Exile, loss, and alienation in Walcotts The Schooner Flight - Essay Example

? Exile, loss, and alienation in Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight” 7 December This paper analyzes Derek Walcott’s narrative poem, “The Schooner Flight.” The speaker is a mariner mulatto, Shabine, who speaks as a poet and a “red nigger.” His diction, syntax, and choice of words manifest both his education as a colonized object and a subject-poet; he is freer as a poet and a mariner and more limited as a colonized object. The voice is conversational and narrative, at times detached, at times emotional, but always introspective. The poem also used sound and rhythm to reflect the sounds of the Caribbean’s ocean and the texture of their conflicted lives. The paper employs an eco-critical perspective and argues that the environment, both the nation and the sea, are depicted in different images, the nation both home and alien, while the sea, also uncertain, but lovelier because it allows flight and introspection. The paper argues that the writing poems and exploring the sea are similar to the process of exploring one’s individual and national identity that cannot be easily attained because of the Caribbean’s history of colonization and slavery that leads to themes of exile, loss, and alienation. Shabine experiences loss of identity because of being exiled and alienated in a nation where he is not considered white or black. Though he had personal conflicts with his division over his wife (and their children) and Maria Conception, the poem also touches on socio-economic and political issues of slavery and lack of freedoms and rights in the Carribean. Clearly, Shabine is a divided individual, as divided as the structure of his poem that has enjambed lines and caesuras, but as a poet and a mariner, he left a positive image of being one with his true identity. Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight,” published in1986 as part of the Collected Poems 1948-1984, depicts a schooner’s life, its making and his becoming. The speaker is a mariner mulatto, Shabine, who speaks as a poet and a “red nigger.” His diction and choice of words manifest both his education as a colonized object and a subject-poet. The iambic pentameter maximizes inner rhymes that express his frustrations and ideals as a mulatto and a poet. The paper uses eco-critical perspective and argues that the environment, both the nation and the sea, are depicted in different images, the nation both home and alien, while the sea, also uncertain, but lovelier because it allows flight and introspection. The narrative poem compares writing poems and exploring the sea as the convoluted process of exploring one’s individual and national identity that cannot be easily attained because of the Caribbean’s history of colonization and slavery that leads to themes of exile, loss, and alienation. Walcott used a mixture of English and Caribbean language and the diction of a seaman to portray his cross-cultural identity from a colonized viewpoint that can help explain his nomadic tendencies. He selected words that showed different factors that shaped and controlled his identity. Carenage is located in Saint Barthelemy in the Caribbean. He is an islander, but he wants to be more of a mariner, which is asserted when the title of the first stanza is “Adios, Carenage” (Walcott). By saying these words immediately, Shabine expresses his original intention, to leave the island that is both alien and home to him. Shabine also used the word “bohbohl,” when he said: “But they had started to poison my soul/with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,” (Walcott, 1.30-31). “Bohbohl” means corruption that people in the government or anyone in power is involved with. It is a local word that describes local political issues. Shabine is tired of his nation’s corruption that he has been part of too. In addition, Meerzon (2012) argued that “The Schooner Flight” uses Shabine as a conduit for Walcott’s political and artistic ideas (p.76). Shabine expressed his racial and ethnic identity directly when he said: “I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,/I had a sound colonial education,/I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,/and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation” (Walcott, 1.40-43). He is a “red nigger” who comes from a line of slaves and the colonized, and he is saying that he is a “nobody” because colonization means someone always claims and owns the Caribbean through owning the nation’s properties and natural resources and the education system, but he can also be a nation, since this is his home. Thus, using different words exemplify multicultural divisions and tensions within him that is present also in his country. Apart from the use of words and diction to assert the speaker’s identity, the structure of the poem indicates the story he wants to tell about his identity and the identity of his people. The poem is a narrative epic with eleven titles. The poem is divided into these chapters, as if it is a novel, because every chapter has something to say about his identity, the society that formed it, and his reactions to these social forces, which is mostly about flight or running away from them all. The poem begins with “1 Adios, Carenage,” which is media res, where he bids goodbye to his islander life, particularly noting that he is leaving his loved ones, which is followed by “2 Raptures of the Deep,” which explains why he is in the Flight. These chapters are organized by each important event during the journey of the Flight, but filled with “memories or visions of the past” (Fuller, 1995, p.323). Each chapter develops the themes of exploration, colonization, exile, separation, and loss by focusing on each or several themes either directly or indirectly through the structure and different elements of the poem. Baugh (1997) asserted that the passing through the islands enabled Shabine to narrate the historical conditions of his people. Baugh (1997) noted how Shabine described “West Indian history” with the horrors of slavery in the Middle Passage (p.312). There are several turning points in the poem that are characterized by important characterizations of Shabine’s political and artistic beliefs. One of the turning points is in the second chapter, where Shabine asks: “Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor?” (Walcott, 2.71). The question is one that is looking for a nation, a homeland, because in his nation, he is an exile as a mulatto, which means he has no harbor. This chapter is followed by chapter 3, “Shadine Leaves the Republic.” By leaving, it suggests that the colonized is lost in their own lands because by owning nothing, they have no nation at all. The structure of the poem is important to the narration of self and national exploration and introspection of the speaker. Apart from the structure, the poem uses sound and rhythm to reflect the sounds of the Caribbean’s ocean and the texture of their conflicted lives. The speaker uses alliteration that says something about him and his homeland. He said: “In idle August, while the sea soft” (Walcott, 1.1). August is “idle” for him with nothing to do, but the “sea” is “soft,” as if waiting to be caressed. The alliteration of the “sea” and “soft” binds them into a beautiful image, the image of what a sea must be for a mariner like Shabine. Consonance and assonance followed: “and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim” (Walcott, 1.2). Consonance is found in “leaves” and “islands” with the sound of “s,” while assonance is “i” in “rim” and “stick.” The impact is the feeling that in the island, it feels like one is stuck in the rim or the margins of existence. The consonance contrasts with the “soft” “sea” that flows against them all. Another form of assonance followed, where Shabine blew the light “by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion” (Walcott, 1.4). The sound of “s” is in “dreamless face” and “Maria Concepcion,” which is also in the “soft sea.” It is clear that Shabine loves Maria as much as he loves the sea. The sound of “s” is in assonance again. Shabine said: “I know these islands from Monos to Nassau” (Walcott, 1.35). The sound of “s” is onomatopoeia for the sound of sea crashing into these islands, which suggests love and bitterness for his homeland. Despite the need for flight, Shabine also loves his homeland, but is more troubled in it. The meter of the poem is iambic pentameter, which is used in traditional verse. An example is in these lines: “that they nickname Shabine, the patois for/any red nigger…” (Walcott, 1.37-38). In this meter, enjambment and caesura explore the split in colonized identities. Phillips (2010) called “they” an “introduction/intrusion” that came before “Shabine” (p.116). “Shabine” stands for the caesura that splits the rhythmic unit, and then followed by the enjambment. Phillips (2010) described the prepositional enjambment “for” as a weak preposition that followed the cleft with the pentameter “any red nigger” (p.116). This can be connected to “I know” (Walcott, 1.35) that is precedent to it, which means that the subject has become an object that is more dismissive (Phillips, 2010, p.116). “Any red nigger” ends as caesura, which creates a semantic unit split, as it is followed with: “and I, Shabine, saw/when these slums of empire was paradise” (Walcott, 1.38-39). The enjambment of “saw” complicates the meaning of the passage, for again, the poet is a subject who has full knowledge and awareness. Describing the “slums of “empire” as “paradise” further indicate the birth of Shabine as the poet, the subject (Phillips, 2010, p.116). Writing poetry has opened his spirit to new ways of seeing the world, where even the slums can be beautiful too because it is his homeland. As for the rhythm, there are lines with ending rhymes. For instance, “light” (Walcott, 1.3) rhymes with “flight” (Walcott, 1.5). The rhyme complements the meaning of flight for Shabine where he hopes it can give light to his need to know himself. “Yard” (Walcott, 1.11) and “hard” (Walcott, 1.13) also rhyme, reinforcing that in land, Shabine finds it hard to know himself and to be content with his happiness. “Said” (Walcott, 1.12) and “dead” (Walcott, 1.14) also rhyme. They signify the voicelessness of the colonized, where to express their grief can result to death. Though mimicking traditional English verse, Shabine owns his meter through his inner rhymes that explore the themes of loss and alienation because of colonization. The use of inner rhymes is prevalent in the poem to describe the inner troubles of the speaker. The speaker knew the problems of being a nobody as a mulatto. He said: “I no longer believed in the revolution./I was losing faith in the love of my woman” (Walcott, 3.20-21). The inner rhyme is the alliteration of “longer,” “losing,” and “love.” They are all emotional concepts that are getting vague for Shabine. The parallelism in having no more faith in the revolution and love suggests a fractured identity. The syntax and arrangement of the words in the poem are analyzed next, where complex sentences have meaningful repetitions and oppositions that provide ambiguity or double meanings to the speaker’s quest for identity. Repetition is used to explore double meanings and oppositions. The speaker described his home that he was leaving behind: “From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road/to when I was a dog on these streets” (Walcott, 1.26-27). He compared himself to a dog because like a dog, he is a slave to his colonizer. The effect is also parallelism in structure that shows parallels in real life. Like a dog, Shabine is homeless without his master. In addition, by using the word “rotting,” Shabine felt himself rotting from within as a dog, the colonized object. Another repetition is the use of “the dead.” The speaker described his salvage diving: “I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans,/dead-men’s-fingers, and then, the dead men” (Walcott, 2.42-43). The wealth of the sea mixed with the nothingness of the “dead men.” The repetition of the “dead men” highlighted the grief of finding people who like him, might not have experienced a more meaningful existence. Anaphora further reinforces the conflicts inside the speaker. Shabine imagined himself crying under the sea for his dilemmas: “When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife,/when I saw my worries with that other woman,/I wept under water, salt seeking salt” (Walcott, 2.49-50). Repeating “when” asserts time, the past that he could no longer fix, but he could just store as memories, though these are painful memories. The alliteration of “woe,” “wife,” “worries,” and “woman” show his opposing feelings of love and misery from his relationships. The further alliteration of “water” with these other “w” words indicate some form of redemption in his flight in the sea, as if the saltiness of the ocean can reduce the saltiness of his life. To analyze textual content, the specific dramatic context is the poet finding redemption through his poetry while the general dramatic context is the grief of his colonization. These contexts modify the meaning of the passage because they can also affect how personalities are interpreted. The specific dramatic context concerns Shabine as a poet and a nomad. In Chapter 3, the speaker directed attention to his poetic nature: “I had no nation now but the imagination” (Walcott, 3.1). As a poet, his imagination replaces what the colonizers have taken away from him and his people. Wilson-Tagoe (1998) asserted that the passage depicts the journey toward a better understanding of the “self.” She stressed that the “poetic imagination” is driven to “land, people, and language,” and to show that poetry is a “personal odyssey of a distanced, introspective poet,” whose personal history intersects the “corruption, contradictions, and paradoxes of the Carribean itself” (p.160). Wilson-Tagoe (1998) is saying that Shabine is finding himself through his poetry that his colonized status denies him. As for the general dramatic context, for instance, in the context of colonization, Maria Concepcion can be the hidden passionate indigenous identity, while the wife and children are the colonial structures that are part of one’s identity too. Shabine was thinking about his love for Maria and family, when he used personification for his passionate yearning for Maria: “for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword/cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh!” (Walcott 2.51-52). Beauty might be physical, but in this passage, it seemed inward, as it fell like a sword that sliced Shabine from within, and took him away from his children. It is not easy to be cleaved from one’s own flesh, but it is possible to interpret that Maria is inside Shabine too, his inner self that could not be properly expressed in a colonial world. The stress on “flesh” could be an inversion of meaning, where the real flesh is not with one’s existing colonial cultural values and beliefs, but in the inner indigenous norms that must be fought for by a sword. They clash because they are the contradictions between the hidden and the visible, and the acceptable and the unacceptable in colonial language and norms. The textual context can change and expand the analysis to different aspects of being and nationhood. The narrative voice comes from Shabine, someone who straddles the status of the colonized and the liberator and has a partially detached, partially emotional conversational voice because of exiled status. The speaker knows his multicultural identity and how it makes him a nobody. He depicted his ethnicity and race in a divided manner: “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,/and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation” (Walcott, 1.42-43). He started with the word “nobody” than a “nation,” an arrangement of word that shows his disbelief in the idea of the Caribbean as being a nation. The speaker’s tone is also detached, such as when he mentions “red nigger” as if it as casual, when it also speaks of his racialized colonized social class. He is also be detached because of his experience as a biracial. In Chapter 3, the speaker leaves the Republic that does not claim him as a citizen: “The first chain my hands and apologize, “History”;/the next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride” (Walcott, 3.4-5). Hamner (1997) asserted that as a “red nigger,” social alienation becomes more pronounced for Shabine because he is too blacks for the whites to accept him, but too white for the nationalist blacks to embrace him too (p.24). He is in a state of perpetual exile in a nation that is not a true home to mulattos like him. But Shabine can also be sentimental. When he remembered Maria, his poetic nature emerged: “I couldn’t shake the sea noise out of my head,/the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion” ” (Walcott, 2.36-37). He is saying that his memories of Maria are like having a shell on his ears. The sea noise is her, his memories with her. Something deeply emotional within him stirs his passions too. Imagery helps connect to the tensions in the self and the nation. The speaker remembered images of corruption in his nation. He said: “You saw them ministers in The Express,/ guardians of the poor—one hand at their back,/and one set o’ police only guarding their house,/and the Scotch pouring in through the back door” (Walcott, 2.20-23). The irony is that people from the church steal from the poor and yet feed on and to the colonial mechanisms, such as the police. The poor are around them, and yet they have “Scotch pouring,” which shows their luxurious life. The image represents the vexing contradiction between the church’s teachings and their own actions. For Shabine, the image is a narration of the Caribbean history- a history of contradictions and corruption. The poem uses diverse elements of literature to explore the complexities of finding and establishing one’s identity. Shabine finds liberation from his poetry and sea flight, but he cannot escape his past and memories. The past and memories shape his identity too, in ways that he cannot stop or control. The flight goes on within Shabine. As a red nigger, he must go on writing, go on digging for himself inside himself. The depths of the ocean are the depths of his mind. He is in it so that he can get out it too. References Baugh, E. (1997). The poet's fiction of self: “The Schooner Flight.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 96, 311-320. Retrieved from Humanities Source. Fuller, M.C. (1995). Myths of identity in Derek Walcott's “The Schooner Flight.” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate, 5(2-3), 322-338. Retrieved from MLA International Bibliography. Hamner, R.D. (1997). Epic of the dispossessed: Derek Walcott's Omeros. Missouri: University of Missouri Press. Meerzon, Y. (2012). Performing exile, performing self: Drama, theatre, film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Phillips, R.R. (2010). When blackness rhymes with blackness. Illinois: Illinois Arts Council. Walcott, Derek. “The Schooner Flight.” 1986. Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177932 Wilson-Tagoe, N. (1998). Historical thought and literary representation in West Indian literature. Florida: University Press of Florida. Read More