School of English Language and Literature - A.U.Th.
Doi
Abstract
This essay focuses on Derek Walcott’s The Haitian Earth, a chronicle of Haiti’s violent revolution led by Toussaint l’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe. Far from painting a romantic idealization of those legendary heroes, Walcott gives a fairly unsavoury realistic picture of what power does to men in a postcolonial context, and of how violent models can be appropriated and made worse. The use of language, dialect, of different registers of creole and standard English plays a major role in drawing the dividing-line between morality and unethical, bestial behaviour. The essay also focus on an unpublished musical comedy, Marie Laveau, which was however staged and recorded in Trinidad, in which dialogism develops between several forms of language, including that of songs, and also between two separate worlds. In Haitian Earth, Walcott seems to have opted for a realistic pessimism, while in the musical comedy Marie Laveau, he has chosen an unrealistic, somewhat romantic faith in man’s ability to reform himself and in human redemption at large.
