ENG 482: Poetics of Relation Research Guide: Café Martinique

Walcott’s illustrious use of language coupled with his insatiable desire to have the audience dig deeper into the meaning of his phrases made me stop frequently. “Café Martinique: A Story” provides the audience with a personal testimony reflecting the notions expressed throughout the collection in the form of a brief narrative. The short story also aims to seamlessly blend the voices of Walcott and the sardonic Martinican protagonist into a harmonious yet bitter melody— a melody that accurately depicts the attitude of many West Indians including Walcott himself.By highlighting Martinique, Walcott is simultaneously making a statement about the West Indies. Walcott has said in many of his works that many of the West Indian nations are presented in the same light. Their beaches are indistinguishable, their resorts are as standard as the complimentary shampoo bottles, and all the natives are jolly people—or the exact opposite, miserable and poverty-stricken. The world is a stage and Walcott, the director of this play, is portraying Martinique as something new. It seems that Walcott burned the banana costumes and fake dreadlock wigs, and instead has decided to display a café and a blur of gendarmes in khaki shorts and hard round caps.

It is what Martinique represents that has pushed Maurice into an abyss of sorrow and regret. It is the history of the island, the history of their people, of his people, of his culture—this is the main cause to Maurice’s acidic character. “Everything has been the same since that quick glance from God known as history in the tropics. (236)” Maurice is describing history in the tropics as an exchange between ants and a boy with a magnifying glass. The tropics, an anthill which was quickly put under God’s magnifying glass, only for a brief moment, just enough for God to get bored, divert his attention elsewhere and just enough for a significant amount of damage to be done. According to Maurice and by extension Walcott, history was made up of little fragments; “it was by such little things that we measure entire epochs, not by love. (238)”. Walcott as well as other Caribbean authors have written extensively on the amalgamation that many refer to as the West Indies. Walcott presents this to us while simultaneously stirring sympathy in our hearts for Maurice.  However, it is important to consider the mindset that many West Indian natives have adopted—while the past may have been brutal and dark, the present is bright and we are proud of our culture. While bloodshed and dominance has occurred in the West Indies throughout history, one shouldn’t necessarily be sour about it now because the fact remains that the Caribbean is a beautiful, rich in history and natural resources, vibrant, and unique archipelago that exists nowhere else in this world.

-Javier Robles 15’

Women who are emblematic of the Caribbean wear their struggle, according to Maurice. Their faces and garments reveal a sense of pain, as he associates the Caribbean with pain. Maurice is incredibly misguided and trapped in the past. He wants to symbolize women who have experienced colonial exploitation, assuming the essence of the Caribbean lies in its historical suffering.

-Taylor Pisel 14’

Café Martinique reinforces Walcott as a writer who continues to question and examine the value and effects of his heritage and history on the Caribbean artist.  The themes in his story are genuine – they do not shout militant declarations or foist political platforms on his reader.  Instead, they embody and expand on the themes of history, time, memory, and cultural hybridity prominent in his earlier works.  They espouse philosophical principles that are relevant and important to each Caribbean citizen, giving his authorial voice authenticity and relatability.  Maurice, the stories protagonist, grapples with the same issues that Walcott expresses in the collection, which appears to be an understated creative manifesto (though Walcott would certainly oppose the term, I believe that the collection works as an ideological manifesto).  Through his protagonist, Maurice, Walcott explores in a personal and self-questioning way the political, cultural and historical experiences that have forged his identity as a Caribbean artist.

Walcott’s decision to write short story fiction plays a critical role in uniting the philosophical and political ideas expressed in his previous works.  In this story, Walcott is able to insert himself into his protagonist and test out different ideas in a real life setting.  Fiction as a genre allows for Walcott to work through Maurice – to expand on the ideas in his previous work and explore a character’s reaction to them, to show different points of view, to characterize and personify sentiments that in his essays may have seemed flat, unrealistic or challenging to grasp as a reader removed from the setting.  Though this is a new format, he still has command over his prose, which are rich, vivid and rife with multinational cultural influence – every word is deliberate and often expresses the beauty of the lingual hybridity that he argues is a distinctive and superior characteristic of Caribbean culture.  For Walcott, it is the synthesis of French Creole and Adamic English that bears an impressive and unique Antillean artistry.

-Carolyn Griffith 14’

“Café Martinique” reveals Walcott’s self-reflection: a real-time account of one who exists in a state of ambivalence unsure of which way to move, the pain of the colonized. For Derek Walcott, a man of the twilight, Maurice could have easily been the fate of his own however, he used his platform to speak, uplift, and emphasize the twilight. Locking one’s self between histories creates constraints and immobilizes the mind. Instead, one must actively choose progression and seize authenticity. The authentic citizen is one who moves forward, no longer waiting and wishing but crafting and constructing his/her future, his/her distinct culture, and his/her identity. For Walcott, it’s the ability to use the best, reconstruct, and reinvent that constitutes the essence of humanity. Those who recognize and write about it as well as SEE and appreciate distinct cultures have understood all along that, as always, in the Antilles or any island for that matter it’s always been about active invention never imitation. ”

-Aminata Dumbuya 14’

“Walcott’s opening paragraph is only a bite out of the entire Café Martinique narrative.  Throughout the text, Walcott jumps from one narrator to another, balancing different points of view on the same protagonist, Maurice.  By way of multiple narrators, Walcott propels Maurice’s anguish forward, presenting his stuck character in a number of different voices so as to repeat again and again the one-dimensionality of his character.  Walcott’s clever use of repetition provides a doubling and later, tripling of the story through a variety of binoculars looking at Maurice, including his own.  Each narrator bares Maurice’s skewed self-identity that not only stems from his strained romantic affairs, but his destructive relationship with himself.”

-Catherine O’Donnell 15’

At the end of “Café Martinique: A Story”, Derek Walcott, acting as narrator, makes the following claim concerning Maurice:

It is you who are waiting.  And only you know what for (245).

Such statements on the part of the work's author, of course, force one to ask: What is Maurice waiting for?  Certainly, it can be argued that Maurice is waiting to be released from the grasp of history.  Yet, as suggested by Maurice's two love interests, Maurice is also waiting to be understood as a person by both others and himself.  With respect to his apprentice, Maurice says that he wishes to age her so that "she might understand him" (Walcott 239).  To the picture of Madame Vigée-Leburn, Maurice speaks self-reflexively when he states, "'They do not understand you [Madame Vigée-Leburn ]… but I do'" (Walcott 242).  It seems, then, that to be personally understood- and by extension accepted for who he is- is what Maurice is waiting for in his search for love.

-Grayson Hill ‘15