Ilhas Windward, 1930 – Cap Estate (Santa Lucía), 2017

By Flávio Aguiar

Reading the work of novelist and poet Derek Walcott, Nobel Prize in Literature 1992, is to identify a profound commitment to the people and territory of Saint Lucia, a volcanic Caribbean archipelago. The history of this former British colony and the consequences of the exploited condition of the islanders are found in his texts, along with the cultural elements from Asia, Africa, and Europe present in the country’s formation.

Published in both standard English and Creole, he advocates for traditional Black culture, which places him among the writers of the Négritude Movement, alongside Saint-John Perse, Aimé Césaire, and Cyril Lionel Robert James. He defines the “mulatto style” as the tendency to merge various oral languages on the literary plane, exploring Latin American mestizaje as another significant writer, Serge Patient, does in French Guiana.

The publication of In a Green Night in 1962 was a milestone in the artistic production of the West Indies because it laid the groundwork for the creation of Caribbean literature. With this concern, he reveals the sense of marginality experienced by Black writers from the Antilles (The Gulf, 1969).

Omeros (1990), an epic poem that weaves together the histories of Greece and the Caribbean, encapsulates the writer’s commitment to examining the post-colonial condition of the region, which is central to some of his plays (Dream of Monkey Mountain, 1967).

From 1953 onward, he lived between Trinidad and Tobago and Boston, where he worked as a playwright, literary critic, and teacher. Between 1959 and 1976, he directed the Trinidad theatre, where he staged some of his nearly thirty published plays.

A descendant of slaves, the death of his twin brother is one of the themes of The Prodigal (2004), which he declared to be his last book. Another work: Bounty (1997).

In 2010, he took the poetry chair at the University of Essex in England. In 2011, he received the TS Eliot Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for the collection White Egrets. He passed away at his residence on March 17, 2017, at the age of 87.