huge melting pot of peoples, of cultures
and of languages. However, as I just mentioned,
when Froude wrote about the Caribbean islands
in the late 19th century, the civilisation
and cultural attainments of the indigenous
population had all but vanished
and a new Caribbean culture was yet to emerge.
Therefore, in the Caribbean, Froude could
see only an empty space of civilizational
nothingness. And the sense of nothingness
that Froude associated with the Caribbean
in the 19th century was again echoed in the
20th century by the Caribbean born author
V S Naipaul, an author with Indian origins.
And he too believed that his home country
was actually a space of nothingness. It did
not produce anything, it did not have any
history of its own. But when we come to Walcott,
we see that this very nothingness becomes
a position of cultural strength and cultural
experimentation.
And Walcottfreedom fighters during the
Mau-Mau uprisings of the 1950’s.
And in the poem Walcott extends his solidarity
to the dead Africans. And here we need to
remember that some of Walcott's own ancestors
came to the Caribbeans from Africa, bound
in slave ships. But, even while extending
his solidarity, Walcott cannot distance himself
from the English language which he has inherited
from the very British colonisers who enslaved
his ancestors and who now persecuted the Mau-Mau
revolutionaries in Africa.
So, he talks about his, “love” for the
English tongue which,, though it originally
belonged to the colonisers, is now being used
by him to lament the death of the people suffering
from the atrocities of colonialism. The language
of the colonisers being used to lament the
atrocities of colonialism. And, this is very
important. This cultural appropriation is
crucial in Walcott. Because it speaks of how
we can take