Epistemic Resistance in Walcott’s Caribbean Poetics of Transnationalism

Abstract

The current article, applying a discourse-based interdisciplinary comparative postcolonial approach with transnational orientations, examines how Derek Walcott’s diasporic poetry transcends the colonial legacy of slavery and cultural dislocation into a culturally synthetical arena of self-conscious postcolonial resistance. Challenging biased traditional postcolonial approaches that emphasize either on nationalist recovery or cosmopolitan dilution of identity, this study argues on how Walcott, via appropriating and subverting metropolitan epistemological institutions, constructs a counter-poetic method. Through close analysis of Walcott’s, A Far Cry from Africa (1962), The Sea is History (1978), and Forest of Europe (1986), this study demonstrates how Walcott sews such colonial properties to form a counter-poetic device that operates as an alternative form of memory, simultaneously critical and highly creative. In addition, the study endeavours to demonstrate how Walcott poetically criticizes the Eurocentric historiography, emphasizing on its failure to properly register authentic colonial pain inflicted upon the colonized; in response, he surfaces suppressed broken memories and neglected historical archives through re-membering and critical imagination. Moreover, Walcott’s appropriation of European literary forms constructs an efficient approach for articulating Caribbean transnationality, diaspora, exile, and colonial pain without erasing regional specificity or local traits. The article concludes that Walcott’s poetry constitutes not merely a Caribbean culturally syncretic experience but a profound epistemological intervention into the colonial legacy of the region.