Nobel Prize-winning poet who reset The Iliad in St Lucia
Derek Walcott 1930-2017
Derek Walcott, who has died
aged 87, was a Nobel Prize
winning writer and poet whose “expansive universe revolved around a tiny sun”, said The New York Times: the island of St Lucia. His “intricately metaphorical poetry captured the physical beauty of the Caribbean”, its “opulent vegetation, blinding white beaches” and the ever-visible sea; but also the “harsh legacy of colonialism, and the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds”. Of mixed race, he lived on a British-ruled island, many of whose people spoke a French-based Creole. It was a paradoxical situation that he addressed in his poem A Far Cry from Africa: “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?”
Derek Alton Walcott was born on St Lucia in 1930, the son of a civil servant, poet and painter, who died before he turned one, and a Shakespeare-loving teacher. Both his parents were the product of mixed-race marriages. Two of his grandparents were probably descended from slaves. Of his background, he wrote: “Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” At his Methodist school, he was taught English literature as though it was his inheritance. “Forget the snow and daffodils. They were real, more real than the heat and oleander, perhaps, because they lived on the page, in imagination, and therefore in memory.” Inspired by Milton, he began writing poetry, and when he was 17, his mother paid for him to have his first collection published. At the University of the West Indies, in Jamaica, he wrote the first of his 80-odd plays. In 1953, he moved to Trinidad – which V.S. Naipaul had left a few years earlier – to work as a teacher and critic. The two writers would later clash over their different approaches to the legacy of colonialism. In 2008, Walcott attacked Naipaul in verse at a festival in Jamaica: “I have been bitten, I must avoid infection / Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.”
Walcott drew global attention in 1962 with In a Green Night; many more poetry collections followed. In 1990, he produced his epic Omeros, which drew on Homer’s Iliad, and clinched him the Nobel Prize. Meanwhile, he taught at various universities in the US – where he was twice accused of sexual harassment. In 2009, he withdrew his name as a candidate for professor of poetry at Oxford University after dozens of academics received anonymous letters about these allegations. His rival Ruth Padel was chosen, but stepped down when it emerged she’d briefed journalists about the case. Walcott always kept a home on St Lucia, and had returned there shortly before his death. In the US and the UK, he told The Guardian in 2012, people defined him as a black writer. He found the black/ white division “a little ridiculous… I am a Caribbean writer.”