SCHOLARLY ARTICLES

G E O R G E B . H A N D L E Y

A Postcolonial Sense of Place andthe Work of Derek Walcott

History, Nature, and a Sense of Place

Think only, Anya, your grandfather, and great-grandfather, andall your ancestors were slave owners—the owners of living souls—and from every cherry in the orchard, from every leaf, from everytrunk there are human creatures looking at you. Cannot you heartheir voices? Oh, it is awful! Your orchard is a fearful thing, andwhen in the evening or at night one walks about the orchard, theold bark on the trees glimmers dimly in the dusk, and the oldcherry trees seem to be dreaming of centuries gone by and tor-tured by fearful visions. . . . It is clear that to begin to live in thepresent we must first expiate our past, we must break with it; andwe can expiate it only by suffering, by extraordinary unceasinglabor. Understand that, Anya. (Davis 1196)

Anton Chekhov's character, Trofimov, here speaking to his lover,Anya, in The Cherry Orchard, articulates a third, alternative view of thesignificance of the Ravensky cherry orchard that is shortly to be soldfrom the landed aristocracy to a new merchant class. The first view isarticulated by Anya's mother, Lyubov, a member of the dying aristoc-racy, who sees the orchard nostalgically as a site of childhood inno-cence and intimate luxurious pleasure. The landscape she so cherishesis one where she can stand outside of history and responsibility; theorchard is the place where "happiness waked with me every morningand in those days the orchard was just the same, nothing has changed"(1186). As a natural place unchanged by human history, the orchard

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provides refuge from human agency and accountability; although anemblem of the past, the orchard is where she can "forget the past" ofinjustice waged by her own family against serfs (1186). The second,opposing point of view is held by the representative of the emergingbourgeoisie, Lopahin, who is a descendent of the very serfs who onceworked the land by force. Lopahin sees the land only in terms of utilityand specifically in terms of economic and social vindication. He sug-gests to Lyubov's family that they can save themselves economically ifthey would be willing to tear down the house and the orchard and selltheir land piecemeal to vacationers. This is because the orchard nolonger retains any of its former economic viability; Lopahin explainsthat "the only thing remarkable about the orchard is that it's a verylarge one. There's a crop of cherries every alternate year, and then there'snothing to be done with them, no one buys them" (1184). Lopahin buysthe estate in an act of historical revenge and declares: "If my father andmy grandfather could rise from their graves and see all that has hap-pened! How their Yermolay, ignorant beaten Yermolay... has boughtthe finest estate in the world!" (1203). This class difference notwith-standing, both views pull the orchard up and out of its historical roots,either by means of converting it into a commodity of nostalgia or oneof vindication. Trofimov's view is a viable alternative to this dialecticalbattle because it views natural beauty and human error as inseparable;nature is used neither as a means of escape from, nor revenge for, hu-man folly. Trofimov implies that both Lyubov and Lopahin equallyneglect to see competing human tales inherent in land and therebysimultaneously dispossesses others of it. As I wish to argue in this es-say, a sense of place is indeed an important, missing element in ourmodern cultures, but we cannot hope to establish a meaningful andlasting relationship with our landscapes if we do not consider the mostfar-reaching and competing human claims on place that have affectedthe vast majority of our earth's landscapes. If we continue to stripnature of its human histories, we create a seductive but singular senseof place that potentially dispossesses others of the land we choose tocherish.

Wallace Stegner once argued in his essay, "The Sense of Place," that"a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown upin it, lived in it, known it, died in it—have both experienced and shapedit as individuals, families,. . . communities . . . until things that havehappened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, ormonuments" (201-02). He goes so far as to say that "no place is a placeuntil it has had a poet" (205). Stegner responds to the West's particularform of restlessness that has allowed modern American culture to rav-age the lands we inhabit without facing long-term consequences. He

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explains that we would be cured of this restlessness if we recognizedthat "we have no business, any longer, in being impatient with history.We need to know our history in much greater depth, even back intothe geology.... History," he explains,

was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launchedourselves into the New World Plunging into the future througha landscape that had no history, we did both the country and our-selves some harm along with some good.. . . 'The land was oursbefore we were the land's' says Robert Frost's poem. Only in theact of submission is the sense of place realized and a sustainablerelationship between people and earth established. (206)

Closer attention to history is indeed necessary if we are to becomemore rooted in our landscapes, but as Elliott West has recently argued,Stegner's own conception of history isn't historical enough, since heseems to imply that "history doesn't really get going until Europeansshow up and start changing things" (89). Therefore, West emphasizesthe need to rely on archaeology and anthropology in order to fill in themissing pieces of Native American history that will save us from amore shallow sense of history in the American West. This will moreeffectively fulfill Stegner's hope, West contends, that the western story"moves unbroken" and that "westerners feel properly grounded in acontinuous past that is theirs alone" (86). The problem that West per-haps understates is that deeper historical knowledge, in most NewWorld contexts, leads us to many dead-ends, violent eruptions of his-torical change, and a tremendously discontinuous series of historicalnarratives. The allure of an unbroken history has led to many neo-colonial and rather facile attempts to smooth over the inherentdiscontinuities of New World history. The dream of historical continu-ity in the land may have some dangerous and dark corners, and thusthe equation between greater historical knowledge and a deeper senseof place is not necessarily a simple one.

This is evident when we consider that Stegner's historicized senseof place paradoxically relies on an ahistorical conception of nature asan original, prelinguistic space desvoid of human stories and outsidehuman history until it is named and thereby brought into history asplace. In other words, prior to a landscape's conversion into a place, itmust be prehistorical and edenic, without a name and in need of itsAdam, the poet, who will perform the historicization of nature throughlanguage, tales, and legends. Place is a category that needs a poet be-cause it is defined as a space where human and natural history merge;it is where human beings understand themselves and their history inrelationship to natural, physical space. Two models of the poet emerge

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in Stegner's paradigm. On the one hand, the poet is the one who speaksabout and represents the event of the marriage between nature andculture that has presumably already taken place. As a witness to themerger, the poet's language is not procreational, or performative, butrather representational of historical events, recalling to our communalmemory a relationship we perhaps once had or knew but have sinceforgotten. In this sense the poet is the prophet, a voice of warning thatreturns us to prior knowledge and history. On the other hand, the poetis the one who enacts the merger. In this case, nature is originally emptyof human history, and the poet's language, like Adam's first task ofnaming things, inscribes itself onto that blank sheet that is the land-scape, thus creating a sense of place. Rather than a prophetic witnessto the marriage, he is the priest who performs the marriage.

What is troubling about these two models is that the role assigned toboth nature and the poet in establishing a sense of place is mythical. InMythologies, Roland Barthes has explained that

myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: init, things lose the memory that they were once made.. . . A conjur-ing trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emp-tied it of history and filled it with nature, it has removed from thingstheir human meaning so as to make them signify a human insig-nificance." (142-43)

Barthes warns us that the most challenging, and in many ways themost dangerous, myths are precisely those that seem the most natural,like nature itself, since the traces of human agency, or what he calls anobject's political qualities, have faded. "What is more natural than thesea?" he queries after demonstrating the political uses of the sea in afilm about European exploration (142). The problem Barthes confrontsis the utter impossibility of escaping the tendency of mythification.His point is that we should be aware of the costs every time it happens.If the poet assumes the role of priest and relies on a concept of naturethat is devoid of human history, perhaps nature can be protected fromhuman-related degradation, but it also means that nature becomes amythical sign that could potentially erase a prior human presence inthe land. In this way, "wilderness" may potentially invite possessionand will at the very least imply dispossessing others who have comebefore. As Elliott West remarks, "What a bleak joke it would be if Euro-pean Americans come to believe that they can find their "sense of place"only by denying to their neighbors what they must have for their ownlegitimate sense of belonging" (94). On the other hand, if the poet as-sumes the role of prophet and thereby presumes to be able to representthe human story within nature, the poetry itself (and perhaps the poet

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as well) is elevated to the level of mythical status. Although this latterfunction of poetry serves to debunk prior myths, the authority of thepoet becomes the new myth.

To avoid mythification of nature or of the language about it is nosimple task but the inherent risks are rarely fully considered. How of-ten do we assume that the voice of the naturalist, the human voice ofnatural history, the lone voices in the wilderness, obtain an ontologicalstatus beyond reproach, beyond, even, any particular individuality orits own historical contingency? Why is this language, ontologicallyspeaking, any different from the language that attempts to "natural-ize" our wanton abuse of land? In both cases, the agency of the speaker,like Lopahin's voice of market reason, is stripped of personality, pulledout of the context of a particular individual, within a particular classand historical moment. Even in the most moving nature writing, na-ture is sometimes reduced to a commodity for the purposes of the writer,however benevolent the approach might be. Such commodification, itseems to me, always functions as a trade-off for "naturalizing" the poetas prophetic or priestly witness. For that matter, how often is natureelevated to a status beyond language and our human capacity to un-derstand, standing above and beyond human agency and responsibil-ity? Clearly this is often done as a way to argue for a more profoundrespect for the agency of nature, for its own independent history, andtherefore as a call for greater humility and less presumption incommodifying it. But like Lyubov's love of the cherry orchard, such aview can potentially serve to disguise our own irresponsibility since itneglects to see any competing or alternative human story in the land-scape to which our edenic purge blinds us. In places of multiple layersof human history in the landscape like those of the New World, this isinherently dangerous rhetoric.

Barthes suggests that one way to bring myth back into history is byexposing those forms of labor and of ownership that have enabled lan-guage to disguise its place in a particular space and time. To make hispoint, he distinguishes between metalanguage that is language about, say,a tree from political language which would be the equivalent of what thewoodcutter expresses when he speaks of the tree. In the latter case, lan-guage retains its historicity because "the tree is not an image for [thewoodcutter], it is simply the meaning of [his] action" (146). What is use-ful about this concept is it implies that unless language about nature isaccompanied by, or emerges from, our earthly historical action, it willonly return to mythological status, and traces of our agency will disap-pear from that language. Nature will remain a myth, stripped of its hu-man history, as long as language is "about" nature but not produced asa result of our human interaction with it. Unless the poet constantly works

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to expose his own labor with the materials of the poem (and unless crit-ics read poetry for those signs of the poet's presence), poetry will persistin divorcing nature from culture. It is for this reason that I argue apostcolonial sense of place is one in which both poetry and our criticallanguage about it must return continually to this question: What are theforms of labor and of dispossession that allow us this possibility, thisluxury, to see nature as denuded of humanity?1

Robert Frost's poetry, as a general rule, consistently places the poetwalking in or working with the material of nature and transforming itinto his poetic meaning and thus avoids this problem of seeing land-scape as myth. However, Frost's poem invoked by Stegner, "The GiftOutright," once recited by Frost himself at JFK's inauguration, demon-strates this risk of unwittingly relying on a measure of historical amne-sia. It demonstrates that the way we remember the past and forge com-munity on that basis is always in tension with erasing the past andexcluding others from that community. Literature, as Elizabeth Lynn-Cook argues, is indeed a powerful tool of establishing roots, but forthat same reason it "can and does successfully contribute to the poli-tics of possession and dispossession" (40).2 Frost's poem describes ourlack of a sense of place as a function of our continued colonial depen-dency on British culture; we have been possessed by English gardensand literature and even though we possess the land around us, wehave not surrendered ourselves to it. This implies that a return to asense of place, to a fresh evaluation of the importance of our immedi-ate physical environment, is crucial to establishing postcolonial inde-pendence. Frost further implies, though, that to achieve this indepen-dence we need an original relationship to the land around us, one thatis pure and untainted by a displaced cultural imagination. He explainsthat this postcolonial possession by the land became possible once wesurrendered ourselves "To the land vaguely realizing westward, / Butstill unstoried, artlesss, unenhanced" (348, emphasis added). His rheto-ric, then, like many other failed attempts to establish postcolonial in-dependence, seems to rely on the very same structures of power andof thought with which he set out to argue. In an ironic twist, Frostneeds to depopulate the lands to the west, rid them of Native Ameri-can or Mexican poets and storytellers prior to the arrival of Anglo-Americans, in order to imagine the possibility of this post-Anglo "fresh"start.

This conception of a sense of place relies on an adamic view in whichthe landscape must always be void of previous human contact beforea sense of place can be achieved. The danger is that this becomes asimple replication of colonialism across new frontiers rather than a fun-damental epistemic break from it. John Elder argues against this false

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dichotomy between nature and human civilization, propagated bymany writers of the American West, and insists that the "greenimpression"of nature potentially becomes "a scouring away of histori-cal details"or "an undifferentiating pastoral blur" (19).3 This, in turn,implies a kind of human "self-loathing"where humanity is "viewed astaboo with relation to wilderness—not only people but, in the empha-sis upon roadless and 'untrammeled' areas, our human history" (117).Self-loathing without forgiveness and acceptance of what is irrevocableis essentially self-erasure and denial.

Frost's and Stegner's suspicions that our restlessness finds its roots inthe history of New World colonialism are nevertheless to the point. WendellBerry explains that for the modern American citizen, "geography is artifi-cial; he could be anywhere, and he usually is" (53). And Berry traces thiscrisis of contempt for place to the very beginnings of New World colonialhistory: "at the same time that they 'discovered' America, these men in-vented the modern condition of being away from home . . . they arrivedcontemptuous of whatever existed before their own coming, disdainful be-yond contempt of native creatures or values or orders" (54-55). Barry Lopezsensed this connection between recovering a sense of place and the im-pulses of postcolonialism when he wrote:

the real topic of nature writing, I think, is not nature but the evolv-ing structure of communities from which nature has been removed,often as a consequence of modern economic development. It iswriting concerned, further, with the biological and spiritual fateof those communities. It also assumes that the fate of humanityand nature are inseparable. Nature writing in the United Statesmerges here, I believe, with other sorts of post-colonial writing,particularly in Commonwealth countries. (8)

If it is true that environmental literature shares with postcolonialisma common concern with recovering a sense of place in the wake ofdisplacement and transplantation, then it follows that it also wrestleswith the same potential for contradiction. For this reason, recognizingthe burden of Western environmental legacies is only part of the solu-tion to our problem of placelessness in the New World. Postcolonialliterature has demonstrated repeatedly that it is not enough to identifyourselves as victims of continuing forms of colonialism. If we are tosituate ourselves rhetorically against the legacies of colonialism, thensymbolically if not genealogically, we place ourselves in a line of de-scent from the early native inhabitants of the New World down to thepresent. The problem is that we thus risk denying our own complicityin the legacies we describe, or we wish away what for many of us isour own undeniable Westernness. The "simplification of choosing to

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play Indian instead of cowboy," to quote Derek Walcott, "is the hal-lucination of imperial romance" (Twilight 58). This is because if we merelyloathe ourselves for what has happened, we make ourselves historicallyinvisible and thus disguised agents in carrying forth the legacies of West-ern colonialism. After all, chief among those legacies is the fact that Eu-ropeans have alternatively seen the Americas as an Eden wherebyWesterners can recover their innocence or as a commodity of revenge,and in both cases, accountability for the historical legacies of disposses-sion, slavery, and genocide is erased. We pin ourselves into a logicalcorner by suggesting that to establish a sustainable relationship to land,we must move beyond the bounds of Western values altogether, or sodramatically revise them that they are no longer recognizably Western.4

To cry out against Western violation of a native Eden is paradoxicallythe first step toward commodification and exploitation of land. ManyEuropeans, such as Bartolome de las Casas, loathed their own colonial-ism from the very beginning. They thus stripped America down to anaked virgin only to inadvertently set the stage for further abuse sincesuch rhetoric was never based on an understanding of the newness anddifference the New World presented. It is for this reason that we cannotseparate the dialogue about place from the debates about the legacies ofthe Western world and about postcolonial values. Considering Ameri-can places within the larger context of New World colonialism meansthat we need to work carefully to unveil the hidden commonalities be-tween the American West's legacy of Manifest Destiny with the largerexpansion westward of European colonialism that stretches back toColumbus's arrival in the Caribbean. For this reason, I draw upon DerekWalcott's work and that of other Caribbean critics. Both geographicalareas have raised difficult questions: How does the New World subjectmanage the chaos of cultural breakdown and of reconstruction in orderto establish a sense of place in the land? New forms of culture that haveemerged from the contact of European colonialism with Native Ameri-can and African cultures may represent a rupture with the past, but howdo these new cultures find the capacity to nurture tradition within aparticular landscape?

As Lopez suspects, postcolonial thinking suggests that a vital strat-egy for moving beyond the reach of such colonial powers is to insist onenvironmental specificities in representations of the marginalized.Where modernism tends to universalize the conditions of memory andof narrative as existential, postcolonialism returns to the specificity ofsites of memory and of language production, the very specificities ofplace, gender, race or class that colonialism has attempted to erase.Fiona Barnes contends that "the focus on the specificities and limita-tions of place... in the formation of identity and society is particularly

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germane to the writings of postcolonial writers. While modernist writ-ers valorized the existential conditions of exile and alienation . . . incontrast, postcolonial writers [concentrate] on the cultural and politi-cal ramifications of geography, the so-called sense of place" (150). Theproblem is that the very locale of the postcolonial subject has in factbeen determined by imperial powers. Therefore, the postcolonial sub-ject is not only placed in a discontinuous relation to the imperatives ofEuropean colonialism and history but is also placed in a problematicrelation to land since land represents both the site of one's emotionaland cultural development and perhaps of one's history of displace-ment and alienation.

Establishing a sense of place is key to a dismissal of colonial dis-course because it involves a radical resituation of the marginalized, aspeaking from and to those circumstances which have been passedover. Houston Baker has addressed this return to place in AfricanAmerican fiction: "For place to be recognized by one as actually PLACE,as a personally valued locale, one must set and maintain boundaries.If one, however, is constituted and maintained by and within bound-aries set by a dominating authority, then one is not a setter of place buta prisoner of another's desire" (184). The Martinican writer EdouardGlissant explains that "any group that is limited by the stubborn in-ability to take control of its surroundings is a threatened group" (154).What Stegner and Berry describe as a moral crisis of placelessness canbe understood as a political crisis as well if we consider the displace-ment and murder of Native Americans, the violent transplantation ofAfricans, and the chaotic scattering of many Europeans, Asians, andothers in New World history, factors that have all been more difficultto ignore in areas like the Caribbean. By so doing, we come to see thatour inability to identify ourselves in the land is inherently aninterhuman struggle for the autonomy to name our place and identifyour history in it.

The danger is when the political struggle is only resolved in a parti-san fashion and all competing historical claims on the land are erased.For Glissant, a crucial strategy to avoid this is an archaeological searchfor the "subterranean convergence of our histories" (66, emphasisadded). We must not be seduced by the temptation to seek a singular,diachronic history of one people that stretches back through time andinto the landscape, but rather develop what he calls a cross-culturalpoetics whereby we discover that landscape "is not saturated with asingle History but effervescent with intermingled histories, spreadaround, rushing to fuse without destroying or reducing each other"(154). For this reason, he argues that for the survivors of New Worlddiasporas, people who have experienced traumatic and sometimes vio-

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lent transplantation and outright dispossession, "ambiguity was thefirst necessity of survival" (272). Glissant's point is that New Worldcultures are rarely anything but amalgamations of traces, or fragments,of prior cultures. The construction of New World identities occurs "byproceeding not from preserved folklores . . . but from these traces, andby combining them with countless other elements, from China or In-dia or the Middle East, and so on, with so many conflicts to resolve"(273). Therefore, both one's cultural identity and one's sense of placeare not to be pursued with a singular perspective; the result wouldonly be disillusionment and disappointment, and perhaps renewedviolence aimed again at dispossessing others. A sense of place and be-longing in this New World is conditioned by an always incompleteknowledge of natural and human histories and therefore necessitatesrecreating our sense of place always in the present. As Glissant ex-plains, the New World subject faces the rather paradoxical "obligationto remake oneself every time on the basis of a series of forgettings"(273),since every step forward in forging a new identity and sense of placefrom the fragments created by New World experience means leavingbehind a forgotten whole. This means that all cultural and natural signsthat are intended to communicate our sense of belonging to a placemust be read backwards, metonymically reaching back to a wholenessof which the sign is simply a part. In other words, a sense of place isperhaps just that, a hint or a hope that we do belong.

This returns us to Stegner's idea that deeper historical knowledge isnecessary for a more profound and lasting sense of place. The prob-lem, however, is to remember that this kind of historical reconstruc-tion may largely be an act of imagination or an expression or desire fora wholeness that is perhaps not altogether achievable. While recogniz-ing that "the broader our perspective, the more immediately presentdo our ancestors in the land become," John Elder also insists that apoet's recreation of this ancestral belonging in the land is an illusion,even if it remains a truthful one (110). The illusion avoids the status ofmyth as long as there is a recognition of the poet's role in the expres-sion of this desire for belonging. Elder explains that "when an illusionis engaged with sufficient imaginative energy, then it may take on thepower of Saint Paul's 'faith': 'the substance of things hoped for, theevidence of things not seen'" (110). In his defense of wilderness as anintegration of natural and human history, Elder articulates what I wishto suggest is akin to Derek Walcott's postcolonial sense of place that Iwill explore below. Elder explains that this faithful desire for whole-ness and ancestral belonging in the land is a function of one's love anddesire for reconciliation. He explains: "We don't remember, and love,the past because it was painless and perfect. We don't cherish our par-

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ents because they had it all right. Love grows with the growing recog-nition of perpetual brokenness" (177). We become aware, then, not somuch of the concrete historical density embedded in nature but of ourown participation in the making of a sense of place. That is why thatwholeness often appears in imaginative literature; in representing thehistorical past of our landscapes, imaginative literature also points toour loving desire for place, and in this sense, the poet is both priest andprophet since he simultaneously points prophetically to a past we haveforgotten, but then confesses his own priestly desire to create that pastin the present words before us. So poetry of place is nothing but a fic-tion, but an historicized fiction that confesses our own desire for re-demption in being, once again, placed. Derek Walcott expressed theredemptive value of poetry's self-conscious search for wholeness inhis Nobel Speech of 1992 (the year, I might add, of the quincentenaryof Columbus's "discovery"): "Break a vase, and the love that reas-sembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symme-try for granted when it was whole" (Twilight 69).

The Work of Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott, from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, is a poet accus-tomed to negotiating between western and non-western poles and con-sistently warns against the trappings of colonialism even in the mostardent postcolonial stances. He was a great admirer of Robert Frostparticularly because of Frost's deep sense of irony, something he foundconspicuously missing as Frost played the role of the "emblem of therepublic with his flying white hair" (Twilight 194), reading "A GiftOutright" at JFK's inauguration, and creating "the sublime Augustanmoment of a country that was not just a republic but also an empire,no more a homespun vision of pioneer values but a world power" (193).Walcott's critique of Frost's performance is uncharacteristically uneasy:"this was the calm reassurance of American destiny that provokedTonto's response to the Lone Ranger. No slavery, no colonization ofNative Americans, a process of dispossession and then possession, butnothing about the dispossession of others that this destiny demanded.A Navajo hymn might have been more appropriate: the "ours" andthe "we" of Frost were not as ample and multihued as Whitman's tap-estry, but something as "tight and regional as a . . . Currier and Ivesprint" (193-4). Walcott argues not ad hominem but against any kind ofa sense of place that reenacts an erasure of our historical memory ofviolent human displacement—in the case of Frost's poem, of NativeAmericans, African Americans and Mexicans that enabled Anglo-America's pretension of its own "innocent" westward relocation in the

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New World. Walcott points out that that erasure serves to underesti-mate the significance of the multicultural realities of the New Worldand the overlapping and historical ironies in its various landscapes.

Walcott's poetry consistently demonstrates that provincialism is anopportunity to have a more complete "communion with things thatthe metropolitan writers no longer care about," such as "family, earth,history" (Nichols 177). However, postcolonial access to a sense of placeis made problematic by the fact that history and the earth itself have,in the Caribbean past, often masked those affiliations one would wishto establish. As Walcott once argued, "amnesia is the true history ofthe New World" (Twilight 39). For this reason, "History is irrelevant,not because it is not being created, or because it was sordid, but be-cause it has never mattered, what has mattered is the loss of history,the amnesia of the races; what had become necessary is imagination,imagination as necessity, as invention" (qtd. in Ochillo 31). Natureitself has often acted as a kind of accomplice to this colonial violence.Perhaps his most daring statement about nature is his 1969 poem "Air":

The unheard, omnivorousjaws of this rain forestnot merely devour allbut allow nothing vain;they never rest,grinding their disavowalof human pain.

Long, long before us,those hot jaws, like an ovensteaming, were opento genocide; they devouredtwo minor yellow races, andhalf of a black;in the Word made flesh of Godall entered that gross un-discriminating stomach;the forest is unconverted,because that shell-like noisewhich roars like silence, orocean's surpliced choirsentering its nave, to a censerof swung mist, is notthe rustling of prayerbut nothing; milling air,a faith, infested, cannibal,which eats gods, which devouredthe god-refusing Carib, petal

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by golden petal, then forgot,and the Arawakwho leaves not the lightest fern-traceof his fossil to be culturedby black rock,

but only the rusting criesof a rainbird, like a hoarsewarrior summoning his racefrom vaporous airbetween this mountain ridgeand the vague seawhere the lost exodusof corials sunk without trace—

there is too much nothing here. (Collected Poems 113-4)

The poem describes the jaws of the verdant forest devouring the na-tive inhabitants of the Caribbean, Caribs and Arawaks, and half of theblack race in the Middle Passage. Nature devours human history like arabid cannibal, but whereas cannibalism as practiced by the Caribswas intended to incorporate the powers of the eaten enemy, "the forestis unconverted" after ingestion. All that remains is "nothing: millingair" heard in the conch shell. The poem simply concludes with thelament: "there is too much nothing here." Thus, the lack of ruins, offossils, or of any kind of documentation of the genocide of the nativeinhabitants of the islands or of those enslaved is documented by thesilent and persistent "nothing" of nature. The fact that these eventsare known but not properly remembered is clearly the result of humanviolence, but these events are signified alone by what Wordsworth oncecalled nature's "oblivious tendencies." As Chekhov's Trofimov shows,remembering history is a process of learning how to read back intonature what its indifference cannot tell us. Walcott's nature is thereforenever entirely Edenic because beneath its virginal untamed appeal lurksthe suspicion of its "disavowal of human pain." This is because, asDavid Mikics explains, "an Edenic image of nature, though at first adeeply attractive prospect, proves futile exactly because it means de-nying the cultural complexities that make up the New World" (383).To view our natural surroundings as an uncontaminated virginal spacethat provides us respite from the relentlessness of human history wouldbe an immoral identification with nature's indifference towards thathistory. "Air" is a lamentation for what cannot be named and an ex-pression of desire for connectedness to the land while simultaneouslyproviding a caution: it expresses the inevitability of its own failure toestablish a static sense of place and historical belonging in the land-

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scape. Walcott does see some human trace in the nothing of naturalhistory and even goes so far as to name it in the void; he names thegenocide of Native Americans and of Africans. However, there is a lin-gering sense of incompletion. In this sense, the poem avoids makingnature a myth but also avoids becoming myth, since both nature andthe poem have a relationship to history that can never be adequatelyaccounted for. Walcott debunks nature's apparent ahistorical positionby resurrecting a history that haunts its scenic edges, but he does notpretend to totalize that history; rather, like Nature, the poem is alsohaunted by what it cannot tell. Nature signifies a difference from hu-man history but because it is always emerging from traces of that his-tory, it always presents itself in Barthesian terms as a thing made, orconceived, by the poet.

For the Caribbean subject, landscape is, of course, only part of the en-vironment that defines place. For this reason, Walcott also explores sea-scape in his 1979 poem, "The Sea is History." If nature is the most "natu-ral" of myths, as Barthes suggests when he remarks that no myth is more"natural" than the sea, Walcott pointedly denotes the forest's but also thesea's unnatural story as a signifier of an invisible history of death andviolence. That is to say, the empty pages of the sea, its illegibility as arecorder of the Middle Passage and other consequent losses in New Worldhistory, is the essence of that history. He begins the poem with the ques-tion: "Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? / Where isyour tribal memory? Sirs, / in that grey vault. The sea. The sea / haslocked them up. The sea is History" (Collected Poems 364-7). And he pro-ceeds to list its chapters according to the books of the Bible; Genesis is"the lantern of the caravel" of Columbus; Exodus "the packed cries, /the shit, the moaning" of the Middle Passage. The irony of this exegesisis particularly keen. The historical events he recites clash with the tradi-tional meanings of the biblical books: "Bone soldered by coral to bone, /mosaics / mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow, / that wasthe Ark of the Covenant" (364-7). Here the bones of Africans thrownoverboard have been soldered into coral, and the very covenant of theword of God, so carefully preserved to bring the Israelites to the Prom-ised Land is the power by which these black bodies are enslaved and fedto the sharks.

But the irony lies also in the fact that a "text" is not in fact textual orhistorical; it is an illegible natural record. Seeking the historical roots ofa place becomes an impossible, perhaps even an undesirable task, whenthe past is ridden with events that waged a war against historicalmemory itself, events intended to obliterate countermemory to West-ern claims of legitimacy and justification. In a postcolonial context, seek-ing historical rootedness in landscape may lead one to a perpetual nos-

A Postcolonial Sense of Place and the Work of Derek Walcott 15

talgia, either for the original colonial land that is marked by monu-ments and other colonial signs of "civilization," or for the "eden" ofalternative exotic soils, such as Africa. In either case, colonial historyleads us away from our contemporary place. If Stegner claims a placeneeds a monument to be a place, Walcott points out that the wreckageof colonialism and slavery has resulted in a place with no edifices tomark its history. He wryly remarks that "the ocean kept turning blankpages / looking for History." The coral, the sharks, the sea-sands, thebarnacles all have locked within them the evidence of human suffer-ing; they are the most ironic of monuments since they serve not to tella legendary story for community memory but are in fact emblems ofhistory's erasure; the sea, one might argue, is in fact anfr'-history. Thepoem itself serves as the real monument, then, since it is the act ofimagination by which those stories are unlocked. The stories, how-ever, come with a taste of bitterness because they are both incompleteand merely sorrowful.

It would appear that if nature is unwilling to yield the full narrativeaccount of New World history, then the poet has two choices. He canforever lament the New World's apparent paucity of a monumental-ized history and suffer an "oceanic nostalgia for the older culture anda melancholy at the new, and this go can as deep as a rejection of theuntamed landscape, a yearning for ruins" (Twilight 42). Or he can pre-tend to a kind of adamic innocence in the new landscape and demon-strate his own indifference toward its prior history of violence and dis-possession and thus reenact a colonization of place. In both cases, thepoet commodifies nature into myth, as do Chekhov's Lyubov andLopahin, and fails to allow nature to remain grounded in a history thatis continually present and unfolding. Confronted with this denudedhistorical account that nature leaves him—this failure to find history—the poet explores a third possibility by summoning forth those sameforces of nature to be his ally in the creation of a future. The poemconcludes with a list of contemporary voices emerging from the fabricof nature itself: "then came the synod of flies / then came the secre-tarial heron, / then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote ,/ fireflieswith bright ideas " We sense we are in the midst of a history tryingto emerge from the vault where it was buried by genocide, slavery andcolonialism. He then imagines the emergence from nature of the prom-ise of history: "And in the salt chuckle of rocks / with their sea pools,there was the sound / like a rumour without any echo / of History,really beginning." So the poet finds cause for lamentation when con-fronted with land and sea that provide no monuments, no fossils, noevidence of the historical process by which he can ground himself inthis New World place, but, ultimately, that lamentation turns to hope

16 I S L E

because nature reflects the fragmented traces of the past which spellthe possibilities of a new beginning. Walcott's strange coupling of thefragmentation and loss of history with natural processes allows him tofind an ambiguous solace in the emptiness around him and to hone hiseye and ear to perceive what he calls the "subtle and submarine" fu-ture possibilities contained in the natural present.

In an essay entitled "Where I Live," he explains that "local color" isliterally the visual qualities of the Caribbean's natural environmentthat, although they disguise the traces of a former historical battle ofempires, simultaneously present opportunity for art since they sur-prise the viewer with their newness. Walcott is a painter as well as apoet, and he celebrates the fact that "local color is what moves over theblackened galleons of rocks, the skulls of pervious coral, the mossedropes of seaweed and the little flags of fish escaping battle" ("Where ILive" 30-2). Ultimately, "blue is the color of oblivion here, but it alsocreates shadows" that conceal the "rusted cannon, broken ships andwho knows what treasures" of history (32). Walcott avoids amythification of nature perhaps because nature ultimately signifies apossibility yet-to-be, a "future that can stand against history," not apast to which the poet yearns to return (Mikics 383). Glissant similarlyargues that in Caribbean literature, when the poet seeks the historythat nature conceals, "landscape in the work stops being merely deco-rative or supportive and emerges as a full character. Describing thelandscape is not enough. The individual, the community, the land areinextricable in the process of creating history"(105, emphasis added). Thesearch for history, then, is not "teleological" but "implies the plasticityof human experience as on-going" (104).

This optimism regarding the paradoxical hope of oblivion is ex-pressed again in Walcott's 1987 poem "Gros-Ilet" where this emergentvoice becomes that of an African consciousness which, in its conflationwith natural phenomena, may have been buried but has therefore alsopreserved an intimate relation with place. The voice of nature, as in theconclusion of "The Sea is History," becomes the human voice of his-tory because nature always signifies anew and is not dependent on orimitative of the past, even if the poet has to get to that newness afterfirst exorcising history's phantasms. He begins the poem by stating:"From this village soaked like a grey rag in salt water, / a languagecame, garnished with conch shells, / with a suspicion of berries in itsarmpits..." (Arkansas 34-5). In this search for nature's language, nature'sindifference is a cause for amusement and awe, not lamentation: "howrocks aged quickly with moss, / the sea made furrows that had noth-ing to do with time, / and the sand started whirlwinds with nothing todo at all, / and the shadows answered to the sun alone." Finally, he

A Postcolonial Sense of Place and the Work of Derek Walcott 17

dismisses Western history and identifies a local human voice withinnature: "keep moving," he says to Homer's character Elpenor,

there is nothing here for you. . . .There are different candles and customs here, the deadare different. Different shells guard their graves.There are distinctions beyond the paradiseof our horizon. This is not the grape-purple Aegean.There is no wine here, no cheese, the almonds are green,the sea grapes bitter, the language is that of slaves.

So the poet's sense of place results from his conflation of fragments ofAfrican culture with nature. These fragments have been pounded intonature, as it were, embedded there in their flight from violence and thethreat of extinction and have quietly assumed an intimacy with naturethat has allowed a survival of fragments, but fragments from whichthe poet can imagine the whole. Walcott implies that to remember thehistory of the Caribbean, or that of the New World, we must look toour contemporary place and attune ourselves to its historical voiceswhich, like ghosts, emerge partial, ephemeral, wasted, but neverthe-less still "singing from the depths of the sea/'to quote Walcott's char-acter Shabine in "The Schooner Flight" (Collected Poems 361).

Walcott's poetry consistently searches for the merger between hu-man and natural history, and as is exemplified in "Gros-Ilet," he sug-gests that the only human voice where those disparate histories unifyis the voice of those who, like Roland Barthes's woodcutter, speak aboutand from what they do, those whose actions are intertwined with thematerial of the earth: peasants, "the fishermen, the old women behindtheir trays of fruit in monumental patience" ("Where I Live" 34). Heinsists that these people "know who they are and what they are, andwhen we show them our wounded sensibilities we are, most of us,displaying self-inflicted wounds" (Twilight 63). The "we" he refers tohere are those of us who become alienated from our place preciselybecause in the teleological search for our historical origins in the land,we discover a divided and impossible history. We discover that thesearch for history removes us from place because it removes us fromearthly actions such as fishing or harvesting that are crucial to enact-ing the nature /culture marriage. The problem, of course, is how toreturn to a knowledge of the land that is a function of our on-goinginteraction with it, not of the inaction we bring upon ourselves whencontemplate the past. That is, how can we maintain a historicized, ratherthan a merely historical, knowledge of place? If we are to argue that thepoet must be a fisherman or peasant of some sort, then we slip into anontological argument about the poet assuming a fixed ahistorical be-

18 I S L E

ing outside of the history he attempts to describe, and yet if we arguethat his identity and place in society is irrelevant, we are equally onto-logical. The poet either runs the risk of placing a dangerous hope inone's surroundings as an imagined site of edenic purity free of NewWorld History or, on the other hand, turning away from one's placebecause of excessive nostalgia for the eternal signs of an Old World.For Walcott, the answer lies in understanding that poetry about placeand about the voice of human and natural history is a poetry of per-petual error. It misses the mark, but in so doing and so acknowledg-ing, it necessitates beginning again; it points to a poetry yet-to-be.

For this reason Walcott explains that the best New World poets likeRobinson Crusoe, a kind of second Adam in a second-hand Eden. Walcottis adamant that he is not arguing for a new version of the noble savage:

The myth of the noble savage would not be revived, for that mythnever emanated from the savage but has always been the nostal-gia of the Old World, its longing for innocence. The great poetryof the New World does not pretend to such innocence, its vision isnot naive. Rather, like its fruits, its savor is a mixture of the acidand the sweet, the apples of its second Eden have the tartness ofexperience. In such poetry there is a bitter memory and it is thebitterness that dries last on the tongue. . . . For us in the archi-pelago the tribal memory is salted with the bitter memory of mi-gration. (Twilight 40-41)

He describes in "Crusoe's Journal" (1965) the nature of this Adamicpoetry of Crusoe, which is akin to the political language of Barthes'swoodcutter: "Like those plain iron tools he salvages / from shipwreck,hewing a prose / as odorous as raw wood to the adze; / out of suchtimbers / came our first book, our profane Genesis / whose Adamspeaks that prose / which, blessing some sea-rock, startles itself / withpoetry's surprise" (Collected Poems 92). Crusoe's language is not sim-ply about landscape, but involves a refashioning of the wrecked mate-rial of the Old World in order to create the chance to speak as if for thefirst time from within landscape. It is paradoxically in that very mo-ment, however, that the poet discovers he stands apart from the envi-ronment with which he labored to unify himself, for as soon as Crusoeblesses the sea-rock, with his refashioned language, and discovers thenewness of the world around him, he also discovers his language as athing apart from that which it names; his poetry "startles itself" andbecomes aware of itself as language about things, not the thing itself.For this reason, Crusoe's is a language of pretension, an as ifprimordiality that, by virtue of its conscious fictionality, neither bowsto the myth of poetic nor to environmental originality. The poet per-

A Postcolonial Sense of Place and the Work of Derek Walcott 19

petually discovers his solitude and separation from his environment.The Adamic privilege of naming things as if for the first time will notultimately satisfy the needs of the poet "for [the hermetic skill] knows/ it needs another's praise / like hoar, half cracked Ben Gunn, until itcries / at last, 'O happy desert!' / and learns again the self-creatingpeace / of islands" (94).

The poet can enjoy the surprise of the world's and of language's new-ness as long as he is willing to be content with the emptiness and soli-tude of an islanded existence. But such contentment is never static; whatWalcott describes here is a dialectic by which a sense of place is estab-lished over and over again as the poet moves in and out of "the self-creating peace / of islands." The poem concludes that to see himself as akind of Adamic Crusoe is ultimately an illusion: "all of us / yearn forthose fantasies / of innocence, for our faith's arrested phase / when theclear voice / startled itself saying 'water, heaven, Christ,' / hoardingsuch heresies as / God's loneliness moves in his smallest creatures" (94).Poetry, like all acts of creation, is an act of faith against the fear of loneli-ness, and for this reason the poet's attempt to clear the slate of historyand begin anew will never come to an end because ultimately he writesto conquer separation into individuality, the same separation that is thevery condition and inspiration of his writing. And the history he setsaside is also what he rediscovers in the landscape.

This trap is perhaps what he means to suggest in his poem "Crusoe'sIsland" (1965) when he writes that "men fail / according to their creed"(Collected Poems 69). Crusoe's solitude enabled him to create an Edenfrom the wreckage of the Old World, but he had "all the joys / But one /Which sent him howling for a human voice" (69). This poem relatesCrusoe's dilemma to Walcott's own sense of inadequacy and lonelinessbefore a community of believers who quite suddenly emerge in themidst of the poet's musings about Crusoe, summoned by the church'sbell. The poet witnesses

. . . Friday's progenyThe brood of Crusoe's slave,Black little girls in pink... .

At dusk, when they returnFor vespers, every dressTouched by the sun will burnA seraph's, an angel's,And nothing I can learnFrom art or lonelinesscan bless them as the bell'sTransfiguring tongue can bless.

20 I S L E

The sense of place that the poet can achieve is a tenuous one at bestsince he has by necessity separated himself from the very rooted com-munity he represents. If a place needs a poet to make it a place accord-ing to Stegner, Walcott reverses the paradigm by asserting the exist-ence of an extra-linguistic rootedness that precedes poetic representa-tion, a representation in language that is only possible as a failure. Forthis reason, the sweet scene is rounded by "the tartness of experience,"by the hints of literary tools salvaged from the wreckage of the OldWorld and by the poet's melancholy at the distance he has maintainedfrom these contemporary subjects in order to imagine their subtle origi-nality. Friday's progeny, here, walk with stunning beauty and the poemhumbly gives a nod to the superior power of the church bell to rootcommunities, and in this way the poem achieves a representation of asense of place. This confession of his own solitude, in light of Carib-bean history, essentially becomes an expression of a desire for solidar-ity. As David Mikics remarks, "he stands aloof, frightened, and en-tranced by his image of the folkloric powers that surround him" (399).Walcott observed about the figure of Crusoe:

Crusoe's triumph lies in that despairing cry which he utters whena current takes his dugout canoe further and further away fromthe island that, like all of us uprooted figures, he had made hishome, and it is the cynical answer that we must make to thosecritics who complain that there is nothing here, no art, no history,no architecture, by which they mean ruins, in short, no civiliza-tion, it is "O happy desert!" We live not only on happy, but onfertile deserts, and we draw our strength, like Adam, like all her-mits, all dedicated craftsmen, from that rich irony of our history. Itis what feeds the bonfire. We contemplate our spirit by the detri-tus of the past. ("Figure of Crusoe" 40)

So it is by salvaging tools from the wreckage of the Old World to makea new home and by crying out against our solitude that we obtain asense of place because we contemplate "our spirit"as mutually strandedhermits whose only light in the darkness is fueled by traces of his-tory—by its irony and by its omissions. Walcott is a poet of place whois both priest and prophet. He pretends to enact the first-time mar-riage of human and natural histories and of individual and environ-mental histories, fails, and then warns us prophetically of a solidaritywith each other and with our place that we may have lost. His role asprophet is then rendered equally unstable since evidence of the his-torical marriage that he suggests occurred prior to his poetry is eitheralready washed away by the ravages of nature or at least points to ourdivorce from the union he perceives. In either case, we must begin,

A Postcolonial Sense of Place and the Work of Derek Walcott 21

again, our reunion with place. A poet needs a place to be a poet, sincepoetry expresses the elusive nature of place; it is a language of bothcommemoration and mourning.

N O T E S

1. Wendell Berry's criticism in The Unsettling of America pertains here. Heargues that American placelessness is a function of excessive specialization,particularly in the production, sale, and consumption of food. Modern societyis designed to protect the citizen from knowledge of our connections to land,to the life forms we eat, or to the waste we produce. Berry calls for a return toforms of labor and of production that are more intimately involved with howwe live and feed ourselves in order to regain a more intimate awareness of ourinterdependence with others and with the land and to conquer the modernhome's "remoteness from work" (52). Otherwise our culture and the languageof representation used to make sense of our lives will forever remain divorcedfrom place, and we will tend to see nature as free-floating myth, beyond thereach of human history.

2.1 am aware that Wallace Stegner has come under fire from Elizabeth Cook-Lynn in her polemic, Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner, and I don't wish to repli-cate her argument here. She takes offense at the notion that Stegner, a frequentlydisplaced child in his youth, enacted his own literary form of colonialism byattempting to lay claim to being native to the Dakotas since, as she claims, herpeople (the Sioux) have first and exclusive claim. Clearly the Native Americanstory is central to revising our sense of place in the modern Americas, and as Ithink Elliott West has also shown, Stegner's view of place was limited by hissimplification of Native American history and culture. The problem, however,as I hope to show, is that whenever singular ethnographic claims become openlyhostile toward competing claims or excessively nostalgic for what should havebeen, they can become complicitous in erasing the irrevocable scars of humanhistorical error. Such rhetoric, tragically, has often cropped up wherever ethniccleansing rears its ugly head.

3. Elder's book is based on a fascinating and convincing reading of Frost'spoem, "Directive/'which is a work at pains to demonstrate the very traces ofhuman history in the landscape he seems to ignore in "The Gift Outright."

4. Clearly not everything in the Western tradition is inherently antitheticalto land or to a sense of place. Some of the most original theologians have re-cently made persuasive arguments that Western traditions have been corruptedto the point where nature has been reduced to an object of our use and abuse,but that this may not have originally been the case. The biblical scholar WalterBrueggemann, for example, agrees with Stegner that a poet or prophet is neededto call a history into being and thereby to create the possibility of place, but heinsists that the ancient biblical tradition demonstrates that this was a rhetori-cal process of renewal, that "the voice of the prophet—or the poet if you wish—calls a name, bestows a vision, summons a pilgrimage"and this journey be-comes not so much the realization of communal satiation in a land of milk andhoney, but an anticipation of working in the land (17). Brueggemann is careful

22 ISLE

to insist that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the people are always betweenEden and the promised land, both of which seem to stand outside of history.He explains: "there is no timeless space but there also is no spaceless time.There is rather storied place, that is a place which has meaning because of thehistory lodged there" (185). He explains that when Christianity abandonedthe land ethic of the Old Testament and purged itself of a materialist philoso-phy, it located "the possibility of faith in the realm of private decision-making/'took the believer out of the "flow of the generations/'and abandonedthe idea that "the unit of decision-making is the community and that alwayswith reference to the land" (186). The solution to our contemporary rootless-ness may not be a rejection of Western values but a return to their originalform where land is seen as a gift bestowed, and therefore "it is also land inhistory, land not usurped or simply mastered, but a land with its own history.Therefore this people does not own the land but also belongs to the land. Inthat way we are warned about presuming upon it, upon controlling it in scien-tific and rational ways, so that its own claim, indeed its own voice, is not heardor is disregarded" (192).

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Barnes, Fiona R. "Dismantling the Master's Houses: Jean Rhys and West IndianIdentity." International Women's Writing: New Landscapes of Identity. Eds. AnneE. Brown and Marjanne E. Gooze. Westport: Greenwood P, 1995.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang,1972.

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco:Sierra Club Books, 1996.

Brueggemann, Walter. The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in BiblicalFaith. Philadelphia: Fortress P, 1977.

Davis, Paul, Gary Harrison, David M. Johnson, Patricia Clark Smith, and John F.Crawford, Eds. Western Literature in a World Context: The Enlightenment to thePresent. Vol 2. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.

Elder, John. Reading the Mountains of Home. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, 1967.Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: UP of

Virginia, 1989.Lopez, Barry. "We are shaped by the sound of wind, the slant of sunlight." High

Country News. 30.17 (September 14,1998): 1,10-11.Lynn-Cook, Elizabeth. Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal

Voice. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996.Mikics, David. "Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History, and the

Caribbean Writer." Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Eds. LoisParkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

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Essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity. Ed. HelenRyan-Ranson. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1993.

Ochillo, Yvonne. "The Power of the Past in Derek Walcott's Another Life." XavierReview. 8.1-2 (1988): 26-38.

Stegner, Wallace. Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writingin the West. New York: Random, 1992.

Walcott, Derek. The Arkansas Testament. New York: Noonday, 1987.. Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, 1992.. "The Figure of Crusoe"in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Robert

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