Analysis of the Sea is History by Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott, acclaimed Caribbean author, writes to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage. Born in 1930 in the island of St. Lucia, Walcott has a melancholic relationship with Caribbean history which shapes the way he carefully composes within “The Sea is History.” Walcott’s application of Biblical allusions seeks to revise and restore Caribbean identity.

Born on the island a former British colony in the West Indies, established poet and playwright Derek Walcott developed a burning passion for writing as a young man. His family descended from a line of slaves in the West Indies, and the legacy of slavery is a common theme threaded throughout his work. Both mother and father were schoolteachers and strongly supported Walcott’s love of reading. In the poem “Midsummer” he wrote: “Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen, that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse (Poetry Foundation, 1).” This early vocational recognition enthused Walcott and at the age of fourteen he published his first poem in the local newspaper. By 19, Walcott had self-published his two first collections, 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949), which he distributed himself on street corners. Continuing as a prolific poet, Walcott penetrated the literary world with his publication of the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), “a book which celebrates the Caribbean and its history as well as investigates the scars of colonialism and post-colonialism” (Poetry Foundation, 1). This book closely parallels with the theme of “The Sea is History” and is perhaps one of the first publications that inspired a long and distinguished career seeking to r...

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...continues to see Walcott’s need to reiterate that there is an identity lost and his aim to restore the Caribbean character.

There is a sense of a Caribbean writer’s role as a “revolutionary hero” who must paint his words to restore a Caribbean sense of identity. This dedication t to the Caribbean’s story of struggle is, without a doubt, far from “dismissed” in Walcott’s work. Walcott delicately articulates that “In the Caribbean, history is irrelevant. Not because it is not being created, or because it was sordid; but because it has never mattered, what has mattered is the loss of history, the amnesia of the races, what has become necessary is imagination, imagination as necessity, as invention.” In order to explain the present conditions of the modern Caribbean, he cannot avoid recounting the tragic phases of its colonial past, as he does in “The Sea Is History.”