Derek Walcott – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Derek Walcott’s response to my question on the BBC

Arising from what I had written on this blog about Derek Walcott, a couple of months ago I was contacted by the BBC’s World Book Club to submit a question to Walcott. On Saturday, 6 December, 2008, Harriett Gilbert spoke to Walcott, St. Lucian Nobel laureate in literature, about his epic poem Omeros. I got […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Derek Walcott Blasts Tourism at Carifesta X

According to John Mair, of CaribWorldNews.com (Aug. 26, 2008), Derek Walcott, a Nobel laureate for literature, blasted Caribbean governments for “selling our land like whores to foreign investors.” Speaking at literary session of the Caribbean Festival of the Arts in Guyana, he declared: “Prostitution is a thing called development.” He talked about the “obscenity of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

“The Mongoose” from a Trinidadian, Indian, Greek Point of View

My comrade Guanaguanare has published a different take on “The Mongoose.” Naipaul has been a deeply problematic figure in Trinidadian cultural politics, loved and reviled, admired and scorned. I had the pleasure of seeing him speak in Port of Spain, in 1991 I believe, in the company of friends from the University of the West […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

“The Mongoose,” by Derek Walcott, has a bigger bite than one might think (1.2)

“It’s going to be nasty,” Derek Walcott said, prefacing his war on V. S. Naipaul with a warning. “The Mongoose” was the last of Walcott’s new poems at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica last weekend [May 2008]. He’d wondered whether he ought to read it, Walcott said, “and then I figured if I don’t […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Restoration: More Indigenous than the Ancestors, in the Poet’s Eye

I was struck by this passage from Derek Walcott‘s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. I had read this at the time it was released and had forgotten this passage until I accidentally found it again in the last few weeks. Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments […]