Polyps,Plankton,and Passages: Mythopoeic Islands and Long-Memoried Seas

Derek Walcott’s poetics balance on the generative lines of tension drawn between the desire to journey away from his island home and the yearning for homecoming. The poet is in many sense of the word a traveler, both physically in his journeys across the globe in search of employment and greater publishing opportunities, and mentally in the much-remarked upon allusiveness of his writing. It is unsurprising therefore, that the trope of the sea operates as a polyvalent figure within his poetic idiom. He reads the sea as a repository of the past, the swash and backwash of recurrent tides bearing witness to the continual inscription and erasure of time and thus possessive of atemporality; it is a palimpsestic record in which successive ages are contained. A blank canvas on which everything or nothing can be read, the sea for Walcott is a shifting narrative that resists the fixing impetus of Atlantic historiography, a concept reaching fullest realization in the poem The Sea Is History. For the writer living on a small island this continual sea presence can promote a feeling of provincialism, of being “castaway” on “islands [that] have drifted from anchorage,” far from the metropolitan centers of publishing houses and readerships. The outward gaze can, conversely instill an anxiety of perceived betrayal of the island home. Walcott’s identification of a “mythopoeic coast” in the poem Origins calls upon the aid of mythological analogy and imagination to fill in the gaps of memory caused by the trauma of the Middle Passage crossing. In the figure of the polyp, the postcolonial poet finds the metaphor for local, self-authorizing creation that conjoins the twin desire for routes and roots.