Derek Walcott

On theorizing Caribbean space: History and linguistic diversity in the Caribbean

Coolitude poetics from the Caribbean

Rajiv Mohabir
Sewdass Mohabir's Jeewan Jhoti, Courantyne River, Berbice, Guyana.

In order to understand Caribbean Coolitude poetics, one might review the local poetics to illuminate context. Coolitude uses Caribbean poetics — broadly created by and maintained by black intellectuals. Coolitude would be nowhere without its ancestor and kin, Négritude. A question arises: is the Caribbean as one geopolitical space and how have the histories of different colonizers’ languages created disparate yet united experiences in the Antillean archipelago?

Imagined cartographies: Madeleine Campbell in Saint Lucia

MARCI VOGEL
Brain Coral photographed by Madeleine Campbell
Brain Coral photographed by Madeleine Campbell

Some waves originate deep in space; others arrive with the wind, cresting the ocean's surface. At low tide, a traveler might walk a long stretch of shore, shifting boundary between land and sea. She might lift spiraled shell to ear, listen for a sound that began in a neighboring galaxy, named after an explorer intent on sailing the globe. She might hear history. “It might sound like this: in the salt chuckle of rocks / with their sea pools, there was the sound /like a rumour without any echo / of History, really beginning.” Such does Derek Walcott locate history's source in a tidepool made of words. Writing in Poetic Intention, Édouard Glissant uses the same materials of construction: “I build my language out of rocks, I write, indeed, with the feeling of some scribe. . . .” In the tides between history and language: poetry, an island that breaks away from the main.

Some waves originate deep in space; others arrive with the wind, cresting the ocean's surface. At low tide, a traveler might walk a long stretch of shore, shifting boundary between land and sea. She might lift spiraled shell to ear, listen for a sound that began in a neighboring galaxy, named after an explorer intent on sailing the globe.

She might hear history.

It might sound like this:

in the salt chuckle of rocks

with their sea pools, there was the sound

like a rumour without any echo

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