Walcott, Derek

In many anti-colonial works, including The Playboy and The Shadow of the Glen, the conflict also centres on a woman who becomes symbolic of the nation who is to be redeemed, the motherland. Eavan Boland has written of her need as a woman writer to combat the association of the feminine and the national - and the consequent simplification of both . But such an association of the feminine with the national is not limited to Irish literary and oral cultures. The Senegalese poets Leopold Senghor and David Diop, as well as many Ghanaian and black South African writers, assert their loyalty to a symbolic Mother Africa, portrayed as the embodiment of African tradition. In Derek Walcott s epic poem Omeros, Helen becomes symbolic of his native St Lucia, desired by coloniser and colonised alike. 

Synge s drama has also been a significant influence for the Caribbean poet and dramatist Derek Walcott. In a 1980 interview Walcott spoke of his identification with Irish writers ... 

Quoted in Stewart Brown (ed.). The Art of Derek Walcott (Bridgend Seren Books, 1991), p. 24. 

See Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says An Overture , Preface to Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York Noonday Press, 1970), p. 13. 

Derek Walcott, Interview with Edward Hirsch, Contemporary Literature, 20 3 (1979), PP-188-9. 

Derek Walcott acknowledges Riders as a model for The Sea at Dauphin. 

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