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Article Excerpt
There are occasions when blasphemy must be seen as one privilege of
the excluded Caliban. (Lamming 1984, 9)
Rarely does a critic of Derek Walcott's poetry fail to mention his excellent command of the English language. John Figueroa, for example, describes Walcott as an "aficionado of English English," (1993, 158) and Seamus Heaney, Walcott's close friend, and fellow poet, remarks upon the "sumptuous authority" of Walcott's use of language (1993, 304). Many commentators, pointing to the facility with which Walcott invokes West Indian dialects and vocabularies, also commend Walcott's adept incorporation of Creole into his poetry. As John Thieme affirms, Walcott "moves easily across illusory linguistic, literary, and social fault-lines" with his use of both Standard English and Creole (1995, 165). Walcott consequently develops "a complex pluralistic aesthetic that spans the Caribbean linguistic continuum and its social and cultural correlatives" (167). While the critical attention to Walcott's considerable verbal skills is no doubt apposite, such an emphasis on eloquence or verbal virtuosity can obscure those moments when Walcott purposely adopts language that is coarser to the ears. Indeed, by focusing their praise either on eloquently phrased Standard English or the verbal nuances and inventiveness of Caribbean vernacular, critics have tended to overlook swearing and obscenity as integral aspects of Walcott's poetry. Though the impulse may be to dismiss the profanity as an aberration of poetic language, these obscenities should not be taken as anomalies. On the contrary, Walcott's use of profane language indicates a negative and ironic poetics at work. By integrating profanity into his poetry, Walcott explores how coarse language can counteract the staidness of "refined" poetic diction, and he also demonstrates how obscenity can inform an innovative poetics that redefines epic poetry and the epic hero through parody and irony. The recognition of Walcott's use of swearing and curse words in order to parody the epic tradition, moreover, elucidates his understanding of the complexities of Caribbean history, as he refutes those--in particular V.S. Naipaul--who would view Caribbean history as non-existent (Naipaul 1962, 29).
Paula Burnett has suggested that Walcott "is generally not interested in using language to curse," asserting that Walcott is not inclined towards malediction when critiquing colonial history in the Caribbean (2000, 128). Nevertheless, Burnett does compare Walcott to Shakespeare's Caliban, in that both Walcott and Caliban artfully utilize cursing to contest inequities of power and identifies in each an impulse characteristic of the Caribbean cultural tradition of picong: "Like Caliban, Walcott has a double project, to create a counterdiscourse and to initiate new expression--utterance, in Caliban's terms, polarized between curse and song, or between Caribbean 'picong' and praise-song" (128). As Burnett explains further, "'picong' [piquant, sharp, hot] ... is the Trinidadian term for the language of abuse elevated to an art form" (140). That cursing could be considered an art presumably depends on the level of irony and nuance at play within the verbal exchange, and such a predilection for irony is prevalent throughout many Caribbean cultural practices, including, as Burnett notes, calypso and carinvalesque "robber talk." Jahan Ramanzani also argues that irony is a fundamental cultural form or practice historically found in the Caribbean.
Although irony may seem to be a Western formalist concept, one of the world's most vibrant figures for the ironist is the folk hero Anancy-- the mystical spider who gives his name to animal tales and even to West Indian storytelling in general. Derived from a West African prototype, he is arguably the Afro-Caribbean counterpart to the Greek eiron.... (Ramanzani 2001, 106-07)
As a trickster figure, Anancy stands furthermore as a surrogate for the poet, since his tricks tend to involve using language as a vehicle. "In his clever ruses, Anancy ironically manipulates language, saying one thing while slyly meaning another, using periphrasis to prompt another animal to say a dangerous word, or deliberately distorting norms of pronunciation" (Ramazani 2001, 108). Both Burnett's identification of picong and Ramazani's delineation of the importance of irony to Caribbean culture serve as a call to assess the significance of profanity in Walcott's poetry.
Walcott, I would argue, endows the swearing and curse words within his poetry with such irony and linguistic innovation that he raises the vituperations and profanities to the level of art. Indeed, one ought to take Walcott's use of obscenity as another dimension of his linguistic skill, a facet as proficient as his employment of Creole or as exemplary as his commitment to Standard English. In an interview with Edward Hirsch, Walcott discusses a poetics to cursing:
People swear very simply here in New York; they are in a hurry and they just use a short, casual expletive. But in other places, the pastoral or semi-developed situations, the backyard and the street where people are alive and in contact with each other, the care required to curse a man thoroughly is a poetic form of expression. (Hirsch 1979, 286)
In recognizing the care necessitated by legitimate, "proper" swearing, Walcott elides the differences between the poetic act and the utterance of profanity. Walcott's description of the cultural differences in swearing between New York and the Caribbean also indicates a range in the purposes and seriousness of swearing. Such seriousness intimates that expletives have as their origin a curse, a malediction intended to cause harm and recalls Caliban's statements about his newfound ability to curse. For the purposes of my argument about Walcott's use of obscenity in his poetry, I am extrapolating from Caliban's meaning of the word curse--as a hex or malediction--to include instances of profanity as well. Geoffrey Hughes has succinctly described such an arc in the evolution of swearing, from utterances made in God's name to baser forms of profanity: "The crude history of swearing, however named ... is that people used mainly to swear by or to, but now swear mostly at" (1991, 4).
Walcott's poetics of profanity and cursing is equally varied and frequently undergoes metamorphoses. To elucidate the various attributes and purposes of Walcott's use of swearing, I will begin this essay by examining the poetic dimensions of the profane utterances made by the downtrodden sailor, Shabine in "The Schooner Flight." One may be inclined to ascribe the swearing in "The Schooner Flight" merely to the development of a seagoing character for whom cursing is the norm, yet I intend to demonstrate that swearing is also integral to Walcott's parodic revision of the epic genre in both "The Schooner Flight" and Omeros. In "The Schooner Flight," Walcott ironically revises the use of epic epithets and apostrophizes history only to dress it down with contumelies in the tradition of picong. Such a treatment of history informs and prefigures Walcott's metafictional and skeptical engagement with history in Omeros and his contentious relationship to Naipaul. Walcott's ultimate modification of swearing, though, returns in "The Arkansas Testament" to the origins of obscenity as a form of swearing an oath: Walcott's swears to the power of art and redefines the epic hero's struggle as that of the artist, who must come to grips with writing the colonial and postcolonial history of the Caribbean justly.
Kate Brown and Howard Kushner argue in "Eruptive voices: Coporalia, Malediction and the Poetics of Cursing" that swearing necessarily functions in relation to a dominant discursive framework. "Cursing always reflects the success of cultural discipline, but it does so only in the breach; cursing is at once conventional and an eruption of and within convention. Cursing must therefore be thought of in terms of interruption and negation" (2001, 539). Such a mode of breaching the conventions of a dominant cultural discourse describes Caliban's linguistic situation, as Caliban's cursing entails an inherent act of negation. Subsequent to Caliban's famous lament in The Tempest about being taught his captors' language, he makes a vainglorious claim about improving upon that newfound knowledge: "You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse" (Tempest 1.2.364-65). Caliban's boastful words aim to negate Prospero's instruction and are followed by a curse itself: "The red plague rid you / For learning me your language" (Tempest 1.2.365-66). Caliban's "improvement" is a vileness of speech that seems entirely appropriate to his aggrieved condition and situation. As Alden and Virginia Vaughan suggest in Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History: "Prospero's legacy to Caliban is not a glorious new way...
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