18 pages • 36 minutes read
The Almond Trees
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Background
Historical Context
The entire body of Derek Walcott’s poetry explores the implications of Caribbean identity in the postcolonial world. The history of the West Indies is complicated because for more than five centuries European entrepreneurs, industrialists, and venture capitalists settled into the Caribbean and, without regard to the impact, imposed European traditions, cultures, and religion on the indigenous people. In addition, these same predatory, mercenary forces ruthlessly exploited and plundered the region’s natural resources, largely by degrading the indigenous people into de facto slaves while also importing Africans through the transatlantic slave routes to do difficult and dangerous work on the plantations and in the mines.
“The Almond Trees,” however, offers a big-picture meditation on how the post-colonial Caribbean might handle that troubling history. By the time of Walcott’s emergence as the voice of Caribbean culture, the European occupation in the Caribbean was mostly symbolic, as West Indian nations, including Saint Lucia, began individually accepting independence from the British Commonwealth during the 1960s and 1970s. Walcott’s poetry suggests that despite the end of the empire, the Caribbean people still needed to process the impact of centuries of violent occupation and the displacement of entire indigenous communities from their own culture. History—as well as his own peripatetic life—showed Walcott that anger and resentment and bitterness were crucial to avoid. Forgiveness was out of the question. Ignorance was anything but bliss. Only an informed and balanced perception of the dynamic of Caribbean identity might reveal to the region a way forward.
Literary Context
Walcott, a career academic and respected essayist, enthusiastically acknowledged the poets whose work informed his own. Despite—or perhaps because of—his interest in the Caribbean world where he grew up, Walcott found most influential the works of poets whose careers, like his, reflected split cultural identities, lives spent negotiating between and among cultures, expatriates and those displaced for political reasons whose work reflected the dynamic between writers and their cultural identity. Whatever the subjects, these poets, displaced from their home, grappled with the implications of what the term “home” means in the first place.
British-born W. H. Auden, Irish-born Seamus Heaney, Russian-born Joseph Brodsky all emigrated to the United States, each for different reasons, most often seeking creative freedom or fleeing political oppression, and often, as with Walcott, to accept teaching positions. Walcott maintained close relationships with both Heaney and Brodsky. Like each of those iconic poets, Walcott, although living for decades in America, never abandoned his sense of home.
Indeed, as with the work of those other poets, “The Almond Trees,” with its theme of embracing a generous multiculturalism and the value of diversity, reflects the radical American theme of embracing different cultures as central to any national identity. By rejecting the use of Caribbean prosody and dialect in approaching the question of his cultural identity, much like Auden, Heaney, and Brodsky, through the formal structures and prosody of European Modernist poetry, Walcott’s poetry embodies his sense of a cooperative hybrid cultural identity.
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By Derek Walcott
