淡江人文社會學刊【第二十三期】
Ambivalence, a key concept in postcolonial studies, refers to a simultaneous attraction
toward and repulsion from an object, person or action. (Young, 1995, p. 161) According to H.
K. Bhabha the relation between the colonizers and the colonized is ambivalent. The colonizers
want to dominate the colonized and the exploitation of the colonized is under the mask of
nurturing; they impose their own culture on the colonized as if they were civilizing the
colonized people, but actually they are eager to have them assimilated. Yet, the colonizers can
never really succeed, because through mimicry the colonized find the interstice to subvert the
culture of the colonizers. Bhabha (1994, p. 86) suggests, “[C]olonial mimicry is the desire for
a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not
quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence.”
This kind of colonial mimicry always turns out to be mockery because it is almost the same
but not quite. It is supposed to be mimicry but it actually turns out to be mockery.
“Ambivalence describes this fluctuating relationship between mimicry and mockery, an
ambivalence that is fundamentally unsettling to colonial dominance.” (Ashcroft, Griffiths &
Tiffin, 1988, p. 13) In the postcolonial period, this kind of ambivalence is very significant
since it demonstrates the possibility for the subversion of the colonized.
In the postcolonial era with the increasing attention to postcolonialism and
multiculturalism, marginalized people have been demanding more and more attention and
cultural diversity is gradually emphasized. “In post-colonial Europe and the United States,
people who have been colonized and those who have colonized others have responded to the
diversity of multiculturalism by a renewed search for ethnic certainties.” (Woodward, 1997, p.
17) Generally speaking, homogeneous elements are essential in forming a group, a society or
a nation since people believe that “[c]ommon values, shared principles, core beliefs, national
purpose” bring people together. (Gordon & Newfield, 1996, p. 9) So, people of an ethnic
group must share the same “cultural codes.” S. Hall (1997, pp. 2-3) thinks that
……culture is concerned with the production and the exchange of meanings –
the ”giving and taking of meaning” – between the member of a society or
group……Meaning is what gives us a sense of our own identity, of who we are
and with whom we ‘belong’ – so it is tied up with questions of how culture is
used to mark out and maintain identity within and difference between
groups.
So, cultural codes are important for a group of people to find their identity and to
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distinguish themselves from others. For the formerly colonized, marginalized people,
however, it is not so easy to find their identity. Psychologically, they are unwilling to identify
with the colonizers’ culture; yet, practically, they are heavily influenced by that culture.
There exists a kind of ambivalence in finding their cultural identity. In the country with more
than one ethic group, such as the United States, it is also hard to achieve the collective
identity because those once marginalized groups now demand more attention and put more
emphasis on their difference. Searching for collective identity may result in the ignorance of
the many differences between different ethnic groups; whereas, emphasis on difference may
result in discrimination. This kind of dilemma always exists in multiculturalism; “while
identity now labors under a charge of essentialism, difference is now checked by the charge of
inequality.” (Alarcon, 1996, p. 134)
Besides, globalization results in the increase of migrants and as Woodward (1997, p. 16)
says, “Migration produces plural identities”; consequently, many people get the experience of
being diaspora. As Gilroy (1992, p. 20) says, “The complex of difference and similarity that
gave rise to the consciousness of diaspora inter-culture has become more extensive in the era
of ‘globalization’.” The diaspora also faces the ambivalence of cultural identity. In order to be
taken as part of the new country they have to get accustomed to the culture of the new world
while they still cannot, however, forget their own culture. So, they have to live in the
interstice between two worlds, cultures, and races, and this results in the so-called
“identity-in-crisis.” Culture of the colonized is interwoven with that of the colonizers.
Difference of the minority resists the assimilation of the majority. Homeland culture is
entwined with the culture of new worlds. In the postmodern aura, this kind of postcolonial
and multicultural ambivalence is most conspicuous.
As Hall (1997, p. 53) mentions in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” “Cultural identities
are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made,
within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning.” As a
Caribbean, Hall thinks that black Caribbean identities are quite complex. Most of the
Caribbean people share the common history—transportation, slavery, and colonization. Yet,
there also exist some differences, such as the difference of religion, of tribes, and so on.
Therefore Hall (1997, p. 53) suggests, “We might think of black Caribbean identities as
‘framed’ by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and
continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture.”
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Born on the island of St. Lucia in the British West Indies, once educated in Jamaica,
having lived in Trinidad, having been poet-in-residence at several American colleges and
universities, Derek Walcott understands best the Caribbean people’s identity-in-crisis and
personally experiences the wrestling of different cultures. St. Lucia has been colonized by
both French people and Englishmen. Though most people there are the descendents of West
African slaves, it is under strong French and English cultural influence in language and
religion. Jamaica and Trinidad also have been colonized by British Empire. Since Walcott
shares the Caribbean people’s experience of slavery, transportation and colonization,
Walcott’s poetry is the best testimony to the postcolonial, multicultural and diasporic
ambivalence mentioned above.
In the poem “A Far Cry from Africa” the poet’s ambivalent feelings in facing cultural
identity are clearly presented. When colonizing Africa, the white people fought against
Africans and massacred many people there, whom they took as savages and in Walcott’s
words the white people took those savages as “expendable as Jews.” (1992, p. 17) The white
people’s cruel treatment of Africans makes Walcott believe that the whites are even more
cruel than the beast so the poet writes, “The violence of beast on beast is read / As natural law,
but upright man / Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.” (1992, p. 17) It is quite ironic that the
whites seek divinity by inflicting pain on those Africans. This also satirically signifies the
whites’ ridiculous belief — they believe that they are civilizing the savages, a sacred task.
Living in the interstice between European civilization and African origin, an interstice mode
even more complicated by being the offspring of both European and African ancestors,
Walcott experiences identity-in-crisis. So, he wonders:
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live? (1992, p. 18)
The poet is in a dilemma; he is split in the unstable position, in the ambiguous status.
Since he is “poisoned with the blood of both” and “divided to the vein” it is hard for him to
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tell to which group he should belong. As D. R. Samad (1995, p. 229) mentions in “Cultural
Imperatives in Dream on Monkey Mountain,” “The traditions of Europe and Africa ……
enacted a psychic tug-of-war in the consciousness of the West Indian; it is this inner conflict
which elicits Walcott’s painful query in ‘A Far Cry from Africa.” The series of questions
represent the ambivalence he faces. He loves English, the colonizers’ language, but he cannot
forget the ancestral Africa. He regards both origins of blood as poison because both have
something hateful. The European dominant cultural authority is blended with the African
history of enslavement. In the line “……how choose / Between this Africa and the English
tongue I love?” we can see the jaxtaposition of land (Africa) and language (English), which
seems to imply that the poet admires the British culture yet he cannot forget also the place his
ancestors came from. Yet to the Africans, colonizers brought first bloody fights; therefore, the
beginning of civilization was also the start of slaughter. Then Walcott cries, “How can I face
such slaughter and be cool? / How can I turn from Africa and live?” There is the tension
between his historical antecedents and the colonized cultural identity. As Yocum (1996, p.
224) suggests,
The line seems to imply that there is no escape out of the traumatizing past of
colonization into a different language and culture, out of the diasporic history
of enslavement and exile. It is within these boundaries that the tension
between self and its otherness is inscribed: the subject is burdened by a
double belonging.
Walcott’s situation is more complex because he is not only one of the colonized people
but also the descendent of the migrants. He is in the condition of alienation and displacement
from both a native and adopted “land.” With both English and African blood in his body, it is
hard for him to choose between these two origins. He hates the British Empire because it
colonized other people, changed their life, imposed its own culture on other people, and even
killed lots of people to achieve its own purpose. So, Walcott says, “How can I face such
slaughter and be cool? / How can I turn from Africa and live?” These final questions, as
Yocum (1996, p. 224) says, “articulates the ultimate and final voyage. The subject’s
re-memberment, its re-turn ‘home’ to selfhood is achieved in the reclamation of Africa, in the
embrace of the history of colonization, in the memory of migration and enslavement.”
It seems that Walcott sympathizes with the colonized people. In the poem “Ruins of a
Great House” he again criticizes the colonization of the British Empire. In this poem the great
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house is the symbol of the British Empire, and “A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose /
The leprosy of empire.” (Walcott, 1992, p. 19) The great house becomes ruins full of moths,
lizards, and cattle droppings; trees there are also dead because “Deciduous beauty prospered
and is gone” just as the empire, which once has had its glory, now is gone. The empire maybe
is gone, but the hurt and deaths it caused still remain; hence, the poem reads, “A spade below
dead leaves will ring the bone / Of some dead animal or human thing / Fallen from evil days,
from evil times.” (Walcott, 1992, p. 19) The house was built upon many deaths just as the
empire got its colonies through bloody oppression and massacre.
Walcott also implies that
the collapse of the empire is inevitable by saying:
I climbed a wall with the grille ironwork
Of exiled craftsmen protecting that great house
From guilt, perhaps, but not from the worm’s rent
Nor from the padded cavalry of the mouse.
And when a wind shook in the limes I heard
What Kipling heard, the death of a great empire, the abuse
Of ignorance by Bible and by sword.
(1992, p. 20)
Therefore, through the application of religion and armed force, the empire dominated the
colonized and ignored the injustice, which results in the inevitable death of the empire.
Then the poet thought of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake, and he calls them
“Ancestral murderers and poets.” (Walcott, 1992, p. 20) Hawkins (1532-1595), English
admiral, in 1562-1563 and in 1564-1565 led extremely profitable expeditions that captured
slaves on the West African coast, shipped them across the Atlantic, and sold them in West
Indies.
Drake (1540?-1596), English navigator and admiral, in 1567 commanded a ship in a
slave-trading expedition of his kinsman, John Hawkins. Walter Raleigh (1554?-1618),
English soldier, explorer, courtier, and man of letters, once conceived and organized the
colonizing expeditions to America. These three persons either took part in the enslavement of
West Africans or in the colonizing of America so Walcott calls them “Ancestral murderers
and poets.” Here, the word “ancestral” is ambiguous and also quite significant since it may
ostensibly states that they inherited this kind of characteristic from their ancestors but it can
also imply that Walcott takes them as ancestors. Walcott thinks that he and those British
murderers are the offspring from the same ancestry; that is, Walcott is also a descendent of
British people. Yet, a few lines down, Walcott writes, “The rot remains with us, the men are
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gone.” (1992, p. 20) After the great house, the British Empire, collapsed, the colonizers left
and the rot remains with the natives. Now, Walcott seems to identify with those colonized
natives and he continues to show his rage toward the empire. He writes,
Ablaze with rage I thought,
Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake,
But still the coal of my compassion fought
That Albion too was once
A colony like ours, “part of the continent, piece of the main,”
Nook-shotten, rook o’erblown, deranged
By foaming channels and the vain expense
Of bitter faction. (Walcott, 1992, p. 20)
To think that the British was once also a colony, which is no better than the situation in
which they suffer now, seems to be the only way for the oppressed colonized people to
mitigate their rage and keep the coal of compassion. Here Walcott regards himself as one of
the raging colonized people. Yet, he feels also compassion for the Empire. As a descendent of
both West African slaves and British colonizers and at the same time also one of the
colonized people in West Indies, Walcott faces triple difficulties in settling his cultural
identity. Under the multicultural circumstances, different races, and different cultures
intertwine and result in the dilemma and ambivalence in Walcott’s poetry.
The same ambivalence also appears in another poem “Exile,” in which Walcott, as an
observer, expresses the feeling of an Indian going to England. The title is “Exile” but in the
poem Walcott writes, “……you had come / to England; you were home.” (1992, p. 100)
Later, the poet again emphasizes, “Never to go home again, / for this was home!” (Walcott,
1992, p. 100) Is the trip an exile or homecoming? For the Indian and also for all the former
colonized people it is hard to tell. Growing up inbetween different cultures those colonized
people always fluctuate between two or more cultures. This kind of ambivalence becomes
rooted in their life. As Samad (1995, p. 229) says,
This dichotomy is the legacy of the history of the region, and it results in the
dangerous illusion within the West Indian sensibility that home lies in any direction
away from the region. But to give up any of the other ‘wholenesses’ so necessary
for reintergration would be to deny essential fragments of the splintered stage upon
which a sense of home may be constructed in the West Indies itself.
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Since there is no clear-cut between those different cultures, they can only live in the
interstice. Therefore, in “Codicil” Walcott says, “Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles, /
one a hack’s hired prose, I earn / my exile.” (1992, p. 97) Being forever in exile seems to be
the only way of life for those people who are in the condition of displacement and diaspora.
Therefore the poet sighs, “Once I thought love of country was enough, / now, even if I chose,
there’s no room at the trough.” (1992, p. 97) Where can he settle down, except in the
interstice between different cultures?
In the same poem, Walcott also mentions the significance of language by saying “To
change your language you must change your life.” (1992, p. 97) Language is quite
important in forming a culture since it is the most important system of representation and
concerns with the communication of shared meanings. People of the same language forms
a cultural group. The colonizers change the language of the colonized and at the same
time change their way of life; consequently, the culture of the colonized people is
changed. Yet, as Bhabha always insists, there is always ambivalence in mimicry, since
mimicry is always ‘repetition with difference’. In the poem “Names” Walcott shows how
the marginalized culture claims its right to signify and how Caribbean people make
mimicry of European language a kind of mockery. At the very beginning of the first
section, Walcott says, “My race began as the sea began, / with no nouns, and with no
horizon, / with pebbles under my tongue, / with a different fix on the stars.” (1992, p. 305)
Through these lines, Walcott seems to endow his race a kind of spatial and temporal
limitlessness quite different from the European tradition which holds the idea of
proceeding and chronological historicity and in which “the mind was halved by a
horizon.” (1992, p. 305) Later in the poem, the poet says, “A sea-eagle screams from the
rock, / and my race began like the osprey / with that cry, / that terrible vowel, / that I!”
(Walcott, 1992, p. 306) In English the capitalized “I” represents the subject “I”, which
helps to distinguish self from other; whereas, the Caribbean people consider that
important word to be only a terrible vowel just like the cry of the osprey. Since they
began that terrible vowel, that I; that is, since they began to adopt the English language,
they started to lose their own history and their names will be just written on the sand,
which will be erased soon by the sea and what is ironic is that this is done to their
indifference:
Behind us all the sky folded,
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as history folds over a fishline,
and the foam foreclosed
with nothing in our hands
but this stick
to trace our names on the sand
which the sea erased again, to our indifference. (Walcott, 1992, p. 306)
So, the history of the colonized will thus be erased and buried. Besides, they do not care
so much about the names as the Europeans do. Naming is no doubt a very important system of
representation in European culture and in their colony they ask the colonized to follow their
naming system. Yet in the second section, Walcott wonders,
And when they named these bays
bays,
was it nostalgia or irony?
In the uncombed forest,
In uncultivated grass
Where was there elegance
Except in their mockery? (1992, p. 306)
In the wild forest this naming system does not bring the elegance those colonizers have
intended to bring; instead, it turns out to be a kind of mockery in the colony. Then, the poet
asks,
Where were the courts of Castille?
Versailles’ colonnades
supplanted by cabbage palms
with Corinthian crests,
belittling diminutives,
then, little Versailles
meant plans for a pigsty,
names for the sour apples
and green grapes
of their exile. (1992, p. 307)
The Caribbean people do not have the glory or prosperity of Castille, Versailles, and
Corinth; yet, they have their own life style. To Walcott, it is ridiculous to impose the
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colonizers’ naming system, and consequently life style, on those Caribbean people. So,
Walcott comments,
Their memory turned acid
but the names held;
Valencia glows
with the lanterns of oranges,
Mayaro’s
Charred candelabra of cocoa.
Being men, they could not live
except they first presumed
the right of every thing to be a noun.
The African acquiesced,
Repeated and changed them. (1992, p. 307)
To those Europeans naming is part of their life; it is the way to differentiate self from
other. The colonized unwillingly consent, repeat, and finally change the names. This is the
repetition with difference; “that is almost the same but not quite.” In “Of Mimicry and Man,”
Bhabha (1994, p. 86) mentions
……in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its
excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I
have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges
as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal.
Then this situation is reflected through some examples Walcott raises in the poem:
Listen, my children, say:
moubain: the hogplum,
cerise: the wild cherry,
baie-la: the bay,
with the fresh green voices
they were once themselves
in the way the wind bends
our natural inflections. (1992, p. 307)
Now, we can see the subjugated colonized people can also find an agency of utterance.
The colonizers impose the European culture on them but they can find their own way to keep
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their own culture. So, in the following lines, Walcott further claims,
These palms are greater than Versailles,
for no man made them,
their fallen columns greater than Castille,
no man unmade them
except the worm, who has no helmet,
but was always the emperor,
and children, look at these stars
over Valencia’s forest!
Not Orion,
not Betelgeuse,
tell me, what do they look like?
Answer, you damned little Arabs!
Sir, fireflies caught in molasses. (1992, p. 308)
The Europeans are proud of their culture and civilization but actually in Walcott’s
opinion, the natives’ natural surroundings are far greater than the European culture and to our
surprise, the worm is the only great emperor, which will ruin everything. It seems that nature
has its own time schedule and human beings are under the manipulation of nature. No one
should be arrogant in front of that natural power. No matter what names you give to the stars,
to children, they are just like “fireflies caught in molasses”. In the whole poem Walcott
attempts to show us that cultural ambivalence between the colonizers and the colonized.
Under the colonization and oppression the Africans on the Caribbean islands still can find
their way to adjust themselves and to disavow. As Bhabha (1995, p. 52) says, “Walcott
explores that space of cultural translation between the double meanings of culture: culture as
the noun for naming the social imaginary, and culture as the act for grafting the voices of the
indentured, the displaced, the nameless, onto an agency of utterance.”
In addition to the colonization of British Empire, Walcott’s homeland also suffers from
the invasion of American culture, another kind of colonization. At the beginning of XXVII in
Midsummer the poet says,
Certain things here are quietly American—
that chain-link fence dividing the absent roars
of the beach from the empty ball park, its holes
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muttering the word umpire instead of empire,
the gray, metal light where an early pelican
coasts, with its engine off, over the pink fire
of a sea whose surface is as cold as Maine’s. (1992, p. 486)
“Here” refers to Trinidad and this place is quietly Americanized. The fence divides the
beach, where the natives walk, and the ballpark, which no doubt belongs to the Americans.
Though the poet emphasizes that the holes in the park mutter the word “umpire” instead of
“empire”, yet actually the poet is trying to show us that the Americanization of the country
is quite like the colonization of an empire. Even the surface of the sea is quite American.
The American whites again own the privilege that once the colonizers had, and it is another
kind of occupation, just as the poet writes, “The sheds, the brown, functional hangar, / are
like those of the Occupation in the last war. / The night left a rank smell under the
casuarinas, / the villas have fenced-off beaches where the natives walk.” (1992, p. 486) The
natives again are treated as inferior people and “Illegal immigrants from unlucky islands /
who envy the smallest polyp its right to work. / Here the wetback crab and the mollusk are
citizens, / and the leaves have green cards.” (1992, p. 486) Even the polyp, crab, mollusk,
and leaves are luckier than those natives because those sea creatures and plants can stay at
the place where the illegal immigrants cannot. Americanization results in the
industrialization of the island, so Walcott thus depicts, “Bulldozers jerk / and gouge out a
hill, but we all know that the dust / is industrial and must be suffered.” (1992, p. 486)
Natural world of the island is being destroyed but the natives have to endure this kind of
suffering since industrialization is considered to be progress. Yet the poet sees another side
of this kind of progress,
……This
drizzle that falls now is American rain,
stitching stars in the sand. My own corpuscles
are changing as fast. I fear what the migrant envies:
the starry pattern they make—the flag on the post office—
the quality of the dirt, the fealty changing under my foot. (1992, p. 486)
Americanization, to Walcott, implies another kind of colonization and occupation: the
American rain stitches stars in the sand, which resembles the starry pattern of the American flag.
Therefore, Walcott fears it. Yet, the migrant envies the American lifestyle and wants to change
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willingly and the people now show their fealty to the America. This kind of cultural colonization
further complicates their cultural identity. This is quite ironic but this is the situation the Third
World faces now. As in “Elegy” the poets says, “Our hammock swung between Americas, / we
miss you, Liberty.” (1992, p. 109) “Still, everybody wants to go to bed / with Miss America.”
(1992, p. 109) Besides, in “The Glory Trumpeter” Walcott further depicts his fellow
countrymen’s diasporic fate in America. The trumpeter is Eddie, Walcott’s uncle, and he went
to America for money; Walcott says, “Old Eddie’s face, wrinkled with river lights, / Looked
like a Mississippi man’s.” (1992, p. 64) His eyes had “seen / Too many wakes, too many
cathouse nights.” (1992, p. 64) Eddie in America had seen all the vicissitudes of life. “The bony,
idle fingers on the valves / Of his knee-cradled horn could tear / Through ‘Georgia on My Mind’
or ‘Jesus Saves’ / With the same fury of indifference, / If what propelled such frenzy was
despair.” (1992, p. 64,) The life of Uncle Eddie in America was full of despair and sufferings.
Seeing Uncle Eddie play the trumpet, the poet reminisce about the life of his childhood in his
homeland. Walcott says,
Now, as the eyes sealed in the ashen flesh,
And Eddie, like a deacon at his prayer,
Rose, tilting the bright horn, I saw a flash
Of gulls and pigeons from the dunes of coal
Near my grandmother’s barracks on the wharves,
I saw the sallow faces of those men
Who sighed as if they spoke into their graves
About the Negro in America. That was when
The Sunday comics sprawled out on her floor,
Sent from the States, had a particular odour,
A smell of money mingled with man’s sweat. (1992, p. 64)
Eddie went to America with the hope of making his American dream come true. All the
black people labored to earn money and so the comics sent from the States had a smell
mingled with man’s sweat. Eddie maybe made some money but he paid far more than what he
had earned. As Walcott says,
And yet, if Eddie’s features held our fate,
Secure in childhood I did not know then
A jesus-ragtime or gut-bucket blues
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淡江人文社會學刊【第二十三期】
To the bowed heads of lean, compliant men
Back from the states in their funereal serge,
Black, rusty Homburgs and limp waiters’ ties
With honey accents and lard-coloured eyes
Was Joshua’s ram’s horn wailing for the Jews
Of patient bitterness or bitter siege. (1992, pp. 64-65)
The jesus-ragtime or gut-bucket blues can be seen as a kind of cultural invasion and for
those came back from America, this music was just like Joshua’s ram’s horn, which wailed at
the fall of the city of Jericho. This time the horn signifies the fall of their own country; they
came back for the funeral not only of a person but also of the country. In the end of the poem
the poet laments at the fate of his people and his country and says
His horn aimed at those cities of the Gulf,
Mobil and Galveston and sweetly meted
The horn of plenty through a bitter cup,
In lonely exaltation blaming me
For all whom race and exile have defeated,
For my own uncle in America,
That living there I never could look up. (1992, p. 65)
The Gulf is the Gulf of Mexico, and Eddie maybe worked at the cities there. The horn of
plenty is the cornucopia, which in Greek Mythology is the goat’s horn feeding Zeus and is
filled with fruit and grain emblematic of abundance. For Eddie, the horn of plenty was meted
however through a bitter cup because those who migrated and worked in America were
defeated by race and exile. Their American dreams were thus distorted.
Having been to America, Walcott also expresses his own experience in America, at the
cities around the Gulf of Mexico. In the poem “The Gulf” Walcott says, “Yet the south felt
like home. Wrought balconies, / the sluggish river with its tidal drawl, / the tropic air charged
with the extremities / patience, a heat heavy with oil, / canebrakes, that legendary jazz.” (1992,
p. 107) At the beginning, the south of America seemed to remind him of his homeland.
However, he continues, “But fear / thickened my voice, that strange, familiar soil / prickled
and barbed the texture of my hair, / my status as a secondary soul.” (1992, p. 107) The
scenery of the South was similar to that of his homeland and so was the fate of the black in
the South. They were still regarded as inferior to the whites. Though Walcott and those
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African Americans came from different origins, their fate was similar. Then Walcott says,
The Gulf, your gulf, is daily widening,
each blood-red rose warns of that coming night
when there’s no rock cleft to go hidin’ in
and all the rocks catch fire, when that black might,
their stalking, moonless panthers turn from Him
whose voice they can no more believe, when the black X’s
mark their passover with slain seraphim. (1992, p. 107)
The gulf, “your gulf” represents the widening distance between different races in
America. Walcott implies that if the problem will not be solved then the black will not believe
what God says, and may fight back. Is violence the only way to change the fate of the black?
In another poem Walcott gives us another suggestion.
In “Blues” Walcott describes how he, a black, was beaten by five or six young guys.
One oven-hot summer night, on his way home these guys hunched on the stoop and whistled
him over, nice and friendly. Walcott says,
A summer festival. Or some
saint’s. I wasn’t too far from
home, but not too bright
for a nigger, and not too dark.
I figured we were all
one, wop, nigger, jew,
besides, this wasn’t Central Park.
I’m coming on too strong? You figure
right! They beat this yellow nigger
black and blue. (1992, p. 111)
In the poet’s mind, all the migrants are the same, including wop, nigger, and Jew. They are
migrants and belong to the minority. Walcott says he is a “yellow nigger,” and this implies that
he has the blood of both the whites and the blacks as mentioned in “A Far Cry from Africa.”
Because he is a “yellow nigger” he was not too bright nor too dark. “Bright” and “dark”
ostensibly describe the color of his skin but they also imply his personality. Walcott uses past
tense to imply, I think, that originally, he was not smart enough or he was too optimistic. Now
he is beaten “black and blue.” The expression “black and blue” is quite significant here.
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Literally, it means that his body is full of stasis; symbolically, it suggests that after being beaten
he is black now, same as those African Americans, not yellow nigger any more, and he is blue
and sad, because black people suffer the same, either in the colonized country or in free America.
Though strictly speaking, he is not a diaspora (he stays in America as a poet-in-residence), yet,
as a black, he still experiences what the African diasporas have experienced. Besides, the poet
also mentions that he took off his coat for fear that the just-bought coat should be cut. After the
beating, he says, “My face smashed in, my bloody mug / pouring, my olive-branch jacket saved
/ from cuts and tears.” (1992, p. 112) The poet cherished the new coat even more than his own
skin and flesh. Has the mistreatment of the white resulted in the hidden aversion toward their
own skin in the black’s mind? Or Walcott tries to suggest that peace is still possible since
olive-branch is the symbol of peace. Here, the poet shows us his broad-mindedness. Finally the
poet comforts himself and the readers by saying “It’s nothing really. / They don’t get enough
love.” (1992, p. 112) Nevertheless, he still says something about America and that is really food
for thought. Walcott writes,
You know they wouldn’t kill
you. Just playing rough,
like young America will.
Still, it taught me something
about love. If it’s so tough,
forget it. (1992, p. 112)
The lack of love results in the mistreatment toward black people and even toward all
the marginalized people. If everyone plays rough then the world will become chaos.
Though the poet, being discouraged, says, “If it’s so tough, / forget it” we cannot just
forget it. Maybe the only way to face this multicultural world is to love, as Walcott
implies in this poem.
With increasing globalization of the world, everyone is going to face diverse cultures in
his everyday life. Cultural identity is no longer some “essence” but a kind of positioning, just
as mentioned above. Essentialism is by all means out of date. In the postmodern world all of
us will more or less face the kind of ambivalence Walcott has faced. Maybe “to love” is the
only way to solve this kind of ambivalence. If we consider all the people in this world as the
villagers on the globe and if we understand that all of us are just equal temporary residents on
this earth, maybe it is easier for us to love all the people and give away every kind of
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discrimination. Walcott’s poems, as epitome of post-colonial and multicultural ambivalence,
are really food for thought in this highly globalized world.
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