Bicultural Tension as a Creative Force in Derrek Walcott's Poetry

Abstract

To readWalcott'spoems is to read a poet situated in the in-between location with hybrid prototypes of his own creation in order to evoke discourse on the cultural root and identity. Walcott's poems are the best examples of a hybrid poet's muse on cultural duality and its simultaneous poetic resolution. Walcott puts the anxieties of self-betrayal under erasure so as to seek a space for his bio-culturally split self. By creating the human as spatial equivalent images of his own self, he establishes the relation of interdependence with such images. The in-between images like Caribbean seascape and landscape, twilight and beach provide him important frames of reference to locate his split state of being. There is a correspondence between Walcott's split in-between states of being with the in-between images with which he repeatedly identifies himself. Thus, Walcott's split consciousness has a symbiotic relationship with the images of in-between (spatio-temporal) locations, and such images of the neither the one nor the other positions are the defining metaphors of Walcott's consciousness. This consciousness of Walcott has inculcated a sense of immanent transcendence in his poetry; this is what this research is going to unfold.