Making All of Mankind One : Deserved Nobel Prize for Walcott--a fine and moving study in many colors

How did Columbus feel on the morning after? How does the New World feel as it begins the fifth century after? Columbus, quite literally, did not know where in the world he was. We know, now, where he was and where we are. The crucial question--in 1492+500--is who we are.

We are divided among ourselves and--both better and worse--divided within ourselves. Derek Walcott, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, had a black and a white grandparent on each side. He is, as he once wrote, “divided in the vein.” But division in one man, if the man is a poet, can purchase union in whole populations of men. Walcott--an irresistibly modest man, suspicious of himself, loathe to make himself a metaphor, suspicious of metaphor itself--has been read with a pleasure tinged with relief by those who allow themselves to feel both the pain and possibility of multiracial, multicultural society. If the governor of Arkansas is elected President, he should read, between Nov. 3 and Jan. 20, Walcott’s “The Arkansas Testament.” No policy briefing could possibly teach him more about where we are and where we must go.

The Caribbean, where Columbus landed, where Walcott was born, is a region where several European cultures--French, Spanish, English, Dutch--lie atop one another like fish in a net. Africa is there too, brought there in chains by Europe. So is Asia: Notified that he had won, Walcott thought immediately of Trinidad’s V.S. Naipaul, who may yet win.

“No man ever dies in his own country,” Walcott wrote once. Five hundred years after Columbus, we are all strangers, yearning for home as Walcott’s black fisherman Achille yearns for an Africa that he knows only as a word, as his Englishman Dennis Plunkett yearns to be at home on the island where his kind are now a minority. All yearning for home, but all home already. All we need do is recognize one another as family.