Encounters with Caribbean Genius: Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Aubrey Williams

Clockwise from top: Aubrey Williams ‘Tumatumari’ by Aubrey Williams, which is part of the Timehri series of murals at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Guyana (CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons); Wilson Harris’ novel “Palace of the Peacock”; a Swedish postage stamp commemorating Derek Walcott’s 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature. Courtesy Global Voices.

By Ian McDonald | Global Voices

Sparks from the central fire — I was lucky to be near enough to feel the blaze these men ignited in the world.

WALCOTT
(23 January 1930–17 March 2017)

The St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, or rather his poetry, entered my life when he was 20 and I was 17. I had read poems in the English Classics on my parents’ bookshelves earlier in my life. And a great teacher, John Hodge at Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad, had introduced me — outside the set curriculum — to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which had flared like a torch in my mind. But this was the first time I knew immediately and deep down that great poetry could be written by one of my own West Indians…

Read the rest of McDonald’s reflections on Walcott, Harris, and Williams at Global Voices.