When Formidable Things Happen and Shocks and Revelations Come: Warwick Walcott's Absent Presence

Formative years are crucial in a writer's career: as Graham Greene put it in The Lost Childhood, ‘the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share’. In 1987, in conversation with Charles H. Rowell, Derek Walcott referred precisely to Greene's remarks to underline his belief that writers ‘mine their childhood or their boyhood up to about eighteen or twenty, when the formidable things happen and the shocks and revelations come’.

Walcott's early years in St Lucia, from his birth in 1930 to 1950, when he moved to Jamaica to attend university, are described in the autobiographical poem Another Life (1973) which was triggered by a request by Alan Ross to contribute a short piece for the London Magazine: the article, focused on Walcott's youth and native place, was published in 1965 under the title ‘Leaving School’. After producing the article, Walcott continued to reminisce about his childhood, collecting his memories in two notebooks where the prose memoir gradually metamorphosed into the long poem which was completed in 1972 and published a year later. At that point Walcott was establishing himself as a major figure in the literary world: he already had eight collections of poems in print which had attracted praise on both sides of the Atlantic, more than ten of his plays had been performed in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and the United States and, in 1971, Dream on Monkey Mountain had received an Obie Award for Off-Broadway productions. Walcott's activities are to be seen in the context of what, in his 1992 Nobel lecture, he calls the ‘delight’ and ‘privilege’ of witnessing Caribbean literature (in all the languages of the region) establishing itself as part of ‘the early morning of a culture’, a ‘flowering’ that, he insists, ‘had to come’.