SITES OF HISTORY AND CULTURAL RECLAMATION: RIVERS AND SEAS IN THE POETRY OF WALCOTT AND HUGHES
By Gelsey White
Although they were born thirty years apart in different countries, Langston Hughes and Derek Walcott both wrote through the racial and cultural history of the transatlantic experience. This transatlantic experience unifies Hughes’ American landscape and Walcott’s Caribbean seascape through the history of Africa and its descendants. Through their poetry, both Hughes and Walcott reclaim places of cultural significance from the dominating white male narrative of history to document sites of trauma and realign them with the agency of non-white peoples. While Walcott focuses on the Caribbean Sea and Hughes on rivers in the American landscape, both poets incorporate transatlantic movement and the power of waterscapes to hold, submerge, or let resurface the history of African oppression. While the bodies of water presented in their poetry function mainly as recreations of history, they also function as sites of agency and hope for the descendants living in the wake of these waterscapes.
Walcott and Hughes, in their respective texts, use waterscapes that function as both sites of cultural significance and narrative frames. While waterways have no official political ownership, white, imperial powers have traditionally used rivers and oceans as a means of transportation and destruction of non-white bodies through the transatlantic movement of people. The cultural significance of a place, in this context, refers to the way in which a location produces meaning for a group of people by providing a literal site for social, political, or historical memory to live on past an event. By marking the cultural significance of a place, members of a social group recognize the shared experiences that unify people of a certain identity. W. Jason Miller notes that white artists have claimed ownership over the natural world and occupied it for their literary use: “White American riverscapes are often considered the domain of white male heterosexuals, and certainly had this reputation during Hughes’s lifetime” (24). For Walcott and Hughes to write about waterways is to both acknowledge their view of these spaces as sites of trauma, history, and remembrance, as well as to complicate the meaning of these sites through metaphoric representation. It is no coincidence that Walcott and Hughes use the sea and the river, respectively, to subvert the traditional expectations of nature in poetry; for both men, these places were and are real, and transfixing them in poetry allows them to create cultural significance in art where it already exists beneath dominant narratives of reality. Through their poetry, Hughes and Walcott establish the shared experiences associated with rivers and the sea by using these waterscapes as places that both exist and influence their poetic narratives.
Walcott, of African and white descent born on Saint Lucia, and Hughes, an African American born in Missouri, wrote poetry which worked through the histories of their ancestry, blending the past with the present and future. For Walcott, the Caribbean Sea functions as a site of memory that combines his multiple racial lineages. According to Ben Thomas Jefferson, “the history contained within the “oceanic past” complicates the poet’s European lineage and emphasizes his Afro-Caribbean roots” (296). Walcott mixes these two heritages within his poem “The Sea is History” to highlight how the sea is at once fluid and permanent, a site that upholds cultural history throughout time. Unlike teleological history, which distinguishes events in the past through a progressive narrative, cultural history in this context unifies disparate events through associations established in artistic and material recreations of the past by a social group. Walcott begins the poem by asking “where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? / Where is your tribal memory?” (1-2). While Walcott may be speaking to the people who have a “dominant relationship” to the Caribbean, he does not specify whose history the sea can or does stand in for and uses the unspecific second person “you,” suggesting that the sea can simultaneously hold multiple histories. In these first two lines, Walcott connects a Eurocentric view of history, which records history through monuments, battles, and martyrs, with a Caribbean view, tracing memory through tribal ancestry. Both records of the past, according to Walcott, are held within the sea; “in that grey vault. The sea. The sea / has locked them up. The sea is History” (3-4). Not only does the sea hold history, according to Walcott, but it traps it, a metaphorical reference to the transatlantic slave experience. By unifying different perspectives through the sea, Walcott develops this place to function in his poetry on multiple thematic levels.
In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes uses the river as a way of connecting multiple moments in the histories that are part of his ancestry. Hughes references different rivers in the Middle East, Africa, and America, “I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young…” unifying these separate lands through the image of a constant river (4). According to Miller, Hughes finds historical significance for himself in these rivers as a way of combating the threat of the American landscape for African Americans: “By claiming intimacy with the world’s historical rivers, however, he lessens this fearfulness” (24). Hughes seeks a commonality between the experiences with these rivers, unlike Walcott who layers multiple experiences onto a single sea and highlights the human relationship to the river as place. “I bathed…I built…I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it…” (4-6). Hughes includes physical actions, driven by the first-person narrator, to challenge the idea of how humans interact with the river. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the narrator is vicariously acting in these historical moments by relating to the imagery of a river, which is “older than the flow of human blood” to physical interactions with the rivers of time (2).
Both Walcott and Hughes combine the metaphorical and literal throughout their poetry to acknowledge the black and Caribbean people who lost their lives within these spaces of the sea and the river. Walcott’s biblical references in “The Sea is History” serve not only to unify the pre- and post-colonial experiences of Caribbean people but also to use the Christian tradition to make sense of the colonial experience:
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:
Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
Mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,
that was the Ark of the Covenant. (10-16)
The exodus to which Walcott refers is the slave trade, the physical movement of bodies across the Atlantic. The Ark of the Covenant, which contains the Ten Commandments, is, according to Walcott, the reef beneath the sea which he imagines built with the bones of slaves. According to Jefferson, “By affixing the skeletal corpses of Africans who did not make it across the Middle Passage onto the ocean floor, Walcott turns the whole Atlantic into a kind of necropolis…a place of memory” (298). By occupying and transforming the religious tradition into the physical experience of slaves, Walcott reclaims the sea as a site for historical trauma as opposed to economic profit, while also acknowledging the literal bodies that exist beneath the waves.
For Hughes, rivers also act as sites that unify both metaphorical representations of suffering and the material bodies of those who have died as a result of white oppression. In “The Bitter River,” Hughes imagines that the river has a metaphorical power as well as a physical power to drown someone: “There is a bitter river/ Flowing through the South. / Too long has the taste of its water/ Been in my mouth” (1-4). The bitter river stands in for oppression, which sours all the experiences of the narrator by constantly influencing his physical senses. The narrator is not literally consuming the bitter river water, but the oppression he experiences every day functions like the river. Just as the sea contains the reefs constructed of bone in “The Sea is History,” the river in “The Bitter River” is “mixed with the blood of the lynched boys” (11). As Miller notes, Hughes’ autobiographical experiences with rivers suggest that he viewed rivers as a site of cultural importance in relation to race (25). Hughes wrote this poem for two boys who were lynched, and the bitter river contains the history of murdered African Americans both literally and metaphorically.
Waterscapes occupy both the physical body and the mind of the characters in the poetry of Walcott and Hughes. As Jefferson notes about the character Shabine in Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight,” “one could argue that the sea has become an integral part of [Shabine’s] body” (291). Rather than Shabine reflecting aspects of the ocean, however, the ocean forces its way into his body, challenging the character instead of providing insight into him. In “The Schooner Flight,” Shabine imagines himself consumed and drowned by the ocean in the same way the ghosts he encountered earlier in the poem were:
I remember them ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing
to the sea-bed of sea-worms, fathom pass fathom
my jaw clenched like a fist, and only one thing
hold me, trembling, how my family home safe. (396-399)
By referring to the ghost ships earlier in the poem, the narrator Shabine places himself within the historical context of humans’ relationship to the sea. For Shabine, the sea does not become a way to understand his current self, but rather his past; as he points out, the only thing that holds him steady, that keeps him from drowning in the sea, is the thought of his family on land. For Shabine, water occupies his thoughts in the form of fears, which gestures back to Hughes’ connection with the river as a site of fear.
Waterscapes contain cultural memories which continue the historical consciousness of characters within both Walcott’s and Hughes’ poetry. While Shabine in “The Schooner Flight” distresses over the threat of the sea, the narrator in Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” finds power in the historical prevalence of the river. His mantra, “my soul has grown deep like the rivers” suggests that he finds a sense of spiritual understanding in the river (4, 10). The history which the narrator references, of people bathing, living, and working beside rivers, suggests a symbiosis which exists between the narrator, a self-proclaimed negro, and the rivers of history. In this poem, the narrator understands his soul through the river, finding a sense of life instead of a foreboding death.
While the river and the sea provide mechanisms for the poets to make sense of their narrators, it is less through a physical sense of self and more through the language of the water. Jefferson notes that “Walcott’s poetry is not only created in the sea, it is also created of the sea” (291). The “sea voice” which Jefferson imagines is part of a larger cultural relationship with the sea which comes from Walcott’s life around the sea and the importance it plays in the identity of his poetry (291). While Jefferson suggests that the sea becomes a part of Shabine’s body in “The Schooner Flight,” as he “couldn’t shake the sea noise out of [his] head,” this line rather demonstrates that the sea is an internal language (112). The language of the sea or the river carries symbolic meaning for both Walcott and Hughes, as James de Jongh, referenced in Miller, notes that in Hughes’ poetry there is “symbolic relevance of being sold ‘downriver,’ finding comfort at ‘the riverside,’ and longing for the freedom found ‘over Jordan’” (Miller 25). By using the language of these water sources as a universal experience, either through a historical or cultural understanding, the poets transform the river or the sea into significant literary sources of knowledge for their narrators and the communities they situate in relation to the waterscapes.
The language of rivers and seas embeds a source of cultural knowledge into the poetry of Hughes and Walcott because places are formed through both oral and literary understandings of a certain space. Seamus Heaney’s sense of place, referenced by Jefferson, includes the vital aspects of inherited oral culture and literary culture which create a sense of a place through the “equable marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind, whether the country of the mind takes its tone unconsciously from a shared oral inherited culture, or from a consciously savoured literary culture, or from both” (288). In his poetry, Hughes instills the oral inherited culture of their communities by using music as an oral language. The blues influences the poetry of both Walcott and Hughes, as the blues have “[come] into form as a result of a series of intersecting experiences (slavery, resistance to enslavement, and the post-slavery experience), [they] have emerged as poignant early 20th century articulations of black life and struggle” (Thomas 26). Just as the blues developed as an oral culture to discuss these issues, the thematic use of the river and the sea also have taken part in forming both an oral and written culture of black experience. Hughes, in “Sylvester’s Dying Bed,” for example, uses blues features of repetitious syncopation, rhyming, and regional vernacular to discuss the relationship between the life of Sylvester and the River Jordan:
But I felt ma time’s a-comin’,
And I know’d I’s dyin’ fast.
I seed de River Jerden
A-creepin’ muddy past- (17-20)
Hughes presents the river as a measurement of time through a written voice that implies speech. In these lines, the river not only represents a past time in history but also the present time as it moves past, like the flow of a river. In this poem, Hughes combines the image of the river with the experiences of the black community through vocalization in blues aesthetic. Hughes’ poems rely on language, not only through written language but also through the vocalization of trauma and experience which the blues provided to African Americans. He has his narrator “speak” of rivers, not write of them, in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” As Miller notes, “speaking is central to how truth is remembered” (30). Just as Hughes’ poems function as sites of remembrance of a cultural past, the rivers function as metaphorical places for the reclamation of narratives through oral language such as the blues.
While Walcott does use the blues as a way of commenting on the social conditions of “black America” (Thomas 24), he connects the sea with the oral culture of the sea chantey because the chantey functions as a shared cultural experience unique to the nautical world. Walcott’s rich use of blues makes a thorough discussion of this topic beyond the scope of this paper, however it is worth noting that Walcott often uses the blues to articulate the experiences of the African diaspora community (Thomas 23-27). The blues function as a source of oral culture in Walcott’s poetry through a “West Indian appropriation of the blues to communicate the phenomenon of black male belonging in the US” (Thomas 23), but Walcott’s primary focus on language in relation to the sea is through the inherited culture of the sea chantey. According to Jefferson, “the chantey is produced from an experience of the sea, and this experience reflects upon how the sea is known” (293). In “A Sea Chantey,” for example, Walcott uses “the sea’s liquid letters” (26) to describe the names of the islands in the Caribbean, suggesting that the sea has a language which influences not only those who live in proximity to the sea, but also the songs, or chanteys, which in turn make sense of the sea. The story that Shabine tells in “The Schooner Flight” is a nautical chantey, as the poem represents “Shabine [singing] to you from the depths of the sea” (472). By tying the experience of Shabine, a self-proclaimed “red nigga who love the sea” to the act of vocalizing his experiences through song, Walcott demonstrates how a language produced by the sea then reflects upon the production of the sea in his poetry as a place of oppression as well as reclaimed history (40).
Both Hughes and Walcott use the power of speaking and writing about the historical experiences of the African diaspora through waterscapes to create a form of agency in spite of oppression. By invoking agency, the ability of an individual to make decisions without constraints from larger societal structures, the poets suggest that their artistic work provides a space to escape hegemonic restraints. The sea and the river both function as sites of cultural trauma, the sea holding the bodies of murdered slaves and the river holding the bodies of lynched African Americans both metaphorically and literally. By using these waterscapes as sites not only of death but also of rebirth and agency, the poets transform their cultural perspectives on these places. In “Life is Fine,” the narrator jumps into a river and sinks, but fails to die and later proclaims his affinity for life:
I went down to the river
I set down on the bank
I tried to think but couldn’t,
So I jumped in and sank…
You may hear me holler,
You may see me cry,
But I’ll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die. (1-4, 23-26)
By claiming the experience of drowning as a decision for this narrator, one that he ultimately chooses to avoid in favor of life, Hughes transforms the site of the river into a place acted upon instead of imposed. The river, instead of drowning the narrator, appears to give him a new perspective on life, therefore restoring his agency. In “Lament Over Love,” Hughes presents the river as a place for his narrator to work through her emotions in the present, rather than a place to be tied to because of historical significance:
I’m goin’ down to de river
An’ I ain’t goin’ there to swim.
Goin’ down to de river,
Ain’t goin’ there to swim.
Ma true love’s left me, an’
I’m goin’ there to think about him. (7-12)
By repeating the first two lines, Hughes emphasizes that the river is not only a site for physical interaction with the water, but also for more introspective actions. By making both “Lament Over Love” and “Life is Fine” highly individual experiences, using the first person and emphasizing personal decision and agency, Hughes reclaims the river as a site of personal transformation.
While Hughes wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” with the understanding that the river “has as much cultural significance as a site of oppression in [the year the poem was written] as it did during times of slavery,” he does not use the river to portray experiences of suffering but rather to demonstrate how rivers allowed his ancestors to survive and thrive (Miller 31). Miller argues that “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” uses historical memory to overcome the relationship between African Americans and the American river created through white lynching:
The poem reminds others that despite the mob tendency to lynch victims from bridges which cross America’s rivers, historical and personal memories of waterscapes have become essential to overcoming the psychological trauma of imagining bodies becoming the subject of sadistic souvenir seeking. (31)
In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the historical references that the narrator places himself in culminate in Abe Lincoln’s trip to Mississippi, which sparked the decision to end slavery. Hughes highlights this historical milestone by describing the physical transformation of the river from a site of lynching, murder, and darkness that he portrays in “The Bitter River” into a place of beauty: “I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset” (8-9). Hughes uses the river as a thread which ties together different historical moments of survival and reclamation of the self to transform the river into a symbol of life for the African American community.
Walcott uses the sea to give voice to the people of the Caribbean, and working through his own historical traumas allows his characters to sail past these experiences and survive the sea. According to Jefferson, “Walcott suggests that, as the places of history, aquatic bodies may also be the site of healing” (301). In “The Schooner Flight,” Walcott’s protagonist Shabine discovers from his perils on the sea a newfound sense of power previously reserved for foreign colonials:
Well, Shabine has bridled the horses of the sea; you see me watching the sun till my eyeballs seared, so all you mad people feel Shabine crazy, but all you ain’t know my strength, hear? The coconuts standing by in their regiments in yellow khaki, they waiting for Shabine to take over these islands, and all you best dread the day I am healed of being a human. (358-365)
Walcott uses the Eurocentric reference to Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, to describe Shabine’s control of the sea, redesigning this myth to suit his non-European character. Not only does Shabine learn how to conquer the sea, but he also imagines a time when he will be able to lay claim over the islands of the Caribbean previously colonized by white Europeans. Shabine can only reclaim the land, a form of reverse colonization, by first being able to control the sea, the place which facilitates inter-island travel and discovery. Shabine can imagine a day when he is “healed of being a human,” a day when the baggage of ancestral influence and the external powers of the natural world no longer cause him suffering. Walcott presents this image of the future through Shabine to suggest that African descendants can use the sea, which previously was the site of their oppression, death, and suffering, to permit cultural healing.
Finally, it would not be proper to conclude this analysis without examining how Walcott deals with the image of the river in Omeros. In Book 3, chapter XXV, part II, the character Achilles hallucinates returning to the Congo River in Africa, where he is reunited with his father. By having Achilles experience his ancestry by traveling to a civilization on the river, Walcott appears to use the same historical power of the river which Hughes uses in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Achilles does not discover this place, however, he “remembered this sunburnt river” (1). Just as the narrator in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” imagines his life among rivers through history, Achilles uses vicarious experience to reconnect with the river of his past. In part III, Achilles discovers his multiple ancestries through the waterscapes reflected in his father’s features: “He sought his own features in those of their life-giver,/ and saw two worlds mirrored there: the hair was surf/ curling round a sea rock, the forehead a frowning river” (31-33). Walcott’s image of the sea and the river creating the features of Achilles’ father unifies the function of these waterscapes together. By referencing time, history, ancestry, and the ability to give life through the description of the features of the face, Walcott unites the two worlds of the historical river and the transatlantic ocean, the pre and post-colonial features of the African diaspora.
Through their use of waterscapes to recreate and work through historical and cultural experiences, Walcott and Hughes imagine new meanings and functions of the sea and the river for their communities. Both poets make sense of historical traumas by acknowledging the sea and the river as sites of oppression, and by reclaiming these places by writing through their legacies. The act of writing poetry, for both men, was itself a form of agency, which they used to reclaim these natural waterscapes for their cultural performance. By knowing rivers, Hughes knows the history of the African American experience, and by writing of the sea, Walcott transforms it into a place of spiritual and physical knowledge. Hughes and Walcott use the river and the sea, these natural forces unified by their power to transport, transform, and destroy, to return, transfix, and give life to narratives previously submerged within the depths of cultural existence.
Works Cited
Jefferson, Ben Thomas. “The Sea as place in Derek Walcott’s poetry.” The Journal of Commonweath Literature, vol. 48, no. 2, June 2013, pp. 287–304, doi:10.1177/0021989412471837.
Miller, W. Jason. “Justice, Lynching, and American Riverscapes: Finding Reassurance in Langston Hughes’s ‘The Negro
Speaks of Rivers.’” The Langston Hughes Review, vol. 18,
2004, pp. 24–37. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/2643466
Ramazani, Jahan, et al. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. 3rd ed., vol. 1, W.W. Norton, 2003.2.
Thomas, Charleston Alex. “Walcott’s “Blues” and the Discourse of Black Male Existence.” Journal of West Indian Literature. vol 21. No. 1/2. 2012, pp. 23-41. JSOTR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/24615442.
Walcott, D. “A Sea-Chantey.” The Wilson Quarterly, 21, 1997. Pp. 114.
Gelsey White ’19 is a senior English major from Taunton, Massachusetts whose interests include literary nonfiction, anthropology, and gender studies. She is a member of VRDT, VARC, student theater, and Boilerplate Magazine. She can often be found reading books about mountain climbing, taking photographs, or dancing.
