ENG 482: Poetics of Relation Research Guide: What the Twilight Says

Walcott argues that “The truly tough aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor forgives history. It refuses to recognize it as a creative or culpable force.” This seems to me an appealing idea, but nearly impossible to achieve in actuality. Perhaps this is because the American works of literature I have read are almost always contextualized within their own historical settings. For example, when studying Slaughterhouse Five, I was taught about the actual historical event of the bombing of Dresden which the novel is based upon and the author himself actually witnessed firsthand. But I was also taught that the novel was released during the Vietnam War, and that while it is in part about World War II, it was also trying to make a point about war in general, which was particularly relevant at the time of its release.

I would argue that Vonnegut neither explains nor forgives history in that novel. He certainly does not forgive the US for bombing the largely civilian population of Dresden, nor does he explain or try to rationalize their motives. In fact, it could be argued that instead he subverts the desire to explain a country’s actions by using time travel and alien abductions to explain the life of one rather insignificant soldier. But the novel still uses history as both a creative and culpable force. I suppose in this way it does not capture Walcott’s vision of the true aesthetic of the New World, but it is still a valuable work of art that has a lot to say about American identity.

-Mark Brannan ‘14

Even now the poor are treated as the enslaved were hundreds of years ago. Poverty in the Caribbean remains on stage; it continues to be a marvel to those who know it is there. However it is important to note that there are different stages just as there are different forms of theatre. The stage that is presented to the world is a very different stage that the present natives know. The Caribbean is presented as nothing more than a vacation spot. The stage that the world knows is consumed with banana boats, piña coladas, jet skis, and crystal teal waters with sugar white sand. Yet the stage that Walcott has been on and is familiar with is far from this image. He knows the stage that is littered with garbage, suffering, and strangely happiness.  What Walcott wishes to do here is bring the stage he knows to the forefront.

History has not been very forgiving to the poor and unspoken. Knowing this, Walcott writes to give voices to those whose throats were mercilessly ripped out or whose tongues were sliced for talking back to their masters. Walcott, like Soyinka, uses his Nobel laureate as a megaphone to amplify his voice; so when you listen closely and read between the lines you don’t just hear Walcott’s voice. Once you silence the voice of the victor, and once you erase the markings made by the manipulating white men of the past, and only then do you start to hear a whisper—a harmonious whisper with Walcott as the leader of the choir. Harmonizing with him are hundreds of thousands of Antilleans.  

-Javier Robles 15’

Coming directly from the logically argumentative style of Soyinka, I found the animated, poetical prose of Walcott's What the Twilight Says a refreshing change.  Filling each page with scenes of "blue mountains… [and] bright grass," (65), Walcott presents his argument for how the world should view the Antilles in a manner I found so captivating that it was easy for me to forget he was making an argument at all.My personal view reveals an interesting point about Walcott's poetics:  that Derek Walcott views himself as a writer first and a critic second.  He understands the power that poetic, narrative language has in being able to convince others of a position or thought.   So, at no point within his range of works is language made either anything less than poetic or to bend for the purpose of argument.  It exists as both simultaneously.  Walcott, then, seems to have more fully integrated into his writing the idea that art is itself a means of propaganda than has Soyinka.  This is not to say that Soyinka does understand that art- in the form of plays- can be propagandistic; an idea that found its footing within the United States during the Black Arts Movement.  Rather, the point is that Soyinka, as is the case within his work Of Africa, can dismiss the art of language for the sake of argument since the language itself is not his focus.

-Grayson Hill ‘15

In the twilight, there is no guilt or fury at the European and African history, only continuation and living. In existing in this New World, the poet borne of colonial existence accepts the twilight of history. That is he accepts the two identities without blaming either of his links. While the Caribbean may have been founded in the twilight of Europe and Africa, the possibilities for achievement are endless.

-Aminata Dumbuya 14’

Walcott references the book of Genesis as a way to compare de-colonization with Creation. The people experienced new innocence, just as God created Eden for Adam and Eve to experience pleasure within His boundaries. Twenty years later however, the people have tainted this innocence, just as Adam and Eve infiltrated Eden with their sin. What was once an astounding opportunity for challenging the cultural influences of the oppressors has become an avenue in which the Caribbean consents, existing as mere copies. Walcott writes about the corruption that turns art into a “luxury” rather than a right and stifles the Caribbean identity:

Every state sees its image in those forms which have the mass appeal of sport, seasonal and amateurish. Stamped on that image is the old colonial grimace of the laughing nigger, steelbandsman, carnival masker, calypsonian, and limbo dancer. These popular artists are trapped in the state’s concept of the folk form, for they preserve the colonial demeanor and threaten nothing.  The folk arts have become the symbol of a carefree, accommodating culture, an adjunct to tourism, since the state is impatient with anything which it cannot trade (7).

Walcott professes his disappointment towards the way the African Diaspora within the Caribbean allow themselves to take on personas that resemble caricatures rather than forming their own legitimate identities. The newness that was so exciting and presented such a positive challenge is now ruined, as the Caribbean submits to tourism and exploitation of its natural resources. Imitation then, has resurfaced and the African identity only presents itself in folk representations of the authentic.

-Taylor Pisel ‘14

Walcott argues that the history, regardless of how scar filled, should be drawn on for artistic purposes.  Instead of rejecting any aspect of their history (he opposes those, like Naipaul, who reject any aspect of West Indian heritage, whether it be European, American, Asian, or African) he argues that there are virtues and values in hybridization, and that West Indian people should embrace all aspects of their history so as to not reject any part of themselves.  He states, "Pastoralists of the African revival should know that what is needed is not new names for old things, or old names for old things, but the faith of using the old names anew, so that mongrel as I am, something prickles in me when I see the word 'Ashanti' as with the word 'Warwickshire,' both baptizing this neither proud nor ashamed bastard, this hybrid, this West Indian". (9)  Walcott explains that the native West Indians were, at one point, “all strangers here” (10) and that this experience gave the West Indian artist not just a claim over his land, but also gave him the material for a new kind of linguistic expression.  He expresses his struggle with his hybridity in his youth - “At nineteen, an elate, exuberant poet madly in love with English, but in the dialect-loud dusk of water buckets and fish sellers, conscious of the naked, voluble poverty around me, I felt a fear of that darkness which had swallowed up all fathers”. (10)  But he goes onto express that it was the Creole language that elevated his ancestors stating that “what would deliver him from servitude was the forging of a language…one which began to create an oral culture of chants, jokes, folksongs, and fables, this, not merely the debt of history, was his proper claim to the New World”. (15) For Walcott, it was this combination of cultures, this hybridity and post-colonial state, that was focal in elevating his art.  It was the “electric fusion of the old and new” (16) that made him militant in his prose – able to accept his heritage, use it as art, and express on an international level the state and history of the West Indian culture.

-Carolyn Griffith ‘14