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On the coast of the Samaná Bay, a protected peninsula of the northeastern shore of the Dominican Republic, young boys aged ten to fourteen cut through the shallow water of the sea, in search of fish.

Roger Ramirez is a freelance photographer based in the Dominican Republic.

Although he will never be short of admirers, V.S. Naipaul can probably claim the distinction of being the least liked man in English literature. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001; his fiction and travel writing has helped broaden the cultural scope of the novel in English. Yet surely no figure in contemporary literature has been so reviled. Over the years, he has provoked the ire of Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, and Edward Said, mostly over political disagreements. But if the exact dimensions and contours of the personal ground covered by Sir Vidia’s shadow are unclear, we already have some idea of the harsh and bitterly inhospitable climate. Former friends and acquaintances such as Paul Theroux and Diana Athill have written at length to prove that V.S. Naipaul is not a very nice man. To stay the distance with Naipaul you clearly need to keep your distance. When the truth itself is a hatchet-job, it takes the cooler, more proportionate scrutiny of a skilled biographer to properly order our understanding of the man and his art.

To illuminate this area of darkness, Naipaul has called upon the services of the distinguished young travel writer Patrick French. Given special authorization to sift through and quote from his subject’s personal archive at the University of Oklahoma, which includes the previously unread diaries of his first wife, Pat, and the correspondence of his long-term mistress, Margaret Gooding, French has produced a stylish and comprehensive volume that has nonetheless let off the biggest stink in English letters since Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin. This is hardly French’s fault. The details must have caught even him by surprise. The World Is What It Is, bearing a title that suggests a somewhat resigned and down-at-the-heel James Bond flick, demystifies the sad story of a man who could hardly be described as a successful womaniser. With typically sober clarity, French confirms that we are dealing with a brutishly determined man. ‘Vidia had a view of the world that he would do anything to maintain, just as he would sacrifice anything or anybody that stood in the way of his central purpose, to be “the writer”.’ From his wife Pat, he derived vital encouragement and sound literary advice; from his mistress Margaret, sexual fulfilment. In return for their gifts, they were neglected and abused, and the unhappy situation only expired when Pat did, after a long and harrowing struggle with breast cancer in 1996. Just weeks after this sad demise, he married the present Lady Naipaul, Nadira Alvi, a woman with whom he finally appears to have found something approaching contentment. The book ends at this juncture, with a huge sigh of relief from French (the final, exasperated one-word sentence is ‘Enough’), which is understandable. Against the odds, French has succeeded in producing a remarkably dignified portrait of a very troubled man who somehow managed to channel his numerous resentments into genuinely great literature.

But the potentially lurid material can’t have been the only challenge facing French. Nakedly incorporating events and people from his life into his writing and perpetually toying with the confessional properties of various narrative forms, Naipaul has quietly expanded the personal frontiers of literature and made the biographer’s task all the more demanding. Strangely, Naipaul’s will-to-candour has never actually resulted in a full-length memoir; the closest he has come to that is the ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ which takes up the first half of Finding the Centre (1983). A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, the latest of these attempts at memoir, brings together the best and the worst of Naipaul’s accomplishments. In this quaint oddity, ostensibly a reflection on those writers and public figures that have influenced him most, he muses that ‘a rise to achievement makes a better narrative than random decay’. This might seem a strange comment from the author of A Bend in the River and Guerrillas, novels that chart the fungal rot of newly independent post-colonial states, but it serves as an accurate description of his own trajectory. Born in Trinidad in 1932, the descendent of indentured Indian labourers, he won the island’s scholarship to study at Oxford. He then became something of a giant.

Yet A Writer’s People follows no such triumphal course. Writing sympathetically of Gandhi, Naipaul observes, ‘there was no completeness to him. He was full of bits and pieces he had picked up here and there.’ The same is true of Naipaul who, in this book, mentally traverses those times and places that have moulded his own view: the Caribbean, India, and literary London of the 1950s. The fragmentary tone is set in the opening chapter on Derek Walcott, where isolated images taken from Walcott’s first volume of poetry chink about like so much loose change without purchasing anything in the way of critical insight. But critical insight isn’t Naipaul’s goal. ‘My purpose in this book is not literary criticism or biography […] I wish only, and in a personal way, to set out the writing to which I was exposed during my career. I say writing, but I mean more specifically vision, a way of seeing and feeling.’ At the beginning of his essay on Flaubert, he gives us more of a clue as to his method by explaining how he approached book reviewing for The New Statesman. ‘I found it helped if in a review I didn’t mention the names of the characters; in that way I got nearer to a book’s essence; certain books condemned themselves. I had no further reviewing scheme.’ Reader, you will forgive me if I avail myself of a slightly more rigorous model. This dogged pursuit of ‘essence’ does not tell us much about Naipaul’s ways of seeing and feeling (about what they involve and to whom they belong) or define that frustratingly bland word ‘vision’. The result is that too often throughout the book the prose slumps into the very quality that Naipaul has spent his entire career guarding against. Although we are told what he felt at the time, how he read and what he remembers now, it is all too vaguely presented: choice morsels glimpsed through a fogged shop window.

Ungenerous readers (and there are those who might suggest that Naipaul hardly deserves any other kind) will describe A Writer’s People as the withered fruit of a creative senescence. Indeed there are times when the narrative reads as a sort of rambling, off-the-record fireside chat at the gentleman’s club: A Writer’s People is garrulous in spirit, if not always in style. The problem becomes most obvious in the now notorious chapter devoted to his former mentor Antony Powell. In the late 1950s, Powell let ‘Viddy’ loose on Grub Street, securing for him a regular job as reviewer with The New Statesman and offering him friendship and support. In the chapter, Viddy repays him by savaging the achievement of the extraordinary 12-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time, which took Powell several decades to compose, even going so far as to suggest that their relationship wouldn’t have lasted had he read the book while his old friend was still alive. In fairness to Naipaul, it should be recognised that he pays uncharacteristically warm tribute to Powell’s generosity and writes appreciatively of his criticism. But ineptitude rather than ingratitude is the problem here, and in dispatching the life’s work of the friend who helped him to find his place among London’s literary milieu, Naipaul dilutes the signature precision of his sentences. ‘There was less and less care in the writing; everything was over-explained,’ he opines before going on to claim, ‘there was no narrative skill, perhaps no thought for narrative.’ We might not have expected a close reading, but these stern remarks require some supplementary quotations if they are to appear as anything other than invective. Powell is probably performing indignant cartwheels in the grave: it is likely that he would be more disappointed by Viddy’s sloppy want of discretion than by the opinions themselves.

But Naipaul does not entirely forsake the many virtues of his prose. He really can write about literature, even if he reads another author’s work largely to confront his own anxieties and ambitions. The essay ‘Conrad’s Darkness’ from the non-fiction miscellany, The Return of Eva Peron, is a compelling example. Here, he describes his earliest encounters with Conrad’s short stories and provides his readers with valuable insights into the development of a creative writer’s standards. In A Writer’s People, he most fully reveals himself in considering the achievements of Flaubert and the historians and poets of antiquity. Naipaul’s vivid renditions of various people and landscapes have been distinguished by the deliberate economy of his style, and at their best, his observations on literature impart a similar substance and vigour to a writer’s specific imaginative vision. Contemplating Madame Bovary and the comparative failure of Salammbo, he evokes his own proclivity for la mot juste by writing with firm lucidity and enthusiasm. Attention to detail is fine, we gather, so long as it is itself strictly controlled; this seems a balanced assessment of what has been the presiding principle of Naipaul’s own style. It has been insufficiently acknowledged that, more than almost any other writer of the last half-century, he has recorded the painful severity of literary application as well as the great rewards of such discipline. This process was movingly characterised in Finding the Centre. ‘To write was to learn. Beginning a book, I always felt I was in possession of all the facts about myself; at the end I was always surprised.’ The most convincing passages from A Writer’s People are those where one suspects Naipaul is unwittingly describing his own travails, learning more about the peculiar obligations of his craft as he analyses others’ struggles to make themselves understood or heard.

French cannot hope to compete with the guileless authenticity of these revelations, but this is not to detract from his achievement. There are elements of the creative process that Naipaul himself cannot hope to explain. After all, A Writer’s People is the story of the previously unfelt presences that indelibly shaped Naipaul’s work. Given the enormous influence that she had on his writing, Naipaul’s wife Pat might seem an obvious choice to include in A Writer’s People; and yet inclusion has never been an emotional technique available to Naipaul. His callous neglect of her was interrupted only by the occasional recognition that she was among the most astute readers of his work. French unflinchingly presents Pat’s emotional suffering, which was now and again coloured by the awareness that maybe Vidia had not earned her abject devotion, and in so doing French allows us to see that Pat was a woman of independent taste and judgement. Her ‘soft left’ opinions might not have prevented her husband from holding increasingly reactionary positions, but they were sufficiently strong to mould those positions by contrast. Margaret, on the other hand, ‘was addicted to Vidia’ and ‘liked to be dominated by him’. But she misunderstood the rival claims of his literary vocation and, in her turn, was cruelly shunted aside.

Those who feared a warts-and-all account may be surprised to discover that French’s biography is far from being all warts. Although Naipaul emerges as a capricious and often extremely unfeeling man, French’s penetrating and sympathetic assessment of his literary achievement makes us understand how Naipaul’s attraction to disappointment, taken by many as the token of a pitiless conservatism, belies a vast fund of frustrated compassion. In case we had forgotten, he points out that Naipaul’s ‘chosen subject was the powerless: those who, although in the majority in the world, had appeared in European literature only as peripheral characters, or at best as Man Friday’. French perhaps underestimates the extent to which Naipaul’s early criticisms of post-colonial societies proceeded in part from his powerful inclination towards self-betterment, which as we learn in Finding the Centre, led Naipaul to think of writing as ‘a fantasy of nobility’. This urge impels several of his protagonists, but Naipaul was also aware that this fantasy could slide into a sterile mimicry of the colonial master—a sad process that had been effectively satirised in his very first novel, The Mystic Masseur, and later in the figure of Indar from A Bend in the River. Whether or not this made Naipaul’s judgements on the post-colonial world accurate is another matter altogether. French acknowledges that there were those who were too willing to incorporate Naipaul into their own ultra-reactionary perspectives. Evelyn Waugh was one and although he privately moaned to Nancy Mitford about ‘that clever little nigger Naipaul’ winning yet another literary prize, he saw in The Middle Passage incontrovertible proof that the struggle for independence in the Caribbean and elsewhere was doomed. Discussing Naipaul’s contentious book on Islamic societies, Among the Believers, French persuasively maintains that Naipaul never really occupied the role of mandarin intellectual in which Said and others cast him. He was much too willful, too reliant on ‘close observation’ of his immediate surroundings to slot into any grand neo-colonial schemes. If anything, Naipaul’s work advances a misconceived notion of cultural authenticity, and French justly sees his recent advocacy of extremist Hindu nationalism in India as a worrying example of that.

There are those who would find in French’s book enough material for a damning indictment of Naipaul’s place as an elder statesman of contemporary prose. His misogyny, his ill-tempered dismissals of what he once called the ‘half-made societies’ of the developing world, as well as the appalling treatment meted out to people intimately connected to his work are all too plain to see. Without the undeniable fact of his achievements in fiction and travel writing, however, we would scarcely be interested in the baroque contortions of his private life. Naipaul’s more critical readers become stunned when they recognise that his elegantly organised and often very sensitive writing can harbour a vicious disregard for other people’s and other culture’s ways of looking and feeling. But a writer’s personality is never given to us unfiltered through his or her writing; indeed, artists themselves will always be taken aback by what they find in their own work. Naipaul’s most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds, represent no attenuation of his strengths, and mark the latest stage of this process of self-discovery. Over half a century since his debut, V.S. Naipaul is still standing. Most disturbing of all, he deserves to be.

Jonathan Gharraie is a DPhil student at St. Catherine’s College working on D.H. Lawrence and exile.

While the publishing industry in Britain manages to conjure a bestselling literary sensation every few years or so, in America it is naturally an annual event, and this year undoubtedly belongs to Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Aloft on the wings of unanimous critical acclaim, Díaz recently became the first Dominican–and only the second Latino-American–to scoop the Pulitzer, a species of literary prize quite unknown on these shores, in that it has a reliable history of recognising enduring fiction. It would be quite unfair, of course, to review the hype rather than the book, but it is instructive to note the way in which so much of the praise heaped on Díaz has sounded the same note: he is ‘a powerful new voice’ (Powell’s Books); ‘an ironic, confiding, exuberant voice’ (Kirkus Reviews); ‘one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices’ (New York Times). There has been a great deal of harping on ‘voice’ amongst reviewers, and in order to explain Oscar Wao’s significance—because it is, I believe, a significant novel—I would like to consider a few senses of the word in relation to contemporary American fiction.

One sense of ‘voice’ that we should forbear to inflict on Díaz, and which I suspect some of his reviewers had in mind, is that of a representative of his particular sociopolitical subculture. He is not quite the first Dominican author to gain an American readership–Julia Alvarez went before him–but his Pulitzer award signals his entry to the mainstream proper, with all attendant privileges like huge sales and having to answer inane questions on The Charlie Rose Show. Allowing that one happy incidental effect of Díaz’s success may be increased exposure for a vastly underrepresented immigrant group, to honour him as a ‘voice’ in this sense is to imply a view of American literature as a great pluralistic confab, a house of representatives where each community’s experience is articulated by its own anointed delegate. Whatever the imperfections of American democracy, it is a category error to expect American literature to redress them. And quite apart from the a priori objection that good fiction first of all searches out the specific as against the general example, the starting point for Oscar Wao’s drama is its eponymous hero’s crippling, mortifying atypicality.

Oscar isn’t ‘one of those Domincan cats everybody’s always going on about–he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock’. In fact, he’s a fat, sci-fi-loving nerd who seems destined to disprove the seeming law of nature that no Dominican male can die a virgin. Increasingly alienated from his contemporaries at Rutgers University, Oscar develops an obsession with the ancient Dominican legend of fukú, a curse which is said to wreak havoc on all who fall under its influence. Meanwhile, the narrative arcs backwards, tracing the upheavals faced by his mother, Beli, and his grandfather, Abelard, whose encounters with a murderous Dominican dictatorship are chilling enough to support Oscar’s suspicions of a family curse.

Given all this, it would be understandable had Díaz written a long howl of intergenerational anguish, but the impression that arises on putting down Oscar Wao is of a warmth and humour which belie its dark materials. The reason for this is found in another, more literary sense of ‘voice’: the prose in Oscar Wao is a marvellous olio of Spanglish that ranks alongside any of the recent experiments in American prose. Listen:

There are those alive who claim that La Fea had actually been a pro herself in the time before the rise of her brother [Joaquín Balaguer, President of the Dominican Republic], but that seems to be more calumny than anything, like saying that Balaguer fathered a dozen illegtimiate children and then used the pueblo’s money to hush it up—wait, that’s true, but probably not the other—shit, who can keep track of what’s true and what’s false in a country as baká as ours—what is known is that the time before her brother’s rise had made her una mujer bien fuerte y bien cruel; she was no pendeja and ate girls like Beli like they were pan de agua—if this was Dickens she’d have to run a brothel—but wait, she did run brothels!

For all its colloquial swagger, this is a highly stylised piece of writing, with its comic missteps and reversals, sprinklings of Spanish jostling smartass canonical quips and shrugging expletives, all in a sentence the momentum of which is carried by a slipstream of hyphens. It is the voice of Yunior, a homeboy machista and Oscar’s sometime college roommate, whom Díaz reprises from his 1996 short-story collection Drown, and who often addresses the reader as though he were shooting the breeze on a street corner in New Jersey. But, by an act of narrative sleight-of-hand, we do not realise there’s a first-person behind this voice until some way into the novel. The surprise is calculated and central to Díaz’s purpose, because by revealing the presence of another personality written into the margins of the text, he radically undermines the authority of the narrative—a move with obvious significance in a book partly about a dictatorship, but which has implications for its American context too.

Like many of his contemporaries, Díaz is suspicious of the near-hegemony of the monoglot voice that, with the admitted exceptions of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, used to form the bedrock of English-language prose. His solution is to unveil a narrator who is not merely unreliable but who, for many readers, will be occasionally incomprehensible. Yunior is apt to address his readers as ‘nigger’, to season the prose with sci-fi arcana and untranslated Spanish (sometimes extending to full sentences) — to make, in other words, few concessions to the kind of artificial, standardised rhetoric that we normally think of as ‘literary’. It thus marks the distance travelled in the politics of American narrative voice since, say, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), which signalled the throat clearing of a different, newly confident subculture. When Bellow’s protagonist opened his account by announcing, ‘I am an American, Chicago born’, he was brassily declaring his right of access to the cultural centre ground, his right to interpret America to itself. Oscar Wao, meanwhile, bespeaks a society fragmented into a thousand overlapping cultures, comfortable with difference and distrustful of centricity. Its linguistic world is one in which we are all migrants, with all the excitement and occasional confusion that condition entails.

This distance can be measured in the way Díaz handles cultural references. While Augie March displays an almost maniacal desire to prove a mastery of cultural authorities on the part of both author and protagonist, Oscar Wao’s allusions are scattershot and irreverent: ‘The sexy isthmus of her waist alone could have launched a thousand yolas,’ says Yunior of one character, and there are some jocose nods to Flaubert, Conrad, Proust and, yes, Bellow. The book’s title refers to the Hemingway story ‘The Short Happy Life of Franic Macomber’, and contains a joke about miscommunication: ‘Oscar Wao’, the protagonist’s nickname, is ‘Oscar Wilde’ rendered in a Domincan accent. None of these references suggests a thorough engagement with the traditions they invoke—nor are they bothered to. Díaz’s deepest mines of cultural reference, in fact, are those of sci-fi and fantasy. Where Augie March would reach for Herodotus or Hegel to illuminate character, Yunior heads for the world of comic books: ‘Like Superman in Dark Knight Returns, who drained from an entire jungle the photonic energy he needed to survive Coldbringer, so did our Beli resolve out of her anger her own survival.’ These are more than just knowing lowbrow hijinx: Oscar Wao eloquently suggests that the immigrant experience is often so vertiginously strange that it can only be understood in terms of eccentric genre forms.

At the outset of the book, Yunior notes that if the influence of fukú can be discerned throughout Oscar’s family history, then perhaps his narrative can be seen as a zafa, that is, a counterspell with power to unloose fukú’s hold. Yunior seems to have in mind something akin to a ‘talking cure’, the idea in psychoanalysis that catharsis can be induced in the trauma victim by enabling the victim to express his or her experience vocally. Yunior turns out to be a historian of Oscar’s family, his self-appointed task to redeem its generational trauma by giving it a voice, and, in doing so, to deal with a related trauma of his own.

Place Oscar Wao beside a couple of other American literary bestsellers of recent years—Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002), and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)—and something of a mini-genre begins to emerge. In all three, an intimate, confiding first-person voice makes significant claims for the power of storytelling to redeem an originating trauma (whether bereavement, genocide, or tyranny). There is an affinity here with the culture of the talk show–which is, of course, another form of the talking cure where a few million viewers, channelled by the host, fulfil the role of the analyst (except, with characteristic American inclusiveness, in this version the catharsis is not restricted to the analysand but is intended for everyone). Oscar Wao shares with Oprah an expressivist faith in sounding out pain, where the final release is affecting in proportion to its dreadfulness. ‘Negro, please’, says Yunior at one point, ‘this ain’t a fucking comic book’. But when the rhetoric of self-expression lapses into pure hyperbole, Oscar Wao is just that: wonderfully, hilariously, but unremittingly overstated. Its voice is so compelling that when, teen-flick-style, the loser implausibly gets the girl in the end, you can barely bring yourself to demur. And yet, for my part, I hope we’re not in danger of forgetting that literature can be more than just a talking cure.

Matt Hill recently completed a BA in English Literature at Jesus College, Oxford, and is now a night porter at a hotel in Bristol.

Caribbean literature in English is a relatively young genre, having developed only in the late 1930s and 1940s. Usually shelved among the “other” literatures in most libraries and bookstores, this minor literary genre nonetheless contains some of the great names of contemporary literature, including Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.

Born in 1930 in the British colony of St. Lucia, Walcott received a “sound colonial education” (‘The Schooner Flight’) in the Methodist school before moving to Jamaica and Trinidad, where he founded the Trinidad theatre workshop in 1959. In the 1970s, he started teaching in the United States; he currently teaches creative writing at Boston University. Though an expatriate, he maintains ties with his homeland through his writings and frequent visits.

Walcott considers himself primarily a poet, but he is also a painter, essayist, and dramatist. Critics have approached his writings from various perspectives, as his work cannot be strictly categorised as, say, post-colonial or postmodern (in fact, Walcott’s writings problematise such theorisations). Although his concerns are primarily postcolonial, Walcott uses postmodern techniques like parody and pastiche as a weapon to strike back against the empire.

To quote its editor, Edward Baugh, the recent publication Selected Poems (2007) is a mere “distillation from the harvest”—“the pleasure of choosing was usually inseparable from the pain of having to leave this or that poem”. Baugh’s selections are compelling, however: the collection offers invaluable insight into Walcott’s poetic journey, drawing on poems from 13 collections from his sixty-year career.

Baugh’s edition includes poems published in previous collections of Walcott’s works, including Selected Poems (1981) and Collected Poems (1992)—like the celebrated ‘The Ruins of a Great House’, ‘Tales of the Island’, and ‘Far Cry from Africa’—as well as Walcott’s more recent works, like ‘The Bounty’ (1997), ‘Tiepolo’s Hound’ (2000), ‘Prodigal’ (2004), and sections from his epic ‘Omeros’. The more recent poems serve as a commentary on his entire career, re-evaluating many of the concerns introduced in the earlier poems. As such, Baugh’s collection has a latent cohesive force, like a sequence of related stories in which images and metaphors develop throughout.

Throughout his work, Walcott has pondered reflexively about himself and his art and the collection as a whole allows us to trace his artistic evolution, as he explores the multiple possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, and language. The collection can be seen as a travelogue from mimicry through intertextuality to creativity—this is somewhat true of all postcolonial literatures. There are, however, significant difficulties involved in assimilating Walcott’s paradoxical and multifaceted poetic strategies into a discursive whole. Editors of his collections have repeatedly acknowledged the difficulty of bringing his poems together, while asking questions about the overall readability of his work. Wayne Brown’s comment in his introduction to the Selected Poems (1981) that Walcott’s poetry is an “exercise for an adventurous reader” echoes Baugh’s statement that the “adventure of reading Walcott is also an adventure in poetic style and form”. Indeed, throughout Walcott’s career, critics and readers have continually found his work impenetrable and obscure, criticising his alienating scholarly allusions, his digressive, over-elaborated metaphors and his attempts to squeeze all possible meanings from his tropes.

The question of accessibility relates to his initially reluctant use of patois. In ‘Tales of the Islands’, taken from the collection In the Green Night (1962), the poetic voice moves between Creole and standard English, finding a complex resonance in the way the poet blends lyrical and narrative modes:

The fete took place one morning in the heights
For the approval of some anthropologist.
The priests objected to such savage rites
In a catholic country; it was quite ironic.
[Chapter V]
Poopa, da’ was a fete! I mean it had

Free rum free whisky and some fellers beating.
… … … ….
Generation has its angst, but we has none’
And wouldn’t let the comma in edgewise.
[Chapter VI]

As Walcott moves towards artistic maturity, however, there is an unmistakeably increasing and confident use of patois in poems such as ‘Sainte Lucia’ (1976) and ‘The Schooner Flight’ (1979):

In the empty schoolyard
Teacher dead today
The fruit rotting
Yellow on the ground,
Dyes from Gauguin

the pomme-arc dyes
the earth purpule,
the ochre roads
Still waiting in the sun
For my shadow
Oh, so you is Walcott?

You is Roddy brother?
Teacher Alix son?
And the small rivers
With important names.
(Sainte Lucia).

Craftsmanship is very important to Walcott: although he does use free verse in some of the later poems, his essential commitment to classical form shines through. Critics have pointed to his mastery of iambic pentameter as creating a disparity between form and content. As contemporary Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Braithwaite explains, a “hurricane does not roar in pentameter”. Such poets would prefer calypso rhythms and oral drumbeats, which invoke a response from the local audience—an appropriate “representation”, in Braithwaite’s terms, “of a nation in revolution”.

Against such tendencies, Walcott’s poetry clearly reflects his rootedness in European tradition and literature; his acceptance of that heritage is, however, never whole-hearted. His poems explore the inner conflict between native culture and an imperial tradition imbibed from books, dramatising both a personal and historical quest for identity. Themes of exile, estrangement, and isolation predominate, although Walcott’s consciousness of his poetic obligations towards his homeland spurs reflections on the Caribbean culture and society, as well as beautiful, multifarious description of its landscape.

Walcott’s poetry is highly self-exploratory, an effort to relate his own experience as a poet to the larger literary world through his personification of various literary archetypes. He is at once Crusoe, Friday, Shabine, Adam, Stephen Dedalus, and Odysseus. Colonised like Friday, learning his master’s language to turn it against him, he also resembles Crusoe in the sense that the island he inhabits is not his native land—he has come from somewhere else. As such, he is a lonely wanderer like Stephen and Odysseus. All these figures metamorphose into each other, acquiring new meanings.

As regards the themes, one of the central concerns of Walcott is the legacy of Caribbean history, or its non-history and cultural fragmentation. The Caribbean artist has no ancestral myths, no glorious past to look back to—and yet, paradoxically, no subject has occupied the Caribbean artist so much as his own history. Like Joyce, Walcott considers history a kind of nightmare, but it takes a central role in his poems, not as a documentation of dead facts but as a living presence. In the ‘The Schooner Flight’, Shabine, an autobiographical representation of Walcott and the Caribbean nation, meets History personified. The sailor poet tries to relate himself to History but it does not recognise a Creole:

I met History once, but he ain’t recognise me,
A parchment Creole…
I confront him and shout, Sir Shabine!

They say I’se your grandson. You remember Grandma,
Your black cook, at all? The bitch hawk and spat.
A spit like that worth any number of words.
But that’s all them bastards have left us words.
[The Schooner Flight]

The Caribbean has been portrayed as an illegitimate child of history because of its paucity of written records; to western historiography, it is a lacuna, a dark void. As a Caribbean artist, Walcott tries to fill in the gap with his literary and pictorial efforts. The landscape in Walcott’s poetry is an alternative to those traditional monuments which stand witness to the history of a civilisation:

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
In that grey vault. The Sea .The Sea
Has locked them up. The Sea is History.
[The Star-Apple kingdom (1980)]

Since the Caribbean has few monuments and a tangled history, the celebration of landscape works to reconstruct a dialectical relationship between nature and culture. However, Walcott is optimistic: he makes a creative use of his nation’s absent history by casting himself as an Adam of the New World, giving names to his surroundings. He is face to face with a nature whose objects demand fresh meanings, which his poetry provides with arresting new metaphors. These metaphors are not stagnant but dynamic, lending continuity to his work.

‘Omeros’ (1990), one of his most famous works, reformulates his earlier concerns. The poem is considered his tour de force and was specially mentioned by the Swedish academy while awarding Walcott his noble prize. It is modelled on Homer’s Odyssey though there are echoes from Joyce’s Ulysses, and Dante’s Divine Comedy as well. Walcott uses terza-rima like Dante, dividing the poem into cantos. Even God speaks in creole now:

God said to Achille, Look, I giving you permission
to come home. Is I send the sea -swift as a pilot,
the swift whose wings is the sign of my crucification
[Omeros xxv, i]

Walcott reinvents Homer’s classical characters but strips them of their grandeur, making Achilles a fisherman and Helen an ordinary black lady. His use of epic style serves two purposes. First, it defines his work against a “postmodern” distrust of great works and grand narratives. Second, it allows him to undermine classical genre distinctions which categorise epic in terms of serious action and larger-than-life characters. In this way, Walcott not only rejects cultural servitude but also asserts cultural difference. It is a revolt against the Eurocentric universal claims made on behalf of western canonical master narratives. It is not mimicry, as many critics think, but rather a parody of the epic form in a postmodern sense.

Walcott’s later poems, such as ‘Tiepolo’s Hound’ and ‘The Prodigal’, are more reflective, recapitulating the experience narrated in the earlier poems. They bring the reader back to the point were he had started. Here Walcott prepares for yet another journey. But this time both the poet and the reader have sharper vision than that of a merely ‘Fortunate Traveller’.

Baugh’s edition gives readers a comprehensive account of Walcott’s journey through life and art, bringing together Walcott’s personal and political concerns. Through these poems the poet has succeeded in mixing up a fresh, Creole aesthetic which accommodates both the indigenous and the western culture. Having read through this selection, we end where we started, but with a renewed sense of the gulf that has bridged from one end of the sea to another:

And always certainly, steadily, on the bright rim
Of the world, getting no near, the more
the bow’s wedge shuddered towards it, prodigal,
that line that shines from that other shore. (Prodigal)

Asiya Zahoor has been reading for an MPhil in Postcolonial Literatures in Kashmir, India and is now studying Applied Linguistics at Oxford.

José Martî
Ismaelillo
Translated by Tyler Fisher
Wings Press, 2007
128 pages
ISBN 0916727424

As international interest turns to Cuba in the wake of Fidel Castro’s failing health, nineteenth-century revolutionary poet José Martí’s 1882 poem sequence Ismaelillo offers an increasingly relevant account of the search for a Cuban political and poetic identity.

Magdalen College doctoral student Tyler Fisher’s  new translation of Ismaelillo will be published by Wings Press this September. Fisher’s is the first complete English translation of Ismaelillo and offers a fresh rendering of some of the most powerful poetry in Latin American letters.  Composed for Martí’s infant son during the poet’s banishment from Cuba, Ismaelillo foreshadows the modernista movement in Spanish-American poetry and presents a poignant interplay of political and paternal emotion.  This bilingual edition from Wings Press will include his critical introduction and notes.

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Valle lozano

Dígame mi labriego
¿Cómo es que ha andado
En esta noche lóbrega
Este hondo campo?
Dígame de qué flores
Untó el arado,
Que la tierra olorosa
Trasciende a nardos?
Dígame de qué ríos
Regó este prado,
Que era un valle muy negro
Y ora es lozano?

Otros, con dagas grandes
Mi pecho araron:
Pues ¿qué hierro es el tuyo
Que no hace daño?
Y esto dije – y el niño
Riendo me trajo
En sus dos manos blancas
Un beso casto.

Lush Valley

My peasant ploughman, tell me how,
How have you walked
Within the gloom of this dark night
Through this low field?
What flowers, tell me, did you use
To grease your plow
So that the pungent soil smells
Of lilies now?
And tell me from what streams you drew
To irrigate
This valley once so barren black
Yet verdant now?

When others with large dagger blades
My chest have gouged,
What iron then is this of yours
That makes no wound?
All this I asked the little lad,
Who laughing brought
To me within his two white hands
An unstained kiss.

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Tyler Fisher is presently completing his dissertation on Spanish Counter-Reformation poetry. He is a past contributor to The Oxonian Review of Books and his work has appeared in The Lyric, The Formalist, and Bibliophilos.