THE death of Sir Derek Walcott, a Nobel prize-winning poet died in St. Lucia on Friday at the age of 87 after a prolonged period of illness. The literary giant’s death is being mourned globally, but has hit home more in the Caribbean.
In Guyana, literary minds celebrate his life and have described him as one of the greatest literary minds that has graced the Region.
Walcott’s works throng national libraries and academic institutes globally and are common on the shelves of many writers, in English Literature classrooms.
Government Advisor on Cultural Policy, Ruel Johnson, himself a poet and award-winning writer, told the Guyana Chronicle that his work was greatly inspired by the Nobel laureate, whom he first met in Guyana during Carifesta in 2008.
Though he writes fiction as well, Johnson said the poet was his greatest influence in writing.
“I started writing poetry, proper poetry, after having read his ‘Another Life’,” Johnson told the Guyana Chronicle on Friday as he described the literary giant as the “first among equals… the pioneering giant of Caribbean Literature.”
Walcott’s name is placed with other Caribbean writers such as E.R. Braithwaite and V.S. Naipaul, to name a couple, and with writings “too far-ranging” for the selection of a single best piece, Johnson said, ‘Hic Jacket’ is one which won his heart and sealed his position as a writer in Guyana.
“But the work that made me want to stay and live as a writer in Guyana, despite the drawbacks, was a poem called ‘Hic Jacket’.”
Johnson said the legacy of Walcott is “incomparable” in helping the Caribbean define itself not as “merely peripheral former colonial subjects,” but as human beings.
“His death will be a reason for profound sadness, but his legacy is incomparable in helping us in the Caribbean to define ourselves as human beings and not merely peripheral former colonial subjects. He gave us the idea that we possessed a soul worthy of celebration in poetry and that goes beyond any indicator of self-determination and self-development we could conceive of,” Johnson said.
Walcott’s work includes In A Green Night: Poems 1948 – 1960 and his epic work, Omeros, which draws on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. In 1992, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 2011, the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, with his collection ‘White Egrets’, which judges in the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry called “a moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet.”
Meanwhile, writer and poet Dr. Ian McDonald, said he will forever remember how remarkable a playwright and poet Walcott was. The Guyanese-born McDonald wrote a comprehensive feature on the poetic stalwart headlined, ‘The unshakable faith of the humble’ on page 271 of his own book, ‘A Love for Poetry’ published by the Caribbean Press in 2013.
Walcott’s writings captured his attention from his very first collection of about 25 original poems released in 1959. At the time, Dr McDonald said he was still in school and his own writings had just begun.
“I was at school and I remember when his first collection of poems came out. It was about 25 poems. It impressed people right away. He was 19 years old…So he’s been on the West Indian scene and on the world scene.”
He told the Guyana Chronicle that he read many of the works of Walcott and other writers. “Derek Walcott stands out as the greatest poet now writing in the English language. As he has grown older his work has grown if anything denser, more beautiful, more compelling,” McDonald, himself one of the Caribbean greats, wrote.
He called the St. Lucian a “true West Indian man” and said even as he travelled the globe, “he remained rooted in the West Indies. His universal theme springs from a deeply felt West Indian experience. He is by far the best playwright the West Indies has yet produced.”
‘A letter from Brooklyn’ had really captured McDonald’s literary love, and he pointed out that “in a small compass” there is a demonstration of “what it sometimes takes whole volumes to explain – the unshakable faith of those who are humble and the redeeming power of unquestioning love.”
The poem he called “miniature but perfect in scale,” and McDonald added, “One of Walcott’s fundamental motivations is “to speak the name of all the humble.”
The two writers met about four times and accompanied by his work, his presence was enough for McDonald to conclude that the man was “a world figure [and] the greatest poet the West Indies has produced… But never forget that he is also a very, very good playwright.”
McDonald told the Guyana Chronicle that Walcott had made a positive change in Caribbean poetry and brought a fresh confidence and image to the lives of Caribbean poets.
“In those days the influences on young poets in the West Indies tended to be not from the West Indies (but poets who were Englishmen). Derek Walcott came on the scene with his first collection of poems and he was immediately seen as a very, very good poet. I remember as a schoolboy reading his first poetry and saying ‘but this is lovely, and he is a West Indian like me’,” McDonald stated.
He added: “When he first came on the scene he inspired a lot of young West Indian poets to realise that they did not have to write like the English poets. They could now write like Derek Walcott about their home scenes and their own people and their own events. And so he was very influential in that way.”
Similarly, Al Creighton, literary and art critic, said he was shocked when he heard of the death of Walcott. “I really never expected that of Derek Walcott — not at this time. He seemed such an important fixture in our literature and it is hard to imagine it without him. Not that there are not several other outstanding heroes, but he became such a colossus — he spoke a lot for the Caribbean Region and the forms of Caribbean literature, those that he utilised and those to which he gave shape.”
Creighton said the death of Walcott represents not only the loss of one man or one writer, but “the end of an era.”
“Walcott grew to be the most outstanding poet in the world; the best poet/playwright. Standing there on his own after his late friend and co-conspirator, Seamus Heaney. The world will feel the actual absence of its best poet and playwright,” Creighton added.
He posited that West Indian literature will now have to make do with the heritage of Walcott’s brand of theatre. “When you look at his plays and at his poetry; when you read his critical essays — you find he was thoroughly Caribbean, yet he was what his greatest critic Edward Baugh called him — the universal humanist.”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1992 was awarded to Walcott “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”