La alternativa del Nuevo Mundo de Derek Walcott: memoria colonial, imágenes emblemáticas, y la “pequeña gente”

Resumo

In 1957 a relatively young Derek Walcott (he was twenty-seven at the time) was commissioned a play aimed at celebrating the Opening of the First Federal Parliament of The West Indies on the 23^rd of April 1958. The result was Drums and Colours, a play which stages four hundred years of the complex and troubled history of the Caribbean based, as Walcott himself declared, on “four emblematic images: Columbus in chains, Millais’s painting The Boyhood of Raleigh, the coachman of the Breda family Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the martyrdom of George William Gordon for Jamaican independence’. Drawing attention to these ‘emblematic images’, Walcott reveals that Drums and Colours originated from a visual matrix, invites us to consider the play as an extended verbal rendition of visual prompts, and highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity for his decolonial agenda. Whilst looking at Walcott’s visual prompts, I will be arguing that the work of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera is another important, if unacknowledged, visual source for Drums and Colours which reveals how the young Walcott’s views and work were deeply inflected by his sense of allegiance to the vast Caribbean sea-region and to the emancipatory agenda of its ‘little people’.