African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
256 p., This book explores the common links and differences between the works of two modern Caribbean poets, Kamau Braithwaite and Dereck Walcott. The study focuses on the engagement of the two with the mythology of the Caribbean's African experience, defining each poet's contribution to the development of modern Caribbean poetics.
The author examines race, language, and identity in Derek Walcott's poetry, reading Walcott's poetry as an extended meditation on the question of whether it is possible to exist within the English language and an Afro-Caribbean tradition, drawing poetic nourishment from each, or whether the attempt is a betrayal of both. Of mixed racial ancestry, a native speaker of French Creole who was formally educated in British colonial schools, raised Methodist on the Catholic island of St. Lucia, Derek Walcott occupies a peripheral place with respect to both English and Caribbean culture, it is noted. Throughout the course of his poetic career he has been criticized from both perspectives, either for "appropriating the Other" and putting it to use in the service of the dominant culture or for not assimilating that dominant (English) culture fully enough.;