Warwick and Al

More interesting passages and the most explicitly autobiographical references in the poem come with Walcott/the Narrator’s conversation with his father Warwick (XII and XIII) and his visit to his mother Alix (XXXII).

Warwick died when Walcott was three.2 When Walcott meets the ghost of his father, Warwick shows him that his love of poetry is shared with his father and is in part a compensation for never having known him, ‘the calling that you practise both

reverses//and honours mine’ (XII/i/8-9). Walcott admits his poetic voice is that of his father too. Warwick seems to disagree, saying that he never connected with foreign Literature and ‘wrote with the heart/of an amateur. It’s that Will you inherit.’ (XII/i/12) Though ambiguous, this seems to suggest Walcott is the heir not of his amateurism but of the Western canon, of Will Shakespeare and his like.

Walcott walks with his father through Castries and sees it paralyzed by (Catholic) religion and by class based on shades of colour, ‘their reveries were somewhere else,/they looked on their high-brown life as a souvenir/of a dried Easter palm’ […] ‘rubbing their beads and mutteringVeni/Creator’ (XII/ii/6-7). Walcott wrote in

Epitaph for the Young: The burden of my people; first/They would shed the racial

pride and marry well,/That the child may not be darker than the father.’3 Having white fathers, both of Walcott’s parents had light brown skin and Alix boasted of her father’s social standing based on colour.4 Walcott had difficulty with the separateness that came from class and wrote of watching as a child poor black children playing and wanting to join them, until ‘difference became a sadness, that sadness rage, and that longing to share their lives ambition, so that at least one convert was made.’5

2 _{Bruce King,Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, p. 10.}

3 _{Derek Walcott,Epitaph for the Young(Barbados: Advocate Co., 1949, reprinted inAgenda Vol. 39}

Nos 1-3,Winter 2002 – 2003), pp. 15-50.

4

Bruce King,Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life,pp. 11 and 12.

The remainder of Chapters XII and XIII allow Walcott to introduce descriptions of St Lucia’s recent colonial past and to draw comparisons between white and black in that society. He also justifies his own dedication to poetry to the exclusion of all else by making that dedication stem from counsel by his father; ‘Measure the days you have left. Do just that labour/which marries your heart to your right hand: simplify/your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbour//and a sail coming in.’ (XIII/ii/2-3).

Finally, Warwick gives Walcott his poetic charge, to give a voice to the ordinary labouring islanders, here in the form of the women who loaded the coal for the visiting liners when Castries was a coaling station. Walcott used to see the coal wharves when he visited his grandmother, Christiana, who lived down near the harbour.6

This interlude with his father’s ghost has allowed Walcott to do several things: to give a recent historical perspective, to include the grapevine and the coaling scenes from his own childhood, to create a personality for and to talk with a father he never knew and finally to show how he views his own creative burden. He is identifying the Narrator figure with himself and becoming an actor in the poem, where previously (IV/iii) he had only been an observer.

The Narrator’s visit to his mother provides further confirmation that he and Walcott are one person, through the names of her children (XXXII/i/13). The episode is a loving reflection on her, and on aging and the nature of Time. He sees her as lovely (XXXII/i/7) and saintly (XXXII/i/1 and 16), ‘attractive’ and ‘saint’ both terms that

King also used in describing her7. The consequence of the visit is Walcott’s sense of coming home to a place he had lost, rediscovering his lost language, his patois (XXXII/ii/7). When Walcott flies back to the USA, there is a crossing point with Achille’s story (XXXII/iii/3).

Walcott uses this chapter to record both his affection for his mother and his own feelings of broken links being mended when he returns to the island after absence. He also co-locates his fictional character Achille with the real Alix, giving his tale greater truth.

9.3 Norline

Personal relationships appear elsewhere in the poem. In VII/iii, Walcott examines his broken third marriage with Norline, ‘whose breezy vows assured me again/that never in my life had I been happier’ and later, ‘The spike for the Union Pacific had

entered/my heart without cheers for her far gentler weapon./I could not believe it was

over’ (XXXIV/ii/2-3). WhenOmeroswas being written, mainly in the USA, Norline

had left Walcott and was back in St Lucia. King states thatOmeroswas written in

part to work Walcott out of the emotional depression caused by the end of his marriage, with Helen representing aspects of Norline.8 Plunkett’s and Maud’s childlessness may also have been informed by Norline miscarrying Walcott’s child.9

7_{Bruce King,Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life,pp. 12 and 14.} 8

Bruce King,Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life,p. 519.

XXXIII/ii has Walcott lonely in his Brookline, Boston apartment, missing Norline, who has left him. At this period he was alone in Boston, without his friend Sigrid.10 He lives the bachelor life, with an intensely habitual diet (XXXIII/ii/1-2), longing for letters (-/5), masturbating (-/8). He sees Norline in women he passes in supermarkets (-/12), trolleys (-/13), the streets (-/14). He has no-one to give flowers to (-/17), ‘nowhere to go but home’ (-/18), hoping for someone to be there to greet him (-/19). All this rings with the truth of Walcott’s life, yet is objective, reportage almost.