Walcott's sea and Caribbean geomythography

Abstract

There is an imaginative unity to Derek Walcott's treatment of the sea as matter and metaphor that exemplifies how Walcott's poetic vision and voice have been shaped by his immersion in Caribbean seascapes. This essay focuses on Walcott's epic-minded poems that indicate his impulse towards the poetic vision quest as a transcendental return to an originary site of collective experience. These journeys into deep water confront primordial chaos in order to create a Caribbean place-based mythopoetics that makes meaning from the transculturation of oceanic crossings and gives form to artistic renderings of life in an archipelago.

Keywords:

• Derek Walcott
• postcolonial environmental studies
• sea
• Omeros
• “The Schooner Flight”

Notes

1. Breslin quotes Martin Mueller: “One may well ask whether the Greeks, who during the dark centuries colonized much of the eastern and some of the western Mediterranean, would have resisted the centrifugal tendencies of such geographical dispersion had it not been for the common past, common religion, and the common set of values that the Iliad ‘created,’ if only by putting traditional materials in canonical form” (241).

2. Walcott signals the correlation between his own efforts to document this process and the Homeric tradition in chapters V and VI of Book 1.

3. Wilson Harris’s womb of the sea, described in his essay “The Schizophrenic Sea”, builds upon his idea of the womb of space and offers an alternate vision of the sea as a site of cultural rebirth.