Postcolonial Romanticisms: Landscape and the Possibilities of Inheritance

In the W ork of Jamaica Kincaid. G arrett Hongo and Derek Walcott

Roy Osamu Kamada Jr.

B.A. (University of Oregon) 1992
M.F.A. (University of Virginia) 1994

DISSERTATION
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR O F PHILOSOPHY
in
English
in the
O FFICE OF G RA D U A TE STUDIES
o f the
UNIVERSITY O F CALIFORNIA
DAVIS

Committee in Charge
2005

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UMI Number: 3182499

Copyright 2005 by
Kamada, Roy Osamu, Jr.

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 2 005

by
Roy Osamu K am ada Jr.
All rights reserved.

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A cknow ledgem ents

For ideas and assistance directly related to this project: David Simpson, Riche
Richardson, Linda Morris, Elizabeth Constable, Garrett Hongo, Tina Kendall, Laura
Ceia, and Vanita Reddy.
For love and friendship along the way: Roy, Elaine, and Jill Kamada, M inoru and Rose
Kamada, W allace and Chiyoko Otsuka, Robyn Stoddard, Sabina Chen, Brian Komei
Dempster, Janice Pfeiff, W ensday Carlton, Ed W etherell, Ruria Namba, Garrett Cotham,
Jim Miller, Kristine Ito, Kristin Koster, Joyce W ade, A nett Jessop, Pam Self, Liana
Holmberg, Dolores Miller, and Austin Sloat.
For time, support, and money: University of California, Davis and the V erm ont Studio
Center.
Finally: Sketch, Sierra, Tanner, and Charlie for patient com panionship.

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Postcolonial Romanticisms: Landscape and the Possibilities of Inheritance in the W ork

of Jam aica Kincaid, Garrett Hongo, and Derek W alcott
Abstract
O ver the last half of the 20th century, the process of decolonization steadily
transform ed form er imperial territories across the globe. However, the projects of
decolonization have been frequently animated by jealously guarded essentialisms, which
often simply reinscribe the power structures of imperialism under the guise of nationalist
identities. Franz Fanon articulates this as the crisis of the native intellectual, who has
thrown him self greedily upon Western culture (Wretched 218). Such a crisis assumes an
over-determ ined homogeneity inherent in W estern culture; and ignores traditions from
within W estern culture which contest the coherence and modernizing thrust of European
im perialism. This project articulates the heterogeneity of Western culture and resituates
the postcolonial within a genealogy that allows for the possibilities of an inherited
tradition of resistance already internal to the logic of the W estern literary tradition.
Postcolonial Rom anticism s examines the m ethods of resistance that are achieved in the
postcolonial literary text through a sometimes ironic appropriation and redeploym ent of
the discourses of British romanticism , specifically the discourse of the romantic
landscape. As critics of romanticism and empire such as Edward Said note, romanticism
produced the East in term s that subordinated it to the im peratives of imperialism and
European capitalism. However, as Saree Makdisi and Ian Baucom suggest, it is possible
to read some of these rom antic texts as capable of contesting the very systems of
imperialism they were so much a part of inscribing. I argue that a num ber of postcolonial
authors draw on the tropes o f rom anticism in a way that dem onstrates the com plexity of
romanticism and its legacy. W riters such as Jam aica Kincaid, G arrett Hongo, and Derek
W alcott attem pt to radically reim agine and rewrite the various traditions that have figured
their landscapes as unhistoricized, unoccupied, and marginal. Their island landscapes are
historical and traum atic while still retaining the affect of the sublime. Postcolonial
Romanticisms, informed by postcolonial theory, contem porary readings of romantic
writers and also by theories of traum a, positions the rom antic landscape as a historical
and contemporary technology of intervention that, in its am bivalence between resistance
and com plicity, emerges as a trope truly indicative of the subjectivity o f the postcolonial.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
SHARDS OF AN ANCIENT PASTORAL: THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME................................ 1
I: B r i t i s h , A m e r i c a n ,

and

P o s t c o l o n i a l R o m a n t i c s .................................................................................................... 2

II: T h e E ig h t e e n t h C e n t u r y R o m a n t i c L a n d s c a p e ........................................................................................................ 8
III: T h e P o s s ib il it y

of the

P o s t c o l o n i a l R o m a n t i c ....................................................................................................18

CHAPTER ONE
TRENCHTOWN ROCK: JAMAICA KINCAIDS UNREAL BEAUTY.................................................31
I: T h e R o m a n t i c E d u c a t i o n
II: E a r l y M o d e

of the

III: E m e r g e n t I d e a s
IV : L a n d s c a p e

of

of

J a m a i c a K i n c a i d ........................................................................................................... 3 2

E m p t y C o l o n i a l L a n d s c a p e ............................................................................................... 3 9
L a n d s c a p e ............................................................................................................................................5 4

C o l o n ia l A r t if a c t , L a n d s c a p e

as

as

P l a c e ................................................................................. 5 9

CHAPTER TWO
ONCE OUT OF NATURE: GARRETT HONGOS POSTCOLONIAL POETIC............................ 74
I: T h e C o n s e r v a t i v e P o s t m o d e r n ............................................................................................................................................. 7 5
II: P o e t r y

of the

III: A B o o k

of

U n c h r o n i c l e d ................................................................................................................................................. 8 4

O r i g i n s ........................................................................................................................................................................ 9 0

CHAPTER THREE
HIS COMPANY OF VISIONARIES: DEREK WALCOTT AND THE EDUCATION OF THE
POSTCOLONIAL............................................................................................................................................... 112
I: T h e P r o b l e m
II: T h e A

of

I n h e r i t a n c e ..................................................................................................................................................113

p p r e n t ic e

I m i t a t o r ........................................................................................................................................................ 121

CHAPTER FOUR
THATS ALL THEM BASTARDS HAVE LEFT US, WORDS: THE MELANCHOLY OF THE
POSTCOLONIAL ROMANTIC......................................................................................................................152
I: T r a u m a

and the

P o s t c o l o n ia l R o m

a n t i c ...................................................................................................................153

II: T h e H a r b o u r : A F ir s t C a s e .............................................................................................................................................. 167

III: P o s t c o l o n i a l R o m a n t i c .........................................................................................................................................................1 7 4
I V : T h e R e t u r n in g P r o d i g a l ....................................................................................................................................................... 186

WORKS CITED.................................................................................................................................................. 203

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Shards of an Ancient Pastoral: The Postcolonial Sublime

It is increasingly a com m onplace that tw entieth-century literary
consciousness is a late variant of Rom anticism .
Thom as Weiskel

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I: British, American, and Postcolonial Romantics

In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez describes his journey aboard a cargo ship taking
supplies to an arctic mine. While leaning over the calm waters of Melville Bay, he
reflects upon the icebergs surrounding his ship, comparing their implacable austerity to
the gothic m agnificence of European cathedrals; he cites the building of cathedrals as a
wild leap of spirit, an impassioned attem pt to illustrate how the cathedrals, by the very
way they snared the su n s energy, were an expression of God and of the human
connection with God as well(248). He says that the beauty of the icebergs struck terror
in him, but that the very attempt to apprehend the sublime, cathedral or iceberg, was
indicative of love, of a humble and impassioned em brace of something outside the
s e lf(250). For Lopez, appealing to a universalized experience of awe, this revelation is
powerful, but simple and uncluttered by historical or cultural baggage. Describing a
seascape that lacks history, he is able to imagine his own relationship to that environm ent
in romantically sublime terms: I looked out at the icebergs. They were so beautiful they
also made you afraid (251). The terror of L opezs viewing recalls Edmund B urkes
classic definition of the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature [sic| which
results in fa]stonishment; and astonishm ent is that state of the soul, in which all its
motions are suspended, with some degree of horror (Burke 57).1 The terror of L opezs
experience, a terror inherent in the sublim e as articulated by eighteenth century British
romantics, is indicative of a contem porary strain of rom anticism very much alive in
modern nature writers.
Lopez, along with a cadre of other writers such as Terry Tem pest W illiams, Anne
Dillard, and W endall Berry, to nam e ju st a few, have been at the contem porary forefront

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of a literature that considers the many implications of the relationship between the human
and non-hum an worlds, a literature that is, in many ways, an outgrowth of British
romanticism. The arguments about an American variant of British romanticism are well
heeled ones and in no need of comprehensive reiteration here.2 In literary criticism this
trend has been met with an increasing number of critical studies devoted to the themes
and problem s of environm entally oriented literary studies. Anthologies o f critical essays
have been published which engage the wide variety of methodologies employed by
ecocriticism, landm ark texts have appeared by Lawrence Buell, Jonathan Bate, and
Leonard Scigaj; issues of PM LA, New Literary H istory, and The Chronicle o f Higher
Education have devoted a large number of pages to ecocritical concerns. On the whole
the em ergence or rather the articulation of eco-literature and eco-criticism has been
genealogically linked to romanticism. Essay collections have borne titles such as The
Green Studies Reader: From Rom anticism to Ecocriticism , and James C. M cKusick has
published his study, Green Writing: Rom anticism and E cology, which situates Coleridge,
W ordsworth, John Clare, Blake, Emerson, Thoreau, and John M uir all in the tradition of
green writing.3 Jonathan Bate has published a now-seminal study of W ordsworth,
Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environm ental Tradition, which situates him,
and subsequently rom anticism itself, in a tradition of ecologically oriented literature.

As

William Slaym aker observed in a recent PM LA article, ecocrit and ecolit have
arrived(Echoing 129).
Significantly however, Slaym aker has also observed that despite the growth in
environm entally oriented literary studies, the tide of ecocriticism has had only minor
ripple effects in the black A tlantic com munities. He notes that this has been, in part, due

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to the lack of nature writing traditions(Letter to the Editor 1100) in the diasporic
African com m unities. Slaymaker also notes, ecocrit and ecolit appear to many academic
and literary observers positioned around the margins of the black A tlantic as another
w hiteout o f black concerns, by going green(l 101). Dominic Head expresses a similar
concern about the intersections of ecocriticism and cultural studies in his reading of J.M.
Coetzee.4 H eads critique suggests that ju st as postcolonialism (and Saids Orientalism
before the advent of postcolonial discourse) helped decenter the Enlightenment subject
and the universal narrative of European modernity, so too can ecocriticism help decenter
the Human from the structures of ecological discourse. H owever while there are
potential connections and parallels between postcolonialism and ecocriticism, he warns
against the recentering and privileging of the O bject (in the case of ecocriticism, the
planet or the natural world). Ecocriticism then risks recentering the subject that
postm odernity has worked so hard to decenter, or at the very least, re-placing the
Derridian center with Nature instead of the Enlightenm ent subject. This risk is, at least
in part, at the heart of Slaym akers explanation for what he perceives to be the absence of
Black A tlantic writers participating in the discourses of ecoliterature and ecocriticism.
Slaym aker explains, |f |or some black..critics, ecolit and ecocrit are another attem pt to
white o u t black Africa by coloring it g reen .. . (ecolit and ecocrit] appear...as one more
hegem onic discourse from the metropolitan W est (Echoing 132).5
Additionally, while Slaym aker rem arks on the lack of nature-writing traditions
(Letter to the Editor 1100) in the black A tlantic com m unity, his observations fail to
take into account the uses writers of the black Atlantic com m unity have made of the
traditions received via colonialism, specifically in the case of my arguments here, the

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traditions associated with British romanticism. Slaym aker relies upon a reified definition
of native traditions, a definition that is problematic. While the presence or absence of
an indigenous or native nature writing tradition is not nearly as clearly established as
William Slaym aker would seem to imagine, the significance of such traditions to the
work o f Kincaid, Hongo, and W alcott is not the central concern of this project.6 In this
study I intend to consider the extent to and methods by which these writers directly
engage the tradition of the romantic sublime landscape.7
Slaym akers arguments fail to account for the various modes of nature writing
vitally present in the work of postcolonial writers such as Jam aica Kincaid, G arrett
Hongo, and Derek Walcott. These writers, like Lopez or W ordsworth, share concerns
and themes which the ecocritic m ight consider ecologically oriented; however they are
not ju st writing about the human encounter with a natural world that it may or may not
com pletely belong to; their concerns are also historical.

And the historically m aterialist

nature o f their particular brand of nature writing, a brand I will call postcolonial
romanticism , revises and reorients their received traditions. Kincaid, Hongo and W alcott,
also writing about a sublime landscape, are unable to detach that landscape from its
history of colonialism and all the attendant consequences of that history. For while
Lopez does discuss the human history of the Arctic along with its neo-colonialist
consequences elsewhere in his book, he remains a detached observer, able to sunder his
appreciation for the landscape from his know ledge of history. Similarly, Theodore
Roethke, as Jay Parini reads his work, uses landscape as a synechdocal representation of
his psychic and em otional state and as a m otivating force for his attem pt at spiritual
redemption. A contem porary poet, Charles W right, writes in his 1998 Pulitzer Prize

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winning collection, Black Zodiac. Landscapes a lever of transcendence/ jack-w edge it

here,/ or here, and step back,/ Heave and a light, a little light, will nimbus your going
forth. W right uses landscape as a means of hoisting the self into and out of the
quotidian world; for Wright, like W ordsworth, the landscape is simultaneously the end
and the means of spiritual transcendence. However, this trope of the romantic landscape,
problem atized by Roethke in psychological term s and by W right in his devotion to both a
Southern Baptist tradition as well as a Buddhist tradition, is powerfully complex and
problem atic in postcolonial terms in the works of writers such as Garrett Hongo, Jam aica
Kincaid, and D erek Walcott. Postcolonial writers lack the luxury of an ahistorical
landscape. The landscape that they write about is necessarily politicized; their own
subjectivity is intimately implicated in both the natural beauty as well as the traum atic
history of the place; they confront and engage to varying degrees the history of their
postcolonial geographies, the history o f diaspora, of slavery, of the capitalist
com m odification of the landscape, and the devastating consequences this history has on
the individual.8 These postcolonial w riters confront what Derek W alcott calls the shards
of an ancient pastoral, the literal and literary remains of colonial cultural authority that
clutter their landscapes.9
Far from being unconcerned with the natural landscape in which they set their
novels, memoirs, and poems, the writers in this study have made their postcolonial
landscapes a central m otif in their work. The landscapes that these three writers describe
are landscapes that bear strong m arks of a rom antic inheritance. They evoke, in rom antic
terms, the landscapes of their postcolonial com m unities in order to refigure and radically
reim agine these selfsame historical landscapes in ways that reflect em bryonic and

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interventionist nationalist sensibilities. They adopt and adapt romanticism in a gesture of

hybridity that is indicative of the problem atics of minoritized/ postcolonial discourses
even as it articulates them.
While tropings of the rom antic landscape, whether during the romantic period or
in more contemporary occurrences, are com plex and indicative not only of an aesthetic
but also a political hybridity, postcolonial evocations of the romantic landscape have an
additional and important dimension: they enable the conditions of possibility for the
subaltern to speak, to articulate differences within a given hegemony. Although the
romantics (and their contem porary descendants such as Roethke and W right) worked
within a complex, self-referential, and, at times, self-critiquing tradition, they were still
working within the context of a tradition that, owing to its historical, cultural, and
geographical situatedness, was unable to radically underm ine those projects from outside
the tradition itself. In contrast, postcolonial writers who employ the traditions of
romanticism make use of its hybrid oppositional potential while speaking from the
subject position of the subaltern.10 I argue that postcolonial writers speak from a
historically complex subject position and avail themselves of a m ultitude of tropes and
themes. My purpose in tracing this particular theme is not to indicate any kind of debt
that contemporary postcolonials bear in regard to their colonial cultures, but rather to
resituate certain aesthetics of postcolonial writers within an already established tradition
of opposition to m odernization.11

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II: The Eighteenth Century Romantic Landscape

English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were
evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the
grand tour
Tom Stoppard
Romanticism, in Marilyn B utlers words, is inchoate because it is not a single
intellectual movem ent but a complex of responses to certain conditions which W estern
society has experienced and continues to experience since the middle of the eighteenth
century (184). Similarly, Seamus Perry observes, |t]he difficulty is not ju st knowing
what it [rom anticism | means, but knowing even how to go about deciding [sic] what it
really means (3).12 This very notable incoherence regarding the definition and
application of the term rom anticism makes it a particularly salient discourse to consider
in developing the genealogies of certain postcolonial projects. B utlers com ments, in
particular, suggest that contem porary and on-going responses m ight still fall under the
rubric of romanticism itself. I do not mean to suggest that the postcolonial projects of
Jam aica Kincaid, G arrett Hongo, and Derek W alcott are them selves projects of
romanticism , but rather that rom antic discourse holds a significant place in their projects.
While a number of critics, building on Edward Saids observations in Orientalism (1978),
have remarked upon the ways in which the discourse of rom anticism enabled and
legitimized European imperialisms, so too in recent years have critics voiced the opposite
perspective.
Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson have edited an anthology of essays, Rom anticism
and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, that considers the instabilities,
ambiguities and contradictions which rom antic-period texts reveal at the heart of
colonialism s discourses (11). In the introduction they note that |m ]any of the British

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Romantics saw them selves as being in opposition to aspects of colonialism Coleridge

and Southey actively campaigned against slavery and Blake wrote against it (11). They
do allow, however, that on neither side of the...ideological division, was a selfconsistent discourse on colonialism possible...[they all] reinstated some of its informing
assumptions within their opposition (11). In no small way, this extrem e diversity of
views on the significance and legacies of romanticism makes it an ideal discourse to
consider as part o f a postcolonial methodology. Given the critical readings of
romanticism as a discourse com plicit with as well as in opposition to the political and
cultural authority of colonialism, rom anticism provides a nicely com plex discourse to
read as part of a postcolonial genealogy.
Jamaica K incaids work frequently articulates the colonizing affect of the legacies
o f romanticism. As I discuss in my chapter on her, a scene of classroom instruction
where a character has to m em orize a piece of romantic poetry becom es, over the course
of various retellings throughout her body o f work, deeply significant and representative
o f the ways in which the authority of colonial powers was dissem inated throughout the
culture in which she came o f age. G arrett Hongo and Derek W alcott on the other hand
seek to harness the oppositional affects of romanticism. W here rom anticism for Jam aica
Kincaid represents the pow er of colonial cultural authority and its inescapable
domination over her intellectual life, for Hongo and W alcott, rom anticism is a discourse
that, while adm ittedly congruent with colonial power structures, provides an oppositional
resource. They are able to sim ultaneously locate themselves within an extension of the
romantic tradition while not necessarily aligning themselves with the continuity of
colonial (now neo-colonial) pow er in their respective hom elands and aesthetics. O ver the

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course of the four chapters of this project, I will consider in depth the various
m anifestations of the postcolonial rearticulation of the romantic landscape.
W hile allowing that romanticism as a concept categorically defies easy definition
either through periodization or through identification with aesthetic or ideological
strategies, I will use Saree M akdisis formulation of rom anticism as a discourse that he
places in partial opposition to modernization. M akdisis Rom antic Imperialism:
Universal Em pire and the Culture o f M odernity contends that as the romantic period in
Britain marks the m om ent of the emergence of the culture of modernization...rom antic
engagements were dialectically bound up with modernization, and contributed to its
developm ent as a cultural dominant (7). These entanglem ents o f rom anticism with
modernization are indicative of the potential hybridity of rom anticism , to invoke Homi
B habhas term inology. M akdisi goes on to observe that even as the culture of modernity
was beginning to consolidate under the indices of capitalism and im perialism,
romanticism emerged as a salient ideological discourse that had the capacity to contest
the homogenizing historicization occurring under the rubric of modernization.
Romanticism, according to Makdisi, operates as a critique of m odernization.
Makdisi, in his attem pt to articulate the anti-modern discourse of romanticism,
observes that for W ordsworth, the overw helm ing terror of the crowd of London is far
too real for him and as a result the perspectival detachm ent necessary for the experience
of sublimity is im possible to attain (36),13 W here the terrifying A lpine abyss was able to
induce the experience of sublimity, the terror of modernization and urbanization was too
overwhelming. Citing the end of Book VII of The Prelude w here W ordsworth abandons
London, Makdisi observes that W ordsw orths imagination o f Nature cannot be

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understood independently of his revulsion and flight from the imperial metropolis and the
crisis of m odernization that the city represents (25). In M akdisis analysis London
functions as a synecdoche for the whole process of m odernization which W ordsworth
defined against the residual places in which pre- or anti-m odern existence persists (the
bowers o f A n Evening Walk, the hidden valley of M ichael, the Highlands of Waverley,
the O rient of Childe H arold) (27).14
If we follow M akdisis argum ent and apply some contemporary definitions, the
discourse of rom anticism can be seen, in B habhas terms, to be a discourse of hybridity.
Romanticism functions as a hybrid discourse since it is a site where the single voice of
colonial [or m odernizing! authority undermines the operation o f colonial [or
modernizing) power by inscribing and disclosing the trace of the other (Young 23). In
B habhas form ulations the fault lines of a univocal and hom ogenous colonial authority
reveal themselves in the very texts produced out of that colonial authoritythe very texts
which themselves reinscribe colonial authority bear within them, according to Bhabha,
traces o f alterity, traces which already undermine the colonial claim to univocal,
homogenous authority. Robert Young, speaking of Homi B habhas notion o f hybridity,
observes that hybridity becomes the mom ent in which the discourse of...authority loses
its univocal grip on m eaning and finds itself open to the trace of the language of the
other, enabling the critic to trace com plex moments of disarm ing alterity (22). The
hybrid work infuses the canon with the trace of the language of the other by subverting
the proposed hom ogeneity of the canon and showing its textuality, as Barthes m ight have
described it, to have always already been a site of contestation. Such a consideration of
the canon mirrors B habhas description of other written form s of colonial authority:

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between the W estern sign and its colonial signification there emerges a map of
m isreading.. .[that] inscribes an ambivalence at the very origins of colonial authority
(95). Bhabha argues that this ambivalence reveals an agonistic uncertainty contained in
the incom patibility of empire and nation (96). This kind of hybridity that Bhabha
identifies serves as the foundation for his argum ent about the ultimately self-defeating
nature of colonial power structures.
W hile certainly Romantic texts are indeed caught up in a cultural imagination that
orientalized, to use Saids term, sites of Otherness; as Mary Lousie Pratt, Tim Fulford,
Peter Kitson, Nigel Leask, and David Spurr all note, rom anticism produced the East in
term s that subordinated it to the imperatives of im perialism and European capitalism .15
However, it is possible to read some of these romantic texts as contesting the very
systems of im perialism they were so much a part of inscribing, to read these texts as
disruptive of im perial authority by disclosing the am bivalence of that authority. As
Fulford and Kitson note, writing of the rom antic period cannot simply be seen as
univocal in its support of that [colonial] dom ination:...it articulates resistance to, and/or
anxiety about, cultural imperialism, even as it also in other areas, rem ains com plicit with
it (5). For the purposes of this project, I will be considering the rom antic landscape,
prim arily the W ordsw orthian landscape, as a site in the articulation of resistance to
modernization.
Landscapes, as im agined by the British rom antic writers, were the product of an
evolving tradition that, in a num ber of studies, has been closely linked with painting.
Kenneth Clark in the introduction to Landscape into A rt (1949) declares, landscape
painting... was the chief artistic creation o f the nineteenth century (viii).16 Later Clark

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argues for the interconnectedness between the developm ent of a painterly and literary
idea of landscape. Citing Constable and W ordsworth, Clark observes, [bjoth poet and
painter found nature transformed by the philosophy of the eighteenth century into a
mechanical universe working under the dictates of common sense; and both believed that
there was something in trees, flowers, meadows and mountains which was so full of the
divine that if it were contemplated with sufficient devotion it would reveal a moral and
spiritual quality of its ow n (151). Landscape, as it was theorized through the nineteenth
and m ost of the way through the tw entieth centuries was posited as a developm ent of the
modern world, placed neatly in a narrative of historical and universal m odernity.17
However more recent discussions of landscape have tended to decenter the role of
painting.. .in favor o f a semiotic and hermeneutic approach that treated landscape as an
allegory of psychological or ideological them es (M itchell, Introduction 1)
This more contemporary treatm ent of landscape has tended, like much of
postcolonial criticism immediately after Said, to focus on the intersections between
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century discourses and the ideological demands
of an expanding European empire. In Imperial Landscape, W .T.J. Mitchell observes
that [c]ontemporary discussions of landscape...are likely to place the aesthetic
idealization o f landscape alongside vulgar econom ic and material considerations... Iand
that] we need to explore the possibility that the representation o f landscape is not only a
m atter of internal politics and national or class ideology, but also an international, global
phenomenon, intimately bound up with the discourses of im perialism (Imperial
Landscape 6-9). W hile in its em phasis on the pervasive nature of imperial discourse,
M itchells analysis ultim ately goes over much of the same ground as Edward S aids

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O rientalism , it remains a relevant touchstone in this discussion as it refocuses what has

traditionally been an aesthetic discussion into historical and ideological terms.
A dditionally, as the discourses of landscape production are immutably caught up with the
more general discourses of romanticism , M itchells point about the congruency between
the production of landscape and imperial discourse dovetails nicely with M akdisis points
about the discourses of romanticism being bound up in the production of modernity even
as those discourses contest modernization. I would contend that much as Makdisi
focuses on the larger discourse o f rom anticism as a site whose function in imperial and
anti-m odernization discourses is contestable, so too m ight the discourses of landscape
afford the same opportunity. In particular, I am suggesting that even as the nature of the
role o f the rom antic tradition in the work o f contem porary postcolonial writers is open to
debate, so too is their application of the rom antic landscape to their unique historical and
geographical sites also open to critique.
Landscapes as the British rom antic w riters wrote them were hardly hom ogenous
constructs. John Barrell contrasts the sense of place in John C lares poetry to
W ordsw orths sense o f place. He characterizes Clare as having an alm ost mournful sense
of Helpston that focused on one particular landscape [that] m ight be inseparable from
the whole of m ans know ledge ( The Idea o f Landscape, 182). In contrast Barrell
observes how close W ordsworth [was] to the picturesque travellers whom he
despised...he opens up the landscape and explains its m ysteries in a way not substantially
different from the way W illiam G ilpin...m ight have reclaim ed a similarly rough, secluded
landscape for the metropolitan im agination (183). The m ethod by which W ordsworth
would reclaim these landscapes for the m etropolitan im agination was largely through

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his em ploym ent of the sublime. Samuel Monk, elaborating on W ordsw orths treatment
of landscape, notes that he had a dislike of the picturesque approach and that [n]ature
for him partakes of the Burkean sublime and beautiful, and though the consequent
em otions o f fear and love she seemed to him to have drawn him to herself and to have
built up his moral being.18 Monk, citing what Matthew Brennan refers to as the negative
sublime, rem arks, the grander aspects [of W ordsw orths Lake District] are sublime and
evoke fear. The lonely, the grand, the dark, and the mysterious in nature spoke to the
youth through fear (230).

Or, as Brennan puts it, landscape [in W ordsw orths poetry]

serves not as a record of external reality but rather as a vehicle for conveying the m inds
expression o f the Sublime (49). W ordsworth sought out a simpler world where the
passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and perm anent form s of
nature(Preface 252). He declares the natural world a place where the ever-living
universe / And independent spirit of pure youth / W ere with me at that season, and
delight / Was in all places spread around my steps (Prelude 366).

H owever despite

this euphoric portrait, W ordsw orths landscapes, as M onk and Brennan observe, relied
heavily on the B urkes dualistic form ulation o f the sublim e as both beautiful and
terrible.19 M onk notes, [t]he whole system |o f the sublime] is based on the antithesis of
pain and pleasure (91). The beautiful sublim e in W ordsw orth is a sen se...o f something
far more deeply interfused, / W hose dw elling is the light of setting suns, / And the round
ocean, and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the m ind of m an / A motion and a
spirit that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all
things (Tintern Abbey 241). An exam ple of the negative sublime, on the other hand,
appears in the Simplon pass episode at the end of Book VI of The Prelude where his

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mind, turned fully inward, falls into and is symbolically filled with the abyss of Gondo
G orge (Brennan 82); in this passage, the speaker confronts the sheer terror of this Alpine
abyss with the hollow rent / winds thw arting winds, bewildered and forlorn, with the
ever present threat of The rocks that muttered close upon our ears/ Black drizzling
crags that spake by the wayside / As if a voice were in them (362-3).20
The Burkean sublime, as well as the transcendence of the Kantian sublime, have
all survived into more contem porary m anifestations as the sublim ity of eighteenth and
nineteenth century rom antic landscapes have been mimicked by tw entieth and twenty
first century writers. However, where Theodore Roethke m ight take up the
psychoanalytical angle o f the Burkean sublime, and where Barry Lopez m ight take up the
mantle o f the subjective Kantian sublim e, the postcolonial w riters engagem ent of the
sublime carries with it the additional traum a of history.21 There is a melancholic aspect to
the postcolonial sublim efor all that Jam aica Kincaid, Garrett Hongo, or Derek W alcott
might, at times, see their respective island homes as paradisal and awesome, they
themselves remain aware o f the problem of such ahistorical perspectives; to consider a
postcolonial geographical site as paradisiacal or as simply rom antically sublime disallows
the materiality of history. Kincaid, Hongo, and W alcott all deal with this problem in their
own ways. Kincaid finally attem pts to reject any m ode of apprehension associated with
the traditions of colonial authority. She confronts various m anifestations of the cultural
authority of colonial pow er and rejects their applicability to her own project. Hongo
incorporates these traditions into his own aesthetic and throughout his body of work
offers up various form s o f homage to a num ber of different aesthetic and western
traditions, including romanticism . W hile Hongo is clearly conscious o f his own

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historically and ideologically com plex position and the subsequent problems of aligning
him self uncritically within the continuity of colonial cultural authority, his response is to
posit an alternative genealogy, an alternate history and cultural text that might partake
and borrow from the modes of the dominant colonial culture, but one which exists apart
from that dom inant culture, at times in opposition to, at times simply alongside. H ongos
alternative historical and cultural texts problem atically claim their own status as a
separate tradition. Derek W alcott on the other hand fully engages the tradition of the
rom antic landscape and seeks to revise its conditions of possibility. In particular
W alcotts postcolonial romantic landscapes are full of rom antic sublimity while at the
same time they are historical sites. The sublim ity of these landscapes has a historical
aspect. It retains the materiality of traum a in a way that recalls Freuds form ulation of
melancholia: traum a is not erased or effaced, but rather becom es a constituent part of the
form ation of the subject. In a sim ilar fashion, the postcolonial rom antic landscape m ight
contain all the various form s of rom antic sublimity, but it also retains the materiality of
colonial history. The Caribbean sea m ight be figured as sublim e beautiful and
terrible in the work of the C aribbean postcolonial writer, but the sea is also the site of
the middle passage, the sea also contains the bodies of the thousands of slaves thrown
overboard during the slave trade.

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III: The Possibility of the Postcolonial Romantic

H adnt I made their poverty my paradise?
Derek W alcott, Omeros
If we allow that romanticism is a discourse that itself contains inchoate and, at
times, incom m ensurable ideologies, then its adaptation in the context o f postcolonial
literature is itself an act open to multiple possible readings. The act of postcolonials
adapting a tradition born out of the colonizing culture is an act as inevitable as it is strung
with contradictory complications. This act is one that has been fram ed in deeply
problematic and contradictory ways by critics as well as writers themselves. In theory
and criticism, Aijaz A hm ad has criticized S aids Orientalism for its deep dependence on
Foucault and Gramsci. He has also noted that in its purported attem pt to speak truth to
pow er, it has been reified by the very powers it claims to critique. Speaking of
Orientalism, Ahm ad notes that fi]ts global authority is in fact inseparable from the
authority of those in the dom inant sectors of the metropolitan intelligentsia who first
bestowed upon it the status of a modern classic (166).22 Postcolonial writers have had a
certain self-consciousness about their own problem atic im plication in literary and
aesthetic traditions so closely allied with the very colonial authority against which,
ostensibly, they are writing. W alcott describes him self as a servant and a thief in the
house of literature (Collected 219) signifying his own aw areness o f his unsuitability
as a proper heir (i.e. a postcolonial) to the aesthetic traditions of empire. Echoing
W alcotts anxieties about the incom m ensurability between his nature as a postcolonial
and his nature as an heir to W estern literary traditions, G arrett Hongo describe his own
experience: am idst the tw eedy faculty, I cannot bring m yself to translate my colonized
and tropical beginnings into conversations ( Volcano 291). Jam aica Kincaid fram es this

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question bluntly: isnt it odd that the only language I have in which to speak is the
language of the criminal who com mitted the crime (A Sm all Place 31). There is, in all
three writers, a struggling sense to lay claim to traditions such as romanticism while at
the same tim e in all three there is a great deal of anxiety surrounding this proposition.
This is the obsession of a number of postcolonial writers including the three I am writing
about. Their work performs a crucial political and historical critique of the very tradition
they themselves extend and, to some complicated degree, extol.
O f course, the problem atic relationship between a w riter and his/her literary
inheritance is not a new one, or even one unique to the postcolonial writer. Harold
Bloom's "anxiety of influence" model, using Freud as a launching point, frames
relationships between poets and their influences in distinctly Oedipal terms. In
explaining this model, Terry Eagleton writes that "poets live anxiously in the shadow of a
'strong' poet who came before them ...[and will write] in a way which revises...the
precursor...in this sense all poems can be read as rewritings o f other poems, and as
'misreadings'...so that the poet can clear a space for his own im aginative originality"
(Eagleton 183). The poet must "rewrite" his/her precursors; usurping them in order to
establish his/her own identity as poet. W hile Bloom's model has some possibilities for
explicating the relationship postcolonial writers have to the literary canon, it attem pts to
exclude material and political relations from its considerations o f the work of the literary
artist. Bloom's insistance t h a t "[p[oliticizing literary study has destroyed literary study"
(.Anxiety xvi), makes his model a difficult one to apply to a w riters whose central them atic
is so frequently based in material and historical contexts. H owever, the postcolonials
relationship to literary precursors is fraught with far more than this Bloomian poetic

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anxiety. Their relationship to the "strong" poets (or writers or artists) of the past is not
simply an aesthetic, or as Bloom figures it, an Oedipal one. The postcolonial
unavoidably contends with the political ramifications of their relationship to a W estern
literary canon. The postcolonial confronts his/her implication in a canon and cultural
tradition closely allied with a colonial adm inistration and legacy which he/she is often
ostensibly bent on subverting.
In claiming a legitimate position in the literary canon, does one additionally
accept, at least in part, the legitimacy of the m echanism s of colonialism which were
themselves so fully im plicated in the production of culture in general and the canon in
particular? Does the desire to belong to the tradition necessitate, at least in part, an
acceptance of the modes o f power which were part and parcel of the establishment and
m aintenance of that tradition? As Paul Breslin notes while speaking of the Bloomian
m odels application to W alcotts work, the literary m aster is all too easily identified
with the colonial one. The problem for W alcott was to accept literary apprenticeship
without experiencing it as an extension of colonial oppression (48). The M artinican
psychologist Franz Fanon articulates one side of this dilem m a in his seminal study o f the
traum atic after-effects of colonialism on the psyche of the black child:
The black schoolboy in the Antilles, who in his lessons is forever talking about
our ancestors the G auls, identifies him self with the explorer, the bringer of
civilization, the white man who carries truth to savagesan all-white truth.
There is identification that is, the young Negro subjectively adopts a white
m ans attitude. He invests the hero, who is white, with all his own aggression at

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that age closely linked to sacrificial dedication, a sacrificial dedication permeated

w ith sadism. (B lack Skins, 147)
In F anons form ulation the system of colonial education produces a traumatized
subject w ho masochistically sacrifices his/her own subjectivity in order to identify with
the bringer of civilization. Fanons formulation is over-determ ined and one which
W alcott him self would refute. For while the violence of colonialism is not in doubt, the
hom ogeneous limits of that system of education are. Additionally, the level of
identification that Fanon proposes is nearly total and does not allow for any alternative
identities to exist along side the sadistic self-destructive one. W hile knowledge and
culture in the colonial system of education and, in more general terms, the discourse of
know ledge produced by the west is undeniably im plicated in the colonial project, to
assume hom ogeneity of that knowledge is reductive.23 There is an anxiety about their
implication in the systems of knowledge produced and authorized by the colonial
enterprise, but this anxiety does not necessarily determ ine (as Fanon seems to think it
does) the absolute limits of possibility. W here Kincaid rejects and Hongo mourns his
incom m ensurable relationship to the cultural authority of colonialism , W alcott manages
to escape the over-determ ined binaries of colonizer and colonized while participating in
and extending the very literary and cultural traditions so closely linked with the history of
colonialism and imperialism.
There are two primary models for the postcolonials engagem ent of cultural texts
and traditions associated with colonialism. Both V.S. Naipaul and Homi Bhabha offer
somewhat com peting form ulations of mimicry which provide useful lenses through
which to view the postcolonials m ethod of working through his relationship to the

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cultural traditions so closely allied with colonialism. Naipaul describes mimics as pale
imitations: We, here, on our island, handling books printed in this world, and using its
goods, had been abandoned and forgotten. We pretended to be real, to be learning to be
preparing our selves for life, we mimic men of the New W orld, one unknown corner of
it (Naipaul, The M imic Men, 146). Lacking the authority and existential subjectivity
only available to the metropolitan colonial, these mimic men can do nothing but pretend
to be real. They cannot themselves be real, be fully authorized subjects, ju st pale
imitations. NaipauTs vision of the colonial m im ic characterizes him as witlessly
derivative and given to grandiloquent, self-delusory, and ultimately self-destructive
fantasies...[N aipaul| directs his ire ...a t the m isguided efforts of the formerly colonized
peoples to em ulate the values and institutions o f...th e United States, England, and France
in territories where such values and institutions can be unwittingly parodied but not
meaningfully transplanted (Nixon 132-3). NaipauTs mimic men are pale imitations of
their colonial masters who have w illfully (sadistically, as Fanon would have it) sacrificed
their subjectivity.
Homi B habhas form ulation of m im icry on the other hand situates it as a
methodology by which the postcolonial can transform the possibilities of colonial
discourse. For Bhabha, mimicry can provide a means of resistance and intervention.
Bhabha allows that mimicry em erges as one of the m ost elusive and effective strategies
of colonial power and knowledge (85). However, he also contends that there is an
ambivalence in the act of mimicry. Bhabha rem arks that mim icry emerges as the
representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavow al...[for] M imicry is also
the sign o f the inappropriate,... a difference or recalcitrance w hich poses an im m anent

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threat to both norm alized knowledges and disciplinary powers (Location, 86). In other
words, in the act of mimicry the inevitable difference between that which is mimicked
and the mim icry itself, regardless of the accuracy of the imitation, signifies the mimicry
as a site of contestation. The mimic repeats, but the repetition is itself a marker of a
difference. A ccording to Bhabha, that difference marks the mimicry as already
underm ining colonial structures of authority. Bhabha notes that this mimicry, this act of
repetition with a difference is itself an annunciation of a disavowal, of a distancing from
the colonial structure, and of an undermining of that structure.24 He notes that mimicry
in disclosing the am bivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority (88).
B habhas form ulation is not without its problems. Despite this faith in the revolutionary
potential inherent in the discourse of the colonial authority as well as in the ability of the
colonized to produce viable texts of resistance to that authority, B habhas emphasis on
the agency of the colonial is suspect, as Bart M oore-Gilbert has pointed outparticularly
because he fails to give sufficient w eight to the effectiveness of mimicry as a strategy of
colonial control (134).
The three writers who are the subject of this project can all be read in the context
of their frequently vexed and contradictory relationship to the aesthetic traditions
associated with colonial authority. Jam aica K incaids method is ostensibly to reject the
obvious modes of the romantic landscape so that she avoids implication in the discourses
of neo-colonialism. In short, rather than becom e one of NaipauTs mimic men, she tries
to reject any continuity of romantic tradition in her landscapes. She does offer up a kind
of aesthetic for the representation of her A ntiguan landscape, but her form ulation of
unreal beauty is undertheorized and is, in the end, tantam ount to a simple rejection of

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the terms o f the romantic landscape. Hongo self consciously locates him self in the
romantic tradition but, by reifying the figure of the poet and positioning that figure
against the historical world, he does not explicitly concede the ideological connection
between aesthetic tradition and colonial authority. He doesnt actively deny any such
ideological connection, but by positioning the figure of the poet as standing outside of
ideology, Hongo infers a disconnection between cultural and colonial authority. H ongos
method is m ore archeological than W alcotts; Hongo repeats the themes of romanticism
in a new setting, sometimes placing these them es in relief against different traditions, but
Hongo does not critique the explicit connection between aesthetic tradition and colonial
authority. He posits an alternative tradition that stands apart and counter to the
discourses of colonial cultural authority, how ever Hongo does not explicitly articulate the
ram ifications of im itating colonial cultural modes. W alcott works much more in the
method o f B habhas mimicry his work repeats, but the repetition is perform ed with a
slight difference. O ffering a critique of the African revivalist traditions of the 1960s and
70s, W alcott calls him self, the m ulatto of style. The traitor. The assim ilator who
stands in opposition to, Pastoralists of the African revival [who] should know that what
is needed is not new nam es for old things, or old names or old things, but the faith of
using the old names anew (Twilight, 9).
W alcotts faith of using the old names anew is one of the great strengths of his
work. Throughout his body of work, even in his very early work, W alcott engages his
literary and aesthetic inheritance w ith all the revisionary pow er of Homi B habhas mimic.
He accepts, repeats, and, by repeating, transform s the conditions of possibility
surrounding the terms o f his literary and cultural inheritance. In contrast, the other two

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writers in this study have different and somewhat difficult relationships to their literary
inheritances. K incaids efforts to avoid participating in aesthetic traditions associated
with colonial authority suffer from her own unavoidable implication in those very
traditions. Similarly, H ongos efforts to reify the figure of the poet as one above the
morass of cultural and ideological orientations serves to undercut his own desires to
perform the same kind of revisionary engagem ent as Walcott. W here Kincaid attempts to
reject her literary inheritance and H ongos archeological method recalls his literary
inheritance without com pletely recasting it, W alcotts postcolonial rom anticism extends
and extols his literary inheritance while at the same time revising the tradition itself. For
all three writers, however, the problem s of literary inheritance are explicitly articulated in
their handling of their own individual postcolonial landscapes.

Constructed with a

varying acknow ledgem ent of a relationship to romanticism and by extension the

postcolonials relationship to their colonial cultural inheritance, these landscapes of
Antigua, Hawaii, and St. Lucia continue the attem pt to revise the rom antic landscape.
These literary landscapes attem pt to fram e a historical relationship to their geographical
surroundings while at the same tim e rem aining conscious of the aesthetic traditions that
are inescapably linked with the production of any landscape.

1 T he sign ifican ce o f what T hom as W eisk el calls the lo g ic o f terror in the form ulation o f the romantic
sublim e is by no m eans a contem porary intervention. M ore than tw o centuries earlier, Jean Jacques
R ousseau declared his idea o f a beautiful country : I m ust have m ountain torrents, rocks, firs, dark
forests, m ou n tain s...[an d ] precipices at my sid e to frighten m e (1 5 6 -1 5 7 ). Sim ilarly w h ile crossin g the
A lps, W ordsworth in B ook V I o f The P relu d e d escrib es, the sick sight / and giddy prospect o f the raving
stream, the unfettered clou d s and region o f the h eaven s, / T um ult and p ea ce, the darkness and the light
(lin es 5 6 3 -5 6 6 ). Indeed, the lo g ic o f terror has been a sign ifican t com p on en t o f the sublim e as it has been
form ulated by a number o f eighteenth century ph ilosop h ers, writers, and critics. Edmund Burke, in his
E nquiry Into the O rigin o f O u r Id ea s o f th e S u b lim e a n d B eautiful, w rites, [t]he p assion cau se by the great
and sublim e in n atu re, w h en those cau ses operate m ost p ow erfu lly, is A stonishm ent; and aston ish m en t is
that state o f the soul, in w hich all its m otion s are su sp en ded, with som e d egree o f horror (5 7 ). In an early
meditation on the sublim e, Im m anuel Kant w rites, [tjhe su b lim e ...is so m etim es accom p an ied with a
certain dread, or m elan ch oly (4 7 ). For an exten d ed consideration o f the su b lim e in the eighteenth century,
see Sam uel H. M onks, The S u blim e, T h om as W e is k e ls, The R om an tic S u b lim e, or for a short survey o f

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26

the topic, see N ico la T ro lls essay, T he Picturesque, The B eautiful, and the S u b lim e, in Duncan W u, ed.
A C om pan ion to R om an ticism . M o n k s book provides a very com p reh en sive and useful consideration o f
the historical d evelop m en t o f the sublim e. H e b egin s with w hat he calls the pseudo-L onginian treatise,
P eri H u p so u s (1 0 ), and, proceeding through the centuries, accounts for the d evelop m en t o f the sublim e as
an idea and parses the sign ifican ce o f the sublim e in the eighteenth century.
2 Harold B loom , citin g A m erican poets as varied as W allace Stevens, Robert Frost, Em ily D ick in son , Hart
Crane, and T heodore R oethke, am ong others, argues for the existen ce o f w hat he calls, the R om antic
poem in A m erica, dow n to this present d a y (1 5 7 ). Indeed, the co llectio n o f essay s in w hich this essay by
B loom appears, R om an ticism : Vistas, In stan ces, C on tin u ities (1 9 7 3 ), argues for a broadened con cep t o f
rom an ticism ... a rejection o f older, more restrictive v iew s, in w hich rom antic writers could be d ecisiv ely
distinguished from (sa y ) V ictorian or modern o n e s (9). A lso see D avid M orses tw o volu m e study,
A m erican R om an ticism , w here he reads C ooper, Poe, T horeau, W hitm an, H aw thorne, M elville, and Jam es
as A m ericans participating in the rom antic tradition. A lso o f note is L eon C hais com p reh en sive study,
The R om an tic F o u n dation s o f the A m erican R en aissan ce. M ore contem porary d iscu ssion s o f the legacies
o f British R om anticism in A m erican literature include A lbert Gelpi in A C o h eren t S p le n d o r w h o writes:
T he R om antics defined th em selves out o f and against rationalism in the attem pt to constitute a
new incarnational h olism on the basis o f the in d ivid u als intuitional fe e lin g outside ecclesiastical
and civ il stru ctu res...T h is radical id eo lo g ica l shift elevated to prim acy the in d ivid u als intrinsic
capacity to p erceive and participate in the organic interrelatedness o f all form s o f natural life and
the in d ivid u als con seq u en t capacity to intuit the m etaphysical reality from w hich that natural
harmony p roceed s...A ssim ilatin g g n o stic N eop laton ism , German Idealism , and Oriental
m ysticism , the R om antic supplanted the right reason o f the R enaissance and the logical reason o f
the E nlightenm ent with transcendental R eason...In E nglish poetry this notion o f an organic form
turned the R om antics from the N eo cla ssica l cod ification o f genres and con ven tion s to the m ore
flex ib le p o ssib lities o f blank verse and the irregular ode stanza. T he n ascen t A m erican poetry,
innocent o f tradition and ach ievem en t, d ev elo p ed the R om antic notion further in the p oetic prose
o f Em erson, the open form o f W hitm an, the verbal and metrical id iosyn cracies o f D ick in son (3-4).
G elpi go es on to argue that M odernists lik e S teven s and Pound cannot be understood w ithout reference to
R om antic issues and a lleg ia n ces (5). Jay Parini, in the introduction to his book length study o f T heodore
R oethke entitled, T h eo d o re R oeth ke: A m erica n R om an tic, w rites, ft]he w ork o f recent critics has been
invaluable in sh ow in g the breadth and continuity o f the R om antic m ovem en t from its origins in eighteenthcentury Germ any to the present (4). Parini situates R oeth k es approach to the landscape firm ly w ithin the
sublim e tradition o f British rom anticism . Finally Edward Larissy has com p iled a co llectio n o f essa y s in
R om an ticism a n d P o stm o d e rn ism that situates poets as contem porary as John A shberry as participants in
the tradition o f British R om anticism . T his is not to say that the appellation o f A m erican rom anticism is
w ithout its ow n sites o f contention. S o m e u sages o f rom anticism in the A m erican co n tex t seem to rely on
flim sy and som ew hat overly liberal u ses o f the term. O verly vague co n n ectio n s b etw een A m erican writers
and the British rom antics, such as W illiam A n d rew s note that the ability to w onder and to reflect (Spiller
qtd in A ndrew s ix) is a su fficien t d efin ition o f the rom antic im agination, serve to b elie the very real
connection that other w riters such as A lb ert G elpi, Jay Parini, Harold B lo o m , and Edward L arissy have
m ade. H ow ever there is, in the m ain, an understanding that the periodization o f rom anticism as m erely a
m anifestation o f eighteenth and early nineteenth century British literary culture is overdeterm ined. W illiam
Slaym aker goes even further and con flates the British rom antic p oets, A m erican T ranscendentalists,
C hinese poets o f the T ang dynasty, and m ed ieval Japanese Haiku p oets under the rubric o f ecoliterature.
3 M cK usick notes that for the o v erw h elm in g majority o f A m erican nature writers, the in fluence o f the
E nglish romantic poets is so p ervasive and so freely and o p en ly a ck n ow led ged as to be m erely a
com m on p lace (6). He cites W illiam C ron on s essa y , T he Trouble w ith W ild ern ess, and notes that,
Cronon is w ell aw are o f the sig n ifica n ce o f the E nglish rom antic p oets in the form ation o f contem porary
aw areness o f the natural w orld, and he spends several p ages describing the em ergen ce o f the rom antic
Sublim e in the w ritings o f Edmund Burke, Im m anuel Kant, and W illiam G ilpin, and its dep loym en t in such

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key passages o f rom antic poetry as the Sim plon Pass ep isod e in W ordsw orths P re lu d e (7). Ultim ately
M cK usick argues against C ronons final recom m endation for the rejection o f the romantic legacy in the
form ulation o f w ild ern ess. Instead he argues that the E nglish rom antic poets are the progenitors o f a
new h olistic paradigm [that offers] a conceptual and id eological basis for A m erican environm entalism
(11). M cK u sick g o es on to contend that the E nglish rom antics w ere the first fu ll-fled ged ecolo g ica l
writers in the W estern literary tradition (19).
4 D om in ic H ead. The (Im )p ossib ility o f E cocriticism , W riting the E n viron m en t: E co criticism an d
L iteratu re. Ed. Richard Kerridge and N eil Sam m ells. London: Zed B ook s Ltd, 1998: 27 -3 9 .
5 Slaym aker is careful to distinguish betw een the perceived reluctance o f black critics to adopt the
term in ologies and d iscou rses o f eco lit and ecocrit as he describes it and the practice o f nature writing. He
notes that [a] review o f o f any number o f . . .an th ologies o f black A frican literature and criticism in the past
several d ecad es w ill bear out this intense interest in the local recapture o f a violated nature. B ut there is no
rush by A frican literary and cultural critics to adopt ecocriticism or the literature o f the environm ent as they
are prom ulgated from m any o f the w o rld s m etropolitan centers (E ch o in g 132). T his distinction is not,
how ever, one o f central sig n ifica n ce to m y argument. Rather than en gage Slaym ak ers attem pt to account
for the lack o f participation by black A tlantic writers and critics in the discou rse o f ecocriticism , I w ould
suggest that regardless o f the differen ces that m ight be drawn betw een the discou rses o f ecoliterature,
ecocriticism , and nature w riting in general, all three d iscou rses have a com m on ancestor. Rather than
articulate the d istin ctive rom antic g en ea lo g y o f contem porary nature w riting or ecoliterature and
ecocriticism , m y point is to su g g est a com m on ancestor to all in British rom anticism .
6 Slaym akers remark about the absence o f native nature w riting traditions is certainly a contestable
claim . In 1993 John Murray edited a co llectio n entitled, W ild A frica : T hree C en tu ries o f N a tu re W riting
fro m A frica. T he majority o f p ieces in the co llectio n are from W estern writers, h ow ever he d oes include a
number o f native A frican folk tales and fo lk so n g s. W hile the lab elin g o f such p ieces as a coherent tradition
o f nature w riting is particularly problem atic, so too is categorically d en y in g them such a status.
7 It ought also be noted that the question o f c la ssify in g any tradition as n a tiv e to the black A tlantic, or by
extension any p ostcolon ial, is terribly fraught. Rey C how , in her sem inal essa y , W here H ave A ll the
N atives G o n e interrogates the problem atics o f authenticity. She notes that [o]ur facination with the
native, the oppressed, the savage, and all such figures is therefore a desire to hold on to an unchanging
certainty som ew h ere ou tsid e our ow n fa k e ex p erien ce (5 3 ). C h o w s critique su ggests that our
construction o f the im age o f the native fu n ction s as a counterpoint o f the authentic against w hich our
modern, alienated, and therefore inauthentic liv es stand in poor relief.
8 T his is not to say that the landscapes o f the British rom antic writers th em selv es w ere absolutely
ahistorical. A lan Liu argues that, [i]n the construction o f the total P relu d e in 1 8 0 4 ... W ordsworth inserted
background reminders o f h istoricity (2 3 ). A d d ition ally, a num ber o f rom antic poets W illiam Blake,
Robert Southey, Hannah M ore, and W illiam W ordsw orth am on g them w rote p oem s that sp ecifica lly
addressed the particular historical con text o f the questions o f abolition.
9 In the title poem from The S ta r-A p p le K in g d o m (1 9 7 9 ), W alcott w rites,
There w ere still shards o f an an cien t pastoral
in those shires o f the island w here the cattle drank
their p ools o f shadow form an old er sky,
surviving from w h en the landscape cop ied such subjects as
Herefords at Su n set in the V a lley o f the W y e. (C o lle c te d 3 8 3 )
N ot coincidently, the v a lley o f the W ye river is w here W ordsw orth, in 1793, first saw Tintern A bbey, the
subject o f the final poem in L y ric a l B alla d s. T he poem itse lf is largely concern ed with the break up o f the
W est Indian Federation. W alcotts placem en t o f these left o v er bits o f an an cien t pastoral functions

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m uch like his other evocation s o f the in fluence o f the rom antic landscape (w hich I shall address in the
chapters on D erek W alcott): the romantic landscape offers a fram ing d ev ice for the postcolonial landscape,
but is also im plicated in the history o f colonialism .

T he use o f such w estern tropes is not, o f course, w ithout its critiques. W hile the question o f im posing
a conceptual fram ew ork w h ose origins lie in the very culture w hich has sponsored the colonial encounter is
an important point, the postulation that com parative postcolon ial criticism is a false h om ogen izin g practice
overlook s the dialectical nature o f the post-colon ial state. Graham H uggan observes:
[That] the tendency o f som e o f the more extrem e nationalist critics to w ish away the ex isten ce o f a
European cultural heritage, how ever distorting and/ or debilitating that heritage may have been,
seem s not on ly to d ivest p ost-colon ial w riting o f m uch o f its op positional pow er in exp osin g and
critiquing the material conditions w hich govern its cultural production, but also to risk corralling
nation- or race-based literatures into separate, jea lo u sly protected territories w hich resist intrusion
to the extent that they b ecom e accessib le on ly to th ose ex clu siv e insiders p ossessed by virtue o f
birthright or im m ediacy o f experience o f an intimate k n o w led g e o f their ow n fie ld (2 0 -1)
^ 1 A ijaz A hm ad, in a pointed critique o f S a id s O rien ta lism , ob serv es that none o f the principal figures o f
Third W orld Literature have yet been treated w ith the herm eneutic en gagem en t and inform ed reading
that Said offers so often for scores o f W estern canonical fig u res (1 7 0 ). A n y such en gagem en t m ust
consider the cultural and aesthetic inheritance that p ostcolon ial writers articulate in their texts. Such an
en gagem en t m ust also retain an understanding o f the irreducible plurality o f these texts.
12 Perrys essay, R om anticism : T he B rief H istory o f a C on cep t, provides a very su ccin ct and salient
d iscussion o f the perm utations o f rom anticism . Perry chron icles the various early d efin ition s o f
R om antic, noting that its application to the rather diverse group o f late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century writers is a posthum ous invention: the rom antics did not k n ow that w as w hat they w ere (4).
13 T he sublim e e ffe c t depends on a position o f attainable d etach m en t o n e m ust not, in other w ords, be in
actual fear o f o n e s life. Burke exp lain ed the sublim e as a fe e lin g associated w'ith pain (as he held that
painful fee lin g s w ere more pow erful than pleasurable o n es), but he ob served , ]w ]hen danger or pain press
too nearly, they are incapable o f g iv in g any delight, and are sim p ly terrible; but at certain d ista n c es... they
may be, and they are d elig h tfu l (40).
14 For exam ple, even as M ich ael constructs and reinforces the p ast-ness o f the very pastoral w orld it
id ealizes and sets in o p p o sitio n to the modern urban w orld, the poem n everth eless underm ines the
m etropolitan center by interrogating its norm ative naturalization. W ordsw orth describ es Grasmere V a le in
terms that are u n ap ologetically idealistic. H ow ever o n ce L uke lea v es the v a lley , he began / to slacken in
his duty; and, at length, / H e in the d isso lu te city gave h im se lf / T o ev il courses; ignom iny and sham e / Fell
on him , so that he w as driven at last / T o seek a h id in g-p lace beyond the sea s (4 4 1 ).
15 S ee Mary L ouise Pratts Im p eria l E yes: T ra vel W riting a n d T ra n scu ltu ra tio n (1 9 9 2 ), T im Fulford and
Peter J. K itso n s (ed s) R om an ticism a n d C o lo n ia lism : W riting a n d E m p ire 1 7 8 0 -1 8 3 0 (1 9 9 8 ), N igel
L eask s B ritish R om an tic W riters a n d the E ast: A n x ieties o f E m pire (1 9 9 2 ), and D avid Spurrs The
R h etoric o f E m pire: C o lo n ia l D isc o u rse in Jou rn alism , T ra vel W riting, a n d Im p eria l A dm in istration
(1 9 9 6 ). A dditional sources include A lan Richardson and S onia K o fk o sh s (ed s) R om an ticism , R ace, a n d
Im p eria l Culture, 1 7 8 0 -1 8 3 4 (1 9 9 6 ), Patrick B rantlingers R ule o f D a rk n e ss: B ritish L itera tu re a n d
Im perialism , 1 8 3 0 -1 9 1 4 (1 9 8 8 ), and A lan R ichardsons S la very, A b o litio n a n d E m an cipation : W ritings in
the B ritish R om antic P e rio d (1 9 9 9 ).
16 Clark cites John R u sk in s observation in his 1867 study, M o d ern P a in te rs, that landscape-painting [sic]
is indeed a noble and useful art, though on e not lon g know n by m an (1 5 6 ). Indeed, as if anticipating
Clark, Ruskin opens the 3 rd vo lu m e o f M odern P a in te rs w ith a quote from W ordsw orths The E xcu rsion :

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........................................... A ccu se m e not

O f arrogance,
If, h avin g w alked w ith Nature,
A nd offered , far as frailty w ould allow ,
M y heart a daily sacrifice to Truth,
I now' affirm o f Nature and o f Truth,
W h o m I have served, that their D ivinity
R ev o lts, offen d ed at the w ays o f men,
P hilosophers w ho, though the human soul
B e o f a thousand facu lties com posed,
A nd tw ice ten thousand interests, do y e t prize
T his soul, and the transcendent universe,
N o m ore than as a mirror that reflects
T o proud S elf-lo v e her ow n in tellig en ce
17 A ex cellen t and sustained consideration o f the d evelop m en t o f the idea o f landscape during the R om antic
era can be fou n d in the first chapter o f John B arrells The Id e a o f L a n d sca p e a n d th e Sense o f P lace, 17301840: An A p p ro a c h to the P o e try o f John C la re (1 9 7 2 ). A lso see the third vo lu m e o f John R uskins
M odern P a in te rs (1 8 6 7 ), K enneth Clarks L a n d sca p e into A rt ( 1949), Ernst G om brichs The R enaissance
Theory o f Art and the R ise o f L andscape (1 9 5 3 ), Karl K roebers R om an tic L a n d sca p e Vision: C o n stable
a n d W o rdsw orth (1 9 7 5 ), John B arrells The D a r k S id e o f the L a n d sca p e: The R u ra l P o o r in E nglish
P a in tin g 1 7 3 0 -1 8 4 0 (1 9 8 0 ), Ann B erm ingham s L a n d sca p e a n d Id eo lo g y: The E n glish R ustic Tradition,
1 7 4 0 -1 8 6 0 (1 9 8 6 ), and M atthew Brennans W ordsw orth, T urner a n d R om an tic L a n d sca p e: A S tu d y o f the
T radition s o f th e P ictu resq u e a n d the Su blim e (1 9 8 7 ).
18

Remarking on the history o f the sublim e, S h eila Benn ob serves,

The u se o f the term su b lim e to describe objects and fo rces in Nature is an eighteenth-century
phenom enon. Prior to this century su b lim e had alw a y s been used in the rhetorical context. In
D ion ysiu m C assium L o n g in u s treatise on the su b lim e, the P eri h u p so u s, the term w as used in
con n ection with the exaltation induced by m em orable p assages o f literature, and until the late
seventeenth century, su b lim e w as alw ays reserved for the praise o f great art in the Longinian
tradition. In the eighteenth century, h ow ever, the term becam e associated with the appreciation o f
the sensational appearances o f Nature. N atures superlative grandeur, the rising and setting sun,
the celestial phenom ena, the ocean s, m ountains, p recipices, caverns, cataracts, tem pests, and
thunder becam e a n ew source o f em otional experience. T he pleasure fe lt at the contem plation o f
the grand and vast elem en ts in Nature represented a n ew sen sitivity to Nature, w here the mind
reached out for the infinite. (20)

N icola Trott, com m en tin g on Edmund B urkes form ulation o f the sublim e ob serves that by con n ectin g
pow erful en joym en t with situations o f risk or d a n g e r ...[h e ] g iv e s p o sitiv e value to the osten sib ly negative
responses they produce (79). Sam uel M onk remarks that the k eyston e o f B urkes aesthetic is em otion ,
and the foundation o f his theory o f sublim ity is the em otion o f terror (87).
19 A s Sam uel M onk notes, W ordsw orths treatment o f the natural landscape w as sign ifican tly different from
many other eighteenth century admirers o f nature. W hile they w ere co n ce r n e d ...w ith the theatricality o f
nature...W ordsw orth was m ainly interested in his aesth etic exp erien ce o f nature as it offered support for his
religious intuitions o f the reality o f the One in the M any (2 2 8 ).
20 For a sustained consideration o f W ordsw orths relationship to the Burkean and Kantian su b lim es as w ell
as the distinction o f the W ordsw orthian sublim e, see T heresa K e lle y s T he E co n o m ics o f the Heart:
W ordsw orths Su b lim e and B ea u tifu l in V ol. 5 N um . 1 (1 9 8 1 ) R o m a n ticism P a s t a n d P resen t. M onk

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30

notes that in this passage |t)h e pow er o f sublim e scenery to evok e into co n scio u sn ess the apperception o f
the infinite has now here been given finer ex p ressio n (2 3 2 ).
21 Jay P arinis analysis o f T heodore R oethke w ould seem to locate him closer to B urkes idea o f the
sublim e-an idea that N ico la Trott refers to as em o tiv e p sy ch o lo g izin g (7 9 ). Barry L o p ezs experience
o f the A rtie landscape is sublim e because that exp erience o f sublim ity is a function generated by L o p e zs
interaction with the sublim e objects o f the A rtie landscape with the appropriate distance. A ccord in g to
Kant, in order for an ob ject in nature to fu nction as sublim e, a certain distance is necessary, a distance from
w hich w e can regard an ob ject as fe a rfu l [sic] w ithout b ein g afraid o /[ s ic ] it (1 2 4 ). A dditionally, the
experience o f the sublim e according to Kant is not so m uch due to any quintessential quality in the object
itself, but rather the exp erience o f the sublim e arises in the response o f the subject v iew in g the object.
Sublim ity, therefore, d oes not reside in anything o f nature but only in our m in d (129).
22 T he other major criticism brought against O rien ta lism w as the totalizing nature o f its narrative w hich
ignored counter-h egem on ic v o ices from the co lo n ies as w ell as from w ithin a heterogeneous W estern
cultural tradition.
23 A s early as 1983, D ennis Porter objected to Edward S a id s form ulation o f a h om ogen eou s W est and
accuses him o f ignoring in both W estern scholarly and creative w riting all m anifiestations o f counterhegem on ic thought (1 5 2 ). H ow ever, as subsequent w riters such as Patrick Brantlinger (Rule o f D a rk n ess:
B ritish L itera tu re a n d Im p e ria lism , 1 8 3 0 -1 9 1 4 ), Mary L ou ise Pratt (Im p e ria l E yes: T ravel W riting a n d
T ran scu ltu ration ), and R obert Y oung ( W hite M yth o lo g ies: W riting H isto ry a n d the W est) h ave observed,
w h ile Porters point is w ell m ade, there is a sign ifican t ten d en cy toward the very p rocesses that Said
labeled as O rientalism .
24 In a sim ilar although d istin ct form ulation, R obert Y o u n g ob serves that sin ce Sartre, Fanon and M em m i,
p ostcolon ial criticism has constructed tw o antithetical groups, the co lon izer and co lon ized , se lf and
Other...a M anichean d iv isio n that threatens to reproduce the static, essen tia list categories it seek s to
undo.(5 ) In op p osition to this M anichean d iv isio n , Y o u n g argues that there is a need for organic
metaphors o f identity or so c ie ty w hich m igh t counter the tendency toward fragm entation and dispersion
that arises from the construction o f tw o antithetical groups: the co lon izer and the co lon ized , the se lf and the
Other. H e su ggests a differen t m odel from that o f a straightforward pow er relation o f dom inance o f
colon izer over c o lo n ize d . T he m odel that Y o u n g su g g ests is that o f the structure o f p id g in -c ru d e ly the
vocabulary o f one language superim posed on the gramm ar o f another (5). A ccord in g to this m odel,
cultural contact, here syn ech d och ally represented by the languages o f tw o cultures being layered upon on e
another, is im plicated in an interactive and dynam ic p rocess. W alcott seek s to enact a sim ilar p rocess o f
contact, intrusion, and interpenetration in his poetic projects. H e creates a body o f work that layers the
m ultiple vocabularies o f his canonical in flu en ces over the grammar o f the historical and cultural reality o f
the postcolon ial. Y oung's m odel is useful but doesn't fu lly account for the m odalities o f pow er at w ork and
the real material con d ition s affectin g the p ostcolon ial cultural product. A nd yet it serves as a fu n ctio n a l
starting poin t as it offers us a necessary starting point to avoid an alw ays already im plication in a set o f
M anichean binaries w hich refuse interrogation.

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Chapter One
Trenchtown Rock: Jamaica Kincaids Unreal Beauty
It is a pity th a t...[W ordsworth] never traveled beyond the boundaries o f Europe. A
voyage through the tropics would have cured him of his too easy and com fortable
pantheism. A few months in the jungle would have convinced him that the diversity and
utter strangeness of Nature are at least as real and significant as its intellectually
discovered unity
Aldous Huxley
W ordsw orth in the Tropics

R e p r o d u c e d with p e r m is s io n of t h e cop y rig h t o w n e r. F u r th e r r e p r o d u c tio n prohibited w ith o u t p e r m is s io n .

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I: The Romantic Education of Jamaica Kincaid

Stephanie B lacks 2001 docum entary, Life and D ebt, opens with a series of closeup shots of the natural landscape of Jamaica; shots of the ocean crashing hard into the
reef are intercut with close-ups and extreme close-ups of the vegetation. Black remarks
that she wanted to shoot nature in a foreboding, nearly violent m anner and highlight the
vicious contrast between the islands absolute beauty and the crippling poverty in which
many Jam aicans find themselves (D irectors Commentary). In this she is successful; the
opening shots of her docum entary show the fierce brutality of the ocean and the
overw helm ing fecundity of the natural landscape. Following this is a contrasting cut to a
small group of people in the ghetto in Kingston, Trenchtown, watching a TV newscast
docum enting island-wide IM F and W orld Bank riots in 2000. These two powerfully
divergent visuals of Jam aica are then juxtaposed with shots of the tourist experience
showing prim arily Am erican tourists as they begin their bucolic vacations. In a voice
over that continues throughout the film , Belinda Becker reads from text written by
Jamaica Kincaid and adapted from her 1987 book, A Sm all Place. W hat follow s is a
brutal and searing critique not only of the IM F and its financial practices in Jamaica, but
also an examination of the ways in which neocolonialism (under the guise of neo-liberal
economic policies of globalization produced by the IM F, WTO, and W orld Bank) is
implicated with the tourist industry and the subsequent state of poverty in which the
island of Jamaica currently finds itself.1
While Kincaid had written about the legacy of colonialism in A ntigua and while
Blacks film is concerned with the im pact o f 30 years of econom ic debt incurred by
Jamaica to the IM F and W orld Bank, K incaids revised text adapts itself easily to fit the

R e p r o d u c e d with p e r m is s io n of t h e cop y rig h t o w n e r. F u r th e r r e p r o d u c tio n prohibited w ith o u t p e r m is s io n .

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more contem porary circumstances. In the film ic as well as the earlier written text, the
film m aker and speakers anger is foreground but tempered with the impulse to adequately
represent the com plexity of the postcolonial experience.2 In both the text that Belinda
Becker reads from in Stephanie B lacks docum entary and in her 1987 book, A Small
Place, and indeed throughout her body of work, Jamaica Kincaid addresses the central
problem of representation facing the postcolonial artist. However, while Blacks film is a
singularly direct and overt condem nation of the impact of specific policies connected to
global capitalism, it is not self-reflective regarding its own im plications in the very
systems which it purports to critique. K incaids work, on the other hand, speaks to more
than ju st the im m ediate specifics of an asymmetrical pow er relationship brought on by
global capitalism. It seeks to parse and explicate the consequential affects (economic,
cultural, and psychological) of m ore than ju st the contem porary neo-colonial moment;
her work seeks to understand the consequences of her own im plication in the very
systems of dom ination that she seeks to resist. For even as B lacks film contains images
of a fecund and beautiful Jamaica, im ages not entirely unlike those that are used in other
contexts to sell the island as a tourist destination, K incaids w ork contains descriptions
not unlike those that had been used in other contexts to eroticize an exotic locale for the
imaginative consum ption of a colonial power. Furtherm ore, even as B lacks film, not
only as docum entary but as film ic text itself, operates in a tradition that is undeniably
com plicit with global capitalism, so too does Kincaid, published by m ainstream New
York publishing houses, receiver o f honors and awards from the literary world, and
Professor at various American Universities, also participate in the very traditions against

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which she so frequently w rites.3 Unlike Black however, Kincaid specifically addresses
this throughout her work.
This problem of the postcolonial artist or intellectual can be posed thus: while
educated in the culture o f the colonial authority and while usually using the language
(and frequentlyconsciously or unconsciously the aesthetic modes) of the colonial
authority, how does one adequately represent the postcolonial experience and landscape
without always extending the reach of the cultural authority of the colonizing power?
Homi Bhabha, rem arking on this articulation of difference, asks how strategies of
representation...com e to be formulated [w hen]...the com peting claims of
com m unities...m ay be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incom m ensurable
(2). In A Sm all Place, Kincaid frames this question bluntly, isn t it odd that the only
language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who
committed the crim e? (31) A nsw ering her own question, she notes that the language of
the criminal can only contain the goodness of the crim inals deed (32). She suggests,
like N gugi W a Thiongo, the im possibility of working against Em pire while working in
the language and traditions of em pire.4 H owever while N gugi calls for a simple
rejection of the W ests cultural legacy, K incaid seeks to interrogate her own conflicted
relationship to this legacy. For Kincaid, like other postcolonial writers, this problem atic
relationship to a cultural authority unavoidably attached to colonial dom ination is
articulated over and over again through her body of work. She foregrounds the
significance and legacy of an education and cultural m ilieu largely determ ined by
colonial authority. In her early w ork K incaid uncritically replicates, specifically in terms
of her treatment of the A ntiguan landscape, the same modes of representation that arise

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out of the cultural texts associated with colonialism. In her later work she goes on to
critically interrogate her own implication in her received modes of representation. Her
effort, initially in this later work, is largely directed to rejecting her received modes of
representation in favor of an explicit refusal (whose success, as I shall discuss, is
dubious) to take part in any mode of representation of the postcolonial landscape. She
asserts its unrepresentability amid claims of its status as unreal. For Kincaid the
com munication and subsequent internalization of these modes o f colonial representation
that she would initially repeat and later reject occurred in the classroom. In a number of
scenes Kincaid illustrates the crisis of being educated in colonial modes of representation
and self-representation, and she testifies to the profound effects o f her education in the
form ation of her own artistic sensibilities.
The ideological affect of colonial education has been thoroughly discussed by a
variety o f critics. Referring, in part, to the educational system, Louis A lthusser describes
the effects of what he refers to as ideological state agencies. He defines such an
educational ideological apparatus as one that has been installed in the dom inant [sic I
position in mature capitalist social form ations (152). He goes on to observe that the
educational ideological apparatus, like all other ideological state apparatuses,
contribute^ | to the same result: the reproduction o f the relations of production, i.e. of
capitalist relations of exploitation (154). Identifying the explicit role of literary texts in
the construction of these relations, Terry Eagleton notes, [i]t is within this [educational]
apparatus that the ideological function of literatureits function, that is to say, in
reproducing the social relations of the mode of production is m ost apparent (56). In
the case of Jamaica Kincaid and other postcolonial writers, the social relations being

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rearticulated and reproduced are the social relations between colonized and colonizer.
Reflecting E agletons claim to the ideologically persuasive affect of colonial education,
and speaking to the imagined body of colonial authority, Kincaid says, you loved
knowledge, and wherever you went you made sure to build a school, a library (yes, and in
both o f these places you distorted or erased my history and glorified your own) (36).
She suggests that it was exactly through the mechanics o f a colonial educational system
that colonial ideology was deployed.
Kincaid singles out romanticism as a particularly problem atic site of colonial
knowledge that was part of her educational experience. In a 1992 interview with Kay
Bonetti, Kincaid com m ents on how English rom antic poetry stirs a sort of desire for a
perfect place, a perfect situation... It described a perfection which one longed for, and of
course the perfection that one longed for was England (130-1). For Kincaid, while
England is set up as the perfect place, A ntigua conversely becomes a place where
millions of people, of whom I am ju st one, [are] made orphans, no motherland, no
fatherland, no g o d s...n o tongue (Kincaid, A Sm all Place 31). Edw ard Said might note
this as an example of im pressive ideological form ations that include notions that certain
territories and peoples require [sic | and beseech dom ination (9). N oting the coercive
role o f romanticism and its im plications in the colonial project, Kincaid observes, I
memorized W ordsw orth when I was a child, Keats, all sorts of things. It was an attem pt
to make me into a certain kind of p erso n ... (Bonetti 130). Rem arking on these scenes in
Lucy, Helen Tiffen notes that these lessons produced the valorization of AngloEuropean culture at the colonized site (909). And subsequently, this cultural
colonization results in the de-valorization of the native culture. As Kincaid notes in her

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com m entary about the actions of the British colonizers throughout their empire, and so
everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned
English. B ut no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly
like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land
that came from that (Sm all Place 24).

However, for all of her legitimate criticisms of

the social, political, and historical legacy of the cultural colonialism wrought by English
im perialism , she nonetheless finds herself working within the very tradition she critiques.
She finds herself caught in the language of the criminal who com m itted the crime (31).
W hile W ordsworth and rom anticism function metonym ically for the attitude she
names the English approach and a larger social history of cruelty alluded to in the
English teacher to im plicated literatures political role in the work of empire (Smith
802), Kincaid, as a writer working in English, finds herself participating in the tradition
of literature which had caused so much cultural damage, to herself as well as to all the
colonies. Using her consideration of rom anticism and the rom antic landscape in
particular, I will exam ine the treatm ent of landscape as a site of negotiation between
K incaids postcolonial im pulse to reject the cultural authority of colonialism and her own
unavoidable im plication in the contem porary traditions that have grown out of the W est.5
I will consider her efforts to reject the m odes of beauty associated with rom anticism (and
by extension, tourism ) and her own artistic struggle to represent, with a method that
claims its unrepresentability, the beauty of the Caribbean in modes free from colonial
cultural influence.
Throughout her much of her work, Kincaid engages the problem of locating a
mode of apprehending the beauty of the landscape that is not im plicated in the

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overw helm ing discourses of colonialism. Part of her approach has been fiercely
oppositional, she has frequently rejected modes of apprehending beauty because of their
unavoidable associations with the culture of the colonizer. While in her earliest work, A t
the Bottom o f the River, she is not actively pursuing this question, that work does serve as
a useful starting point to consider how her methods have evolved. As critics have noted,
K incaids texts are indelibly marked by opposition to the hegem onic project (Ferguson,
6).

However, to characterize her approach as purely opposition is overly simplistic. The

mode that she does ultimately suggest at the end of A Small Place is only a consistent
refusal to im plicate her representations in any existent tradition. Rather than articulate a
counter-hegem onic mode of apprehending the beauty of Antigua, Kincaid simply repeats
its unrealness, and articulates the inability o f various signifiers to sufficiently represent
her landscape. For Kincaid, this insufficiency o f the signifier is directly and unavoidably
connected to this self-same signifiers im plications in a history o f colonial and
postcolonial dispossession. As a result, she does not posit any replacem ent system of
signifiers to articulate her hom es beauty because any such system would inevitably be
subject to the same overly determined modes of representation as those she has already
rejected. Instead she has, in effect, arrived at her own mode o f representation, a mode
that Bhabha m ight describe as a com plex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize
cultural hybridities that em erge in m om ents of historical transform ation (2).

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II: Early Mode of the Em pty Colonial Landscape

Speaking of her first published collection, A t the Bottom o f the River, Jamaica
Kincaid rem arks that I can see that A t the Bottom o f the River w as...a very unangry,
decent, civilized book and it represents sort of this successful attempt by English people
to make their version of a human b ein g .. .out of me6 (Perry 698-99). Citing this quote,
M oira Ferguson notes that here, by her own admission, Jam aica Kincaid views her first
publication.. .as the text of a repressed, indoctrinated subaltern subject (7). Certainly
K incaids first published collection, made up of pieces she had published between 1978
and 1982, is unlike any of her other work. The prose in A t the Bottom o f the River is
stylistically difficult, owing more to an experim ental m odernist im pulse than to the
postcolonial fem inism which characterizes her later work. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gilbert,
rem arking on the cryptic dream like quality o f many of the texts (49), observes that this
method characterized K incaids early w ork...w hen she was experim enting with the m ost
suitable styles, languages, and voices to recreate the A ntigua she carried within her (50).
Critics have a variety of views on the function and efficacy o f this style but they all agree
on the significant contrast between this early work and the rest of K incaids oeuvre.7
K incaids critique of her early w ork as functionally ineffective and as evidence of her
own internal colonization is borne out in part by the cryptic m odernist style of the short
stories, but is also borne out in this early treatm ent of the landscape. For while in her
later works the landscape of A ntigua functions as a prim ary part of her critique of the
physical and ideological legacies of colonialism , in A t the Bottom o f the River the
landscape of A ntigua is rather secondary to her m odernist aesthetic, and functions
primarily as exotic setting or objective correlative for the narrators emotional state.

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In this way, K incaids treatm ent of landscape replicates colonial treatments of the
Caribbean landscape such as those we see in Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, and Jean Rhys.
Austen, Bronte, and Rhys have all been written about extensively not only as fem inist
writers, but also in terms of their own im plications in colonial discourse. As I shall
discuss, all three canonical writers are notably implicated in the construction of the
Caribbean landscape as a colonial space. All three writers extend the tradition of the
colonial landscape as they write the Caribbean (or, in the case of Austen, refuse to write
the Caribbean) as an empty space open for settlem ent as well as open to the inscription of
meaning. A consideration of their landscapes as particularly representative of the
colonial landscape serves as an exem plary model for K incaids initial imitation of the
colonial landscape and subsequent attem pt at developing a postcolonial landscape. I do
not mean to suggest that Austen, Bronte, or Rhys articulate any kind o f canonical version
of colonial landscape, but rather that their particular landscapes offer a particularly
germane background against which K incaids landscapes em erge in distinct relief.
In colonial treatments o f the Caribbean landscape, ranging from Austen and
Bronte through Jean Rhys, the landscape does not represent a thing in and of itself with
its own historical materiality. The colonial landscape is in service to the aesthetic or
narrative demands of the text, and is som etim es articulated in service to the econom ic
demands of empire. Mary Louise Pratt observes that the travel narratives of the
eighteenth century call up again the im age of the naturalist as A dam alone in his
garden...[t]he landscape is written as uninhabited, unpossessed, unhistoricized,
unoccupied even by the travelers them selves (51). Describing the landscapes o f these
narratives, she goes on to note, [t|he European im proving eye produces subsistence

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habitats as em pty landscapes, meaningful only in terms of a capitalist future and of their
potential fo r producing a marketable surplus.8 And, in an observation that links the
production of these em pty landscapes by colonial narratives with the ideological affects
o f the colonial educational apparatus, Pratt remarks, fi |t is not only habitats that must be
produced as empty and unimproved, but inhabitants as well (61). As these colonial
landscapes were sometimes the setting in classroom texts, Kincaid, as she testifies, grew
very fam iliar with them. She would, in her earliest work, simply imitate colonial
landscapes such as those posited by Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, and Jean Rhys.
A ccording to Edward Said, the physical absence o f A ntigua in A ustens narrative is
indicative o f a very real colonial ideology regarding the function of the colonies as purely
an econom ic resource. Similarly in K incaids earliest im itative work the landscape only
provides the setting o f her narratives. Just as A ntigua in A ustens narrative is the
econom ic backdrop w ithout any presence o f its own, so in K incaids stories the landscape
of the island is mere setting, mere physical backdrop, also with no presence or history of
its own. For both Austen and Kincaid, the landscape has no history of its own; it simply
enables their respective narratives. In this act of imitation, Kincaid reinstates the same
repressive modes of representation that she would, in her later work, categorically reject.
Edward Said, in Culture and Im perialism , cites the curiously absent presence of
Antigua in the narrative of M ansfield Park as evidence o f the ideological power of
empire in sustaining the com plete subordination of colony to m etropolis (90).
A ccording to Saids critique, A ntigua functions in A ustens novel solely as a resource to
be visited, talked about described, or ap p reciated ...fo r... m etropolitan benefit (93).
A ustens Antigua serves the narrative function o f providing Sir Thom as with an income

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and serves no purpose as a place in and of itself; rather its existence in the novel is solely
predicated on the needs of the narrative to provide a source of income for the Bertram
household. S aid s critique focuses primarily on the transfiguration of Antigua from a
place in and of itself to a link in the great economic chain of being of empire. Citing
John Stuart M ills Principles o f Political Economy, Said notes that the way in which
A ntigua does not appear in the novel is a prime example of how, at the time, the W est
Indian colonies cannot be [and were not] regarded as countries with a productive capital
o f their o w n... [but are rather] the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the
production o f sugar, coffee and a few other tropical com m odities...alm ost all industry is
carried on for English uses (qtd. in Said 90: 6 9 3 ).9 As is typical in relationships
between the m etropolis of empire and the outlying colonies, the colonies are denied any
and all forms of autonomy or subjectivity; rather they are seen as wholly subservient to
the requirements and dem ands of the m etropolitan center. Furtherm ore, as I have noted
elsewhere, this relationship is also signified in the aesthetic representations of colonies
they are not figured as places in and o f them selves, but rather as em pty spaces available
for Western colonization, or at best as exotic locales offering adventure or a thrilling
setting for a narrative focused on European characters.
In a sim ilar move and in contrast to the function of landscape in her later w ork
where landscape is part and parcel of her postcolonial critique, in A t the Bottom o f the
River Kincaid subordinates the Antiguan landscape to the narrative and stylistic demands
of this early text. The landscape of A ntigua is simply the backdrop for K incaids stream
of consciousness bildungsrom an. While Said holds that for A usten A ntigua itself simply
serves as a narrative device thereby reenacting and reinscribing the colonys relationship

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to the m etropolitan center, so too in this early text of Kincaid, the place itself is presented
simply as a convenient setting. While there is a quantitative difference between the two
treatm ents o f Antigua, there is no real qualitative difference. A ustens A ntigua does not
even make a m anifest appearance; the Antigua of A t the Bottom o f the River is the setting
but lacks the active presence and historical nature that is evident in K incaids later work.
In both representations, the place itself does not appear as subject, especially, in the case
of A? the Bottom o f the River, when compared to K incaids later work. The landscape
when it does appear is frequently fram ed in ways that exoticize it, that present it as
unknowable, mysterious, and faintly forebodingways that reaffirm its status as
prim itive other in opposition to civilization.
While there are certainly mom ents in this early text that contain traces of a
critique of the legacies of colonialism, the landscape of the island is not itself inscribed as
a site of colonization; instead the inscription of colonial authority is limited to the
characters in the story. By om itting the landscape as a prim ary site o f colonial inscription
in A t the Bottom o f the River and by using the landscape simply as setting and backdrop
for the psychic dramas she seeks to represent in her m odernist prose, Kincaid replicates
A ustens treatm ent of Antigua, and thereby replicates an act that, as Said m ight note,
reinscribes the relationship between colony and em pire w here the colony itself is
completely subordinated to the material, cultural, and aesthetic dem ands of the
metropolitan center. In this very early work, the landscape is ahistorical even when it is
the site of colonial trauma. Given the significance that the school, the site of education
has in her later work, her description of the school in the story, W ingless stands out.
The school is described thus: |t|h e schoolhouse is yellow and stands am ong big green

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leaved trees {At the Bottom o f the River 22). It simply stands there as backdrop to the
psychological drama going on within. The school and the landscape in which it rests
functions simply as setting, devoid of any implications o f history. In her later work
K incaids landscape is historical and explicitly implicated in the traumas of colonialism;
speaking to a tourist in Antigua, she describes the schoolhouse thus: [ylou pass a
building sitting in a sea of dust and you think, its some latrines for people ju st passing
by, but when you look again you see the building has written on it PIG G O TTS
SCHOOL [sic] {A Sm all Place 7). In contrast to the early description of the school, the
later description situates it in a desolate landscape and describes it as a building easily
mistaken for a latrine rather than the site of education. This is, o f course, a not so very
subtle condem nation o f the kind of education available, in K incaids mind, at this school.
The know ledge and the schooling offered in the school are, according to this description,
little better than the excreted waste o f empire. The scatological connection implies not
only the degradation o f the landscape but also of the people who lived and learned in this
landscape. The physical landscape of which the school is a central part of is, in this later
work, historical and articulated by the traum as of colonialism.
As Kincaid notes in the interview I quoted earlier, for her A t the Bottom o f the
River is an unangry book, it represents...this successful attem pt by English people to
make their version of a hum an b ein g ...o u t of me (Perry, 699). She is speaking primarily
of the obscure and cryptic style of the collection, a style whose em phasis on representing
the inner psyches of her characters owes far more to a European m odernism than a
Caribbean postcolonial sensibility. She is also critiquing, I would argue, her early
unknowing participation in a tradition of imagining landscape as subject to the econom ic

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or aesthetic demands of empire or em pires cultural imagination. This is a tradition that,

as Raym ond W illiams notes in The Country and the City, has roots going back to
classical tim es, in the very first imaginative distinctions made between the city and
country. But as W illiams, like Said after him, notes, this is also a tradition that
crystallizes during the age of imperial expansion in England when Britain became a
predom inantly industrial and urban society...[a developm ent that] would have been
im possible w ithout this colonial developm ent...!w here| the traditional relationship
between city and country was then thoroughly rebuilt on an international scale. Distant
lands became the rural areas of industrial B ritain (280).
Describing the effect of this transformation on the cultural imagination, W illiams
writes that we can see in the industrial novels of the m id-nineteenth century how the
idea o f em igration to the colonies was seized as a solution to the poverty and
overcrow ding of cities (281). W illiam s also notes the contradictory images associated
with the colonies: on the one hand, the lands of the Em pire were an idyllic retreat, an
escape from debt or sham e, on the other hand, there was also a marked developm ent of
the idea of England as hom e... fas] a memory and an id e al...an idea of rural England:
its green peace contrasted with the tropical or arid places o f actual work; its sense of
belonging, of com munity, idealized by contrast with the tensions of colonial rule and the
isolated alien settlem ent (281).

Indeed, more than ju st a site of isolation and tension,

the colonies were sometimes represented as hellish places. These contradictory impulses
where the colonies are sim ultaneously a place to desire and a place to fear and flee are
evident in not only the writings of ninteenth century British authors such as Charlotte
Bronte (Jane Eyre), but also in the works of tw entieth century reim aginings of these

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nineteenth century characters (Jean R hys Wide Sargasso Sea) as well as in Jamaica
K incaids early descriptions of Antigua. For Bronte and Rhys, the Caribbean landscape
was, in addition to being a place of fear, a place that was fram ed as ju st as dark,
mysterious, and disturbed as their characters. The landscape, in fact, functioned
primarily as an objective correlative, a signifier for the disturbed psyches of their
characters. Once again, as in A ustens M ansfield Park, the landscape has no history, no
presence o f its own. The colonial landscape is, as sometimes im agined, threatening to
the modern rationalism ; its fecundity threatens to overrun the neatly placed boundaries of
the eighteenth and nineteenth century dom estic space. The colonial landscape in these
instances sim ply stands as a reflection o f the European mind, albeit a mind that is, at the
narrative m om ent where landscape reflects it, conveniently distraught. Kincaid, as I shall
discuss, in an uncritical im itation of this trope, repeats it quite dram atically in her early
work.
At best, the colonies would appear in the nineteenth century British imagination
in the way that Jane Austen writes of Antigua: profitable and unthreatening, at times a
place of refuge from the chaos of industrial England. A t worst, the colonies (especially
the W est Indian colonies, but also the east Indian colony) would appear as dark and
mysterious places full of threat and dire omens. Describing his breakdown upon com ing
to grips with the realities of his youthful m arriage to Bertha M ason, Rochester tells of a
W est Indian landscape that is hellish and unknowable in its fecundity.
It was a fiery W est Indian night; one o f the description that frequently precede the
hurricanes of those clim ates...the air was like sulphur-steam s [sic]...m osquitoes
came buzzing in and hummed sullenly round the room; the sea, which I could

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hear from thence, rumbled dull like an earthquakeblack clouds were casting up
over it; the moon was setting in the waves, broad and red, like a hot cannon-ball
(357).
Not only does the climate imply the com ing of a hugely destructive storm, but even
insects in the air are more than ju st their normal blood sucking selves; going about their
normal routine, even they are sullen and unhappy in this cursed place where the very
atmosphere is laden with the scent of sulfur, m aking it literally quite hellish, or so Bronte
implies. And overlooking this doomed landscape is a moon looking more like a weapon
assuring R ochesters destruction than a planetary body. The landscape functions as an
objective correlative for Rochesters frustrations and anguish, the landscape is
subordinated to the dem ands of the narrative; its sole function in the novel is to reflect
Rochesters turm oil, even as the colonies them selves were subordinated to empire.
In contrast to this scene of inevitable doom while still perpetuating this
subordinated relationship between landscape and narrative, Rochester tells how he
developed his grand idea to deal with his mad wife.
A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open
casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew
pure...W hile I walked under the dripping orange-trees o f my wet garden, and
am ongst its drenched pom egranates and pine-apples...true w isdom ...consoled
m e...T h e sweet wind from Europe was still w hispering in the refreshed leaves,
and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty; my heart, dried up and
scorched for a long time, swelled to the tone, and filled with living b lood...F rom

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a flow ery arch at the bottom of my garden I gazed over the sea...the old world
was beyond; clear prospects opened thus (358).
Here, a fresh wind from Europe brings the inspiration that Rochester needs to escape the
seemingly intractable bind of his first marriage. The implication is clear: left to its own
devices, the inherent foulness of the colonies cannot help but corrupt and ruin all who
come in contact with them. W hat is necessary for salvation is the return home to the
civilizing com forts of the metropolis. W hile in some ways this does operate as a
prohibition against either m iscegenation or going native, it also functions to contrast
the tw o worlds of the imperial m etropolis, hom e of reason, and the colonial margin,
where a fecund foulness awaits Englishmen. An alternative reading, however, might
infer some degree of irony here in B rontes descriptions. For while it is certainly the
sweet wind from Europe that brings relief to Rochesters torm ent, that which relieves
Rochester is the inspiration to deceive others, deny the existence of his wife, and
im prison her in the attic above his house. W hile Jane is undeniably the heroine of this
rather gothic novel, Brontes treatm ent of Bertha Mason is not entirely unsympathetic.
There is a potential irony in B rontes descriptions of both the dire foulness of the colonial
landscape and the sweet wind o f inspiration that arrives from Europe. Such an irony
m ight allow us to read a simultaneous critique of Rochester as well as the couching of his
deceptive inspiration in the language o f enlightenm ent rationalism . But even if this is a
dramatic insight into Rochester and not identical with B rontes opinion, we can still
register it as symptom atic of a fam iliar British m ind-set w hich positions the metropolitan
center as the locus of rationalism . In any case, a fuller consideration of B rontes potential
irony is too far afield for this current study.

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Indeed, this treatm ent of the colonial landscape as a fearsom e place is so coherent
that Jean Rhys would chose to replicate the tone of Rochesters descriptions of Dominica
in her 1967 rewriting o f Bertha M asons story, The Wide Sargasso Sea. Imagining the
cultural im agination o f empire, Jean Rhys writes of the travels of a young Mr. Rochester
in Dominica. This Dominica is not only wild but menacing where R ochesters first
bewildered description of his new hom e is, what an extreme green (41). The colonies
in the colonial im agination are not only extreme, but also a place o f fearsom e excess:
everything is too much, I fe lt.. .too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The
flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near (41). This excess would be,
for Rochester, intoxicating: the scent of the river flowers was overpow eringly strong. I
felt giddy (49). R ochesters description of Dominica is as a beautiful placewild,
untouched...w ith an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness where he sees even something as
common as sunset as mysterious: darkness came and it came quickly. Not night or
darkness as I knew it but night with blazing stars, an alien moon night full of strange
noises (51-2). The irony in R hys evocation of the Dominican landscape is clearer than
any potential irony present in B rontes portrayal o f R ochesterthe descriptions are in
R ochesters voice as he marvels at his own incom prehensible estrangem ent from his
physical surroundings, as he self-reflexively articulates his unabashed longing for
England coupled with his contem pt and disdain for the colonies. The irony lies in the
boorish and unflattering portrait of R ochester in R hys novel; unlike B rontes Rochester
who, for all of his faults, can easily be read as a torm ented man o f goodwill, R hys
Rochester is fussy, im m ature, and petulant. Thus one cannot help but acknow ledge a wry
irony in Rhys construction of the Dominican landscape as seen through R ochesters eyes

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and w onder if the landscape is only so fearsom e seeming because of Rochesters

inadequacies. But, as with Bronte, a more extensive consideration of R hys ironies is
outside the bounds of this study.
In Jam aica K incaids first published collection, A t the Bottom o f the River,
however, no such irony is evident. Rather she appears to be operating in the received
mode of exoticizing the landscape in what I would define as a gesture derived from the
romantics. Additionally, she uses landscape as an objective correlative for her characters.
In the short story, In the Night, the young girl is im agining her future as over
determined. She im agines herself already consigned to a confining destiny that has been
pre-written for her, a destiny of unhappy m arriage and m otherhood to children who feed
off her like leeches. The landscape that is the setting for this story reflects this young
girls worst fears. The landscape of A ntigua as Kincaid describes it is fecund, swollen,
pregnant, and choked with flowers:
In the night, the flow ers close up and thicken. The hibiscus flow ers, the
flam boyant flowers, the bachelors buttons, the irises, the marigolds, the
whiteheadbush flow ers, the lilies, the flow ers on the daggerbush, the flow ers on
the turtleberry bush, the flow ers on the soursop tree, the flow ers on the sugarapple tree, the flow ers on the mango tree, the flowers on the guava tree, the
flowers on the cedar tree, the flow ers on the stinking-toe tree, the flow ers on the
dumps trees, the flow ers on the papaw tree, the flow ers everyw here close up and
thicken. The flow ers are vexed (10-11).
Like Bronte and Rhys, K incaids Caribbean landscape is one that is choking on its own
fertility; and like Bronte and R hys, K incaids landscape functions in this early text as an

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objective correlativeeven as the young girl in this section, In the Night, imagines her
life as suffocating and confining, so too is the world around her described in similarly
claustrophobic terms. H owever where it is possible to read a kind of ironic distance in
Bronte and R hys texts, in K incaids there is nothing to indicate such a possible reading.
We are, as readers and like the girl in the story, overwhelmed by the sheer number of
flowers nam ed in the passage; flow ers whose abundance is oppressive, flowers, like the
girl, that are vexed.
The source of this vexation is unam biguous in this story. K incaid focuses on
questions of gender and sexuality while leaving aside questions of colonialism. In the
sounds filling the night, the young narrator of the story, In the N ight, hears the sound
of a man groaning in his sleep, the sound o f a woman disgusted at the man groaning...the
sound of the man stabbing the w om an (7). These sounds are not the sounds of a violent
m urder actually happening, rather they are im agined sounds which represent to this girl
an inevitable future of unhappiness should she follow the life she im agines for herself.
Elsewhere in the story she im agines herself with a young child of her own, in all the
various roles that a heterosexual woman could fill; roles which she seems not to desire
for herself. It is this very act of im agining herself m aking a b ask et.. .m aking a girl a
dress or a boy a shirt...m aking her husband a soup with cassava (11) which is preceded
by the passage describing the choking and oppressive flowers. The m om ent of her
im agining her happiness does not come in an imagined fulfillm ent of a heterosexual
domestic role, but as she envisions herself in a homosexual relationship m arrying a
woman she describes as a women a red-skin woman with black bram blebush hair and
brown eyes who wears skirts that are so big I can easily bury my head in them (11). The

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landscape, as well as the whole of the imagination of K incaids youthful narrator, mirrors
her own consciousness of gender and sexuality in a world that is unfriendly to adventures
outside the social norms. My point is not to launch into a long and worthy discussion of
how Kincaid m ight or m ight not queer the landscape, but rather to m ark that the
landscape o f this story is divorced from its own history and put in service to K incaids
desire to reflect her characters psyche. This treatm ent of landscape mirrors, as I have
said, the treatm ent of colonies by empire; landscape, like the colonies, is not a thing in
and of itself, but rather a thing in service to aesthetic or, in the case of the colonies,
econom ic demands.
Kincaid, as I have said earlier, does take up a critique o f colonialism to some
extent, but the sites upon which these questions are posed remain the psyches and
occasionally the bodies o f the characters. In no way does the landscape of A ntigua ever
become an active site o f critique of colonialism in the ways that it will in K incaids later
work. O f the ways in which Kincaid does offer up some critique o f the legacies of
colonialism, the most notable appears in the section entitled, W ingless. In this section,
as she would do so often in later work, Kincaid imagines the scene of instruction of a
child in school. Again, as she would do later, she figures the scene o f instruction as a
scene of imperial discipline, a scene where the child asks herself again and again what
she m ight do to please her teacher, how she m ight rem ake the ugly colonial that she is
and become an object o f the teachers love. The title itself is rather suggestive. As Moira
Ferguson notes in her discussion of this section, w inglessness denies legitimate
ontological status, deprives the narrator em otionally, and enforces lim its (8). However,
where in her later work Kincaid would situate the scene of instruction and discipline in

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specific and particular kinds of literary knowledge (rom antic treatments of landscape, in
particulara choice that, as it marks landscape as subjected, succeeds in avoiding
replicating patterns of colonial domination), in this early work, the narrators anxieties
are far less specifically articulated. She fears terrible punishm ents if she does not learn
her lessons properly, while at the same time she longs to satisfy her teacher, that woman
over there about whom she inquires is she cruel? Does she love me? If not, can I make
her? (22). The narrator bemoans her own weakness and im m aturity (I am not yet a
woman with a terrible and unwanted burden. I am not yet a dog with a cruel and
unloving m aster (24)), and yet is unable to recognize the cruel and racist nature of her
teacher who remarks on the narrators m onkey fingernails (24). K incaids portrait of
this scene o f instruction is one where colonialism s legacies are clearly evident but they
are also far less plainly articulated than they will be in her later work. In particular she
has not yet, in this early work, attached to her critique of colonialism and its legacies a
sense of her own im plication in the very ideology she is ostensibly bent on contesting.
This implication is evident in her early treatm ent of landscape, a treatm ent that
uncritically replicates colonial m odes of landscape.

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III: Em ergent Ideas o f Landscape

T his early scene of instruction in A t the Bottom o f the River fails to fully critique
not only the scene of colonial instruction but also K incaids own implication in the
replication o f colonial ideology. Kincaid would take up this challenge in her later work.
In contrast to this early scene Kincaid, by virtue of a different style and greater level of
specificity, links a later scene of instruction with her own developing consciousness of
the ways in which her own aesthetic o f landscape had itself been the product of the very
colonial scenes of instruction which she critiques, both in A t the Bottom o f the River and
in later work. W hen the title character of K incaids 1990 novel, Lucy, asked by her
em ployer to appreciate the sight of a field of daffodils, recounts the forced m emorization
of W illiam W ordsw orths poem, I W andered Lonely as a Cloud, she frames it not only
as a scene o f scholastic discipline, but also as a scene of cultural indoctrination which has
traum atic psychic consequences:
I remembered an old poem that I had been made to m em orize when I was ten
years o ld ...I had been made to memorize it, verse after verse, and then had recited
the whole poem to an auditorium ...A fter I was done, everybody stood up and
applauded with an enthusiasm that surprised me, and later they told me how
nicely I had pronounced every w o rd ...h o w proud the poet, now long dead, would
have been to hear his words ringing out of my mouth. I was then at the height of
my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside
false, inside tru e...In sid e I was m aking a vow to erase from my mind, line by line,
every word of that poem. The night after I had recited the poem, I dream t...that I
was being chased down a narrow cobbled street by bunches and bunches of those

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sam e daffodils that I had vowed to forget, and when finally I fell down from
exhaustion they all piled on top of me, until I was buried deep underneath them
and was never seen again (17-18).
In this passage, and indeed throughout Lucy, Kincaid links the memorization of
W ordsw orths poem with her vision of landscape and the filter of cultural authority
through w hich she had viewed that landscape. As Ian Smith writes, Kincaid testifies to
the profound ideological effects of English romantic poetry within her early colonial
experience and, later, on her as a writer (801). In this scene, Lucy, transplanted to New
Y ork from Antigua, is attem pting to explain to Mariah, the m other whose children Lucy
serves as nanny, why she is unable to appreciate the site of a field of daffodils as M ariah
does: This woman who hardly knew me loved me, and she wanted me to love this
thinga grove brim m ing over with daffodils in bloom that she loved also (30). Lucy
is, however, unable to share in M ariahs simple enjoym ent of the sight o f flowers. Smith
notes that M ariah enjoys an apparently seamless union of life and literature, secure that
the literary tradition she appeals to m irrorsis m aterialized even in the very landscape
and season she em braces like old friends. Lor her there is no disjunction between art and
experience (809). Lor Lucy, on the other hand, there is a considerable disjunction
between art and experience. In contrast to M ariahs exclam ations of appreciation for the
flowers, Lucy rem arks that I did not know w hat these flow ers were, and so it was a
mystery to me why I wanted to kill them (29). As she attem pts to explain her reaction to
Mariah, she says, do you realize that at ten years of age I had to learn by heart a long
poem about some flow ers I would not see in real life until I was nineteen? (30). This is,
of course, for Lucy more than ju st the absurdity o f being forced to m em orize a poem

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about flow ers she m ight have never seen. As Lucy notes, this w asnt exactly [about]
daffodils, b u t...th ey would do as well as anything else (29). This response, as Smith
notes, .. .registers the frustration and the sense of absurdity she felt growing up in the
West Indies where she never saw the flow ers that her literary and educational exposure
had taught her to revere as an entirely second-hand doubly mediated English experience
(806).
L u cy s frustration with daffodils, the W ordsw orth poem, and, by extension, her
colonial education is based on the fact that she was supposed to adm ire something that
was absent from her own cultural experience (802). This supposition devalues her own
cultural experience and raises the value of the British cultural experience, a process that,
as Terry Eagleton m ight note, reproduces the social relationship o f the mode of
production, a social relationship defined and dictated to by colonialism and its cultural
and educational authority. Helen Tiffin, reading the scenes o f mem orization in Lucy,
notes that these acts o f rote m em orization function to im merse the student in the lessons
of the m aster...through memorizing the English script, i.e., taking it into the body and re
producing before audiences of fellow colonials that which had been absorbed by
heart/m ind (Tiffin 913). Thus not only does K incaids critique of this scene of
instruction highlight the unequal pow er relationship between the colonial authority as it is
articulated through education and the colonized students; it also brings into relief the
imaginative after-effects of this very process. For if the exportation o f W ordsworth was
part of the imperial project of establishing English attitudes and mores as hegem onic in
the colonized world, then these attitudes first inculcated in the colonial subject will be
reproduced as if they were entirely self-m otivated (Smith 811). And it is the very

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replication o f these attitudes that is so clearly evident not only in the obscure prose of A t
the Bottom o f the River, but also in the exoticized treatm ent of landscape in that early
collection. In the characters of M ariah and Lucy in this later work, however, we begin to
see Kincaid working through her own questions about the treatm ent of landscape. She
begins to understand the implication of her own earlier aesthetic approach to landscape as
being ineluctably caught up in received term s dictated through a colonial authority. In
her early w ork she treated the landscape of the Caribbean as she had always seen it
treated, as exotic backdrop, as fodder for her narrative, or as object correlative for her
characters inner turmoil. W hat Kincaid begins to w ork through in Lucy is the idea that
her conception of the landscape of A ntigua was largely received. She begins to confront
the origins o f her received landscape, to see it as located w ithin the very structures of
colonialism she is ostensibly challenging.
M ariah, unlike Lucy, had never had to consider the gap between her lived
experience and the experience contained in the literature with which she was familiar.
Lucy could not help but see this very gap, and by her sight o f it, make M ariah see it as
well. Or as Lucy puts it I felt sorry that I had cast her beloved daffodils in a scene she
had never considered, a scene of conquered and conquests; a scene of brutes
masquerading as angels and angels portrayed as brutes (30). The irony here is that it is
this very self-consciousness that Lucy regrettably brings to M ariah that Kincaid was
missing in her earliest work. In this M ariah functions as a kind o f cipher for Kincaid as
author in At the Bottom o f the River. M ariah, like Kincaid in her early work, evinces an
initial inability to apprehend the mediated relationship that she herself has with not only
the landscape around her, but also with the cultural authority w hich has articulated and

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described this landscape. While Kincaid in A t the Bottom o f the River clearly
understands and attempts to provide a critique of the legacies of colonial cultural
authority in the educational system, her critique does not extend to an awareness of her
own m ediated relationship to the landscape. In Lucy, the mediated relationship between
individual and landscape is brought into relief by the new consideration of I W andered
Lonely as a Cloud. As Smith notes, this scene of forced m emorization has attained a
primal status in K incaids oeuvre where W ordsw orth, incorporated into the intransigent
mechanism of colonial educations, remains the sign of an unresolved relationship to
English literary and cultural traditions that inform K incaids history (802). This
W ordsworth poem, then, m etonymically stands for not only this conflicted and
unresolved relationship to English literary and cultural traditions, it also m etonymically
stands fo r a conflicted awareness of her own m ediated relationship to landscape.10
W ordsworth, by extension the rom antics, and by further extension all of British and
W estern cultural tradition are, in this construction, im agined as homogeneous in their
representation of colonial authority.11 This awareness of a mediated relationship to
landscape is something that we only see in K incaids later work.

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IV: Landscape as Colonial Artifact, Landscape as Place

In K incaids 1987 polemic, A Small Place, she first clearly articulates two
separate kinds o f landscape: one, the construction of a European tradition that she
identifies as closely allied with a tourist industry which functions as a non-administrative
neo-colonialism ; the second, the lived-in landscape of the people of Antigua. Throughout
the course o f this text, Kincaid shows the white tourist as repeating in the postcolonial
age the pattern of racial and cultural dom ination begun by slaveholding European
colonists (Sim m ons 135). The first section of the text is an inflamm atory invective
which, D iane Simmons, in a review for the London Times Literary Supplement, says that
she never got past.12 The second section of the text, acidly nostalgic for the A ntigua in
which Kincaid grew up, is comprised of a catalog o f an A ntigua that no longer exists
(23). The third and longest section of the text attempts to draw a picture of contem porary
Antiguans. But throughout A Sm all Place, Kincaid wrestles with the difficulty of writing
about A ntigua in a way that does not simply reinstate and repeat the colonial construction
o f A ntigua as an im agined place. In the fourth and final section of this short and
controversial text, Kincaid attem pts to articulate a mode of apprehending landscape that
is not imitative or derivative. Ostensibly rejecting rom anticized visions o f the A ntiguan
landscape, Kincaid simply asserts the inability of any signifier to adequately represent the
landscape: she simply calls the landscape unreal. Elowever this rejection of any mode
of representation is itself suspect as it com es on the tail end of A Sm all Place, which is
itself an interventionist representation o f Antigua.
The first sentence of A Sm all Place instantiates this divided vision of an A ntiguan
landscape. Kincaid writes, If you go to A ntigua as a tourist, this is what you will see

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(3), and then she proceeds to remark that you will not see a school, a hospital, or public
monument, but rather that you will see the airport named for the Prime M inister of
Antigua. Aside from the obvious fact of the airport being the place of arrival, Kincaid
also infers that it is also the place of param ount importance. Why else, she seems to ask,
would the Prime M inister have the airport named after him? How could an airport be so
much more important to A ntigua than a school or a hospital? She implies here that the
tourist industry is far more im portant to the Antiguan governm ent than the needs of the
Antiguan citizens.
In concert with this implication, the sarcastic and facetious description o f the
beauty of A ntigua that follows suggests that not only are the needs and desires of the
tourists o f param ount importance to the official powers of Antigua, but that the very
landscape and the w eather itself are available on the term s which the tourists m ight wish.
As your plane descends to land, you m ight say, W hat a beautiful island A ntigua is
more beautiful than any of the other islands you have seen...they were much too green,
much too lush with vegetation which indicated to you, the tourist, that they got quite a bit
of rainfall, and rain is the very thing that y o u ...d o not want (4). The im plication here is
that the whole of the islandthe infrastructure, the people, even the weather itself is in
service to the needs of the tourist. Furtherm ore the implication is also that the tourist,
then, is the prim ary subject, the sole actor, the only agent. The native Antiguans as well
as the landscape itself function only as objects, they possess no agency, no subjectivity;
they are there to provide the setting for the tourist experience. As Diane Simmons
observes, the white tourist uses the islanders and their lives as decorative background for
his vacation (137). Kincaid describes the beauty o f A ntigua through the eyes o f the

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tourist: T h at w aterhave you even seen anything like it? Far out, to the horizon, the
color o f the w ater is navy-blue.. .from there to the shore, the w ater is pale, silvery, clear,
so clear that you can its pinkish-white sand bottom. Oh, what beauty! Oh what beauty!
You have never seen anything like this (12-13). The ocean, as Kincaid imagines the
tourist sees it, is a transparent (and, like the island and people themselves, totally and
com pletely knowable), peaceful, and utterly serene idyllic vision.
In contrast to what the K incaids tourist imagines he sees when looking at the
ocean, K incaid observes that, lacking a proper sewage disposal system in Antigua, once
the tourist has flushed his toilet, the contents o f your lavatory might, ju st might, graze
gently against your ankle as you wade carefree in the water (14). A cting to deconstruct
the tourists vision of A ntigua as a place entirely as his disposal, Kincaid makes this point
to clarify the distinction between the tourists vision of A ntigua and the lived reality of
the place for Antiguans. The ocean that the tourist sees as pure and untouched is, most
likely, seething in raw sewage direct from the hotels. Additionally, in a seeming nonsequitur, Kincaid states that, the Caribbean Sea is very big and the Atlantic Ocean is
even bigger; it would amaze even you to know the number of black slaves this ocean has
swallowed up (14). W hats suggested here is not ju st the estimated 20% of slaves who
died during the journey from A frica to the Caribbean, but rather, in concert with her
remark about raw sewage polluting the clear waters, Kincaid suggests that the tourist
does not see the ocean of A ntigua at all. Kincaid is intent on pointing out that w here the
tourist sees the transparent serenity of a idyllic ocean, the visceral reality instead points to
the watery grave of millions as well as the unhealthy and unclean waters in which the
tourist pretends to wash himself. This m om ent is emblematic of one o f the m ajor themes

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of the te x t it interrogates the two separate visions of the landscape. In one, landscape is
constructed according to the term s and needs of the tourist who here is framed as
repeating the very forms of cultural and economic domination perform ed by European
colonists. M aking this comparison, Simmons writes, like the tourist, who wants to be
renewed and refreshed among people too backward to have entirely controlled nature, the
European im perialist wanted to take raw materials from the unspoiled New W orld
(138).
In the second construction of landscape, Kincaid offers a vision of landscape that
is historically grounded and one that A ntiguans attempt to negotiate through in their daily
lives. Her method is almost archeological; following how she presented the two versions
of the ocean, she sets up the landscape initially through the eyes of her im agined tourist,
then, im plying that initial view is superficial, she proceeds to offer a m ore historically
nuanced description. The passage about the ruined library goes on in far greater detail to
connect more than ju st two different visions (beautiful ocean vs. watery grave). In her
description of the library, laid to ruin by an earthquake in 1974, Kincaid attaches to its
state of disrepair a larger significance.

She notes that soon after the earthquake a sign

was posted stating, Repairs are pending. The sign hangs there, and hangs there more
than a decade later, with its unfulfilled prom ise of repair (9).

At first Kincaid reads the

significance of this facetiously through the eyes of the tourist thinking how quaint this
is. Her larger point how ever is to attach to this hanging sign and the dam aged and
unusable library a metaphorical value. For here the dam aged library and the ludicrous
sign promising repairs for over a decade are indicative of an ineffective and incom petent
postcolonial governm ent and a population so com fortably mired in its own ignorance that

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they easily forget that their current state is largely a historical by-product of an age of
empire th a t greatly benefited metropolitan powers but left them in this state of
uneducable poverty. And indeed it is this very point that has drawn Jam aica Kincaid
some of h er harshest criticism.
In a long essay published in Callaloo in 2002, Jane King takes issue with
K incaids portrait of the people of Antigua. King remarks that, Kincaid has established
nothing but her profound dislike for her form er homeland, which is, she says, a beautiful
place as well as a small one (898). King describes A Sm all Place as a dem eaning
portrait of the Antiguan people living under the corrupt rule o f a postcolonial government
that finds itself more beholden to the demands of the tourist industry than the demands of
its own people. She claims that Kincaid is denigrating our small place in this
destructively angry fashion (899). There is no denying the anger in K incaids
descriptions of her postcolonial countrym en; she notes that m ost young people seem
almost illiterate. On there airw av es.. .they speak English as if it were their sixth
language (43). She rails against the fact that people cannot see a relationship between
their obsession with slavery and em ancipation and the fact that they are governed by
corrupt men, or that these corrupt men have given their country away to corrupt
foreigners (55). By virtue of these kinds of descriptions, K incaid does appear to
acknowledge her own incom m ensurable distance from her fellow Antiguans who have
not had the opportunities she has had. In these passages that King criticizes, Kincaid
does not explicitly identify herself with her fellow Antiguans. Fanon accounts for this
kind of distance by observing that the fact that the newly returned Negro adopts a
language different from that of the group into which he was born is evidence of a

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dislocation, a separation...[and that] the N egroes inferiority com plex is particularly

intensified am ong the most educated (Black Skin, 25).

H owever as I shall argue,

K incaids critical descriptions of her fellow postcolonials do not always amount, as King
suggests, to an instantiation of her own distance and distinction from them. Rather, the
ambiguity in K incaids language as she numbers herself at times am ong those she
critiques am ounts to a partial indictm ent of her own implication in the very discourses of
colonial and neo-colonial authority. Kincaid does, at times, identify herself with her
fellow Antiguans and much of the anger that King takes offense to is, in fact, directed
inward by Kincaid. She suggests at times that this com m unity, as she herself has
admittedly done in her earlier work, consciously or unconsciously reproduces colonial
structures of oppression against itself, and is subsequently im plicated in the reproduction
of colonial (now neo-colonial) authority.
Jane King charges that K incaids criticism , more than ironic, is in fact
hypocritical given K incaids own observation that the very language in which she herself
writes is the language of the crim inal (32), a language that, as Kincaid observes can,
explain and express the deed only from the crim inals point of view (32). King seems
to find Kincaid an outside observer, one who, in her choice to live in Vermont, to write
within the confines of the Am erican publishing industry, to w ork in American academia,
has give up her status as authentic. King finds K incaids criticism anger and insult
and little else (907). She considers Kincaid to be in the throes of w hat Fanon called,
the arsenal of com plexes that has been developed by the colonial environm ent (30).
She calls Kincaid one of those who want to prove to white men at all costs, the richness
of their thought, the equal value of their intellect (12).

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H ow ever what King fails to take into account is the very real w ay in which
K incaids polem ic is not so much a portrait of a weak and dull people w ho have blindly
given over their sense of self-worth in ignorant obedience to the m achinery of
neocolonialism . K incaids polemic is, at least in part, a portrait of herself, of her own
m em bership in this community of weak and dull people. Through her occasional
(though n o t constant) identification with her fellow Antiguans, Kincaid articulates her
own im plication in the process of reproducing colonial structures under the sign of neo
colonialism . King is mistaken in claiming that Kincaid places herself in a unique
position able to understand the tourist and the Antiguan and despise both while
identifying with neither (895). Throughout A Small Place Kincaid routinely identifies
herself as one who has been a victim of colonialism as well as one who includes herself
among those who do to ourselves the very things you used to do to us (36). Recounting
the scene o f education in the old library Kincaid recalls ironically the beauty of us
sitting there like com m unicants at an altar, taking in, again and again, the fairy tale of
how we met you, your right to do the things you did, how beautiful you were, are, and
always will be (42). Here, by linking via simile the status o f students learning and
com m unicants prostrate at an altar, Kincaid performs a critique of western history and the
com plicitous role played by Christianity in the colonial project. By characterizing the
colonial version o f history as a fairy tale told to students with all the force of religious
truth, she im plicates religious traditions in the m anufacture of a colonial version of
history. Additionally, in describing this beautiful scene of education, Kincaid
implicates herself as one who had com pletely taken in the fairy tale told to her. She is
one of the children, the com m unicants prostrate before the altar of colonial history an

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ideology. A nd while certainly she ultimately rejects the part of that fairy tale that she
could im m ediately and early on recognize as colonial ideology, she did not reject the part
of the fairy tale that generated her early aesthetic in A t the Bottom o f the River.
In no small way, much of the anger that critics read in the prose of A Sm all Place
is anger K incaid directs at her self and her own implication in the structures of colonial
cultural authority. She declares herself as one of the m illions of people...m ade orphans:
no m otherland, no fatherland.. ( 3 1 ) .

H owever she also mourns what I became after I

met you [the colonizers] (37). However, K ings criticism, while not as absolute as she
implies, is not without its basis. K incaids identification with her fellow Antiguans is, in
some places, inconsistent. For all that she uses the first person plural in the examples
above, she also em ploys the third person when speaking of the Antiguans. In other
words, she does not always identify herself as one o f those who she is criticizing. For
each time that she suggests through the first person plural pronoun that she is included in
the critical portrait of the Antiguans, she also uses the third person pronoun to refer to
these same people thereby instituting a distance and distinction between them and her.
She fails to include herself among those who have made the degradation and humiliation
of their daily lives into their own tourist attraction [emphasis m ine] (69). She fails to
include herself in w hatever criticism she m ight level at the people of A ntigua who
cannot see a relationship between their obsession with slavery...and their celebration of
the Hotel Training School., .and the fact that they are governed by corrupt m en...[w ho]
have given their country away to corrupt foreigners |em phasis m ine] (55). For all the
times that she does identify herself as one of her fellow A ntiguans, she turns around and
fails to include herself in her indictm ent of a colonized people who Fanon m ight have

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described as people in whose soul an inferiority com plex has been created by the death
and burial o f its local cultural originality (18).
Kincaid does not, by any means, limit herself to a pitiable portrait of the colonial
who has internalized (or epidemalized, as Fanon put it) her sense of inferiority in the
face of colonial cultural authority. On occasion, she admits her own im plication in
colonial authority while at the same time, through A Sm all Place, as well as in a num ber
of her other books, she angrily repudiates her own indoctrination and attempts to locate
an alternative position. She frames herself in ambiguous terms: she is a m ember of a
colonized people, yet at the same time she is a postcolonial struggling to articulate an
identity and cultural authority that exists independent of colonial authority. She is
uncertain o f her own origins noting, I cannot tell w hether I was brought up
by...children, eternal innocents, or artists w ho have not yet found em inence in a world
too stupid to understand, or lunatics who have made their own lunatic asylum, or an
exquisite combination of all three (57). This uncertainty is what leads her to her own
am biguous position as postcolonial intellectual one who was educated under the sign of
colonial authority, one who uses the language o f that colonial authority while rem aining
one who tries to adequately critique not only the form ations of colonial authority
deployed through the postcolonial state, but also her own implication in that authority.
For all of K ings effort to condemn Kincaid for adopting a position as outsider criticizing
Antiguans, the argum ent falls short. Kincaid herself is clearly aware of her own
implication in the colonial project, and her rage in the text is not entirely directed at either
the forces of neo-colonialism or the victim s o f neo-colonialism , much of the anger is
directed at herself, at her own early inability to make the connections between the

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language and literature she loved.1'5 And yet, as an example of the irony of the status of
the postcolonial and as Kincaid m ight adm it herself, such exposure to language and
literature, how ever loaded with the weight of colonial authority, was a constitutive part of
her own developm ent as a postcolonial artist and intellectual.
In the end, K incaids harshest words com e for the tourist industry while at the
same tim e she strives to find her own ways o f describing A ntigua and Antiguans which,
unlike the aesthetics of the tourist pam phlets, do not simply repeat and reinstate the old
colonial ways of im agining the landscape and its peoples. Her problem here, as it has
been throughout her body of work, is to represent A ntigua in ways which do not reinstate
the colonial imagination. Her solution here is to attempt to categorically reject any mode
o f representation.

Kincaid begins the final section o f A Sm all Place by writing, A ntigua

is beautiful. A ntigua is too beautiful. Som etim es the beauty of it seems unreal (77).
She goes on to suggest that language as a series of signifiers used in the construction of
any landscape will always be inadequate to describe this or any place. All of this is so
beautiful, all of this is not real like any other real thing that there is. It is as if, then, the
beautythe beauty of the sea, the land, the air...w ere a prison, and as if everything and
everybody inside it were locked in and everything and everybody that is not inside it
were locked out (79). She implies that only by being there, only be being part of the
place in a way that a casual tourist cannot be, only by residing there can one see the place
for what it is. Through the claim that the landscape exceeds representation (A ntigua is
too beautiful (emphasis mine)), and through the claim that such beauty is indescribable
( unreal), Kincaid refutes the ability of the place to be known through language, saying
that those outside the place cannot see it, that they, like the tourist, would only see the

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ocean as an idyllic vista, rather than as a beautiful vision that contains within it the horror
and history o f slavery. She argues against the capacity of traditional m odes of
representation to adequately represent Antigua. She writes, It is as if, then, the beauty
the beauty o f the sea, the land, the a ir...were a prison, and as if everything and
everybody inside it were locked in and everything and everybody that is not inside it
were locked out (79). She implies the inability for any mode of representation to
successfully apprehend the landscape. She implies that language is simply not capable of
describing Antigua. The place defies the circumscription that linguistic description
would perform . Language, especially the language she herself uses, is always on the
outside o f the prison of beauty of Antigua. Anything other than an admission o f the
Antiguan landscapes un-representability, Kincaid seems to suggest, would place A ntigua
within a linguistic and cultural tradition of beauty that has for so long been used to
devalue it and its people. W hat Kincaid does, then in the end, is reject rom antic ideas of
landscape suspecting, like Aldous Huxley, that the beauty of romantic landscapes which
find nature...divine and morally uplifting is misplaced in Antigua. And not only
because the romantic landscape owes its origins to the culture of empire, but also simply
because the W ordsworthian who exports this pantheistic w orship of Nature to the tropics
is liable to have his religious convictions som ew hat rudely disturbed. Nature, under a
vertical sun, and nourished by the equatorial rains, is not at all like that chaste mild deity
who presides ov er...th e Lake district (Huxley 123).14
Kincaid attempts to reject not only the rom antic and neo-colonial vision of
A ntigua as a tourist destination, but she also attem pts to reject the very fram ing of
A ntigua into any kind o f portrait, she rejects the idea of landscape itself. Rather than risk

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what she has already done in A t the Bottom or the River and reduce landscape to a
resource to be mined for her uses, she suggests that language that attempts to adequately
circum scribe A ntigua into the accessible term s that the term landscape suggests is
always already inadequate. In her work, Kincaid posits two versions o f her postcolonial
Antigua: the romanticized landscape assembled for the pleasure of (largely) Am erican
tourists w hich m ust be rejected for its deep im plications in a history o f traum a and
dispossession and the unreal beauty of A ntigua that exists, according to Kincaid and
implied visually by Stephanie Black in Life and D ebt, unarticulated, apart from and
perhaps underneath the manufactured landscapes of tourism and poverty. This is a
position that attempts to reject any mode of representation as always already inadequate.
Kincaid repeats this point again and again in the final section o f A Sm all Place.

In

something o f a nod to the always representational aspect of landscape, she notes that
[s]ometimes the beauty of it [Antigua] seems as if it were stage sets for a play. She
goes on to catalog all the various features o f the landscape which are unreal : no real
sunset could look like that; no real seaw ater could strike that many shades o f blue at
once; no real sky could be that shade o f b lu e ...n o real day could be that sort of sunny and
bright, making everything seem transparent and shallo w ... (77). Kincaid continues and
lists the unreal nature of the diurnal cycle, the sand, the air, the earth, the grass, the
cows, the rain, the villages, and the people themselves. Through this com prehensive
catalog of the features of the landscape which defy representation, Kincaid attem pts to
evade implication in historically weighted m odes of representation by rejecting the act of
representation itself. W hile at the same time, ultimately, she is forced, by the very act of
linguistically representing Antigua, to be im plicated in the very m ode o f representation

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she claim s to be rejecting. She cannot, in other words, represent A ntigua while
ostensibly rejecting the supposition that any representation is possible. The evocation
and repetition of A ntiguas unreal beauty as a place that exceeds the very act of
repetition is something of a dodge at the end of A Small Place. She paints herself into a
corner; her rejection of all modes of representation places her in a double bind. She
cannot perform the act of representation with an eye toward intervening in existent
discourses about the Antiguan landscape and subsequently assert that all representation is
a failure. Her choice to set her next project, Lucy, in New York rather than Antigua, is
perhaps a concession to the difficult position in which she had situated herself. While
Kincaid does go on to develop and articulate other modes for engaging Antigua and
fram ing it within the context of a landscape, such texts lie outside the bounds of this
current study. In contrast to this initial accommodation and subsequent rejection of the
modes o f landscape as a method o f representation, G arrett Hongo and Derek W alcott
engage the mode of landscape in their own ways. Hongo attempts to use it as a trope
divorced from its colonial legacies, while W alcott attempts to revise the conditions of
possibility surrounding the very nature of the romantic landscape.

1 Mark D risco lls R everse P o stco lo n ia lity in S o c ia l T ext 7 8 , V ol. 2 2 , N o . 1, Spring 2004: 5 9 -8 4 provides
a w ide v iew o f the overall g eo /so cio p o litica l ram ifications o f current IM F, W T O , and U N p olicies
regarding industrial and d ev elo p m en ta l countries. C iting a host o f sp ecific U N p o licy docum ents,
D riscoll notes how even after the form al end o f co lo n ia lism , trade and capital largely [m im icked] previous
colonial structures (South A sia therefore relinking w ith the U .K .; Latin A m erica with the U nited States; and
later, East and Southeast A sia with Japan) (6 3 ). D riscoll, w h ile not speaking sp ecifica lly about Jam aica,
nonetheless d iscu sses in great detail a num ber o f the issu es to which Stephanie B lack alludes to in her film .
2 Indeed, B lack s film has a sim ilar structure to K in ca id s 1987 A S m a ll P la ce. B oth texts cut back and
forth between shots or descriptions o f the tourist ex p erience and shots or descriptions o f the im pact o f
global capitalism ; both texts draw an im p licit link b etw een the material exp loitation o f a sm all Caribbean
nation in the form o f coercive and external p o licies(in Jam aica, the IM F, W TO , and W orld Bank; in
A ntigua, the leftover forces o f co lo n ialism m eto n y m ica lly represented by B arclays Bank and the m em bers

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o f the M ill R e e f Country Club) and the cultural exploitation that occurs under the auspices o f the tourist
industry.
3 T esh om e H . Gabriel addresses this concern by noting how co n scio u sly and fu lly Third W orld cinem as
have em ulated the W estern H o lly w o o d film industry. He cites how even the nam es o f Third W orld film
com panies proclaim their origin. For instance, the N igerian film com pany, C alpenny, w h o se name stands
for C alifornia, P ennsylvania, and N ew York, tries to hid behind an acronym (3 4 1 ). A dd ition ally he notes
that there are frequently easily identifiable them atic concerns (the prioritization o f entertainm ent and the
m otivated narrative m ode o f c la ssic H o lly w o o d cinem a) and ob v io u sly stylistic sim ilarities: T he em phasis
on form al properties o f cinem a, technical brilliance and visual wizardry , overrides subject matter. T he aim
here is sim p ly to creat a sp e cta c le. A p in g H o llyw o o d stylistically, m ore often than not, runs counter to
Third W orld n eed s for a serious social art (3 4 1 ).
4 F ollow in g a sustained critique o f Chinua A chebe's w illin g n ess to em brace the E nglish language, N gugi
declares that "by our continuing to w rite in foreign languages, paying hom age to them , are w e not on the
cultural level continuing that n eo -co lo n ia l slavish and cringing spirit?" (2 6 ). H e doesn't allo w for any
internal h eterogen eity in culturew hether colon ial or p ostcolon ial. N gugi g o es on to remark that w hat
writers such as Chinua A ch eb e, W ole Soy inka, and Sedar Senghor, am ong others, have "produced, despite
any claim s to the contrary, is not A frican literature" (26 ). F inally he m akes the claim that in anticipation o f
an "inevitable revolutionary break w ith n eo-colon ialism ...A frican literature can on ly be written in A frican
languages" (2 7 ). N gugi calls for m ore than ju st a rejection o f the W ests cultural leg a cy , he g o e s further
and insists on rejecting the very language o f that culture.
s The landscape o f the Caribbean, as it appears in the nineteenth century B ritish im agination is, o f course,
so very d ifferent from the landscape o f England as it appears in the nineteenth century British
im agination a differen ce brought hom e by A ld u s H uxley in his essay, W ordsw orth in the T rop ics. In
his description o f the form ulation o f the rom antic landscape, nature is d ivin e and m orally uplifting. For
good W ordsvvorthians...a w alk in the country is the eq u ivalen t o f go in g to c h u rc h ...to c o m m u n e ...w ith the
visible m anifestations o f the W isd om and Spirit o f the U n iv erse. .. .the W ordsw orthian w h o exports this
pantheistitc w orship o f N ature to the tropics is liable to have his religiou s co n v ictio n s som ew h at rudely
disturbed. Nature, under a vertical sun, and nourished by the equatorial rains, is not al all like that chaste
mild deity w h o presides o v e r ...th e Lake district (1 2 3 ).
6 E lsew here K incaid has also talked about this attem pt by E nglish p eo p le to m ake her a certain kind o f
person: speaking o f her ex p erience being forced to m em orize K eats and W ordsw orth in sch o o l K incaid
notes that it w as an attem pt to m ake m e into a certain kind o f p erso n ...a n educated black person (B onetti
130). Ian Sm ith remarks that th ese E nglish p eo p le refers to an entire educational system that w as still
very much under the control o f England and supported by an array o f adm inistrators, teachers, p oliticians
and governm ent functionaries. K incaid reco g n izes very q uickly that the kind o f p erso n that she w as
destined to b eco m e w ould subscribe to E lio ts narrow v iew o f a venerable literary tradition, an e x clu siv ely
European one, to the extent that the description an educated black p erson w as at best an oxym oron and at
w orst an outright contradiction in terms. Such a hyphenated person, she argues, has no real value w ithin
the colonial market w here racial ex clu siv ity d em ands E n glish n ess as the go ld standard and w here
incom m ensurate ca te g o r ie s b lack n ess, E n glish n ess, color, culture and nationality are collap sed into a
sim ple operational binary (8 0 8 ).
7 Ferguson argues that through various characterizations o f m other figu res, K incaid sets up a subtle
paradigm o f colon ialism that en ab les these repressions to be heard; the text, that is, m asks and marks the
role that colon ialism plays in educating c o lo n ized p eop le against their interests (7). D iane S im m on s on
the other hand, fin d s that far from being indecipherable dream scapes, the ten p ieces trace an em otional
jo u rn ey ...[m o u rn in g ] the lo ss o f a prelapsarian w orld (73).
8 A nd, in an observation that accounts, in part, for the postcolon ial response to the colonial landscape, Pratt
writes, [f|rom the point o f v iew o f their [the la n d sca p es] inhabitants, o f cou rse, these sam e sp aces are

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lived as in te n se ly hum anized, saturated with local history and m eaning, w here plants, creatures, and
geographical form ation s have nam es, uses, sym b olic fu n ction s, histories, p laces in indigenous kn ow led ge
form ations (6 1 ).
9 John Stuart M ill, P rin cip les o f P o litic a l E con om y, V o l. 3, ed. J.M. R obson (Toronto: U niversity o f
T oronto P ress, 1965), p. 6 9 3 .
10 Furtherm ore, S m ith s contends that W ordsworth w as, in fact, ideal for this exportation to the colon ies.
W hile putting forward the facade o f a restorative, more natural claim to com m u n ication W ordsw orths
literary th eo ries and desires for the language o f m en and topics regarding low and rustic life w orked to
reinstate an a g e-o ld cultural functionalism that is interpreted here as placing the agricultural (the m en o f
low and rustic life) at the behest o f an urbane project o f internal co lo n ia lism (8 1 2 ).
11 lan Sm ith n o tes that, A s a fixed feature o f English colon ial education, W ordsw orths work becam e
deeply im p licated in the p ro jecto r curricular indoctrination, w hat J.A . M angan describes as the im perial
curriculum that prom ulgated racial stereotypes, the creation o f ethnocentric attitudes and the la b ellin g o f
colonial p e o p le s ...K in c a id ...te stifie s to the profound id eological effects o f E nglish R om antic Poetry
within her early C olonial experience, and later, on her as a w riter (8 0 1 ). For K incaid, W ordsworth, the
rest o f the R om antic p oets, and indeed all o f British and W estern literature are h o m ogen ou s authorial
m anifestations o f w hat she calls, the E nglish approach and a larger social history o f cruelty alluded to in
the E nglish teacher to im plicated literatures political role in the w ork o f em pire (8 0 2 ).
12 Sim m ons n otes that alon g w ith a host o f review s ju d gin g A S m all P la ce as too angry (the N ew Yorker)
or distorted by anger ( The N ew York Tim es B ook R eview ), the T im es L ite ra ry S u pplem en t, am azingly
stated that w h at K incaid d oes not sa y is that A n tigu a has had self-g o v ern m en t for decad es (F on esca),
Kincaid d e v o tes the bulk o f the essay to precisely this, a detailed account o f the sham bles that has been
m ade o f the island sin ce the end o f colon ial rule and the aw ful fear K incaid fe e ls that things may be
actually w o rse than b efore (136).
13 T h is failure is evident, as I have argued, in the im itatively m odernist lean in gs o f her early collection o f
short stories, A t the B o tto m o f the R iver. A dditionally, K incaid articulates this inability as w ell in A S m a ll
P lace. She n otes that as a child she w ould steal b ook s from the library o n ce I had read a book I c o u ld n t
bear to part w ith it. Sh e g o e s on to note that as a child, on e o f her favorite activities w as to go to the
library every Saturday a ftern o o n ...an d sit and look at the b ook s and think about the m isery in being m e
(45). A s a child, K incaid w as (quite understandably) unable to m ake the con n ection betw een the artifacts
o f colonial culture w h ich she lo v e and the realities o f co lo n ia lism and n eo -co lo n ia lism w hich dom inated
her everyday life.
14 H uxley g o es on to note that, G od m ade the cou n try, said C ow per, in his rather too blank verse. In
N ew G uinea he w ou ld have had his doubts; he w ould have lon ged for the m an-m ade tow n (1 2 6 ). And
w h ile H uxley d oes h im self fall into the very traps that K incaid strives to avoid, traps that ex o ticize these
tropics, his critique o f W ordsw orths vision o f nature is pointed en ou gh to note that W ordsw orths
daffodils w ould not have survived w ell under the A ntiguan sun.

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Chapter Two
Once Out of Nature: Garrett Hongos Postcolonial Poetic1

I m ight love T.S. Eliot or John Donne, but I realized that were I to have met them, they
would have considered me either a curiosity or a savage; in any case, an unlikely
candidate for a poet of the English language...T he trick, then w as...to write not in slavish
imitation of the European tradition but to use it and com bine it with other elements of my
background, trying to achieve a difficult balance.
David M ura

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I: The Conservative Postmodern

Born in 1951, Garrett Hongo has become one of the m ost influential Asian
American writers and editors. Diane W akoski, in an early review of Yellow Light, his
first collection of poetry, compares Hongo to Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, and
Frederico Garcia Lorca.

She says, not to slight those poets, favorites of mine, but

Hongo is astonishing (4). She calls O ff from Swing Shift the best poem I have seen
on the A m erican treatm ent of native Japanese during the Second World W ar because it is
not really written about that subject (4). W akoski is refering to the clear yet oblique
fashion in which Hongo exposes the costs of historical traum as.2 George Uba in a 1985
review of Yellow Light notes that Hongo does not merely trum pet the fam iliar tune of
ethnic pride. Rather, he excels at balancing a passionate interest in ordinary workingclass people perform ing ordinary activities, with a deep-felt concern over w hat they are
often the unknowing victims o f (123). Uba notes that H ongos project in Yellow Light
concerns the quest for a personal identity and the desire to build and retrieve a collective
identity by sifting through the past (123). H ongos m ethod o f sifting through the past
resembles the ways in which W alcotts poetics strive to use the old names anew. Both
techniques are characteristic of the postcolonial artist; they require an engagem ent with
the artists inevitable com plicity with hegem ony and the traditions of cultural
im perialism, traditions which their own work is sim ultaneously a part of and an
intervention into.
Phoebe Pettingill, in a 1988 review of The River o f H eaven, remarks that
H ongos verses become an elaborate ritual of atonem ent for leaving behind his
culturally ambiguous background (16). A nd while she perhaps overstates things a bit in

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claiming th a t Hongo leaves behind his background, she does point to his theme of
hom elessness in the diasporic experience. Robert Schultz remarks that H ongos book is
carefully structured to make explicit the way music and story can mitigate suffering
(149). He points to H ongos use of a W hitmanic sense of rhythm, his effective use o f the
catalogue as a technique to build and sustain rhythm within language. It is not only
H ongos technique, but also the ends to which he directs that technique which has caught
the eyes o f critics. For while Hongo m ight em ploy the Homeric catalogue within his
W hitm anic rhythm s, he bends these techniques to his own obsessions, to his own
endeavors to reclaim a lost past. And yet he does not simply seek to reinstate what has
been lost, but rather seeks to make his own claim upon his personal as well as his cultural
past. W hat Hongo seeks to create is an alternative cultural and historical text; one that
can function as a counter-discourse to the traum as o f his own racialized experience of
colonialism. He seeks to create an alternative to the texts of colonial authority that have
figured his own racial and historical identity as diminished, as im poverished, as less than
deserving of its own mythic treatment. Speaking of his childhood, Hongo writes,
I d snap on the television and Hop Sing would be there in living color, on
Bonanza, doing his chop suey English thing, catering to his bosses the ruling
Carwrights, making a dam n fool of him selfand me too, I thought. Oriental
minstrelsy, chop-chop. Or Peter Tong would come on in Bachelor Father with
his houseboy act, garbling phone messages, Ikallupusutay, gooneying for the
camera. This was the early sixties, and being Asian was a joke in A m ericaa
sidekicking dem eaning one. (The M irror Diary 463)

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H ongos efforts are not limited to simply refuting the cultural texts of
disenfranchisem ent: he also seeks to chronicle the unarticulated history of his family.
Speaking o f his family, he writes, [t]hey were a kind of golden mystery to me at the
time. T here was no brief of their passage. No record that I knew of that marked their
stories dow n for me to inscribe m yself within them as the living image of their ancestral
shadows (459). Hongo fram es this alternative cultural text in the very modes and
m anner o f the canon in order to create a uniquely hybrid text that relies on canonical
modes even as it presumably articulates its own alterities. His m ethod has been, at least
in part, to borrow freely from the rom antic tradition in poetry and the meditative tradition
of the American transcendentalists in his prose memoir. W here Jam aica Kincaid seeks to
reject the aesthetic modes associated with colonial authority, Hongo seeks to borrow
from them and turn them to his own use. W here Derek W alcott turns his eye tow ard
revising the traditions and aesthetic m odes them selves, H ongos method is less
interventionist. W here W alcott, as I will discuss, actively engages a myriad of aesthetic
modes, poetics, and whole narrative structures, H ongos method is less confrontational.
He does not take on the task of changing the conditions of possibility of the canon itself;
he seeks to borrow, in full postmodern fashion, from the W estern literary canon and
generate his own cultural texts.
In her m onograph on G arrett H ongo, Laurie Filipelli notes that Hongo is
traditional in his Euro-A m erican Rom antic leanings, yet eclectic in his openness to other
influences, both literary and non-literary, Hongo is at once conservative and m odern.
(6). She goes on to cite H ongos increasing hom age to the Rom antics (7), particularly

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in his use of landscape as a prim ary thematic in his work. She notes how Los Angeles
and H aw aii stand at opposing ends of the spectrum in H ongos work:
Los Angeles becomes, in a sense, the failed dream, a city as inhumane as it is
diverse...Functioning as a redem ptive counterpoint to L.A., H aw aii is where
Hongo wants to belong... [howeverj the enchanting beauty of the rural setting of
his birthplace is realistically balanced against the oppressive history o f im migrant
workers on the sugar p lantations...H aw aii and L.A. became paradoxically linked
by the com mon thread o f his own identity, producing in him a need to infuse his
Los Angeles experience with missing elem ents of m ystery and beauty. (8)
H aw aii functions for Hongo in much the same way that Saree M akdisi argues that the
sublime landscape of the Alps function for W ordsworth: as a salve against the
dehum anizing urban landscape.3 H aw aii, in short, functions rom antically.4 Filipelli
ends her monograph rem arking that Hongo complicates our ideas o f the West,
particularly in terms of expansion and opportunity. She notes that Hongo unearths
identity not by surging forw ard into the unknown, but by m oving back toward the
landscape and culture of his origins (51). W hile certainly there is a m ovem ent of return
in H ongos w orkw hether that return is to a geographic local or to a particular formal
poeticsthe potency of his w ork lies in the ways in which he interrogates and
com plicates the possibilities of return. Filipelli notes that Hongo balances the Edenic
beauty of H aw aii against the savage history of colonialism, but H ongos m ethod also
explores his own implication in the history of colonialism. H ongos method is not nearly
as explicit as W alcotts. He does engage this topic but it does not attain the status o f a
major theme in his work in the way that it does in Derek W alcotts poetry.5

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In th e last poem of The River o f Heaven, The Legend, Hongo considers his
relationship with the cultural authority of colonialism m ost explicitly. H e tells of a
random act of street violence: an Asian man leaving the laundry, w alking to his car, is
shot and killed by a young boy running down the icy sidewalk. In this poem , the speaker
confronts his own distance from this violence; he confronts his own sham e at how far
away he is from this scene. For even while he might imagine, as he does in Stay With
M e, a poem in Yellow Light, a scene of compassion and comfort, in T he Legend there
is no one to com fort this dying man as a few sounds escape from his mouth, / a babbling
no one understands/ as people surround him / bewildered at his speech (66). There are
echoes of H ongos father in this description. In Volcano, Hongo writes o f his father that
since he was hard of hearing since child-hood, language and speech cam e with difficulty
to him (29). The inability to properly articulate oneself is a trope throughout H ongos
body of work.6 If anything these sim ilarities between the unnamed victim and H ongos
father make all the more poignant and powerful the speakers distance. There is, in this
poem, an expression of deep regret that articulates the speakers distance, both
educationally and culturally, from this lonely dying man. The regret and consciousness
of distance is not unlike Derek W alcotts self-critique of his own incom m ensurable
distance from those he often writes about: H adnt I made their poverty my paradise?
(Omeros 228). Echoing this sentiment, Hongo describes him self in V olcano, the village
in which he was born, as a traveler in their paradise (292). For Hongo as well as
W alcott, the allusion to Hawai'i and St. Lucia respectively as paradise, is an ironic nod
to the ways in which their own landscapes have been articulated by colonial and neo

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colonial (in the form of the tourist industry and its intersections with global capitalism)
discourses.
N ear the end of this poem, Hongo remarks, |t|onight, I read about D escartes /
grand courage to doubt everything / except his own miraculous existence / and I feel so
distinct / from the wounded man lying on the concrete / 1 am asham ed (67). The power
of this confession lies at the heart of H ongos work; it is, in many ways, an articulation of
his own crisis as an intellectual and as a poet. For while he m ight want to chronicle the
lives of the downtrodden, give voice to the voiceless, he m ust also acknowledge that by
his very position as poet, as academic, as professor and teacher, he is also distinct from
them; he is distinct from his own past, from his own self. M oreover, by invoking
Descartes, Hongo articulates his conflicted engagem ent with the Enlightenm ent subject; a
form ulation of subjectivity which is essential to H ongos reification of the figure of the
poet.7 H owever this is also a form ulation which lies at the heart of the very hegemony
which Hongo would contest.8 Faced with this crisis, what he does is make a plea for the
redemptive potential of language and story.
A t the end of The Legend, Hongo writes, Let the night sky cover him as he
dies. / Let the w eaver girl cross the bridge of heaven / and take up his cold hands (67).
And here, referring to a Japanese legend about mercy and love, H ongo does not attempt
to mitigate the tragedy of the m ans death or the savagery of the w orld in which it
happened; instead the poem functions to bestow dignity and intimacy upon a story of
anonymous street violence, providing, through legend, an afterlife consolation for
unexplainable suffering (Filipelli 46). It is this form of consolation, this attem pt to
compensate (however inadequately) for a history of traum a and deprivation through the

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lyric that has stood and continues to stand at the heart of H ongos w o rk .9 He suggests
that a lyric, rooted in an alternative narrative tradition but articulated within the Western
literary tradition, is capable of producing a counter-discursive effect. The task he sets
him self is the form ation of an alternative history; one that sits in opposition to and
alongside the history of the dom inant culture. For all that Hongo understands him self
through his work as a postcolonial subject, his attem pt to situate the lyric along the axis
of cultural alterity functions as much along postmodern as on postcolonial lines. Hongo
cannibalizes the lyric and the rom antic mode in his efforts to find the aesthetic and poetic
scaffolding upon which he m ight hang his stories and narratives o f cultural alterity.
H ongos m ethod recalls Fredric Jam esons form ulation o f pastiche as an explanation for
how postm odernist texts are constructed out of w hat are frequently unanchored,
decontexualized, and defam iliarized aesthetic and stylistic modes.
Jam esons Postm odernism differentiates between parody and pastiche. Both
enact "the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the m annerism s and stylistic
twitches of other styles ("Postm odernism and Consum er Society" 113); but Jameson
makes note of parody's "ulterior motive," a sensitivity to a "linguistic norm ...som ething
normal com pared to which what is being imitated is rather comic" (114). For Jameson's
purposes, this linguistic norm vanishes as (post)m odernity begins to fragm ent any notion
of a coherent culture. "(I ]n the decades since the em ergence of the great modern styles,
society has itself begun to fragm ent in this way, each group com ing to speak a curious
private language of its own...[thus] the very possibility of any linguistic norm ...would
vanish, and we would have nothing but stylistic diversity and heterogeneity" (114).
Jameson goes on to make the link between the disappearance of this "linguistic norm"

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and the postm odern "death of the subject"; he further suggests, more radically, that one
might take w hat he calls, "the poststructuralist position" which would claim that neither
the linguistic norm nor the individual subject ever really existed in the first place. The
primary im plication here is the final absence of presence (in the Derridian sense) at the
heart of any structure, and the claim that structures such as linguistic norms, individual
subjectivities, or literary canons are themselves constructions born out of ideological
intersections.
H ow ever w here parody m ight assume a stable referent point, pastiche "is a neutral
practice o f [parody'sl mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the
satiric im pulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal
tongue you have mom entarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists"
(Jameson, Postm odernism 17). Pastiche, lacking the presence of a linguistic norm, would
be the postm odern practice, a practice which would allow for the random
cannibalization of all the styles o f the p ast...[an d ]...th e play o f random stylistic allusion
(18). H ongos em ploym ent of pastiche, of the freeplay of cannibalized styles and the
aesthetic modes of the literary canon is perform ed with a postcolonials flair. His poetry
freely uses the rom antic mode w ithout attem pting to remake the conditions possibility of
the romantic landscape; his prose com bines m em oir with travel and nature writing
alongside the tradition of the Japanese diary. He perform s all of these acts in order to
authorize his own identity, in order to posit an alternate genealogy o f subjectivity, one
that does not rely on the history of shame and oppression. But he rem ains conscious of
his own deep im plication in the cultural texts that are so much a constitutive part of the
colonial history.

In his two poetry collections, Hongo takes on the project of

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docum enting and articulating the unchronicled lives of his own experience within the
fram ew ork of contem porary American poetry. W hile these collections are replete with
various kinds o f homage and imitations, his engagem ent with the canon, in particular
with the rom antic landscape, is largely tangential. The rom antic landscape surfaces
occasionally in his two collections of poetry, but it is not treated with the kind of
sustained engagem ent that we see in H ongos prose memoir, Volcano.10

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II: Poetry of the Unchronicled

In an interview with Alice Evans, Hongo remarks, I m talking about those that
the literature has forgotten, those that the culture has forgotten. Its im portant to me that
we be rem em bered, that there be a literature for us, that we be sung about, that there be
songs for the lives that my people have lived (44). However, rather than becom ing a
sentimental Pastoralist of the Asian American tradition, Hongo engages his subjects with
a direct and unflinchingly honest eye.
H e opens his first collection o f poetry, Yellow Light, w ith a series o f portraits o f
his fam ily and com munity. Here, as throughout the whole collection, Hongo portrays his
subjects w ith an alm ost desolate tenderness. In the first poem , Yellow Light, Hongo
em ploys a film ic aesthetic: the unnam ed w om an w alks hom e from the bus stop carrying
her groceries and as she reaches her door the m oon rises from behind some eucalyptus
trees and covers everything in a heavy light like yellow onions (12). But under that
heavy light, are gangs o f schoolboys playing w ar, m osquitoes, moths, a few orange
butterflies, set in a backdrop where Los A ngeles / seethes like a billboard under
tw ilight (11). W ith a Hom eric sensibility, H ongo catalogues the details o f this world,
bathing them over in a heavy light that is sensuous yet bitter. He avoids any hint o f
sentimentality, instead choosing to end his poem on this am biguous, yet distinctly
forgiving image o f the yellow m oonlight covering over the landscape.
Hongo uses this lyrical trope o f a landscape in crisis covered by a heavy light
again at the end o f Stepchild, a long poem that attem pts to chronicle the history of
Asians in America. In this poem Hongo speaks out against the social forces which have
w orked to deprive A sian A m ericans o f their identity. It is a poem full o f rage and seeks

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to chronicle not only a history o f im posed racism, but also o f internalized racism. A t the
end o f the poem , after cataloging everything from the Asian Exclusion Acts o f the
nineteenth century to the legacies o f silence and shame in the Japanese American
com m unity after W orld War II and Internm ent, the poet seeks repose and meditation.
The poem ends with the image o f the sun ripening yellow melons on the w indow sill,
the yellow ones we call bitter (63). Here, as at the end o f Yellow Light, Hongo ends
the poem with a sensuous, yet caustic image. This kind o f method, here and throughout
his body o f work, enables Hongo to avoid sentim entality he figures history through the
lens o f these images: sensuous, lush, organic, and yet laden w ith an acrim ony that gives
voice to generations o f frustrations and denials.
In Yellow Light, Hongo begins developing the same them es that will preoccupy
all o f his work: the homelessness o f the diasporic experience and the relentless attem pts
by the children o f diaspora to connect to some kind o f inheritance, to develop some sense
o f belonging, o f home. Even in this early work, H ongos focus is clear: to create and
articulate an alternative history one that functions as a counter-discourse to the
internalized narrative o f shame and oppression. In his construction o f this counter
discourse, Hongo relies on established m otifs and m odes freely draw n from the catalog of
the W estern poetic canon. Using the same encyclopedic poetic catalog that H om er used,
Hongo lists the details o f the unchronicled and undocum ented lives which populate his
poems.
In his second collection o f poetry, The River o f Heaven, Hongo expands upon the
them es initially developed in Yellow Light. H ow ever there is a m elancholic overtone to
this collection, in part due to the deaths o f his father and grandfather (the book is, in fact,

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dedicated to both o f them). The River o f Heaven is divided into two sections. Part one
deals prim arily with characters (both real and partially imagined) situated in H aw aii; part
two is m ore focused on H ongos experiences on the mainland. The collection is infused
w ith a poignant sense o f nostalgia throughout; many o f the poems in part one evince
H ongos ow n preoccupation with his attem pts to stitch together a coherent sense o f
identity th at is situated in H aw aii.
H ongo begins The River o f Heaven with an elegy for his dead father and
grandfather, M endocino Rose. In the poem he recalls listening to Gabby P ahinuis
version o f a nineteenth century H aw aiian lyric, a dirge w ritten by Queen Kapiolani as she
m ourned h er husband, King D avid Kalakaua, who had died far from home. Hongo notes
that [t]he song is about the dying o f a loved one who is far away from hom e, in a kind o f
exile ( Volcano, 321).11 The landscape in this poem functions as a kind o f objective
correlative for the speakers grief; as he listens to this lament, the speaker him self is in
the same landscape where the H aw aiian King died. The grief o f the Queen as well as the
H aw aiian people in the nineteenth century is echoed in the speakers ow n g rief for his
dead father and grandfather all o f w hich is reflected in the evocation o f the surrounding
natural landscape. However, despite this grief, the speaker m akes the argum ent for the
pow er o f the lyric to transcend the m elancholy o f grief. After quoting K apiolanis lyrics
for her dead husband, Hongo writes, and the roses seemed everyw here around me then, /
profuse and luxurious / as the rain in its grey robes, / undulant processionals over the
land, / echoes, in snarls o f extravagant color, / o f the music / and the collapsing shapes /
they seemed to trium ph over (4). Here, the abundance o f beauty in the form o f the
ubiquitous M endocino roses overw helm s this otherw ise grey landscape Hongo suggests

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that beauty in the form o f the poetic lyric as well as in the literal form o f the roses is able
to m oderate the anguish o f grief. Hongo makes the im plicit connection between
Kalakaua w ho was regarded as the H aw aiian King who legitim ized H aw aiian culture
(song and H ula) in the nineteenth century, Pahinui who is considered one o f the principal
architects o f the twentieth century Hawaiian cultural renaissance, and his own poetic
project to articulate and legitim ized the undocum ented lives o f his ow n experience, in
particular, the lives o f his family. In M endocino Rose, Hongo w rites that this song
w ould have served as the dirge / 1 didnt know how to sing / when I needed to (3).
The next three poems, N ostalgic Catalogue, Village: K ahuku-m ura, and
A ncestral Graves, K ahuku m em orialize elements o f the past as Hongo recalls it, a past
that is very nearly vanished. In Village: K ahuku-m ura, he describes how the plantation
village that he lived in as a child has fallen into disrepair: H ow did I know it would all
recede into nothing, / derelict shacks unpainted and overgrown / with m orning
glories.. .H ow did I know my own jo y s beginning / would be a relic in my ow n lifetim e
(10). In Ancestral Graves, K ahuku, Hongo recounts the history o f this gravesite and
articulates something o f the im pulse driving his own poetics. He recalls the story o f his
grandfathers sister who was beaten to death for having a sexual relationship with a
Scotsman, a hoe handle they say / Struck dow n by her own father, / m ythic and
unabsolved (13). Hongo declares that our shame is not her lo v e ... / N or is it the poor
gruel o f their daily liv es... / It is its effacem ent (13). Here, as throughout his body o f
work, Hongo seeks to reclaim and rearticulate the stories o f the forgotten.
In O-Bon: Dance fo r the D ead, Hongo uses language to recreate w hat he has never
had, a full record of the past, a full sense of his own heritage. He repeats throughout the

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poem what he lacks: I have no memories or photograph o f my father / coming home

from w ar...o r of my grandfather...as he bent to weed and hoe the garden that Sunday /
while swarms of planes m aneuvered overhead. / 1 have no memories o f the radio that
d ay ...I have no story to tell about lacquer shrines (14). And yet even as he proceeds
through this catalogue of lack, he provides, in language, exactly what he is mourning.
For while he has no photo or m em ory of his father returning from war, he describes him
nonetheless, thin as a caneworker, / a splinter of flesh in his olive greens / and khakis
and spit-shined G.I. shoes (14). Similarly, while he lacks a photo of his grandfather the
day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he describes him vividly in his flow er-print shirt
/ humm ing his bar-tunes, tying the bandana / to his head to hold the sweat back from his
face as he bent to weed and hoe the garden that Sunday (14). Hongo summons his lost
dead and brings them beside me when I dance, to help me / flesh the notes of my song,
to tell me its all right (15). A nd indeed, that is what happens over the rem ainder o f part
one of The River o f Heaven', Hongo summons his dead and gives them voice through a
series of dramatic monologues.
In The Unreal Dwelling: My Years in V olcano, Hongo takes on the voice of his
grandfather, Torau Hongo, and details his history. The Unreal D welling tells the story
of a man who has lied, cheated, and gam bled his way through life. A t the end, he leaves
behind children and an adulterous wife. And yet this character is sympathetic not only
because of his panache, but also because o f the gesture he makes at the end o f his life. At
the poem s end, the speaker, conscious o f his im m inent death, declares that prior to his
death, I know I must bow down, / call to my oldest son, say what I m ust / to bring him,
and all the past, back to me (35). Hongo im agines his grandfather searching for

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forgiveness, and thereby indicates his own absolution of his grandfather; in envisioning
his gran d fath ers quest for mercy Hongo forgives the man who abandoned his father.
In p a rt two of The River o f Heaven Hongo returns to the m ainland, but does not
depart fro m his method of cataloging and recording the plights of those whom society has
attempted to forget. In M etered O nram p Hongo chronicles the bums and ragpickers,
the shopping bag people...sifting through the loose dirt and refuse piles for whatever
treasure they could find (43). He ends this poem watching one o f the homeless, a
woman nam ed Sally, throw ing herself down a long slope. He writes, All the while she
flailed her arm s, / billowing her open co at.. .Hallelujah, she was saying, / A-le-leu, over
and over / as we marvelled, crouching in our cars (45). Here Hongo avoids any
sentimental characterization, instead Sally is powerfully m ysterious to the speaker of the
poem, unknow n and unknowable. Her m ystery is not something to be mocked or even
com prehended, she is utterly and com pletely other from the speaker and all he and the
rest of the com m uters can do is marvel and crouch in their cars. This kind of gesture is
very typical o f H ongos aesthetic, he seeks to chronicle lives which would otherwise
remain invisible; and yet he acknow ledges his own distance from the very ones he seeks
to give voice to.

R e p r o d u c e d with p e r m is s io n of t h e cop y rig h t o w n e r. F u r th e r r e p r o d u c tio n prohibited w ith o u t p e r m is s io n .

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III: A Book of Origins

G a rre tt H ongos third and most recent book, Volcano, draws heavily from both
W estern a n d A sian Pacific folk and literary canons and relies on Odyssean m otifs o f
w andering as heavily as it relies on the evocation o f myths o f return and reconciliation.
A parad o x ical text, Volcano situates itself dynamically w ithin the subjectivized space
between ra c e and culture (Hongo, Open xix). It is, as Lisa Lowe m ight note, a cultural
production em erging out o f the contradictions o f im m igrant m arginality [that]
displace[s] th e fiction o f reconciliation, d isru p ts] the m yth o f national identity by
revealing its gaps and fissures, and intervene[s] in the narrative o f national developm ent
that w ould illegitim ately locate the im m igrant before history or exem pt the im m igrant
from h isto ry (9). W hile H ongos text certainly displaces fictions o f reconciliation, it
does not efface them. Rather Volcano effects a problem atic reconciliation w ith the lost
past, the history o f dispossessionpersonal and culturalthat Hongo and his family
suffered.
In telling the stories o f his fathers exile from H aw aii, the fam ilys loss o f its
inheritance and his tenuous return to Volcano, Hongo m akes clear the am bivalent nature
o f that return. By chronicling in such exhaustive detail his study o f the ecological and
social systems o f the place, Hongo explicitly renders the difficult and inconclusive nature
o f his reconciliation; for even w hile he acquaints him self through a rigorous program o f
study w ith the natural and social environm ent, he cannot naturalize his presence in
Volcano, he is alw ays aw are o f his distance and distinction. Indeed, the very m ethod by
w hich he renders the landscape articulates his ow n distance. He fram es his descriptions
o f the landscape partially in purposefully scientific discourse, a m ethod that repeats the

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classificatory methodology o f eighteenth century exploration narratives narratives

which them selves were a great part o f constructing landscape in collusion with colonial
and im perial authority. Hongo remains, on some level, unrooted even as he grounds
him self in his birthplace. A t the books end he observes I belong nowhere, I tell myself.
And, 1 belong in Volcano ( Volcano 332). His m emoir articulates the extreme difficulties
and tensions underlying the very tropes o f reconciliation. Volcano is a cultural product
that actively intervenes in narrative[s] o f national developm ent by deploying as a
thematic a p rio ri the dom inant trope o f dispossession, a dispossession that is racially,
culturally, econom ically, and geographically inflected, and one that is internally
problem atic as its very term s sometimes contradict or m agnify each other. Hongo
doesnt attem pt to narrate a simplistic story o f redem ption. Rather he makes clear the
intersections and contradictions o f the various axes o f A sian A m erican identity: he
represents the som etim es conflicted term s o f his own history in an attem pt to make that
history available to material inquiry. He does so by laying out the multiple sources o f his
identitythe social, cultural, and intellectual term s w hich inform his poetic and social
identitywhile m aking clear the difficulties facing the poet who would, in this
postcolonial culture, im agine a m ythic book o f origins.
In contrast to autobiographies such as R ichard R odriguezs H unger o f M em ory or
M alcolm X s A utobiography o f M alcolm X, Hongo eschews the structure o f what W erner
Sollors calls narratives o f conversion. For while Rodriguez transform s him self from a
m inoritized ethnic to a culturally assim ilated member o f the m iddle class, and while
M alcolm X follow s a revisionary form o f the Christian conversion pattern., .a conversion
away from A m erican assim ilation and tow ard the black nationalism o f Elijah

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M uham m ads N ation o f Islam (Sollors 32), Hongo refuses to em plot him self and his
narrative w ithin either rubric. To employ either o f these narrative structures would be to
efface the m ateriality o f his history. He doesnt attempt to narrate his complete
reintegration with either some im agined com munity o f the dom inant or marginalized, a
com m unity that would be im agined as a coherent and discrete group. Rather Hongo
attempts to reim agine the possibilities for the kind o f w ork that a cultural product can
accomplish.

He attempts to imagine a new kind o f w ork for his memoir, a w ork other

than the representation o f his conversion and/or em plotm ent w ithin some m eta
narrative ; he materializes his own personal, familial, and cultural history in ways that
keep that history open to continual inquiry.
In im agining the technology o f this w ork o f the cultural product, Hongo positions
him self as firm ly as possible as a poet, an academ ic university poetan identity inflected
by all m anners o f know ledge, mystic as w ell as academic, aesthetic as well as scientific.
This identity allow s for a connection to the m ultiple axes inform ing his history and
allows Hongo to perform critiques o f the very structures o f dom ination which have
resulted in his dispossession. This identity also ensures that Hongo will constantly
acknowledge his own im plication and com plicity to those structures. For while the poet
is a marginal artist, a university professor who is a m em ber o f the academic m iddle class
rem ains im plicated in the hegem onic discourse o f A m erican culture in unavoidable ways.
This problem atic and conflicted identity enables Hongo to enact w hat Tisa Lowe refers to
as the heterogeneity, hybridity, and m ultiplicity o f the A sian A m erican artist. By
chronicling the different geographical locations o f his upbringingVolcano, O ahus north
shore, and Los A ngeles and by citing the vast array o f differences between him self and

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any o f his im agined com munitieswhether the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Los

Angeles or the local communities o f Volcano and Hilo (both significantly different)
Hongo dem onstrates his heterogeneity. This is to say that Hongo indicate[s]
the...differences and differential relationships w ithin a bonded category (Lowe 67). By
detailing his own education and m arginalization in elementary school, in his graduate
creative w riting program, and elsewhere w here he was alienated and taught valuable
lessons H ongo narrates his own hybridity, his ow n history o f survival within
relationships o f unequal power and dom ination (67). Finally, in detailing the enabling
forces o f his subjectivity and his will to the poetic identitythe sale o f his fathers BM W
financing his education, the privileges his education has granted him (But w hat the
capital has given me is a way not to live in a locals identity...I dont have a laborers
jo b (H ongo 332)), even the origin o f his nam e, G arrett (from a wine bottle, confirm ed by
a paperback rom ance)Hongo chronicles his ow n m ultiplicity. He makes clear how
the po ets identity is constructed by different axes o f pow er [which] are multiply
determ ined by the contradictions o f capitalism , patriarchy, and race relations,
w ith...particular contradictions surfacing in relation to the m aterial conditions o f a
specific historical m om ent (Lowe 67). He chooses to be a poet, thereby choosing an
identity that is flexible and protean in its potentiality.
W hile this identity does, to some extent, posit the autonomy o f the individual, it is
not an identity w hich assumes a com plete divorce from the influences o f culture and
society. Hongo also codes him self as a cipher at times; he adm its both the necessity and
the instability o f the individualized identity. He im plicates his ow n developm ent in w hat
A ntonio Gramsci, referring to the flexible role culture plays in the interrogation o f

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hegem ony calls, a war o f position. 12 For Gramsci this w ar o f position arose when
revolution cam e at a more gradual pace and where culture and literature are an essential
part o f countering existing hegem onies and establishing new ones. Hongo deploys his
own identity through a kind o f m om entary essentialism w here the sets o f w hat Gayatri
Spivak calls strategic essentialism s are em ployed with such diversity that they are
sim ultaneously strategic and m om entary.13 Even as Hongo establishes some essential
term o f the identity o f the poet, that term is effaced, displaced, or at least problem atized
in such a w ay that this identity is always in flux; he generates successive, m odifying, and
sometimes contradictory traces o f identity. O f course, as Stuart Hall points out, the
very notion o f the D erridian trace is som ew hat problem atic as it is evacuated o f political
potential and refers simply to the endless repositioning o f its [significations] differential
term s, [and that] m eaning...depends on the contingent and arbitrary stopthe necessary
and tem porary break in the infinite sem iosis o f language (394). Hall refutes the notion
that this break, this positioning, is purely contingent and arbitrary. Instead he calls it
strategic. A nd as these meanings, these breaks, these identities continue to unfold
beyond the arbitrary closure o f signification, they have protean and politicized
potential, especially in the m anners in w hich they continually posit necessarily
rearticulated relationships w ith history. For Hongo and his deploym ent o f the identity o f
the poet in his efforts to devise a com plex relationship w ith history, this kind o f dynam ic
identity is key.
Speaking o f the transitory nature o f all identity formations, especially in regard to
cultural identities, Hall observes that:
Cultural identity...is a m atter o f becom ing as well as o f being. It belongs to

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the future as much as to the past. It is not something w hich already exits,
transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from
somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo
constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised
past, they are subject to the continuous play o f history, culture and power. Far
from being grounded in m ere recovery o f the past, w hich is waiting to be found,
and w hich when found, will secure our sense o f ourselves into eternity, identities
are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position
ourselves within, the narratives o f the past (394).
H alls rem arks are o f particular im port for Volcano as the text effects far more than some
archeological uncovering o f a previously silenced history. While Hongo does reclaim
some narratives and refram es others w ithin the context o f a history o f dispossession,
specifically the story o f his maternal grandfathers interrogation during the tim e o f the
W orld W ar II Japanese internment, the em phasis in his text is not the simplistic recovery
o f lost pasts, but the establishm ent o f a relationship to that past that is dynam ic and
present. Hongo posits a com plex and contradictory set o f term s for the identity o f the
poet w hich allows this dynam ic reconnection to an effaced history. A nd since, as W alter
Benjam in points out, nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for
history (254), Hongo articulates and deploys the identity o f the poet in order to make
m anifest the m ateriality o f not only his ow n history, but also o f the history o f his family
and o f the culture within w hich their identities and experiences have been forged.
H ongos m ethod is to reim agine the past as a poet in all its fullness so that he has...[his]
past become citable in all its m om ents (254).

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H ongo suggests that while he m ust acknowledge his own distance from the people
who populate this postcolonial landscape, that very distance (here m aterialized in the
figure o f th e poet that he claims as his identity) gives him the necessary postm odern
flexibility to adequately represent his landscape. He writes, [n]o m atter that I try, with
all m aterial emphasis and psychic earnestness, to be almost solely [sic] o f this village, I
am yet outside o f it...L ik e the ingenuous, sincere diplomat from a small, postcolonial
country sent to the capital for an ed ucation.. .1 am returned hom e (331).
His prim ary tool for m aking the past citable is a poetic and lyrical language with
historicized potentiality. In addition, H ongos deploym ent o f language and narrative as a
strategy for intervention has politicized historical roots. In H aw aii, the developm ent o f a
pidgin English, a polyglot creole o f the various Polynesian and A sian languages
subordinated under the English rubric, served to enable a kind o f H aw aiian nation form ed
o f the various plantation laborers. As Ronald Takaki remarks, [a]s pidgin English
became the com m on language in the camps, it enabled people from different countries to
com m unicate with one another and helped them create a new identity associated with
H aw aii (168). Thus H ongos abandonm ent o f pidgin, a language that served the
plantation laborers well during their first attem pts at acquiring labor rights, has cultural as
well as political valences. In order, how ever, to fully participate in the poetic aesthetic
which he has sketched out for him self, an aesthetic inform ed by English language as well
as A sian poetries, Hongo finds he m ust posit some kind o f resolution to this dialectical
conflict.
In the m em oirs prologue, Hongo lays out the foundation o f this com plicated
relationship to language itself, a relationship at the heart o f his som etim es conflicted

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identity as a poet.14 The opening scene o f the memoir is that o f H ongos acquisition o f
m ainland English, o f his distancing from pidgin English, from his history in H aw aii.
In a very telling passage in the prologue, Hongo portrays his willful educative effort to
learn m ainland English which results in his abandonm ent o f pidgin: [w]e are seated at
the kitchen table by the hum m ing refrigerator...She teaches me fricatives, gives me
exercises, shows me where to place my tongue against m y teeth. I say there, there,
constructing a calisthenic phalanx o f enunciations. I say earth. I was with (x). Here o f
particular note are the m etaphors Hongo uses to characterize the difference between the
dialects. There is a forceful kind o f accom m odation in his description: by describing the
process o f articulating the fricatives o f m ainland English as the constructions o f a
calisthenic phalanx o f enunciations, Hongo implies a m ilitary necessity to the
appropriation o f m ainland E nglish.15 H e dem onstrates an urgency to this acquisition o f
language, an urgency w hich betrays his ow n eventual interventionist purposes. He arms
him self w ith the language o f the hegem ony in order that he m ight have, as Benjam in puts
it, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past (263). Furtherm ore, the
metaphorical description o f the two dialects has descriptive significance. He says:
I have to soften my tongue to shape it around the new way o f saying words, to
make it shape itself in my m outh m ore quickly so that I can m ake vowel sounds,
smaller sounds, faster sounds in a sentence that has to flutter the way a m ullet
swims, alm ost surreptitiously, through lagoons o f syntax rather than churning
through the blunt re e f o f my thinking like ulua, a jack crevalle that hunts, like
speaking pidgin, (x)
While invoking the figurative sense o f the word, phalanx, he also com pares the act o f

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speaking m ainland English w ith the quick flutter[ing] m ovem ent o f the mullet. He
implies an adaptive and agile quality to the act o f acquiring the language o f the dominant
culture. In a later scene set in a soda shop with his parents, Hongo reveals the virtue of
this procurem ent o f m ainland English: I chattered on in m ixed pidgin and M ainland
English, confused about what language to use...I wanted vanilla ice cream...'I can play
dah juke?' I said. 'I can have vanilla cone?' Then, reacting to the scowl on m y mother's
face...I shifted dialects...swerving the syntax, finding the m agical inflection...The treats
came" (243). Here the child learns the material effects o f acquiring the language o f the
dom inant culture: he becom es an agent in the society, he can get w hat he wants. Later, o f
course, the objects o f H ongos desire becom e m uch m ore historical in nature and he
employs these m agical inflections w ith politicized objectives. He sets the ground for
his own interventionist historicized aesthetic, an aesthetic w hich is inform ed by the
interventionist strategies o f other m inority discourses where this acquisition o f a
culturally specific literacy has strong resonances, particularly in w hat Henry Louis Gates
refers to as the trope o f the talking book.
In The Signifying M onkey, Gates, drawing upon the m etaphor im agined by James
Gronniosaw in his seminal 1770 autobiography, A narrative o f the m ost remarkable
particulars in the life o f Jam es A lbert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, notes
that Gronniosaw describes his frustration w ith his illiteracy. U sing the m etaphor o f the
silent book, Gates articulates the crisis o f illiteracy: [t]he silent book [which] did not
reflect or acknowledge the black presence before it. Gates goes on to observe that [t]he
books rather deafening silence renam es the received tradition in European letters that the
mask o f blackness w orn by G ronniosaw and his countrym en w as a trope o f absence

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(136-7). T h u s this (non) talking book requires the acquisition o f literacy, o f im plication
within the language, the discourse o f the very structures o f dom ination th at are being
interrogated, not only by G ronniosaw s autobiography, but by im plication, by the body o f
m inoritized discourse. The political valences o f the project o f literary acquisition are
therefore clear. In order to achieve the political and legal objective o f abolition,
G ronniosaw and later Phyllis W heatley and Frederick Douglass would have to establish
their subjectivity through a dem onstration o f their literacy and thus, according to
Enlightenm ent ideals, their humanity. They must, in effect, m ake the book talk, and
speak for them with their voice. The conflicted nature o f this project is also clear, not
only in G ronniosaw and in G ates analysis o f the trope o f the talking book, but also in
such explications o f the project o f literacy acquisition as H ongo perform s. For while
Hongo, like the authors o f early slave narratives whose projects also inform his own,
must learn the language o f the dom inant culture, that education requires an initial
abandonm ent, a loss o f not only a language but also o f the culture and place associated
with such loss.16
Nonetheless, for Hongo these accom m odations have an interventionist intent:
w hatever accom m odation the colonized w riter makes, w hether it be to a linguistic,
educational, or aesthetic structure, he does so in order to enable his own rearticulation o f
the sites o f historical and familial dispossession. W hile enabling a material
historiography, the poet perform s this w ork also out o f a desire to produce those
incredible arias o f verbal splendor that made sense and beauty out o f the overwhelm ing
urban dullness that was sm othering m e (255). There is an im plicit com parison to his
father, Albert Hongo, who, in his youth, cultivated bonsai trees. The bonsai would

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gather h is unease and restlessness...into the deliberate lashings o f gum m y twine...His

effort thus w ould make o f bough and limb an order o f beauty pow erful enough to hold
the m ind in contem plation...Focus, precision, and discipline brought together in a fragile,
inexpensive beauty. It was a way to deal w ith a n g s t (241). H ongos w ork politicizes
the aesthetic act and endows it with historicized potency. This work is therefore a
hybridized effort; an effort that begins to becom e the form o f cultural difference itself,
the jarrin g s o f a differentiated culture whose hybrid counter-energies, in Saids phrase,
challenge the centred, dom inant cultural norm s with their unsettling perplexities
generated out o f their disjunctive, liminal space (Young 2 3).17 Hongo locates the two
dialects, the two discourses, not so m uch on a vertical scale o f pow er relations but rather
on a horizontal scale that subordinates the work o f culture(s) to the w ork o f the mind, to
the w ork o f the poet. The discourse o f m ainland English is surreptitious and like
'auana, dancing to a wavy melodic song (Hongo xi), w hile the discourse o f pidgin is
more like kahiko, the ancient dance, the kanaka [m ens] dance o f tradition...harsh
moves, slaps, and full o f pounding force (xi). Both dialects have their use in the w ork o f
counter-hegem onic discourse (as is evidenced by H ongos inclusion o f pidgin throughout
his m em oir alongside lyric m ainland English), but one or the other arises only out o f
individual historical mom ents. The languages that H ongo deploys, according to the
aesthetic and politicized needs o f the m om ent, are the tools he uses to describe the
varying environm ents, the landscapes and cultures w ithin w hich he finds himself.
As the landscape o f H aw aii is so central to the structure o f the memoir, it is only
fitting that Hongo w ould represent his interaction w ith the landscape in terms that are
structurally sim ilar to his problem atic relationship to language. Laurie Filipelli notes that

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Hongo has articulated, over his career, an increasing hom age to the R om antics...[that is]
expressed in his adherence to a connection between em otion and sense o f place, whereby
landscape becom es the diving rod into selfhood (7). This devotion to a romantic
tradition is also a devotion to a m ystical tradition, one that Hongo would claim is part o f
his poetic aesthetic: I thought I m ight turn my family losses aroundthe store that had
passed out o f our care, the broken promise o f its inheritance, the life w ed been sundered
from by becom ing as family with this extraordinary place and its various histories as a
Hasid is w ith his chosen text, as a Buddhist m onk m ight be w ith his puzzling koan and
regim en o f m editation (Hongo 26-7). Here Hongo situates h im self as a kind o f mystic
with herm etic impulses; he is one who encounters other worlds, the worlds o f life and
death. He establishes the difficult and disciplined nature o f the w ork o f reestablishing a
connection w ith a lost home. In order to reconnect w ith the past, how ever tenuously, he
m ust study it in all o f its manifestations; he cannot simply physically return hom e nor can
he allow him self the luxury o f reductionism . Even when he finally meets Evelyn, the
w om an who took the fam ily store from H ongos father, even then he comes to an
understanding o f the com plex notion o f all historical mom ents. He finds he has to leave
w ithout making public pronouncem ents o f guilt; he has, at least to some extent, to forgive
her.
And like these historical m om ents which are, in C hakrabartys term, hyper-real,
so too do the landscapes them selves resist inscription w ithin some simplified binary
traditiona place o f redem ption versus a place o f desolation (Volcano and Los Angeles).
Rather Hongo establishes Volcano as a liminal site, a place on the Borderlands: Volcano
seemed to me an exotic and slightly m iraculous place that I associated with the M acondo

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o f G arcia M arquez, the M acchu Picchu o f Pablo N eruda.18 There was something magical
about ita purgatorial m ount in the m iddle o f the southern oceanand there was
som ething o f it native to me, an insinuation o f secret and violent origins and an aboriginal
past (4). He identifies the town o f V olcano w ith G arcia M arquezs and N erudas locales
o f m ythic origin, places associated with political and aesthetic reawakenings. He foists
together the aesthetic, aboriginal prim itivism o f the rom antics with the political
im peratives o f the postcolonial. Hongo also states: I could tell at once it was a place o f
m oonlight and rain, as they say in Japan, ugetsu, a w orld o f faery and im agination
w here the dead m ight dance in the right light, w here the m ilky river o f stars and the
swallow -bridge o f heaven m ight set down and be a passageway between this and the
afterlife (16). Here he narrates one o f the fundam ental crises o f the postcolonial: how
one represents the physical beauty o f a locale, o f a landscape that is simultaneously the
site o f historical trauma. His solution, not unlike the solutions o f D erek W alcott in The
Schooner Flight, or even Toni M orrison in Beloved, is to speak o f the past as a ghostly
haunting, o f the m anifestation o f historical and historicized traces in the present.19
Tike these other literary ghosts, H ongos father and ancestors exert a spectral influence
on the text; their presence and absence operate as the im peratives w hich undergird the
poets own attem pt to incorporate him self not only in this localized landscape but w ithin
history itself. W hen Hongo chronicles his fathers death and rem arks on the ways in
w hich his mother had draw n a veil o f silence over their past, he also describes the terrible
Santa A na storm that hit the day after his father died. He says, The aerial photo showed
all o f this in a huge swirl o f clouds o f the L.A. basin...betw een the eastern m ountains and
the large bay to the west, was the w hite serpentine o f a dragon spiraling out from my

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fathers deathbed (31). The dragon, o f course, is the imperative o f history, the trace o f
the traum a o f dispossession, the voice o f King H am let speaking to his son dem anding
justice for a n untimely and unworthy death. The dragon, however, unlike the apparition
o f King H am let, is not a singular voice, it is the abstracted demands o f an oppressed past
made m anifest, the articulations o f obligations Hongo feels when he first hears the stories
about his fath e rs m other and how she abandoned her children. He says, [a] dragons
tail knotted and unw ound itself in my body. I felt its scales rubbing against my ribs
(59). H ongo figures the m anifestation o f the past and the ferocious ways in w hich it
claims its dues.
H ongos pilgrim s progress to reconnect with this abandoned past, its
languages, place, and narratives, is made legible in the evolution o f his own poetic self.
W hile describing his childhood after the departure from H aw aii, he observes: I d grown
up there [Los Angeles], cipherously, a child o f im m igrants to the M ainland, and for h alf a
lifetime, I knew nothing o f the family history or the volcanoes I was born under (4).
Hongo fram es his identity as a child in Los A ngeles as non-existent, dependant on the
codes o f behavior dictated to him and his family. They were, as he indicates, ciphers,
nothings and nobodies whose m eanings were, as a result o f the econom ic dispossession
his father suffered, dispersed. In his adulthood, when he returns to H aw aii, Volcano
stands as a necessary and terrifying trope in his life. He says that, Volcano came to be a
kind o f faith to m e after a w hile...it becam e the place...to w hich I believed I could return.
I needed it like an identity, a way to m ark m y s e lf (287).
While Volcano is a place on the far extrem e, a place far away from the
dehum anizing and alienating urbanity o f Los Angeles, it is also is a locale o f

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dispossession. The tropes o f place, in H ongos text, mutually im plicate, interpenetrate,

and determ ine each other. For Hongo, H aw aii, and Volcano in particular, is the place o f
an idyllic youth almost pastoral in its beauty, but the simplicity o f that beauty belies
itself: the islands and its cultures are made pow erfully com plex as he em plots the
physical beauty o f the landscape with its histories o f cultural and personal dispossession
and colonization. Hongo articulates an additional com plicating factor to his own
relationship w ith Volcano: [a]nd yet this was all so silly. H ow can one derive a sense o f
self from som ething as lately invited into ones life as Volcano was for m e?...Though my
anxiety dem anded that identity have its source in the unchanginga place and attendant
culture som ehow fixed in the scheme o f things, a thing easily characterized and
identifiablemy own thoughts ran otherwise, saying I belonged now here (288). W hat
H ongos anxiety calls for, a thing easily characterized and identifiable, w ould be a kind
o f nativist desire. Presumably, he w ould uncover, through some archeological imagining,
the essence o f who he was. He knows, o f course the problem atics o f such a desire.
Edw ard Said articulates clearly them w hen he says, [ nJativism, alas, reinforces the
distinction even while revaluating the w eaker or subservient partner. A nd it has often led
to com pelling but dem agogic assertions about a native past, narrative or actuality that
stands free from worldly tim e its e lf (228). Hongo figures the resolution to this anxiety
in the story about a cousin who, at H ongos fathers funeral, presses a tw enty-dollar bill
into his hand. This gesture was only a crude execution o f a Japanese custom o f
communal mourning, to give kodencash in an envelope...[i]t was a was to pay for
expenses, to show respect and solidarity (289). Like the trace o f this custom, H ongos
own ability to connect to the landscape is troped not so much in term s o f a thing easily

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characterized and identifiable, but rather in the traces o f the past.

Indeed, his very physiognom y is inscribed with these traces o f the past: when he
and his w ife, Cynthia, first return to reside in Volcano, they go to the Hongo Store (no
longer u nder family management) and he is recognized by the trace o f his fathers face in
his own. A nd later the postman, Kazum asa Okamoto, also recognizes Hongo by his
resem blance to his father. Was A lbert your faddah?...Y ou face dah sam e as your
faddahs...Y ou look like your faddah (48). This identification and this identity are, as
Hongo h im self notes, over-determ ined; they do not allow him his ow n w ill to identity
formation. W hile he finds a certain security in knowing that he does, at least in part,
belong to V olcano, he is also discom forted by the ways in which this initial belonging
cancels out who he has become. I d fit into an identity here apart from anything I d
done in my ow n life, independent o f all its facts except for the one that had m e born
here...Even my face had m eaning...I still felt the weight o f a feeling I guessed to be
nothing if it w asnt pure descent (49-50). This w eight o f a feeling, this descent is
very beginnings o f his reattachm ent to his history; yet it is also indicative o f the
inauthenticity o f this initial attachm ent. For while Hongo m ight be acknow ledged
because o f his physical sim ilarity to his father, his ow n identity is not yet recognized in
the text.
Only near the end o f the m em oir w hen a new newspaper carrier com es to deliver
the days news is he recognized for being not only a poet, but a poet whose w ork has
served his community and thus entitled him, rightly, to a place w ithin that com munity.
W hen the carrier approaches him, she identifies him as the poet, not as the son o f
A lbert Hongo, the grandson o f Torau, the dispossessed descendant o f a local tragedy.

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Hongo rem arks, It seemed so odd to hear a stranger announce my identity, speaking it
out loud in the forest that w ay (301). W hat is so odd for Hongo is that here he is
acknow ledged for who he is, not for his physical similarity to a local legend. He realizes
the efficacy o f his own work, o f his own worth: I thought o f my early lessons in poetry.
1 began to believe that words could join me to people and not sunder me from them
(302). A nd the poem which the news carrier refers to, saying, I read your poem about
the Japanese graveyard (301), is probably a poem that appeared initially in the Am erican
Poetry R eview and subsequently in H ongos second collection o f poetry, The River o f
Heaven. A ncestral Graves: K ahuku is a particularly em blem atic poem to trigger such a
m om ent in the memoir. In this poem , Hongo, along with a friend, presum ably Edward
Hirsch (to w hom the poem is dedicated and who has a poem o f his ow n about this
graveyard: Cem eteries by the Sea in his 1990 collection, The N ight Parade), attempts
to enact the same tropes o f resolution that he perform s in the memoir. Hongo observes
that [o]ur shame is not her love, /...[but] it is its effacement, the rough calligraphy / on
rotting wood / W orn sm ooth and illegible, / the past / Like a nam e w hispered in a shallow
grave (River 13). And w hile Hongo attem pts to undo this effacem ent o f the past, to
recover it from the hom ogenous course o f history, he, even in this early work, seems to
understand that w hat can be recovered is only a trace, a nam e w hispered.
In having his identity as a poet recognized and, indeed, spoken out loud in the
forest to the landscape itself, Hongo achieves a mom ent not o f detachm ent from the past
but a moment o f giving up such a detachm ent to the past. He reconciles him self w ith his
ow n complicity in effacing history, his ow n failures to adequately recuperate it. I think I
gave up detachment. W hat radiates as know ledge from that tim e is that there is a beauty

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in belonging to this earth and to its past, even one locked in m ystery and prohibition,
unstoried, th at exceeds all the passion you can claim for it (339). Rather than give into a
kind o f cynical despair born out o f the knowledge that the past exceeds our attempts to
m aterialize it, Hongo chooses, like his father chose, to w ork out a need for order and
beauty...[as he] grafted a material beauty onto an orphaned teenagers life (241).
H ongo can finally claim that while the m ateriality o f the past, the particularity o f
history and loss exceed the range o f language, thought, or signification to articulate it
adequately, these traces can be represented; he claims that the fragm ents o f landscape, o f
narrative, o f self, suffice, but they suffice only when undertaken w ith a rigorous, alm ost
religious intensity. Hongo posits the ability o f the poet to rearticulate dispossession and
reframe it, but dem ands that this new frame be a com plex thing o f beauty. He admits the
insufficiency o f structures o f thought to adequately represent and redeem a lost past but
does not, ultimately, assert that such a project is necessary. To claim some conclusive
representation, or some essentialized and redem ptive reconciliation w ith a place, culture,
and history o f dispossession w ould in turn efface the very lost past one is attem pting to
recover. Rather than locate his narratives as history or situate h im self categorically
within some term o f identity, Hongo em ploys the abstraction o f the poet and cathects that
identity with m ultiple constitutive and contradictory terms. Certainly the figure o f the
poet is an identity that, despite the conflicted term s constituting it, rem ains solidly
associated with the very structures o f dom ination Hongo ostensibly attem pts to subvert.
However, the figure o f the poet is hardly a hom ogeneous construction. The figure o f the
poet is subject to the dialectical nature o f all identity form ation; no term is entirely
discrete. Hongo deploys a trope o f identity that he adm its is com plicit with existing

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hegem onies, but it remains, in its own hybridized potentiality, an effective means o f
constructing not simply another oppositional binary, but rather a new kind o f identity,
one that adm its the dynamic as its foundational term, one that allows for poetry and
history to lie side by side in an epic personal narrative.

1 The title o f this chapter is taken from the final stanza o f Sailing to B yzan tiu m :
O n ce out o f nature I shall never take
M y b odily form from any natural thing,
B ut such a form as Grecian gold sm ith s make
O f ham m ered gold and gold en am ellin g
T o keep a d row sy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a gold en bough to sing
T o lords and ladies o f By zantium
O f what is past, or passing, or to com e. (194)
Y ea ts p oem alludes to the ability o f the figure o f the p oet to stand ou tsid e o f history, outside o f id eology.
T his is the very m odel o f the figure o f the poet that Garrett H o n g o relies upon through his body o f work.
2 The speakers father in the poem , like H o n g o s father, w ork s as an electrician for a helicopter
manufacturer. T he portrait o f the man is tender w ithout overt sentim entality, but is, at its heart, tragic. T he
father, a veteran o f W orld War II and the 1 0 1 sl battalion (the all Japanese A m erican battalion w hich
remains the m ost b lood ied and decorated battalion in all o f A m erican m ilitary history), is unable to beat
the odds / o f g o in g d ea f from a shell / at A n z io still ech o in g in the cave o f h is inner ear. H on go cites the
fathers role in on e o f the major Italian battles o f W orld War II, and describ es the lasting traumas o f that
service: the blue ch ip s o f shrapnel still grinding / at the thickening join ts o f his le g s (14). T he grim
reality o f the fathers life is laid bare; d esp ite his service, despite his lin gerin g injuries the b est work he can
get is the sw in g sh ift and even his attem pts to conjure lu ck ou t o f the horse races co m es to nothing. A nd, in
a gesture that w as characteristic o f m uch o f the Japanese A m erican resp on se to the inequities o f their
treatment as veterans and internees during W W II, the p o em ends in silen ce: N o on e speaks a w ord (14).
This con clu d in g line operates as an ad m ission o f com p licity and w ill serve as a m otivation in H o n g o s later
work as he seeks to undo the silen ces w h ich surrounded the self-sile n c in g internalized sham e o f Japanese
A m ericans at their treatm ent during the war.
3 In my introduction I cite Saree M ak d isis R o m a n tic Im p eria lism : U n iv e rsa l E m p ire a n d the C ulture o f
M odern ity. M akdisi argues that rom anticism functions, in part, as a d iscou rse in opp osition to the
m odernization and industrialization o f the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. C iting
W ordsw orths residence in London in B o o k S even o f The P re lu d e , M akdisi argues that W ordsworth
situates the urban frenzy in direct op p osition to the sublim e landscape o f the A lp s.
4 The irony is, o f course, that Hawai'i is arguably one o f the first rom antic landscapes. Gananath
O beyesekere in The A p o th e o sis o f C a p ta in C ook: E u ro p ea n M yth m akin g in the P a cific (1 9 9 2 ) remarks that
the three v oyages o f Captain C ook in the South P acific play a large role in the d evelop m en t o f w hat Mary
Louise Pratt refers to as planetary c o n scio u sn e ss. Planetary c o n scio u sn ess, according to Pratt, is marked
by an orientation toward interior exploration and the construction o f g lo b a l-sca le m eaning through the
descriptive apparatuses o f natural history (1 5 ). It is, in effec t, a Eurocentered co n scio u sn ess that is
deployed and m aintained through exploration narratives and scien tific classificatory sch em es o f natural
history. O beyesekere argues that C o o k s v o y a g es, in particular his final o n e to H a w a ii, heralded a shift in
the goals o f d iscovery from conquest, plunder, and im perial appropriation to scien tific exploration devoid

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o f any e x p lic it agenda for conquest o f and for the exploitation and terrorization o f native p eo p les (5).
W .J.T. M itch ell observes, [t]he South P acific p ro v id e d ...a kind o f tabula rasa for the fan tasies o f
European im p eria lism , a place w here European landscape con ven tion s could w'ork th em selv es out virtually
unim peded b y n a tiv e resistance w here the naturalness o f those con ven tion s could fin d itself confirm ed
by a real p la c e understood to be in a state o f nature (18).
5 A s I d isc u ss in the fo llo w in g chapters on D erek W alcott, on e o f W a lco tts m ost persistent and important
them es th rou gh ou t his career has been his very active and ex p licit en gagem en t w ith h is literary (and in
m ore recent y ea rs, painterly) in fluences. W a lco tts m ethod has been to fu lly en gage the canon in his ow n
tex t often b rin gin g sty les and even characters from the canon into his poem s.
6 The issue o f sile n c e and either the inability to speak or the refusal to speak on b ehalf o f historical trauma
and d isp o ssessio n has a trem endous currency in A sian A m erican studies. K ing K ok C heung titled her
study o f fe m a le A sian A m erican writers, A rticu la te S ilen ces, stories by H isaye Y am am oto and W akako
Yam auchi h a v e chronicled the affect o f silen ce in the A sian A m erican fam ily. D avid Mura has written
exten siv ely ab ou t silen ce as the dom inant response to internm ent and its lasting traumas in the Japanese
A m erican fa m ily in his m em oirs and poetry.
7 H ongo, as w e ll as W alcott w hom I shall d iscu ss, p osits the figu re o f the p o et as an abstract ideal o f an
identity that stands relatively free from im plication the structures o f colon ial authority. There is som e
aw areness o f the figure o f the p oet as com p licit to colon ial authority, but any confrontation with that
aw areness is deferred. In part this aw areness is deferred in order to provide a d efin ab le site for H on go to
locate his id en tity.
8 One o f R en e D esc a rtes m ost sign ifican t interventions w as the estab lish m en t o f the self, o f the individual
subject as an authoritative topic o f p h ilosop h ical inquiry. T he self, after D escartes, could no longer be
regarded as co n tin g en t or irrelevant to the content o f p h ilo so p h y (M oyal 20 3 ).
9 In V olcano, H o n g o tells the story behind this allu sion , w hich is a Japanese folk tale that h e d heard during
his childhood in H awai'i. T he folk tale exp lain s the rationale behind the Japanese festival o f Tanabata (July
7). I d heard that in order for the stars to turn and remain w here they w ere, it took tw o special creatures
w h o were parted lovers a W eaver M aid to make the stars (b ein g) and a Herd B o y (N on b ein g) to keep
them in their p laces. W eaver M aid and Herd B oy liv ed on op p osite sid es o f the M ilky W ay, the band o f
stars that is our g alaxy and w h ich w e A sia n s see as a m ighty river, the R iver o f H eaven . T he Herd B oy and
W eaver M aid are stars in its op p osite b a n k s...A ll year they lo n g to be together. T h ey labor, dutifully
fabricating the w eb and warp o f B ein g, herding the star bands in an eternal solitu d e. ..Y e t, for on e night o f
the year, on an ev en in g w hen the star sky is said to b e clearest, the universe su ccu m b s to an o verw h elm ing
pity for them. In the form o f a flo ck o f com p assion ate starlings or s w a llo w s .. .the u n iv e r se .. .responds by
making a footb rid ge across the R iver o f H eaven out o f its o w n interlocking bodies, out o f its ow n n eed to
create mercy and requital in a nigh t o f lo v e for the dutiful sacrifices o f tw o o f its ch ild ren ...It is a parable
about m ercy and fu lfillm en t, the response o f the universe to the n eed s o f the hum an heart (2 2 2 -2 2 3 )
10 In a poem from The R iv e r o f H ea ve n , H on go ex p licitly im itates the rom antic m ode o f landscape in
Eruption: P u u O o H o n g o s landscape recalls the su b lim e as form ulated by Burke and Kant. D escribing
K ilau eas major eruption in 1983, Eruption: P u u O o describ es the e ffe c t o f w itn essin g the 9 0 0 fo o t
fountain o f lava that erupted from the P u u O o vent. C iting W illiam B la k e s description o f the fires o f
H ell (In The M arriage o f H eaven and H ell), H o n g o describ es red sh o w e r s...m a g e n ta and b illo w s o f
black v o lle y in g ...[a n d ] the hardened, grey back o f L eviathan / steam in g and v en tin g (27). Sim ilarly B lake
describes the infinite abyss, fiery as the sm ok e o f a burning c ity ...|a n d ] the head o f L eviathan (85).
H ongo g o es on to in v o k e the rom antic su b lim e as he d escrib es the effe c t o f seein g this eruption: he w rites,
[tjhere over can efield and the hardened lava la n d .. .the m in d s fear and the hearts delight, running us this
w ay and that (27).

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11 K ing D a v id K alakaua cam e to power in 1874 and ruled for 17 years. Kalakaua w as know n as the Merry
M onarch a n d w as an accom plished scholar, singer, and dancer. A nd although the H ula had been
abolished fo r years, Kalakaua revived it. A d d ition ally, Kalakaua w as an accom p lish ed m u sician he w rote
H awaii P o n o the national anthem o f Haw aii.
In 1874, K alakaua v isited the m ainland and w en t to W ashington D.C. to lobby for a reciprocity treaty . T he
H awaiian m on arch s had been trying, for the previous 5 0 years, to get such a treaty passed by the A m erican
governm ent. It w ou ld , in essen ce, have functioned as a free trade agreem ent betw een the tw o n a tio n s
good s could h a v e flo w ed betw een the tw o nations w ithout duty. Kalakaua w a s su ccessfu l and the
H awaiian e c o n o m y b o o m e d a boom w hich financed the im portation o f vast num bers o f A sian im m igrant
laborers.
K alakauas later years were marked by d om estic unrest governm ent scandals and corruption gave birth to
a secret p o litica l organization called The H aw aiian L eagu e in 1887. A lth ou gh their stated p o licy w as
reform ist, there w as a radical faction w hich w ou ld urge overthrow and subsequent annexation by the U S.
T hey w ere th e backers o f the R evolution o f 1 8 8 7 w hich broke out after Kalakaua w as im plicated in a
scandal in v o lv in g bribes for the sale o f opium licen ses (w h ich sold for $ 3 0 ,0 0 0 a p iece in 1878). T his
revolution fo rced Kalakaua to sign the B ayon et C onstitution o f 1 8 8 7 . The K in g s pow ers w ere severely
curtailed and votin g rights w ere granted to resident foreigners o f A m erican or European birth...though
ob viou sly n o t to the resident A sian laborers.
In 1890, the U S C ongress passed the M cK in ley T ariff A c t w h ich , am ong other things abrogated the
reciprocity treaty that K alakaua had gotten passed nearly 15 years earlier. K alakaua journeyed to the U S
m ainland o n c e again to lob b y once again. H o w ev er he took ill in San Francisco and died there on January
20, 1891. H is sister L iliuokalani, w ho had been his regent, w as proclaim ed Q ueen on January 2 9 th.
T he son g that H on go refers to w as written by K alakauas Q ueen, K a p iolani. T he lyrics as w ell as my
translation are:
Ipo Lei Manu

For M y W inged L ove

H e m ana-o he aloha, ea
N o ka ipo lei m anu

I have a thought o f love

for m y dear w in g ed lover

Ka manu k u'u hoa, ea

N oh o mai i ka nahele

M y intim ate is a bird

liv in g and ruling in the w ild

I iwi a'o uka

Polena i ka ua

the i iw i bird o f the m ountains

is y ello w e d by the rain

H a'ina ka puana
N o ka iani hele loa.

S in g it again, son g o f m y heart,

for the c h ie f g o n e forever.

12 A ntonio G ram scis phrase, the war o f p o sitio n appears in a num ber o f entries throughout his P rison
N otebooks. Gramsci p osits the war o f p o sitio n in op p o sitio n to the war o f m anoeuvre w hich he d efin es
as a revolutionary frontal attack on the entrenched institutions o f the b ou rgeois state (S e le c te d P rison
N o teb o o k s 235). In contrast the war o f p o stio n is a m ore gradual and su b versive strategy...! for |
und erm in in g...th e trench sy s te m s, earthw orks, and perm anent fo rtifica tio n s o f civil so ciety
(R ansom e 146).
13 D efen d in g the idea o f a provisional, contingent, sovereign subject, Spivak w rites, I w ould read it [such a
form ation o f subjectivity ] as a stra te g ic use o f p o sitiv ist essen tia lism in a scrupulously visib le political
interest (202).

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14The p ro lo gu e is entitled 'A u an a and K ahiko after the tw o contrasting primary sty les o f the H a w a iian
dance form , H ula, a dance form that is linked strongly to a tradition o f oral story-telling. Founded on the
perform ance o f narrative, on the enactm ent o f a m yth or legen d , or even a sentim ent, Hula serves as a
appropriate m etaphor for the work o f the text itself.
15 T he O x fo rd E nglish D ictio n a ry lists the antiquated m eaning o f phalanx as [a] lin e or array o f battle;
spec, a b od y o f heavy-arm ed infantry drawn up in c lo se order, w ith sh ield s join ed and long spears
overlapping; esp ecia lly fam ous in the M acedonian arm y. T he figurative m eaning is listed as A num ber or
set o f p erson s, etc. banded together for a com m on purpose, esp. in support o f or in opp osition to som e
cause; a united front'; the union or com bination o f su ch .
16 In a recent essa y , H on go describes an im agined text, an im agined history o f his d isp o ssessed fam ily that
m ight sit a lo n g sid e F or Whom the B ell Tolls, The G re a t G a tsb y, A n n a K aren in a, [and| The W isdom o f the
East" (T h e Mirror D iary 4 5 9 ). H ow ever, w here the trope o f the talking book as G ates im agines it
requires so m e kind o f sacrifice, som e adm ission to the abject status that is im plicit in the texts o f the
dom inant culture, H on go in this later piece seem s to refute the n ecessity o f that sacrifice. H e has full
con fid en ce in the authority o f the alternative text w hich he im agines.
17 Y o u n g s bibliography notes that the phrase, hybrid cou n ter-en ergies, com es from C ulture a n d
Im p eria lism (S aid 2 3 5 ). A d d ition ally, the phrase, disjunctive, lim inal sp a ce, com es from H om i B habhas
essay D isse m iN a tio n published in N a tio n a n d N a rra tio n (3 1 2 ).
18 For fu ll treatm ent o f the p oliticized nature o f the term, B orderlands, in a C hicano/a context, see G loria
A nzaldua B o rd e rla n d s/L a F ro n tera : The N ew M e stizo and the introduction to C riticism in the B o rd e rla n d s
by H ector C alderon and Jose D avid Saldivar.
19 In The S c h o o n er F light, W a lco tts narrator encounters the ghosts o f the m iddle passage w h ile on an
ocean journey through the Caribbean. In M orrison s B e lo v e d , the ghost, the m anifestation o f historical
trauma, returns to force Sethe and D en ver into a confrontation with the m ateriality o f history that they had
attempted to deny and consign to the past.

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Chapter Three
His Company of Visionaries: Derek Walcott and the
Education of the Postcolonial
Oh miserable chieftain, w here and when
W ilt thou find patience? Y et die not!...
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will w ork for theeair, earth and skies;
...thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exaltations, agonies,
and love, and m ans unconquerable mind.
-W illiam W ordsw orth
T o Toussaint TO uverture1

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I: The Problem of Inheritance

D escribing his youthful endeavors as a poet, Derek W alcott writes, I had entered
the house o f literature as a houseboy, / filched as the slum child stole, / as the young slave
appropriated / those heirlooms tem ptingly left / with the Victorian homilies of Noli
tangere ( Collected 219). Elsewhere he notes, my first poems expressed this yearning
to be adopted, as the bastard longs for his fath ers household. I saw m yself legitim ately
prolonging the mighty line of M arlowe, of M ilton ( Twilight 27-8). These statements are
characteristic not only of W alcotts relationship to the house of literature, but also of
the relationship that many postcolonial artists/intellectuals have to their colonial
education.2 Even as W alcott describes him self as wanting to legitim ately inherit the
mantle o f the great poet, he also acknow ledges his own incom m ensurable distance from
that identity of the poet that he (and his own education) has so frequently figured as
European. He describes him self as a houseboy stealing what is not rightfully his; he
calls him self a bastard, a child w ithout a real claim to his fam ilys legacy. H ow ever he
also envisions his own eventual legitim acy even as he doubts his own right to inherit the
poetic mantle of Milton. This is the obsession of W alcott's work; for while his ambitions
as a poet have been largely fulfilled over the course of his career, the vexed nature of
those am bitions rem ains a central them atic throughout. His work critiques the political
and historical nature of the same tradition he him self is em braced by.
W alcotts struggles to locate his own place in the pantheon of writers are by no
means unique. Seeking to articulate a m ethodology by which the relationships between
writers could be evaluated, M atthew A rnold argued for the need fo r touchstones, of
specim ens...of the highest poetical quality (416) to discern the m easure of a p o ets

R e p r o d u c e d with p e r m is s io n of t h e cop y rig h t o w n e r. F u r th e r r e p r o d u c tio n prohibited w ith o u t p e r m is s io n .

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work. A rnold suggests that only by comparing poets directly with great passages from
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare could their relative relationship to the whole canon be
determined. T.S. Eliot, one of W alcotts major influences, proposes that great writers
must be possessed of what he calls the historical sense. Eliot defines the historical
sense as a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it
the whole o f the literature of [the w riters] own country has a simultaneous existence and
composes a simultaneous order (431). Harold Bloom, describing his anxiety of
influence model, observes that poets are constantly involved in the process of engaging
and attem pting to rew rite their precursors. B loom s Oedipal model is also very much a
chronological model; it proposes that from M ilton on, poets have been forced into
aesthetic confrontations with their precursors.3 Such models o f w riters relationship to
their precursors, how ever well articulated and defensible, situate the w ork of this
relationship in aesthetic terms. The m ateriality of history, specifically in the case of
postcolonial writers like W alcott, the m ateriality of colonial traum a is effaced. M odels as
varied as Matthew A rnolds touchstones, E liots historical sense, or B oom s anxiety
of influence model d o n t take into account asymm etrical historical relationships such as
that between colonial and colonized.4 These various models for articulating the
relationship between writers and their influences across time and, at least in the case of
Eliot, across geographies fail to account for such material considerations as the effect of
colonialism and colonial authority on the relationship between cultures. In the case of a
w riter like W alcott, such models fail to account for the com plex and sometimes
contradictory relationship he has with his influences.

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A t the same time, however, a purely politicized consideration of W alcott's work is

insufficient. Such considerations m ight claim that "W alcott...is not W est Indian enough.
He is too much concerned with world literature and international sophistication" (M orris
178). In such critiques, which recall N gugi Wa Thiongo s condem nation of Chinua
Achebe, the purely political consideration of W alcott's work is over-determined. 5
W alcotts w ork does not easily lend itself to either of these interpretive strategies, or to a
purely political or a purely psychoanalytic interpretation. His work does not evince either
an anxiety of Oedipal poetic influence or a political agenda over-determ ining his poetics;
W alcotts work shows an anxiety concerning his own legitim acy coupled with the
uncertainty of his desire to belong to a cultural tradition so closely allied with
colonialism. These anxieties form the context of my inquiry into D erek W alcotts poetry.
For W alcott, the relationship between the postcolonial and the dismantled
imperial adm inistration is plagued by the question of his legitim ate right to his cultural
inheritance from the West. W alcott m ight ironically call his claim upon the literary
canon illegitim ate, but rather than being a sign of his difficulty in accessing a literary
heritage, this is a distinction indicative of the larger problem facing the postcolonial
writer regarding his/her relationship to the metropolitan, form erly colonial, authority.
W alcott manages to escape the over-determ ined binaries of colonizer and colonized while
participating in and extending the very literary and cultural traditions so closely linked
with the history of colonialism and im perialism. The com peting form ulations of mimicry
which V.S. Naipaul and Homi Bhabha offer provide useful lenses through which to view
W alcotts evolving m ethod of working through his relationship to the cultural traditions
so closely allied with colonialism.

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W alcott, especially in his early work, is frequently described by critics in ways

which recall N aipauls witlessly derivative mimic. This is, as I will discuss, a mistaken
characterization that fails to take into account the subversive tendencies of W alcotts
mimicry, a mimicry which, at least in its engagement with certain modes throughout his
work bears a far greater resemblance to Homi B habhas form ulation of mimicry than to
N aipauls form ulation. W alcotts early work, by his own admission, is often heavily
im itative it is indicative of his own self-made exclusion from the canon; it is what
prompts him to describe him self as a houseboy, and thieving slum child when
describing his im itations and invocations of the W estern literary canon. This diminution
of his own self-worth recalls both F anons form ulation o f the self-sacrificing sadist as
well as N aipauls derivative mimic.6 H owever while W alcotts w ork has been read as an
evolving oeuvre, the m ajority o f criticism describing this evolution has read the
difference between the early W alcott and the later W alcott as the difference between
N aipauls model of m im icry and B habhas model.7 The early W alcott is seen as slavishly
derivative; the later W alcott is read as w ork of a poet full of his postm odern authority,
cutting and pasting at will the methods and rhythms of the canon into what has been
described as the w ork o f a postcolonial master. This is a distinction that has been misread
by critics as dem onstrating the absolute difference between W alcott as a young poet
operating in the mode of N aipauls im itative mimic and the older postcolonial working in
the mode of B habhas mimic. This is not, as I will argue, entirely true.
While W alcotts early work certainly evinces this tendency, it is not so absolutely
imitative and derivative as critics from Stuart Brown to Rei T erada m ight suggest.8
W alcotts relationship to the canon has changed; but what has changed most is a

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relationship to history and to traum a and the ways in which that relationship is reflected
also in his relationship to and evocation of the Western literary canon. His method, I will
argue, has alm ost always been the method of B habhas m im icto one extent or another.
His work, I will argue, has always articulated the fractures at the heart of colonial cultural
authority, but, unlike B habhas mimic, this has not always resulted in the articulation of
unequal m aterial pow er relationships between colonial and colonized.

W hereas for

Bhabha, m im icry always emerges as a sign of contestation to colonial authority, that

contestation is not always fram ed in the explicit historical term s of colonial and
colonized. In other words, W alcotts mimicry m ight indeed highlight the fissures always
already present in the canon, but that mimicry does not always articulate the specific
historical m ateriality of the postcolonial; it m ight ju st only articulate the fracture of
colonial authority. The point in his career where his early w ork has been seen to be
slavishly im itative and when W alcott is generally thought to have been w orking under the
guise o f N aipauls m im ic is not as homogeneous and univocal as many critics would have
us believe. Rather, while W alcotts body of w ork dem onstrates a clear evolution of
method, the distinction between the apprentice im itator and the m aster m im ic is not so
clear as has been generally thought.
Even in his early work there are some indications of the kind o f method he would
continue to em ploy throughout his whole body of work, a m ethod that is far closer to
Bhabhas model of the m im ic than to N aipauls model. W hile there are instances in this
early w ork where F anons and N aipauls form ulation m ight apply, there are also
instances that clearly anticipate the poetic m ethods that com e in W alcotts later work,
which evince the sure hand of a poet who m ight have influences, but who is no longer

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anxious about his legitimacy as a poet of the English language. As with the other writers
in this study, I will consider W alcotts interaction with tropes and them es originally
found in British romanticism , specifically the romantic landscape. I will, in the course of
this argum ent, outline the ways in which even W alcotts early uses of tropes and themes
originally found in British romanticism bear a far greater resemblance to Bhabhas vision
of the revolutionary mimic than to N aipauls vision of the slavishly derivative mimic.
For the purposes of this study, and in an attem pt to be as clear as possible, I will
use the term mimic and mimicry according to Homi B habhas form ulation of the concept
whenever it m ight be possible for there to be confusion. Similarly, when referring to
N aipauls version of mimicry in any context where it m ight not be clear that N aipauls
version is intended, I will instead use the term imitation. A dditionally, it is my argument
that W alcotts version of im itation is, at times, significantly different that N aipauls
version. W alcotts version of im itation does not always result in the direct replication of
canonical texts that N aipauls version implies. As I will discuss, W alcotts im itations do,
at times, reveal their own tendencies toward the activity o f B habhas mimic. Finally,
where there is a distinction between W alcotts early and later work, this is, in the main, a
distinction that indicates a differing relationship to a history of historical and colonial
traum a rather than a vastly differing relationship to o n es literary ancestors. It will be my
contention that one of the prim ary differences between the apparently imitative stage of
W alcotts work and the m im icking stage as it is read by critics (as opposed to the
apprentice of the early work and m aster of the laterthis periodization is ultimately a red
herring) is a differing relationship to traum a, a relationship that is m elancholic and
postmodern all at o n ce.9 W here the young seemingly im itative poet is mostly

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overw helm ed by the force and coherence of trauma, the older mimic mines the traumatic
history of colonialism as ably as he mines the lines and m otifs of the W estern literary
canon.
W hile it is certainly possible to consider W alcotts work against any and all styles
of the W estern literary canon, for the purposes of these chapters I will limit my primary
discussion o f W alcotts confrontation with the W estern literary canon to a discussion of
his engagem ent with the tropes of British romanticism , specifically in terms of
rom anticism s treatm ent of landscape. This engagem ent with the rom antic landscape (as
well, ultim ately, with all of his canonical influences) is constant throughout his career.
However, unlike his engagem ent with other kinds o f motifs and styles drawn from the
encyclopedia of the W estern literary canon, W alcotts engagem ent with the rom antic
landscape is exceptional. Even in his early work, the way in which he engages the
rom antic landscape anticipates his later poetic mode of engaging a wide variety of styles
and m otifs o f the W estern literary canon. W here much of his early w ork has been taken
to be categorically im itative, his engagem ent o f the rom antic landscape stands as an
exception; rather than im itating the rom antic landscapes, in his early work W alcott is
already rem aking the conditions of possibility surrounding the evocation of landscape
itself. His landscape, while identifiably romantic, does not simply im itate the landscapes
imagined by W ordsworth and others. Just as his later w ork will do with other styles (reim agining, for instance, the Homeric journey of Odysseus), W alcotts version of
romanticism does more than re-im agine the rom antic landscape and resituate it in the
world o f the postcolonial. He extends the possibilities o f a tradition; he revises the very
tradition that he would claim as an influence. A consideration o f the ways in which

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W alcotts rom antic landscapes function as subversive postcolonial sites dovetails neatly
with some recent criticism that considers the ways in which the rom antic landscape itself,
frequently argued to support various modes of colonialism, m ight be less homogenous
than it had been previously considered.10
W alcott, like a number of other contem porary postcolonial writers, evokes the
landscapes o f the postcolonial state in ways which recall the landscapes imagined by
eighteenth century British romantics: sublime, beautiful, and threatening. However,
W alcotts evocation of romanticism , even in his very early work, marks a contem porary
world view inflected with the historical concerns of the postcolonial; it requires that we
consider the Caribbean landscape not only as a place of beauty, but also as a place where
the M iddle Passage ended and the horrors o f North A m erican slavery began. W alcotts
postcolonial rom anticism requires a reconsideration of the ways in which the postcolonial
artist/intellectual engages with the artistic and intellectual traditions that have been so
much a part of the very colonial legacy against which he/she struggles.

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II: The Apprentice Mimic

The classics can console. B ut not enough.
-Sea G rapes
As his body of work has evolved over the decades, W alcott has developed an
aesthetic that firm ly situates him as a legitim ate heir to the W estern literary tradition; he
has also developed an aesthetic that is postm odern and postcolonial at the same time. His
solution has been to become a part of the tradition even as his very existence and status as
an artist calls aspects of that tradition into question.

Describing W alcott's dilem m a and

method, Seam us Heaney writes that:

The hum anist voices of his education and the voices from his home ground keep
insisting on their full claims, pulling him in two different directions. He...had the
capacity to write with the elegance o f a Larkin and make him self a ventriloquist's
doll to the English tradition which he inherited...he also has the capacity to write
with the murky voluptuousness o f a N eruda and make him self a romantic tongue,
indigenous and awash in the prophetic. He did neither, but made a them e o f the
choice and the im possibility of choosing. (24)
Peter Burian echoes Heaney and writes that, in W alcott's case, "the landscape and
troubled history o f the Antilles pulled him in one direction, while his brilliant
assimilation o f the classical W estern education by which the colonial power asserted its
cultural hegemony pulled him in another. It is not that W alcott had to choose between
them...rather, he has been able to make the choice, or rather im possibility of m aking it,
one of his m ost fertile themes" (360). A dditionally, Helen V endler remarks that W alcott
"was in all things 'a divided child,' loyal to both 'the stuffed dark nightingale of Keats' and
'the virginal unpainted world' of the islands" (Poet 23).

Critics of W alcotts w ork note

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that the p o ets method refuses to invest one tradition over the other; rather his method has
been one of enacting the discursive play between these traditions.

W alcott's method, as

it has developed over the course o f his career, recalls all the com plexities of
postmodernism, specifically the kind of postmodernism Homi Bhabha invokes in his
form ulation of postcolonial m im icry.11 He has freely drawn from the body of the
Western canon and in the process transform ed and extended the possibilities of that
canon.
W alcott's early aesthetic appears to indicate a real belief in the autonom y of
tradition; as he him self as well as critics have argued, the canon appears to have a
distinctive and coherent presence in his early work. He writes in Another Life that he
"entered the house of literature as a houseboy, / filched as the slum child stole (10).
Literature, as W alcott figures it early on, stands com plete and separate from him self; the
postcolonial writer is an orphaned child, a "bastard [who] longs for his father's
household" (Twilight 27). The body of the W estern literary canon is figured as an
external entity possessed fully of its own internally coherent presence, a structure to
which W alcott can only wish admittance. The postcolonial is an orphaned child staring
through the glass from the outside, hungry and abandoned. As this model has been
accepted by critics as an accurate one, W alcott's early work ("Prelude", "As John to
Patmos", "Origins", "A City's Death by Fire") has been mistakingly characterized as
distinctly imitative. In his biography of W alcott, Bruce King remarks that, "[tjhe thirtyfive pages of 25 Poem s were an anthology of influences applied to local subject-matter"
(58). King notes that W alcotts task early on was to to adjust his youthful education
within the English tradition to the still undescribed world of St Lucia with its different

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seasons, strong primary colours, tropical culture, and muscular sem i-nude black bodies
(42). Early responses to 25 Poem s noted "its echoes of Keats", and the "many echoes in
these poem s; of Gerard Manley H opkins...; of Auden...; of Dylan Thom as" (Collymore
89). Helen Vendler, in a review of W alcott's 1982 collection, Fortunate Traveller,
remarks th a t "Derek W alcott is a poet...whose voice was for a long time a derivative
one...there was an often unhappy disjunction between his explosive subject [the black
colonial experience]...and his harmonious pentameters, his lyrical allusions..." (23). Paul
Bresline rem arks that in W alcotts early works [t]he influences of Pound, Joyce, Yeats,
Eliot, A uden, Thom as, and Spender appear as unassimilated borrow ings (17). I will
argue that even in this early, derivative, mode, W alcotts voice still bore some traces of
w hat would come.
W alcott, early on, appears to see the canon as an always already constructed
structure possessed of its own internally cohering presence to which he seeks to gain
admittance. King notes that at the start o f his career, W alcott would fill exercise books
with im itations of poems by other poets. He would use Spender, Hopkins, Eliot, Pound,
A uden, or Thom as as models but em ploy the landscape of St Lucia as his subject matter.
These tendencies account, in part, for the readings of W alcotts early w ork as witlessly
derivative. Yet even while he devoted him self to learning the craft o f poetry and
applying it to this landscape of the New W orld, W alcott would seek to give the local
landscape a value as authentic and w orthy as that of E u ro p e... [and defy] the European
prejudice that nothing o f value really existed in the New W orld (K ing 42). It would
appear that he had changed the subject m atter but still relied on the linguistic and
aesthetic norm of the W estern tradition. As such, while the move to geographically

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resituate the poetic aesthetic would anticipate a much more successful postmodern
method to com e, at the start W alcotts method seemed to have a num ber of distinctly
imitative features. However, while even as W alcotts very earliest work sim ply
resituated W estern aesthetic strategies in the setting of the Caribbean, he demonstrated a
certain level of self-consciousness about repeating them. I would argue that W alcott,
perhaps influenced by E liots historical sense and initially aware of the revisionary
nature of all imitation, performed the kinds of imitations that he saw his European and
Western influences perform in the course of their careers. However, the kinds of
imitations that he performed were not witlessly derivative, they were imitations that
contained anxieties about the act of imitation, they were, in short, instances o f mimicry.
For example, even where he did im itate Eliot, he was also im itating Eliot im itating
Dante who was him self im itating V irgil.12 There is a very real and consistent aspect of
intervention that is built into this model o f imitation. It is, I would argue, not simply just
imitation, but it is, and has always been, a form of m im icry, though perhaps a form of
mimicry that does not yet account fo r the asymm etry between colonial and postcolonial
cultural authority. There is a self-consciousness in this particular model of imitation, of
mimicry rather, that is not always present in the early W alcott. Poem s such as A C itys
Death by Fire, do not evince the same kinds of anxieties about the act of im itation or
the poets place in a great chain of im itato rs.13 As such, I do not mean to suggest that
there is never any such thing as an uncritical imitation or that all repetition is ultimately
mimicry, but rather that W alcott does at times dem onstrate a self-consciousness about the
model of imitation which he employs, a self-consciousness which am ounts to an act of
mimicry.

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As I have m entioned earlier, such models of canonical imitation, of canonical

genealogy, do not take into account the unequal historical relationship between colonial
powers and their form er subjects. I would also argue that even from the very start,
W alcott dem onstrated not only his anxiety about the cultural and historical blinders
necessitated by such imitations, but that, even at this early stage, he sought to introduce
historical and cultural difference as one of his ways of revising the conditions of
possibility for literary mimicry.
As his career progressed, W alcotts aesthetic would becom e postm odern in the
Jamesonian sense. He would abandon mimetic imitations and em brace the mimicking
im peratives of pastiche.14 As I will note, he w ould come into his own voice and remake
the very traditions out of which he had sprung until eventually...[this]...colonial
offshoot... o f English art and poetry became St Lucian, W est In d ian ... and then took [its]
place in that international m useum of the w orlds culture (King 43). His method of
allusion became less the method of the youthful poet im itating the masters, and more the
method of a master freely draw ing from a series o f texts, the method of cannibaliz[ing[
of all the styles of the p a st...[a n d ]...th e play of random stylistic allusion (Jameson 18).
W alcott becomes a truly postm odern poet, though not entirely in the m anner in which Rei
Terada argues. Terada suggests that while on the surface W alcotts language does not
seem overtly P ostm odern...[he] is obviously a...postcolonial obsessed on the thematic
level with cultural and linguistic displacem ent-a concern som etim es held to be a
hallm ark of Postm odern literature (212). W here Terada locates W alcotts
postmodernity prim arily in his them es and subjects, I am suggesting that the
classification of W alcott as a postm odern m ight also lie in his very m ethod of allusion

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and his ab ility to revise the very traditions which have influenced him. But where
W alcotts full ability to remake the very tradition which he seeks to revise and rebel
against co m es to light only in his later work, this impulse is evident in his early work in
his attem pts to adequately represent a different kind of romantic landscape, a landscape
that is postcolonial as well as sublime. W alcotts treatm ent of landscape has, throughout
his body o f work, a distinct aura of romanticism. He has always made free with its tropes
and them es, adapting them to his own specific historical and cultural situation. He
approaches the methods of the rom antic landscape as if they were unhinged from their
cultural context. Even in his early poems, the language of his landscapes struggles to
adequately represent both the beauty and traum a o f his postcolonial w orlda struggle
not unlike his greater one of incorporating the realities of the postcolonial in the aesthetic
tradition o f his literary forebears.
W alcotts early work m ostly stands as a series of poetic experim ents where he
engages a m ultiplicity of motifs and leitm otifs ranging from his use of phrasings,
allusions, and, as his project developed, characters drawn from the w estern literary
tradition. His early w ork echoes Eliot, Dante, Baudelaire, Joyce, John Synge, W.H.
Auden, and Dylan Thom as am ong others.15 He readily invokes Othello, Robinson
Crusoe, and St. John the Divine, am ong others. There are certainly some m om ents of
uncritical im itation in these invocations of his literary influences. H owever at times there
are also fissures evident in this strategy; they occur underneath a series of allusions. At
their m ost obvious, W alcotts concerns are evident in phrases that betray his anxiety
about the coherent authority he grants to his influences. For the most part, he places his
geography and his history into the modes and styles of his influences w ithout yet

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perform ing the categorical interventions of his later years that would call into question
the very cohering presence of the canon. But the anxieties he has about the implications
of his m odes of im itations are clear sometimes even in his earliest works and these
anxieties clear the way for his larger and more categorical interventions in his later work.
In one of W alcotts earliest published poems, Prelude (1948), he already begins
to articulate how he, a divided child, [is] torn between the undocum ented experiences
of the St. Lucian landscape and the other life offered by European literature and art
(Thieme 88). The otherness of European literature and art seems to function as a
coherent presence in this poem, but not to the extent that it undermines the larger project
of revising that selfsame tradition. W hile seeking out a position from which to articulate
both his poetic as well as his political project, this early poem o f W alcotts, with its
lengthy citations and allusions to Eliot and Dante, seemingly works as an admirable
imitation, a witlessly derivative im itation under the guise of N aipauls form ulation of the
mimic. The particular way in which W alcott manages this im itation, however, will
indicate that N aipauls model of the m im ic was never a good fit for W alcott, despite the
critical argum ents to the contrary.
W alcott adopts the mask of the poet, a m ask he inherits via Eliot and Dante, but
reflects, as did they, on the nature of this adaptation. In invoking E liots revisions of
Dante (who him self was, in part, revising Virgil), he places him self in a tradition of
revisionists, of poets who explicitly understand the m ethod o f im itation to be one which
relies on each poet to revise and rew rite his literary forebears. T he way in which
W alcott invokes Eliot and Dante suggests that he him self is aw are o f the contingent and
revisonary nature of the canonthat it itself is always being rewritten. Walcott, in fact,

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suggests through his invocation o f his literary influences, that the body of the canon is
itself m ade up of texts that are constantly rew riting themselves. This is an essential move
in W alcotts aesthetic development. By questioning the naturalized coherence of the
canon, by questioning its status as a fully form ed structure standing outside of historical
time, W alcott opens the spaces necessary for his own intervention into the canon. By
denaturalizing the historical status of the canon, W alcott opens the way to denaturalize
the cultural status of the canon. If the canon is open to historically aesthetic revisions, if,
in other words, reading Eliot can affect the way we read Shakespeare or Dante, then the
canon m ust also be open to cultural revisions, so that W alcotts status as a postcolonial
can affect the possibilities of romanticism. W alcott opens up the space for his own
postcolonial romanticism.
Prelude, the first poem in W alcotts 1984 Collected Poems, begins with the
speaker setting up the three significant parties of the poem: the colonials, the colonized,
and the poet himself. The historical and contem porary pow er relationship is clearly
established: the colonials (who appear in the guise of the tourist), the colonized (who are
still, despite decolonization, functionally colonized), and the speaker of the poem who
stands observing outside of this polarized binary. W alcott positions the figure of the
poet, the speaker, as something of a traitorous outsider, but one who is seemingly
untouched by the modalities of colonial and postcolonial power. By first reifying the
figure of the poet and placing him outside of the binary of colonial/colonized, W alcott
seemingly endorses the authority of the poet as transcending m ere historical and cultural
differencesan idea of the poet that echoes A rnolds faith in A ristotles observation
that the superiority of poetry over history consists in its possessing a higher truth (416).

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It might in d eed be W alcotts intent to reify the figure of the poet much in the tradition of
Shelley w h o called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world (335). However
this act in th e end disrupts the coherence and presence of that tradition, and, ultimately,
articulates the fissures and fractures that have always been at the heart o f authority. In
other w ords, W alcotts mimicry o f poetic authority is performed in such a m anner as to
give full faith and credence to B habhas form ulation of the mimic as one who, in the act
of m im icking the texts of colonial authority, dem onstrates that authority to have always
been falsely coherent. This effect is born out in the ways in which W alcotts citations of
poetic authority am ount to confessions of the inevitably traitorous nature o f the canon
the new texts are always revisions and betrayals of their predecessors. T he myth of an
internally coherent and uncontested canon is laid bare. H ow ever while W alcotts
engagem ent of the canon points to its contingent nature, he has yet to interrogate the
im plications o f engaging the cultural texts by which colonial authority asserted its
hegemony. His consideration of the canon reveals it to be always already open to
revisions, but does not yet articulate the concerns of the postcolonial it simply betrays
anxiety w ithout perform ing the categorical revision of the possibilities o f canonical
representation. The canon is revealed to be open to aesthetic revision, but it is not yet
opened up to a critique of its cultural context.
The poem opens with the speaker w atching clouds gather over / The uncouth
features of this, my prone island {In a Green Night, 11).16 The image of the island as
passive and savage is extended, in the next stanza, to the non-European people of the
island:
M eanwhile the steamers which divide horizons prove

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U s lost;
F o u n d only
In tourist booklets, behind ardent binoculars;
F o u n d in the blue reflection of eyes
T h a t have known cities and think us here happy. (11, lines 4-9)
Even as th e island itself is prone, the people who populate the island are themselves
lost, th e ir identity only available in tourist booklets and in the gaze of the blue-eyed
m etropolitan W esterner. The passive nature of the landscape also indicates the
vulnerable nature of its people to colonialism. This imperial gaze reduces the St. Lucian
native to an object available for the consideration and consum ption o f em pire.'7 Thus
the gaze o f the tourists can be posited as a particularly potent non-violent means of
achieving the violent aims of im perialism .18 A dditionally, the identity of the postcolonial
native is unintelligible; the very existence o f the steamers bringing tourists and colonial
capitalism proves / us lost. W alcott highlights the opposition between the blue-eyed
colonials who have known cities and the postcolonials who lack any identity other than
the ones dictated to them by tourist booklets.
W alcotts own position as observer, as poetic chronicler, however, escapes the
binary of colonizer and colonized. He obtains his authority by situating him self as a third
alternative, one that is ostensibly neither native object nor colonial eye. Instead of
m aking a claim for the absolute authority and truth of his gaze, he makes the pledge to
note the living im ages / of flesh that saunter through the eye (4, In 22-24). By
resituating the native bodies in his own gaze, he attem pts to reorient agency and
subjectivity. The St. Lucian natives who, rather than being lost and found only in the

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gaze of the tourist, are, in W alcotts alternative form ulation, those who saunter through
his passive eye. They are possessed of an agency and a swagger that they lack in the
eyes of the colonials. The poets gaze is not the source of ontological knowledge, it is
transparent in the Emersonian sense, it works as witness w ithout itself having any sort
o f ontological bein g .19 The living im ages of flesh are posited as subjects in the poets
gaze rather than the passive objects who m ight be pierced and determ ined by the blueeyes of the W estern tourist.
Even this reversal and granting of agency to St. Lucians is not, however, w ithout
its paradoxical nature. His claim to authority is not a radical claim. W alcott m ight
reverse the dynam ic of the imperial gaze and return agency to the objects o f the gaze,
making them the subject and the passive, w atching eye the object through which they
saunter; how ever as he does so he adopts the mask o f the poet, a m ask that is distinctly
constructed vis-a-vis the W estern canon, specifically in this poem through Eliot and
Dante. The question arises: does W alcott overturn one im perial gaze only to substitute it
with another, how ever cleverly disguised? I would argue that he does not ultim ately do
this. W alcotts adaptation of the m ask o f the poet is an adaptation that is itself in a long
line of adaptations that ultimately serves to underm ine the coherent integrity o f the canon.
In other words, by participating in a tradition that is built on questioning the authority of
the canon, W alcott avoids the bind of simply reinstating the pow er relationships between
colonial authority and the postcolonial.
Stuart Brown notes that W alcott dons a m ask in this poem akin to E liots Prufrock
who m ust defend his vulnerability by m aking time To prepare a face to m eet the faces
that you m eet ( The Apprentice, 17).20 Echoing Prufrocks need to prepare himself,

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W alcott w rites that he cannot make his life public, Until I have learnt to suffer / In
accurate iam bics (11, 16-17). Before he can write his own story, he adm its the necessity
of know ing and being able to reproduce (albeit with a difference) the kinds o f work that
have preceded him. Until that time he says that he will,
go, o f course, through all the isolated acts,
M ake a holiday of situations,
Straighten my tie and fix im portant jaw s. (11, 18-20)
Even as E lio ts Prufrock prepared a face, so too does W alcott prepare his own mask, his
own identity as a poet, as observer who m ight note the living im ages o f his fellow St.
Lucians. Even as W alcott undermines the authority of the colonial gaze, and by
extension the authority of the gaze itself as a means of determ ining and defining the
object of the gaze, he constructs the figure o f the poet as a figure who consciously
constructs him self within and against tradition. Even as J. A lfred Prufrock declared his
willingness to don, My m orning coat, my collar mounting firm ly to the chin, / My
necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a sim ple pin (42-43), W alcott vows to dress
properly, to metaphorically don a mask, to make a holiday of situations, / Straighten my
tie and fix im portant ja w s (18-20). This m ask is not so very much different from
Prufrocks mask that is itself a rew orking of a Dantean tradition of the poet as visionary,
as prophet. H owever this traditional figure of the poet is a figure whose existence
acknowledges that acts of betrayal are at the heart of a p o ets inheritancethat the act of
imitation itself dem onstrates the contingent nature of the text (and the canon and
ultimately the whole cultural tradition which is associated with the W est) which is being
imitated. That, in other words, m im icry, such as that W alcott perform s or as that Eliot

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and Dante both perform, inevitably discloses, the am bivalence of colonial discourse
[and] also disrupts its authority (Bhabha 88).
W alcotts echoes of Eliot work in tandem with the poem s conclusion, an allusion
to Dante. A t the end of Prelude, W alcott writes:
Until from all I turn to think how
In the middle o f the journey through my life
O how 1 came up you, my
Reluctant leopard of the slow eyes. (11, 23-26)
Some 600 years earlier, at the start of the first canto of the Inferno, Dante writes, W hen 1
had journeyed half of our lifes way / 1 found m yself within a shadowed forest (Canto I,
1). W alcotts poetic career begins with the same flourish with w hich Dante opens the
Divine Comedy. This am ounts to an allusion of sorts to the epic nature of the p o ets
project as epic poem s and thus poem s dealing with epic m atters traditionally begin in
medias res. A dditionally, where W alcott com es upon a reluctant leopard of the slow
eyes at the end o f Prelude, so too does Dante, at the start of the D ivine Com edy come
upon a leopard, very quick and lithe, / a leopard covered with a spotted hide (31-32).
This leopard in Dante im pedes his journey, often causing him to turn back and find a new
path.21 In W alcotts sym bolic register the significance of the leopard is much more
ambiguous than in Dante. If anything W alcotts leopard would seem to have m ore in
common with D antes Beatrice (w ith her holy eyes (Purgatorio, canto 31, 133)) than
with the lustful w arning beast at the start of the Inferno. The figure o f the reluctant
leopard is one to which the speaker of Prelude w illingly turns; m oreover this turn
toward the figure of the leopard is a m editative one: the speaker turns from isolated

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acts, holiday situations, and meditates on how he came upon this slow-eyed figure.
The leopard seems, if anything, a rom antic figure, yet not a lustful and destructive one as
we might read D antes leopard as being. This is a m om ent of W alcotts intervention into
the tradition of the canon he invokes D antes leopard, but rather than derivatively
imitating Dante, W alcott transform s the figure warning of lust into a figure of
rom anticized refuge, a figure who provides solace and a bulw ark against the demands of
noting the living images / of flesh that saunter through the eye (Collected 4). This
ambiguous rew orking o f D antes symbology is indicative of a much larger and more
significant rew orking of tradition itself, a reworking that will become especially evident
when W alcott engages the rom antic landscape.
W alcotts allusions occur in an alm ost genealogical pattern. For even as E liots
quoting of Dante in the epigraphs to The W aste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock shows how Dante stands so very much behind E liots work, Eliot him self
stands behind much of W alcotts early work. Stuart Brown notes that Eliot was clearly
W alcotts first m aster (19). E liots work was both adm ired and suspected by...the
literary world to which the young poet aspired. Additionally Eliot was an outsider, a
colonial, who had somehow captured the im aginative centre ground (19). W alcott, in
alluding to both Dante and Eliot, mimics E liothe repeats E lio ts acts of allusion, and
begins to slightly open the door for the kinds of revisonary tactics which would come full
force later in his career.22
As W alcott works to establish the authority of the poet as a viable alternative to
the authority of tourist booklets he draws solely on the authority of the poet as
imagined by Dante and extended by Eliot. However both Dante and Eliot form ulate a

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complex and somewhat contradictory authority for the poet. In both cases (as in
W alcotts) the authority of the poet is simultaneously reified even as it is doubted. In the
epigraph to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Eliot quotes from D antes Inferno
where D ante and Virgil have descended to the eighth circle of Hell and have encountered
the tortured souls o f the fraudulent counselors.

In the passage that Eliot quotes, one of

these tortured souls, G uido da M ontefeltro, responds to D antes request for his identity
and story. M ontefeltro agrees to tell Dante his tale but only because he is sure that Dante
will not be able to leave Hell and spread this story. Dante the pilgrim says nothing to
disabuse M ontefeltro of this notion.

M ontefeltro says (and Eliot quotes):

If I thought my reply were meant for one

who ever could return into the world,
this flam e w ould stir no more; and yet, since none
if what I hear is tru eever returned
alive from this abyss, then without fear
of facing infam y, I answ er you. (Canto 27, 61-66).
Dante the pilgrim, over the course of the rest of the Divine Comedy, returns to Earth and
becomes Dante the poet who then tells this tale of Guido da M ontefeltro. This m om ent
in the Divine Comedy suggests a certain ethos regarding the responsibility of the poet.
Dante, as both pilgrim and poet, owes less to Guido da M ontelfeltros assumptions about
the confidentiality of his story and more to the aesthetic and ethos of the Divine Comedy
as a poetic project. The dem ands of this poetic project require that M ontefeltro's tale be
told despite Dante the pilgrim s im plicit promise to keep his secret. E liots citation of
this moment in Dante suggests a sim ilar dynam ic between the speaker of Prufrock and

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Eliot the p o et. For even as Montefeltro tells Dante the story of his damnation, so too
does E lio ts use of the Dante epigraph suggest that Prufrock confesses his failures, in
part, because he is deceived by the confidential nature of this confession. The authority
of the poet is reified in this tradition; the betrayal of the confession, be it Guido da
M on telfeltro s or J. Alfred Prufrocks, is of secondary consideration to the power and
authority o f the poet. And yet there is a simultaneous counter-action to this reification of
the poets authority. Even as the poet is instantiated as the primary figure in this
dynamic, th a t authority comes only at the m om ent of betrayal. This paradoxical
valuation o f the poets authority is exactly what W alcott imitates; even as E liots
im itation o f Dante simultaneously avows and disrupts the authority o f the poet, so too
does W alco tts uses o f Dante and Eliot avow and disrupt the authority o f the poet and, by
extension, the very tradition to which the poet belongs. He relies upon precisely this
paradoxical authority of the poet in order to posit his ability to escape the binary of
colonizer/colonized as authority in general, be it literary or colonial, is suspect; it is
instantiated only at the m om ent of betrayal.
In this very early poem, W alcott invokes the paradoxical authority of Eliot and
Dante to articulate the function of the poet as a being always already caught up in an
endless series of revisions and rewriting. Such a m ove clears the space for W alcott to
add another layer to this series of revisions and rew ritings; rather than offer the kind of
aesthetic and them atic rew riting that Eliot perform s on Dante, W alcotts project will be
profoundly postcolonial-he seeks to articulate the asym m etrical pow er relationships
between colonial and colonized as it obtains to his poetics. W here a number of critics
have cited this early poem as much in the main o f one o f N aipauTs mimic men,

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borrow ers, not producers (Nixon, 130), in fact it suggests that not only does W alcott
the postcolonial have the authority necessary to revise the conditions of possibility of
what is canonical, but also that such an authority has always been a part of the process of
the canons formation.
In another early poem, As John to Patm os, W alcott's anxiety about the
inadequacy o f his inherited m ethodology of im itative mimicry begins to become evident
as he am bivalently engages the biblical narrative of St. John the Divine receiving the
Revelation o f the A pocalypse on the Greek island o f Patmos. W here in Prelude,
W alcott invoked his poetic predecessors with an ironic sense o f their own im plicit acts of
betrayal o f their literary predecessors, in As John to Patm os his anxieties about the
limitations o f such aesthetic canonical mimicry comes to light. For even as W alcott
articulates his own aesthetic intervention into literary tradition by shifting the locale of
the poem to St. Lucia, he becomes aware of the dissonance between the application of
colonial modes o f apprehension applied to a now -postcolonial state. W here betrayal and
rewriting is instantiated into the models of literary inheritance, the new poet is simply
rewriting his precursors; any sense of betrayal is individuated. Once modalities of pow er
im plicit in the colonial/colonized relationship are brought to bear, the postcolonial poet is
no longer dealing with the canon in a historical vacuum.

Rather, concerns arise about his

relationship to a cultural authority that is deeply im plicated with colonial power. Finally,
the St. Lucian landscape receives a far more in depth treatm ent than in Prelude. The
result of this treatm ent is, as I will discuss, an engagem ent with rom anticism that places
the landscape of St. Lucia in opposition to tourism , m odernization, and the other

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m anifestations of neocolonialism, a move which anticipates W alcotts later use of

rom anticism as discourse with a historical role of opposition to modernization.
As John to Patm os establishes two prim ary linkages: between W alcott the poet
and St. John the prophet and between the islands of Patmos and St. Lucia. Like
Prelude and W alcotts engagement of Eliot and Dante, As John to Patm os has a
buried revisionary aesthetic even as it pays homage to one of the prim ary texts of the
western, and by extension, im perialist tradition. The linkages that W alcott draws
between St. John and him self as poet and the two islands are am bivalent; the analogous
similarities are inconsistent and selective. W alcotts im itative drive is clearly evident in
his attem pt to draw the link between the poem s speaker and St. John the Divine.
H owever his ultimate failure to effect a com plete hom ology is itself indicative of the
fissures and cracks in W alcotts im itationsfissures and cracks that are themselves the
heralds o f a subversive mimicry, a mimicry that is beginning to be performed under the
guise of B habhas form ulation of the mimic, a mim icry that sees its early starts in this
early poem s engagem ent of the rom antic landscape.
In an extensive discussion o f this poem, Tim othy H ofm eister notes, am ong other
things, that [t]he poets approach to John is...a highly selective one. W alcott works the
analogy to the prophet in order to bring out of Jo h n s apocalyptic song one of love and
praise (282). As H ofm eister notes, what is so com pletely m issing from W alcotts poem
is the wrath and savagery of Johns prophecy. W here John describes the divine violence
brought about by the end of the world and the opening of the seven seals and their
apocalyptic effects, W alcott only notes that he, like John on the rocky isle of Patmos,
"hounded / his heart to peace...[and vow s| to praise lovelong, the living and the brown

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dead" {C ollected 5). The savagery of the last days as told in John's revelation is
com pletely elided under the description of him "hound[ingj his heart to peace" (5). The
verb h o u n d in g is inadequate to describe Jo h n s vision of apocalypse, and its use is
indicative o f W alcotts intent to refashion the tradition even as he engages with it. As in
the case o f "Prelude," the poet's authority is once again reified; what W alcott proposes to
im itate is Jo h n 's ability to create his own peace through his songs of praise. The selective
nature o f th is poem 's analogy allows W alcott to recognize the primacy o f the poet as the
figure of authority. This recognition is not, however, without its attendant anxieties.
In this early poem, the poet is quite self-aw are of his distinction from the very
population w hich he purports to be m aking the subjects of his poetry.23 T here is even a
connotation o f guilt at the possibility that in assum ing the mantle of the poet that the
speaker has somehow betrayed his homeland. This connotation of guilt is key to
W alcotts anxieties about the lim itations of mim icry that functions sim ply within the
aesthetic context of the canon. W alcott describes, "the strew n-silver on w aves...[and] the
sun's brass coin on my cheek" (5). H ofm eister discusses W alcott's use o f coin im agery in
the first tw o stanzas while considering the poem as a whole as an extended reference to
the New Testam ent. He notes that:
Read in that light, the coin images take on a negative cast: "strewn-silver" would
evoke Judas's thirty pieces, the rew ard for his betrayal, and "brass coin" would
echo the "sounding brass" of Paul's fam ous letter to the Corinthians...If it is the
poet's cheek on which the sun's "brass coin" rests, then, by extension, it is he who
collects the Judas-silver. He becom es not merely a hollow vessel but the faithless
follower as well (278).

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If H ofm eister is correct, this doubt is also indicative of fissures in W alcotts aesthetic.
Conceiving of his own claim to the mantle of the poet as a kind of betrayal constitutes an
admission o f the strategy as ultimately a failure. This strategy ultim ately fails because
the poet who seeks to praise lovelong, the living and the brown dead concedes that the
very mantle of the poet that he seeks to cloak him self in itself constitutes a betrayal of
those whom he would praise. Where in Prelude W alcott participates like Dante and
Eliot in the canonical mimicry which simultaneously avows and disavows the coherence
of the canon, in As John to Patm os, the poem articulates the com plications inherent in
applying colonial cultural authority to a postcolonial site. W hereas in canonical mimicry,
betrayal occurred across aesthetic lines, in the postcolonial site, betrayal across cultural
lines can result in a betrayal of ones own identity. Therefore the poet requires another
method a m ethod that would be hinted at in W alcotts deploym ent o f the romantic
landscape in this early poem. W alcott invokes the rom antic landscape in this early poem
as he makes his first attempts to write of a landscape that no one had yet written
o f...th a t it was possible (Collected 195). This early version of W alcotts postcolonial
rom antic landscape has two prim ary features. The landscape of As John to Patm os
simultaneously avows the rom antic landscapes oppositional power to modernizations
while it disavows the eighteenth century rom antic landscapes collusion with the
discourses of im perialism and colonialism.
In something of a tacit acknow ledgem ent to what H uxley called a W ordsworthian
pantheistic w orship of nature (123), W alcott invokes the romantic landscape as he
figures the landscape of his poem as a beautiful, natural place that stands as a refuge from
and in contrast to the dustblown blood of cities ( As John to Patm os, Collected 5).

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Rom anticism and the romantic landscape in particular have been theorized to function in
opposition to modernization. Saree Makdisi argues that the romantic period in Britain
marks the earliest sustained...attem pt to articulate a form of opposition to the culture of
m odernization (9). And W alcott, following this conception, posits the beauty of the St.
Lucian landscape in contrast not only to the urban sprawl o f the cities, but also, by
extension, to the historical and cultural legacies of violence, slavery, and colonialism.
This contrast draws the distinction between the St. Lucian landscape and the forces of
m odernization that operate in concert with capitalism and neocolonialism (represented in
part by the steam ships in Prelude). Here W alcott sets up a rom anticized landscape in
opposition to the cities and by extension to metropolitan colonial authority. This poem
attempts to reconcile the traum as of slavery by placing its faith in the pantheistic good
will of natural beauty. M aking an argum ent for the redem ptive pow er o f beauty (a
rom antic gesture if ever there was one), W alcott writes, For beauty has surrounded / Its
black children, and freed them o f homeless ditties (Collected 5). W alcott implies that
beauty alone will, in some way, repair the traum as of slavery. Beauty is, in this early
poem, a very recognizably rom antic ideal that has recuperative powers.

Furthermore,

even as he articulates the heavenly aspect of the island in verse that echoes Dylan
Thomas, W alcott also reinstates themes that could be extensions of W ordsw orths praise
of common speech and the rustic life.24 In the context of a form er colony, W alcotts
language seems to reinstate a very colonial view of the subject and the lesser status of St.
Lucia. However the language he uses to describe the beauty of the landscape in its
specificities does contain a critique of the idea of landscape and the colonial gaze that

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W.J.T. M itchell argues is part and parcel of the very developm ent of landscape as a
medium.
W .J.T . M ichells Imperial Landscape, argues that landscape as a medium and
genre is intim ately bound up with the discourses of im perialism (9). He claims that
the discourse o f landscape is a crucial means for enlisting N ature in the legitimation of
m odernity (130). Similarly Mary Louise Pratt has remarked that in seventeenth and
eighteenth century exploration texts, ft]he landscape is written as uninhabited,
unpossessed, unhistoricized, unoccupied even by the traveler them selves (51). W here
Pratt rem arks on the myth of the empty landscape as a tool for the discourses of
im perialism , Anne M cClintock observes that this myth of the empty landscape is also
the myth of the virgin land...involving both a gender and a racial dispossession.
W ithin patriarchal narrative, to be virgin is to be empty of desire and void of
sexual agency, passively awaiting the thrusting, male insem ination of history,
language and reason. W ithin colonial narrative, the eroticizing of virgin space
also effects a territorial appropriation, for if the land is virgin, colonized peoples
cannot claim aboriginal territorial rights, and white male patrimony is violently
assured as the sexual and m ilitary insem ination of an interior void. (30)
While there is little doubt, as I have observed earlier, that landscape has been deployed in
support of im perialism , here W alcott, draw ing upon the oppositional tradition that
Makdisi claims is inherent in the rom antic landscape, offers an ironically sexualized
landscape. The irony is that while draw ing upon a well established and critically
articulated tradition of sexualizing the colonial landscape even as he invokes its
romantically articulated beauty, W alcott, in adopting the rom antic mode as it operated in

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service to colonial discourse, disavows this aspect o f that mode and its support of
colonial discourse and implicates it in the very kinds of betrayals which evoke his own
anxieties.
C iting the oppositional pow er of a rom anticized landscape, W alcott writes that
"11]his island is heavenaway from the dustblown blood of cities (9), however he also
uses a num ber of ambiguous adjectives to describe the landscape of St. Lucia. As he
describes ft]he uncouth features of this, my prone island (Prelude 3) in Prelude, he
makes note of the w oods crude hair, |and] the rounded / breasts of the milky bays (As
John 5). The use of both uncouth in Prelude and crude in As John to Patm os is
ironic. In Prelude, the uncouth.. .prone descriptions of landscape is attributed to
tourist booklets...[and] eyes / That have known cities and this us here happy (3). In
As John to Patm os this same irony is repeated in the description of the wood as
crude, as well as in the eroticized description o f the rounded/ Breasts of the milky
bays (5). W here he also evokes the natural beauty in opposition to the urban sprawl,
here he evokes a sexualized landscape that ironically resembles the sexualized landscapes
of im perialism that Anne M cClintock has articulated in Im perial L eather}5 Where, as
M cClintock notes, John Leo Africanus rem arked w ithout any irony that there was no
nation under heaven more prone to venerie than the N egros (qtd in M cClintock 22),
W alcotts figuration of the landscape of St. Lucia as prone, uncouth, crude, and
with its eroticized milky bays, disavows the gendered erotics o f im perialism .26 W alcott
here perform s one o f his first significant interventions into the traditions with which he
has so consciously chosen to associate himself. The use of irony to disavow the
figuration of the landscape as available is W alcotts refutation of the part of the tradition

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of landscape which he must refute in order to preserve his own identity as a postcolonial
writer.
There, to be sure, a very real anxiety not only in this poem but throughout
W alcotts body of work regarding this question of his status as a postcolonial who works
so closely with the traditions associated with colonial authority.

In As John to P atm os,

the poet describes how he is w elcom ed by the landscape and declares that he shall
voyage no more from hom e (5). However, by linking him self so clearly with John
through a simile which extends throughout the entire poem, the speaker of the poem takes
on, at least partially, the exilic status of John on Patmos. H ofm eister notes that these
claims by the speaker to a welcom ed hom ecom ing are offset by the com parison to John:
Patm os was not hom e to John in the same way as the Caribbean island is to the
narrator (276). By taking on this exilic status, W alcott introduces and instantiates a
significant distance between him self and the living im ages o f flesh about whom he
intends to write. He does attem pt to situate the landscape of his poem in opposition to the
forces o f colonialism and m odernization, but at the same tim e he acknowledges his own
distance from those whom he would write about. W alcotts obsession in these early
poems is his own split naturehe wishes to identify with the postcolonial subjects about
whom he writes, how ever he is also clearly conscious of his own incommensurable
distance from these subjectsa distance that his role of poetic observer forces.
In another early poem W alcott mulls the nature of this distance he has, to some
extent, willingly embaced. In A Far Cry from A frica, W alcott writes:
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall 1 turn, divided to the vein?

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I w ho have cursed
T he drunken officer of British rule, how choose
B etw een this Africa and the English tongue I love?
B etray them both, or give back what they give? (18)
H ere he abandons the sly insinuations of guilt and betrayal and fram es the
problem in terrifically dramatic language, claiming to be poisoned by this division. And
yet even in this claim, it is important to note that this poison is not a lethal one; the
speaker m ight associate, to a certain extent, the English language with British colonial
rule and yet at the same tim e he recognizes the discursive difference between the two.
The speaker leaves open the door for some m ethod o f resolving the conflict: it is neither
deadly nor absolute. And even as he slyly positions him self as a Judas figure in
Prelude and As John to Patm os, he also positions him self as a redem ptive prophet,
one who swears to praise lovelong, the living and the brown dead (5). In this
am bivalent anxiety As John to Patm os, like Prelude and A Far Cry from A frica,
are poems that are indicative of W alcotts engagem ent with the W estern literary canon:
he makes liberal use of his allusive talents, but in doing so he takes part in a tradition
which has always been perpetuated by revisions and rewritings. Contrary to much of the
criticism , even in his early work W alcott is perform ing the kinds of interventions for
w hich his later work would be so much praised.
These early poems o f W alcotts are am ong the most anthologized and well
known in no small part due to their obvious and explicit allusions to W ordsworth,
Dante, Eliot, the Bible, and, in A Far Cry from A frica, all of the W estern literary
canon. These are also all poems where the poet succeeds in paying homage to his

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influences, but where he also articulates his anxieties about writing too closely to cultural
sources so directly associated with colonial authority. His own self-awareness is clearly
evidentthe anxieties of the inherently Judas-like nature of the poet in Prelude and his
doubts about the w orth of his subject in As John to Patm os indicate W alcotts
anxieties. His self-awareness in his early work is most clearly evident in A Far Cry
from A frica, where he articulates his misplaced concern that he m ight be forced to
choose betw een an African past and his own desired identity as a poet in the W estern
tradition. W alcott would, as his poetry continued, work out his own relationship to the
canon through a m ethodology that would perform the w ork of mimicry, that would
sim ultaneously establish his own text as well as the canonical texts he would engage, or
mimic, as hybrid texts. As his career progressed, W alcott would m ove on from engaging
narrative fragm ents or motifs. He would engage entire m ythic structures with anxieties
about and am bition of transform ing even those.
In W alcotts second and third collections of poetry, The Castaway and The Gulf,
he makes extensive use o f the mythical figure of Daniel D efoes Robinson Crusoe. As
Katie James notes, W alcott is not parading his literary allusions for self-aggrandisement.
His use of the Crusoe myth as an underlying pattern for The Castaway is the first step in a
series of reworkings or re-interpretations o f classic European literature (38). In the next
chapter, I will argue that James is at least partially incorrectthe Crusoe myth is not the
first step in his reworkings of classic European literature. It may have been the first full
reworking of a narrative drawn from classic European literature, but it was not the first
step in his method of reworking the canon. T hat first stepand the step that sets the
pattern and method for how he will engage the canonoccurs in even his earliest

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published work. In Prelude as well as As John to Patm os, he represents the

landscape in an identifiably romantic mode which is fraught with imitative anxietyan
anxiety that ultimately serves to destabilize and disavow any notion of an uncom plicated
imitation, an anxiety that, in short, indicates that W alcotts method has always been the
method o f Homi B habhas mimic. As I shall discuss in the next chapter, in another early
poem from his very first published collection, The H arbour (or as it was originally
published in 1948, A Fisherman Rowing H om ew ard), W alcotts next engagem ent of
the rom antic landscape would do more than his first act of postcolonial mimicry. Rather
than indicate the contingent nature of the canon and suggest the possibilities of his own
entry into the text of the canon, The H arbour, actually adapts and revises the very
methods of the canon, specifically the methods o f the rom antic landscape. The poem
engages the rom antic landscape and seeks to revise its conditions of possibility so that it
can contain the historical specificity o f the postcolonial experience. Here, W alcott sets
the pattern for how he would engage other strands o f canonical tradition. This m im icking
method, as I shall discuss, extends to not only his engagem ent with, as Katie Jam es notes,
Crusoe, but also to Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer, among others. W alcott, in recent
years, has even gone on to engage texts outside of the literary, he has engaged W inslow
Homer and Camille Pissarro in two recent books (indeed, in T iepolos H ound, he even
included color plates o f his painting, paintings that are, by his own admission, much in
the vein of W inslow H om ers paintings of the Caribbean). But it is that initial reworking
of the romantic landscape that first appears in The H arbour that sets the stage and
establishes the m ethodology for engaging tradition, a methodology that Homi Bhabha
would call mimicry.

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1 T oussaint l Ouverture becam e governor o f Haiti (then S aint-D om ingue) in 1801 and ab olish ed slavery.
W hen l O uverture resisted N ap o leo n s attem pt to reintroduce slavery and restore Saint D om in gu e to her
colonial d ep en d en ce on France, he w as captured and im prisoned w ithout trial in the French A lp s w here, as
Eric W illia m s notes, the rigours o f the clim ate and a sem i-starvation diet soon had the inevitable effect.
On April 2 7 , 1803, he w as found....dead (2 5 3 ). W illiam s notes that lO uvertures rise as the son o f a slave
to the o ffic e o f governor and the unprecedented feat by w hich a horde o f degraded and v ilified
b e in g s... w er e fashioned into an army w h ich hum bled the flow er o f British, French and Spanish
m ilitarism ....had this intellectual co n seq u en ce they m ade the N egro slave trade and slavery m orally
untenable thereafter anyw here in the w orld (272).
2 Bart M oore-G ilbert points out that the elasticity o f the term postcolonial has, in recent years, been
subjected to bitter debates regarding the proper application o f the term. M any critics in clu d in g A nne
M cC lintock, K w am e A nthony Appiah, A ijaz A hm ad, A rlif Dirlik and Stuart Hall have discu ssed the
political im p lication s o f the term p o stco lo n ia l (i.e. the legitim acy o f seein g certain region s, periods,
social-p o litica l form ations and cultural practices as g e n u in e ly p o stco lo n ia l). A concern is that the term
itself m ight e ffa c e the sp ecificity o f historical and geographical sites. K w am e A n th on y A ppiah critiques
p ost-co lo n ia lity as being the condition o f...a relatively sm all, W estern-style, W estern-trained group o f
writers and thinkers, w h o m ediate the trade in cultural com m od ities o f w orld capitalism at the periphery
(62). T his debate and the proper application o f the term and indeed all terms that claim to be descriptive
o f the d eep ly con flictu al subject p osition o f the ra c e d writer are at the heart o f the d iscu ssio n o f m ulti
ethnic literatures in the U nited States. I w ould argue that in contrast to n ew er ideas o f transnationalism or
migratory id en tities, the term, p o stco lo n ia l, rem ains a viab le and n ecessary reminder o f the im pact o f
colon ial structures, both past and present.
3 B loo m , Harold. The A n xiety o f Influence: A T heory o f P o e try . N ew York: O xford U n iversity Press,
1973.
4 A rnold, M atthew. "The Study o f Poetry." The C ritic a l T ra d itio n : C la ssic Texts a n d C o n tem p o ra ry
Trends. Ed. R ichter, D avid H. N ew York: B edford B o o k s, 1998. 4 1 1 -4 1 6 .
Eliot, T .S . "Tradition and the Individual Talent." C riticism : M a jo r S tatem en ts. Eds. K aplan, C harles, and
W illiam A nderson. N ew York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. 4 2 9 -4 3 7 .
5 S ee N gugi. D eco lo n isin g , 27. For a sum m ary o f N gu gi in this m anuscript, see n.4 in chapter one:
T renchtow n R o ck . N gugi's m odel in sists upon a rejection that W alcott is clearly u n w illin g to make.
T hese calls for a "revolutionary break w ith neo-colon ialism " sustain th em selv es through a thinly d isgu ised
b elief in an essen tialized nativism and accept, a p rio ri, the con d ition s o f essen tialism . A n d , as Edward Said
has noted, "[nativism] has often led to co m p ellin g but d em a g o g ic assertions about a native past, narrative or
actuality that stands free from w orldly tim e iself...a s if [such claim s] w ere the only ch o ice for a resisting
d ecolo n izin g nationalism" ( C u ltu re, 2 2 8 ). W alcott h im self scornfully describ es such n ativist m odes as the
work o f, "Pastoralists o f the A frican revival [w ho] should k n ow that w hat is needed is not n ew nam es for
old things, or old n am es or old things, but the faith o f u sin g the old nam es a n e w ( T w ilig h t, 9). R efuting
N gugi's demand for a "revolutionary break with neo-colon ialism " (2 7 ), W alcott seek s a differen t and far
more com p lex m ode that interrogates the p ostcolon ial artist and intellectual's relationship to the empire's
body o f culture.
6 Fanon describes the p rocess o f identification that a black sch ool boy in the A n tille s undergoes as he
identifies his ow n subjectivity with that o f the explorer, the bringer o f civ iliza tio n , the w h ite man w h o
carries truth to sa v a g es. Fanon describ es this p rocess as, a sacrificial ded ication perm eated with sa d ism
(147). Sim ilarly, Naipaul describes the m im ic men as lack in g their o w n real sen se o f identity, instead they
are m en w ho sim ply pretended to be real (1 4 6 ). In th ese very sim ilar form ulations o f the assim ilated
m im ic, Fanon and N aipaul present a very p ath ological portrait o f the m im ic he is on e w h o has abandoned
his ow n sense o f eg o in a vain attempt to b ecom e that w hich he can never be. A nd yet, sad istically, the
m im ic strives to please h is colon ial m asters by trying and trying to accom p lish the im p o ssib le, to b ecom e
one o f them .

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7Rei T eradas 1992 study o f W alcott, D erek W a lc o tts P o e try : A m erica n M im ic ry, relies on still y e t another
form ulation o f m im icry, a form ulation more rooted in postm odernism and poststructuralism . She allow s
that m im icry usually bears pejorative, if contradictory, connotations o f im itation, servility , and
m o ck e r y ...h o w e v e r I ta k e ... m im icry [to be] the representation o f a representation, a repetition o f
som ething itself repetitious (1). Terada allow s that B habhas form ulation on W a lco tts poetry has som e
bearing, but argues that B habhas form ulation o f p ostcolon ial m im icry can on ly e x p o se d iffe r e n c e ...[it
cannot] invent p len itu d es (98). Terada seem s to su g g est that W alcotts m im icry ex ceed s the mere
differentiation im p licit in Bhabhalian m im icry and that W a lco tts m im icry produces the m ultiplying
abundance m ade p o ssib le by postm odernism and poststructuralism an abundance that Baudrillard w ould
have called, the procession o f sim u lacra. T eradas reading o f m im icry , w hich she a ck n ow led ges o w es a
debt to Baudrillard assign s a value (abundance)to the act o f m im icry, o f en d less repetition, o f a hyperreal,
produced from a radiating syn th esis o f com binatory m od els in a hyperspace w ithout atm osphere
(Baudrillard 2). Her argument, citin g W alcotts p oem , N a m es, asserts that W alcott, in his act o f
reproduction, the repetition o f colon ial cultural authority, in fact ex c e ed s that authority (1 0 0 ). She
proposes, in effe ct, that m im icry produces a kind o f jo u issa n c e. Contrary to T eradas su ggestion about the
lim itations o f B habhas m odel, I w ould argue that, w h ile not proposing the production o f som ething n ew
(i.e. abundance) in the w ay that Terada reads W a lco tts form o f m im icry, Bhabhas m odel in fa ct renders
the production o f som ething n ew irrelevant. B habhas m odel o f m im icry su ggests that the act o f m im icry
itself underm ines the naturalized authority o f norm alized k n o w led g es and disciplinary p ow ers (8 6 ) and
d isclo ses the internal frisson alw ays already present in the fiction o f h om ogen ou s, naturalized colon ial
authority. A ccord in g to B habhas m od el, then, the production o f anything n ew and in ex cess o f the original
is not necessary and not p o ssib le such a proposition w ould require that on e accep t the coherence and
authority o f that w h ich is reproduced. And if the sig n ifica n ce o f m im icry is to dem onstrate the d ifference
already present at the heart o f colo n ia l authority, then the repetition that is perform ed that is itself different
and articulates the d ifferen ces already present is itse lf an e x cess, the repetition is already n ew and ex ceed s
the text upon w hich it is based a text w hich is itse lf invariably a repetition, a m im icry, a sim ulacra o f
som ething else.
8 T he m odel o f im itation as that w h ich is w itlessly d erivative is itse lf som ew h at problem atic. It proposes
that the canon and sp ecifica lly the text stand ou tsid e o f w hat Benjam in critically referred to as em pty
hom ogen ou s tim e (2 6 1 ). Such a m odel o f im itation assu m es an absolute determ ined coherence to the text
being imitated. It d oes not allo w for such w ell accepted n otion s as E lio ts rather postm odern historical
sen se.
9 In the fo llo w in g chapter I w ill d iscu ss the con n ection b etw een a revised reading o f Freuds 1917 essay,
M ourning a n d M e la n c h o lia , and the kind o f p ostcolon ial m eth o d o lo g y that W alcott em p lo y s in his
engagem en t w ith canonical literary texts.
10 S ee Saree M ak d isis R om an tic Im p eria lism : U n iv e rsa l E m pire a n d the C u ltu re o f M o d ern ity. M akdisi,
as I d iscu ss in the introduction, argues that R om anticism functioned antagonistically to the d iscou rses o f
modernization. H e argues, in particular, that the rom antic landscape fu n ction s as a counter-discourse to the
discourses o f capitalism , urbanization, and m od ern ization all associated tangentially w ith the concerns o f
im perialism and colon ialism .
11 L inking p ostcolon ialism and postm odernism , Bhabha asks, H ow d oes the deconstruction o f the sig n ,
the em phasis on indeterm inism in cultural and political ju dgem ent, transform our sen se o f the subject o f
culture? (174). He addresses the con cern s o f m any other p ostcolon ial and m inority critics w h o see
postm odernism as in fact w riting out (or off) the predicam ent and problem s o f the non-W estern w orld in a
new universalizing discou rse w h ich parallels the im p licit ethnocentrism o f the hum anism w hich
accom panied the colo n ia l project (M oore-G ilbert, 121-2). In term s o f B habhas form ulation o f
postcolonial m im icry and the hybridity o f texts m im ick ed , postm odernism , sp ecifica lly in Ja m eso n s
form ulation o f pastiche as a primary sym ptom o f postm odernism , d ovetails neatly w ith Bhabha. A s
Jam eson defines it, pastiche a llo w s for the random cannibalization o f all the sty les o f the p a st... [and [...th e

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play o f random stylistic a llu sio n (Jam eson, 18). T o co n c e iv e o f a text as pastiche, then, w ou ld en v ision it
as lacking the univocal, h o m o g en izin g presence necessary to the construction o f colonial authority. Thus,
even as B habhas hybridity underm ines the coherent authority o f co lo n ia lism , so too does pastiche
undermine the cohering presence o f text.
12 Later on in this section , I d iscu ss this particular g en ealogy at length in m y d iscu ssio n o f Prelude.
13 A C ity s D eath by F ire, lacks the anxieties about im itation that are evid en t Prelude and A s John to
P atm os. T his poem is principally about a terrible fire in June o f 1948 w hich destroyed about 2/3 o f
Castries, W a lco tts hom e tow n. T his poem , w hich Bruce K in g refers to as a m odernist son n et, positions
very clearly and uncritically the natural w orld as a romantic refu ge from the horrors o f the fire. H ow ever
this position is accom p lish ed w ithout the attendant anxieties about im itation that are evid en t in Prelude
and A s John to P atm os. W alcott p osits nature as a curative to the despair after the fire. T he green
breath o f the h ills above C astries have the pow er to re b u ild ...a lo v e I thought w as dead as n a ils in the
aftermath o f rubbled ta le s, b ales / torn open by lo o tin g , the sm oking se a and the burned rubble o f
his w ooden w orld (6).
14 My use o f the word, m im etic, is not in the classical sen se (in the Platonic or the contrasting A ristotelian
notion o f the w ord), neither is m y use o f the w ord exactly as Erich A uerbach m igh t have defined it. Rather
Im using it in the m ost com m on se n se as that w hich seek s to im itate. A s I v e said earlier, I m using the
idea o f m im icry as articulated by H om i Bhabha.
15 See Stuart B ro w n s T he A pprentice: 2 5 P oem s, E pitaph f o r the Young, P o e m s and In a G reen N ig h t.
A lso see Rei T eradas chapter, Chains o f L anguage, Chains o f Com m and: W a lco tt and P oetic In flu en ce
in D erek W a lc o tts P o e try: A m erica n M im icry.
16 The ech o o f Caliban is this description is clear. W here the island is uncouth, Caliban lacked language,
where the island is prone, Caliban w as initially the w illin g servant to Prospero and M iranda in
Shakspeares The T em pest. T h is is a com parison that W alcott ultim ately esch ew s in favor o f exp licatin g
the relationship betw een Friday and C rusoe in both his poetry (see p oem s in The C a sta w a y and his essay,
The Figure o f C rusoe).
17 Speaking o f the v io len ce inherent in the p rocess o f id en tify in g (or cla ssify in g ) the native, v is-a -v is the
gaze, R ey C how notes that w atch in g is theoretically defined as the primary agen cy o f v io len ce, an act that
pierces the other w ho inhabits the place o f the p a ssiv e victim on d isp la y (2 9 ).
18 Mary L ouise Pratt addresses such concerns in her d iscu ssion o f John B arrow s 1801 chronicle o f his
1797 and 1798 T ravels into th e In terio r o f S outhern A frica. Pratt w rites that B arrow s descriptions o f his
travels position him as a neutral, unbiased observer w h ile at the sam e tim e, B arrow s ow n language
suggests the fantasy o f d om in an ce and appropriation that is built into this o th erw ise passive, open stance.
The eye com m an d s w hat fa lls w ithin its g a ze...T h e European presence is a b solu tely uncontested (60).
19 C rossing a bare com m on , in snow puddles, at tw ilight, under a clouded sky, w ith ou t having in my
thoughts any occurrence o f sp ecial good fortune, I have en joyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the
brink o f fear. Standing on the bare ground, m y head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite
space, all mean egotism van ish es. I b ecom e a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents o f
the U niversal B ein g circulate through me; I am part or particle o f G o d . (E m erson, 13).
20 The full stanza in T he L o v e S on g o f J. A lfred Prufrock reads:
A nd indeed there w ill be time
For the y ello w sm ok e that slid es alon g the street,
R ubbing its back upon the w indow -panes;
There w ill be tim e, there w ill be tim e

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T o prepare a face to m eet the faces that you m eet

T h e r e w ill be tim e to murder and create (1230).
E liots P ru fro ck articulates the anxieties w hich attend any act o f representationfor E lio t and W alcott, the
act o f rep resen tation in v o lv es the form ation o f an idea o f a poet, o f a speaker in the poem w h o p o ssesses
the n ece ssa ry authority to perform the act o f representation. Furthermore, E liot refers here to the
revisionary nature o f the creative process where (as Harold B loom m ight have it), new poets m ust murder
in order to crea te . E liot su ggests that there is a betrayal and v iolen ce som ew h ere in the heart o f im itation
and in n o v a tio n .
21 A llen M an d elb au m notes that the leopard has been frequently thought to represent lu st in the sym b olic
schem e o f D a n te s p oem (345).
22A s I d is c u ss in the fo llo w in g chapter, W alcotts later career sh ow s him en gagin g a m yriad o f canonical
them es and m o tifs. From his en gagem en t o f D e F o e s R obinson Crusoe (T he C astaw ay) to H om ers
Illia d and O d y s s e y ( O m e ro s), W alcotts later work is strung through with am bitious rew orkings o f his
canonical in flu e n c e s rew orkings that are not on ly aesthetic and stylistic interventions but are also
interventions indicative o f a d ev elo p in g op positional postcolonial poetics.
23 In a 1983 in terview w ith L e if Sjoberg, W alcott notes that T he peop le I honor and glorify from
sim plicity, n o t from a M arxist or political view p oin t, rather say from a W hitm anesque o n e, are m y heroes.
Fisherm an. W ork in g m en, isolated artists ( C o n versa tio n s w ith D erek W a lco tt 80).
24 Stew art B ro w n notes that A s John to P atm os, like a num ber o f other early poem s, ow e[sJ m uch to
T h om ass so n o ro u s d iction and d istin ctive m annerism s (2 8 ).
25 M cC lin tock cites, am on g other exam p les o f the sex u a lized landscape in service to im perialism ,
Christopher C o lu m b u s description in a 1492 letter o f the earth shaped lik e a w o m a n s breast, with a
protuberance upon its sum m it in the unm istakable shape o f a n ip p le toward w h ich he w as slo w ly sa ilin g
(21). T h is is, she argues, an exam ple o f w hat she calls, European p orn o-trop ics. C o lu m b u s breast
fantasy fe m in iz e s the earth as a c o sm ic breast, in relation to w hich the ep ic m ale hero is a tiny, lost infant,
yearning for the E denic n ip p le. She g o e s on to note that this fantasy draw s on a lon g tradition o f m ale
travel as an erotics o f ravishm ent. For centuries, the uncertain co n tin en ts A frica, the A m ericas, A s ia
w ere figu red in European lore as lib id in ou sly eroticized. T ravelers tales abounded w ith v isio n s o f the
m onstrous sexu ality o f fa r-o ff lands, w here, as legend had it, men sported gigan tic p en ises and w om en
consorted w ith a p es...R en a issa n c e travelers found an eager and la sciv io u s audience for their spicy tales, so
that, lo n g before the era o f high V ictorian im perialism , A frica and the A m ericas had b eco m e w hat can be
called a porno-tropics for the European im agination a fantastic m agic lantern o f the m ind onto w hich
Europe projected its forbidden sexual d esires and fears (22).

26 John L eo A fricanus, A G e o g ra p h ic a l H isto rie o f A frica, trans. John Pory (L ondon: G eorg. B ishop, 1600),
p. 38.

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Chapter Four
Thats All Them Bastards Have Left Us, Words
The Melancholy of the Postcolonial Romantic
There is no docum ent o f civilization which
is not also a docum ent of barbarism .
W alter Benjam in

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I: Traum a and the Postcolonial Romantic

Affliction is one them e of this work.
Omeros
D erek W alcotts early work has been described by a num ber of critics as being
overw helm ingly im itative and derivative. As I indicated in the previous chapter, this is
not an assertion that I entirely agree with. I do agree that in his early work there is the
danger of imitation, of uncritically adopting modes of representation that, by virtue of
their ideological associations, w ork against his stated desires to produce poetry which
docum ents the undocum ented history of St. Lucia and its people. In two early poems,
Prelude and As John to Patm os, W alcotts method o f im itating the styles and modes
of representation of the W estern literary canon result in poem s that articulate some
anxieties about the uncritical reproduction of canonical aesthetics. H owever even in
these early poem s, the anxieties themselves, and the m anner in which they are articulated,
offer up a portrait of the canon as a body o f texts always already in flux. Historically the
canon is, according to these poems, a series of texts that are them selves always the
subject of revisions. This portrait of the canon belies any attem pt to situate W alcott (even
in his early work) as simply one of N aipauls mimic m en.1 As I have discussed,
W alcotts method of im itation is one which keenly relies on the revisionary aspect of the
canon which, according to the models he invokes, has always been present. Katie James,
among others, places W alcotts interventionist methods in two books from the mid/late
1960s, The Castaway (1965) and The G u lf( 1969). Jones, as I have mentioned, claims
that the reworking of the Crusoe myth that W alcott perform s in these two books
represents the first instance of his revisionary m ethods regarding his literary canonical
inheritance. I would place his earliest intervention and revision of his literary inheritance

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much earlier. I argue that in fact from the very beginning W alcotts w ork has evinced
this revisionary intent. Prelude and As John to Patm os articulate a num ber of
anxieties ab o u t the significant role of his literary influences and thus open the way for a
more active intervention into the discourses of tradition. The first instance of this kind of
active intervention into the discourses of tradition occurs in The H arbour, published
alongside P relude and As John to Patm os, in a slim self-published volum e entitled
simply, 25 P oem s (1948). In this very early poem, W alcott engages the landscape of St.
Lucia in an identifiably romantic way. While he does also engage the landscape of St.
Lucia in A s John to Patm os, that engagement, as I have discussed, articulate anxieties
about his m ode of representation (rom antic) while not fully perform ing the kind of
categorical revision of the mode of representation that we see in The H arbour. The
mode of rom anticism that W alcott em ploys in The Harbour is, as I will discuss, a
postcolonial rom anticism , one that takes into account the historical and material
specificity o f the landscape and incorporates that specificity into its aesthetic mode of
representation. This use of the rom antic landscape prefigures W alcotts overall method
for engaging the text of the canon, a m ethod that falls under Homi B habhas form ulation
of mimicry. Over his career, W alcott repeats with a difference a num ber of tropes and
themes in the canon; Odysseus will becom e Shabine, A chilles will become Achille, and
the poet him self will appear in the guise of everybody from Dante to Robinson Crusoe to
W inslow Homer. The repetitions evoke the original, but articulate crucial differences.
They are, in B habhas words, alm ost the same, but not quite. (86).
Romanticism is a particularly salient discourse to consider against W alcotts work
because of the central im portance of landscape in both. As I have discussed in the

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introduction, the preoccupation with landscape that many romantic poets and painters
displayed provided a ready method of aestheticizing landscape within an artistic context.
A dditionally, romanticism, in the last two decades, has acquired a certain legibility as a
discourse th at undermines the homogeneity of colonial culture and authority.2 The
continued relevance of romanticism as a modern poetic trope com bined with the ways in
which it dem onstrates the heterogeneity of colonial authority makes it an ideal historical
genre to consider in terms of Derek W alcotts work.
C ertainly the engagem ent of landscape as a central them atic is a common enough
aesthetic and political strategy in the literature of our ecologically conscious age. Indeed,
in the tradition of the British romantics, there is a vibrant and productive tradition of
contem porary writers who posit a sublime landscape in opposition to the m odernizing
forces of global capital. However, while also writing about a sublim e landscape, W alcott
is unable to detach that landscape from its history of colonialism and all the attendant
consequences o f that history. The landscapes of these poems are of particular im portance
largely ow ing to the rom antic mode of representation that m ost frequently fram es them.
As W alcott works to adequately represent the landscape, given the im perative to do more
than simply im itate received modes of representation, he revises the term s o f the romantic
landscape in order to accom m odate his postcolonial needs. The landscape that he writes
about is necessarily politicized; his own subjectivity is intim ately im plicated in both the
natural beauty as well as the traum atic history of the place; he directly acknowledges the
history of St. Lucia and the Caribbean, the history of diaspora, of slavery, of the capitalist
com modification of the landscape, and the devastating consequences this history has on
the individual even as he would wish to rem em ber when these slums of em pire was

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paradise (W alcott, Collected 346). To do otherwise would am ount to nothing less than a
denial and subsequent pathologization of that history.
In h is evocation of a sublime landscape intertwined with the traum as o f history,
W alcott em ploys a kind of postcolonial romanticism. He seeks a redem ption in the
landscape even as some romantics did, but he also deploys, at times ironically, this
romantic trope of landscape together with the interventionist sensibilities of the
postcolonial. Referring to the retribution he intends to bring on those who exploit the
economic vulnerabilities of the postcolonial state, a speaker in The Schooner Flight
declares, M inisters, businessmen...I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand, / 1
who have no weapon but poetry and / the lances of palms and the seas shining
shield !(357-358).

His threat suggests a certain belief in the efficacy of poetry but also,

and most im portantly for my purposes, it suggests that a poetic evocation of the
landscape itself will be part and parcel of the technology of his retribution. W hile
invoking the rom antic sublime, W alcott politicizes it and articulates the traum a of history
so that the postcolonial landscape of his poems recalls the overw helm ing beauty of the
natural w orld while simultaneously calling up the history of colonialism. His landscape
is traum atic as well as sublime.3 Indeed, it is w orthw hile to consider W alcotts
postcolonial rom antic landscape through the lens of traum a theory as well as through the
lens of postcolonial theory. This is not to say that postcolonial theory and traum a theory
are mutually exclusive, by any means. In fact there is a great deal of overlap that will be
useful in parsing W alcotts method. The application of B habhas model of mimicry (as
well as the discussion of N aipauls model) is furthered by a discussion of trauma; not
only are the political/historical theoretical im plications of W alcotts mimicry significant;

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so too significant is how W alcotts mimicry functions as a non-pathological response to

trauma. T he theorization of such a non-pathological response is, in fact, essential to a
theorization of the efficacy of W alcotts postcoloniality.4
F or W alcott, the landscape of the Caribbean bears the history of loss within it; the
landscape, like many of the speakers and characters in his work, is haunted by the
im peratives o f history. These im peratives are iterated within the very tex ta process
well described by theorists of traum a such as Cathy Caruth who says that traum a is more
than ju st a pathology; or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of
a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attem pt to tell us of a reality or truth that is
not otherw ise available (4). If one reads W alcott via theories about trauma, his work
exem plifies various strategies, both successful and failed, for coping with the legacies of
colonial trauma. M ore specifically, the im itative tendencies of his early work, which do
not specifically address the asymmetrical relationship between colonial and postcolonial
cultural authorities, dem onstrate their own inadequacies for articulating the history and
traum a o f colonialism within the aesthetic strategies available to the poet. W hile the
strategies of im itation that Ive argued are present in early poem s such as Prelude and
As John to Patm os do articulate a certain Bhabha-esque m im icry always present in the
texts and intertexts of the canon, these strategies of mim icry fail to also articulate the
history and traum as of colonialism that are so much a part o f W alcotts intervention into
the canon. In the act of imitation that does not fully take into account the concerns of the
postcolonial, W alcott repeats, to a certain extent, the same traum as that he is ostensibly
set on healing. As I discuss in the previous chapter, W alcotts early poems are indicative
of his anxieties about doing nothing more than repeating the poetic inheritance of the

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colonial powers, and that his imitation structurally repeats the traum a of colonialism.
The kind of imitation that V.S. Naipaul describes as mimicry is simply the repetition (and
therefore reinstatem ent) of colonial cultural authority. In the derivative act of this
imitation, W alcott, like one of N aipauls mimic men, is anxious that he can only
p reten d ...to be real (Naipaul, 146). A dditionally, in this act o f pretending, of
derivative imitation, the Naipaulian m im ic man repeats the very unmaking of subjectivity
that is produced under the sign of colonial power. And W alcotts anxieties arise out of
his fearing to function under the guise of the Naipaulian mimic man because such a move
would unmake his own subjectivity and repeat the traum a of colonialism and its
unm aking o f the subjectivity of the colonized. This repetition of traum a and the ways in
which it is a constitutive part o f the subject form ation of the N aipaulian mimic man falls
fairly neatly under what Freud would have identified as a pathological response to
trauma, a melancholic response. In contrast, W alcotts later work and his use of the
rom antic landscape indicate strategies for coping with and representing traum a that seek
to escape the binds of a pathological m elancholy.5
A ccording to Sigmund Freud, traum a is pathological (i.e. melancholic) when it
produces an unwitting reenactm ent of the event that cannot be left behind. In his essay,
M ourning and M elancholia, Freud fram es his discussion by delim iting the condition of
m ourning as a healthy way of dealing w ith traum a and m elancholia as an unhealthy way.6
For Freud, m ourning means that one essentially lets go of the trauma. M elancholia is
the condition that arises when one is unable to let go of the traum a and in fact is when
one is unable to separate that object o f loss from a sense of self at all. M elancholia
occurs when there is an identification o f the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the

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shadow o f the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged...as
thought it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object loss was transform ed
into an ego loss (249). The ego, the sense of self is consumed by what is lost, it
becomes the loss, and the traum a itself becomes constitutive of the ego. Or, to couch it in
terms specifically applicable to the postcolonial, one is suffers a sacrificial dedication
permeated with sadism (Fanon 147). The postcolonial m elancholic would be one who is
unable to separate the traum as of colonialism from any sense of self, one who identifies
so com pletely with loss that he has internalized the abjection and seeks to identify
him self with the forces of colonialism, i.e. one of N aipauls mimic men, or as I have been
calling him, a mere imitator.7
Freud would have diagnosed the postcolonial who is unable to do more than
imitate colonial authority, to do anything but be one of N aipauls mimic m en, as
possessing a melancholic affect and described this affect in terms o f a disabling
pathology, an indication o f a wounded and disabled psyche. This diagnosis would have
been, at least for the purposes of this current study, far too over-determined. This
diagnosis is made only with the assum ption that there are no alternatives to the almost
M anichean duality of Freudian m ourning or Freudian melancholy. Furtherm ore, the
pathology o f m elancholia as form ulated by Freud is constitutive in its entirety; the ego is
com pletely consumed by the trauma. Thus all a postcolonial would be able to do would
be repeat, m elancholically, the traum as of colonialism. The act of mimicry is not, as I
have discussed in the previous chapter, limited to a singular pejorative definition. The
simple application of F reu d s notion o f m ourning and m elancholy to the problem of
postcolonial representation is problem atic because such an application would inevitably

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diagnose th e status of the postcolonial as a pathological condition. Such an application

does not allow for the holding on to an object heavily tied to the experience of traum a (in
the case o f a postcolonial writer such as Derek Walcott, his literary and cultural
inheritance from the colonial authority). The postcolonial writer who would hold onto, in
some part, or engage, in some way, the text o f his literary inheritance w ould, in the purely
Freudian m odel, be diagnosed as pathological. In the Freudian (and Naipaulian) model,
there is either pathological im itation or the am nesia of mourning.
H ow ever, revising established notions of mourning and m elancholia, Anne Anlin
Cheng notes that F reu d s essay offers a potentially effective lens through which the
problem atic of race and historical dispossession can be viewed. C hengs revision of
Freudian m elancholia offers a m ethod o f reading the work of the postcolonial that does
not reduce that work to an over-determ ined pathological text. Interrogating the
problem atic of m ourning Cheng rem arks that, for Freud, m ourning entails, curiously
enough, a forgetting...U pon a closer look, the kind of healthy letting g o Freud delineates
goes beyond mere forgetting to com plete eradication. The successful w ork of m ourning
does not only forget, it reinstates the death sentence(53). Such m ourning effaces the
materialism of a historical event. As Cheng points out, such getting o v er...means, in a
sense, never getting over those m em ories [of the originary traum atic event], so that health
and idealization turn out to be nothing more than continual escape, and nothing less than
the denial and pathologiz,ation o f what one is [emphasis m ine] (50). Such attempts at
mourning, of getting over, of inscribing narrative closure to a historical site which
confounds articulation, risks disarticulating the event. Such an effactm ent would enforce
a historical amnesia. Mourning, fo r the postcolonial subject, becomes the indicator of

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pathology, a pathology that is no less disabling than the traditional view of the
m elancholic subject. In F reuds initial formulation, at least in its application to the
postcolonial, there are only two responses to the legacies of colonialism: a pathological
repetition o r an amnesic forgetting. In responding, Cheng attempts to provide a revised
definition o f melancholia, a means of understanding the responses of postcolonials such
as W alcott in term s that neither efface history or pathologize the inevitable and
unavoidable m emory of it.
For Cheng, m elancholia provides a provocative metaphor fo r how race in
America or more specifically how the act of racialization w orks (50). M elancholia, for
Freud, is essentially an econom y of loss, an economy that prevents the melancholic from
abandoning the object of loss. Instead, the m elancholic incorporates the object of loss
into his/her own ego. In this way an object-Ioss lis| transform ed into an ego loss
(Freud, 249). And thus, ft|he wounded subject, finally, is im prisoned within the
brooding cell of m elancholy...unable to abandon the lost object of desire, unable to return
to it, and unable to erase the marks of its degradation from his own person (246). For
the purposes of discussing the postcolonial experience, however, this form ulation is far
too over-determined. Cheng argues that minority identity reveals an inscription marking
the remembrance of absence. Denigration has conditioned its form ation and
resuscitation...the m in o rity ...is also a m elancholic subject, except that what |sic | she
renounces is h e rse lf (52-3). Noting that this results in a traum atized and a
pathologically crippled subject, Fanon m ight call such a renunciation, a sacrificial
dedication permeated with sadism (Black Skins, 147). The crux here is that for Cheng,
this remembrance of absence, o f the object-Ioss or traum a o f racialization, inform s the

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postcolonial experience and itself must be conceived as a wholly melancholic activity

(54). The postcolonial and the racialized other is thus caught in a bind if one adheres to
F reuds nearly M anichean binary of healthy m ourning vs. pathological melancholy.
C hengs intervention is to suggest a m elancholic identification that is not wholly
conceived as a pathological response to trauma. C hengs version of m elancholia defines
it as more of a haunting and less of a pathological eruption of a traum atic past. The past
is still present, but lacks the full pathological force that we see in F reu d s form ulation of
melancholia. A ccording to C hengs version of melancholia, the past m ight haunt the
structure of the subject, but it does not underm ine the stability of the psyche, its presence
is ghostly present but not.
Citing Homi B habhas definition of colonial mimicry, Cheng suggests a version
of B habhas third space between Freudian mourning and m elancholia.8 This third space,
while retaining some of the pathological com ponents o f the Freudian melancholia, and
while still operating under the sign of melancholia, lacks the determ ining pathology
suggested by Freudian melancholia. C hengs m elancholic identification allows for a
relationship to the traum atic past that, while retaining some pathological aspects, is not
determined by pathology, but rather this relationship to traum a functions according to a
kind of negative capability. Speaking of Freudian melancholy in its application to the
postcolonial, she observes, by this account, the colonized finds him /herself in the
position of m elancholically echoing the master, incorporating both the master and his
denigration (55). H owever while Cheng allows that this mim icry functions, at least in
part, pathologically, she also m aintains that this process m ight prove to be most
pow erful...w hen it can maintain a negative capability between neither dismissing, nor

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sentim entalizing the racialized identity of the postcolonial. Cheng suggests that the
postcolonial relationship to colonial culture is capable of being in uncertainties (Keats
43), that w h ile there is a pathological aspect to the melancholic identification that she
locates u n d er the guise of Homi B habhas mimic, this process is not nearly as over
determ ined as initially thought. Rather like B habhas mimic, Cheng reform ulates
m elancholia and allows the postcolonial subject to maintain a relationship to the
traum atic past without that past necessarily overw helm ing the subject. W hile such
m elancholic identification is not free of problems, it does allow for the opportunity to
interrogate the historical m ateriality of an object of loss or an event o f traum a. The
traum a can be considered as a constitutive com ponent of the subject, but does not
necessitate any sort o f sacrificial dedication. The traum a o f the past is neither effaced
nor pathologized, but rather appears in a kind of spectral form, present w ithout being
manifest. A ccording to C hengs revised melancholia, in the act o f representing the
trauma, an act that inevitably falls under Homi B habhas definition o f mimicry, the
minority subject functions as a kind of haunted subject, haunted by a past of traum a
and cultural dispersion.
C hengs reform ulation of Freudian m elancholy is a significant intervention
because it helps to resolve a considerable problem with m im icry as defined by both V.S.
Naipaul and Homi Bhabha. W hereas N aipauls version of m im icry, which I am calling
imitation, functions neatly as a Freudian m elancholia replete with all of its disabling
pathologies, B habhas form ulation does not directly address the issue of the subjects
relationship to trauma. C hengs intervention rearticulates B habhas mimic in the
psychologically specific term inology o f m ourning and m elancholia. In its application to

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Derek W alcotts work, C hengs reformulation of melancholia helps further parse

W alcotts relationship to the artifacts of colonial trauma, his literary inheritance. This
negatively capable m elancholy functions as the sign under which W alcotts relationship
to traum a falls. There is an identifiable am bivalence in his relationship to the texts of
colonial authority, and that am bivalence is a function of the com plexity of the act of
postcolonial mimicry. B habhas version of mimicry allows for the agency o f the mimic,
it allows for the act of mimicry itself to constitute, at least in part, an underm ining of
colonial structures of power. By considering mimicry as a m elancholic activity (as
reform ulated by Cheng), the constitutive nature o f colonial traum a is articulated without
becom ing the sole defining aspect of the text. D erek W alcotts engagem ent of
rom anticism (as well as other tropes and themes o f the W estern literary canon) can be
situated in this context. Romanticism, specifically the rom antic landscape, functions in a
m elancholic fashion in W alcotts work. A llow ing that rom anticism can stand, at least in
part, as an artifact of colonial traum a, the repetition of that traum a is, according to these
working definitions, melancholic. However, the m elancholia does not necessarily result
in a disabling pathology. It is possible for the repetition of traum a or the artifacts of
traum a to result in ju st that, as we have seen in some of W alcotts very early work where
he articulates his own anxieties about uncritically repeating the m ethods and themes of
his colonial education. H owever in the case of what I am calling W alcotts postcolonial
romantic landscape poetry, he mimics a number of themes of the rom antic landscape and
yet he does so in a m anner that belies simple repetition.
W alcotts language describing the landscape articulates the w ounds of history
even as it aestheticizes the landscape; for while he understands the historicity of the

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landscape and the destruction brought on by colonialism, he also strives to imagine the
sublimity. In Sainte Lucie, a poem in his 1976 collection, Sea G rapes, W alcott
describes the valley of Roseau on the eastern part of St. Lucia:
...This is a rich valley,
It is fat with things.
Its roads radiate like aisles from the altar towards
those acres of bananas, towards
leaf-crowded mountains
rain-bellied clouds
in haze, in iron heat;
...This is a cursed valley,
ask the broken mules, the swollen children
ask the dried women, their gap-toothed men ...{Collected, 320).
The Edenic richness o f the Roseau valley is sim ultaneously the geographic site of poverty
and colonial misery. And while W alcott m ight write that it is a rich valley, that
richness has an alm ost overw helm ing fecundity to it; the m ountains are leaf-crow ded,
alm ost smothered by rain-bellied clouds. This landscape that is rich and cursed by
its own richness hints at a sublime locale with its beautiful and threatening fecundity that
was perhaps never pure but now is certainly overrun by the historical, by the demands of
capital and the legacy of colonialism.

The valley is figured as an altar, how ever the

use o f this word is am biguous is the valley in its natural beauty a kind of natural altar, a
natural sacred space, or does the poet indicate that the landscape itself has been
sacrificed, placed figuratively upon the altar of capitalism ? This am biguity is central

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to W alco tts approach: the people who occupy this landscape are them selves broken, and
yet at the sam e time he employs language that tries to belie the misery, that itself is
Edenic. H e admits the physical devastation but he still strives to im agine beauty in the
midst of th is devastation, to imagine the richness of a landscape cursed by history and
colonialism . This is the crux not only of W alcotts engagem ent with a rom antic tradition
of im agining the landscape as a sublime site, but also of his aesthetic. Even as he
imagines and m aintains a relationship to a W estern literary tradition, he is in the process
of transform ing the conditions of possibility o f that tradition. He forces his own history
and the history of the Caribbean into that tradition. The postcolonial landscape is, in fact,
an ideal m edium for this am bition; it is both describable in term s of his rom antic legacy
as well as visibly historical.
In Freudian term s, W alcott follows the im peratives o f m ourning while retaining
the m elancholic affect. History is not, bluntly put, something that is gotten over ; and
yet neither is history something that disables the subject. H istory haunts W alcotts
works, appearing now and again like H am lets father to dem and m em ory and justice, and
yet, like H am lets father in Shakespeares play, history does not overw helm W alcotts
work and become its central preoccupation. H istorys presence is spectral, present and
not-present.

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II: The Harbour : A First Case

The very early poem (like Prelude and As John to Patm os , published in In a
Green N ight (1962)), The Harbour, contains the first real appearance of what I have
been calling W alcotts postcolonial romantic landscape. Ironically, little critical attention
has been paid this poem other than in the form of a notation, repeated in a number of
places, that the original title of the poem in 1948 was A Fisherman Rowing H om ew ard
(King 64). W hile descriptions of the landscape in the other poems function in opposition
to identifiable elements associated with colonialism, such as capitalism , tourism, and
m odernization, in The Harbour W alcott historicizes the landscape of this poem, the sea.
The treatm ent of the sea as a landscape is a consistent m otif throughout W alcotts work.9
In this last poem from this very early collection that W alcott would select for inclusion in
the 1984 edition o f his collected poems, he describes the landscape and the inhabitants of
that landscape in ways that recall quite vividly W ordsw orths Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads.10 In addition to selecting a fisherm an as the subject of the poem (which would
keep nicely with W ordsw orths decision to write of low and rustic life), W alcott
implicates the low and rustic landscape through which the fisherm en move with the
history of slavery. He injects a fairly bitter historical pill into this rather romantic
landscape. He makes this landscape postcolonial even as it retains so much of the
romantic.
The poem is, for the m ost part, a kind of hybrid Petrarchan and Shakespearean
sonnet that spends the entirety of the first two quatrains and the first tw o couplets of the
concluding lines seemingly making the com parison between a lovesick speaker, lonely
with his broken heart, and the isolated fisherm an.11 The H arbour seems, at least

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initially, to be a bit of juvenilia, the w ork of a young poet seeking to raise heartache up to
the noble isolation of a fisherman. Even as the speaker makes note of the blessed
ignorance o f the fisherm en rowing hom eward in the dusk / [who] Do not consider the
stillness through which they m ove (7), he remarks that like them, he ought not ask for
that w hich he cannot have anymore, the safe tw ilight which your calm hands gave (7).
The casual logic of this analogy does not hold: the fisherm en move homeward through a
medium that they are not even fully conscious of, therefore the speaker should not ask for
the return of his love. The logic of this analogy appears, at first, to be nonsensical.
Furtherm ore, the succeeding lines do not belie this initial im pression of the poem. The
speaker goes on in a similar vein over the next tw o quatrains describing in seemingly
cliched term s how night brings on lies, how tim e knows / That bitter and sly sea, and
love raises w alls (7). He ends the second of three ending couplets with an im age that
ostensibly resolves the failed logic o f the initial simile. The speaker describes, Others
who now watch my progress.. .On a sea which is crueler than any word / Of love, may
see in me the calm my passage makes / Braving new w ater in a an antique hoax (7).
Here the speaker is apparently a figure of nobility, isolated, like the fisherm an of the
poem s beginning. His heartache is elevated to a noble thing by its association with the
fisherman. The hoax to which the poet refers is, in the logic of the poem, simply an old
boat. However, the p o ets act of braving new w ater in an antique hoax also serves
nicely as a m etaphor for W alcotts poetics in this poem. Using the antique (though by
no means obsolete) form of the sonnet, W alcott does indeed push the old vessel into new
waters. Additionally, the use of the word, hoax, to describe the vessel which bears his
new poetics, W alcott once again calls attention to the contingent nature of the canon and

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canonical form s, as, in the logic of this metaphor, all form s are som ething of a hoax; the
closed nature of a form such as the sonnet is never absolutely closed, like the canon itself,
it is alw ays the subject of revisions.
In th e final couplet this apparent piece of juvenilia takes a major turn. W alcotts
speaker rem arks that, And the secure from thinking may climb safe to liners / Hearing
small rum ours of paddlers drowned near stars (8). The first line of this couplet makes
an allusion to those secure from thinking who, by dint of their mode o f transportation
(Ocean liners, cruise ships) are tourists and thus an extension of the intersections of
neocolonialism and capitalism.

The second line of the couplet makes a somewhat

obscure reference to paddlers drowned near stars. Here, as he will again and again,
W alcott is m aking references to the tales of slaves throw n overboard during the course of
the m iddle passage.12 However unlike the references in his later work, here the reference
is som ew hat obscure; it could simply refer to fisherm en who have drow ned while out
fishing. However, the placem ent of this line belies such an excuse. It follow s the
som ewhat contem ptuous description of tourists as secure from thinking ; a line which
raises up all the details of history (such as the practice of throw ing overboard sick or
excess slaves during the middle passage) that the tourists are free from thinking about.13
The paddlers who have drowned near stars allude, at least in some significant fashion,
to those drowned slaves. These tw o lines require a considerable reconsideration of the
preceding lines. The simple rom antic relationship of the previous reading is no longer
applicable. The poem is suddenly no longer simply a piece of juvenilia with a
heartbroken speaker pining for a departed lover; as well as a poem about a relationship,
the poem becomes a m editation on the relationship the speaker has with history and

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tradition, in particular a relationship with the modes of describing landscape.

In the fine

tradition of Shakespearean sonnets, the final couplet forces a reconsideration of the

previous lines.
The landscape that the speaker describes no longer seems to function simply as an
objective correlative for his emotional devastation. The lying night and the bitter and sly
sea, rather than metaphors for a failed romance, become sinister bystanders o f a savage
history of slavery and colonialism. In their task of surveillance, the watchful sentry
stars acquire a menacing aspect. The landscape, which had once seemed a m etaphor for
the speakers emotional devastation after a failed romance, now, as a result of the
concluding couplet, gives voice to the specters of slavery. By bringing in the tourists
who have the luxury of being ignorant about the history o f the middle passage, W alcott
draws a firm distinction between different kinds of know ledge about a placeknowledge
that the colonized have, and knowledge that the conquers have. W alcott introduces
alterity into the landscape of the poem; the night, the sea, the hills, and the stars are
drawn in two distinct ways in this poem as they appear fo r the colonized, and as they
appear to the conquers. For the tourists, the landscape is available for their consumption,
their pleasure. It is free of historical materiality, of historical specificity. For the
colonized, however, the landscape (in this case, the sea) bears within it the literal bodies
of history. The landscape is no longer simply a place of beauty and a reflection o f the
poets mind and emotional state. The landscape of the poem is postcolonial even as it
retains its roots in romanticism. The traum as of history are rearticulated in W alcotts
sonnet. Even as he avoids the pitfalls of sim ple im itation of a lovelorn sonnet which
offers an internalized rom anticism regarding the speakers failed love affair, he

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transform s the conditions of possibility of meaning for what is being longed for in the
poem. R ather than unrequited love, the speaker longs for the safe tw ilight, (7) that
precedes th e traum as of colonialism. A t the same time there is a distinctive selfconsciousness in W alcotts speaker regarding his interventionist mimicry. The speaker
remarks that he is braving new w ater in an antique hoax (7), indicating that he is aware
of the new ground that he is breaking while using the form, the vessel o f the canonical
sonnet as well as the form s of the rom antic landscape. Unlike the treatm ent W ordsworth,
Eliot, and D ante received in Prelude and As John to Patm os, W alcott treats the
modes o f canonical literature not with simple imitative reverence, but with the full force
o f the postcolonial mimic.
This early poem sets up the m ethod o f W alcotts engagem ent with other them es
and tropes o f the canon. The H arbour mim ics the traditional form o f the sonnet even as
it uses the final couplet to upset the form al expectations established by the previous
quatrains; the final couplet also upsets the initial ideological bent o f the poem.
A dditionally the landscape o f the poem, established initially as an objective correlative
for the speakers em otional anguish, is, by the reversal enabled by the final couplet,
revealed to be a m elancholic site w here the traum as o f the middle passage are articulated
alongside the contem porary traum as o f neo-colonialism . This is em blem atic o f the
m ethod that W alcott will return to tim e and tim e again throughout the course o f his
career. He m im ics forms, tropes, them es, and even characters draw n from the canon but
he does so in a m anner that belies simple imitation. He, like Homi B habhas mimic,
repeats these things, but repeats them w ith a difference. And the difference lays clear the
traum as o f history while at the same tim e avoiding the pathological bind o f the self-same

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traum as. W alco tts work articulates traum a but does not become obsessed and
pathologized by it.
In h is later w ork W alcott engages an im posing number o f forms, tropes, and
them es draw n from the canon. In virtually all o f these cases his m im icry follows the
same m elancholic methodology as his m im icry o f the romantic landscape. While
certainly th e them es o f his later work w ould diversify, W alcott inevitably returns, time
and tim e again, to the task o f interrogating not only his ow n relationship w ith the canon
but also the consequences that m aintaining that relationship would have for his ow n sense
o f self. A nd it is the landscape, in the early w ork as well as in the later work, that is
continually the linguistic and physical site upon w hich this relationship is staged,
contested, and occasionally resolved. For while W alcotts work, as his career progressed,
takes up larger and m ore epic them es and m odes drawn from the canon, the landscape o f
all the poem s rem ains singularly consistent in its significance.
In The Bounty (1997), W alcott w rites o f his attem pt to serve both his languages,
one so rich / in its im perial intimacies, its echo o f privilege, / the other like the orange
words o f a hillside in drought (32-33). He seems to have arrived at a resolution for his
own divided nature, a poetic one: he attem pts to construct w ithin his ow n language the
hom eland from which he, as a result o f his own education and im brication w ithin the
canon, has found him self exiled.14 He w rites A nother Life, an autobiographical poem that
actively engages the problem o f the divided child torn between the undocum ented
experiences o f the St. Lucian landscape and the other life offered by European literature
and art (Thieme 88). (Thiem e m entions a sim ilarity to W ordsw orths Prelude in that its
central subject is the grow th o f the p o ets m in d ). Throughout his body o f work,

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W alcott uses his landscapes as the site upon which this division is staged. Additionally it
is in these landscapes, at least on a linguistic level, that W alcott resolves his issue o f
exile, his anxieties o f distance and difference from the other citizens o f St. Lucia. But it
isnt until his 1979 collection, The Star A pple Kingdom , in the poem "The Schooner
F lig h f that W alcott brings his vexed engagem ent w ith his literary inheritance and his
postcolonial surroundings to its fullest fruition. In this long narrative poem, W alcott
creates a character, Shabine, whose ow n journey stands very m uch as a mirror o f
W alcotts own. Through Shabines narration and language, W alcott takes the
postcolonial rom anticism that had once been his only real adequate tool for linking
together his postcolonial im peratives w ith his poetic aesthetic and he links this m ethod o f
postcolonial rom anticism with a larger project: his engagem ent w ith Homer.

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III: Postcolonial Romantic

we live like our names and you would have
to be colonial to know the difference,
to know the pain of history words contain...
...an d we
if we live like the names our master please,
by careful mim icry m ight become m en.
The Schooner Flight

W alco tts poem The Schooner Flight, explores landscape even as it explores the
problem atics of a postcolonial subjectivity. In this poem, which prefigures his obsession
with The O dyssey15, W alcott yokes together the identity of his poet/speaker, Shabine,
with descriptions o f the landscape in such a way as to create a notion of self that, like the
landscape which he describes, is capable of containing multiple and conflicting terms.
While refusing more simplistic, nativist, and ultimately essentialist models of identity,
W alcott creates a character whose very nature is a dynam ic model of postcolonial
identity, a model that finds its m irror in his presentation of the problem atic relationship
between a sublime landscape and a history o f dispossession and trauma. Rather than
close off the ontological possibilities fo r either the landscape or the postcolonial subject,
W alcott instead offers us a m elancholic narrative of identity and landscape w here the
traum as o f the past remain legible in a liminal yet continually present fashion. The
ghosts o f history are kept present in landscape and subject; they are not consigned to the
oblivion of that which is past. Instead, traum a and history are subjected to what I am
calling, following Cheng, a kind of healthy process of m elancholic identification where
traum a is not gotten over yet neither does it disable or pathologize the form ation of
subjectivity. W alcott suggests ju st such a liminal legibility in his personified description
of History: H istory is a parchm ent Creole, with warts/ like an old sea bottle, crawling

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like a crab / through the holes of shadow cast by the net / of a grille balcony (Collected
350). W alcott figuratively suggests that history, here characterized in an almost gothic
fashion, is in a continual state of em ergence, constantly crawling out of the dark of the
past, m aking itself known and remembered. Through an aesthetics inform ed equally by
political as well as formal concerns, he m aintains the im peratives of m emory even as he
immerses him self in the sublimity of the landscape.
For W alcott the landscape of the Caribbean, like Shabine him self, bears the
history of loss within it; both are subjects haunted by the m elancholic im peratives of
history. T he character of Shabine seeks, through a process of im plication and
interrogation of dualities, to transcend the polarized oppositions of colonial/postcolonial,
black/white, and self/other. Shabine is a character who on all levels straddles
oppositional forces; he is of mixed racial background, sim ultaneously both black and
white while rem aining neither; he is a poet and a sailor, a tender sentim entalist and a
vicious fighter; he, in the course of the narrative, journeys between life and death with
apparent ease; he loves both his wife and his mistress; and like O dysseus, he is a figure of
both everyman and no man, (or as Shabine proclaims in an oft quoted declaration, either
I m nobody, or I m a nation(346)), he is sim ultaneously the representative of a
communal sensibility while rem aining a concrete individual. Even as Shabine seeks to
resolve these oppositions w ithin his own character, so too does W alcott seek to unravel
his relationship to the landscape; for even while he understands the historicity of the
landscape and the devastations brought on by colonialism , he strives to im agine the
sublim ity of the landscape w hile rem aining conscious of these devastations. Thus, in

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Freudian term s, he follows the im peratives of m ourning while retaining the melancholic
affect.
So while Shabine him self cannot be conveniently identified as black or white, a
poet or a sailor, a faithful husband or an adulterer, so too does the landscape which the
poem engages resist any easy figuring. For like Shabine the landscape of the poem is a
dynamic site where conflicting terms com e together. W hile it is a place once considered
a paradise, now the slums of em pire hold sway; where Shabine m ight entreat the
fierce salt of the Green Islands...[to] let my wound be healed, he finds instead visions
of the skies aflame and leprous rocks...and the noise of the soldiers progress through
the thick leaves (356). The landscape in this poem is hardly the im age that a tourist
board would generate. Furtherm ore, the very act of im agining the landscape is
implicated in the project of colonialism. Earlier in the poem , Shabine, recalling the many
names given to stands o f trees leaning out toward the sea, allows that these trees have
been named and renam ed many times. Suggesting a kind of analogous colonial rem aking
of him self and his people, he says, we live like our names and you would have / to be
colonial... / to know the pain of history words contain (353-4) Here Shabine suggests
that the violence of this rem aking and renam ing results in the corrupted landscape and in
the corrupted and degraded people: we, / if we live like the names our masters please, /
by careful mimicry m ight becom e m en (354). Here Shabine lam ents the adoption of the
names, of the term s of identity im posed upon him. Saying, however, we live like our
nam es, he also confesses his own com plicity and passivity in accepting these terms. He
implicates him self in this corrupted landscape.

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A nd yet, it is also within this same landscape that W alcotts poet/sailor finds a
kind of redem ption. For when, at the po em s start, Shabine is w eary of living under a
corrupt governm ent, in a corrupt society (they had started to poison my soul / with their
big house, big car, big time bohbohl (346)), he leaves the island and goes down the road
to enlist on the Schooner Flight. And saying I taking a sea bath, as he walks down the
road to start his odyssey through the Caribbean and through history, Shabine announces
his intention to undergo a cleansing process, a kind of baptism w here he m ight be washed
clean of the very corruption he despises. And while ultimately figuring both the
landscape as well as the character as both caught in a collapsing m om ent of
transcendence, a m om ent only made possible by imagination and sacrifice, W alcott
nevertheless seeks redem ption and resolution and the establishm ent of an postcolonial
identity capable of containing the multiple histories of traum a and beauty. Even as
W ordsworth was, in his seed-time [his childhood [...fostered alike by beauty and by
fear (Prelude, Book I, line 306-7), so too does W alcott articulate the contradictory poles
of his landscape.

Fie seeks to mourn while rem aining a melancholic.

The narrative of the poem follow s Shabine though a veritable O dyssey that like
the Homeric epic, begins in m edias res, and is ultimately the story of a journey h o m e .16
Shabine is inscribed linguistically and racially as a figure o f tw o cultures. I...a rusty
head sailor with sea-green eyes / that they nicknam e Shabine, the patois for / any red
nigger...Im just a red nigger who love the sea / 1 had a sound colonial education, / 1 have
Dutch, nigger, and English in m e (346). Here Shabine describes not only his racial
duality, but also his possession of w hat Dorothy H ale calls a Du Boisian double
consciousness where the personal identity of the black man is encoded in two

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contradictory impulses: for Shabine, the love of the sea and the demands of a colonial
education. 17 However, despite this dual nature, Shabine is not accepted by either of his
cultures, either the black or the white. After the white man, the niggers didnt want me /
when the pow er swing to their side (350). He also critiques the racist cultures both
generate in their false form ulation of oppositional relations. In the Rapture o f the Deep
section of W alco tts poem, Shabine narrates his experience as an em ployee of O Hara,
the big governm ent man who is an em blem o f the corrupt post-im perial official who,
while investigating a scandal he him self is responsible for, appoints him self as chairman
investigating him self. Shabine later generalizes about the corrupt structure o f the post
imperial governm ent: You saw them m inisters in The Express, / guardians of the p o o rone hand at their back, / and one set o police only guarding their house, / and the Scotch
pouring in through the back door (348). Similarly, Shabines vivid, alm ost cinematic,
description o f the revolutionaries taking up arms against this post-im perial corruption is
not free of critique. For though the revolutionaries are earnest, they are also doomed:
1 no longer believed in the revolution.
...Young men without flags
using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.
The kept m arching into the m ountains, and
their noise ceased as foam sinks into sand,
They sank in the bright hill like rain, every one
with his own nim bus, leaving shirts in the street,
and the echo of power at the end of the street. (3 5 1)18

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M irroring this situation of mutually im plicated corruption and impotence is

W alcotts evocation of a lush tropical landscape, itself corrupted by the consequences of
history. Shabine remarks that this Caribbean so choke with the dead /...[that] I saw
them ...the dead men. / 1 saw that the powdery sand was their bones / ground white from
Senegal to San Salvador (349). Shabine is firmly and fully made conscious of the
corruption around him. Rejected by both of his cultures, unable to access eithers
essentialized m ythic identity and caught in this bind o f the degraded landscape m irroring
the corruption and im potence of the postcolonial human society, Shabine turns to
imagination and language to generate his own Self. Haunted by visions of dead
m en...their bones / ground white from Senegal to San Salvador... (349) and by
hallucinations of the great admirals, / Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, [andj the hoarse
orders / they gave those Shabines [the slaves on their ships] (352), and convinced that he
is heir to no tradition, W alcotts narrator declares his only inheritance and legacy to be
his poetry. Speaking to his wife whom he has abandoned for the love of another woman,
Shabine says, I have kept my own / promise, to leave you the one thing I own / you
whom I loved first: my poetry (354).

Shabine develops and asserts his own subject-

hood through a poetic and im aginative act. He says, my com m on language go be the
wind, / my pages the sails of the schooner Flight...I had no nation now but the
imagination... (347-350).
However subject-hood is available only at the m om ent of its utterance, at the
moment of the act. W alcott denies, in the section titled, M aria Concepcion & the Book o f
D ream s, the ability of language to fully decode any traum atic experience, even a dream.
She said: I dream t of whales and a storm , / but for that dream the book had no answ er

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(357). E ven this seemingly harmless dream, this experience, is resistant to the decoding
that a book, that language m ight provide. And later when Shabine w akes screaming and
crying, m y flesh / raining with sweat (357), the Book of Dreams is unable to find any
meaning in his trauma. Thus, placing priority on the m om ent of utterance and the
transitory and mom entary respite from postcolonial traum a, Shabine sings:
All you see me talking to the wind, so you think I mad.
...All you fate in my hand,
m inisters, businessmen, Shabine have you, friend,
I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand,
I w ho have no weapon but poetry and
the lances o f palms and the seas shining shield! (357-8)
T he poetic act, the utterance of an im aginative construct, is not the only thing
necessary in this poem for the constitution of subject-hood. Shabine, while a figure of
authority and learning in the poem, learns the lesson of self-sacrifice from his captain.
Near the end o f the poem, as the schooner Flight is caught in a great storm, Shabine and
the rest o f the crew, prepare themselves for death and the destruction of their subjecthoods. However, it is through the Christ-like devotion of their captain as he is bound to
the helm, crucif[ied] to his post (359), that the crew survives. W alcott, invoking the
virtue and primal power of self-sacrifice, establishes the second condition necessary for
transcending oppositional dualities: one must be w illing to be devoured by the very
forces of history that one seeks to, at least, m om entarily decode.
Once Shabine has survived his adventures and avowed the contingent nature of
his subjectivity and willingness to subm it that subjectivity to the m elancholic m em ory of

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historical traum a, he declares, I am satisfied/ if my hand gave voice to one peoples

g rie f (360). He is able, drawing upon complex and contradictory terms of identity, to
articulate, fo r a moment, the cry of a postcolonial; he mourns the past while im agining
that past in m elancholic terms: traum a remains but does not disable. A nd while W alcott,
like Shabine, notes that there are more islands there, man,/than peas on a tin plate, all
different size (360) and implies the unfinished w ork of recovery that remains, the poem
successfully articulates, momentarily, a postcolonial subject-hood that adm its to the trails
and travails o f colonialism and then transcends them. The transitory and fleeting nature
of this subjectivity is, in the end, a necessary aspect of W alcotts project. For him to
posit some lasting transcendence of traum a would be for him to im plicate his project in a
narrative o f mourning, a narrative of getting over the past, of denying and
pathologizing history. By allowing only a m om entary transcendence, and an incomplete
one at that, W alcott retains the essential affect o f the melancholic: the object of loss,
while figured alongside the beautiful and transcendent, rem ains present.
A t the end of the poem, Shabine sets dow n his poems, abandons his speech, and
studies the stars, observing that:
Sometimes is ju st me, and the soft-scissored foam
as the deck turn white and the moon open
a cloud like a door, and the light over me
is a road in white m oonlight taking me home. (361)
Thus while Shabine is able to successfully articulate his subject-hood despite the internal
contradictions of the postcolonial, he does in the end, set aside his linguistic tools and
surrender him self to the world. A nd while this final m om ent o f the poem is clearly an

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indication o f redemption and transcendence, of W alcotts narrator finding him self, at last,
able to im agine a way home, a way to a physical and an emotional place of refuge, this
rem ains a m om ent which, with the absence of a perm anent transcendence, is a collapsing
and transitory moment. For while the moon open / a cloud like a door and the light
over Shabine is a road home, it is only a pathway to a destination, it is not the actual
destination, the actual perm anent transcendence of earthly and historical concerns. The
final lines, despite the lyric rapture suggested, are ultimately, once again, a deferral of
Shabines rest. For even as Odysseus, at the end of H om ers epic, suggests, that although
he has com e hom e to Ithika, he must, according to Teiresias, take an oar / and trudge the
m ainland...(438) until he makes the proper sacrifice to Poseidon, so too does the end of
W alcotts poem suggest that Shabines journey is incomplete. The postcolonials
subjectivity, then, is troped as what Stuart Hall refers to as a diasporic identity:
cultural identities (that] are the points of identification, the unstable points of
identification or suture, which are made, w ithin the discourses of history and
culture.,.(n]ot an essence, but a positioning [H alls em phasis] (395). Like the landscape
of the Caribbean, Shabines subjectivity contains m ultiple and som etim es contradictory
constitutive elements; their articulation w ithin the text o f the poem is unstable,
mom entary, and articulated through the retention of a m elancholic affect. There are
suggestions of a transcendence of historical trauma, both in the subject of Shabine as well
as in the sublimity of the Caribbean, how ever these suggestions are only strategic and
provisional. The possiblity of getting over the past, o f a healed and only beautiful
subject and landscape is continually deferred and yet this deferral does not result in some
kind o f paralysis. Instead, while a desire for a prelapsarian landscape or subjectivity

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remains as problem atic as ever, Shabine, the prototypical postcolonial melancholic

retains his agency, continually reforms and recasts his subjectivity, and persists in his
vain search for one island that heals with its harbor / and a guiltless horizon, where the
alm onds shadow / doesnt injure the sand (361). For Shabine, as for Odysseus, the
ideal of home and hearth remains, necessarily unfulfilled but still sought after.
As a num ber of critics have pointed out, the publication o f The Star Apple
Kingdom and The Schooner Flight in particular m ark the end o f an era in W alcotts
work. Indeed, Patricia Ismond has attem pted to periodize W alcotts work from his
earliest publications through the publication of The Star A pple Kingdom (the book which
contains The Schooner Fligh tA. She has called this period W alcotts Caribbean Phase,
a phrase which dem arks the period in which his sole place of residence was in the
Caribbean.19 Paul Breslin has noted that the publication of W alcotts next book of
poems, The Fortunate Traveller (1981), inaugurates a restless decade of shuttling
between the Caribbean and North A m erica with increasingly frequent trips to Europe as
w ell (216). Not unexpectedly, this post Caribbean phase o f his work sees W alcott
engaging a variety of new landscapes and experim enting with various ways o f portraying
his landscapes.
In poem s written during the 1980s W alcott explores a num ber o f non-Caribbean
landscapes; where it s relevant, he applies some of the same m elancholic m ethodology to
geographical sites as varied as W ales and the A m erican south. In a poem from the 1981
collection, The Fortunate Traveler, W alcott writes about the landscape of W ales and
situates that landscape within the continuum of a history of colonization. W alcott writes
of, A plump Raven, Plantagenet, who abides over the walls of W ales; he describes the

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physical to ll of British colonialism in Wales as resulting in blackened cottages with their
stony hatred / of industrial fires. In opposition to this Walcott proposes the pow er of
language: a language is shared / like bread to the m outh (455). W alcott suggests that
there is continuity between the W elsh landscape and the postcolonial rebelliousness of
the W elsh language (Terada 165). To emphasize his decision to address non-Caribbean
landscapes, he even divides his 1987 collection, The Arkansas Testam ent into two
sections: H ere and Elsewhere , with H ere denoting St. Lucia and Elsew here
denoting everyw here else. In the title poem from The Arkansas Testam ent, W alcott
writes about the landscape of the A m erican south where even the color o f the light carries
with it the w eight of history. (Dawn was fading the houses / to an even Confederate
grey (A rkansas 108).) W alcott writes about the wounds from the Indian wars / cut into
the soft plank tables / by the picnic lake...[and] The pines [that] huddle in quotas / on the
lakes calm w ater line (114).
Furtherm ore in these later texts W alcott presents a variety of perspectives on the
landscapes which he writes about. W here in The Schooner Flight the landscape is
simply the setting for the poem and is really only seen through the eyes of a single
narrator, in W alcotts later work, m ost notably in O meros, the landscape is presented
from a m ultitude of perspectives. The Caribbean landscapes o f these later poems retain
the melancholic affect that informs W alcotts postcolonial rom anticism , but in the later
work he uses a num ber o f different landscapes that help to place the specificity of the St.
Lucian postcolonial landscape in relief. W alcott has never confined him self to simply
writing about the St. Lucian or even Caribbean landscapes. He has, even in his very early
work, written about a m ultitude of landscapes.20 H owever in W alcotts later w ork he

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explores the function the various landscapes can have in their representations of various
subjectivities. In work such as The Schooner Fligh t W alcott creates a landscape that
functions as a kind of postcolonial object correlative; rather than simply metonymically
representing a character or speakers emotional state, the landscape functions historically
and articulates the materiality o f traum a, not only for the individual but for the
postcolonial in general. By the tim e W alcott writes Omeros, however, he is no longer
just using landscape to represent a single postcolonial consciousness; he uses landscape
to represent a myriad of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities.

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IV: The Returning Prodigal

The sun and the rain contend for the same place
like the two languages I know one so rich
in its imperial intimacies, its echo of privilege,
the other like the orange words of a hillside in droughtbut my love of both wide as the A tlantic is large
H om ecom ing
Omeros, a long narrative poem that mimics the epic genre in general and H om ers
Odyssey in particular, is often described as W alcotts masterpiece. It is unsurprising that
this masterpiece would, like so much o f W alcotts other work, prom pt a vigorous and
sustained debate about its relationship to its canonical influences.

Specifically, the

relationship between O meros and the epic genre (and H om ers Odyssey) has becom e the
site of a great deal of debate and contention. R obert Hamner, in one o f the first full book
length studies on the poem, locates O meros rather unproblem atically in the tradition of
the epic. John Thiem e, while not totally in disagreem ent with H am ner, remarks that at
first sight Omeros may well seem to constitute itself in term s of a derivative relationship
with H om ers epics...H ow ever, the relationship is not simply one o f derivative homage;
nor is it an adversarial counter-discursive riposte in which the post-colonial text simply
opposes the m aster-narrative o f a colonial original (153). N oting that W alcott him self
has said that the poem is not an epic, Paul Breslin argues that Omeros has uneasy
relations with the epic genre (243). Carol Dougherty, echoing T.S. E liots argum ents in
Tradition and the Individual T alent, goes further and suggests that Omeros in fact
reshapes epic tradition and transform s our readings o f H om er.21

She notes, poetic

influence flows both ways ...O m ero s certainly belongs to an epic tradition defined in
large part by the Iliad and the Odyssey, but W alcotts poem supplem ents and reshapes
that tradition in turn, helping us learn to read H om er again (355).22 W hile discussions

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about the relationship of Omeros to the epic genre are virtually unavoidable given the
poem s self-stated analogous linkages (and just as often subsequent disavowals of those
linkages) to Homer, my point here is not to dwell on the virtues o f these discussions.23
Rather I m ention the discussions about the p o em s relationship to the epic genre and
Homer as one more instance of the com plexity of W alcotts mimicry. In many ways the
debates ov er the relationship between Omeros and the epic genre m irror the larger critical
discussions surrounding W alcotts work in general. Questions o f W alcotts relationship
to canonical texts and them es have dogged him throughout his entire career. Some critics
have sought to locate him as a direct successor to his canonical influences, other critics
have em phasized his postcoloniality as a source of counter-discursive poetics that
undermines the cultural hegem ony o f colonial authority. As I have argued throughout
these two chapters, W alcotts relationship to the canon, w hether we are discussing his
relationship to the epic genre or to the rom antic landscape, is ultimately more complex
than the M anichean binary of com plicity or resistance.
Like the relationship of the poem to the epic tradition, a relationship that is the
site of a vigorous intellectual debate, the relationship of the various landscapes of the
poem to their canonical and anti-canonical influences are also w orth considering. W hat
is particularly significant about the various landscapes in O m eros is the sheer variety of
them appearing throughout the poem.

More than literal geographic variety, the poem

sometimes presents the same landscapes from a variety of views.

We see St. Lucia

through the eyes of D ennis and M aud Plunkett, tw o colonials transplanted to St. Lucia
from Britain and Ireland respectively.

We also see the landscape of St. Lucia through

two very different postcolonial perspectives, those of H ector and Achille. To contrast

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just these three landscapes dem onstrates a self-consciousness on the p o ets part, a selfconsciousness of his own various prejudices regarding the representation of landscape.
The landscape viewed through the eyes of the colonials turns out to be not so different
from the landscape depicted by the speakers of some of W alcotts earliest poems. As I
discuss in the previous chapter, the ways in which the landscape is constructed in some of
the earliest o f W alcotts published poems indicates the p o ets anxieties about reproducing
received m odes o f landscape even as he acknowledges in other poem s the revisionary
aspect that has always been part of the canon.

H owever in producing imitatively

romantic landscape through the perspectives of the colonials, Dennis and Maud Plunkett,
W alcott dem onstrates a clear self-consciousness about the ideological associations of
these kinds o f landscapes. In contrast, the landscape of the speaker of Omeros and the
landscapes in which the postcolonial characters of Achille, Philocete, Hector, and Helen
dwell is much m ore like the landscape of The Schooner F l i g h t full of historical
allusions woven into the linguistic evocation o f the islands beauty. H owever Achille and
H ectors two very different perspectives of the landscape o f St. Lucia also points to the
sheer diversity of postcolonial perspectives. Such a m ove on W alcotts part helps him
avoid the pitfalls of reifying any single postcolonial perspective.
For Dennis Plunkett, a British expatriate, the beauty of the landscape offers him
some consolation for his various wounds and anxieties. Plunkett, wounded while serving
in the British A rm y in North A frica during W orld W ar II, experiences the landscape in
fairly unproblem atized rom antic terms. However, Plunkett does dem onstrate a profound
disaffection for the trappings o f em pire (he refers to his fellow British in St. Lucia as
middle-class farts who affect upper class m annerism s and accents despite the fact that

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their sonic / judgm ent couldnt distinguish a secondhand-car / salesman from
M anchester from the phony pukka / tones of ex-patriates (25)).

Also Plunkett does

dem onstrate some consciousness of the historical m ateriality of the landscape: he

remarks, th e re s too much poverty below us (63); he also acknowledges the
consum ptive and voracious appetite of em pire as he declares, [w]e helped ourselves / to
these green islands like olives from a saucer, / m unched on

the pith, then spat their

sucked stones on a plate (25). Yet for all of these displays of self-consciousness, his
experience o f the St. Lucian landscape is, on the whole, unproblem atically romantic. The
landscape, fo r all of Plunketts acknow ledgm ents of social and econom ic injustice,
provides succor and relief for his own, ultimately, very colonial subjectivity.

Looking

down over the island and contem plating the Edenic view in front of him, Plunkett
remarks:
England seemed to him merely the place of his birth.
How odd to prefer, over its pastoral sites
reasonable leaves shading reasonable earth

these loud-m outhed forests on their illiterate heights,

these springs speaking a dialect that cooled his mind
more than pastures with castles! To prefer the hush

of a hazed A tlantic worried by the salt wind!

Others could read it as going back to the bush,
but harbour after crescent harbour closed his wound. (61)

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190

For all th a t Plunkett registers a sincere appreciation for St. Lucia, the landscape remains
constructed in service to his subjectivity. The landscape of England, while lacking
som ething undefined for Plunkett (perhaps the magical healing powers o f the St. Lucian
landscape), rem ains nevertheless the site of reason and rationality with its reasonable
leaves sh ad in g reasonable earth. In contrast, the St. Lucian landscape is loud
mouthed a n d illiterate. Plunkett, to use Edward Saids term inology, orientalizes the
landscape. F or all of Plunketts feelings o f estrangem ent from his hom eland, England
remains th e seat of empire, the site of rational enlightened subjectivity posited in
opposition to the landscape of the form er colony, a landscape that is placed in service to
P lunketts w ounded needs, even as the landscape of the colonies was placed in material
service to th e needs of a voracious nineteenth century British empire.
T he landscape of St. Lucia is, for M aud Plunkett, even less am biguous than for
her husband. W ithout any am bivalence she misses her homeland of Ireland: I miss the
light northern rain, I miss the seasons / M aud moaned, im plying the climate lacked
subtlety (48). A lso w ithout any am bivalence, she dislikes St. Lucia:
T here was a lot in the island that M aud hated:
the m oisture rotting their library; that was the worst.
It seeped through the shawled piano and created

havoc with the felt ham mers, so the tuner cost

a regular fortune. A fter that, the cluttered light
on the choked m arket steps; insects o f any kind,

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191

especially rain flies...w orse than the insects

w h o , at least were natives. (61-62)

Like Jean R h y s portrait of B rontes Rochester in The Wide Sargasso Sea, M aud sees the
Caribbean landscape as oppressive, even threatening in its fecundity.24 The landscape is
cluttered, disorganized and infested (the cluttered light / on the choked m arket steps),
even the texts of em pire are subject to the entropic influence o f the tropics (the moisture
rotting th eir library). Speaking o f the nineteenth century novel, Raymond W illiams
observes th at there was also a marked developm ent of the idea of England as
hom e...[a s] a m emory and an id eal...an idea of rural England: its green peace
contrasted w ith the tropical or arid places o f actual work; its sense of belonging, of
com m unity, idealized by contrast with the tensions o f colonial rule and the isolated alien
settlem ent (281).
The landscape o f St. Lucia is, for both M aud and Dennis Plunkett, an orientalized
landscape, a place that, as Raymond W illiams describes the rural landscape, was an
idyllic retreat, an escape from debt or sham e (281) (or in Dennis P lunketts case, a balm
for a wound). W alcott, by constructing the landscape experienced by Dennis and Maud
Plunkett in distinctly orientalized term s, situates the Plunketts in a very imperial tradition
of im agining landscape. For all that D ennis experiences of the St. Lucian landscape are
ambivalent, even this am bivalence is easily located within the traditional discourse
surrounding the colonially imagined landscapes o f em pire.25 The landscape the Plunketts
experience as W alcott writes it is threatening, savage, and som ew hat out of control:
|h]ogs ran to slaughter / like infantry tired o f trenches and shovels, / and rain-m addened
lilies chose a death by water, / like pregnant virgins in V ictorian novels (55). However

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at the sam e time, the landscape is the source of a divine, alm ost intoxicating beauty:
sunrise w ould flood M auds garden, pouring relentless / light in angelic lilies, yellow
chalices / o f morning glories, and Queen A n n es seraphic lace (62). These twin poles of
barbarism and Eden are, as critics as varied as M ary Louise Pratt, Raymond W illiams,
and Patrick Brantlinger have argued, very typical of landscapes as im agined in colonial
cultural productions. St. Lucia, as experience by the Plunketts, is very a colonial
landscape as typically imagined by colonial texts. It is im itatively romantic.26
W alcott uses these colonial landscapes in the poem to bring the postcolonial
landscape into relief. The threatening and edenic nature o f the colonial landscape
highlights how dehistoricized that landscape is. St. Lucia, as the Plunketts (and by
extension other colonials) see it, is a landscape that reflects their own fears and desires, it
functions as an objective correlative for their own subjectivities.

In contrast, the

postcolonial landscape as the speaker of the poem and the other characters o f the poem
experience it is historical and material. The postcolonial rom antic landscape of Omeros,
much like the postcolonial landscape of The Schooner Flight is weighted by history
and carries with it the m elancholic affect of trauma.
M uch like the landscape in other poem s (Ruins of a G reat House,
Homecom ing: Anse La Raye , am ong others including The Schooner Flight) the
landscape of Omeros is ruined, dangerous, and still beautiful: the broken roads, the clear
rivers / that congealed to sepia lagoons, from which some case / of bilharzias would erupt
in kids whose livers / caught the hookw orm s sickle. Pretty, dangerous stream s (57).
The experience of this landscape is, however, not always the same for its postcolonial
inhabitants. W here A chilles experience of the landscape is much like Shabines in The

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193

Schooner F lig h t, sublime, historical, and melancholy, H ectors experience of the

landscape is more adversarial.
H ecto rs experience of the St. Lucian landscape is tragic. W here Achille and
Shabine have revelatory experiences that allows them, to some extent, to apprehend and
transcend the inequities of the postcolonial state, Hector is simply spun about by
history he does not have the same kind of metaphysical experience that allows A chille
and Shabine to locate a kind of meaning in their lives.

For Hector, the landscape

contains no meaning, no significance. W here Achille journeys back to A frica and w here
Shabine has his dreams and his storm, H ectors life lacks such a narrative focus. Instead,
while w atching his canoe founder, he is tossed about by the sea (the m ore / he dived, the
faster the current spun him, thunder / and lightening crack ed .. .he could swim / with the
crum bling su rf...ev en if it chose / to treat him like its garbage (51). W here both A chille
and Shabine, when tossed about in the sea, experience visions which reveal to them their
own racial history, and which tie them to a long historical chain of being, Hector is
simply treated like the seas garbage. H ectors narrative is, to a certain extent, the central
tragedy of this poem. His life is not, in this landscape, invested with meaning. The
landscape which H ector inhabits is, for him, utterly unintelligible. His response is to ally
him self with a tourist industry which W alcott, like Kincaid, holds in contem pt.27 H ector
purchases [t|he Comet, a sixteen-seater passenger-van...C oiled tongues of flam e / leapt
from its sliding doors. Each row was a divan / o f furred leopardskin. Because of its fiery
name / under an arching rocket painted on its side / the Space Age had come to the
island (117). H ector uses this van to ferry tourists about. The Comet is described as
simultaneously atavistic and representative o f an Icarian future, and it seems to

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embody so m e of the most puerile aspects of the tourist industry it relies on fetishized
ideas of th e past and the future as it rum bles over the landscape carrying tourists who
them selves presumably only hold fetishized ideas of the place to which th e y ve com e.28
E quipped with a pagan as well as a Christian good luck charm (a fur m onkey
and a porcelain Virgin in flow ers (118)), H ectors participation in the tourist industry
here is lad en with self-pity and self-hatred. He asks himself, Why he had bought this
chariot / a n d left the sea. He believed she still loved Achille, / and that is why, through
palm -shadow s, the leopard shot / with its flam ing wound that speed alone could not heal
(118). H ow ever what began as an act inspired by his lack of confidence in H elen s love,
becomes its own trap. H ector finds him self in the throes of a frightening discontent
brought on by the know ledge that he has willingly joined another / kind of life that was
changing h im ... / where he could not / whip off his shirt, hearing the conchs sum m oning
note (231). It is only after his death, that his anguish is fully explicated. His m isery is
assigned to his willingness to sacrifice his love for the sea.
H e d paid the penalty of giving up the sea
as graceless and as treacherous as it had seemed,
for the taxi-business; he was m aking money,

but all that money was m aking him ashamed

of the long afternoons of shouting by the w harf
hustling passengers. He m issed the uncertain sand

under his feet, he sighed for the trough o f a w av e...

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Castries was corrupting him with its roaring life,

its littered market, with too many transport vans. (231)
W here A chille em braces the sublimity of the landscape and is carried off to explore
primal memories of Africa, Hector refuses his own love of the landscape and retreats into
the easy corruption of urban m odernization. H ecto rs retreat from the sublime is, in
many ways, a direct reversal of the rom antic journey that A chille takes and also is a
reverse o f the kind of m ovem ent that Saree M akdisi reads in W ordsw orths journey out
o f London. W here W ordsworth eschews the jum bled u p...parliam ent of m onsters
(Prelude 381) that he encounters while in residence in London, H ector turns tow ard the
city with its roaring life, /its littered m ark ets...its endless garages (Omeros 231).
W here W ordsworth escapes from the press of the city into nature, Hector attem pts to
escape his own fears and anxieties by going into the city. If romanticism , as M akdisi
suggests, is a discourse that runs in opposition to m odernization, then H ectors
experience serves as a negative exam ple o f o n es experience with the romantic landscape.
In the landscapes articulated through the perspectives of the Plunketts and Hector,
W alcott presents us with two distinct m odels of inadequacy; one is simplistically
imitative, the other is a simplistic rejection, a rejection which has tragic consequences. In
contrast to these two failed models o f articulating landscape, W alcott offers A ch illes
model, which is in many ways sim ilar to the model W alcott constructed around S habines
experiences. Achille experiences the landscape through the lens o f W alcotts
postcolonial romanticism.

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A chille, like Shabine in The Schooner F l i g h t does have a very complex and
som etim es conflicted relationship to his postcolonial landscape. At tim es that
relationship is seemingly im itatively romantic: Achille felt the rim / of the brimming
m orning being brought like a gift / by the handles of the headland. He w as at home. /
This was his garden (126). H owever even as Achille enjoys this idyllic moment, his
boat floats over the watery and ghostly rem ains of the middle passage: the nameless
bones of all his brothers / drowned in the crossing (128).

But where Shabine only

briefly encounters the ghostly specters of drowned slaves, Achille is im m ersed in their
world: [t)he shreds of the oceans floor passed him from corpses / that had perished in
the crossing, their hair like weeds, / their bones were long coral fingers, bubbles of eyes /
watched h im ...(45-6) Like some postcolonial Tom O Bedlam, A chille seemingly
spends three hundred years w alking across the bones of the drowned slaves: he walked
for three hundred years / in the silken w ake... / he saw the huge cem eteries / o f bone and
the huge crossbows of the rusted anchors (142). Like the landscape through which
Shabine moves in the earlier poem, A ch illes landscapes are beautiful and haunted by the
specters of colonial trauma. W here the P lunkets experience articulates landscape in a
imitatively rom antic fashion, H ector simply rejects the beauty of the landscape for the
bitterness of his own insecurities and the alienation that is in part self-im posed. Achille,
on the other hand, not only experiences the landscape of his hom e in all its beauty and
tragedy, he functions in the poem as a cipher for the com plexity of the postcolonial
experience. The poet brings this issue up by asking, |w ]hy waste lines on Achille, a
shade on the sea-floor? (296). The answ er is to offer a counter-discourse to either the
Plunketts or H ectors experiences o f the postcolonial landscape. W here the Plunketts

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and Hector experience the landscape and its history along simplistic term s (either
imitation o f received mode of apprehension or simple rejection), Achille experiences the
landscape as beautiful, as historical, as traumatic, in short, he experiences the landscape
as a postcolonial.
By contrasting the landscape of the Plunketts with the landscape that Achille
experiences, W alcott highlights the difference between acts of im itation and acts of
mimicry. By contrasting H ectors experience against A chilles, W alcott highlights the
costs of simplistically rejecting history and attempting to assimilate into the very urban
sprawl and touristic mode of viewing that is in large part responsible for H ectors misery.
For the Plunketts as well as Achille, the landscape is identifiably rom antic, beautiful and
in opposition to the urban metropolis. H owever the landscape that A chille moves
through m elancholically recalls the traum as of colonialism; it is postcolonial whereas the
landscape o f the Plunketts is colonial and where H ectors landscape is simply
unintelligible.
In Omeros, W alcott goes further than simply constructing three alternative
landscapes, one colonial, one unintelligible, and one postcolonial. He interrogates his
own assumptions and agenda fo r generating the kinds of landscapes in the poem.
Demonstrating that he still feels some o f the old anxieties about his relationship to those
he writes about, W alcott writes, D idnt I w ant the poor / to say in the same light so that I
could transfix / them in amber, the afterglow of an em pire, / preferring a shed of palmthatch with tilted sticks / to that blue bus-stop? (227). This is not, after all, so very
different from the concerns articulated in his earliest published works, Prelude and As
John to Patmos. As I discussed in the previous chapter, those tw o poem s articulate the

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poets anxiety about his own incommensurable distance from those he writes about, the
living im ages / of flesh that saunter through the eye (Collected 4). However in those
early poem s the p o ets anxieties are not nearly as explicitly articulated as in Omeros
where the poet plainly asks, H adnt I made their poverty my paradise? (228).

Despite

this anxiety the speaker o f the poem excuses his own complicity by declaring, [a]rt is
H istorys nostalgia, it prefers a thatched / roof to a concrete factory (228). Eschew ing a
political excuse for his anxieties, the speaker of the poem takes refuge behind the excuse
of art, claim ing that the im peratives of art require the poets com plicity in fram ing the
people of St. Lucia in such a nostalgic, some m ight even say rom antic, light. However
where in the very early poems the p o ets desire to cloak him self in the authority of the
canon m ight indicate certain im itative tendencies in the early work, in this late poem by
Derek W alcott, his deflection of anxieties onto the im peratives o f art does not belie the
interventionist and subversive nature of his mimicry. W here in the early work, W alcott
was, at times, anxiously replicating the tropes of his classical and canonical influences, in
this late work W alcott places these anxieties in the fuller context o f his various modes of
writing, including the m ode of the colonized im itator and the m ode of the postcolonial
mimic.

1 T he lim itations o f this project preclude w hat could b e a far m ore ex ten siv e con sid eration o f the nature o f
canonical texts and their subsequent revision s and rcinterpretations according to the dem ands articulated by
new texts. I have argued that in large part the revision s o f the canon that W a lc o tts earliest w ork have
articulated are revision s that are lim ited to aesthetic and form al concerns. H o w ev er, 1 do think that given a
com p lete material historiography o f the texts o f the canon w h ich are d istin ctly related to on e another, one
could articulate a sustained argum ent that W a lco tts cultural interventions into the canon are not an entirely
isolated event.
2 See introduction for a d iscu ssio n o f contem porary trends in R om anticism . A fter the publication o f Jerome
M cG anns The R om an tic Id e o lo g y in 1983, a number o f critics have fo cu sed on the id eo lo g ica l orientations
o f R om anticism . A t the tim e (the 1980s) a num ber o f critics, taking their inspiration from Edward S a id s
O rien talism (1 9 7 8 ) fo cu sed on the intersections b etw een R om an ticism and Im perialism . John Barrell, A nn
Berm ingham , Karl Kroeber, T im Fulfurd, Peter K itson, M ary L ou ise Pratt, N ig el Leask, and D avid Spurr
are just a few o f the critics w h o have fo cu sed on this id eo lo g ica l co llu sio n b etw een R om anticism and

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Im perialism . R ecently som e critics have consider R om anticism as a discourse that has som e oppositional
power. E d w ard L arissys R om an ticism a n d P o stm o d e rn ism (\9 9 9 ) contains a number o f e ssa y s that rely on
historicist, fe m in ist and post-colon ial c r itic ism s...to exp lod e the R om antic canon, partly under the
pressure to d e -e sse n tia lise [sic ] (3) the canon and su ggest opposition id eo lo g ica l c o llu sio n s betw een
R om anticism and these more contem porary discourses. Saree M akdisi, in his book, R o m a n tic
Im perialism : U n iv e rsa l E m pire an d the C ulture o f M o d ern ity, observes that even as the culture o f
modernity w a s beginning to consolidate under the indices o f capitalism and im p erialism , rom anticism
em erged as a sa lien t id eological discourse that had the capacity to con test the h o m o g en izin g historicization
occurring u n der the rubric o f m odernization, rom anticism , according to M akdisi, operates as a critique o f
m odernization. He d oes, h ow ever, take to heart M arilyn B utlers observation that rom anticism is inchoate
because it is n o t a sin gle intellectual m ovem en t but a com p lex o f responses to certain co n d itio n s w hich
W estern s o c ie ty has experienced and continues to exp erience since the m iddle o f the eigh teen th century
(184).
M ak d isi and Ian B au com su ggest that it is p o ssib le to read som e o f these rom antic texts as capable
o f contesting th e very system s o f im perialism they w ere so m uch a part o f inscribing, to read these texts as
disruptive o f im perial authority by d isclo sin g the am b ivalen ce o f that authority.
W ithin the space o f such am b ivalen ce lies the op positional pow er that I argue contem porary
writers h ave taken up through their so m etim es un con sciou s deploym ent o f rom antic tropes. For the
rom antics, the evocation o f landscape represents an opp osition w h o se ability to radically underm ine the
naturalized authority o f m odernization is ultim ately defeated. T his hybridity w hich su g g e s te d the fissures
o f m odernity, b eco m es for the postcolon ial a m eans to form a historically co m p lex su b ject position.
3 In contrast to trauma w h ich , as I w ill d iscu ss, relies on the repetition o f pain, the su b lim e, as articulated by
Edmund B urke and Im m anuel Kant am ong others, relies in part on the overco m in g o f the trauma o f the
sublim e encounter. Burke notes, |w ]e have all along considered the su b lim e as d ep en d in g on som e
m odification o f pain or terror (1 4 3 ). Kant remarks, [t]he feelin g o f the S u b lim e is therefore a fe e lin g o f
p ain ...T h ere is at the sam e tim e a pleasure thus e x c ite d .. . (1 1 9 ). W hile pain and terror are essential
com ponents o f the su b lim e, their m od ifica tio n or an accom p an yin g pleasure m oderates the pain that is
a part o f the sublim e. Traum a, on the other hand, is defined by its repetition. Cathy Caruth, citin g Freud
notes that trauma em erges as the unw itting reenactm ent o f an event that o n e cannot sim p ly lea v e behind

( 2 ).
4 I argue that W alcotts m im icry fu n ction s as an effe c tiv e alternative to either Fanon or N aip au ls
form ulation o f the fate o f the p ostcolon ial. Im itation, in the pejorative w a y s that Fanon and Naipaul define
it, is tantam ount to the p ath ological repetition o f a trauma.
5 This later w ork d oes not fall under the rubric o f the other sid e o f F reuds form ulation: m ourning. The
argument I am m aking relies upon a third term, one w hich d o es not rely upon the e ffa cin g o f trauma
(m ourning) or the con stitu tive p ath ologization o f trauma (m elan ch oly).
6 In sp ecific terms, Freud says that m ourning is regularly the reaction to the lo ss o f a lo v ed person, or to
the loss o f som e abstraction w h ich has taken the place o f o n e, such as o n e s country, liberty, an ideal, and
so on. In som e p eop le, the sam e in flu en ces produce m elan ch olia instead o f m ourning (2 4 3 ). In contrast to
m ourning, Freud d efin es m elancholia: T he d istin gu ish in g mental features o f m elan ch olia are a profoundly
painful dejection, cessa tio n o f interest in the ou tsid e w orld, lo ss o f the capacity to lo v e, inhibition o f all
activity ... and so on. T h ese sym p tom s occur, according to Freud w hen the e g o , the se lf, the person, cannot
detach him /her se lf from the ob ject o f lo ss, and in a w ay, m erges his/her o w n sen se o f se lf w ith that object.
7 C heng cites Paul G ilro y s The B la ck A tla n tic and S ad iya Hartm ans S c en e s o f S u b jectio n as tw o texts
w hich contend that the internalization o f dom in an t o p p ression may not sign al pure conform ity or d efeat
(21). D espite this caveat, and w h ile I w ou ld by no m eans su g g est that even W alcotts early efforts indicate
pure conform ity or d efea t, as I have ob served at the start o f the previous chapter, h is tendency to refer to
his relationship to the canon as illegitim ate or even illegal d o e s indicate intense an xiety about his own

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subject fo rm a tio n and his identification with the very forces o f colon ialism and n eo co lo n ia lism he clearly
understands a s responsible for the abjection o f the colon ial and form er colon ials.
8 Hom i B habha, articulating an intervention that ch allen ges our sense o f the historical identity o f culture as
a h o m o g en iz in g , u n ifyin g force, authenticated by the originary Past [sic ], (3 7 ) describ es a th ird sp a ce
w hich he d e sc r ib e s as a contradictory and am bivalent space o f en u n cia tio n ...th o u g h unrepresentable in
itse lf...c o n stitu te s the discu rsive conditions o f enunciation that ensure that the m ean in g and sym b ols o f
culture h ave n o primordial unity or fixity; that even the sam e signs can be appropriated, translated,
rehistoricized and read a n ew (37).
9See in particular, T he Sea is H istory, from The S ta r-A p p le K in gdom .
10 W ordsw orth, in The P refa ce to the L y rica l B a lla d s (1 8 0 2 ), w rites that he proposed to m y self in these
P o e m s...to c h o o se incidents and situations from com m on life ...L o w and rustic life w a s generally ch osen,
because in that con d ition , the essential passions o f the heart find a better soil in w hich they can attain their
m atu rity...an d lastly, because in that condition the p assion s o f men are incorporated w ith the beautiful and
permanent fo rm s o f nature
"The Petrarchan son n et is generally com prised o f an octave (abbaabba) and a sestet (cd ecd e or cdcdcd); the
Shakespearean is com prised o f three quatrains and a con clu d in g couplet. T h is poem is made up o f tw o
quatrains and three cou p lets, h ow ever the first tw o quatrains do form a rhetorical unit as the poem takes a
significan t turn at lin e 9. A d d ition ally, like the Shakespearean sonnet, T he Harbour con clu d es with a
coup let that fo r c e s a recursive re-reading o f the first 12 lines o f the poem .
12 In T he S c h o o n e r F lig h t, as Shabine, the narrator, exp eriences a dream , W alcott describes how this
Caribbean so ch o k e w ith the d e a d ...I saw th e m ...th e dead m en ( The S ta r-A p p le K in g d o m , 7). In O m ero s,
A ch ille sees the n am eless bones o f all his brothers / drow ned in the cro ssin g (1 2 8 ).
13 In her e ssa y , E xotic B o d ies, D istant Landscapes: T ouristic V ie w in g and P opularized A nthropology in
the N ineteenth C entury, E llen Strain notes that, the tourist-spectator p osition w as the product o f
a ...ca p ita list v ie w o f the w orld as a reservoir o f products, raw m aterials, and experiential p lea su res...O n e
outcom e [o f th is p osition ] w as the learned pleasures o f the touristic as d efined by the visu al ob jectification
or the con version o f the cultural Other into spectacle; the separation o f the tourist from the tou red ...In other
w ords, touristic pleasure m ade p o ssib le the creation o f a safety zon e w ithin w hich the exhilaration o f
geographical p roxim ity w ith the other could ex ist w ithout com p rom isin g other less literal form s o f
distance (7 2 -7 3 ). O ne o f the literal form s o f d istan ce that d o not h ave to be com p rom ised by the tourist is
historical d ista n ce the tourist is not ob liged to con sid er or even know any o f the history o f the place
w hich he/she v is its w h ile this is not alw ays the ca se, there are a num ber o f w a y s in w hich the
exoticization o f the toured landscape plays into the obscuration o f history. Strain m akes the argum ent that
the conception o f the Other and the landscape w hich the other inhabits as a pleasurable sp ectacle d evoid
o f its o w n historical and material particulars gradually d ev elo p ed during the nineteenth century and
continues to d evelop .
14 R egarding w hat he calls, im aginary h om elan d s, Salm an R ushdie w rites, It m ay b e that writers in m y
position, ex iles, or em igrants or expatriates, are haunted by so m e sen se o f lo ss, som e urge to reclaim , to
look back, even at the risk o f b ein g mutated into pillars o f salt. But if w e do look back, w e must also d o so
in the k n o w le d g e .. .that w e w ill not be capable o f reclaim ing precisely the thing that w a s lost; that w e w ill,
in short, create fictio n s, not actual cities or v illa g es, but in v isib le o n e s, im aginary hom elan d s (10). W hile
R ushdie is speaking sp ecific a lly here o f ph ysical estrangem ent, the estran gem en t o f the im agination o f the
postcolonial is also im plied. W alcott, like R ushdie, is constantly constructing various versions o f a
remem bered (and therefore interpreted) past even as h e, again like R ushdie, rem ains aware o f his ow n
im aginative intervention and d istan ce from the p eop le and p laces he w rites about.

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l- W alcott w ou ld g o on to produce O m ero s as w ell as a stage version o f The O d y sse y during the 1990s. In
both texts he restages the H om eric quest for h o m e in the con text o f a p o stco lo n ia ls continual and
unfulfillable q u est for a prelapsarian b lissa bliss that w ould im ply the constitution o f an alm ost Cartesian
subjectivity set in a su b lim e landscape. S ee John T h ie m es, D erek W a lc o tt (M anchester: M anchester
U niversity Press, 19 9 9 ), esp. 151-197: the travelling O dyssean protagonist...increasingly b eco m es a
v eh icle for exp ressin g his (W alcotts ] sense o f the need to escap e static, essen tia list constructuions o f
personality...[this] O d yssean protagonist is a m etonym for | W alcotts] co m p lex b eliefs about cultural
affiliation ...H e is a figure w h o not only crosses lines o f longitude and latitude at w ill, but also en gages in a
sim liar m ovem en t alon g a discursive continuum w hich offers em ancipation from ...M anichean
binaries(1 5 2 ).
N ed T hom as, O b session and R esp on sib ility, in The A rt o f D erek W alcott. Ed. Stew art Brown.
(B ridgend, Mid Glam organ: Seren B ook s, 1991), 86.
17 D orothy J. H ale, Bakhtin in A frican A m erican Literary T h eo ry , ELH . 6 1 (1 9 9 4 ): 4 5 1 -3 .
18 The dynam ic im agery describing these failed revolutionaries contrasts the stagnation o f the p ostcolonial
bureaucracy: W alcott g o es on to say that, Propeller-blade fan s turn over the Senate; / the ju d g es, they say,
still sw eat in carm ine,... / In the 12:30 m ovies the projectors best / not break dow n, or you go see
revolution. Ironically, in the end the on ly thing that m ight startle the bureaucrats out o f their com a o f
inaction is the denial o f their entertainm ent, their spaghetti W est- / ern w ith C lint E astw ood (351). H e
suggests that a corrupt bureaucracy w ill on ly react to a threat to its o w n selfish and trivial interests. E ven
as the yo u n g revolutionaries are d oom ed to fail, so too is the hope for governm ental reform futile.
19 Bruce K ing n otes that at the end o f the 1970s, shortly after the w ell received publication o f The S ta r
A p p le K in g d o m , W alcott, for a num ber o f reasons (in clu d in g his d esire to place his son Peter in architecture
school in N ew Y ork) started seeking out em p loym en t opportunities in the U nited States. K ing exp lains
W alcotts desire to relocate as a function o f colon ial w riters [w ho] had to m ake it in the imperial capital;
those w h o stated at hom e w ere m inor writers, regional w riters (3 8 5 ). A d d ition ally, K ing credits W alcotts
w inning o f a fiv e year M acArthur Foundation F ellow sh ip in June o f 1981 as providing him w ith the
financial freed om to m o v e to the U nited States.
20 S ee B leeck er Street, Sum m er or A Letter from B rook lyn in In a G reen N ig h t (1 9 6 2 ). Or, for a more
extended consideration o f non-C aribbean landscape, see T he V illa g e L ife from The G u lf( 1970).
21 E liot remarks that w h at happens w hen a new w ork o f art is created is som eth in g that happens
sim ultaneously to all the w orks o f art w hich preceded it. T h e ex istin g m onum ents form an ideal order
am ong th em selves, w h ich is m od ified by the introduction o f the new (the really new ) work o f art am ong
th em ...th e w hole [sic] ex istin g order m ust be, if ever so sligh tly, altered; and so the relations, proportions,
values o f each work o f art toward the w h o le are readjusted (4 3 2 ).
221 w ould su ggest that this kind o f recursive effe ct on canonical texts is, in fact, som ething W alcotts w ork
has done all along. A s I argue earlier, W alcott tacitly a ck n o w led g es such a recursive effe c t in som e o f his
earliest poem s.
23 Speaking about the O d ysse y , the speaker o f O m ero s remarks, I n ever read it ...n o t all the w ay through
(283).
24 In m y chapter on Jam aica K incaid, I d iscu ss R h y s fram ing o f the landscape as threatening for her
reim agined R ochester.
25 Patrick Brantlinger traces the g en ealogy o f the m yths surrounding the construction o f A frica as the dark
continent. Citing the am biguity o f rom antic ab olition ist poetry (such as B la k es Little B lack B o y ),

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202

Brantlinger p arses the contradictory im ages o f A frica (and by exten sion other colonial landscapes) as
sim u ltan eou sly barbaric and Edenic. Brantlinger notes that pre-V ictorian writers w ere often able to
en visa g e A fr ic a n s livin g freely and happily w ithout European in terferen ce...[a s] noble savages livin g in
pastoral fre e d o m and in n ocen ce (176).
26 There is so m e indication that the Plunketts exp erience o f the landscape isn t totally free o f historical
materiality. D u rin g one o f their backcountry hikes near a v o lca n o , D ennis Plunkett encounters a hellish
scene:
It w a s a place w here an ancient fear
increased as he neared it. H o les o f boiling lava
bubbled in the M aleb olge, w here the m ud-caked skulls
clim b ed , m ultiplying in heads over and over,
...T h is w as the gate o f sulphur through w hich he m ust pass
sin g e in g his m e m o ry ...
like registering skulls in the lim e-pits o f A u sch w itz. (5 9 )
Here it is arguable that Plunketts experience o f the v o lca n ic landscape indicates on som e register that his
experience o f the landscape is historical that the sim ile, lik e registering skulls in the lim e-pits o f
A u sch w itz, in d icates a historical dim ension to Plunketts landscape. I am partially con vin ced by this, but
this is the o n ly point in the text that m ight allow us to read a historical d im en sion to Plunketts experience
o f the St. L ucian landscape. O therw ise D en n is and M auds ex p erience rem ains typically colon ial an
experience d escribed by W alcott in self-c o n scio u sly im itative language.
27 In The B ou n ty, W alcott d escribes the St. Lucian landscape as ly in g [b ]etw een the visio n o f the tourist
board and the true / paradise (3). The vision o f the tourist board o f the landscape is thus equated w ith a
hellish vision . W a lco tts regard for tourists is evid en t even in his earliest w o rk w here, in T he Harbour
the tourists are those w h o are secure from thinking (7).
28 Later in the p oem , the inevitably disappointing nature o f th ese fetish ized ideas is m ade clear. N o w the
goddam n souvenir / fe lt absurd, e x ce ssiv e . T he painted gourds, the sh e lls (22 9 ).

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203

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