Theme
The theme for this month is home. Home can mean many things: it might be the place in which you grew up; or a feeling of comfort with family and friends; it might even be a book to which you always return. Whatever form it takes, ‘home’ represents an emotional connection and a sense of identity, of pattern and ritual – there’s a reason they say home is where the heart is. It’s crucial, too, for any business to create a sense of home, to cultivate an environment where people feel comfortable: by doing so people feel free to explore ideas in a place to which they belong.
Who?
To explore this feeling of home, we’re reading some Derek Walcott (1930 – 2017). Born on the island of St. Lucia, Walcott was, he wrote, always with his home at his finger-tips. Originally trained as a painter, his poetry and plays won many awards, including the Nobel Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize. He wrote with great subtlety about his life growing up on a British colony, fearlessly approaching complex issues of identity and, at the same time, acknowledging the joys of his own culture. He would often re-write Homeric myth to describe his relationship to his home, adding a fresh and necessary perspective to the classics of the Western literary canon.
Midsummer, Tobago
Broad sun-stoned beaches.
White heat.
A green river.
A bridge,
scorched yellow palms
from the summer-sleeping house
drowsing through August.
Days I have held,
days I have lost,
days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harbouring arms
What?
Though Walcott is perhaps best-known for his sprawling, St Lucien epics (in particular, an extraordinary poem called Omeros), he also wrote short lyrics of equal sophistication. The poem above is suggestive in its brevity, beginning with a simply wrought but evocatively described scene: ‘Broad sun-stoned beaches.’ Walcott doesn’t elaborate or tell us exactly how such a place makes him feel; but the simplicity tells us all we need to know, and the single line comes to stand for the feeling the poet associates with Tobago.
The poem then unfolds in equally brief couplets – but still implication gathers around their edges. Walcott thinks about ‘A bridge, |scorched yellow palms’, and indeed couplets are good for thinking about how two things might be bridged – how different ideas might be drawn together. And, within that seemingly simple pair of lines, we might also think about how a bridge might be ‘scorched’, as we lose contact with our roots, or else how our home might be co-opted by other, invading forces. This extends, too, to the ‘palms’ which are, at once, the trees that populate the Tobagan landscape and the hands by which we feel, by which we grasp our sense of self: ‘Days I have held, | days I have lost.’ It is both reverent and fearful.
But this is important: the poem itself thinks diversely about how we understand history, both personal and social, and offers a complex perspective on these problems, interrogating its own sense of home. In doing so, we get a nuanced portrait of person’s sense of place in the world.
The Broader Context
There have been – in academic circles but more widely, too – increasing calls for the decolonisation of our literature and art. One consequence of doing so is that we get new perspectives on our histories, voices that have previously been marginalised or silenced. Walcott is a vital figure for encountering other ways of life, and other ways of thinking about what a home might represent. This can only be a good thing: it is by listening to each other that we learn and form bonds, and by making room for all kinds of lives that we find a better sense of place.
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