RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

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Walcott utilizes the canoe 33 as a maritime symbol of subjectivity because of the
―alter/native‖ chronotope associated with it. Unlike the masculine imperial traveler, who
gives meaning and history to a blank spatial environment, 34 nature gains presence in the
navigational system of etak in which ―the voyaging canoe is perceived as stable while the
islands and cosmos move towards the traveler‖ (DeLoughrey 3). The canoe traveler
remains relatively still; shores and waves are the things that move toward and away from
him or her. The Pacific islander chronotope of etak travel displaces the center of agency
from the subject to the region in which the canoe travels, making an imaginative leap
from the fact that during small boat travel, passengers sit down and go relatively nowhere
to cover large distances across water. Since Achille journeys to Africa by sitting still in
the waters of the Windward Islands, his dramatic place-memory is shaped by an
―alter/native‖ historiography.
Bill Ashcroft describes Walcott as a ―symbolic Adam‖ who defines himself in his
autobiography Another Life as a castaway Adam in a second Eden (Caliban’s Voice 87).
As an Adamic poet, Walcott does not name the world for the first time; he names a
perennially new world that has been named countless times before. The difference
between a first and second Adam lies in the traditionally epic desire for continuity and
the Adamic ability to recognize dis-continuity between classical, patrician poetry and
33 The small narrow boat is named as the canoe, pirogue, or vaka in either the Pacific or
the Atlantic.
34 This traveler is epitomized in Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness as a violent torchbearer
spreading England‘s ―sacred‖ fire: ―Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all
had gone out on that stream [the Thames], bearing the sword, and often the torch,
messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What
greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . .
. The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.‖