“A Far Cry” Turns Fifty-Five

Abstract

IT'S 15 OCTOBER 1964 in New York City. Thirty-five-year-old Martin Luther King is on front page of New York Times winning Nobel Peace Prize. On 13 October bodies of three murdered civil rights workers killed in Mississippi had been found. In South in June, Nelson Mandela was jailed for life. It's been first hot summer of race riots in New York and Philadelphia. And thirty-four-year-old Derek Walcott is having bad hair day on stage at Solomon Guggenheim museum in New York where's he's been debuted by most influential American poet, Robert Lowell. Hair was getting important that year; Afro hadn't hit Harlem yet, but race riots had in July, and Walcott had just had wild electric razor cut. infuriated me but you can't put your hair back on. I even thought of wearing hat. But I went on anyway, my head looking like hell. He is reading A Far from Africa when suddenly there is applause from auditorium. He leaves stage confused and in state of shock that maybe he's being politely clapped off, then he's asked to go back and finish reading, but says no.1Written in 1953, A Far Cry is poetic self that future 'mulatto of style' presents to New York literary establishment of Guggenheim. Walcott told his biographer Bruce King that poem was a result of student quarrel about at University College, and poem retains an overblown rhetorical, undergraduate tone.2 Unsuccessful in getting in book of poems published in UK in 1954, Walcott first published A Far from Africa in newspaper Public Opinion on 15 December 1956. A Far Cry concerns war in Kenya during 1950s when militant Kikuyu Mau-Mau fought bloody war against British and an even more bloody fratricidal war against loyalist Kikuyu under control of colonial administration. At time poem was published, in Christmas term 1956, I was twelve-year-old and Walcott my house master at Jamaica College where he taught for year. During that term, on 21 October, Dedan Kemathi, leader of MauMau, was finally captured, tried on 27 November, and hanged on 18 February 1957, by which year Mau-Mau were defeated. The Kenyan Emergency ended in i960, and Kenya achieved independence from Britain on 12 December 1963, under presidency of Jomo Kenyatta. A Far Cry was included in Walcott's first book, In Green Night? published in 1962, in his 1986 Collected Poems, 4 and in Edward Baugh's Selected Poems5 in 2007. It is his best known and most anthologised lyric.A Far Cry is, after all, poem about genocide, as this can be only reason for saying savages, expendables as Jews6 even if it is sentiment qualified by irony. It is also poem about the child hacked in bed.7 This implies children in general but actually refers to particular child, six-year-old Michael Ruck, who along with his settler parents was killed with pangas on their farm in January 1953. For these killings eight Kikuyu men were hanged, after speedy 'trial', but to everlasting glory of English 'justice' two minors also convicted were spared noose. The photograph of white child hacked in bed is an image of known provenance, and helped inflame settlers to greater violence against Kikuyu. It was flashed around world by Colonial Office to show what atavistic evil British government was up against. By time it featured in Walcott's poem, published three years after incident, image had served to justify an orgy of hanging of Africans by British authorities during Churchill's postwar tenure as prime minister. By end of Emergency, 1,090 Africans had been hanged in an effort that dwarfed judicial killings, even of French, in Algeria during same time span.8 (Yet there I was in same 1953, nine years old and so close I could smell Churchill's cigar, and waving my little Union Jack as in pith helmet and suit he passed in his motorcade through Kingston. …