy suburbs, and if the city is lucky, behind it, spacious plains. Behind it, fine mountains; before it, an indigo sea. Spires would pin its centre and around them would be leafy, shadowy parks. Pigeons would cross its sky in alphabetic patterns, carrying with them memories of a belief in augury, and at the heart of the city there would be horses, yes, horses, those animals last seen at the end of the nineteenth century drawing broughams and carriages with top-hatted citizens, horses that live in the present tense without elegiac echoes from their hooves, emerging from paddocks at the Queen’s Park Savannah at sunrise, when mist is unthreading from the cool mountains above the roofs, and at the centre of the city seasonally there would be races, so that citizens could roar at the speed and grace of these nineteenth-century animals. Its docks, not obscured by smoke or deafened by too. much machinery, and above all, it would be so racially various that the cultures of the world – the Asiatic, the Mediterranean, the European, the African – would be represented in it, its humane variety more exciting than Joyce’s Dublin. Its citizens would intermarry as they chose, from instinct, not tradition, until their children find it 165 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
increasingly futile to trace their genealogy. It would not have too many avenues difficult or dangerous for pedestrians, its mercantile area would be a cacophony of accents, fragments of the old language that would be silenced immediately at five o’clock, its docks resolutely vacant on Sundays. This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo. The finest silhouettes of Port of Spain are idealizations of the craftsman’s handiwork, not of concrete and glass, but of baroque woodwork, each fantasy looking more like an involved drawing of itself than the actual building. Behind the city is the Caroni plain, with its villages, Indian prayer flags, and fruit vendors’ stalls along the highway over which ibises come like floating flags. Photogenic poverty! Postcard sadnesses! I am not re-creating Eden; I mean, by “the Antilles”, the reality of light, of work, of survival. I mean a house on the side of a country road, I mean the Caribbean Sea, whose smell is the smell of refreshing possibility as well as survival. Survival is the triumph of stubbornness, and spiritual stubbornness, a sublime stupidity, is what makes the occupation of poetry endure, when there are so many things that should make it futile. Those things added together can go under one collective noun: “the world”. This is the visible poetry of the Antilles, then. Survival. If you wish to understand that consoling pity with which the islands were regarded, look at the tinted engravings of Antillean forests, with their proper palm trees, ferns, and waterfalls. They have a civilizing decency, like Botanical Gardens, as if the sky were a glass ceiling under which a colonized vegetation is arranged for quiet walks and carriage rides. Those views are incised with a pathos that guides the engraver’s tool and the topographer’s pencil, and it is this pathos which, tenderly ironic, gave villages names like Felicity. A century looked at a landscape furious with vegetation in the wrong light and with the wrong eye. It is such pictures that are saddening rather than the tropics itself. These delicate engravings of sugar mills and harbours, of native women in costume, are seen as a part of History, that History which looked over the shoulder of the engraver and, later, the photographer. History can alter the eye and the moving hand to conform a view of itself; it can rename places for the nostalgia in an echo; it can temper the glare of tropical light to elegiac monotony in prose, the tone of judgement in Conrad, in the travel journals of Trollope. These travellers carried with them the infection of their own malaise, and their prose reduced even the landscape to melancholia and self-contempt. Every endeavor is belittled as imitation, from architecture to music. There was this conviction in Froude that since History is based on achievement, and since the history of the Antilles was so genetically corrupt, so depressing in its cycles of massacres, slavery, and indenture, a culture was inconceivable and nothing could 166 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
ever be created in those ramshackle ports, those monotonously feudal sugar estates. Not only the light and salt of Antillean mountains defied this, but the demotic vigour and variety of their inhabitants. Stand close to a waterfall and you will stop hearing its roar. To be still in the nineteenth century, like horses, as Brodsky has written, may not be such a bad deal, and much of our life in the Antilles still seems to be in the rhythm of the last century, like the West Indian novel. By writers even as refreshing as Graham Greene, the Caribbean is looked at with elegiac pathos, a prolonged sadness to which Levi-Strauss has supplied an epigraph: Tristes Tropiques. Their tristesse derives from an attitude to the Caribbean dusk, to rain, to uncontrollable vegetation, to the provincial ambition of Caribbean cities where brutal replicas of modern architecture dwarf the small houses and streets. The mood is understandable, the melancholy as contagious as the fever of a sunset, like the gold fronds of diseased coconut palms, but there is something alien and ultimately wrong in the way such a sadness, even a morbidity, is described by English, French, or some of our exiled writers. It relates to a misunderstanding of the light and the people on whom the light falls. These writers describe the ambitions of our unfinished cities, their unrealized, homiletic conclusion, but the Caribbean city may conclude just at that point where it is satisfied with its own scale, just as Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture. There might be less of Tristes Tropiques after that. Here, on the raft of this dais, there is the sound of the applauding surf: our landscape, our history recognized, “at last”. At Last is one of the first Caribbean books. It was written by the Victorian traveller Charles Kingsley. It is one of the early books to admit the Antillean landscape and its figures into English literature. I have never read it but gather that its tone is benign. The Antillean archipelago was there to be written about, not to write itself, by Trollope, by Patrick Leigh-Fermor, in the very tone in which I almost wrote about the village spectacle at Felicity, as a compassionate and beguiled outsider, distancing myself from Felicity village even while I was enjoying it. What is hidden cannot be loved. The traveller cannot love, since love is stasis and travel is motion. If he returns to what he loved in a landscape and stays there, he is no longer a traveller but in stasis and concentration, the lover of that particular part of earth, a native. So many people say they “love the Caribbean”, meaning that someday they plan to return for a visit but could never live there, the usual benign insult of the traveller, the tourist. These travellers, at their kindest, were devoted to the same patronage, the islands passing in profile, their vegetal luxury, their backwardness and poverty. Victorian prose dignified them. They passed by in beautiful profiles and were forgotten, like a vacation. 167 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Alexis Saint-Leger Leger, whose writer’s name is Saint-John Perse, was the first Antillean to win this prize for poetry. He was born in Guadeloupe and wrote in French, but before him, there was nothing as fresh and clear in feeling as those poems of his childhood, that of a privileged white child on an Antillean plantation, Pour FeteruneEnfance, Eloges, and later Images a Crusoe. At last, the first breeze on the page, salt-edged and self-renewing as the trade winds, the sound of pages and palm trees turning as “the odour of coffee ascents the stairs”. Caribbean genius is condemned to contradict itself. To celebrate Perse, we might be told, is to celebrate the old plantation system, to celebrate the beque or plantation rider, verandahs and mulatto servants, a white French language in a white pith helmet, to celebrate a rhetoric of patronage and hauteur; and even if Perse denied his origins, great writers often have this folly of trying to smother their source, we cannot deny him any more than we can the African AimeCesaire. This is not accommodation, this is the ironic republic that is poetry, since, when I see cabbage palms moving their fronds at sunrise, I think they are reciting Perse. The fragrant and privileged poetry that Perse composed to celebrate his white childhood and the recorded Indian music behind the brown young archers of Felicity, with the same cabbage palms against the same Antillean sky, pierce me equally. I feel the same poignancy of pride in the poems as in the faces. Why, given the history of the Antilles, should this be remarkable? The history of the world, by which of course we mean Europe, is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings. At last, islands not written about but writing themselves! The palms and the Muslim minarets are Antillean exclamations. At last! the royal palms of Guadeloupe recite Éloges by heart. Later, in “Anabase”, Perse assembled fragments of an imaginary epic, with the clicking teeth of frontier gates, barren wadis with the froth of poisonous lakes, horsemen burnoosed in sandstorms, the opposite of cool Caribbean mornings, yet not necessarily a contrast any more than some young brown archer at Felicity, hearing the sacred text blared across the flagged field, with its battles and elephants and monkey-gods, in a contrast to the white child in Guadeloupe assembling fragments of his own epic from the lances of the cane fields, the estate carts and oxens, and the calligraphy of bamboo leaves from the ancient languages, Hindi, Chinese, and Arabic, on the Antillean sky. From the Ramayana to Anabasis, from Guadeloupe to Trinidad, all that archaeology of fragments lying around, from the broken African kingdoms, from the crevasses of Canton, from Syria and Lebanon, vibrating not under the earth but in our raucous, demotic streets. A boy with weak eyes skims a flat stone across the flat water of an Aegean inlet, and that ordinary action with the scything elbow contains the skipping lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and another child aims a bamboo arrow at a village festival, another hears the rustling march of cabbage palms in a Caribbean sunrise, and from that sound, with its fragments of tribal myth, the compact expedition of Perse’s epic is launched, centuries and 168 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
archipelagoes apart. 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. There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise. Then the noun, the “Antilles” ripples like brightening water, and the sounds of leaves, palm fronds, and birds are the sounds of a fresh dialect, the native tongue. The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one’s biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island. 9.3 POEM - RUINS OF A GREAT HOUSE Though our longest sun sets at right declensions and 169 makes but winter arches, it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes. . . Browne, Urn Burial Stones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House, Whose moth-like girls are mixed with candledust, Remain to file the lizard’s dragonish claws. The mouths of those gate cherubs shriek with stain; Axle and coach wheel silted under the muck Of cattle droppings. Three crows flap for the trees And settle, creaking the eucalyptus boughs. A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose The leprosy of empire. ‘Farewell, green fields, Farewell, ye happy groves!’ Marble like Greece, like Faulkner’s South in stone, Deciduous beauty prospered and is gone, But where the lawn breaks in a rash of trees CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
A spade below dead leaves will ring the bone 170 Of some dead animal or human thing Fallen from evil days, from evil times. It seems that the original crops were limes Grown in that silt that clogs the river’s skirt; The imperious rakes are gone, their bright girls gone, The river flows, obliterating hurt. I climbed a wall with the grille ironwork Of exiled craftsmen protecting that great house From guilt, perhaps, but not from the worm’s rent Nor from the padded cavalry of the mouse. And when a wind shook in the limes I heard What Kipling heard, the death of a great empire, the abuse Of ignorance by Bible and by sword. A green lawn, broken by low walls of stone, Dipped to the rivulet, and pacing, I thought next Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake, Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed In memory now by every ulcerous crime. The world’s green age then was rotting lime Whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text. The rot remains with us, the men are gone. But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind That fans the blackening ember of the mind, My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne. Ablaze with rage I thought, Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake, But still the coal of my compassion fought CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
That Albion too was once A colony like ours, ‘part of the continent, piece of the main’, Nook-shotten, rook o’erblown, deranged By foaming channels and the vain expense Of bitter faction. All in compassion ends So differently from what the heart arranged: ‘as well as if a manor of thy friend’s. . .’ 9.4 ANALYSIS – RUINS OF A GREAT HOUSE Derek Walcott’s “Ruins of a Great House” is a poem written in his perspective of the Caribbean in the 19th century. During the 1800’s slavery was in the process of being abolished however, before this time slave conditions in the sugar estates were among the most brutal. Themes that continuously stand out in the poem are Walcott’s expressions about the destruction of the Caribbean using references to death, decaying, and historical figures. Walcott uses graphic imagery, irregular language and rhyme schemes to convey what he feels were serious problems in the Caribbean during this period. Walcott starts the poem with “Stones of disjecta membra of this Great House/ Whose moth- like girls are mixed with candle dust”. With this he is describing an old house that has been destroyed. Disjecta membra is scattered fragments and the words moth-like would have the reader think of something old. Candle dust is the residue you get from a candle once it has been fully used and you can no longer light it. This is an interesting way to start the poem because Walcott uses this quote to speak about the ruins of this Caribbean Great House so well that you can grasp his concept in the very beginning. We also see this in the second stanza when Walcott uses dead limes and the leprosy of the Empire. With this he is explaining the fall of the British Empire which once stood strong. This is another section of the poem in which he refers to death or decaying and smells of such. In stanzas of the poem the reader can see Walcott’s frustration and anger with the wrong doings to these African Slaves. He also references some historical writers such as Blake and John Donne. We see this in Stanza 6, “Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake” and in Stanza 3, “Fallen from evil days from evil times”. In these two Stanzas Walcott is showing sympathy for the African slaves and disgust with the historical foundation of the Caribbean. Also in Stanza 5 from the quotes “Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, and Drake, Ancestral murders and poets, more perplexed”, and “My eyes burned from the ashen prose of 171 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Donne”. In this Stanza Walcott uses a quote from a poem of William Blake, which expresses his frustration with these historical figures. Drake and Hawkins were both early slavers, however all of these men had one thing in common which is the fact that they were all knights and aided the British Empire (Konstom, 1560-1605). With this bold statement the conclusion can be drawn that Walcott clearly knows the history of these men. Lastly at the end of the Stanza he has an interesting way of approaching John Donne by explaining his rage after reading The Ashen Prose. The imagery that Walcott uses throughout the poem is quite interesting, partly because the language has a unique way of expressing the metaphors. For instance, in the last Stanza he says “But still the coal of my compassion fought”. With this Walcott is saying that the coal was his fuel and his compassion was raging by presenting an image of a strong burning fire that can’t be put out. Also in Stanza 2 when Walcott says, “Farewell, green fields, Farewell ye happy groves!” we see a turn in the imagery he presents. This quote gives an image of a beautiful field with perfect green grass and healthy trees, which only appears once in the poem. However, if the reader is educated on the poem “Night” by Blake, as it is about evil rising with the darkness, they will know that this is not such a beautiful image Walcott is trying to portray. Throughout the poem Walcott uses a unique language; tone and rhythm to convey his message in such a way that many foot notes were provided for this poem. His language structure is not something that the reader would see or even understand the meaning of in an everyday poem. Walcott uses many words that refer to decaying or dead things, “moth-like”, “leprosy”, “exiled craftsmen” “dead ash”. The layout of the poem seems rather dark and disturbing, which is the theme that Walcott is clearly going for. Walcott also does not follow the traditional form of a poem in that he starts two of the Stanzas in the middle, almost like they are titles. He also ends one Stanza in the middle which may suggests significance of the statement. The rhyme scheme is also not your typical ab rhyming format. It almost makes it difficult for the reader to flow from stanza to stanza without pausing to obtain the full message in each one. The reader may see the tone Walcott uses as serious and even a bit angry although there are not many punctuation marks that give these clues. If you understand Walcott’s message along with his background you can predict that he must have been stern when writing this poem. The poem was appropriately titled “Ruins of a Great House” seeing that the overall theme of the poem was ruins. Walcott uses a plethora of images and references to the rotting of the slave house in the Caribbean and the British Empire. It is evident that Walcott has feelings of fury and resentment towards the history of slavery in the Caribbean in the 1800’s. We get this conclusion from his interesting choice of the layout for the poem, his educated language which suggests the poem is not for your typical reader, and his consistent use of metaphors in reference to deterioration. 172 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
“Ruins of a Great House” begins with a quote from the seventeenth-century writer Sir Thomas Browne, describing a setting winter sun. Following this quote, the first stanza of the poem begins by describing a “Great House” which has gone into ruin, and which symbolizes European empire. All that is left of the physical structure of the once great manor are the stones which built it, strewn across the earth for lizards to sharpen their claws against. The cherubs that decorated the gate now sing out with stained mouths, and the wheels of carriages have been sucked underneath the muck which has gathered outside the gate. Three crows settle in the creaking branches of a eucalyptus tree, and the smell of rotting limes fills the air, reminiscent of the rotting of the old empire. The stanza ends with a quotation from Blake, whose words call out goodbye to the “green fields” and “happy groves” which have been replaced by ruin. The next stanza continues this extended discussion of the decaying empire as a “Great House” in ruin. Its marble was made up of the places its culture lauded: classical Greece, the American South. Yet this beauty was “deciduous”—a term that refers to plants that lose their leaves in the fall—and now it is gone. What is left is the lawn overgrown with rough forest. Below the dead and fallen leaves, animals and humans have rotted down to bone. These dead creatures were never good, but rather come “from evil days, from evil times” (18). In the third stanza, Walcott returns to the river, on the banks of which the lime trees grew. These were the first crop grown on the manor's grounds. The manor's wealthy, immoral young men and the beautiful young women they pursued are both gone, but the river still flows. The speaker climbs a wall decorated with wrought iron, made by craftsmen now exiled, trying to protect the great house. They may have successfully protected it from guilt, but not from the worms or the mice which gnawed it into ruin. The speaker hears the wind shaking in the limes, and hears it as “the death of a great empire,” a death brought about through the abuse of ignorant people by violence and Christianity (28). The fourth stanza begins in a “green lawn,” split up by short walls built out of stone. The lawn dips down to the river, and the speaker paces over it thinking of the great poets of the English empire, men who wrote beautifully and murdered on behalf of the empire. Now their memories are muddled, because people aren’t sure whether to remember them for their writing or their crimes. The glorious “green age” which Blake called back to, the height of civilization and cultural achievement, was itself rotting, because it stank of the violence of empire. Its representatives are long dead, but the rot remains. The other remainder is their words, which rise up out of the ashes of empire and burn the eyes of the speaker. Thus, in the final stanza, the speaker begins full of rage, thinking of the people who were enslaved and killed by the empire whose poetry is so admired. Yet against this anger, the compassion within him reminds him that England too was once a colony, seen as a backwater island on the fringes of Europe, torn up by the cold winds, the foaming English Channel between it and France, the fighting of different factions. He ends not in the anger he expected 173 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
from himself, but rather with this compassion, this sense that the great manor belonged to a friend. Analysis Walcott’s home of Saint Lucia, an island in the Caribbean, was the site of numerous colonization efforts by multiple European powers beginning in the early 1600s. For years, the native Carib people successfully fought off the British. The island was eventually purchased from the Caribs by the French in 1651. Immediately, the British sent troops in to attempt to take the island for themselves, and the fighting continued until 1814, when the French lost and ceded Saint Lucia to the English. By this point, the colonizers had murdered most of the native Carib people, although there are still people with Carib ancestry on the island. The majority of the population were enslaved Africans, and today most Saint Lucians are Black. Saint Lucia did not become independent until 1979, when it became a member of the British Commonwealth like Australia or Canada. “Ruins of a Great House” reckons with this long history of brutal colonization, one which also spanned much of the modern history of England. There are really three resonances to the “Great House” which Walcott describes. Most explicitly, it symbolizes the British Empire, once great and now fallen into ruin. Walcott also suggests that the “Great House” can be read specifically as the structure of the English literary canon, the elevation of works by “men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake” as the height of poetic achievement. On a literal level, Walcott’s extensive use of imagery to describe the “Great House” brings it vividly into view as a physical structure: a colonial-era mansion on Saint Lucia which has since fallen into ruin. The first stanza establishes an extended metaphor between the Great House and a body. Referring to its “disjecta membra,” Walcott suggests that the house is like a dismembered corpse. This comparison goes on to inform his reference to the “leprosy of empire” at the end of this stanza; the suggestion is that empire has become a kind of wasting disease afflicting the Great House. This is true in the sense that the fall of the British Empire led to the rotting of structures like the colonial-era mansions on Saint Lucia. However, the bodily metaphor makes that image more moving, as the reader is affected more strongly by the image of a lifeless corpse than that of a crumbling building. The tension between Walcott’s hatred for colonial empire, and his sympathy for the Great House, is what drives this poem forward. That sympathy is driven by the symbolic resonance of the Great House as the English canon—the history of “great works” which forms the structure of contemporary literary scholarship. In the second stanza, Walcott references Faulkner because in some ways he embodies the tension between loving beautiful work, and recognizing that that work coexists with or reinforces a history of violence. William Faulkner was a Southern writer whose work glorifies the American South, and often centers racist white characters, while Black people are marginalized. At the same time, his prose is 174 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
profoundly beautiful, and today it creates a mournful sense of a lost past, even if the reality of that past was one of brutal white supremacy. In “Ruins of a Great House,” writers like Faulkner create works of “marble”—beautiful ruins. This tension is complicated by Walcott’s own investment in the “Great House” of the English canon. As a poet writing in English, he is the heir to the tradition of English poetry whether he likes it or not. More than that, however, “Ruins of a Great House” makes it clear that Walcott is not so much an unwilling inheritor of English poetic tradition, but a troubled lover of the beautiful writing of “men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake.” The quotations throughout the poem emphasize that Walcott is not attempting to excise his work from this legacy, but rather wants to visibly and actively intertwine his writing with works composed by colonizers. The ending of the poem quotes from the early modern writer John Donne’s poem “No Man is an Island.” This quotation expresses the central irony of the poem: Saint Lucia is an island, subjugated to a colonial power that it eventually expelled. Yet Walcott cannot be an island; he exists in relation to other people, and he not only recognizes himself in the writing of colonizers, but even finds truth and beauty in what they write. 9.5 A CITY’S DEATH BY FIRE - POEM After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky, I wrote the tale by tallow of a city’s death by fire; Under a candle’s eye, that smoked in tears, I Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire. All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales, Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar; Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire. By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails? In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths; To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails, Blessing the death and the baptism by fire. 175 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
9.6 A CITY’S DEATH BY FIRE - ANALYSIS Poetry in essence is a written artistic form of expression. It allows for writers to reveal their ideas and feelings in a very unique way. Wallace Stevens once said, “Poetry is a destructive force”. In other words, poetry has power, I believe this is a very true statement. Another poet by the name of William Carlos Williams once said, “Poetry is a small (or large) machine made out of words.” I also believe this statement to be true, each aspect of a poem is important to its function as a whole, and if something is missing or changed it can no longer work in the same way. The poet Derek Walcott I believe knew these “rules of poetry” and modeled them in his own writing. For example, we can see use of these statements in his poem “A City’s Death by Fire”. “A City’s Death By Fire” is a powerful poem about a city in ruins after being destroyed by a fire. Someone who appears to have witnessed the tragic destruction is telling the story in the first person, and it is as if we are being walked through the aftermath. The overall tone of this poem is very serious. Making it so the reader can feel what the onlooker is feeling, it is very dark and overwhelmingly sad. However, as the poem goes on the tone slowly shifts from morbid to hopeful, and we are given the feeling that resurrection is to come. Imagery is the dominating force in this poem, and Walcott creates these strong images to describe what the town now looks like. In lines 5 and 6 he says: “All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales, Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;” He appears to be in disbelief at what he sees; the place he once called home is now ... ... middle of paper ... ...o paint a clear picture through the structure of his poem, his specific word choice, and the tone he creates. And each of his poems is unique in the way it makes you feel when you experience it. “A city’s Death by Fire” is a very good example of a Walcott poem that can paint a picture. It has the ability to place you among the debris that was once a town; it makes you feel as though you lost everything in this tragedy. A City’s Death by Fire poem is literally about a city being destroyed by a fire. This is a very lyrical poem that shows expression of sadness and loss that is brought on by the destruction of the city. The narrator says “faiths that were snapped like wire” (line 4) and “under a candles eye that smoked in tears” (line3). This all said to be due to the city’s death by fire which portrays a dark image of sadness and sorrow. The personification in the title makes the poem all the more sad because it makes you feel for the city in a way you wouldn’t if this information was released as a news bulletin. Each line about the severity of destructions makes you feel as if it were a living thing that had died. I 176 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
guess in a way, when all the buildings in a city burn down all the history and memories in those buildings go down with it. The imagery in this poem is also very strong. The metaphors provide for connections to be made. The religious imagery is obvious in this poem and shouldn’t be overlooked. Right in the beginning of the play the fire is referred to as the “hot gospeller” this suggests the origin of the fire has to do with the church and religion and maybe the fire is a metaphor itself for some destructive power that “killed” the city. The metaphor “hills that were flocks of faith provides a juxtaposition between the nature world and this “wooden world” the narrator speaks of. The nature world is immune to this fire and the city, this “wooden world” is flammable. So if we are to assume the origin of the fire is religion then it makes sense that the “hills that were flocks of faith were unharmed. The narrator even talks about walking through the rubble and seeing walls still standing. He personifies them by calling them “liars” which would also be sinners because lying is a sin. While at the beginning of the poem there is a sadness about what happened, yet now you get the feeling that maybe it wasn’t all bad. This is all confirmed by the line “baptism by fire”. I think this is a pro-religion poem that displays much symbolism of cleansing a world of sinners. Where the “wooden world” was our world, and the “hills” is an enlightened world like heaven. The symbolism of cleansing and rebirth to start a new is all over the bible (i.e. Noah’s arch). I think Walcott’s intention was to point out the unfaithfulness of some people in this world and to create another example of what could happen if all of us are unfaithful. The speaker is identified several times in the poem by the first person pronoun ‘I’, but it is a bit ambiguous as to who the speaker really is. It seems to be written in the point of view of a bystander, either that saw the events of the poem take place or arrived shortly after it all to witness the aftermath of the fire. Either way, he observes all the details of the burned city with a certain incredulity and bewilderment. The audience seems mainly to be aimed at the surviving residents of the city. The second part of the poem focuses on reassuring the people that everything will be restored in the end. The poem also seems to reach out to the rest of the world. The last lines of the poem make you think a bit more, as a reader, rather than just looking onward at the aftermath and not feeling like a part of the audience. The poem takes place in a fairly large city, during the aftermath of a large fire. The speaker walks around the ruins of the city, gazing at all the destruction. He vividly describes all of the burned buildings, the crumbling walls, and the rubble left after the fire. The once great city has been reduced to mere rubble, mortar and bricks. Even if all the terrible destruction and devastation of the fire has crippled the people of the city, eventually normal life will begin again and people will live on with love, acting as a living testimony to what happened. 177 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
The poem does have end rhyme present. In the beginning, it rhymes lines 1 and 3, 2 and 4, 5 and 7, and 6 and 8. But after line 8, it stops the regular rhyme scheme, only rhyming the words ‘fails’ and ‘nails’ for the rest of the poem. No other rhyme is present, and the poem is written in free verse with no apparent meter to it. There are several examples of alliteration though: tale by tallow, smoking sea, wooden world, etc. He doesn’t use repetition thoroughly, but the whole poem gives off biblical, fire-like images through its choice in words. The shape of the poem itself even looks a bit like a fire, with its peaks and dips. The poem is very specific in all of its diction and word choices. Walcott uses several words, such as ‘blessing’, ‘baptism’, ‘nails’, and ‘Christ’ to give off a holy, biblical image and feeling about the poem. It’s almost as if the fire is a purging sort of rebirth for the entire, which alludes to the story of Jesus Christ’s Crucifixion and him rising from the grave three days later. The diction and word choice gives a serious tone and mood to the poem, and draws the reader into the aftermath of the fire. Yes. It is dominant throughout the entire poem. The word choices and placement of the lines of poetry help to create image after image, as the speaker of the poem walks through the burned city. Images of burned buildings, ruined walls, and piles of rubble immediately spring to mind when Walcott describes the aftermath. The lines at the beginning and the end even give the readers specific pictures, even if they don’t focus on the fire. The poem is a bit more lyric in structure rather than narrative. It provokes more than one emotion in the reader, however. I think that the poem gives off two distinct feelings, transforming the reader from one feeling to the next as it progresses on with the poem. In the beginning, as the speaker is walking through the burned, charred aftermath of the fire, the reader feels sorrow and disbelief for the people of the city. But as the poem continues on and ends on the ‘renewal’-type feeling, it causes the reader to change his initial feelings of sorrow into hopefulness for the future. Sorrow/sadness–> hopefulness/possibility. This poem is full of metaphors and allusions, and has some personification present as well. The majority of metaphors and personification centers around the landscape after the fire, including the remaining walls, the clouds, the hills, and the leaves. Lines 5,6, 7, 11, and 12 have these personifications, and they bring out a feeling of both destruction (lines 5-7), and then later in the poem, renewal (Lines 11-12). There are a few symbols in the poem. The candle mentioned in line 3 is continually referenced to throughout the poem, through word choice and metaphors. The candle can be seen as a symbol for life; as it continues to burn and whittle away, it still gives off light and goes on. It can be connected back to the last couple lines of the poem, with the leaves and hills. The clouds and the fire-like imagery associated with it can also be seen as a symbol. It’s like the pillar of fire in the Bible that guides the Israelites through the desert, symbolizing the hope and possibility of the future that the people of the city must have. It is another symbol 178 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
that life goes on. And though there are symbols present in the poem, I don’t think the poem is focused on being allegorical in any specific way. The intensity of the loss is captured in the personification in the title of the poem “A City’s death by Fire”. A city is said to die yet it is not a living organism that dies. However, the metaphor captures the existence of the town which in totality is like an organism that has life. When the fire consumes the city, its heritage such as buildings and daily activities of the city is completely destroyed and which cannot be brought back to original form. Walcott’s poem “City’s Death by Fire” is a lyrical; poem imbued with expression of intensive feelings of loss, sadness and disillusionment that come with the destruction of the city. The persona talks of “faiths that were snapped like wire” (line 4) due to the city’s death. And the circumstances under which the poem is written” under a candles eye that smoked in tears” (line3) delivers a sullen picture of great sadness. The poem is also effective in its communicating due to use of imagery. The imagery is rich and is extensively captured in various metaphors employed in the poem. The fire is referred to as the “hot gospeller”, an indication of the fire’s might and the manner in which it widely spread like the way gospel is spread. This is followed by the metaphor “churched sky” which means that the sky like untouchable church is never affected by the fire. Together with the metaphor of ‘hills that were flocks of faith” (line11) which gives the picture of many sheep grazing in peace, help draw a sharp contrast between the persona’s “wooden world” and the natural world which is not affected by the fire. This contrast in the two world’s created by the images of the two worlds show how unreliable and insecure the persona’s world that has been created by humans is and therefore worth not putting trust in. Therefore, to alter persona’s mistaken faith in manmade world, his world has to go through a transformation captured in the image enhancing allusion of “baptism by fire”. Loss of persona’s faith in his “wooden world” is captured on the similes “…faiths that were snapped like wire” which shows that the impact of the fire is so sudden, and which suddenly demands a new way of looking at life. People’s faith in their indestructible world is suddenly broken and thus their pain as their belief is destroyed. The persona is shocked at the walls that stood on the street “…like liars”. The walls give a false picture of the reality; of the city as it were before its destruction, and which cannot now be brought back to life. However, in the last stanza the persona expresses much hope for the town and its people since there “baptism” by fire marks the beginning of a new well founded faith that is not based on man made things 9.7 TEXT - FAR CRY FROM AFRICA A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt 179 Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies, CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt. 180 Corpses are scattered through a paradise. Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries: \"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!\" Statistics justify and scholars seize The salient of colonial policy. What is that to the white child hacked in bed? To savages, expendable as Jews? Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break In a white dust of ibises whose cries Have wheeled since civilization's dawn From the parched river or beast-teeming plain. The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum, While he calls courage still that native dread Of the white peace contracted by the dead. Again brutish necessity wipes its hands Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again A waste of our compassion, as with Spain, The gorilla wrestles with the superman. I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live? 9.8 ANALYSIS - FAR CRY FROM AFRICA Derek Walcott's 1962 poem \"A Far Cry From Africa\" responds to the Mau Uprising in Kenya, a guerrilla war fought by native Kenyans against British colonists from 1952-1960. The speaker—implied to be from a colony, just as Walcott himself was—has both African and English heritage. Although the speaker hates colonial rule, he also bristles against the gruesomeness of the rebellion, creating a feeling of deep ambivalence and confusion regarding his loyalties. Ultimately, the poem treats both the violence in Kenya and the speaker's own conflicted identity as part of the legacy of colonialism. Rather than finding a way out of this legacy, the speaker expresses the deep pain it persistently causes. A breeze lifts Africa's yellow-brown fur. People from Kenya's Kikuyu tribe, fast and lively as flies, fasten themselves to the veins of the grassland. Dead bodies are strewn throughout paradise. Only a worm, captain of decaying bodies, yells out: \"Don't bother feeling sympathy for each of these dead people!\" People use statistics to justify colonialism; scholars jump on different facts about colonialism to debate it. What do these abstract discussions matter to a white child who is chopped to death in bed? What do they matter to native Africans who are considered savages, who are seen as worthless Jews in Nazi concentration camps? Shaken by farmers, the long grasses snap and a white dust fills the air. This dust is actually the flapping of ibises—white, long-legged birds. The birds are disturbed by the farmers and take off, crying out, just as they have done for thousands of years, ever since civilization began, whether over the shallow river or the plain full of animals. People interpret animals' violence towards each other as natural, but humans have often seen themselves as god-like, walking on two legs rather than four. Humans try to embraces that godliness by hurting others. But people are as crazed as fighting animals. They wage wars that are like dances to the beat of drums made out of corpses. Native rebels believe they have courage, when it is really just fear of extermination—a false peace that white people achieve by killing all those who resist. Once more, the brutal idea of necessity is used to justify violence, appealing to a movement that itself is deeply flawed—just like someone trying to clean their bloody hands with a dirty napkin. Once more this is a waste of everyone's sympathy, as it was with the Spanish Civil War. As in racist stereotypes, it's like an ape fighting a super-human. I'm poisoned with the blood, or heritage, of both colonizer and colonized. Which side will I support when even my veins are split in two? I have vehemently opposed British colonial rule, which is like a drunken army or police officer (and also is literally enforced by drunken officers). How can I choose between African peoples and the English language that I love so much? How can I 181 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
can betray both of them? How can I give each of them what they've given me? How can I face all this violence and remain calm? How can I forsake Africa and keep on living? A Far Cry from Africa” responds to the Mau Uprising, a rebellion fought by native Kenyans against the British colonial army in the mid-20th century. The poem’s speaker has connections to both Africa and England, and feels conflicted about how to interpret the violence of this conflict. Usually identified closely with Walcott himself, the speaker is painfully divided between his connections to the English as well as to the colonized people of Africa. In fact, the poem implicitly argues that a confused identity—and the anxiety it causes—is one of the painful legacies of colonialism. To understand the speaker’s dilemma here, it’s important to understand some historical context. The Mau, or Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), were rebels from the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya that waged a gruesome guerrilla war against English settlers for eight years (1952-1960). The British response to the rebellion was even more brutal. This, then, is what the speaker is responding when asking, “How can I face such slaughter and be cool? / How can I turn from African and live?” For the speaker the word “slaughter” seems to suggest the highly publicized violence of the Mau, which provoked the subsequently brutal response from the British. These lines embody the speaker’s internal division between England and Africa, laying out the two sides as diametrically opposed choices. The speaker feels that the violence of the Mau Rebellion requires a passionate and decisive response. Either one must condemn the Mau and side with England, or support the Mau and forsake England entirely; accept the violence of the Mau rebellion as necessary to Kenyan independence, or reject such violence, and in the process reject Africa and all connection to colonized people. The speaker is suspended between these two options, unable to choose. Thus, the speaker feels alienated from each side of the conflict. At the same time, however, the speaker also feels inextricably linked to both the British and the Kenyans. It’s implied that the speaker has a colonial heritage, ancestry from both English colonists and colonized Africans. As a result, the speaker feels as if his own body is divided by this conflict. In the third stanza, the speaker addresses this problem explicitly: “I who am poisoned with the blood of both, / Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” The word “poisoned” conveys the powerful sense of alienation the Mau Uprising provokes in the speaker. Although the speaker has “the blood of both” Europeans and Africans—that is, ancestry from each place— this blood feels poisonous, linking the speaker to violence no matter what. This heritage also “poison[s]” the speaker because speaker feels “divided to the vein.” No matter which way the speaker “turn[s],” it’s as if half the speaker’s “blood” does violence to the other half. By framing this conflict in terms of “blood” and the speaker’s own “vein[s],” the poem captures the very personal, even bodily, division the speaker feels. This isn’t a 182 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
matter of abstract politics for the speaker, but a very intimate struggle that’s taking place within him—a struggle caused by the legacy of colonialism. At the end of the poem, the speaker is no closer to choosing a side than at the beginning. Colonial history has forced the speaker into this situation, forever divided by colonizer and colonized. The poem explores the complex relationship between colonized peoples and the language that they’re often pushed to adopt—in this case, English. For the speaker, there are two distinct sides to the English language: one is the rich tradition of English literature, particularly poetry, and the other is England’s brutal history of colonization. While English literature has given the speaker a means of thought and self-expression, English colonists have only caused pain in the speaker’s eyes. As a result, the very act of writing in English embodies the speaker’s complex and conflicted identity. The poem, by its very existence, also illustrates how one may find a means of resistance and self-expression while using the language of an oppressor. The speaker’s antipathy towards England is a response to the history of colonization, which, for the speaker, is directly connected to the English language. In other words, the English language is not separate from the actions of England; the poem implies that language is closely linked to identity and heritage. The speaker states this connection and its resulting dilemma most clearly in the third stanza: “I who have cursed / The drunken officer of British rule, how choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?” In other words, the speaker hates English colonial rule and wants to support the independence of Africans. Yet the speaker feels that such support means rejecting the English language—the very language the poem is written in, and which is also a part of the speaker's identity and means of expressing himself. In fact, the speaker expresses “love” for “the English tongue.” This “love” communicates how passionately the speaker feels about English, how difficult it would be to give up writing in it. This passion makes a lot of sense if the speaker is interpreted as someone from a British colony, as Walcott himself was (he grew up on the Caribbean island of Santa Lucia). While native peoples in English colonies did not originally speak English, they were forced to adopt it, especially those who attended school. English became a very important language for such people, even their primary mode of expression, as it was for Walcott. At the same time, though, it was a language they were coerced into adopting, the language of their oppressor. The poem’s form conveys this nuanced relationship with English. The speaker engages with the traditional constraints of English verse while also striving for some freedom from those constraints. The poem—like the rest of Walcott’s work—is based on a traditionally English understanding of poetic form, albeit one that Walcott loosens and tweaks. In other words, the poem sounds like a freer, more modern version of traditional English poetry. For instance, the 183 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
poem weaves in and out of a loose meter, sporadically using rhyme and half-rhyme in no set scheme. The speaker conveys “love” for the English language and English literature. Yet by not fully conforming the forms of that past, the speaker reveals some distrust. Perhaps poetic constraints are not so different from the legal constraints imposed on natives by British colonial rule. The speaker bristles against colonial rule, even at a literary level. In adopting a more fluid attitude towards form, then, the speaker attains a degree of self-expression and self-interrogation that resists colonial authority. As a result, the speaker occupies a kind of halfway point: not fully conforming to English expectations, but not fully free of them either. Rather than finding a resolution to this conflict, the speaker lingers in the painful contradictions of a divided identity, using eloquent English and a fluid attitude towards traditional form to address the suffering that colonization has caused. \"A Far Cry from Africa\" responds to the Mau Uprising, a guerrilla war waged by Kenyan rebels against British colonists from 1952-1960. This fact becomes apparent as soon as the speaker references the Kikuyu, the tribe that the Mau fighters were from. Derek Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa,” published in 1962, is a painful and jarring depiction of ethnic conflict and divided loyalties. The opening images of the poem are drawn from accounts of the Mau Uprising, an extended and bloody battle during the 1950s between European settlers and the native Kikuyu tribe in what is now the republic of Kenya. In the early twentieth century, the first white settlers arrived in the region, forcing the Kikuyu people off of their tribal lands. Europeans took control of farmland and the government, relegating the Kikuyu to a subservient position. One faction of the Kikuyu people formed Mau, a terrorist organization intent on purging all European influence fromthe country, but less strident Kikuyus attempted to either remain neutral or help the British defeat Mau. The ongoings in Kenya magnified an internal strife within the poet concerning his own mixed heritage. Walcott has both African and European roots; his grandmothers were both black, and both grandfathers were white. In addition, at the time the poem was written, the poet’s country of birth, the island of St. Lucia, was still a colony of Great Britain. While Walcott opposes colonialism and would therefore seem to be sympathetic to a revolution with an anticolonial cause, he has passionate reservations about Mau: they are, or are reported to be, extremely violent—to animals, whites, and Kikuyu perceived as traitors to the Mau cause. As Walcott is divided in two, so too is the poem. The first two stanzas refer to the Kenyan conflict, while the second two address the war within the poet-as-outsider/insider, between his roles as blood insider but geographical outsider to the Mau Uprising. The Mau Uprising, which began in 1952, was put down—some say in 1953, 1956, or 1960—without a treaty, yet 184 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
the British did leave Kenya in 1963. Just as the uprising was never cleanly resolved, Walcott, at least within the poem, never resolves his conflict about whose side to take. \"A Far Cry from Africa\" occurs in Derek Walcott’s collection In a Green Night. The poem explains the conflicts of poet’s European and African ancestry. The poem describes how violence and racial prejudice had spewed blood throughout the land. The poet remembers the Mau uprising when he thinks of the incidents of the Kikuyu people. When he looks back at “the tawny pelt” of Africa, he remembers about the Mau uprising in Kenya and he is unable to fully sympathize with any one side. He sees both enemies as murderers who have strewn dead bodies across a beautiful land and brought death to a veritable Eden. Form and Tone of the poem The poem is written in free verse. It is presented in two stanzas one consisting of twenty one lines the other consisting eleven. It does not follow a strict rhyming pattern, although end rhymes feature prominently throughout the poem. The effect of this is that the poem has a stilted, disjointed feel which mirrors the feelings expressed within the poem. The rhythm is also inconsistent, although the line lengths are similar the beats in each line alter which again adds to the sense of discord. The poem is deeply rooted in Africa. The language used helps to make the poem feel culturally African. The first three lines depict the poem’s setting on the African plain, or veldt. The nation itself is compared to an animal (perhaps a lion) with a “tawny pelt.” Tawny is a color described as light brown to brownish orange that is common color in the African landscape. The word “Kikuyu” serves as the name of a native tribe in Kenya. What seems an idyllic portrayal of the African plain quickly shifts; the Kikuyu are compared to flies (buzzing around the “animal” of Africa) who are feeding on blood, which is present in large enough amounts to create streams. Walcott shatters the image of a paradise that many associate with Africa by describing a landscape littered with corpses. He adds a sickening detail by referring to a worm, or maggot, that reigns in this setting of decaying human flesh. The worm’s admonishment to “Waste no compassion on these separate dead!” is puzzling in that it implies that the victims somehow got what they deserved. The mention of the words “justify” and “colonial policy,” when taken in context with the preceding six lines, finally clarifies the exact event that Walcott is describing—the Mau Uprising against British colonists in Kenya during the 1950s. Where earlier the speaker seemed to blame the victims, he now blames those who forced the colonial system onto Kenya and polarized the population. They cannot justify their actions, because their reasons will never matter to the “white child” who has been murdered—merely because of his color—in retaliation by Mau fighters or to the “savages,” who— in as racist an attitude as was taken by Nazis against Jews—are deemed worthless, or expendable. (“Savages” is a 185 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
controversial term that derives from the French word sauvage meaning wild, and is now wholly derogatory in English. Walcott’s use of “savage” functions to present a British colonialist’s racist point of view.) Walcott shifts gears in these lines and returns to images of Africa’s wildlife, in a reminder that the ibises (long-billed wading birds) and other beasts ruled this land long before African or European civilization existed. The poet also describes a centuries-old hunting custom of natives walking in a line through the long grass and beating it to flush out prey. Such killing for sustenance is set against the senseless and random death that native Africans and European settlers perpetrate upon each other. These lines are simultaneously pro-nature and anticulture. Animals kill merely for food and survival, but humans, having perfected the skill of hunting for food, extend that violent act to other areas, using force to exert control—and prove superiority over—other people; they seek divinity by deciding who lives and who dies. Ironically, wars between people are described as following the beat of a drum—an instrument made of an animal hide stretched over a cylinder. Walcott also points out that for whites, historically, peace has not been the result a compromise with an opponent, but a situation arrived at because the opposition has been crushed and cannot resist anymore. These lines are difficult to interpret, but they appear to be aimed at those judging the Mau uprising from a distance—observers who could somehow accept brutality as necessary and who are aware of a dire situation but wipe their hands, or refuse to become involved, in it. The poet appears to condemn such an attitude by comparing the Mau Uprising to the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Leaders of France and Great Britain wanted to avoid another war that would engulf all of Europe, so they introduced a nonintervention pact that was signed by twenty-seven nations. Nonetheless, the Insurgents, or Nationalists, (under the leadership of General Francisco Franco) were aided by and received military aid from Germany and Italy. The Loyalists, or Republicans, had no such backing; they fought valiantly but were outmanned, lost territory, and were eventually defeated in March of 1939. Line 25 presents a cynical view of the Mau Uprising as just another colonial conflict where gorillas—negatively animalized Africans— fight with superman—a negative characterization of Europe. This stanza is a change of scene from primarily that of Africa, to that of the poet. Walcott, being a product of both African and English heritage, is torn, because he does not know how to feel about the Mau struggle. He certainly is not satisfied with the stock response of those from the outside. Walcott is sickened by the behavior of Mau just as he has been disgusted by the British. By the end, the poet’s dilemma is not reconciled, but one gets the sense that Walcott will abandon neither Africa nor Britain. 186 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
The poem \"A Far Cry from Africa\" belongs to post-colonial poetry. Mainly the poem discusses the events of the Mau uprising in Kenya in the early 1950s. It was a bloody battle during the 1950 between the European settlers and the native Kikuyu tribes in Kenya. Kikuyu was the largest and most educated tribe in Kenya. As the British people invaded more and more their land they outrageously reacted. The Kenyan tribes rebelled against the British who stole the motherland of them. The rebellion was under a secret organization called Mau. It is estimated a large number of Kikuyu as well as whites were slaughtered during the process. The poem starts with the painful jarring harsh experience of the rebellion that changed the tranquil peaceful setting of the country. The nation itself compared to an animal, as it indicates it is an animal like a lion. “Tawny pelt” And how Kikuyu started the bloody battle. The Kikuyu are compared to flies who are feeding on blood. Next we are informed the aftermath of the rebellion. The poet describes that the country before the conflict was a ‘paradise’ and with an ironical comment he indicates the death, inhumanity and destruction occurred in the land. There is the juxtaposition of the conflict againstsomething divine with the image of corpses scattered through a paradise. The worms that can be seen as the ultimate emblem of stagnation and decay, cries at the worthless death. Sarcastically poet indicates how the humans are reduced to statistics. And at the same time though scholars justify the presence of white men in Africa and the process of civilizing the natives, the poet indicates the fact that it was a failure with the brutal death of the small white child and his family. People behave like animals ‘savages’ hints and remind us the persecution endured by the Jews. Jews were killed in millions due to their ethnicity during the time of Hitler. Though the time and the place is different the same kind of situations repeat in the world time to time. Next the poet creates a picture of white men in searching for natives who are hiding behind the bushes. The sound of ‘ibises’ hints a bad omen. Again the repetition is shown through the word ‘wheeled’. The civilized men thrived on conquering others. This process of violence and conquering each other indicates the law of the jungle. The violence of ‘beast on beast’ can justify according to the law of nature, the law of jungle. Yet it cannot be applied to the ‘upright man’ who are stretching out themselves to reach the ‘divinity’. Apart from the task of stretching themselves to reach ‘divinity’ they end up with ‘inflicting pain’ which is killing and which is the law of jungle; killing for prey. They call for the massacre they create by killing as war. Ironically, wars between people are described as following the beat of a drum — an instrument made of an animal hide stretched over a cylinder. Though the natives think the act of killing white men brings them ‘courage’ it ends up with fear. Moreover the poet emphasizes the fact that though the natives justify their task mentioning it as a ‘brutish necessity’ and considering it as a national cause they just clean their hands with ‘the napkin of dirty cause’. So the poet suggests the fact that the natives’ cause is dirty and ugly though they consider it as right and nationwide. He sees a comparison with the West Indians who had their share of harsh experiences with Spain. The fight is just as the gorilla wrestles with superman. The gorilla in this context is compared to natives and superman is compared to 187 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
white men. The last two lines indicate the situation of the poet, as he belongs to both cultures how he feels inferiority regarding the situation. The mixed heritage of the poet makes him unable to decide to which he should be partial. The title itself too indicates the state of mind conflict of the poet, a cry from a great distance away and moreover it shows the alienation and the inferiority of the poet. The poem ends with a picture of violence and cruelty and with the idea of searching for identity. A Far Cry from Africa by Derek Walcott deals with the theme of split identity and anxiety caused by it in the face of the struggle in which the poet could side with neither party. It is, in short, about the poet’s ambivalent feelings towards the Kenyan terrorists and the counter- terrorist white colonial government, both of which were 'inhuman', during the independence struggle of the country in the 1950s. The persona, probably the poet himself, can take favor of none of them since both bloods circulate along his veins. He has been given an English tongue which he loves on the one hand, and on the other, he cannot tolerate the brutal slaughter of Africans with whom he shares blood and some traditions. His conscience forbids him to favour injustice. He is in the state of indecisiveness, troubled, wishing to see peace and harmony in the region. Beginning with a dramatic setting, the poem \"A Far Cry from Africa\" opens a horrible scene of bloodshed in African territory. ‘Bloodstreams’, ‘scattered corpses,’ ‘worm’ show ghastly sight of battle. Native blacks are being exterminated like Jews in holocaust following the killing of a white child in its bed by blacks. The title of the poem involves an idiom: “a far cry” means an impossible thing. But the poet seems to use the words in other senses also; the title suggests in one sense that the poet is writing about an African subject from a distance. Writing from the island of St. Lucia, he feels that he is at a vast distance- both literally and metaphorically from Africa. “A Far Cry” may also have another meaning that the real state of the African ‘paradise’ is a far cry from the Africa that we have read about in descriptions of gorgeous fauna and flora and interesting village customs. And a third level of meaning to the title is the idea of Walcott hearing the poem as a far cry coming all the way across thousands of miles of ocean. He hears the cry coming to him on the wind. The animal imagery is another important feature of the poem. Walcott regards as acceptable violence the nature or “natural law” of animals killing each other to eat and survive; but human beings have been turned even the unseemly animal behavior into worse and meaningless violence. Beasts come out better than “upright man” since animals do what they must do, any do not seek divinity through inflicting pain. Walcott believes that human, unlike animals, have no excuse, no real rationale, for murdering non- combatants in the Kenyan conflict. Violence among them has turned into a nightmare of unacceptable atrocity based on color. So, we have the “Kikuyu” and violence in Kenya, violence in a “paradise”, and we have “statistics” that don’t mean anything and “scholar”, who tends to throw their weight behind the colonial policy: Walcott’s outrage is very just by 188 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
the standards of the late 1960s, even restrained. More striking than the animal imagery is the image of the poet himself at the end of the poem. He is divided, and doesn’t have any escape. “I who am poisoned with the blood of both, where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” This sad ending illustrates a consequence of displacement and isolation. Walcott feels foreign in both cultures due to his mixed blood. An individual sense of identity arises from cultural influences, which define one’s character according to a particular society’s standards; the poet’s hybrid heritage prevents him from identifying directly with one culture. Thus creates a feeling of isolation. Walcott depicts Africa and Britain in the standard roles of the vanquished and the conqueror, although he portrays the cruel imperialistic exploits of the British without creating sympathy for the African tribesmen. This objectively allows Walcott to contemplate the faults of each culture without reverting to the bias created by attention to moral considerations. However, Walcott contradicts the savior image of the British through an unfavorable description in the ensuring lines. “Only the worm, colonel of carrion cries/ ‘waste no compassion on their separated dead'.” The word ‘colonel’ is a punning on ‘colonial’ also. The Africans associated with a primitive natural strength and the British portrayed as an artificially enhanced power remain equal in the contest for control over Africa and its people. Walcott’s divided loyalties engender a sense of guilt as he wants to adopt the “civilized” culture of the British but cannot excuse their immoral treatment of the Africans. The poem reveals the extent of Walcott’s consternation through the poet’s inability to resolve the paradox of his hybrid inheritance. 9.9 SUMMARY Derek Walcott’s poem “Ruins of a Great House” starts with the description of a ruined colonial mansion. He described the mansion by using such metaphors which show the decay and death of that place that once used to be a lively place. Trees and plants used to grow their in the past but now they have become lifeless. These are the remnants of that time when this house was used as a plantation for the business of slavery in 19th century. The speaker of the poem is reminded of how Rudyard Kipling in his writings talked about the decline of British Empire and justified the subjugation of the colonized people by quoting references from Bible. He compares the era of colonization with a stinking lime that reeked like deadly slave ships. 189 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
The stench of those times is still there and the speaker feels it although the slaveholders have died long ago. He recalls words of John Donne that death of a single man diminished everyone who’s living. His lines fill up the speaker with compassion more than anger and he looks around at the ruins of the house which remind him now of not only those slaves but the death of their masters too. 9.10KEYWORDS Acacia - a tree or shrub of warm climates that bears spikes or clusters of yellow or white flowers and is frequently thorny Benin - a country on the western coast of Africa, formerly colonized by the French Burnoose - a long, loose hooded cloak worn in the Middle East and North Africa. Candelabra - a large, branched candlestick or holder for several candles or lamps Canton- a province in southern China Carthage - an ancient city-state on the north African coast near modern Tunis, famously destroyed by ancient Rome charnel galleon - A charnel house is a vault or building where the remains of the dead are stored. A galleon is a type of sailing ship; Walcott combines these two terms in \"Ruins of a Great House,\" probably to refer to a slave ship. Declension - in certain languages, especially romance languages, the variation of the form of a noun, pronoun, or adjective, by which its grammatical case, number, and gender are identified Diminutive - a shortened form of a name, typically used informally disjecta membra - scattered fragments, especially of written work The Harmattan - a very dry, dusty easterly or northeasterly wind on the West African coast, occurring from December to February. Levantine - A native or inhabitant of the Levant. \"The Levant\" is the former name for the geographical area of the eastern Mediterranean that is now occupied by Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. The Madonna - the Virgin Mary, especially when depicted seated and holding the infant Jesus 190 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Manchineel - a Caribbean tree that has acrid apple-like fruit and poisonous milky sap that can cause temporary blindness Osprey - a large fish-eating bird of prey with long, narrow wings and a white underside and crown, found throughout the world Pontoise - a city in, and the capital of, Val-d'Oise, a region northwest of Paris. Prodigal - In the Bible, the prodigal son returned home after he had wasted all of his possessions and was forgiven by his father. The word \"prodigal\" often refers to someone who is wasteful, but in \"Map of the New World,\" Walcott uses it to refer to someone who finds their way back home. Rake - a fashionable or wealthy man of dissolute or promiscuous habits Seditious - inciting or causing people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch Ulcerous - being or having a corrupting influence 9.11 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Analyze Walcott's Nation - Inclusions and Ambivalences in her works ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 2. Examine the Landscapes, Seascapes and the Caribbean Identity ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 3. Justify Naming and Re-naming towards Healing the Colonial wound ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 9.12 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Describe the Speaker of the poem A City’s Death by Fire 2. Who is the audience of the poem A City’s Death by Fire? 3. What is the dilemma of Derek Walcott in A Far Cry from Africa? 191 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
4. What is the message of A Far Cry from Africa? 5. Mention the theme of the poem, Ruins of a Great House. Long Questions 1. What is the situation and setting of the poem, A City’s Death by Fire? 2. State the poem’s central idea or theme in A City’s Death by Fire. 3. How does Derek Walcott express his conflicting loyalties in his poem A Far Cry from Africa? 4. Why does Derek Walcott say that he is poisoned with the blood of both what does he mean by both? 5. Explain the theme of split identity and anxiety as reflected in \"A Far Cry from Africa\" by Derek Walcott B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. _____ and spirituality have played a significant role from the beginning in Walcott's work a. Methodism b. Materialism c. Colonialism d. Idealism 2. Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in ______ a. 1992 b. 1999 c. 1991 d. 1990 3. What is Derek Walcott's epic poem? 192 a. Omeros b. Enclaved c. Memory d. A Far Cry from Africa CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
4. Ruins of a Great House' presents the reader with vivid imagery and stark _____ a. contrast b. society c. culture d. Africans 5. Derek states that those___ who lived and worked here were subject to appalling injustices, a. slaves b. people c. natives d. ancestors Answers 1-a, 2-a, 3-a, 4-a, 5-a 9.13 REFERENCES References book Patel, G. (2007). Poetry with young people. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Thomas J. T. (2004). Child poets and the poetry of the playground. Children’s Literature Bishop, Edward. (1989). A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan Press, London. Spiropoulu, Angeliki. (2010). Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with W.Benjamin. Palgrave, London. Textbook references https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56907/raw-meditations-on-money-1-she- speaks-a-school-teacher-from-south-india Websites 193 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
https://d7.drunkenboat.com/db20/reviews/finds-larger-chaos-meena-alexanders- birthplace-buried-stones-wallis-wilde-menozzi https://ijllnet.com/journals/Vol_5_No_3_September_2018/23.pdf https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Raw+Meditations+on+Money-a077035217 https://poem.shivyogastudio.in/2021/03/a-school-teacher-from-south-india.html 194 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
UNIT – 10 CLAUDE MC KAY: “ENSLAVED”, “TO ONE COMING NORTH”, “DAWN IN NEW YORK”, “IN BONDAGE” STRUCTURE 10.0 Learning Objectives 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Texts Claude McKay - Enslaved 10.3 Analysis - Enslaved 10.4 Text – To One Coming North 10.5 Analysis – To One Coming North 10.6 Dawn in New York – Poem 10.7 Analysis - Dawn in New York 10.8 In Bondage - Text 10.9 In Bondage - Analysis 10.10 Summary 10.11 Keywords 10.12 Learning Activity 10.13 Unit End Questions 10.14 References 10.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to: Understand Claude Mc Kay’spoems Realize the concept of love and understanding in the poem Appreciate the characterization of Claude Mc Kay 10.1 INTRODUCTION Author’s Biography 195 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Claude McKay was born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica to farmers, Thomas Francis and Hannah Ann Elizabeth (née Edwards). Claude was one of eleven children, and one of only eight to survive to maturity. The McKays were highly respected in their community and in their local Baptist Church. Thomas was an expert planter who raised numerous cash crops, including bananas, coffee, cacao, and sugar cane. The family’s prosperity, coupled with their Christian education, afforded them an elevated social status, akin to that of the “colored,” or lighter-skinned caste, of Black Jamaicans. According to family lore, Hannah was descended from slaves brought to the West Indies from Madagascar, while Thomas was supposedly descended from the Ashanti tribe. He regaled his family with West African folk tales and his knowledge of Ashanti traditions. Thomas also had immense respect for British culture, particularly the Christian fundamentalist faith that he had followed since his youth. The latter instilled in him a sense of moral uprightness, which included teetotaling and an aversion to profanity. Thomas’s stern and formal demeanor left McKay feeling distant from his father. His relationship with Hannah, on the other hand, was warm and intimate. Hannah also appreciated her son’s aesthetic sensibilities and desire for intellectual enrichment. Before becoming a poet, McKay foresaw a future as a manual laborer. Lacking skill as a farmer, he chose to learn a trade and, in 1907, was fortunately awarded a trade scholarship to study in Kingston. Shortly before he could enroll in trade school, McKay experienced Kingston’s biggest earthquake since 1696, which reduced the school to a pile of rubble. He returned home to Sunny Ville. Less than six months after his homecoming, McKay’s beloved mother died. He returned to Kingston and worked briefly at a match factory before joining the constabulary. He formed close friendships with other men on the force, particularly elder men, who served as surrogate fathers. In his biography of McKay, Tyrone Tillery suggests that McKay may have also had a lover on the force. This, however, may not have been his first homosexual relationship. Some scholars have also suggested the possibility of a romance between McKay and his mentor, Walter Jekyll. Though Jamaica offered him some intellectual enrichment, McKay felt limited by the island’s offerings, later writing that “Jamaica was too small for high achievement.” In 1912, McKay left his homeland and never returned. After accepting an offer to attend Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he immigrated to the United States. He disembarked in Charleston, South Carolina in the late summer. In the American South, for the first time, McKay encountered Jim Crow segregation. Though Jamaica, too, was a society stratified by color, with the white minority on top, dark-skinned Black people like McKay on the bottom, and more privileged lighter- skinned Black people serving as intermediaries between the ruling and peasant class, the hostility of white Southerners enraged McKay. McKay left Tuskegee after two months and transferred to Kansas State College. He remained there for two years, but never graduated. He received a gift of $2,000 from an “English 196 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
benefactor” (on his transcript from Kansas State, McKay named Walter Jekyll as his “means of support”) in 1914 and moved to Harlem. During the two years that McKay lived in Kansas, he corresponded with a sweetheart back home—Eulalie Imelda Lewars, who joined McKay in New York City shortly after his arrival there. The couple married on July 30, 1914. They had a daughter together, Eulalie Ruth Hope—McKay's only child. Around the time of his wedding, McKay briefly became a restaurateur, opening an eatery in Brooklyn in partnership with a friend. Both McKay’s marriage and business venture quickly failed. After separating from his wife, he abandoned his daughter. Having neither the patience to be a husband and father nor the acumen for entrepreneurship, McKay focused on poetry. He supported himself with wages from menial jobs then found steadier work as a server in a railroad dining car. The job also fulfilled his wanderlust. He simultaneously began publishing poems in various journals, including Pearson’s Magazine. He published two more poems in the monthly literary magazine Seven Arts under the pen name Eli Edwards. McKay’s canonical poem “If We Must Die” was first published in Max Eastman’s Communist magazine Liberator. The poem, which is McKay’s best-known work, is a response to the terrorism that Black citizens throughout the country experienced at the hands of their white neighbors in 1919, during a spate of bloody riots referred to historically as Red Summer. McKay served as executive officer of the Liberator until July 1922, when he resigned to focus on poetry and to travel. He published his last article in August 1922—a review of T. S. Stribling’s novel Birthright, which was adapted into a film directed by Oscar Micheaux thirteen years later. McKay and Eastman remained friends. Their relationship is well-documented in the letters between them, which they exchanged until the end of McKay’s life. McKay with the Greenwich Village-based Dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, c. 1928. The publication of Harlem Shadows resulted in McKay becoming a celebrity among the bohemian crowd, which included the German-born baroness. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress) McKay also made his first trip abroad in 1919 and traveled throughout Europe for the next two years. He released his third book of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire (1920). The collection features another of his best-known poems, “Harlem Shadows.” In 1922, he published a fourth collection titled after this poem. When he returned to the U.S., McKay learned about fellow Jamaican Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey, like McKay, had been attracted to Booker T. Washington’s ideas about Black self-sufficiency and visited Tuskegee with the idea of starting a similar institution in Jamaica. Instead, Garvey remained in the U.S. and formed the UNIA—a Harlem-based Black nationalist organization whose goal was to repatriate African Americans and West Indians to a new colony in West Africa. Though McKay admired Garvey’s charisma and talent with rousing a crowd, he found Garvey’s ideas 197 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
to be, according to biographer Wayne F. Cooper, “impractical” and “dangerously utopian.” He gravitated instead toward socialism and found a community of other West Indian socialists in Harlem, including Cyril Briggs—the St. Nevis-born editor of the New York Amsterdam News. Briggs, McKay, and others formed the African Blood Brotherhood—an organization devoted to racial pride, connection to the diaspora, and to solidarity with the working-class. Two years after its formation, the African Blood Brotherhood merged with the Communist Party, thereby creating the first substantial group of Black Communists in the United States. “Mr. McKay Speaking in the Throne Room of the Kremlin,” from Claude McKay's article \"Soviet Russia and the Negro,\" The Crisis, December 1923. McKay published his seminal collection Harlem Shadows (1922) the year before, which had made him famous. McKay read poems from this collection, particularly “If We Must Die,” to soldiers stationed at Red Army camps. In further pursuit of Communism as the solution to America’s race problem, McKay traveled to the Soviet Union around September 20, 1922. During his sojourn, he met and befriended Leon Trotsky. McKay published the propagandist tract The Negroes in America the following year. The book was re-released in 1979. His other prose works are My Green Hills of Jamaica (1922, 1979), Home to Harlem (1928), and Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), Ginger town (1932), Banana Bottom (1933), and the autobiography A Long Way from Home (1937). Trial by Lynching (1977) was published posthumously. In May 1923, before settling in Paris, McKay developed a respiratory infection. He supported himself by working as an artist’s model. After recovering, he spent the next eleven years traveling throughout Europe and North Africa before returning to the U.S. in the mid-1930s. During a period in which African American literature became increasingly political and numerous Black writers, including Richard Wright, looked to Communism to solve the problem of American racism, McKay became disillusioned with the party. He came to see Communism and other political movements as largely motivated by power. McKay seated with Bolshevik revolutionaries and Communist Party leaders GrigoryZinovyev and Nikolay Bukharin (1923). During his visit to Moscow, McKay spoke about his experiences with racism among American Communists and Socialists. McKay would later abandon his support for the Soviet Union due to the nation’s continuation of trade with Italy after Benito Mussolini’s invasion and occupation of Ethiopia in 1935–36. (Wikimedia Commons) In the early-1940s, McKay was beset by more health troubles and financial problems. The Harlem-based branch of Friendship House, a Catholic organization, provided him with assistance, leading to a temporary recovery of his health in the spring of 1942. On October 11, 1944, he fell ill with dropsy. The following year, he traveled to Albuquerque, New 198 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Mexico, where he received regular medical attention. After his condition improved, he left for Chicago in September 1946 and remained there, despite a doctor’s warnings to go to a warmer clime. McKay died of congestive heart failure in a Chicago hospital at age 57. Several collections of poetry were published after his death, including The Dialectic Poetry of Claude McKay (1972) and The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose (1973). McKay’s long-unpublished manuscript Romance in Marseille was released in February 2020. 10.2 TEXT - CLAUDE MCKAY - ENSLAVED OH when I think of my long-suffering race, For weary centuries despised, oppressed, Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place In the great life line of the Christian West; And in the Black Land disinherited, Robbed in the ancient country of its birth, My heart grows sick with hate, becomes as lead, For this my race that has no home on earth. Then from the dark depths of my soul I cry To the avenging angel to consume The white man's world of wonders utterly: Let it be swallowed up in earth's vast womb, Or upward roll as sacrificial smoke To liberate my people from its yoke! 10.3 ANALYSIS - ENSLAVED Oh when I think of my long-suffering race, For weary centuries despised, oppressed, Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place In the great life line of the Christian West; The poem is not actually separated into verses, but it’s far easier to analyze bit by bit. Enslaved follows a very Shakespearian structure, in an ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG fashion. Though a few of the rhymes are somewhat forced, the structure works well for the poem and helps it to flow in an elegant way. 199 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
The content of this aspect of Enslaved speaks clearly to the history of colonialism. The “long- suffering race” is almost certainly a reference to McKay’s own heritage — he was born in 1889 in Jamaica, by then long colonized by European influence. McKay was, from birth, given a first-hand colonial experience, racially labeled, deemed worthless by the Western World: an especially evident conclusion after he moved to the United States, approximately ten years before the publishing of this poem. The reference to the “Christian West” more than likely refers to the religious superiority that was typically espoused by European colonists. McKay himself began his basic education in the church he attended, and across the world, those who were not born into Caucasian, European families were, as McKay so well puts it, denied a human place. This verse serves to remind the reader that the racist tradition of the world as McKay has been living it is not isolated to him, nor to his neighbors, nor even to his country. It is a long tradition of hatred, oppression, and slavery that has, at this point, stood for many “weary centuries.” And in the Black Land disinherited, Robbed in the ancient country of its birth, My heart grows sick with hate, becomes as lead, For this my race that has no home on earth. McKay’s choice of words here is evidently very careful. “The Black Land disinherited” is a line filled with a strong meaning. The word “disinherited” especially speaks to the injustices of racist policy. Typically, in order to disinherit someone from ownership of land, the one doing the disinheriting must actually own that land. And so, in order for the “Black Land” to be disinherited, Western colonialism must claim ownership of it. McKay is stating that the home of the black people — be that in his native Jamaica, in the countries across Africa, or anywhere they may have migrated to in Europe or North America — has been stolen from them, and the door locked forever. And without a homeland, who can say that those people have a home left in the world? It’s not as though anyone else was giving them one. These lines to Enslaved carry with them unmistakable connotations of deep sorrow. For the narrator, their heart has closed. The sorrow has passed for them and is now sickened with the weight of unbearable hatred. Being hated, they have learned hate, and feel it when thinking about the home that was ruthlessly and horrendously stolen from them. Then from the dark depths of my soul I cry To the avenging angel to consume The white man’s world of wonders utterly: Let it be swallowed up in earth’s vast womb, Or upward roll as sacrificial smoke 200 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
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