Voyage to the Blessed Isles

I first came across Derek Walcott’s narrative poem ‘The Schooner Flight’ in the mid-1980s, when I was travelling on a Commonwealth bursary through the Caribbean. I was away from England for two months, on an island-stepping journey whose final destination was St Lucia in the Windward Islands – where I once worked at a radio station, and where my wife and I spent the first two years of our marriage. I must have regarded my return to St Lucia after a decade and a half as a kind of culmination – Ithaca at the end of an odyssey – and I was nervous as I walked across the tarmac at Castries airport.

‘Radio Caribbean, right?’ asked the customs man, who recognized me and held out his hand. ‘Where have you been in the longest while?’ I felt his smiling welcome was like a benediction. I had come back to a place which was once my home. The rhythm of speech patterns, the rhythm of sea-waves and buffeting winds are what I remember most about life in St Lucia half a century ago. They are the rhythms that drive the poetry of Derek Walcott, who was born in St Lucia in 1930, and who once compared poetry to a religious vocation. He would have liked the idea that a lyrical phrase from popular speech conveyed a sense of blessing. When I worked in St Lucia, Walcott was one of the island’s absent sons, making his name as a dramatist in Trinidad and Jamaica, and then taking up various academic posts in America. Fifteen years later, on my island-stepping odyssey, his name was frequently cited in conversation. In Barbados, a State Senator who was the editor of an arts review told how the American poet Robert Lowell had sought out the young Walcott when he was working in Trinidad and implored him to send poems so that he could arrange for them to be published in New York. A broadcaster in Jamaica, a man of my age who invited me to spend a convivial weekend in the Blue Mountains with his family, told me ‘The Schooner Flight’ was his favourite poem. ‘It’s a mid-life poem, Andrew,’ he said, handing me a glass of rum and the Walcott collection in which the poem first appeared. ‘So it speaks to you and me!’ The poem can be seen as an allegorical account of a personal crisis; the kind that comes with a sense of approaching age, of time running out, of regret for mistakes made and paths mistaken. The collection in which it first appeared was published when Walcott was almost 50. The poem tells of a sea-voyage northwards from Trinidad – a ‘flight’ perhaps from the consequence of those mistakes – up the chain of the Windward and Leeward Islands into the scattershot pattern of the myriad Bahamas. Flight is one of the old island schooners, with a deep hold in which staple commodities like copra and charcoal were carried. There were only a few of these lovely vessels left when I worked in St Lucia. I remember their wooden hulls nodding at the quayside beside Castries market, while on the other side of the harbour the fibreglass tourist yachts crowded into the expensive new marina. The narrator of the poem is partly based on Walcott himself. It is as though the poet, like an artist embarking on a self-portrait, has set up a sequence of mirrors to ensure there is no direct gaze. He introduces himself as ‘a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes/that they nickname Shabine’ and explains that this is the patois word for any mixed-race person with a reddish tinge to hair and skin. He tells us wryly that, like Walcott himself, he’s had a ‘sound colonial education’; that his ancestry is Dutch, black, English, ‘and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation . . .’ The poem is lyrical, full of the striking images and gamey profanities of demotic speech. It consists of eleven sequences, like chapters, and each has a title that advances the story, charts the journey northward and provides a tacit commentary on the drama. Reading the poem, I overlay these sequences with my own recollections of the Caribbean, in a kind of palimpsest of memory. In ‘Adios, Carenage’, the first sequence, Shabine leaves his young mistress at dawn. As the poem progresses, it becomes clear he has earlier left his family for her. He flags down a taxi and makes his way to the dockside in Port of Spain.

In idle August, while the sea soft and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim of this Caribbean, I blow out the light by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.

I remember my own visits to Trinidad: cockcrow at sunrise in the low hills around Port of Spain; cooking-pots being lit and yards swept; and, on the Queen’s Park Savannah, racehorses at exercise in the dawn mist. In the sequence entitled ‘The Flight Anchors in Castries Harbour’ Shabine recalls his youth in St Lucia, ‘When the stars self were young over Castries,/ I loved you alone and I loved the whole world.’ Sitting on deck, he describes the port of Castries at night. From his description he must be looking down the length of the harbour to the velvet darkness of the open sea, with Vigie – ‘Lookout Hill’ – to the right. The little house where my wife and I lived was on Vigie, on the winding lane which led to the lighthouse. On just such an August night as Shabine describes, we would hear the lapping waves in the harbour and the gentle percussion of the town’s steel band at their weekly rehearsal for carnival. But there is more than wistful evocation at play in this poem. There is drama, tense and vivid. In ‘Fight with the Crew’ the narrator confronts the cook, who has stolen the exercise book in which he writes his verses and has mockingly read aloud from it.

. . . Well, I beg him first but he keep reading, ‘O my children, my wife’ and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh; it move like a flying fish, the silver knife that catch him right in the plump of his calf.

Shabine has made his point – literally: ‘None of them go fuck with my poetry again . . .’ There is sombre history in the poem, and the psychic pain felt by people of Afro-Caribbean ancestry who contemplate the experience of their unknown forebears. In ‘Shabine Encounters the Middle Passage’ there is a terrifying and hallucinatory vision. A ghostly fleet of warships, their hulls trailing Sargasso weed, crewed by men with rusty eyeholes like cannon, escorts ships transporting human cargo across the waist of the Atlantic.

Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations, our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose, to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows who his grandfather is, much less his name?

Fifty years ago my wife and I found our way to the site of an eighteenth-century sugar plantation behind the Pitons of St Lucia, where rusting cogs and cauldrons lay scattered on the forest floor. In that bright satanic mill, grinding inexorably away under the tropical sun, it was not just sugarcane that was crushed, but the very identities of the people who toiled there. Anonymous human beings, bereft of kinship and unknown to their descendants, were denied any sense of past or future; treated as livestock by French and English owners; captured, shipped, bought, bred, worked and sold. The Flight continues its northward journey, passing Dominica, where Shabine broods on the fate of the Carib people who were the first inhabitants of these islands. By now, the sea is becoming skittish. A storm – and the crisis of the poem – is approaching. A stingray leaps from the choppy water; the frigate birds wheel inland, a shoal of flying fish falls like an arrow-shower, and suddenly

a black-mane squall pounce on the sail like a dog on a pigeon, and it snap the neck of the Flight and shake it from head to tail. ‘Be Jesus . . . That wind come from God back pocket!’

There now follows an extraordinary passage in which Shabine combines a description of the storm’s fury and the crew’s terror with the poet’s recollection of Sunday services in the Methodist chapel in Chisel Street, Castries. ‘Proud with despair, we sang how our race/ survive the sea’s maw, our history, our peril . . .’ The captain of the Flight holds fast to the wheel ‘like the cross held Jesus’, with Shabine prising his lips open to ply him with white rum,

till red-eyed like dawn, we watch our travail subsiding, subside, and there was no more storm, and the noon sea get calm as Thy Kingdom Come.

The final sequence, ‘After the Storm’, is the joint testament of Shabine the narrator and Derek Walcott the poet. As Shabine watches the storm pass away, he acknowledges he must break with his young mistress.

I wanted nothing after that day . . . Fall gently, rain, on the sea’s upturned face Like a girl showering; make these islands fresh As Shabine once knew them!

The poet then takes up the narrator’s theme of reverent love for all the islands of the Caribbean – not merely the ‘final’ Bahamas through which the schooner is sailing. As with every odyssey, there comes the quiet realization that the journey and the destination are the same thing

. . . . I have only one theme: the bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart – the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know, vain search for one island that heals with its harbour and a guiltless horizon . . .

When I discussed this remarkable poem – having just read it for the first time – over a rum and soda in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, my host told me that Walcott’s conclusion always reminded him of his youth in the 1960s. Along with other candidates for the much-prized island scholarships which they hoped would take them on to a university education, he spent a week on board a steamer which had been hired by the Education Department of the newly formed Federation of the West Indies to visit the various islands of the English-speaking Caribbean. ‘We would go to bed in one port and wake up next morning in another. The friends I made then throughout the Caribbean are still my good friends today.’ For that reason, he said – even though the collapse of the Federation meant smaller islands like St Lucia faced the challenges and reaped the rewards of independence on their own – he loved Walcott’s theme of companionship with all the island peoples. Raising his glass, he proclaimed the telling line with which Shabine the narrator defines himself at the outset of the poem: ‘“Either I’m a nobody, or I’m a nation.” Ay-men to that!’ Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, the year which saw the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first journey westward across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Walcott was one of two Nobel laureates from St Lucia, an island of fewer than 200,000 people. His companion in honours was Sir Arthur Lewis, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1979. Both men were alumni of St Mary’s College in Castries. It is situated on the steep hillside of Vigie: beneath the lighthouse, beside the harbour entrance, looking out to the open sea.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Andrew Joynes 2024