As a writer, I have always been fascinated by the past and the way it interconnects with the present. Perhaps, it was something that was born from the innate desire we all had as children to experience the life of someone else who lived in another, more fascinating time in history. Perhaps, it was

born from knowledge that I, that we all, possess; knowledge which informs me, as a Guyanese, with a history that is constantly affecting the present, whether through the recurrence of undead colonial ideology or through how politics from decades ago continue to influence the contemporary landscape, to understand and appreciate how the past never really disappears or lets us out of its grasp.
Derek Walcott, Nobel Laureate and St. Lucian, has a plethora of work that speaks about the interconnectivity between the past and present in order to highlight various aspects of postcolonialism, which is crucial to his plays and poems, as in, for example, the poem, The Schooner Flight. It is impossible to write all that can be written about this poem in a single article and, for this reason, along with the importance of such a poem to the Guyanese people, the observation of The Schooner Flight will be divided into parts, with this article being the first.
At its simplest level, the plot of the poem has to do with a man, Shabine, and his experiences as he journeys around the Caribbean. The way in which his journey, forever going forward, is interwoven with images from the Caribbean’s past, however, is one of the ways in which Walcott not only blends past with present, but is also probably reminding us that the past shapes, and is responsible for, the present and, indicated by the constant moving forward of the poem’s speaker, even the future itself.
Shabine’s travels and experiences offer a lot of room for Walcott to make some scathing criticisms of a variety of aspects of West Indian society – from the need for people to search for their identity, to corruption and capitalism, to the new West Indian bourgeoisie. There is also the implicit warning that all of these things can be representative of neo (new) colonialism, where modern West Indians, unaware of their identity, begin to ape the actions and behavior (excessive capitalist interests, etc.) of the colonizers. When Shabine says of the people he lives among: “…out of corruption my soul takes wings. / But they had started to poison my soul / with their big house, big car, big time bohbohl…” that is exactly what he is talking about.
As one of the best poets in the world, it should come as no surprise that Walcott, while presenting a plethora of themes and ideas in The Schooner Flight still manages to do so using language that is beautiful and sublime. Take, for instance, the lines where he writes of Shabine, working as a diver, experiencing a fleeting underwater vision that invokes the slave trade – an important aspect of Caribbean history that is crucial to the Caribbean identity:
“but this Caribbean so choke with dead
that when I would melt in emerald water,
whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent,
I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea-fans,
dead-men’s-fingers, and then, the dead men.
I saw that the powdery sand was their bones
ground white from Senegal to San Salvador…”
Not only is the imagery in that section particularly vibrant but, more importantly, it manages to convey a whole lot in just a small section of words. Think of how Walcott links the enslavement of the Africans to one of their descendants freely swimming the ocean that they crossed, shackled and abused from Africa. Look at how Walcott conveys images of the enslaved still being very much a part of the Caribbean Sea by connecting them to the coral and the sand, as if the Caribbean itself – the waters and the soil that makes the Caribbean – was literally created from our ancestors in the past. It is a powerful piece of imagery, one of many that can be found in Walcott’s excellent poem.