Writing in Paradise

George Handley

Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature

In the 1940s, Derek Walcott was a young teenager on the small and remote island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean Sea, aspiring to be a poet and a painter of the highest caliber. His father, a government employee and an amateur playwright, painter, and poet, had died when he was only a year old, leaving behind unfinished poems and plays, sketches, and a coffee-table book of the great masters of Western art. Haunted by these remains of his father’s artistic ambition and inspired by his mother’s devout Methodism and commitment to the arts, he began an artist’s journey that would culminate in winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Still writing poetry and plays today, and still painting his native island of St. Lucia at the age of 80, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest living poets in the English language.

Visiting BYU in 2000, Walcott gave a reading to an audience of over 600 students. He liked his visit to BYU enough to come again in 2004. This time, an audience of 1,000 of us sat spellbound, listening to his deep, sonorous voice with the Caribbean accent. He read poems about the plight of Caribbean fishermen, the often vulnerable conditions of the Caribbean environment, his love of painting, and his deep devotion to his native island, despite his world travels. If poets are generally good lovers of nature’s beauty, Walcott is the Don Juan. Prone to shake with emotion in the face of the world’s surprising bounty, he opens a listener’s senses to the Caribbean world—the heat of an unforgiving sun, thesight of passing clouds, the sound of beating wings, the rush of wind rattling palm fronds, and the rhythm of the sea.

The dream of sharing with students my love for his poetry and for the culture of the islands of the lower Antilles became a reality this past summer. Professor of art Gary Barton and I proposed a Study Abroad program in St. Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago that would allow students not only to explore the land and seascapes of the Caribbean through Walcott’s poetry and painting, but also to explore and develop their own efforts at watercolor painting. For five graduate students and eleven undergraduates, the program became an unusual combination of literary studies and hands-on creative art that took full advantage of direct experience with the environment and history that have shaped Caribbean culture. We wanted our students to come home more sensitive to the beauty of the world, more vigilant about the threats to that beauty posed by many forces in the modern world, and more aware of the cultures and peoples of the Caribbean. We think our hopeswere realized in this program.

After two weeks of intense reading and watercolor training on campus, the trip began with two weeks onthe island of St. Lucia, where we stayed about a mile from Walcott’s house. We toured botanical gardens and visited ruins. We held class and we listened to and took tours with local guest lecturers on topics from botany to folklore. We read the works of Walcott and others, discussed them, kept journals, wrote papers. We visited local painters and writers and learned of their work. We took several excursions on the island’s windy and rough roads. These were experiences of euphoria and sadness, including many staggering views and challenging hikes, visits to several ruins of old slave plantations, encounters with garbage-infested beaches, and snorkeling at a protected bay with one of the largest and most diverse populations of fish any of us had ever seen. And nearly every day, we headed out in the heat with painting equipment under our arms and sunblock applied. All the while, we did our best to understand the Caribbean environment and its relationship to Caribbean culture—to understand the relationship between the changed environment (the Caribbean has one of the most transformed environments anywhere in the world) and the uprooted peoples of the islands, a major theme in Walcott’s writings.

To read intimate portraits of the landscape, history, and culture of a place so dear to the heart of a great poet and to walk the streets and beaches of these poems with canvasses of our own was an unmatched opportunity to step inside the heart and mind of a great writer and to experience directly the full range of feeling an environment can inspire. But to cap it off, we were able to meet with Derek Walcott several times. We first met him on the beach, and we were greeted with coconut juice, mangos, and fried fish supplied by Walcott himself. We invited him and family members on a boat ride a few days later, where he tested the students’ knowledge of poetry and painting, told jokes, and relaxed to the motion of the waves as we moved south along the coast on our way to see St. Lucia’s famous Piton peaks. And he invited us to his house for a reading. He read poems from his new collection, two of them about President Obama. They weren’t political poems, but instead deeply moving reflections on the distance traversed by a country that once enslaved men like Walcott and Obama. A question and answer session followed, andthen we made a visit to his patio in the backyard facing the ocean. There, he surprised us with a traditional St. Lucian band that played while Walcott occasionally sang along with them or played the drums. He critiqued students’ art and poems in his light and teasing way. He insisted that we stay until sunset, and once it arrived, we understood why. The immense sky burned a yellowish orange and deepened into crimson while the surf relentlessly rolled in, lapping the black stones on the coast before us.

Our trip to St. Lucia was followed by three weeks in Trinidad and Tobago where Walcott had lived for 30 years and which was the setting of one of his books that we studied. Trinidad and Tobago is a country of unusual diversity—about 40 percent of the country’s people are from India and another 40 percent are of African descent, the remaining portion being largely of mixed race. It is a deeply religious country of Christians, Muslims, and Hindus. It is also the heartland of the Caribbean carnival and the birthplace of steel drumming. We took the graduate students to the archives of Walcott’s papers. We traveled to the Caroni swamp where at night thousands of enormous birds—scarlet ibises, blue herons, and white egrets—fly over the waters and settle in the mangrove trees. And we took a midnight excursion to the northeast coast of Trinidad to watch massive sea turtles dig their nests and to witness dozens of tiny hatchlings emerge miraculously from the sand after about two months of gestation, desperately trying to find their way to the ocean.

Students kept journals to record their insights and experiences, and together with a final exam and a portfolio of art they produced by the end of the term, these materials allowed us to assess how much the experience had enhanced their own powers of perception. We were not disappointed with what we saw. One student’s comment summarizes the feelings of many others: “With our study of Derek Walcott, our efforts in painting,and our exploration of the island, I was able to see the integration of the different disciplines so clearly. It was an exciting way to learn. . . . Spiritual impressions and thoughts came fluidly as I spent hours in quiet contemplation. I now know that I want to move a little slower, meditate a little longer, go to bed a little earlier, experience nature a little deeper, and pray a little harder.”

Another student wrote: “The entire experience of being in the very environment described by Walcott’s poetry, and trying to paint the same landscape he paints has been, dare I say, life-changing.”