ENG 482: Poetics of Relation Research Guide: Malcochon, or Six in the Rain

Taking into account that "Malcochon" was created in 1958, Walcott's larger intention for the play becomes apparent.   Writing at a time when many nations in the Antilles, including both St. Lucia and Trinidad, had begun a renewed attempt at driving out Western oversight, Walcott saw the theater as a means of artistic propaganda with which to hasten the freeing of colonized peoples.  Yet, just as Trinidadian Prime Minister Eric Williams did with his work History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, Walcott knew that independence was not only a matter of removing colonial forces but also a matter of decolonizing the minds of the people.

This latter idea is the emphasis of "Malcochon" where Walcott deals with the audience's [assuming a Caribbean audience] notion of inhumanity as would have been grinded into them as colonized persons.  Rather than an inevitable point of failure, Walcott calls the Caribbean people to embrace the idea of inhuman as a means to establish themselves as different from, if not better than, that human form of government that ruled under the Union Jack.  Additionally, Walcott also plays on the word inhuman to talk about what it means to live in the world as a human.  To Walcott, then, when independence came to the people of the Antilles, each nation was in a unique position to establish a better form of government if it only embraced the inherent positives already within both it's culture and people which might have been otherwise obscured by history.

-Grayson Hill 15’