Abstract
Derek Walcott’s three hour pageant, Drums and Colours, commissioned to celebrate the inauguration of the West Indian Federation was first performed at the West Indian Festival, April 25 – May 1, 1958. Some feel that the nationalist and didactic thrust of this early drama blunted it value as art. It is, however, the opinion of this paper that this play provides one of the earliest conceptual maps for Walcott’s orchestration of key thematic occupations such as the quarrel with history, racial and cultural syncretism and the evolution of a distinctive West Indian theatre style. Fifty years after the breakup of the Federation led to nationhood for the various territories beginning with Jamaica and Trinidad, the play is still a relevant gauge of Walcott’s conceptual evolution on issues as diverse as the role of the artist in West Indian society, his thesis on historical amnesia and the benefit of the proto-Christian virtues of compassion and forgiveness in the fashioning of modern Caribbean societies.
Highlights
Derek Walcott’s three hour pageant, Drums and Colours was first performed between April 25 and May 1, 1958 at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Port of Spain, as part of the West Indian Festival of the Arts, to inaugurate the West Indian Federation
For various ideological and logistical reasons every territory did not enter a play, the desire for this to happen was inspired by the idea that in a regional political federation “no element is of greater potential importance than a West Indian theatre, for the theatre is the meeting place and the nursery of the arts”
As a dramatic work commissioned by the University College of the West Indies, Drums and Colours was more than a celebration of nationalistic pride and achievement of federal nationhood
Summary
Derek Walcott’s three hour pageant, Drums and Colours was first performed between April 25 and May 1, 1958 at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Port of Spain, as part of the West Indian Festival of the Arts, to inaugurate the West Indian Federation. (2014) "Towards “that republic in which complexions do not matter”: Derek Walcott’s Drums and Colours Fifty Years On," Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol 11 : Iss. 2 , Article 4.
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