Elvis Fuentes y compañía, la cita anterior en el original en inglés completa juntoa la pregunta que estaba respondiendo: NTERVIEWER One of your most well-known early poems, “A Far Cry from Africa,” ends with the question, “How can I turn from Africa and live?” However, by 1970 you could write that “the African revival is escape to another dignity,” and that “once we have lost our wish to be white, we develop a longing to become black, and those two may be different, but are still careers.” You also assert that the claim to be African is not an inheritance but a bequest, “a bill for the condition of our arrival as slaves.” These are controversial statements. What is your current sense of the West Indian writer’s relationship to Africa? WALCOTT There is a duty in every son to become his own man. The son severs himself from the father. The Caribbean very often refuses to cut that umbilical cord to confront its own stature. So a lot of people exploit an idea of Africa out of both the wrong kind of pride and the wrong kind of heroic idealism. At great cost and a lot of criticism, what I used to try to point out was that there is a great danger in historical sentimentality. We are most prone to this because of suffering, of slavery. There’s a sense of skipping the part about slavery, and going straight back to a kind of Eden-like grandeur, hunting lions, that sort of thing. Whereas what I’m saying is to take in the fact of slavery, if you’re capable of it, without bitterness, because bitterness is going to lead to the fatality of thinking in terms of revenge. A lot of the apathy in the Caribbean is based on this historical sullenness. It is based on the feeling of “Look what you did to me.” Well, “Look what you did to me,” is juvenile, right? And also, “Look what I’m going to do to you,” is wrong. Think about illegitimacy in the Caribbean! Few people can claim to find their ancestry in the linear way. The whole situation in the Caribbean is an illegitimate situation. If we admit that from the beginning that there is no shame in that historical bastardy, then we can be men. But if we continue to sulk and say, Look at what the slave-owner did, and so forth, we will never mature. While we sit moping or writing morose poems and novels that glorify a nonexistent past, then time passes us by. We continue in one mood, which is in too much of Caribbean writing: that sort of chafing and rubbing of an old sore. It is not because one wishes to forget; on the contrary, you accept it as much as anybody accepts a wound as being a part of his body. But this doesn’t mean that you nurse it all your life.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 20:08:29 +0000
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