Derek Walcott

In June 2000, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library acquired the papers of a graduate of the first class in the Faculty of Arts at the University of the West Indies. It was an exciting period; and part of the excitement had to do with the place of poetry and painting and play writing in the development of a new West Indian consciousness. The emerging independence of the region was imaginative as well as political, and this person played a central role. His name? Derek Walcott — poet, playwright, painter, essayist, theatre director, teacher, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature.

This is a major collection for the University of Toronto. It includes drafts of most of Walcott's published work, with holograph notes, rough drafts, revisions, final drafts and galleys of publications, as well as journals and notebooks. It also includes all future work. This in itself would constitute an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Walcott, West Indian poetry and play writing, and contemporary literature. But there is a remarkable dimension to this material, for it includes an extraordinarily rich array of watercolours and pen and ink drawings — many in the form of what are sometimes in the theatre world called 'story boards' — intimately related to his poems, plays and film scripts. The combination and calibre of Walcott's visual and verbal art are unique among contemporary writers, and rare in the history of arts and letters. In a nice coincidence, his  book of poetry, Tiepolo's Hound (2000), combines poetry and painting — there are twenty-six colour reproductions of his watercolours — and signals a new acknowledgement, both of their interdependence, and of the importance of a collection such as this.

By the time he left his native St. Lucia in 1950 for the Jamaica campus of the University of the West Indies at the age of 21, Derek Walcott already had a significant reputation. Nobody had told him that he should keep to one medium of art or one mode of writing, so he had published two volumes of verse privately; he had held an exhibition of his paintings with his friend, the St. Lucian painter, Dunstan St. Omer; he had begun the play writing for which he is almost as well known as for his poetry; and he had directed a production of his play, Henri Christophe, about one of the leaders of the Haitian revolution. After university he stayed in the West Indies at a time when many of his friends and fellow writers and artists went abroad to study or live. Along with a handful of others, including his brother Roderick (who lived in Toronto until his death this year) and Louise Bennett (who has been such a generous friend to the University of Toronto), Derek Walcott laid the foundations for an indigenous theatre movement. In 1959, he established the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which he directed for nearly 20 years. With its powerful sense of collective enterprise providing a source of inspiration and innovation, and its mix of people from across the West Indies bringing a wide range of experiences and traditions together, the Workshop was for Walcott something much more than an experiment in theatrical conventions. It was an attempt to determine the possibilities for cultural expression in the changing times that accompanied the politics of West Indian federation and independence, and to develop new relationships between economic power and social vision by bringing the sometimes desperate realities of Caribbean life into communion with the dreams of Caribbean art.

During his distinguished career as a playwright, Walcott has written well over two dozen plays. From the beginning, he incorporated a rich mixture of local folklore, fabulous adventure, and the lives of the poor and dispossessed people of the islands. His subjects and his style were local, in somewhat the same way as were Shakespeare's. For Walcott's ambitions were to combine experiences of West Indian life with possibilities of dramatic expression that were part of a theatrical tradition going well beyond the Caribbean, and that came to him from Europe and Asia and Africa as well as from Central and South America.

He has also written over a dozen books of poetry, not including volumes of his selected poems and a Collected Poems: 1948-1984. Several of his books are landmarks in West Indian literature. When it was published in 1962, In a Green Night announced Walcott as a major West Indian voice, and established West Indian poetry as a significant presence in contemporary literature. It was followed by books chronicling the experiences that have defined his poetry: The Castaway (1965); The Gulf (1969); and Another Life (1973), about the relationships between poetry and painting, and between the imagination and reality. Sea Grapes (1976) confirmed the place of local language in West Indian literary forms with its call to "come back to me my language". In The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), he showed new possibilities for poetic expression that combined spoken and written language and the imaginative logic of both local and literary inheritances; and in the publication in 1990 of his long narrative poem, Omeros, he reminded an enthusiastic international audience that poets are story-tellers too. Through all his years of writing, Walcott has created a poetry that displays how much of its strength is drawn from the conventions of art, and he has done this as though it all came naturally.

This collection confirms the commitment of the University of Toronto to the study of contemporary literatures in English, already demonstrated by recent faculty appointments, curricular developments, and enhanced library holdings. With this in mind, the formal announcement of this acquisition was made during a visit to the University of Toronto in November 1999 by Rex Nettleford, Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies, at which he commended our initiative, celebrated the collaboration of our universities, and sang a praise song to one of the greatest writers of our time, Derek Walcott.

"History is built around creation and achievement, and nothing was created in the West Indies", said V.S. Naipaul bitterly in 1962, the year of independence for his native Trinidad. "Nothing will always be created in the West Indies," answered Derek Walcott, from neighbouring St. Lucia, "because whatever will come out of here is like nothing one has ever seen before." Difference has been a shaping force in both his life and his art. He recalls how, as he was developing his poetic talents, he became conscious of the distance between his literary and his local language. "I wrote in one language while people spoke in another." A divided child, was how he described himself, remembering how "my generation looked at life with black skins and blue eyes". Divided to the vein . . . and to the voice. "What I wrote had nothing to do with what I saw. While I honoured and loved them in my mind, I could not bring myself to write down the names of villages, of fruits, in the way people spoke because it seemed too raw . . . And I found no lines that mentioned breadfruit, guava, plantain, cassava in literature." And so Walcott began a career as poet and playwright that has helped establish local languages at the centre of the English literary tradition, obliterating all those distinctions between the raw and the cooked, or the barbaric and the civilized, that have routinely been used to keep people on the margins.

You ever look up from some lonely
    beach
and see a far schooner? Well, when I
    write this poem, each phrase go be
    soaked in salt; I go draw and knot
    every line as tight
as ropes in this rigging; in simple
    speech my common language
    go be the wind

There's a long dispute, in European literature at least, between literature that derives its power from real places, including the language of those places, and literature that locates itself on Parnassus, in an ideal place far away from here and now. These are not clear alternatives, as we can see in the Greek and Latin words for "poet" — the one a maker, whose imagination shapes the poem; and the other a diviner, locating sources of inspiration in the everyday. Walcott's poetry reflects this ambivalence, and is both grounded in his commitment to the Caribbean and heightened by his craft. There are politics here, of course, for (in his own words) "no language is neutral". But as he says, you have to walk barefoot to get a sense of scale.

"Loose now the salt cords binding our tongues", says the Jamaican Lorna Goodison, a major poetic voice of the generation following Walcott's and one whose papers the Fisher Library is also privileged to have acquired; "loose the long knotted hemp / dragging the old story / the rotted history." Like Goodison, Walcott has embraced the idea of a new world tradition that will bring new visions in new voices. Describing the local women from St. Lucia carrying heavy baskets of coal on their heads up a narrow wooden ramp onto a luxury liner for a penny a load, he vows to "give those feet a voice". In his inimitably witty way, he is also talking about metrical feet, about bringing together the melodies of Europe and the rhythms of Africa in poetry that is both rooted in the land and rises into song.

Toward the end of Omeros, a blind old man called Seven Seas, whose "words were not clear. They were Greek . . . or old African babble," discusses how
there are two journeys
in every odyssey, one on
    worried water,
the other crouched and motionless,
    without noise. For both, the "I" is a
    mast; a desk is a raft for one,
    foaming with paper, and dipping
    the beak
of a pen in its foam, while an actual
    craft carries the other to cities
    where people speak a different
    language, or look at him differently,
while the sun rises from the other
    direction with its unsettling
shadows, but the right journey is
    motionless; as the sea moves round
    an island
that appears to be moving, love moves
    round the heart— with encircling
    salt, and the slowly travelling hand
    knows it returns to the port from
which it must start.

This acquisition chronicles this journey. In the drawings and paintings and journals and notebooks and drafts of poems and plays that make up this remarkable archive, we find both a map of Walcott's imaginative travels and a dream of wholeness for himself and for his people.