Creole Language in the Poetry of Derek Walcott

Abstract

The perception of Walcott as a poet primarily in dialogue with the European tradition encourages an assumption that he writes in metropolitan standard English. Yet instances of Caribbean creole in his poetry are significant, and more frequent than they may appear at first glance. To investigate Derek Walcott's use of creole language in his poems, and the implications of that use, we should begin by taking note of how the language of poetry written in a creole cultural setting differs from spoken language. The process of creolization occurs at all levels of culture, and although its effects are large scale and highly visible, its actual operations are often very localized and unconscious. To a considerable extent, creolization is a matter of individuals making routine adjustments to a multicultural setting. The process moves forward through small appropriations and accommodations: one cook borrows ingredients from another, one dancer learns someone else's steps, a speaker modifies his language so his listener will understand more easily.1 Consider a very simple example. Two people are conversing, and they happen to pronounce a key term differently. By the end of the conversation, it is likely (but not inevitable) that they will both be pronouncing the term the same way. Furthermore, the shared pronunciation will usually be that used by one of the two speakers, not some intermediate compromise. Why? Sometimes the explanation seems easy—we might expect that an employee would always yield to the pronunciation of his boss. But the analysis of such situations is not always so simple, because the issues that come into play are subtle, including relative status, perceived status, individual self-confidence, and linguistic assurance. And what happens when the same people converse again on the same topic? Do they tacitly accept the "winning" pronunciation from the first conversation, or does the unacknowledged contest begin again? On a microscopic scale, those are the dynamics of creolization. As that example suggests, the development of language in multicultural settings provides some of the best-documented and most readily analyzed evidence for the dynamics of creolization. The Caribbean region constitutes perhaps the world's most extensive and most varied site of creolization as a result of the very different histories of [enslavement and] colonization that unfolded on each of those islands. The inhabitants have come from Africa, Asia, and Europe. As a consequence, many metropolitan languages are spoken. In addition, the region presents a uniquely rich assortment of creole languages. These languages have historical affinities with different European languages (French, English, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese), they [End Page 29] have developed along different lines, and they stand in quite different relations to the languages of the [enslavers and] colonizers still spoken in the area.2 For instance, in Haiti it has been customary to regard metropolitan French and Haitian creole as separate, even opposed, languages. One speaks either one or the other. To combine them in a single utterance would be regarded as bizarre. This is the case even though the creole naturally includes many elements of French; in fact, the official orthography for Haitian creole programmatically works to make written creole look less like French, reinforcing the sense of opposition between the two languages. For example, the Haitian creole expression meaning "for me" is written pou mwe so that visually the relationship to the metropolitan equivalent pour moi is obscured; to the ears of most Francophones, the aural affinity is much more apparent. Jamaica, on the other hand, offers a fine example of what linguists call a "creole continuum." The creole that developed in Jamaica is more African in lexicon and syntax, and therefore less comprehensible to most speakers of English, than that of any other Anglophone Caribbean territory. But it is acceptable and indeed customary for Jamaican speakers to move very freely along this continuum, often in a single utterance combining elements from standard English and Jamaican creole, and not necessarily always combining them in the same way when saying more or less the...