Foregrounding Conflict: An Introductory Exploration of Some Recurrent Motifs in Derek Walcott's Poetry

Abstract

The overt presence of a narrator-figure in much of Walcott's poetry acts to foreground the creative conflicts that are involved in celebrating Antillean vitality in English within a self-consciously Western aesthetic and intertextual framework. The current paper examines how the foregrounding of these conflicts, in the form of some recurrent motifs, is used to deflect criticism that he is complicit in perpetuating the organizing metaphors of Empire. Indeed, they are what ultimately enable him to question colonial epistemologies and symbolic practices, allowing his Antillean heroes to return the gaze of those, including the poet, who would try to scrutinize and codify what makes them unique.