Along the sandy reach of Fort James, Antigua, the shoreline still supports the sparse colonial keepsake cannons, but a few patches of mottled tarmac remain of what once was a road. Hurricane Luis, a massive category-four event, struck in early September 1995 and leveled the islands of Antigua and Barbuda. Like an indifferent colossus made of harbor and sea it brought back its bow of storm and struck; the damage to the island was cataclysmic. Where the hungry surf swallows the road is a reminder; and the once full and familiar shape of the beach is now thinner, more sallow. Indeed—though still beautiful—there is simply less of it. Over by Dickinson Bay, a similar coastal duress still shows its wounds. The case is similar for nearly all of Antigua’s beaches and stony shoals. For Antigua is shrinking, bit by bit.
Each hurricane brings with it howling storms and clawing waves that paw the sand further and further away from the shore, dragging fragments of Antigua into the Caribbean Sea that curls below it and the Atlantic Ocean that expands above it. If you return to Antigua intermittently you are always liable to find a different island than the one you last saw. The islandness of it may seem the same, but the sea has taken back much of Antigua. Surrounded by the sunshine reflecting off the shimmering still-life of the sea are bits of the island that dissipate with each tug of the salt-soaked surf. What will the citizens of Antigua, which gained independence in 1981, think of the shape of their new but shrinking nation in 2081?
Larger islands like Puerto Rico may not share this admittedly apocalyptic concern of mine. Yet certainly the issue of nation is a pertinent, perhaps axiomatic, concern to that place. It also has its apt and quiet metaphors. In Aguadilla, a medium-sized town on the northwest coast of the island, there is half a graveyard teetering on the edge of the sea like a loose tooth. Another spiteful storm sucked in a number of graves and headstones, leaving cenotaphs in their place. Aguadilla is the birthplace of poet and statesman José de Diego. Some of his verses rest in that graveyard slope in the sun toward the ocean, though the poet himself was buried among the distingué in Old San Juan. A staunch activist for Puerto Rican independence until his death in 1918, de Diego founded the Academia Antillas de la Lengua (Antillean Academy of Language) in defense of the Spanish language in 1915. He was referred to among his admirers by the sobriquet “el Caballero de la Raza” (loosely, “knight of the race”). Diego’s most well-known poem is probably the elegiac “A Laura,” a love poem that has since remained within the memory of various Puerto Rican communities and is a well-wrought fragment of national consciousness. The Laura in question, a lost love still alive when de Diego wrote the poem while studying in Barcelona, eventually went mad and took to reciting the poem as she wandered. After her death, de Diego wrote “Póstuma,” a few stanzas of which emblazon a sepulcher high up in the storm-raked graveyard, having survived what must at times seem the cannibalistic temperament of the sea.
Landmasses small and smaller in the Caribbean weather the changes of larger nations. The poets from this region often at one point or another find themselves either attempting to herald a tradition or jack-knifing a foreign one. Nations have been granted the right to call themselves such with a limp tongue or have been encouraged to dismiss the entire enterprise altogether as a pitiable carrot for the passé. What is a nation? That should be a simple question to pose to a chain of islands separated not only by water but often by language as well. Simple?
The Caribbean has always been a subject of speculative vision as a mode of Western desire. From the travel narratives and maps of explorers and cartographers to the glossy mass media of tourist agencies and tourist boards, what the Caribbean gives of itself to the “First World” has been largely a matter of eye candy.62 Even in its aural evocations—zouke, reggae, salsa, calypso, and such—the arts of the Caribbean have been overburdened by a glut of exportable visual signs for foreign consumers. Always the apt pupil, the Caribbean has become quite skilled at repeating those signs of itself as itself. But the politics of these types of visual metanarratives hardly stop with aesthetics. They are, of course, a vital part of the economic and political life of the Caribbean. How does this then relate to its artists?
Before becoming a poet and subsequently one of the great novelists of his generation, Wilson Harris was a geological surveyor for the government of his native Guyana. His extensive knowledge of the Guyanese landscape—its savannahs, rivers, white sand belt, interior highland and rivers—has led to the enrichment of his novels by its prominence as its own distinctive near-character with a pervasive and iconic quality to it. “Instead of acting on a passive landscape with an inquisitive, romantic or even scientific imagination,” writes the poet Fred D’Aguiar, “Harris found that his experience as a surveyor in Guyana’s Amazonian interior changed how he imagined. Landscape informed his utterance and defined the very makeup of the expression of the story.”63 Twenty-three novels later, to look back now at the poetry of Wilson Harris what stands out most is the dramatic change in his vision of landscape. Classical, primordial and above all allegorical, Harris’s poems transfigured Guyana into a world of public and private significations (which, in retrospect, makes a world of sense for an ambitious young writer employed by the government to survey the land). “I found it impossible to write what I felt, but persisted. There were clues in ancient Homer speaking of the gods as animals and birds arising and descending from spaces in and above the earth. This reminded me of the pre-Columbian god Quetzalcoatl, quetzal (the bird), coatl (the snake). There were clues in the one-eyed Cyclops that I now saw standing like a lightning-struck tree in the forest. But such clues came home to me as ‘museum pieces’ divorced from their genuine and original sources. I had never felt such a divorce so acutely, so sharply before. I had accepted it all along as natural.” Harris continues, “My busy activities were all that action was. Now, however, in the depths of the multiform pressures of what seemed other than the nature I had known, in the sudden station of a tree, in the sudden station of a rock, like watchers that were potently alive, potently still, there was something else, something akin to a bloodstream of spirit that ran everywhere with an astonishing momentum that made my former activities pale into a fixity or immobility.”64 The result was Eternity to Season, a collection of poems constantly poised between the living world and the pre-life/afterlife, the material world and the immaterial world. The epigraph to the book is “Every living being is also a fossil” and should be considered against his lines in the poem “The Well” that “Each step / has its witness and leaves / its record: / turns stone into echoing flesh.” The chiasmus of flesh, fossil: stone, flesh marks the Guyanese landscape as the site within which human change happens, but the repeated sense of the gods talking through nature and the past’s speaking insistently through the present gave the work the sense that the imagination was standing before nature and making itself a priority among a natural history of ruin and hope.
Within this context, consider the following reflection by Wilson Harris on national boundaries and artists.
A friend of mine recently told me that in conversation with a certain high-ranking Guyanese official and politician, he discovered that that politician saw landscape as nothing more than the boundaries of his constituency. The ideal artist or scientist for him, therefore, was someone who conformed to an immediate governing stasis of place and time.65
The implication being that the difference between artists and the politician’s ideal of the artist involves, in part, the way in which the national environment is considered and subsequently rendered. A “governing stasis of place and time” by which only newspapers state the date and maps mark the bureaucrat’s zone of indifference houses artists who mimic the newspaper’s drone, the bureaucrat’s canton. This is beyond the Caribbean in stasis; this is the Caribbean in traction. Fanon writes:
A world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge; a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world. The native is being hemmed in; apartheid is simply one form of the division into compartments of the colonial world. The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits.66
The opposite of the politician’s ideal poet, we should infer, would be prophetic, difficult, a contrarian.
Landscape, with Nation in It
Hence, I find myself thinking of poets and their always (hopefully) problematic relationship to nations. Poets in particular, if not bathed in dogma (though no one can claim freedom from some ideological underpinning), face the harrowing task of creating representations of the world with tools that, like the shores, are always swallowing themselves: poets use words. And despite the fact that poetry is the great card trick of making houses with aces and spades, people continue to live under the poet’s unstable tools. To exist linguistically is to be in a relationship with a poet, some poet. Whether lyric, epic or dramatic, verse calls attention to one voice’s way of saying the world and necessarily acts as a counterpoint to other uses of the same language. Either it is a hopeful mimetic of a way of representing a language or it startles against the conventions of common usage.
Both poetry and nation link etymologically to creation. “Poetry,” coming from the Greek poiesis, or “making,” also implies a relationship to home and to the body in its uses of the Italian word for “room,” stanza; its invocation of “foot” as the term for the basic metric unit of verse; and dactyl (Latin for “finger”) for a particular foot that, like any finger on your left hand, has one long unit and two shorter ones. “Nation,” meanwhile, echoes the Latin nasci, “to be born,” and its obvious equivalents in modern languages are the Spanish verb nacer, as well as the French naître. Thus, in any examination of the relationship between poetry and the idea of nation, one also is witness to a parthenogenetic event: a simultaneous situation of making and of being born.
Shabine, protagonist of the poem “The Schooner Flight,” was one such character. A sailor and poet who spent most of his life at sea, within the schooner Flight as within “The Schooner Flight” he reflects on how geography has formed his fate.
I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,
a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes
that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw
when these slums of empire was paradise.
I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.67
This passage, early in the long poem, concludes on the idea of nation, yet one should note as well how heavily invested the lines are in both the strategy of naming and the strategy of self-definition. Though Shabine first asserts that he knows the vast stretches of the archipelago, he undercuts this assertion with a simple and quick admission of how he received his name. “Shabine” is not only patois, itself a differentiated mode of speaking from an imperial language, but what it signifies (“just a red nigger”) is an accentuation of that linguistic difference as a reductive and metonymic agent. Yet, as poetry is concentrated language, we find that in this brief passage Shabine re-inscribes almost every assignation that originally circumscribed him. The “I” is situated first, as speech comes before recognition. Then the metaphoric recognition of the self in other objects, in this case an admixture of a nail with the sea: “a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes.” A pronoun enters the passage to provide a name. This is where the passage turns. Let’s look at the role that the texture of Walcott’s lines play in this.
I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,
a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes
The first line is a statement of knowledge in which the predicate (“these islands from Monos to Nassau”) states a claim (I know all of the Caribbean) while demonstrating it (“these islands from Monos to Nassau”>“all of the Caribbean”>“this region from end to end”). Knowledge in this sense reveals itself as experience. It also subtly makes the statement of knowledge both autobiographical (I have been to these places) and an unstable signifier (i.e., if you neither know where Monos nor Nassau are you may or may not get the point of what Shabine is saying) that therefore leaves only one recipient of the knowledge claim undeniably accounted for: Shabine himself. The second line is a moment of self-perception separate, as Plato argued, from knowledge itself. Shabine is able to perceive himself based on objects that undoubtedly were around him: nails that held his boat together and that grew rust from their contact with the sea; that same sea sharing the green hue of his eyes. We can know without perceiving and we can perceive without knowing. Thus, Shabine’s knowledge of his region, of his geography is a thing apart from how he sees himself. That the poet maintains the grammatical integrity of the lines reinforces this. That the lines lose this integrity to enjambment and the intrusion of “they” reinforces this further.
that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red nigger
With the introduction/intrusion of others, of “they,” we are introduced to “Shabine,” a false name we learn was given to him (before he was “I”). “Shabine” brings with it a split in the rhythmic unit: the break caused by the caesura after the name; the enjambment; weak-ending with the prepositional “for” and then the subsequent cleft of the pentameter with “any red nigger.” The passage has moved from subject-centered knowledge (I know”) to object-transferred dismissiveness (“any red nigger”). And what follows encourages its reader to regard the half-line as also a split in the semantic unit:
and I Shabine, saw
when these slums of empire was paradise.
The resultant effect is rife with paradox. While forming a portrait of the artist (lest we forget that while a seaman, Shabine also is a poet), the passage pits Shabine’s ontological naming against his own articulation of his self, and culminates that filtered articulation with the evocation of the self as a perceiving, metaphorizing subject. Though named through metaphor and racial assignation, the poem, like a fulcrum, teeters upon the beats of the “and I,” where the change from object to subject is again realized in its reconsideration of his birth as the poet and protagonist “Shabine.” That this crucial line ends with “saw” and enjambs Shabine’s historical-romantic vision highlights the interdependence of these lines as a unit through which to understand how Shabine’s ability to interpret is strongly wedded to how he has been interpreted. Walcott foreshadows this interplay of name and self-realization in his earlier poem “Names.”
Names
My race began as the sea began,
with no horizon,
with pebbles under my tongue,
with a different fix on the stars.
But now my race is here,
in the sad oil of Levantine eyes,
in the flags of Indian fields.
I began with no memory,
I began with no future,
but I looked for that moment
when the mind was halved by the horizon.
I have never found that moment
when the mind was halved by the horizon—
for the goldsmith from Benares,
the stonecutter from Canton,
as a fishline sinks, the horizon
sinks in the memory.
Have we melted into a mirror,
leaving our souls behind?
The goldsmith from Benares,
the stonecutter from Canton,
the bronzesmith from Benin.
A sea-eagle screams from the rock,
and my race began like the osprey
with that cry,
that terrible vowel,
that I!
Behind us all the sky folded
as history folds over a fishline,
and the foam foreclosed
with nothing in our hands
but this stick
to trace our names on the sand
which the sea erased again, to our indifference.68
Shabine is, by name and identity, what is around him, and he muses likewise on what surrounds him. His power of rhetoric, however, is spurred beyond the immediacy of his vision. Hence, the proximity of “these slums” becomes distanced by the vague and diffusing nouns of “empire” and “paradise.” Shabine’s lyrical reconsideration of his birth as “Shabine,” from knowledgeable surveyor (“I know these islands from Monos to Nassau”) to the clause-cragged invocation of his own name, leads to a more minute and specific rendering of his place. He extends this action, of course, through metaphor. Shabine makes his name a linguistic birth, and we are to assume that the islands, the sea, and the wet and rusted nails that would hold his boat together are the synecdochical parts of this Caribbean individual. From here, the “I, Shabine”—fully and rhetorically intact—makes poetry out of a simple statement of himself similar to a Caribbean Walt Whitman, even down to the anaphora.
I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.
In Poétique de la Relation, Éduoard Glissant describes a “poet-Éduoard Glissant describes a “poetics of language-in-itself [that] sanctions the moment when language, as if satisfied with its perfection, ceases to take for its object the recounting of its connection with particular surroundings, to concentrate solely upon its fervor to exceed its limits and reveal thoroughly the elements composing it—solely upon its engineering skill with these.”69 In a similar vein, we can see that Shabine is actually repeating himself. There is little difference in content between the previous five lines we have been discussing and these succeeding four lines. In fact, the persistent articulation of the “I” in all nine lines should clue a reader in to the delving and desirous theme of self-articulation throughout the passage. Yet, as Glissant suggests, Shabine’s language provides extra text almost as if out of pleasure, or at least from some sort of satisfaction from the previous summation. The “just” is heavily sarcastic, and the confidence of calling himself “a red nigger” in a full line of iambic pentameter provides a marked difference from the stalled line of “any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw.” Shabine’s memory of his name as the object “recounting…its connection with its particular surroundings” precedes fallen “paradise” as that which can bypass its “limits” through an evocation of the elements of composition: those things that make up the speaker and that the speaker in turn seeks to make a priori. Walcott has always been an Adamic thinker. Hence, though Shabine basically repeats a composite sketch of himself in these nine lines, the final four serve as a “national romance,” but of the self—one that shares no sense of sacrifice toward a utopic space.70 To understand Shabine correctly, one must remember that he is an individual singled not only by his burning thirst to “say” himself (he certainly seems already to know himself) but also by his desire for domestic and poetic harbor. It is on these terms—Adamic, and almost entirely self-serving—that the poet can claim such a distinction between nobody and nation. Nationalism along these lines, as opposed to those of patriotism, is hardly a loyalty to a body politic. On the contrary, it is a loyalty to the self and the self’s potential realizations of itself; for the self supposedly desires—in tandem with the nation—to be (or to become) someone after all. But if “someone” is part of the phenomenon of someone else’s consciousness (the context in which “I” and “Shabine” co-exist), what is the effect then, if any, on the reality of the poet.
The Shield of the Caribbean
“I had no nation now but the imagination” begins the third part of “The Schooner Flight” and is titled “Shabine Leaves the Republic.” The line is much more of a pun than a declaration, more a mise-en-scene than a statement about the self. Structurally, the line comes immediately after the series of rhetorical questions directed to Christ. And these questions come on the heels of Shabine’s failed attempt at sexual satisfaction with other women on the heels of two prior failed romances; one with Maria Concepcion (a failed source of erotic capture), the other with his wife (a failed source of domestic security).
When I left the madhouse I tried other women
but, once they stripped naked, their spiky cunts
bristled like sea-eggs and I couldn’t dive.
The chaplain came round. I paid him no mind.
Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbour?
Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for,
and the window I can look from that frames my life?71
Why is it that immediately following a failed attempt at both sexual and spiritual union that “The Schooner Flight” picks up speed again with this quip of nation, identity and the imagination—undoubtedly the most well-known line of the poem? As stated above, the line should be read perhaps more as a pun than as an edict, as Shabine has proven to rely almost entirely upon the instability of language to codify and support his fractured sense of self. Shabine is, in one sense, a character from romance, as his lack of sexual and domestic union has left him now for some reason to declare that he has no nation. This moment is generally read as, first, a matter of Shabine’s (read: Walcott’s) multi-racial identity leaving him an alien in his own home country. Evidence for this observation would seem to be reside in these early lines from “Shabine Leaves the Republic.”
After the white man, the niggers didn’t want me
when the power swing to their side.
The first chain my hands and apologize, “History”
the next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride.
Yet, Walcott has already written this but little over one hundred lines ago in the “I, Shabine” passage which we discussed. The passage “either I’m nobody or a nation” chases the subject of races down quite succinctly it would seem; and, as stated earlier, it even provides a form of poetic architecture through which Shabine may iterate a new beginning through verse as well as through the idea of nation. “I had no nation now but the imagination” asks a reader to stall and unpack the phrase—the eye rhyme, the internal rhyme, and the alliterative “n’s”—and, therefore, as an impediment to reading, leaves a reader still to contend mnemonically with the action antecedent to this passage.
That said, I do not wish to undermine the importance of the sense of racial difference and alienation as a part of Shabine’s conception of his relation to nation. Rather, I suggest we draw our attention more to his relationship to Concepcion, which is clearly as vital to his sense of alienation, at least at this moment of the poem, as is his race. “Concepcion” is, of course, Spanish for the act of conception and forms a play on words in and of itself. Walcott, in Maria Concepcion, has created an allegory of religious, conjugal, and creative desire. Doris Sommer’s work on the “foundational fictions” of Latin America, those nineteenth-century canonical romantic novels, found that those “sentimental epics” determine for their readership the “erotic and national projects” through allegorical portraiture.72 They are fictions that “look relentlessly forward [and] set desire into a spiral or zigzagging motion inside a double structure that keeps projecting the narrative into the future as eroticism and patriotism pull each other along.”73 Pun and allegory serve here as that double structure of which Sommer is concerned. And while we should read the split of Shabine’s desire between Maria Concepcion and his wife as its own double structure of erotic and domestic desire, we should also note that within the poem neither flaw is mediated in a way that would “overcome the obstacle and [then] consolidate the nation.” Sommer concludes that these foundational fictions influence traditional allegory in the sense that they produce a resolution dialectically. That resolution takes the form of “the promise of consolidation,” as it “constitutes another level of desire and underscores the erotic goal, which is also a microcosmic expression of nationhood.”74 The connections between Shabine’s desirous and increasingly alienated subjectivity and the foundational fictions of Latin America are intriguing. The obvious divergence comes in that Shabine has no institutionalized or locally sanctioned fictions by which to consolidate the nation that does not include his own subjugation. He owns no land (“but for the sea,” I am sure he would say), has no title, seems desperately useless anywhere save in a boat or before a page, and apparently loves but two things: poetry and landscape.
To claim that “I had no nation now but the imagination” is to first of all locate the statement in a particular narrative context: “I had no nation now.” Shabine is in the midst of recollection while agitating toward a poetic form. To recollect in poetic form is to attempt to negotiate recollection and repetition. Freud theorizes that recollection is a function of voluntary memory, and repetition is a function of involuntary memory. Instead of debating Freud’s theories, I wish to emphasize how a poetics of memory attempts to mediate recollection precisely through repetition instead of at its expense. Poetry repeats by its very nature; syllables and sounds bear the stain of repetition. Only the most sarcastically truncated and self-conscious poem can hope to avoid repetition of any sort. Thus, I read “I had no nation now but the imagination” as Walcott expressing a past situation in that present of the poem’s narrative. It is a recollection of a past trauma—that fractured, alienated consciousness recognizing its fracture—but also a repetition of a complaint—the complaint of being nobody’s national.
The “now” is a strong beat after the falling “-tion” of “nation” and serves as a narrative link to the just concluded episode of questioning and failure. It hinges the spiritual, erotic, domestic failure of the previous canto to this consideration of a national and political self. The stress upon “now” also introduces another caesura into the line (say the line without “now” and you will hear it even more clearly). This pause dramatizes the reflective nature of the conjoined clauses as well as the time signature of the thought. The question begs itself: is “now” the present of the narrative or is “now” the constant present of the utterance? Do you always have no nation but the imagination?
In returning to that moment of crisis, Walcott pits language against praxis, and raises the hand of language as the victor. In doing so he wrestles with historians such as Franklin W. Knight, who claims in that “language, of course, has little relevance to political culture. Political, social, and economic patterns in the Caribbean seldom conform to the linguistic or cultural boundaries.”75 The pun is of course with the “nation” embedded within the word “imagination.” Shabine attempts to empty “nation” of its significance by wedding it to “image.”
The “image-in-nation,” then, is a reflection of the very title of this section, “Shabine Leaves the Republic.” While we can take this to mean that Shabine exits his inhabited place to begin an exodus, any familiarity with Walcott’s work strongly invites a reader to recognize “leaves” as another well-placed Walcottian pun. He even puns “leaf” in the very body of this canto: “the Budget turns a new leaf.” In fact, Walcott frequently turns objects of nature and the very landscape of his surroundings into metaphors of print, writing, and erasure. As much as it may signify that he abandons the Republic, “Shabine Leaves the Republic” means as much that Shabine reads through the republic, that he thumbs forward and backward through the pages of the Republic like a book, that he paints over the Republic as the swaying leaves mimic the strokes of a painter. “Archetypal dreams employ symbols of brokenness to depict the shedding of habit,” wrote Wilson Harris. By “archetype” Harris means those signs that engage reality in challenging, creative discourse. “A naked jar sings in a hollow body, sings to be restored, re-filled with the blood of the imagination. The jar sleeps yet sings.” Harris’s vision of symbolic language is one full of imagery and place—of landscape—through which all “haunting and necessary proportions of a new dialogue with reality in all its guises of recovered and revisionary tradition” encompass the inner workings of the re-emergent artist. “Inner ear and inner eye are [the] resurrected anatomy attuned to the music of painted silence in pulse and heart and mind arisen from the grave of the world.”76 Walcott’s “Republic”—Shabine’s patron of exile—is one of these “symbols of brokenness.” To pun is to defamiliarize language from its standard context. It is, despite the external threat of banality through cliché, an othering of discourse. Hence, to defamiliarize language is also to slow it down, to ponder over it as its possible meanings well up, as though regarding one’s vexing reflection in a dystrophic pool. Thus, the broken Republic is a crack in monumental language, revealing res (“thing”) and publica (feminine of publicum, “public”). In its halted, fragmentary form the idea of the Republic is still a sign of remarkable power. For the unavoidable condition of the speaking exile is the burden to representation as the res publica or, in my butchered Latin, “the public thing.”
Shabine is a poet—albeit a violently private one, though the intense protection of his poetry cannot quell the fact that his poetry becomes, in the end, public material. One of his shipmates steals Shabine’s notebook, reads some of his poems, and mocks him. Shabine reacts quickly.
There wasn’t much pain,
just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend,
but none of them go fuck with my poetry again.77
Whether fucked with again or not, his poetry has become a shared text, an archetype of Caribbean creative expression and a staple piece for its author. The chief crux of the poem is that the character it portrays is in flux. Like the fragmented res publica, “The Schooner Flight” portrays a consciousness in medias res: any conclusions we come to based on the developing action we therefore subject to serious questioning. While this by no means implies that there is a true reading to a poem based on some consideration of the present life of the poetic subject, there is much to be gained from simply paying heed to the parts of a poem that are in the past tense.
Poetry, which is perfection’s sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue’s brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery.78
This outlines what Walcott means by fragmented “epic memory.” Walcott views the so-called buried language of the Caribbean as a starting point but not a resting point for self-discovery of the individualized ars poetica. Poetry, as language, asks of others, and Walcott ends the poem with language imbued in an image that should produce in the end silence, yet metaphorically yields a fluid and incremental trope from which the process of creative imagining can begin again.
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.
The poem’s concluding conflation of death and poetry juxtaposes mystery to serialized information-gathering. Revelation is the slow matter of gathering and splitting words like fruit rather than the impetuous rash of discovery and reportage. Lest we forget that small “discovery” and “reportage” are what brought this predicament to the archipelago in the first place. As Glissant suggests, “Rather than discovering or telling about the world, it is a matter of producing an equivalent, which would be the Book, in which everything would be said, without anything being reported.”79 In contrast, Benedict Anderson saw novels and newspapers as producing a Benjaminian “homogenous, empty time…their fame…historical and their setting sociological.” “This,” he continues, “is why so many autobiographies begin with circumstances of parents and grandparents, for which the autobiographer can have only circumstantial, textual evidence; and why the biographer is at pains to record the calendrical, A.D. dates of two biographical events which his or her subject can never remember: birth-day and death-day.”80 Walcott displaces birth-day and, as we may infer from the last line of the poem, death-day with the signs over which he pleads creative license. His, then, is not an autobiography in serial time but rather one within poetic time, full of its jumps, increments, and dwellings over fragmented objects, nation being one of them, but sound and word being of that mold as well. For Walcott, who recognizes exile as a useful point of departure into making art, the nation then remains distanced from the real world and can become for the poet parts to re-imagine with the imagination; republic can fracture into its Latinate flotsam and a patios slur for a name can become the “I” of a remembering consciousness (“I,” which Walcott refers to as “that cry, / that terrible vowel”). The poetics of memory begin with memory’s invocation of things and conspires with the imagination to shatter and re-arrange them. And yet, can this bring the res publica together? Through this gathering of broken pieces, which is Shabine’s experience from Monos to Nassau, is a resounding yes. As it was as well for Walcott himself when he spoke upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Stockholm.
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.81
The nation—as an idea, as a principle, as a thing in and bestowed onto itself—need not be abandoned, though perhaps, in this English-language version of the Caribbean, we should split the trochee apart and re-fuse it. Perhaps we need not fly from the sign of the Republic but rather, fissured, speak of its aboriginal woe.
The possibility of nations is protected by the creative process of image-making by the victims of time and circumstance who, having been born instead of landed, struggle against the dominant eye that would have its surveyed be a “them” or worse yet an “it.” Fanon reminds us of this crisis of interpretation:
It must in any case be remembered that a colonized people is not only simply a dominated people. Under the German occupation the French remained men; under the French occupation, the Germans remained men. In Algeria there is not simply the domination but the decision to the letter not to occupy anything more than the sum total of the land. The Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees, and the camels make up the landscape, the natural background to the human presence of the French.82
The problem of interpretation placed before Shabine is to break imagination from nation while keeping the imagination intact. This has always been a Walcottian theme, since his most persistent metaphors have remained landscape and image as a metonym for writing. Tiepolo’s Hound puts the theme for Walcott in its most explicit voice to date. In Walcott’s nation of the image, a “lowering window resounds / over pages of earth, the canefield set in stanzas”83 the “beach will remain empty / for more slate-coloured dawns / of lines the surf continually / erases with its sponge”84 and in the Spanish Caribbean, the English-language poet might just “resist the return / of this brightening noun whose lines must be translated / into “el mar” or “la mar,” and death itself to “la muerte.”85 But along with these metonyms of place is an anxiety over their constitution. Shoreline and its imprints, the colors of dawn, the indifferent return of the waves as las olas—these are images that test our faith in permanence. Yet will these images, these dividends of nation, return; and, even if they do will they be as they once were? This is the anxiety of a poetics of place that irks its desire to recall, recite, and retort (as opposed to a desire to report, which would be the sign of a cumbersome, as opposed to a creative, nationalism). A poetics of place in the Caribbean is the imagination’s investment in a creative nation formed by a fractured, pictorial reality that faces up to its possible dissolution both in political and aesthetic form. Walcott is fundamentally a descriptive poet, and his poetics border a type of cyclical pictorialism. His is a manner of writerly reliance on visual phenomena—often evoked to describe writing itself—through images that are fraught with the inner workings of their inevitable erosion. Is either verse or vista permanent? Can they function as an artist’s metaphor for freedom and imperishability, as both had (rhetorically at least) for so many of Walcott’s English-language predecessors? The landscapes of the Caribbean region continually affirm and yet deceive. This implies a diurnal discord between dissolution/ruin and resuscitation/renewal that the poet sublimates through the anachronistic tenor of the trope ekphrasis. Since ekphrasis is the verbal representation of visual phenomena, it manifests an unavoidable problem: can writing or sound suitably reproduce what is seen, and why would we desire that either do so?
In his longer works Another Life and Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott writes within ekphrastic moments. In these works painting explicitly plays with and against the narrative thrust of the long poem. Passages such as the one below from chapter nine of Another Life insist on a relationship between self and landscape as being necessarily outside of time, like the close reading of poetry. They argue for a contentious, isochronal mode of recognition capable of significant change. Nation in Walcott’s poetry is not only embedded within imagination but is also subject to the pun of I/eye, as well as to what “I/eye had.”
There are already, invisible on canvas,
lines locking into outlines. The visible dissolves
in a benign acid. The leaf
insists on its oval echo, that wall
breaks into a sweat, oil settles
in the twin pans of the eyes.
Blue, on the tip of the tongue,
and this cloud can go no further.
Over your shoulder the landscape
frowns at its image. A rigour
billows into the blue crowd,
A bird’s cry tries to pierce
the thick silence of canvas.
From the reeds of your lashes, the wild commas
of crows are beginning to rise.86
The cyclical nature of Walcott’s ekphrastic imagination ruptures other discourse—as verbal language and visual phenomena collapse—into a debate between the voice and the image. Which one is other? What does a “benign acid” do? Here creates an altered vision of the “muttering variegations of green.” New vision, that which was already there yet invisible, still carries with it threat as ekphrastic fear builds.
At your feet
the dead cricket grows into a dragon,
the razor grass bristles resentment,
gnats are sawing the air,
the sun plates your back,
salt singes your eyes
and a crab, the brush in its pincer,
scrapes the white sand of canvass.
as the sea’s huge eye stuns you
with the lumbering, oblique blow
of its weary, pelagic eyelid,
its jaw ruminates
on the seagrass it munches
What sustains in the face of this threat of loss (an anxiety-ridden one where landscape consumes landscape: in other words, subject consumes subject, nation consumes nation) is memory, the benefactor of the spatial still-time of the ekphrastic imagination. Memory, as an increment of recognition, makes failure if not tolerable, then survivable.
Shabine was a failed character who found nevertheless possibility from the fact that, as an artist, his failures might be mediated by what Benjamin would call “redemptive time,” which would not redeem the individual in a moral sense but would re-create the effort, as is done by experiencing again a poem. In lyric time, however, there are few places of solace within a landscape as problematized as that of the Caribbean region for reasons we will probe further below. Nation as the articulation of ekphrastic hope is as tenable as a reach for the sun; the effort—imagine the gesture—further ostracizes the poet, and even in its possibility, it burns.
Dear Theo, I shall go mad.
Is that where it lies,
in the light of that leaf, the glint
of some gully, in a day
glinting with mica, in that rock
that shatters in slate,
in that flashing buckle of ocean?
The skull is sucked dry as a seed,
the landscape is finished.
The ants blacken it, signing.
Round the roar of an oven, the gnats
hiss their finical contradiction.
Nature is a fire,
through the door of this landscape
I have entered a furnace.88
Caribbean poets suffer a burden similar to that of African-American poets: the weight of an allegorical and capitalized self. The weight cleaved a schizophrenic poetics within Paul Lawrence Dunbar and has left camps of investors in Caribbean writers who place their stock in Walcott or dub poets as though either will pay.
In his search for suitable words for suitable images, Walcott risks an indictment worse than exile: uncommunicative, “indifferent” nature, more compelled by its “work” than by the challenge set to it by the artist who wishes to tame nature into landscape and landscape into nation.
I have toiled all of life for this failure.
Beyond this frame, deceptive, indifferent,
nature returns to its work,
behind the square of blue you have cut from that sky,
another life, real, indifferent, resumes.
Let the hole heal itself.
The window is shut.
The eyelids cool in the shade.
Nothing will show after this, nothing
except the frame which you carry in your sealed, surrendering eyes.
While the success of these poetic efforts are constantly sublimated by the absence of a resolute chord of completion, the task it seems is left to forces exterior to the poem. The “sealed, surrendering eyes” are what abates the onrush of ekphrastic indifference and fear. Akin to Shabine’s diminuendo in the concluding passage of “The Schooner Flight,” “I stop talking now. I work, then I read,” one finds that both poems, despite crafting a delicately aesthetic interior, cannot help but reference further, to moments posterior to the poem. Ekphrasis, precisely because it undulates space and time, fashions a way to capture an ulterior purpose to poetics without sounding a prophecy. I would argue that it is this very static, counternarrative reading encouraged by ekphrasis that opens the borders for new national imaginings and alternatives to incumbent political discourses.
Walcott’s work continually poeticizes the Caribbean’s chief export—its picturesque faux-exoticism—in its full (though perhaps failing) splendor, remaining cognizant that it remains a site of imminent and ruinous difficulty. For empires, and just as important for the idea of empire, the ruin as artifact is art-in-fact. Empires hope to exploit the vague temporal links to antiquity that imagined ruins inspire.
Anne Janowitz writes that “in order to coerce its culturally complex populations into the industrial and globally imperialist age, ‘Britain’ calls upon the figure of ruin to secure its past.” Yet, though the ruin as evoked by imperial Britain attempts to reify a sense of perpetuity onto its expanses it nevertheless “cannot help asserting the visible evidence of historical and imperial impermanence.”89 Ruin, captured by the national imagination of Britain at the same time that the museum was beginning to take a prominent role for captured artifacts and their reproductions, is an example of serialized time that cannot function convincingly in the Caribbean.90 The tempting canonical possibilities of a doppelgänger Caribbean literary history are shelved invitingly for its writers—a perjurious shorthand—as Walcott intimates in his early “Ruins of a Great House.”
Stones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House,
Whose moth-like girls are mixed with candledust,
Remain to file the lizard’s dragonish claws.
The mouths of those gate cherubs shriek with stain;
Axle and coach wheel silted under the muck
Of cattle droppings.
Three crows flap for the trees
And settle, creaking the eucalyptus boughs.
A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose
The leprosy of empire.
…...
A green lawn, Broken by low walls of stone,
Dipped to the rivulet, and pacing, I thought next
Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake,
Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed
In memory now by every ulcerous crime.91
No, the imperial tropology of ruin will not do. Far from a continuation of national narrative, it is instead, in this region, a rut.
Marble like Greece, like Faulkner’s South in stone,
Deciduous beauty prospered and is gone92
Appropriately, the blank page in search of something that will suffice may find that modern Caribbean poetry still has much use for its landscapes, no matter how vexing the proposition may appear. The prospects at times appear bleak for two over-arching reasons: one being landscape’s materialist presence as an export that rarely invests what it reaps within the foundations of an appropriately self-motivated infrastructure. The other reason involves the impulse of Caribbean artists to avoid national landscapes for fear of complying with and partaking of their own fetishization and the pastoral impressions of empire looking seaward.93
Much like the locus classicus of ekphrastic hope, the “Shield of Achilles” episode in Book XVIII of the Iliad, Walcott’s descriptive moments are an interior and altering moment within a longer narrative. It is the narrative’s flowering ulcer, slowing time down to descriptive subsets of human consciousness. It chooses visual space over narrative time. It obsessively calls attention to itself as difference and thus frames gaps though which necessary processes of change may take place. Ekphrasis is a quietly social trope that makes its need for a pragmatic audience, a community, implicit in its change of the image into word, the word into image. It asks of a community to imagine as opposed to being imagined, and to intelligently inhabit the fractured time therein. Even ensconced within a love poem like “To Norline,” stacked squat like a typically low-lying home and the concluding poem in the “Here” section of The Arkansas Testament, the intent of the imagistic wish to redress time and memory beckons as a consideration of domestic and aesthetic borders.
To Norline
This beach will remain empty
for more slate-coloured dawns
of lines the surf continually
erases with its sponge,
and someone else will come
from the still-sleeping house,
a coffee mug warming his palm
as my body once cupped yours,
to memorize this passage,
of a salt-sipping tern,
like when some line on a page
is loved, and it’s hard to turn.94
The page that is hard to turn either revels in its avid readership or suffers under the gaze of a somnolent one through which words begin to blur from fatigue or disinterestedness. Love in this instance is what clarifies the blur of the poem’s scenery and intent. Yet love, as another ambiguity, seeks out a slow heterogeneous time. For it is this “someone else” that is left to memorize the poet’s image (“this passage”) “of a salt-tipping tern”—yet another portly pun—as the poem concludes with an analogy that also chafes against the need to “turn the page.” This is the burden of the descriptive imagination as it faces its boundaries. It asks for a community that dares to slow down its ontological frames in order to draw and redraw, to address and redress, the parameters of the nation. “To Norline” reads, one can imagine, as one of the stolen poems within Shabine’s book that he fought so vehemently to protect, as a “To Maria Concepcion.” And though Caliban is now le roi soleil of Caribbean agency, there is still room within the growing archive for “nobody,” that “someone else” who rises from the stanza to memorize the multiple meanings of “passage” along the ever erasing edges of the sea.