PAT DIAL REMINISCES ON DEREK WALCOTT AND MONA

Apr 02, 2017 News

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Derek Walcott, the great St Lucian and West Indian poet and one of the two West Indians who were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature died on 17th March. Three weeks before his death, I felt the desire to e-mail him since we had not been in contact for very many years. I phoned the CARICOM SECRETARIAT to find out if they had his e-mail address and the young lady with whom I spoke said they did not have it but she will contact St Lucia and secure it for me. I tried on two other occasions to contact her without success.
I had wished to contact Walcott because we were both 19-year old students who, among other students from other parts of the West Indies, started the Faculty of Arts of the University College of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. This was about 1950. The years we spent there were the happiest in our and our fellow-students’ lives. Since the survivors of that era are gradually becoming fewer and fewer, I had wished to reminisce with him about those years.
The other reason why I desired to contact Walcott was to mention to him, Ryhaan Shah’s important Caribbean novel, Weaving Water, which uses Indian Mythology in a masterly fashion to produce a unique novel. He himself had used Greek Mythology for his Omeros which won him the Nobel Prize.
I expected to have had his take as to why our writers in the West Indies, though brought up for generations on Greek Mythology, never creatively used it as European writers had used it from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, enriching the literatures of Europe. I also wished to have his take on the present and future use of the Greek and Indian Mythologies since the Caribbean is the only region in the world where these two complete Mythologies exist side by side and are available to all Caribbean writers.
The University College of the West Indies started out as a college of London University under the auspices of Britain. It had a campus of over 600 acres, that is, more than six times the size of Turkeyen. It was on a low plateau surrounded by the Blue Mountains. The plateau itself had a valley through which flowed a crystal clear stream, all the rivers and streams of Jamaica being clear.
The Arts Faculty, I believe, started out with less than 60 students and these together with the 100 or so who were pursuing Medicine and the Natural Sciences meant that there were a very small number of us living on the campus. The lecturers were largely from the UK and Europe with a sprinkling of Americans and West Indians. They resided on the campus creating a genuine university community.
We all initially lived in wooden huts built for the refugees from Gibraltar and Malta who were evacuated to Mona during World War II. The lecture rooms and library were also wooden huts. The dining room and kitchen facilities and the teaching Hospital were new concrete structures. The new Halls of Residence came up one by one beginning with Taylor Hall.
There were comparatively few of us on the campus and we came from every part of the Caribbean. We lived in close proximity to each other, saw each other every day, ate together, studied together, danced together for every night after dinner we entertained ourselves in the common room before retiring to our rooms. We became closer to each other than our families. All the students of those first few years of the University, if ever they met each other in any part of the world, did so with warmth. Walcott did tell me in the few times we met in other countries, about his pleasure in meeting friends of those years.
Mona was an extraordinarily beautiful place. Its temperature was always cool and the Blue Mountains which surrounded it gave it an awesome beauty. Every afternoon, the surrounding Mountains vividly reflected the colours of the sunsets and moonlight on the plateau could only be described in poetry.
Since there was often a mist, the moonlight impregnated the mist and one felt that one was actually physically touching the moonlight. Walcott, as a poet, and he came up to Mona with published work, drunk in this beauty with more sensitivity and enjoyment than any of us. The beauty of Mona would certainly have been an influence in his creativity.
Walcott, like all of us, positively considered ourselves West Indian by living at Mona. For the first time, West Indians from every part of the West Indies, including Guyana, came together as a close community. We saw how much the same we were and developed close friendships with each other. An ideal West Indian nationality was realized at Mona and Walcott shared in it.
There is a plethora of ordinary occurrences featuring Walcott which come to my mind: His play, Henri Christophe, was performed for the first time at the well-appointed theatre we inherited from the Mediterranean refugees and Walcott produced and acted in the play. It was a very successful production.
Prof. Croston, an Englishman, taught us English Literature. We laboured with reading and synthesizing literary criticisms for our essays. Walcott’s sensitivity was so great that he wrote his essays without much reference to critics. There was, for example, White Devil, a play by Webster where we could find no criticisms to help us with our essays. Walcott did his own criticism and Prof Croston congratulated him on it. He got an A+..
Walcott was one of the founders and the first editor of the University’s newspaper, the Pelican. The newspaper was usually six or eight sheets of cyclostyled matter. I was a reporter but in Walcott’s book, reporters took on editorial duties. There were some regular features – Dunstan Champagnie wrote a witty comic column and Eddie Seaga who later became Prime Minister of Jamaica wrote articles on Economics. As far as I could remember, Walcott never wrote anything under his own name in the newspaper.
He was also a painter and drew very quickly and very well and he was the one who designed the Pelican’s monthly cover. One evening at our nightly parties in the Common Room, I saw him glancing at me on the dance-floor. He later told me he had actually sketched me dancing with my academic gown blowing in an odd direction for the cover of the next issue of the Pelican.
Every Sunday evening, one of the medical students who knew a great deal about classical music and played the piano, presented recorded concerts in one of the smaller rooms.
Walcott had a liking for Bach and Beethoven but he enjoyed popular music as well. One evening we were listening to the current popular hits, one of which titled “Beyond the reef” noticeably moved him. The first lines of that song, I well remember, were: Beyond the reef/where the sea is dark and cold/will she remember me, will she forget.
At Christmas, Jamaicans went home often inviting friends to spend Christmas with their families. Many students from the other territories largely stayed on the campus. Prof Bowen, a Jamaican and warden of Gibraltar Hall, always had open- house for the entire day where there was much good food, music and conversation. On Christmas morning, when many of us were over-sleeping, Keith Tang usually led a band which went around banging a metal drum to awake everyone and reciting appropriate poetry such as Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam: Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night/ Has flung the stone that puts the Stars to Flight/ And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught/ The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
Walcott, who was generally a person of thoughtful reserve and kept away from loudness, surprisingly was in one of these marches.
While talking with him, he suddenly mentioned Arthur Seymour, as being a person who promoted young West Indian poets and he said Seymour was the first person to publish his poetry outside of St Lucia in one of his anthologies. At the time, he did not know Seymour and was quite interested when I told him who Seymour was.
Walcott had a great wit and sense of humour. I remembered he married towards the end of his last year, which would have been 1953, to Fay Moston. I was in company with a Jamaican who asked him how was Fay and he replied “swell”. The pun was that she was pregnant. [“swell” was a current slang at the time meaning “very well”.]
Not much, if anything at all, has been written about Walcott’s formative years at Mona and this may be a good MA or PhD research topic since some of his contemporaries of those years are still alive and could be accessed by ICT

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