Remembering Walcott
AT the 2008 Calabash International Literary Festival, it was widely reported by major media outlets how Sir Derek Walcott trashed fellow Nobel laureate, Trinidadian writer V S Naipaul.
But the event’s co-founder Justine Henzell recalls a less sensational admonishment.
“I remember when a BBC reporter remarked that the Caribbean did not support the arts and he retorted, ‘Young lady, I have never read to a larger audience anywhere in the world than I just did.Caribbean governments may not support the arts, but Caribbean people certainly do!’”
Walcott died last Friday in his native St Lucia at age 87. He is among a fading breed known as the Caribbean Man.
Henzell said having lived in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, Walcott developed an enduring love for the countries. He had unyielding admiration for Jamaica’s most famous son.
“On Desert Island Discs from the BBC, he remarked that if he could write a lyric as beautiful and moving as Marley’s No Woman No Cry he would be a happy man.”
Walcott’s lone appearance at Calabash was widely covered by American and British media. His perceived jab at Naipaul got much attention.
The New Yorker reported that Walcott unveiled “The Mongoose, a long rhyming diatribe against his fellow-Nobelist and West Indian writer V S Naipaul. The poem begins: I must have been bitten I must avoid infection Or else I will be as dead As Naipaul’s fiction.”
According to the publication, “Later lines cast the novelist as ‘a burnt-out comic’ and ‘a rodent in old age’. This may be payback for Naipaul’s 2007 essay on Walcott, in which he described the poet as ‘a man whose talent has been all but strangled by his colonial setting’.”
Contrary to what the BBC reporter heard, Walcott was pleased with the contemporary Caribbean arts scene.
“In an interview with Kwame (Dawes) in Barbados a few years ago, he spoke with a great deal of pride and admiration about the new generation of Caribbean writers working today. He was gratified by this,” said Henzell.
The state funeral for Derek Walcott takes place at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Castries, St Lucia, on Saturday.