ABSTRACT
Long before he won the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, Derek Walcott had earned a reputation as a somewhat controversial writer whose capacious literary embrace encompassed both the folk traditions of his native Caribbean and the high art of the classical European canon. Unlike some of his nativist compatriots, such as poet Edward Brathwaite, Walcott did not spurn his European colonial legacy in favour of a black sensibility largely devoid of the echoes of Western myth. Instead, he fashioned himself as a ‘mulatto of style’ (Walcott 1970b: 9), adept at synthesis and dedicated to ‘an electric fusion of the old and new’ (1970b: 17). Over more than fifty years and across an impressive oeuvre that has included more than twenty plays and ten major collections of verse plus a number of lyrical essays, Walcott has grappled frequently with the politics and poetics of forging a Caribbean identity from the historical fragments of colonialism. A paradoxical sense of renewal located in the colonial crisis of dividedness permeates his work, both thematically and stylistically. Colonialism, despite – and even because of – its brutalities, thus becomes a kind of alchemy out of which is rendered a protean postcolonial subject able to move, if not always with ease, between different cultures and traditions.
