ABSTRACT
By contrast to Brathwaite’s folk-centred poetics, Derek Walcott’s suspicion of the folk is articulated sharply in the long essay ‘What the Twilight Says’.17 In this essay, first published in 1970, Walcott challenges the (then) current orthodoxy amongst West Indian intellectuals of sentimentalizing so-called folk culture, much of which he felt was the deliberate invention of politicians, intellectuals and other ‘culture vultures’:
The folk arts have become the symbol of a carefree, accommodating culture, an adjunct to tourism, since the state is impatient with anything which it cannot trade. [. . .] Today they are artificially resurrected by the anthropologist’s tape recorder and in the folk archives of departments of culture.18
