The muse of history derek walcott pdf

Who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or for revenge? The pulse of New World history is the racing pulse beat of fear, the tiring cycles of stupidity and greed. In time the slave surrendered to amnesia. That amnesia is the true history of the New World. That is our inheritance, but to try and understand why this happened, to condemn or justify is also the method of history, and these explanations are always the same: This happened because of that, this was understandable because, and in days men were such.

These recriminations exchanged, the contrition of the master replaces the vengeance of the slave. We are misled by new prophets of bitterness who warn us against experiences which we have never cared to have, but the mass of society has had neither the interest nor the opportunity which they chose. These preach not to the converted but to those who have never lost faith.

I do not mean religious faith but reality. Fisherman and peasant know who they are and what they are and where they are, and when we show them our wounded sensibilities we are, most of us, displaying self-inflicted wounds. Walcott is among many other artists who feel the need to take these fragments and fuse them in order for an Antillean voice to emerge.

Bobb, quotes Brathwaite: Slowly, ever so slowly…. I was coming to an awareness…of cultural wholeness, of the place of the individual within. Get Access. Read More. Creole Hybridity in Literature Words 2 Pages class of the country. Colonialism, in its most lasting capacity, produces an attitude to and system of knowledge that has not yet been able to deal with this artificial break in historical time.

Nehru in The Discovery of India sounds closest to this assimilationist project, for he neither accepts nor debunks the past. It believes that communism necessarily implies a contempt for the past. Progress is to be measured by its evaluative aspect. The responsibility expected of modern minds is to think the present by retrieving all that is valuable from the past. Idle fancies, for there is no going back to the past; there is no turning back even if this was thought desirable.

There is only one-way traffic in Time. In terms of values, Nehru was clear what those benefits were, and what India must aspire to: scientific temperament in thought, equality in social relations and industrialisation for economic growth. The Marxist thinker, Walter Benjamin, critiqued this idea. For Benjamin, any theory of humanity as a whole is untenable. The concrete social reality of so-called humanity lies in its class contradictions. Taking recourse to theological imagery, Benjamin rather poetically advances the thought that real, or genuine progress is a rupture in the homogenous and empty time of capitalism, where the most neglected and victimised dead in history find voice.

This idea is deeply attached to how Benjamin envisages historical past. If the dead victims of history have to come alive, the past needs to be imagined and resurrected.

Such an event alone will ensure a rupture in historical time and open up possibilities of a genuine future.

Taking the example of Jews, Benjamin says the future in fact has always been forbidden territory and we need to seize it. Walcott in his essay treats memory, the entity that provides our psychological link with the past, as the central problem in the modern reconstruction of history, both by victors and victims.

In The Discovery of India , Nehru forwards the idea of collective remembering. Credit: Photo Division. In Perse there is the greatest width of elemental praise of winds, seas, rains. The revo- lutionary or eyelic vision is as deeply rooted as the patti cian syntax. What Perse glorifies is not veneration but the Perennial freedom; his hero remains the wanderer, the man who moves through the ruins of great civilizations with all his worldly goods by caravan or pack mule, the poet carrying entire cultures in his head, bitter pethaps, but unencumbered.

His are poems of massive or solitary migrations through the elements. They are the same in spirit as the poems of Whitman or Neruda, for they seek spaces where praise of the earth is ancestral.

This self-torture arises when the poet also sees history as language, when to the suffering of the victim. Their admirable wish to hon. The Muse of History netic pain, the groan of suffering, the curse of revenge. Their view of Caliban is of the enraged pupil. They cannot separate the rage of Caliban from the beauty of his speech when the speeches of Cal- iban are equal in their elemental power to those of his tutor.

The language of the torturer mastered by the victim. This is viewed as servitude, not as victory. But who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or for revenge?

The pulse of New World history is the racing pulse beat of fear, the tiring cycles of stupidity and greed. The tongues above our prayers utter the pain of entire races to the darkness of a Manichean God: Dom- inus illuminatio mea, for what was brought to this New World under the guise of divine light, the light of the sword blade and the light of dominus illuminatio mea, was the same iridescent serpent brought by a contaminating Adam, the same tortured Christ exhibited with Christian exhaustion, but what was also brought in the seeded en- trails of the slave was a new nothing, a darkness which intensified the old faith.

In time the slave surrendered to amnesia. That am- nesia is the true history of the New World. That is our inheritance, but to try and understand why this happened, to condemn or justify is also the method of history, and these explanations are always the same: This happened because of that, this was understandable because, and in days men were such. These recriminations exchanged, the contrition of the master replaces the vengeance of the slave, and here colonial literature is most pietistic, for it can accuse great art of feudalism and excuse poor art as suffering.