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Abstract
The aim of this paper is to disclose the nexus of dislocation and ecology in the work of two Caribbean poets, Derek Walcott and Lorna Goodison. It shows how they deal with the founding experiences of the wider Caribbean community, such as diaspora and the process of creolisation, by drawing on the vegetation imagery. The concept of transplantation is central to this reading, as it refers to the history of forced removal, while also celebrating the biological and cultural hybridity of the region. Arguably, the shared preoccupation with island vegetation can be associated with the importance of naming for the Caribbean writers – hence the constant references to language in their representations of local plants. If geographic dislocation caused linguistic dislocation, it is only through the repossession of language that the poet is able to enact a return to her/his homeland. In Walcott and Goodison, however, this aim is pursued through further dislocation.
Notes
See the special issues of Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 13:2, 14:1, 2006–2007, Interventions 9:1, 2007 and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literary Environment 14:1, 2007.
One of Goodison's poems from To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (1995) is Jeremiah's complaint in the form of dramatic monologue. Though one of Walcott's preferred sources of stylistic devices and imagery is the prophet Isaiah, he was no doubt influenced by the rest of the Holy Scriptures, primarily the prophetic books and the Apocalypse of John. For his appropriation of Adamic imagery, see Handley's New World Poetics (2007).
The King James Version reads: ‘And his breath, as an overflowing stream, shall reach to the midst of the neck, to sift the nations with the sieve of vanity: and there shall be a bridle in the jaws of the people, causing them to err.’
‘I am, in effect, obsessed by vegetation, the flower, the root. None of this is arbitrary, it is all linked to my position as a black man exiled from his original soil. … The tree, deeply rooted in the soil, is for me the symbol of man linked to his nature, the nostalgia for a lost paradise.’ My translation.
Mimic Men is the title of a 1967 novel by V.S. Naipaul; it has been particularly significant for postcolonial theory, since Homi Bhabha drew on it for his essay ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, reprinted in The Location of Culture (1994).