I hope that all the auxiliary reading I've assigned recently (Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Walcott himself) may have prepared you to hear some of the things I want to say.  And what I have to say involves, first of all, going back and catching up on some (literary) history.

We devoted three whole days—a relatively long time, for this class!—to Naipaul, and I hope you don’t think they were misspent.  Naipaul is a pivotal figure, and he puts us at a kind of crossroads in Caribbean literary history.  Think back: when we last checked in, a whole bunch of important West Indian writers and intellectuals had congregated in Britain, where to their great relief they had found:

1) an audience,
2) a sense of perspective on their home islands, and
3) the latitude to contemplate, and perhaps even create, something like a collective West Indian cultural identity. 

All this pent-up energy, concentrated in one place (London) had exploded in a veritable West Indian Literary “boom”—which Selvon, Lamming, and Naipaul were all part of, and whose thunder was amplified even louder with West Indian independence in 1962.  And yet with Naipaul, as we saw, there was a bleak sense that even at this glorious moment of independence, the boom had already gone bust, and the promise of independence would turn out be illusory and short-lived.  In Naipaul’s radically skeptical view, nations built on deracinated peoples, people long ago cut off from their ancestral traditions, then brutalized and debased for many generations, are left shipwrecked, with no viable materials from which they might produce anything of lasting value.  As he sees it, they’re doomed to imaginative failure, to forever mimic the authenticity of selfhood.  Bummer.  So where do we go from here? 

Well, even if other writers weren’t nearly as pessimistic as Naipaul about possibilities for the development of Caribbean culture, it's nevertheless true that the latter years of the 1960s saw lots of West Indian people in a kind of funk—what Kamau Brathwaite once called “post-Independence depression.”  Writers weren’t exempt: many of them shared at least some of Naipaul’s disillusionment, and they all began to do a lot of soul-searching.  For one thing, they recognized that their nominally independent nations were still dependent on Britain in various ways (or else—perhaps even worse—under the thumb of the U.S.).  And furthermore, they realized that they themselves—in exile, 3000 miles away—hadn’t done much to help:  their absentee efforts to construct new national and regional identities had not been altogether “people-based.”  And increasingly, even if they did not feel (as Naipaul seemed to) that the Caribbean had no authentic identity or that it was doomed to mimic foreign models, many of them nevertheless came to suspect that Caribbean writing may have been too dependent on foreign training, foreign models, and foreign critical approval.  That is: there was a growing, guilty sense that Caribbean literature was still “in thrall” to a European master, and/or that it had become a “branch” of English literature (as Sylvia Wynter puts it), a commodity produced for foreign export and foreign consumption which was no longer “relevant” to Caribbean people themselves.  And so there was a revival of the kind of hand-wringing we saw thirty years earlier among CLR James’s generation, over the “gap” between intellectuals and the masses.  As the 1960s wore on—which is to say, as the colonial world continued to decolonize (in Africa especially) and as the Civil Rights and “Black Power” movements built up steam in the U.S, and as apartheid turned uglier and uglier in South Africa—there were various proposals floated by West Indian writers, most notably by Brathwaite, to re-establish grassroots links with “the people,” their language, and their culture, to bring about a cultural emancipation (as Sylvia Wynter called it) that would be commensurate with political emancipation. 

Belatedly, then, many of writers and intellectuals who’d exiled themselves in London decided, like Wynter, that it was time to go home; that regardless of how philistine and materialist and unappreciative their compatriots might be, there were limits to how much West Indian writers could hope to serve or educate or raise up their people from abroad, in a sort of limbo state where they were neither truly West Indian nor truly English.  So now that they’d had their fun and won their fame overseas, it was imperative, they felt, to go back home and truly recreate Caribbean culture, to write the cultural history Naipaul claimed the region lacked.  It was time to abandon ties to England and its culture, to look homeward both for sources and for validation, to rediscover what was happening on the ground, to become relevant once again to the Caribbean common people. 

Now:  while all these guys were wringing their hands over their “limbo” status abroad, it turns out that Derek Walcott had been back home, hard at work, for a long time already:  althoug he’d had a couple of plays produced abroad during the 1950s & early 60s (including one in London, to great acclaim), he, unlike so many other writers, had never really left the Caribbean since publishing his first poems in 1948—and he wasn’t quite so keen as some of the returning exiles were to throw the English baby out with the bathwater.  Let me explain what I mean by that:  the returning exiles, many of them stung by Naipaul’s charges of “mimicry,” were newly preoccupied with the other side of their double heritage as Afro-Creoles—not the “European” traditions in which they’d been educated, but the African-based folk culture from which they’d been alienated, either by education or by social climbing or both.  But Walcott, even though he was attracted by the people down below (see “Twilight” 22: the image of him and his brother at the window, watching the carnival masqueraders), still wasn’t quite ready to come down off his balcony.  His view of the Caribbean predicament (and of Caribbean creole identity) was different both from Naipaul’s and from that of the other increasingly Afrocentric exiles.

In a way, Walcott embodies all the contradictory feelings of that era:  like James—whose radical, anti-colonial credentials were impeccable—Walcott was unapologetic about claiming the intellectual heritage of Europe as his own.  It was one which, like James, he had mastered, and which he’d used as a tool for understanding and analyzing the West Indian situation—even for helping West Indians see themselves, their society, and their culture as valuable and distinctive.  (James says bluntly: “I didn’t learn lit fr/the mango tree” [163]; Walcott, meanwhile, sees Caliban’s mastery of Prospero’s language as victory, not defeat [“Muse of History” 355].) 

At the same time, like Wynter, Walcott is conscious of the fact that the sense of spiritual exile, alienation, and emptiness expressed by the great European modernists of the twentieth century (Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Kafka, Thomas Mann, et al.) might actually be said to have originated with West Indians, who are in many ways the prototypically “modern,” deracinated people.  But neither is he blind to the fact that it’s England—even English—which is responsible for that deracination.  Furthermore, he’s keenly aware that even though he may be enamored of English Lit, EngLit will not necessarily reciprocate his affection; though he’s comfortable claiming EngLit as a parent, it may not be so comfortable claiming him as a rightful heir.  But finally, like Wynter, he realizes he’s got no choice but to live with that and to deal with it.  As Wynter says, “the dilemma of being either West Indian or European is a false one” (312).   “By openly fighting tradition we perpetuate it,” adds Walcott.  “The truly tough aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor forgives history” (“Muse” 354-55).   A mature culture, he says, doesn’t rant and rave; it comes to terms with its history.  And so, when he founded his first theatrical company, the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, in 1959, he said that he wanted to create "a theatre where someone can do Shakespeare or sing Calypso with equal conviction." 

Walcott is best-known as a poet—an extremely versatile one—and it’s a shame we’re mostly ignoring that. But let me present you with a couple of poems that display his range and illustrate some of the themes I’ve been talking about. Walcott speaks in “What the Twilight Says” about the prestige, the allure, the sexiness, of English; about the desire (which those revelers down in the street wouldn't fully understand, he thinks) to master the English tongue, to learn its poetic models and traditions, to adapt its iambic rhythms to his own voice (or vice versa), to adjust its preferred images to suit his eyes. That’s also the explicit subject of some of his earliest poetry. Here’s an excerpt from “Prelude,” published in 1948:

I, with legs crossed along the daylight, watch
The variegated fists of clouds that gather over
The uncouth features of this, my prone island.

Meanwhile the steamers which divide horizons prove
Us lost;
Found only
In tourist booklets, behind ardent binoculars;
Found in the blue reflection of eyes
That have known cities and think us here happy.

Time creeps over the patient who are too long patient,
So I, who have made one choice,
Discover that my boyhood has gone over.

And my life, too early of course for the profound cigarette,
The turned doorhandle, the knife turning
In the bowels of the hours, must not be made public
Until I have learnt to suffer
In accurate iambics.

And here's another excerpt—in accurate iambics, yet (!)—from “A Far Cry from Africa” (1962):

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

[...]

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?

So: you can note there the declamatory tone, the showy and learned technique, the complicated syntax, the refined diction. And both of these poems (you'll have to take my word for this if you don’t know it from firsthand experience) show the influence of both 17th-century metaphysical poets (like Donne and Marvell) and 20th-century modernists (like Eliot, Auden, and Dylan Thomas). (And I’ll just mention parenthetically that from the earliest stage of his career, Walcott has been interested in "rewriting" the history of the Caribbean as a kind of humble, vernacular echo of classical epic—in imbuing both the colonial past and modern West Indian everyday life with the dignity and awe of antiquity. This all culminates, of course, in Walcott's allusions to Homer in his own epic poem Omeros.)

But at same time, Walcott has also written in Creole (or "patois," spelled and pronounced "patwah" in Creole) for most of his career. Here, for instance, is a fragment from “The Schooner Flight” (1979):

In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim
of this Caribbean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.
Out in the yard turning grey in the dawn,
I stood like a stone and nothing else move
but the cold sea rippling like galvanize
and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,
till a wind start to interfere with the trees.
I pass me dry neighbour sweeping she yard
as I went downhill, and I nearly said:
"Sweep soft, you witch, 'cause she don't sleep hard,"
but the bitch look through me like I was dead.
A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on.
The driver size up my bags with a grin:
"This time, Shabine, like you really gone!"
I ain't answer the ass, I simply pile in
The back seat and watch the sky burn
above the Laventille pink as the gown
in which the woman I left was sleeping,
and I look in the rearview and see a man
exactly like me, and the man was weeping
for the houses, the streets, that whole fucking island.

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!
From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road
to when I was a dog on these streets;
if loving these islands be my load,
out of corruption my soul takes wings,
But they had started to poison my soul
with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,
coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole,
so I leave it for them and their carnival—
I taking a sea-bath, I gone down the road.
I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,
a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes
that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw
when these slums of empire was paradise.
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.

You can see and hear how he effortlessly switches registers from "standard" English to Creole to something in between. 

So let's see, as we start to talk about Dream on Monkey Mountain (first produced the same year that The Mimic Men was published, by the way), if Walcott lives up to his own aesthetic ambitions and to his own view of history. That is, let’s see how he deals with the historical "amnesia" he mentions in "The Muse of History" (356).  Finally, let's see in what way his vision of people in the new world is "Adamic" (357): how he views the survival of the Middle Passage as leaving you not in the ruins of history, but at the beginning of history, with a blank slate to write on ("What the Twilight Says" 4), in a language that goes "beyond mimicry" (17).