An Interview with Derek Walcott

Abstract

Derek Walcott is most important poet and playwright writing in English in West Indies today. For past thirty years he has been engaged in a complex struggle to render in words his native Caribbean culture, New World, first successor to Eden. From his first book of poems (Twenty-Five Poems, 1948) to his most recent book of plays (The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!, 1978) his work is characterized by an insistent naming of things, a resolute determination to capture tensions and ambiguities of West Indian life without descending into merely local or provincial. It has been his particular achievement to remain attentive to diversity and reality of West Indies without surrendering its symbolic resonances and possibilities. Throughout his work Walcott has explored paradoxes and enigmas of life as a West Indian artist. While titles like The Gulf and The Castaway reflect burdens of artistic isolation, 'the beauty of certain degradations, the precocious resignation to fate involved in life on a small island, his work is energized by an exhilarating sense of privilege and opportunity. For Caribbean writers of Walcott's generation experience of Adam naming things in Garden is very real: there is a belief in propitiousness of hour. Aime Cesaire, great French Caribbean poet, sings of this feeling in 'Return to My Native Land: Storm, I would say. River, I would command. Hurricane, I would say. I would utter 'leaf.' Tree. I would be drenched in all rains, soaked in all dews. Walcott's collected works-poems, plays, and essays-continually engage that crucial hour of naming. Derek Walcott was born on island of St. Lucia in 1930. He