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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
We had just finished lunch. Derek Walcott got up from his canvas chair and stretched. He said to his longtime companion, "Sigrid, I am going for a swim." We were on a beach in Castries, the capital of the island of St. Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles, where Walcott was born, in 1930, and where he still lives. It was Bastille Day, a French holiday celebrated in St. Lucia, too. Two boys on horseback, very thin and very black and shoeless, rode along the stretch of ground behind us. Their necks swivelled as they picked up speed, urging their horses to gallop, looking for more and more open space to explore.
Sigrid said, "Oh, all right, Dodo. I'll join you soon."
Walcott walked away. He is bantam weight, with light-blue-gray eyes and honey-colored skin. A black frigate bird--what patois-speaking St. Lucians call a scisour de la mer--cut through the turquoise sky. Sigrid and I looked on as Walcott made his way down to the Caribbean Sea, getting smaller and smaller against the big, watching water.
As Walcott disappeared beneath the surface, Sigrid said, "You know, when he won the Nobel"--for literature, in 1992--"I was worried about our relationship. There were many women around. Speaking generally, West Indian men like to hop from flower to flower." Sigrid laughed. She is sixty years old, German-born, with lemon-colored hair and a burnished face. They met in Pittsburgh, where Sigrid ran an art gallery, in 1986, when Walcott gave a reading at the Carnegie Museum. She offered him a ride home from the reading, and later he invited her to Cleveland to see one of his plays. They have been together since. "I was married once before," she said. "One hopes for . . . an upgrade. And, of course, Derek has been married before. When we got together, and it became clear we would stay together, Derek said, 'I certainly hope this is it.' "
"Sigrid! Look!" Squatting, half out of the water, Walcott hoisted a glistening black boy on his shoulders. The boy's wide, white grin was as unbridled as Walcott's joyful shout.
"Oh, look at Dodo!" Sigrid said. "You know, he paid for that boy to have swimming lessons once he saw that the boy couldn't swim well but wanted to learn. Derek will do that, and never speak of it. So generous."
Walcott, the most ardent chronicler of the island's history and landscape and people, sometimes acts as a patron, a kind of John the Baptist of St. Lucia. ("I would be a preacher, / I would write great hymns," he wrote in the 1973 autobiographical book-length poem "Another Life.") He has lived in the West Indies for most of his creative life, writing, painting, and teaching, not only in St. Lucia but in Jamaica, St. Thomas, Barbados, Grenada, and Trinidad. In nine volumes of poetry, and in numerous essays, speeches, and plays, he has documented life in a place most Americans think of in terms of sunblock and steel drums, and their own fantasies about slimming walks along the beach, limbo lessons, and rum drinks dressed with flowers. Walcott's work revels in the history, the mores, and the differences of a people generally misunderstood, if they are thought about at all.
In formal, somewhat extravagant verse, Walcott captures the island's beauty: "the rounded / Breasts of the milky bay, palms, flocks, the green and dead / Leaves, the sun's brass coin on my cheek, /. . . This island is heaven." His vision can be unromantic, too, and the impulse to idealize is checked by a sharp irony. "Subject of poetasters, the Paradisal Isles!" he once remarked in a review of an anthology of West Indian writing. His St. Lucia--with its dusty frangipani trees, its mixed-race people speaking several languages, and its junked British- and American-made jeeps--is a place of both poverty and abundance. In "Sainte Lucie," a poem from the 1976 collection "Sea Grapes," Walcott writes:
Laborie, Choiseul, Vieuxfort, Dennery,, from these sun-bleached villages, where the church bell caves in the sides, of one grey-scurfed shack that is shuttered, with warped boards, with rust,, with crabs crawling under the house-shadow, where the children played house;, a net rotting among cans, the sea-net, of sunlight trolling the shallows, catching nothing all afternoon.
Working in an English verse tradition and writing about everyday life in the Caribbean, Walcott knows himself to be an anomaly. "I have to live, socially, in an almost unfinished society," he told me once. "Among the almost great, among the almost true, among the almost honest. That allows me to describe the anguish." His goal, he said, is to "finish" his incomplete culture.
We were meant to have lunch the next day. Sigrid picked me up in a white jeep at my hotel in Castries, in the northwest part of the island. She wanted to give me a tour of Castries and the coast, stopping off in a restaurant in the fishing village of Soufriere. "Soufriere is down the coast, all the way west," she said. "We could have taken a boat around the island, but then you would not have seen as much of St. Lucia. Today you'll see--well, you'll see so much! When we were on the beach yesterday, did you happen to notice Martinique? On a clear day--"
"On a clear day you can see Martinique," Walcott said. He was sitting in the back seat and laughed dryly when he interrupted Sigrid's good-natured spiel. He sounded impatient with her tendency to treat the landscape like a sitting room: here are our needlepoint pillows, here is our mountain.
"Sigrid loves saying that to everyone who comes down here," he said. "Darling," he said, leaning forward a bit in his seat and speaking over her shoulder. "You must curb your natural ebullience today. It's a long drive." His sharp tone was a reminder that the trip to Soufriere was disrupting his work routine. He usually rises shortly after dawn and writes and paints for three or four hours.
We passed the harbor in Castries. A ship carrying passengers from St. Lucia's neighbors in the Windward Islands--St. Vincent, the Grenadines, Grenada--was about to dock. A shed at the near end of the dock cast a shadow in the early-morning sunshine. It made the black...
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