ABSTRACT
As a figure, Crusoe reflected but one side of Walcott’s creativity, for his poetry, widely if inaccurately identified with a metropolitan ‘literary’ tradition, was being written alongside drama rooted and performed in the Caribbean. Appropriately, Friday enters the Crusoe trope within a play, Pantomime (1976), a brilliant two-hander which brings together both aspects of Walcott’s talent. Harry Trewe, once an actor, is now proprietor of a run-down hotel on Tobago, in local legend the original of Crusoe’s island. Bored, and looking to devise an entertainment for his guests, he starts to improvise on the Crusoe story with his black servant Jackson playing Friday. But he soon finds himself confronted by Defoe’s racial stereotype. In Walcott’s words, ‘cracks appear [in the facade of the Eng lishman] and it is where these cracks appear that Jackson darts in and widens [until] we look into his room and see Trewe naked and exposed’.6 Trewe attempts to stop the show, but Jackson insists it cannot be shrugged off so easily:
You see, it’s your people who introduced us to this culture: Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe, the classics, and so on, and when we start getting as good as them, you can’t leave halfway. So I will continue? Please?7
