Derek Walcott: Blessed Discontent

J. P. White:  In your essay "What the Twilight Says", you have said that the goal of theater and poetry must be to explore the origins of aboriginal calamity-to search below these origins for the deeper questions of who we are and what our nature is, what mix of good and evil we are capable of?

Derek Walcott:  It comes down to a question of whether one considers human nature to be intrinsically and irrevocably evil. Perhaps one settles too much on the idea of the question, which may be the whole point, because the question exists in the figure of Prometheus, and it exists in the figure of Cain, and it exists in all of the emblematic characters. The question travels-it takes you as far as Dante, because the horrors through which Dante goes are finally sublimated in love, a radiant light that swirls backward into a center. There is validity in that progress. It is not apparent, and it certainly is not apparent in the cycles of history. But the cycles of history are repetitive, they do not resolve anything. What remains unresolved is the is, the light, the is, the thing that is at the heart of being.

JPW:  The word exile turns up throughout the poems. The feeling of homelessness, of not quite belonging to the culture, is a quality that describes many of the characters in your plays. But even homelessness is not quite right. It's more like someone on the periphery of empire-of looking in and out simultaneously. How would you describe this double vision, this seeking of your characters?

DW:  In a very simple way, it is extremely physical. One has grown up in a certain climate from childhood, and that climate is built into one's body, into one's temperament. So every year, as I get older, it becomes more intensified, this physical nostalgia for simple things like warm sea, sun, a certain kind of food. And it may be that in the childhood of every writer there is a taste of a certain fruit, a slab of light in a certain field, a color of the sky. All of these things are instinctive in a writer and they may be clouded over by a lot of experience. But the taste on the exile's tongue is the taste of his childhood. The taste cannot be washed away with a different wine, with the best sort of food, for beneath it all, the travel, the politics, the sociology, there is a simple food and fruit of his region, the place he has come from. So there is an interior exile, however sublimated, in every writer who is not in his own territory.

Perhaps the idea of heaven is created from this idea that we are in exile on earth from a place to which we really belong and this period of time is simply a passing. That may be the root of the concept of paradise, that we have an interior heaven in our own heart. This idea certainly is in the heart of poetry, because poetry is a situation of divine discontent. It is a blessed discontent. It is a discontent that says there is more than this. There is more than me, there is more than what's immediate and what's temporal. That discontent is part of the beat and spirit of poetry.

JPW:  There is a sense throughout your plays and poetry of keeping a pledge to be an artist, to nurture your gift, to approach the act itself as divine vocation. What is your sense of what it takes to write great poems?

DW:  I don't think anybody sets out to write a great poem. I mean, you do, yes, you do. Otherwise there's no point in undertaking it. I think sometimes one confuses greatness with honesty. And that's our trouble as we get older as poets. We get a lot of great technique, but some kind of innocence is lost. It's a kind of tragedy in writing poetry as you get older. A tragic sense that you wish you could keep the exhilaration and the innocence of apprenticeship, but you can't sacrifice some kind of technical mastery that really fuses the poem

JPW:  You have produced a tremendous amount of material in forty years. When does he pace catch up?

DW:  Over here in front of you, is a two hundred page poem that I have nearly finished called Omeros, which is the Greek name for Homer. And what this poem is doing, in part, is trying to hear the names of things and people in their own context, meaning everything named in a noun, and everything around a name. You see maybe the whole West Indian experience is not itself-it is translated. There is a film over the name, Caribbean. You can see the object, but between the object and you, there is some experience, some artifice. We look through a glass in which the noun on the other side has not yet been named. It's the origin of the real Caribbean nouns that I'm after.

from  Green Mountain Review | 1990