Written by My heart has been pounding more than once this holiday: as I zip-wired through the rainforest, and as I hiked up the steep rocky path of one of the world’s largest volcanic plugs. But now, the racing heartbeat has nothing to do with exercise. I am sitting in a parked car on a dirt path. Below me is a cluster of buildings above a brilliant blue Caribbean sea. This is Derek Walcott’s St Lucian home and I am plucking up the courage to walk down.
The Nobel laureate is considered the Caribbean’s foremost poet and playwright, and has put his island on the literary map in work that explores the post-colonial situation and gives voice to the West Indian people, culture and landscape. Next Saturday is his 80th birthday and he will be playing host to other literary greats including Irish poet Seamus Heaney and African playwright Wole Soyinka. I intend to get a preview of what Walcott is planning for his guests, and his recommendations for what to see and do in St Lucia.
This hilly volcanic island belongs to Walcott in the way Gabriel García Márquez possesses South America or Salman Rushdie’s thumbprint is on India. In his 1973 verse autobiography Another Life, he tells of the vocation he felt to “name” St Lucia – this “virginal, unpainted world” that was missing from the history books, where there were “forests of history thickening with amnesia”. His birthplace has been the backdrop to many of his works, most notably his 1990 epic poem Omeros, in which he reimagines Homer’s Odyssey as the tale of two St Lucian fishermen.
Walcott is wary of journalists and had initially barked at me on the phone. However, when he realises it is his island I want to talk to him about, he becomes an affable host, offering me rum punch and inviting me to join him and his partner Sigrid for a swim and lunch.
Later, we pack deckchairs into the boot of a jeep and Walcott climbs into the back, grumbling as his partner Sigrid drives over rough ground on a shortcut to the beach. “Derek’s son Peter calls this bit Serengeti,” she jokes, and there is a whiff of Africa about the place: a couple of horses stand like wary antelope under a calabash tree. Many of the roads would have been like this when Walcott was growing up.
