St Lucia

22 February is St Lucia’s Independence Day: full independence was achieved in 1979, though St Lucia had been self-governing from 1967 onward. Like many other nations that have formed a part of the British commonwealth, St Lucia continues to recognize Queen Elizabeth II as the titular head of state.

It’s thought that St Lucia has been inhabited since around 200-400 AD—the first known inhabitants were Araweks, a people believed to have come from northern South America; around 800-1000, Caribs came to replace the Arawel population. Europeans first visited St Lucia around 1500. Until the early-mid 17th century, neither the French nor the English succeeded in their attempts at colonisation. In the 1550s, a French pirate was known to frequent the island (Francois le Clerc, or “Jamb de Bois”—he used the nearby Pigeon Island to target Spanish galleons, and is also credited as the first pirate of the modern era to have a “peg leg”) and a few attempts were made at more a more formal settlement, though most of the men brought to the island died within a few years due to disease.

After passing between them many times, the French ceded St Lucia to the British in 1815. While the British had abolished the slave trade in 1807, it wasn’t until 1834 that slavery was abolished on St Lucia. Today the population of St Lucia mostly of African descent (over 90 percent of the population). Among the remaining population, approximately 3 percent are of Indo-Caribbean descent.

The official language of St Lucia (care of the British Commonwealth) is English—but 90 percent of the population speak a Creole language called Kwéyòlaka. In articles Kwéyòlaka is refered to as “patois”—a term that bothers me. While (or perhaps because) a patois doesn’t have a formal definition in linguistics it seems to indicate a “degraded” form of language, because it is “non-standard.” It seems there’s some hierarchy that steps from “language” to “dialect” to “patois” or “pidgen.” “Patois” seems to be loaded with imprecise but slightly negative meaning.

Choosing a St Lucian poet is a task made easy by the fact that Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott calls St Lucia home. Of course then the task is then to choose just one poem by Walcott—not easy. I settled on “Sabbaths, W.I.” which I feel produces such a strong series of images of the West Indies, and makes sense of St Lucia having a separate national identity to that of Great Britain.


Sabbaths, W.I.
Those villages stricken with the melancholia of Sunday,
in all of whose ocher streets one dog is sleeping

those volcanoes like ashen roses, or the incurable sore
of poverty, around whose puckered mouth thin boys are
selling yellow sulphur stone

the burnt banana leaves that used to dance
the river whose bed is made of broken bottles
the cocoa grove where a bird whose cry sounds green and
yellow and in the lights under the leaves crested with
orange flame has forgotten its flute

gommiers peeling from sunburn still wrestling to escape the sea

the dead lizard turning blue as stone

those rivers, threads of spittle, that forgot the old music

that dry, brief esplanade under the drier sea almonds
where the dry old men sat

watching a white schooner stuck in the branches
and playing draughts with the moving frigate birds

those hillsides like broken pots

those ferns that stamped their skeletons on the skin

and those roads that begin reciting their names at vespers

mention them and they will stop
those crabs that were willing to let an epoch pass
those herons like spinsters that doubted their reflections
inquiring, inquiring

those nettles that waited
those Sundays, those Sundays

those Sundays when the lights at the road's end were an occasion

those Sundays when my mother lay on her back
those Sundays when the sisters gathered like white moths
round their street lantern

and cities passed us by on the horizon

—Derek Walcott