Derek Walcott

Anyway, so much out there.

I thought when, when Jonty started with Clough, I thought he was going to actually take us to another kind of real biggie in world literature, uh, that we're also going to have to pass by quite quickly, which was, uh, uh, Derek Walcott's Omeros, which is a Caribbean version of Homer.

And, you know, I've, I've always thought about this as, as more to do with the Iliad than the Odyssey, but, and Jonty rather disagrees.

Omeros is a c- a, a complete tour de force by Derek Walcott.

He was from the island of, um, St. Lucia in the Caribbean, and what he's responding to is a, is the way that St. Lucia had been called by British historians, mostly from the 19th and early 20th century.

It was called the Helen of the West Indies because the British and French had fought over it so many times.

The Saint Lucia National Trust is advancing plans to complete the Walcott House project with renewed focus on the Walcott family's contribution to Saint Lucian cultural heritage.

Education consultant at the Saint Lucia National Trust, Mar inget Edward, says greater attention will be given to the work of Roderick Walcott, as well as of his brother, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, and their mother, teacher Alix Walcott.

Edward added that the initiative will highlight Roderick's lesser-known contribution and broaden understanding of the impact on Saint Lucia's cultural landscape.

He was very much into theater like his brother, so he also wrote plays like, we know, Banjo Man, which is a very famous one.

A lot of his work is not known sufficiently, and we want to bring some balance into an understanding of the contributions of both brothers.

The completed Walcott House is being positioned as the first in the places of memory under the new National Trust initiative.

Reporting for the Government Information Service, I am Desly Poyotte.

You know, we've got passages from Melville or Yates about islands.

We've got Derek Walcott.

They're just, you elevated high literary works on islands that help us think about and experience the meaning of islands.

But we also had a sequence of kind of found poems made from the language inscribed as graffiti at Angel Island.

There were theater, there was poetry and dance, painters and players.

We recall Derek Walcott, Robert Lee, Kentilla Louis, Llewelyn Xavier, Kendell Hippolyte, Drinia Frederick, Kennedy Saniels, George Fish Alphonse, MacDonald Dixon, Jane King, Dunstan St. Omer, Roderick Walcott, Harold Simmons, and Vladimir Lucien.

Not a handful of exceptional men and women working alone, it was the very water we swam in, a people who believed that their imagination was public property, and somehow that culture has drifted away from us.

We grew less interested in the performing and visual arts.

His later collections include Tipolo's Hound in 2000, The Prodigal, Selected Poems, White Egrets in 2010, Mourning Paramin, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1992.

And that's Derek Walcott.

So like a lot of people have been talking about

him recently because of the Odyssey.

Yeah.

But and I couldn't do it with Paul, so finally when Paul, uh, c- uh, and Derek Walcott, which was a Nobel Prize winner in literature, um, uh, wrote, uh, Capeman.

Wrote the book.

Wrote the book, and then Paul did the music and, and it was Paul's idea about Salvador Negron, the, this, the story of this Puerto Rican kid who had, um, become involved in gang, uh, gangs and had ended up killing two kids.