It has been said that you can never go home. When you grow up black on a small Caribbean Island and have to leave it for another to further your education; then leave that island as well to live in predominantly white America you suffer both dislocation and discrimination. The very process of education creates a gulf between the intellectual and people back home with whom you grew up. The price you pay is being left with a feeling of dislocation that leaves one uncomfortable in both worlds. To the people back home you are an object of admiration but they’ll never understand you; to the people in your new-found world you’ll always be that upstart who will never quite fit in. These are the themes that inform the poetry of Derek Walcott. I should mention that the authour also provided the art work on the cover.
No matter where a writer goes he must draw upon what he knows and the most deeply engrained memories are those created during a writer’s formative years. Therefore Walcott writes about his home in the islands but infuses his poems with literary illusions he has learned since leaving. One of the banes of a writer’s life are the book tours publishers insist on mounting to promote their products and Walcott writes candidly about the experience. It is an irony that to make a living writers must engage in a process that is counter-productive to their work. Racial prejudice is an experience no person of colour can ignore and for Walcott it is augmented by the added stigma of having risen about his station in life as apprehended by Black America. In his later poems Walcott confronts the universal theme of his mortality and exhibits resignation with his own death.
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