My first question is about the sea and the role it plays in The Sea at Dauphin. We’ve encountered other stories of great losses at sea, in Riders and John Redding that seemed to speak to loss of place and community. In this play, Afa remarks that the sea forgets. How does that fit with the sea as we’ve seen it in those other works? Does the sea forget, or does it just not care?
In “The Schooner Flight” Walcott talks about naming and mimicry saying “we live like our names and you would have to be colonial to know the difference.”How does identity play into naming and memory and what pain can be stored in names as well?
How does the representation Creole in The Sea at Dauphin compare to other representations of dialect we’ve encountered? What (and whose) histories are encoded in language and its literary representations?