West Indian literature as an expression of national cultures: the literature of St. Lucia

Abstract

In the above line, Derek Walcott takes a despairing glance at the present reality of political individualism among the island-nations of the Caribbean, a reality which, ever since the breakdown of the West Indian Federation, has meant the loss of their more hopeful promise as one regional entity.1 Walcotťs line echoes the kind of concerns, with which one begins to focus on the literatures of the individual islands an approach which raises similar questions about separate national literatures or a single regional literature. One needs to start with at least this qualification: West Indian literature, from its earliest beginnings to the present, has always been much more about West Indian nationalism than about separate national identities. The writers have demonstrated one common pursuit, the urgency of which far transcends the individual needs of their various territories. They have all drawn strength from the sense of a shared preoccupation with the basic question facing the peoples of the region: the question of where to find and how to realize themselves in the wake of the experience of slavery and colonialism. Each writer comes to this collective endeavour, however, out of the lived experience of his own island background. Walcott, again, provides a striking example of the functional relationship between the two. His arch-hero Makak {Dream on Monkey Mountain) comes from his childhood memory of a rowdy, awesome woodcutter in St. Lucia.2 To make him the carrier of his revolutionary message, Walcott has loaded him with regional history. Makak starts from the common stigmas of racial inferiority and the degrading image of the native as ape-figure, as his French patois name implies. At the same time, Walcott has set him in a cultural milieu which draws as much on the peasant life of his native St. Lucia as on