“…once I had decided to make the writing of poetry my life, my actual, not my imaginative life, I felt both rejection and a fear of Europe while I leaned its poetry. But it is its complexity, not its historically explained simplicities, which is new (54).” “The Caribbean sensibility is not marinated in the past. Yet the more ambitious the zeal, the more diffuse and forced it becomes, the more it roots into research, until the imagination surrenders to the glorification of history, the ear becomes enslaved, the glorifiers of the tom-tom ignoring the dynamo (43).” “At this stage the polemic poet, like the politician, will wish to produce epic work, to summon the grandeur of the past, not as myth but as history, and to prophesy in the way that Fascist architecture can be viewed as prophecy. What seemed the death of faith was its rebirth (43).” What seemed the loss of tradition was its renewal. What seemed to be surrender was redemption. “But the tribe in bondage learned to fortify itself by cunning assimilation of the religion of the Old World. Adamic, elemental man cannot be existential (41).” They reject ethnic ancestry for faith in elemental man (40).” “It is this awe of the numinous, this elemental privilege of naming (link to naming) the New World which annihilates history in our great poets, an elation common to all of them, whether they are aligned by heritage to Crusoe and Prospero or to Friday and Caliban. “The recriminations exchanged, the contrition of the master replaces the vengeance of the slave, and here colonial literature is most pietistic, for it can accuse great art of feudalism and excuse poor art as suffering (39).” “That amnesia is the true history of the New World (39).” “But who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or for revenge (Walcott 39)?” But, are acts of assimilation and association in writing/art expected? Required? Inexcusable? Walcott has posited that there is assimilation in culture formation. This ancestry, Paula Burnett claims, he shares with the Caribbean people (Burnett 2 and Hamner 6 ). Walcott has been described as having “twin ancestry, black and white” because he is the descendent of a white grandfather and a black grandmother on both his maternal and paternal sides. In Walcott’s essay, “The Muse of History,” he calls history the “medusa of the New World” and claims that writers who are obsessed with its wrongs and who reject all European influences should, “…know that by openly fighting tradition we perpetuate it, that revolutionary literature is a filial impulse, and that maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor (Walcott 36).”
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