Derek Walcott "Names"

Summary

In the first section of “Names,” the speaker

describes the beginning of his race, the Caribbean
people. At first they were like the sea, undefined
and looking down at the seafloor and up to the
heavens, rather than across the land to other
places and peoples. Now they are in the world. To
trace the line from then to now, the speaker, like
his race, must begin without knowledge of the
past or the future. He looks for the moment
where their collective view of the world shifted
from the sea and became divided by the horizon,
but he cannot find it.

His race of people came from countries across the

colonized world—Benares in India, Canton in
China, and Benin, a country in West Africa—and
they have lost their memories of who they were
before they were taken from their homelands.
The speaker thus goes back to the only beginning
of his race he can remember, a beginning like the
harsh cry of a “sea-eagle” as his people first tried
to articulate a sense of self when they arrived in
the Caribbean. Yet that world left them with
nothing.

In the second section, the poem shifts to discuss

language and the ways the European colonizers
shaped the map of the Caribbean. They mockingly
named the bays and forests they encountered
after the places they remembered in Europe, and
called a pigsty "Versailles" (the name of King Louis
XIV's opulent palace). The Europeans grew
resentful, starting to perceive the Caribbean as a
place of exile and to resent its land and fruits.

As they grew resentful, they began to hate the

memory of the countries they had lost, yet the
names stuck. Europeans believed in “the right of
every thing to be a noun,” or felt that converting
elements of the world into distinct items with
names was a way of validating them. The enslaved
African people brought to the Caribbean accepted
this but changed the names as they repeated
them back, used their own voices to transform
this colonial register. They bent the names the
way the wind bends the world.

Thus they came to see the world differently. The

palms which the colonizer mockingly named
Versailles are in fact greater than that palace ever
was, because they were made by nature, not by
man. The fallen trees, compared to fallen columns
in the names of the Europeans, are greater than
Castille because they too were destroyed by
nature, not by man. In this configuration of the
world, the worm is a greater emperor than any
human ruler. The Caribbean children can thus
look up to the heavens in a forest named for
Valencia, Spain, and yet see the stars not as the
European constellations, but as “fireflies caught in
molasses” (83).

Analysis

The first stanza of “Names” establishes the sonic

aesthetic of the poem, which employs repetition
and deliberate syntax rather than rhyme or meter
to establish a rhythm. Walcott repeats “began” in
the first line, and repeats the phrase structure
“with no nouns…with no horizon” in the second.
The third and fourth line are slightly less
constrained, but still begin with the word “with,”
a repetition which also establishes a similar syntax
for each line in the stanza. In a sense, the first
stanza acts as a microcosm of the poem as a
whole, establishing some of the strategies Walcott
will use throughout, as well as introducing the
most important themes.
The patterns of repetition established in the first
four lines continue through the rest of the first
section. Both the second and third stanza repeat a
word or phrase at the beginning of multiple lines:
“in the” in lines 6 and 7, “I began with” in lines 8
and 9. In lines 20 through 22, “The goldsmith from
Benares / the stone-cutter from Canton / the
bronzesmith from Benin,” Walcott repeats the
same syntax three times while invoking different
places from across the colonized world. Here, this
repetition suggests the way that the colonization
flattens the differences between these culturally
and geographically distinct locations. Even as the
poet names each specific location, and asserts
that the people who came from them had both a
national identity and a personal identity, such as
goldsmith or stone-cutter, the structure of the
poem has begun to erase those distinctions just as
colonization and slavery created peoples who
could not remember their homelands.
Walcott’s use of repetition suggests the
conventions of folktales or parables, which often
rely on the repetition of certain phrases to aid the
memory of the storyteller and create a sense of
events building upon one another in the context
of a simple plot. The story of Goldilocks and the
Three Bears is a good example of this. On a purely
aesthetic level, then, repetition makes the poem
sound better, makes it more memorable, and
reminds the audience to pay attention to
repeated phrases. For example, the repetition of
the word “began” stresses the importance of
beginnings throughout the first section, reminding
the reader that an origin point cannot be so easily
moved on from, even if it happened in the distant
past. On a structural level, the use of repetition
suggests that Walcott here is creating a kind of
folktale or myth for the beginning of his own
Caribbean people.

Yet the story that Walcott tells about the

beginning cannot be sufficient, because the forces
of colonization have severed his people from their
own past. He is instead caught in a futile search
for “that moment / when the mind was halved by
a horizon” (10-11). This moment is a reference to
the idea that European rationality rests on the
imposition of dichotomies, especially between the
self and the Other, or between the mind and the
body. From there, European philosophical,
cultural, and social tradition assigned power and
superiority to one side of the opposition, and
subjugated the other; most centrally, here, they
imagined white society as the self—familiar,
civilized, and knowing—and colonized peoples as
the Other—exotic, uncivilized, and known.
Walcott equates the “moment when the mind
was halved by the horizon,” or the moment when
these dichotomies came into being for Caribbean
people, with the beginning of his race. He is
suggesting here that the very concept of a
Caribbean people hinges on colonial ideas which
designate a diverse group of people with distinct
histories as one racial category, defined in
opposition to whiteness. This is “that terrible
vowel, / that I,” the speaker says: the very act of
asserting a selfhood, an “I,” is terrible because it
occurs in the context of the violence that brings
into existence a racialized self.

The poem therefore suggests that even the

beginning for which Walcott is searching is a
function of white supremacy and colonial history.
For that reason, the very idea of storytelling or
myth-making is put under pressure. As much as
the first section embodies the aesthetics and
priorities of folktale, it can never really become
one because it not only lacks its own beginning,
but the beginning it seeks out is already troubled,
already a function of the oppressive forces which
Walcott is trying to write against. We see this
theme explicitly in the last lines of the first
section, where the speaker describes his people
left on a coastline “with nothing in our hands / but
this stick / to trace our names on the sand / which
the sea erased again, to our indifference” (31-34).
The stick here symbolizes the act of writing or
storytelling, which, according to the speaker, is all
his people have left. Yet the sea returns to erase
the story again and again. Rather than this being a
moment of hopelessness, the people are
“indifferent.” They aren’t attached to preserving a
document of their story, even though the ability
to write it is all that they have. Indeed, the poem
identifies more with the sea, to which Walcott
first compares his people, than with the act of
writing.

The theme of writing and language becomes more

central in the second section of the poem.
Repetition as a literary device largely disappears
in this section, with the syntax becoming more
conversational and less sing-song. Instead,
Walcott employs frequent enjambment, or
breaking a line in the middle of phrase, as in
“Versailes’ colonnades / supplanted by cabbage
palms / with Corinthian crests” (43-45). This
device renders the poem more fragmented,
replacing a soothing, folkloric rhythm with one
which is off-putting and ragged.

However, the idea of repetition becomes

powerful here. The second section speaks to the
way that the Europeans imposed language on the
Caribbean. They superimposed the geography of
their homeland onto the natural landscape they
encountered; the palm trees became the
colonnades of Versailles. They thus imagined that
the landscape of Europe was repeated
everywhere, only in an inferior form. By naming a
pigsty “little Versailles,” they mockingly repeated
and twisted their own language as a way to
denigrate the colonized land. Eventually, these
names took, even as the colonizers began to lose
their memories of the land they had left; the
language became a repetition without an original.

Describing the European process of naming the

land, Walcott states, “Being men, they could not
live / except they first presumed / the right of
every thing to be a noun” (58-60). The language
here is pointedly ambiguous. The phrase “Being
men” seems to suggest that language and naming
is an inherent aspect of humanity, a natural thing
that people do to understand their world.
However, the broader structure of this stanza
juxtaposes “the African” against the subject who
“presumed the right of every thing to be a noun.”
Walcott thus implies here that Africans were not
men. This might seem like a strange thing for an
anti-racist poet to imply, but his point is that the
very idea of who is or is not a human being is a
constructed category based around whiteness.
Race pseudo-science argued that people of color,
especially Black people, were less evolved, or
were in-between human and animal, in order to
justify oppression. In these lines, Walcott is
arguing that white colonizers believed that the
way they used language was inevitable, and that
peoples who used language differently were less
than human.
From this place, the colonized people began to
reclaim repetition, to use it in their own way. In
response to the Europeans who imposed names
on the land, “the African acquiesced, / repeated,
and changed them” (61-62). In other words,
Africans agreed to begin perceiving the world as a
set of nouns, but they also took those nouns,
repeated them back, and eventually transformed
them. Repetition thus became the first step to
claiming language and making it their own. We
see the conclusion to this process in the last two
stanzas of the poem. The children look at the stars
“over Valencia’s forest,” or over a forest named
for a place in Spain (77-78). However, their sight is
not constrained the way that of the Europeans
was; they are able to perceive the place in their
own way, not as a derivative of somewhere else.
When they look at the stars, they see “fireflies
caught in molasses” (83). Rather than simply
naming their own constellations, variations on the
classical idea of tracing pictures like “Orion” or
“Betelgeuse” in the heavens, they understand the
sky totally independently, seeing natural imagery
upon natural imagery, rather than translating the
natural night sky into man-made myth.