Walcott’s use of repetition suggests the conventions of folktales or parables, which often rely on the repetition of certain phrases to aid the memory of the storyteller and create a sense of events building upon one another in the context of a simple plot. The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a good example of this. On a purely aesthetic level, then, repetition makes the poem sound better, makes it more memorable, and reminds the audience to pay attention to repeated phrases. For example, the repetition of the word “began” stresses the importance of beginnings throughout the first section, reminding the reader that an origin point cannot be so easily moved on from, even if it happened in the distant past. On a structural level, the use of repetition suggests that Walcott here is creating a kind of folktale or myth for the beginning of his own Caribbean people.
Yet the story that Walcott tells about the beginning cannot be sufficient, because the forces of colonization have severed his people from their own past. He is instead caught in a futile search for “that moment / when the mind was halved by a horizon” (10-11). This moment is a reference to the idea that European rationality rests on the imposition of dichotomies, especially between the self and the Other, or between the mind and the body. From there, European philosophical, cultural, and social tradition assigned power and superiority to one side of the opposition, and subjugated the other; most centrally, here, they imagined white society as the self—familiar, civilized, and knowing—and colonized peoples as the Other—exotic, uncivilized, and known. Walcott equates the “moment when the mind was halved by the horizon,” or the moment when these dichotomies came into being for Caribbean people, with the beginning of his race. He is suggesting here that the very concept of a Caribbean people hinges on colonial ideas, which designate a diverse group of people with distinct histories as one racial category, defined in opposition to whiteness. This is “that terrible vowel, / that I,” the speaker says: the very act of asserting a selfhood, an “I,” is terrible because it occurs in the context of the violence that brings into existence a racialized self.
The poem therefore suggests that even the beginning for which Walcott is searching is a function of white supremacy and colonial history. For that reason, the very idea of storytelling or myth-making is put under pressure. As much as the first section embodies the aesthetics and priorities of folktale, it can never really become one because it not only lacks its own beginning, but the beginning it seeks out is already troubled, already a function of the oppressive forces which Walcott is trying to write against. We see this theme explicitly in the last lines of the first section, where the speaker describes his people left on a coastline “with nothing in our hands / but this stick / to trace our names on the sand / which the sea erased again, to our indifference” (31-34). The stick here symbolizes the act of writing or storytelling, which, according to the speaker, is all his people have left. Yet the sea returns to erase the story again and again. Rather than this being a moment of hopelessness, the people are “indifferent.” They aren’t attached to preserving a document of their story, even though the ability to write it is all that they have. Indeed, the poem identifies more with the sea, to which Walcott first compares his people, than with the act of writing.
The theme of writing and language becomes more central in the second section of the poem. Repetition as a literary device largely disappears in this section, with the syntax becoming more conversational and less sing-song. Instead, Walcott employs frequent enjambment, or breaking a line in the middle of a phrase, as in “Versailles’ colonnades / supplanted by cabbage palms / with Corinthian crests” (43-45). This device renders the poem more fragmented, replacing a soothing, folkloric rhythm with one which is off-putting and ragged.
However, the idea of repetition becomes powerful here. The second section speaks to the way that the Europeans imposed language on the Caribbean. They superimposed the geography of their homeland onto the natural landscape they encountered; the palm trees became the colonnades of Versailles. They thus imagined that the landscape of Europe was repeated everywhere, only in an inferior form. By naming a pigsty “little Versailles,” they mockingly repeated and twisted their own language as a way to denigrate the colonized land. Eventually, these names took, even as the colonizers began to lose their memories of the land they had left; the language became a repetition without an original.
Describing the European process of naming the land, Walcott states, “Being men, they could not live / except they first presumed / the right of every thing to be a noun” (58-60). The language here is pointedly ambiguous. The phrase “Being men” seems to suggest that language and naming is an inherent aspect of humanity, a natural thing that people do to understand their world. However, the broader structure of this stanza juxtaposes “the African” against the subject, who “presumed the right of every thing to be a noun.” Walcott thus implies here that Africans were not men. This might seem like a strange thing for an anti-racist poet to imply, but his point is that the very idea of who is or is not a human being is a constructed category based around whiteness. Race pseudo-science argued that people of color, especially Black people, were less evolved, or were in-between human and animal, in order to justify oppression. In these lines, Walcott is arguing that white colonizers believed that the way they used language was inevitable, and that peoples who used language differently were less than human.
From this place, the colonized people began to reclaim repetition, to use it in their own way. In response to the Europeans who imposed names on the land, “the African acquiesced, / repeated, and changed them” (61-62). In other words, Africans agreed to begin perceiving the world as a set of nouns, but they also took those nouns, repeated them back, and eventually transformed them. Repetition thus became the first step to claiming language and making it their own. We see the conclusion to this process in the last two stanzas of the poem. The children look at the stars “over Valencia’s forest,” or over a forest named for a place in Spain (77-78). However, their sight is not constrained the way that of the Europeans was; they are able to perceive the place in their own way, not as a derivative of somewhere else. When they look at the stars, they see “fireflies caught in molasses” (83). Rather than simply naming their own constellations, variations on the classical idea of tracing pictures like “Orion” or “Betelgeuse” in the heavens, they understand the sky totally independently, seeing natural imagery upon natural imagery, rather than translating the natural night sky into man-made myth.
For the first of this article, click the link below:
https://paidforarticles.in/top-2-poem-by-derek-walcott-summary-by-md-zahiriddin-560236
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