This is the sixth in a series of articles that celebrate the lives of the Nobel Prize laureates whose names grace the 125 streets of Laureate Park. These laureates are extraordinary men and women – many of whom are alive today – who through their lifetime achievements have made our daily lives immeasurably richer, often in ways not readily evident. Through these articles, we hope to introduce you to these exceptional individuals and encourage you to learn more about them.
At the heart of our neighborhood, on the border of Walcott Avenue, is a half-moon parcel of land called Crescent Park, which recalls in form and function a New England town common. Many and sundry community events take place in Crescent Park, and each Saturday morning here a clutch of residents practice yoga in the open air under the guidance of an expert instructor.
Midway through the one-hour-long session, as we enthusiasts lie on our backs and gaze upwards at the brilliant Orlando sky, the instructor asks us to consider our intentions for the coming days. Might our thoughts sometimes wander to contemplate the poetry of Derek Alton Walcott, the Saint Lucian bard whom many consider the greatest modern poet in the English language?
In January 1930 in Castries, St. Lucia, a school principal named Alix Walcott gave birth to two boys, Derek and Roderick. A year later, her young husband, Warwick Walcott, an amateur painter and theater aficionado, died, leaving her to raise her twins and their older sister. Alix loved literature, especially Shakespeare, and would recite lines from his plays so incessantly that the twins would plead for her to stop. But the rhythm of those lines stayed with Derek, and by age 14 he had published his own poem in a local newspaper.
His calling in life, he sensed already, would be to produce poetry. Four years later, Derek had composed verse of sufficient length and depth to compile into a book. Touching his mother for a $200 loan, Derek had his collection, 25 Poems, printed locally and hawked on the streets of Castries. That loan, Derek later joked, was never paid back.
But Derek Walcott did repay that debt in kind through an extraordinarily prolific career as both master poet and innovative playwright, as he gave voice to the experience of the Caribbean isles, which had never before possessed a cultural advocate of such stature. After obtaining degrees at Saint Mary’s College in St. Lucia and the University of the West Indies in Jamaica in the early 1950s, Walcott settled in Port of Spain, Trinidad, earning a living as a theater critic and instructor. There, the Trinidad Theatre Workshop he founded staged his plays, such as Ti-Jean and His Brothers, a retelling of a Caribbean folktale where the cleverest of three brothers bests the devil, and Dream on Monkey Mountain, a profound portrayal of the cross currents of Caribbean life.
With African, Dutch and English blood coursing through his veins, Walcott in his person quite literally embodied the contradictions and conflicts within Caribbean culture, in race, language and religion. Though he first gained worldwide attention with the collection of poems In a Green Night, it was through his masterwork, the 325-page epic poem Omeros, that Walcott so skillfully conveyed the complexities of his native land.
Even for passionate lovers of poetry, Omeros, the Greek for “Homer,” is not for the faint-hearted. This is a daunting read, on the level of Ulysses, James Joyce’s version of that Homeric epic. For his poem, Walcott reinvented the Iliad and Odyssey as a struggle between two St. Lucian fishermen, Achille and Hector, who vie for the attention of Helen, a local waitress.
The poem’s panoply of local St. Lucian characters echoes the heroes of the Iliad, while the narrative jumps forward and back through time and place, and occasionally slips into French patois. In one crucial passage, Achille dreams he is transported to Africa, where he witnesses, in a native village, the capture of his ancestors for transport to the New World.
In another scene, the narrator is chilled in the snow-shrouded streets of Boston where, struggling to hail a cab, he considers the life of Caroline Weldon, a 19th century activist who worked to protect the Lakota tribe from slaughter on the wintry plains of the Midwest, a fate that native Caribbean tribes met centuries earlier. The central character of Omeros, though, remains St. Lucia itself, whose verdant and sparkling beauty Walcott renders with intense power.
Tears filled Roderick Walcott’s eyes as he watched his brother deliver his Nobel acceptance speech in Stockholm in the winter of 1992. Roderick, too, had led an impressive career promoting Caribbean art and theater. In his remarks, Derek referred repeatedly to another Caribbean Nobel laureate, poet St. John Perse of Guadeloupe, who, by a remarkable coincidence, is also honored with two streets in our neighborhood. Even more remarkably, Upper and Lower Perse Circles intersect Walcott Avenue and trace the bow of Crescent Park.
Probably Derek Walcott never practiced yoga. But yoga remembers Derek Walcott, as one of his best-loved poems, Love After Love, appears often on the websites of yoga studios. In these lines, which might encircle the weekly intentions of yoga enthusiasts everywhere, the message could not be clearer:
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Next month: William Vickrey, E-Z Pass Economist
Dennis Delehanty moved to Laureate Park with his wife, Elizabeth, from the Washington, D.C., area in mid-2018. Dennis completed a long career in international affairs at the U.S. Postal Service, the United Nations and the U.S. Department of State, jobs that required extensive global travel and the acquisition of foreign languages. You can contact Dennis at donnagha@gmail.com.
