Barbados and Derek Walcott

On a ship in the early 50s I read an article on the Island of Barbados in the West Indies. As luck had had it, I found the abandoned "Atlantic Monthly" ashore and brought back aboard Life on the ship was particularly difficult at that time and I soon found myself fantasising life on this Caribbean Island In fact I soon found myself searching out further information on Barbados and wondering if I might be able to use the GI Bill there in a small college after I got out.

One of my shipmates was a man named Lyday (everyone was pretty much called by their last names) who had had an interesting career before he joined the Navy to avoid being on the ground in Korea. One of his jobs was as a sponge diver in the Caribbean, I forget what area. But he fueled my fantasies with stories about his women, the rum, and the island he claimed to have started constructing atop a coral reef (!). He was an artist, and had already worked for Disney in animation, but hated the "fascist politics" of what he called the Disney machine.

Recently I heard about Derek Walcott winning the T.S. Eliot prize for poetry, and a quick call to the local library facilitated an inter-library loan of the prize winning volume, "White Egrets." Aye, the poems brought my fantasies back, many of them I've read several times, and I sent one poem to some neighbors who sailed the Caribbean years ago on a yacht. After having read the dust jacket and found he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992 my curiosity sent me to Google, and then on to Wikipedia. And on the list of his works I found this one published in l950: "Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes, Barbados Advocate (Barbados). Well, it looks like I'm going to have to call the Library and see if they can land that one for me. Incidentally, this very great poet was born in Castries, St. Lucia in the West Indies in 1930, a year before Yours Truly. Please don't miss his work.