If "Language is the perfect instrument of empire," as the Bishop of Avila
told Queen Isabella, handing her the first Spanish grammar, then more than
horse, cross or blade, the book is the chief agent and icon of European domination
in colonial narratives and in the extension of colonial power (Quoted in
Hanke, 1959, 8). The book becomes at issue in talking back from the colonial
community, the counter-narratives of colonial discourse, as means both of displacing
that power and of redefining local postcolonial cultures. Within the power
structures of the "venerable Western trope of Prospero and Caliban—figures portrayed
in terms of ... the colonizer and the indigenous people," Prospero's book is
the source of his incantatory power over Caliban. His book historically
proliferated in the form of texts—reports, relaciones, histories, letters, treaties and
treatises—among them the books instrumental in the education of Walcott as a
young artist in Another Life (Baker, 1985, 389). Histories, particularly James
Williamson's History of the British Empire (1930), as well as volumes of European art
and poetry, figure in the growth of Walcott's awareness of his mixed heritage.
The young poet becomes the proprietor of textual lineage, in the forms of
his sketchbook, in which he renders the island's topography, colonial
architecture, and the young Anna, as well as the journal that becomes Another Life, both of which require the development of his own art that will test that heritage, in
the beginnings of the postcolonial Caribbean. The poem is a sustained struggle
to appropriate the instruments of empire as primary means of envisioning a
new, postcolonial poetry, which leads Walcott ultimately to Omeros (1990), which Robert Hamner called Walcott's "epic of the dispossessed" (1991, 13).
The problem of the book in Another Life initially appears to be a
reformulation of the problem of Walcott's identity, in particular, his being "divided to the
vein" between Africa and Europe, the common misreading of his deservedly
much anthologized "A Far Cry from Africa"
(Collected Poems 1948-1984 [CP], 1986, 17). Houston A Baker Jr.'s brief critique of Walcott, is founded on
a reading of that poem, which he generalizes as "the colonial subject's
borderlining his or her literate stance between two worlds" (1985, 389). However,
Walcott's poetry is not typically motivated by a crisis of choosing between blood
ancestries, as the poem is frequently read, but "between this Africa and the English
tongue I love" (CP, 18). His poetry is consistently driven by forces operating
between nationality, locale, and language; that is, by the problematic formation of
cultures in the West Indies, which draws from Europe, Africa, Asia, as well as the
Americas. Focusing on the process of cultural assimilation as the paradigmatic
moment accounts for his treatment not only of the milieu of Afro-Caribbean
concerns, but also that of East Indian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Native American
as well ("The Saddhu of Cova," CP, 372; Midsummer LIII, CP, 508; Omeros Book IV, and The Antilles, 1992). |
