Derek Walcott, a Nobel Prize-winning poet and a West Indian, writes poems that reflect a split between his two ancestries, European and African. In his poetry, he searches for the meanings of the West Indian essence. “The Almond Trees,” written in 1965 when Walcott was in his mid-thirties, is no exception. And yet this poem is not only about a split, or schizophrenia. It is about something more powerful, more empowering that helps better define the West Indian identity.
The tropical climate of the West Indies is stretched to an extremity in Derek Walcott’s “The Almond Trees” by a motif of intense fire, of hellish scorching, of a white-hot furnace, as the “acetylene air” (Walcott 23) singes, parches, and more importantly, “welds” (“acetylene,” OED) together everything it engulfs. As the poem progresses through different times of the day from early morning to afternoon, the heat only becomes fiercer, melting and welding everything in its way. This welding motif, contrasted with the “cold” (Walcott 3) nothingness at the beginning of the poem, presents Walcott’s attempt to not only acknowledge the colonial past, but also to weld the past and the present, the historical and the modern, the European and African together, all poured into one “mongrel” (Walcott 11), fiery furnace that, along with Walcott’s language, tries to define and heighten the creativity the West Indian culture possesses.
“By noon” (Walcott 15), when the heat is at its zenith, is when Walcott’s juxtaposition of past and present, as well as the Greco-Roman and the African, reaches its melting point. The West Indian shore is addressed as “this further shore of Africa” (Walcott 16), calling back to its African ancestry. And yet the fact that it is only a “further” shore hints at the hybridity of the West Indian identity – an echo, an inheritance that both asserts its link to its origin and calls into question its historical allegiance.
On these partly inherited, partly disinherited shores, the bikini is awakened to its ancient origin in the Roman culture, the overarching paternal power of which remains the foundation of even today’s Western society. It is, however, problematic that the girls who wear the “Pompeian bikinis” (Walcott 18) are named “brown daphnes” (Walcott 19) – brown, not because of sun tan, but most probably because of their mixed ancestry of both “black skins and blue eyes” (Walcott 9); “daphnes” (plural, uncapitalized), because there is always more than one victim to Apollo’s pursuit (a metaphor for the European attempt to control the West Indies and many other territories), their names and characters irrelevant and irretrievable, like the dropped capital in the name daphne itself. The “brown daphnes” is neither a mere emblem of similarities, nor a simplistic marker of difference from the Greco-Roman white Daphne image, but the coexistence of both, an attempt to weld two histories together to create a new myth.
The image of a daphne who is not white as the moon under which she transforms into a laurel tree, is disconcerting, in that it is counter-establishment, counter-canon, a heterogeneous identity that resists one single interpretation in the dominant white aesthetic. It is also both visually and aurally provoking: the “pale skin” was seared “copper” (Walcott 27) by the furnace, reminiscent of the doubly valent “foundered, peeling barge” (Walcott 26) that could be both the rusted, wrecked vessels and the brown, aged limbs of sea-almond trees (“barge,” OED) – in fact, the trees were once made into canoes in the West Indies, as in Omeros. By transforming the trunks of brown girls on the beach into those of sea-almond trees, and then into wrecked vessels, Walcott draws together the West Indian essence and the Greco-Roman myths of metamorphoses, two traditions that seem mutually exclusive.
In another cross-cultural transformation, the Daphnean laurel of Ovid becomes the double of sea-almonds in Walcott. On the one hand, “Daphne” pertains to “virgin timidity and shyness” (“Daphne,” OED), on the other hand, sea-almonds, like the brown girls in bikinis, are described by Walcott as “brazen” (29) – a polyvalent reference to both their color, and curiously, their shamelessness (“brazen,” OED).
Such shamelessness, not a careless abandon that will result in eventual degradation, is discussed by Walcott himself in an interview with Edward Hirsch in 1985 and recorded in The Art of Poetry XXXVII:
If we admit that from the beginning that there is no shame in that historical bastardy, then we can be men. But if we continue to sulk away and say, “Look at what the slave-owner did,” and so forth, we will never mature… [Y]ou accept it as much as anybody accepts a wound as being part of his body. (Hirsch 114)
This shamelessness is a rejection of shame in having a mongrel identity, in being a mulatto of cultures. Rather than “lov[ing] those trees with an inferior love” because of their colonial name as in “The Schooner Flight”, here Walcott calls for maturity in accepting old wounds and multiple heritages of history as part of the joint West Indian identity. Such growth is epitomized in the sea-almond trees, for “[t]hey’re cured, / they endured their furnace” (Walcott 31-2), their past and present a welded, blended whole without the sense of shame in any part of it. It is even possible to trace a hint of glorious resurrection from the fire imagery: from the “white-hot ash” (Walcott 28) the aged bodies of trees shine – a latent image of the Phoenix’s rebirth from ash. Here, the rare full-rhyming couplet of “fire-dried” (Walcott 38) and “nourished where their branches died” (Walcott 39) constructs the rebirth scene of the moulted sea-almonds as a metaphor for human generations, one growing upon another, nourished by history instead of being stunted by its pain. With the images of furnace, fire, and rebirth in mind, Walcott delineates the pride in owning a hybrid identity, “historical bastardy”, and multiple voices.
The West Indian voice and Walcott’s poetic language, like historical identities, are also hybrid. Aurally, the language of the West Indies is Creole, a “coarse” “dialect” (Walcott 40) that is the exact opposite of the shrill “cries” (Walcott 43) of Ovid’s Daphne, the hamadryad; a mongrel language that arose exactly from West Indies’ mixed identities; a language that people of different historical positions “shared together” (Walcott 42) – a melded whole. It is, however, highly restricted, not only in volume, but in grammar, vocabulary, and the force of expression: it is a muffled, coarse sound that “howls seaward through charred, ravaged holes” (Walcott 47). It is a language so full of complexity and echoes that only the vast churning sea could receive and endure; a voice burnt (“charred”) and scarred (“ravaged”) – in a sense, broken.
Similarly, Walcott’s poetic language also appears broken and torn, taking on an almost montage-like jagged form. However, behind the disorderly façade, the poem keeps a fine balance between consistency and irregularity, symbolizing Walcott’s attempt to weld the rigorous European literary tradition together with the idiosyncrasies of the West Indian creole language. The poem appears disorderly because its aural consonance – a combination of half rhymes and full rhymes – remains hidden, almost drowned out by the clatter of the ocean waves, as if the poet deliberately buries them. For example, on the “cold sand” (Walcott 3) is this “stand” (Walcott 6) of old sea-almond trees, something solid and steady planted on the bare, shifting ground – a strong contrast that sets a firm tone for the poem at the very beginning, but only subliminally, because of the distance between the two rhyming words. But rhyming pairs appear less scattered gradually, and eventually reach the zenith where the whole eighth stanza is composed of full-rhyming couplets such as “flame” and “name,” “lashed” and “washed,” “fire-dried” and “died” – yet all the while the uneven form remains. Reaching the end of the poem, Walcott is able to keep a balance between the rhyming structure and idiosyncratic irregularities (unusual enjambment, unfixed beats and lengths of lines, et cetera). It is expressiveness and inexpressiveness combined, and two traditions merged – one of the white Anglo-Saxon tradition of literary craft, the other of the West Indian creole expression.
The internal connections between words in the poem also contribute to such a blending motif, as the “r” sounds in “churning” (Walcott 4), “mongrel,” “growling,” “whirling” (11), and “writhing” (25) run throughout the poem, lingering with a circular movement (both visual and aural) that mimics the melting process of the furnace, the cyclical metamorphosis, and the ceaseless ebb-and-flow of the Caribbean sea.
Walcott sometimes describes himself as a split, schizophrenic Caribbean poet; yet his split is also a means to creative fusion. In “The Almond Trees,” the motif of welding is reinforced by the images of acetylene air, heated furnace, and intense fire. Walcott uses such images to embrace the mixed identity of the West Indies, as well as the creole language. In merging diverse histories, mongrel origins, and multiple voices, Walcott empowers the West Indies with its diversity, instead of piling shame on it. Eventually, with welding comes transformation, the metamorphosis of the West Indian culture into a thicker, stronger mixture.
Works Cited
“acetylene, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 11 September 2016.
“barge, n.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 11 September 2016.
“brazen, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 11 September 2016.
“Daphne, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 11 September 2016.
Hirsch, Edward. “The Art of Poetry XXXVII: Derek Walcott.” Conversations with Derek Walcott, edited by
William Baer, University Press of Mississippi, 1996, 95–121.
Baugh, Edward, editor. Selected Poems: Derek Walcott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Walcott, Derek. “What the Twilight Says.” What the Twilight Says: Essays / Derek Walcott, Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux, 1998, 3–35.