1A resolutely post-Babelic space which witnessed wave after wave of settlement, invasion and general historical turmoil, the Caribbean Basin knows of no other “other” than the stranger, than the foreigner even. Such prevailing otherness often veers towards alienation insofar as the Caribbean identity is, more so than elsewhere, made up of layers whose archeology quite soon becomes impossible. As it were, this statement (among many others) lies at the foundation of the foray into autobiography which the “strangely” entitled Another Life represents: what “other life” than one’s own, really, should an autobiography be supposed to recount? Started off as a prose text by Derek Walcott (King 218), the Saint Lucian poet, Another Life is yet one more of his experiments with narrative poetry, and stands as an apparent autobiography in verse evoking the childhood of the poet and playwright who was to become the recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1992.
- 1 D. Walcott, 1972. All references to Another Life will be made as follows: (AL, page number).
2A long poem which does not so much retrace the origins and the trajectory of a life as explore the diffractions of the self into the prism of difference, the text undercuts the very enterprise of “self-writing” with, in turn, irony, faking, doubt, suspicion, humbug and iconoclastic laughter. Incessantly, and more and more so as the narrative proceeds, the author stands at a distance from himself, seeming to take stock of a strange being who could only be voiced through heteroglossia, throwing identity and stability into confusion. Writing at a distance from himself, he calls into question the way in which the colonial psyche has been compelled to use masks and personae to (re)claim an identity. This autobiography is a fake one, a vast legerdemain, a substitution of one genre for another; or rather it is, in very Proustian fashion, a fictional (if not fictitious) autobiography recounting a life that was never lived, but which lingers in the memory more vividly than any “other” life. The diffractions registered are always to be chalked up to the misdeeds of a trickster-like poet who revels in ambiguities and puns, in intertextual and polyglot games. Nevertheless, otherness is not easily explained away as a mere trick. It rather seems to outline a poetic intention, associating images of movement, transposition, transience, displacement, exile and slippage, with the trope of metaphor: “No metaphor, no metamorphosis” (AL, 115).1 The aim of this paper is really to endeavour to show how an identity made of otherness allows the poet to deploy a metalinguistic and poetic quest and questioning.
- 2 Here, Derek Walcott puts a caribbeanism to (good) use. Indeed, in Caribbean English, “self” is used (...)
3Admittedly, the genre of the autobiography is deemed and doomed to be poised between the same and the other; it relies on a bifurcation of two voices, on a splitting of personae, the one that tells and the one that is being told, the now and the then. Without doubt, however, and much more so than would normally be expected, the voice of Another Life is wrenched from itself, torn between the one and the other at the same time. Setting the tone for the rest of the text, the reflexive pronoun itself2 is split, intimating a deep-rooted dissociation from the self:
About the August of my fourteenth year
I lost my self somewhere above a valley (AL, 42; my emphasis).
- 3 Samuel Beckett, 1953. Like many other Irish writers, Samuel Beckett has been a major influence on D (...)
4There lurks throughout this long text a growing sense that the subject of the autobiography keeps escaping, and that the “another” in the title might be interpreted as meaning “just any.” There is more than one reason for this, including biographical elements: the fire of Castries in 1948 (“the burnt town”, AL, 5, one resembling, as Stewart Brown aptly remarks [The Art of Derek Walcott 20], the Eliotian waste land); the highbrow education received at Saint Mary’s and the fascination for the superstitious folk tales told by the mysterious Aunt Sidone; the early death of his father, who looms large as a strange double for the artist; the presence of a twin brother, Roderick; his own failed calling as a painter as well as, prominently, bilinguism (French patois and Standard English). Beyond anecdotal events, the poem is a reflection on how different a life could have been, on how one road taken cancelled out all the others, on how forking paths kept erasing the always offered, and systematically withdrawn, possibility of “another life.” As an incarnation of these possible beings, of these manifold potential existences, the poet appears to revel in a proliferation of doubles. These doubles include ectoplasms, which are repeatedly convoked (“Mama, / your son’s ghost circles your lost house,” AL, 12), inducing the feeling that the poem reaches us from beyond the tomb – but also, in another sense of ‘ghost writing,’ that it was not written by whom we might assume it was. These ghosts also seem to wonder who is saying I, distinctly recalling the self-baffling first-person in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable.3 In the first chapter, during one of those (only) half-farcical, self-debunking passages for which Derek Walcott has a knack, the poet projects a double, Emanuel, who is pitilessly shown parrotting forth and painstakingly stressing verse from the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam:
Ah moon / (bend, stroke)
of my delight / (bend, stroke)
that knows no wane.
The moon of heaven / (bend, stroke)
is rising once again (AL, 18).
The irony is furthered by the fact that this passage appears to parody (unless it be the other way around, irony often going topsy-turvy in Derek Walcott’s poetry) the opening lines of the very book (the two versions are at minor variance; one will notice, in particular, the presence of the moon as central theme, the “again” / “wane” rhyme, as well as the “bend / stroke” iambic rhythm, the first verse being a strikingly pure iambic pentameter):
Verandahs, where the pages of the sea
Are a book left open by an absent master
In the middle of another life –
I begin here again,
Begin until this ocean’s
A shut book, and, like a bulb
The white moon’s filaments wane (AL, 3).
5Traditional poetry, that of the “absent [and obviously British] master,” a poetry incidentally symbolised by the (naturally white) moon for many ages and even more so with the Romantics (“all that romantic taxidermy”, AL, 41), is branded as ridiculous and derivative. The “other life” which keeps arising on the page is then used as an artifact, a fabrication defusing the stateliness of “this life”; it is as spectral as the aforementioned phantom, or as the absent master whose unsettling presence goes on being felt in the lurking, looming, hovering mode, dead life feeding on living matter, absence recalling presence, present and past conjoined.
- 4 Derek Walcott was born well before colonisation times were over and carried a British passport unti (...)
6The predicament thus outlined is unmistakably that of the (post)colonial4 subject who has been relegated into an absence of being, a ghostly existence, a fiction contrived by white minds who have long written the master narratives. He sees himself through his own eyes but also as the other sees him. The treatment meted out to the Black man has been analysed, even before Franz Fanon, by the Black American author Ralph Ellison:
Very often, […] the Negro’s masking is motivated not so much by fear as by a profound rejection of the image created to usurp his identity. Sometimes it is for the sheer joy of the joke; sometimes to challenge those who presume, across the psychological distance created by race manners, to know his identity. Nonetheless, it is in the American grain. (Ellison 55)
- 5 D. Walcott, “Crusoe’s Journal”, 1986, 94.
7To a large extent, Another Life is a text about this very estrangement, one which confines the subject to masking. Life stories thus become fictional at best, fictitious otherwise, and an autobiography in the strict sense of the word cannot but prove to be impossible: “the fiction of their own lives claimed each one” (AL, 39). The ghosts may then be understood as mere impersonators of the narrator merrily parading under masks, carnival-like. Such a theatrical paradigm accounts for the histrionics that are there to be found in Another Life, which is, really, like all poem collections by Derek Walcott, also a play (for several actors) to be staged. Derek Walcott’s postcolonial stance becomes a symbol for a more general ontology and for the possibility to discover what one is, and is not, through the other’s gaze, “another’s praise.”5
8Transferred onto a grammatical level, the colonial subject is never a subject but, indeed, a predicate: something that is said, never the core of discourse. Quite fittingly, syntactical subjects are always vague, pronouns are fleeting, and one is never too sure as to whom or what they ought to refer (who is hiding, for example, behind “they” in the last chapter (AL, 150)?). Ranging from adjective to adverb, from complement to supplement, the emphasis is ceaselessly laid upon the predicate. Derek Walcott authors a poetical work of excess and profusion, wor(l)ds apart from a prominent trend in postmodern poetry veering towards silence and aphasia.
- 6 A more exhaustive study of the status of the predicate in Derek Walcott’s works, for which there is (...)
There
was your heaven! The clear
glaze of another life,
a landscape locked in amber, the rare
gleam (AL, 3).6
The second sentence is a development of the first one, an afterthought, an appendix, a predicate after the theme (“your heaven”; one might notice that here, once more, the attribution of “your” raises a certain amount of problems). A ghostly imprint of the subject, predicates are foregrounded to such a degree that only they carry meaning, and that the subject remains similar, unchanging, useless, disarticulated: “lives dissolve in the imagination, […] they all exist, they never have existed” (AL, 115). In this passage, a polyptotic repetition at the caesura does not so much repeat what has been said as contradict it exactly through the negation, signaling the shortcomings of language. Predicates both sustain and puncture the illusion of a singular world in which things and subjects would not be pliable, changeable, or interchangeable.
- 7 “What defines autobiography for the one who is reading is above all a contract of identity that is (...)
9The word, the name, are often the locus where alienation is allowed to dwell: “like bastard children, hiding in their names” (AL, 53). Here, the poet dwells on the fear to look at oneself which lies at the root of any self-portrait and every autobiography. Remarkably, in a text where proper names are plentiful (the book closes on them: “Gregorias, Apilo!”, AL, 152), the author does not hide in his name, but he hides his name. He never writes down his own, be it fictitious, accurate, encoded or otherwise, thus infringing one of the main rules of the autobiography.7 In true Beckettian fashion, he is “the unnameable”. It might be that the Caribbean Basin is, after all, much like Ireland, a place where everyone speaks the wrong language, with all native tongues eradicated (“the lost Arawak hieroglyphs and signs” [AL, 54]; “forgotten Yoruba” [The Bounty, 45]):
so that a man’s branched, naked trunk,
its roots crusted with dirt,
swayed where it stopped, remembering another name (AL, 54; my emphasis).
Otherness comes to feature as the lost language of the Amerindians and of the Africans (“bastards” who bear names that should not be theirs, and which belong to another lineage altogether, that of the “masters”); it is an irretrievable strangeness, the symbol of a lost innocence, of a prelapsarian linguistic bliss, and the poem appears as a (falsely, even histrionically dismal) failure to reenact such a lost language. As a result, any language might do, so that English is regularly interwoven with French patois (the nursery rhyme on page 27), but also with Standard French (“Alouette, gentille alouette,” “tristes, tristes tropiques”, AL, 38), with Latin (the beginning of chapter 5), or else Spanish. English is fully of one piece with a whole series of different idioms, so that ‘tropiques’ may rhyme with ‘reek’, one line before, with the two lines sharing the same rhythmic pattern exactly. Otherness is not so much a foreign element as a spectrum, an open space where things enter into relation, “branch out” as the trunk which is often compared to man, and in which they are measured by one another: “in the middle of another life” (AL, 3). The web in which this “middle” makes fast and overhauls a polyglot reality is prominently the one, well-known to readers of Derek Walcott, of intertextuality, a dense, prolific, ecstatic one.
- 8 It is notably the main thesis upheld in an article signed by Derek Walcott and entitled “The Muse o (...)
- 9 “It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking glass of a servant” (Ulysses, 1993, 7).
10Indeed, ranking among the foreign languages which keep appearing, there are those coined by other writers. There is a proliferating, baroque profusion of hidden quotations in Another Life, all of them poised between reverence and irony, tribute and mockery, a testimony to the belief that creation will start with imitation and mimicry.8 Joyce’s postcolonial anger9 looms (large) behind the “half-cracked / unsilvering mirror of black servants” (AL, 5), whereas the staid Victorian artistry of George Meredith crops up on page 43, between quotation marks this time: “darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting” (these lines are from “Love in the Valley”, and there is a second occurrence of this same verse further down, as though to confirm the infinite echoing power of art). As for fashionable artists of the past century, they are mentioned during a tea-party and their names are intertwined among other, less hallowed, voices and sounds: “Eliot. Plop. Benjamin Britten. Klunk. Elgar. Slurp” (AL, 106). The irreverence theatrically shown towards consecrated classics introduces a polyphony, a heteroglossia much akin to that described by Bakhtin when discussing the structure of the novel. Even more striking (and also more humorous) is the appearance of yet another ghost of the poet who in his turn sets about to recite the verse of yet another poet, Padraic Henry Pearse (the name is mischievously mispelt and made to evoke the Guadeloupian French poet, Saint-John Perse, yet another distinctive influence on Derek Walcott), the Irish artist and hero who gave his life for the independence of his country in the uprising of 1916:
A ghost, accosting, softly grew beside me.
My other self, the Brother, the mathematical Poet,
Scented with mint, he cited, softly, Perse:
“The beauty of this world hath made me sad” (AL, 104-105; the last verse is the opening line of “The Wayfarer”, written by Pearse on the eve of his execution).
These less than totemic figures seem to imply that the poet who is writing the text we are reading is a mere fabrication, a strange combination of these “ghosts”, these “brothers,” who share the authority of the voice with him; the ghost is not so much a double as the proof that there is no essential version of the self. Just as foreign languages were made to rhyme, distinct works are cunningly unified, with Pearse’s assonance in [s] echoed in Derek Walcott’s preceding lines, so that the reader is under the impression that the original has merged with its various sequels and spin-offs. The “other life” of the title may then be interpreted as that lived by subjects of the Empire who read texts from another place and another time (colonial syllabuses having seldom tackled the most avant-garde movements): “we lived by another light, / Victoria’s orphans” (AL, 77; my emphasis). Otherness features as the loss of one’s own authority, hence the last word. Books are relegated to the status of artefacts which hold nothing but an alienation that cannot but become that of the poet. This accounts for the (repeated, as with Meredith) quotation from Yeats:
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,
An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;
And now he seeks in book or manuscript
What he shall never find (Yeats, “The Phases of the Moon”; AL, 43 and 77).
- 10 “Identité culturelle : une identité questionnante, où la relation à l’autre détermine l’être” (Glis (...)
11“Grotesque” (AL, 59) is the word used admiringly to describe Gregorias’s works, but it might very well fittingly be ascribed to this poetry. No longer lyrical, the poem could be described as “choral,” and is quite aptly outlined in Glissant’s reflections on “relation” and the Caribbean identity.10 After all, the epigraph for the book was taken from Glissant’s The Ripening (La Lézarde, 1958), launching the book into intertextuality and relation.
12By the same token, language, sometimes under the form of a same cue, travels from speaker to speaker, each of them differing in turn from the poet:
Who spoke? I,
said the Indian woman you finger-poked in the doorway.
I, said the Negro whore on the drawing-room floor (AL, 86).
- 11 “Dans une langue il n’y a que des différences sans termes positifs” (Ferdinand de Saussure, 166).
13Words are thrown in a mad and anonymous, authorless spin. Later on, the poet quotes a poor Indian cow farmer from Trinidad before repeating what he said quite faithfully, exiling words from authority, diffracting the origin of the verb. What is made tangible by the text here is the necessary interrelatedness of language itself, which is understood not as an absolute but rather as a system where every element depends on all the others.11 The way in which, in this latter quotation from Another Life, the verb travels from one speaker to the other is also an attempt to come to terms with the end of lyricism (in which the poet is the only conscience from which words emanate) and to describe a scattering of origin, a movement best described by these place descriptions (“in the doorway,” “on the drawing-room floor”) which comically trace an identity to its geographic location.
14“[W]orld after world” (AL, 12), “word by word” (AL, 45), “Days welded by the sun’s torch into days!” (AL, 51), “days woven into days” (AL, 52), “the breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers” (AL, 53), “heel after heel as if heel / after heel were my thumbs” (AL, 71), “from pole to pole” (AL, 83), “from tongue to tongue” (AL, 104), “one after one” (AL, 120): these expressions describing a movement from the same to the other are to be found at every turn of the text, placing it on the side of an infinite chain, of the archipelago. One might also remark on the scantiness of end-stopped lines in Another Life, as if there were no border stopping the flow of words after, or into, one another. Another prominent instance of the omnipresent repetition with a difference is the recurrent use of the (ever so slightly) imperfect rhyme (e.g. the last rhyme, glow/Apilo), as though emphasizing the movement from one sound to another and the impossibility to hark back to the same. In a fully attested sense, then, “another” also comes to signify, in this text, “following” (“In another year the soldier shrank and died”, AL, 51), precipitating the race of the text after its own writing. Otherness represents a future state of the same, caught in the flux of time and verse. One steps into a universe where everything is set in motion, a motion which only the moon seems to escape, which is to be expected from a symbol “for whiteness, for candour, unreturned”, the alienating white, romantic poetry: “The moon maintained her station” (AL, 4-5). Life is presented as an infinite repetition of the same becoming the other: “another life it seemed would start again” (AL, 7), and its writing stages its own speed, its mercurial agitation, the rush of words into one another.
- 12 A word of which Derek Walcott is particularly fond. See for example “Derek Walcott and E.A. Markham (...)
15There is in this text a mistrust of the written, static, dead word, which might account for the following line: “a life older than geography” (AL, 54; naturally, what is being cancelled here is colonial education and rational knowledge, but also “history” expected in the context). The “other life” which is sought and projected is also one which could escape the graph, the fixity of the written page. Repetition is very often conceived not only in linguistic terms, but also in phonetic ones: “corrugations rippled with his name” (AL, 26). Having erased all written signs (“not a sign”, AL, 142), the world becomes the resonance chamber where poetry may be heard (“There would be violent bursts of shrieking French”, AL, 31). The verbs ‘roar’, ‘scream’, ‘chant’, ‘rumble’, are absolutely teeming, designating the tone12 of a voice which performs the text rather than just reciting it, and they are very often linked, in one way or another, to, precisely, otherness: “their thunderous exchanges / rumbled like gods about another life” (AL, 41). Sound becomes the major impulse of these lines, which are furthered not by meaning (“No meaning, and no meaning”, AL, 133) but by phonetic tropes: anaphora, apophony, paronomasia, symploce, epistrophe.
Why not, indeed? In deed.
There was his hand and the shadow of his hand,
there was his thought and the shadow of that thought
lying lighter than the shadow of a sound
across coarse canvas or the staring paper,
the quiet panic at the racing sun
his breath held before its trembling wick,
the done with its own horror of the undone
that frays us all to pieces and breakdown,
all of us, always, all ways, one after one (AL, 120, my emphases).
Everything (alliterations and assonances; the rhyming pattern which, although veering towards an aabb regularity, is not as rich as internal rhymes; the repetition before the caesura and at the end of the line; the division of a word into two, “in deed”, “all ways”) points to a text which appears to be circling but which is really moving forward and onwards. Similarly, at the end of the text, the already quoted beginning is reinterpreted, old words yielding to new ones even as old verandahs yield to others:
I looked from old verandahs at
verandahs, sails, the eternal summer sea
like a book left open by an absent master (AL, 150).
Grappling and tussling with autobiography, the writing out of one’s life, the poet experiences the impossibility of coming full circle, of reverting to type, or, quite simply, of ending the narrative.
16Poetry becomes a means to restitute the shock and wonder of the self in front of the world, and of itself. Far from cultivating obscurity, oddity, or strangeness, Derek Walcott’s distinctly metaphoric style goes back to the original perception, too intense to be contemplated from close up:
A sun that stands back
from the fire of itself, not shamed, prizing
its shadow, watching it blaze! (AL, 152).
17These lines, dedicated to the memory of the symptomatic artist, Gregorias, who acts as a double of the poet, may be taken as a definition of the poetic act in Another Life: a dissociation of sensibility between emotion and contemplation, between sun and shadow, light and darkness, black and white, the self and the other, the subject and the object of the experience, the man and his distanced life. This passage does not conclude on a reconciliation of opposites, but points towards movement thanks to the dynamic connotations of blaze through such expressions as ‘blaze a trail’, or else ‘like blazes’, meaning ‘very fast’.
18Possibly not an autobiography in its own right, but assuredly a successfully postmodern splitting of the lyrical voice, Another Life unfolds an indictment of unilinguism, of singularity and of the literary foregrounding of the subject. “[H]e wished himself moving / yet forever there” (AL, 87): the self steers clear of fixity, stability, and that damned “taxidermy” to which he had condemned the romantics as a child. At the core of the text, there lies a tension between one self and another one, the poet and the painter but also the artist and the simple man, the educated man and the man in the street, between the simple and the double, or else the living man and his ghosts. Derek Walcott’s Another Life is an endeavour not to reconcile these tendencies, but to superimpose them somehow and to record the textual spectrality that may thus emerge. Another Life might be described as the enactment of life’s ability to renew itself by repeating itself at a variance, and to rid us of all we thought we had and were: “the refugees began another life” (AL, 84). More prominently, this book tells of art (“another life”) and its power to estrange us from life. Writing at a distance from himself, distorting experience, the poet sights nothing more, maybe, than a way of escape from solemnity, from the necessary tediousness and boredom of one’s own life story and voice, and from romantic “taxidermy”. Hovering in the distance and already embarked on a schooner named “Flight”, “another life”, a parodic, a grotesque, but a brilliantly artistic one, holds glorious promises.
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