Me and DW - Part I

It is not often that one gets to meet one's idol. During CARIFESTA, I finally got to meet Derek Walcott, the man whose book, Another Life, made me first want to become a serious writer. In fact, Walcott's use of a quotation from Andre Malraux' Psychology of Art:

"An old story goes that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw the shepherd boy, Giotto, sketching sheep. But according to the true biographies, it is never the sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting: but, rather, his first sight of the paintings of such a man as Cimabue. What makes the artist is the circumstance that in his youth he was more deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of the things which they portray."

My Giotto moment was opening Another Life and reading the first lines:

"Verandahs, where the pages of sea
are a book left open by an absent master
in the middle of another life -
I begin here again,
begin until the ocean's
a shut book, and, like a bulb
the white moon's filaments wane

Begin with twilight, when a glare
which held the cry of bugles lowered
the coconut lances of the inlet,
as a sun, tired of empire, declined..."

I knew then, not only that I was sure that I wanted to write, but also what I wanted to write about, this place, this place that I could not recognise in the best books, or indeed any book, that I read. After a while, Walcott's "Hic jacet" became my credo and it still is to this day.

My [first] book of poetry, The Enormous Night, had two major influences: Pablo Neruda and Derek Walcott. In fact, the collection is actually named for a phrase from Neruda, just as Fictions is named after Borges' Ficciones.

Walcott is the only living writer I have idolised, and the only writer whose work I see my own as an extension of, even though my current major genre of creative writing is short fiction and his is poetry. Meeting Walcott was therefore important to me and CARIFESTA provided the opportunity of just that. I suppose I was awaiting my own Cimabue-Giotto moment, but it never happened. In the next post, I'll give a summary of what did happen. In the meanwhile, anyone interest in e-mail me, please do so on ruel.johnson@gmail.com.

Next post, Me and DW - Part II...