I was on several occasions honored to find myself invited to sit opposite him at tables a close distance from picturesque Pigeon Point, at his well ventilated beachside residence or at some particularly welcoming off the beaten track barely 2-star restaurant. He never seemed to mind that more often than not I carried with me an unobtrusive tiny recording device. What follows is part of a conversation taped in 1999, when I was the host of Straight Up. I refer to our 1992 Nobel Prize winner for Literature. Considering the show’s nature and Derek Walcott’s legendary aversion to “village politics,” I did my utmost on the remembered occasion to at least disguise such questions as might’ve triggered answers likely to singe normally incombustible hides.
Rick Wayne: You emphasize in ‘What the Twilight Says’ that when you approach our government for help with the arts the state must recognize it as something bigger than just assistance. What does that mean?
Derek Walcott: It is something that people here have heard me say for over fifty years. It is phenomenal but predictable that this area of little islands has produced the kind of people it has produced. It had to happen because of the pressure of history—because of the fact that Africans were prevented from expressing themselves. Indians went through a period of indenture and repression. The same is true of everybody. That type of struggle is typical of each race of the Caribbean. Now we have come to a point at which we are articulating that suffering, or that joy. If you go down from Antigua, every island has produced a quality of talent in terms of writing that is really phenomenal. I think the quality of work is even richer than the American Renaissance. All I am saying is that if that creativity happens, why is it that Caribbean governments are totally without that creative thinking that says: ‘Look, how much does it cost to give five scholarships a year to any young artists?’ The policy has always been a mimic policy, as V.S. Naipaul has written, in which we think the same way the big countries think and then we fall short because we don’t have the money. But that thinking makes us look stupid. If we had the creative kind of government that saw the arts as something essential to our way of life, the exultation of the arts could have happened. But it might be too late for that one.
Rick Wayne: Any idea why there seems to be such a lack of interest?
Derek Walcott: I don’t know how you make people aware of the reality that a good cricketer is less important than a good writer. Our mentality is that we think what lies in the achievement of a country lies in its sportsmen—and that’s not true. Any sportsman will tell you that. Culture is another important question. From the time it was given independence. And the culture of independence, of nationalism, has some real dangers. Independence brings in an aggressiveness of identity that is based basically on a kind of revenge of conduct. In other words, a belligerence of conduct that is frightening in terms of its aggression. An aggression that says we don’t have to have a grammar or drawing that’s historically predictable.
How you control it comes in terms of what is the solidity of the education given to a young person. If that young person is black, people would say: ‘We don’t want anything to do with anything white. Everything we do must be black!’ If that is changed over to culture, you have younger people emphasizing something borrowed conceptually from America—dressing, behaving and singing like Americans. You get this loss of identity which is aggressive in terms of what is emphasized about the ghetto. What is a ghetto? We keep using the word ghetto. The whole of Saint Lucia is a ghetto!
Rick Wayne: Have you recognized much of Saint Lucia in the calypsos or soca we are now bombarded with?
Derek Walcott: I’m not sure calypso is a Saint Lucian thing at all. My Saint Lucian music is the anba gorge music, which I think is genuine. I am not saying everybody has to do that. I am just saying I am suspicious of anything that elevates itself into a form of imitation because it is based on concepts of publicity. Somebody becomes a star and the young star wants to create a violent ghetto situation so he can justify his music. My proto-typical West Indian artist is somebody who has to make such an accommodation that they have to sit in an empty hotel lounge and play ‘Bye-bye Blackbird’ or something. That’s the fate of the gifted musician here, and that’s the tragedy. We have to ask questions of who we really are. And the answers are not being supplied by some of these pompous, vacuous calypsos that pretend to be examining questions but have absolutely no melody, no music, and pattern themselves on the worst kind of Trinidadian calypso. I don’t identify that as being what a Saint Lucian identity is, in terms of the melody, the music and the shape of the music. Calypso should be seen as an art form. It is not everybody’s thing.
I would also say that is true of certain young writers and young painters who want to do abstract expressionist painting that’s dead now. The instinct of African artists in the Caribbean from survival is a linear instinct to tell a story. A novelist tells a story, and our painters basically have to be narrative painters because we are just beginning to articulate our experiences over the last less than a hundred years. Our styles are dictated by critics who come from the metropolis. They say what’s in. And if you draw a donkey and a coconut tree, that’s out. What you have to do is something else, and we continue to be baffled by that identity. Also, when we insist on doing our own thing, it is mediocre because it is phony; and angry. It’s commercial angry.
Rick Wayne: You’ve said of Naipaul’s writing that some of what he says about the black writer, while perhaps true, still contains some prejudice against negroes.
Derek Walcott: The difference is this: every black man in America waking in the morning still has to face the white man. That’s not true of here. So, if we are talking about West Indian writing, the man that you are facing now is black. What you have to examine is the hostility of that man. Now we get into the questions that we are political, that it’s no longer the white man who is there. We have to face our own people, which makes it more profound; more complex. What is it we are dissatisfied with? With black people? With Indian people? In terms of running or managing our government, my dissatisfaction is based on the fact that the astigmatism increases in proportion with the power. In other words, the more power you have, the blinder people seem to be.
The generic description of black experience in the New World has to be differentiated. Differentiated per culture, per experience. The young black writer here has to take on a belligerence that is not real. In other words, he has to focus his belligerence on the reality around him. He can’t generically identify with the struggle. The memory is different in every case. The alleged belief is that everything that was shared by the African in the New World is universal; it’s standard. But it’s not true; the experience varies according to the culture. The French attitude to slavery is different from the British attitude. The French instruction to a young French-African is to him very early on: ‘You are a French man. You are a Department. Not like the British who call you a Colonial. And that is treachery. A treachery that led to Vietnam, that led to Algeria. The French were lying to those people, saying to them: ‘Yes, you are part of the metropole.’ When it turns out they are not part of the metropole and they revolt, then they say: ‘How can you do this to us? We made you Frenchmen.’ That’s the trap. The direct dramatic conflict between someone who was a slave and was a colonial is that ‘this is my enemy, this is a colonial system of which I am no longer a part and to which I could be elevated only up to a certain point.’ For instance, you couldn’t have a black administrator. But this has changed.
Rick Wayne: What do you think about the suggested use of our resources to further develop kwéyòl?
Derek Walcott: The tone of our best writers is kwéyól. It does not have to be a matter of grammar. Kwéyòl is a tone. I have tried to preserve that tone. Even the tone of government is wrong. The tone of government is in another place; it is not rooted in the real experience of language. In other words, if you hear West Indian politicians talk they are talking in another tone. They use the same language but the tone is wrong and that is why they don’t really reach people. Why is it that if a politician in Saint Lucia thinks he can’t reach people, he does this beautiful insult of talking to them in kwéyól? What is he saying? ‘I am one of you, forgive me if I talk in English?’ Basically, he is tonally separated from whom he is addressing—and the people in the stands know that! I don’t think it should be politicized to the degree that one says we should only speak kwéyól. We cannot help being who we are. It is because kwéyòl has been subjugated to contempt that people turn around and get very aggressive about it as some sort of compensation for that contempt. There is a vehement thing about kwéyól that one has to be careful about: it can be politicized as a kind of revenge on the language that you had to speak. What is the use of teaching proper kwéyól if it is not going to enter the economy of the country? It is a very elaborate process which has to be planned.
