Derek Walcott’s Poetry Deconstructed, Its Political and Sociological Discourse Revealed From “In A Green Night” to “The Fortunate Traveler” A Product of Hallucinatory Whiteness

Book excerpt: This is a deconstruction of the published books of poetry of Derek Walcott from 1961 to 1981 to unearth, expose and analyze the discourse and worldview of Walcott of miscegenated being, the Caribbean dystopia and the existential condition of the African and Indian Diasporas in the Caribbean dystopia. Walcott segregates himself from the Caribbean dystopia as he excoriates the African and Indian Diasporas blaming them for constructing the dystopia, they are trapped in. Walcott exempts white supremacist colonial and neo-colonial imperial power relations which condemns us to dependency and underdevelopment at the level of the idea. Which he must do for Walcott insists that what separates him from the Dystopia and enables his freedom from the dystopia, his flight to the North Atlantic is his white grandfather's legacy bequeathed to him by his miscegenated father. At the level of his genome Walcott is special, exceptional in the realm of the Dystopia compelled to prove and affirm this state of being in the North Atlantic. Walcott then frames his poetry on the foundation of the binary, Manichean duality of white North Atlantic discourse. I had a white grandfather and father which makes this deconstruction a personal conversation between two conflicting discourses of miscegenated being and our place in the world.