The Pain of History
Stephen Brook, 19 February 1981
Derek Walcott is now 50 years old, but there is none of the placidity or mellowing of middle age in The Star-Apple Kingdom. If Naipaul is the great novelist of the colonial experience, Walcott has a claim to be considered the great poet of the same experience. They share an acute sense of belonging to more than one culture and hence to none. The reference in the title poem to the Caribbean’s ‘history-orphaned islands’ is a motto for many other poems in Walcott’s new collection. The book opens with the long dialect poem ‘The Schooner Flight’. The narrator, Shabine, is a Trinidadian ‘red nigger’ sailor-poet who is fiercely conscious of his place, or absence, in history:
