Derek Walcott
An old black man who sells charcoal and lives apart in the forest because of his ugliness is put in jail, where his aberrant mind presents him with a dream: a white woman who walks in the silver beauty of the moon beckons and becomes his mistress. With the jailor and felons taking parts in the nightmare, he sets out on a pilgrimage to Africa where he imagines he has many wives and does great and glorious deeds. But the truth must be faced: the white mistress is really the suppressed desires of the black people for white culture, and until she is killed the Black man is seduced into slavery. Thus the old man beheads the goddess of his desires.
Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott’s life and work. Both his grand ...
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