2013 Volume 13 Issue 1 Pages 39-54
Over the past few decades, the theatrical works of Derek Walcott have come to be seen as occupying a major strand of postcolonial literary criticism. Yet his recent play Walker (2002) remains surprisingly unexamined. The reason for this, in part, stems from the play’s geographical setting. Walker focuses primarily on the history of American slavery and abolition and, as such, cannot be fully understood within the existing framework of postcolonial or Caribbean literary criticisms. It is for this reason that in exploring Walker this essay works to integrate two different theoretical perspectives—postcolonial criticism and African American literary criticism. By referring not only to the work of such postcolonial and anthropological theorists as Frantz Fanon, Johannes Fabian, Helen Gilbert, Jacqueline Lo, but also to that of such black nationalist or diaspora theorists as Amiri Baraka, Stanley Stuckey, Michael Hanchard, the analysis that follows explores the play at the nexus between these theoretical insights. It argues that, although Walker seems to be an American historical drama, it in fact embodies the experimental blending of the U.S. black nationalist aesthetics and Caribbean aesthetics, producing what Walcott calls “an electric fusion of the old and the new.”
The goal of this essay is to demonstrate the ways in which Walker juxtaposes two contradictory modes of theatricality. The first is the theatricality of revolution, premised on the ideology of black nationalism and militant politics. The second is the theatricality of syncretism, which reflects Walcott’s postcolonial aesthetics of syncretism, cross-culturalism, and mutual love that unites racially, nationally, and sexually divergent characters. The essay offers close readings of key scenes in Walker that evoke the elements of the black revolutionary theatre and syncre-theatre. In conclusion, I consider the implications these different modes of theatricality have for Walcott’s theatre aesthetics. I suggest that Walcott’s contradictory theatricality, which embraces both revolutionary theatre and syncre-theatre, should not be read as some form of his aesthetic inconsistency. Rather, this contradictory impulse toward both black nationalism and syncre-multiculturalism lies at the very core of Derek Walcott’s Caribbean theatre aesthetics. Respecting the past traditions of the U.S. black nationalism and the black revolutionary theatre, but at the same time blending them with the West Indian aesthetics, Walcott succeeds in creating Walker as a quintessentially transhistorical and transnational drama.
