BERNARD BOXILL ABSTRACTS

"DEREK WALCOTT'S ONE ENDEAVOUR"

Derek Walcott is often described, by others and also by himself, as divided. He has also declared his long engagement in the one endeavor of exalting the small people of his birthplace, the island of St. Lucia. What does he mean by describing himself as divided and is his dividedness consistent with his having one endeavor? I take up these questions in this paper. My project is not biographical, but philosophical. I am not trying to identify the people and circumstances that might have caused Walcott to be divided. I am trying to understand what he means when he calls himself divided and whether he can be divided in that way and still be engaged for as long as he implies in just one main endeavor. The key to my argument is the last sentence in a passage from Andre Malraux that Walcott uses to introduce his chapter "The Divided Child" in his masterpiece Another Life. The sentence states that the child who will one day be an artist is distinguished by the fact that he (or she presumably) is more deeply moved by works of art than by the things that they portray. It certainly seems true of Walcott himself; we have his word that he was as a child more deeply moved by English poems about daffodils, flowers that he had never seen, than by equally beautiful flowers like the oleander that he saw all around him. If future poets grow up inclined to write poetry in the tradition of the poetry that moved them deeply when they were children, it follows that Walcott grew up inclined to be an English poet. But I conjecture that when he calls himself divided he means that he grew up inclined as strongly to be a very different kind of poet, in particular, a West Indian or a St. Lucian poet. If this conjecture is correct, to explain his dividedness, we must identify another artistic tradition that he was exposed to as a child and that moved him as deeply as the English artistic tradition. Close attention to his poetry and essays indicates that he believes that he was exposed to such an artistic tradition, and that it was carried on by certain of the small people of St. Lucia, though not so much in standard works of recorded art like poetry and painting, but in their very persons and behavior. Though divided by these two traditions, drawn strongly to work in both, but also aware of his radical freedom to choose to work in one or the other, Walcott chose to work in only one of these traditions, namely, the artistic tradition carried on by those artists and human works of art among the small people of St Lucia. I explain why this choice was made for good reasons and why it fills Walcott with elation just because it was made for good reasons and was therefore also free. I also explain how he has used the Caribbean as the imagined gift of his European and African ancestors to motivate him to persevere in his decision to be a West Indian poet, despite his continuing dividedness and his continuing strong inclination to be an English poet.

"DU BOIS AND DOUGLASS ON THE SORROW SONGS"

W.E.B. DuBois’s essay "The Sorrow Songs" is his eloquent tribute to the songs of the American slaves as rendered by the famed Jubilee Singers. Although he exulted both in their beauty and in their power to establish sympathy between the enslaved and the free, it was their beauty that most impressed him. Indeed he seemed to think that it was the beauty of the Sorrow Songs that gave them the power to establish sympathy between the enslaved and the free. Years later he went further, declaring that "beauty" should be used to "set the world right," and that "all art is propaganda and ever must be." I argue that this view is deeply mistaken and that Frederick Douglass understood the source of the power of the slave songs to establish sympathy between the slave and the free far better than did DuBois. Douglass never described the songs as beautiful. He emphasized instead their apparent incoherence. Yet he insists that no thoughtful person overhearing the slaves singing these songs could fail to be impressed with the soul crushing character of slavery. I try to explain Douglass’s insight and why it went far deeper than DuBois’s proposal to use the beauty of the Sorrow songs for propaganda.