Derek Walcott: the voice of the Caribbean: Saint Lucia's favorite son discusses the emerging identity in literature and prose unique to the islands.

• Author: Cabrera, Enriqueta
• Position: Interview

Poet and playwright Derek Walcott received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. He reached this apex of literary achievement by transmitting the Caribbean culture with strength, sensitivity, beauty, and ingenuity.

Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in Saint Lucia, then a British colony. His father died when he was very young, but he was a precocious child and his mother took great care with his education. "I knew from very early on that I was going to be a writer," he says. Eventually, he studied at both St. Mary University in Saint Lucia and the West Indies University in Jamaica.

The island of Saint Lucia, which became independent in 1979, alternated between British and French rule for centuries, producing a multilingual, multicultural place where Methodism and Catholicism coexisted and combined with religions of African influence. Walcott's own works are a reaffirmation of the Caribbean culture and identity. The Caribbean is not a copy of anything, says the poet. "It is an amalgam of everyone's experiences." It is also an amalgam of peoples--Africans, Indians, Chinese, English, Dutch, and French--in a unique environment that developed its own unique culture and identity.

Walcott recalls his first years as a writer and painter. It was an uncommon thing in the Caribbean to dedicate oneself to writing back then. There was no sophisticated audience, he says, but there was an audience that could be moved by feeling, by vitality. He recalls feeling that writers had the responsibility to move people. This passion vibrates in his poetry and his plays. It is a passion for justice, but above all, the desire to highlight the Caribbean as a culture and as a social reality.

A master of language, Walcott has been on the vanguard of his craft, opening and building a space for the Caribbean's own expression. He has written more than fifteen books of poetry and close to 30 plays. He writes in English and often introduces elements of popular language in Creole. His work is marked by the experiences of the Caribbean people and reflects their identity and their heritage.

The poetry and drama of Walcott is the voice of the Caribbean.

Between 1959 and 1976, Walcott directed the Trinidad Theater Workshop (called the Little Carib Theater Workshop until 1966). It was an intense and passionate time period during which he worked part-time with a troupe of actors and also held another job, since theater didn't pay him enough to live on. At that time, occasional contributions came in from the Rockefeller Foundation. Successes led the company to do presentations outside the country in Jamaica, Guyana, Toronto, Boston, and New York. Walcott eventually also became a professor of drama.

Dream on Monkey Mountain is considered Walcott's greatest work and one in which he makes a great effort to interpret the nature of the Caribbean identity. Reality and dreams are interwoven in the drama in which the main character, Makak (French patois for "ape") faces imprisonment and dreams that he is crowned king in the romantic Africa of his roots. Some say Dream on Monkey Mountain is influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre's theories of the black Orpheus and by the work of French sociologist Franz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth). But Walcott doesn't make direct references to the classics; they are names from the Atlantic, geographic parallels, but they are not culturally integrated or articulated. What does exist in terms of reference points are fragmentary memories, associations, echoes of previous cultures. The essential is Caribbean.

Another of Walcott's great works is Omeros, historic reflections divided into 192...