Introduction to Derek Walcott @ CABA: Carole Boyce Davies
Carole B
oyce Davies was born in Trinidad. She was recruited to raise the African-New World Studies Program at FIU, she served as its director for three successful three-year appointments, which moved the program to worldwide recognition. Boyce-Davies has degrees from the University of Maryland (BA, 1972); Howard University (M.A., 1974) and (University of Ibadan, Nigeria (Ph.D., 1978). In September 2008, she will verge on the staff at Cornell University. Dr. Davies is Director of Florida Africana Studies Consortium (FLASC).
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Derek Walcott began his Nobel unveiling, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” in Felicity a village in Trinidad on the edge of the Caroni basic. In it he paints a picture of the Epic dramatization of Ramleela, the epic dramatization of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, in a aspect on which was superimposed Indian festival culture : “a field strung with different-coloured flags,” and set against “Low dismal mountains on the horizon, bright grass, clouds that would gather colour before the light went.”
Here he plays well with “Felicity” with all its resonances and with all its story in Anglo Saxon coloniality, but not without engagement with its African and Indian Diaspora memory, actors, mythologies. He sees the view as peopled by a series of actors, acting out a variety of fragments of various epics but above all re-creation and the joy in this process that marks the Caribbean. This is what Walcott celebrates.
Thus for him, “Visual set someone back on his is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.”...