The Forms of Creole Testimony: A Poetics of Fragmentation

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The speaker in Walcott’s poem contemplates the remains of a plantation-era great house and finds both physical remnants—the stones, a bone under a tree, dust, and a possibly decomposing slave body in the lake—and the more ephemeral ancestral memories of loss and rage at past oppression. Both the physical and ephemeral traces are given equal weight in the poem and echo the closing lines’ assertions that England, as Albion, was also once a fragmented colony, “nook-shotten” and “rook o’erblown.” The poem provides a more complicated and nuanced response to the experiences of colonization and enslavement in the British West Indies/Caribbean during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Consequently, the poem allows us to consider the voices of Caribbean slaves, scattered throughout colonial archives like the strewn “stones” and “disjected membra” in the poem. Indeed, the wholesale disenfranchisement of slaves has left only fragments of their voices in the colonial archives. And as a result, stories of slave lives manifest a complex presence in the written narratives of the slave era.KeywordsSlave SystemSlave OwnerAfrican SlaveReading PublicBodily PresenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.