And, the messages resonated right off the galvanize fence in my backyard. One marveled at the range and the depth of the imagery. The language of the poetry was compelling. Walcott, when I met him, triggered no laughter.
Their narratives were engaging and even enjoyable in the comic sense, and the tragedy was spiced with dashes of comedy. Within a few years I was also to meet Ganesh Ramsay Muir and Mohun Biswas-the principal characters in two novels by VS Naipaul. I had not, however, analyzed and joked at their frailties until the writings of Vidiadhar Surajprasad had skinned and presented them for further examination….like the pathologist would do to a patient etherized upon a table. They lived in the yard in which I grew up in Boissierre Village No. Titus Hoyt, Man Man, Hat and Laura-characters from a collection set in wartime Trinidad–were real. In my teenage years, I had met VS Naipaul and had enjoyed the images presented in the mirror. The subsequent satisfactory grade for the Yuletide exercise further encouraged and heightened the interest in the man and in his work and by the culmination of the semester, there was another student admirer of the craftiness of the magnificence of the poet’s use of the idiom. The crispness in his presentation of successive lines of soul-touching poetry was fascinating. Our first official “meeting” came when as a first year, part-time student of West Indian Literature at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, the vacation assignment was – over Christmas – writing a book report of the Walcott anthology, “ In A Green Night ” (1962). There was respect, admiration, love and hero-worship, in some cases notwithstanding the brusqueness of attitude that Walcott displayed periodically, when he felt that his colleagues fell short of his expectations. Perhaps the 1977 episode though, was an aberration in the defining of the relationship betwixt the Nobel Laureate and the Trinidadian, for everything that this writer grew to learn and to know about the man Derek Walcott during the next forty-odd years signaled attitudes and emotions that were extremely contrary to those provoked by Julian Pierre’s singing in the mid-nineteen seventies. Sit down on river stone and talk river bad…” There was therefore an awareness of his presence here an awareness that prompted Unknown’s indignation at the poet’s need to bite the hands that were feeding him Walcott would, at the time have been a regular contributor, in the same way that he had regularly contributed to one of the daily newspapers with his regular features.
The Mighty Unknown must have been on hand to over-hear one of the programmes, like “ Cultural Miscellany ,” that were state sponsored and frequently aired on one of the two radio stations that operated then. Walcott had lived and wed and wrote and worked in Trinidad & Tobago. Unknown was selected for the National Calypso Semi-Finals that year and his composition, beyond its triggering of the nerve of sensibility in a population fiercely protective of its new-found nationalism in that post black power era, would have made the average Trini, sadly, just barely aware of the genius that literally walked and worked amongst them.
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Who are so friendly and full of courtesy,ĭerek Walcott say Trinidad is Carnival and Sexĭerek suffering from one big, big, big complexĭerek go back to St Lucia and you would seeĪnd Derek wouldn’t say ah thing about St Lucia.”
That you have enjoyed, through we ancestor You wouldn’t talk about we pitch lake, oil and sugar Sit down on river stone and talk river bad Unknown, in his cleverly constructed offering, threw four stanzas of piccong at the St Lucian poet whom the calypsonian alleged had had the temerity to be critical of the place which had been good enough to extend to him, its generosity In the year 1977, a calypsonian from Trinidad & Tobago named the Mighty Unknown caused patrons to the calypso tent to be falling off their seats when he performed a calypso called, “ Ah Vex ”. Nobel Laureate, DEREK WALCOTT TRINIDADIAN?
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