Names
Summary
In the first section of “Names,” the speaker describes the beginning of his race, the Caribbean people. At first, they were like the sea, undefined and looking down at the seafloor and up to the heavens, rather than across the land to other places and peoples. Now they are in the world. To trace the line from then to now, the speaker, like his race, must begin without knowledge of the past or the future. He looks for the moment where their collective view of the world shifted from the sea and became divided by the horizon, but he cannot find it.
His race of people came from countries across the colonized world in India, Canton in China, and Benin, a country in West Africa—and they have lost their memories of who they were before they were taken from their homelands. The speaker thus goes back to the only beginning of his race he can remember, a beginning like the harsh cry of a “sea-eagle” as his people first tried to articulate a sense of self when they arrived in the Caribbean. Yet that world left them with nothing.
In the second section, the poem shifts to discuss language and the ways the European colonizers shaped the map of the Caribbean. They mockingly named the bays and forests they encountered after the places they remembered in Europe, and called a pigsty "Versailles" (the name of King Louis XIV's opulent palace). The Europeans grew resentful, starting to perceive the Caribbean as a place of exile and to resent its land and fruits.
As they grew resentful, they began to hate the memory of the countries they had lost, yet the names stuck. Europeans believed in “the right of every thing to be a noun,” or felt that converting elements of the world into distinct items with names was a way of validating them. The enslaved African people brought to the Caribbean accepted this but changed the names as they repeated them back, used their own voices to transform this colonial register. They bent the names the way the wind bends the world.
Thus, they came to see the world differently. The palms which the colonizer mockingly named Versailles are, in fact, greater than that palace ever was, because they were made by nature, not by man. The fallen trees, compared to fallen columns in the names of the Europeans, are greater than Castillo because they too were destroyed by nature, not by man. In this configuration of the world, the worm is a greater emperor than any human ruler. The Caribbean children can thus look up to the heavens in a forest named for Valencia, Spain, and yet see the stars not as the European constellations, but as “fireflies caught in molasses” (83).
Analysis
The first stanza of “Names” establishes the sonic aesthetic of the poem, which employs repetition and deliberate syntax rather than rhyme or meter to establish a rhythm. Walcott repeats “began” in the first line, and repeats the phrase structure “with no nouns…with no horizon” in the second. The third and fourth line are slightly less constrained, but still begin with the word “with,” a repetition which also establishes a similar syntax for each line in the stanza. In a sense, the first stanza acts as a microcosm of the poem as a whole, establishing some strategies Walcott will use throughout, as well as introducing the most important themes.
The patterns of repetition established in the first four lines continue through the rest of the first section. Both the second and third stanza repeat a word or phrase at the beginning of multiple lines: “in the” in lines 6 and 7, “I began with” in lines 8 and 9. Walcott repeats the same syntax three times while invoking different places from across the colonized world. Here, this repetition suggests the way that the colonization flattens the differences between these culturally and geographically distinct locations. Even as the poet names each specific location, and asserts that the people who came from them had both a national identity and a personal identity, such as goldsmith or stone-cutter, the structure of the poem has begun to erase those distinctions just as colonization and slavery created peoples who could not remember their homelands.
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