I was most struck by our reflections on hybridity this week and the various ways it manifested in the different works we looked at and the ways it complicates identity. Walcott, unnecessarily pointed out by Heaney, clearly interacts with the intersections of history and identity within his work and Heaney’s characterization of this hybridity is conventional and mundane, despite the beauty of the language he communicates it in. His view of Walcott’s work plays into tropes about the Caribbean and the Atlantic experience, that I think some of us were skirting around activating in our descriptions of Walcott’s poetry and its flow – tropes of lyricism encoded in the language and people, that, while maybe not entirely inaccurate, fail to grasp the true dynamics of hybridic identity. Heaney says of Walcott “From the beginning he has never simplified or sold short. Africa and England are in him.” (Heaney, 6). This statement is its own unintentionally ironic and blunt simplification of what we know to be the complex histories at work here and as I believe Alexis pointed out, who is Heaney, as an Irishman, to be the judge of how Walcott expresses his hybridic identity. The Irish too have their realm of hybridity within their sphere, which I think we can see Heaney attempting to reconcile in his own work about the Troubles, but that does not privilege him to assign value judgements for the expressions of another’s identity. How does he truly know that Walcott’s activations of both the Caribbean and Egypt are “risky” or “large appropriations” and even if they are, with what experience does he legitimize them?
I’m curious to know how we would have read Heaney’s assessments of Walcott had we not had the collective aha moment last week about the nature of comparisons between the Black and the Green and the fundamental distinctions between them and if we would have come to the came conclusions.
Heaney’s comment about Africa and England is interesting too based on what we have discussed about the ideas of a homeland and how the memory of a homeland becomes unique to those that hold it. There is a change of time and distance and I think that plays into hybridic identity too – history and identity aren’t static or easily separable. We can see this, the idea of hybridity as exchange and ultimately change within A Tempest too. As we, and the text, attempted to point out, the process of colonization changes the colonizer as much as it changes the colonized – you can’t dehumanize someone else without losing some of your humanity in the process – and Prospero’s cruelty is a marker of that. In the same way that The Tempest couldn’t be translated to French without Cesaire imbibing himself, and the subsequent English translation for our version of A Tempest would have lost some of Cesaire. Once again, that was rambling, but I’m essentially trying to assert that identities can’t be distilled into stock categories. There is change in the creation of hybridic identities that can’t fully be quantified, but should be appreciated.
I also found it interesting that Heaney mentions specifically England and Africa within the writing and person of Walcott as a gross oversimplification. While these two lands certainly play a role in his identity and have influence in his work, Heaney does not pay much attention to the multiplicities of identity found within Walcott’s native Caribbean as a melting pot with far more ingredients than Heaney mentions. Like in his use of the song title of “Strange Fruit,” Heaney means well in his comparison to and gesture towards the broader Atlantic world, but he also tends to miscontentualize other events to relate them to his own narrative and perspective. While I see the merit of Heaney’s comparison of Walcott to Synge, I also think their approaches to writing are not all that similar, with Synge’s capturing of language in “The Aran Islands” as a sort of time capsule for a fading tradition and people, Walcott’s authenticity seems more natural and just comes as a result of living in such a diverse and mixed part of the world, especially within the larger transatlantic world we have discussed all semester. The interview we watched also confirms this authenticity, as I found myself rereading “The Schooner Flight” in his own voice unconsciously in my head. I think Heaney’s mention of Africa and England is significant, but still not enough to encompass the hybridity of Walcott and his legitimacy to authentically represent the multitude of cultures within him.