Maria Cristina Fumagalli

Morning, Paramin Derek Walcott, Peter Doig, and an Ekphrasis of Relation

In Morning, Paramin (2016), 51 new poems by Derek Walcott are in dialogue with 51 paintings by Peter Doig. Walcott, also an accomplished painter, has often engaged with the visual arts, but this is the first volume in which every poem “cor-responds” to a painting, offering unique opportunities to examine Walcott’s ekphrastic practices and the way in which they might offer alternatives to current paradigms. Rejecting the paradigm of a paragonal struggle for dominance, I will argue that Morning, Paramin is shaped by an ekphrasis of Relation (resonating with Glissant’s poetics of Relation) in which the verbal and the visual interact in complex ways, exercising mutual reclaimings of agency and transformative dialogues that engender new composite works of art governed by a noncompetitive, nonexploitative approach; as otherness is reconfigured, the right to “opacity” is upheld, and each image and word contribute to a whole bigger than the sum of its parts.

Every Brightening Minute: Morning, Paramin, by Derek Walcott and Peter Doig

Towards the end of The Prodigal (2004), the late Derek Walcott suggested that this collection might have been his last book. Thankfully, we were lucky enough to have four more: the poetry collection White Egrets in 2010 – which won the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry – followed, in 2012, by Moon-Child, a revisitation of Walcott’s 1958 Ti-Jean and his Brothers; two years later Walcott published the play O Starry Starry Night – where he dramatises Paul Gauguin’s visit to Vincent Van Gogh in Arles in 1888 – and, a few months ago, in November 2016, appeared Morning, Paramin, a new collection of poems. Morning, Paramin, however, is a collection of poems with a difference: bringing together Walcott’s deep and long-lasting passion for poetry and painting, the volume stages a sustained dialogue between fifty-one of Walcott’s poems and fifty-one paintings by the contemporary artist Peter Doig. Walcott and Doig met a few years ago, when Walcott was visiting family in Trinidad, the island where Doig has been living since 2002. Born in St Lucia in 1930, Walcott had a very strong bond with Trinidad: not only has he frequently celebrated its natural beauty and vibrant culture in his poems, plays, paintings, and essays, but in 1959 he funded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and wrote for the Trinidad Guardian for many years. From a more personal perspective, his two daughters, who were born after he married the Trinidadian Margaret Maillard in1962, still live in Trinidad with their husbands and Walcott’s five grandchildren. Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Doig lived in Trinidad between the age of two and seven, when his family moved to Canada. He returned to the island in 2000 for a short visit and two years later decided to relocate there from London, where he had been mostly living and working since he was nineteen. Since his arrival in Trinidad, Doig has played an active role in its cultural life: amongst other things, he has held workshops for the inmates of one of the island’s prisons and, with the artist Che Lovelace, son of the Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace, he has been screening films in his large studio for a group of local viewers interested in nonmainstream cinema. Walcott pays homage to Doig’s activities by including poems inspired by three of his advertising posters, two of which are for documentaries dedicated to Trinidadian culture, namely, Van Dyke Parks Presents the Esso Trinidad Steel Band (2004) and Pure Chutney (2004). Walcott’s poems are affectionate reminiscences of going to the cinema in his youth, vignettes of the enthusiastic but ‘broke’ audiences who resorted to ‘storm[ing]’ the cinema to avoid paying their tickets to see Hollywood stars like Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Peter Lorre, or Jack Palance (59, 61, 63). The inclusion of Doig’s posters and the reference to film also encapsulate the interplay between images and words which characterises Morning, Paramin, a collection in which the visual and the verbal ‘cohere’ and ‘ignite,’ as Walcott always hoped they would (Another Life 58–59). Walcott’s poems, in fact, do not speak about, to or for Doig’s works but, one could argue, they speak with them: each time we turn a page we are faced with a new composite work where words and images combine in often surprising and always engaging ways. The opening poem, ‘Dedication to S.H.’ sets the scene and provides us, from the very beginning, with one of these startling combinations: as Walcott welcomes his new friend. Doig to St Lucia, the poem initially zooms in on Pigeon Island and the landscape one can view from Walcott’s balcony. Then, temporality shifts between present and past and the poem zooms out of the balcony to encompass the entire island as Walcott names, in a loving inventory, some of St Lucia’s most striking landmarks and the places he used to frequent as a youth — Gros Piton, Dennery, Choc, Blanchisseuse (3). The painting by Doig which faces the poem -–J.M. at Paragon (2004) – presents us with a beach where we can see, from a distance, a man standing, up to Maria Cristina Fumagalli

Resistance in the Rubble: Post-San Zenón Santo Domingo from Ramón Lugo Lovatón’s Escombros : Huracán del 1930 to Carlos Federico Pérez’s La ciudad herida

On 3 September 1930, hurricane San Zenon ravaged the city of Santo Domingo and the reconstruction effort became instrumental to Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s consolidation of his autocratic power in the Dominican Republic. Fumagalli puts in dialogue Ramon Lugo Lovaton’s Escombros: Huracan del 1930, a collection of journalistic articles published in the immediate aftermath of San Zenon which fully endorse Trujillo’s despotic project, with the novel La ciudad herida by Carlos Federico Perez. Published in 1977, Perez’s novel revisits the effects of San Zenon highlighting the existence of different forms of social solidarity which aimed at counteracting Trujillo while tentatively putting forward the possibility of an (albeit deferred) alternative to despotism.

Audubon, Another Vision: Derek Walcott's "white Egrets" and Adam's Task of Giving Things Their Names

In Derek Walcott’s “White Egrets” (2010) the titular birds play a central role in the conversation that the poet opens up with the ornithological artist John James Audubon. Audubon’s work is the fruit of complex negotiations between life and death, humans and animals, real presences and emblems. Walcott’s examination of these negotiations enables him to reconsider Audubon’s poetics and ethics of representation whilst rearticulating his own. Walcott referred to poetry (and painting) as “Adam’s task of giving things their names”: a statement that might be taken to suggest an exploitative perspective and an anthropocentric approach which dismisses the need to treat nonhumans ethically. “White Egrets,” instead, emphasizes interaction rather than prevarication, showing that “naming” the world can only be significant and regenerative if the “things” to be “named” play their part in the creative process rather than being sealed off from the human world in order to be reified and exploited.