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.
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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
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