Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Derek Walcott visits Grow Well Library

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1 comment:

Unknown said...

This article recalls a fond memory and recently, after the Haiti earthquake and in response to a friend’s comments, I wrote about it - copied here:

“St Lucia’s eminent playwright Derek Walcott, and long before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote a fantastic play centred on the Haitian revolution and – if I recall correctly - up until two years after when Jean-Jacques Dessalines was himself murdered. I don’t remember the play’s title, but in 1983 (?) he produced the play in St Lucia and held it at night outside in the old colonial ruins high on the mount overlooking the north-west Caribbean, with the port of Castries backlighting it from below and Martinique glowing through the night sky in the distance. I was invited to the opening night so I made a bed in the back of my hatchback for my two young daughters to sleep in, parking them close-by, and had the most thrilling evening. It was a fantastic production and evoked the atmosphere so brilliantly it was eerie to experience. Afterwards, and past midnight, Derek invited a few of us to join him at his favorite bar skirting the cemetery at the end of the local small airport’s runway next to the ocean. It was a tiny, wooded shack just set back off the main arterial road out of the capital city of Castries and holding a full clientele of colorful local personalities, but the atmosphere was perfect. Soon after downing a few rums, Derek, still in his revolutionary costume, began to quote from memory and then act the great Shakespearian speeches – line perfect - within the bar’s narrow confines. His odd audience listening in rapt silence and my skin rising with goose bumps. He went on for about two and a half hours, almost to dawn, and this after a three-hour ‘stage’ performance. He stopped when the cockerels’ crowing took over. It was an amazing experience! (The girls slept through it all, still in the back of my car, but backed up to the bar with the back door wide-open!)”

This article just brought it all back as if last night.

Voice: Perhaps you could ask Derek Walcott to confirm both the play’s name and provenance for me and the date he staged it in St Lucia.

March 9, 2010 at 12:27 PM

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