Swearing at--not by--history: obscenity, picong and irony in Derek Walcott's poetry.(Essays)(Critical essay)

 
  There are occasions when blasphemy must be seen as one privilege of 
  the excluded Caliban. (Lamming 1984, 9) 

Rarely does a critic of Derek Walcott's poetry fail to mention his excellent command of the English language. John Figueroa, for example, describes Walcott as an "aficionado of English English," (1993, 158) and Seamus Heaney, Walcott's close friend, and fellow poet, remarks upon the "sumptuous authority" of Walcott's use of language (1993, 304). Many commentators, pointing to the facility with which Walcott invokes West Indian dialects and vocabularies, also commend Walcott's adept incorporation of Creole into his poetry. As John Thieme affirms, Walcott "moves easily across illusory linguistic, literary, and social fault-lines" with his use of both Standard English and Creole (1995, 165). Walcott consequently develops "a complex pluralistic aesthetic that spans the Caribbean linguistic continuum and its social and cultural correlatives" (167). While the critical attention to Walcott's considerable verbal skills is no doubt apposite, such an emphasis on eloquence or verbal virtuosity can obscure those moments when Walcott purposely adopts language that is coarser to the ears. Indeed, by focusing their praise either on eloquently phrased Standard English or the verbal nuances and inventiveness of Caribbean vernacular, critics have tended to overlook swearing and obscenity as integral aspects of Walcott's poetry. Though the impulse may be to dismiss the profanity as an aberration of poetic language, these obscenities should not be taken as anomalies. On the contrary, Walcott's use of profane language indicates a negative and ironic poetics at work. By integrating profanity into his poetry, Walcott explores how coarse language can counteract the staidness of "refined" poetic diction, and he also demonstrates how obscenity can inform an innovative poetics that redefines epic poetry and the epic hero through parody and irony. The recognition of Walcott's use of swearing and curse words in order to parody the epic tradition, moreover, elucidates his understanding of the complexities of Caribbean history, as he refutes those--in particular V.S. Naipaul--who would view Caribbean history as non-existent (Naipaul 1962, 29).

Paula Burnett has suggested that Walcott "is generally not interested in using language to curse," asserting that Walcott is not inclined towards malediction when critiquing colonial history in the Caribbean (2000, 128). Nevertheless, Burnett does compare Walcott to Shakespeare's Caliban, in that both Walcott and Caliban artfully utilize cursing to contest inequities of power and identifies in each an impulse characteristic of the Caribbean cultural tradition of picong: "Like Caliban, Walcott has a double project, to create a counterdiscourse and to initiate new expression--utterance, in Caliban's terms, polarized between curse and song, or between Caribbean 'picong' and praise-song" (128). As Burnett explains further, "'picong' [piquant, sharp, hot] ... is the Trinidadian term for the language of abuse elevated to an art form" (140). That cursing could be considered an art presumably depends on the level of irony and nuance at play within the verbal exchange, and such a predilection for irony is prevalent throughout many Caribbean cultural practices, including, as Burnett notes, calypso and carinvalesque "robber talk." Jahan Ramanzani also argues that irony is a fundamental cultural form or practice historically found in the Caribbean.

 
  Although irony may seem to be a Western formalist concept, one of the 
  world's most vibrant figures for the ironist is the folk hero Anancy-- 
  the mystical spider who gives his name to animal tales and even to 
  West Indian storytelling in general. Derived from a West African 
  prototype, he is arguably the Afro-Caribbean counterpart to the Greek 
  eiron.... (Ramanzani 2001, 106-07) 

As a trickster figure, Anancy stands furthermore as a surrogate for the poet, since his tricks tend to involve using language as a vehicle. "In his clever ruses, Anancy ironically manipulates language, saying one thing while slyly meaning another, using periphrasis to prompt another animal to say a dangerous word, or deliberately distorting norms of pronunciation" (Ramazani 2001, 108). Both Burnett's identification of picong and Ramazani's delineation of the importance of irony to Caribbean culture serve as a call to assess the significance of profanity in Walcott's poetry.

Walcott, I would argue, endows the swearing and curse words within his poetry with such irony and linguistic innovation that he raises the vituperations and profanities to the level of art. Indeed, one ought to take Walcott's use of obscenity as another dimension of his linguistic skill, a facet as proficient as his employment of Creole or as exemplary as his commitment to Standard English. In an interview with Edward Hirsch, Walcott discusses a poetics to cursing:

 
  People swear very simply here in New York; they are in a hurry and 
  they just use a short, casual expletive. But in other places, the 
  pastoral or semi-developed situations, the backyard and the street 
  where people are alive and in contact with each other, the care 
  required to curse a man thoroughly is a poetic form of expression. 
  (Hirsch 1979, 286)