Echoes of Africa: Négritude, Afrocentricity, and Identity
in Derek Walcott’s Poetry
Dr. Narinder K. Sharma
Assistant Professor of English
Central University of Punjab,
Bathinda,
Punjab, India
&
Dr. Niharika
Assistant Professor of English
Guru Nanak Dev University,
Amritsar, Punjab, India
Abstract: Derek Walcott’s poetry embodies the ideological and aesthetic dimensions
of Négritude and Afrocentricity. In a nuanced manner, it deals with African
heritage, linguistic identity, and postcolonial resistance. This paper attempts
to examine how Walcott’s works challenge Eurocentric historical narratives,
employing Creole, oral traditions, and intertextuality to assert a
Caribbean/African cultural identity. By drawing from theorists such as Fanon,
Asante, and Brathwaite, the paper explores how Walcott negotiates the tensions
between colonial mimicry, cultural authenticity, and the universality of
literature. The paper also highlights Walcott’s strategic use of myth, satire,
and language to reclaim a diasporic African consciousness. Furthermore, his
reworking of European literary traditions subverts dominant paradigms,
presenting the Caribbean as a legitimate cultural and literary space.
Ultimately, Walcott’s poetry transcends the victim-victimizer binary and offers
a synthesis of postcolonial identity and artistic autonomy.
Keywords: Afrocentricity,
Postcolonialism, Cultural Resistance, Colonialism, African Identity, Linguistic
Reclamation
Caribbean literature is the ambassador
of its turbulent cultural codes and constructs, which have been shaped by its
colonial past and postcolonial present. That the colonial experience refuses to
wipe away the scars of its marauding experience in the present narratives of
the colonised national state is not hard to understand; the complexity of
cultural redefinition, which stares in the face of future generations, puts the
native theorists in a spot of bother. So, the issue that is being debated is
how it will affect future generations' cultural and social formations as well
as the structure of the economy and government. This has a direct effect on the
lives of a people or community, in this case the Blacks, who are the
descendants of sugar plantation slaves who worked legally in the Americas. The
writers of the Caribbean, ranging from V. S. Naipaul to Mikey Smith, Edward,
and Edward K. Brathwaite, have voiced the perils of mimicry, which is
contemporaneous with the dialectical erosion of the West Indian cultural
identity. Like all other postcolonial literature of the post-slavery era,
Caribbean literature has been constantly trying to formulate an indigenous
voice that must write the abstract of its Africa-centered experiences and
history under strain. Language plays a big role in putting this reality in
context. That's why Caribbean writers have used inherited dialects like Creole
and its dialectical predecessor, the socio-political movement Négritude, to try
to expand the African experience in a way that will make Black Africans proud
of their heritage. Such a cultural movement steering towards the renaissance of
the African glory in the form of Re-Africanization marred by the Eurocentric
theorizations is termed Afrocentricity, and Derek Walcott’s poetry is one such
instance of concerted efforts to make Négritude an African cultural and social
acceptance.
Derek
Walcott’s poetry is the embodiment of Negritude and Afrocentricity. This
perspective is based on the idea that globalisation doesn't include the unique
ways of talking about things in Africa, like literature, in its efforts to make
everything the same. The politics of universality don't respect how unique
African culture is and how it can provide a unifying code for the Black African
experience, including the times before and after independence, as well as in
some cases during slavery. The revolutionary document in the annals of
Négritude and Afrocentricity that establishes their broader framework has been Molife Asante’s The
Afrocentric Idea, which interrogates the claims of multiculturalism that fail
to recognise the justifiable contribution of Negroes to the world’s historical,
artistic, and intellectual development while simultaneously challenging
cultural hegemony.
In connecting to the previous works of Cheikh Anta Diop, Maulana Karenga, and
Harold Cruse, “Asante seeks to rescue the continent from the clutches of
anthropologists through establishing a genuine narrative of Africa through
explaining how Diopian Histography, Kawaida, and Black Nationalism movements
all influence Afrocentricity but remain distinctively different in their
ideological orientation” (Smith 2). The broader framework of the terms
Afrocentricity and Négritude has the following implications: a) an intense
interest in psychological location as determined by symbols, motifs, rituals,
and signs; b) a commitment to finding the subject-place of Africans; c) a
defense of African cultural elements as historically valid in the context of
art, music, and literature; d) a celebration of centeredness and agency; and e)
a powerful imperative from historical sources to revise the collective text of
African people as one in constant and consistent search for liberation (Asante
4).
The Négritude
Movement signaled an awakening of race consciousness for Blacks in Africa and
the African Diaspora. This new race consciousness, rooted in a (re)discovery of
the authentic self, sparked a collective condemnation of Western domination,
anti-Black racism, enslavement, and colonisation of Black people. It sought to
dispel denigrating myths and stereotypes linked to Black people by
acknowledging their culture, history, and achievements, as well as reclaiming
their contributions to the world and restoring their rightful place within the
global community. This is so typical of the colonial ideology and is reflected
in the thoughts of legendary African theorist Fanon, who comments upon the
truth behind the colonial politics of denting the African nativity in the
following manner: “The native intellectual had learned from his [colonial]
masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. Now the native who
has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for freedom
will discover the falseness of this theory” (6). The same loss and emasculation
must be replaced with a new vigor, which must be symptomatic of the revolution
that lies ahead in terms of African cultural identity dimensions. Literature
could be that revitalising vehicle since the representations through literature
can subvert the ideologies that thwart the African narrative and stymie it from
taking new but self-destructive epistemological routes. Derek Walcott’s poetry
aims to steer it towards Africa-centred narratives, grounded in
Caribbean/African legends and cultural rubrics influenced by contemporary new
wave thought, where language and culture are of primary importance.
Language is an important dimension of
the Negritude discourse as well as the postcolonial angle of the African
cultural dynamics, and hence Derek Walcott has stressed its importance for the
Caribbean imagination. Apparently, Négritude/Afrocentricity calls for a defense
of the Africa-influenced aesthetic ideals in the form of literature, arts,
music, etc. One part of Négritude that is seen as important for the survival of
the Negro ethos in the face of colonial hostility and postcolonial apathy is
the use of native language in literature and the promotion of it as a way to
communicate in everyday life. Creole is the language/dialect of the Caribbean,
which signifies the cultural union of the Caribbean and a strong bond with the
history, which is characterised by numerous struggles for autonomy, cultural
and political. The Caribbean was polyglossic or polydialectical, and creolised
English retained some of the standard internationally spoken English. Walcott’s
awareness of this poetic medium is an effort to acquaint the postcolonial
Caribbean world with its ancestral heritage, which bears witness to the bloody
struggle of which today’s Caribbean and other islands are the outcomes. People
in the Caribbean look down on it, and Walcott's clear permission for it to be
used shows how revolutionary he thinks language can be to fight cultural
oppression. It has to do with the "African aspect of experience in the
Caribbean" (Brathwaite 285). Also, it has a very sophisticated syntax and
lexicon, which qualifies it as being a language system and not merely an
approximation. In terms of linguistic assertion, Walcott's use of Creole in his
works is a big step towards rehumanising Africans because it stands in direct
contrast to the imported forms of cultural exchange that people are afraid will
turn into colonial imitation. Sharing the same sentiments, his fellow outstanding
poet from the Caribbean, Brathwaite, writes about Creole and the Caribbean
social model, which is: “…historically affected socio-cultural continuum”
(310).
Walcott’s
preoccupation with language is visible in his “Crusoe’s Journal,” whereby he
literarily recreates Defoe’s classic novel Robinson Crusoe
in the intertextuality mode to lend credibility to the Negro Caribbean
experience in the settling days. In the poem, Crusoe, the protagonist, reflects
on his unwelcome arrival on a lonely island inhabited by brutes and
contemplates his role as a colonial settler. Crusoe finds himself in a state of
isolation, where his three identities—Robinson, Adam, and Christopher
Columbus—intersect. His identity as Robinson is apparent, while as Adam he is
vested with the responsibility of naming everything in the quaint place in his
own language, and as Christofer he seeks to Christianise the inhabitants like
Man Friday. On the surface, this means that the poem is trying to show Crusoe
as the New World Adam whose actions changed and adopted a race's language and
other cultural aspects.
Out of such timbers
came our first book, our profane Genesis
whose Adam speaks that prose
which, blessing some sea-rock, startles
itself
with poetry’s surprise,
in a green world, one without metaphors;
like Christofer he bears
in speech mnemonic as a missionary’s
the Word to savages,
its shape an earthen, water-bearing vessel’s
whose sprinkling alters us
into good Fridays who recite His praise,
parroting our master’s
style and voice (Walcott, “Crusoe’s Journal”
45)
The lines clearly represent the
different avatars of the colonial master trying to take over the exotic and
imbuing it with civilised colour. Walcott’s consciousness about this
Eurocentric exercise of erasing the native and savage history amply sums up his
Negritude resistance. This feeling of the natives being upset about being
forced to learn a new language and culture is expressed in the poem
"Names." The settlers' act of giving things names has been compared
to Genesis’s account of how God told Adam to name everything on earth. This new
arbitrary relationship between the sign and the signified hurts the natives and
even more the Caribbean slaves who were new to the language and environment.
The dual fix in which they found themselves disoriented them from the
linguistic aspect of both the signifier and the signified. The excerpt sums up
this delusional consciousness about language and ethnicity.
My race began as the sea began,
With no nouns and with no horizon,
With pebbles under my tongue,
With a different fix on the stars.
……………………………….
I began with no memory,
I began with no future,
But I looked for that moment
When the mind was halved by a horizon.
(Walcott, “Names” 12)
The Negro identity, along with that of
the Indian and Cantonese, appears to be in ruins, as they, too, have been drawn
into the Caribbean from their native fields. The anguish of such souls is
rendered in the following lines, whereby the various professionals from
different lands regret being seen just as objects of merit and not humans.
Have we melted into a mirror,
Leaving our souls behind?
The goldsmiths from Benares,
The stonecutter from Canton,
The bronzesmith from Benin (Walcott, “Names”
12)
The transformation into mirrors signifies an
identification based solely on their physical craft and material names, rather
than their humanity. The repressive regime of colonialism obliterates their
native names and replaces them with a physiochemical existence.
Négritude calls for a validation of
the African cultural value system and a defense of the pan-African cultural
connection variegated by the anthropological dispersal of the African diasporas
in various European-dominated topologies as well as autonomous nation-states.
The preservation of its aesthetic ideals in the spheres of music and arts is an
important argument of the Afrocentric Négritude. Calypso is one such cultural
manifestation of the Caribbean. It is a satirical song in rhymed verse whose
origin the cultural critics ascribe to the 18th-century French rule in
Trinidad. Only in the conservative cultural circles of the Caribbean has the
calypso, sung to praise the master or criticize the rivals, endured over time.
It has acquired a musical pattern with youthful overtones vastly different from
its original rhythm and tunes. In his poem, Walcott tried to bring back this
old Caribbean art form to simplify the ideas of Négritude. The goal of
Négritude is to teach the African generation about its historical and cultural
forms that are different from those that were forced on them and further
internalized because of changes in the political situation that support
hegemony. The satiric tone couched in calypso is Walcott’s method to invoke the
oral tradition of the Caribbean as well as a postcolonial ruse to record and
incisively present the contemporary social, economic, and political scenario
alloyed with realism. The decolonisation of the Caribbean was supposed to usher
in an era of prosperity and regard for democratic ideals of liberty, equality,
and fraternity. The autonomy was expected to transform the Caribbean into a
Black paradise, which, however, didn’t happen as the colonial mindset refused
to die down from those in power. The scars of the colonial experience produced
men and culture that reeked of the same hegemony and similar sleaze. The
rebirth of cultural agents such as language and traditions shattered the
initial excitement surrounding decolonization. Fanon ruminates over the drama
of decolonization: “Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it
influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally” (Fanon 28).
The Caribbean
too witnessed the filling in of new Whites in Black skins, shattering the Negro
dreams. Walcott’s poem “The Spoiler’s Return” chronicles this dialectical shift
of power in the islands and finds calypso and the satiric vein enshrined in it
as the best means to express this reality. Walcott uses the persona of Spoiler,
a calypsonian, in the poem to further his vision of the modern-day Caribbean.
He returns from hell and Satan to his native place, where he has left his
"conscience" and "rum-eaten wit," showcasing his drudgery
and poverty, which are typical of the Caribbean middle class.
I sit on this bridge in Laventille,
Watching that city where I left no will
But my own conscience and rum eaten-wit,
And limers passing see me where I sit,
Ghost in brown gabardine, bones in a sack,
And bawl: “Ay, Spoiler, boy! When you come back?” (Walcott, “The
Spoiler’s Return” 56)
In addition to celebrating his reunion with his old
mates, Spoiler also confronts those who abuse their position at the top of the
power hierarchy. Spoiler calls them sharks who are devouring the small fries or
the commoners at whose expense they are enjoying the power. Wole Soyinka
echoed similar sentiments by admitting the vices enshrined in the
decolonization of his country, Nigeria. Soyinka was swift in expressing his
real feelings in an interview on the re-lettered day of his country: “I saw the
most naked and brutal signs of alienation of the ruler from the ruled from the
very first crop. There were one or two exceptions, of course. And then I
realized that the enemy within was going to be far more problematic than the
external, easily recognizable enemy” (Bandele-Thomas
145). The Spoiler in Walcott’s poem also feels disillusioned at the
unscrupulous shift of power from the whites into the hands of the Black
bureaucrats rife with manipulative motives translated into similar actions.
Spoiler deems satire the weapon to attack these parasitic leeches, invoking legendary
satirists like Martial, Juvenal, Pope, and even V. S. Naipaul, who has painted
a very gloomy picture of Caribbean life in his novels. Walcott has also said
very harsh things about how journalists and poor writers use language in a way
that is disrespectful to African culture, which is something that the Négritude
stands for.
Walcott’s promulgation of Négritude
makes him fully alive to the postcolonial dialectics of his origin and his
place. As such, he attaches special importance to the constant correspondence
between the native language and the acquired one, i.e., English. He has written
poems underlining the Creole and Calypso motives to elevate their indigenous
character, but at the same time, he has not turned back on the delineation of
European and Eurocentric tropes, which have had a great impact on his
socio-cultural patterning of aesthetics. His poem Omeros, an African variant of Homer, is an
attempt to blur the demarcations between the colonized and the decolonized
notions of arts and expressions; he attempts to forge a relationship between
the European literature that has been centering its narratives around Greece
and its inspirational manifestations. He goes, in fact, farther when he declares a proximity
with Greece on account of both being close to the sea. Furthermore, it is
apparent that Walcott, by choosing to write about Greece, writes back to
establish his own decolonised autonomous identity. In an interview, he spoke
about this ambition to situate the Caribbean’s alliance with Greece, which the
European writers have been taking for granted: “I understand what he feels.
It’s not that I am trying to be Homeric. I am on an island in an inland ocean,
so the correspondence leaps centuries” (Smith, “Interview” 296). Hence,
Walcott’s poetry tries to transcend the victim-victimizer binary by making a
claim about the universal appeal of literature. Interestingly, it is the same
universalism of experience that is the starting point of postcolonial thought.
It is this subversion of the clichés that defines the Négritude of an African
writer, which Derek Walcott achieves with a masterful stroke of balancing the
antithesis.
To conclude, Derek Walcott's poetry,
situated upon the Africa-centered experience, makes a political statement about
its deserving place in the world culture defined and dictated by Eurocentric
practices. His knowledge of the needs of the modern African generation's social
and cultural stories, combined with African traditions and folk culture, shows
that he is relevant in both postmodern and postcolonial ways. He is a true
spokesman of the concerted intellectual movement of Négritude, aiming to grant
dialectical legitimacy to the African experience and elevating it not only in
the European sphere of aesthetics but also in its contemporary Caribbean
structures comprising youth and their cultural preferences.
Works Cited
Asante,
M.K. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
Print.
Bandele-Thomas,
‘Biyi. Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal. London: Heinemann, 1994. Print.
Brathwaite,
Edward K. “History of the Voice: The Development of National Language in
Anglophone Caribbean Poetry.” Roots.
Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993, pp. 284-312. Print.
Fanon,
Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Print.
Smith,
Levar L. “An Afrocentric Manifesto: The Book Review.”. The Journal of Pan-African Studies. Vol. 2 No. 7, 2008, pp. 1-17.
Print.
Smith,
Richard E. “Interview”. Contemporary
Literary Criticism 76 (1992), pp. 291-301. Print.
Walcott,
Derek. Collected Poems, 1948-84. New
York: Noonday-Farrar, 1986. Print.
---.Omeros. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
Print.