"A Far Cry From Africa"

 

--Derek Walcott, 1957

 

A couple years ago, Derek Walcott became the first Caribbean-born person to win the Nobel prize for literature. This poem is perhaps Walcott's most frequently anthologized one, probably because of its anguished evocation of hybridity. Its specific occasion was the "Mau-Mau' uprising in Kenya, seen by white colonists as a savage terrorist campaign and by Kikuyu militants as anti-colonial freedom-fighting. When Walcott wrote this poem, the death toll stood at approximately 100 whites, 2,000 Black loyalists, and 11,000 Kikuyu rebels. Kenya gained independence a couple of years later.)

 

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
But still the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
'Waste no compassion on these separate dead'
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

 

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain;
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still, that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

 

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain.
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.

 

I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?