ABSTRACT
Reading Walcott’s earlier collections up to Another Life, published in 1973, Angelo Righetti’s chapter observes the evolution of his deep awareness of the unwanted inheritance of shameful and shaming racial prejudice, and, more painfully, of the racist blight of miscegenation cast by the colonizer on the colonized by faking scales of blackness in the multiethnic Caribbean. In his poetry’s intellectual agenda Walcott as an individual not only copes with the impact of a racism inherent in the exploitative colonial project, but also gradually envisages that a communal response to and exploration of colonial and postcolonial history’s aporias – either in lyrical-meditative poems or in meditative-narrative ‘epics of the ordinary’ – may help him reconcile ethical and aesthetic demands.
