Imagining the ‘wettest indies’: The Transatlantic Network of James Joyce and Derek Walcott

Abstract

Derek Walcott’s use of Ireland in his works reaches back to his earliest days as a young man in Castries, St. Lucia. A student at St. Mary’s College, he was taught Irish Literature, including Joyce, by Irish Presentation Brothers from County Cork. He terms such instruction affectionately in his autobiographical poem, Another Life, ‘a generation of slaves’ children sang […] steered now by Irish hands to their new epoch.’¹ A child of Methodist parents with both Dutch and African ancestry, he was an outsider as an English-speaking Protestant on the largely French patois-speaking and overwhelmingly Catholic St. Lucia, an island literally called the ‘Gibraltar of the Caribbean’ because the British and French fought over it no less than fourteen times. Walcott has long acknowledged an affection for Irish literature and his most famous statement on its impact is frequently quoted:

I’ve always felt some kind of intimacy with the Irish poets because one realized that they were also colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean. They were the niggers of Britain. Now, with all that, to have those outstanding achievements of genius whether by Joyce or Beckett or Yeats illustrated that one could come out of a depressed, depraved, oppressed situation and be defiant and creative at the same time.²