Derek Walcott

In 1954, Derek Walcott married Fay Moston, who came from a wealthy Jamaican family. With her, he fathered a son, Peter Walcott, who later became a famous painter and now lives in St. Lucia. The marriage ended in divorce in 1959.

He then married Margaret Maillard, with whom he had a live-in partnership before marriage. She was an almoner in a hospital in Port of Spain, but was equally active as a dancer and painter. They had two daughters; Elizabeth Walcott Hackshaw, and Anna Walcott Hardy.

This marriage too did not last long. From the middle of the 1970s, he started having an affair with Norline Metivier, a young dancer in one of his plays. He married her in 1976, but it too broke up before long.

Derek Alton Walcott was born on January 23, 1930 in the colonial city of Castries, located in the eastern Caribbean island of St. Lucia into a family of mixed descent. While both his grandfathers were whites, both his grandmothers were descendants of African slaves, brought to the island centuries ago.

His father, Warwick Walcott, was a civil servant by profession, but by avocation he was a watercolorist and a poet. He was of bohemian nature and died at age 31 from mastoiditis. His mother, Alix Walcott, was a teacher at the local Methodist school and raised their three children singlehandedly.

Apart from a twin brother Roderick, who would eventually become an established playwright, Derek had an elder sister named Pamela. They grew up in a house full of books, paintings and recorded music and spoke an English-French patois.

At that time, the territory was under British dominance and the official language was English. However, signs of earlier French rule were still there and majority of the population was Roman Catholics as established by the French. Being Methodist, young Derek often felt like an outsider in his own land.

As a young boy, he would often go out to watch the poor people living in shanties; some of whom would later appear in his autobiographical poem, ‘Another Life’. He also found the sea, with its different moods and legends, fishermen and schooners, and sounds of the sea, very fascinating.

In 1953, Derek Walcott began his career as a theatre and art critic in Trinidad. But some biographers are of the opinion that he first returned to Castries, where he taught at St. Mary’s College for a year, before moving to Trinidad.

Whichever version is true, it is universally accepted that by 1954, he was well-established at Trinidad because in the mid-1950s he had two of his plays. ‘The Sea at Dauphin’ and ‘Ione’ premiered here. Soon he decided to establish a resident theatre project on the island.

In 1958, on earning a Rockefeller Foundation grant with his play, ‘Drums and Colours’ Walcott moved to New York City with the aim of working with off-Broadway directors. He wanted to learn the skills that would help him to establish a repertory group in Trinidad. But he was sorely disappointed.

He soon realized that he wanted to create something different and neither the Off-Broadway nor the Broadway was the right model for that. Therefore, he returned to Trinidad and in 1959, founded Trinidad Theatre Workshop along with his brother Roderick in Port of Spain, the capital city of the island.

Derek Walcott remained the founder director of the Workshop till 1971. Concurrently, from 1960 to 1968, he also worked as a reporter of ‘Trinidad Guardian’ and covered local news for the paper.

In 1962, Derek Walcott’s poems gained the attention of the editors at the British publisher Jonathan Cape’s publication house. In the same year, the publisher released Walcott’s first major collection of poems, ‘In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960’. The book was well received and very soon he was established as a poet.

One of his admirers was poet Robert Lowell, who came to Trinidad to meet Walcott. It was largely through his effort that publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) signed him as their new writer.

His subsequent publications, ‘Selected Poems’ (1964), ‘The Castaway’ (1965), and ‘The Gulf’ (1969), were hailed for their rich language and complicated rhyme. But more importantly, they expressed his feelings of being caught between his Caribbean traditions as well as beliefs and the European culture in which he had been oriented.

From the early 1970s, Walcott started spending more time in the USA, teaching creative writing at well-known universities like Harvard and Columbia. Concurrently, he continued publishing books like ‘Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays’ (1970), ‘The Gulf’ (1970),’ Another Life’ (1973), ‘Sea Grapes’ (1976) , and ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’ (1979).

In 1981, he joined Boston University, where he taught literature and creative writing. In the same year, he established Boston Playwrights' Theatre to promote new plays. Concurrently, he continued to publish poems and plays on a regular basis. He retired from the university in 2007.