Real Absences
Editorial
Stabroek News
December 9, 2006
In The Prodigal, his most recent and possibly final poem, Derek Walcott confronts his reflection with these lines: "Look at that man, looking from the stalled window-/ He contains many absences. He has ridden over infinite bridges..." With his usual skill, Walcott phrases the moment so that it may hold an echo of Pilate turning Christ over to the mob ("Behold the man!"), even as it counterpoints Whitman's boast about his vast and multitudinous self. The infinite bridges, presumably, are the poet's travels beyond the Caribbean of his youth, and the connections he has made to the English literary tradition. Beyond these grace notes, the lines hauntingly evoke the doubts of so many West Indian lives, absent from home by choice or circumstance, wondering what might have been had different roads led elsewhere than reflections in a foreign land.
The rest of Walcott's poem suggests that it is possible, with sufficient energy and commitment, to adapt to new landscapes, and to engage with and eventually possess new cultures. In fact this process is made easier by the gathering of absences, each of which helps consolidate the wanderer's advance. And yet, for all the pleasures of the journey, the imaginary homeland never vanishes completely, we always daydream about another life.
Few West Indian writers can approach our collective history this brilliantly, but even if we had dozens who could, the sad truth is that most of us probably wouldn't bother to read them until they had managed to win a prize in London or New York. For, despite pockets of high culture, the Caribbean at large remains unremittingly hostile to serious literature. Our teenagers can often name scores of basketball stars and celebrities, but who would dare bet that an average university graduate could tell you who wrote The Black Jacobins? Chamoiseau, Carpentier, Danticat-should you serve these after dinner, or put them on a shelf?
This is an inestimable loss. Quite apart from arguments about diminished attention spans and the shallowness of television, our neglect of contemporary writers usually has the unintended effect of skewing their work towards the taste of foreign audiences. At its worst, this tendency results in the bitter fictions of someone like V.S. Naipaul, more commonly it causes young writers to abandon serious ambitions in order to get published. In developed markets literary success is driven almost entirely by what will sell that season and few West Indian writers, faced with that sell-or-be-damned pressure will ever feel brave enough to take the necessary risks which lasting work requires. Kiran Desai, this year's Booker prize winner, spent eight years working on her novel The Inheritance of Loss. A gamble worth taking, perhaps, if you have grown up in the shadow of a bestselling novelist-her mother, Anita-but almost inconceivable in the absence of a serious book culture.
Walcott's poem is filled with nostalgia for home, and eloquent brooding on the vagaries of exile. Weighed down with history, Europe seems tired of itself and curiously inert. As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean, one might say. And yet, for all the skill he has lavished on his craft, despite its glorious passages about the Caribbean, The Prodigal must face up to a grave truth: that it will be read and appreciated by a substantial elite in the countries of its author's diaspora, but reach only a handful of the people who most need to ride across its infinite bridges.