“A language of wet stones and mists”: The Caribbean Poet as a Traveller in Wales and England

Abstract

This article examines Derek Walcott’s “travel poems” about Wales and England from the collections The Fortunate Traveller (1981) and Midsummer (1984) through the prism of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of littérature mineure. As a Caribbean poet, Walcott is placed both outside the centre of “majority”, post-imperial civilisation and within the scope of its literary and linguistic heritage, which he has deterritorialised in his long endeavour to articulate a specifically Caribbean poetics. However, Walcott brings about the decentralisation, or “minorisation”, of English not by means of the oppositional poetics characteristic of avowedly revolutionary poetry (through disruptive linguistic practices or the exclusive use of Creole), but rather through immersion in the English literary tradition and a keen interest in contemporary “provincial” Anglophone poetic production. His tentative gestures of identification, accompanied by contrary motions of distancing and critical self-awareness, complicate and deepen his troubled encounter with Europe. In their engagement with the Welsh and English “Elsewhere” these poems ultimately participate in transvaluation of the relationship between centre and periphery, a dynamics that marked the most significant Anglophone literary currents in the second part of the twentieth century.