The Prodigal,
by Derek Walcott (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN
0-374-23743-3)
Review by Nicholas Laughlin
First
published in Caribbean Beat, March/April
2005
“What language do you speak in your own
country?” This is the kind of question often asked of West Indians
abroad, and it haunts Derek Walcott halfway through his new book-length
poem, The Prodigal. It is, of
course, a question every poet must answer, regardless of history or
geography; but, in Walcott’s case, the facts of history and geography
make the imperative to answer particularly urgent. He came of age “in a
green world, one without metaphors,” as he once put it — in a West
Indies yet to be named by its native poets, still to enter the
permanence of literature. In one of his earliest poems he swore “to
praise lovelong, the living and the brown dead” of his home island, St
Lucia, and for decades he has faithfully pursued his vocation to name
and praise the islands of the Antilles and their people.
But Walcott has long struggled with a sense of dividedness that comes
of being the hybrid son of a hybrid culture, neither African nor
European yet also both. It comes of mastering the forms of English
literature so as to write about a place and a people far outside that
literature’s traditions. And it comes also of the tension between being
in the islands he loves and being in the wider world, “exiled” by the
practical necessities of being a professional poet.
These two themes — making the world “real” through the power of poetry,
and the anxiety of dividedness — drive the narrative of The Prodigal. Walcott tells the
story of his fortunate travels through Europe above all, but also the
United States, Mexico, South America, a journey foreshadowed by his
reading: “We read, we travel, we become.” And he tells the story of his
homecoming, once again, to St Lucia. He wonders whether his exile from
the Caribbean is a betrayal, and wonders whether his poetry compounds
that treachery or redeems it.
The Prodigal’s first two
sections are a catalogue of days and nights among the landmarks of
Geneva, Florence, Rome, and Milan. Descriptions of streets and hotels
give way to memories, snatches of conversation with strangers, musings
about the relations between the history of a place and its art. There
are times when the traveller’s enthusiasm seems to flag, his attention
to wander, and so may the reader’s. “How many more cathedral spires?”
Walcott asks. A line from “Islands”, forty years ago, drifts into
the mind: “Merely to name them is the prose / Of diarists”. But, too
alert and scrupulous a poet ever to write mere prose, Walcott animates
his long travelogue with the memory of and longing for his
“unimportantly beautiful” island over the sea, to which he returns in
the final section.
Here The Prodigal truly
soars, revealing again an intensity of faith in words and images
equalled by few living poets. With as little obvious effort as
breathing, he launches extraordinary flights of metaphor, sustaining
them aloft longer than syntax should allow. Apparently at his command,
the world translates itself into words then back again.
The dialect of the scrub in the dry
season
withers the flow of English. Things
burn for days . . .
Every noun is a stump with its roots
showing,
and the creole language rushes like
weeds
until the entire island is overrun,
then the rain begins to come in
paragraphs
and hazes this page, hazes the grey
of islets . . .
Attentive readers of Walcott will notice that The Prodigal — which he describes
as his last book, “an old man’s book” — is often in dialogue with his
earlier work, especially with his great mid-career long poem, Another Life. Here, attempting to
describe and understand the birth of his vocation in 1940s St Lucia, he
semi-mythologises himself as “a prodigy of the wrong age and colour,”
torn between his love for his native landscape and the knowledge that
only by leaving can he truly fulfil his promise. “Prodigy” and
“prodigal” are etymologically unrelated, but so masterful a punster as
Walcott must have been drawn to the phonetic link, and the suggestion
that the prodigal’s self-imposed exile is rooted in the prodigy’s
inescapable talent.
Ultimately, Another Life
traces an arc of departure; The
Prodigal completes the shape with its arc of return. In the
earlier work, Walcott notes with the nearly desperate ambition of the
young “how the vise / of horizon tightens / the throat”. The Prodigal in turn ends with
another horizon, but this time a “line of light that shines from the
other shore.” That other shore is the freedom of the imagination that
every artist struggles to achieve. That line is the light of poetry
itself. It is also the light of love. For Walcott, they are the same.
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