His monumental poe­try, such as his 1990 epic ‘Omeros’, a Car­ibbean reim­agining of ‘The Odyssey’, secured him an international reputation which gained him the Nobel Prize in 1992. Derek Walcott also had an accomplished theatrical career, being the writer and director of more than 80 plays that often explored the problems of Caribbean identity against the backdrop of racial and political strife.

Born in Saint Lucia in 1930, Walcott’s ancestry wove together the major strands of Caribbean history, an inheritance he described famously in a poem from 1980’s The Star-Apple Kingdom as having “Dutch, nigger, and English in me/ And either I’m nobody, or I’m a/ Nation.” Both of his grandmothers were said to have been descended from slaves, but his father, who died when Walcott was only a year old, was a painter, and his mother the headmistress of a Methodist school — enough to ensure that Walcott received what he called in the same poem a “sound colonial education.” He published his first collection of poems — funded by his mother — at the age of 19. A year later, in 1950, he staged his first play and went to study English literature, French and Latin at the newly established University College of the West Indies in Jamaica.

After graduating in 1953 he moved to Trinidad, an island recently vacated by V. S. Naipaul, a contemporary of Walcott’s whose career advanced in eerie synchronicity — from early dreams of a life in literature to Nobel success. Naipaul was first to find a London publisher, Walcott first to find favour with the Swedish Academy — but their contrasting approach to the legacy of empire soured their early friendship, igniting a feud which reached its apogee when Walcott read out an attack in verse at the 2008 Calabash festival in Jamaica: “I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/ Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.”

Poet and playwright Derek Walcott died last week aged 87

Walcott continued his project to make the Western canon his own, summoning up the spirits of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Yeats and Eliot in collections that explored his position “between the Greek and African pantheon.” His decision to write mostly in standard English brought attacks from the Black Power movement in the 1970s, which Walcott answered in the voice of a mulatto sea-dog in ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’: “I have no nation now but the imagination/ After the white man, the niggers didn’t want me/ When the power swing to their side/ They first chain my hands and apologise, ‘History’/ The next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride.”

A 1981 MacArthur “genius” grant cemented Walcott’s links with the United States, first forged during a Rockefeller fellowship begun in 1957. Teaching positions at Boston, Columbia, Rutgers and Yale followed, but his teaching style, which he described as “deliberately personal and intense,” got him into trouble. Two female students at two universities accused him of interfering with their academic achievements after they rejected his advances. One case was settled out of court, but this was said to have counted against him when he was passed over for the post of poet laureate in 1999.

In 2012, he told The Guardian that he felt that he was still defined as a black writer in the US and the UK. “It’s a little ridiculous. The division of black theatre and white theatre still goes on, and I don’t wish to be a part of any one of those definitions. I’m a Caribbean writer.”

By arrangement with The Guardian

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 26th, 2017