Derek Walcott (1930 - 2017)

From Donnell "Derek Walcott crafted a different literary framework through which to imagine Africa from the Caribbean, creatively establishing an extension of sympathies and a politics of solidarity based on the shared contemporary experience of and resistance to colonial exploitation
and violence."

"For Dathorne, Walcott’s work here emphasizes 'personal disorientation'. While it is indeed this sensibility of conflicted attachments that has come to be seen as the watermark of Walcott’s poetic oeuvre, the specific political dimension of
his reference point to Africa cannot be dissolved entirely into a generalized affective register. For Walcott, the impossibility of an unspoiled connection to Africa is made more problematic by his mixed ancestry, but his rendering of a conflicted call to both and a turn to Kenya and the bloody conflict there is not insignificant. The poem’s ambiguous representation of victims that allows for sympathy with the Mau Mau and also with the murdered settlers seems to echo something of Reid’s “both sides were full of sinners”. Yet, as Edward Baugh points out in his reading of this poem, Walcott’s representation of a symmetry of cruelty does
not finally lead to a symmetry of sympathy, “the purportedly even balance and conflict of choice . . . remains somewhat uneasy and factitious. Beyond the beauty of landscape, ‘[t]his Africa’ is not realized in any way that establishes a vital bloodline between it and the poet. By contrast, the hold of English is real'"