The Nobel Prize in Literature 1992
Derek Walcott
Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1992
Felicity is a village in Trinidad on the
edge of the Caroni plain, the wide central plain that still grows
sugar and to which indentured cane cutters were brought after
emancipation, so the small population of Felicity is East Indian,
and on the afternoon that I visited it with friends from America,
all the faces along its road were Indian, which, as I hope to
show, was a moving, beautiful thing, because this Saturday
afternoon Ramleela, the epic dramatization of the Hindu
epic the Ramayana, was going to be performed, and the
costumed actors from the village were assembling on a field
strung with different-coloured flags, like a new gas station, and
beautiful Indian boys in red and black were aiming arrows
haphazardly into the afternoon light. Low blue mountains on the
horizon, bright grass, clouds that would gather colour before the
light went. Felicity! What a gentle Anglo-Saxon name for an
epical memory.
Under an open shed on the edge of the field, there were two huge
armatures of bamboo that looked like immense cages. They were
parts of the body of a god, his calves or thighs, which, fitted
and reared, would make a gigantic effigy. This effigy would be
burnt as a conclusion to the epic. The cane structures flashed a
predictable parallel: Shelley's sonnet on the fallen statue of
Ozymandias and his empire, that "colossal wreck" in its empty
desert.
Drummers had lit a fire in the shed and they eased the skins of
their tables nearer the flames to tighten them. The saffron
flames, the bright grass, and the hand-woven armatures of the
fragmented god who would be burnt were not in any desert where
imperial power had finally toppled but were part of a ritual,
evergreen season that, like the cane-burning harvest, is annually
repeated, the point of such sacrifice being its repetition, the
point of the destruction being renewal through fire.
Deities were entering the field. What we generally call "Indian
music" was blaring from the open platformed shed from which the
epic would be narrated. Costumed actors were arriving. Princes
and gods, I supposed. What an unfortunate confession! "Gods, I
suppose" is the shrug that embodies our African and Asian
diasporas. I had often thought of but never seen Ramleela,
and had never seen this theatre, an open field, with village
children as warriors, princes, and gods. I had no idea what the
epic story was, who its hero was, what enemies he fought, yet I
had recently adapted the Odyssey for a theatre in England,
presuming that the audience knew the trials of Odysseus, hero of
another Asia Minor epic, while nobody in Trinidad knew any more
than I did about Rama, Kali, Shiva, Vishnu, apart from the
Indians, a phrase I use pervertedly because that is the kind of
remark you can still hear in Trinidad: "apart from the
Indians".
It was as if, on the edge of the Central Plain, there was another
plateau, a raft on which the Ramayana would be poorly
performed in this ocean of cane, but that was my writer's view of
things, and it is wrong. I was seeing the Ramleela at
Felicity as theatre when it was faith.
Multiply that moment of self-conviction when an actor, made-up
and costumed, nods to his mirror before stopping on stage in the
belief that he is a reality entering an illusion and you would
have what I presumed was happening to the actors of this epic.
But they were not actors. They had been chosen; or they
themselves had chosen their roles in this sacred story that would
go on for nine afternoons over a two-hour period till the sun
set. They were not amateurs but believers. There was no
theatrical term to define them. They did not have to psych
themselves up to play their roles. Their acting would probably be
as buoyant and as natural as those bamboo arrows crisscrossing
the afternoon pasture. They believed in what they were playing,
in the sacredness of the text, the validity of India, while I,
out of the writer's habit, searched for some sense of elegy, of
loss, even of degenerative mimicry in the happy faces of the
boy-warriors or the heraldic profiles of the village princes. I
was polluting the afternoon with doubt and with the patronage of
admiration. I misread the event through a visual echo of History
- the cane fields, indenture, the evocation of vanished armies,
temples, and trumpeting elephants - when all around me there was
quite the opposite: elation, delight in the boys' screams, in the
sweets-stalls, in more and more costumed characters appearing; a
delight of conviction, not loss. The name Felicity made
sense.
Consider the scale of Asia reduced to these fragments: the small
white exclamations of minarets or the stone balls of temples in
the cane fields, and one can understand the self-mockery and
embarrassment of those who see these rites as parodic, even
degenerate. These purists look on such ceremonies as grammarians
look at a dialect, as cities look on provinces and empires on
their colonies. Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb
remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those
bamboo thighs of the god. In other words, the way that the
Caribbean is still looked at, illegitimate, rootless,
mongrelized. "No people there", to quote Froude, "in the true
sense of the word". No people. Fragments and echoes of real
people, unoriginal and broken.
The performance was like a dialect, a branch of its original
language, an abridgement of it, but not a distortion or even a
reduction of its epic scale. Here in Trinidad I had discovered
that one of the greatest epics of the world was seasonally
performed, not with that desperate resignation of preserving a
culture, but with an openness of belief that was as steady as the
wind bending the cane lances of the Caroni plain. We had to leave
before the play began to go through the creeks of the Caroni
Swamp, to catch the scarlet ibises coming home at dusk. In a
performance as natural as those of the actors of the
Ramleela, we watched the flocks come in as bright as the
scarlet of the boy archers, as the red flags, and cover an islet
until it turned into a flowering tree, an anchored immortelle.
The sigh of History meant nothing here. These two visions, the
Ramleela and the arrowing flocks of scarlet ibises, blent
into a single gasp of gratitude. Visual surprise is natural in
the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its
beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past. I
felt privileged to discover the ibises as well as the scarlet
archers of Felicity.
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in
the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the
ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts. Looking around
slowly, as a camera would, taking in the low blue hills over Port
of Spain, the village road and houses, the warrior-archers, the
god-actors and their handlers, and music already on the sound
track, I wanted to make a film that would be a long-drawn sigh
over Felicity. I was filtering the afternoon with evocations of a
lost India, but why "evocations"? Why not "celebrations of a real
presence"? Why should India be "lost" when none of these
villagers ever really knew it, and why not "continuing", why not
the perpetuation of joy in Felicity and in all the other nouns of
the Central Plain: Couva, Chaguanas, Charley Village? Why was I
not letting my pleasure open its windows wide? I was enticed like
any Trinidadian to the ecstasies of their claim, because ecstasy
was the pitch of the sinuous drumming in the loudspeakers. I was
entitled to the feast of Husein, to the mirrors and crepe-paper
temples of the Muslim epic, to the Chinese Dragon Dance, to the
rites of that Sephardic Jewish synagogue that was once on
Something Street. I am only one-eighth the writer I might have
been had I contained all the fragmented languages of
Trinidad.
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is
stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when
it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its
original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African
and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration
shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the
care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate,
ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original
sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in
their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our
shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago
becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original
continent.
And this is the exact process of the making of poetry, or what
should be called not its "making" but its remaking, the
fragmented memory, the armature that frames the god, even the
rite that surrenders it to a final pyre; the god assembled cane
by cane, reed by weaving reed, line by plaited line, as the
artisans of Felicity would erect his holy echo.
Poetry, which is perfection's sweat but which must seem as fresh
as the raindrops on a statue's brow, combines the natural and the
marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and
the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the
beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the
buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the
process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery.
Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own
accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial
concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and
dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities,
political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island
that breaks away from the main. The dialects of my archipelago
seem as fresh to me as those raindrops on the statue's forehead,
not the sweat made from the classic exertion of frowning marble,
but the condensations of a refreshing element, rain and
salt.
Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured
tribes create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an
old, an epic vocabulary, from Asia and from Africa, but to an
ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued
by slavery or indenture, while nouns are renamed and the given
names of places accepted like Felicity village or Choiseul. The
original language dissolves from the exhaustion of distance like
fog trying to cross an ocean, but this process of renaming, of
finding new metaphors, is the same process that the poet faces
every morning of his working day, making his own tools like
Crusoe, assembling nouns from necessity, from Felicity, even
renaming himself. The stripped man is driven back to that
self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of
the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these
echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially
remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They
survived the Middle Passage and the Fatel Rozack, the ship
that carried the first indentured Indians from the port of Madras
to the cane fields of Felicity, that carried the chained
Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and
the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle.
And here they are, all in a single Caribbean city, Port of Spain,
the sum of history, Trollope's "non-people". A downtown babel of
shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without
a history, like heaven. Because that is what such a city is, in
the New World, a writer's heaven.
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
Another first morning home, impatient for the sunrise - a broken
sleep. Darkness at five, and the drapes not worth opening; then,
in the sudden light, a cream-walled, brown-roofed police station
bordered with short royal palms, in the colonial style, back of
it frothing trees and taller palms, a pigeon fluttering into the
cover of an cave, a rain-stained block of once-modern apartments,
the morning side road into the station without traffic. All part
of a surprising peace. This quiet happens with every visit to a
city that has deepened itself in me. The flowers and the hills
are easy, affection for them predictable; it is the architecture
that, for the first morning, disorients. A return from American
seductions used to make the traveller feel that something was
missing, something was trying to complete itself, like the
stained concrete apartments. Pan left along the window and the
excrescences rear - a city trying to soar, trying to be brutal,
like an American city in silhouette, stamped from the same mould
as Columbus or Des Moines. An assertion of power, its decor
bland, its air conditioning pitched to the point where its
secretarial and executive staff sport competing cardigans; the
colder the offices the more important, an imitation of another
climate. A longing, even an envy of feeling cold.
In serious cities, in grey, militant winter with its short
afternoons, the days seem to pass by in buttoned overcoats, every
building appears as a barracks with lights on in its windows, and
when snow comes, one has the illusion of living in a Russian
novel, in the nineteenth century, because of the literature of
winter. So visitors to the Caribbean must feel that they are
inhabiting a succession of postcards. Both climates are shaped by
what we have read of them. For tourists, the sunshine cannot be
serious. Winter adds depth and darkness to life as well as to
literature, and in the unending summer of the tropics not even
poverty or poetry (in the Antilles poverty is poetry with a V,
une vie, a condition of life as well as of imagination)
seems capable of being profound because the nature around it is
so exultant, so resolutely ecstatic, like its music. A culture
based on joy is bound to be shallow. Sadly, to sell itself, the
Caribbean encourages the delights of mindlessness, of brilliant
vacuity, as a place to flee not only winter but that seriousness
that comes only out of culture with four seasons. So how can
there be a people there, in the true sense of the word?
They know nothing about seasons in which leaves let go of the
year, in which spires fade in blizzards and streets whiten, of
the erasures of whole cities by fog, of reflection in fireplaces;
instead, they inhabit a geography whose rhythm, like their music,
is limited to two stresses: hot and wet, sun and rain, light and
shadow, day and night, the limitations of an incomplete metre,
and are therefore a people incapable of the subtleties of
contradiction, of imaginative complexity. So be it. We cannot
change contempt.
Ours are not cities in the accepted sense, but no one wants them
to be. They dictate their own proportions, their own definitions
in particular places and in a prose equal to that of their
detractors, so that now it is not just St. James but the streets
and yards that Naipaul commemorates, its lanes as short and
brilliant as his sentences; not just the noise and jostle of
Tunapuna but the origins of C.L.R. James's Beyond a
Boundary, not just Felicity village on the Caroni plain, but
Selvon Country, and that is the way it goes up the islands now:
the old Dominica of Jean Rhys still very much the way she wrote
of it; and the Martinique of the early Cesaire; Perse's
Guadeloupe, even without the pith helmets and the mules; and what
delight and privilege there was in watching a literature - one
literature in several imperial languages, French, English,
Spanish - bud and open island after island in the early morning
of a culture, not timid, not derivative, any more than the hard
white petals of the frangipani are derivative and timid. This is
not a belligerent boast but a simple celebration of
inevitability: that this flowering had to come.
On a heat-stoned afternoon in Port of Spain, some alley white
with glare, with love vine spilling over a fence, palms and a
hazed mountain appear around a corner to the evocation of Vaughn
or Herbert's "that shady city of palm-trees", or to the memory of
a Hammond organ from a wooden chapel in Castries, where the
congregation sang "Jerusalem, the Golden". It is hard for me to
see such emptiness as desolation. It is that patience that is the
width of Antillean life, and the secret is not to ask the wrong
thing of it, not to demand of it an ambition it has no interest
in. The traveller reads this as lethargy, as torpor.
Here there are not enough books, one says, no theatres, no
museums, simply not enough to do. Yet, deprived of books, a man
must fall back on thought, and out of thought, if he can learn to
order it, will come the urge to record, and in extremity, if he
has no means of recording, recitation, the ordering of memory
which leads to metre, to commemoration. There can be virtues in
deprivation, and certainly one virtue is salvation from a cascade
of high mediocrity, since books are now not so much created as
remade. Cities create a culture, and all we have are these
magnified market towns, so what are the proportions of the ideal
Caribbean city? A surrounding, accessible countryside with leafy
suburbs, and if the city is lucky, behind it, spacious plains.
Behind it, fine mountains; before it, an indigo sea. Spires would
pin its centre and around them would be leafy, shadowy parks.
Pigeons would cross its sky in alphabetic patterns, carrying with
them memories of a belief in augury, and at the heart of the city
there would be horses, yes, horses, those animals last seen at
the end of the nineteenth century drawing broughams and carriages
with top-hatted citizens, horses that live in the present tense
without elegiac echoes from their hooves, emerging from paddocks
at the Queen's Park Savannah at sunrise, when mist is unthreading
from the cool mountains above the roofs, and at the centre of the
city seasonally there would be races, so that citizens could roar
at the speed and grace of these nineteenth-century animals. Its
docks, not obscured by smoke or deafened by too. much machinery,
and above all, it would be so racially various that the cultures
of the world - the Asiatic, the Mediterranean, the European, the
African - would be represented in it, its humane variety more
exciting than Joyce's Dublin. Its citizens would intermarry as
they chose, from instinct, not tradition, until their children
find it increasingly futile to trace their genealogy. It would
not have too many avenues difficult or dangerous for pedestrians,
its mercantile area would be a cacophony of accents, fragments of
the old language that would be silenced immediately at five
o'clock, its docks resolutely vacant on Sundays.
This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and
human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a
pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became
a cultural echo.
The finest silhouettes of Port of Spain are idealizations of the
craftsman's handiwork, not of concrete and glass, but of baroque
woodwork, each fantasy looking more like an involved drawing of
itself than the actual building. Behind the city is the Caroni
plain, with its villages, Indian prayer flags, and fruit vendors'
stalls along the highway over which ibises come like floating
flags. Photogenic poverty! Postcard sadnesses! I am not
re-creating Eden; I mean, by "the Antilles", the reality of
light, of work, of survival. I mean a house on the side of a
country road, I mean the Caribbean Sea, whose smell is the smell
of refreshing possibility as well as survival. Survival is the
triumph of stubborness, and spiritual stubborness, a sublime
stupidity, is what makes the occupation of poetry endure, when
there are so many things that should make it futile. Those things
added together can go under one collective noun: "the
world".
This is the visible poetry of the Antilles, then. Survival.
If you wish to understand that consoling pity with which the
islands were regarded, look at the tinted engravings of Antillean
forests, with their proper palm trees, ferns, and waterfalls.
They have a civilizing decency, like Botanical Gardens, as if the
sky were a glass ceiling under which a colonized vegetation is
arranged for quiet walks and carriage rides. Those views are
incised with a pathos that guides the engraver's tool and the
topographer's pencil, and it is this pathos which, tenderly
ironic, gave villages names like Felicity. A century looked at a
landscape furious with vegetation in the wrong light and with the
wrong eye. It is such pictures that are saddening rather than the
tropics itself. These delicate engravings of sugar mills and
harbours, of native women in costume, are seen as a part of
History, that History which looked over the shoulder of the
engraver and, later, the photographer. History can alter the eye
and the moving hand to conform a view of itself; it can rename
places for the nostalgia in an echo; it can temper the glare of
tropical light to elegiac monotony in prose, the tone of
judgement in Conrad, in the travel journals of Trollope.
These travellers carried with them the infection of their own
malaise, and their prose reduced even the landscape to
melancholia and self-contempt. Every endeavor is belittled as
imitation, from architecture to music. There was this conviction
in Froude that since History is based on achievement, and since
the history of the Antilles was so genetically corrupt, so
depressing in its cycles of massacres, slavery, and indenture, a
culture was inconceivable and nothing could ever be created in
those ramshackle ports, those monotonously feudal sugar estates.
Not only the light and salt of Antillean mountains defied this,
but the demotic vigour and variety of their inhabitants. Stand
close to a waterfall and you will stop hearing its roar. To be
still in the nineteenth century, like horses, as Brodsky has written, may not be such a
bad deal, and much of our life in the Antilles still seems to be
in the rhythm of the last century, like the West Indian
novel.
By writers even as refreshing as Graham Greene, the Caribbean is
looked at with elegiac pathos, a prolonged sadness to which
Levi-Strauss has supplied an epigraph: Tristes Tropiques.
Their tristesse derives from an attitude to the Caribbean
dusk, to rain, to uncontrollable vegetation, to the provincial
ambition of Caribbean cities where brutal replicas of modern
architecture dwarf the small houses and streets. The mood is
understandable, the melancholy as contagious as the fever of a
sunset, like the gold fronds of diseased coconut palms, but there
is something alien and ultimately wrong in the way such a
sadness, even a morbidity, is described by English, French, or
some of our exiled writers. It relates to a misunderstanding of
the light and the people on whom the light falls.
These writers describe the ambitions of our unfinished cities,
their unrealized, homiletic conclusion, but the Caribbean city
may conclude just at that point where it is satisfied with its
own scale, just as Caribbean culture is not evolving but already
shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller
or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be
told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response.
I am not your city or your culture. There might be less of
Tristes Tropiques after that.
Here, on the raft of this dais, there is the sound of the
applauding surf: our landscape, our history recognized, "at
last". At Last is one of the first Caribbean books. It was
written by the Victorian traveller Charles Kingsley. It is one of
the early books to admit the Antillean landscape and its figures
into English literature. I have never read it but gather that its
tone is benign. The Antillean archipelago was there to be written
about, not to write itself, by Trollope, by Patrick Leigh-Fermor,
in the very tone in which I almost wrote about the village
spectacle at Felicity, as a compassionate and beguiled outsider,
distancing myself from Felicity village even while I was enjoying
it. What is hidden cannot be loved. The traveller cannot love,
since love is stasis and travel is motion. If he returns to what
he loved in a landscape and stays there, he is no longer a
traveller but in stasis and concentration, the lover of that
particular part of earth, a native. So many people say they "love
the Caribbean", meaning that someday they plan to return for a
visit but could never live there, the usual benign insult of the
traveller, the tourist. These travellers, at their kindest, were
devoted to the same patronage, the islands passing in profile,
their vegetal luxury, their backwardness and poverty. Victorian
prose dignified them. They passed by in beautiful profiles and
were forgotten, like a vacation.
Alexis Saint-Leger Leger, whose writer's name is Saint-John Perse, was the first
Antillean to win this prize for poetry. He was born in Guadeloupe
and wrote in French, but before him, there was nothing as fresh
and clear in feeling as those poems of his childhood, that of a
privileged white child on an Antillean plantation, Pour Feter
une Enfance, Eloges, and later Images a Crusoe. At
last, the first breeze on the page, salt-edged and self-renewing
as the trade winds, the sound of pages and palm trees turning as
"the odour of coffee ascents the stairs".
Caribbean genius is condemned to contradict itself. To celebrate
Perse, we might be told, is to celebrate the old plantation
system, to celebrate the beque or plantation rider, verandahs and
mulatto servants, a white French language in a white pith helmet,
to celebrate a rhetoric of patronage and hauteur; and even if
Perse denied his origins, great writers often have this folly of
trying to smother their source, we cannot deny him any more than
we can the African Aime Cesaire. This is not accommodation, this
is the ironic republic that is poetry, since, when I see cabbage
palms moving their fronds at sunrise, I think they are reciting
Perse.
The fragrant and privileged poetry that Perse composed to
celebrate his white childhood and the recorded Indian music
behind the brown young archers of Felicity, with the same cabbage
palms against the same Antillean sky, pierce me equally. I feel
the same poignancy of pride in the poems as in the faces. Why,
given the history of the Antilles, should this be remarkable? The
history of the world, by which of course we mean Europe, is a
record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings. At last,
islands not written about but writing themselves! The palms and
the Muslim minarets are Antillean exclamations. At last! the
royal palms of Guadeloupe recite Éloges by
heart.
Later, in "Anabase", Perse assembled fragments of an
imaginary epic, with the clicking teeth of frontier gates, barren
wadis with the froth of poisonous lakes, horsemen burnoosed in
sandstorms, the opposite of cool Caribbean mornings, yet not
necessarily a contrast any more than some young brown archer at
Felicity, hearing the sacred text blared across the flagged
field, with its battles and elephants and monkey-gods, in a
contrast to the white child in Guadeloupe assembling fragments of
his own epic from the lances of the cane fields, the estate carts
and oxens, and the calligraphy of bamboo leaves from the ancient
languages, Hindi, Chinese, and Arabic, on the Antillean sky. From
the Ramayana to Anabasis, from Guadeloupe to Trinidad, all
that archaeology of fragments lying around, from the broken
African kingdoms, from the crevasses of Canton, from Syria and
Lebanon, vibrating not under the earth but in our raucous,
demotic streets.
A boy with weak eyes skims a flat stone across the flat water of
an Aegean inlet, and that ordinary action with the scything elbow
contains the skipping lines of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, and another child aims a bamboo arrow at a
village festival, another hears the rustling march of cabbage
palms in a Caribbean sunrise, and from that sound, with its
fragments of tribal myth, the compact expedition of Perse's epic
is launched, centuries and archipelagoes apart. For every poet it
is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac
night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning,
because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in
spite of History.
There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a
writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture
that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that
self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the
sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise. Then the noun,
the "Antilles" ripples like brightening water, and the sounds of
leaves, palm fronds, and birds are the sounds of a fresh dialect,
the native tongue. The personal vocabulary, the individual melody
whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any
luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
This is the benediction that is celebrated, a fresh language and
a fresh people, and this is the frightening duty owed.
I stand here in their name, if not their image - but also in the
name of the dialect they exchange like the leaves of the trees
whose names are suppler, greener, more morning-stirred than
English - laurier canelles, bois-flot, bois-canot - or the
valleys the trees mention - Fond St. Jacques, Matoonya,
Forestier, Roseau, Mahaut - or the empty beaches - L'Anse
Ivrogne, Case en Bas, Paradis - all songs and histories in
themselves, pronounced not in French - but in patois.
One rose hearing two languages, one of the trees, one of school
children reciting in English:
I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute;
From the centre all round to the sea
I am lord of the fowl and the brute.
Oh, solitude! where are the charms
That sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the midst of alarms,
Than reign in this horrible place ...
While in the country to the same metre, but to organic instruments, handmade violin, chac-chac, and goatskin drum, a girl named Sensenne singing:
Si mwen di 'ous ça fait mwen la peine
'Ous kai dire ça vrai.
(If I told you that caused me pain
You'll say, "It's true".)
Si mwen di 'ous ça pentetrait mwen
'Ous peut dire ça vrai
(If I told you you pierced my heart
You'd say, "It's true".)
Ces mamailles actuellement
Pas ka faire l 'amour z'autres pour un rien.
(Children nowadays
Don't make love for nothing.)
It is not that History is obliterated by
this sunrise. It is there in Antillean geography, in the
vegetation itself. The sea sighs with the drowned from the Middle
Passage, the butchery of its aborigines, Carib and Aruac and
Taino, bleeds in the scarlet of the immortelle, and even the
actions of surf on sand cannot erase the African memory, or the
lances of cane as a green prison where indentured Asians, the
ancestors of Felicity, are still serving time.
That is what I have read around me from boyhood, from the
beginnings of poetry, the grace of effort. In the hard mahogany
of woodcutters: faces, resinous men, charcoal burners; in a man
with a cutlass cradled across his forearm, who stands on the
verge with the usual anonymous khaki dog; in the extra clothes he
put on this morning, when it was cold when he rose in the
thinning dark to go and make his garden in the heights - the
heights, the garden, being miles away from his house, but that is
where he has his land - not to mention the fishermen, the footmen
on trucks, groaning up mornes, all fragments of Africa originally
but shaped and hardened and rooted now in the island's life,
illiterate in the way leaves are illiterate; they do not read,
they are there to be read, and if they are properly read, they
create their own literature.
But in our tourist brochures the Caribbean is a blue pool into
which the republic dangles the extended foot of Florida as
inflated rubber islands bob and drinks with umbrellas float
towards her on a raft. This is how the islands from the shame of
necessity sell themselves; this is the seasonal erosion of their
identity, that high-pitched repetition of the same images of
service that cannot distinguish one island from the other, with a
future of polluted marinas, land deals negotiated by ministers,
and all of this conducted to the music of Happy Hour and the
rictus of a smile. What is the earthly paradise for our visitors?
Two weeks without rain and a mahogany tan, and, at sunset, local
troubadours in straw hats and floral shirts beating "Yellow Bird"
and "Banana Boat Song" to death. There is a territory wider than
this - wider than the limits made by the map of an island - which
is the illimitable sea and what it remembers.
All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory; every
mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog.
Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows,
arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the
Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames,
phrase by phrase.
Decimation from the Aruac downwards is the blasted root of
Antillean history, and the benign blight that is tourism can
infect all of those island nations, not gradually, but with
imperceptible speed, until each rock is whitened by the guano of
white-winged hotels, the arc and descent of progress.
Before it is all gone, before only a few valleys are left,
pockets of an older life, before development turns every artist
into an anthropologist or folklorist, there are still cherishable
places, little valleys that do not echo with ideas, a simplicity
of rebeginnings, not yet corrupted by the dangers of change. Not
nostalgic sites but occluded sanctities as common and simple as
their sunlight. Places as threatened by this prose as a headland
is by the bulldozer or a sea almond grove by the surveyor's
string, or from blight, the mountain laurel.
One last epiphany: A basic stone church in a thick valley outside
Soufrière, the hills almost shoving the houses around into a
brown river, a sunlight that looks oily on the leaves, a backward
place, unimportant, and one now being corrupted into significance
by this prose. The idea is not to hallow or invest the place with
anything, not even memory. African children in Sunday frocks come
down the ordinary concrete steps into the church, banana leaves
hang and glisten, a truck is parked in a yard, and old women
totter towards the entrance. Here is where a real fresco should
be painted, one without importance, but one with real faith,
mapless, Historyless.
How quickly it could all disappear! And how it is beginning to
drive us further into where we hope are impenetrable places,
green secrets at the end of bad roads, headlands where the next
view is not of a hotel but of some long beach without a figure
and the hanging question of some fisherman's smoke at its far
end. The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives. They draw
their working strength from it organically, like trees, like the
sea almond or the spice laurel of the heights. Its peasantry and
its fishermen are not there to be loved or even photographed;
they are trees who sweat, and whose bark is filmed with salt, but
every day on some island, rootless trees in suits are signing
favourable tax breaks with entrepreneurs, poisoning the sea
almond and the spice laurel of the mountains to their roots. A
morning could come in which governments might ask what happened
not merely to the forests and the bays but to a whole
people.
They are here again, they recur, the faces, corruptible angels,
smooth black skins and white eyes huge with an alarming joy, like
those of the Asian children of Felicity at Ramleela; two
different religions, two different continents, both filling the
heart with the pain that is joy.
But what is joy without fear? The fear of selfishness that, here
on this podium with the world paying attention not to them but to
me, I should like to keep these simple joys inviolate, not
because they are innocent, but because they are true. They are as
true as when, in the grace of this gift, Perse heard the
fragments of his own epic of Asia Minor in the rustling of
cabbage palms, that inner Asia of the soul through which
imagination wanders, if there is such a thing as imagination as
opposed to the collective memory of our entire race, as true as
the delight of that warrior-child who flew a bamboo arrow over
the flags in the field at Felicity; and now as grateful a joy and
a blessed fear as when a boy opened an exercise book and, within
the discipline of its margins, framed stanzas that might contain
the light of the hills on an island blest by obscurity,
cherishing our insignificance.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1991-1995, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1997
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1992
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