Upon the giving of
The W.E.B. DuBois Award to Derek Walcott at the
Black Writers’ Conference,
Medgar-Evers College, Brooklyn March 29th, 2014
'Port of Spain or
Castries, No Greeting Is Casual'
No matter how busy, they stop to talk, to friends,
strangers, to anyone who happens to catch the eye. There is so much crime
today, they are a bit more wary, but they find time to discuss good fortune, to
ask about yours. Sometimes they tell the whole story, even the part about a
daughter’s disgrace, about a son for whom they have no money for lawyer, about
one who is on the verge of getting into college.
I ran into a store to shelter the rain, and a woman asked me
if it was raining. I saw the drops on your shirt, she said, and I wasn’t sure
if it was rain, or a pattern on the material. See? It looks like a pattern. And
she turned to others around and they confirmed, yes, it look like a pattern,
but is really rain. Further down the road my mind would be taken up by sight of
the security guard in front of a jewelry store, by the size of the bore of his
rifle. And later by the cloud over the city, the stifling smell of yellow fumes
coming from an area near the city dump, where bad boys from gangs were staging
some kind of standoff.
And in the taxi on the way home, the driver pointed out a
man who he said played the most beautiful chords on the church organ on Sunday,
but who the rest of the week drank heavily, till one of his daughters had to
find him wherever he was and bring him home. And I remember my neighbors asking,
how is your father, and that thumb cut off by the train, how are the goats he
has decided to mind?
And I looked at my shirt from which the pattern had
disappeared and it occurred to me that this is where poetry begins, in an
observation captured before it disappears for good, given with the honesty of a
woman wondering if it was raining in truth, a witness. That someone will call
out, like the passenger on the bus in Walcott’s Light of The World to remind us that we left something behind,
mister, your cigarettes, while we wish they were calling us back for something
more.
This, more than ambition, is what makes a man close the door
to his room, even as the world outside calls to say how good he is, sends
tickets to bring him across the globe to receive prizes, the Nobel included. It
sends him back to a window from which he can see his father show a young boy a
line of women climbing the hills for anthracite, the pattern and weave and
rhythm of their walk as they crisscross, how his verse should be true like
that, like the weight balanced ever so lightly on their heads; close the door
to what he says is “the hardest prison ever”, the prison of verse, as his
friends have also testified, like Brodsky out of Russia, saying the world is
hard all over, might as well try the States, the line in the poem Forest of Europe speaking of poetry as “the
bread that will last after all systems have failed”. It is what makes him close
the door and assume the position of prayer, whatever that is, standing,
kneeling, sitting, and begin the next line, the next stanza, about a man like
an egret, standing still in thought.
For it is never finished; this work is never done, because the
light of the world will slant differently on a different morning, and who is to
see it, who is to find the right metaphor, who is to listen to the voice in the
community observe that it must be raining, I can tell by the pattern on your
shirt, it’s new, like a new Caribbean, a new America, for ourselves and for those,
as Stephen Vincent Benet said, who are to come.
To you, Derek Walcott, for time spent in the service of
verse, for the miracle of achieving ordinary speech, in thousands of poems that
are simply, prayers, for the next poem, and the one after that, this award- The
W.E.B. DuBois Award, presented on behalf of Medgar Evers College, CUNY, at this
10th anniversary of the Black Writers’ Conference, 2014.
Mervyn Taylor
