Writing agential landscapes: making history through materiality in the poetry of Derek Walcott and Audre Lorde

Abstract

This essay examines poetry by Derek Walcott and Audre Lorde, two poets rarely compared despite their biographic and poetic common ground. By reading them in conversation with one another, the essay demonstrates how the imagery of Caribbean and North American landscapes within the poems provokes investigations of how gendered and generational bodies operate within particular ecosystems and how these spatial models possess their own trajectories and tendencies separate from the human subject. The author’s methodology utilizes current scholars from ecocriticism and new materialism to support the thesis that Walcott and Lorde figure history as an intra-active discipline, tied distinctly with the ethical considerations of the black body, the human and non-human alterations to the environment, and the epistemological development of marginalized identity. For Walcott, “Ruins of a Great House” and “The Sea is History” avoid dichotomous separation of the interior self and the exterior environment by proposing a history grounded in the liminality of the body, where the material processes of decay, desiccation, and de-sedimentation chart a non-linear chronology. Meanwhile, Lorde’s “The Winds of Orisha” and “Relevant is Different Points on the Circle” do more than reflect landscape; they mesh the agency of human and non-human matter through generative biological capacities. Contrary to simplistic or clichéd conceptions of the environment as a monistic spirit that humans must harmonize with and transcend into, Walcott and Lorde demonstrate an ecological awareness of how culture, history, and the environment are all immanent, intra-related and perpetually emerging.