This week’s juxtapositions will end with a contrast of time frames. The photographs were taken within a window of 2 hours and mostly through the window of the car, across a space of some 25 miles, driving up the Pacific Coast from Newport, OR to Lincoln City, OR. The weather changed from sun to rain to hail and back multiple times. The color of the water alternated accordingly, sometimes three bands of different color simultaneously, unusually vivid in the cold air.

Today’s poem, on the other hand, spans seemingly all of historical time and the geographical space between Africa and the Caribbean. It looks into the pit of despair and emerges with renewed determination to look forward and resume a rightful place in history, or start history altogether – which is my own goal after yet another week of this interminable flu.

Walcott, who won the Nobel prize in literature in 1992 as well as a MacArthur Foundation genius award, died this month two years ago. He taught at various ivy league institutions, dividing his time between Boston, NYC and St. Lucia, the caribbean island where he was born. A lot of his poetry deals with the consequences of colonialism, slavery, and displacement. The work asks questions about memory in the absence of the typical memorial markers found in nation states, and the broken links of tribal narratives that come with forced exodus.

His poem The Sea is History weaves biblical and historical events together in wonderful ways, showing the parallels in lack of established “factual evidence” and yet richness in assumed underlying truths. You can just hear how the colonial interrogators are defied by the persistence of memory, however drowned in the sea, its return to power and will towards a new history, a right to place by the person who answers, representing all those who were subjugated far too long.

The Sea Is History

Derek Walcott

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands
out there past the reef’s moiling shelf,
where the men-o’-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself.
It’s all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations – 
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History; 

then came, like scum on the river’s drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges’ choirs, 
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves’ progress,
and that was Emancipation – 

jubilation, O jubilation – 
vanishing swiftly
as the sea’s lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.

*

And as the most effective anti-depressant ever, let’s hear it for caribbean music, dreaming ourselves into the lesser Antilles.